Night Shift

by Robin Triggs

  Then the door to the canteen opened and Abi looked out. He seemed as bewildered as I felt, and as I met his eyes, I realized that something bad, something serious, really had happened.

  My breath became suddenly shallow, my mind blank. Oh, God, where was my training? Panic – I knew that feeling. I knew how to deal with it. Control the breathing. Clear emotions. Focus.

  “Check the building,” I called to Abi. My voice cracked, overloud in the silence; I cleared my throat. “See if there’s any damage, and find out who’s here. Ask Weng if she knows what happened.”

  Abi nodded. “What about you?”

  “I’m going outside.”

  I ran off to the vestibule and threw on my suit. I was out in the darkness before I’d got my mask on properly; the cold hit hard.

  The floodlights mounted on each of the buildings illuminated the courtyard well enough but I couldn’t see any damage. Garage, coal shed, iron storage, oil tanks – all looked normal. I ran towards Maggie’s greenhouse. A few of the glass panes had cracked and I could see some of the lights had failed. The outer door opened as I approached, and a figure stepped out onto the ice – Maggie herself.

  “Maggie, are you okay?” I shouted.

  She didn’t answer, just pointed somewhere towards the south.

  I tried to follow her gaze. I didn’t see anything at first, but as I got closer to her, I passed the roll in the ground that had been blocking my sight. A flickering red light.

  “The oil well,” Maggie breathed.

  It wasn’t too far away – just a few kilometers distant. But I shouldn’t have been able to see anything on a normal Australis morning.

  “It’s on fire,” I said numbly.

  “It exploded,” Maggie corrected.

  * * *

  This was now a rescue attempt; Theo and Mikhail had both been working the drills. I sent Maggie running to the barracks to fetch Fischer and the rest of the crew before I raced to the garage and, after a moment’s hesitation, chose the 4x4. I ran my finger across the bioreader to get the engine going and was immediately blinded by the glare of the four massive headlamps. The vehicle jumped forward as I fought with the controls.

  I wasn’t so panicked as to rush straight to the fire: I needed help, and that help was to be found at the minehead. Even if they weren’t experts in drilling, Fergie and Dmitri were engineers – they’d know what to do. I’d pick them up in the 4x4 and get to the oil platform as fast as possible.

  I was not a good driver. I’d driven these things as part of my training, but never in such a panic. I hurtled over bumps, barely seeing dips and bends in my haste to get up the steep slope to the mine. I ran straight over the revealed section of the radio mast that Max had been excavating at the site of the comms building. Soon I found the conveyor that carried the coal to the storage sheds, and used it to guide me upwards. It was as wide as a road, and a track had already formed beside it.

  The mine was nothing like the barracks, or the hydroponics, or anything I’d seen around the courtyard. There was no airlock or vestibule; all there was on ground level was a small control room and a lift shaft. No one there. But on the wall there was a large electronic map of the underground workings. Red lights were flashing, and my stomach began to fill with cold dread.

  I grabbed the intercom and jabbed at the buttons but nobody answered. I hesitated, uncertain. Should I go down? Would I just be wasting time? Impatiently I called again.

  I was just about to leave when a voice crackled up to me. “Who’s that?”

  “Max? It’s Anders. We’ve—”

  “Anders! We’ve had a collapse – Fergie’s hurt.”

  I swore, very loudly. “How bad is it? What can I do?”

  “Head injury. We need to get him to the doctor. We need you down here!”

  I hesitated again, torn between the conflagration at the platform and the need to assist Fergie. “I’m on my way.”

  “Fourth level, corridor two.”

  I checked the plans to make sure I could get to them without getting lost, then grabbed a torch from a rack. I ran to the lift, praying that it was still working, that the cable wouldn’t snap….

  The mechanism ran perfectly. I paced the tiny space, doubting all the way into the depths. For all I knew, Mikhail and Theo needed me urgently – they could have received a lot more than just a concussion.

