***ANAD has opened a path through the borer module. The forward bulkhead and horn have been disassembled. Remove the main console and you will have access***
“Jesus,” Winger muttered. “ANAD has practically burned away the whole front of Ferret.”
ANAD detached a part of the swarm that had already replicated into respirocytes. He and M’wale let the swarm enter orally, coughing as the dry fog filled their mouths. One after another, the rest of Ferret’s crew followed.
“Ugh,” said Bandarsaran, the sensors tech. “Tastes like dirt.”
“Or metal chips.” Winger added, though he was grateful for the oxygen boost. In a few minutes, his headaches subsided and his vision was no longer blurry. Deep inside his lungs and bloodstream, uncountable trillions of nanoscale respirocytes swapped oxygen molecules through his alveolar tissues, improving the molecule exchange a million-fold.
“Feels better,” he took a deep breath, looked over at Gerhart.
“Yeah, like I just swam the Pacific.”
“Let’s get to work.” Winger squeezed himself below the main console and started to unfasten its mounts. “Help me get this bugger off its mounts—“
Between the two of them, they managed to push the console away from the bulkhead enough to get at the frame behind.
Winger pushed and pulled at the skin, until he had worked the panel loose. Rock dust and rubble poured into the cabin with a crashing roar.
Blinking and coughing through the dust, the two troopers pawed their way through the rock and rubble until Winger lost his balance and fell forward through a weak spot into a void. He wound up crawling through the debris into a narrow vertical shaft, buzzing with the high-freq whine of nanobots and backlit by a pale unearthly glow. It was the bore hole, guided by ANAD right into Ferret’s forward compartment and shored up with a barrier screen of bots.
It was like being inside of a kaleidoscope.
Winger raised his head up to look around and hit his head on something hard. Feeling with his hands, he realized he was squatting under the treaded boot of a hypersuit.
“I think I found our suits,” he called back to Gerhart. “I just hit my head on one.”
An hour later, Winger, Gerhart, M’wale and the rest of the crew were grunting and panting, trying to contort themselves into ANAD’s tunnel. With effort and a lot of shoving, Winger was able to force M’wale, now encased in full hypersuit, up into the shaft. Drawing straws, the crew had decided the geotech should go first.
“What kind of clearance do you have?”
The Ugandan geologist bit her lip. She was not going to succumb to claustrophobia now.
“Maybe a centimeter around my head. It’s a tight fit.”
“Can you see anything above you?”
“I can see a wall of rock screened off by bots. It’s like the wall is bubbling and heaving. But I can reach out and touch it with my helmet. Above me, it’s black as night. Can’t see a thing.”
“It’s probably going to be a bumpy ride. Close your eyes and think of something more pleasant—“
“Yeah…like what? Downing a few brews at the O Club?”
“Just light off your suit boost and get going. It’s a long way to the surface.”
Amen to that, she thought. Maybe a little Masai prayer would help too. She took a deep breath, counted to three and pressed a button on her wristpad with her other hand.
Then she started to move upward, smacking the side of her helmet on the hard rock walls.
She continued her painstaking ascent for what seemed like hours, maybe days. She soon lost all track of time and space.
Only the labored sound of her own breathing—her helmet visor was getting pretty fogged up—and the bang and crunch of her hypersuit scraping along the tunnel walls gave her any sense of motion.
She tried reducing the suit boost to see if it had any effect on the scraping but it didn’t.
Guess I’m going to be a billiard ball when I get topside, she told herself. She wondered how long that would take. She would have given anything to know where she was, how close to the surface she was. Pitch black, in a narrow tube the size of a coffin, with no idea where she was or where she was going. The geologist in her said study the rock walls, identify the species and the inclusions but---
It was enough to drive a girl to drink.
How long she had passed out, she didn’t know. But her mouth was bone dry and there wasn’t any liquid in the chin tube; she must have sucked it all dry. Her shoulders, neck and legs throbbed from the incessant banging and battering.
Maybe I’m not going anywhere, she thought. But that couldn’t be. How else to explain the steady thrummm at the soles of her feet—the liftjets pulsing on and off had made her feet go numb hours ago. They had never been designed for extended duty like this.
At least, ANAD’s tunnel seemed navigable, if a bit snug. She wondered where the rest of the crew was. Had they left right after her? Or were they still inside Ferret, trapped and suffocating, maybe dead?
She didn’t want to think about that at all.
Suddenly she felt like she was being accelerated forward. With a sudden surge, she was pushed upward, through loose soil…then light…blindingly bright light and before she realized what had happened, she was on the surface, wallowing in snow and dirt like a beached whale.
