Death is Forever

she muttered.
    “So he probably bolted that ladder into place well enough to take my weight, not just his. Besides, those bolts could hold up the Brooklyn Bridge.”
    “There’s a ladder?”
    “After a fashion.”
    Cole grunted as he jackknifed his big body around and lowered his legs into the hole, supporting himself on his braced forearms. To Erin it looked as though he was trapped in stone up to his waist.
    “Shine that light somewhere else than in my eyes,” he said.
    “Sorry.” Hastily she tilted her head down.
    He found one of the aluminum rungs with his right foot. Slowly he shifted more and more of his weight from his arms to his foot, ignoring the water falling on his face and shoulders.
    His foot slipped.
    He caught himself on his forearms.
    “Cole.”
    “No worries. The rungs are just wet.”
    This time he jammed his foot all the way to the rock wall before he put on any pressure. The metal took his weight without complaining or giving way. The bolts didn’t even quiver. He shifted his weight quickly, repeatedly, bouncing up and down, testing the bolts that held the ladder.
    Nothing moved.
    “That old bastard wasn’t entirely crazy,” Cole muttered. He looked up at Erin. His light made the water falling over him sparkle and shimmer. “I’d just as soon you didn’t try this, honey.”
    “Into each life a little rain must fall.”
    “I’d settle for a little, but it’s the wrong damn season.”
    He tilted his head and looked up at the black opening that was drooling thin streams of water over him. As he watched, he slowly realized that the volume of water falling down had increased just in the few minutes he had been there.
    “This could be bad news,” he said.
    She followed the direction of his lamp, adding her own light. Despite the fugitive glitter of reflected light, the thicker streams of water appeared more black than silver or transparent.
    “Right now it’s running enough to be annoying,” he said. “In a few hours it could be a gusher. Depends on how much of the surface water this is a collection channel for, and how long it takes for the rain to get through the limestone above us into this channel.”
    “When Abe talked about swallowing black and drowning,” she said uneasily, “I thought he meant claustrophobia.”
    “Doubt it. The deeper the mine, the better he liked it. Besides, he was a literal bloke, for all his metaphors. If he said drown, he meant drown. In water.”
    “Black water.”
    “No other kind in a cave.” Cole eased his left foot onto the ladder. “We’re under a high-water mark right now.”
    “What?”
    “The horizontal stains on the wall on the way in. High-water mark.”
    “Very comforting.”
    “If you want comfort, go back to the entrance.”
    She took a slow breath and bit her tongue.
    “The scallop marks we’ve been crawling over are proof that water ran through the tunnel at some time in the past and could run again in the future,” he added.
    “Could or will?”
    “Once the limestone below gets saturated, the water level will rise and rise and rise until it overflows through places like the crevice we came through. If the level rises slowly, we’ll be able to get out. Or if there are enough outlets lower down for the water to escape, we’ll be safe.”
    “And if there aren’t?”
    “Then we’ll find out how much black water we can drink before we drown.”

44
Abe’s mine
    Slowly Cole shifted his right hand to one of the flexible ladder’s rungs. The stone was uneven enough to keep some of the rungs a few inches away from the wall of the shaft. Where the stone didn’t slope, Abe had chipped out places for hands and toes.
    “Cole? Are you sure we shouldn’t wait?”
    “I’m sure it’s going to get a lot wetter down there before the dry begins. I’m damn sure our chances of surviving the ladder are a hell of a lot better than our chances of surviving ConMin’s attention for the next six months with only the possibility of a diamond mine as a weapon.”
    “Be careful,” she said.
    “This from a woman who thinks king mulgas are beautiful?”
    “Tasty, too.”
    His smile flashed as he shifted his left hand onto the ladder. For an instant the handle of his knife gleamed beneath the flap of the muddy leather sheath.
    The ladder held his full weight.
    He let out a long, silent breath and began feeling blindly with his foot for the next rung below. The ladder flexed and twisted slightly until it crunched up against