  The elevator thumped heavily to the bottom of the shaft. Too late to worry now; I had to get this done as soon as I could. I hauled open the doors and shone my torch around. It was then that I realized that the plan I’d looked at upstairs was a massive oversimplification. Just stepping into the tunnels was to lose your sense of direction.

  The walls were rough-hewn from dark rock, while the floors had been leveled carefully. Rails led both left and right, with a junction in front of the lift. Cabling ran along the walls, and lights hung every ten or so meters. They illuminated a sign: Corridor One, with an arrow, and Corridor Two in the other direction. Beneath these official notices, someone had added two handwritten direction signs. Waverley one way, Haymarket the other. A little touch of Scots humor.

  I hurried down Haymarket.

  It stretched only a few hundred meters, and I began to hear voices above the echoing of my feet. I skipped past a row of trucks before the track ended abruptly in a mass of heavy machinery. I was at the coal face, and had to squeeze to the side to pass the seam’s main excavator.

  In a shifting pool of torchlight – no wall lights here – I found two figures in their warmsuits wading through rubble and wrenching up steel bars to form a rudimentary lattice against walls and ceiling. They worked quickly, talking almost in code as one held a beam in position while the other lashed some kind of bracing pad onto the end. Behind them a third figure sat on the floor, leaning against a wall. He was half-pinned beneath some sort of metal spider, all legs and angles. Drill bits waved feebly from several of its limbs, and it whined almost piteously. All of the miners were wearing hard hats and I suddenly felt terribly conscious of the millions of tons of rock above me.

  “Anders? Anders, we need to get Fergie out of here – before we have another fall!” The figure to the left of the pair had turned her head to look at me, and I knew Max’s voice. So it must be Dmitri on the right, and Fergie on the floor.

  “What happened here?”

  “Earthshock,” Dmitri replied, not pausing in his work. “Damn earthshock brought down the ceiling.”

  “It brought the precursor drill down on Fergie,” Max added, not turning from her work. A dustfall drifted over us.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, taking a few paces forward to crouch by the Scotsman – but not too close to be threatened by the horribly alive-looking spider-machine.

  He looked up at me. “I hurt like a fucker,” he grumbled. “At least I were knocked back, didnae get buried. Me hat protected what little brains I have.” He was slurring but at least he was making sense.

  “Get him to the infirmary,” Max said. “We’ve got to shore up—”

  “No time. There’s been an explosion.”

  “What?”

  “A little quieter, if ye don’t mind,” Fergie muttered to the floor.

  “The oil platform – it’s on fire. I was coming to get you – Mikhail and Theo, they were out there—”

  “My God,” Max gasped.

  “Forget about that,” I said. “A collapse—”

  “A collapse is just a delay, jus’ money,” Fergie said. “An explosion’s people’s lives.”

  Dmitri threw down his plank and crossed to Fergie. With easy confidence he rolled the spider off the man’s legs, and together we scraped away some of the debris to let Fergie stand. I helped get him up, and the three of us together started back down the corridor, Max close behind.

  “Nice to have an explanation for the earthshock, at least,” D
mitri said.

  I nodded. We hurried back to the lift shaft.

  * * *

  The sky was clear, and on another day, to be hurtling through the moonlight in the 4x4 would’ve been a pleasure. But we sat in grim silence. All of us could see the fire stabbing its fingers upwards as we approached – and soon we could hear it growling, almost like a tribal chant with its odd percussive bellows, as smoke billowed up to obscure the stars.

  A group had gathered by a bunch of half-tracks, well away from the metal platform that formed the base for the huge rig. Steel flashed red and black as the flame eddied. For a moment I dared to hope that both Mikhail and Theo were fine. We raced the last few hundred meters to them, then skidded to a halt. Max and Dmitri leaped out; I told Fergie to stay in the vehicle, but he insisted on clambering out.

  “Never mind that now. What’re we going to do?” Keegan was saying.

  “Is everyone accounted for?” Max asked.

