by James Axler
IT TOOK slightly better than two hours to clear the room. Everybody took turns with the fire ax and the hand ax J.B. had in his kit. And everybody carried the ice away.
After a little while, Albert joined in, and proved to have a fine and deep singing voice that no one expected.
Once the room was clear of ice debris and the floor was scraped, J.B. switched on the environmental-controls override. "Only problem's going to be if the vents and fans are clogged up somewhere down the line," he said.
Ryan stood with the others, listening to the machinery gasp and wheeze to life. Somewhere down at the deep end of the duct work, metal beat against a hard, unyielding surface for a while. Then there was an explosion of noise, and the beating sound disappeared.
Only a thin trickle of heat came out of the floor vents. It was a lot weaker than Ryan figured the designers had intended, and not nearly as effective as the systems installers planned. Still, it was warm air and it was welcome.
They huddled around the main blowing unit against one wall opposite the comp stations. Gradually the room warmed, coming up to a degree of comfortability. The lights also brightened.
The main door leading to the access tunnel wasn't quite flush, but J.B. had made it work. However, gusts of cold wind were allowed in.
Dean fell asleep with his back to the wall, his hands held out before him to soak up the warm air coming through the vent.
Ryan was feeling the fatigue himself. He glanced at J.B. "Situation we're in is pretty bad, but we're not going to get anywhere without sleep."
"Been over thirty hours since we got any," J.B. said. "Except for that near coma the jump provided us."
Doc stretched and yawned. "If you are suggesting that we get some, my dear Ryan, then I heartily accept the decision."
"Me, too," Mildred said.
"Should we post a guard?" Krysty asked.
Ryan shook his head. "I think we can be pretty certain that we're all that's left alive inside this redoubt. And the sec doors are wedged pretty tight. We should be just fine."
He took time to get Dean settled proper, remembering the Trader's words in the jump dream. It made matters worse thinking about his son going down into the ocean when the iceberg fragmented.
He joined Krysty, stretching out beside her so they could share the warmth between them. The environmental controls had made a difference, but the room still had a long way to go before it got comfortably heated. Still, they were no longer in danger of freezing to death if they slept.
"Something on mind," Jak called from the corner.
"What?" Ryan asked.
"Warm up redoubt, iceberg melt faster?"
"The lad has a point," Doc said.
"And we're all out of choices," Ryan answered. And he didn't remember a single thing after that.
"THIS REDOUBT ISN'T as big as a lot of them we've been to," J.B. said. The Armorer sat in the corner, his fedora cocked back on his head while he worked a pencil over a ragged spiral-bound notebook.
Ryan blinked sleep out of his eye. "How long you been up?"
"Twenty, thirty minutes." J.B. had a fresh bandage on his side where he had been hit by the bullets during the fight back in Hazard. A med-kit had been in the room under all the ice, as well.
"Been outside?" Ryan sat up, disentangling himself from Krysty's arms. Her sentient hair lay protectively over her face.
"Nope."
"Find a map?"
"You could call it that." The Armorer kept working on the notebook with his stub of a pencil. "Reread a lot of those electrical blueprints this morning when my head seemed clearer. Was working too late to be sharp yesterday."
"A man working with not enough sleep is a man aiming on taking a dirt nap," Ryan said, remembering the Trader's words.
"Know it. That's why I gave the blueprints another go this morning. I think I've got a pretty good idea of where everything is and what it might be."
Ryan pushed up from the cold floor and joined the Armorer. Even with the heat on, a chill remained in the room. "Tell me."
J.B. tapped the drawing as he spoke. "This isn't scale. You're getting my best guess."
"It'll do."
"You got the room here with the mat-trans in it." The pencil hit the center of the page near the top. "Then you got the shaft you explored yesterday."
Ryan knew "yesterday" was a relative term. They had slept, so a "day" had passed by.
