“Okay,” Gina agreed. “Hang here and I’ll be right back.”
She started back up the shaft to get the thermate from Eric’s APC. He had parked closer than she had, having found a clear route on the far side of the city from the shuttles. It took her a little over an hour to make the round trip. She found Eric exactly as she’d left him, dangling from his rope and staring at nothing. She hated it when the old ones did that. It was like finding a droid in sleep mode. They became statue still and just went away, whether into memory or thoughts, she didn’t know.
“Eric?” Gina said.
His head swivelled like a targeting sensor and his eyes! They were empty, but then a second later awareness flooded back and with it his Humanity. He was back, but if this was him, what had been looking out of his eyes just then? She shivered; she didn’t want to know. She handed him some of the thermate, keeping back a sizable amount for later. She had more up top as well, safely out of the way.
“You want me to do the other one?”
“I’ll handle it,” Eric said and quickly went to work.
She had to admit he was quick and precise. She could have done the job and would probably have gotten the same result when they lit it off, but he was faster. Like he’d told her on Thurston that time; he was a dab hand with explosives.
Gina climbed out of the shaft leaving him to it. Eric joined her a while later but only briefly. He touched off the thermate remotely almost the instant he reached her, and then after the smoke had cleared from the shaft, they descended together to admire the results.
Gina looked over his handiwork and decided they were heading in the right direction but weren’t there quite yet. This time she helped Eric set up. She wrapped the cables with the thermate bandage, wrapping it nice and tight before adding the detonator and then spraying the entire thing with the aerosol. The quick setting nanopolymer was designed to contain the heat and gasses only briefly before succumbing. The result was that the thermate would melt everything inside to a semi-liquid state before bursting outward in a shower of red hot metal particles. She set up four charges, and Eric three more. The detonators were all on the same channel and would ignite together.
This time when they lit off the charges they had to wait ten minutes or so for the smoke to clear and the metal to cool down. Vipers could survive a punctured suit even in these conditions, but why put themselves through the discomfort? When the smoke had cleared and thermal imaging suggested the scrap had cooled, they lowered themselves down the shaft for the third, and hopefully final, time.
“Looks good,” she said. There was still plenty of scrap cable in the way, but the central area was clear all the way through. “Me first?”
“If you like,” Eric said, sounding amused. “You did find it after all.”
“Yeah, I did find it. Looking forward to our boat trip?”
“Getting ahead of yourself aren’t you? We don’t know there’s anything down there.”
“There’s something,” she disagreed. “I don’t know what or how useful it is, but there’s something.”
Eric didn’t argue. Wise of him. The heat source alone made this one worth investigating, and was why they were doing this location first and not some other random site.
Gina lowered herself carefully through the entangled cables, keeping to the middle of the cleared zone. She managed not to snag her suit and once clear allowed herself to fall faster. The car was a long way down, but she soon reached it and was standing on its roof watching Eric make his descent. Before he did, she had the hatch open and peeked inside.
“I wonder who they were,” she muttered when Eric joined her to look into the car. “Three strangers, three friends?”
“Doesn’t matter now. They’re closer in death than alive.”
Strange sentiment, Gina thought, as she dropped into the elevator. She tried not to land on the skeletons, but Eric had no such sensibilities. He landed with a crunch and a puff of bone dust as one of the skulls disintegrated beneath his boots. She didn’t protest. She was too interested in forcing the doors apart.
“Give a hand would you?”
Eric stepped beside her and they heaved the doors apart to reveal darkness. He directed his light and revealed an empty corridor stretching ahead. Gina could tell it was the source of the heat despite her suit, or maybe because of it in a way. Condensation immediately began forming on its exterior surfaces when the warmer air touched it. The moisture flashed to frost almost immediately.
She turned on her own lamp and panned it around, looking for anything that might tell her what she had here. This wasn’t a basement access for instance; too well appointed. It looked like any other corridor in a generic office building, but not like something leading to a machine room that typically serviced such buildings. There was carpet on the floor for one thing; a clue that said to her that people and not machines were expected to use the spaces down here.
She advanced along the corridor nailing a door with her light. It was locked, but she twisted the handle with smooth inexorable power listening to the mechanism. The pop and crunch made her happy. Silly really, but the little things about being a viper still thrilled. She opened the door and scowled. Eric peered over her shoulder at the cleaning supplies and chuckled. She growled under her breath and closed the storeroom door. They moved to the next door. Unlocked this time. It was an office. Eric entered first and Gina followed.
The room was partitioned into work spaces each one containing a desk and computer. She played her light over the nearest work station. It had been left neat, as if its user had just left for the night and planned to return the next day. Without a power source she couldn’t begin to guess what kind of business had been conducted here, but Eric hadn’t even glanced at the computers. He’d made a beeline for the waste bins.
The waste bins?
Eric dug through the trash and selected a discarded flimsy. He read it and then another. “Not what I hoped.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing important. Just an old memo.”
Gina left him to it and stepped back out into the corridor to investigate the other doors. She entered offices to scout around. Most were executive offices with an outer room for an assistant and a plush inner office for the exec. She didn’t find anything interesting until she came to a stairwell.
