Project Charon 2 by Patty Jansen (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

the gallery level. They couldn’t see her from where they were.

Tina checked her comm device. The message to Jens had disappeared off the screen, but he had not yet replied. Had he received it?

Heavy footsteps on the metal floor of the gallery above indicated that the two men were coming towards the stairs.

Tina made a snap decision.

Instead of heading back to the recycling plant, she turned the other way and walked deeper into the restricted area, keeping to the side and making sure she was out of sight of the bottom of the stairs.

It wasn’t long before a male voice called out. “Hey! Where did she go?”

Tina ran.

Chapter Twenty-Four

A male voice shouted behind her.

Tina made sure that she kept out of the line of vision, ducking behind banks of equipment and pallets with supplies. She would have loved to have had more time to look around. What was in the large bottles packed neatly in a metal cage? What did the machine with the blinking lights do? A number of white tubes ran from it into the ceiling, presumably to the people in the cabinets on the shelf above.

But there was no time to look.

The men had figured out that she had run in the wrong direction, further into the restricted area. They were somewhere behind her, but she couldn’t see how far.

Tina reached the far end of the hall.

The main passage was blocked by a solid door that was closed, but a small door next to it was open.

She ran in, plunging into utter darkness. With her hands along the wall, she managed to proceed a couple of steps, but then her hands met a corner, and she couldn’t work out if it was a right angle or there was a cupboard in the passage.

She pressed herself against the wall, her heart thudding. She fumbled for her tool belt. At such close range, she would have to use the stunner. She hoped it had lost little of its charge.

The entrance into the large hall showed up like a grey rectangle, dotted with a few glows of purple light.

A silhouette stopped at the door. Tina grabbed the handle of the makeshift stunner, waving the business end in front of her.

If the man came into the passage alone, she might have a chance, but if they both came, not even a miracle was going to save her.

The man said something to his comrade. It sounded like some dialect of Sinolese and Tina wasn’t good at Sinolese, especially the informal type.

She grabbed the handle with sweaty hands.

Come, come a bit closer.

She pushed herself along the wall towards the entrance. She did not want to get stuck here. This passage might lead somewhere, but she couldn’t see it, and she couldn’t make a light because they would know where she was.

Come on, come a bit closer… a bit closer…

Tina hit out with the stunner. The zap of electricity was so loud that she could feel it through the handle. The man didn’t even have time to yell out. He dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.

Tina didn’t wait for his colleague to come over to check. She ran out of the passage—straight into the second person.

Something soft and sticky lashed around her arms. Tentacles. Eew. Eeeeeew.

She hit out with the rod, hitting soft and springy threads. They lost grip on her arm.

Tina ran.

She ran past the large closed door. She didn’t know where she was going or what had happened to the second person.

There was another entrance on the other side of the large closed roller door. A ceiling light cast a pale glow within the depth of the passage. It was impossible to tell where it went. Some sort of maintenance corridor, she guessed. Maybe the inner shelter of the station that Jens had been talking about.

She ran.

The passage looked deserted. There were no doors to either side, just a metal walkway suspended over a set of pipes. She chanced a glance over her shoulder. A person was just coming into the entrance.

She spotted a recess in the space under the walkway. She climbed over the railing, stepped onto the pipe and jumped down.

Only when she had ducked into the dark niche that held a control panel did she realise that she might have a hard time climbing back up.

But she’d worry about that later.

Footsteps thudded on the metal walkway, becoming louder. They weren’t very fast footsteps, and as they came closer, the sound of muffled voices became clear. The footsteps were kind of uneven and limping.

Tina pressed herself as far into the alcove as possible. She sat well within the shadows.

The two men came past, one supporting the other. They spoke softly and stopped regularly to look around. But they passed Tina without spotting her.

Tina waited as quietly as she could until they were out of sight.

As she had suspected, getting back up on the walkway proved a bit of a challenge. She had to track back quite a bit before she found a spot where there was a joint in the pipes with a rim and bolts that she could use to haul herself up.

During this time, no one came into the passage.

The light remained on, which probably meant a motion sensor kept it on for her, and this might also mean that someone was watching into the passage through a remote channel. She needed to find something quickly, because any warnings that her presence generated would escalate the longer she stayed here.

At the end of the passage she came to a T-intersection. Her map told her that if she turned left, she might end up in a wider passage that was part of the main thoroughfare, presuming the door between the two was open.

Tina found the door and tried it, but it was locked. So she kept going. How long would it be before she ran into those two men who had passed her? They weren’t going very fast. They might have warned their mates.

No, she