It took about an hour to get the first set of doors opened. They defaulted to locked, for one thing. For another, the mass of the doors was a lot more than the usual lift gates. In the end, it had taken Amos, Sullivan, and Morris on one door and Konecheck with his modifications on the other to pry them open enough to slip through. Twice, the ground had shaken, and the second time harder than the first; the whole damned planetary mantle was ringing like a struck bell. By the end, Amos was starting to get thirsty, but he didn’t see the point in mentioning it.
The shaft was in darkness, which Amos had expected. It was also wet, which he hadn’t. Black drops like filthy rain pattered down from above, smearing the walls and making them slick. He couldn’t tell if it was leaking through from one of the floors above them or if the building at the ground level had been sheared off. The guards had flashlights, but all the beams showed were dirty steel walls and a recessed track that the car ran on. A set of repeating steel access panels ran along beside the track looking like cabinets stacked one on top of the other, going up forever into the gloom.
“That’s the maintenance ladder,” Rona said, playing a circle of white light over the cabinet doors. “The doors retract, and there’s handholds.”
“That’s great,” Amos replied, leaning out into the empty air. The shaft went down another three meters or so. The black soup at the bottom might have gone deeper than that, but he was hoping not to find out. The air smelled like ashes and paint. He didn’t want to think too much about what was leaking into the shaft or where it was coming from. If the whole place was ass-deep in toxic crap, it didn’t change what they had to do.
The gap between floors was maybe half a meter. Craning his neck, he could see the lines of the elevator doors set flush into the wall. Not so much as a fingerhold. He thought maybe there was something way at the top of the shaft – a spot of brightness that came and went in an eyeblink.
“Can we get to the next doors?” Clarissa asked from behind him. “What’s it look like?”
“It looks like we need a plan C,” Amos said, coming back into the prison hallway.
Konecheck chuckled, and Sullivan turned on the man, lifting the gun-like thing to the prisoner’s head. “You think that’s funny, asshole? You think it’s all so fucking amusing?”
Amos ignored the homicidal tension in the air and looked at the gun. It wasn’t like anything he’d put his hands on before. The grip was hard ceramic with a contact interface running along the seam. The barrel was short and square and as wide across as his thumb. Konecheck loomed up over Sullivan, his swollen face a mask of rage and defiance, which was fine as long as it stopped there. “You going to use that, little man?”
“What’s it shoot?” Amos asked. “Tell me it ain’t one of those riot gear things. They give you real bullets down here, don’t they?”
Sullivan turned to him, the gun still trained on Konecheck. Amos smiled and very slowly, gently put his hand on the guard’s arm and drew it down.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Sullivan asked.
“Plan C,” Amos said. “That thing. Shoots real bullets, right? Not gel rounds or some wimpy shit like that?”
“They’re live rounds,” Morris said. “Why?”
“I was just thinking about how a gun makes a shitty metal punch.”
“Where are you going with it?” Clarissa asked.
“Thinking we’ve got three shitty metal punches,” Amos said. “Maybe we can punch some metal.”
The guns were biometrically linked to the guards in case someone like Peaches or Konecheck got hold of them, so Amos and Rona lowered themselves down into the muck instead of Amos going alone. The black sludge came up to Amos’ ankle, cold and slick. The lowest of the cabinet-like doors had its edge under the dark surface. Amos rapped on the metal with his knuckles, listening to the sound. The beam from the flashlight bounced, filling the shaft with twilight.
“Put a round here,” Amos said, putting a daub of muck on the steel. “And here. See if you can get us some fingerholds.”
“What if it ricochets?”
“That’ll suck.”
The first round left a hole in the steel covering maybe a centimeter wide. The second round, a little less. Amos tested the edges with his fingertips. They were sharp, but not knife-sharp. The black rain had soaked the shoulders of his shirt, and the back of it was clinging to his spine.
“Hey, Tiny,” he called. “You come down here a minute?”
After a short silence, Konecheck’s growl came down. “What’d you call me?”
“Tiny. Just come take a look at this. See if we’ve got something.”