"Of course," Valthyrra answered calmly.
"Send your packs in now. Keep them out of the atmosphere, but have them shoot anything in space that moves.
We need the interference they can create as soon as possible. Marlena? Threl?"
"Here!" Marlena answered.
"If you caught that, then carry out those plans. Move the fighters down but do not, I repeat, do not give battle without my approval. Make certain that the cabin air in Velmeran's fighter is working."
"I can fly for him," Marlena offered.
"Professional courtesy dictates that a pilot flies his own ship, if he is able," Dveyella answered, and used one of her guns to indicate the doorway of the main corridor. "We go on, then."
"I hear a sentry coming."
"The one I was following, no doubt. It came running the moment the first sentry gave warning." She pulled a heat charge from his belt and handed it to him. "You can hear it, so you know how close it is. Hide behind the door and put the charge on its back as it comes through. Ignore the head; as you may have noticed, that is not where they have their brains."
Velmeran made a gesture to indicate that he was no longer free to speak aloud, and Dveyella hid in the adjoining chamber. Then he hurried to the doorway opening onto the main corridor and waited, taking up the heat charge and twisting the top as far as it would go. The sentry charged through the doorway. Velmeran slammed the disk against its shell and ducked out the door behind it, just as the sentry began to draw itself to an abrupt halt. The machine lifted a foreleg as it began to turn toward its attacker, and slowly lowered it as the heat charge, activated as its magnetic base attached itself to the thick metal hull, began to fry its electronics.
Velmeran glanced back inside the doorway to find the motionless machine standing in a cloud of smoke that continued to pour from its joints and vents. Dveyella returned from the side passage, pausing only a moment to regard the stricken automaton before she indicated for him to continue on.
"Better," she said approvingly as they hurried down the wide hall. "Our problem is going to be getting back out, since every sentry in the complex is going to be converging on this area. They might try to pin us on the stairs."
Moments later they came upon the stairs they were looking for. The well was square, between five and six meters along each side, with long flights of steps descending down each side. The center of the well was filled by something clearly not of native manufacture; a lift platform, guided by metal rails fitted into each corner of the well. The stone rail had been removed on the nearest side, and a metal shelf extended the floor out to the edge of the lift platform. The Starwolves could see that, while the original inhabitants might have had no choice, the military was not about to lug supplies up and down those steps on the unreliable backs of enlistees. Necessity is the mother of invention, it is said. Then laziness is surely the father.
"I hope this thing is not too slow," Dveyella said as she stepped aboard and triggered it to descend. "Ah, not too bad."
"I do not much like descending blind," Velmeran remarked as he watched steps appear along the side of the platform, starting along one side and proceeding down the next.
"I do not like it either," Dveyella agreed. "A sentry could be waiting for us on any landing, ready to shoot as the platform clears."
"Stop at the next level," Velmeran said suddenly, holstering his guns.
Dveyella stopped the platform level with the next landing stage, and he stepped out. He quickly descended the steps until he passed below the lift. As he had guessed, there was a heavy metal framework that supported the platform and held the field projector that raised and lowered the lift. He climbed out onto the stone railing and leaped out to catch a bar of the framework, then swung up and arranged himself as best he could, facing down, with three of his four hands free. Two held guns, while a heat charge was in the fourth.
"Start down!" he ordered into his collar mike.
The platform started again. Velmeran watched the steps closely, waiting for a white rectangular head to appear over the rail near the corner landings. He did not know if the sentries could elevate their guns very high, although he did remember that the cameras were inset and not able to rotate very far up. He hoped that he could drop a heat charge on the machine before it saw him; he did not care to get into another shooting contest with a sentry.
"Hello, and welcome to beautiful Bineck," Valthyrra's voice, radiating the commercial enthusiasm of a tour guide, announced over their corns. "The weather at your location is threatening, turning to openly hostile at any given moment. I must also inform you that two wings of seven fighters each are taking off from the main base. Your twenty minutes have just begun."
"This will be cutting it close," Dveyella remarked.
"My packs will not be in time to intercept those fighters," Valthyrra continued. "They will have to be your problem. We will get anything else."
Velmeran thought that he could see the bottom now, a square of pale gray stone far below. Five levels were past and the sixth opened beside him, so he was now halfway down. Then he saw an indistinct shape lean out over the railing far below, more than halfway down from where he was.
"Something on the stairs," he warned. "Just passing the second level, I would guess."
"A sentry?" Dveyella asked.
"It really did not look like a sentry's head," he replied. "I believe that it was too small for a sentry, and there were no guns. Whatever it was, I am going to put a bolt through it if I see it again."
"If it is something hidden with a gun, you should know that the two larger, rounded things on your belt are explosives," she offered.
"They are?" Velmeran sounded surprised. "Then I will use one of those if it tries to ambush us as we get nearer. It is dark under here, and it might not see me until too late."
"Reverse ambush," Dveyella agreed. "But do not use the explosive if you get too close, since you have no helmet. Try throwing it from a fourth of a level up."
"I will thank you not to," a third voice said suddenly. "If you two have come to collect me, I would prefer that it be alive."
Velmeran nearly fell out of his perch. "Keth? Is that you?"
"Of course it is."
"Stay at the third landing," Velmeran instructed. "We will collect you there. Do you have a gun?"
"No, nothing. I have been listening to you since you landed. When that first sentry attacked you, the one guarding my door took off at a run. Since he was really the only thing keeping me in that room, I kicked open the door and headed straight for the stairs."
"Why did you not tell us you were coming?"
"I have ho helmet," Keth replied. "And the echoes carry far in these old halls. I was afraid that one of the beasts might hear me."
"You would hear it," Dveyella pointed out.
"Not if it was standing still."
"What does this do to our schedule?" Velmeran asked.
"Barring further incident, we might actually be out of here in another ten minutes," Dveyella answered. "In realistic terms, we might just be ready when those two wings of fighters descend upon us."
After another half a minute, Velmeran had Dveyella stop the platform a short distance above the third level so that he could climb out. Keth looked up and saw his pack leader hanging facedown from the framework beneath the platform, his legs and free arm braced wide against parts of the structure, rather like an ironclad spider in a tubular steel web. Keth was at first inclined to laugh, but the expression his pack leader wore warned him against it. Velmeran threw Keth a gun, then quickly lowered himself from the frame and swung out to the landing stage. Dveyella quickly brought the lift down low enough for them to step on, and immediately started back up. When Keth tried to return the gun, Velmeran indicated for him to keep it and pointed up.
"Since you and I have no helmets, we are going to have to be on guard," he said. "If any of those monsters pokes its head over the railing, shoot it."
"Remember that the design of this type of sentry is such that it can rotate its cameras straight down," Dveyella added. "And since its smaller guns are mounted on the sides of the cameras, it can shoot what it sees."
"Is that one?" Keth asked, pointing at the rectangular shape that appeared over the edge of the railing a level up.
Velmeran nodded. "I believe so."
"Oh," Keth said, and began shooting. His aim was surprisingly good, considering that he had seldom practiced with such a weapon. His second and third shots caught the sentry under the chin before it had a chance to draw back its head. "Did I hurt it?"
"I do not believe so," Velmeran said. "No parts feH off. Do we stop?"
"No, we have to get closer," Dveyella answered. "Swat that thing back every time it shows itself."