“I was wondering if I had heard clucking.”
“You did. Half a dozen hatched from Mars Expedition eggs. Now talk to me about how you filter the chips out of the oil.”
###
Subby looked dubiously at the scuba gear. It reeked of sewage, but once the mask was in place, it was much more tolerable.
“Go in, and keep going until you get to the next lift station. Turn around, and come out. You have ninety minutes of air, but it should only take you twenty, total. If you get lost or confused, always remember, head downhill. You can tell by following the, ah, flow. Downhill takes you here.”
Garth had bypassed the alarm and popped the lock on a sewage lift station halfway up the hill to the kaserne. Like all infrastructure supporting the sewage system, it was hidden behind a screen of vegetation and unseen from the street.
Funny, thought Subby. Here we are, me dressed like a commando, ready to target the powerful, and not fifteen meters from us, traffic and people are walking by like nothing is amiss. Amazing.
“Are you ready?” asked Garth, and Subby nodded. Garth guided him through the lift station, pointed out the rungs on the vault walls, and wished him good luck.
It wasn't five minutes before he heard a loud splash as Subby fell in the tunnel.
Suffer, asshole.
Garth did not like Subby at all.
###
“Should be any moment now,” said Devore.
“How do you know?”
“Sonar indicates that the septum wall at this point is forty-nine meters, ten centimeters. The drill bit is ten centimeters long, and we've fed in forty-eight meters of pipe. That stub you see poking out of the wall is the forty-ninth meter.”
“Right,” said McCrary. “Pressure on the other side of the wall?”
“Got a reading within a millibar of this side,” said Devore. “Trust me, I don't want to have all the air in this cofferdam head down that little hole.”
“Trust, but verify,” said McCrary. “You know my motto.”
The whine of the electric drill suddenly rose in frequency and reached a shrill screech before Devore cut the power down to idle. He needed to keep the drill string moving while he pulled it back out.
“Don't you need to stop the drill string as you put each pipe segment on it?” asked McCrary.
“Yes. You need pipe wrenches—the torque had the threads almost fused with pressure.”
“And if you take too long?”
“Then the hole cools and contracts around the drill string, and it's stuck like that forever—nothing will get it out. We don't have to worry about that on Earth, the rocks are naturally hot from the Earth's core.”
“What about up here? How do you keep the drill string moving up at this end, where the heat must have gone away long ago? The drilling oil?”
“Yes,” said Devore, starting up the drill motor once again.
“Wait a minute. Why don't you just push the whole string forward out of the hole? You don't have any drilling oil to keep the hole hot and open, and sooner or later, the hole will contract around the string. If any of it is left in the hole, it's as bad as leaving the whole thing in there.”
“Someone's got to catch it and not bend it,” said Devore. “Tell then to hurry—the steel cools off pretty quick.”
Devore’s crew safely extracted the drill string and was soon at work drilling the one-eighty hole, exactly across the cylinder from the first hole. The crew soon added a ninety and two-seventy hole. With those holes as guides, powerful lasers on a drilling rig were soon burning through the steel from both directions. A whirling wheel, mounting sixteen optically perfect mirrors, were directing beams from a continuous megawatt laser to the small circular track that became deeper with every turn of the mirrored wheel. Instead of one laser trying to burn through almost fifty meters of steel, the spinning rig had sixteen beams sweeping through the narrow walls, only ten millimeters wide, to impact the melting face of the steel. Powerful jets of air swept away the vaporized steel, keeping the vapor from condensing onto the mirrors. The cutting rate sped up rapidly as the men became more adept at handling the high powered laser.
McCrary guessed another two weeks before the cylinder was cut all the way through. He left the men in Devore's capable hands.
The Slog
Perseus, Oceanus Procellarum, & UNSOC-DRC: June 20, 2087, 1452 GMT
Garth waited for Subby, reflecting on something he’d read once. Cops on surveillance described the job as debilitating boredom followed by moments of sheer panic. He was in the slog period of the job, where there was nothing exciting going on, but the task at hand was absolutely necessary for the job to be completed.
He thought of the times when he tracked Celine to wherever she had relocated. He’d done it a lot of ways. GPS tracker in her wallet, hacking her phone, looking for tell-tales in social media. He was shameless. He had all of her personal data; he was able to hack into a new bank account almost as soon as she set it up.
Sure, she tried different passwords all the time. He winkled them out fairly rapidly. Many times, her car was her failing. Once, she moved from Ohio to Kansas, thinking that life in a smaller city would keep her anonymous. He knew better. He got her address, one of those mail drop places, from her bank account.
He set up an automatic license plate reader. The cops used them all the time to catch people with warrants or unpaid parking tickets. Garth found one on the black market that did nothing but read the plate. Nothing else. No connections to databases that could get him in trouble. He spotted her car the same day. After a couple of months, the reader never saw that plate again. She had clearly re-registered the car. So he checked out the car that last sported the plate, then waited for that same car to show up to get the mail. Now he had her new plate number.
Garth had loved that part of the game. He sat in his car at the intersection beyond the mail drop. In a couple of days, he knew she always took the left hand turn to leave. It took a while, this form of tracking, but it was absolutely reliable. There were only a certain number of ways between a place you had to visit, like a mail drop, and your house. Sometimes, it was a grocery store; other times, it was church.
