Tasìa nearly sprung an ankle when she landed on the platform of a hard metal lift. She assumed the surface would be either concrete or asphalt, and she did not anticipate the bay floor being more than a few feet off from the ground. It was four.
She cursed herself when she realized her bag of loot was left in the chamber on the other side.
Tasìa turned back to the door and she found the double handles of the latch release. She could use to raise it up again. She hesitated.
The bag of loot could stay put for now. She reasoned, as she thought of the Infernal Madré in the room on the other side of the bay door. There was nothing in the bag that she absolutely needed at the moment.
She had her .32 caliber, Heloïste's PA in her fanny pack, along with a secondary assistant taken from another spook's corpse and a flashlight.
The carbine was left at the hatch. She had intended to retrieve it after dealing with the spiders.
Things just did not go as planned.
Tasìa shrugged to this understatement. She pulled out the flashlight and swept the corridor in front of her.
There wasn't much to see except an asphalt road wide enough to allow a small service truck through with just enough room to turn it back around.
She had seen the compact, electric trucks used throughout the complex. They were the same width as the golf carts maintenance crews rode around in everywhere on the complex but possessed a length three times their size.
Glancing around, Tasìa noticed severe disrepair. Whatever the original purpose of the tower generations ago, it was no longer used as intended.
Girder supports maintained every thirty yards along the ceiling were minimally lit. Many of the lights were broken with the remnants strung along the asphalt.
Deeply corroded pipes from an HVAC system were supported between the girders. A set of generators originally stacked in rows above the bay wall were broken down with parts strewn about beneath. A service stairwell for the generators had also collapsed.
Tasìa began to walk and she turned off the flashlight as her eyes adjusted to the low-light conditions.
One-eighth of a mile down the track, on the right, a side-corridor dropped off into a pitted tunnel with an entrance ladder grounded against the road asphalt.
She wondered if it would lead to service tunnels. Leòn did not recommend this one though. It likely only led deeper into the complex.
A cacophony of noise like the shriek of damaged brass instruments from up the corridor almost stunned Tasìa. She switched out the magazine on her .32, and shone the flashlight ahead.
Several large, but not unnaturally large, rats were in a panic over one of their own. Their eyes glared in the light she shined on them. They scattered in all directions.
Tasìa shot the two that charged with their flickering red eyes coming closer towards her.
She was not about to risk any disease they may have carried.
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When the rats disappeared, there was one left. The one that the others screamed over. It limped away, slowly.
Tasìa could tell there was something odd about it. She shined the light on it.
It looked like roadkill that had come back from the dead. Matted and oily hair laid along the length of its body. The skin of its face had worn rough against the skull.
The bones at the joints of its limbs showed through the surface. The pulse of limping muscle tendons rippled beneath the decaying flesh.
She believed it to be the most pathetic thing she had ever seen. Was it leprotic? Or just another oddity manifested from the Cull Spores?
Tasìa walked past it, but she kept her distance. The rat squealed at her in a tone dry and pneumatic.
Walking up another eighth of a mile, Tasìa came to the corridor to her left that Leon mentioned. She had a decision to make.
If she was going to go back to the SIU, she needed to do so soon.
She also realized her temperament towards Felicité was more forgiving and less inclined towards suspicion now that she understood the pressure General Kutuzov bore down upon the Argentinian hacker.
Yet, even as she reasoned this, Tasìa began to run down the long corridor to find where it might lead. The last thing she wanted to do was to go back to the worker collective and resume that life.
She could not let sentiments and attachments weigh her down.
That is what got me here in the first place.
However she decided to play this out, she still needed to set her Plan B in place as a valid alternative to relying on either Kutuzov or Felicité.
Even though she forgave, even though Tasìa knew she would have done the same thing Felicité did in the same situation, Tasìa could not ignore the fact her closest ally could be turned against her.
She would be a fool not to plan for betrayal.
Tasìa finally came to the end of the road. A large, pressurized vault door faced her. On a panel to its side was a double stacked microcontroller and, along with it, an accompanying display.
Tasìa pulled the screen up. From reading it, she gathered there would be two matters that would prove to be obstacles for her to overcome.
The first, the door could be accessed only twice a day. In cycles of twelve hours apart. On the other side of the pressurized door was an aqueduct of water. It drained out twice a day to be purified. There were ten hours and forty-seven minutes before the next drain cycle.
As for the second of her obstacles, the door itself was encrypted with password protection.
She had a device now in the form of Demona Heloïste's PA that was much better than even Felicity's modified TRS-80. With enough time, she could breach the code that set the password.
Tasìa could tell from the schematic that merely repositioning the pins on the board would completely shut the unit down, rendering it useless. It was secured to prevent a physical hack.
If she came back on the next drain cycle and was able to dial Felicité in remotely to the address of this device, how long would it take to breach it?
"Shit," she spat out.
It was the one factor she would rather not rely on - an unknown quantity of time that could not be accurately measured before an operation was set in motion and executed.
Of course, Tasìa did not expend hundreds of hours of her time coding customized apps and tooling with hacking software the way Felicité did, so she was nowhere near the Argentinian's level of mastery in that art.
How she was going to get that clumsy blonde across the security parameters that Tasìa herself had a little trouble handling, she was not sure, either.
Most likely, for that, she would have to rely on General Kutuzov's pull.
They make some of those barriers go away, as Felicité put it.
Tasìa was determined not to be forced to rely on Kutuzov for her escape.
She needed time to develop a schematic of the service tunnels, and where along the grounds they lay before she could even hope to solve that dilemma.
Cursing to herself, that she couldn't just go through that pressurized door and be done with this place, Tasìa turned back around and started running.
She had a feeling her eventual choice of an escape route would turn out to be the most perilous one, but for now, with too many unknowns for her to sort through at the moment, Tasìa's only viable option was to find a way back over to Spore Isolation.