The Bridge

by Simon Winstanley

  “So where are all the awake people?” said Mat, casting his flashlight around the room.

  “Maybe we open the box and find out,” said Tessa and began tapping at her screen.

  “Pandora. Box,” Mat grumbled, “What could go wrong?”

  Sabine could see from Tessa’s screen that she’d found the Cryo unit’s access controls.

  “Open it,” Sabine nodded.

  “Fai, I’m syncing your tablet with the unit.”

  “Confirmed,” Fai replied, “I am receiving live telemetry from unit fourteen beta.”

  “Here we go,” Tessa pressed a small, black hexagonal patch on the side of the unit. Immediately a series of cycling clicks began inside the box, “Fai, do you have enough storage space to capture the unit’s internal data?”

  “Yes, I have begun transcription. However, portions will require later analysis.”

  “Why’s that?” Mat crouched down to inspect the side of the unit.

  “My present container has insufficient pathways to attempt a local solve,” Fai replied, “Copy operation is now complete.”

  Sabine saw Mat frown then point at a label.

  “Any idea what permafrost means?”

  Tessa consulted her tablet, “It identifies an occupant who’s been put in long-term suspension.”

  Sabine could feel her pulse racing; Marcus had found a way to sleep through the years that had separated them.

  “Eight minutes until the seal opens,” Tessa put the tablet in her bag, “Let’s do another sweep and check we haven’t missed anything.”

  While Mat and Tessa rechecked the sphere’s upper levels, Sabine stood guard next to the Cryo unit. If Marcus was about to wake up, she wanted to be here for him.

  Ebony seemed ill at ease standing still. Several times, Sabine had been forced to stop her climbing the safety rails that ran around the perimeter of their level. Sabine wondered if it was a trait unique to her daughter, or if all three-year-olds were hard-wired to test the limits of their vulnerability.

  When Sabine considered the number of times she’d intervened to stop Ebony putting herself in peril, it was a miracle she was still alive. She stared back at the Cryo unit. Hopefully there would be just one more miracle today.

  Mat and Tessa returned and she found herself drawing a deep breath.

  “OK,” said Tessa, consulting her tablet, “I think it’s almost ready to -”

  Accompanied by a slight hiss, the seal along the side of the unit broke open slightly.

  “But…” Mat now frowned at the tablet.

  Sabine couldn’t wait any longer. She pulled up on the handle just as Mat’s expression shifted to one of horror.

  “Wait!” Tessa was too late to stop her.

  The unit opened and instantly the air was filled with a thick, decaying odour. Tessa swore and staggered back, and Sabine twisted her daughter around to look away.

  Paper-white skin stretched thin over a skeletal frame, the man inside was clearly dead.

  “The hibernation sequence failed,” said Fai.

  “Gee,” Mat’s muffled voice came from behind his cupped hand, “D’you think?”

  Although they’d encountered corpses several times during their travels, the shock always took a few moments to get over. But this was like nothing Sabine had seen so far.

  Across the man’s forehead and sunken eye sockets was a loose, wire-laden headband. Covering his emaciated body was a mixture of thin tubes, sloughed hair and shreds of degraded plastic body-suit.

  Although the degradation was severe, Sabine was immediately sure of one thing: the skin was a pasty white.

  “Ce n’est pas Marcus,” she stared.

  “No it isn’t,” Tessa knew enough of her language to understand, “But who is it?”

  Mat cast his flashlight over the corpse and Sabine saw a medical bracelet around its wrist. She could discern the characters AE57 on it, but the rest of the digits were hidden behind plastic tubing.

  Sabine crouched to hug her daughter. Thankfully, it seemed that Ebony was too short to have seen the horrific sight; she greeted the show of affection with a slight look of confusion.

  It had been Sabine’s most desperate wish to find Marcus here. The utter relief that he wasn’t the dead man only highlighted the fact that her search wasn’t over.

  She knew that she had to be strong for Ebony’s sake. So, burying her turmoil in a place that her daughter couldn’t see it, she patted her back and produced a smile.

  “OK?” she asked her daughter.

  Ebony nodded, “OK.”

  Being careful to obscure the Cryo unit opening from Ebony’s line of sight, Sabine stood and noticed something: the hexagonal patch that Tessa had pressed was now protruding from the surface.

  “Look,” Sabine pointed out the new detail.

  “Hmm,” Tessa’s fingers once more flew over her tablet to find out what she could, “It’s a Cryotrace.”

  “Oh,” said Mat, “For a second there, I thought we didn’t know what the hell it was.”

  Ignoring the sarcasm, Tessa slid the black hexagon out of its retaining channel, “It’s supposed to hold user data, but I -”

  A deep rumble shuddered from somewhere above them and Tessa lost her grip on the hexagon. It dropped, hit the floor and fell between the metal gratings. Sabine heard it ping off something lower down in the sphere, then there was a final dull impact noise.

  “Damn,” Tessa was trying to peer down into the darkness, “Damn it! Sorry… my fingers are freezing and I…”

  “I think we’ve got bigger problems,” Mat anxiously looked above them, “We need to move on.”

