The Winter Over

by Iden, Matthew

  Cass, prudent and hardworking, would’ve normally gone for the first option and humped half the tools in the VMF with her, but Doc Ayres had been right: although it had been a month since her sprain, her ankle was still tender. The last thing she wanted to do was reinjure it or prolong the healing process, so dragging a sled for a mile-long round-trip wasn’t a possibility. Making two round-trips? Not a savory option, either, but she didn’t have a choice. Unless she wanted to supplant Keene as the most unpopular person at Shackleton, she had to find the problem before the toilets stopped working.

  As she passed it, she glanced down the alcove at the access ladder that led to her hidden radio spot and felt a twinge of guilt. Busy with countless tasks around Shackleton, she hadn’t gotten in touch with Vox lately. She imagined him waiting by his own shortwave—hidden who knows where—listening to the hiss of empty airwaves. She promised herself she’d make it up to him.

  She continued down the tunnel, each segment looking exactly like the last. Bright overhead lights lit the way, although as an energy-saving measure they were spaced farther apart than in the main tunnels. The radius of each light died out just as the next one picked up the slack, forming modest pools of illumination interspersed with wedges of darkness. Since she’d want her hands free in order to inspect the pipes thoroughly, Cass pulled out her trusty headlamp and secured it in place as needles of cold sprang along her forehead and scalp. She switched the red light on and pulled the hood back over her head, giving the lamp just enough room to shine through.

  The work was slow going. To do the job right, she had to look over each section of pipe, running her light along and behind the sections where the overhead illumination didn’t reach. After the first hundred meters, however, there was no sign of a leak and she felt a small surge of vindication—if she’d taken a chance and pulled a sled full of tools with a bum ankle, she’d already be regretting it.

  But the air seemed colder here, if that were possible, and she shivered as she thought about losing her way at the far end of the frozen tunnel. Wandering and alone, unable to find the path back to the surface as the heat slowly left her body . . .

  “Jesus. Get a grip,” she said out loud, regretting it instantly as the sound died in the still air. She calmed herself and kept moving, continuing on to the Section D branch, different from the others in that—eventually, after many twists and turns—it connected with the ancient tunnels from the original base. At least, that’s what her schematic said. Before he’d left her in charge, Dwight had told her it was worth a look at the old rat warren and abandoned vaults just to see the wood beam and rivet construction the first Polies had used to shore up their tunnels.

  She stopped in front of the plywood door to Section D, then shook off a mitten so she could pull out her copy of the tunnel map. At a guess, it was a half mile back to the Beer Can. Tucking the map into her parka, she tugged open the door and tried the sniff test, regretting it immediately as the inside of her nose turned into an ice cube.

  Not surprisingly, there was no smell, but she hesitated and looked back the way she’d come. For one of the planet’s foremost research facilities, there was a sometimes surprising lack of rhyme or reason to where utilities had been placed, with sewer bulbs plumbed and dropped in different areas over the decades. Abandoned bulbs sat next to some currently in use, while still others had been drilled a decade ago but were waiting to be filled.

  Coming to a decision, she passed through to Section D, closing the plywood door behind her. The lights here were even fewer and farther between than in the main ice tunnel, spaced maybe twenty meters apart. The puddles of darkness were now three or four times larger than the spread of light, making the lamps less a source of illumination and more like beacons guiding her onward.

  She kept her eyes fixed on the pipes running near the top right corner. After another hundred meters, she paused to work the kinks out of her neck, then pulled the schematic out once again. According to the plan, she wasn’t far from the switchback to the 1950s base. She grimaced under her mask. If she didn’t find the leak in the next thirty meters of ice tunnel, there was a good chance it was in the original construction. It would be a major undertaking just to reach it, never mind fix it.

  The thirty meters came and went. No leak. At least none that she could see. The downslope switchback to the original base peeled away to her left and she dutifully followed the pipes down the narrow tunnel. The lights were even more infrequent here, the exception instead of the rule—each lamp was barely within sight of the next.

