The tunnel into Hector's side descended at an angle of perhaps forty degrees through almost a meter of solid armor; Jaime could see the multiple, laminate layers as he scrambled down, ablative ceramics and duralloy, chromesteel lattice, reflectalloy and durachrome, polyablatives, and thirty full centimeters of coal-black, neutron dense-pack.
Beyond the armor layers, though, the tunnel closed up into a tangled forest of wires and fiberoptic feeds. It was also dark. Once he got clear of the end of the tunnel, only traces of light filtered in from outside, enough to dimly illuminate the crisscrossing lines and cables, but even that light faded into blackness as he kept crawling ahead.
There was a passageway, of sorts, a man-sized opening through tightly packed wires and circuits and connections where something had tunneled through, pushing power cables and data feeds to one side or another. It was a tight fit, however, and Jaime was reduced to pulling himself through the black forest hand over hand. It felt like crawling head-first through
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a tunnel underground, one filled with tree roots of every size and thickness which he had to grab and pull against to move himself along, centimeter by painful centimeter.
No placeforadaustrophobe, he thought. He didn't normally mind close, dark, enclosed spaces, but it was impossible to move through this tangled blackness without feeling a suffocating tightening of chest and throat, without the heart beating faster, without sensing the sheer, incredible mass of armor pressing down from overhead and in from either side. The downward slant of the tunnel made it feel like he was literally descending into the bowels of a vast, black mountain.
A shrill chirping, clattering, clucking sound from behind spurred him on faster. Were any of the !*!*! machines small enough to follow? The big floaters, certainly not. An eye floater, though, would have no difficulty, and there were plenty of dumb but still deadly! Ё! *! mechanisms the size of a big dog that might be sent in after the burrowing humans.
He bumped into something soft, and heard a whimper.
"Shari?"
"I ... can't. . ."
"Yes, you can. Let go, and keep moving. We can't stay here."
"Shari!" Alita called from farther up ahead and below. "It's okay, honey! It opens up into a passageway down here. And there's light!"
"I don't think I can . . ."
"Sure you can," Jaime told her. "Just take it one step, one move at a time. Go on. Reach ahead of you, grab some wires, and pull.'*
It was a good thing, Jaime thought, that the wiring and molycircs here were grown in a deliberate mimicry of growing nerve cells, rather than plugged in, or each grab-and-pull could have unplugged God knew what
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of the Bolo's inner circuitry. The sheer size and complexity of a Bolo's neuronic control molecular circuitry, however, made it impossible for human techs to come in here and check individual connections. For most routine repairs and maintenance, the Bolo grew its own, with help from an army of tiny, inner robots and nanoprocessors.
Shari began moving again, slowly at first, then faster as Alita urged her on from deeper within the Bolo. Then, light blazed ahead, silhouetting Shan's form, and a moment later both Shari and Jaime tumbled out of the wiring and into a lighted passageway.
The light, which seemed so brilliant, was the soft radiance of everglow panels along the ceiling of a maintenance access tunnel, bright only by comparison with the darkness they'd just left. Many of the everglows, Jaime noticed, were smashed, the plastic shards of their covers crunching beneath them as they moved. What weapon, he wondered, had reached inside a Bolo to cause this kind of destruction?
"I think this is Number Four, right-side forward," Alita told them. She was crouching on the floor looking up the passage one way, then back die other. The tunnel was less than a meter and a half tall, forcing them to keep moving on hands and knees, but at least the floor was solid and they weren't squeezing through the forest of fiberoptic feeds and wiring.
"Which way?" Jaime asked her. He was worried about Shari, worried that the close confines were proving to be too much for her. If he'd known before they'd planned this op that she was claustrophobic...
Hell, she should have known, and said something.
That way, I think," Alita said "Then right. It should bring us to the Battle Center."
