Alarms blared as the rover fell. Andrew and Cheval were thrown forward in their seats as the rover tipped forward, then they were momentarily weightless as a wall of ice rose before them outside the cockpit window. Then they hit something. The downward motion was momentarily halted and Andrew's chin hit the instrument panel making his teeth bite down hard on his tongue. He heard Cheval give a cry of pain as the base of his spine came down on the edge of his seat.
Then the rover was falling again as the floor of the ancient building gave way under them and they fell another level. Darkness surrounded them as they became momentarily weightless again and Andrew braced himself for another impact. He was vaguely aware of red warning lights appearing all across the instrument panel as the vehicle suffered damage in various places.
The second impact threw him hard onto the floor of the rover between the chair and the instrument panel. A moment later Cheval fell on him and their heads knocked together with an impact that almost stunned them both. The rover tipped this way and that as if it were balanced on something, undecided which way it was going to fall. Then it fell forward again, shuddering as its front wheels came to rest on something hard. The two men braced themselves anxiously as they waited to see if the rover would drop further, but it seemed to be stable for the time being and they cautiously picked themselves up off the floor.
Andrew's tongue hurt him and he stuck a finger in his mouth. It came out stained with blood. He swallowed repeatedly, tasting more blood. His vision swam as his brain tried to decide whether or not he would pass out. He made himself remain conscious with an act of will.
The alarms were still blaring. He forced his eyes to focus so he could see the instrument panel and find the control to turn them off. Beside him, he saw Cheval gently fingering his face, feeling for broken bones. "Is that it?" the Sergeant asked. "Are we at the bottom?"
"Don't know," Andrew managed to say. The rover was angled sharply forward so that the floor rose behind them. He cast his eyes across the window and was relieved to see that none of its three layers were cracked. They wouldn't have to worry about breathing vacuum if it suddenly gave way. He froze, straining every sense to try to feel if the rover was still moving. Was there another floor of the building under them, getting ready to give way? Could any slightest movement cause them to drop again, maybe causing them further damage?
The door flew open to reveal Windsor looking battered and half stunned and with a cut on his forehead that he was pressing a rag to. He had one foot raised as if it was hurting. "What happened?" he asked. It was a rhetorical question. It was obvious what had happened.
"How bad is it back there?" asked Cheval.
"Didn't have much chance to look. You've probably got a better idea here." He waved a hand at the status panel with its kaleidoscope of red, yellow and green lights.
Andrew turned to look at it. Some of the red lights were already turning to yellow of their own accord as automatic systems went to work, re-routing damaged lines and bypassing compromised valves and conduits. Most of the rover's systems were designed to be easily accessible for field repairs, but some of the red lights indicated damage to the vehicle's chassis. Damage that could only be repaired in a city garage. Andrew felt a sick feeling rising in his stomach. This rover was his family's home. They'd put everything into it. The city would help him with the repairs if it was damaged while on city business, of course. They'd even replace it if it was unsalvageable, but that wasn't the point. He'd spent five years working on it. Performing minor repairs, carrying out minor improvements. It felt as though he'd put part of his soul into it. A part that would be lost forever if it had to be replaced.
He got a grip on himself. He was still alive, and there was no telling how bad the damage to the rover was yet. If they could get it back to the surface they might be able to simply drive away. Only one way to find out. "I'm going to check the service level," he said. "One of you needs to go outside and take a look at the wheels and the hull."
"I'll get suited up," said Cheval. He turned to Windsor. "You okay?"
"My ankle," said Windsor, looking down at it. "Twisted or broken, not sure which. And this." He showed him the bloodstained rag. "And just as I was recovering from my last head wound. At this rate I'll have suffered major brain damage by the time this is all over."
"Tie a bandage around it. Can your foot wait a little while?"
"Yeah, I think so."
"Okay. You rest for a bit. Me and Birch'll check things out."
Windsor nodded and moved back against the side of the corridor as the other two men squeezed their way past him.
☆☆☆
Andrew went to the living room, where he rolled up the rug that covered the floor and lifted up the hatch that had been hidden underneath.
The strong smell of ozone wafted up as he lowered himself down into the darkness. The service level of the rover was almost entirely filled with machinery with very little room for a man to squeeze between it all. The ceiling was also low, so that Andrew had to stoop to move around. Lights came on automatically as his feet touched the bare metal floor.
The first thing he did was pick up the geiger counter sitting on a shelf beside the hatch. An alarm was supposed to sound in the cockpit in the event of a radiation leak, but any accident that damaged the atomic generator might also damage the radiation sensors so Andrew had made sure to have an independent way of making sure that it was safe to be down there.
