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I squeezed my eyes shut and started to yell, waving my arms about wildly. The rational part of my brain was trying to figure out where I was falling, but most of me was happy to scream in blind panic until I bounced gently off something.
The yell died in my throat and my eyes managed to open and I found myself looking down at the jets, from the other side of the shaft, only now I was hanging in the air and floating upside down whilst gently drifting back to towards the door. For a split second I felt curious and slightly embarrassed, then my head swam and I felt sick. I heaved, but nothing came up, and I managed to take a hold of my safety line. I pulled it and shot towards the door at incredible speed. Luckily for Pitr and Alyssa, I was aimed to the side of the door so I hit the wall, otherwise I would have crashed into them and we would have all tumbled right back up the corridor. I bounced off the wall with a sickening thud. Then, when I got out to the end of the rope, I bounced off that as well and shot back towards the wall, but slower. This time I was able to cushion myself as I ‘landed’, and to grab one of the metal rungs I could now see ran parallel to the wire cable.
‘Are you all right,’ called Alyssa. I couldn’t see her, but I thought I could hear suppressed laughter in her voice. So the two of them thought that was funny. Fine.
‘No problem,’ I called back. ‘Just take it slowly.’
I started to ‘climb’ up the rungs, and soon realised trying to use my feet was making things that much harder. Eventually I figured out that the best way to get along was to run one hand along the cable, and to use the other to gently tap on a rung occasionally to keep my speed up. It was really cool, and I was so tempted to go faster even though I had already seen how difficult it could be to stop.
The shaft was a scary place. I couldn’t actually see the end. There had been lighting at the bottom, where we had come in, but that had stopped twenty metres away from the door. Now there was nothing more than a faint ring of light ahead. I assumed that was where the other access hatch would be. Other than that, we were in the dark. If one of us got into trouble and broke free of the safety line, we would have to try to find them with torches.
The thought made me hang on to the cable a little bit tighter. I didn’t even know how the others were doing. I suppose I could have called out, but then they hadn’t called to me. I hadn’t even heard them speak to each other. I had tried looking back, but it made me unstable and I had almost bounced into the wall again. All I could do was focus on the light ahead.
When I got there I almost shot right past. I managed to bring myself to a stop inside the pool of light, then backtracked to the door. By the time I got there, I could make out Pitr and Alyssa approaching much more slowly than I had done, although there was something odd about how close together they looked. I started to work on the door, hoping to have to open by the time they arrived. It was starting to swing outwards as they stopped next to me.
‘Let me go in first,’ said Pitr, peering in to the brightly lit tunnel.
‘Why?’ I asked, suspicious.
‘You did all the hard work with door. I can go first and bounce off the floor, then help people step back safely.
I was going to object that I didn’t need his help, but he had already swung himself through the doorway and had righted himself with no more than a stagger. Alyssa went next and just happened to stumble and end up falling into Pitr’s arms. I followed right behind her and brushed past them while they were still untangling themselves, then unclipped the rope from my belt and let it drop before walking up to the other door and starting on the locking wheels at the corners. I was working on the second wheel when I heard the door behind me boom shut, and on the third when Pitr walked up behind me and dropped the ropes on the floor.
‘Need a hand?’ he asked as I struggled with the fourth, and I suddenly found the little bit of extra strength I needed to make it move.
‘Seems not,’ I replied, and set my shoulder against the door to push it open. The room beyond was spookily like the one we had entered the shaft through. I took off my belt and dropped it on the floor beside the access panel. As I walked across the room I heard the panel clang shut behind me. I whirled around and hissed a grumpy ‘shh’ back at Pitr, then waited at the door back into the complex. Before I opened it I signed to Pitr that he should switch off the lights. If the corridor outside was unlit, I didn’t want a beam of light advertising our presence to everybody. Pitr killed the lights and I slid the door open a fraction, peering out. The corridor beyond was lit as though it were night, and clear in both directions. I started to pull the door open, but Pitr put his hand against it and stopped me.