“Never. But why ask me?”
“You’re a good analyst.”
“Lots of us in the woodwork, and I’m not one of your gang.”
“True. I need a degree of credibility with our revered elders. A semblance of working for the greater good, not my own greedy self. You are one of my biggest nonfans, so I want you on side.”
“A figurehead.”
“Much more, Jaz.”
“I believe you’re serious.”
“Yes.”
“Then I accept your kind proposal, sir.”
“You have made me the happiest dishwasher in the world.”
The I-Screen team totalled fifteen men and women, but in the wide space of the subbasement they seemed few and scattered. Pierce came through an airlock; the ramp to the parking garage was sealed off, and so was the existing tunnel to the information cache, over on the west wall. The air had an unusual metallic smell. The transition site was on bottled air now; nothing would circulate between the subbasement and the outside until any radioactive contamination had been dealt with.
Wigner accompanied Pierce across the floor to a dressing area where a woman technician helped him into the Newtsuit. It was painted a dazzling white; the suit would be easier to keep warm at night than cool in the daytime. He spent half an hour checking out the suit, and another half an hour dealing with a small problem in the communication systems.
Six technicians and two engineers had gone over the tank in detail all night long. Pierce walked to the transition chamber, shook hands with Wigner and a few other people, and went inside. The chamber still held air, and the voice of Project Control echoed around him as well as murmuring in his headset.
“We’ll begin the checklist whenever you’re settled, Colonel.” He had a strong Brooklyn accent; Pierce thought it made the man sound intellectual and sophisticated compared to his own New Mexico twang.
“Fine.” Pierce climbed to the top of a tread and released the catches holding down the Plexiglas canopy. He lowered himself stiffly into the driver’s seat and buckled himself in. Only then did he pull the canopy back down and seal it.
“I’m sealed and suit air is working fine.”
“Very good,” said Project Control. They ran through a long checklist of tank and suit systems before Project Control said: “Transition chamber evacuation beginning now.”
A gauge on the dashboard registered rapidly dropping air pressure outside. Within the cabin it remained normal, but if Pierce left the tank the air would evacuate and he would have to refill from a small reserve.
“All right, Colonel Pierce. We’ll have the field up to strength in about thirty seconds. As soon as the screen is up, be ready for a few rocks to bounce in you.”
“I’m ready.”
Project Control counted down the seconds, interrupted by Wigner’s shouted “Good luck, old son!” At zero seconds the I-Screen swirled with soap-bubble colours. Dust whirled up as lumps of rock and concrete suddenly rolled through the circle. They were grey in the tank floodlights, but above them Pierce could see a harsher glare, and above that a chord of blackness: the sky of Ulro late in the afternoon of a spring day in 2089.
Moving the tank over the tumbled rock, he extended the backhoe and rapidly scraped rocks and masonry down into the transition chamber. In a minute and a half he had a ramp dug to the outside.
“We can sustain the screen another 45 seconds,” Project Control said. “Are you ready to go, Colonel?”
Sunlight glared in his eyes through the faceplate filter. “I’m gone,” Pierce answered, and steered the tank forward and upward.
CHAPTER VIII
In the rear-view mirror, Pierce could see the transition chamber, its floor strewn with rubble. Then it vanished, replaced by an irregular crater in the side of a mound of bricks and concrete: the ruins of the apartment building.
He guided the tank over a low ridge of broken bricks. The sun, sinking toward the west, glared in his eyes through the canopy and faceplate and made it hard to see the terrain around him. He steered right, down toward the park, and was at last able to see where he was going.
To his right, the tall rampart of the apartment buildings on Riverside Drive was gone, replaced by a long moraine of dusty debris. Beyond it he could glimpse occasional hillocks, standing out clearly in the near-vacuum: ruined highrises on West End Avenue and Broadway. The moraine had the same eroded look of the ruins of Chicago, the result of the atmospheric tsunami on Doomsday. The shock wave had struck Manhattan from the southwest, blowing over thousands of buildings like so many sand castles.
