John Ringo - When the Devil Dances

Wendy stopped at the top of the escalator and frowned; it wasn’t working, but what was worse were the yells and sounds of firing from below.

“I don’t think so,” she muttered.

The problem was that as far as she could tell the Posleen had gotten around and below them. To avoid the Posleen, the group needed to drop several floors, very fast. But most of the elevators were shut down and so were the escalators. That left very few options.

“Come on,” she said, heading back down the main corridor.

About halfway down she came to an attack pack and palmed it open. She looked at the array of gear and shook her head; there was no way to carry everything she wanted so she had to decide what she really needed.

Med-pack, among other things, that had Hiberzine in it and she’d used that too many times not to recognize the utility. Doors had already been a problem so she pulled out the door-pack including a tank of liquid nitrogen and a punch-gun. And they were probably going to be climbing some, so a coil of rope with a descent pack attached to it was piled on the top of her pack.

Finally recognizing that she couldn’t carry the Halligan tool, or the rescue saw, which had a real appeal, she closed the door and went on.

Entering another maintenance hallway she tied the children together with part of the climbing rope and got them climbing down the ladder. It descended only six levels, but as they approached the base there was a strong wind coming up the ladder shaft.

“What’s that?” Shari panted. Wendy could tell that the trip, especially carrying Amber, was already tiring her out.

“Air shaft,” Wendy said. “That’s how we’re going to get to G Sector.”

“You’re joking,” Shari said as they reached the bottom of the ladder. The corridor felt like a wind tunnel, the air hammering against their bodies.

The corridor was lined with ropes and the children grabbed them as they stepped off the ladder.

Shari grabbed one as well and walked to the end of the corridor. The opening there was the width of the corridor with droppable rail well marked with warning signs. On the right-hand side was a massive winch with a spool of cable that looked long enough to reach to China. Well before she reached the end of the corridor Wendy could see the massive airshaft beyond.

Air for a complex as large as a Sub-Urb was always a problem, especially when almost all of it was recycled in one way or another. To facilitate the transfer of fresh air, and to permit mixing of gasses, the Urb had four massive airshafts, each nearly a thousand feet deep and two hundred feet across.

The opening they were at was halfway down B sector, but it still was nearly eight hundred feet to the bottom.

“All I can suggest is don’t look,” Wendy said, walking to the winch and unlocking the clutch.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Shari shouted back. The wind near the opening felt like a hurricane.

“This is long enough to reach the bottom and then some,” Wendy shouted back, pulling out the first six feet or so of cable and dropping her climbing gear to the floor. “But we don’t really want to do that; the entrance to Hydroponics is on G Four.”

“ Tell me you’re joking,” Shari said. She felt light-headed and the dim light from the shaft seemed to be coming from beyond a veil. She’d had this feeling before, when she was walking away from the Posleen assault in Fredericksburg. It was the feeling of utter, bone-drenching terror.

“I’ll lower you to G,” Wendy continued as if she hadn’t heard the older woman. “The cable is rated for three tons at a thousand feet, so you don’t have to worry about it taking your weight. The winch I marked for the different openings. When you get down there you’ll have to work your way into the opening. Hook the cable up to the take-up spool and then swing it back and forth. I’ll watch from up here; when I see you swinging the cable I’ll send down the kids. You’ll have to work to stabilize yourself on the way down; there’s enough cable, though, that we can hook the kids up halfway and you can stabilize from the bottom. Be careful and don’t let it pull you out the door.”

“This is INSANE ,” Shari said, backing away from the shaft.

“Look,” Wendy hissed in her ear, taking her arm and shaking her. “The Posleen have the elevators and most of the escalators. There is no way out going up; there is a chance we can find our way out through Hydroponics. But there is no other way down. No. Other. Way. Now put the harness on and get ready.”

“The children aren’t going to like this at all,” Shari said, taking the harness with wide eyes. “And I can’t take Amber down.”

“I’ll send Amber on Billy,” Wendy said. “And I’ll just grab them and tie them to the damn thing. No, they’re not going to like it, but there’s not much they’ll be able to do about it, either: The door is locked.”

Shari shook her head at the opening, slowly buckling on the climbing harness. “How are you going to get down?”

“That’s… gonna be tricky,” Wendy admitted.

Shari walked down the wall, resolutely refusing to look down. She had, once, and that had been enough. The bottom of the shaft was shrouded in darkness, but just the sight of lights shining from other openings, deep into the well, was enough to nearly freeze her up.

And that wouldn’t have been a good thing because it was taking all her concentration to keep from oscillating. As the cable lengthened it tended to swing back and forth. The one time that she’d slipped and started to swing she had slammed painfully into the wall several times. And that was when she was only a hundred feet down or so; she really didn’t want to think about how far and hard she would swing if she lost it now.

The other problem with keeping the descent in control was footing; the walls of the air shaft were covered in slime. It was no great surprise once she thought about it; the air in the shaft had come from millions of human throats. Humans put out a tremendous amount of moisture from their lungs and combined with the dust from dead skin cells the water deposited on the walls was a perfect breeding ground for slimes of all type. Thus not having her feet slip out from “under” her was nearly impossible. She understood that part of her purpose was to prevent the children from oscillating the way she was tending to, but they were still going to get covered in slime.

Somehow she didn’t anticipate running across a laundromat any time soon.

She carefully stepped over an opening and read the number. She was at the top of G and, technically, she could stop any time. But there were four openings in the sector and the optimum one was the second from the bottom. Better to drop a little farther, further away from the entrances and further away from the spreading Posleen.

Finally she reached her opening and bounded outward, swinging in and landing on her butt despite all her struggles to avoid that. She quickly stood up and backed into the opening, pulling the cable with her.

There was a take-up winch on the left hand side of this corridor so she first clamped the cable in place then hooked it up to the winch.

There were climbing harnesses and safety lines aplenty in the maintenance packs so she hooked herself off then leaned out and shook the cable.

Wendy had had quite a time getting the children onto the cable. First she had to find clamps for it, then she had to find harnesses that would fit, then she had to convince Billy to take Amber, then she had to run down all the kids who had tried to escape. She had always thought of the expression “dragged them kicking and screaming” as a metaphor, but no longer; Shakeela had actually climbed back up the ladder and was hammering at the door they had come in when Wendy tackled her.