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"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 . . . go
* * *
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 ru
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 Sha
"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.