"The big chem lab's off that," J.B. went on. "Storerooms off the shaft. Mostly stuff for containing the nerve gas in case of an accident."
That explained the plastic suits with oxygen tanks Jak had found on some of the corpses frozen in the corridor. But the explosion had come too soon, too unexpectedly for it to be much good.
"And that takes you to the entrance you say was torn off," J.B. said. "Going back the other way, things appear to be a bit more hopeful. From what I can decipher, looks to be an armory and galley below, a warehouse-sized storeroom and mebbe what looks like a dock."
"A dock? What kind of wags?" Ryan asked.
"Not wags," J.B. said. "Paperwork I found let on like it might be boats. Mebbe even a small sub. Won't know until we go look."
"Then we'd better get it done. What about the mat-trans?"
"Going to have to take it apart," J.B. replied. "Mebbe I'll know more after I do that."
"Then you'll stay here," Ryan said. "The rest of us will take a look at the rest of the redoubt."
J.B. cleaned his glasses. "Probably going to be cold. Doubt if that heat ventilator is working throughout the whole redoubt."
"If we're lucky," Ryan said, "the cold will be the worst of it."
"LIKE WALKING in a tomb down here, lover."
Ryan flicked the rechargeable electric hand lantern over the frozen floor ahead of him. Broken chunks of ice littered the corridor and became hazardous to every step. He had fallen himself nearly a half-dozen times, as had Krysty.
An arm stuck up from the frozen floor. The thumb and two fingers had snapped off some time in the past. Ryan guessed that falling ice had done the damage, but the owner of the hand was long past caring.
Not far from the gateway, the main corridor had branched out in five directions. Ryan had split up the companions to cover ground more quickly. Mildred had gone with Jak and Dean, and Albert kept company with Doc.
The first corridor Ryan had chosen to explore had ended abruptly. The iceberg had swelled sometime in the past, probably battling against the interior heat of the redoubt before the environmental systems went into hibernation, then refrozen as the nuclear winter settled in. The second freezing had broken through the corridor and closed it down. The signs on the hallway leading to it mentioned only that barracks had been in that direction.
Ryan hoped it was so. That left the dock and the warehouse open to scavenging.
The iceberg quivered again, getting set for another big quake. Ryan had learned to recognize the signs. Krysty pressed up against the wall and hunkered down. Ryan followed suit, protecting his head with his arms. This time the quake lasted for nearly three minutes by his chron before subsiding. And that was followed immediately by the vertigo and disorientation Doc attributed to the iceberg redefining its position in the water.
The old man had let them know that somewhere in the vicinity of nine-tenths of an iceberg was beneath the water surface at all times. But when it calved, sometimes the biggest portion came from the bottom, depending on the fissures the melting ice followed. When it did, the remaining mother iceberg shrank lower into the sea.
And that, Doc had went on to say, wasn't taking into account all the extra tonnage of the redoubt carried in the bowels of the particular iceberg they were floating on. Even more of it might be below the ocean level, which would create a tendency for the calving process to take place even more below the surface.
They were working on borrowed time.
It would have been better had the mat-trans unit not been functioning so their jump would have kicked them onto th
e next station.
When the quake finally subsided and the iceberg had renegotiated its equilibrium in the ocean to wipe away most of the feelings of vertigo, Ryan stood. He shone the electric glow of the hand lantern down the corridor, looking over the accumulation of new ice pieces.
"One of the worst," Krysty commented.
"I know. But mebbe it did some good. Look." Ryan played the lantern over the sign painted on the green wall in flat black paint: Docking Area.
The words gave Ryan a flash of hope that he nurtured in spite of their grim surroundings. He followed the arrows, ignoring the other listings of med facility, security office and filing rooms.
RYAN PLAYED the lantern's light over the elevator doors at the end of the corridor they were following. They were shut tight, which offered some hope, and the level-indicator lights flickered across the top, even more hopeful.
