The voice had no answer to that.
Cass swallowed, wincing at the stiffness in her elbows and knees. In the few minutes it had taken to get herself under control, the cold had seeped through the layers of clothing and into her body. An inactive body provided no heat; she’d begun to freeze without even knowing it.
Newton’s first law is truer in Antarctica than any other place on earth . The voice in her head was back. What is Newton’s first law?
“A body at rest will remain at rest.”
And what happens to a body at rest on the ice, Jennings?
“It dies.”
Do you want to live?
“Yes.”
Then . . .
“Get moving.” She whispered the words, or thought them. Alone, in a dark tunnel half a mile from base, it amounted to the same thing.
She moved.
In a few minutes, she’d progressed through the crawl space and out into the upright tunnel. It was still cramped by any normal standard, but it seemed infinitely larger than the crawl space. With visibility reduced to the length of a pool table, the urge to put out a hand for support was hard to suppress, but the shoring was still the timber and rivet construction here, so she kept her hands tucked close to her sides and shuffled along the icy floor in hesitant steps, fighting the sensation that the walls were creeping inward.
To keep her rising fear in check, she turned her situation into a mechanical problem, examining her predicament like she would a clogged line or a bum engine.
Why had the lights gone out? The bulbs in all of the lamps were the best the industry could offer, guaranteed for a minimum of ten years. Although, in the staggering cold of Antarctica, all bets were off. She and Dwight had routinely laughed at performance guarantees.
But that only meant single bulbs should fail sporadically. The tunnel she was in, roughly straight for a hundred meters or more, was impenetrably dark. Surely it was impossible that every bulb had conked out simultaneously. Which meant that the electrical system had failed.
Yet that was as unlikely as every bulb blowing at the same time. She knew firsthand that the base had been wired for triple redundancy. Three generators were in place in the unlikely event of a cascading electrical failure. If the system was down, then the entire base was in jeopardy, and the chances of that happening precisely while she was in the most remote location on base seemed infinitesimal. Which left only one possibility.
Someone had turned the lights off.
Stating it didn’t surprise her as much as she thought it might. An image of the gash in the sewage pipe, obviously man-made, had been sitting in her head, waiting to be acknowledged. Matched with the almost complete darkness around her, the two realizations completed the problem set with the precision of a geometry solution. Unfortunately, that conclusion wouldn’t just sit there, either. Another possibility tickled her mind, demanding to be examined.
Whoever had smashed the pipe must have done it days, even weeks, ago, for the pressure to have dropped over time. They’d planned that part in advance. But the lights were a different story. Short of planting an explosive or rewiring the system, it was unlikely anyone could shut them off remotely. They would have to have done it manually.
So that person was somewhere in the tunnels with her, right now.
This conclusion did startle her and she stumbled. Her bad ankle took the weight of her misstep and she careened to one side, crying out at the pain that lanced up her foot and into her shin. She threw out a hand to brace herself. Her hand found the icy wall, slipped along the slick surface, and plowed directly into a wooden beam with most of her weight behind it.
With a crack like a gunshot, the timber burst next to her ear, followed instantly by a blizzard of flakes and splinters of wood that showered her like a thousand drops of rain hitting the pavement. Without the protection of the hood, she would’ve been deafened from the noise and probably blinded from the shrapnel. Even with it, slivers of seventy-year-old lumber stippled her parka, her pants, and her boots. The thinnest cover was at her forehead and dozens of tiny painful pinpricks erupted where the splinters pierced the fabric.
Lying supine on the icepack, stunned, motionless, Cass waited for the creaks and groans that would mean the roof was about to collapse. She dropped her head to the ground, relishing the restful moment even while she waited for the final crash that meant she’d become Shackleton’s first known “crushed ice” casualty.