Elite: A Hunter novel (9 page)

“Question. Can I access the Apex Power and Water, Reclamation Division flow monitors for the storm sewers?” You had to be careful how you phrased questions, or the computer got confused.

“Affirmative.”

“Order. Notify me when the Apex Power and Water, Reclamation Division storm sewer flow monitors beneath Apex Central register zero flow, and/or less than one percent water present. One-time notification.”

“Affirmative. Order logged.”
There. Now I’d know when it was safe to go down there.

As for my getting caught down there if a storm blew up…well, that was a possibility. And given that someone had tried to kill me already, I was going to go to Kent and make sure he made it a priority that I
got
storm warnings, even if he had to call me himself.

My alarm went off at the usual time, and my vid-screen popped up with
Report to armory for briefing
. A hand to the wall told me that the building wasn’t vibrating anymore; the storm was over, or at least moving off, and it was time to get back to work.

And to reinforce
where
I was going to be this morning, my alert from Power and Water told me that the flow in the sewers was at 3 percent of capacity, and dropping.

I grabbed breakfast with Knight; it was fun hearing about my people through the eyes of his, and he had a lot of questions about the ones where his folk had settled. I was happy enough to answer them, and he left looking pretty contented with his world. I headed for the armory briefing room.

Kent already had the vid-screen up and running, and he waved me to a seat. “This will be short. You’ll have the map on your Perscom. There is a maintenance crew that will want your escort today. They are probably the only Cits that know about the danger down there; they’re handpicked and hard to rattle.”

Well, that was a piece of good news. “Armed?” I asked.

“Some of them,” Kent confirmed. “Licensed, obviously, and they get regular range tests.”

Also good news. People who can defend themselves are always an asset.

“Pick your kit and get ready to bounce. I’ll have a pod to take you to the south entrance.”

I didn’t get much chance to breathe the storm-washed air as I ran from the building to the waiting pod, but the little I did get I inhaled gratefully. The sky was completely cloudless, everything was a little damp, and the sun seemed especially bright. Too bad I wasn’t going to get to appreciate it. I’ve always loved the hours after a storm passes; it seems as if the world is shining and new.

The pod dropped me off at what looked like a little concrete bunker, a door set in the middle of it with an ID checker beside it. There was also a group of six people in bright yellow coveralls and hard hats—the repair crew that Kent had said might be waiting for me. They looked excited and relieved, all at once, to see me.

“I didn’t know we were going to get you, Hunter Joy,” said the one in the only bright blue helmet, who must have been the crew chief, as the pod drove off by itself. His face was actually lit up with pleasure. A sturdy girl with short, dark hair dug her elbow into his side before he could say anything more.

“Job first, Kelly. Fan service later,” she said with a hint of a smile.

“Let’s get this job started, then,” I said, and the crew chief presented his Perscom to the ID checker. There was the sound of the door unlocking, but no one made any move to open it.

Smart people,
I thought with satisfaction, and cast the Glyphs and opened the Way for the Hounds.

Given we were going to be in a sewer, which meant limited space, all my originals had come in greyhound form. I opened the door, and five of the eleven crowded in, looked down the ladder, and
bamphed
.

The ladder is safe,
said Bya in my head, and I went into the little bunker and started climbing down the ladder. At the bottom, I held out my arms, and Hold and Strike jumped down to be caught, one at a time, while Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai
bamphed
down with Kalachakra and Shinje. “All clear!” I called up the ladder, and waited for the maintenance crew to get down while the Hounds and I surveyed the sewer as far as we could see.

All the lights were on, which I was pleased about; I wasn’t sure how well protected the lights would have been from the water that must have been pouring through here. There was a thin trickle of water down the center of the floor but nothing more than that. The crew chief, Kelly, was the first down the ladder. “What are we fixing, and how far is it?” I asked.

“Electrical short, about a half a mile north,” he said. That would put us just about squarely in the middle of the City Center by my reckoning. “And if it turns out to have been caused by a leak, we’re to find and seal that.” He coughed self-consciously. “We’re hoping it’s a leak,” he continued. “Because if it’s not, it’ll be Them.”

“We’d prefer our jobs to be routine and boring, but this is what they pay us the big bucks for,” said the short-haired woman.

“We get paid?” I said in an incredulous voice, getting a laugh from all of them. “Give me a second to get the troops deployed.” I put Hold and Strike with Bya, Dusana, Shinje, and Kalachakra on the front half, Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai and the other three in the rear. I asked Bya to be the front scout, and Myrrdhin to be the lag-behind, and then we set off. They introduced themselves to me; Kelly was the crew chief, Sanders was the woman, and the rest of the crew were Blake, Feineman, Rodrigo, and Lee.

I noticed that Sanders was one of the three packing a handgun, in a well-worn and well-oiled holster, right next to some of her tools on her tool belt. And that gave me some concerns.

I managed to sidle up to Sanders and caught her eye. “What are your loads?” I asked politely, nodding at her sidearm.

“Steel shot,” she said without hesitation. “We get special loads from Supplies. Ricochet is nuts down here.”

I nodded, relieved, since that was exactly what I was worried about, and why I had a shotgun instead of a sidearm. She chuckled. “You’re smart to ask, but anyone they let down here has had the lecture, the demonstration, and the
graphic
demonstration.”