She forced the door open against fallen debris from above and found the stairwell lit by emergency lighting. She blinked in surprise. The emergency lights had power, but from where? She advanced further climbing rubble and edged toward the stairs going down. It was blocked with fallen rubble, but she thought she could detect a hum of machinery. The sounds of her suit PLSS tricked her ears. There couldn’t be active equipment—she glanced sideways at the dimly glowing light panel, but then again...
“Eric, I’ve found something interesting,” she said over her comm. “Come take a look at this.”
“What is it?”
“Emergency lighting in the stairwell at the far end from the elevator,” she said. “I think I hear something.”
“On my way.”
She tried to get a better position to listen for that humming sound, but the helmet made it useless. She hesitated for a second, but then took a chance and removed it. Her eyeballs tried to freeze as the cold hit her face, and alerts started flashing upon her display. The temperature was higher than outside as she had noted before. Wind chill alone made a big difference, but even so it was still well below zero. Her breath puffed into fog and drifted toward the corridor carried along by a current of warmer air coming up through the rubble in the stairs. She switched to infra and was excited to see the faintly glowing current clearly. She coughed and then again. The air was toxic as her display warned and it irritated her nose and throat. Sulphur dioxide was a key ingredient in sulphuric acid. In other words, she was breathing sulphuric acid in a gaseous mist. She coughed again.
>_ Sensors: Environmental health warning, sulphur dioxide in dangerous concentrations.
>
>_ Diagnostics: Warning, lung capacity impaired.
>_ IMS: Repairs in progress.
Yeah, yeah. What else was new? Gina dismissed the warnings, and still coughing, laid down to put her ear against the rubble. She upped the gain to amplify input to her ears, and grinned. Definitely something going on down there.
Gina winced and hastily returned her hearing to normal as Eric arrived, his footfalls booming in her head like a rampaging dinosaur. She climbed back to her feet and put her helmet back on, taking deep cleansing breaths to flush her lungs of the toxic crap she had been breathing. Some of the warnings on her display winked out, while others slowly changed, edging back to safe or normal parameters. She eyed her radiation dosimeter. It continued to glow balefully. Particles of radioactive dust must have entered her suit. She would need to decontaminate the suit inside and out as well as herself. She cursed the need, but wasn’t too worried. The dose wasn’t fatal for a viper, or anyone else for that matter. It was equivalent to an x-ray, no more than that, but it was still a high amount for such a brief exposure.
“Definitely something down there, Eric. I can hear machine noises, and there’s a warm air current coming up from below.”
Eric must have switched to infra as she had done because he nodded. “I see it.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s our first and best indication that something is here,” Eric said. “We won’t know what it is unless we get down there for a look.”
He edged by and studied the tons of rubble filling the stairwell, and then stood craning his neck to study the shaft overhead. He started climbing upward until he ran out of room, shining the powerful beam of his lamp up into the darkness. He came back down.
“Let’s go back. We need Liz’s people.”
Gina nodded and together they headed for the elevator shafts and the ropes hanging there.
Base camp, Landing, Kushiel
The engineers were good, Gina was pleased to note. They had thrown themselves eagerly into their work after being idle aboard ship so long. They had barely been on site a few hours after the trip from Hobbs, and the base camp was already laid out. The first dome was under construction, its supporting framework spreading one triangular formation after another linking together in a circle and beginning to arch upward. Other domes were just a pile of crates and metal tubes as yet, but the ground had been prepared and the foundations poured. Amazing stuff, nanopolymers. Even in such terrible conditions it worked as designed, poured directly onto ice even! Without good foundations and floors, they couldn’t pressurise the domes. The thick plastic circular platforms were already being covered with snow as the clear skies they had praised when they landed, gave way to another howling storm. The engineers worked on, ignoring the blast of icy wind. The dome’s skeleton took after its masters, ignoring the winds as it climbed and linked to its neighbouring structures.
“It’s going well,” Liz said privately on her helmet comm, perhaps interpreting Gina’s watchfulness as worry. “The frame can handle much worse than this.”
“I’m not worried. Your people seem satisfied with things. What about the walls?”
“As long as we leave certain panels out for the wind to pass through it will be fine. If we build by the book, the walls would turn into a windbreak and might be carried away. The domes rely upon the structural integrity of neighbouring panels if you know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“Well... think about those old stone arches you’ve seen in the historical sensims. Take one of the stones out and the arch collapses. It’s the same here. When all the panels are in, they push and pull on each other making the structure strong. It’s really an excellent design. We can’t finalise the domes in these conditions, but as long as we let the wind pass through safely we can do ninety percent of the work and finish them later.”
“Sounds good,” Gina said.
They watched the work silently for a time. The cranes had the hardest job. Even flimsy metal pipes became dangerous when the wind kicked up, but they were monitoring wind speeds and so far they were low enough, barely, for safety.
“I would have preferred having some of my people looking at what you found, Gina, but this had to be done sooner rather than later.”
