I nodded. “Yeah, we’re going to need all hands for that. I’ll tell the captain. I’m going back to my console—call me if you need anything.”
“’K.” Corey went back to squinting at the screen. I slumped in my chair, staring moodily at the weather reports.
I went back to my room after six hours of watching the grey landscape go by. Ellie was still in bed as I climbed in. She smiled sleepily, and curled her arm around my chest.
“Hey,” she said after a welcoming kiss. “How’s it going?”
“Ok,” I told her. “We should be laying the last stretch of tunnel in ten hours or so.”
“Not that,” she said, sitting up to look at me properly. Her hair was messy, but her eyes were serious. “How are you feeling?”
Ellie was the only person who knew. When I started sleeping with her, it became pretty hard to hide when my body started shaking. She hadn’t reported me. I loved her for that.
“It comes and goes,” I said. “It’s not like there’s long to go. I just have this terrible fear it’ll take over while we’re outside. Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”
“Who else could do it?” she said. “It took us seven months to get here. We can’t just turn back to get someone else, even if there was someone else qualified to do it. We need you.”
“But what if the Spacers can’t cure me?” I said. “Am I not just wasting a place that could save someone else?”
“We need you, Kimi,” she said. “You’ve done things for this mission and for our morale that no one else could. There’s been 12 crawler missions, and we’re the only ones to have gotten within touching distance of the Azores. We couldn’t have done that without you. The Spacers owe you those stem cells, Kimi.”
Her words were some comfort, but I still felt awkward about it. I probably always would. I didn’t tell her that most of the reason I pushed myself so hard was so that she too would make it up to the suborbital habitats. I just kissed her, and concentrated on that.
I wasn’t on duty for the next two changeovers. Instead, I stayed in bed and hoped sleep would stop the tremors. I never got to find out if it would. It started raining before I could get much sleep.
There’s nothing worse to wake you than pure, bright light after sleeping in a totally dark room. I’d gotten used to the sounds—the constant vibration of the tunnel unspooling, and the thump of magnetically-driven stakes hitting the seabed. I have no idea what I was dreaming but I convulsed awake, retinas flashing warning signs to my brain. My reflexes picked up on the flashing red lights before the rest of me got there. Ellie was already on shift. I groggily clutched my hands to my eyes as I rose from the bed, and instinctively threw on some clothes.
It was only the third or fourth time we’d all been together on the bridge. Usually, clashing shifts kept us all apart. Now the sixteen of us stood at the bow of the crawler, huddled together despite the huge space around us.
The first specks of rain were trickling down the glass. We watched, fascinated.
So far, it had been nothing more than the odd drop; just slight showers, which did happen intermittently during the summer. Nothing heavy enough to avoid being hungrily sucked up by the dry, salty seabed. Everyone noticed the air of inevitability of the day, though. Every drop seemed to drag the rest of the sky closer toward us.
To begin with, all the water would be absorbed. In the old days, there’d been so much water—more in some lakes than would fall on the ocean today. But, as more water evaporated or was locked up in the crystals, the salt content grew and things died. The algae that took in carbon dioxide became one of the first casualties, and after it died, things got hotter. Most of the water that was left evaporated, leaving behind an Atlantic sludge pool separating desert continents. It just kept getting drier and drier.
“We should be doing something,” I said, staring at a bead of water. It met another and rolled down. Most of us had said something similar during the half hour we’d been standing there, but we all knew there wasn’t anything to do until the roll of tunnel ran out, or until the water got too deep to move through.
“I heard that they’ve got a real lake on one of the spacer settlements,” Corey said conversationally. “Like an actual standing body of water. Stays the same all year round.”
We turned to him, to take our minds off the rain.
“So it doesn’t go away in the summer?” someone asked.
“Nope.” Corey shook his head. “They put back what they take out, keep it the same level. I think they have boats on it and things.”
“Weird,” I muttered. We all turned back to the window as if pulled by a puppet master’s strings. My arm trembled.
