Night Shift

by Robin Triggs

  I sat back down. The screen hadn’t activated. I hit the power again but got nothing. I scowled at the machine and hit that too; the only response was from Max, who grunted and rolled over in her sleep. So I got up and went to the door, intending to check the compscreen in my office. But the door wouldn’t open. I did exactly what I’d tried the other day, when it had opened without any problem, but now there was nothing. The door panel looked inoperative. Not one of the LEDs was lit. I went to the combi-maker for my coffee, but that seemed as dead as the door.

  I was half-asleep. I was still half-drunk. I was scared, and I was cold, and I couldn’t face this. I glanced down at Max. I should have woken her, should have found out what was going on – if Fergie had just shut the power to my room, or if there was a bigger reason.

  I had goosebumps on my arms. I shivered and hugged my bare torso. I so, so wanted just to crawl back into bed with Max and pretend I’d never got up.

  And so I did. Coward that I am, I slipped in next to her, put my arms around her and cupped her small, soft breast in my hand. And I pushed the fears from my mind and tried to shut my brain off from the outside world.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Another crisis meeting in the rec room. Another session filled with frightened faces and paranoid stares. There was no amazement this time, no shock, just cold fear. It seemed that we’d passed the stage for accusations; now we stood in silence. Me, Max, Fergie, Dmitri, Weng, Maggie, Greigor, Abidene, and Keegan. It was the first time I’d seen the meteorologist since he’d been admitted to the infirmary.

  We looked at each other but nobody wanted to speak. Just trying to all get together had been an effort. The doors had sealed shut and we’d had to force open each one. And with no internal communications each person had to be found individually. It had taken time, all of us in ones or twos, sealed together but apart, as if we were trapped in some horror movie. No automatic lights – instead we held torches which showed either too little or far too much.

  Fergie cleared his throat, then winced as he was immediately in the spotlight. “Y’all know the situation,” he began. I’d never known him talk so quietly. “We’ve lost computer functions. We have no door locks, no biometrics, no combi-makers, no compscreens…”

  “Wh-what about the equipment in the infirmary?” Abidene said – the first time I’d heard his calm voice struggle.

  “On an independent system,” Weng answered. “Precisely in case of…this.”

  It seemed that everyone relaxed slightly. I hadn’t realized that we were holding ourselves so tightly.

  “But we will need to arrange some form of power boost,” she went on. “The systems aren’t designed to run for more than a few days, let alone six months.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Max said. She sounded exhausted, stretched to the limit. “I’ll put it on my to-do list.”

  “Make it a priority,” Weng said. “If you don’t want them dead—”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well—”

  “You think I’d—”

  “That’s enough,” Fergie said. “We don’t need arguments, not right now.”

  “I thought it was just a power-saving measure at first,” Keegan said half to himself. “I thought you’d just switched off the electricity – a bit weird you’d not told us, but…”

  No one spoke. Eye contact was impossible in this environment of constantly shifting light.

  “How?” Keegan went on. “How did this happen?”

  I wasn’t sure whether this was a genuine question, but Maggie answered anyway. “With a hammer,” she said. “With a hammer and a flare gun.” She sounded as numbed as the rest of us. “Someone went into the network room, smashed up the computer facade with a large hammer, then fired a flare into the hole they’d made. It burned out everything.”

  “More than that,” Fergie said. “They then went outside and severed the network hub that runs to the other buildings.”

  “And then finally they dug out the black box, took it into the smelting plant and crushed it under an ore hammer,” Max finished.

  Everyone’s eyes seemed to visit me briefly, uncertainly. Some glanced at Greigor too. Or at least I thought they did.

  “I think we’re supposed to disappear here,” Maggie said in a hollow voice. “Australis destroyed and our bodies too. Who’ll know what happened? It’ll be like the Mary Celeste. And the killer will find a way to get off Antarctica, set up a new identity somehow and be free. Without the data from the black box, the Company will never know what really happened.”