  Sabine knew there were no more answers here. Her search would have to continue. She held out her hand to Ebony who, as ever, took it without question.

  FAILURE MODE

  Marcus continued adding lines of code on his screen and checking it against the status panel of the Glaucus door.

  “It was lucky that people had their flashlights in their hands,” said Megan next to him, “Can you imagine the injuries if we’d been left in complete darkness?”

  “Thanks Terry,” he quietly offered him a thought.

  “How are we doing?” Rachel arrived out of the dim surroundings.

  “Almost done,” he said, “I’m hoping it’ll be easier to find out what happened from in there.”

  The door jerked slightly then slid open, exposing the central control room. It seemed that most of the consoles had been powered down, but the sickly-green emergency lighting was still operational.

  A smattering of applause rippled round the dark room behind him. He turned to see that the other doors that led out of this space were still closed. For now, the common area was still isolated from the rest of the ARC.

  He disconnected his laptop from the door and made his way into the control room, accompanied by several of the others. As their silhouettes began moving between various consoles, Rachel called out to them.

  “Touch nothing,” she said, then lowered her voice, “Marcus, can you get us back online?”

  He gave her a wry look, “I’m gonna pretend that wasn’t a question.”

  Despite his confident tone, gaining access to a useful computer terminal proved trickier than he’d expected. Historically, most of his hacking achievements had been conducted assuming that electricity itself was not a scarce resource. He had to manually rig his laptop to remotely read one of the console’s hard drives, just to access the system logs.

  Using a fair amount of digital forensics, he eventually found the root issue; something he knew he’d have to share with Rachel and the others before proceeding any further.

  Still operating under the greenish emergency lighting, they gathered around his laptop’s dimly-lit screen.

  “Here it is,” he tapped at the line of code, “the power distribution sensor failed at site two. The system couldn’t tell there was a problem. It explains the lighting issues and power dips we’ve been getting over the past fe
w weeks.”

  “So we just reset it?” said Ian.

  “No,” Marcus rubbed at his eyes, “the problem’s… bigger than that.”

  He exited his current debug screen and opened up the power diagnostic settings.

  “We get all our power from a load of hydrothermal vents,” he said, “The ARC’s location was picked ’cos it’s sitting on the Atlantic Ridge.”

  He displayed a graph on the screen. Multiple coloured lines started out horizontal then angled steeply downward.

  Rachel sat down in the chair next to him.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  Marcus nodded. There was no easy way to put this.

  “The vents themselves are dying,” he said.

  “But,” Ian stared at the graph, “we’re right on top of a geologically active area. How -”

  “Plate tectonics,” Rachel saw the problem.

  “Lunar shard impacts, Siva debris,” Marcus shook his head, “earthquakes, volcanic eruptions… they all changed the mix.”

  Marcus reinstated the debugging console and scrolled to a branching part of the code.

  “The vents don’t all have the same power output at the same time,” he pointed to the relevant subroutine, “The system balances the heat input from all the vent feeds, trying to keep the power constant.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  Marcus knew that he might once have made a similar programming error, so he found it difficult to be angry at the original coder.

  “The program calculated and displayed only the mean power,” he tapped at the offending line, “without working out the mode average at all. It was blind to the possibility that the power source might dry up one vent at a time.”

  When he thought about the demand that had been put on the power system, it seemed a wonder that it had lasted this long. They were now supporting more people at the ARC than was ever intended.

  “OK,” said Ian, “But… I mean, the power’s still out there on the ocean floor, right?”

  “Yes,” Rachel sighed, “but even if we do a reset… lower our consumption… the available power is only going to decrease.”

  “Yeah,” Marcus drew a deep breath, “We should be thankful that the Glaucus safety tripped. If the power to the external airlocks had failed, we’d already be dead.”

  Rachel cleared her throat.

  “I’ll be in the ready room,” she pointed to the side of the control room, “Trying to work out what we’re going to tell everyone.”

  ERROR

  Lucy swore under her breath.

  After twenty minutes’ work she’d succeeded in opening the Glaucus Docking Ring in the floor of the Sea-Bass. The ARC counterpart underneath it was a different matter though. Despite her best efforts to solve the issue, the lower set of intersecting spiral plates were refusing to open. The ARC’s secondary airlock was still inaccessible.

  She tapped in the override code manually.

  “Check it again, Fai.”

  Under the docking room floor, she heard the mechanism engage then immediately disengage.

  “New data available,” Fai’s speakers echoed around the lower deck.

  Abandoning the keypad, Lucy got to her feet and dashed to a diagnostic screen.

  “OK,” she said, “Show me.”

  The screen displayed a diagram of the docking ring assembly: the mechanism that was part of the Sea-Bass, and the counterpart that was integrated within the ARC’s secondary airlock.

  “The manual diagnostic on the Sea-Bass mechanism indicates that all electrical systems and logical condition controls are functioning within expected parameters.”

  The lower portion of the diagram became highlighted.

  “The manual diagnostic on the ARC mechanism indicates that all electrical systems are functional. However, I have detected that there is a logical conditioning interrupt between C-9 and C-10.”

  Lucy frowned at the highlights that had just appeared on the diagram, “What are you up to?”

