Chapter Twenty-Three

 

For as long as he could, Ryan stood out on the lip of the access tunnel where the door had been sheared away trying to see a way clear of the situation. The companions had been in a lot of hard places, but nothing like the present predicament.

 

"How do you think it happened, Dad?" Dean asked. His teeth chattered from the cold.

 

"You should go on back inside," Ryan said. "You're going to catch your death if you keep standing out here."

 

"I'll go back in when you go back in," Dean said stubbornly.

 

For a moment the boy's refusal to do what he asked touched a raw nerve in Ryan. He felt his jaw twitch and turn hard. Then he made himself remember it was the situation he was mad at, not Dean.

 

The wind was worse in the open, whipping around the huge glacier with the intensity of a possessed thing. Mildred and Krysty had taken shelter inside the tunnel again.

 

Ryan let out a tense breath, watching the long streamer of his gray breath spin away from him. His face felt numb all over, not just the nerve-deadened spots. "I guess we're somewhere up near the Arctic Circle," he told Dean. "Only two places that I read about have glaciers as part of their natural environment."

 

"The Arctic and the Antarctic," Dean said.

 

Ryan nodded at his son. "Guess you learned a lot at Brody's school."

 

"I tried. Lot of learning to do, Dad."

 

"I know. It's something a real man doesn't ever give up on."

 

"Trader teach you that?"

 

"Yeah. Him, and a few other real men I've had the chance to meet over the years." Ryan shifted the conversation back to the glacier. Below the dropoff, three white birds with wingspreads that must have been near ten feet across circled and heeled, riding out the rough winds. Their thin cries echoed back up to Ryan. Now and again one of them would dive below the water and come back up with a fish jumping in its beak.

 

"Back before skydark, when the Americans were up against the Russians, they had a lot of their armament invested in submarines. Russians ran the most and the biggest, according to the books I read, and the Americans kept track of them through satellites up in space and sensors along the ocean floor."

 

"Like some of the comps we saw back in the redoubt?" Dean asked.

 

"Mebbe." Ryan shrugged. "At this point I can only guess. The thing is, one of the most watched areas where the Americans searched for the Russian subs was the Lantic Ocean."

 

"Near here?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"So they put a redoubt here, watching over things. Then what?"

 

"Then skydark," Ryan said. "Earthquakes, tidal waves and lots of cold. The Arctic Circle was mostly ice anyway. When the nuke dust shut out the sun for all those years, mebbe nobody knows how much of the world turned to ice up here. Know for a fact that a lot of England is under water now." He glanced down at the iceberg. "Figures that the redoubt mebbe goes through all of this iceberg, helps hold it together."

 

"Like a skeleton," Dean said.

 

"Yeah. Like a skeleton."

 

"Only it's moving now. And we're moving with it."

 

Ryan nodded. He touched his upper lip with a finger, finding it completely numb.

 

"Mebbe we'll drift in someplace," Dean said hopefully.

 

The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the glaciers in the distance cracked with the sound of a cannon shot. Ryan watched as a huge chunk of the original glacier fell away and dropped into the ocean with a splash that sent a wave of water up dozens of feet.

 

"Don't know if we're going to last that long," Ryan said quietly. "Appears as if we have a time problem."

 

 

 

"IT IS CALLED calving," Doc said. Ryan looked at the old man in disbelief, knowing all the other companions were doing the same thing. Even Albert was regarding Doc as if he were something that had turned up unexpected under a rock.

 

"The process of an iceberg splitting off a smaller iceberg," Doc explained. "It's called calving."

 

"Doesn't matter what it's called," Ryan said. "We can't afford to be here when this one goes."

 

They were all gathered back in the mat-trans unit.

 

"Mebbe the redoubt will be strong enough to hold it together," Albert said. He sat shivering. Of them all, the dwarf had the least amount of body heat to waste, and was ill dressed for the weather.

 

"If those quakes are any indication," J.B. said, "that isn't going to be true."

 

"So what's the plan, lover?" Krysty asked.

 

"We continue mapping out this redoubt," Ryan replied. "Mebbe we get some heat in here, and we'll have a base of operations."

 

"That's going to happen," the Armorer said. He stood at the open face of an environmental-control comp. Jagged ice stood out around it where he had chopped his way through. "With all the damage done to the redoubt, the systems automatically went into conservative mode. Getting the doors closed again allowed me to access the relays. Got a new problem, though."

 

"What?" Mildred asked. "I'm ready to be warm again, John."

 

The Armorer glanced around the room. "Once this ice starts melting, we're going to have water everywhere."

 

"Then we'll clear as much of it as we can," Ryan said.

 

"Found a fire ax over here," J.B. said. "But if you use it, you're going to have to be careful with the comps. Don't know if I can fix the mat-trans unit again, but we don't need to be making things any worse."

 

Ryan took up the fire ax and walked to the corner farthest away from the comps and the gateway. "Start here," he said. "I'll bust ice loose for a while and the rest of you carry it into the next room. We get it clear, I'll expect to feel some of that heat." He swung the ax, and sheets of ice crashed to the floor.

