by John Ringo
“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.
She returned to find that Nathan and Shannon had unbuckled themselves and were trying to pry open the door at the end of the corridor, but she got all three connected to the cable before too long. Finally she took Billy’s face in her hands and pointed out the opening.
“Billy, you have to stay with your back to the shaft, facing the wall,” she shouted. “You’ll have to work to stabilize yourself; otherwise Amber will be crushed against the wall. Do you understand? Face the wall.”
The boy nodded looking at her with dark eyes and then pointed at her with a questioning expression.
“I’ll follow you down; I have to work the winch.”
He nodded and closed his eyes, pointing over the side.
She patted him on the shoulder and then clipped off her own safety line and leaned out into the shaft, swinging the cable back and forth and waving to Shari far below.
Billy caught at the ropes to keep from being pulled out by the weight of the cable, but Wendy had it clamped down and he wasn’t going anywhere. Until she released the clamps.
The biggest problem in lowering the children over the lip of the opening was the weight of the cable. Each child was in a harness, either one from the maintenance closet or, in the case of Shakeela and Nathan, a “Swiss seat” made of rope. Each of these was, in turn, attached to a short length of climbing rope and this was attached to clamps on the cable itself. There were two children per clamp and they were currently occupying their remaining free time holding onto each other and, almost to a child, crying their eyes out.
But the cable would pull the children over the lip in an instant if Wendy simply let it slip. And the winch was too far forward to use to attach the children. So she had pulled a section of cable back into the corridor, attached it to a safety ring, set up the tandem rigs and attached the children. Now she faced the problem of slowly lowering them over the side.
She finally took the remains of the climbing rope, looped it through the same ring to which the cable was attached and tied it securely to the last of the children’s clamps. Then she set up a complicated but safe method of lowering the cable over the side using the friction of the rope against itself. Furthermore, she could clamp it off to stop the whole process and she could do it all from the edge.
She nodded at Billy, who was strapped in next to Kelly. The younger girl was now more or less catatonic, but when her brother pushed forward and over the edge she let out a strangled scream and grabbed onto him.
Billy managed to keep Amber from being crushed against the side and he did it all while stroking his sister to try to get her to calm down and having his eyes tightly shut.
With the weight pulling them over the side, the rest of the children were more or less forced to go. Wendy lowered them slowly, ensuring with each that nothing was stuck or pinched as they went over the side. Shakeela managed to get unbuckled again, but Wendy put her back on the line and pointed out that if she did that when she was being lowered it was a long way down.
Once the children were over the side and the rope detached, the lowering went like clockwork. She held the remote control for the winch and leaned outward, lowering them slowly. It was nearly eight hundred feet down and at first she was worried about oscillation. But Shari was on the bottom controlling the take-up and the descent was smooth. Billy lost his footing a couple of times, but each time she stopped the cable until he was set again.
When the cable reached Shari she let out just enough line that Shari could pull the pairs of children into the lower opening. It only took a few minutes and by the end of it, Wendy was shaking. She had to go down next.
How to get down was a huge question. The climbing ropes were only two hundred feet long so rappelling was out. And if there was an eight-hundred-foot rope in the Urb it would be in the security office which the Posleen had already overrun. She had come up with a way to do it, theoretically, but she really didn’t like it. It had about a thousand things that could go wrong and all of them ended up with Wendy Cummings as a red blotch on the scum-covered floor of the airshaft.
But it was the only thing she could think of doing and if she stayed there “taking counsel of her fears,” as Tommy would put it, she was going to get et.
Finally she cut several lengths off of the climbing rope and started tying knots.
The basic method for lowering was called a “Prussik knot.” She took a section of rope and the ends together. Then she wrapped it aroun
d the cable and back through itself. When she put weight on one end, the rope would clamp down on the cable and hold itself in place. Theoretically. On another rope it would work fine. On a cable things were different.
