Dry Ice

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  Bonner had never before failed to take Greg’s call.

  He’s throwing me under the bus.

  There was a small stirring among the agents working on their computers. They conferred in low voices, then one asked Special Agent Dobson to step outside for a minute. She came back in the room almost immediately and walked straight over to Greg. Her attractive face had changed to reveal a toxic mixture of fury and helplessness. She yanked the chair he was sitting on so that he spun away from the table.

  “You son of a bitch,” the agent whispered, her voice rough. With no warning, the agent drew back her arm and hit him with a closed fist so hard that everyone in the room heard the snap of his jaw as it broke, heard the crack of his head as it caught the edge of the small table behind him. The force of the blow made the agent take a stumbling step or two forward before she caught her balance. Then she lunged at Greg. The chair went over as her hands went around Greg’s neck and she began squeezing. Through a haze of pain from his broken jaw, Greg began clawing at the vise-like hands locked around his windpipe.

  The reaction of the other agents in the room was swift but not immediate, and Greg knew then that he was no high-value asset. They’d let him die, given half a chance.

  His vision was awash with pinpricks of darkness when the pressure against his throat suddenly abated and the woman was pulled off him. Greg rolled onto his side, gasping, awkward within the confines of the fallen chair. He saw the agent, one arm twisted and shoved up against her back, being moved away from him.

  “See, that’s the trouble with immunity,” he heard a male voice mutter, and seconds later the speaker moved into his line of sight and stood looking down at him. “It only helps if someone isn’t willing to kill you.”

  Two other agents moved into his line of sight and Greg closed his eyes.

  “Aw, hell, did he just die?” said the same voice.

  “Go ahead and check, if you’re that interested.”

  “I’m not.”

  “He better not be dead,” came another voice. “He’s the only one who knows what’s going on.”

  “Yeah, and he was just about to confess and tell us how to fix it,” the first voice said, dripping with disdain. “How long you been around here, Morrissey? Bad guys don’t do that in real life. He’s a psychotic asshole, okay?”

  The voice paused and Greg heard murmurs too low to be distinguishable, then the harsh voice continued at a higher pitch of anger. “For Christ’s sake, who gives a flying fuck if he has a concussion? Irreversible brain damage would be too good for him.”

  Greg felt a sharp thrust into his gut as he lay curled on the floor.

  “Open your eyes, you pus-filled, motherfucking sack of shit.” The shoe jabbed him again, harder. “I said, open your eyes.”

  Terrified, shaking, his jaw throbbing with white-hot pain, his throat scraped raw, Greg did as he was told.

  “That agent who took you down? Dobson? She’s from Alaska, where you made an earthquake happen a while ago. She just found out she lost her whole family. Courtesy of you. Asshole.”

  Greg stared at the men towering over him as he cowered, defenseless, on the floor. More faces moved into his field of view. They were all grim; some were flushed with anger, others were still and cold. The fury radiating from all of them was palpable, like the pulses from one of his arrays. It felt just as lethal.

  I’m not going to get out of here alive.

  The thought paralyzed him as he lay on the floor, waiting for he didn’t know what.

  * * *

  “Oh crap. Oh man, oh man alive,” Jonah, the youngest member of the science team, moaned in a voice thick with fear. As if pushed by an unseen hand, the young man fell against the back of his chair, his eyes squeezed shut.

  “What?” Nik demanded, not looking away from his own monitor.

  Jonah’s only answer was another low moan. He was the quietest, most even-tempered person at the installation. It was a shock to see his face sheet white, his eyes huge and swimming with unshed tears.

  “We’re dead. He’s killed us all,” he said hoarsely, his voice choked with emotion. “I just figured it out.”

  Tess had risen at Jonah’s first words. Now, she bent to see his screen and asked, “What are you talking about? What did you find?”

  “I know what he did. Look. He reconfigured the array software. All of it. For every array.” He took in a large, audible breath. “It’s beginning to execute now. Every array is moving into position to fire simultaneously. Max power. He’s sending one enormous pulse down. Down, at max power,” the young man finished with a choking sob.

