“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.