A flash of lightning lit up the sky. In the sickly yellow afterglow, I could see a dark cloud rising up to meet the rain. Sludge crystals, lifted by the winds, danced beneath the sky.
Rachel, one of the drivers, counted under her breath,“One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand …” She frowned. “Where’s the thunder?”
Boom. A roll of pure sound swept across us. The tremor made me quiver, but I felt the crawler give a harder shake beneath me. It began to rain for real. The drops on the window slowly built in a determined rhythm that rattled the steel and glass until it became too fast to distinguish between the sounds. Water sluiced down the window in torrents, and poured over the bow of the crawler like waterfalls.
Everyone took a breath and turned away from the window, tension broken as the water began to fall. Now we were filled with a sense of purpose and urgency, as if before we half-expected it wouldn’t happen, not really. Unfortunately, until the crawler unspooled the end of the current tunnel and reached the next connection building, there was nothing we could do but watch.
“How long until the next connection?” the captain asked.
Corey leaned over to read the console behind him, and called back,“Seventy … two minutes, sir.”
“Ok.” The captain gathered us around him. I clenched my hand, and tried to concentrate on what he was saying.
Captain Porter looked more tired than I was. He’d received a nonlethal dose of radiation a few months back, and his bald head was still sunburn red because of it. His once-thick beard, thinned out by the accident, had begun to make an uneven comeback, giving his face an odd, used-brush quality.
“This is it,” he told us, “the final run.” Another lightning flash reflected off his head, and he blinked. “If we can get to Midpoint, and the American team does too, chances are we can get off this stinking rock for good.”
The thunder rumbled around us as we nodded in agreement. The captain looked at each of us. I tried to keep my hand behind my back.
“If we make this, you’ll all be jumped to the front of the queue when the first rocket blasts off.” His gaze took us all in, but I felt it center on me. “I have guarantees from the Norfolk, Andover, and Belfast presidents.
“So, all we have to do is survive the next forty-eight hours, and make sure that the tunnel makes it too. After that, you can have whatever the hell you want.” He frowned. “Just get us through.”
Captain Porter grabbed me as everyone else walked out. “Kimi,” he said, “you’re ok, right? You looked like someone was holding a flare to your skin the entire time I was speaking.”
“I … ” I brought my hands out of my pockets, but the pills I’d popped during the meeting were quelling the tremors for now. The captain looked expectant. I shrugged and shoved my hands back into my pockets.
“I’m just tired, I guess.”
The captain smiled grimly. “Aren’t we all?”
I stared at the mirror. It’s funny how you never notice your own reflection. I could see the marks Parkinson’s had left on me, my own set of red weals beneath my eyes. I struggled to control the rigid mask my face had become.
I splashed water across my face and stared down at the pills on my palm, daring to believe for a second that I didn’t need them. My hand shook. The pills scattered
across the tiles.
I shoved the next ones out of the bottle straight into my mouth and swallowed without hesitation. The pills scraped down. More water followed them. I’d used most of my ration in this wake-up session, but if we succeeded, I doubted anyone would care to check the forms.
The crawler jolted to a halt as we reached the connection point. I stared at my eyes for another heartbeat and left the bathroom, crushing a forgotten pill as I walked by.
Four of us suited up this time.A connection took two, normally, but in times of need, lives are backup plans. Putting on the suit made me feel better. The servos sent powerful shivers through my muscles, telling them they had help. My full-body mask was back on.
I clawed around in the locker and found a box of seals, which I handed around to Ellie, Arnold, and Gus before digging into it myself. We pasted two seals over every join, and I put three over my helmet seal before putting it on. The steady thumping of the railguns and the vibration of the crawler’s movement slowed and then stopped as we reached the connecting station.
We took some extra equipment this time: grappling cannons, which we usually used for pulling the crawler and its smaller units over fissures. We each had the smallest model strapped to our arms. The steel cable was designed to hold in fierce winds. I hoped they’d be strong enough if we needed them.
