“What the hell were you THINKING?” Shouted Ithaca, kicking Dannal off her. “What possessed your tiny mind to touch something, in the old, abandoned, tube station!” She punctuated her words with further blows, until he finally rolled off.

“Look, I didn’t think anything would actually happen, okay?” He shouted, standing up to fast and floating away from the floor. “Crap, someone grab me!” He shouted as he drifted back to the floor. Ipra’s hand closed on his shoulder and she helped hold him to the floor.

Light filled the small room suddenly, and the four yelped in shock. Blinking away the sudden brightness, they found all four walls illuminated by a caricature of a human woman. It waved as a voice started talking in a language none of them could follow. The figure started gesturing, indicating things that didn’t seem to exist in the small room.

“Is this an inflight instructional video?” Asked Ithaca after a few seconds.The figure was indicating the position of the main door and a hatch in the ceiling.

“Looks like it.” Said Ipra, as the figure on the walls moved over and a long line drew itself from ceiling to floor, something red pulsing down it. “And that looks like a travel map?”

The line suddenly split into two just ahead of the pulsing mark, and a pair of arrows pointed towards the split off section. “You all may want to hold on to something.” She said. 

The room shuddered suddenly, everyone staggering as it felt like everything moved sideways. “Did we change to a different track?” Asked Dannal, staggering back upright. “How complex is this system?”

A new icon started flashing on the walls, a red triangle with an exclamation point inside it. The voice started repeating one word over and over.

“What do you think that’s about?” Asked Ithaca, as an alarm started to sound as well after a few seconds.

“I think it wants us to brace.” Said Oldra, looking at the line of their route. “It looks like there’s a break in the route it’s taking!”

The words had barely left Oldra’s mouth when the weight of two people fell on their shoulders, all four slamming hard into the floor as their legs gave way under the strain. Outside, brakes screamed as they tried to slow the descent as fast as they could, the entire thing shaking like a leaf. Finally, after endless moments of pressure and screaming brakes, the entire thing shuddered to a halt, and the weight vanished.

Ithaca pushed herself up slowly, groaning from the blow. “Everyone okay?” She called. The others chorused back with groans and mild swearing. “Good. Now, what do we do now?”

The caricature woman was now sitting peacefully on the screens, the image of a door behind her as the chatter continued. The image of a door opened and similar caricature people in uniforms were beyond it, smiling and waving.

“I would guess that means sit still and wait for rescue.” Said Ipra as she got to her feet, dusting herself off. The footage looped again, the same smiling faces.

“Sod that for a lark.” Said Dannal, going into his bag and producing a small metal pry bar. “Let’s get out of here before this thing starts moving again. And before anyone says it,” he said, walking to the door and inserting the pry bar into the gap, “we’re not going to get saved, because there’s no one to save us. No one seems to know about this place but us, and that means we could be stuck here a LONG time!”

Ithaca joined him at the door, and together they got the door open. They were part way down a huge shaft, a metal gantry and stairs leading up just visible beyond the doors by the light from the lift. Ithaca slipped out, climbing down the two foot onto the gantry, and looked around, shining her torch left and right. Then she swung it up. 

“Looks like there are loads of levels above us.” She said. “My torch can’t reach the top of this staircase.” She swung it down. “And about four levels below before we reach some kind of shutter.”

The others climbed out to join her, Ipra climbing enough to get above the lift and look up. “There’s a shutter above us. I would estimate it is about a half mile above our current location.”

“That’s one long lift shaft.” Said Oldra, hefting here backpack on. “Well, I guess there’s not too much to climb to get back out.”

Ipra dropped back onto their level. “We are easily five miles below where we started,given our rate of decent and length of fall. At a regular rate of climbing, that would take us at least ten days, even if you could keep up the pace, which you would not.”

Ithaca opened her palm, and looked at the hologram. It was still going straight down, but now showed vast amounts of what could have been rock around them. “I don’t think there’s another lift shaft nearby. We should see where we can get going down this.” She patted the stair rail.

It wasn’t far to get to the huge shutter that had locked across the lift shaft, the stairs creaking softly with each step they took. Soon they were at the shutter, where the stairs stopped, before a large door set into the shaft wall, more than big enough for a few human sized people to use at once. “So, what’s through here?” Said Dannal, reaching for the door handle. He paused, fingers centimetre from the handle and looked at the others.

“We’ve got nowhere else to go.” Said Oldra, and he nodded, turning the handle. The room beyond was disappointingly small, with a huge tool rack taking up one wall, some bunks on the other side, and a pair of doors at the bottom of a flight of steps.

“Access to the next section of lift shaft?” Suggested Ithaca, and Ipra considered it, before agreeing. They looked over everything, finding only a few traces of mold and ancient spiderwebs to tell them anything had been alive this far down. They walked down to the next set of doors, and opened the ones that doubled back on them, and Oldra turned the handle.

Only Ipra’s fast reflexes saved her life, the human woman’s shout of shock echoing down the empty lift shaft, the first few feet of roof mountings for a catwalk still clinging to the roof before them. The torch span into the darkness, end over end until it was almost invisible, before highlighting something glittering far below, before the torch went out suddenly. It took several long seconds for the sound of crashing metal to echo back up, the disturbed pile of lift runners collapsing further into a heap far below, along with what ever remained of the stairs in this section of the shaft.

“Well, we are not going that way.” Said Ipra, closing the door after dragging Oldra back from the brink. She was clinging to Ithaca now, her breath fast and shallow, before Ipra walked past them and opened the other door. 

A long stone passage was on the other side, walls of time worn stone flanking the first few steps before the metal stairs vanished and were replaced with first cut, then worn, stone steps. Ipra and Dannal shone their torches around, first up a side passage that led upwards and around a corner in a steep curve, then ahead of them, down a much broader gap between rocks.

The light only penetrated so far down the cutting, the light swallowed up by the dull rock, absorbed and refracted so much that it highlighted everything for a few dozen paces, then faded to nothing.

“‘In dark spaces do the forgotten dwell.’” Quoted Ithaca to herself, recalling the words of an old book about an explorer at the bottom of an unknown cave system. “Gods alone knows what’s down this deep.”

Ipra looked around from where she was helping Oldra with a bottle of water, the canteen shaking in her fingers from the shock. “That is odd.” She said after a few moments. “Do you not feel something?”

Ithaca looked around, then shrugged. “Feels normal enough to me, but I’ve not been in many deep caves.”

“That is my point.” The artificial woman said. “At this depth, we should be feeling a great deal of pressure, on our lungs, our ears, a feeling of being squashed from all sides. But instead-” 

“Instead, it feels normal, like sea level.” Interrupted Oldra, taking the opportunity to think of something, ANYTHING else than her near death experience. “How is that possible?”

“Airlocks.” Dannal said suddenly. “We’ve passed through airlocks. The shutters on the lift shaft, the small chamber we just passed through, they must stop the pressure building up too much or something.”

Ipra shook her head. “Something would need to be actively pumping air out of lower sections as well, to balance things. I do not believe that can be the case.”

“Well, whatever the truth is,” Ithaca said, shouldering her way to the front and opening her hand. “We keep going down. Until we can’t go any further, or we find whatever is down here that is so important as to make all this for.” She shouldered her backpack, pointed her torch forwards, and took a step forwards. The others followed her, stepping into the darkness.

Once the light of their torches had faded into the darkness, and the sound of their footsteps was long turned to endless echoes, the door to the small room swung closed, and with a groaning sound, the lift started to ascend back up the way it had come, rattling up and back towards where it had started.