Invardii Box Set 2

by Warwick Gibson

To Human and Mersa alike the shaft was a bottomless well – the stuff of nightmares – even though they knew it did eventually end, deep in the mantle of the planet. No one wanted to be endlessly falling, and bouncing off the rungs along the sides.

  “The electricity from the cable has started surging,” said Ereth over a comms link from his position beside Sebastian. He had a scan meter attached to one of the junction boxes, and the readout was starting to oscillate wildly.

  Sebastian forced himself to look away from the bottomless pit below them, and back to the work at hand. He nodded.

  “We might be able to use the heat exchanger cable to generate a comms signal,” said Ereth thoughtfully. “Question is, how?”

  Sebastian mentally kicked himself. The old engineer was ahead of him on the comms front. Getting a signal out of the shaft was their only real hope of getting rescued.

  Serostrina worked her way around the shaft, hanging off the rungs, and sidled into the booster station cavity.

  “There’s going to be a problem standing on the rungs like this,” she said, once she had switched to the comms link they were using. “Some of the Human females are getting tired already.”

  Ereth popped his head out of the alcove where the junction boxes sat. He could see the sense in what Serostrina said. No one could stand on the thin rungs and just hang there in a vertical shaft forever, certainly not with the extra weight of the suits.

  The rungs had been installed to fit into the cogs of tractors that wound themselves up and down the shaft when maintenance was needed. It was fortunate that both Human and Mersa feet were finding good purchase on them.

  Trust Serostrina to pick up a problem with the group first, thought Ereth. The Mersa were alert little creatures. He knew the men would just hang on grimly until it was damn near too late to save them. The women, though, had been talking. Men and women rose to extreme conditions in different ways.

  “Sebo,” he said quietly, “rig some sort of floor across the shaft will you? Then maybe some seats so we can fit everybody in, maybe even hammocks, something like that?”

  Sebastian looked up from the electronic schematics tablet he held and nodded.

  “I’ll try to figure out a way to send a signal the Javelins will recognize,” said Ereth, the white of his short hair all that was visible inside the face plate of his suit, as he bent over the boxes again.

  While Sebastian was trying to solve one problem, he witnessed the beginnings of another.

  He had cut rungs from further down the shaft, and was cold welding them into a lattice that could support a floor, when he saw a flicker of light deep in the shaft. He mentioned it to Ereth as he carried on welding.

  “I was afraid of that,” said Ereth, over the comms link. “The data from the junction boxes suggests the cable isn’t discharging into the surrounding snowfields as normal. Since it isn’t being used by the depot, or stored, the power has been building up until it earths somewhere in the shaft. That is what’s been causing the energy in the cable to surge.

  “The cable’s probably burned some of its insulation off lower down,” he continued. “My best guess is you saw an arc from the cable as it crossed the shaft to a point where the conductivity is good. The problem is, the arcing’s going to get worse. It might be a good idea to get that floor finished as soon as you can.”

  Sebastian made a circular ‘speed it up’ signal to the two Mersa working alongside him, and the little group redoubled their efforts.

  It wasn’t long before Ereth was proved right. Bright flashes issued from the depths of the shaft on a regular basis, accompanied by phantom thunderclaps as the flashes split the thin air around them.

  Ereth disconnected the lamps from the junction boxes when the surges started to overcome the bypass circuits he’d put in place. He and Sebastian kept working using their suit lights, but the rest of the group stayed in darkness to conserve the power the suits still held.

  Sebastian soon had the floor supports in place, and started working on the floor itself. He was using the doors off the junction boxes and the lids off some of the equipment boxes, and anything else he could find, to make a patchwork floor covering. Out of nowhere there was an enormous electrical discharge in the shaft, and what sounded like an all-out artillery battle directly below them.

  The welders scrambled for the walls, and the rest of the group clung to the rungs. Immense flashes lit the shaft time after time, while the whole shaft screamed as electrical arcs ripped the air apart, and groaned as the surrounding rock reverberated from the assault.

  “Sounds worse than it is,” shouted Ereth over the comms link.

  “It’s the methane gases in the planet’s atmosphere building fireballs around the arcing. We’re lucky the concentration isn’t any higher, or the whole shaft would go off like a bomb.

  “Sebo, set some heat cutters around the cable, we’re going to have to drop it down the shaft. It’s only lightly pinned to the walls when its not going through the booster stations. The stations are a thousand meters apart, and that should give us a reasonable margin of safety.”

  Sebastian hurried to carry out Ereth’s plan. The light show and unholy racket had diminished a little by the time he was ready. He set the heat cutters to activate in a matter of seconds, and climbed up to join the others. As he reached the makeshift platform the cutters flared, and the thick cable fell away into the depths below them.

  Sebastian looked at Ereth, who shook his head sadly. He didn’t need to say anything. Their plan to set up a comms system using the energy in the cable had disappeared as the cable had plummeted into the depths. They would have to think of something else.

  “Come up to the booster station when you’ve finished your welding,” said Ereth quietly, and Sebastian knew their chances of survival were down to slim, or none. And those chances depended on what the two of them dreamed up next. What they could make out of the supplies they still had left.