  The light from her headlamp swung back and forth as she walked. Smooth, sculpted walls gave way to hand-chiseled passages so tight that she could almost reach up and touch the ceiling. After a minute, those began to seem spacious as the walls and ceiling closed in until Cass’s shoulders brushed the ice and she had to duck her head to keep from banging it on the suddenly low-hanging pipes. The walls were now supported with the wooden shoring and steel rivets Dwight had described to her.

  Eventually, the tunnel squeezed down into a passage no larger than a crawl space.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said, looking at the four-by-four opening. With the pipes in the way, she’d have to get down on her hands and knees to squeeze through.

  It was time to call it quits and go back to the base. Fixing the plumbing and emptying trash cans was one thing, but doing major repairs in a seventy-year-old ruin was another. She turned to leave, then stopped.

  A vision of the contempt and disappointment on Hanratty’s face materialized in her head. Who, exactly, is supposed to do the work, Jennings? she could hear him ask. Biddi? One of the astrophysicists? Want someone to fly in from McMurdo with some duct tape? This is what wintering over means. Like it or not, you’re it.

  Encumbered by her layers of clothes, she sank to her knees awkwardly, like a bear kneeling to pray. She inched forward, wincing as she brushed her head against the crawl space ceiling. The timbers and fasteners around her were not only decades old, they’d no doubt been compressing under the millions of tons of settling ice above. Dwight had warned her that the risk of collapse was small, but there was a chance that the wood—desiccated, aging, and under tremendous pressure—could essentially explode from even a modest amount of friction. Say, like the top of your parka brushing against it.

  She sank until her belly made whisking sounds along the icy ground. Crawling was more work than she’d thought. The balaclava was moist from her breath and the outer layer began to freeze. The crawl space in front of her, revealed in patches from the light of her headlamp, looked like a miner’s shaft instead of the access tunnel to a relatively modern scientific installation.

  Cass swallowed. She wasn’t claustrophobic, but she didn’t have to be to feel the weight of the continent above her head. The threat of Hanratty’s sarcasm was melting away in the face of the shrinking tunnel in front of her.

  Just as she was contemplating turning around, the tunnel broadened, expanding until it transformed into a room. She shuffled forward on her hands and knees, then gingerly stood up into what looked like a grubby old lounge or galley. Steel desks and plastic chairs were gathered in random groups around a musty central table, while a counter in the rear seemed to be the focal point of either meals or drinks or both. Sniffing cautiously, she picked up the clear stink of sewer gas, making her wish for the frozen air of the tunnel behind her.

  She swung her lamp to the ceiling. The sewer conduit had obviously been installed long after the space had been abandoned; the silver pipes shot rudely across the room in complete disregard for its original purpose. They passed through the lounge and out the other side, exiting through another crawl space. As she played the light along the pipes, her heart leapt in her chest when she saw something she’d never thought she’d be excited to see: a sluggish stream of sewage dripping from a gash in the side of the pipe. Much of it had frozen to the outside of the pipe, forming a stalactite of shit that reached to the floor.

  Placing
both of her mittens over her face to guard against the smell, Cass picked her way around the furniture and debris, dodging frozen pools of sewage.

  She frowned as she got closer. What the hell?

  The leak’s source was a ten-inch vertical slash, but structural failures usually occurred horizontally, following the length of something like a pipe or cable. This breach looked like someone had whacked the pipe with an axe, which was stupid. If you were going to sabotage the pipe, you’d do your damage a quarter mile back up the tunnel and save yourself the hike. But, of course, that missed the point. Who would want to vandalize the sewage system?

  She stared at the damage a moment longer, then shook her head. Forensic work on the failure would have to wait until she returned to make the repair, but at least she had her answer to the what and where . The how and why would have to wait.

  Sighing, she turned and knelt to reenter the crawl space. It would be a hell of a lot of work to get her tools down the tunnel, into the crawl space, and set up in the old base lounge.

