Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (30 page)

The elevator car hung like a small building against the column, slightly curved to match the slow curvature of the wall. Alta jumped down on the roof first, her bundled anchor swinging at her waist. Lot followed her to the roof’s outer edge. They looked over the side, peering down the building’s face. He could see the glitter of windows, and seams that marked three sets of doors at the car’s lowest level. “We could climb down there.” He looked at Alta, and she nodded.

Gent had already gone down the car’s side. Now he climbed back up, examining the seam between the car and the elevator column. “It’s fused. All around, as far as I can tell. It must have bonded when the tracks were slagged.”

Lot looked up. The column above the elevator was scarred, as if it had been partly melted and the slag dragged downward. “You think it’s still pressurized?”

Gent shrugged.

“We need to look.”

“Sooth.” Gent dropped his anchor at his feet, then stepped on it a bit to smooth it out. Lot copied him. He ordered his cassette to feed slowly, then dropped over the side, letting his boots stick and rip across the face of the wall.

He looked in a couple of windows, but they were opaque against the sunlight. Next, he dropped down to the bottom of the car and examined the middle set of doors. But he couldn’t find any way of opening them. Gent swung over to join him. “Have you got any more of that explosive spray?” Lot asked. “We could try it on a window.”

Gent nodded. His eyes looked grim.

Lot hung on his cord while Gent painted one of the midlevel windows; then they both retreated several yards.

The window blew out in an explosion of debris: blankets like slow birds, dropping in long arcs, keeping pace with squat pillows and pieces of electronic junk glinting in the sunlight.

When the debris had cleared they returned to the window. Looking inside, Lot saw a small cabin. Double bunkbeds hung on two walls, stripped of their bedding. The door was open only a few inches; it looked to have been wrenched off its runners. Debris clogged the gap: blankets, packs, shed exoshell armor. Lot swallowed hard, then climbed through. He pulled some of the debris clear of the doorway, then leaned on the door, forcing it to open wider. “Careful,” Gent said.

Lot glanced back, to see Urban and Alta climbing in through the window. He nodded at Gent, then squeezed through the gap and into the hallway.

Doors on both sides stood partly open. Gent joined him, and together they moved cautiously down the hall, glancing into each cabin, stepping carefully over debris that had been scattered across the floor by the sudden depressurization. Lot saw a thigh guard and helmet. A pack of the design issued to Jupiter’s army. A woman’s white crystal hairbrush.

At the end of the corridor an escalator descended to the next level. They walked down its frozen treads, counting three more levels of deserted cabins. Dust clung in static attraction to the walls, growing thicker as they descended.

They found the bodies on the lowest floor.

Lot performed a rough count, and decided there had been perhaps 180 people aboard. They’d gathered in prayer circles in the open space of the lobby. A few had been reduced to white bones bedded in dust. Others were mummified, their skin like rough wood, stretched taut over protrudent bones. But most had avoided decay.

Lot walked between the kneeling figures, gazing into faces that seemed almost alive beneath an encasement of wrinkled, glassy skin. They were terribly thin. Their fat and muscle had burned away as their Makers had used the only available energy source to secure the sanctity of tissue pattern. But their structure remained. They could be brought back. Maybe. If their Makers had successfully preserved the patterns of their brains.

Lot walked carefully between the circles, crouching to examine each preserved face, trying to see in the withered features people he’d once known. He accessed fixed memories he hadn’t explored for years, and gradually attached identifications. Gent helped, and Alta too.

Urban kept his distance. He sat on the escalator watching them, his dark eyes unreadable. Lot tried to copy his expression, scared again of falling down a pit of black emotion. Trapped in his suit, with no outside input. . . .

The harsh croak of Urban’s voice interrupted his thoughts: “There must be a radio system in this car.”

Lot looked at him, not understanding. “You want to call your old man?”

Urban shook his head slowly. “These people. They must have screamed for help for days . . . over the radio. The real people must have listened to them begging for help . . .
for days
.”

Lot frowned. It could be. The direct-line transmission would be easy. “They would have switched off their atriums, I think.”

Urban stared at him, and Lot figured he’d said something dumb, but he was too tired to think about it.

They were nearly through the prayer circles when Urban asked in an artificially casual voice, “Jupiter with them?”