He smiled as he basked in the warm sun outside the sewage lift station, waiting for the weaselly little Indian to emerge.
He remembered one time when he spotted her in her favorite grocery store. He had left her alone for at least six months now. But he felt the need to remind her that she was still his. He bypassed her car alarm and made certain changes to the interior. Then he locked her car, and went in the store. She was easy to spot—and a guy was usually there trying to engage her in conversation. He drifted by her shopping cart, dressed shabbily and using one of the mobility carts. He dropped the note in her purse, leaving no fingerprints behind. He ran the cart down to the far end of the first aisle and out of the store before the first security officer responded to her screams.
He watched from a distance as they led her to her car and left, only to come running again as she began screaming anew. When the actual police started arriving, he faded into the surrounding traffic and disappeared.
Later that week, he called her on her new cell phone. She only lasted a few moments before screaming and hanging up. Garth took out his pent-up emotions on a poor woman who needed the money. She wasn't hurt badly, but Garth was furious with himself for what he did to her.
Celine moved a few weeks later, restarting the game, just in another locale. Garth was soon on her trail again.
###
The segments of the reentry vehicle fuselages were complete, including seats, cushioning, and reentry tiles. All that remained was to bolt on the front and tail, and finish the aerodynamic surfaces from the stubs of the wings. The ERVs, scaled versions of the ones that McCrary finished for the Chaffee, were known to the aviation community as 'lifting bodies'. They derived their lift from the very shape of the fuselage, rather than from a wing. As such, they were perfect for this kind of mission
. Like the old space shuttles, they had the gliding characteristics of a brick. You weren't going to do Immelmanns in these flying machines. They were designed for two functions only: survive reentry and glide down near an area where they could be recovered.
Their cross-sections might have started out as ring-shaped structures, but they looked like someone sat on the hoops, and were now more like covered boats than cigar tubes.
But they were roomy inside. Thirteen meters might not sound like much, but when you had two decks of seating in the front and one in the back, you could see that these craft were shaped just like a regular aircraft wing, just scaled up a lot.
They littered the assembly area, four craft curiously beheaded like bodies of carp ready to be filleted.
“Everything's at a standstill, McCrary,” said Horst. “We can't do anything more with the craft until we get them out through the lock. We can't build anything else, because we have no place to build it, plus a whole lot of our materiel is stuck behind the airlock system which isn't close to done yet. How deep is the cut now?”
McCrary sighed. “Fifteen meters. We're having difficulty extending it further.”
“What's the matter?” asked Horst. “I thought this spinning gizmo was the bomb.”
“It was, for the first dozen meters. Then we got some stability issues. The lasers aren’t making it all the way to the cutting face before their energy leeches away. Some of the energy is absorbed by the metal vapor clouds, some is caught by the edges of the hole. So we slowed down the spin of the mirror wheel. That helped some—it seems there was some kind of physical instability in the wheel itself—but now the exhaust cloud issue is worse while the edge stealing issue is better. We've collimated the beam down as tight as we could make it, and we're still only drilling about half the speed we were making at the beginning.”
“I know you've got compressed air blowing across the mirrors, keeping them clear. How about setting up a complete circuit? Direct the compressed air down the slot, and have a trailing metal tube connected to a vacuum line. The condensing metal clouds will get pulled into the vacuum line, pushed by the higher pressure from above, and before the next beam passes through them.” Horst sketched out the concept in the dust on the workbench.
“Might work,” said McCrary. “I was thinking of setting up another laser on the other side, maybe meet in the middle.”
“I don't know about that,” said Horst. “Unless you have some very accurate measurements, you're not going to be able to tell when breakthrough is going to occur. We still want to do this fore-to-aft, right?”
“Absolutely. In fact, we have a shiny aluminum plate at the far end that will defect any laser beams onto a trough of sand. Can't have stray beams cutting up stuff back there. We certainly don't want any laser light coming out this end.”
“That's all I can think of, McCrary. If you want to use a second rig, then make sure you've got millimeter accuracy laser range finders. Second, get an air blast running. It might cut a week or two off the schedule.”
###
Garth stirred when he heard noises coming from the inside of the lift station. He got up to look inside the manhole vault.
He was not surprised at all to find Subby covered, head to toe, in sewage. Fortunately, the lift station came with its own water hose, which Garth applied to the sorry-looking figure. He kept it up, cold as the water was, until Subby emerged from underneath the covering of filth.
“You're a mess,” said Garth.
“I…I don't think I can do this again,” said Subby. “It was hell in there.”
“How far did you go?”
“The first lift station, like you told me. It took almost the entire tank!”
“I made it to the kaserne. That's about twice the distance you went. You're going to have to get better at this, Subby.”
“Don't. Don't call me that ridiculous name again,” said Subraman.
“I'll call you whatever I want. As I see it, I'm the only one pulling this train. You've been a drag the entire time. Only reason I'm keeping you around is that you can be helpful at some things I need done. Plus, you're going to plug that Daniels chick for me.”
