When the Devil Dances

by John Ringo

  "Where to?" she asked.

  "I was going to blast the face by Rocky Top," he said, examining the map. "But that would be easy for them to clear. So I think we'll find something a little tougher. Unfortunately, we're a bit cut off."

  "What!?" Kitteket yelled.

  "Oh, nothing we can't handle," the major replied. "But the drive out of here is going to be . . . interesting. On the other hand, it will give us time to think of new ways to amuse our visitors."

  * * *

  "Is it bad?" Shari asked as Wendy came through the door.

  "Yep," Wendy answered. "Load the kids up. You have the emergency packs?"

  Shari just shook her head and went to the back, calling for the children to get in line. She pulled out backpacks that were new to the children and passed them out. Each child got one and she put a warm jacket in it along with small packs of food. She admonished them not to go diving in, that the food might have to last a long time. She checked their shoes and in one case changed them out for some better footwear, then had them all line up to go to the bathroom.

  Wendy, in the meantime, filled larger daypacks with food and water. She left room for some ammunition, but she hoped that Elgars would be able to bring combat harnesses; they had integral ammunition bags. She considered changing clothes, but the pair of leather pants she had picked up had sort of stretched out to fit and would probably wear as well as anything she had.

  By the time she was finished Shari had lined up the kids and thrown Amber into a papoose on her back. Without another word they headed for the door. Looking both ways, Wendy led them out with the kids following in line and Shari at the rear.

  * * *

  Elgars palmed open her door and then strode across to her wall locker, peeling off her clothes as she went. The door popped open as if it had been waiting for her and she started putting on the gear. First was the uniform and boots, then body armor, helmet and combat harness. She considered all the weapons in the locker and frowned. She wanted the Barrett like a junkie wants a fix, but she finally decided that it was the wrong weapon for the situation. Finally she pulled out two pistols, the Steyr that Wendy had picked up, the MP-5 and the AIW. She grabbed three combat harnesses and loaded them down with magazines then pulled the sheet off her bed and filled it with ammunition for all five weapons. Fortunately the Steyr and the AIW both used the same type of bullets and the MP-5 used the same as one of the pistols.

  Finally she felt that she was set. She was as loaded down as a camel, but once she joined up with the other women the stuff would get distributed.

  Without looking back or closing up she strode back out of the room, headed for G sector.

  * * *

  Cally pried up another section of bunker and stopped, dropping down on her heels; in the broken moonlight she could see a still pale hand. She reached out to it and wiped at the thick hairs on the back. One of the fingers was bent back and the skin was gray and cold.

  She squatted in the moonlight, quietly rocking back and forth on her heels for what seemed to be half the night. Then she piled rocks back over the hand, picked up her rifle and headed back up the hills without looking back.

  After she had left, the Himmit wormed its way out of the wreckage of the bunker, put away the Hiberzine injector and followed her, without looking back.

  CHAPTER 31

  When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,

  He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.

  But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.

  For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  "The Female of the Species" (1911)

  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 greas
ed. 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.