Dar walked immediately to the edge of the platform and climbed over the rail, getting her boots on the small ledge and walking along it with confidence. She didn't look behind her to see if anyone was following, leaving it to their individual conscience.
It was dark in the tunnel, but this close to the station there were lights against the wall just barely glowing from the layers of soot and grease covering them. She climbed up a few steps onto a platform that faced a set of closed doors, the faint hum from behind them audible to her.
The platform had steps back down to the ledge, she paused, as the wall dipped into a darkened angle as though a wedge had been cut into it.
Dar pulled out her flashlight and turned it on, flashing it down to the tracks to see a set of them diverging from the main ones and heading directly into the wall. The gap they made was far too wide for her to jump, and she wasn't really sure which one of them was live in the dim light.
Jumping down seemed like a bad idea. Dar turned her flashlight to the wedge instead, playing it against the walls. There were old pylons there, branching off to go with the tracks but it all ended up in bricked off wall.
"Over there, boss." Mark spoke up. "See the cable? It's coming down--where the hell does it go?"
Dar flashed her light over to the edge of the tracks and spotted the thick cable. "Yeah." She examined the ground beneath the platform she was on, seeing piles of litter and eyeballs reflected back at her. With a sigh, she gathered her courage and stepped off the concrete, falling through the air for a few seconds before she landed in the trash, sending cracklings and squeals in every direction.
"Yow." Mark stayed where he was.
"You know something? I went into information technology so I'd avoid crap like this. I should have stuck with the damn Navy." She edged carefully along the platform into the shadows, spotting a much bigger bulk in the darkness in the very corner of the wedge.
"Careful, boss."
Dar lifted her light and moved forward into the gloom, pausing when she heard a frantic rustling just near her right foot. "Oh boy," she muttered. "Glad I have boots on." She scuffed her feet forward, and felt her toe impacting something soft and moving.
Expecting a squeak, she was shocked at a hiss instead, and froze in place, her senses on momentary overload.. "Holy shit! I think there's a damn snake down here!" She trained the light down at her feet and searched the litter.
Then she felt something strike at her boots and instinctively she kicked out with one of them, impacting a body and sending it flying.
"Boss! Dar!" Mark scrambled off the platform. "Hey!"
A loud yowl made them both freeze.
"That's not a snake," Mark said, after a nervous silence.
"No." Dar felt her heart about to come out of her chest. "I think it's a cat."
"Kitty cat or wildcat?"
Dar heard motion again and prepared herself to be attacked, but a furry form dashed past her, eyes glinting in the flashlight, and disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. "Okay." She moved a little further, and then stopped as her thighs bumped into something big. "Oh."
"Wh--oh." Mark peeked past her at the big spool blocking the way."Hey, good job, boss. You found it."
Dar leaned over and examined the remaining cable, and then straightened. "They're right. Not enough. Barely get to the damn stairs in the station."
"Shit." Mark peered at the cable. "Now what?"
Dar started searching the walls with her light. "I don't know. I honestly don't goddamned know."
KERRY STOOD BACK as they opened the door to the old storage closet that they'd used as a demarc. "Thanks," she told the custodian.
"We really appreciate it."
The man grunted and walked off, shaking his head.
"What a nice guy," Scuzzy said. "A real New Yorker." She looked inside the room. "So what are we looking for?"
"Wow. What a place." Nan entered, shining a big flashlight around. "Good grief, Ms. Stuart. Don't tell me this is an actual telecom demarc."
"Kerry, please." Kerry poked her head in. "Unfortunately, yes, it is.Here's the problem. They have the cable for this thing down in the subway tunnel, and it's too short for us to bring up the steps and across the floor there. Dar wants us to find a pipe or conduit that might go down there so she can bring the connection up."
"Oh. Wow." Nan peered around. "Are we still trying to do this? I thought we were giving it up last night." She looked back at Kerry. "It's almost eight o'clock."
"Yeah." Scuzzy looked at her watch. "I gotta get going to the airport, yeah? Bring this guy right back here?"
"Right back here." Kerry agreed. "Okay, Nan, Robert, let's see what we can find." She entered the room cautiously with the office applications support specialist behind her. "We're looking for a pipe."
"Plenty of them in here." Nan said.
"Keep clear of that one, it's steam." Kerry pointed. "And don't touch that panel. It's live electrical."
Nan stopped, and turned around to look at her.
"Dar found out the hard way." Kerry took a careful breath, and edged along the wall, inspecting everything within reach of her flashlight. She'd passed on wearing her jumpsuit, since the idea of struggling into it was just too much for her at the moment.
Dar had insisted on her boots though, going so far as to put them on her, in a moment of exasperating over protectiveness, in front of the staff standing there waiting for them.
Goofball. She found a pipe and tapped on it, shaking the rust off the outside and exposing the old lettering. "Water. No, that won't do it."
"These are huge pipes--steam you said?" Nan was moving around the other side. "They're big."
"We have steam heat," Robert said. He was kneeling on the floor near the front of the room looking at the pipes protruding through the concrete. "What are we looking for, Ms. Stuart? Will they be labeled? I think these are electrical, they say Edison."
"What we're really looking for is an empty pipe that might go down." Kerry stepped carefully over their router and the fiber patch panel Kannan had just finished. "Something that might be going down into the subway from an office building."
"Well." Nan slid between two of the bigger pipes, her slim form almost obscured by them. "This one says fire alarm system--it's going down."
Kerry abandoned her search and made her way to the other side of the closet, easing her head between the pipes since she was pretty sure the rest of her wouldn't fit. "Okay--oh." She turned her head sideways."Telegraph conduit. Telegraph?"
"There used to be fire boxes on the street," Robert explained. "Connected to the fire department. It worked by Morse code or something."
Kerry unclipped her mic. "Dar? You there?"
A loud rushing sound answered her and she pulled the mic away from her ear. "Yow."
"Sorry." Dar clicked in a minute later. "Train going by. What's up? You find anything?"
"Are you in the tunnel?" Kerry asked. "Where the tracks are? Holy crap, Dar!"
"That's where the cable is," Dar reminded her.
"Be careful." Kerry felt her stress level rising. "We found a pipe that is supposed to be for the fire alarm system. It says 'telegraph' on the outside. Can you find one down there?"
"Bang on it," Dar said. "Get something and keep banging on it and we'll look."
Nan nodded. "Good idea." She looked around. "There's a piece of brick--maybe that'll work." She squeezed over near the wall and retrieved it, and then came back over and started banging on the pipe.
"Hear that?" Kerry asked over the radio.
"Hang on."
Kerry held the mic with one hand, keeping her other elbow pressed against her side that had started to ache again. "Good catch, Nan." She complimented the woman. "Last thing we needed was to be stuck inhere for a long time."