  Everyone was relieved when the rough patchwork floor was finished. The fear of falling down the shaft had affected them all differently, and one or two had dipped into the small medical kit that came with each suit for something to reduce the anxiety.

  Some of the little group were standing, but some could now sit with their backs to the wall, legs spread out. Sebastian left his two Mersa co-workers trying to change some tough, synthetic-fiber sheeting into hammocks to sling around the walls.

  He climbed up into the junction box alcove and tapped Ereth on the shoulder. It was time for desperate measures. The older man put down the circuit board he was working on. His own ideas for sending a message had all reached dead ends when he examined them more closely.

  “I can’t see how we can send a message to the Javelins without the sort of power the cable was carrying,” said Ereth.

  “Even coupling up all the suits, and whatever else we can find, there wouldn’t be enough power to send a signal through the rock and ice above us, and into space.”

  Sebastian agreed. It was odd the way it had turned out. The shaft that had been their salvation had now become their tomb. He began to cast his mind over the possibilities for a comms system, looking at the equipment they had and the ways they might use it. They had to attract the attention of the Javelins soon, while they were still somewhere above the planet.

  An hour later their prospects weren’t looking any better. Some of the group were working on ways to prolong air and water over the next few days, and some were taking the first rest shift. It was strange to see survival suits curled up uncomfortably in the simple hammocks that were now slung around one side of the shaft.

  “We just don’t have the power!” exclaimed Serostrina as the three of them tried to brainstorm a solution.

  “Pretend that we do!” said Ereth obstinately, wedded to the idea that the message they sent must be powered somehow.

  “Pretend that we don’t!” said Sebastian suddenly, his face lighting up in hope. “What generates a comms signal without a power input?”
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br />   “Nothing?” said Ereth automatically, still not sure what Sebastian was talking about.

  “Well, the piezoelectric effect does, for one,” said Sebastian, “but that’s not what I’m thinking of.”

  “You want to generate electricity from crystals in the rock? How will you get them under enough mechanical stress?” said Ereth.

  “Nothing like that,” said Sebastian. “Let me think!”

  Ereth went quiet. It looked like his protege was onto something, but what was it?

  CHAPTER 12

  ________________

  “Remember the Euro Russian experiments with standing waves at Vladivostok?” said Sebastian excitedly. “They generated a signal in different mixtures of gases by collapsing a standing wave inside the column.”

  Ereth nodded. “Matsu Fujimi used to talk about it. I don’t think he saw it as a way of sending an emergency comms signal if the power went down, though.”

  “You’ve been to Prometheus?” said Sebastian in awe. Prometheus was the holy grail, the ultimate research station in the Alliance world.

  “No,” answered Ereth. “Matsu came to the South Am block when I was the head engineer on a new accelerator in the Andes. He took an interest in my work. He has an amazingly retentive mind, that one. We keep in touch.”

  Sebastian discovered a new-found respect for his boss and mentor. Still, Ereth hadn’t seen the possibilities in the shaft below them yet, but Serostrina was starting to. She was looking at him with a growing understanding in her eyes.

  “That’s what we’ve got here!” exclaimed Sebastian. “A column of mixed gases. We’re standing on top of it!”

  Understanding dawned on Ereth’s weathered face. He twisted his face around as he examined the idea in his mind to see if it would work. Sebastian was surprised to see how mobile the old man’s face was.

  “Still,” said Ereth doubtfully, “the composition of gases has to be pretty exact, and the length of the column has to be some ratio of the speed of the wave in the gases, I would think. It’s a bit of a long shot.”

  “But worth a try!” said Sebastian. “The first problem is the tangle of cable hanging from the booster station a thousand meters further down. That’s going to dampen the standing wave, and we may not be able to close the isolation doors.”

  The two men looked at each other. Someone was going to have to climb down there, cut the cable away, and close the isolation doors above the booster station. A thousand meters straight down, and a thousand straight back up again.

  Time was critical, and they should get a team onto it right now. The rest of them would try and work out how to get the column of gases idea to work.

  “I don’t think it should be me,” said Ereth, his eyes twinkling. Sebastian laughed. Ereth didn’t let old age stop him from doing many things, but he had just admitted this was one of them.

  “This is a job for the Mersa!” said Serostrina enthusiastically. “We climb better than you, and we have a way of going down very fast, and we have all the technical skills to close the isolation doors.

  “The ‘free fall’ game is something all Mersa play as children. We’re smaller and quicker than you, and the atmosphere on Alamos is less than on Earth, something like it will be lower down the shaft I think.

  “We have competitions for this game. I was best in my village,” she said proudly.

  Ereth looked at Sebastian, then at the keen little Mersa. He tried not to smile. They were so enthusiastic about everything!

  “Cut a trapdoor in one corner of your new floor, Sebo,” he said, “with access to the rungs, and find Serostrina enough heat cutters to take care of the cable.”

  Sebastian called out to one of the Human engineers, who hurried to cut out the trapdoor, on the opposite side of the floor to the alcove. Then he explained the heat cutters to Serostrina.

  Last of all Ereth spoke to the little Mersa. “Thank you for this,” he said quietly. “Do you want to choose the Mersa who go down the shaft with you?”

