Eric Flint: Boundary

Helen smiled. "Yes, I can see it now. 'Helen the Hun' and 'Skibow the Scalper.'"

She shrugged, a bit uncomfortably. "It rubs me the wrong way, too, being honest. But… what can we do? On Earth we have the luxury of unlimited air when we want to get into an ancient ruin."

"True enough," Madeline said. "Even digging in Antarctica was a picnic compared to this."

A.J. would never leave well enough alone. "Why were you digging in Antarctica? Never mind, never mind. Still a deep, dark secret."

"Well, the name is, but that's just to protect the family from publicity. Not the fact. I was trying to find a corpse. It was all very anticlimactic, in the end. I was called in because the guy who disappeared knew a lot of classified information. But there turned out to be no foreign skullduggery involved at all. Not a terrorist in sight. The damn fool just got drunk and wandered off too far. You really, really, really don't want to do that in Antarctica."

There was a sudden crunching, tinkling noise, and the inner air-lock door ground inward an inch and a half. On the next blow, it moved six inches, and the next caused the door to swing almost fully open, amid a sound like a cement mixer filled with champagne glasses. With nothing left in its way, Jack the Ripper shut down.

White dust drifted smokily in their lights. As it settled, they could see that the corridor beyond was coated with ice.

"They were hooked to a water source, all right," A.J. said, quite unnecessarily. "Well, let's take a look-see."

After he and Skibow moved the ripper to the side, all four of them started cautiously down the icy tunnel. Helen and A.J. were in the lead, with Rich coming next and Madeline bringing up the rear.

"The ice starts off incredibly thick on the ceiling," Helen reported. "Two meters thick, at a guess. Fortunately the roof is much higher than I'd expect with Bemmie construction. I think that's because, from the looks of it once the ice starts thinning out, this was originally a natural formation that they just took advantage of. The ice starts tapering two thirds of the way through, and is gone completely about fifteen meters from the end. The roof here is just rock. The walls are sort of gray colored, with the floors almost black."

"I see another door," Rich said. "It looks like it has a plaque with the same airlock markings."

Madeline came last, walking down the ice-coated corridor carefully, to keep from slipping. She was quite a ways behind them because she'd stopped to study the wall at one point.

The ceiling collapsed.

To Madeline, time seemed to freeze. The fact that the great slabs of ice fell more slowly than they would have on Earth just made the coming doom a bit more protracted. Even three eighths of a ton, multiplied by untold tons, is a crushing weight.

If time seemed frozen, her brain wasn't.

She saw A.J., Rich, and Helen ahead of her-facing the wrong way, and too far in any case to be able to reverse direction and escape. They were now almost at the far end of the tunnel.

They weren't in immediate danger, because Madeline could now see that only the central area of the tunnel was caving in. That was the part right above her.

She glanced back and saw that she had no time to make it out herself, even if the supports beyond the tunnel held and the entire cave system didn't come down. And even if she could, the other three would be trapped.

She might-barely-be able to race to shelter with them at the far end, assuming she didn't slip on the treacherous footing. But that would just leave all four of them trapped.

With not much oxygen left, only the water in their small sip tanks, and no food. And only Bruce and Joe-and him with a broken leg-to try and get them out. With, even leaving aside the fact they'd have asphyxiated by then, not more than forty hours they could count on the suits remaining powered. Once the batteries were dead, they'd freeze within minutes.

In the very short time it took her to finish that assessment, the slabs had come more than halfway down. There was only one possible chance left, slim as it might be. She took a step forward, stopped, planted her legs, extended her arms at what she guessed was the best angle, and braced herself.

The ice arrived.

A moaning, grumbling noise echoed through the tunnel. A.J. spun to see the roof coming down, seeming to break in two directly above Madeline's head.

A ghostly blast of white-red dust filled the corridor. A.J. felt himself dragged backward by Helen, away from the collapse. The two of them tripped over something. They fell to the floor and lay there, expecting to see the roof come down on top of them also.

"Madeline! A.J.! Helen!" Joe's voice came faintly over the radio. "Are you all right? What's happening down there?"

Dust fogged the air so thickly that A.J. felt an impulse to cough or hold his breath, despite the fact that none of it could possibly get to him. His voice was strained when he answered.

"Cave-in, Joe. Me and Helen seem to be okay." The rumbling had faded away. The ceiling in this far area of the tunnel seemed solid enough. He looked at Helen, who blinked wide-eyed back at him. For a moment the two just held each other. He saw Rich picking himself up. He was apparently what they'd tripped over. "Rich is okay too."

"What about Madeline?"

It was starting to sink in. "Jesus… She was smack in the middle of the tunnel when it came down."

He heard a choking sound from Joe, a sound filled with so much pain that it caused his own eyes to sting. "I'm going to take a look, Joe. We really don't know anything yet."

Despite that attempt at reassurance, A.J. had no real hope that Madeline was still alive, as he groped his way toward where she'd been. Ice dust still drifted thick as smoke in a burning building in the corridor. He couldn't see anything, although he could sense Helen and Rich following him.

"I can't see anything at all yet. Place is filled with ice dust. Some rock dust too, looks like. Hold on…"

He could now make out vague dark shapes in the beam of his light. "Clearing up slowly. Probably all blocked, but I'll get as close as-"

He broke off sharply. Just stared, wide-eyed.

Helen and Rich came up beside him. "Holy…" Rich started to say, but trailed off, unable to finish.

Helen said nothing at all. Just shook her head, back and forth, like a metronome.

Finally, A.J. cleared his throat, very loudly. "I swear, I swear, I swear. I will never again made a wisecrack about Supergirl."

Madeline stood in the center of the corridor, her arms stretched up and out to either side at perhaps a sixty-degree angle. Her hands held up two huge slabs of ice which, in turn, prevented most of the ice above from erasing the entire corridor like a bubble from a wad of dough.

They heard a gasp from her. Now that the ice dust was clearing away, A.J. could see that Madeline's eyes looked as wide as his felt.

"W-what do you know…" she said shakily. "It worked. For now, anyway."

"What? What worked? How the hell are you holding up all that? Dammit, you're not that strong. Three-eighths gravity be damned. No human being who ever lived is that strong!"

By the end, he was almost screeching. A.J. realized he sounded half-hysterical; relief, terror, incomprehension all mingled in his high-pitched demand. Somewhere in the background, but not really grasping the words, he could hear Joe hollering words that combined relief and demands for a coherent report.

"No, I'm not." Madeline took a slow breath, settling her own nerves. "But I thought the suit might be."

The dazzling Fathom smile came. Even shining through her faceplate, it seemed to light up the whole tunnel. "I remembered what you did with Joe, after he broke his leg."

Enlightenment burst over A.J. "Mother of God. You made your whole suit go to rigid impact mode and lock that way. With mostly carbonan components… yeah, it could work. Genius. Pure effing genius."