When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 31 Near Franklin, GA, United States, Sol III 2214 EDT Saturday September 26, 2009 ad

Wendy stopped at the top of the escalator and frowned; it wasn’t working, but what was worse were the yells and sounds of firing from below.

“I don’t think so,” she muttered.

The problem was that as far as she could tell the Posleen had gotten around and below them. To avoid the Posleen, the group needed to drop several floors, very fast. But most of the elevators were shut down and so were the escalators. That left very few options.

“Come on,” she said, heading back down the main corridor.

About halfway down she came to an attack pack and palmed it open. She looked at the array of gear and shook her head; there was no way to carry everything she wanted so she had to decide what she really needed.

Med-pack, among other things, that had Hiberzine in it and she’d used that too many times not to recognize the utility. Doors had already been a problem so she pulled out the door-pack including a tank of liquid nitrogen and a punch-gun. And they were probably going to be climbing some, so a coil of rope with a descent pack attached to it was piled on the top of her pack.

Finally recognizing that she couldn’t carry the Halligan tool, or the rescue saw, which had a real appeal, she closed the door and went on.

Entering another maintenance hallway she tied the children together with part of the climbing rope and got them climbing down the ladder. It descended only six levels, but as they approached the base there was a strong wind coming up the ladder shaft.

“What’s that?” Shari panted. Wendy could tell that the trip, especially carrying Amber, was already tiring her out.

“Air shaft,” Wendy said. “That’s how we’re going to get to G Sector.”

“You’re joking,” Shari said as they reached the bottom of the ladder. The corridor felt like a wind tunnel, the air hammering against their bodies.

The corridor was lined with ropes and the children grabbed them as they stepped off the ladder.

Shari grabbed one as well and walked to the end of the corridor. The opening there was the width of the corridor with droppable rail well marked with warning signs. On the right-hand side was a massive winch with a spool of cable that looked long enough to reach to China. Well before she reached the end of the corridor Wendy could see the massive airshaft beyond.

Air for a complex as large as a Sub-Urb was always a problem, especially when almost all of it was recycled in one way or another. To facilitate the transfer of fresh air, and to permit mixing of gasses, the Urb had four massive airshafts, each nearly a thousand feet deep and two hundred feet across.

The opening they were at was halfway down B sector, but it still was nearly eight hundred feet to the bottom.

“All I can suggest is don’t look,” Wendy said, walking to the winch and unlocking the clutch.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Shari shouted back. The wind near the opening felt like a hurricane.

“This is long enough to reach the bottom and then some,” Wendy shouted back, pulling out the first six feet or so of cable and dropping her climbing gear to the floor. “But we don’t really want to do that; the entrance to Hydroponics is on G Four.”

“Tell me you’re joking,” Shari said. She felt light-headed and the dim light from the shaft seemed to be coming from beyond a veil. She’d had this feeling before, when she was walking away from the Posleen assault in Fredericksburg. It was the feeling of utter, bone-drenching terror.

“I’ll lower you to G,” Wendy continued as if she hadn’t heard the older woman. “The cable is rated for three tons at a thousand feet, so you don’t have to worry about it taking your weight. The winch I marked for the different openings. When you get down there you’ll have to work your way into the opening. Hook the cable up to the take-up spool and then swing it back and forth. I’ll watch from up here; when I see you swinging the cable I’ll send down the kids. You’ll have to work to stabilize yourself on the way down; there’s enough cable, though, that we can hook the kids up halfway and you can stabilize from the bottom. Be careful and don’t let it pull you out the door.”

“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 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 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.

“Go!” she said, pointing at the entrance where Elgars kneeled.

The boy nodded his head and sprinted across the corridor, carefully keeping to the crossing points of the tram-track, but not slowing or stopping at all.

“What’s going on?” Shari asked, pushing children through the opening.

“What do you think?” the younger woman snapped. “Elgars took care of the first scouts, but we have to move.”

“Get over there,” Shari said. “I’ll push them through. You go get a gun or something.”