Gina nodded. “I could take you to see it if you trust me. I’ll have to lower you down on a rope.”
“Tempting,” Liz said with a shy smile. “And of course I trust you, but I won’t be able to do much. Eric said we need a crane?”
“Yeah. We went down using an elevator shaft, but it would be easier if you cleared the stairwell from directly above it.”
Liz nodded.
Hours fled and Gina spent all her time transporting equipment from Hobbs in her shuttle. Eric was doing the same. The heaviest items had been dealt with by the end of that day, and she moved onto transporting the pieces needed to build up the walls of the habitat domes. The weather worsened and it was decided to halt further operations. High winds made the cranes unsafe to use, and Liz decided not to risk it. Work upon the walls was abandoned, and everyone retreated to the shuttles to wait.
The second day dawned bright and clear. Liz took advantage by pulling everyone off the other dome’s supports to quickly clad the main residential dome. The idea was to complete it quickly so that everyone could move in and sleep comfortably instead of in the shuttles and APCs. They hadn’t enjoyed the experience the night before.
Gina watched in amusement as Liz’s people went into high gear. She guessed the promise of a warm place to live and sleep without their suits was a spur to action. She could understand that. Her suit was getting a little ripe, and she imagined hers wasn’t the only one.
The marvellously designed panels that impressed Liz so much quickly covered the skeleton of the dome, and stabilised it. It didn’t take too long either. Men and woman clambered all over the thing, guiding the panels being lowered by the cranes and snapping them into place. The more that were added, the stronger it became. Liz directed the entire scene like a conductor with an orchestra. As the dome was buttoned up with the last few panels still going in, her people poured inside with equipment, generators, crates, god knows what else, and began building the interior partitions to separate common areas and sleeping compartments. Wiring for lights and heating units was the first order of business however, quickly followed by plumbing and the air filtration needed to pressurise the dome. Positive atmospheric pressure was a must to keep contaminants out. The showers were particularly important in the air lock. Contamination could enter the dome on their suits. They had to decontaminate the suits before entering the dome proper. There would be other showers and toilet facilities inside as well of course. The main dome was for people to live in and would have all the conveniences. The other domes had different uses. One would garage the heavy equipment like the cranes and dozers so they could be maintained and protected from the weather. The third and last dome was to house supplies and the main generator to power the entire base. The portable generators would work in a pinch as a backup, but they were low capacity, meant for powering tools not buildings.
At the end of the second day, everyone ate a meal together in the main dome in relative comfort. Bare wires and pipes were everywhere. Tables, chairs, and beds were scattered all over amid crates and tools. Generators whirred supplying power to autochefs some still in their crates, but everyone sat together laughing and chatting, amid the remains of their meals on the tables. Their suits hung in the completed airlock, where they dripped dry from the decontamination cycle. Everyone was upbeat and happy with progress. They were warm and protected from the elements and no longer confined in smelly suits.
All was well.
It took the rest of that week to completely finish work on the base camp. The weather had quickly turned from unpredictable to solidly bad for three days straight. During that time, with winds howling outside and snow building up to half bury one side of the dome, Liz’s people worked inside finishing
their new home in record time. Finally the storm blew itself out and the engineers emerged blinking into brilliant sunshine like bears after a long winter. Everything was clean and white. Snow had been blown clear of the ice and built into drifts against the cranes and dozers. The foundations of the unfinished domes were uncovered, something that seemed to satisfy Liz, though she scowled at the need to dig out her machines and the supply crates.
As soon as the camp was finished, Liz shifted focus and labour to the prize she had come for. Gina had warned her a number of times that they didn’t know what was under that rubble. Don’t get your hopes up, she warned, but Liz ignored the pessimism determined to be optimistic. She didn’t believe the A.I was down there, she said, but it was obvious she hoped it was. Gina could see the passion and hope in the woman’s eyes and prepared herself to console her when the inevitable failure came to pass.
Alpha site looked a lot different from her first visit, Gina thought now, standing to one side of the main event. The stub of the stairwell had been demolished level to the ground leaving a square plascrete lined hole leading down into the foundations. A crane lifted a huge bucket full of rubble and freshly cut steel sections out of the hole as she watched, and swung it away. A few moments later, she flinched a little at the thunderous crash of the bucket emptying itself onto the growing pile in the street. As soon as the crane lowered the bucket back, the engineer’s drills and hammers started up again.
Liz had agreed with Eric regarding the need to clear the stairwell after she surveyed things. To Gina’s surprise, the elevator was in fact at the bottom of its shaft, not stuck part way as she had thought, and there was nothing to be gained by using it as an access point to the stairs. It would have made clearing the rubble harder. Using the crane down the stairwell itself was the obvious and most efficient choice, though it took more work to clear in the initial stages. Once it was open all the way to the bottom, it would give the engineers a fast way down using the crane as a makeshift elevator. The old stairs were being left in place to save time and effort, and could be used by those who didn’t mind a workout, but the suits were confining and made everything more tiring. Gina doubted anyone would choose the stairs.
Merkiaari Wars Series: Books 1-3 Page 105