To his left the park was a smooth hillside, dotted with rocks like a Martian plain, running down to the great fragments of concrete: the shattered highway. Beyond was the bed of the Hudson River, darker and smoother than the yellow-beige of the park and ruins.
He could see far up the river, but saw nothing where the George Washington Bridge should have been. The Palisades across the riverbed were a black horizontal of shadow below sun-gleaming spikes at the top of the cliffs. The Spry sign was gone.
Pierce found himself beginning to hyperventilate. He leaned back and relaxed, and remembered to start describing what he saw and did for the tape recorder. Murmuring into his microphone, he swung the tank farther right and headed along the slope. The rocky outcrop where he and Wigner had sat was clearly visible, rising out of yellow soil and sharp-edged pebbles. The hum of the electric motor and the crunch of treads rolling over rock made the tank cabin noisy, but at least he didn’t have to put up with the constant chatter of trainers as he had in Texas.
He glanced up at the black sky, unable to see any stars at first and then spotting a few to the east, away from the glare of the sun. Even after the Chicago tapes, the sky seemed unreal and made everything else look false as well. He felt for a moment as if he were simply driving across some kind of film set, that the rocky hillside and the moraines of ruins were some art designer’s concept of the end of the world. He did not say so for the recorder.
Then he was positioning the tank for the dig, and concentrating on the job. The backhoe extended smoothly and struck the surface; a metallic rasp vibrated through the tank body to the cabin.
“Soil’s very hard,” he said, knowing that the camera would have shown that already. After three more attempts, he had done nothing but disturb some of the surface rocks and the top inch or two.
“Dryness and heat seem to have severely compacted the soil and rock,” he remarked calmly. “I guess water freezing and evaporating near the surface has kept it relatively loose, but below that it’s like brick. Moving twenty yards south to see if it’s any better.”
It wasn’t. Pierce extended the tank’s drill and began to punch a hole into the rocky soil. Blasting would be time-consuming, but the possible need for it had been anticipated.
After twenty minutes, the drill failed. It had reached less than a foot below the surface, and the top of the repository tunnel was ten feet down.
The air in his helmet tasted sour. The shadow of the tank was lengthening: soon the sun would be down and he would have to operate by floodlights. For a few minutes more, Pierce scraped at the surface with the backhoe and then abandoned the effort.
He sipped a little water and reviewed what he knew about the repository and the terrain. The old water tunnel had been walled off by the Agency, and the north-end wall was only a couple of hundred yards beyond the rocky outcrop where he had begun digging. If he could get into the tunnel somewhere along its length, he could blast through the wall with ease.
Perhaps even that wouldn’t be necessary; the original access tunnel might still be open, concealed under a thin layer of rubble. Pierce drove back to his starting point, to the dimple in the moraine, and did some experimental clearing. At first nothing happened. Then he managed to pry out a couple of blocks of concrete, and the loose bricks below them were easy to remove. Rapidly he cleared a broad stretch running roughly north from the transition point. The access tunnel had been only a few yards fr
om the transition chamber; he ought to be able to cut across it.
The shadow of the Palisades crept over the site as the sun went down. Pierce swung around in his seat and saw sunset: a slight oranging of the yellow-white disk revealed the vestiges of an atmosphere, and a brief rainbow arc appeared in the black sky just as the sun went below the horizon. Evidently some water vapour was still up there, ice crystals in what remained of the stratosphere.
With the sun down, the tank’s radiation counters showed a sharp drop. His trainers had told him to expect it; from the earlier expeditions, it seemed likely that the planet’s magnetic held was very weak, the Van Allen belts were gone and solar radiation, from X rays to infrared, was pouring unimpeded to the surface of Ulro.
He switched on the floodlights and kept digging. Ice crystals gleamed outside the canopy, and he saw the faintest web of hoarfrost on the upper surfaces of the tank. With each load from the backhoe, a little dust fell and drifted in a thin carbon dioxide wind.