  “No word from Theo or Mikhail.”

  A massive spike of flame was roaring up from the heart of the platform. Heavy black smoke writhed around the structure, always shifting and rising but somehow never clearing from the metalwork.

  “Where’s the rescue gear kept?”

  “You can’t go in there!”

  “What’s the emergency procedure?”

  Too many people talking at once. “We don’t have time for this,” I snapped, and everyone immediately fell silent; the mistrust the crew felt towards me had been swallowed by the emergency. “Fischer – where’s Fischer?”

  “Still in barracks. She’s not fit to be out here,” Weng said.

  “You, then – Fergie’s been hurt, have a look at him. The rest of you—” I paused. “Max, Dmitri – you’re the engineers. We need to get the fire out and find the others. How do we do it?”

  “We have to go in before the fire goes out,” Dmitri said tersely.

  “Why?”

  “We put the fire out easily – blow up the rig and all the oxygen is gone. The rig was built with explosives ready. But no oxygen, no survivors.”

  “So we have to go in.”

  He nodded; tense, professional, steady.

  “Will our warmsuits protect us?”

  “No way in hell, but there’s special protective gear – coldsuits – on the platform. They’ll keep us alive.”

  “Okay. The two of you – with me.”

  “Hang on,” Max interrupted. “We need to close off the pipes that link the rig to the rest of the base. Otherwise there’s a chance – if anything goes wrong – that the heat could split them and oxygenate the crude. If that happens, we’re all fucked.”

  “But the chance of it chaining back to base is—” Dmitri started before Max cut him off.

  “Microscopic. But do you want to take the risk?”

  Fergie staggered away from Weng. He had his mask off, breath white in the torchlight. “I take it you’re not gonna to let me go in there?” he growled.

  “No,” Weng said sharply.

  “No,” echoed Max.

  “Then I’ll deal with the pipes. Someone come with me, in case I do somethin’ stupid like black out.”

  “I’ll go,” Weng said.

  “No,” Maggie countered. “You need to stay. If Theo or Mikhail are hurt you’ll be needed here. I’ll go with Fergie.” She and the miner hurried to a half-track and disappeared towards the base.

  On the rig, a gantry gave an agonized squeal and fell away from its moorings. It disappeared into the heart of the fire, and an arm of flame billowed outwards.

  “Looks—” Max’s voice broke and she gave a nervous laugh. “Looks a bit hot.”

  “Well, they say a change is as good as a rest.” I shrugged and, not giving myself any chance to reconsider, set out for the rig.

  * * *

  The flames filled my world: there was just fire and the black silhouettes of objects in front of it. I felt hypnotized, couldn’t look away. My warmsuit was struggling. Adjusting to the heat, it gradually shut down the level of warmth it provided. But it couldn’t provide cooling. Once the threshold had been passed, the electronics in my suit just failed, and then the temperature rose sharply as we advanced. My sweat provided an added layer of discomfort. I looked to Max, then to Dmitri. We walked side by side, straight towards the platform, towards the main access center. Like gunslingers heading for the big showdown.

  “Where’ll they be?” I asked, shouting over the roar of the flame and the screaming of metal.

  “Main control room, I hope.” Dmitri’s tone was grim.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Middle.”

  Figured. “Do either of you have a plan?”

  We were rapidly approaching the platform, where Theo and Mikhail had parked their half-track. Smoke was rising from its seat. There was no escaping the heat now. We paused. As it was doing little more than keeping the sweat trapped uncomfortably against my skin, I unclipped my mask.

  “Best keep it on,” Max cautioned. “Your sweat’s all that’ll stop you baking.”

  It might’ve been an illusion, but it looked as if the steel of the platform itself was beginning to melt, to buckle. It was a certainty that we couldn’t walk in unprotected. “So where are the coldsuits?” I yelled.

  “Emergency shelter – can you see it through the smoke? We’ve got to get there.”

