Quest for the Well of Souls - Jack L. Chalker [123]
He screamed in horror for some time. But thanks to Coriolis effect, he was smashed to death against the shaft long before he struck bottom.
The Bozog climbed up and over the bridge and down onto it, the pale-red cloak of the Ghiskind following.
Wooley saw what happened and applauded. There was more rumbling, booming, and flickering and she grew suddenly businesslike.
"Vistaru, Zinder, go with the Bozog and the Ghiskind! Get both elevator cars open and ready! Com'on, Star! Let's help Renard get the others!" They ran back to the open, dark doorway.
"Renard!" Wooley screamed.
"Here!" he yelled. "Damn it! Come and help! I can't see a blasted thing!"
They could, and Vistaru gently herded the confused and blank other women up the stairs and out the door.
"Come on!" she yelled.
"Mavra! We've got to find Mavra!" Renard screamed.
Wooley looked around with her exceptional night vision. "I don't see her! Mavra!" she screamed. "Mavra!"
Suddenly the whole control room shook with a thunderous wrenching, and part of the far balcony collapsed.
Wooley grabbed Renard. "Come on! Get out of here!" she yelled at him. "We need you to get the others out!"
He looked desperate, tragic. "But—Mavra!" he screamed back.
"She's got to be dead, or unconscious, or something!" Wooley snapped back. Another spasm shook them and the shaft lights stayed out. "Come on! We've got to get out of here or we'll all die!"
With her deceptive strength she picked him up and raced up the stairs. At the top, she looked back, and there seemed to be tears in her eyes.
"Forgive me once more, dear Mavra," she whispered more to herself than to Renard, although he heard.
Then she was off across the bridge.
* * *
Both cars were packed with bodies, and they stopped and started several times and moved jerkily. Despite moments when they seemed stuck, doomed to die of asphyxiation, both made it to the surface.
Renard, though still in shock, realized it was now his show. "To the ship!" he yelled. Time for mourning later.
Aboard the Shuttle
The shuttle had originally been designed for humans. The Bozog engineers had adapted it for the flight from the Well World to New Pompeii—and though there were now eleven humans and only three nonhumans aboard, they managed. The shuttle had been designed for up to thirty people, and the rear area still had its seats—with two to spare.
The Bozog and the Ghiskind remained with Renard on the bridge. The Agitar struggled to get ahold of himself. "Ghiskind, look in back and make sure everybody's seated and strapped down," he snapped. The red specter drifted back, looked, came back, and its hollow-hooded head nodded.
"E-release," Renard muttered. "Now—oh, yeah. Hold tight!" He checked his own straps and reached over to a keyboard, punching the code in.
Nothing happened.
He cursed, then thought a bit, trying to figure out what he had done wrong. Suddenly, he had it.
"E-lift," he punched.
The ship broke free and rose at near maximum power.
"Code please," a pleasant, mechanical voice came at them over the ship's radio, startling him. "Correct code within sixty seconds or we will destroy your ship."
"The robot sentinels!" he cried. "We forgot about them!"
But Mavra hadn't. She'd had him program the entire sequence.
"The Decline and Fall of Pompeii," came her recorded voice over the radio. It was, Renard thought with some relief, a truly appropriate title.
Now the ship slowed, came almost to a standstill. Before him, the screens showed a meaningless series of figures and lots of circles, dots, and other shapes.
The shuttle began to move forward again.
He sighed and relaxed. "That's that for now," he told the others. "She said it would be a day or two before we'd be in range of anybody, unless we run into someone coming our way first."
He walked back to the passenger compartment.
"Goddamned bushy horse's tail!" one