  I glanced around at my colleagues. They all looked ghastly, odd shifting shadows ebbing over their faces, as if they were already specters. Keegan looked sick. I thought Max looked puzzled, but the torch that was on her shifted before I could be sure.

  “That’s only part of it,” I heard myself say.

  Everyone was now staring at me.

  “We’ve lost all our computer files. All your personal logs, all records, everything that could be used to catch the killer. Or could be evidence…of any wrongdoing.” Heads turned to Greigor.

  “Hey, I never—” he began before Maggie cut him off.

  “So, what are we going to do?” she asked. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not too happy about the idea of just sitting around and waiting to die.”

  Again I surprised myself by answering. “We carry on with Fergie’s plan,” I said, my voice barely wavering. “We hibernate. We clear out the basement and live down there, shutting down all power except to the infirmary and the kitchen, and the greenhouse.”

  “There’s no point in saving the greenhouse,” Maggie said bitterly. “Without the computer I can’t maintain the crops that we’ve been growing. My robots have deactivated. The heating system’s already failed. We’ll have to abandon the greenhouse as well.”

  “How does that leave us for food?”

  “Not good. There are some grains and fruit that are just about ready to be harvested. If we get them, we’ll have…?”

  “About two months’ normal rations,” Abi said. “We can stretch that out, but two months’ normal rations are all we have.”

  Keegan slumped into a seat, his face pale. He moaned quietly. Dmitri and Fergie shared a glance.

  “Can we all survive until the night shift ends?” the Scotsman asked. “Can we cut right down and starve ourselves to eke it out until help arrives?”

  “Possibly,” Abi replied. We all waited for him to say more, but his mouth remained grim and closed.

  “Who’s doing this?” Keegan wailed, before burying his head in his hands. He still looked ill, his skin disturbingly yellow in the poor light.

  “I have an alibi for this one,” I said with a bitter smile. “I had…company all last night.”

  There were no secrets left for me; now everyone turned to Max. I had expected her to nod, to agree, but instead she just frowned and would not meet my gaze.“Anders…” she began slowly. “Anders, I’m sorry, but I can’t give you an alibi. I – I was drunk, I couldn’t swear…I wouldn’t know…”

  My head dropped. Goddamn, I was telling the truth. I’d been telling the truth since the very beginning. Why was there never any proof, never any evidence? “I – I never left,” I mumbled. “I woke briefly in the morning but that was after the power went.” I looked back to Max in desperate appeal.

  She looked away.

  I broke. “I didn’t do it,” I cried. “I didn’t get up, not until the computers were already broken!”

  No one spoke. They just stared at me, and that was far, far worse.

  I leaned against de Villiers’s stupid pinboard and this time no one moved to pick up the fallen papers.

  It wouldn’t have been hard for Max to tell the rest that she knew I’d been with her all night. I mean, it was the truth – I’d never left my rooms. I wa
tched Max, but still I couldn’t read her expression. I could see nothing but the anxiety and the fear and the deep, deep cold that rode through us all; and that once more I was alone. Alone and hated.

  Maybe she had set the system reset on purpose – to let me out, to read the personal logs of the crew, to give me the rope to hang myself…

  “Does it really matter?” Dmitri said into the resulting silence. “At this point, does it really matter who’s done this? Now we must survive. We need every hand to get through this.”

  “Why should we feed a murderer?” Maggie replied, her face tight with anger and fear.

  This time I didn’t even have the energy to deny it.

  “Even if Anders is a murderer,” Dmitri said, “I am not. I won’t allow anyone to starve. We survive until rescue comes. All of us.”

  I felt rather than saw a general shifting of feet around me, an uncertainty in the air. I took a deep breath. My head hurt and my legs ached. “I didn’t do it,” I said again. “I’ll work with you. I’ll help you. When we get through this, I’ll take another Psych test. I’ll take any test you like.”

  “But that ain’t gonna come soon enough, is it?” Keegan said. “I mean, without Fischer and without the computers, we can forget about doing our own test here. Any Psych you can take’s gonna come a bit late.”