Strong hands helped her upright and a blur of faces were just outside her helmet, but the visor was grimy and fogged and she couldn’t make out anything.
She was wobbly but all the hands and her own suit gyros kept her upright. She felt the helmet quick disconnect go, then a stream of cold arctic air leaked in around her neck dam and the helmet came off with a jerk.
The first face she saw was Drew Wilkins, scowling in at her bruised, sweaty face.
“Well, well,” Wilkins said, “aren’t you a sight? Sergeant M’wale, welcome back to the land of the living.”
With help from the rescue squad, her hypersuit was clamshelled open and M’wale lifted carefully out. She was quickly placed into a life-support pod and taken to a nearby lifter.
One after another, the entire crew of Ferret made the ascent and one by one, they were pulled free and littered to the med trailer, where Corps doctors looked them over carefully. There were no major injuries, but quite an array of cuts, bruises, and lacerations.
The crew of Ferret had been lucky.
The crew of Otter was not.
Otter had lost three crewmembers to injury when the first tremors hit. By the time the rescue borehole had been drilled and hypersuits boosted down, another crewmember had died…Otter’s BOP tech…a Mexican trooper fresh out of nog school who’d opted for Boundary Patrol as a way to see the world…or at least what was below it.
Now, only four remained to make the harrowing ascent up the rescue shaft: Kimmel, the ship’s CC1; Pinyan, her geotech; Suvorov, the driver; and Sheila Reaves, operating as Otter’s DPS.
One after another, with Reaves leading the way, the survivors lit off their suit boost and banged and scraped and squeezed their way upward through the tiny, barely navigable shaft.
Nobody had foreseen the possibility of additional tremors. Topside, geologist Theresa Mueller had frowned briefly at small-magnitude seismic signals permeating the rock layers underlying the test site. She said nothing at first, deciding it was normal strain and settling after the sonic lens had fractured several large plate segments along an undetected fault line, a seam stretching from offshore onto the western flanks of Banks Island.
When the amplitude and frequency of the ‘settling signals’ began to increase, though, Mueller tugged at her lips and motioned Wilkins over to her instrument cart, mounted just a few meters from where Ferret’s crew had surfaced an hour before.
“Dr. Wilkins, I don’t mean to be a worrywart, but I really don’t like the looks of—
That’s when the ground shook and slid noticeably enough to tip Mueller’s cart ri
ght onto its side. Alarmed, Wilkins helped right the cart, while the geologist stared wide-eyed at the waterfall display, aghast at the exponentially expanding signals she was seeing.
“Transverse wave, Drew…shear waves all over the place…my God—“
Four hundred and twelve meters below them, the ANAD rescue shaft was instantly severed by shifting rock plates, pinched off above the struggling survivors of Otter’s crew. Incredibly, the lower borehole was unaffected as all around them, the earth groaned and squealed and ground and shimmied. The borehole above was gone. Troopers slammed headfirst into each other’s boots. Arms were broken. Legs twisted and contorted. Hypersuits were punctured.
“Shut off your boost now!” Kimmel yelled over the crewnet. “Cease the ascent…cease ascent!”
Whether by the fortune of fate or just an unpredictable shifting of hard basaltic rock layers, the section of rescue shaft with the four trapped troopers widened just a bit, forming a small, elliptical void, no bigger than a closet, wider at the sides, slammed shut above and below them.
CC1 Kimmel dug his boots out of the hypersuit helmet of Cindy Pinyan with a great, groaning effort, contorting himself to get a bit more comfortable in the confines of their rock-lined coffin. He opened his own helmet, snapping off the quick-disconnect and blinked dust out of his eyes.
They were completely trapped in a space no bigger than a taxicab, three Boundary Patrol troopers and Sheila Reaves of Quantum Corps. Reaves coughed, spat dirt and a little blood, which alarmed her and muttered, “Well, this is a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves in to.”
Kimmel’s voice was hoarse, echoing around the small void. Everybody okay? Anybody hurt down there?”
A chorus of voices spoke at once. “My neck’s strained…it’s my foot, that damned suit boost…no, I’m okay, but I need something to drink…yeah? want a beer or would you rather have a Merlow…?”
Kimmel told them to cut all unnecessary chatter. As long as they’re bitching, we’ve got a chance, he said silently. Bitching keeps the panic away.
Try as he could, Otter’s skipper, CC1 Lieutenant Kurt Kimmel could see no way any of them would ever survive this.
The Inuit angakkuq had been staring intently into a fire inside his tent for hours when the spirits told him that Inuvik’s visitors were in trouble. Silap inue was quite insistent on this and the angakkuq, whose proper name was Aua Hilap, listened carefully, divining the details from the crackling flames and dancing shadows of the fire.
