James Axler – Shadow World

“Dr. Huth?”

Irritated, he whirled.

The petite brunette took a step back, eyes wide. “This just came back from DNA retyping,” she told him. “You said you wanted to have it as soon as it was processed.” She held up a stoppered glass tube. In it was a single, intensely blue human eye.

“Yes, yes,” he said, taking it from her just to shut her up. “You can go, now.” He slipped the tube into his pocket and immediately forgot about it.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Thrill Bill used his flashlight to point out a screened, three-by-three-foot rectangle set just under the shaft’s ceiling on the wall opposite. “Where we’ve got to get is over there,” he said.

There was a twenty-foot gap between the beam they sat on and the wall, and it was another eight feet up to the vent.

“Tricky is putting it mildly,” Damm said, “considering that none of us can fly.”

Nara was just as upset. “How did you expect us to get across?” she asked the warlord. “Even if we didn’t have all this fucking gear, there’s no way we could jump that far.”

“I was hoping you’d have some suggestions once we got here,” Thrill Bill said.

Nara looked down at the seemingly endless drop and shook her head. “Oh, man”

Ryan swung his leg over the I-beam, straddling it as he pondered the problem.

“We could wait until the next car comes up,” Damm said, “jump down through the trap, and search the top floor for another way into the vent shaft.”

“If we did that, we’d alert the security force,” Nara said. “They’d seal us in, and we’d never get off the floor alive.”

The four of them sat in silence for a long time.

Ryan didn’t speak up until he had the whole thing figured out and was pretty sure it would work. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “First thing, let’s get rid of that screen.”

He unslung his pulse rifle, put the selector switch on sustain and fired from the hip. The pencil line of green struck the corner of the grate, instantly melting it. Ryan followed the perimeter of the opening, cutting away the metal mesh, which dropped away into the dark.

They all held their breath, waiting for it to hit bottom. After thirty seconds, Ryan gave up. He decided either the sound had been so faint that they’d missed it, or the shaft went to the bottom of the earth.

Ryan adjusted the blaster’s beam to the slowest pulse. Then he said, “What we need next are some foot- and handholds.”

“I think he’s got something,” Thrill Bill said delightedly.

Ryan took a one-handed aim and began blasting a series of holes in the concrete at the far end of the beam. It took him several tries to figure out how many bursts it took to make a proper niche, one that was deep enough without being too wide.

Once he had refined his technique, he started manufacturing a line of holes about a foot apart at shoulder height above the beam. He cut them all the way to the corner of the shaft, then across the facing wall, angling slightly upward to meet the vent opening.

When he was done, he swung the laser rifle back toward the end of the beam and started burning out the footholds. He bored them about five feet below the first set. Because they had to accommodate the toes of their boots, he made them both deeper and wider than the ones above.

“I knew we’d come up with something,” Thrill Bill said when the process was complete.

“Going to be a bitch scuttling around that wall carrying packs and weapons,” Damm said.

“Well, we can’t leave them here,” Nara snapped. “We’re going to need them in the complex.”

“Look,” Thrill Bill said, “I’m not carrying anything but my tribarrel. We can shift the loads around and make things a little easier for everybody.”

It took them a while to decide how to divide the weaponry. When they were done, Ryan said, “Since it’s my idea, I get to go first.”

Nobody gave him any argument.

Ryan pushed to his feet and tightrope-walked along the beam to the wall. He put his hand flat against the cool concrete and measured the distance to the first foothold. No point in putting it off, he thought. He reached out with his right hand and slipped his fingers into the niche, then he cautiously extended his right foot.