The Third Gate (33 page)

But it was the Umbilicus itself that stopped him in his tracks. Its yellow skin, normally so smooth and regular, was distorted into an ugly mass of runaway wrinkles and bulging concavities. At the points where the wooden bracing had partially collapsed, the Umbilicus walls pressed frighteningly in on the half-dozen people overhead, moving one after another like mountain climbers, heading for the surface. The great weight of the Sudd was squeezing in on them from all sides, probing the damaged tube, searching for a way,
any
way, to …

Logan felt a pressure on his shoulder. “Come on, man!” he heard the voice of Valentino say. “Climb!
Sbrigati!
”

Romero was now several feet above him. Logan forced himself to look only at the hand and footholds, to ignore what was above, and to begin the climb. He resolutely refused to look up again, concentrating on putting one hand above the other, first the left, then the right. Below, at the edges of his vision, he saw another technician mount the lowest step, begin to climb.…

And then he felt Romero’s foot graze the side of his head. Without thinking, he glanced up to see what had stopped her ascent.

As he did so, he heard gasps—and curses—from the climbers above.

He glanced past Tina—and his heart sank. About twenty feet over his head, near the top of the Umbilicus tube, one of the wooden supports—broken in two, its edges like sharp stakes—was being pressed against an inward bulge in the Umbilicus wall, its material weakened by whatever explosion had caused this devastation. Even as he stared in horrified fascination, the yellow fabric met the sharp edges of the wood. A tear formed; first small, then quickly growing, as the external pressure of the swamp found the weak spot and exploited it.

“No!” the grunt overhead, Kowinsky, screamed. “Jesus, no!”

And then, with a strange sound that was half a sigh, half a shriek of rending fabric, the wall of the Umbilicus gave way. And instantly the Sudd poured in: a vomiting eruption of quicksand. Like water traveling the length of a garden hose it came down toward them. Under its irresistible pressure the Umbilicus began to unravel, from top to bottom, a long seam of black that began tearing itself apart with alarming speed, the foul sludge thrusting inward and downward. Cries and shrieks arose from the climbers above—a cacophony of mingled dismay and terror.

Logan did the only thing that came to mind. Instinctively, without thinking, he reached up, put his hands around Tina Romero’s feet, then let go of the ladder, sliding down past the climbing tech and falling heavily onto the floor of the air lock platform.

She struggled against him. “What are you doing?” she cried.

“Tina!” he shouted over her protests. “Close your eyes!”

There was a rushing sound; a strange tremor, like an approaching earthquake; a chill puff of cesspool wind—and then they were enveloped in cloying, suffocating, disorienting blackness.

54

In the sudden dark, there was a confusion of sensations: cries; screams of pain and fear; slippery, struggling limbs; the cold, fetid grip of the vile muck as it began piling up in all directions around them. Logan wasn’t sure why he’d dropped back to the floor of the air lock platform, the very base of the Umbilicus. A galvanic burst of self-preservation had told him to run from the onrushing foulness of the Sudd, to keep ahead of it at all costs. But almost as quickly as this thought had come, he realized it was madness: they were forty feet below the surface, there were no air tanks or scuba gear at hand, the irresistible submarine pressure of the swamp would quickly fill the tomb, one chamber after another, like a colostomy bag.… He quickly shook away this horrible image, as he also did the image that immediately followed it: running, with a half-dozen other panicked
people, back to the rear of the tomb, there to wait as the rotting filth came roiling toward them, rising, rising.…

There was a violent movement beneath him; a sharp cry. He realized it was Tina Romero, trying to break free of his grip. He let go of her, shielding his eyes from the down-rushing viscous nightmare, digging into his pocket for his flashlight and snapping it on. From their own position—where the bottom of the Umbilicus was affixed to the granite wall of Narmer’s tomb—several of the supporting beams from overhead had collapsed and fallen down around them, forming a crude, jungle-gym riot of wood that rose toward the ceiling of the tomb entrance just overhead.

As he swiveled the flashlight around, he noticed that the black foulness of the Sudd was quickly pouring down the length of the ruined Umbilicus, crushing beams and cabling and people alike under its weight. Somebody overhead—one of the techs—disappeared into a boiling, heaving riot of mud, shafts of wood, coilings of metal; for a minute his hands remained visible, covered in blood; then they, too, disappeared into the black storm. The Umbilicus was shaken by an intense tremor, as if the pressure of the tons of swamp roiling down through its length was twisting it in upon itself.