  Tess felt a bone-deep chill settle over her as she looked at the code on Jonah’s monitor. She looked up at Nik, who was at her elbow.

  “Is what he said true?” Nik asked, his voice strangely quiet, yet almost booming in the too-still atmosphere. The sound made the skin on the back of Tess’s neck crawl.

  “Seems to be,” Ron replied, more subdued than Tess had ever seen him.

  “When?”

  “Now. A few minutes,” Jonah blurted in answer to Nik’s hushed question. “They’ve started moving into position.”

  With hands that were shaking, Tess picked up her walkie-talkie. “I need everyone to the control room stat. I don’t care what you’re doing, get in here now.” She set the unit back into the holster clipped to her belt. “What’s a few, Jonah?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  Oh man.

  She took a deep breath. “Plenty of time,” she muttered.

  The room had filled in what seemed like seconds. People crowded into every open space.

  Tess cleared her throat and took a deep breath. “The situation is critical. We’re in imminent danger of sustaining a catastrophic blow,” she said bluntly, speaking loudly enough to be heard throughout the whole room. It wasn’t difficult; you could have heard a feather drop. “The arrays are moving into a new position.” She paused.

  “Sorry if this sounds like a science lesson, but you guys need to know the scope of what we’re facing. There’s a theory about the effect of a specific combination of magnetic fields on the earth’s gravity. Looks like Greg thinks he knows what the combination is and has decided to test it today.” She took another deep breath. “The theory states that, when combined in the right sequence and magnitude, magnetic fields will momentarily release the earth’s gravitational field in a very, very small area. That means for a few nanoseconds, that section of the earth’s crust would be in zero gravity and fully vulnerable to the spin of the planet’s magnetic core. Every fault line in that region would be able to move freely. And even though the gravitational pull would resume almost immediately, it would be too late; the crustal plates would be in motion.”

  “But there aren’t any faults here, are there?” Fizz said. “This continent—”

  “This half of the continent is one big seismic zone,” Tess explained. “The ice sheet we’re on is miles thick, but underneath all that ice is a large mountain range that’s home to a lot of small, live volcanoes.”

  Fizz jumped as if someone poked her with a pin. “Volcanoes? Down here?”

  Tess nodded, trying to remain patient. “About two and a half miles below us. The weight of the ice sheet keeps them from erupting into the atmosphere, but they have constant lava flows. Small icequakes happen every day down here. The ice sheet that covers the entire continent is moving slowly but steadily outward, toward the coast. The volcanoes aren’t actually the biggest problem,” she said after a slight pause, trying to keep her voice slow and measured so that the people listening, many with their jaws hanging open, could absorb it.

  “The bigger problem,” she continued, “is that the weight of all this ice we’re sitting on has naturally, over the millennia, pushed the actual continent down. I meant that literally. So, in theory, the instant the gravity disappears, this ice we’re living on will fracture, possibly explosively, as the crust rushes up. Then all that volcanism that has never had an o
utlet will erupt. There will be no way to stop any of it.” She took a quick breath and went on.

  “That’s just the beginning. Earthquakes will trigger across the continent, further fracturing the ice sheet and shifting the pieces. Major ice shelves will break off, flooding every coast in the southern hemisphere and allowing the interior of the sheet to slide unimpeded until it hits the water. Once there, it will break into huge icebergs that will eventually drift into shipping lanes. As they melt natural forces will pull the excess water into the northern hemisphere, causing more flooding and rising sea levels. Meanwhile, the massive influx of freshwater will severely and irreparably compromise the thermohaline convection cycle and the global weather will begin to change.” She shook her head, almost as if she couldn’t believe what she was saying.

  With a soft sigh, one of the housekeepers dropped to the floor in a loose-limbed heap. Kendra, the installation’s physician, pushed through the crowd to her side.

  “Let’s get her straightened out. Somebody get something to elevate her feet.” She looked up from the prostrate woman and met Tess’s eyes.