  Cass’s mind was busy making calculations and decisions on what tools to bring, crawling forward on autopilot and simply letting her body work its way to the string of lights ahead of her. She looked up only once to reassure herself that the crawl space was coming to an end.

  Which was when the lights went out.

  Frozen in place on her hands and knees, she stared straight ahead, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Okay okay okay . Even with the lights on, she told herself, visibility had been poor at this end of the tunnel. Maybe she just wasn’t seeing the halo of the nearest light. She wagged her head to move her lamp’s beam back and forth, comparing the illumination she was seeing to what had been there.

  Wherever the beam went, there was red light out to fifteen feet in a soft, diffuse spread. Anywhere else, it was pitch black. Dead black.

  An instinctive panic grabbed her, and her chest tightened as though a belt had been cinched around it. The layers of clothing that had kept her warm and alive felt instead like they were suffocating her. She clawed at her scarf and mask, her nails scratching her face. She took a deep, piercing breath that sent her into a coughing fit.

  But the frozen air sliced through her panic like a razor, halting the fear and giving her enough presence of mind to stop what she was doing and take stock. Moving deliberately, she replaced the scarf and mask, imagining how her instructors back in the States would’ve told her to tackle the situation.

  Stop and think. Assess the situation. Where are you and what’s going on?

  “I’m in the tunnels underneath Shackleton,” she whispered. “I’m probably a half mile from the basement level.”

  What else?

  “The lights are out.”

  Are you in any danger?

  “No. Maybe. With visibility down, I’m more likely to brush the tunnel shoring, causing a burst or even a collapse.”

  Which means?

  “I better be careful and take my time going back.”

  Is there something wrong with being cautious, Jennings?

  “If I don’t freeze to death, probably not.”

  The voice had no answer to that.

  Cass swallowed, wincing at the stiffness in her elbows and knees. In the few minutes it had taken to get herself under control, the cold had seeped through the layers of clothing and into her body. An inactive body provided no heat; she’d begun to freeze without even knowing it.

  Newton’s first law is truer in Antarctica than any other place on earth . The voice in her head was back. What is Newton’s first law?

  “A body at rest will remain at rest.”

  And what happens to a body at rest on the ice, Jennings?

  “It dies.”

  Do you want to live?

  “Yes.”

  Then . . .

  “Get moving.” She whispered the words, or thought them. Alone, in a dark tunnel half a mile from base, it amounted to the same thing.

  She moved.

  In a few minutes, she’d progressed through the crawl space and out into the upright tunnel. It was still cramped by any normal standard, but it seemed infinitely larger than the crawl space. With visibility reduced to the length of a pool table, the urge to put out a hand for support was hard to suppress, but the shoring was still the timber and rivet construction here, so she kept her hands tucked close to her sides and shuffled along the icy floor in hesitant steps, fighting the sensation that the walls were creeping inward.

  To keep her rising fear in check, she turned her situation into a mechanical problem, examining her predicament like she would a clogged line or a bum engine.

  Why had the lights gone out? The bulbs in all of the lamps were the best the industry could offer, guaranteed for a minimum of ten years. Although, in the staggering cold of Antarctica, all bets were off. She and Dwight had routinely laughed at performance guarantees.

  But that only meant single bulbs should fail sporadically. The tunnel she was in, roughly straight for a hundred meters or more, was impenetrably dark. Surely it was impossible that every bulb had conked out simultaneously. Which meant that the electrical system had failed.

  Yet that was as unlikely as every bulb blowing at the same time. She knew firsthand that the base had been wired for triple redundancy. Three generators were in place in the unlikely event of a cascading electrical failure. If the system was down, then the entire base was in jeopardy, and the chances of that happening precisely while she was in the most remote location on base seemed infinitesimal. Which left only one possibility.

  Someone had turned the lights off.

