Citadel 32: A Tale of the Aggregate

by Tom Merritt

  The distant sound of falling rocks quieted and they could hear nothing else. She had no idea how far they’d gone. It felt like the whole thing had taken a long time, but she knew it couldn’t have been more than a minute. Her breathing steadied. It looked like the air would hold for a little longer. Corge’s breathing slowed as well and he gasped, “You win.”

  “What?” she managed to wheeze. “Win what?”

  “The argument,” he spluttered. “You didn’t have to collapse the tunnel to do it, you know.”

  She laughed, which made it harder to catch her breath. Between gasps, she managed to say, “It—worked—didn’t it?”

  He started to giggle himself, “A little too well.”

  “That’s not good,” she said, giggling in spite of herself. “It’s not that funny.”

  This brought Corge’s laughter to a mild rumble. “Are we losing pressure?”

  “I don’t think so,” LeAnn sniffed the air a bit. She knew how to smell for pressure, a chief talent of tunnel Specialists like her. “Must be some kind of gas leak, though I don’t know where it would come from.” She fought the urge to giggle. It wasn’t funny. But her brain found everything humorous right then.

  “Look at that pipe?” Corge almost shouted, stifling a guffaw.

  An incredibly old metal pipe jutted out of the rock above them, broken by the cave-in.

  “Is it hissing?” Corge couldn’t help but smile and start to laugh at this joke. Except it wasn’t a joke. It was death.

  “Yeah!” LeAnn choked off the word. They had crawled up a small pile of rubble toward the pipe. Somewhere in her mind, LeAnn knew that unless they could cap it quickly, moving toward it was the wrong thing to do.

  “Cap it,” she squeaked, and Corge almost busted a gut laughing at this but at the same time desperately searched for something to plug the hole. Suddenly he started taking off his outer shirt.

  “No time for that,” she couldn’t help but say, making him pause as he fought off his own mirth, shaking his head and pointing at the pipe.

  “Water,” was all he managed to say and pointed at the ground.

  She got it. Stuff the shirt in the pipe, make some mud out of dust with water from their flasks, and fill the gaps with wet dust as a seal. Then hope there was enough air movement in the tunnel to dissipate the gas that already escaped.

  It took several minutes to finally plug the hole, but it seemed to work. The hissing stopped. At one point, the shirt began to move and it looked like the pressure would foil their plan, but some more wet dust in the right places seemed to stabilize it.

  “That should hold for now,” LeAnn said. “Good idea.”

  “Observation,” Corge said, and let out a satisfyingly unhappy “ha,” that wasn’t prompted by a lack of oxygen in his brain.

  “I think the air cleared,” LeAnn said.

  “You’re always telling me to wear a helmet,” he said. “Why aren’t you wearing a helmet?”

  “You’re a bad influence,” LeAnn spat. “Do you think Chi-lin’s all right?”

  “I would think so. She was on the other side of the drill last I saw her and pretty far from it. She should have seen it coming, easy.”

  “I hope you’re right,” LeAnn sighed and stood up as much as she could in the narrow tunnel. She followed the pipe as far back as possible into the rock above them.

  “N2O,” she finally read off the pipe. “That would have been my guess.”

  “Why is there an N2O pipe way out here?” Corge asked.

  “We’re not that far, really,” LeAnn said. “The refinery and main fuel engine is two clicks,” she paused and moved her hand about as if she was dowsing. “That way,” she said when she finally landed on a direction. “Probably some kind of fuel mixture thing. I bet it comes from Chemistry Ops. Byproduct of something or other, headed out here through the rock where it can’t hurt anyone,” she laughed but again it was a perfectly honest and somewhat miserable laugh.

  Corge began to crawl back the way they came. He couldn’t see far down the tunnel. Their headlamps had come on automatically during the cave-in but didn’t penetrate far. He got a few steps away and hit a pile of rocks. They didn’t entirely fill the tunnel.

  “Think we can dig our way back?” he asked.

