Part 17 (1/2)
Setting off without a word, he began to propel himself forward. He trusted the abilities of the Gate warriors to follow, even at the speed he was setting for them.
The first drop had to come soon. The light was so poor that even with his eyes adjusted to the almost total blackness, picking out more than normally pigmented eyes would be capable of, Jak found it hard to see where the darkness of the cold concrete floor became the darkness of an empty s.p.a.ce.
Except that there came a point where the draft from the shaft behind them became mixed with the eddying current of air that was traveling from the opposite direction. These currents met in a swirl that bespoke of one thing alone -a shaft leading down toward the purification plant.
Jak slowed his pace, aware that a wrong move could plunge him headfirst down a sheer drop, with not enough room to twist and save himself.
”Wait,” he said softly to the party at his heels.
The Gate warriors slowed to a halt while Jak edged forward to the point where the air currents appeared to meet.
His fingers felt in the darkness and found the uneven and slightly jagged lip of a shaft. Inching his torso forward, he peered down, the crosscurrents of gently rippling air making his hair swirl gently around his head, white even in the lack of light. He couldn't discern anything beneath. There was only a total blackness.
”This way down. Not know where lead, so be careful,” he said softly over his shoulder, eliciting the barest murmur of agreement from those to his rear. Aware that any sound would travel along the shafts, and perhaps even be amplified by a trick of acoustics, all were concerned with keeping noise and communication to a bare and essential minimum.
Jak contorted his wiry frame, straining muscles so that he could bring his knees up beneath his chin and pivot on his tailbone, ignoring the temporary pain on the hard surface. He wanted to turn his whole body in the narrow shaft, so that his feet instead of his head would hang over the lip of the downward shaft.
He could feel the sweat gather in a pool down the small of his back, could feel the camou jacket sc.r.a.pe against the concrete walls, the metal patches sparking with the force of their contact, could feel the muscles in his thighs cramp and burn as he pushed his body around so that he was facing the direction he wished.
Finally he was there. He paused to exhale slowly and deeply, allowing the adrenaline pulsing through him to calm, and for the fire in his tortured muscles to subside. He knew they would soon be protesting again, and for far longer and a far better reason.
Breathing slowly and deeply, Jak extended one leg across the shaft. It was about three feet wide, and would be about the right width for the maneuver he planned. Sliding over the edge of the lip, and bringing his knee up so that it tensed and supported his back against the wall that slid up behind him as he began his descent, Jak began the slow and painful descent toward the next level. From previous experience, he knew that the downward shafts were always staggered, so there was only the slightest chance that he was taking them down into the purification plant. If the shaft led straight down, there was no way anyone's muscles would last the distance. It was a necessary risk.
”NEARLY THERE,” Dean whispered to the Gate warriors descending from above him.
Like Jak, Dean had led a Gate party through the shafts. He had felt a sense of unease as he entered and began the trek. The last time he had been in such a situation also involved the Illuminated Ones-or at least, a connection to them- when he escaped from the mad mutie queen Jenna and her tame sec chief back in the ville of Raw. That time, Dean was weakened by the torture that Jenna had put him through in the name of her experiments with genetics. This time he was rested up and at a peak of fitness. But still, all the old fear came flooding back to him as he made his way through the narrow concrete shafts.
Ultimately it made him more determined to focus on the task ahead, and when Dean came across the first downward shaft, he didn't hesitate in negotiating it. Unlike their opposite party, Dean's band of Gate warriors was lucky in coming across two downward shafts soon after entering the maze of the air conditioning. As a result, they made good time and were now close to the point where the air conditioning and purification shafts ran parallel with the first level of service ducts for the redoubt.
Dean's left foot moved downward and hit empty air. He almost lost balance, as he had on the first downward shaft, but recovered with ease, extending his foot to judge the drop to the bottom of the shaft below. His toe touched without too much of a stretch, and he followed it, letting his other leg fall and taking the impact lightly.
”Bottom,” he whispered up the shaft above him, preparing his fellow travelers for the drop.
Crouching to one side of the shaft, Dean could see nothing in the complete blackness. Unlike Jak's pigmentless eyes. Dean's...o...b.. were at full dilation and yet could still see nothing. He could, however, feel the air brus.h.i.+ng his cheek and rippling the down of hair on his forearms. From this, he knew the direction in which the air was being drawn, knew this would take them toward the heart of the redoubt.
It was the best direction to take. The farther they got into the redoubt, the better the chance of finding a panel connecting the air shafts and the service ducts.
”This way,” he whispered, crouching lower and beginning to walk on. This far down, the shafts had grown taller and wider, and progress was easier, a byproduct of their need to be bigger in order to incorporate the necessity to pull in more air and dissipate the resulting pressure.
