Checkmate

18

Once through the gap, Fisher instantly realized they’d all misread the schematics for the ducts. Unlike a ship’s propeller, where each blade was mounted alongside its neighbor on the shaft, here they were mounted one behind the next lengthwise along the shaft, like threads on a screw. Worse still, looking down the shaft, he counted eight blades rather than four. The setup made sense, he realized, given their purpose was to provide suction, not propulsion.

“Got a problem here,” Fisher radioed. “How much time?”

“Thirty seconds.”

He grabbed the edge of the first blade and pulled himself beneath it, then finned ahead, weaving and ducking his way beneath and over blades two, three, four, five.

“Fifteen seconds, Sam.”

Beside him, the barrel-sized shaft emitted an electronic buzz, then a series of steel-on-steel clanks as the propellers gears began to re-engage. He ducked under blade six, then veered right and arched his body, feeling the trailing edge of the blade seven scrape his thighs.

“Eight seconds… seven… six…”

He put all his strength into his legs and kicked. He felt rather than saw the propellers begin to move, as though he’d been shoved from behind by a crashing wave.

“Starting up… power’s at twenty percent.”

“I’m through.”

“Don’t slow down. The maintenance shaft is fifty feet down the tunnel. Should be a circular opening in the roof. It won’t be marked; you’ll have to feel your way. If you don’t reach it in time—”

“I know, I remember.” Into the desalinization tank for boiling.

“Power at fifty percent.”

Already, the roar of the propellers was nearly deafening. Beyond his mask he saw only froth. He angled his body upward. His outstretched hand touched corrugated metal.

“Power at seventy-five percent,” Grimsdottir called. “There should be a ladder jutting from the maintence shaft, Sam. Coming up quick now… Thirty feet… twenty-five…”

With his hand thumping over the ribbed steel of the roof, Fisher had sense of his speed. He switched on his light, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ladder as it approached, but the swirling bubbles had reduced visibility to zero. He switched off the light. He’d have to do it by feel and reflexes alone.

“Fifteen feet… You’re dead on track, Sam. Almost there…”

For a split second the froth cleared and he caught a glimpse of something, a horizontal steel bar. He latched onto the rung with both hands and was jerked to a sudden halt. Pain shot through his wrists, up his arms, and exploded in his shoulder sockets. His legs, fully caught in the slipstream, felt impossibly heavy. One of his fins was ripped from his foot, then the next.

Climb, Sam, climb!

He reached up, hooked his hand on the next rung, and pulled. Then again, and again. The draw on his legs lessened. He kept climbing, one rung at a time, until suddenly, his head broke into a pocket of air. Just as abruptly, the drag on his legs disappeared.

He took in a few lungfuls of air until his heart rate settled; then he clicked on his task light and looked down. A few inches below his bottom foot, the water in the duct was rushing by as though driven by a fire hose — which, in essense, it was.

He keyed his subdermal: “I’m in the shaft, all limbs and digits accounted for.”

“Good work, Sam,” Lambert replied.

“Any alarms, change of routine?”

Grimsdottir said, “None. I’m tapped into the hotel’s security and maintenence frequencies. They read the intake shutdown as a routine glitch. Check in when you reach your first waypoint. That’s where the real fun begins.”

“Roger.”

It took some patience in the tight confines of the shaft to remove his rebreather harness and weight belt and get them hooked on the ladder, but after a few contortions he got it done. Though he didn’t plan to exfiltrate the hotel the same way he’d come in, he knew better than to assume anything. Having his gear here would give him insurance against not only Murphy’s Law—“If it can go wrong, it will go wrong”—but also what he’d come to think of as Fisher’s Law: “The road of assumptions is lined with coffins.”

He climbed to the top of the ladder, then spun the locking wheel, and lifted the hatch just enough to slip the tip of the flexi-cam through. The lens revealed what he’d expected: the hotel’s maintenance center. Dimly illuminated by fluorescent shop lights spaced down the length of the ceiling, the space was roughly one hundred feet long by fifty feet wide. The walls were lined with banks of monitoring consoles and framed blueprints. Down the center of the room stood row after row of floor-to-ceiling shelving for the odds and ends it took to keep the hotel running, from the smallest of screws to new showerheads to cleaning supplies and paint. Here and there were stacks of crates containing what he assumed were larger items like motors, pumps, electrical switch panels.

After the roar of the intake tunnels, the maintainence room seemed eerily quiet, with only the occasional crackle of radio static and a faint electrical hum to break the silence. He panned the flexi-cam around. At the far end he saw a forklift pass between a row of shelves and disappear. Aside from that, he saw no movement. He wasn’t surprised. At this time of night the maintainence shift was likely run by a skeleton crew. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the security staff. According to Grimsdottir, it was fully manned twenty-four hours a day.

He switched to EM, or Electro-Magnetic, view and looked for odd signatures that would indicate sensor grids or cameras. There was nothing. He withdrew the flexi-cam.

“Okay, Grim, I’m not reading any cameras or sensors.”

“Confirmed,” she answered. “There’s nothing until you reach the outer corridor.”

“Roger, I’m moving.”

He lifted the hatch, climbed out, closed the hatch. He paused in a crouch, waiting and watching. The fluorescent lights, which were likely fully lit during the day, had been switched to half-power. The walls and shelving units were cast in shadow.

He sprinted to the nearest wall and flattened himself against it, then slid to his right, eyes scanning the room, hand resting on the butt of his pistol. His other hand touched steel. He knew without looking it what it was.

“I’m at the main door,” he radioed.

“First camera is twenty feet down the corridor. It’s on a ten-second span, no thermal, no NV.”

“Waiting for your mark,” Fisher whispered.

“Ready… ready… Go!”

He turned the knob, swung open the door, and slipped into the corridor.