Andrew was awoken by the sound of the autopilot beeping at him, getting steadily louder and more insistent as he failed to respond. "Attention. We have arrived at our destination. Attention. We have arrived at our destination."
David's face was close beside his, close enough for him to be able to smell the sickly sweet scent of the boy's breath. He could also feel the heat radiating from his red, flushed skin. His fever had intensified. He would need more of the acetaminophen if his small body wasn't to literally cook itself. Or maybe an ice bath. At least he's still alive, Andrew told himself. He couldn't imagine how he'd have reacted if he'd found that the boy had died while he'd been asleep beside him.
James and Jasmine had also survived the night, but Susan had gone. Andrew summoned the strength to climb off David's bed and back to his feet and went off to find her. A wave of dizziness and nausea swept over him. He waited for it to pass, then staggered towards the door.
"Daddy," said Jasmine as he passed her bed. She turned her head to look at him, strands of hair plastered to her face by perspiration. Andrew sat on the edge of her bed, glad to take the weight off his feet even though he'd only taken a couple of steps.
"How do you feel?" he asked. He stroked her hair and felt waves of heat coming off her. She was scarcely in better shape than David.
"I'm sorry, daddy," said the girl, tears appearing in her eyes. "I'm so sorry."
"Jas, I've told you again and again, this isn't your fault. You have to stop blaming yourself." The girl had fallen asleep again, though, or perhaps lost consciousness. Andrew stroked her hair again and went in search of Susan.
She wasn't in the upper level so he climbed down the ladder to the lower level. Getting down was a lot easier than getting up had been, but before he was half way down he suddenly wondered whether he was wise to be descending. He'd barely made it up the ladder the evening before. Now, he was sicker and weaker than he'd been then. Would he be able to return to his children? He would, he told himself. Somehow, he would find the strength. He tried to convince himself of it as he continued to descend.
He found Susan in the kitchen, sorting through the cupboard containing their medical supplies. She looked terrible. Her face was red and inflamed, deepening the lines around her eyes. She was shivering and gasping for breath, leaning against the kitchen table for support. She looked at him with eyes that were sagging and bloodshot. "The children...?"
"Asleep," Andrew replied. He knew what she'd really been asking, but he hadn't been able to say still alive. The phrase carried the implications that that state could change at any time. Asleep was a safe thing to say, though. Sleep was normal.
Susan nodded, correctly recognising the unspoken implications of his reply. "Come get your medication," she said, pointing to the bottle of acetaminophen. "Let's see if we can get your fever down."
"Have you had some?"
"Yes. Have to keep myself as well as possible so I can look after the children."
Andrew took the pill she handed him and swallowed it with a glass of water. "The autopilot says we've arrived at New Philly," he said.
"Yes, I heard it," Susan replied. "Andy, I don't... I don't know how much time the children have. I don't think they've got long." She staggered across to him and fell into his arms. She shook and trembled as he held her. She spoke into his shoulder. "If you go in alone, the time it takes to bring the antibiotics back out here..."
Andrew nodded his agreement. "We all go in together," he said. "If we get a hostile reception, well, we're dead anyway."
"Then we have to be fast," Susan said. "We can't waste any time."
"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.
The ice tunnel was wide enough for the hab-rover, but only just. Andrew imagined the radiator fins on the roof bending and springing back with every glancing contact with the ice above. Every so often the rover lurched to one side or the other as one of the front wheels scraped against the sides of the tunnel. Somehow, though, the vehicle made it through, and then it was passing through the hole in the blast door and down the long, sloping tunnel to the hanger space beyond.
There were five IceRunners visible, docked to airlocks along the circular wall, but four of them were partly disassembled. It looked as though someone had cannibalised them to get the fifth operational. It had a look of neglect about it, though, as if it had been years since it had last moved. Andrew could imagine what the city's inhabitants had thought. They had found nothing on America Terra Borealis to threaten them. If they went further out, they might be discovered by the occupants of other underground cities who might want to punish them for the actions of their ancestors. Best to stay put, therefore. Stay hidden, and hope that they would remain undiscovered by those who might want to do them harm. The thought scared Andrew. The people of New Philadelphia might just let them die, so they couldn't tell the people of New London about them. Andrew would have to convince them that the New Londoners meant them no harm.