To his relief the geiger counter showed only the normal background radiation, so he turned it off and put it back on its shelf. Then he took a real look around. To his relief he saw that his biggest worry was unfounded. None of the thirty centimetre H-girders that gave the rover most of its structural strength were bent. If they had been, that would have been a fatal injury that would have left the rover fit for nothing but being scrapped for parts. A quick inspection showed that none of the joins, where horizontal H-girders were joined to vertical ones by massive nuts and bolts, had been compromised either. Structurally, the main body of the rover was still sound. He continued his inspection, therefore.
The floor had been dented upwards in several places. That probably meant that the outer hull had been penetrated in places and the insulation torn away. That wouldn't normally be a problem as the vacuum that normally surrounded the rover was the best insulator of all, but Andrew thought it very likely that there was compacted ice beneath them, in direct contact with the inner hull. It was definitely cold down there, which pretty much confirmed his suspicions. He had to find the places where the rover was losing heat and warm them.
There was a pair of thermal goggles beside the geiger counter. He put them on and looked around. All the machinery in the service deck was raised up on thick rubber pillars, giving him an unobstructed view of the floor, and he saw that some of the dents were definitely cold, and getting colder even as he watched.
There was a cabinet standing against the wall. He opened it and took out a heat pad which he plugged into a wall socket by means of a long cable. Then he walked across the room, squeezing between the warm radiator fins of the atomic generator and the massive, humming bulk of the primary transformer, stepping across the bundle of fat cables that connected them. Then he placed the pad, which was already growing warm in his hand, in the middle of the cold spot on the floor. His thermal goggles showed a patch of less intense cold spreading out from the pad. It was only a temporary fix until the ice touching the hull could be cleared away and a layer of insulating foam applied, but it would, hopefully, keep the machinery from suffering cold damage. The rubber pillars that supported everything were particularly vulnerable, since below a certain temperature they became brittle and liable to shatter with the slightest movement.
He placed more pads on the other cold spots and was relieved to feel the air growing warmer on his hands and face. That done, he then looked at the machinery itself. All power in the rover was carried by electricity in thick, flexible cables. There were no shafts or axles that might become bent or broken in an accident. No moving parts at all, in fact. Also, the rubber pillars carried every item of machinery separately and allowed them to move to a certain extent relative to each other. The result was that the machinery seemed to have come through the ordeal intact. They wouldn't know until they tried to use it, of course, but as far as he could tell everything was in good working order.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he climbed back up out of the service level and closed the hatch. Then he put the rug back over it and made his way to the outfitting room to put on a surface suit.
☆☆☆
The angle at which the rover was lying on the mound of ice below meant that there was a three metre drop from the outer airlock door to the ground. Cheval had lowered the ladder, which stopped a metre short of the icy ground, and simply dropped, trusting in the cleats of his boots to keep him from slipping over. Tensing himself up, Andrew did the same.
Each of the rover's six wheels was on the end of a spring loaded leg that allowed it to rise and fall as they drove across uneven terrain, and the first thing Andrew noticed was that one of the legs was broken. The wheel, which contained the motor that turned it, was lying a short distance away, still connected to the rover by a thick bundle of power, control and data cables. Andrew swore under his breath and went to get a closer look.
"Looks like a clean break," said Cheval, who was standing there looking at it. "If we break out the lifting gear we should be able to lift the wheel back into place. Then we drill some holes and bolt a steel beam across the break. I assume you have some steel beams in the spare parts cabinet."
"My family normally lives aboard this rover," Andrew reminded him. "You assume correctly."
Cheval nodded. "Apart from some dents and scrapes, there doesn't seek to be any more serious damage. All the wheels have bent and missing cleats but I think there are still enough to get a good purchase on the ice. What's it like inside?"
"Buckled and bent, but nothing fatal, I think. I've put some heat pads in the service room. We need to clear the ice away."
"The ice is supporting the rover, and by holding the rear end clear of the ground it's actually making it easier to fix the leg. When it's fixed we can simply drive off the ice."
"Drive where?" said Andrew, looking around the chamber that now contained the rover. It was almost completely dark. The only light came from the torches on their helmets. They were at least six metres below the surface of the ice and surrounded by vertical walls on all sides.
"This is a large building," Cheval replied. "There are other rooms adjacent to this one. We can demolish the dividing walls and create a ramp back up to ground level. Along with the repairs, we should be back on our way within ten hours." He glanced around at the gloom surrounding them. "Let's get some lights set up so we can get a good look around."
