Inside he wriggled six meters to where it ended in a cross duct, then paused to rest. The ordeal of pain and shock and the demands of healing had weakened him. There Ilse whispered in his mind. While he’d been crawling, she had scouted the ventilator system to its roof opening. He needed to turn left. In such cramped space, that took effort. Ilse was gone again, back to her body; there had been a sense of urgency in her.
He pulled himself along, feeling without eyes the utter blackness. Before long the duct opened into a vertical shaft about a meter square. He stood up in it, leaned his upper back against one side, placed his bare feet against the other, and began working his way upward.
Ilse was back. “I can only stay for a moment,” she thought to him. “I’m in labor and it’s coming fast. I . . . ” She was gone, drawn by the pain in her body.
Fifteen grueling meters higher, his shoulders felt the edge of another side duct entering the shaft; he slid into it and rested. After several minutes he continued upward, stopping in yet another duct not far above.
Ilse was with him again. “Rest well here,” she told him. “There won’t be another chance and you have a long way to climb. The top is in a roof garden. When you get out, circle the shaft—it’s like a chimney—keeping one hand on it and reaching out low with the other. You’ll find a low-walled thing of soil there, with thick bushes growing in it. Crawl beneath the bushes and hide. I’ll try to have someone come down and get you.”
He was alone again. Wriggling back into the shaft, he started climbing. Warm air moved softly upward around his sweating body. His shoulders soon were raw from rubbing on rough dry stone; his legs and back were tired again. It was far. The dungeon was deep underground and the roofs high. He could not rest braced within the shaft; it would take strength to stay in place, draining his energy without progress. His sense of time blurred as he labored upward; there was only long concentration, and pain, and growing fatigue. Very largely he could put himself outside the pain, but exhaustion progressively slowed him.
At length he had to stop. There was no way to tell how much farther it was. With an effort of will he gathered himself, then jacked himself higher, half a meter, a meter.
And smelled fresh air! In moments his back-pressed head reached an opening.
The shaft was capped and the side-ports small. He reached an arm out, and then the other, exhaling and pushing powerfully with his legs to force his chest through. After pausing for a moment on the small of his back, he grasped the cap of the shaft, pulled, wriggled, and tumbled to the roof. For scant seconds he lay there, greasy with sweat, then turned over and crouched. There was no watchfulness nearby—no mind of any kind except for insects and sleeping birds. The planter was in front of him, fragrant with blossoms, and after standing for a moment, Nils crawled beneath its cool-leaved shrubs, to lay on the dry-surfaced soil.
A part of him watched while he slept.
The hull was on one-way transparent and Ram reached out to the instrument panel. Although it was against safety regulations, he pressed the key that slid the door open, to feel the air.
The City swung closer beneath, its rows of buildings defined by black shadow and the weak light of a slender, newly-risen moon. This was night on a planet, not the perpetual blackness of space, and it felt rich and beautiful, with an unreal reality that tingled. There were people down there, too, breathing, sleeping, dreaming—people whose existence was not quite real to him.
The whole scene felt unreal; he was acting in a dream fantasy at the request of his own hostage. Perhaps she had hypnotized him; the story she’d told between contractions sounded like sheerest lunacy. Though Celia had urged him, she hadn’t needed to. This was action, something to do about something, something to accomplish after the waiting and frustration.