 

 

 

IT TOOK slightly better than two hours to clear the room. Everybody took turns with the fire ax and the hand ax J.B. had in his kit. And everybody carried the ice away.

 

After a little while, Albert joined in, and proved to have a fine and deep singing voice that no one expected.

 

Once the room was clear of ice debris and the floor was scraped, J.B. switched on the environmental-controls override. "Only problem's going to be if the vents and fans are clogged up somewhere down the line," he said.

 

Ryan stood with the others, listening to the machinery gasp and wheeze to life. Somewhere down at the deep end of the duct work, metal beat against a hard, unyielding surface for a while. Then there was an explosion of noise, and the beating sound disappeared.

 

Only a thin trickle of heat came out of the floor vents. It was a lot weaker than Ryan figured the designers had intended, and not nearly as effective as the systems installers planned. Still, it was warm air and it was welcome.

 

They huddled around the main blowing unit against one wall opposite the comp stations. Gradually the room warmed, coming up to a degree of comfortability. The lights also brightened.

 

The main door leading to the access tunnel wasn't quite flush, but J.B. had made it work. However, gusts of cold wind were allowed in.

 

Dean fell asleep with his back to the wall, his hands held out before him to soak up the warm air coming through the vent.

 

Ryan was feeling the fatigue himself. He glanced at J.B. "Situation we're in is pretty bad, but we're not going to get anywhere without sleep."

 

"Been over thirty hours since we got any," J.B. said. "Except for that near coma the jump provided us."

 

Doc stretched and yawned. "If you are suggesting that we get some, my dear Ryan, then I heartily accept the decision."

 

"Me, too," Mildred said.

 

"Should we post a guard?" Krysty asked.

 

Ryan shook his head. "I think we can be pretty certain that we're all that's left alive inside this redoubt. And the sec doors are wedged pretty tight. We should be just fine."

 

He took time to get Dean settled proper, remembering the Trader's words in the jump dream. It made matters worse thinking about his son going down into the ocean when the iceberg fragmented.

 

He joined Krysty, stretching out beside her so they could share the warmth between them. The environmental controls had made a difference, but the room still had a long way to go before it got comfortably heated. Still, they were no longer in danger of freezing to death if they slept.

 

"Something on mind," Jak called from the corner.

 

"What?" Ryan asked.

 

"Warm up redoubt, iceberg melt faster?"

 

"The lad has a point," Doc said.

 

"And we're all out of choices," Ryan answered. And he didn't remember a single thing after that.

 

 

 

"THIS REDOUBT ISN'T as big as a lot of them we've been to," J.B. said. The Armorer sat in the corner, his fedora cocked back on his head while he worked a pencil over a ragged spiral-bound notebook.

 

Ryan blinked sleep out of his eye. "How long you been up?"

 

"Twenty, thirty minutes." J.B. had a fresh bandage on his side where he had been hit by the bullets during the fight back in Hazard. A med-kit had been in the room under all the ice, as well.

 

"Been outside?" Ryan sat up, disentangling himself from Krysty's arms. Her sentient hair lay protectively over her face.

 

"Nope."

 

"Find a map?"

 

"You could call it that." The Armorer kept working on the notebook with his stub of a pencil. "Reread a lot of those electrical blueprints this morning when my head seemed clearer. Was working too late to be sharp yesterday."

 

"A man working with not enough sleep is a man aiming on taking a dirt nap," Ryan said, remembering the Trader's words.

 

"Know it. That's why I gave the blueprints another go this morning. I think I've got a pretty good idea of where everything is and what it might be."

 

Ryan pushed up from the cold floor and joined the Armorer. Even with the heat on, a chill remained in the room. "Tell me."

 

J.B. tapped the drawing as he spoke. "This isn't scale. You're getting my best guess."

 

"It'll do."

 

"You got the room here with the mat-trans in it." The pencil hit the center of the page near the top. "Then you got the shaft you explored yesterday."

 

Ryan knew "yesterday" was a relative term. They had slept, so a "day" had passed by.

 

"The big chem lab's off that," J.B. went on. "Storerooms off the shaft. Mostly stuff for containing the nerve gas in case of an accident."

 

That explained the plastic suits with oxygen tanks Jak had found on some of the corpses frozen in the corridor. But the explosion had come too soon, too unexpectedly for it to be much good.

 

"And that takes you to the entrance you say was torn off," J.B. said. "Going back the other way, things appear to be a bit more hopeful. From what I can decipher, looks to be an armory and galley below, a warehouse-sized storeroom and mebbe what looks like a dock."

 

"A dock? What kind of wags?" Ryan asked.

 

"Not wags," J.B. said. "Paperwork I found let on like it might be boats. Mebbe even a small sub. Won't know until we go look."

 

"Then we'd better get it done. What about the mat-trans?"

 

"Going to have to take it apart," J.B. replied. "Mebbe I'll know more after I do that."

 

"Then you'll stay here," Ryan said. "The rest of us will take a look at the rest of the redoubt."

 

J.B. cleaned his glasses. "Probably going to be cold. Doubt if that heat ventilator is working throughout the whole redoubt."

 

"If we're lucky," Ryan said, "the cold will be the worst of it."