"Elevator's right where J.B. said it would be," Krysty said. The Armorer hadn't had the precise measurements, but he'd let them know how the corridor would shake out.
"If we get lucky," Ryan growled, "it'll still work." He stepped over to the control panel and put his palm over the activation plate. He unconsciously held his breath for a moment, wondering if the lingering comp systems were going to reject him because his palm print wasn't in its data banks. Some of the plates were programmed to react like that. Still others were boobied in some fashion.
But it pulsed amber, then turned green.
The elevator doors squealed as the servos surged into motion for probably the first time in a hundred years. When they settled back into their respective housings, no elevator cage was in view.
A harsh grinding continued.
Ryan watched vibrations of the huge tractor belt responsible for bringing the cage up as the pulling engine tried to raise it. With a harsh snap, it broke in two. The broken end whipped through the drum at the top, then fell back down into the elevator shaft.
Leaning in through the doors cautiously, Ryan directed the lantern down. The white beam knifed down through the darkness but didn't touch bottom.
"The cage didn't try to come up at all," Krysty said.
Ryan nodded. "Can't see the bottom."
"J.B. said it would probably be down there a ways."
Ryan shone his light around the room, then spotted a door marked Stairs. Ice sealed the door, but it wasn't as thick as some of the places they had been. He led the way through the door and started down the stairwell. He counted the landings as they went down, spiraling around and around. With the constant circuitous motion, he felt more vertigo than normal.
"You can feel the iceberg floating down here," Krysty said.
Ryan nodded, understanding what was upsetting his stomach. The motion of going down the stairs, coupled with the iceberg's natural buoyancy, was too much. It didn't last much longer, though.
Fourteen floors down, counting two landings per floor, they came to an end of it. Not the stairway shaft, but of how far they could go.
Ryan played his lantern beam over the black water sloshing across the stairway shaft. He had no way of knowing how much farther it went down. The fact remained that they couldn't.
"The water level inside the redoubt must be rising, lover," Krysty said in a low voice. "Otherwise all that water would be frozen."
"Or," Ryan replied, "it could be a degree or two just above freezing, just enough to start the iceberg melting a little faster."
Either way, it wasn't good.
Chapter Twenty-Four
J.B. laid the circuit boards on the table Jak and Dean had brought up from one of the storerooms they had successfully broken into. It was a long way from making the gateway room homey, but with the heat working a little better, the addition of the chairs gave the companions momentary respite that they weren't deep in a sinking iceberg. "These are the problem," the Armorer said. "Boards are shorted out."
"Can't you simply fix them, John Barrymore?"
Doc asked.
"Mebbe, but this is precise work we're talking about, Doc. And if I get it wrong, mebbe we all just go out like a puff of smoke instead of getting on to the next gateway."
"What do you need?" Ryan asked.
"Access to an electronics shop," J.B. answered. "Got to have the right kind of soldering metals, magnification lenses so I can get a good look at what I'm doing. Robot arm with a laser is what would work best."
"Don't they have an electronics room in the redoubt?" Albert asked. "Seems like they'd have one."
"They do," Ryan said. "From the blueprints J.B. ciphered out, the electronics lab is down there somewhere around the docking bay."
"Oh."
"Leaves us one choice," Ryan said.
J.B. nodded. "Go up top and take a look around."
"And if all you find is ice and snow?" the dwarf asked.
"Don't know that's true until we go look," Ryan said. "You start counting off possibilities before you go see what you can do, you might as well stay home and put a bullet in your brain. I'm not ready to do that yet."
IT WAS ONE HUNDRED feet to the top of the iceberg. Jak went up first, setting pitons they had found in one of the open storerooms.
The albino drove them deep and fast into the hard ice, having no problem at all to get them to seat. The white birds—Doc called them albatrosses and said they were birds with a lot of bad luck assigned to them—screamed at one another and took turns diving at Jak and Ryan. The cool green of the killer-cold ocean waited below for the slightest misstep.
