"Leave your lamp off at first," Matt said as Rudy started to lean his head into the opening.
Rudy switched off the lamp, then took off his hardhat entirely before he stuck his head into the darkness and looked down then up. He pulled back into the tunnel. "I don't see anything at all," he said softly.
Everyone on the team got a turn. Abby couldn't see anything when she looked, either, except possibly a very faint glimmer, that may or may not have been imagination, directly across from the opening.
"All right," Matt said finally. "I guess there's no harm in using our lights."
Rudy switched on his hardhat lamp and now Abby could see a vertical wall about a meter away from the triangular opening they had cut. The surface of the wall was flat–black, absorbing so much light that despite its being illuminated Abby had to move her head back and forth a couple of times to convince herself the wall really was close.
"Whoa!" Bobby Joe said when it was his turn to look.
Abby understood his reaction when she looked down. She felt the vertigo coming from standing on top of a tall building under construction. The gap between the two walls receded into the depths, broken only by staggered rows of large beams extending between the pair of walls, a beam every two or three meters. She could see at least fifty rows down as the reflections grew weaker and weaker. The invisible bottom could have been a hundred meters away or a million.
A similar view showed to the right and straight up. To the left, the intersection between the wall they had cut through and the one next to it blocked her view, but she supposed the view around the corner would be much the same. The air between the walls was significantly cooler, and Abby suddenly felt very small.
"What now?" Bobby Joe said softly.
"I'm not sure," Matt said. "I suppose we see what's beyond that next wall.
Abby turned and saw that Rudy had already retrieved a rope from the trailer and was tying a loop around his waist. "I'm ready," he said as he picked up the drill and a roll of tape.
Matt looked like he was going to object, but then said, "Just a minute. Let's get some tape over this new edge so we don't cut the rope or anyone's hands.
Minutes later Rudy climbed into the dark opening as Matt and Bobby Joe held onto the rest of the rope. Rudy got his balance on one of the beams running between the walls, moved slowly toward the far wall, and straddled the beam. He brushed his fingers against the far surface. "This wall is cold."
Rudy locked his feet together under the beam and put the drill against the wall. He switched it on, and Abby realized how nervous she was that someone beyond the wall would hear them this time. She deliberately relaxed her breathing.
The drill noise sounded for at least five minutes before Rudy switched it off. He moved his head close to the wall and aimed his hardhat lamp toward the point where the drill bit had been. He turned back to the group watching through the triangular cutout and said, "I don't know that we're going to get through here very easily. I can't see even a scratch."
Bobby Joe looked at Matt. "If that wall is really cold, it could be an outside wall."
"True. Just a second."
A moment later Matt came back from the trailer with a long flashlight topped with a wide reflector. He aimed the lamp down into the space between the walls, then up.
After Rudy crawled back into the tunnel, Abby got a chance to see what the powerful flashlight revealed. Looking down, she could see a faint glimmer that suggested a floor. To the right side and straight up, there wasn't even a hint that the surfaces ever stopped—just a never–ending forest of black beams shrinking in the distance and sucking away the light.
Matt took another look into the chasm. "I think the closest surface must be down there. I think our next step is to get to it."
Abby took a deep breath and told herself this would be no worse than the tunnel had been. Probably.
Chapter 11
First Encounter
"Is everyone ready?" Matt asked. He felt nervous about entering the hole between the walls. At the same time he was excited that they were finally getting closer to being able to do something positive, and worried that they might be too late.
"Except for one thing," Rudy said. "I'd better park the borer."
"I thought it was parked."
"It is. I should have said, 'park it more securely.'" Rudy walked down the tunnel toward the borer. "We're going to be leaving it parked a lot longer than normal. I just don't want it sinking to the bottom. Besides the fact that I don't want to lose it, I also don't want it pulling this section of the tunnel down with it. We don't need to have goo start pouring into the hole we just made, and I don't want it to snap the tunnel and flood it, either."
As Matt followed Rudy toward the borer, he realized that the tunnel floor was in fact dipping down as they approached, even though it hadn't been all that long since they had parked the borer here.
"So, what are you going to do about it?" Matt asked.
"Balloon," Rudy said. "I'm going to give it some flotation support, so it's closer to neutral buoyancy.
As Matt watched, Rudy retrieved a dozen small pipes, gas canisters, and inflatable bladders. Rudy hammered the pipes into the walls, then sealed each pipe with a torch. Finally he attached a small gas canister to each bladder and stuck the limp bladders into the pipes. Each canister had a small lip that hooked over the pipe it fit next to. Rudy twisted the valves on each of the gas canisters.
"Okay," Rudy said. "I'm almost set. The goo flows slowly enough that it will take a while for those balloons to fill, but I think it'll go fast enough that the borer won't sink very far before it starts to rise again."
Finally, Rudy took a huge balloon and connected a larger gas canister. The balloon expanded to fill the entire tunnel. Rudy let the gas keep running until the balloon formed a tight fit, then turned off the gas. "One more layer of insurance," Rudy said, "in case the tunnel springs a leak."
Matt and Rudy went back to the hole in the wall. "Okay. Is everybody armed and ready?" Matt asked.