“Absolutely. But I am doing that for me.”
“Whatever. Let's get you in some traveling clothes, and put these coveralls on the line.”
First chance I get, he's gone.
###
John, Celine, Lisa, and Sir Rodney sat around her small conference table. Security was wrapping up a briefing on the old Nazi tunnel system.
“That's all that's available to the public. It's come out over the years, particularly back when the U.S. Army was stationed in these barracks. The story of the lost Special Forces team probably occurred then, just to keep the amateurs out of the tunnels. Most of them were sealed up at that time, as well.”
“What about sewer tunnel E5?” asked Lisa.
“Ah, yes, thank you for reminding me. E5 dead-ends in a manhole near the end of the parking lot of the Mess Hall. It's uphill of the Mess Hall drains, and nothing drains into it. It's a dead end. But there are indications that the Nazi tunnel system is co-located with it. One of the old drawings shows the manhole vault sharing a wall with one of the assembly area halls.”
“He got in,” Lisa said, looking over to Sir Rodney. “That's why the signal disappeared.”
“Possibly,” he said. “I prefer my sensor theory. But, as we cannot perform any investigations for fear of tipping off our Mr. Wakeman, we will not know for certain. What do you have in mind?”
“Show me the entrances again,” said Lisa. On a modern hi-resolution overhead image of the kaserne, the entrances to the old Nazi system appeared in colors of green, red, and yellow, depending on the degree of difficulty of getting in.
“All of the entrances are blocked in some manner, but some of that was just a sheet of metal screwed into concrete, or a pile of rubble at a cave entrance. Those are green. Some are poured concrete caps over a sand-filled entrance. Those are red. Yellow is between those two extremes.”
“Commander? I have a runner from Security.” Lisa's aide opened the door to admit the runner, who handed a slip of paper to the briefer, saluted the Commander, and departed.
“Interesting. It seems that there was a break-in at a German sporting goods store three weeks ago. Sometimes, local crime takes a while to get to us. One set of scuba gear was stolen. That would explain how they’re using the sewer tunnels.”
“I know they must smell bad, but scuba?” asked Lisa. “The tunnels aren't that full, are they?”
Sir Rodney laughed. “No, not unless you've got a hurricane going. That smell is no joke. A big component of that is hydrogen sulfide. Bacteria breaking down the sewage release it—it's a major component of the smell of sewage. Nasty stuff. The gas mixes with the moisture in the human lung and gives you sulfurous acid, the weaker cousin to sulfuric acid, which it soon becomes.”
“Rots them pretty bad, I guess.”
“Quickly, too. This Garth is no idiot. He might just be trying to avoid the smell, but my guess is he's avoiding dying, too.”
Lisa looked again at the map of tunnel entrances. “If the sewers are so hazardous, why isn't he checking out these tunnels?”
“Probably because he doesn't know they exist,” said John. “Oh, sure there's WarLand, where Celine and I have a spot. But I've wandered around, carefully, and I haven't seen anything that looks like a big tunnel in the area.”
“What about WarLand?” Celine asked the briefer. “You've given us the public information. Now tell us the rest of it. And don't give us this 'need to know' runaround. John and I are living in them now. We deserve to know what we've gotten ourselves into.”
Security raised his eyebrows at Lisa, who punched a button on her desk. A low hum came from the walls, and steel bolts thudded softly into the doors, locking them in. “Secure. That is, if you guys have done your work.”
Security gave her a tight-lipped smile.
“The dan
gers of WarLand are actually quite real. That story of the lost Special Forces team was only a little exaggerated. The bodies of at least fifteen U.S. Army soldiers from the Cold War days are still in the tunnels, somewhere. Now, we'd go after them with drones and other remote gear, but back in the sixties and seventies, I mean the nineteen sixties and seventies, there just wasn't the means to go in without risking more men. After the third consecutive team suffered casualties, the Army gave the order to seal up the system.
“Since that time, other, ancillary tunnels have been found, mostly by curious German youth. Fortunately, without injury. These ancillary tunnels appear to be supply routes, air and water supply lines, and secondary escape routes. The main tunnels, the sealed ones, head down to the river, under it, and come up near the airfield. Germans would flood the airfield during the day, making it look like a lake, then drain the airfield and fly out of it during the night. Pilots lived away from the field, and when it was bombed, they were safe.”
“While the main system is sealed, these, what do you call them, ancillary tunnels, are still open?”
The Security man seemed a little uncomfortable. “They don't go to anywhere important. They run up the hill, and converge in a large assembly hall under a parking lot. The hall's connection to the main system is sealed with actual bricks and mortar and a steel plate. The rest of the tunnels are just empty passages leading nowhere.”
“Show me these tunnels,” said Lisa.
The overhead photograph of the kaserne washed out and dimmed, while the tracings of the old Nazi tunnels showed up.
John stood up and walked over to the projection screen. He tapped one of the tunnels with a green portal on it. “This is where Celine and I are spending our nights. We're looking for someone attacking us from the street, and in the meantime, they're climbing up a tunnel to stab us in the back. When were you going to tell us this?” John looked ready to pull the Security man limb from limb.
Tears of Selene Page 12
