James Axler – Way of the Wolf

But it pulsed amber, then turned green.

The elevator doors squealed as the servos surged into motion for probably the first time in a hundred years. When they settled back into their respective housings, no elevator cage was in view.

A harsh grinding continued.

Ryan watched vibrations of the huge tractor belt responsible for bringing the cage up as the pulling engine tried to raise it. With a harsh snap, it broke in two. The broken end whipped through the drum at the top, then fell back down into the elevator shaft.

Leaning in through the doors cautiously, Ryan directed the lantern down. The white beam knifed down through the darkness but didn’t touch bottom.

“The cage didn’t try to come up at all,” Krysty said.

Ryan nodded. “Can’t see the bottom.”

“J.B. said it would probably be down there a ways.”

Ryan shone his light around the room, then spotted a door marked Stairs. Ice sealed the door, but it wasn’t as thick as some of the places they had been. He led the way through the door and started down the stairwell. He counted the landings as they went down, spiraling around and around. With the constant circuitous motion, he felt more vertigo than normal.

“You can feel the iceberg floating down here,” Krysty said.

Ryan nodded, understanding what was upsetting his stomach. The motion of going down the stairs, coupled with the iceberg’s natural buoyancy, was too much. It didn’t last much longer, though.

Fourteen floors down, counting two landings per floor, they came to an end of it. Not the stairway shaft, but of how far they could go.

Ryan played his lantern beam over the black water sloshing across the stairway shaft. He had no way of knowing how much farther it went down. The fact remained that they couldn’t.

“The water level inside the redoubt must be rising, lover,” Krysty said in a low voice. “Otherwise all that water would be frozen.”

“Or,” Ryan replied, “it could be a degree or two just above freezing, just enough to start the iceberg melting a little faster.”

Either way, it wasn’t good.

Chapter Twenty-Four

J.B. laid the circuit boards on the table Jak and Dean had brought up from one of the storerooms they had successfully broken into. It was a long way from making the gateway room homey, but with the heat working a little better, the addition of the chairs gave the companions momentary respite that they weren’t deep in a sinking iceberg. “These are the problem,” the Armorer said. “Boards are shorted out.”

“Can’t you simply fix them, John Barrymore?”

Doc asked.

“Mebbe, but this is precise work we’re talking about, Doc. And if I get it wrong, mebbe we all just go out like a puff of smoke instead of getting on to the next gateway.”

“What do you need?” Ryan asked.

“Access to an electronics shop,” J.B. answered. “Got to have the right kind of soldering metals, magnification lenses so I can get a good look at what I’m doing. Robot arm with a laser is what would work best.”

“Don’t they have an electronics room in the redoubt?” Albert asked. “Seems like they’d have one.”

“They do,” Ryan said. “From the blueprints J.B. ciphered out, the electronics lab is down there somewhere around the docking bay.”

“Oh.”

“Leaves us one choice,” Ryan said.

J.B. nodded. “Go up top and take a look around.”

“And if all you find is ice and snow?” the dwarf asked.

“Don’t know that’s true until we go look,” Ryan said. “You start counting off possibilities before you go see what you can do, you might as well stay home and put a bullet in your brain. I’m not ready to do that yet.”

IT WAS ONE HUNDRED feet to the top of the iceberg. Jak went up first, setting pitons they had found in one of the open storerooms.

The albino drove them deep and fast into the hard ice, having no problem at all to get them to seat. The white birds—Doc called them albatrosses and said they were birds with a lot of bad luck assigned to them—screamed at one another and took turns diving at Jak and Ryan. The cool green of the killer-cold ocean waited below for the slightest misstep.