  Silence fell again.

  “Okay,” Fergie said eventually. “This is all well and good. Now we need to work out what we’re going to do.”

  “Survive,” Dmitri growled.

  “We know what we have to do.” Abidene took a half pace forward. “Maggie, Greigor and I will go to the greenhouse and salvage what can be salvaged. The rest must continue to clear the basement and find a way to keep warm for the next five months.”

  “I—” Max hesitated and cleared her throat. “I need to go to the workshop to knock us up a good, efficient coal brazier. And check on the infirmary’s power supply.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” My voice was still cracked. “We shouldn’t work alone – none of us. We should stay at least in pairs—”

  “Yeah, because I’ve never seen a horror movie before, dumbass,” Fergie said. “Of course we go in teams. We’re not stupid. We all stick together. And we keep our suspects apart,” he added with a glance at Greigor.

  “Hey,” Greigor protested, “I was sealed in my room las’ night.”

  “So was I!” I snapped.

  “Only if Max thought to lock the door. Weren’t too busy fucking a killer.”

  “Hey, I—” she began, and I think only the intercession of Dmitri and Abi prevented her from hurting the little rat.

  Max wasn’t mentioning the system reboot. I wondered if she’d forgotten I was no longer a prisoner or if she was deliberately keeping that to herself.

  Fergie turned to her. “So we work in teams. You need to go to the workshop. Who d’you want with you?”

  “Keegan,” Max said with barely a pause.

  “Okay,” Dmitri said. “Maggie, Abi and Greigor to the greenhouse. Max and Keegan in the workshop. The rest of us – the basement.”

  “We need to check Fischer and Petrovic,” Weng said. “They need to be maintained.”

  “We’ll all go,” Fergie growled. “You, me and him,” he said, jerking a thumb in my direction. “That way we can all look after each other – can’t we, Nordvelt?”

  * * *

  The next few days passed in a haze of exhaustion. The work seemed endless, constant lifting and carrying. There was barely any time for thought, let alone talk. Even moving through the barracks was a mission; every door had to be wrestled open and then wrestled closed again behind us – all to conserve precious heat. Now the ground floor was almost as cold as it was outside. Had the computers been working we could have worn our warmsuits permanently, but now the small battery packs that powered them couldn’t be recharged, and so they were reserved for essential use only.

  All this technology. The planners hadn’t thought we’d need anything as basic as fur-lined coats. Even the primitive gear worn by the very first Antarctic explorers would have been so very welcome.

  It was a little better – survivable – below. I spent my nights locked in my room, cocooned in blankets, all spares dug out of storage. Max had found – or made – some old-style bolts, and she fitted one across my door. That was enough. Funny how the simplest ideas last through the centuries; for all our electronics, it was plain mechanics that we were falling back on. I gathered they’d done the same with Greigor’s door, but I barely saw him. Our paths only crossed when the work shift had finished and we sat together for a silent, inadequate meal. Nutritious mush, packed with vitamins to stave off scurvy, beri-beri and whatever else.

  No one smiled and no one laughed, not at dinner and not after. Small arguments became large. I spoke to nobody beyond what was necessary, and nobody spoke to me except to order me around.

  Life became painted in shades of amber and gray. Battery-lamps were retrieved from the minehead and hung around the barracks. Shadows mocked our efforts, our own forms twisting grotesquely around the walls. The floors became scuffed and stained as beams and plates of metal were set down or dropped.

  The service lift was as dead as the rest of the building. I felt like a pit pony. Clearing even part of the basement for habitation meant the endless moving of sheets and shelves of prefab steel: three flights of stairs from the basement to the surface. There were buckets of bolts, loose cable by the mile and great reels of wire and mesh. Sectioning off an area to trap our body heat meant holding heavy panels in place with muscles that were barely getting fed, while Max wielded the rivet gun or the arc welder dangerously close to the flesh.

  We hardly spoke. No communication was necessary. We just did the jobs that needed to be done.

