"We'll have to go back through the ship."
We found the nearest hatch and went back in. Smoke was hanging thick in the corridors. Shouting came from all directions as passengers clogged the halls in an effort to get to the stairways. It was bedlam. Lori took my arm. We followed her back the way we had come, made a few turns, then ducked into a small room lined with cabinets that held bedding and linen. Near the back wall a ladder descended through a hatchway in the floor. I looked down. The ladder went down a long way. She told us these were quick-access shafts, and that only the crew used them. We started down. It took a good while and a few trod-upon fingers before all of us made it down to C Deck, winding up in a storage room full of crates and miscellaneous equipment.
"Where to now?" I asked Lori, taking off my shirt and handing it to her. She had doffed the sheet before taking the ladder.
"Thanks. You'll have to take the ventilation shafts to get below decks. They'll have the elevators shut down."
"Ventilation shafts?"
"Yeah. Otherwise you couldn't breathe down there, leastwise not very well."
It made sense, but I had a question. "Isn't all that air kind of hard on Fiona's tummy?"
"Sometimes. Every so often she burps and it all empties out. That's why you can't stay down there."
"You mean she can burp up a vehicle or two?"
"Sometimes she does, but we spray the sacs down with antispasmodics to keep that from happening often."
"Well, let's go."
It was a long trek through the ship to the stem. We passed more storerooms, then the crew's quarters, where Lori stopped to get decent. I got my shirt back. We continued aft, past the infirmary and the topside holds, through the crew's mess, the galley, and some workshops, then through a section of economy-class cabins, and finally into heating and ventilation rooms. The machinery was still running, but if the fires got out of control, it wouldn't be for long.
"What happens when the equipment shuts down?" I asked our guide as we climbed through a thicket of pipes.
"Oh, there's enough air down there to last for a while. But if Fiona gets upset over the attack, she may start burping."
"Oh."
Access to the shaft was through a tiny door in a metal cylinder into which fed a maze of piping. "This is the outtake shaft. The intake one has a bunch of filters. Watch the updraft." She held the door open for me. "There are rungs running down it."
I poked my head through and saw a tubular shaft dropping straight down into darkness. The updraft almost made me bang my head against the door frame. I took my head out and stood up. "What about light?"
"I have a torch in my kit-bag," John said. "I can lash it to my epaulets. Roland has one too, I think."
I handed him his pack, then said to Lori, "Are you coming?"
"No, I belong here," she said firmly. "I should report for
fire detail."
"Well, okay. I don't think you'll be in any danger now, except to answer to Pendergast for hiding Winnie."
"I can handle him." She frowned, and asked, "What arc you going to do down there anyway?"
"Find a place to hide," I said, "until I can convince your captain that we're no threat to him… or to the Outworlds."
"But you'll never find your way down there. You could wind up as Fiona merte."
"Well, I've been called worse."
"But you might hurt her too!" Conflicting impulses crossed and recrossed her mind. Then something hit her and her mouth hung open. "Oh, my God! Where's Winnie?"
"She's safe, down in my rig."
"Huh? How did she get down there? And why did she leave
the radio shack? I told her to―" She slapped her forehead. "The siren! The general quarters alarm is right above the shack. She must have got frightened when it went off during the gorgon attack! God, am I stupid," she groaned.
"Don't think about it. Turned out for the best anyway. Just take care of yourself." I gave her a peck on the cheek. "And thanks."
I stooped toward the hatch, but she caught my arm. "No, wait. I want to see if Winnie's all right. I'll go down fust."
The updraft actually made it easier to descend, but the rungs were small and slippery, and the shaft started tilting to an awkward angle. I stopped now and then to look up and check everyone's progress. Darla and the men were doing all right, but Susan was struggling with her heavy backpack. I saw her lose her foothold several times, with Darla boosting her rear end back up. We continued the long descent. The air currents weakened as we got further down, then the odd angle worsened until it became a real problem to hang on, making it necessary to use the rungs as handholds only and fight for purchase with our heels against the smooth wall of the shaft, skidding and scuffing our way down. The angle was steep, but further ahead it began to level out. Before we got that far, the shaft began to move, sometimes lurching violently, banging up against us and making it hard to judge where to grab next. I heard a squeal, and before I could look back, Susan slid past me, disappearing into the darkness. Then the shaft buckled crazily and John was next to go. I reached out for him, but missed. The hand grips were almost directly above now and were impossible to grab if you were sliding. The flexible shaft was dancing like a length of rope in the wind, pitching wildly in every direction, and it was Darla's turn next, but I managed to catch her as she passed ― and lost my grip in the process.
It was a quick trip down. Very soon we were off me smooth plastic of the tube and onto a wet, warm sliding-board of organ-tissue. In the total darkness, I braced for a sudden stop, not knowing what we were sliding into, but before long I could see light ahead. Then the slope leveled out and we skidded over flat surface for a dozen meters until we stopped. We were soaking wet. A torch beam hit me and then swung to Darla. It was John, and he walked over, Susan with him.
"Interesting idea for an amusement-park ride," he said.
I got up and helped Darla to her feet. "Where are we?" I asked him.
He played the beam ahead and I saw a few parked vehicles in the distance. "Good," I said, got out Sam's key, and was about to call when something hit the back of my legs and bowled me over. It was the kid. He apologized, then groaned, as anyone would with 90 kilos of truckdriver on his chest. I got off him. John swung his light in the direction of the shaft. Lori and Roland were skating toward us like champions, then broke into a nimble trot over the treacherous surface until they reached us.
"You people were in a hurry," Lori said cheerily.
"What was all that jerking around about?" I asked.
"Oh, that's nothing. We don't bother to spray down empty areas. And the floor's so slippery because we didn't put down rosin here."
"Oh." I keyed Sam.
"Where are you now?"
'Turn on your high beams."
He wasn't more than a minute's walk away.
After me, it was Lori whom Winnie hugged when we all got in, and I was at a loss to explain how Winnie could have gotten any sense of betrayal from Darla, for clearly she had. At first, she barely acknowledged her onetime friend and interpreter. Perhaps she read the guilt in Darla's face, invisible to me, but by now Winnie's empathic powers were a given. I only wondered as to their extent. Whatever that was, I knew that Winnie's second sight was keen enough to see Darla's grief, and perhaps her regret at using Winnie as a pawn, because before long Winnie was hugging Darla too, her capacity for forgiveness and compassion probably greater than anything. It was a moment of revelation for me, because up until then I really didn't have a robust sense of Winnie's personhood, couldn't really accept her as the thinking, feeling being she obviously was. I didn't know what prejudices had gotten in the way; I have my share, but maybe the problem had been a simple lack of attention on my part. Winnie's subtle brand of personality and intelligence were easy to lose amid the gunfire, the frantic chases, the noise, and the intrigue. Her innate shyness and reticence didn't help either. All along I had caught glimmers of the light she was hiding under a bushel of soft, ape-brown hair, but I hadn't had the time nor the opportunity to groom through the shag and see what was glowing. Nor did