“I know that.”
“Good.” She tightened the rope and stretched her shoulders.
“Have you ever done anything like this before?” Quait asked.
“Tree house.” And, when his expression did not lighten, “I’ll be fine, Quait.”
“We should have thought to bring a harness,” said Claver.
They secured the rope ladder to a cottonwood and dropped it over the side. Then they looped Chaka’s safety line around the same tree, left sixty feet of slack, and anchored it to an elm.
“Be careful,” said Quait. “If you need more line, pull once. You want to get hauled out of there, pull twice.”
“Okay, lover,” she said. “I got it. And I’m ready.”
“If the place is really here,” said Flojian, “I can’t believe there’s not another entrance.”
Claver shook his head. “There’d be a lot of ground to search. Let’s use the way we know. Once inside, we can see what else is available.”
Chaka put on a pair of gloves, stuffed a bar into her belt, and walked to the edge.
“Luck,” said Flojian.
She flashed a smile, straddled the ladder, and began to back down over the cliff edge. Quait paid out the safety line.
The ladder’s rungs were wooden. But it was hard to get her feet onto them until the rock wall curved away somewhat. She kept her eyes on Quait as long as she could. She did not look down, but she felt the presence of the void. There seemed to be a damned lot of business with heights on this trip.
But it was surprisingly easy going once she got below the summit.
“Are you okay?” Flojian’s voice drifted down.
She assured him she was and continued the descent. Every few steps they’d ask again and as she got farther away it became more distracting until finally she called up that she’d yell if she needed anything and please otherwise keep quiet.
Once she ran out of slack and had to signal. The rock was rougher than it had looked from above. Vegetation was sharp and prickly. At one point it snagged the ladder and she had to hang by one hand while she worked it free.
Streams of pebbles dribbled past. Vertical fissures appeared. From a dark hole, a pair of eyes watched her.
A sudden burst of wind hit her and she swung gently back and forth, clinging to the ladder. Below her, right where it was supposed to be, she saw the discolored rock. It looked exactly like a set of doors. “A little more,” she called up. “I think we’ve got it.”
There were actually four doors set in the face of the cliff. This was where Showron Voyager’s bullet-shaped vehicle had delivered its passengers. So there had been a terminal here once. Several pieces of iron remained, supports outside, beams inside. And a bench. One of the doors was wedged open. She had some difficulty gaining purchase because the ladder was hanging a couple of feet out, as a result of the overhead bulge. But she swung herself close, grabbed a wiry bush, and tried to get inside.
The scariest part of the entire operation came when she tried to climb off the ladder and get through the doorway. There wasn’t enough slack and they didn’t seem to understand up there that if they kept the safety line tight she couldn’t move. Moreover, she had to hang on to the bush to keep the ladder close until she was safely through the open door. When it was over she wasted no time releasing the safety line. She congratulated herself and called up that she was okay. The high-roofed corridor Knobby had described lay beyond. But it was too dark to see more than a few yards.
“Chaka.” Quait’s voice. “We need to tie the ladder down.”
“Right.” The ladder was about three feet out. Just beyond easy reach.
She tried for it twice. The second time she lost her balance and almost fell. It was a desperate moment. And it was stupid because they didn’t need to do it this way. “Quait.”
“Yes. What’s taking so long?”
“I can’t reach it. I need someone to come down.”
Flojian came next, with lamps dangling from his belt. When he reached the doorway, she caught his hand and pulled him in. And the ladder along with him. They tied it to a beam and lit the lamps while they waited for Claver.
Quait was last to descend, having looped his safety line around the tree and dropped it to them so that someone would be holding the other end.
When he’d joined them, they pushed through into the inner passageway. Beyond, in the gloomy light thrown by the lamps, they saw the stairway and the corridor and the shafts. The shafts were very much like the ones in the towers around Union Station. Chaka looked down into one. “Damp,” she said.
She found a couple of pebbles and tossed them in. After a few seconds, they splashed.
The air was stale away from the door.
Claver indicated his surprise that the air was breathable at all, until Flojian noted a duct cover in the ceiling. There was a system of vents.
The stairway was not cut from rock, but rather was an insert, made of Roadmaker metal. The handrail and the stairs were covered with dust.
They picked up their equipment and started down. Flojian took the lead.
Chaka had never quite believed the story about the six deaths. When people die in groups, they don’t die without marks. She noticed that Quait kept his hand close to his weapon.
That Flojian harbored similar feelings was evident. He moved as quietly as he could, spoke in a hushed voice, and everything about his demeanor suggested that he was controlling his own set of devils. That was an unusual attitude for him: He was given to caution, but Chaka rarely saw him frightened. Nevertheless, he stayed in front.
Even Claver seemed intimidated, and had little to say. He carried a coil of rope and a bar, but he was probably not aware he gripped the bar like a weapon.
The dark was tangible. It squeezed the light from their lamps. Shadows moved grotesquely around the walls. They could hear the wind, seemingly in the rock. Corridors opened at each level. The shafts were always there, of course, and beyond they saw doorways, sometimes open, sometimes not.
“The walls are wet,” said Claver. “This isn’t a place I’d use for storage.”
“It was probably military,” suggested Quait. “Whatever it might have become in later years it was originally a military or naval installation.”
The stairway wound back and forth, landing by landing, until they concluded they must surely be near the base of the cliff. And then it ended. Broke off.
“This is probably where they found your father,” Chaka told Flojian.
Quait stood at the edge of the landing, held his lamp out, and looked down. They could see a floor.
That’s where they died.
“No dust here,” said Claver.
There wasn’t. The landing was dean. So were five or six stairs above the landing. Above that, the dust was thick. Curious.
The floor was about twenty-five feet down.
“Maybe,” Claver continued, “they opened a door and released a pocket of gas.”
That was dose to making sense. It was akin to what had happened to Jon Shannon when he opened the wrong door. But there was a missing element. “There was no explosion,” Chaka said.
“Don’t need one. They start breathing gas, lose consdous-ness, and they smother.”
“All six of them?”
“Well,” Claver admitted, “it does require a stretch.”
“Anyhow,” said Flojian, “they were found in different places.”
Claver shook his head. “There’s always a tendency to dramatize when you’re telling a story.”
“I don’t think Knobby was lying,” said Chaka.
Flojian tied a line around his lamp and lowered it. The remains of the collapsed staircase lay scattered around the floor below.
“I wouldn’t suggest he was lying,” said Claver. “But people get confused easily. Espedally in a place like this. To be honest with you, if things happened the way Knobby said, I’d be ready to accept the idea that there’s something loose in these tunnels.”