Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra by Stephen Lawhead Read Free Book Online Page A

uniforms awaited them in an electric six-wheeler. Stepping from the elevator the moment the doors slid open, they climbed into the cart and were off, humming along the wide, low corridor whose illuminated walls cast bright white light over them.
    The driver kept his foot to the floor the entire trip, and Treet, with the bottle between his knees, held onto the passenger handgrips and watched the smooth, featureless interior slide by. He felt like a bullet traveling through an endless gun barrel. No one said a word; both attendants kept their eyes straight ahead, and Varro seemed preoccupied with thoughts of his own. Twice he glanced at his watch, and then returned his gaze to the tunnel ahead.
    At last the cart slowed as it rounded a slight curve and came to a gateway—a squatty set of burnished metal doors, guarded by a tollbooth arrangement and two more uniformed men who carried unconcealed stunners on their hips. Varro waved and one of the guards hurried forward with a press plate, which Varro took, pressing his hand flat to its black surface.
    Instantly the right-hand door slid open just wide enough to admit the six-wheeler. With a jerk, the driver bolted through the gap and they entered another corridor, slightly larger than the first. This tunnel wound around a tight corner and unexpectedly opened into a gigantic cavern of a room.
    Treet blinked in surprise as the cart rounded the last turn and sped into the enormous chamber. Lights—red, yellow, blue—burned down like varicolored suns from a ceiling seventy-five meters above, forming great pools of light on the vast plain of the floor. Across this plain they raced, gliding in and out of the pools of light. First red, then blue, then yellow—plunging through light and shadow like minidays and nights until at last they came to a slope-sided metal bank which rose up from the floor.
    Around this bank swarmed several score men and women—each dressed in an orange one-piece uniform. They were, Treet noticed, entering and emerging from the bank by way of numerous passages cut into the face. Some of these workers pushed airskids loaded with duralum cargo carriers, while others dashed here and there with mobiterms in their hands.
    The driver parked the cart in a recharging stall near one of the passages, and Varro turned, saying, “Here we are, Mr. Treet. And not a moment too soon. Shall we?”
    Treet got out of the cart, handed his bottle to the driver, and followed Varro through the passage. On the other side, glittering in a bath of white light, looking like a dragonfly poised for flight, a shuttlecraft stood on its stilt legs. The vehicle was smaller than a commercial craft by more than half, Treet estimated; but it was far more graceful and streamlined than the stubby, rotund taxis of the airlines.
    The heatcones of two large engines swelled the skin of the craft on the underside near the center, then flared gracefully along the belly to end in a bulge at the rear of the vessel. Thin, knifelike wings slashed out from grooves along the upper back. Once in space, the wings would be retracted and solar panels affixed in their place. Along the side and beneath the wings, lettered in bright sky blue, was the shuttle's name:
Zephyros.
An escalator ramp joined the main hatch, which was open.
    “Some boat,” remarked Treet, but Varro was already striding toward the ramp, across a tangle of cables and hoses snaking to the shuttle from every direction. At the ramp Varro turned and waited for Treet, allowing him to mount the moving stairs ahead of him—less from courtesy, Treet decided, than from caution. Varro did not want to take any chances that Treet would get cold feet at the last minute and bolt.
    As the escalator took them up into the belly of the gleaming, silver shuttle, Treet gazed all around him at the hurried activity below. Controlled chaos, he thought. They're obviously pushing a tight schedule. Why the rush?
    The interior of the shuttle was divided into