  “Is this for real?” the doctor demanded.

  “Yes,” Tess said simply.

  “So let’s get in the planes and fly out,” Kendra demanded. “Let’s get moving.”

  “It wouldn’t help, Kendra. When gravity is disrupted, the last place you’d want to be is in the air,” Nik said.

  “But if we left now—”

  “We wouldn’t get far enough away,” he snapped. “It’s not an option, Kendra.”

  “So we just stay here and die?” Kendra said as she rose to her feet, with fear and fire blazing in her eyes, forgetting her patient, who was moaning slightly.

  “No. We won’t just sit and wait, Kendra. We need to stop the arrays from powering up, or at least from aggregating their frequencies.” Tess looked around at the people in the room and her gaze came to rest on Dan Thornton. “Any ideas?”

  “We don’t have to worry about powering down, Tess, because the arrays can’t be powered up like that. To get the arrays to do what you’re talking about, getting all the arrays humming at full power at once, would require a hell of a lot of power and we don’t have that kind of dedicated power,” he said, arms folded across his chest. “Doing that would drain every fuel cell out there. And you’d need more to boot.”

  The group had begun to murmur, and Tess knew everyone liked what he’d said, and would believe him over her.

  I wish I could believe him.

  She frowned at him and held up her hands to quiet the crowd. “Dan, I don’t want to contradict you, but the arrays are already powering up. Could they be programmed to pull extra power directly from the wind turbines?”

  “Even if we had a Force Ten gale blowing out there, the conversion from the wind turbines wouldn’t take place fast enough to provide the kind of juice you’re talking about. Besides, have you been outside in the past few hours? There’s practically no wind.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, about the power? Are you absolutely sure?”

  “Never been more sure of anything.”

  She looked at Nik, who let the shadow of a smile cross his face, then at Kendra, who looked slightly less pissed off than she had a minute ago. Tess felt the weight of the world slide from her shoulders and she slumped, as she started to laugh. “Dan, I think I love you.”

  The tension in the room broke, and the sound of soft laughter mingled with pent-up sobs finally released. People held one another in fierce, silent hugs.

  Kendra walked the few steps to Tess. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Don’t,” Tess interrupted her. “You were right to question me.”

  As she spoke, the lights flickered for nearly a full minute. The room had fallen silent, except for a round of gasps.

  Tess felt her knees begin to shimmy. She looked at Nik and saw true alarm on his face for the first time. Dan had gone pale and was already at a computer, key-stroking savagely. The lights flickered several more times, then blinked off. The emergency lights came on instantly, bathing the room in an eerie blue glow as a dozen alarms started sounding at once: the installation’s emergency alarms, the backup power supplies for the computers. The door to the control room slid open and locked in place.

  “Dan?” Tess asked shakily. “What’s happening?”

  “The power supply for the installation has been breached. It’s being fed to the arrays,” he said, not looking away from the monitor.

  Tess felt her brain freeze for a second, as if all activity to the molecular level stopped as her mind absorbed the situation. “That can’t happen, Dan. They’re discrete systems with a one-way flow. We can pull power from the array power station, but the habitat can’t feed power to it,” she said, her voice raspy.

  Shaking his head, Dan slowly looked up from the screen. “I know that, but it’s happening. It’s some sort of embedded override.”

  “Can you stop it?”

  Dan held her gaze for a second, then returned his attention to the monitor without answering.

  Tess turned to face Nik, who was at her side. “Greg is betting it all, Nik,” she whispered hoarsely, trying and failing to keep her own terror in check. “When all that power goes to the arrays, they’ll blow up. We’ll have no life support. We can’t let this happen.”

  “Tess, we don’t have an option,” he said softly. “We can’t kill the power to the arrays. The system won’t let us.”

  She turned then to the dozens of pale faces, many streaked with tears, that were focused on her with an intensity that was frightening. “Everyone needs to get in their survival gear and move to the growth station.”