  LeAnn looked thoughtful. “Maybe. If we feel any kind of vibration, we need to back off right away. If they come to find us, they won’t use the widening drill, but they might use another kind. We don’t want to lose a hand right before we get rescued.”

  Corge looked horrified. “I hadn’t even thought of that. But I meant, is it possible to dig through all this?”

  LeAnn nodded slowly. “Sure. At least it looks like it from here. We’ll have to see what we run up against as we get nearer the main cave-in point. Plus we need to be careful not to cause another fall.”

  It was slow work, especially trying to figure out what to do with the rock and dust they moved out of the way. They didn’t want to block the way back up the tunnel in case they needed to retreat again. Secondary cave-ins were atypical but certainly not impossible. Eventually, they couldn’t keep enough room behind them and still remove rock from in front of them.

  Corge sat down, exhausted. “I know it’s probably just the hard work, but the air seems thinner here. That wouldn’t make any sense, would it? We’re headed back toward the source. It should be getting richer.

  LeAnn breathed heavily, too. “I don’t know. Maybe we’re losing air from a crack in the tunnel.” She shook her head. “We might want to investigate the tunnel near the surface,” she shrugged.

  Corge looked a little shocked. “Why? There’s nothing that way but vacuum, right? I mean, can’t we just take a little more time to spread out what we’ve dug and keep going here?”

  LeAnn shook her head. “No. It’s not going to help. I can tell. This cave-in is pretty solid. We haven’t hit the concentration point yet. The material keeps getting denser. That means we haven’t hit any of the main cave-in points yet, which means we’re not yet halfway. Imagine having to do everything we’ve done, times at least two, and slower as we spread the material out farther up the tube.”

  Corge looked a little desperate. “OK. But what choice do we have? You’re not giving up are you?”

  “No, idiot.” LeAnn scowled at him and punched him somewhat hard on the shoulder. “Yeah right, I’ve decided to just throw in the helmet and die. Which, by the way, I wish I had right now, you dumbass.”

  “Don’t call me a dumbass,” he said, trying to pretend not to be actually hurt. Corge realized just how stupid it was to act sensitive about insults at a time like this. “What’s your plan?”

  LeAnn looked a little sheepish. “Well, it’s not so much a plan as it is a hope.”

  “What hope?”

  “Telfer tubes.”

  “What tubes?”

  “Telfer tubes.”

  “What the hell are Telfer tubes?”

  “Some of the earliest ventilation hacks from right after Disconnection. Supposedly invented by a guy named Telfer.”

  “Oh. I’ve heard of him. He led the team that laid the foundation for the recycling and reuse system. Right. He was in charge of the ventilators. Never heard of Telfer tubes, though,” said Corge.

  “Of course not, because you’re not a Specialist in vent, like me. Telfer’s most famous for general quality assurance. That’s what you remember learning about. But he did a lot of detailed work on the system of fluid and gas reclamation. One of his early hacks was to create a system that efficiently rerouted air and gas back where it was needed. He took advantage of natural air currents.”

  “OK,” Corge said doubtfully. “How does that help us?”

  “Well, it was the Disconnection right? A little bit of chaos was going on, so his hack tubes never got properly mapped. Plus, his system couldn’t draw any power since generation wasn’t very good yet. Eventually, they figured a more efficient powered system involving small tubes. When that happened,
the Telfer tubes were abandoned. A lot of folks think we wouldn’t have survived Disconnection without them. We came pretty close to running out of water and air a few times back then.”

  “Of course,” Corge nodded. “Now that you mention it, I remember Telfer getting some of the credit for systems that got us through those crises, but I never learned exactly what he did. Figured it was just ventilation stuff.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m a Specialist and you’re a—whatever you are—a Watcher. I was very interested in what Telfer was doing and wrote an independent examination of it. That’s where I learned about Telfer tubes. They still exist, and they’re all over the place. They just act as sort of passive storage now. Not worth bothering with.”