“He’s not here!” Lot snapped, not knowing until he said it how much that question had been weighing on him.

“Be sure of it, fury,” Urban said. “I don’t want to drop into the Well if there’s not even a ghost to chase.”

They made sure of it. Alta and Urban searched the upper floors, while Lot and Gent recorded the identities of everyone in the lobby. They didn’t find him. “There could be more cars,” Urban said.

Gent nodded. “We’ll check them too.”

After nearly an hour they gave in and retreated to the upper floor. Gent told everybody to rest, then went outside to survey the elevator column and the void overhead for any sign of pursuit or attack from the city.

Lot kicked a clear space on the floor and settled into it. His suit offered him a straw, but he ignored it. Through a dull buzz in his ears he only half-heard the start of a conversation between Urban and Alta on the dwindling state of their nutrient supply. Alta asked him a question, but he didn’t remember answering. The next thing he knew Gent was shaking him awake. It was past noon, and they had to get moving if there was any hope of getting down before dark.

CHAPTER

22

A
GRIM MOOD SETTLED ON
L
OT AS HE WORKED HIS WAY
across the face of the car and back to the elevator column. His body hurt, and hunger cramped his belly. The suit didn’t offer to feed him anymore. It was the same for all of them. Nutrient reserves had been consumed far faster than expected, and the suit DIs had changed strategy, conserving what was left for their own use.

“It’s bit garbage,” Urban told Gent. “The way these suits are sucking energy, they have to be flawed. There’s an error in the reconstructed design, and you didn’t catch it.”

Gent answered stonily, “There’s no flaw in the design.”

Lot nodded, fairly sure the real source of the drain lay elsewhere. “It’s us. We run hot.” And the ripping damage of jump after jump had placed a high demand on all their self-repair systems.

“Sooth.” Gent sounded worried. “Our metabolic rates are likely higher than the norm when these suits were written. I didn’t take that into account.”

“Then,” Urban said, “we better start breathing slow.”

Alta answered him, her voice softly confident. “This is not a bad thing. If we run hot, at least we fix fast. An antique metabolism might have failed the cumulative repair.”

Lot liked the neat circle of her reasoning. “So we’re paying for an advantage?”

“Sure.”

“That’s very nice,” Urban said, “if we’ve got the currency.”

Gent slapped his anchor against the wall. “I should have foreseen this. Dammit. Lot, ready? Then jump.”

L
OT STAYED CLOSE TO
G
ENT.
T
HEY CHECKED EACH
other’s jump procedures, on guard against the stupid mistakes that always followed in the wake of an exhausted mind.

For Lot, the next couple of hours passed in a blur. They made good progress, dropping forty miles down the column. His mood picked up a little. The sunlight dazzled him. He felt as if he were soaring above the landscape. Though he was still cognizant of the curve of the Well, it was an arc broader than anything he’d ever experienced. Less a curve now than a cloud-covered plain, flat enough to fire the ancient synapses in his mind that had been first arrayed on primeval savannahs. But this was more. He
floated
over the surface, like a spirit in a vision quest, looking down on an ocean of brilliant white clouds piled upon each other in a creamy spiral, completely obscuring the grasping fingers of land that he knew lay beneath. He could see the bulk of the clouds below him, building up like a circular mountain range. He would lose himself sometimes, gazing at the structure of it, taken by the hypnotic beauty of the flowing white vistas. For a while, the clouds became his destination, with the land below of no more interest to him than the bones beneath Alta’s smooth white skin.

L
ATER,
L
OT BEGAN TO EXPERIENCE A CURIOUS PRESSURE
at his back, as if some rogue force pushed at him. When he jumped, he sailed a little farther from the column’s surface than he had before. It gave him a creepy sensation, and he thought about the phantoms below and Urban’s remark about chasing Jupiter’s ghost. Then Gent said, “We’re deep enough in the atmosphere now, we can feel the wind.”

They fell more slowly, held back by atmospheric resistance. Within half an hour they’d entered a dense cloud deck. Visibility dropped abruptly. Water clung to Lot’s suit and the wind blew in fierce whispers past his hood. Gent shortened the length of their jumps, and their progress slowed again. But caution paid off. Through the ripping fog Lot saw below them the looming shape of another elevator car. Legs would have been broken if they’d hit the roof in a state of free fall.

