When the Devil Dances

With the weight pulling them over the side, the rest of the children were more or less forced to go. Wendy lowered them slowly, ensuring with each that nothing was stuck or pinched as they went over the side. Shakeela managed to get unbuckled again, but Wendy put her back on the line and pointed out that if she did that when she was being lowered it was a long way down.

Once the children were over the side and the rope detached, the lowering went like clockwork. She held the remote control for the winch and leaned outward, lowering them slowly. It was nearly eight hundred feet down and at first she was worried about oscillation. But Shari was on the bottom controlling the take-up and the descent was smooth. Billy lost his footing a couple of times, but each time she stopped the cable until he was set again.

When the cable reached Shari she let out just enough line that Shari could pull the pairs of children into the lower opening. It only took a few minutes and by the end of it, Wendy was shaking. She had to go down next.

How to get down was a huge question. The climbing ropes were only two hundred feet long so rappelling was out. And if there was an eight-hundred-foot rope in the Urb it would be in the security office which the Posleen had already overrun. She had come up with a way to do it, theoretically, but she really didn’t like it. It had about a thousand things that could go wrong and all of them ended up with Wendy Cummings as a red blotch on the scum-covered floor of the airshaft.

But it was the only thing she could think of doing and if she stayed there “taking counsel of her fears,” as Tommy would put it, she was going to get et.

Finally she cut several lengths off of the climbing rope and started tying knots.

The basic method for lowering was called a “Prussik knot.” She took a section of rope and the ends together. Then she wrapped it around the cable and back through itself. When she put weight on one end, the rope would clamp down on the cable and hold itself in place. Theoretically. On another rope it would work fine. On a cable things were different.

The problem, of course, was that the cable was metal. It was both lower in friction than a rope and greased. All things considered, it was not a good candidate for lowering herself using Prussik knots. The answer to that, from Wendy’s perspective, was to make several. Thus if one cut loose, the others would start to clamp down.

The last line was tied off to her safety harness and wasn’t from the climbing rope, it was one of the safety lines. If she went into freefall, the rope would snag on the cable at the bottom. There were several bad things that would happen then, starting with slamming into the side of the airshaft, but most of them were better than being a red blotch on the floor.

She tested the security of the knots at the edge and they seemed to hold, so she put her foot in one, grabbed two others and stepped over the edge.

And immediately slammed into the side. The good news was the knots were holding, the bad news was that lowering herself was not going to be an easy evolution.

Finally she got a rhythm going. She would let go with one hand and loosen and lower the two foot knots. Then she would lower the two hand knots. Using this slow method she had travelled about two hundred feet, or a quarter of the distance, when she heard a Posleen railgun down one of the side corridors. Then one appeared towards the top of the shaft, on the far side. If it looked down, she was dead meat on a string.

She had noted that by grabbing the knots where they were wrapped around the cable, she could slide them without removing her weight. Sliding the two hand knots down she managed to get all four of the knots side by side and started working them all down without taking pressure off.

What she was unaware of was that the ropes, by sliding over the two hundred feet of cable, had picked up quite a bit of grease. Combined with this, by maintaining pressure, she was significantly increasing the friction generated by the method. Increased friction meant increased heat. Increased heat reduced the coefficient of friction of the climbing rope and under the conditions gravity began to assert its natural hold.

Wendy had gotten another forty feet down when first one foot rope then the other started to slide on their own. She immediately threw her weight onto the two hand lines, but the sudden jerk as she did so changed their coefficient from standing, high, to moving, low, and they, too, began to slide.

She was now on a one-way trip to the bottom of the cable and there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.

She clamped her hands around the upper ropes for dear life. If she clamped down very hard she could slow her progress, but already she could smell the ropes beginning to melt and fray. She worked one of the foot ropes up by bending herself into a U, but that rope was smoking as well and the bottom of the cable was coming up fast.