  “But you said they’d never been mapped.”

  “Right, which means there might be one up ahead of us near the surface. They ran everywhere. Or I should say, anywhere is as likely to have them as anywhere else. It was a hack. If we can find one, we might be able to crawl through it to somewhere on the other side of the collapse.”

  “But you can’t be sure one is up there. Even then you don’t know where it would lead to.”

  “I told you, Corge—it’s a hope, not a plan.”

  Corge began to get up into the stooped position they called “standing” in that part of the tunnel. “Well, let’s go take a look, then.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The air thickened as Corge and LeAnn climbed back over the rubble to the place where they had started digging. For the first time in a while, Corge felt like he could fully stand up.

  “Do you feel that?” LeAnn asked him.

  Corge wasn’t sure what she meant. They were standing very close together but also in rather thick tunnel suits. “Feel what?” he asked.

  “A breeze.”

  Corge stopped. He wasn’t sure if it was the power of her suggestion or if he actually felt a breeze. “I think. Maybe. I feel something,” He felt his face grow hot after he said this last.

  “It’s definitely a movement of air. Very slight. But it’s coming from up ahead toward the surface, not back by the collapse.”

  “A Telfer tube?” Corge asked hopefully.

  “Or a leak near the surface, sucking the last of our breathable air out and losing us a few more years off of max station survival,” she said in her “just stating the facts” voice. Corge often hated her “just stating the facts” voice.

  “So, hope or death, which is it to be?” he sighed.

  “You’re a lighthearted one,” she chided.

  They kept moving toward the surface and the vent tunnel got small enough that they couldn’t even stoop. Corge felt the breeze on his cheek but still wasn’t convinced he wasn’t imagining it. Then he felt a brief gust. He was sure of it. An actual gust of somewhat stale air had blown past his face and rustled the whiskers on his cheek.

  “Did you feel that?” LeAnn asked.

  “Yes!” he squeaked. “I damn well did! That was a breeze. So I’m not imagining it.”

  “No, you’re not,” and they felt another one. “And here’s why. Scoot up near me.”

  Corge got very close to LeAnn and put his head right below her neck. Her shoulders had blocked his view of another vent tunnel intersecting with this one. A small waft of air came out as he looked into it. He felt LeAnn put an arm around him as he stared.

  “Problem is,” she said, “it’s wide enough farther in, but we can’t fit through the entrance. We’ll have to dig it out to get in.”

  Corge could see what she meant. It looked like he could stand up inside this new tunnel. But the entryway was barely as big as his head.

  “Too bad I’m not a cat,” he said.

  “A cat?” She laughed. He felt the laugh through her whole body, as it was wrapped around him.

  “Yeah. Supposedly they could fit into any opening they could get their head into.”

  “Hmm,” LeAnn said and slid out from under him, wrapping her upper body more around him, putting her head right next to his so they could both see into the hole. “That gives me an idea.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “And I’m in!” LeAnn shouted from inside the new tunnel.

  “How in the hell did you do that?” Corge marveled.

  “I’m a cat,” she teased. “Come and get me.”

  “Not a chance,” Corge laughed.

  “No, really,” she got serious. “You can do it. You just fold your shoulders. They have to go out of the socket a bit. Painful for an instant, but in that instant you’re through and you pop them back in.”

  “I cannot do that,” he said.

  “I thought everyone could do that.” LeAnn sounded mystified.

  “I’m not that flexible.”

  “Oh really? Too bad,” she teased.

  “Plus I’m too big.”

  “What do you mean?” she had half a smile and half a frown on her face. She looked like she couldn’t decide if he was joking or telling her some unfathomable thing.

  “My head’s bigger than the hole.” And he plunked his head up so his face filled it.

  “Oh,” she said. “Too bad to be you,” she laughed again. Then took off running up the Telfer tube.

  “Hey!” Corge yelled. He was as jealous of her ability to run in that tube as he was of her being in it.

  “Be right back,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Just checking something.”

