That lack of testing, since he had been the test pilot, was a personal indignity of the highest order. If there was any failure Mike had precisely no one else to blame. As he went bouncing off into the darkness he would be forced to curse only himself: designer, test pilot, user. Idiot.
For it was inky darkness his suit lights barely penetrated. Silt from breaks swirled through the tube and as he twisted wildly in the raging current the light swung randomly, illuminating for a moment then being swallowed by the turbidity. A moment's flash of wall, empty water, wall, opening, broken bits of plascrete from the shattered infrastructure, what was once an Indowy. The feeling of helplessness, swirling movement and flashing lights induced massive vertigo. He abruptly vomited, the ejecta captured and efficiently scavenged by the helmet systems.
"Down," he continued. "How much farther?" He would have looked, but he had to close his eyes for a moment. That made it worse so he opened them again and glued his eyes to the suit systems, checking the schematic just as the suit slammed into the wall. The heavy impact was more than absorbed by the suit systems and Mike hardly noticed.
"Two hundred seventy-five meters to waypoint one," answered the AID.
"Increase rate of descent to five meters per second."
As the descent rate increased, the swirling lessened, the suit moving at approximately the rate of the current. He started stabilizing himself, fending himself away the next time he swung toward the wall.
"Michelle, adjust the winch to maintain a tension of ten pounds regardless of rate of descent, up rate of descent to ten meters per second."
"Lieutenant O'Neal, if you strike a serious obstacle at ten meters per second, it could cause serious damage. Regulation maximum uncontrolled movement is seven meters per second."
"Michelle, I wrote that spec, and it's a good spec, I like it. But there are times when you have to push the specifications a little. Let me put it this way, what was the maximum gravities sustained by a mobile survivor of the fuel-air explosion under Qualtren?"
"Private Slattery sustained sixty-five gravities for five microseconds and over twenty for three seconds," answered the AID.
"Then I think I can take hitting concrete at an itty-bitty thirty or forty feet per second," Mike answered with a smile.
"Nonetheless, his suit systems indicate some internal bleeding," protested the AID.
"Is he still functioning?"
"Barely."
" 'Nuff said."
Her silence was as good as a sniff of derision to Mike after so much time in the suit. He had amassed over three thousand hours before this little adventure and he, the suit and the AID were now a smoothly running team. This was again proven when Michelle started flashing an unprompted warning as the waypoint appeared. Restrained by her programming, she could not override his rate setting but she could communicate the need to start slowing down quite pointedly. He sometimes wondered where she had picked up so much personality. Most of the other AIDs he dealt with tended to be flat. He decided to tweak her nose a bit and let the rate setting ride until the last moment. Playing chicken with an AID, what would he do next?
As the waypoint loomed up through the haze he thumbed the manual winch control. The descent braked to a stop just as Michelle intoned "Ahhh, Mike?"
"Gotcha," he laughed. Again the lack of response was pointed. The braking maneuver immediately started him spinning near the far side of the three-meter tube. He let out a few more feet and tried to "fly" over to the opening by twisting his body into a position used in skydiving called a "delta track." Essentially it forms the body into a self-directed arrow. Unfortunately, the external design of the suit did not lend itself to the maneuver and although he swung briefly toward the opening he just as swiftly swung back. He grasped the line and tried to swing toward the opening again, but the current and the geometry of the movement defeated him.
He finally stopped the spin by the simple expedient of switching on his boot clamps, universal binders again, locking his feet onto the far wall, and studied the problem. He had to cross three meters of water with every bit of physics working against him. Wait, which way was gravity? Well, it was perpendicular to the direction of movement, so that was no help. He slowly paid out the line until he was perpendicular to the wall on which he stood facing into the current. He deliberately stopped thinking about gravity again, and stretched his arms as far as they would go. No way to reach, he was way too short. What to do, what to do?
Suit boots. Damn. He released his right boot, stepped a foot sideways and reclamped it. Then the left boot. Step. Clamp.
"Lieutenant O'Neal?" sounded a concerned Sergeant Green a few minutes later.
"Yeah?" Mike puffed.
"You okay, sir?"
"Yeah," Mike grunted, fighting the physics of the situation was like carrying a boulder up a hill and the suit almost made it worse; the pseudomusculature had never been designed to side step against current. My fault again. "I'm almost to the first waypoint," he gasped. "Get the first team ready."
"Yes, sir."
Now he was climbing up the side of the slippery tunnel. The boots refused to slide, a tribute to the Indowy makers he decided, not the idiot designer, but getting them to clamp was noticeably harder. Finally he got a boot over the sill and with his right hand he clamped a binder onto the waypoint wall. Switching grips on the binder he rolled into the still waters of the side tunnel with a final grunt.
"No rest for the wicked," he rasped, sucking in oxygen and pulling himself up the wall. "Michelle, increase the O2 percentage, please, before I panic."
"Say again sir?"
"Nothing Sergeant," Mike said, fighting a desire to tear off the armor and get a really deep breath. Of water. The increased O2 level started to help the oxygen starvation. "I'm down. Recheck those binders and I'll clamp off on this end."
"Yes, sir."
"Send the next suck . . . ah, volunteer for the bound down first." Mike said as he clamped the end of the line to the ceiling. He let out a few feet of slack and then clamped his line to the wall, belaying himself into the tunnel. "I definitely need to brief him. This is not as easy as I thought it would be."
"Yes, sir," said Sergeant Green, with a chuckle. "I will tell you that you just made me fifty bucks. The betting was five to one that you wouldn't make it at all."
"Beg pardon. I designed these systems. I, at least, had total confidence in them." In a pig's eye. "It's just the last part that's hard."
"Ah, airborne, sir, whatever you say."
The rest of the move out of the zone of destruction was time consuming, but not dangerous. As the move progressed the line men discovered myriad techniques to overcome the flow. Notably, stopping before the occasional turn and walking through. After three more hours they reached a pump room four kilometers beyond Qualtren in the subbasement of another megascraper.
Ensuring that there were no Posleen in the area, Mike put the AIDs on guard and ordered the troops to get some rest. He, on the other hand, had to keep going. His problem was that although he had fifty some odd troops who, as soon as they got some rest, would be ready to murder anything with more that two legs, they were effectively weaponless. Their external weapons had been swept away in the explosion and only the few gunners with sidearms still had projectile weapons. On the other hand they each were carrying several thousand rounds of ammunition that used antimatter as a power source so there had to be something they could do. First he had to catch up on "the big picture."