Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘If the sensors detect heat, any heat at all, the on-board computer will assume that the blood has been compromised and then deploy a nanodevice to destroy the units. This is a simple molecular disassembler manufactured to behave like a bacteria. It eats the compromised units, container bags, labels, everything. And then dies. The car contents are then disinfected and vented into space. I’m afraid you and I would be treated in the same way. The nanodevice would eat through our space suits and then us. By the time it finished we’d look like moondust.’

A great spasm of a shiver ran down Gates’s broad back. He was uncertain if this was the result of fear or cold, and finally concluded that it was probably both.

‘Jesus,’ he said through chattering teeth, ‘Christ.’

‘By my estimate, we only have sufficient time to get through the main facility door before what body heat remains inside our suits starts to get out and be detected by the sensors. But for this, we could ride the car all the way through the inner labyrinth door and into the vault itself. Instead, we exit as soon as we’re through the main door and then head for the rest and recreation area to get warm again, before proceeding to the next stage.’

‘I can hardly wait,’ Gates said dully. His hands were numb and his core temperature had now dropped to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit.

‘It’s a nice balance.’ Dallas’s speech was already sounding slurred, an early sign of mild hypothermia.

‘Nice?’ Gates laughed flatly.

‘Nice. Meaning something requiring great precision.’

‘And I thought it meant nice, as in nice and warm. Whatever the hell that is.’

‘What I mean is that if we don’t get cold enough, we get killed by the nanodevice. But if we get too cold, we die as well.’

‘Oh, that kind of nice. Of course. Dumb of me. I’m shivering like I’ve got a motor disease.’

‘When you stop, you can start to worry,’ Dallas told him. ‘Means heat output from burning glycogen in your muscles. Insufficient. Shivering in waves. Pauses get longer. Until stops altogether. Life threatening.’

The next two or three minutes passed in frozen silence.

Dallas gave a little jump as he heard Prevezer’s voice inside his headset.

‘Okay, cold people, let’s go.’

‘What?’

Dallas felt himself picked up like a side of frozen meat. Why were they being carried, and to where? His thinking processes seemed as frozen as his toes. Something to do with blood. Not the same blood as moved slowly inside him. Different. Lunar sunshine streamed through his unvisored helmet, dazzling him for a second until, slowly closing his eyes, he remembered. Amnesia. Somewhere on the edge of severe hypothermia. Body temperature probably as low as ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe lower. Couldn’t see his EVA computer to check. Much lower than that and they’d really be in trouble. Needed brain to perform something that required higher reasoning. To stay fully conscious inside the electric car. Otherwise might forget to climb out.

Dallas began to count backward from one hundred by nines.

‘Ninety-one,’ he mumbled as Prevezer laid him carefully in the car’s frozen interior. ‘Eighty-two.’ Why was the man carrying him — he couldn’t see if it was Simou or Prevezer — breathing so heavily? Whoever it was sounded like there was something the matter with him.

‘Dallas? Gates? You’re both in the car.’

‘Seventy-three.’

‘Come again?’

‘He’s counting backward by nines to keep his mind alert.’

‘Please collect your components, close the car, and then step away,’ ordered the transport computer.

‘Whatever you say,’ said someone, and then the lid on the car was closed.

There wasn’t supposed to be an opportunity for dialogue with this particular computer, so no open communications channel existed between them; but the channel that existed between the two men lying inside the car and the two men now stepping away from it would last only as long as they were all outside the main facility. Dallas and Gates were relying on Simou and Prevezer to tell them when the car was about to pass through the main door, thus giving them their cue to get out. Once they were through the outer door, Dallas and Gates would have no further verbal contact with the outside until the vault had been breached.

‘Good luck, guys.’

‘Yeah, good luck.’

‘Sixty-four.’

The car, the shape and proportions of a medium-sized missile, began its silent return to the main facility.

‘Dallas? This is Prev. You’re on the move.’

‘Fifty-four. Fifty-five. Fifty-four.’

‘Talk to me, Gates,’ said Simou.

‘Cold,’ said Gates.

‘Forty... forty-six.’

‘Terribly cold,’ he whispered. And then, ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s me, Gates. Simou. What’s your name?’

‘Thirty-something.’

‘My name?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Thirty-what, Dallas,’ said Prevezer. ‘Come on, think, man. What comes after forty-six?’

‘Seven. Forty-seven.’

‘My name is...’

‘Negative, Dallas. Think. You were counting backward by nines. If you were hypothermic, you couldn’t do that. Come on, Dallas. You’re halfway there. Just a little longer.’

‘Gates. Your name is Rameses Gates. Can you hear me?’

‘Come on, Dallas. What’s the next number in the sequence?’

‘Gates, answer me.’

‘Thirty-seven, Dallas. The answer’s thirty-seven. Dallas? Are you reading me?’

Lying in the frozen interior of the electric car, Dallas opened his eyes and tried to remember. For some reason, a number came into his cold and aching head. Twenty-eight. What was the significance of that? But what did it matter now that he was dead and lying inside his tomb? Lying there like some sepulchral statue? One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more. This living buried man, this quiet mandrake, rest. A voice followed this number.

‘Wake up, Dallas, wake up. The outer door’s opening. You’re about to enter the main facility.’

Until that moment he had not been afraid. But when he saw how close to a frozen death he had come, panic seized him and galvanized his almost rigid muscles. He had momentarily forgotten that this was still a simulation.

‘Get up, Gates. For Christ’s sake move. The door’s inside. The car’s going forward again. Dallas? Move now. ’

For a brief second, Dallas had thought he was dreaming. But at last he recognized that this was Prevezer urging them both to action. Quickly he unzipped the polyethylene bag and struggled to his feet, his helmet forcing open the door on top of the electric car. And even as he climbed, then half-jumped, out of the car into the bright light of the main facility’s entrance hall, he recognized that he would have to devise something more certain than the voices of Prevezer and Simou to rouse him when it came to the real thing.

‘Dallas,’ he heard himself mumble as Prevezer and Simou cheered. ‘Back on-line.’

‘We’re about to lose your signal,’ said Simou. ‘Good-bye, Dallas, and good luck.’

Glancing around him he saw that the outer door of the facility had started to slide shut behind them. They had made it, although Gates had yet to stir from the floor of the car.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

Whatever Prevezer and Simou said next was lost as the outer door closed as silently as it had opened.

‘Gates, come on, we’ve got to move.’

The other man remained motionless. Dallas reached down and picked him up, grateful for the microgravity that made possible such a superhuman feat of strength. And not a moment too soon. Even as he carried Gates across the entrance hall and laid him against the airlock door that led into the rest and recreation area, the single inner door leading into the labyrinth opened, and the electric car disappeared into the Stygian darkness beyond. Then the entrance to the labyrinth closed again. No one — not even the First National security workers who handled the supplies of cryoprecipitate — was allowed beyond this door, which was itself protected by a number of safeguards: proximity detectors and mechanical vibration detectors that could activate lethal bolts of electricity. Anyone close to the car’s exterior as it entered the labyrinth would have been fried to a crisp.