The door opened, and then I couldn’t worry anymore. Gus, who was standing near the door, got sucked out by the wind. His grappling hook caught the rock below, and he thumped down into the sludge. Crouching, I inched out of the crawler after him.
The glass of my helmet rippled as the rain pelted it. The wind pushed me sideways. I was half-tempted to fire my grapple, but I was just about strong enough to stay on my feet.
Stepping off the metal platform outside the door gave me another shock. I sunk to my waist in near-liquid sludge. It sucked at me, trying to pull me under. I waded to where the tunnel emerged from the crawler and whacked the panel.
Machinery whirred and cut the tunnel, fixing the connector to the loose end and releasing it in one easy movement. The end of the tunnel snapped out of the crawler and bucked as I held it. The robotic arm on the crawler swung around to carry most of the weight, clamping its jaws around the tunnel further down. It was clumsy, and we had to guide the connection in ourselves.
They designed the tunnel to be lightweight despite its size, but the pull of wind and water made it seem like half the world hung from my arms. I amped up the suit boosters to maximum power.
The strain eased. I looked over to see Gus grabbing the other side. Together, we dragged the tunnel away from the crawler’s rear, with the robotic arm taking the weight we couldn’t. The crawler edged forward, causing a ripple of wake to run through the sludge, tipping us both into it.
My helmet’s light only penetrated the first few centimeters of darkness, enough to show a maelstrom of browns, reds, and a nasty, oily blue. The ocean bottom came up to meet me. I kept my grip on the tunnel, and pulled myself back up.
I bobbed to the surface like a cork, sludge sluicing off my helmet. The tunnel felt heavier in my hands, and I looked over to the other side—Gus’ glove still gripped the tunnel’s handle, but it wasn’t attached to its owner anymore.
Gus had emerged close to the carrier, clutching his arm as chemicals leaked into his suit. The radio was filled with screams.
“Gus!” Ellie yelled. “Are you ok?”
Gus’ cries died down to panicked breaths, and he climbed back into the crawler. The hatch closed.
I pulled at the end of the submerged tunnel, sloshed around the end, and grabbed Gus’ handle with my free hand, moving it around the circumference of the aluminum until I could hold both handles at once. Gus’ glove slipped off and bobbed away. With the closed end of the tunnel against my back, I began hauling it towards the connection point.
The building was already half-submerged, but piles of water-absorbing crystals—which had helped along this world’s death in the first place—had piled up around the connection points. Water was being sucked up readily, and it was almost completely dry around the ports.
The water slapped at my chest as the crawler began to move again. When I got near the port, the robotic arm unclenched and whirred away to help Ellie and Arnold with the tunnel on the opposite side. I lugged the end of the tunnel into the waiting jaws of the connection.
The jaws violently tore the tunnel away from me, and I fell back against the side of the building. The tunnel rotated 45 degrees as the openings aligned, and then a meter of it shot into the port. The metal sheath irised closed and secured the tunnel.
One press of the arming button on the tunnel’s side activated the anchors. Explosive bolts blew deep roots into the rock below and tied the length of tunnel to the ocean floor. The tunnel sank beneath the sludge, complete.
I pushed myself upright from the wall, wiping the sludge off of my faceplate and battling fresh gusts of wind. Then I walked back towards the crawler, almost swimming towards it through the wake it had left.
“I’m done,” I said over the radio. “I’m coming inside.”
There was a flurry of conversation in the background, and then Captain Porter said, “Negative, Kimi.”
“What?”
“Gus left a huge mess in the airlock, and some of the ship is contaminated. Until we clean up, there’s nowhere safe for you to enter.”
“Great,” I said, turning back towards the building. “I guess I’ll go help Ellie and Arnie, then.”
“Sorry, Kimi.” The captain sounded more stressed than I did, and he wasn’t out in the storm. Gus must have been bad. “We’ll try and sort it out in the next ten minutes or so.”