Elgars nodded to the boy as he skidded through the doorway. “Left wall,” she said, with a gesture of her chin. “Grab the smallest pistol and the three boxes of ammunition by it then line up against the wall. Make sure the other kids line up with you.”

Billy picked himself up off the floor and darted to the table, grabbing the Glock and the boxes of .45 ammunition.

Elgars directed the next three children to the side of the room then ducked out of the way as Wendy ran through the door. “About time.”

“Sorry,” Wendy said. “I was hanging around.”

She had been carefully planning the quip so she was mildly annoyed when Elgars just grimaced in anger at the inconsequential.

“Grab the MP-5,” the captain said as another child came through the door. “They’re going to be back here in a second.”

“Nobody has a sense of humor around here,” Wendy said with a shrug, picking up the submachine gun and racking in a round. “It’s worse than dealing with Danes.”

“What are you talking about?” Elgars snarled.

“Never mind,” Wendy answered, kneeling on the opposite side of the door as the first Posleen came around the corner. “It’s a human thing,” she added, hitting the shotgun-toting normal in the chest with a three-round burst.

Behind that one, however, there were four more. The first stumbled over one of the bodies in the corridor and was easy meat for Elgars, but two of the others simply jumped the blockage, landing in the middle of the intersection.

Wendy fired at one of them in the air, spreading the fire like shooting at skeet, and hit it on the flank. The damage from the relatively small rounds was not fatal, however, and the normal spun in place and fired its railgun down the main corridor.

The last child, Kelly, was crossing as the normal fired. Most of the rounds flew wide, but one slashed through the back of the child’s calf in a bloody mess.

The girl slid to a stop on the hydroponics side of the tram-track, lying on her stomach and screaming.

Wendy emptied the rest of her magazine into the centauroid with a shriek of primordial anger as Elgars neatly dispatched the last survivor.

“Motherfuckers!” Wendy shouted, her nostrils flaring. “I hate the fucking Posties!”

“Give me a hand,” Shari gasped, dragging her daughter through the opening.

Elgars ripped the knife out of the juncture of the door and sealed it, coding the lock to indicate a biochem emergency on the inside; it wasn’t going to open without heavy explosives or a supervisor’s codes.

Wendy pulled out her first aid kit and first numbed the wound then wrapped it tight, cutting the flow of blood down to a trickle.

“It missed the artery,” she said, tightening the bandage. “It hit the veins, but they’ll keep. It’s going to be hard to walk on, though.”

Shari rocked her daughter, who was still wailing like a lost soul. “It’s okay, Kelly. Shhh.”

Elgars suddenly leaned forward and struck the child across the face with an open hand slap. “Quiet.”

“God damn you!” Shari shouted leaning towards the captain. She suddenly found a pistol socketed in between her nose and her cheekbone.

“We don’t have time,” Elgars said coldly. “We have zero time. She has to get up and move. And she has to do it without shrieking. Or we all die.” She pulled the pistol back and holstered it. “Now go pick up your rifle and harness; we need to go. Now.”

Shari nodded after a moment and stood the now quietly weeping Kelly on her feet. “Can you walk on it?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Kelly said quietly. “I think so.”

“Then let’s get out of here,” Wendy said, putting the MP-5 on safe with a distinctive “click.”

Elgars suddenly realized the younger woman had been standing directly behind her. She turned around and looked at her, but Wendy just returned her appraisal coldly.

Wendy walked over to the table and looked at the remaining weapons and ammo. “Shari, come over here.”

Shari took the combat harness from the younger woman and threw it over her shoulders and accepted the Steyr bullpup assault rifle.

“You arm it by pulling back on the charging handle,” Wendy said, pointing to the device. “And here’s the safety.”

“Got it,” Shari said nervously. “I’ve fired before, but not much.”

“That’s why I want you to take the nitrogen,” Wendy added, pulling off the pack. “You’ve seen how I do it. You open the doors, we’ll cover and do the entry on them. I’m also going to pile you with anything that the kids can’t carry; that means I can move faster.”

“Okay,” Shari said.

“Billy,” Elgars said. “You’re going to have to carry more ammo.”

