第16章 Whiteout

The water in the station was not water the way the colony knew water. It was a slurry of melt and ice crystals and fine regolith dust, graded by the pump the way a river grades its bed, and it was two degrees above freezing and it took the heat out of a person's hands almost immediately. Delyth went in along the upper conduit where the flood was shallowest, holding her lamp above her head and her breath shallow in her helmet, and the cold came through her suit at the seams and settled into her bones like a debt. The station was still there under the water. The nameplate, the corridor, the cut-open tanks, all of it going under one centimeter at a time, and she swam and waded and crawled along the conduit until she reached the corridor where she had left the cache, and there she found the locker still above the waterline, still sealed, still holding a five-kilogram data core and a sheaf of survey sheets that had been drawn by people who were now a line on a memorial wall. The water was honest about one thing, at least. It was cold in a way that did not pretend, and it rose at a rate she could measure, and she measured it as she went, because measuring was the only thing that kept her from thinking about the ceiling. A hand's width since she entered. Two. The conduit was graded just enough that the level climbed more slowly than the flood behind her, and she counted that as a kindness and used it, keeping her head low and her lamp high and her free hand on the cable tray, which ran the length of the corridor like a rail and was the only thing in the dark that went anywhere useful. She got the locker open with cold, clumsy fingers and clipped the module to her harness and folded the sheets flat inside her jacket, and then she turned to swim back and saw what she had not seen on the way in, because she had been looking at the water and not at the wall. The wall was coming apart. Not the station wall. The rock behind it, the wall of the cavity itself, which had stood for a time no one had measured and had never needed to be strong, because nothing had ever pushed on it. Now something was pushing on it. The fill was not a river finding its level; it was a mass being forced into a closed space at pressure, and pressure does not care what it breaks, and Delyth watched a seam open in the rock above the corridor and a thin, hard jet of ice-slurry spray out of it and hit the far wall like a cutting tool. The cavity was failing under the weight of the water the company was pumping into it, and Delyth was standing inside the thing that was failing, and above her, at the top of the cable, the casing head of the hole she had come down was sitting on ground that had already dropped half a meter in a place she could not see. "Wim." She was already moving. "Wim, get off the head. Get back from the hole." Silence. Then, thin and wrong: "The head's moving. The whole casing is tilting. I'm going to lose the drum." "Let it go. Get clear. That's an order." "It's the only way down to you." "I know." She hauled herself along the conduit with the module dragging at her harness. "Get clear, Wim. Now." The radio gave a long, tearing hiss, and then a sound like a door slamming somewhere enormous, and then Wim's voice came back high and fast and torn. "It's going. The ground's going. The casing's down, the whole head's down, I'm—" and the channel dissolved into static, and above her, through forty meters of rock, Delyth felt the borehole close. She felt it more than heard it, a pressure change and a long low grind that came down the shaft and into the water and up through her ribs, and then a silence that was different from the silence before it. The cable that had hung beside her since she entered went slack, and slack meant down, and down meant the drum was gone, and the drum gone meant the surface was no longer attached to her in any way a person could climb. She looked up at the black column where the light used to come from, and the black column was just black, and she understood that whatever happened from here she would have to do inside the ground. She stopped moving and hung in the black water and listened. The station creaked around her. The rock above her let go of a long, slow groan and something heavy slid past on the far side of a wall. Somewhere very far above, a storm she could no longer hear was pressing down on a hole that no longer existed, and she was alone in a drowned building under a basin that was going to seal itself around her by morning. She checked her lamp. Half a charge. She checked her suit. Intact, cold, holding. She checked the module clipped to her harness and the sheets inside her jacket, and both were there, and both were the reason she had come, and neither of them was worth anything to a dead surveyor in a flooded room. "Wim," she said into the static, because a partner who cannot answer is still a partner. "If you can hear this, I'm alive and I'm underground, and I'm going to find my way out, and you are going to be standing there when I do." The static did not answer. The water did, rising past her ribs, and somewhere above her, muffled by rock and slurry and forty meters of closing ground, she heard a dull, rhythmic thud that did not belong to the storm. She stood in the water and took stock the way she had been taught to take stock on a bad traverse, one item at a time, in a fixed order, because panic is mostly a failure of order. Air: her suit held, her scrubber was good for four hours, and four hours was a long time in a place that was filling at a hand's width a minute. Light: half a charge, maybe ninety minutes if she stopped using it, and she could not stop using it because the dark in here was total and total dark was the same as being lost. Route: gone, the bore closed, the cable buried, the way she had come in sealed by the ground itself. And below all of it, under the arithmetic, a smaller and steadier thought, which was that she had walked into this room to keep six names from being buried twice and that the ground had apparently decided to take her word for it. It was the pump, still running on its schedule, still pushing water into a hole with a person at the bottom of it. ---