  Nothing distinguished the shelter from anything else on the rig; it was just another metal shed, dark and dull against the violence of the inferno. About fifty yards away.

  “You’re sure that’s the right building?” I asked.

  Dmitri nodded.

  “We’ll have to run,” Max said. “We get there as fast as possible, get inside, and get the door shut. We should be okay when it’s sealed.”

  “Why are you not filling me with confidence?” I muttered. “Ready?”

  We all shared looks, nods, and then we ran.

  It was like swimming through treacle; time seemed to slow as the three of us sprinted towards the hut. There was a crackling in my ear as the electronics in my mask began to short out. I coughed as the air filters failed, and the taste of burning petroleum and the spit of melting steel began to fill my chest. A crash right beside me made me spin around, but I could see nothing – the earpieces of my mask playing tricks, I realized, as I saw a girder fall to the ground twenty feet away. It landed in silence, it seemed, before a sudden crump came three seconds later.

  I tried to keep my companions in view but my eyes were watering badly and it was hard enough to stay on course. I kept seeing strange movements, blurred and disorientated, in my peripheral vision, and I prayed it was them; the last thing I wanted was to be alone right now. I felt a sharp pain over my left eye; a piece of burning scrap had burned right through my mask. I brushed it aside, then screamed as a red-hot splinter burrowed into my hand.

  I threw myself against the hut, gasping for breath; sensory overload blanked my mind for a moment, and I wasn’t sure where I was, why I was here. Then Max’s slight figure slammed into the wall next to me, and then Dmitri was at the door, and then one by one we fell inside.

  The Ukrainian shoved the door closed behind me; I fell against a wall, the smell of burning plastics still strong in my nostrils. It was suddenly, shockingly cold. Max snapped off her mask and threw it to the floor as it smoked and sparked dangerously.

  “Damn,” Dmitri said once his mask was off as well. “Hoped they’d be here.”

  I looked around. I tried to remove my mask as well, but the fastenings had melted shut. My forehead hurt terribly, my hand worse. I tried to push the pain from my mind.

  Dmitri had called the structure a hut but it was built like a bunker. It was a bare place where workers could survive even a major blast and wait for help. There was a rack of coldsuits – heavy, clumsy, heat-repellent
gear – as well as first aid kits, bottles of fresh water and an emergency radio.

  “All okay?” Max asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, she strode to the nearest coldsuit and hauled it off the rack. Dmitri followed, and both began to pull them on over their warmsuits.

  I dragged myself over and followed their example, the helmet going straight over my still-masked head. I shook tears from my eyes. Vision began to sharpen again.

  “Okay,” Max said as she checked first Dmitri, then me, to make sure we were properly insulated. “We go…control room. Dmitri…lead as we know…Anders. Rem…doesn’t…debris.” Her voice kept cutting in and out, my ears full of static. “We…control room and we…safe…. We get…others…again.”

  No time to get her to repeat, no time to think. Back to the entrance. Dmitri glanced at us both. He threw open the door.

  We couldn’t run in these new suits. We walked into the heart of a fire that I could see but neither feel nor hear. Surreal. Destruction lay all around me – shattered barrels, twisted, unidentifiable shards of scrap, burning piles of litter. The only thing I could smell was the acrid stench of my heat-damaged mask; the only things I could feel were sweat and pain. Sounds weren’t coming from their sources, the static crackle indistinguishable from the burning around me. I followed the others as close as I could. They led me between pipes that were either bubbling or smoking, I couldn’t tell, and soon I could see the jet of flame erupting from the very center of the metal platform that supported the bulk of the above-ground facility. Then we were under part of the superstructure and facing the door to the control room. It was blocked by a pile of blazing debris.

  Grimly we walked on – and then both Max and Dmitri stopped and the ground shook violently. I staggered and, massively delayed, there came an awful screaming of metal and a crash that must have been the cause of the shock wave that was still rattling through me. The towers trembled and debris rained down like a deadly swarm of fireflies.