He switched the rover to remote control and the city's automatic systems took control of it, turning the vehicle around and reversing it to dock with the nearest available airlock. Behind him, the other two rovers were doing the same thing. "Andy," said Lungelo's rasping voice from the cockpit speaker.
"Lundo," said Andy, relieved and reassured to hear his voice. "How you doing?"
"Still alive," the other man replied. "I think. The way I feel at the moment it's hard to be sure."
"I know how you feel," Andrew replied. "This city still has power, though. That's promising."
"Promising but not conclusive. Geothermal energy lasts a long time. The last man might still have died twenty years ago."
"So let's find out."
Now that they were docked, he had access to the city's communications systems. He opened a channel and began to speak. "Attention New Philadelphia traffic control. This is Andrew Birch from New London." He waited for a reply but there wasn't one. "There are eleven of us in three rovers," Andrew continued. "We are infected with a deadly strain of streptococcus and will die without treatment. We beg for medical assistance. We need antibiotics." Still nothing. "The disease we are carrying is extremely infectious. You must take extreme care not to become infected. We will remain aboard our rovers until you can arrange secure containment for us."
Nothing but silence came from the speaker and Andrew fretted nervously. Was he really going to just sit there while his wife and children died one by one? He decided to try one more time. "New Philadelphia traffic control, this is Andrew Birch from New London. Please reply if there's anyone here still alive."
"So what do we do now?" asked Lungelo when several minutes had gone by and there was still no reply.
"I'm going in," said Andrew. "If there's anyone still alive here, we gave them every chance. I've got a family to save."
"Andy, you can't!" Susan protested, putting a hand on his arm. "The upper levels may be unoccupied but there might still be people living below."
"Hopefully, we won't need to go below," Andrew replied. "The antibiotics we need might be right outside, in the supply storeroom. I'll take a couple of antiseptic grenades with me, set them off when we've found what we need. Anyone from down below who comes up here won't be in any danger."
"You were going to wear a surface suit."
Andrew pointed to a display on the instrument panel. "There's warm air on the other side of the airlock. It's not cold enough to sterilised the outside of the suit so there's no point." He climbed from his seat before his wife could raise another protest and staggered from the cockpit.
He had to pause a couple of times as his head swam and he felt himself close to passing out. His pulse pounded in his ears. He held onto consciousness by sheer force of willpower. He reached the airlock and almost fell against the keypad that would open both doors at once. He staggered in, leaning against the wall to remain on his feet, then lurched through the two doors of the city airlock.
The rover's air was mingling with the air of the city, which prevented him from noticing at first, but as he made his careful way into the reception area the air smelled increasingly stale, as if it had been standing undisturbed for a long time. Andrew was both encouraged and dismayed by this. One the one hand it seemed there wasn't anyone to be infected by the deadly germs he was emitting with every breath, but on the other hand antibiotics had a limited shelf life, even when refrigerated, and if they hadn't been replaced for several years...
He reached the supply storeroom and yanked the door open. The effort caused spots to appear before his eyes and he had to wait a few moments while his vision cleared. Then he lurched in, heading for the area at the back that, in New London, contained the medical supplies. Everything he saw looked old and neglected. Damp had caused mold to grow and labels to peel from boxes and cabinets. Cockroaches and silverfish scuttled across the floor, desperate to escape from the gigantic intruder into their domain. Andrew forced himself to remain hopeful. If the freezers were still cold, the antibiotics they contained might still be potent enough to save his family even if they were years out of date.
Then he passed the final wall of cabinets, saw the freezers and his heart sank in despair. Someone had cleared them out and left their doors open. There was nothing left inside but black mold. Andrew sank to his knees and closed his eyes, tears running down his face. That was it. It was over. There was nothing left to do now but return to the rover and die with his family. First though, he had to rest. Just for a moment...