“OK,” I said, edging closer to where Arnold and Ellie manhandled the fresh end of the tunnel out of the hole in the crawler’s rear. This would be the tunnel that took us to the Azores—the very last section of the European side of the America-Europe tunnel.
A tremor overwhelmed me as I rounded the corner of the connection building, taking hold of my limbs and freezing them. I reached out for the concrete wall, trying to steady myself against the fit. A roll of thunder boomed across my senses.
The water was getting too close to my neck, and I didn’t think I could handle that in my disabled state. I could see the worn and soapy, dissolved edges on the seals of my shaking gloves, and I didn’t like it. From here, I could climb onto the roof of the building—so I did, using one last push of controlled strength to clamber onto the concrete before I lost control entirely.
When I’m in this state, my mind isn’t affected. It’s strange to be in this body, rigid like a mannequin and yet still able to think clearly.
My body wound down and the tremor eased to a stop. I pulled my legs further from the water’s edge and flopped onto the concrete, exhausted. Lightning flared nearby, barely a second away from its thunder twin. Rain pummeled my suit and helmet, and the wind tried to tug me away from the roof. I closed my eyes and still managed to drift into something near sleep.
BOOM. Earth-shattering noise pounded my eardrums, even through the helmet. The concrete beneath me shivered. I snapped my eyes open to the aftereffects of a lightning burst, very close by. I’d slept for about a minute. I brought my head up and looked into the sky above me. The clouds drew around the crawler, flashes of static focusing on one point in the darkness and then …
This time, the blast was so close that the light and sound came simultaneously. I tore my eyes away from the sight of a million volts flash down into the water next to me, filling the air with greasy potential and ionizing everything. The sound wave seemed to push me down into the concrete.
I heard screaming—first Arnold, then Ellie. The radio was filled with their pain for a moment, and then only static hiss answered my calls. I looked over to where they’d been. Two bodies floated in the water, still smoking from the shock. My breath caught in my throat. The lightning had torched them in the water, and the roof’s concrete had saved me. Not her, I thought.
Anyone but her.
“Ellie?” I shouted over the radio. “Ellie! Arnold, are you ok?”
The robot arm trailed sparks, illuminating the scene in a gold that seemed almost festive. Its claw hung loosely from the tunnel, shorted out by the blast. As I watched it, Paulo tried to use the last remnants of power in the arm to reposition it. The arm sparked again and swung drunkenly wide, crashing across the tunnel into the water.
That massive bolt had also stunned the crawler. Breakers would soon put the circuits back online, but for now, the crawler lay dark in the night. The only light came from the top of my helmet and from ominous flashes as the sky prepared for another attack.
The water was oddly calm now that nothing was moving through it. Even the rain had lessened, as if waiting for the next blow. The force of the lightning had caused a lot of sludge to float to the surface. As I eased into the water, my legs knocked against floating pieces of crystal and rock.
I don’t know if it was the aftereffects of the lightning or the fit, or if I was just imagining it, but my head had cleared completely. I observed everything with utter clarity. The ripples I made wading through the water and the light that highlighted them, the falling sparks from the robotic arm, the floating bodies bumping into the partly submerged tunnel.
The water wasn’t fully liquid anymore—the sludge was beginning to soak up some of it, making the consistency more like mud, and pushing and resisting as I stumbled through it. If the rain held off for much longer, I’d soon need a shovel to get through.
The tunnel lay some twenty yards from the connection. The robotic arm slumped across it like a fallen dragon. I couldn’t spot Ellie or Arnold. As I reached the tunnel, I tried to lift the metallic hand. Even at full assistance, my arms couldn’t bear the weight. After a second, I let the robotic arm fall back the inch I’d lifted it. It slid a little further down, as if it was trying to give the tunnel a protective hug.
Something bumped into the back of my legs and I spun around. It was Arnold. I leaned over to check for life signs. The screen was dead. I turned the body over and saw that its owner was too. He had fallen and broken his helmet, and the water had rushed in. I didn’t want to look too closely at what the acid had done to his face.
Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2 Page 2