There was still no light, but Dean used his fingertips to feel along the walls. He was searching for a point where the cold roughness of the concrete was replaced by something icier and smoother-the panels connecting the two openings that were supposedly airtight, and had been placed in all the redoubts for purposes of service and maintenance.
He walked only a short distance when his fingers brushed across something that felt like the rounded end of a rivet or smooth nut. The roughness of the concrete ceased and was replaced by the cold smoothness of metal.
”Found it,” he breathed, stopping. Sensing him halt rather than seeing him ahead of them, the rest of the party slowed until they were cl.u.s.tered behind him.
”So this is it, babes,” whispered the Gate warrior nearest to him. ”Tell ya something-if we've kept quiet for them up to now, there ain't no way that we can keep this next bit quiet.”
Dean grinned at her, even though he was sure that she couldn't see him. ”Who gives a s.h.i.+t,” he said in return. ”This is where the action begins.”
J.B.
HAD BEEN ALLOTTED to a party that would take one of the stairwells. Because of his experience in combat of this sort, the others in his group deferred to him. As one of them remarked, ”You don't get sec stairwells and s.h.i.+t like that in the jungle, honey.”
J.B.
adopted a slightly different tactic than the other parties with regard to the sec cameras that lined the route to the hidden sec entrance. He and one of the Amazon warriors had gone ahead of their party and shot out all the cameras and then returned to their companions. The Armorer then held them back for a short while.
”They'll have been expecting us straight away, as soon as the sec monitors went down. We hold back, and their nerves will be shot to s.h.i.+t.”
Timing himself on his wrist chron, J.B. counted in his head, then finally nodded. The taciturn Armorer didn't bother to offer instructions beyond what the Gate tribeswomen already knew from the briefing.
”Just follow and watch, stay frosty,” was all he offered them.
It was all there was to say.
They made their way briskly but without hurrying to the sec door that stood between them and the stairs that spiraled hundreds of feet down into the earth. They had no idea where there would be a sec defense waiting for them, only that there would be, inevitably, at some point.
There was only one thing to do. J.B. punched in the code and heard, in the tense silence, the soft click of the sec lock as the door became accessible. The Armorer s.h.i.+fted his Uzi onto continuous fire and looked over his shoulder at the Gate women behind him. He gave a brief nod that was partly a gesture to them, and partly an affirmation to himself.
He pushed open the door, flattening himself to the wall, the rest of the group following suit When there was no immediate chatter of blasterfire, or the coruscating beams of the laser blasters raking the now empty center of the corridor, J.B. waited a couple of seconds before inclining his head toward the empty stairwell and leading the war party.
AS J.B. HEADED OUT, Mildred was already halfway down to the first level, leading her party down the twisting concrete spiral that was lit in a dim glow by recessed fluorescent lights placed at regular intervals. Some of the tubes had blown out over the years, and Mildred was surprised that the sec force hadn't thought to either shoot out the rest of the lights or simply to turn them off at source. But she was glad that they had overlooked that, as it made progress easier.
One of the warriors, close by Mildred's elbow, leaned over a little farther and whispered in her ear.
”Guess they're waiting at the bottom for us-a last line from the first.”
”Best not to a.s.sume that, girl, but I reckon you could be right. Just what the h.e.l.l are they playing at? It's almost like they want us to walk into there.”
”Could be 'cause we can't really go back,” the woman replied. ”You and me would make more fight of it, but mebbe they figure they're like spiders, and we're the willing flies.”
Mildred looked down at her Czech-made ZKR. ”Then we'd better be the kind of flies that have a nasty bite.”
Chapter Seventeen.
”Fireblast! What are they doing?”
Ryan's bewildered yet triumphant cry cut through the sound of blasterfire and acted as a rallying call to the rest of his party. The triumphant whooping of the Amazon queen at his shoulder bolstered the spirits of the attack party yet more, and they tore into the opposition with relish.
As the elevator doors had opened, Ryan flattened half of the party into the recesses at the left-hand side of the car, while beckoning Gloria to do likewise on the right. As the doors opened with a gentle hiss of hydraulics, a crackle of laser blasts rent the air, and the beams uselessly hit the back of the car, scorching the metal and making it glow white with heat. The party within the car was. .h.i.t by the wave of heat as it spread around the metal of the car, and huddled as close to the metal as they dared without actually touching it.
But this initial blast was followed by a confused silence as the secluded defense force on the outside wondered what to do.
Ryan was loath to put that down to incompetence, and felt it safer to figure on a plan that would lure the attackers away from the elevator car and into a trap. There was only one course of action. Pulling a gren from one of the vest pockets stuffed with ammo and weaponry, he pulled the pin and stepped back a pace, enough to give him an angle to toss the gren out into the corridor without revealing enough of himself to be a blaster target.