Abby and Bobby Joe patted the Glock 17s at their hips and said, "Yes." Everyone else said, "Yes," without needing to double–check. Canteens hung opposite the holsters.
"All right. Let's get on with it." Matt picked up the end of a long coiled rope and snapped the hook onto his belt. He climbed up and into the dark space between the walls. The black surfaces absorbed much of his helmet light. Matt climbed onto one of the beams that ran between the walls. Richard hooked the next clip onto his own belt, then climbed into the hole and let the slack in the rope fall into the blackness.
"Hand me the lamp," Matt said.
Richard gave him a utility lamp. Matt took it and stuck the suction base to the wall, well away from the opening. Matt set the lamp to flash once every five seconds so the battery would last a long time.
"All right," Matt said. "I'm going to another beam."
Richard said, "Okay. I'm hooked up, and so is Abby."
Matt nodded. He took a breath and leaped for the beam closest to the nearby corner intersection. His body felt weightless as he arced through the darkness toward the beam three meters away. His hardhat almost hit the beam in the row above. His feet hit the next beam, and he steadied himself against the walls.
He leaned into the blackness, and he could just see around the corner. The space between the two parallel walls looked the same as where he was—just an unending series of beams between the surfaces.
Matt leaped back to the beam he had been on and prepared to jump diagonally down to the next row. He looked at the beam he was bound for. It was almost three meters below him, and about half that distance away horizontally. He checked the slack in the rope to make sure he wouldn't get almost all the way and then get sprung back like a dog on a leash. Fortunately the low gravity made a jump of that distance much easier than it would have been otherwise.
He made his best guess as to how fast he'd fall, and he pushed himself away from the beam. He dropped deeper into the darkness
.
The beam rose to meet him, but he wasn't moving sideways fast enough. Instead of hitting the beam with his feet, he was falling past it just as his arms got close enough to grab it.
He held on more easily than he had expected. He pulled himself up to the beam. Seconds later, he jumped to the next beam down on a diagonal. This time he pushed harder and hit the beam with his feet. He bounced and steadied himself against the walls. His backpack was large but not too heavy, and contained part of Richard's supplies.
Matt looked up toward Richard and called softly, "Next."
Richard moved onto the beam near the hole, then followed Matt to the beam he had just been on. Richard also misjudged the jump, but he managed to scramble up onto the beam seconds later.
Within minutes the rest of the team were all in the gap. Behind Richard were Abby, Bobby Joe, Julie, and finally Rudy. Lengths of rope stretched between each adjacent pair. Matt was so far down into the darkness that he felt he was in a tall elevator shaft, and the hole above looked like a dim opening onto a poorly lit floor some five stories above. Flashes from the lamp next to the opening were much easier to see than at first.
The team made another series of jumps, bringing each member lower into the chasm. As Matt watched the group catch up, they looked like giant fireflies with a purpose. Abby must have landed wrong, because Matt heard a sudden "whoops!" but when he looked back she was all right.
They worked into a pattern where each person would jump just after the person ahead in line jumped, and soon Matt figured they were moving down one level about every ten seconds. The cycle was interrupted occasionally, once by Bobby Joe missing his beam entirely, but fortunately his weight in the low gravity was only twenty or thirty pounds, and Abby and Julie were able to support their ends of the rope while Bobby Joe climbed up to the beam he had missed.
Richard's only reaction during the incident was a muttered, "Klutz." Shortly after that, Richard himself slipped and had to climb back up.
They'd been going on and off for an hour when Matt called a slightly longer halt. "How is everyone holding up?" he asked. He could see the five other hardhat lamps but couldn't make out anyone's face.
No one complained.
"How deep are we, Bobby Joe?"
"The box says 1162 meters."
Matt took the big flashlight from his backpack and aimed it at the floor of the chasm again. The floor seemed brighter this time. "We're making significant progress, it seems to me. I'd guess we've gone at least a quarter or a third of the way."
"How about if I drop a dollar and we time it?" Bobby Joe said.
"Go for it," Matt said.
A moment later the sparkle of the silver coin lit the beam from Matt's hardhat lamp. "Everyone be quiet for a minute or two," Bobby Joe said.
The silence lengthened to almost five minutes, and still Matt had heard nothing.
"Something's wrong," Bobby Joe said finally. "It had to have hit by now."
"Let's get moving again," Matt said. "We'll figure it out later."
Abby's soft voice came to him clearly in the darkness. "Be careful, Matt. Maybe the coin hit some barrier."
"Will do."
The team resumed hopping diagonally down into the darkness. They had been jumping for another half–hour when Matt realized he had misjudged the last several beams, overshooting each of them. He called a halt. "Has anyone else been misjudging their jumps recently?"
Everyone but Richard admitting they were having the same trouble, and finally Richard admitted it, too.
"I feel fine," Matt said. "I don't think I'm getting tired or anything. Any theories? And how deep are we now, Bobby Joe?"
No one had any theories.
"We're about 2339 meters down," Bobby Joe said. A moment later, he added, "Uh oh."
"Uh oh what?" Matt asked.
"I'm not sure. But the depth reading is still increasing. And I'm just sitting here."
