Jerry.
Sitting in a square niche was the crude bust of a man, his mouth open in a frozen scream. It was made both more horrible and more comical by the fact that—while the eyes were clearly flange gaskets, and the mouth was the end of a vacuum hose—the entire sculpture was made of something . . . brown. Cass had heard theories that it was old cheese, or snow mixed with axle grease, or even leftovers from the latrine, but since almost nothing smelled down here and no one had had the brass to . . . well, taste Jerry, the composition of one of the station’s most famous shrines remained a mystery. He was worth a laugh in the light once you knew about him, but of course no one warned the fingies, and the screams of first-time fuel techs rounding the corner were sometimes heard as far away as Shackleton’s galley.
The tunnels went on for hundreds of yards, peeling off from the main artery at various points toward old storage rooms, sewer bulbs, and dead ends. The tunnel was perfectly, almost eerily, rectangular, with only slight deviations and scallop-shaped patterns on the surface of the ice to show where the hydraulic tunneler—built specifically for the purpose—had shaved and carved out the shaft more than twenty years before. A very few tunnels, rough-hewn and rounded at the top like the entrance to a medieval chapel, were handmade, and sure as shit not on any station schematic.
She’d heard various reasons for the tunnels during her time at Shackleton. Some people had heard they were originally meant to be year-round pedestrian walkways between labs, living quarters, and maintenance hangars, but that funding dried up before they could be built. Others were sure that the tunnels had been—and still were—meant to connect to military facilities that none of them knew about. It was typical tinfoil-hat bunk, but she’d been in the tunnels when odd noises came to her from hundreds of feet ahead, or boot tracks that she’d never seen before disappeared after heading down one of the branches.
Cass knew that the primary reason for the tunnels, the one that disappointed everyone when they heard it, was simple: they harbored the sewage, fuel, and electrical lines for the station. All of it needed to be protected from the punishing environment and as a result, the main tunnel went on for nearly a half mile under the ice, with a dozen or more tangents branching off to carry the necessary resources to, or away from, every corner of Shackleton. Access hatches with ladders leading to the stub-ups on the surface had been built every five hundred yards as a safety measure, but the reality was that the doors and latches in most of them had frozen years ago and even those that might work were probably buried in drifts on the surface. That left the tunnels as the best way to access the more mundane needs of the station.
Of course, it was foolish to think you could keep smart, adventurous—and most of all, bored—people from doing crazy things in a place as strange as an ice tunnel. She’d heard of one attempt to start an ice bar and at least three attempts to sleep overnight in ice niches until the campers found they couldn’t feel their toes after the first hour. There were the truly creepy and hidden utilidor tunnels, left over from the original 1950s station that had been abandoned and snowed in decades before. “Spelunking” had, in fact, been a popular Shackleton pastime until someone had slipped and broken an arm in a freak accident, and now the old tunnels were off-limits. Naturally, that just meant people were more careful to not get caught.
About halfway down the long, long tunnel was the one bit of civilized relief: the warming hut, a small cube cut out of the ice and lined with insulation. There was room enough for about three people to stand over an electric heater that was kept bolted to the center of the floor.
But her destination was far short of the halfway point. Not far past Jerry was a metal ladder leading to an emergency hatch. Iced over, uninviting, and seemingly impassable. While the bottom ten rungs were, in fact, solid ice, she happened to know it was not iced over on the remaining five rungs, nor was the hatch itself sealed by ice. She knew that because one night, several months ago, she’d dragged an acetylene torch and a portable tank to this very spot and spent two hours carving out the topmost handrails and melting the access hatch open.