Runaway World

Death's Door

     "So let's go," Andrew replied, and he led the way to the cockpit.

     There was no reply from either of the other rovers when Andrew tried to contact them, but when his rover drove forward the others followed, their autopilots responding automatically. Neither Andrew nor Susan questioned the strange silence. There were parents with loved ones aboard both rovers. They had better things to do than indulge in idle chatter, assuming they were still conscious.

     Andrew had to struggle to stay awake as the rover bumped its way across the uneven terrain. Beside him, Susan closed her eyes, probably intending for it to be just for a moment, but her eyes remained closed and as the rover trundled on her head began to loll in a way that told Andrew that she was asleep. Andrew seized on the word asleep. It was a better word than unconscious, or comatose. Susan was just asleep, he told himself, but I have to stay awake if there's to be any hope for any of us.

     He told the rover to start transmitting the warning message. The message he'd recorded shortly after leaving the habitat. "Warning," his voice said, coming from the cockpit speakers. "These vehicles are contaminated with a deadly streptococcus bacterium. You must take every precaution to avoid becoming infected. If this disease gets loose in your city, it could kill the entire population. We are infected and will die without antibiotics. We come to you begging your help. We need antibiotics to save our lives. Please help us. Message repeats..." Andrew listened to the message just long enough to be sure that it was being transmitted, then turned the speakers off.

     Ahead of him he began to see rover tracks. Narrower than those made by a hab-rover. IceRunner tracks. The rover began following them. They crested a ridge, and as they descended the other side Andrew got his first glimpse of New Philadelphia.

     Like New London, the entrance to New Philadelphia was a massive blast door, or at least it had been. Most of it was still buried under the ice, but the part of it that Andrew could see was a blasted ruin. During the seige, two hundred years before, some kind of massive bunker busting weapon had struck it. The kind of weapon that only governments were supposed to possess. The besieging mob had had such a weapon because a large part of the army that was supposed to be defending the city had joined them. Fighting the army units that had remained loyal, wiping them out and then turning their firepower on the city they were supposed to be protecting.

      Andrew knew he should despise the mutineers, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do so. They'd been desperate people with families to protect. Wives and children whose only chance for survival lay on the other side of that blast door. If he'd been there, Andrew found that he couldn't quite be sure that he wouldn't have been among them. After all, wasn't he himself putting the inhabitants of that city at risk just by being there? The moral thing to do, he knew, would have been to quarantine themselves. Remain in the habitat to die while leaving warning messages for anyone who might happen by one day. He couldn't do that, though. He had to do whatever he could to save his family, and that made him a spiritual brother to the mutineers who had breached the city. Somehow, he would have to find a way to live with that knowledge.

     The occupants of New Philadelphia had presumably emerged at the same time as the people of New London, when the atmosphere had finished freezing out onto the surface. They'd cleared the ice filling the upper levels, widened the hole in the blast door made by the bunker buster, and then dug a tunnel up to the surface. Overlapping rover tracks ran along the base of that tunnel, but not that many of them. Andrew estimated that only a dozen or so trips had been made from the city. Maybe they'd only had a single working IceRunner and had just wanted to get an idea of what the world had become in the centuries they'd been trapped underground.