  I stopped feeling hunger after the first week. I stopped feeling human at the end of the second. There was no hot water and the cold was too cold; we began to stink. We were animals, weak and helpless. We worked in silence, timeless as every day became the same. Sleep was a blessing.

  I was only allowed outside once, to help Max and Dmitri fetch the large brazier that Max had knocked together. But while the fresh air made me feel awake, the sky was as black as ever. I could see no stars, no moon, nothing to tell me whether it was day or night.

  Eventually the basement was clear enough for us to start moving beds downstairs. Weak as I was – as we all were – it took a long time to negotiate the stairs. Fergie cursed fluently every time we dropped the pallets, his imprecations becoming a constant background as we all focused on nothing more than the next few feet, the next few steps.

  Another week and we moved into the basement. Max had carefully drilled holes in the walls, next to the pipes that had once fed the generator, to allow a jerry-rigged chimney to pass out of the building. The brazier was installed in the center of the sectioned-off area and we crowded around it and watched the coals smoldering beneath a crude hood mounted on the ceiling. The generator now served only the infirmary. We huddled under whatever blankets and duvets and sheets we could find. We wore all the clothes we had. We shuffled around like troglodytes and we prayed for time to pass.

  * * *

  Physically, Weng seemed to be coping better with conditions than the rest of us. Maybe it was because she was so slight to start with; she didn’t suffer from the painful muscle wastage of Fergie, Max, myself and especially Dmitri. Mentally, however, she was suffering.

  It was in her eyes, in the times we spent playing chess, when the body was broken with exhaustion but the mind was still too active for sleep. Sometimes in those eyes I saw the cold fury, the ice-passion of self-contained, calculating rage. But other times she seemed to barely be there. She would stare through the board as if she were in a different land in a different time. She looked like a child at those times: a lost, scared little girl. She still won every game.<
br />
  Once, before we thought to play, the loathsome pariah Greigor had gone to talk to her. She didn’t respond. Didn’t object to his putting an arm across her shoulders. But when he tried to pull her in for a hug, she suddenly seemed to wake, and she shoved him away with a little screech. Greigor, who once stood so tall, was once so handsome, slunk away in the half-light.

  Lost children, that’s what we were. All lost children, pale echoes of people.

  I had no idea of the time. Day and night meant nothing anymore. The night shift was all there was. I’d lost track of how long we’d spent here, of how long I’d been meekly submitting to restraint and suspicion, tied to my bed when sleep overtook me. Greigor was left free, but I couldn’t bring myself to complain.

  Weng and Keegan separately kept track of days, the arbitrary twenty-four-hour units of gloom in which we existed. Maybe some of the others did too – Abi must have, because he had to ration our food.

  I’d tried to talk to Max, but she was always working, worn snappy and short. Eventually, I learned to leave her alone, not knowing whether we had a relationship or even if she thought I was a killer. And the less we spoke, the more difficult it became to form words. Silence begot silence and we lived in our individual heads.

  There wasn’t much to do down there. We had chess and we had cards, but the games became more and more desultory, default activities drained of any real enjoyment. Poker caused too many arguments among a crew already stressed and frayed. After the first month, chess was too much for most of us, the intellectual depths ungraspable. The few books that Maggie had brought from her library were too technical. We were left to play patience games, taking turns with the cards.

  Fergie had developed scrubby ginger stubble, while Abidene’s beard had grown bushy and unkempt. We seemed to be shrinking. Dmitri, the biggest of us, seemed top-heavy, stumbling around the basement as if in a state of constant near-collapse. There was nothing to do but wait and sleep. The cots were arranged at the generator end of the basement. They’d originally been set in two rows, but it hadn’t taken long before they’d been edged into a crude horseshoe around the brazier. The table had been brought down from the rec room; it sat at the open end of the horseshoe, completing a rough circle. A set of the mine lamps ran on minimal power, providing enough illumination to see the coal dust and ash hanging in the air around us.