  Serostrina nodded, then scurried out of the alcove and down the rungs to the patchwork floor.

  “Dammit they’re fast when they want to be,” said Sebastian, watching her go.

  Ereth smiled.

  Sebastian suddenly changed tack. “How long have we been down here now?” he asked.

  “A little over four hours,” said Ereth, checking his comms armband. If only the comms system would reach the Javelins, he thought wistfully, but it was only a short-range system, and certainly wouldn’t work through the layer of rock above them.

  “Then we haven’t got long,” said Sebastian grimly. “Win or lose, the Javelins must be leaving the planet soon. We have a few hours at most.”

  “Anything we said would be guessing,” said Ereth, “and various events could hold them back, or speed up their departure.”

  Sebastian sighed. “I wish we knew what was happening up there!” he groaned.

  “So do I,” said Ereth softly, “so do I. Now, let’s dig up the Euro Russian data on the column experiments. It should be in the memory banks of the schematics tablet. It’s got every damn formula in 800 years of scientific research stuffed into it. The file we want should be there too.”

  They got down to work.

  Serostrina and her two helpers were ready to descend into the shaft by the time the crude trapdoor was finished. They stepped carefully into the darkness below Sebastian’s improvised floor, and switched on the lights Ereth had given them. The rungs fell away away into the darkness below them, one set for each quarter of the shaft. Then they launched themselves into space.

  They were soon far below the booster station. The three Mersa switched off the linguist earpieces so they could communicate more quickly, and the flute-like scamperings of the Mersa language passed swiftly from helmet to helmet. Three beams of light sought out the rungs in the shaft as they fell rapidly downward, their intense concentration never slipping.

  “450 mark,” said Serostrina, checking a pressure meter strapped to her forearm. The Mersa were moving swiftly in a controlled fall, guiding their descent with a brief touch at every tenth or twelfth rung, slowing themselves to a descent rate they could manage.

  “500 mark,” reeled off Serostrina. If they maintained this speed they would be at the booster station in a matter of minutes. There was still no sign of the fallen cable, and that was good. The less of it they had to manhandle past the second booster station the better.

  Serostrina barked a short little Mersa laugh. Manhandle was a Human word she had picked up. But they couldn’t manhandle it, they would have to Mersahandle it. Human was a funny language.

  The heat cutters in her waist pack began to move around in the near weightless conditions, and she concentrated on maintaining her balance, keeping her semi-flying descent straight and true.

  “700 mark,” she said, and began to think about slowing herself at the end of the drop. It was all very well to use the planet’s gravity to their advantage, but that left a lot of kinetic energy to bleed off when they got to the end of the fall.

  “750 and starting to slow,” she warned the others. They overshot her a little, and then the small group was level again. The strain was beginning to show on all their faces, as the gloves of the suits made more and more contact with the rungs, and bodies came out of the horizontal to an almost vertical position. Too much, too soon, and the feet of the suits would start to clip the rungs – at a time when they were still going far too fast.

  “850 mark,” reeled off Serostrina. There was still no sign of the booster station in the shaft below them.

  “950 and preparing to close,” said Serostrina, having reduced her speed to something she felt she could control safely. A few more rungs flipped by, and she grabbed the next one, releasing it as the strain came on her arm and grabbing the following one. In a few, short, sharp jolts she had come to a complete stop.

  She looked around. The others had made it okay too, one above her to her left and one slightly below her
to her right. Then she looked down, and saw the inset shadow of the second booster station, right where she expected it to be. Of the cable there was no sign.

  She clambered down to the alcove, and saw the broken end of the cable where it was fixed to the top of the station. Its own weight and speed had been too much for it.

  Well, that was a blessing, it was one more problem she didn’t have to worry about. It looked like the cable was still intact in the shaft below, and they still had power at the station. The occasional point of light flared deeper in the shaft, followed by a dull boom, but there was nothing that threatened them where they were.

  The Mersa took up residence in the alcove that housed the booster station, and Serostrina fed in the codes for the isolation doors. It took a minute to change one of the comms armbands to the same frequency as the booster station, and then they retreated up the shaft.

  Serostrina sent the activation signal, and the isolation doors closed smoothly, forming a tight seal. She nodded her satisfaction.

  “Let’s see what you’re made of,” she said to the two Mersa with her. It was a challenge, and all three started climbing fast, chortling as they did so.

  Though weighed down by the now unnecessary heat cutters, Serostrina kept up with the others, pushing herself until the suit’s temperature and humidity systems were on full and barely doing their job.

  Climbing was a skill that required strength, and the Mersa weren’t much better than an athletic Human. Still, a certain amount of Mersa pride was at stake, and they kept up the grueling pace.

  “750 to go,” encouraged Serostrina as the shaft drifted by on either side of them, reducing to a small black hole above where their lights faded out. It was going to take a while.

  At the top of the shaft Ereth and Sebastian had worked out a plan to use the shaft as a giant column of signal-generating gases.

  “The figures for the size of the column and the speed of the pulse through it look good,” said Sebastian, somewhat surprised, “but we still have the problem of how to generate such a large standing wave.”