The problem, of course, was that the cable was metal. It was both lower in friction than a rope and greased. All things considered, it was not a good candidate for lowering herself using Prussik knots. The answer to that, from Wendy’s perspective, was to make several. Thus if one cut loose, the others would start to clamp down.
The last line was tied off to her safety harness and wasn’t from the climbing rope, it was one of the safety lines. If she went into freefall, the rope would snag on the cable at the bottom. There were several bad things that would happen then, starting with slamming into the side of the airshaft, but most of them were better than being a red blotch on the floor.
She tested the security of the knots at the edge and they seemed to hold, so she put her foot in one, grabbed two others and stepped over the edge.
And immediately slammed into the side. The good news was the knots were holding, the bad news was that lowering herself was not going to be an easy evolution.
Finally she got a rhythm going. She would let go with one hand and loosen and lower the two foot knots. Then she would lower the two hand knots. Using this slow method she had travelled about two hundred feet, or a quarter of the distance, when she heard a Posleen railgun down one of the side corridors. Then one appeared towards the top of the shaft, on the far side. If it looked down, she was dead meat on a string.
She had noted that by grabbing the knots where they were wrapped around the cable, she could slide them without removing her weight. Sliding the two hand knots down she managed to get all four of the knots side by side and started working them all down without taking pressure off.
What she was unaware of was that the ropes, by sliding over the two hundred feet of cable, had picked up quite a bit of grease. Combined with this, by maintaining pressure, she was significantly increasing the friction generated by the method. Increased friction meant increased heat. Increased heat reduced the coefficient of friction of the climbing rope and under the conditions gravity began to assert its natural hold.
Wendy had gotten another forty feet down when first one foot rope then the other started to slide on their own. She immediately threw her weight onto the two hand lines, but the sudden jerk as she did so changed their coefficient from standing, high, to moving, low, and they, too, began to slide.
She was now on a one-way trip to the bottom of the cable and there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.
She clamped her hands around the upper ropes for dear life. If she clamped down very hard she could slow her progress, but already she could smell the ropes beginning to melt and fray. She worked one of the foot ropes up by bending herself into a U, but that rope was smoking as well and the bottom of the cable was coming up fast.
She managed to slow herself to what felt like a hurtling speed just as first one of the foot ropes and then the other gave way. Her glove-covered hands were now for all practical purposes the only things on the cable and she slammed onto the end of the cable at nearly twenty miles per hour.
What saved her from a broken back were several variables. The first was that she was near the end of the cable, and the weight of the metal above her had put some “stretch” into the line. Thus it gave a bit when she hit the end. The second was that the security line was designed with a give of one third of its length so a bit more of the energy was absorbed by that design. Last, her harness was well designed and transferred most of the energy up along her spine rather than across it.
That didn’t mean it was a good experience, simply survivable. She slammed into the wall, hard, and the only thing that kept her from cracking her head was that her shoulder caught the blow. Of course, her left arm now seemed to be out of commission. It didn’t seem like anything was broken, it just wouldn’t flex worth a damn.
She dangled on the end of the cable for moment and just moaned.
“Are you okay?” Shari asked from ten feet above her.
“No, I’m not okay,” Wendy croaked. “I’m alive and…” she moved her arms and legs, “everything seems to be working. But ‘okay’ is not how I’d phrase it.”
“I saw a Posleen up there,” Shari whispered.
“That damned Postie is about a thousand feet above us, Shari,” Wendy said. “And two hundred feet across. If my scream on the way down didn’t attract his attention, talking in normal tones isn’t going to do it.”
“You didn’t scream,” Shari said.
“I didn’t?” Wendy asked. “I could have sworn I screamed.”
“Nope, just fell past mostly in silence,” Shari said. “I was really impressed. You might have been cursing, I couldn’t tell.”
“Shari?” Wendy asked, pulling herself up with her functional arm and wincing at the strap bruises.
“Yes?”
“Start winching me up or I’ll climb up there and so help me God I’ll eat your heart.”
