Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [145]
‘Do it,’ Cameron said.
Trent typed a message, then did a quick cut-and-paste. When he was finished he practically slammed his finger down on the ‘SEND’ button.
Libby Gant stood in front of the heavy steel door set into the small ice tunnel.
It had a rusty pressure-wheel attached to it. With some difficulty, Gant turned it. She rotated it three times.
And then suddenly, Gant heard a loud clunking noise from within the great steel door, and the door creaked opened a fraction.
Gant pulled the door wide and shone her flashlight beyond it.
‘Whoa,’ she said.
It looked like an aeroplane hangar. It was so big, Gant’s flashlight wasn’t even strong enough to see the far end. But she could see enough.
She could see walls.
Man-made walls.
Steel walls, with heavy reinforcing girders holding up a high aluminium ceiling. Huge yellow robotic arms stood silently in the gloom, covered in frost. Halogen lights lined the ceiling. Some metal girders lay at awkward angles on the floor in front of her. Gant saw that several of them had jagged marks at their ends – they had been broken clean in two. Everything was covered in a layer of ice.
Gant saw a piece of paper at her feet. She picked it up. It was frozen solid, but she could still read the letterhead. It read:
ENTERTECH LTD.
Gant walked back to the small tunnel that led to the main cavern. She called to Montana and Hensleigh.
A few minutes later, Montana rolled through the horizontal fissure and walked with Gant into the giant subterranean hangar.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ he said.
They entered the hangar, their flashlights creating beams of light. Montana went left. Gant went right.
Gant came to an office-type structure which seemed to be overgrown with ice. The door to the office opened with a loud creak, and slowly, very slowly, Gant stepped inside.
A body was lying on the floor of the office.
A man.
His eyes were closed, and he was naked. His skin had turned blue. He looked like he was asleep.
Gant saw a desk on the far side of the office, saw something on it. Moving toward the desk, she saw that it was a book of some kind, a leatherbound book.
It just sat there on the desk all by itself. The rest of the desk was bare. It was almost, Gant thought, as if someone had left it there deliberately, so that it would be the first thing a visitor found.
Gant picked up the book. It was covered in a layer of frost and the pages were hard, like cardboard.
Gant opened it.
It appeared to be a diary of some sort.
Gant read an entry near the beginning:
2 June, 1978
Things are going well. But it’s so cold!! I can’t believe they brought us all the way down here to build a fucking attack plane! The weather outside is terrible. Blizzard conditions. Thankfully, our hangar is built below the surface, so we stay out of the weather. The sad irony is, we need the cold. The system’s plutonium core maintains its grade for longer in the colder temperatures . . .
Gant jumped ahead to a page not far from the end of the diary.
15 February, 1980
No one’s coming. I’m sure of it now. Bill Holden died yesterday and we had to cut Pat Anderson’s hands off they were so frostbitten.
It’s been two months now since the quake hit and I’ve given up all hope of rescue. Someone said Old Man Niemeyer was supposed to be coming down here in December, but he hasn’t showed.
When I go to sleep at night, I wonder if anyone but Niemeyer knows we’re here.
Gant flipped back some pages, looking for something. She found what she was looking for around the middle of the diary.
20 December, 1979
I don’t know where I am. We were hit by an earthquake yesterday, the biggest motherfucking earthquake you have ever seen. It was as if the earth opened up and just swallowed us whole.
I was down in the hangar when it happened, working on the bird. First, the ground began to shake and then suddenly this massive wall of ice just thrust up out of the ground and ripped the hangar in half.