He looked away, started to yell to Tina. As he did so, a gobbet of flying muck hit his face, filling his mouth. He spat it out, retching at the taste—many thousand years’ worth of rot and decay—then he grabbed her hand and managed to shout.

“Tina!” he cried, pulling at her and pointing at the tangle of beams directly above them. “Climb!
Climb!
”

Machine Specialist Frank Kowinsky had been lucky. When the Umbilicus tore apart and the Sudd rushed in, the technician climbing the rungs directly above him had slipped and begun to fall, becoming tangled in the floating entrails of cabling that hung everywhere. Kowinsky had used the man’s body as part catwalk, part springboard, and he’d managed to launch himself out through the widening rend in the yellow tubing. He knew he’d never be able to climb up
through the remains of the Umbilicus itself—one look at the crush of wood and tangle of bodies and oozing black filth above had told him that—but if he could force himself out into the swamp, he could swim and claw his way to the surface. He’d had to fight hard against the inrushing mud, but by using the technician’s body as an unwilling fulcrum, he’d managed to grasp at the torn fabric of the Umbilicus and pull himself out, kicking and struggling, into the swamp.

And now he was free. Free of the screaming, struggling death scene within. But he hadn’t counted on just how thick and black the depths of the Sudd were; he hadn’t paused to think of how its horrible consistency—thick as tar, yet gritty, like sandpaper—would scratch his skin, hurt his eyes. He quickly closed them, but the sharp grit was in them now and there was no way to rinse it away.

No time to worry about that—he had to get to the surface. He took a moment to orient himself in the blackness, and then he began to struggle upward.

As quickly as he could, Logan climbed up through the welter of ruined beams and supporting spars that rose to the ceiling of the tomb entrance. The wood was black and slippery with mud, and it seemed that for each beam he climbed, he slipped back at least two. Now and then he glanced down to make sure Tina was following him.

There was another dreadful shudder, and the entire ruined tube that had been the Umbilicus seemed to bow away from the tomb interface with a groan of protesting metal. The shouts, the screams, the cries for help had all ceased now—and that, more than anything, filled him with despair: there was only the sloppy, splattery noise of the Sudd as it ran down the remains of the yellow tube, quickly filling the tomb and rising around them.

Flashlight held between his teeth, he pulled himself onto the top spar, his head mere inches below the roof of the interface with the tomb entrance. The ceiling of the Umbilicus—where the tube’s lowest section met with the air lock—drooped ominously overhead. At
this height, the makeshift structure of wooden beams was precarious and unstable, but the unctuous swamp, rising within the tomb and already creeping up his calves, held it in place like black glue. Stabilizing himself against the uppermost metal pylon of the Lock, he reached down and helped pull Tina onto the spar beside him.

In the dim glow of his flashlight, she was barely recognizable, her face, hair and clothes thickly daubed with ordure, her eyes small white points in an otherwise unbroken carapace of muck.

“Now what?” she screamed. “Wait to drown in this shit?”

“We’re not going to drown!” Logan cried back.

As he spoke, there was another, still more violent shudder; the two clung to each other as the entire structure trembled, then sheared to one side.

Logan directed his flashlight up, at the point where the fabric of the Umbilicus met the Lock. “That’s going to fail any moment!” he said. “When it does—listen to me carefully
—do not panic
. The swamp will come down around us. Whatever happens, hold on to me. Hold on tight. I’ll be gripping this pylon, here—it’s anchored to granite and basalt, it’s not going anywhere.”

He tore off his shirt, then undid his belt and shrugged out of his pants. Reaching over, he grasped Tina’s shirt and tore it away as well, buttons flying, exposing her bra.

“What the hell are you doing?” she cried.

“Take off your pants,” he said. “Quickly. Your clothes—they’ll act like weights. You’ll never make it to the surface.”

She understood immediately, unzipping her fly and slipping out of her jeans.

“As soon as the pressure’s equalized, we’ll rise. Keep hold of me. Whatever you do, don’t get disoriented. Shut your eyes
before
we start upward—that will help you keep your bearings in the mud.” He glanced down at the wooden structure beneath them, made a quick calculation. “We’ve got thirty-five feet of swamp to rise through. Pace yourself. Pace your oxygen. Got it?”