Something would have to be done.
First, there would be qilaneq, asking questions of the spirits. The angakkuq fished in a small bag and found a sealskin glove. He carefully placed the glove on the ground beside the fire. Then he raised a staff of walrus tusk and a belt high over the glove. He spoke an incantation. Qila would now enter the glove and the angakkuq would have the power.
The shaman gathered up his bag with the glove on his hand, threw on his anorak and mukleks and trudged out of the tent, heading for the visitors’ test camp a kilometer away, over in the next ravine. He made sure to take a small walrus tusk with him. Qalupalik was inside the tusk, in a small containment capsule.
The angakkuq could see as he approached the visitors that they were all quite agitated. He went to the leader, the one named Drew Wilkins.
“The Old Woman of the Sea is disturbed,” he told Wilkins. “Your friends are in trouble.”
Wilkins seemed exasperated, directing people left and right, moving strange equipment around. “Aua, I can’t talk now…we’ve got an emergency. We may have lost an entire geoplane crew.”
The angakkuq squinted at the chief. “Your friends are not lost. This Sedna has told me. They’re down there—“ he pointed to the snow-covered ground. “They’re alive.”
“Aua, you can’t know that. Theresa—“ Wilkins motioned the geologist Mueller over. “Anything…any kind of signal…noise…anything?”
Mueller’s face looked like a child’s, inside her huge fur-lined parka. “Hard to say, Drew. We’ve got a lot of seismic noise down there…plates shifting, rock fracturing, strains building up…steady compression and release generates a hell of a lot of energy. It has to go somewhere. I’m not hearing anything that sounds like a geoplane, anything man-made at all.” Her eyes clouded. “Sorry.”
Wilkins swore. “Seven people. I just don’t feel right giving up on a recovery. But I don’t know where to send ANAD, where to bore an escape shaft.”
Now the angakkuq intervened. “The spirits talk to me. Sedna, the silap inue, talk to me. She speaks of souls lost in the ground.” The shaman hoisted up his walrus tusk. “I will call qalupalik.”
Wilkins threw up his hands. “Go ahead, Aua…do whatever you can. It can’t hurt. I just dread having to fill out another accident report, another one with casualties. Maybe the geoplanes—“ he stopped. He wouldn’t let himself even go there, or believe that. “Go ahead—“
The shaman trudged off through light snow to a small dish-shaped depression fifty meters away, up a slight rise. He saw caribou tracks in the snow. The animals had passed this way recently. He hoisted up the walrus tusk, at the same time thumbing a small control stud along the side of the containment capsule inside the tusk. Then he carefully laid the tusk on top of the snow.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then a faint shimmer in the air at the mouth of the tusk indicated the emergence of a small nanobotic swarm. The mist drifted out and began to coalesce into a human form, briefly visible as a long-limbed creature with long hair to its shoulders, green-tinted skin and very long finger nails. Then the apparition began to fade, dispersing into an amorphous cloud and burning a blue-white hole in the snow, melting the depression’s snow cover into small rivulets of steaming water. In five minutes, the blue-white glow had subsided.
The qalupalik had entered the earth.
Four hundred and twenty meters below the still-smoldering depression, Boundary Patrol troopers Kimmel, Pinyan and Suvorov coughed steadily in the thickening dust, clinging precariously to a narrow ledge in their rock void. Quantum Corps trooper Sheila Reaves had already passed out from carbon dioxide buildup.
It’s only a matter of time now, Lieutenant Kimmel told himself. He didn’t say that out loud, and tried as best he could to keep the spirits of the others up. In the last six hours, they had sung songs, told their life stories, imagined their favorite dinners and listed their top ten vacation spots in order of desirability.
Now the void, heavy with dust, was steadily losing breathable air and the emergency lighting on Pinyan’s hypersuit helmet was giving out.
For long minutes, nobody could think of anything to say.
Then, Suvorov, the Russian DSO, coughed and spoke up. “What is that, tovarich? Something in the wall—“
Kimmel figured the Russian was hallucinating, then he saw the faint blue white glow as well. Momentarily startled, he started to reach for the bubbling rock face of the wall then thought better of it. He started to imagine what it could be, but wouldn’t let himself think, believe that—
The troopers watched in amazement as the wall in front of Suvorov’s face dissolved in a blindingly bright blue-white glow. In less than five minutes, a two-meter opening had formed, smoking around its edges. A small glowing ball burned supernova hot in the center of the opening.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Pinyan breathed, “they did it. Topside came through. Wilkins, that stinking bastard did it!”
