"Down."

He started the car moving. Oddly curving and angling corridors bending with geometrical precision. He saw an elevator door and he pressed the button; the door opened and he drove the car into it. Down, fast, sickeningly fast.

"Bottom ... clear down," Van Ness mumbled. "Start from there. I can't see—"

Danton kept the elevator dropping and then it stopped. He hadn't stopped it.

He stepped to the side as the door slid open. He hit the entering Oligarch, hit him with a short hard blow in the solar plexus and when the man gasped and bent forward, Danton brought his knee up. Bone and cartilage crunched. The man slewed to one side, and Danton hit him again and the man smashed into the wall and slid down toward the floor.

"I can't see," Van Ness said. "But what I hear has a sweet sound."

Danton dragged the Oligarch up, held him against the wall. The man sagged and lifted his hands to protect his face. His lips were torn, his nose bleeding. He stared dazedly at Danton, his eyes filled with terror, shock.

"Wha—" he started to say something. Danton pushed his flash-gun into the man's middle. And the Oligarch screamed. Danton's voice chopped into the scream.

"I'm going to kill you," Danton said. "Unless you tell me what I want to know. Tell me where the power rooms are, the central power units."

The man shook his head, no.

Danton moved the gun around, pressed the stud. Burning flesh, and the Oligarch jerked away and fell twitching on the floor, his left leg charred from the knee down. He sat and stared at the leg, and he started whimpering. He reached down with his fingers, then drew them back again.

"Tell me," Danton said. "Or what's left of you, even the body parts from your banks won't put back together again."

The Oligarch murmured, and he had changed his mind.

The Oligarch led them into the gigantic room, then collapsed. Danton killed him where he lay. Danton recognized some of the equipment, though he was no nucleonics or electronics expert as Van Ness had been. "Listen to this, Van. Listen to me!"

"Yes...."

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