Tina said nothing. She was looking at the muck that was now up to their waists and still rising, thick as a foul, black milkshake.

“Tina!” he shouted. “
Do you understand?
”

The round circles of white in her otherwise black face turned to him, blinked, then rose up and down—a nod. Logan took tight hold of her hand, squeezed it.

“Don’t let go,” he said.

Just then there came a final, cataclysmic shudder—a rising squeal of metal, stressed beyond endurance—and then the ceiling above them tore away and the black heart of the Sudd descended on them, enfolding them in its noxious embrace.

Frank Kowinksy fought his way up through the muck and ooze. His eyes stung from the grit, and his ears and nostrils were filled with thick silt. The swamp seemed to pull at him, giant invisible hands that tugged at his clothes, trying to drag him down. And there were
things
here in the muddy blackness: sticks and weeds and softer, more slippery things he didn’t care to guess at. Some he could use, like hand and footholds, and he made his way up through a slippery universe of mud.

He’d been in this shit now for—what, maybe sixty seconds?—and already his chest was starting to burn. He should have taken a deeper breath when he launched himself out from the Umbilicus. And then, he’d expended precious oxygen just forcing himself out into the swamp. Had that been a mistake? Should he have tried to make his way up through the ruined hell of the Umbilicus? But no—that would have meant certain death.

Mud trickled down past the nape of his neck, down his back, under his arms. It seemed to seep in everywhere, his belly, even his groin. It was too horrible, this blackness, not knowing where he was, not knowing how much farther he had to go, and all the time slowly running out of air.…

Suddenly, he hit his head against something, hard. It brought stars to his closed eyes—but it also snapped him out of incipient panic. At first, he thought—hoped—it might be one of the floating pontoons of the Station. But then as he reached out, probing at it with
blind fingers, he realized it was a huge chunk of wood, a tree branch, embedded in the quicksand of the Sudd. He shook his head to clear it—shook it as much as the surrounding ooze would allow—then pushed himself away from the chunk of wood, reoriented himself as best he could, and resumed clawing his way up through the black nightmare.

Logan had been utterly unprepared for one thing: the intense, implacable pressure of the Sudd. It pressed in on him like a cold vise: from above, from behind. It squeezed his chest as if trying to force the air from his lungs. For a moment, he just hung in place, an insect trapped in amber, stunned by the overwhelming, awful, claustrophobic sensation. And then, with a mighty effort, he kicked upward, tugging on Tina’s hand as he did so. He felt her hand moving back and forth as she, too, began forcing her way upward. He tightened his grip, interlocking his fingers with hers—somehow, he sensed that, if they were to get separated, it would mean death for them both.

He kept his eyes and mouth tight shut, tried to forget the muck that oozed its way into his ears, and he allowed his body to find its own equilibrium as they struggled up toward the surface. He kept his nose clear by blowing out, gently, every few seconds—it had the effect of clearing the mud from his nostrils and also kept him from retaining too much air in his lungs. Now and again, as he flailed with his free hand, he knocked against branches and twigs, caught in the matrix of the Sudd; whenever possible, he used them as hand- or footholds to help force his way upward, all the while keeping a tight grasp on Tina’s hand. Once he almost became entangled in the rotting tendrils of some submerged plant. Fighting down panic, he pushed it away, still careful to maintain his equilibrium.

Their upward struggle together, their combined momentum, seemed to make the ascent easier than it would have been for one person alone. Lack of shirts and pants helped coat their bodies in an oil-like slick that counteracted some of the swamp’s treacherous
downward pull. And yet, all too soon, Logan began to feel Tina’s hand twitch and tremble. She was running out of air.

How far had they risen? Fifteen feet? Twenty? It was impossible to tell in this black oblivion. His hand encountered another branch; he used it to pull himself upward, then felt for it with his foot and forced himself up yet again. Now his own lungs were starting to burn. The twitching of Tina’s hand became more urgent; he had to hold on still tighter to keep her from letting go. Another few moments and either she would breathe in or go unconscious. He would not be able to continue to lift her as a deadweight. Already, he could feel his strength ebbing. They would both sink down into the endless blackness, and their bodies would join all those of Narmer’s train, who had—