Boundary

by Eric Flint

  A gray-white chamber about ten meters wide greeted them, with another door directly opposite the one they had forced. This one was of a single piece, a sort of flat-bottomed circle, and seemed to open inward, towards the interior of the base. A wide construction that looked rather like a helicopter rotor whose two blades had been dented on alternate sides with sledgehammers stood out from the center of the door.

  "That's a locking valve," Madeline said decisively. "Like the ones on some submarine doors, except it's much bigger."

  "Don't tell me," A.J. grumbled. "You've spent time on submarines, too."

  He raised his hand abruptly. "I know, I know. It's still classified because your boss thinks someday he might need to take our new ally the Sultan of Cumquat deep-sea fishing. I don't need to know the details, however. That's because I agree with you. This is an airlock, and that's why it opens inward. If someone left the outer door open, you can pull all you want and it'll still be held shut by the higher pressure in the base."

  "I think you're right, A.J.," Rich said, pointing. "Those markings look the same as those we've found near airlock doors on the Phobos base."

  Helen's trained instincts as a paleontologist were leaning her toward the same conclusion. The locking valve had confused her until Madeline identified it, because it was out of human scale. But now she could see that the bladelike extensions were well positioned for the long manipulating arms of a Bemmius.

  "Yes. I think this was a Bemmie base, too, not that of a different species. If Rich is right, they even used the same language."

  "Not necessarily," Skibow cautioned. "There are a lot of subtleties in the way Bemmie script works that Jane and I are unsure about. We'll still very much groping our way, from a cultural distance far greater than any we face dealing with a human language. Even there, don't forget that to someone unfamiliar with any of them, the way Chinese and Japanese and Korean are written all look quite similar, even though they're not very similar at all."

  He moved closer and scrutinized the markings. "I should have said that the markings here look similar, not the same. They might be identical, but that would take closer examination. And keep in mind that even the markings on airlocks in Phobos aren't always identical, either."

  "Okay, Rich, caution noted," Helen said. "But, more and more, I'm thinking that Bemmie was quite similar to us in many respects, whatever the differences elsewhere. One of those similarities—if we're right—being the fact that they didn't always get along with each other any more than we do."

  Madeline, meanwhile, had been studying the lever arms. "If this works anything like ours, it's mechanical, and probably a sort of turning lever or screw arrangement. Did they have a preferred direction? Clockwise or counterclockwise, I mean."

  Helen shook her head. "Not that I've ever been able to determine. Rich? A.J.? Any opinion?"

  A.J. shook his head. So did Rich.

  "May as well just try one, then, and see what happens," Madeline said. "Experiments-R-Us. Let's start with clockwise. Rich and A.J., why don't you go over to the one on the right and lean down on it. You both weigh more than I do, so you'll get more leverage. Meanwhile, I'll pull up on the other one."

  "Damn lady weightlifter." But A.J. went over to the lever she was pointing to.

  "Don't be silly, A.J.," Madeline said sweetly. "I'm quite sure you could lift a much heavier weight than I could, so small a woman am I."

  She sounded about as sincere as a praying mantis extolling the culinary virtues of broccoli. Helen almost laughed out loud. "What do you want me to do, Madeline? Give you a hand?"

  "No. Just stand there and watch. I have a feeling we're going to need an observer to let us know if we've moved it at all. Otherwise we could wind up straining at it for hours, not knowing."

  Once they were in position, Helen gave the signal. A.J. and Rich essentially jumped on the right side while Madeline pulled upward on the left.

  To their surprise, the handle moved grudgingly about ten degrees before it stopped. "Maybe that's got it!"

  The door, however, would not open. A.J. inserted Fairy Dust around the rim and determined that some sort of bolts were retracted.

  "But something else is blocking the entrance and keeping the door from swinging open. We'll have to push it in."

  That called for reconfiguring the ripper into a device more like a short, fuel-cell-powered battering ram. After about twenty minutes, the ripper started pounding regularly on the door.

  "You do realize that we are to Arean archaeology what Indiana Jones would have been in real life," Rich commented dryly. "You watch, Helen—future generations of our colleagues will call us looting barbarians."

  Helen smiled. "Yes, I can see it now. 'Helen the Hun' and 'Skibow the Scalper.'"

  She shrugged, a bit uncomfortably. "It rubs me the wrong way, too, being honest. But . . . what can we do? On Earth we have the luxury of unlimited air when we want to get into an ancient ruin."

  "True enough," Madeline said. "Even digging in Antarctica was a picnic compared to this."

  A.J. would never leave well enough alone. "Why were you digging in Antarctica? Never mind, never mind. Still a deep, dark secret."