Suvorov squinted at the apparition. “I don’t know how—“
“Who cares?” said Kimmel. “I think there’s a navigable tunnel behind that opening…if this little bugger will just move out of the way.”
“You think it’s safe? We don’t know where that leads. Wilkins would have sent down some gear as well…that’s protocol.”
“Is it safe to stay here, Cindy? Come on…get your ass in gear. This is the way home.” Kimmel didn’t bother to wait for the others.
He contorted himself around Suvorov’s legs, stuck his head inside the opening and hoisted himself through. “Hot as hell in here…the walls are like glass. What the hell kind of swarm is this, anyway?”
Suvorov pushed and shoved the Lieutenant through. “Move your ass, Skipper. We don’t know how long this opening will hold up. The whole area’s unstable. Another tremor and it could collapse.”
“Someone wake Reaves up too.”
One after another, the four buried troopers squeezed and shimmied and contorted themselves into the still-sizzling rock tunnel. The only light they had was Pinyan’s fading helmet lamp.
That and the strange blue-white ball of light…now moving ahead through the newly bored tunnel, beckoning them on.
Their journey lasted for what seemed like days. Kimmel was in front, followed by Suvorov, Reaves and Pinyan. Reaves was out of breath the whole time.
This must be how a worm feels, she said to herself. What a life.
They dared not use suit boost. The close quarters meant any boost would have fried the face of the person behind them. So they crawled on hands and feet and it wasn’t long before all hands and feet were cut and bleeding and scalded from the hot walls. But nobody complained.
Onward they squirmed and squeezed, following the twists and turns of the tunnel which thankfully stayed wide enough for all them to work through.
“Man,” said Suvorov, “this is some kind of escape shaft. We go up, we go down, we go sideways. What the hell kind of recovery protocol is this?”
“Who cares? At least we’re out of jail. I didn’t much care for expiring in that rock prison we were in.”
Hours later, the tunnel walls began to grow icy. The ice thickened, then started melting.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Pinyan muttered. “My fingers are numb.”
“Shut up and keep moving,” Suvorov warned. “Just follow the light.”
The ice melted into a trickle of cold water, then a stream and before they realized, they were crawling and sloshing through freezing cold water, which filled nearly half the tunnel. The water level continued to rise. It gushed into the tunnel into torrents.
Kimmel wondered if they had made a serious error in judgment following the blue-white light but it was too late now. Ahead of him, maybe two meters, the light glowed from below the water like a malevolent eye.
Then, all of a sudden, they were out of the tunnel, all of them, floating in water, numbingly, brain-freezingly cold water and they gasped and choked and flailed wildly.
Reaves had a brief thought, as she clawed and kicked her way toward what seemed like light and air and some kind of surface above her. This is how it ends, girl. Either trapped in a rock prison and drowned in an ice lake.
Suvorov was first to the surface. He popped up above the water, splashing, yelling, banged by some kind of ice floe right next to his head.
Then came Kimmel, Reaves and Pinyan, all of them slapping the water, yelling, nearly dead from the numbing cold.
They splashed and coughed and gagged and stroked and kicked and eventually found themselves inching their way on their bellies up onto a rocky slope, the shores of what seemed to be a meltwater pool surrounded by hills. Sleet flecked the air, driven into their faces like stinging needles by a stiff wind.
They were injured, dehydrated, cut, bleeding, stiff from the cold, nearly in shock, facing hyperthermia but they were alive.
It was Reaves who heard the whop-whop-whop of a lifter’s props somewhere over the hills. With her last ounce of energy, she got unsteadily to her feet, waved wildly in the air, cycled her helmet comms and shrieked over the wind at the top of her lungs.
The lifter was overhead in seconds, descending toward the ground. Reaves crumpled in a heap into a snow bank.
Out in the center of the meltwater pool, the blue-white ball of light had disappeared. Now there was only an old man, slinking off toward the hills. Cindy Pinyan shook her head, sure she was seeing some kind of ghost. Maybe it was the aurora undulating over their heads, visible even in daylight.
The old man had long hair halfway down his back. His skin had a greenish tint. His fingers were broken, misshapen, with incredibly long nails at the ends.
He turned to look one last time at the recovery scene, the grateful troopers being littered over to the lifter, the medics, the para-rescue people.
Then the qalupalik loped off toward the hill and was soon gone, lost beyond the veil of swirling snow.
Cindy Pinyan had seen the whole thing. She started to say something to the medic attending her but thought better of it.
Just my imagination, she figured. A ball of light and an old man. When you’re desperate, your mind will conjure up anything.
She sank back in the litter and let the rescue techs carry her off to the lifter.