Empyrion II: The Siege of Dome Read Online Free Page B

and, wonder of wonders, was unguarded.
    He backed away quietly and, keeping a safe distance from the Saecaraz, moved around the cleared circle to the doors. He had reached the halfway point when the machine stopped. The wash of noise evaporated into silence. Treet froze. He could hear the voices of the Saecaraz. Apparently they had finished their work and were leaving. They were coming toward him!
    Treet continued on, hurrying to stay ahead of them, but taking pains to remain silent and unseen. The voices were closer behind him when he reached a place where two pathways crossed among the towers of cast-off equipment. He hesitated. One path appeared to lead directly to the door, while the other bent around and wound back into the welter. With the Saecaraz closing on him from behind, he chose to make a stab for the door rather than muddle through the maze.
    He dashed for the door, thinking that if only he could reach it before the others reached the ring of steps he would have a chance of slipping through unseen. The Saecaraz were coming perpendicular to him now, making for the same path he had chosen. From the sound of their voices, Treet guessed that some were approaching from behind him, and others were just ahead, having chosen different paths to the single exit.
    Treet put his head down and ran for it, but had not gone more than three paces when one of the Saecaraz stepped onto the path ahead of him, his back to Treet. Treet skidded to a stop.
    The man turned toward the door and moved off. Treet remained unnoticed, but knew now that he had to get off the path. He glanced around and saw a stack of vent covers and stepped onto it. The stack shifted under his weight, and Treet was pitched backward into the path, while the vent covers cascaded around him in a clattering avalanche. The insidious gray film that lay thick over everything in the Archives powdered up in dusty clouds. Heart beating wildly in his throat, he looked up to see that the Saecaraz ahead of him had not turned around. Was the man deaf?
    Furiously scrambling for his feet and scattering more of the infernal vents, Treet picked himself up. The startled shout from behind him caught him with his rear end poised in the air in the act of standing up. He glanced behind him—two Saecaraz Hagemen stood together, both wearing expressions of amazement. The foremost of the two shouted again, this time for the help of his comrades. The Saecaraz ahead of Treet turned around and started running toward him.
    Treet stood for an instant, poised for flight but with nowhere to go. Then, without thinking what he would do, he threw himself forward, crashing through the stack of vent covers and into a glassy wall of electrical insulators. He tore down the wall, and stumbled through the breach—heaving ceramic insulators big as a man's head behind him as he went—and fell into a tightly packed corridor on the other side, the sounds of the chase close behind.
    He flew down the corridor, formed by banks of heat deflector shields, and ran headlong into a dead end. Panting, Treet halted and turned to meet his pursuers.

FOUR
    Horatio Crocker plowed through the heavy underbrush, searching for the trail he hoped he would find somewhere just ahead. The robot carrier tagged faithfully along behind, riding its treads over the foliage Crocker tramped down.
    For six days Crocker had stalked the lonely hills. Dazed, senses numb, whimpering pitifully to himself, he pursued a meandering path that roughly paralleled the river. On the seventh day he had come to the edge of the Blue Forest—a trackless expanse terminating the desolate hill country like an enormous curtain of deep blue-green vegetation.
    He had no thought but to lose himself in the darkness of that many-shadowed land—and even this was not a conscious desire. He simply moved because he could not stop moving. At first there had been some urgency in his flight, but as time and again he glanced fearfully over his shoulder and saw