“He’s just a boy,” Shari protested quietly. “He’s carrying enough.”

“He can carry more,” Elgars pointed out. “Can’t you?”

The boy nodded and took the additional boxes of ammunition and a harness.

“You know the different kind of magazines?” Elgars asked. “If you do, when we’re running out, come up and give us more ammo. And reload them when you have time. Clear?”

Billy nodded and smiled then pulled out a magazine for the AIW and gestured at the rifle.

Elgars smiled back and dropped her partially expended magazine, replacing it with the one he had offered.

“Okay,” Wendy said. “Let’s roll.”

Wendy looked at the PDA and at the doors; according to the schematic she had picked up there should only be one door at this point, but there were two.

They had passed through a processing area for the fruit and vegetables produced by the section; much of it piled high and already beginning to wilt. Billy had sniffed out a bin full of boxes of strawberries and the children stuffed their mouths full of the tart-sweet fruits. Wendy realized at that point how long it had been since the attack. It must have been at least three hours with the humans staying just ahead of the front ranks of the Posleen.

Now, though, they were in an actual “green” room; the sixty foot high, several hundred meter long room was packed, floor to ceiling, with trays upon trays of legumes growing in nutrient solution. The ones closest to their position were just sprouts, but in the distance she could see full-sized plants and harvester bots passing back and forth across them.

None of which helped her determine which of these two doors was right. The area that they were headed for was the seed and grain loading zone. There were eight supply elevators, most of which the Posleen would have already taken. But there was also a grain elevator that went two ways. It was possible that they could activate it and ride to the surface. Barring that, she was willing to gather some more climbing gear and climb them out. It would take some time, but if they sabotaged the elevator they would have all the time in the world; as long as they were in the tube, the Posleen weren’t going to be catching them.

The problem was getting there without using any of the main corridors; the two times they had intersected corridors there had been Posleen in the area. To do that they needed to go into the nutrient pumping section next, then into the seed storage which connected. From there it was a hop, skip and jump to the main receiving area. There might be, probably would be, Posleen there. But they’d deal with that when they came to it.

“What’s wrong?” Shari asked, nodding at the door. “Left or right?”

“I dunno,” Wendy said. “There’s only supposed to be one door.” She palmed the controls for the right-hand door, but it wouldn’t open even after she punched in the override code. Neither would the left-hand door. But they’d dealt with that before.

“Blast the right door,” she said.

Shari stepped forward and carefully pointed the nitrogen wand at the center of the door; she had been splashed lightly once, painfully, and had, thereafter, donned one of the hazardous materials suits. The light ramex suits were no proof against Posleen railgun rounds, but they were dandy for keeping off the occasional splashes of hyper-cold liquid.

Normally the door would harden and turn brittle; the memory plastic was not proof against the cold of the liquid nitrogen. In this case it simply cascaded to the floor and ran off to the side, rapidly boiling off.

“Step back,” Wendy warned. “That stuff could make you anoxic in a heartbeat. Interesting, the door looks like memory plastic, but it’s blasplas.”

“What’s that mean?” Shari asked, exhaustedly. The trek had drained her to the floor.

“It means somebody wants it looking absolutely normal, but impenetrable,” Wendy said. “Try the left door; we don’t have time for mysteries.”

The second door immediately turned to gray and then white, the memory plastic hardening from the cryogenic bath. When the fog began to clear she stepped forward and placed the punch gun against the door, firing it and shattering the brittle plastic.

The Posleen normal on the other side looked down at the suddenly disappeared door then up at the human blocking the doorway and started to raise his boma blade.

Shari let out a yell and pointed the wand at the Posleen, firing a stream of the liquid into his face.

The normal let out a shrill garbled cry that only served to open his mouth to the stream. Shrilling in pain it tumbled backwards into the room as Wendy leaned over Shari and fired two bursts into his chest. The first burst bounced off of and shattered the flattened breast bone that armored the Posleen’s chest and, but the second burst pierced through to the heart and the normal slumped to the ground as if genuflecting.

Wendy swept the rest of the room but, as far as she could tell, it was all clear.