 

 

 

"LIKE WALKING in a tomb down here, lover."

 

Ryan flicked the rechargeable electric hand lantern over the frozen floor ahead of him. Broken chunks of ice littered the corridor and became hazardous to every step. He had fallen himself nearly a half-dozen times, as had Krysty.

 

An arm stuck up from the frozen floor. The thumb and two fingers had snapped off some time in the past. Ryan guessed that falling ice had done the damage, but the owner of the hand was long past caring.

 

Not far from the gateway, the main corridor had branched out in five directions. Ryan had split up the companions to cover ground more quickly. Mildred had gone with Jak and Dean, and Albert kept company with Doc.

 

The first corridor Ryan had chosen to explore had ended abruptly. The iceberg had swelled sometime in the past, probably battling against the interior heat of the redoubt before the environmental systems went into hibernation, then refrozen as the nuclear winter settled in. The second freezing had broken through the corridor and closed it down. The signs on the hallway leading to it mentioned only that barracks had been in that direction.

 

Ryan hoped it was so. That left the dock and the warehouse open to scavenging.

 

The iceberg quivered again, getting set for another big quake. Ryan had learned to recognize the signs. Krysty pressed up against the wall and hunkered down. Ryan followed suit, protecting his head with his arms. This time the quake lasted for nearly three minutes by his chron before subsiding. And that was followed immediately by the vertigo and disorientation Doc attributed to the iceberg redefining its position in the water.

 

The old man had let them know that somewhere in the vicinity of nine-tenths of an iceberg was beneath the water surface at all times. But when it calved, sometimes the biggest portion came from the bottom, depending on the fissures the melting ice followed. When it did, the remaining mother iceberg shrank lower into the sea.

 

And that, Doc had went on to say, wasn't taking into account all the extra tonnage of the redoubt carried in the bowels of the particular iceberg they were floating on. Even more of it might be below the ocean level, which would create a tendency for the calving process to take place even more below the surface.

 

They were working on borrowed time.

 

It would have been better had the mat-trans unit not been functioning so their jump would have kicked them onto the next station.

 

When the quake finally subsided and the iceberg had renegotiated its equilibrium in the ocean to wipe away most of the feelings of vertigo, Ryan stood. He shone the electric glow of the hand lantern down the corridor, looking over the accumulation of new ice pieces.

 

"One of the worst," Krysty commented.

 

"I know. But mebbe it did some good. Look." Ryan played the lantern over the sign painted on the green wall in flat black paint Docking Area.

 

The words gave Ryan a flash of hope that he nurtured in spite of their grim surroundings. He followed the arrows, ignoring the other listings of med facility, security office and filing rooms.

 

 

 

RYAN PLAYED the lantern's light over the elevator doors at the end of the corridor they were following. They were shut tight, which offered some hope, and the level-indicator lights flickered across the top, even more hopeful.

 

"Elevator's right where J.B. said it would be," Krysty said. The Armorer hadn't had the precise measurements, but he'd let them know how the corridor would shake out.

 

"If we get lucky," Ryan growled, "it'll still work." He stepped over to the control panel and put his palm over the activation plate. He unconsciously held his breath for a moment, wondering if the lingering comp systems were going to reject him because his palm print wasn't in its data banks. Some of the plates were programmed to react like that. Still others were boobied in some fashion.

 

But it pulsed amber, then turned green.

 

The elevator doors squealed as the servos surged into motion for probably the first time in a hundred years. When they settled back into their respective housings, no elevator cage was in view.

 

A harsh grinding continued.

 

Ryan watched vibrations of the huge tractor belt responsible for bringing the cage up as the pulling engine tried to raise it. With a harsh snap, it broke in two. The broken end whipped through the drum at the top, then fell back down into the elevator shaft.

 

Leaning in through the doors cautiously, Ryan directed the lantern down. The white beam knifed down through the darkness but didn't touch bottom.

 

"The cage didn't try to come up at all," Krysty said.

 

Ryan nodded. "Can't see the bottom."

 

"J.B. said it would probably be down there a ways."

 

Ryan shone his light around the room, then spotted a door marked Stairs. Ice sealed the door, but it wasn't as thick as some of the places they had been. He led the way through the door and started down the stairwell. He counted the landings as they went down, spiraling around and around. With the constant circuitous motion, he felt more vertigo than normal.

 

"You can feel the iceberg floating down here," Krysty said.

 

Ryan nodded, understanding what was upsetting his stomach. The motion of going down the stairs, coupled with the iceberg's natural buoyancy, was too much. It didn't last much longer, though.

 

Fourteen floors down, counting two landings per floor, they came to an end of it. Not the stairway shaft, but of how far they could go.

 

Ryan played his lantern beam over the black water sloshing across the stairway shaft. He had no way of knowing how much farther it went down. The fact remained that they couldn't.

 

"The water level inside the redoubt must be rising, lover," Krysty said in a low voice. "Otherwise all that water would be frozen."

 

"Or," Ryan replied, "it could be a degree or two just above freezing, just enough to start the iceberg melting a little faster."

 

Either way, it wasn't good.