  Corge thought about what they were doing while he waited. Now that it had gone from sneaking around to trying to find a way back into the base, the whole fragility of their world hit home. Like everyone he knew, Corge was raised to consider the long-term effects of everything he did. It informed the smallest, most mundane acts. But it also faded into the background. While no one decision made by him or Ibrahima felt like it violated any of his core principles, he wondered if that was really true.

  If they circumvented the rules of the Assembly, weren’t they doing exactly what the Passives feared? The Assembly was one of many safety nets to keep civilization, or “survivalization” as some of his teachers called it, stable and long-lived. If Ibrahima succeeded, wouldn’t that undermine the Assembly’s authority? The problem wasn’t that anyone would revolt now. The problem would come years later when someone pointed back at what Ibrahima did and used it to justify whatever action they wanted. That action might be good, or it might not be. Worse, it might be well intentioned but deadly, and the safety check of the Assembly wouldn’t catch it.

  Who were they, anyway, to move against the Assembly? The Passives weren’t evil. They were just cautious. Their voice deserved to be heard more than any other. And it had been, Corge realized. In a fair vote, the Passives had lost and this very operation had been approved. It was the Passives who wanted to game the system. Nobody he’d spoken to felt the purported new evidence would really end up proving a danger. Of course he hadn’t spoken to any Passives, but he had spoken to plenty of Moderates.

  Ibrahima was right, and most people agreed. The Passives amplified the evidence to slow progress and moved to cancel the project. It wasn’t a safety valve. It was an attempt to force a minority view. When he thought about it that way, Corge felt compelled to do what they were doing. It felt imperative to carry out what seemed to be the true will of the Assembly. He realized every great criminal in history probably felt the same, but that didn’t change his opinion. What they were doing wasn’t risky. It was right.

  He heard LeAnn huffing and puffing, running back toward him in the Telfer tube.

  “This tube is HUGE,” she shouted before he could even see her. “I never knew Telfer tubes were so big, especially this near the surface. It must have been a major vent shaft conduit!” She was grinning from ear to ear. Vent mechanics really did get her blood going. Corge decided he should learn more about the subject.

  “The what with the who?” he joked.

  “Never mind,” she shook her head, panting but still smiling.

  “Is the air thinner in there?”

>   “No, I was sprinting. I went a lot farther than I meant to. There’s lots of cool stuff in here. Some that might even be interesting to the vent-ignorant,” she waved a hand toward Corge, still catching her breath.

  Corge laughed. “OK. Did you figure out how to get us out of here? Or how to get me in there?”

  “Oh yeah, no,” she said quickly, nodding as her breathing slowed. “We’ll just have to dig you in. May take a bit, but we’ve had lots of practice today, haven’t we?”

  “Is it even still today?” Corge wondered.

  “How philosophical. Anyway, as to the major question of getting us out of here, yes and no. I found one definite way to get back into the station but it’s in Docking Bay. At least, I think it is.”

  “Wow, you did go far!”

  “I didn’t go all the way there; I just recognized the vent.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Stop it. That’s a very not secret way to get back in, but it’s good to know. I think, with a little more exploration, we could probably get back to the other side of the cave-in. I even saw some networks that might give us a good alternate route to the machine.”

  “All right,” Corge sighed and smiled at the same time. “Shall we start digging?”

  CHAPTER 13

  “No, it’s a solid cave-in, Ibrahima” Chi-lin said over her com. “After we got the widener out, we found a wall of rubble. We hand dug a bit, but that would take forever. We didn’t even get to the central collapse point. It’s amazing we got the widener drill out at all. I’m sorry—we’re going to have to call in rescue. We’ll need a slow drill team to find them.”

  Ibrahima’s tinny voice came out of Chi-lin’s com. “And there’s nothing else you can try? It’s not just that I’m hesitant to reveal what we’ve been up to. Waiting for a rescue team burns up time, too. If they are hurt, they need the fastest response possible.”