They explored the car, but it was empty, and from the track damage they guessed that it had been ascending when its progress had been stopped. Inside, they found the discarded power pack from a bead rifle and graffiti on the wall that declared in a long flowing script:
on this day we have entered a higher existence
.

“So they got all the way down,” Urban said.

Lot ran his fingers across the flowing alphabet, then turned to look at Gent. Gent’s eyes crinkled in what was probably a smile, lost behind the muzzle of his respirator. “Soon,” he said, and Lot nodded.

They set out again, descending through the troposphere into storm conditions. Gent wouldn’t let them drop more than seventy-five feet at a time—about the limit of vision in the day’s fading light. Progress was reduced to a slow creep. The pace was frustrating, but Lot could only feel grateful for the respite from the horrible jarring of the long jumps. He was beyond tired. The false clarity of exhaustion ruled him. He babbled philosophy over the suit comm, running on about the encroachment of entropy upon the Universe until Urban kindly told him to shut up. A few minutes later he noticed that his gloves had begun to slip.

He blinked hard, not sure he was getting the facts right. But there. When he laid his right hand against the column, he could drag it. Beneath his palm he could feel the rasp of the hot zone against the column, but it refused to take solid hold. His left hand had a better grip, though it slipped a little too. So far his leggings seemed to be holding up. Next, he slapped the anchor out flat and examined it. With a sinking feeling, he watched the edges curl. And still seven miles to go. Softly: “Gent?”

“Yeah?”

“My equipment’s failing.”

“
Shit
.”

Lot showed him the condition of the gloves; the peeling edges of the anchor. Gent checked his pack. “Your nutrient reserve’s been sucked dry.”

“The suit didn’t warn me.”

“The suit’s as dizzy as you are.”

Or maybe there really had been a flaw in the design . . . though Lot didn’t suggest that out loud.

Gent called Urban and Alta in, then carefully checked the state of their equipment. It seemed to be fully functional. He inventoried their remaining reserves, then divided it, linking a couple of full packets into Lot’s system. Lot’s gloves still slipped, but the anchor held tight. “Your suit’s putting energy where it’s needed most,” Gent said.

Lot nodded.

Urban smoothed his anchor against the column. “We’re going to have to start risking longer jumps. We can’t keep moving at this pace, or the suits will fail before we reach the ground.”

Gent was a silhouette in the gathering dark. He nodded. “I’ll go first.” That assertion was greeted by a three-way chorus of dissent, but Gent silenced it with an angry chop of his hand. “This is my expedition,” he said.

“But—”

“No. Don’t follow until you get my all-clear. I want Lot coming down second. Then Urban, then Alta. Understood?”

“But Gent—”

“
Understood?
” Something in his tone left no room for argument. They nodded. Gent checked his anchor, then kicked off, disappearing swiftly into the running clouds.

N
EAR FULL DARK THE CLOUDS AROUND THEM BEGAN
to flicker dully with distant lightning. Thunder rumbled in ominous warning, and Gent began taking longer and longer jumps. Over the next twenty minutes the thunderheads moved closer. The surrounding clouds began to light up like lanterns, and a few minutes later they could see lightning bolts forking across the cloud faces. The thunder was so loud now it could be felt as much as heard. The column itself seemed to hum with an inner vibration that intensified with every deafening clap.

They were quiet, their pensive gazes fixed on the storm around them while they waited for their turn to jump. Like small animals, sensing the approach of a predator.

Gent kicked off. Lot checked his anchor, waiting for permission to follow. Nearly forty seconds passed. He started to get scared, but finally Gent called up. “Okay, Lot. Set your cassette for maximum range. Check him, Alta.”

“Checking.”

Lot dropped. Lightning flickered twice during his fall, and somewhere near thirty-five in his count it began to rain. He hit the end of the cord, every muscle in his body braced against the impact. Then he swung into the wall. Rivulets of water ran sideways around the column, blown by the wind. More water skittered across his visor, blurring his vision. He secured a grip with his leggings, using his hands in a near-useless attempt to screen his visor from the rain. “Gent?” He could just make him out, about twenty feet below. The DI called his anchor down.