  People who had already started to move toward the door stopped as another voice cut through the room.

  “The arrays are starting to power up.” Jonah’s voice was strangled.

  Tess knew the people in the room were stretched to their emotional limit; she was, too. She couldn’t blame them for starting to lose it as the mutterings and sobs became higher and angrier. She turned to Nik and was about to speak when she met Dan’s eyes—bright, furious, and full of a fighter’s challenge.

  “I don’t know about you, Tess,” he said quietly, “but I’m not quite ready to fucking die. I’d rather go out there and take an ax to the feed horn on the arrays or a fucking sledgehammer and kill the power station than sit here whinging until I freeze to death.”

  Kill the power station.

  The room was still crowded but absolutely silent. Tess felt as if she’d been struck by lightning.

  Her whole body was trembling, but she made her voice as steady as she could. “Dan, what’s the biggest plane you have in the hangar?”

  He stared at her in disbelief. “You want to fly out?”

  “No. What’s the biggest plane?”

  “The Dash 7.”

  “Let’s get out to the hangar.”

  He folded his arms across his wide chest. “What the fuck are ye on about, Tess? I’m not leaving these people here to take you anywhere.”

  “I’m not asking you to take me anywhere but to the hangar,” she said, her eyes boring into his. “We need to cut the power to the arrays. That’s the only thing that will stop what Greg is planning. We can’t do it using the computers. One man and an ax isn’t, either. That leaves us with one option: we need to go to the source. The fuel cells. I’m going to drive the plane into the power station.”

  “What?” Nik demanded.

  “It’s the only way,” she said. “The building was built to withstand gale force winds, Nik, but not a direct impact.”

  “Tess, it’s suicide,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. “You can’t do it.”

  She bit the inside of her lip hard against the sudden flood of emotion that swamped her. “Staying here and doing nothing is suicide, too, Nik. I have to do this. If I’m not successful, we all die. If I am successful, only I die. It’s the only choice.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t a
rgue with me, Nik. You’ll undermine my authority,” she said with a shaky laugh through building tears. “I have to do this. The captain goes down with the ship.” She turned to Dan. “On the way out to the hangar, you can tell me what to do. I know the power station for the arrays is the low building at the side of the far end of the runway. All you need to do is point me in the right direction and tell me how to hit the accelerator. Then you leave.”

  Dan, looking a little pale behind his cocky smile, set his gaze on her and shook his head. “There’s no fucking way I’m letting you drive my Dash 7 into a fucking building full of fucking hydrogen fuel cells. In me arse, woman. I’ll do it.”

  “No, you won’t. Don’t argue with me, Dan. That’s an order.”

  “There will be a lot of fireworks. They’ll see it at McMurdo.” He paused. “There’s no fucking way I’m missing a show like that.”

  “It’ll be the first time I see fireworks from the inside,” Tess said, forcing a tight smile. She turned to Nik and made herself meet his eyes, hating the pain she saw in them.

  “I know this is a bad time for what-ifs, but you should have tracked me down in Moscow. I’ve always wondered what would have happened with us if we had half a chance,” she whispered, then cleared her throat and addressed the group. “Ron, I want your guys to try to pull back the power that’s being diverted from the installation. This place won’t stay comfortable for long without it. The rest of you, get into survival gear. Nik’s in charge.” She turned to Dan. “Let’s go, big guy.”

  Without another word or backward glance, the two of them left the room.

  CHAPTER 33

  Nik was stunned at Tess’s decision. He turned back to the silent group and moved toward the desk she’d been using. “Ron, Lindy, let’s try to get that power back. If we can’t divert the flow, then we’ll try to stop it. I don’t care how. Etienne, you guys keep throwing everything you can at the arrays. Kendra, you get down there and follow Tess and Dan at a safe distance. Take someone with you. If they survive the crash and the explosion, they’re going to need you. Fizz, you and the others go through the habitat and turn off everything that’s not critical, even emergency systems. I want to have the lowest possible power load running when we pull this back.”