The Winter Over(38)

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.