Engineman - Eric Brown [99]
"I think they've got the whole area staked out." She thought for a second. "Okay, this way." She all but dragged him down an aisle between emptied food racks and old freezer units. They entered a storeroom. Caroline looked around, then crawled through an air-conditioning duct in the far wall. She reached back for Mirren and he scraped himself through head first. She helped him to his feet and he stood, panting. Her expression was grim. "Look," she said.
Mirren could do little else but look. A metre before his eyes was a curving silver surface. It took him seconds to realise that it was the outer membrane of the dome which enclosed the cultural heritage of central Paris, effectively blocking their flight.
Caroline stood with both feet on the curve of the dome, her back braced against the wall. She edged along, foot over foot, came to the end of the building and peered down the street, then returned to Mirren, fast. Her eyes were wide with alarm. "There's about a dozen of the bastards coming down the street." She banged a heel against the silvered surface of the dome. "I could always blast our way through - but they'd soon find the hole and we'd be trapped in there."
Then she saw the inspection hatch five metres to the left. She moved towards it, feet crossing, and Mirren hurriedly followed. The hatch was an oval doorway set into the base of the dome, secured by a finger-print access lock. Without ceremony, Caroline aimed at the lock mechanism and fired once. The pistol spat and the lock disintegrated. She looked left and right to ensure they were unobserved and hauled the hatch open. She crawled through and Mirren ducked in after her, closing the hatch behind him.
The gap between the outer and inner membrane was less than one metre thick, a confined area of supporting girders and air treatment units. Mirren stood awkwardly, his belly and face pressed against the grime-encrusted plastex. It was suffocatingly hot and pitch black; the inner membrane was darkened in its nighttime phase, and the silver outer membrane admitted no light. Further up, where the artificial starfield began, the backwash of the individual halogens provided erratic illumination. The surface of the inner dome was patterned with regular, indented toe-holds allowing the inspectors and engineers to climb between the two great curving planes.
Caroline clutched his arm. "Up there, Ralph," she ordered. "I'll try to shoot a hole through the inner dome. With luck they'll think we went straight through."
Mirren climbed, finding the indents with difficulty. He pushed his way up, his progress impeded by loose hanks of wiring and the pipes of the air-conditioning which kept the precincts within the dome at a pleasant seventy degrees. He paused when he was a couple of lengths above Caroline and peered down. He could just make out her dark shape, spread-eagled between the planes. He heard two sharp shots. Caroline cursed aloud, tried again. Mirren was thankful that the outer membrane was silvered, so they were unobserved. He wondered how long it would be before the thugs noticed the damaged lock of the hatch.
He looked down, saw Caroline moving towards him up the recessed toe-holds. He felt her hand on his leg. "No good, Ralph. The stuff's reinforced."
"Christ!" Mirren yelled. "We're trapped in here!"
"Just keep climbing."
The confined space became suddenly claustrophobic. The heat seemed to increase by twenty degrees. "Where to?"
She thumped his legs. "Just let me do the thinking, will you? Climb!"
As he moved further up the inside of the dome, the gap became narrower, as if the planes of reinforced plastex converged at the apex. Each step became an effort, the toe-holds harder to find, and his fingers ached from supporting his weight when his feet slipped. They entered the region of the starfield. Mirren tried to keep his mind from the terrible thought of being discovered like this by identifying the constellations. He calculated in which quarter of the city they were positioned, and the degree of their elevation, and then recalled the