When the Devil Dances

“I wouldn’t have run, for that matter.”

“Even with three kids that were your responsibility?” Wendy asked.

“Ah…” Elgars had to stop to think about that. “I probably would have fought anyway. I can’t imagine running from the Posleen. It seems like a losing proposition.”

“Shari’s alive,” Wendy pointed out. “So are her children. All the other people, adults and children, who were at Central Square are dead. Unless you’ve got the force to hold ground, staying is a losing proposition.”

Elgars shrugged as a double set of high blasplas doors, similar to an airlock, retreated into the walls. The room beyond was large: high-ceilinged, at least sixty meters across and even taller than it was wide. The walls were covered in white tiles and there were large fans on the distant ceiling.

In the center of the room was a large structure made out of vitrified stone. It looked something like a small, separate building, about six stories high, but it was covered in black soot and had dozens of different pipe-ends sticking out of it. The numerous windows were all unglazed, with edges cracked as if from hammering or, perhaps, really intense heat. A series of catwalks led off of it to lines arrayed up to the ceiling.

Arrayed along the base of the walls were hundreds of small openings. As Elgars and Wendy entered, the overhead fans kicked on with a distant howl and a faint draft came out of the nearest opening. The fans were drawing the air in the room fast enough to slightly reduce the pressure; if it was not for the hundreds of air-vents along the floor wherever the air did enter would be a hurricane.

The walls were lined with lockers and rescue gear and near the structure in the middle were some of the “fire-carts” that the rescue teams used for transportation in the Sub-Urb. The carts were sort of like a large golf cart with a high pressure pump and racks for rescue gear on the back. With the pump removed they could double as ambulances.

There were about twenty people gathered in the room, most of them females in good to excellent condition. Elgars had met a few of them when Wendy went to her EMS meetings and the captain had to admit that Wendy was in the middle range from a physical perspective. Wendy worked out every day, but she wasn’t very well designed for high-strength, especially upper body strength; among other things she had parts that got in the way. It also appeared that a once a day workout was not quite enough; more than half of the women waiting to try out looked like female triathletes; their arms were corded with muscles and their breasts had shrunk to the point where they were practically nonexistent.

There was a group of emergency personnel confronting them, ten of them in a line. They were wearing the standard day uniform of the emergency, a dark blue Nomex jumpsuit. All of them were female and most looked like ads for a muscle magazine; Elgars had the unkind thought that they probably opened doors by chiseling through with their chins. In front of them was an older female in a bright red coverall. As Wendy joined the group, she glanced at her watch and nodded.

“Okay, I think everybody’s here that’s going to try out,” the firechief said. Eda Connolly had been a lieutenant in the Baltimore Fire Department until she received a politely worded order to leave Baltimore as “excess to defense needs.” She had found herself one of the few fully trained emergency personnel in this hole, but in the last four years she had built a department to be proud of. And she was fundamentally uninterested in lowering her standards.

“You all know what you’re here for,” she continued, gesturing behind her. “You want to join this line. You want to be in emergency services instead of whatever hole the powers that be have stuck you in.

“Fine,” she said with a nod. “I’d love for you to be in emergency services too. I think that if we had three times the number of emergency personnel it would be grand; too many times we find ourselves being run ragged because we don’t have enough hands. But every single hand that we have can do every single job that needs to be done. And that’s not always the easiest thing in this hole.

“There are two million people in this hole. Two million people that, every, single, day, seem to find a new way to get hurt. Arms caught in drains, knifings, shootings, industrial explosions. There are grain elevators that catch on fire, a situation where if you turn off the ventilation the whole thing just blows up. There’s chemical plants and showers to slip and fall in and four thousand foot vertical air shafts that kids manage to climb out into and then panic.

“And all there is keeping them alive, half the time, are these gals,” she said with another gesture behind her. “Every one of them have passed this test. And then, within a week or two, found something harder than this test that they had to complete. Or someone, probably themselves, would die.