  Stating it didn’t surprise her as much as she thought it might. An image of the gash in the sewage pipe, obviously man-made, had been sitting in her head, waiting to be acknowledged. Matched with the almost complete darkness around her, the two realizations completed the problem set with the precision of a geometry solution. Unfortunately, that conclusion wouldn’t just sit there, either. Another possibility tickled her mind, demanding to be examined.

  Whoever had smashed the pipe must have done it days, even weeks, ago, for the pressure to have dropped over time. They’d planned that part in advance. But the lights were a different story. Short of planting an explosive or rewiring the system, it was unlikely anyone could shut them off remotely. They would have to have done it manually.

  So that person was somewhere in the tunnels with her, right now.

  This conclusion did startle her and she stumbled. Her bad ankle took the weight of her misstep and she careened to one side, crying out at the pain that lanced up her foot and into her shin. She threw out a hand to brace herself. Her hand found the icy wall, slipped along the slick surface, and plowed directly into a wooden beam with most of her weight behind it.

  With a crack like a gunshot, the timber burst next to her ear, followed instantly by a blizzard of flakes and splinters of wood that showered her like a thousand drops of rain hitting the pavement. Without the protection of the hood, she would’ve been deafened from the noise and probably blinded from the shrapnel. Even with it, slivers of seventy-year-old lumber stippled her parka, her pants, and her boots. The thinnest cover was at her forehead and dozens of tiny painful pinpricks erupted where the splinters pierced the fabric.

  Lying supine on the icepack, stunned, motionless, Cass waited for the creaks and groans that would mean the roof was about to collapse. She dropped her head to the ground, relishing the restful moment even while she waited for the final crash that meant she’d become Shackleton’s first known “crushed ice” casualty.

  She thought of the memorial they’d erect for her. Given Polies’ macabre sense of humor, it would probably be an empty parka and mitten sandwiched between two blocks of ice. Biddi would write the epitaph and get Dave to chisel it with a pneumatic hammer. Between these blocks lies my girl Cass. She slipped on some ice, said, “Isn’t this nice!” and now she rests flat on her ass . The image hit a nerve and Cass started to laugh so hard tears began to r
un down her cheeks and pool around the seal of her goggles.

  But a long minute passed without a sound except her dying laughter. The collapse wasn’t coming. Cass opened her eyes.

  Or thought she did. Her eyes were wide open but the darkness in front of her was as total as if she’d kept her lids squeezed shut.

  She wriggled her hand free of her mitten and reached to her forehead where her lamp was. Correction , she thought as she felt jagged shards of plastic where the bulb’s housing should be. Had been .

  The hard knot of anxiety in her gut yawned wider. Like an idiot, she hadn’t brought a backup flashlight, instead relying only on her headlamp. No flare, no acetylene torch—she would’ve had those if she’d dragged the tool sled along. She had a miniature magnesium flint and striker fire-starter attached to a keychain almost as a joke, but was she willing to risk a fire, even a small one, in a tunnel filled with desiccated wooden timbers that had been sitting in an ultra-arid environment for more than half a century?

  Hell, no . The only thing worse than being squashed by a collapsing roof would be finding herself trapped in a raging tunnel fire she herself had started, drowning in the resulting ice melt, then having the ceiling collapse in on her.

  A shudder went through her. The safest thing—the only thing—she could do was to walk the tunnel in the dark.

  While her hand was still out of her mitten, Cass passed her hand around her mask and hood to check the damage. She’d been lucky. None of the tiny fléchettes had done much except prick the skin. She pulled the largest splinters out, then put her mitten back on and got to her feet painfully, ready to set off into the complete darkness.

  It was disorienting. Thinking carefully, she replayed her fall, the bursting timber, hitting the ground. Obviously, she’d been walking toward the base. If she’d hit the ground in one motion, her head should still be pointing the right way. It seemed unlikely she’d spun in a circle before falling. Unless she’d sprawled sideways across the tunnel?