The vast chamber was obviously a mixing room of some sort, nutrients from the smell of it. There was a rich stench of ammonia and phosphate in the air and the floor was lined with massive tanks, ten or twelve feet high and thirty or forty feet across. The room was gigantic; the ceiling was high with large fans at the top and it was at least a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards across.

The doorway had opened onto a small metal-grate platform. A catwalk led from it, between rows of tanks, to a door on the wall in the distance. In the middle it was bisected by another catwalk that crossed the room side to side and there was a large control station at the intersection.

Wendy waved the others in and trotted towards the center. It had been decided that since the greatest threat was the Posleen coming up behind them, Elgars would cover the rear. She was backed up by Billy, who had his pistol and reloads for her. Shari had the nitrogen tank and the bag full of uniforms and respirators while Shannon carried Amber. Wendy led the way, both as the second best fighter and the one who knew the route.

The children followed wearily behind her. The trek had been long and extremely tiring, but they understood that they had to keep up. One of the adults, usually Wendy, would carry the youngest ones from time to time. And they slowed down for them when they felt they could. But the children had grown up with the war and the Posleen were the ultimate bogey-men; they would keep running until they dropped of exhaustion or were told to stop by an adult.

Wendy had reached the intersection before the captain entered the room. When she got there she consulted her map, but the last “secure” area would, according to the map, be through the right-hand door. She considered it then walked over, palming the pad. From the inside, the door opened easily. Sticking her head through, she checked the far room. It was, as the map said, a storage room for the nutrient materials. She waved the rest to follow and waited for them to catch up.

Elgars swept her rifle from side to side, turning to cover back and sides as she closed up the group. As she passed through the intersection something seemed to scream at her from the back of her mind. She had learned to listen to these little internal comments and she did now, looking around the room for whatever threat the voice was trying to tell her of.

After a moment she leaned her rifle up against the console and considered it thoughtfully while rubbing the bridge of her nose.

Wendy checked the far room again, but it was still clear. When she saw Elgars put her rifle down she swore.

“Shari, get the kids through to the other side; I have to go find out what the captain is up to.”

“Got it,” the older woman said wearily.

“Take a break, but we won’t be long.” She paused and contemplated the captain again. “I hope.”

By the time Wendy had reached the center consoles there was a massive gurgling sound echoing through the room and Elgars had headed to the nearest tank.

She walked over to the ladder on the side of the tank and started to climb up it, drawing her combat knife.

“Hey, Captain America,” Wendy said. “We’re on our way out of here in case you’d forgotten.”

“I know, ’twon’t take a minute,” Elgars said in a strangely deep voice. “Could you possibly rummage me up a spot of wire, baling wire will do well, and a few scraps of duct tape and… oh… a can of spray paint? There’s a good lass.”

“Hey!” Wendy said, catching Elgars’ eye. “Hello! Anne! We have to make like a tree and leaf!”

Elgars shook her head and looked down at her hands, which had started to strip out the wiring harness for the tank motor. She shook her head again and nodded. “I know,” she said in a normal, if distant, voice. “But I think the Posties should have a something to remember us by, don’t you?”

“So you’re mixing up a really nice batch of nutrients?” Wendy asked sarcastically.

“Not exactly,” Elgars said with a death’s-head grin. “What’s in nutrients, Wendy?”

Wendy thought about it then said: “Oh.”

“Roight,” Elgars said, her head going back down to her task. “Now go get me a spot of wire and some duct tape, there’s a good lass.”

“Wire and duct tape,” Wendy muttered, shifting the MP-5 to a better grip. “Where in the hell am I going to find wire and duct tape?”

There would be some in a maintenance section, but the nearest one on the map was further away than the elevators and in an area the Posleen were bound to have overrun. She walked to the far end of the room and thought about it. Something one of the long-time “pro” firefighters had told her floated up to the surface of memory and she smiled. She looked at her map and figured out which door an administrative puke would come in. All things considered, either the one they came in or the one they were going out. So, where was the furthest away from that you could get?

