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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 around 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 begi
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 ru
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 begi
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 perso
"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. "A
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 perso
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.