“Then there’s some sort of feedback uplink on the tram itself, hooked to a lowtech inertial guidance unit, which probably is designed to report any sudden change in the tram’s speed.”
“What about the pit itself?” asked Ruiz.
“Nothing, as far as I can tell,” said the cyborg, shrugging his metal shoulders. “If we had a week and the right gear, we might be able to scale the wall, if no one came along and noticed us. The rail is hot with detector filaments, though, so we can’t just climb the webbing.”
“So,” said Albany. “Let’s see if I can sum up. Our freaked-out sisters got to get steady enough to punch the solenoids, we got to pop the Dirms without losing any elbows, and then we got to get on the thing without slowing it, even though it’s moving fast enough to break our legs if we land wrong. Then we got to miss the jects and the razor rails, keep from stepping in the tanglefoot. Then when we get to the top, we’ll probably have a reception waiting for us because we missed some detail, or stuck the wrong elbow in the scanner. Stop me anytime, someone.”
“I guess I’ll go talk to Moh and Chou,” said Ruiz. “Meanwhile, figure out how to get on the tram.”
Ruiz went back along the tunnel, to where the two Jahworld women huddled in the angle between wall and floor, each clutching her pinbeam, as if deriving some comfort from its heavy glass and metal barrel.
“I’m sorry you’re frightened,” he said. “But we’ll need you when the tram comes back.”
“Too deep,” said Moh in a voice trembling with strain. “Way too deep. You told us this was going to be a cavecrawl.” Her tone was only slightly accusing; her terror seemed to be occupying all her attention.
“I thought it was,” said Ruiz. “But it’s not; and that’s too bad. I’m going to put you two up at the tunnel mouth — you’ll have to burn out some gear for us. Can you do it?”
Chou sat up and disengaged herself from the other woman’s grip. “We’ll give it a shot. But if you think we’re going out into that hole, you’re wrong.”
“No, no, I don’t expect that. What good would you be to me there? I’ll leave you here to guard our back door, after we get the tram. You wait for us.”
Chou’s flat broad face cleared. “We’ll camp down the tunnel, where we can’t see the light or feel the deep.”
Ruiz nodded and went back to the lip.
“Go set up the sisters’ fire pattern and priorities,” he told the cyborg.
More than an hour passed before Ruiz heard the rail begin to sing again.
They had used the time to formulate and refine a plan. It depended too much on perfection of execution, Ruiz thought pessimistically, but it was the best he could do. He didn’t really believe that he would be able to come up with a better plan if they waited for the tram to make another trip; besides, who knew when that might occur — it might not go down to the Gencha again for a week. And he’d always been luckiest when he improvised quickly.
Ruiz had sent the gladiator, the puppet, and Durban the beaster out along a horizontal crack in the wall that widened sufficiently to hide them, a few meters closer to the rail and perhaps fifty meters farther up — a point from which boarding the tram would be somewhat easier. Ruiz had sealed the puppet’s leash to the gladiator’s wrist — and told the nameless man that getting the puppet safely on the tram was the most important job.
Ruiz, Albany, Huxley, and the sisters lay on their bellies at the tunnel mouth, rehearsing each other in their roles in the impending attack. The sisters would burn out the deadman solenoids, so those mechanisms would stay locked in the live positions. Albany would try to burn off as many of the physical antiboarding devices as he could. Huxley wasn’t notably skilled with long-range weapons, so his job was to get his and Albany’s gear aboard undamaged.
Ruiz had taken one of the most difficult tasks for himself — killing the Dirms. Dirms possessed vestigial remote brains distributed through their bodies in a number of locations, a legacy from their overgrown sauroid ancestors. Through an expensive and uncertain process, these vestigial brains could be enhanced with tissue from the Dirm’s primary brain, until the alien possessed a form of distributed intelligence that made it almost impossible to instantly disable the creature. Ruiz would have to burn through enough of the Dirm’s brains to disable the creature before it could report the attack.
Then, supposing all went well, and Huxley detected no alarms on the tram’s uplink, they would all fling themselves into space, tethered by programmable monolastic descenders — special lines that would stretch to absorb the shock of hitting the end of the tether, but not rebound. If Albany’s calculations were correct, they would end up dangling two meters over the rail as the tram passed.
They’d have to drop, avoid any of the mantraps Albany might have missed, avoid injury, and not fall off. Then they’d have to catch the puppet, and the other two slayers.
After that they could start wondering what they might find at the top of the pit.
“This ought to be easy,” said Albany, grinning ferociously.
Ruiz wasn’t very amused. All his life he had thrown himself into situations of uncertain violence, confident that he would survive them, as he always had. It no longer seemed possible for him to enter conflict with the same impersonal monomaniacal intensity that had guarded him for so long, and he wasn’t sure what had changed. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he was no longer as indifferent to the possibility of death; now he wanted very badly to live, with a fervor that grew stronger every day.
He wondered how it was he had lived for so many years without noticing that he hadn’t cared very much whether he lived or died.
“Wake up, Ruiz,” whispered Albany, who nudged him and pointed. The tram was coming up the incline toward them, moving upward somewhat more slowly than it had descended — a heartening development. It carried six passengers, though these weren’t anesthetized. They lay on their pallets, looking up empty-eyed. A chill passed through Ruiz — these were obviously deconstructed persons, returning from the Gencha.
Ruiz squinted through the scope of the long-barreled spitter he had carried strapped to his packframe for just such an occasion. The Dirm’s scaly face swam into focus, the pithing scar prominent just below the creature’s skulltop nostrils. Its moonstone eyes stared dully, as if the redistribution of its intelligence had taken something essential from it.
Ruiz dropped the crosshairs to the Dirm’s left shoulder joint; it held the tram’s speed yoke in its left hand.
“Now,” he said, and fired.
His weapon launched a supersonic needle of frozen gas, which struck the Dirm and thawed explosively.
Before Ruiz could see the damage he had done, he was firing again, at the right shoulder brain, the abdominal brain, the left hip, the left calf. He switched his fire to the other Dirm, who was reacting to the destruction of its partner, its right hand rising toward an alarm button. Ruiz hit the right shoulder brain, then before the Dirm could switch hands, the left shoulder, and on to the other centers.
He was vaguely aware of the spurts of white sparks as the pinbeamers killed the solenoids, of the darker flash of Albany’s graser as he burned away the mechanical devices on the near side of the tram.
The shooting was over in two seconds.
“Clean so far,” Huxley barked. The three of them slung their weapons and rolled over the lip of the tunnel into the void.
The fall lasted a timeless instant, until the deceleration jerked Ruiz upright. He waited until the tram was almost under him, then slapped the release and dropped the last two meters. He landed on one of the passengers; it was like falling into soft sand, it cushioned the impact. He managed to keep his balance, and jumped toward the first Dirm he had shot, which was floundering weakly. The spitter had pulped its joints along with its brains, and it showed no sign of surviving intelligence.