Pierce realized he had dug right through the tunnel when the backhoe scraped against its floor. Clearly the tunnel had collapsed; it would not give him entry to the repository.
Without stopping, Pierce spun the tank around and drove back down into the park. Something gleamed in the floodlights: a battered but recognizable metal toy truck. He mentioned it for the tape, but his mind was elsewhere: on the maps he had studied of the tunnels, sewers and conduits under the upper West Side. Somewhere up around 96th Street there had been a sealed-off access door to the old water tunnel. If he could find it and the tunnel was intact, he could walk back to the repository, blow the wall, and reach the records.
The tank crunched steadily along. On the dashboard, his mission clock recorded elapsed time: he had been on Ulro for almost two hours, the radio receiver, automatically scanning dozens of wavelengths, reported only silence and occasional static. The odometer recorded about half a mile from the transition site. Here the terrain was different, barer, with more recognizable landmarks: concrete shapes that had once been park benches, a short stretch of shattered brick walkway, and then, unexpectedly, a crumpled vehicle lying on its side. It had no wheels, but otherwise looked much like an ordinary compact automobile.
And there, in the floodlights, was the manhole cover. Nothing obstructed it except a couple of pebbles and a film of hoarfrost. Pierce spoke quickly and calmly into the recorder, explaining what he planned to do. Then he gathered the items he would need, put them into a chest pack, and clipped it to his suit.
“Ready to pop the canopy,” he said, and did so. The air in the tank puffed out in a cloud of ice crystals, glittering against the blackness. Pierce clipped the audio recorder to his suit also and gave the holotape recorder a farewell wave. Then he stood up and climbed carefully down from the tank.
“I’ve got one hour and forty-five minutes,” he said. With a geologist’s hammer he levered the manhole cover up and away; the lamps on his helmet and belt showed the shaft clear. Without pausing, Pierce let himself down the ladder. At the bottom he was disoriented for a moment, until the helmet compass showed him which way to go: north again, about two hundred yards, to the door connecting this storm sewer to the water tunnel.
This tunnel had suffered some damage, and he stumbled over chunks of fallen masonry in the darkness. The only sounds, apart from those of the suit systems, were those he made scraping against the sides of the sewer. Pierce carefully counted his steps and-wished the suit contained a pedometer. He might overshoot the doorway —
No. Here it was, sealed tightly, the handle spiky with tiny frost needles. He put his hand on it, pushed down, and it swung open effortlessly. Pierce laughed briefly; the sound inside his helmet was unpleasant.
About sixty yards more now, down a gentle slope. It looked unscathed, the light fixtures in places. Ahead was the door to the water tunnel.
“Stuck.” He used the pointed end of the hammer to try to pry it open, and got nowhere. Out of the chest pack came two ISO-gram discs of plastic explosive. He placed them on either side of the lock and imbedded their detonators. Then he plodded back up the tunnel and through the first door before detonating them. The tunnel flared with light. Pierce walked back down through rapidly settling dust. The door was open, but he had to pull hard on it to make enough space to get through.
“I’ve got an hour and thirty-two minutes.”
And now he was in the water tunnel, tilting his head back to see the roof thirty feet above. The far side of the tunnel was fifty feet away, and the floor was covered with a layer of fine grey sediment.
The sediment had footprints in it.
Pierce stopped and very carefully detached his belt lamp. Holding it with both hands, he swept it back and forth, up and down the tunnel. The footsteps began right at the door to the storm sewer, and went south into the darkness. Part of his mind wanted to describe them on the tape, but he could not make his voice work.
Slowly he stepped out onto the sediment, feeling it give slightly beneath his feet. The prints he made were much sharper than the others. He walked south, holding the lamp in one hand and the hammer in the other. Inside the suit, he was sweating.
Something ahead reflected light. Pierce stopped and swung the lamp back and forth, producing more reflections: glints of colour against the grey sediment and black rock of the tunnel walls. They seemed to move, but he was certain the movement was only the shadows caused by his lamp.
He moved forward. When he was fifty yards from the reflecting objects, he knew they were humans, and dead.
