Dean’s left foot moved downward and hit empty air. He almost lost balance, as he had on the first downward shaft, but recovered with ease, extending his foot to judge the drop to the bottom of the shaft below. His toe touched without too much of a stretch, and he followed it, letting his other leg fall and taking the impact lightly.
“Bottom,” he whispered up the shaft above him, preparing his fellow travelers for the drop.
Crouching to one side of the shaft, Dean could see nothing in the complete blackness. Unlike Jak’s pigmentless eyes. Dean’s orbs were at full dilation and yet could still see nothing. He could, however, feel the air brushing his cheek and rippling the down of hair on his forearms. From this, he knew the direction in which the air was being drawn, knew this would take them toward the heart of the redoubt.
It was the best direction to take. The farther they got into the redoubt, the better the chance of finding a panel connecting the air shafts and the service ducts.
“This way,” he whispered, crouching lower and beginning to walk on. This far down, the shafts had grown taller and wider, and progress was easier, a byproduct of their need to be bigger in order to incorporate the necessity to pull in more air and dissipate the resulting pressure.
There was still no light, but Dean used his fingertips to feel along the walls. He was searching for a point where the cold roughness of the concrete was replaced by something icier and smoother—the panels connecting the two openings that were supposedly airtight, and had been placed in all the redoubts for purposes of service and maintenance.
He walked only a short distance when his fingers brushed across something that felt like the rounded end of a rivet or smooth nut. The roughness of the concrete ceased and was replaced by the cold smoothness of metal.
“Found it,” he breathed, stopping. Sensing him halt rather than seeing him ahead of them, the rest of the party slowed until they were clustered behind him.
“So this is it, babes,” whispered the Gate warrior nearest to him. “Tell ya something—if we’ve kept quiet for them up to now, there ain’t no way that we can keep this next bit quiet.”
Dean grinned at her, even though he was sure that she couldn’t see him. “Who gives a shit,” he said in return. “This is where the action begins.”
J.B. HAD BEEN ALLOTTED to a party that would take one of the stairwells. Because of his experience in combat of this sort, the others in his group deferred to him. As one of them remarked, “You don’t get sec stairwells and shit like that in the jungle, honey.”
J.B. adopted a slightly different tactic than the other parties with regard to the sec cameras that lined the route to the hidden sec entrance. He and one of the Amazon warriors had gone ahead of their party and shot out all the cameras and then returned to their companions. The Armorer then held them back for a short while.
“They’ll have been expecting us straight away, as soon as the sec monitors went down. We hold back, and their nerves will be shot to shit.”
Timing himself on his wrist chron, J.B. counted in his head, then finally nodded. The taciturn Armorer didn’t bother to offer instructions beyond what the Gate tribeswomen already knew from the briefing.
“Just follow and watch, stay frosty,” was all he offered them.
It was all there was to say.
They made their way briskly but without hurrying to the sec door that stood between them and the stairs that spiraled hundreds of feet down into the earth. They had no idea where there would be a sec defense waiting for them, only that there would be, inevitably, at some point.
There was only one thing to do. J.B. punched in the code and heard, in the tense silence, the soft click of the sec lock as the door became accessible. The Armorer shifted his Uzi onto continuous fire and looked over his shoulder at the Gate women behind him. He gave a brief nod that was partly a gesture to them, and partly an affirmation to himself.