She climbed down from the catwalk and began hunting along the walls of the room until she found what she was looking for. On the south wall, the furthest from the door they had come in, behind the last tank, carefully hidden from all but a determined search, was a chair.

And a toolbox.

And a pile of oily rags and roll of baling wire. And a can of gray spray paint, half full.

And a pin-up calendar.

“Well, at least he had some taste,” she said sourly. “Although that chick has no idea how to carry a rifle. And I guarantee that’s a dye job! If she’s a natural blonde, I’m Pamela Anderson.”

She opened up the toolbox and, after extracting a hard candy from the bag in the top, found the roll of duct tape in the lower compartment.

“Okay, all the comforts of home,” she muttered, rolling the candy around in her mouth. She put the baling wire in the toolbox, closed it up and picked up the can of spray paint. “Now if I can just get it all up the ladder.”

“What took you so long?” Elgars asked.

“Gee, sorry, Captain,” Wendy snapped back. “I just found a toolbox I thought you could use and all the other shit you asked for. I guess I should have hurried carrying the heavy fucker up the ladder! And trying to breathe in here isn’t helping!”

The atmosphere, slightly ammoniacal and earthy before, now reeked of ammonia: it stung the eyes and clawed at the nostrils.

Elgars tossed her a mask and donned one herself. “Sorry, but all I really needed was the baling wire, tape and spray paint,” she said, her voice muffled by the respirator. “Thanks for the rest of it, though. What happened to your shirt?”

Wendy’s shirt had taken a beating with three of the buttons torn away.

“I caught it on the damned ladder,” she snapped, looking down at herself. “I thought about duct taping it together, but that was just too redneck.”

“Don’t let Papa O’Neal hear you say that,” Elgars said, chuckling.

“You’re sounding normal again,” Wendy noted, opening up the toolbox and tossing her a hard candy. “You had me creeped out for a second there.” She adjusted the mask and refit it carefully. Without careful fitting, masks tended to leak and she could smell a trace of ammonia still.

“What did I sound like?” the captain asked. She had stripped out the primary power leads for one of the mixing tanks and brought it under the catwalk so that it reached the tank on the opposite side. Taking the spray paint can from Wendy she proceeded to tape the three-phase leads onto the can.

“Sort of… British I think. All this ‘there’s a good lass’ stuff.”

“I sort of remember it,” Elgars admitted. “All this stuff is just sort of ‘coming’ to me as I go along. I think the shrinks were right; I think the Crabs implanted… more than just skills, but sort of ‘memories’ in me. When I dredge one up, the… personality associated with it comes up to the front too. Then when I use it for a while, when I get used to it, the personality fades. Sometimes I get real memories along with it. Sometimes I even seem to be the person for a while. I think they might have given me most of my day-to-day skills through a single entity and she’s who comes to the fore most of the time.”

“So who is the real you?” Wendy asked.

“I dunno,” Elgars said softly. “But for the time being I’ll take what I can get; better than getting eaten by the Posleen.”

Wendy nodded for a moment then grinned. “So, you’re channeling the spirit of a British mad bomber? Does he know any good drinking songs? The Brits usually know all the good drinking songs…”

Elgars laughed and went back to the main control board. “Trust you to see the humor of it.”

“Nah, it’s just a matter of looking on the bright side of any really fucked up situation,” Wendy said with a muffled chuckle. “I didn’t know how to do that at first; I really had a hard time understanding how Tommy could be so… comfortable in Fredericksburg. I mean, we were all getting ready to be either blown up or killed and eaten. It’s because the rest of us had had our heads in the ground for years about the Posleen. But he had been thinking about what fighting them would be like, getting beaten by them would be like, for years. So when the time came, he just did it while I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, crying and worrying and half useless.”

“That I have a hard time believing,” Elgars said. She cut the power to the tank that the leads had been run to and walked back. She carefully leapt to the mixer arm and waved at the wires. “Hand those to me, would you?”