Six of them lay scattered in a line near the east wall of the tunnel: four adults and two children. They wore the glossy clothing Pierce had seen in some of the pictures retrieved from Ulro. Their skins were yellow-brown, drawn tautly over their bones: they had been mummified here. Strewn for yards around them were bags of leathery material, now crumbled away and revealing more clothing, some plastic containers, a piece of burst metal that might once have held water. In the shirt pocket of one corpse, a flickreader nestled.
The bodies seemed to be screaming.
Pierce knew it was only the effect of desiccation, the muscles and skin contracting and pulling the jaws apart. Most showed signs of broken bones; all had bled from ears, nose, and mouth. They had probably died instantly and painlessly, seeking shelter where there was none and dying in the same moments as everyone else in the city. But they had found a tomb that would preserve them.
He turned away and walked quickly south. The sediment here was free of footprints, though in a few places a stone block had fallen from the roof of the tunnel.
“One hour and twenty-two minutes,” he muttered.
The tunnel seemed to have no end. Then the floor showed a change of colour up ahead: the pale institutional blue Pierce had come to associate with the Agency.
It was the north-end wall of the repository, and it would not have to be blasted; from somewhere farther south, air had been driven into the tunnel and forced northward like a huge piston. The wall had been tom loose and scattered in fragments for fifty yards.
So had a false ceiling fifteen feet above the tunnel floor. It was strewn across the rows of filing cabinets that filled the repository from wall to wall. The cabinets’ weight and closeness had preserved them from destruction; despite the mess, the repository looked very much as it had when Pierce and Wigner had visited it.
The cabinets were locked, but Pierce had an array of master keys. Choosing a cabinet at random, he found a key that opened it. Inside, the drawer was packed with the crumbled residue of cardboard boxes and very ordinary-looking microfiches. An index tab indicated that the drawer’s contents dealt with Central Asian Economic Documentation, January-April 1995.
He left it and began moving down an aisle between cabinets, flashing his light on each drawer. Within a very few minutes he had found what he was looking for: Daily Executive Briefings, the intelligence summaries prepared for the White House. They filled three cabinets, and dated back to the 1950s; Pierce found
those for the early twenty-first century. They ended with the summer of 2007.
A year’s briefings made a sizable handful, even on microfiche. Pierce shoved the briefings from 2007 into his chest pack, then worked backward toward the turn of the century.
His secondary goal was harder to achieve. For over twenty minutes he scanned other cabinets until he found Senior Personnel Documentation, 1980 — ; he opened it and took the files for 2000 to 2004.
“Forty-five minutes.”
He had what he had come for. Pierce turned and strode back north, marvelling at his luck. The shock wave that had blasted through the repository must also have sealed the tunnel within a second or two. Compression within the tunnel must have heated the air somewhat, but the heat pulse from the energy beam had not reached this far, saving the tunnel from the intense heating that had sterilized the surface. A heat pulse through the repository would have melted the microfiches into solid lumps.
Again he came to the six dead Ulrans. They had had enough warning to seek shelter, and their luck, too, had been good. The shock wave must have killed them instantly. Others had no doubt found deeper holes and had lived to roast alive, or to suffocate as their air reserves were used up. Perhaps a few had survived the seventeen days of cataclysm and had communicated with the lunar and Martian bases. But what could they have said to one another?
His own breathing seemed unnaturally loud in his ears, and the suit systems whirred and clicked in unpredictable rhythms. He slowed to a cautious pace, keeping his lamps trained on the east wall so that he wouldn’t miss the door to the storm sewer. God, if he overshot he could go for miles through this place. What if his lamps burned out? Perhaps he’d better keep one in reserve. He turned out his belt lamp, then turned it on again at once. The tunnel was too black without it.
The LED readouts around the rim of his helmet faceplate were reassuring glows of orange and green, telling him that this was not the only world, that living people were close, that he was not really the last man in the world even if he was the only man on this world.
The Fall of the Republic (The Chronoplane Wars Book 2) Page 10