"Are we moving?" Julie asked.
Rudy said, "You mean the ship? I don't think we'd be able to tell. Since we haven't felt any acceleration other than gravity since we've been inside, my guess is that somehow they've got the technology to shield the interior of the ship from the ship's motion."
"That's lucky for us, too," Matt said. "If this ship can accelerate as quickly as those smaller black ships, we'd probably be dead. Bobby Joe, how does that box work?"
"The inertial navigation unit? It's got a three–axis sealed unit with guts that stay oriented the same direction all the time. Accelerometers in all three axes feed into a microcomputer that integrates the input and computes how far the box has been moved. The vertical axis had to be recalibrated for the lower gravity in here. Right now it assumes a constant reading of about one–sixth gee means we're staying level. If we go up, the increased acceleration tells the box what's happening, and it knows we're going up. If we go down, the decreased acceleration tells the box that, too." Bobby Joe was silent for a moment, then said, "Ah!"
"Ah?"
"If we're in a lower–gee field, it could be tricked into thinking we're descending. And that would explain why we're overshooting beams."
"True," Rudy said. "And if that's the case, then the box is no good for telling how deep we are anymore."
"Any better explanations that occur to anyone?" Matt asked.
No one said anything.
"Okay. Let's get moving again."
They continued their descent, angling down as though following a huge excavated cavern in a deep mine. Within minutes, Matt was convinced the gravity was lower. His leaps took longer, and the lateral push required grew smaller.
"The gravity is definitely lower," Bobby Joe said. "And the box is saying we're dropping even faster."
Soon the gravity was even weaker. Matt felt a tightening in his throat, and a queasiness in his stomach. He had to hold onto the beams to avoid floating upward. He looked back down into the dark chasm, and realized that "down" was no longer as easily identifiable as it had been. He looked behind him. Far in the distance behind him he thought he saw something small and shiny traveling up, but an instant later it was gone.
"This is getting a little crazy," Matt said after moving past a few more beams. "If anyone has anything in a pocket that's not snapped, you'd better fasten it down. This is virtually zero gee."
From beam to beam, Matt now just gave himself a gentle nudge in the right direction and glided straight to it. Moving between beams over the blackness was like walking from log to log as they floated on the surface of the water in a dark bottomless pit.
The air grew dusty, and several times Matt sneezed.
The first time he missed a beam, he realized the rules were continuing to change. He had floated straight toward it at first, but then slowly curved "up," missing the beam by centimeters.
Matt floated until he hit a different beam, one in the same row he had started from. "We've passed zero! What used to be 'down' is now 'up.'"
He positioned himself on the top of the beam, what five minutes ago would have seemed the bottom, and leaped again for the beam he'd been going for earlier. This time he made it. He looked back and saw the pinpoint flashing light in the distance, and the line of climbers behind him. They were still on a straight path from their starting point, but now it felt as if they were climbing out of the chasm instead of going deeper into it.
"Can you point your big light back that way?" Bobby Joe asked.
Matt got out the lamp and aimed it behind him. Very far in the distance a small silvery object moved slowly "up."
"That's my dollar," Bobby Joe said. "It's just oscillating through the zero–gee point. Eventually air resistance will slow it down enough that it just hovers in this region. And that's why it's so dusty here. This is kind of a bizarre gravity well, where everything gathers."
Matt directed the flashlight toward the "floor" he had seen earlier. No reflections returned. "Uh oh," he said. "The floor we saw earlier must have been just the dust in the air in the region we just pas
sed through."
"Does that mean we should stop?" Bobby Joe asked.
"No. Just that the environment is stranger than we expected."
They resumed their trek. After several minutes Matt began to get more comfortable with the idea that they were now traveling "up." Each time he jumped from one beam to the next, he had to jump just a little higher.
They kept climbing. The gravity was still lower than what they'd been used to lately when Richard said, "Lucky the gravity has varied smoothly. Otherwise, we might risk jumping into a ten–gee field."
Matt had a sudden image of dragging the other five behind him to their deaths.
"No problem."
Matt kept climbing through the rows of beams, feeling like a child in a huge jungle gym. When he cleared the next beam, he looked back to make sure he could see the flashing lamp they had left at the hole. It was still there, but very faint.
After another break they reached a region where the gravity seemed as strong as it had been when they started out. Finally the scenery ahead changed. They were apparently nearing another corner of the huge octagon–shaped level of the ship.
Five minutes later that suspicion was confirmed. The wall met another wall at a 135–degree angle. Matt gave the command to stop, and he stuck another small flashing light to the wall.
"So, what now, boss?" Bobby Joe asked. "Try to go through the wall?"
"I think the first step is to explore the boundary," Matt said, then pointed. "Look up there. It seems to me there's a break in the row of beams."
"I think I see what you mean," Abby said.
Julie took advantage of the break to pan with her minivid, capturing more video.
"Quiet!" Matt said suddenly.
In the stillness of the semi–dark gap, Matt could hear the others breathing shallowly. In addition a hum from somewhere around them grew louder and louder. Rapidly the hum grew to a peak and then started to fade again, but Matt couldn't determine which direction the sounds came from.
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