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lizard building, wave their hands and make all the occupants forget
seeing them, but the Arc Commandos’ Ikrid abilities were not so advanced. With
the cover of night and luck having allowed them to get this far, and their
bikes wedged up against roof outcroppings where they would hopefully not be
noticed, they were going to take the ventilation system route to get into the
substructure and therefore hopefully preserve the anonymity of their exit
point.
    But in truth, from here on out they were making up
everything as they went.
    Leo lifted the grated cover off and Jyra slid into the meter-wide shaft first, having to wiggle
around to get her pack to fit inside. With her legs and arms spread out like a
vice, she lowered herself with a controlled slide all the way through the
building down into the substructure where the environmental systems where
gathering the excess heat produced within the building and shunting it outside
so the lizards wouldn’t cook themselves in the close confines of their packed
city.
    This wasn’t the first time she’d been in such a shaft
and Jyra knew what to do at the base, using a cutting
tool to make a hole just above the bottom that led into a maintenance crawlway.
One good thing about lizard infrastructure was that it almost never changed,
and each planet had identical buildings created from a very large playbook.
Learn it, and you’d be able to get around anywhere within their cities no
matter what arrangement they placed the buildings in.
    “Clear,” Jyra said over
their short range comm as she kicked her legs through
the opening and slid out of the shaft as the other three started to come down.
Maneuvering with her pack on was difficult, but it was something she’d gotten
used to on previous missions and didn’t hold her up much now. Leading the way
into an empty room, checked beforehand with her Ikrid, she slid out of the
crawlway and got onto her feet, brandishing a pair of stun pistols and walking
across to the nearby open doorway and held position there while the others
caught up.
    “How we doing?” Brandon asked, bringing up the rear.
    “Not a peep yet.”
    He passed her by and took the lead as the foursome
began to move through the bottom of the residential complex until they came to
the interconnecting tunnels buried deep underground. There they found their
first live lizards in the form of a line pushing hover crates down a long,
highway-like lateral shaft.
    “Can’t go that way,” Mace commented.
    “No, we’re going across,” Brandon said.
    “Across?” Jyra clarified.
    “We’ll have to distract them.”
    “There are too many.”
    “We wait for a gap…it’ll work.”
    “Too risky,” she urged.
    “Not sure what you’re thinking, bro,” Leo added.
    “I’m thinking that if we have to take a detour around
this we’re going to waste a couple of extra hours and probably have to go back
topside anyway.”
    “There might be some auxiliary shafts crisscrossing
this main,” Jyra offered.
    Mace gently shook his head. “It’s a main for a reason.
If there are auxiliaries they’ll be power lines or other utilities. We could
spend hours looking and find nothing. He’s right, we gotta get across here. I just don’t know a good way.”
    “The doorway on the other side is clear, we just have
to sprint across when they’re not looking.”
    “They’re all looking this way from the left,” Jyra argued, “and who knows when someone will come back
from the right side.”
    “Mace, you’re up first.”
    “First for what?” he asked Brandon, but stepped up
alongside him just shy of the doorway and out of sight to the left of the
lizards passing by.
    “When I say go, quietly and quickly cross to the other
side.”
    “You’re serious?”
    “Yes.”
    Mace sighed. “Ok, buddy. You better know what you’re
doing.”
    Brandon closed his eyes and concentrated all his focus
in one direction, reaching out with his Ikrid and touching the lizard minds
closest on