WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(117)

She should be worrying about humans, not books; but the books and their probable fate filled her mind anyway. She smiled at herself with wry humor.

The single soldier on guard at the narrow staircase down straightened when she saw a detachment of commandoes coming toward her. She carried a submachine gun and to Adele looked very young.

"Out of the way," Adele said with a curt nod. The Alliance soldier jumped sideways, knocking her weapon against the wall, pitting the ancient plaster.

Adele pulled open the door and led her detachment down the stairs in single file. Lighting had been improved even here: battery-powered lamps were stuck to the wall at each landing.

She hadn't expected the guard; there'd been no reference to a post at the stairhead in the electronic media Adele had examined. It would have been a mistake to try to explain what the detachment was doing, however. The guard must have been placed by someone of relatively low rank, so she was therefore best ignored by commandoes claiming to operate on the instructions of Blue Chrome Command.

Blue Chrome Command was Markos. Adele wondered if that would amuse him. He hadn't seemed a man with a sense of humor.

Adele smiled faintly. She was finding more humor in life herself since she became a Cinnabar pirate.

The door to the basement level was open. A guard stood there as well. He turned from watching workmen installing power cables to stare as the detachment trooped past down the stairs. Adele gave him a hard glance.

The subbasement was well lit also, but that was a doubtful virtue in a region so decayed. The brick flooring rippled like the face of the sea—a useful simile, because at least half of the surface was under water. The ceiling arches dripped condensate, and an apparent spring stirred one pool clear of the pale algae that scummed the others.

A pump rumbled disconsolately, and the generator at the far end of the building vibrated at a higher frequency. Workmen had drilled fresh holes through the ceiling to pass power lines to the upper stories. The air danced with brick dust.

Adele approved of the additional wiring in principle. The execution of the work was simple butchery, however. One might as well shear a book down on the upper and lower edges so that it fit your new shelving.

Her detachment had returned to double file; the only sound they made was the splash of boots in the foul water. The bays filled with the detritus of past generations looked like the wrack of a terrible storm. To Adele it was a sad reminder of the ephemeral nature of human civilization; but then, she saw most things that way. Hogg and the sailors probably had a different viewpoint.

The pumps were in four brick alcoves jutting from the lengthwise exterior walls, arranged in an X pattern with the outside entrance between the pair on the north side. The pumps were huge cylinders sunk beneath floor level and venting through ceramic pipes half a meter in diameter. They had more than sufficient capacity to keep the subbasement dry.

Only the southwestern pump still worked, and a grumble from it suggested not all was well with that one either. As Adele passed between the eastern pair of pumps, she glanced through the arch to her right. Workmen had recently removed the end cap of the big electric drive motor. The Alliance planned to put this portion of its house in order also.

The broad outside stairs were a continuation of the light well that provided natural illumination for the basement level. The sliding doors that could offer twenty feet of width for large objects—the pumps and the fusion generator were obvious examples—were closed and barred, but the pedestrian door set in one of the larger panels stood ajar.

The guard post covering this entrance was outside and up a level, at the basement landing. Through the door Adele heard a jig, distorted by reverberation in the stone-lined masonry pit of the light well. The soldiers were playing music that had been popular when Adele was on the staff of the Bryce Academy.

She'd never had a taste for music and she doubted that a connoisseur would have found the jig to have been of any particular merit, but it took her back to a time that was now forever past for her. She regretted its loss, as surely as she regretted the loss of her childhood.

The music shut off in mid-chord. Well, so had that stage of her life.

The fusion generator was in a masonry room on the western end of the subbasement. According to architectural files, the original plan had been to enclose the generator in all directions but one, a curtain wall to the west. That way if the Tokamak failed it would vent its plasma harmlessly into the open air.

Later Electors had added to the initial structure. The ionized plume would now envelop the west wing and everyone in it, but Adele had found no evidence in the records that this was viewed as a problem. Fusion bottles rarely failed; and if this one did, well, the west wing was given over entirely to servants' quarters and the offices of low-ranking clerks.