She’d been inspired to do it because a little time studying the base’s engineering schematic had showed her that this hatch had to pop out either very close to, or actually in, one of the old wooden Jamesway huts that dotted the outer perimeter of the base. The collection of red shanties, nicknamed the Summer Camp by adventurous Polies who would take over residence in them when the temperature stayed above freezing, had been part of the original base. More than half of the two dozen huts were buried in the snow. The rest, while still standing, had been officially condemned.
Never a group to waste a resource, Shackleton base staff had, over the years, appropriated the ones that remained and made them into impromptu gyms, bars, and lounges. There was even a climbing wall in one of them. Every few years, some desk jockey in Washington heard about the huts and filed orders for them to be torn down to maintain order. Each time, of course, the directive was somehow lost, ignored, or destroyed. Cass was thankful that the order had never been carried out.
She paused in the small closet-like space that housed the ladder and listened one more time, waiting for a scrape of a boot on the ice or laughing banter of two friends daring each other to go deeper into the ice tunnels than they’d ever gone before.
Nothing.
Reaching into a parka pocket, she swapped the handheld flashlight she’d been carrying for a headlamp. With a hood, balaclava, and scarf all competing for space on her head, she had to wrestle the thing to get it in place. Once it was secured, she turned on the light, letting her eyes adjust to the strange red light. All of the headlamps and many of the flashlights had their lenses covered in a red gel to keep from interfering with the sensitive astrophysics sensory equipment in case a worker forgot and stepped outside. While the precaution made sense if you were, indeed, going outside, it was strange to experience the gaudy red illumination in the tunnels underneath the station.
Once her eyes were ready, Cass mounted the first rung, moving carefully both to protect herself and to keep from knocking ice off the rungs and leaving evidence of her passing. The climb was easy enough at first, but at twenty feet, she was sniffling and gasping from the effort; this wasn’t like humping up the steps in the Beer Can.
Between the thickness of her gloves and the ice that rimed the ladder, her hand felt like it barely wrapped around anything solid, which was unnerving enough. But at the halfway point, she spared a peek between her boots at the ice tunnel below. A mistake. The light below seemed no bigger than the size of a plate. Cass closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued moving slowly and deliberately up the twenty-three rungs until the lamp revealed a closed hatch above her.
Resetting her grip on the top rung, she grunted as she one-handed the latch open. Taking another step up, she crouched at the top of the ladder and pressed her back against the stubborn door until it gave an inch, then a foot, then banged all the way open like the attic door of an old house.
She turned her head in semicircles to pan her headlamp over the inside of the Jamesway she’d discovered over the summer and had been covertly visiting ever since. A quick glance showed no one in the hut and nothing out of place, if you could call a jumble of chairs, tables, and random junk nothing.
Cass climbed the rest of the way out of the tube, then wrestled the hatch back down, dropping it into the floor with a dull thump, a sound barely audible over the wind that rattled and hummed like a train was passing outside. It was an unsettling difference from the absolute stillness of the tunnels.
She straightened up and made a more careful inspection of the tiny space, exactly sixteen square feet, reduced to about the distance of her outstretched arms by the junk that had been chucked into the hut over the years.
The hut had probably started out as a temporary shelter for a mining or construction crew, but the NSF had officially stopped using Jamesways in the seventies, which meant generations of Polies had probably commandeered the hut for a thousand different things since. Nosing around like a rat, she’d found broken drill bits, survival blankets, a part of a parachute from the original navy base from the 1950s, and the remains of a dozen eggs that had long since given up the ghost—cracked and frozen but not rotten.
The geek in her had been thrilled to find the curiosities, but she’d been even happier to see the sheer amount of crap in the hut, since she’d had an ulterior motive for poking around.