Ryan wore the handkerchief around his lower face again, partly to keep out the water and partly to keep warm. The storerooms had also yielded new socks and underwear, all of them thermal lined. There hadn't been much in Albert's size, but the dwarf had made do.
Jak knew what he was doing when he set the pitons. The redoubt had also contained an enormous amount of rope. Between the pitons and the rope, Ryan knew he and the teenager were crafting a stairway that the others could follow safely.
"Ready," Jak called down.
"Go," Ryan said, and dug into his position.
The albino removed one of his safety harnesses and latched it to the new piton he had in place. He pulled himself up and tied on to the new one, then reached for another piton.
Ryan hung on, feeling the wind pull at him with icy claws.
IT TOOK MORE THAN two hours for all of them to reach the summit of the iceberg.
Ryan stared out over the uneven terrain at the top. During the long climb, he had imagined several different ways that it might have looked. Seeing it still seemed a little stunning.
The top of the glacier was made up of a number of plateaus. Several of them held jagged edges, showing how the frozen surface had shaped then been reshaped by the elements. It was a nightmare rendered in cold white edges, stretching out as far as his eye could see.
"Dark night," J.B. yelled to be heard above the crash of surf below and the howling wind above. "All I've seen in this life, Ryan, and I've never seen anything like this."
Ryan swiveled from their lofty perch, taking in the various icebergs surrounding them. He'd taken a compass reading again at the mouth of the access tunnel, and it had showed that their iceberg was facing eight degrees farther south than it had previously.
"Looks like herd of icebergs," Jak commented. With the cold making his pale face even more white, his ruby eyes stood out like blood spots.
"And all headed south for the winter," Mildred said.
As they watched, three of the icebergs went completely to pieces, breaking and shattering in small white storms that left hardly anything visible above the ocean's surface. Their own iceberg shook and shivered, as well.
"You have to wonder where all those pieces of ice come from," Krysty said. "Makes me curious about what it must have looked like during the fiercest part of the cold after the nuclear winter."
"Probably like nothing you'd ever want to see," Dean said quietly. "I got no curiosity about seeing it. Be glad when we get off this one
."
"I've been small all my life," Albert said, "but seeing this, going through that gateway like you people call it, makes me feel real small."
"We're all small when you get right down to it," Ryan stated. "It's up to a person how big of a footprint they want to leave when they step out of this life. That's what Trader always said." He shook himself, then resettled his gear over his body. "Let's move out. Jak, you and me are going to run point. Dean, you're walking drag with J.B., and make sure you don't lose sight of him and he doesn't lose sight of you."
"Right, Dad."
"Mildred, Krysty, you two are walking the middle, kind of loose wing positions. Not going to need to get spread out too far because we're going to keep this narrow. Doc, you and Albert are next."
"I have only one small question, my dear Ryan," the old man said. The wind blew his silvered lock over his shoulders where they were free of the muffler around his lower face.
"What?" Ryan asked irritably. He didn't have time for Doc's usual addle-brainedness with the iceberg sinking beneath them.
"How do you propose we find our way back to this place?" Doc asked.
"Got the compass," Ryan said.
"And with the shifting this deep-sea diamond in the rough is doing," Doc said, "I do not think you can count on the readings you are going to get from that compass."
"Doc's right," J.B. agreed. "If we get enough of a drift, even the minisextant isn't going to be much use. Especially if we get in a hurry."
"Fireblast," Ryan growled, looking out at the white expanse of broken terrain before him. "It's one bastard big rock, but how lost can we get?"
RYAN KEPT THEM moving with the ocean always to the right. If nothing else, they would walk in a giant circle. The problem would be to effectively search the center of the ice mass.
Snow was a problem, too. Piles of it covered the surface, making it necessary to test footing before stepping down through it. Only Jak's cat-quick reflexes saved him from dropping through a fissure in the iceberg that was thirty feet deep.