  “Please can you rephrase your question?”

  “Sorry,” she tried to gather her thoughts, “Can you summarise the function of the, er, logical conditioning interrupt?”

  “Yes,” the reply came, “It is designed to stop the manual override from functioning.”

  “That’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” she muttered to herself and turned away from the screen, “Fai, has there been any communication from the ARC?”

  “No.”

  It felt like her options were running out.

  If the away team couldn’t reach the central control room, they’d return to the secondary airlock. She knew it must have been sealed for some valid reason, but if she did nothing then the team’s only exit would be blocked. In its current state the airlock was useless to anyone.

  There was one option that she hadn’t tried, but it was far from ideal.

  “Fai, I want to re-dock the Sea-Bass.”

  “Understood,” came the reply, “Setting departure conditions.”

  Lucy watched as the metallic plates of the Sea-Bass airlock door slid closed, covering up the ARC’s unresponsive counterpart.

  The characteristic pumping noise began; the gap between the two Glaucus doors filling with seawater to equalise the external pressure.

  Lucy began climbing the ladder to the upper deck.

  Mechanical error, she found herself thinking. It was possible that particles of debris on the ARC’s docking ring might be responsible for tripping the unwanted closure.

  “Fai, prep our underside manoeuvring jets,” she said, “Maybe we can give their airlock a cleaning blast.”

  Although the departure from the secondary airlock was fairly straightforward, the repositioning of the Sea-Bass turned out to be a different matter.

  The curvatures of the ARC’s multiple spheres had meant that the sub could only occupy a few positions whilst directing its manoeuvring jets at the airlock. Even then, basic Newtonian reactions had been hard at work. Each time the jets fired in the direction of the airlock, the Sea-Bass had been slowly propelled away from it. Even with Fai’s best fluid dynamic analysis, random fluctuations in subsurface swell and seawater viscosity had skewed the manoeuvring calculations.

  Despite Lucy’s simple intentions, the operation had taken far longer than she would have liked.

  “OK,” she eased back on the power, “I think that’s probably enough.”

  The powerful thruster jet noise faded as Fai began the process of repositioning the submarine. They’d introduced a fair amount of chaos to the water around the airlock during the manoeuvres, so Fai recommended retreating a few hundred metres to allow the turbulence to settle.

  As the Sea-Bass began to turn around, Fai changed the display screen without being asked.

  “My apologies, Lucy, but I have detected an unknown object on sonar.”

  Concentric circles surrounded their current position, but the outer circle was interrupted by the presence of a large dot. Lucy knew that the ARC had an automated torpedo defence system, but it hadn’t been active when they’d first arrived. Something had just changed.

  “Why didn’t we see it?!” Lucy shouted.

  “To avoid erroneous warnings,” Fai calmly explained, “sonar was temporarily disabled during our manoeuvres.”

  As Lucy looked back at the screen, the dot changed position.

  TWENTY

  Marcus looked at those gathered around the ready room table and shrugged.

  “We adapt or we die,” he said.

  “How long?” Rachel cut straight to the point.

  “We could make extreme efficiencies,” he replied, “but based on current use, less than a year.”

  Ian swore in flat denial of the evidence, earning him argumentative rebukes from around the table.

  “If we don’t act now,” said Marcus, “there won’t even be enough power to come out of a standby state.”

  “Westhouse,” said Rachel, “You know what the Britannia’s
capable of. Can it be done?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” he replied, “Yes.”

  A contemplative silence filled the air.

  “We can make this work,” Megan spoke out, looking around the table, “The equator settlement that we found has got great potential. They’re surface-mining minerals and precious elements from the Lunar and Siva impact sites. One day we could see the return of real technological development.”

  “Digging up fallen space rocks isn’t exactly rocket science is it?” Ian suppressed a laugh, “Or are they hammering their trash cans into space shuttles?”

  “Technically, the equator would be the best place to begin constructing a launch centre.”

  “Seriously, Westhouse?” Ian replied, shooting him an incredulous look.

  “Megan,” Rachel leaned forward, “You think those communities would be open to the idea of supporting us.”

  “It’s early days,” she said, “but we have transport resources that they don’t. If nothing else, it gives us a good trading position.”

  “So that’s it?” Ian threw his hands wide, “We just abandon the hibernation program?”

  “It had a good run,” said Rachel.

  “Twenty years is not a good run,” said Ian.

  “It’s better than most people got out there,” she pointed in the direction of the surface, “They got a hard life avoiding hunger and disease.”

  “Guess what?” Ian now seemed to transition from angry to belligerent, “It hasn’t changed! People digging in the dirt for rock and metal? The hard life is still going on after two fucking decades! We have to keep the hibernation program going!”

  “We have to do what’s right,” Megan shook her head.

  “That’s bullshit, Meg,” he shot back, “Get off your high horse.”

  Marcus saw Megan’s temper erupt and she began directing her fast-paced retort at Ian.

  “Putting aside the bloody obvious fact that we don’t have the power to run it anymore, what would you want to happen? Run it indefinitely? Wake up when the fucking shopping malls reopen? ’Cos I’ve got news for you, sleeper -”