Chapter 17 Collapse

The first hour was the coldest and the most frightening, and Delyth spent it deciding whether to live. That was the honest shape of it. A person in the water in a drowned station does not have a plan; a person has a temperature, and the temperature decides for her, and Delyth felt hers fall the way a barometer falls, one tick at a time, while she moved along the upper conduit looking for a wall that was still whole. The flood was up to her chest in the low parts and over her head in the deep parts, and every part of the station that had opened to the pump before was now open to the pump twice, a hard current hauling at her legs as it found the next room to fill. She made it to the habitat ring by following the ceiling, hand over hand along a cable tray, and in the habitat ring the water was shallower because the ring was higher, and there was a bunk above the waterline and a locker above that, and she hauled herself out of the flood and lay on the bunk in the dark and let herself shake. The shaking was the worst of it and she made herself watch it, the way she watched a needle that had gone off scale. Her hands had stopped obeying her cleanly, and her breath came in short, shallow pulls that the suit's scrubber logged as panic and metered, and the cold had moved past her skin and into the place where decisions lived. She knew the shape of it from training and never from life: hypothermia does not announce itself, it just makes everything else seem like a reasonable thing to stop doing, and a person sitting on a bunk at four degrees above freezing will begin, quite peacefully, to plan a rest. The station had a heartbeat now, or something like one. Every few minutes a low thud moved through it, the pump down its long line, and after each thud the water in the ring rose by a finger's width. The fill was not going to stop for her. The fill was going to finish, and when it finished, the cavity would be a solid block of ice with her inside it, and the only thing anyone would ever know was that a surveyor had gone out in a storm and not come back and that the ground had closed over her and that the ground closes sometimes and there was nothing anyone could have done. She lay on the bunk and looked at the six names on the wall above her, scratched with a screwdriver forty-one years ago, and she thought about the fact that she had come down here to keep them from being buried twice, and that she was now going to be buried with them, and that there was a kind of justice in the arithmetic of that if you were the kind of person who found justice in arithmetic, which she had been, until tonight. Then she stopped lying on the bunk. That was the whole of it, the entire hinge of the night, and she would never be able to explain it to anyone, because there is no instrument that measures the moment a person decides to keep being a person. She sat up. She swung her legs off the bunk and put her boots back into the water, and the cold came up through them like a hand closing, and she stood, and she made her body remember that it had a job. A station does not forget its own exits. That was the first rule of her trade. A station is built by people who are afraid, and afraid people build two ways out, and the second way out is always in the deepest and least convenient part of the building, because that is where the people who build second exits imagine they will be when they need one. She had walked the corridor and read the tanks and the bunks and the records room, and she had not yet read the one document that mattered, and it was not a document at all. It was the plan of the building, and the plan of the building was written in the building. She got off the bunk and waded back into the cold water and followed the ring past the records room to the end of the corridor, where the wall curved and a low, dark opening had been there all along and she had taken it for a collapsed bulkhead. It was not a bulkhead. It was a stair. The emergency shaft rose out of the top of the station, sealed at the surface by a welded plate the first survey had noted and the first survey had struck out. It had a ladder of rusted rungs bolted to iron, and a landing, and above the landing a wheel-lock hatch, and on the hatch a plate with four characters that still, under her failing lamp, read EXIT. Delyth stood at the foot of the ladder and laughed once, out loud, in the dark, the way a person laughs when the ground has finally told her the truth. She left the module and the sheets on the landing, above the water, and climbed the ladder far enough to test the hatch, and the wheel would not turn, because it had been welded from the other side forty-one years ago by somebody whose job was to make sure this station never came back up. She would need a tool. She had a sample pry and her gloves and her own weight, and she had, on the landing below her, the entire remaining charge of her lamp and about four hours of heat in her suit, and somewhere above her through the sealed hatch there was a storm and a basin and a friend who might still be alive. She climbed back down, took the heaviest tool she had, and went back up the ladder to spend the last of her strength on the one door in this whole buried world that had been built to open. The wheel was rusted into its seat and the weld was ugly and old, and she worked it the way she worked a stuck valve, in small bites, by feel and not by force. She braced her boots on the rung below and pulled, and the rust gave a little, and she reset her grip and pulled again, and the water climbed the shaft behind her and lapped at the rung she was standing on and then the one below it, and she kept working, because a surveyor does not stop in the middle of a measurement and the door was a measurement now, and the answer was either open or closed. The water followed her up the shaft, centimeter by centimeter, patient as the fill, and it did not care how hard she worked. ---