Up Against It - M. J. Locke [166]
Holy crap! There was a way in, he realized, and it was right above their heads. How could we not have seen it? But that meant there was also a way out—and he knew how to use it. He threw off the cover.
Back at the map archives, Geoff pulled out the scrips he and Kam had been looking at and traced some lines on a map. The slurry lines went out to the chemical plant. Since Joey Spud had not believed in nanotech, he had built a mechanical system to maintain air and temperature. A small army of bots mined the ice in an evacuated section of the mine. They fed it into a hopper that mixed it with a methanol slurry and pumped it to the chemical plant up on the surface, where it was processed, and fed air, fuel, and water back into the mine.
The slurry pipe was large—easily big enough for Geoff. Maybe even big enough for an army of minerbots. The pipe was filled with methane, ammonia, and methanol, but he could drain it. The real issue was that if he went out, it meant the bad guys could get in and harm his friends.
Truth is, he thought, they could have found this way in all along. Or they could plant a larger set of explosives. They could even tunnel down and plant a really big bomb several kilometers below the surface and turn Ouroboros to rubble. Once those mobsters out there got tired of waiting, Geoff and his buddies would be bug fodder, any way you sliced it.
Fuck it. Geoff was sick of all this. Just do something. Anything!
First he gathered three dozen minerbots. He passed out disposable medical gloves to one squad and had them start filling the gloves with a gaseous methane-oxygen mix from the mine exhaust tanks. A second squad he had adjust their signal broadcast settings to blast a powerful distress signal. A third squad he programmed to set charges along the slurry pipe. As they did so, he moved alongside, marking the scrip to show where the charges were placed. Then he sent the bots to wait for him outside the evacuated section of the mine, the longwall where the currently active seam of methane ice was exposed.
He didn’t want his friends to try to stop him, but once he opened up the pipe, if he failed to defeat the mobsters, it would only be a matter of time before they would find the pipe opening. He had to make sure his friends were prepared to deal with that.
He returned to where his companions slept and set an alarm to wake them in fifteen minutes. Then he wrote a note on the utility drawing.
I’VE GONE OUT THROUGH THE SLURRY PIPE TO STOP THEM BEFORE ANYONE ELSE GETS HURT. I SET CHARGES ON THE PIPE, SO IF THEY TRY TO GET IN THAT WAY YOU CAN STOP THEM. I MARKED THE PLACES ON THE MAP, AND THE BOTS CAN SET THEM OFF IN WHATEVER SEQUENCE YOU WANT.
He stared at the note for a long time, feeling as if he should put something else down, but no other words came. So he just signed it “Geoff.” After another moment, he squeezed, “Love to friends and family—” above his name, then wished he hadn’t, and wanted to cross it out. But that would look even stupider. So he left it as it was. Cheeks burning, stomach achurn, he rolled it up and put it in his hammock with the detonator and an alarm clock.
The bots were awaiting him at the longwall antechamber. They had laid his equipment on the mine floor: a bag of tools and netted clusters of oxygenated methane bladders they had made with disposable medical gloves. Geoff hoped they would fit through the pipe. He donned his suit and did the checks: air, ponies, radio. Then he stepped into the lock. The bots crawled after him, bringing the equipment and methane bladders.
He shut the lock door and pressed the controls to purge the air. The air pressure levels tumbled downward. He listened to the faint hiss of gases as the airlock purged. The methane bladders swelled to several times their original size. One burst, causing his explosimeter reading to spike. He itched, as usual when he couldn’t take off his suit to scratch. His pulse pounded dully in his throat where the helmet