The rover's headlights and the spotlight on its turreted mount we're all mounted on the front of the rover. To see in other directions they had to mount portable lights on poles around the vehicle, which Windsor helped them with when he'd finished tending to his head injury. The lights revealed that the room the rover had fallen into was the size of a tennis court and divided into smaller areas by walls of shelves. "A library," said Andrew. "We fell into a library."
"So where are all the books?" asked Windsor, hobbling over to join them.
"I'm guessing someone burned them all," said Cheval. "To keep warm. Let's see what's through that door."
He carefully climbed down the side of the mound of ice that had come down through the ceiling with them and picked his way across the floor towards the door in the wall towards which the rover was facing. The door was held solidly in place by a thirty centimetre layer of water ice on the floor. The Sergeant had to kick the door to splinters to get through. He ducked his head under the low lintel and stepped into the next room, followed by the others.
Their head torches cast small circles of light in the perfect blackness as they looked this way and that. There was a fireplace in the opposite wall containing a large pile of ash. The remains of the missing books, they assumed. A much larger pile of ash lay in a pile to the right. Andrew assumed that it must have still been hot as someone had shovelled it out of the fireplace to make room for more books. Andrew felt immense feelings threatening to overwhelm him as he imagined similar scenes being enacted millions of times across the world as the planet drifted ever further from the sun. One of these poor wretches would have been the last surviving human outside the underground cities, and they wouldn't have known it.
So where was the man who'd warmed himself by this fire? The room was empty. No. There was a high backed chair with a bundle of rags sitting on it. Lifting one of the blankets, Cheval found a shockingly thin mummified corpse inside, its eyes closed as if, at the last extremity of starvation, it had simply gone to sleep. Andrew tried not to look at it and went to another door that led into yet another room.
The sight revealed by his head torch was so shocking that, for a moment, his brain refused to process what he was seeing. There was a pile of bones in the middle of the room. Human bones. Beside it was a collection of knives and meat cleavers while by the side of the room was a copper bowl stained with dried blood and draped with scraps of dried flesh that Andrew guessed had once been entrails. On the other side of the room was a pile of discarded clothes, some of which had belonged to children.
A hand shook his shoulder and he came to himself with a sudden start, realising that he'd been staring at the awful sight as if hypnotised. "Come on," said Cheval gently. "Let's get back to the rover. We'll plant some explosives and blow this whole place to hell."
"I never realised," said Andrew. He was trembling, he discovered. "I knew intellectually. I knew what it must have been like for the people left on the surface, but to actually see it..."
"Don't think about it," the Sergeant advised as he turned the other man and led him back to the doorway.
It was impossible not to, though. "Do you suppose they drew lots?" he said. "To decide which of them they would eat next. They must have had a leader, someone with charm and charisma. Or maybe someone just bigger and stronger than the others. I wonder if he somehow rigged the draw so that he would always survive. Maybe he had a couple of strong henchmen who helped keep the others in line. They would have been his last victims, and they probably knew they would be. I wonder if they fought at the end to see which one would eat the others."
Cheval let him babble on, knowing it would be futile to try to stop him. When they were back in the room with the fireplace, though, Andrew saw the corpse again and flew into a rage. He ran across, tore the rags away from its head and smashed his fist into it, making it shatter into a glittering cloud of frozen skin and bone. He pounded it again and again, pulverised the corpse. Uncaring of the damage he was doing to his gauntlets until Cheval and Windsor pulled him back, away from the sagging chair. "Cannibal!" sobbed Andrew, his whole body shaking with fury. "They turned to cannibalism!"
"Of course they did," said Windsor gently. "We always knew they must have. There were probably battles of a violence and brutality we can't imagine as they fought over the last scraps of food. If the cities weren't covered by ice we'd probably see corpses lying in the streets, buildings reduced to hollow shells by tanks and gunfire. The ice is a mercy, hiding it all from sight." He drew a long, shuddering breath. "No wonder they fought so hard to get into the underground cities. No wonder so many were overrun, even though they were supposed to be impregnable. What force could possibly withstand millions of people desperate to give their families a chance for life?"
"Only one force," Cheval replied. "Thousands of people, armed with the lost lethal instruments of death ever created. Left outside the city but with frozen, fertilised eggs inside the city. People who had been promised that, if the city survived, future generations of women would be implanted with those eggs and they would have children born to surrogate mothers. Children like your David. They knew they were going to die. They knew they wouldn't be allowed inside the city no matter what, but that they might still have descendants one day if they could hold the howling mobs at bay, by any means necessary."
"Can we please not talk about it?" said Andrew desperately. "Let's just get the rover fixed and get out of this awful place as fast as we possibly can."
Cheval nodded, and so they hurried back to the rover, all of them suddenly filled with a powerful new sense of urgency.