I didn’t ask what the
graphic
demonstration was. I had the feeling it probably involved a lot of vid of people who had become “cautionary tales.”

The sewer was about twenty-four feet wide, and a flat oval, with the lights behind protected slabs of something transparent above us. At about six-foot intervals, there were smaller pipes about a foot in diameter entering the main line about halfway up. The mouths of these pipes were covered in a metal grate; by the rust on the grates, I knew these were cold-forged iron, something most, if not all, Othersiders cannot tolerate. I’d seen the street-level openings of these pipes when I’d gone out running; the openings were not only covered by identical metal grates—they had a fine metal mesh over the top of that. “Hey,” I said, “how do you keep the inlets up on the street from getting clogged up by debris during storms?”

“Turtles,” said Sanders. “That’s what we call them, anyway. Armored gutter sweepers; they’re about twice the size of an armored pod and heavily weighted so floodwaters can’t carry them away. They’re out as long as the rain’s coming down. I used to drive one. It’s weird—you obviously can’t see anything in the downpour, so there’s no windows and it’s all drive-by-wire, the same guide wires the driverless pods use. We could send ’em out without a driver, and sometimes we do, but the bosses want a driver on board in case you sweep up a body. Human, I mean, not one of Them.”

“There are always at least half a dozen bodies for each storm,” said Lee from behind me, before I could ask. “Sometimes more, never less. Accidents, people not paying attention to the warnings, Spillovers that take advantage of the rain to run across the Barriers and don’t realize you can’t just find a busted-up building to take shelter in once you get over here.”

It was the way he said those words that gave me a bit of a chill…as if these dead
people
were an inconvenience and of no more importance than a dead rabbit. Less, really—you could eat the rabbit…but I managed to keep my thoughts to myself.

“Well,” said Kelly, his tone going dark, “I’ve had my suspicions about some of those bodies for a long time. If you wanted to get rid of someone, it wouldn’t be hard to invite ’em over for a storm party, get ’em drunk, then haul ’em outside. The storm would take care of the rest; they’ll just drown, probably get washed as much as a mile away from where you left ’em, and no way to trace it back to you.”

I made a note to tell that to my uncle. Because Kelly was quite right: that
would
be a good way to get rid of someone. And I made another note to make sure that I was either in my room alone, locked in, or with people I knew I could trust during storms. You know, just in case.

Of course, anyone trying to ambush me would get a big surprise. I can do the emergency summons for my pack in mere seconds now, and if I did that, they’d come over alert and angry.

“Damn, Kelly,” said Blake, with an uneasy laugh. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

“He watches too many murder mysteries,” Sanders replied with a snort. “Last time I was over at his house, that’s all that was on the vid. You’re gonna raise those kids of yours thinking that every other person they meet wants to kill ’em.”

That led to some good-natured bickering about vid shows. I let them chatter. It didn’t interfere with my communication with my pack, and it kept them relaxed. They didn’t
need
to be vigilant; that was what the pack and I were there for.

Besides, I really wanted them to concentrate on each other and leave me alone. If I had to make conversation with them, that
would
interfere with my communication—and I didn’t want this turning into fan service for the same reason.

It was cool, damp, and very, very clean down here—pretty much what you would expect in a concrete tube that had been scoured by rainwater for two solid days. According to my Perscom map, we were approaching an intersection where two smaller sewer pipes joined this one. I sent Bya and Myrrdhin ahead to check both of them out as the sewer crew continued talking, this time about the ranking Hunters. With me and Ace out of the picture, the current top five were changing nearly every time a shift went out to Hunt, and the top ten were all within a few points of one another. Since today would be the first Hunts since the storm started, all of them had opinions about who would come in at the number-one spot after first shift. I didn’t really care now that I was Elite, except insofar as Ace’s group had pretty much broken up and were being friendlier to everyone, making the competition among the regular Hunters less antagonistic than it had been when I first arrived.

Bya and Myrrdhin went back to their scouting ahead.
No scents at all coming from the side tunnels,
Bya told me.

In addition to sniffing out trouble, some of the Hounds could use senses besides scent; my original seven could tell when there was another Othersider or a Mage or Hunter using magic about. Thanks to the Hounds, we were able to move briskly, passing several more side sewers before ending up at our destination.

Besides the grated pipes leading up to the streets, there had been featureless metal doors painted the same color as the ’crete every fifty feet or so. Our goal was one of those, on the right-hand side of the sewer. As we neared it, the chatter stopped, and the crew got tense. I didn’t blame them.

When we stopped opposite our goal, they all looked straight at me.

“How do we open this?” I asked Kelly in as quiet a voice as I could manage, while the Hounds arranged themselves, two pairs facing up or down the sewer tunnel, just to make sure we didn’t get ambushed, and the rest in a semicircle around the door.

“Magnetic seal,” he said. “I unseal it with this, it pops open and moves to the side, inside.” He held out a gizmo, and I nodded.

“All right. I am going to assume there’s something in there, and be pleasantly surprised to find out otherwise. So all of you, get in close to me. If you’ve got weapons, get them out now.” I put up my Shield to cover us all; my Hounds each put up their own, and I primed my shotgun. “Kelly, whenever you’re ready, pop the door.”

He did something to the gizmo. The door made a
thunk
sound, pulled away from us, and slid to the side.

And I was not pleasantly surprised.