“Sure,” Wendy answered, pushing the bundle across the gap. “But really, the difference now is that most of us have been thinking about what might happen down here for years. Oh, there were some that thought the Posleen would never come; just like there are some that planned on getting drunk enough not to notice. But most of us realized that they might, and thought about what we would do about it. Generally, that was ‘head for a defense point and hold out until we’re relieved,’ but even that is wishful thinking; the Posleen will overrun those in an hour or two. There’s no way that the Army is going to be back before we’re all snacks.”

“Was this your plan from the beginning?” Elgars asked. She carefully leaned over the edge and lowered the wires into the ammoniated muck in the bottom, pressing the wires and spray can deep into it.

“No,” Wendy said with a sigh that could barely be heard over the grinding of the other motors; the material in the bottom was mostly anhydrous ammonia and the mixture was harder than cookie dough. The motors were designed to drive against liquid and although they were about thirty percent overrated for that, they were quickly reaching the point where failsafes were going to pop out. “My plan had been to be in the emergency crews; they would have been at the front lines, trying to hold the Posleen back for as long as possible. But that presumed that we got some warning; I don’t know why we didn’t.”

“So the longest that the defense points could hold out is… what?” Elgars asked, wiping her gloves off on a rag and jumping back to the catwalk. She walked back over to the central console and started shutting down the pumps.

“Three to six hours,” Wendy said. “That’s the estimated time for a Posleen force to eliminate ninety percent of resistance and presence. Of course, nobody says that, but I’ve seen the estimates. That presumes this wasn’t just a Lamprey, but if it was there wouldn’t be Posleen down here already.”

She keyed the information terminal and dove into the database. She had to enter her password twice, but she finally found the appropriate file.

“Two hours after reduction of primary defense — that’s the security forces in A section — ninety percent of the population will have been removed,” Wendy said, referring to the document. “Within six hours after reduction, ninety-eight percent will have been removed.”

“I guess we’re in the two percent then,” Elgars said.

“I think it’s a bit pessimistic,” Wendy answered. “But there’s one way to find out.” She keyed up a schematic of the Sub-Urb then opened up the emergency services database. “I was wondering, earlier, how we could figure out where the Posleen are. I finally realized you could track them by emergency calls.” She pulled up the call records and patched them into the schematic. “We’ve been on the run for four and a half hours. Penetration was about five hours ago, I’d guess.” She scrolled the schematic back five hours. “See the red dots? Those are calls, both initiating calls and support calls. There’s a bunch of them around the entrances and then they spread out.” She scrolled the schematic forward in time and Elgars could see what she meant; the red dots spread out with a solid “outline” for a while then started to dissipate.

“You can see that there’s starting to be fewer people to put in calls,” Wendy said emotionlessly. “This is by two hours after the entry; we were on our way down at that point. Cafeteria 3-B is already well inside the Posleen perimeter; Dave was gone by then or shortly afterwards.” She scrolled it outward further and now there was a light scattering of red dots. “At this point, almost all the population areas have been overrun and the Posleen are scattering into the industrial sectors. And trying to track them is pointless because nobody is calling for help anymore.”

“So in four more hours?” Elgars asked, tapping at her console.

“There will probably be three or four thousand people alive, trapped and hiding in various compartments,” Wendy said coldly. “Out of two million to start.”

“And they’re not getting out, right?” the officer said, looking at her sharply. “They’re for all practical purposes dead.”

“As a doornail.” Wendy nodded. “Ground Forces have not entered and have not responded and the Posleen are going to totally occupy this facility. There might be a Newt or two left, but for all practical purposes they’re all dead men walking.”

Elgars nodded and hit enter. “Time to leave.”

“Six hours?” Wendy asked.

“Yep,” the captain said, looking around. “Assuming it works. But we shouldn’t dawdle.”

“Are you guys done?” Shari asked, coming down the exit walkway. She had donned a mask as well and the voice was muffled and irritated.

“We could do a backup,” Wendy said. “I’m not sure that will get it going. What did you use for a fuel-oil substitute?”

“Corn oil,” Elgars answered distantly. “What I need is some bloody plastique,” she added, rubbing her chin. “That would fix the bahstahds.”

“We need to leave,” Shari asked. “What are you doing?”

“Blowing up the Urb,” Wendy answered.