Runaway World

Work Begins

     The next day, they began work in earnest.

     Twenty metres away from the habitat Andrew, Philip and Lungelo assembled a three metre tall tripod and hung a heating element from it. When the element had reached its working temperature they lowered it to the nitrogen ice, which sublimed to create a metre wide hole. As the element continued to descend, the hole became a vertical tunnel, reaching down into the darkness. Around them, as the three men stood watching in their surface suits, the vapour re-condensed into crystals of ice that fell to shatter at their feet.

     After a couple of hours, when the tunnel was several metres deep, the vapour was re-condensing before it could reach the surface. In the meantime, though, they had built a net that they lowered to just above the element to catch the ice as it fell and raise it to the surface, where they dumped it on the ground. In this way, they were able to extend the tunnel all the way down to where the water ice began. This had to be raised to a much higher temperature to melt it, in the process creating a five metre hemispherical void in the nitrogen ice above.

     The tunnel continued down until it reached the roof of the building buried below, which Andrew, hanging on the end of a tether, cut through with a power saw. Lowering a light through the hole on the end of a cable, he saw with satisfaction that the building was largely intact. The ceiling had collapsed in places under the weight of the ice above, but elsewhere it had held up, creating vacuum-filled voids below. One such void was directly beneath the tunnel and Andrew told Philip to lower him into it.

     "Looks like clerical offices," he said. "Desks, chairs, computers."

     "Any bodies?" came Philip's voice over the intercom.

     "No," Andrew replied. "Reckon they all went home to be with their families when they knew the end was coming. Who wants to be at their place of work during the end of the world?"

     He reached the floor and detached himself from the tether. His head torch swept a cone of light across the room as he looked around. Several of the windows had broken, he saw. Probably during the storms and earthquakes of Hoder's closest approach. The only reason this building was still standing was because it was far from the coast. That and the fact that the great lakes area was one of the two most geologically stable regions of the continent, along with Texas, that being the reason the two underground cities of the USA had been built there.

     Even so, though, the hurricane force winds that had assailed the whole planet had still wreaked havoc. The furniture had been thrown around like matchsticks and now lay crumpled against the far wall. Papers and small items of office equipment lay strewn on the floor, glued in place by a slick layer of ice. Ramps of snow, still as light and fluffy as the day it had fallen, ran from the jagged, broken windows half way across the floor. Above him the ceiling was sagging under the weight of the ice above. He hoped the tunnel they'd melted hadn't destabilised things. He hadn't come this far just to be killed under a collapsing roof.

     "Pretty much like Sellafield," he said. "And the destruction was mild here compared to the earthquake zones. It's a miracle anyone on the surface survived long enough to freeze."

     "If just one percent of the population survived, that's still tens of millions of people worldwide," said Philip. "And there was a period of calm between the passing of Hoder and the beginning of The Freeze. Several months for people to pick themselves up and organise themselves. There might be a floor plan out in the corridor showing the location of fire exits, that kind of thing. So we can work out where we are relative to the dysprosium storage area."

     "Right," Andrew replied. There was a door on the other side of the room, he saw. He made his way across to it past a row of storage cupboards one of which was half open to reveal the frozen, mummified corpse of a rat. Nearby, a large printer lay on its side. There was a memo trapped under it, probably the last thing that had been printed before the place had been abandoned. He crouched down to read the date at the top. September 13th 2079. A couple of weeks before Hoder's closest approach. It had loomed in the sky ten times the size of the new moon, he remembered from his history classes. Its gravity ripping the oceans from their basins and spilling them across the continents. A ruddy red globe shining dully with its own light but still with a visible day and night side courtesy of the sun. Banded like Jupiter, the cloud tops moving visibly and speckled with almost continuous discharges of lightning as they were whipped around by the supersonic winds that perpetually tormented the almost-star.