“I’ve got the code just about set. You’ve got extra battery packs?”
She patted me on the shoulder. “Hey, have a little faith in your techie fiancée, neh? I pirated all the batteries from our stuff. Taking no chances.”
She glanced over at the rest of the family. “I admit, all the gadgets you people have not only surprised me, they’ll come in handy. Wouldn’t have expected you to have short-range radio repeaters.”
Grandpa laughed. “Hain’t much difference twixt this adventure of yours and some of the ones we’ve thought ’bout doing over the years. Never had to use ’em yet, but Adam durn near did for this last trip. If most of us come with you an’ provide relays with our own radios, those relays should take y’all a good long ways in before we gets out of contact.”
Radio, of course, would be attenuated real fast through all that water-soaked rock, but relays could really stretch that, especially if we used the family to stretch it farther. Evangeline, Grandpa, Mamma, and Helen would be staying topside; the rest would follow us down. We knew the Nomes hadn’t—and couldn’t—come up through the Slade entrance, not with all the iron around and below the entrance. The only question was whether they’d try to kill us when we got out of that area.
I transferred the code into our equipment and spoke into it. There was a faint sideband of whining high-pitched noise, but the instruments showed most of the output centered around the same waveband as the signals I thought were the Nomes’ voices. I put the outdoor headphones on and walked out into the night, pointing a parabolic mike in the direction of the besieging force.
“Choura mon tosetta. Megni om den kai zom tazela ku,” I heard, or something very much like that. The voice was tenor, with an odd, scraping quality to it.
“Zom moran! Zettamakata vos bin turano,” replied another, deeper voice. Chills went down my spine. It was one thing to have figured it out intellectually, another to actually hear the voices of nonhuman creatures. I pulled the headphones off and turned back. “I was right. Voices. Damn!”
Jodi nodded. “Didn’t have any doubt myself, love.”
Jodi and I each clipped one of the little boxes that contained the signal processors, memory, and whatnot that did the conversion to our belts, ran compact headphone wires up inside our clothing, and put on the slim-profile headphones that fit under our caving helmets. No one goes caving with a bare head, unless they want to end up with lumps or worse. We tested all the connections, made sure all the power packs and other gadgets—repeaters, lights, and so on—were well distributed, and then turned towards the door. “Let’s do it. Time’s getting short. They’ve started testing the fence again.”
I led, Jodi followed, with Father, Jonah, Nellie, Adam, and Grandpa bringing up the rear. In the darkness the huge grating seemed even more grim and forbidding, and opening it was like watching a mouth opening up in the earth. We turned on our lights, checked all our equipment again, and descended the iron ladder set into the living rock; as agreed, Grandpa stayed topside to keep the exit secure, just in case, and to be the topside relay.
It’s a long, solemn climb at the best of times; the iron ladder drops straight down into pitch blackness that first muffles the sounds of the outside and then starts amplifying the echoes of your descent into a cadence of solemnly echoing drumbeats. Ninety feet down, my feet touched stone. I looked around, saw nothing in the immediate vicinity, and stepped away to let everyone else get down. The sounds of people and equipment echoed through the tomblike silence of Winston’s Cave, silence normally only broken by water dripping from the ceiling.
“Okay. Everyone ready?”
“Ayup,” Father answered. “Nellie?”
“Yes, Father. I’m first relay. I’ll be right here at the base of the ladder.” She took out her iron truncheon, swung it around, and leaned back against the iron ladder. We heard her checking reception with Grandpa topside as we moved down the Snake’s Belly, a twisting passageway with scalloping where swift-moving water had carved it out. The lights glinted brightly off water-slick rock, giving back highlights of yellow, brown, and white from the flowstone that coated parts of the wall. We moved cautiously, waiting to make sure we could see as far ahead as possible.