* * *
Elgars checked both ways on the main corridor and stepped out carefully. The flickering blue sprite leading her bobbed up and down in the air, maintaining a strict ten-foot separation as it led the way to Hydroponics.
The corridor was wide and high with a tram-track running down the center and oversized doors on both sides stretching off into the distance. It also was deserted. She had always noted that there were fewer people in the lower areas of the Urb, but with the Posleen intrusion this sector seemed to have emptied out completely.
She shifted her burden and took a deep breath. The trip to this point had been relatively uneventful, but nerve-wracking nonetheless. And the weight of all the weapons and ammunition was beginning to wear her down; it was at least her body weight of gear if not more.
She trotted clumsily across the corridor, carefully using the crossing points on the tram-track, and over to the twenty foot high door marked “Hydroponics.” To the right was a personnel-sized door with a palm pad identifier. She shifted her massive load to get a free hand and slapped the pad.
“Name?” the security system intoned.
“Sandra Ells…” She stopped and shook her head for a moment, her eyes widening and a shiver going down her back. “Anne Elgars. Captain, Ground Forces,” she said, panting slightly from startlement as much as the exertion.
The door opened smoothly and she bent down and shoved a combat knife into the juncture; it was a blast door — the entire wall was heavy duty blasplas — but with six inches of Gerber steel in the crack it wasn’t going anywhere.
She heaved herself to her feet and stumbled into the interior.
This was clearly an entrance for hydroponics personnel. The room was large, sixty feet or so deep and forty across, with lockers down both walls and a deserted security stand against the far wall. The room was filled with benches and tables and there were open wall-lockers and a scattering of personal items on the tables as if the place had been hurriedly evacuated.
She dumped her gear on the nearest table and straightened out her combat harness. She knew that she had to hold the fort until Wendy and Shari got there, but other than that she was at loose ends. Since wasting time in this situation didn’t make any sense to her, she started laying out the guns and ammunition, readying the combat harnesses and making small packs for the older kids to wear.
That only took five minutes or so and when she was done Wendy and Shari still hadn’t turned up. She wasn’t worried, the situation was a simple binary solution set. If Shari and Wendy turned up before she got overrun holding the door, they would all leave together. If not she’d die here. She didn’t like the children very much and she could take or leave Shari. But Wendy was the only friend she had; if she left her she would be all alone, without memories and without a purpose. There wouldn’t be much point in leaving. Besides, she knew Wendy would do the same for her.
She watched the door calmly for
a few minutes, considering her options, then decided that it was not a good use of her time. Keeping one eye on the door she started going through the open lockers, looking for anything useful.
She found a few candy bars and snacks, a few small tools that might or might not come in handy and, most importantly, a physical map of the hydroponics section. She wasn’t sure that sprites would work in the area; they tended to stay to the main routes rather than the back ways the group was going to prefer.
At the end of the lockers along the right hand wall was a box of hazardous material suits and three cases of general respirators. She took one of the suits and filled it with the smallest respirators she could find and a selection of the hazardous waste suits; if they were available to personnel, there was probably a reason. Then she plucked out three of the masks for the adults. The respirators were an emergency type that could filter just about any toxin for fifteen minutes; she suspected that they would come in handy.
Elgars walked back to the front, dropped her acquisitions, peeked back out the door and frowned. There still wasn’t anyone around. She wasn’t impatient, exactly, just well aware of the need for speed. As she started to duck back into the room she heard a racket of railgun fire down the cross-corridor; the Posleen had arrived first.
She knelt in the doorway and trained the AIW towards the opening of the cross-corridor. As the first Posleen came into sight, she heard a splintering sound to her right. Sparing a brief glance in that direction she saw a portion of the wall shatter and Wendy step into the main corridor.
* * *
Wendy spotted Elgars just as the grenade launcher of the AIW chugged. She cursed and pulled Billy through the hole in the wall.