  "Well, the name is, but that's just to protect the family from publicity. Not the fact. I was trying to find a corpse. It was all very anticlimactic, in the end. I was called in because the guy who disappeared knew a lot of classified information. But there turned out to be no foreign skullduggery involved at all. Not a terrorist in sight. The damn fool just got drunk and wandered off too far. You really, really, really don't want to do that in Antarctica."

  There was a sudden crunching, tinkling noise, and the inner air-lock door ground inward an inch and a half. On the next blow, it moved six inches, and the next caused the door to swing almost fully open, amid a sound like a cement mixer filled with champagne glasses. With nothing left in its way, Jack the Ripper shut down.

  White dust drifted smokily in their lights. As it settled, they could see that the corridor beyond was coated with ice.

  "They were hooked to a water source, all right," A.J. said, quite unnecessarily. "Well, let's take a look-see."

  After he and Skibow moved the ripper to the side, all four of them started cautiously down the icy tunnel. Helen and A.J. were in the lead, with Rich coming next and Madeline bringing up the rear.

  "The ice starts off incredibly thick on the ceiling," Helen reported. "Two meters thick, at a guess. Fortunately the roof is much higher than I'd expect with Bemmie construction. I think that's because, from the looks of it once the ice starts thinning out, this was originally a natural formation that they just took advantage of. The ice starts tapering two thirds of the way through, and is gone completely about fifteen meters from the end. The roof here is just rock. The walls are sort of gray colored, with the floors almost black."

  "I see another door," Rich said. "It looks like it has a plaque with the same airlock markings."

  Madeline came last, walking down the ice-coated corridor carefully, to keep from slipping. She was quite a ways behind them because she'd stopped to study the wall at one point.

  The ceiling collapsed.

  To Madeline, time seemed to freeze. The fact that the great slabs of ice fell more slowly than they would have on Earth just made the coming doom a bit more protracted. Even three eighths of a ton, multiplied by untold tons, is a crushing weight.

  If time seemed frozen, her brain wasn't.

  She saw A.J., Rich, and Helen ahead of her—facing the wrong way, and too far in any case to be able to reverse direction and escape. They were now almost at the far end of the tunnel.

  They weren't in immediate danger, because Madeline could now see that only the central area of the tunnel was caving in. That was the part right above her.

  She glanced back and saw that she had no time to make it out herself, even if the supports beyond the tunnel held and the entire cave system didn't come down. And even if she could, the other three would be trapped.

/>   She might—barely—be able to race to shelter with them at the far end, assuming she didn't slip on the treacherous footing. But that would just leave all four of them trapped.

  With not much oxygen left, only the water in their small sip tanks, and no food. And only Bruce and Joe—and him with a broken leg—to try and get them out. With, even leaving aside the fact they'd have asphyxiated by then, not more than forty hours they could count on the suits remaining powered. Once the batteries were dead, they'd freeze within minutes.

  In the very short time it took her to finish that assessment, the slabs had come more than halfway down. There was only one possible chance left, slim as it might be. She took a step forward, stopped, planted her legs, extended her arms at what she guessed was the best angle, and braced herself.

  The ice arrived.

  A moaning, grumbling noise echoed through the tunnel. A.J. spun to see the roof coming down, seeming to break in two directly above Madeline's head.

  A ghostly blast of white-red dust filled the corridor. A.J. felt himself dragged backward by Helen, away from the collapse. The two of them tripped over something. They fell to the floor and lay there, expecting to see the roof come down on top of them also.

  "Madeline! A.J.! Helen!" Joe's voice came faintly over the radio. "Are you all right? What's happening down there?"

  Dust fogged the air so thickly that A.J. felt an impulse to cough or hold his breath, despite the fact that none of it could possibly get to him. His voice was strained when he answered.

  "Cave-in, Joe. Me and Helen seem to be okay." The rumbling had faded away. The ceiling in this far area of the tunnel seemed solid enough. He looked at Helen, who blinked wide-eyed back at him. For a moment the two just held each other. He saw Rich picking himself up. He was apparently what they'd tripped over. "Rich is okay too."

  "What about Madeline?"

  It was starting to sink in. "Jesus . . . She was smack in the middle of the tunnel when it came down."

  He heard a choking sound from Joe, a sound filled with so much pain that it caused his own eyes to sting. "I'm going to take a look, Joe. We really don't know anything yet."

  Despite that attempt at reassurance, A.J. had no real hope that Madeline was still alive, as he groped his way toward where she'd been. Ice dust still drifted thick as smoke in a burning building in the corridor. He couldn't see anything, although he could sense Helen and Rich following him.

  "I can't see anything at all yet. Place is filled with ice dust. Some rock dust too, looks like. Hold on . . ."

