Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

“I’m watching you. Keep the line open.”

In the sliver of light from the corridor, I made out a set of recessed pipes, secured with clamps at regular intervals. I found that if I held the pipe tightly enough, I could brace my feet against the wall and get just enough traction to climb very awkwardly down. I went to it. Within a few meters it was pitch black.

“There’s another pressure-sealed door at the bottom of all this, right?” I heard my voice echo into infinity. “If I use another explosive charge in a confined space, it’ll pop my head like caviar.”

“I’m . . . looking into it,” she answered, not very reassuringly.

I started to feel water running over my hands on the pipe, and I could hear the trickling echo in the space. With every step down, the flow increased. I told myself that it was too warm to be ocean water, but the thought only reminded me that by now I was probably in the express segment of the shaft, starting down into the interval between one module and the next. In this place the pressure of the deep was only arm’s length away in any direction, only barely restrained, and atmospheres higher than the air I was breathing.

Under the trickling and the whispers of air there were other sounds: distant crackling thuds, punctuated by bursts of inhuman wailing. Torpedo detonations. Sonar sweeps.

I pressed the bud into my ear. “Kat, are you hearing this?”

“Nothing to worry about.” Her garbled voice paused. “Probably. Hopefully. At this point, Duke’s rivals must know their only real shot at the throne is to drown the whole city with Duke inside it, but his side has nearly all the combat subs. They’ve managed to intercept all the incoming torpedoes. So far.”

“Won’t they target the construction pod?”

“Focus, Lex. One foot in front of the other. Just like Dante.”

I hadn’t read the Inferno, but I knew what it was about. I wondered if that hell had a part just like this. I considered the notion that the only way out of a dark place is to push all the way through. I wished I could believe it.

Maybe I’ll just stay down here, I thought. Maybe this is where I belong. Far from that sky and its inhuman gaze. But just as I thought this, a soft glow dusted the shaft around me.

“Oh holy fuck,” Kat’s voice gasped.

I looked up instinctively to see a bright red star flicker at the top of the shaft. The thunder of the torpedo strike was followed by the low and rising sound of burning wreckage on its way down—presumably with an immense mass of water coming directly behind it.

“Let go!” the shard was shouting in my ear. “Go! Plug your ears and jump! Jump now!”

“What happens at the bottom?”

“Trust me, Alexei!”

I looked down into the void.

So this is how it ends, I thought, and dropped.

Hell ceased to be quiet or smooth. The lightless walls came howling straight at me. I covered my head and braced for oblivion—but eerie light flashed over my eyelids, followed by a wave of air that slammed into me with bruising force. I felt it lifting me on a screaming pillow of upwelling pressure, until I dropped out the now-open floor of the shaft and splashed down into a roiling vat of heavy water. The rush of air had slowed me down just enough to keep the water from shattering my bones on impact, and I managed to reach the ladder and climb out just before the elevator wreckage exploded down after me on a roaring white column of sea.

My ears kept ringing as I shook myself off, and my face was full of salt. Looming machinery came into focus as my vision cleared: pumps; storage tanks enclosed in mountains of pipe; everything lit in glaring orange lines of light. The industrial cavern of the deuterium-tritium refinery level.

“Still kicking?” Kat asked.

I could only cough and spit, but that was all the answer Kat needed.

“Some of Bloom City’s elevator shafts double as part of the ‘Catastrophic Breach Alternative Shunt System,’ or C-BASS.” She was reading from a manual. She chuckled. “That’s a clever acronym, don’t you think?”

“Construction pod.”

“On your left, fifty meters. Virgil’s got you.”

DANAE

Not many people knew how to access the narrow ducts that ran between modules and stayed open even when all the hatches were sealed. Fewer still knew about the points where it was just wide enough for two human beings and their backpacks to squeeze between Bloom City’s substructure and its outer shell. Thankfully, Naoto was one of those few, and what he didn’t know, I did. Now we crawled through those hidden spaces by the light of our headlamps, soaked in an uneven rain of frigid salt water, stopping and holding our breaths whenever we heard shouting or screaming or the clattering of feet through the walls. I only prayed the material was thick enough to stop a stray waver shot from within. Whenever it quieted down again, we grabbed the next beam and kept climbing.

“Are you sure this is normal?” I asked, waving my hand through a column of falling water. “It’s not coming through a breach?”

“There are always small leaks in the outer shell.” Naoto barely raised his voice above the sound of the water. “The pumps at the bottom catch it. Wait—do you hear that?”

I held still and listened. The sound was distant, buried under the dripping, the creaking metal, and the muffled wailing of alarms: a faint droning buzz, but it didn’t sound mechanical. It ebbed and flowed very slightly.

“How much farther to that hatch?” I asked, scooping saltwater out of my eyes.

“It can’t be more than ten more meters up. But, uh . . .” He paused guiltily. “Once we get it open, we’ll have to sprint across about twenty meters of the main habitat level to get to the other hatch.”

“What other