  He could now make out vague dark shapes in the beam of his light. "Clearing up slowly. Probably all blocked, but I'll get as close as—"

  He broke off sharply. Just stared, wide-eyed.

  Helen and Rich came up beside him. "Holy . . ." Rich started to say, but trailed off, unable to finish.

  Helen said nothing at all. Just shook her head, back and forth, like a metronome.

  Finally, A.J. cleared his throat, very loudly. "I swear, I swear, I swear. I will never again made a wisecrack about Supergirl."

  Madeline stood in the center of the corridor, her arms stretched up and out to either side at perhaps a sixty-degree angle. Her hands held up two huge slabs of ice which, in turn, prevented most of the ice above from erasing the entire corridor like a bubble from a wad of dough.

  They heard a gasp from her. Now that the ice dust was clearing away, A.J. could see that Madeline's eyes looked as wide as his felt.

  "W-what do you know . . ." she said shakily. "It worked. For now, anyway."

  "What? What worked? How the hell are you holding up all that? Dammit, you're not that strong. Three-eighths gravity be damned. No human being who ever lived is that strong!"

  By the end, he was almost screeching. A.J. realized he sounded half-hysterical; relief, terror, incomprehension all mingled in his high-pitched demand. Somewhere in the background, but not really grasping the words, he could hear Joe hollering words that combined relief and demands for a coherent report.

  "No, I'm not." Madeline took a slow breath, settling her own nerves. "But I thought the suit might be."

  The dazzling Fathom smile came. Even shining through her faceplate, it seemed to light up the whole tunnel. "I remembered what you did with Joe, after he broke his leg."

  Enlightenment burst over A.J. "Mother of God. You made your whole suit go to rigid impact mode and lock that way. With mostly carbonan components . . . yeah, it could work. Genius. Pure effing genius."

  He finally understood, now, why Hathaway had been so insistent that Madeline accompany them.

  False modesty aside, A.J. knew he was extraordinarily intelligent. Something of a genius, in many ways. But his mind groped to imagine the combination of foresight, quick thinking, and instantaneous reaction that had enabled Madeline to do what she'd done.

  A.J. knew he'd never have been able to do it himself, if he'd been in her position. He'd have been nothing more than a smear in the ice.

  In the end, brains were only a part of it—and a small part at that. The universe that had shaped Madeline Fathom was just a completely different one than had shaped A.J. Baker.

  Whatever residual animosity he still had regarding Madeline's role in the expedition finally vanished. She was what she was—but she was all of it. You couldn't pick and choose what you liked.

  "The good and the bad and the ugly," he murmured.

  It was a package deal. And—on Mars, all things considered—one hell of a good package. It had kept them all alive, when they'd otherwise surely have been dead.

  He must have murmured louder than he thought.

  "Thank you, I guess. Joe doesn't think I'm ugly, though, so poop on you."

  Impossibly, her smile brightened. "Now, A.J.—if you don't mind—I'd like to be able to unlock the suit and put my arms down someday. This is going to get very uncomfortable, after a while."

  "We're on it." The hollering over the radio finally registered. "Hey, Joe, calm down, will you? She's alive and smarter than we are."

  "Thank God. Thank God. Madeline—"

  "It's okay, Joe. I'm fine, really I am. It was scary for a minute, but if the cave back of us is okay, we're going to be just fine."

  "I want you back here right away."

  "Don't be silly, Joe. If I unlock the suit, we'll be trapped—and it's going to take Helen and A.J. and Rich quite some time to substitute some other sort of bracing. So just hold your horses."

  While the rest of them were preoccupied with Madeline's situation, Rich had passed gingerly through the "Madeline Arch" and gone to check conditions at the opening of the tunnel.

  "I think we're okay," he said, coming back. "The bracing held. In fact, as near as I can tell, the roof out there is just fine. I thought at first that the roof had caved in because of a Marsquake, but I think it was just the localized effects of the strain the ripper put on this area near the door we forced. Why it worked that way, I have no idea."

  Chad Baird spoke over the radio. "Underground structures can be very quirky. In fact, that's exactly what I was worried about." His voice sounded a little shaky, too. "What kills most people in mining operations is not the big dramatic explosions and cave-ins and floodings that make the national news. Those are awfully rare, at least when proper safety precautions are taken. But coal miners and hard-rock miners still get killed, year after year, in ones and twos—because a piece of the roof came loose and fell on them."

  He paused a moment, as if checking something. "I can tell you for sure and certain there's been no Marsquake in that area. Our sensors would have picked it up. So I'm almost positive Rich is right. I hate to say it, but it was your own activities that weakened the roof."