Adam Baker - Outpost

He climbed down the ladder to the deck. Sian stayed in the cab. She sat in the operator’s seat and tried to make sense of the controls.

‘Ghost? Jane? Do you copy, over?’

Ghost ran to Medical. Acrid smoke.

Jane was still throwing drugs and equipment into bags.

‘What the fuck are you doing, girl?’

‘Help me.’

They hurried up the stairs. They dragged bags.

Alarms. Smoke. Warning strobes.

‘Who gave the evacuation order?’

‘Sounded like Nail,’ said Jane.

‘I saw people down on the docking platform. They were climbing into the zodiac.’

‘We can’t abandon the rig. Without it we are fucked.’

‘We don’t have a choice,’ said Ghost. ‘There’s plenty of octane distillate left in the pipes. Soon as the fire reaches the injection pumps this place will detonate like a fucking H-bomb.’

They reached the roof.

Driving smoke. They couldn’t see the crane cab.

‘Sian? Ivan? Do you copy?’

Ghost checked his radio. Low battery warning.

He stood at the edge of the roof and yelled.

‘Sian. Ivan.’

He looked down. White furnace heat.

Eight men in the zodiac. The boat rode low in the water. Overloaded. The outboard laboured. They weaved between pack ice.

They reached the island. They lifted Nail ashore. They carried him up the jetty steps to the bunker door.

The crew camped in the tunnel mouth. They lit a couple of storm lamps. They huddled round a hexamine stove for heat. Nobody spoke. They were all thinking the same thing. They were dead bodies. The refinery was life-support. Without the supplies aboard the rig they would last less than a day. Once the stoves burned dry, they would all freeze.

Nail was conscious. He lay still, breathing shallow. Punch crouched beside him.

‘How you doing, big guy?’

Nail coughed and flipped him off.

‘Take it easy, all right? Give your lungs a chance to recover.’ Punch left the bunker. He stood on the jetty and watched the refinery burn.

D Module was ablaze. The fuel store had been on the lowest level. The fire spread upward, floor by floor, until the habitation block was a pillar of fire.

Flame lit the surrounding sea and ice, flickering orange.

‘I’m taking the boat,’ Punch told the crew. ‘I’m going back to help. Any volunteers?’

They looked away.

Punch rode the zodiac back to Rampart.

He could see the underside of the refinery. Liquid, rippling flame washing over pipes and spars. The sight was mesmeric.

White light at the heart of the conflagration. Thousand-degree heat. It was like staring into the sun. He had to look away. Debris fell into the sea, spitting geysers of steam. A shriek. An explosion of sparks. A steady groan, like the refinery was in excruciating pain. A major structural collapse under way.

A cascade of girders: fatally weakened chunks of superstructure tumbled into the ocean with a roar like Niagara.

Punch gripped the side of the boat as waves rippled outward from the refinery, bucking the boat, cracking plates of ice.

Jane and Ghost crouched on the D Module roof. They held each other. They felt the roof begin to buckle and torque. The scream of tortured metal was so loud it became a strange, eye-of-storm silence.

Jane looked up. The crane arm. The cargo pallet descending out of smoke.

Brief glimpse of the crane cab. Sian at the controls.

‘Come on,’ said Jane.

They threw themselves aboard.

Punch docked the zodiac. He watched D Module fall from the refinery into the sea. Support girders beneath the habitation block, fatally weakened by hours of blowtorch heat, buckled and fractured. The blazing structure slowly toppled forward. It hit the ocean, sending a final mushroom-cloud of flame hundreds of metres into the air. Sudden darkness. Sound of on-rushing water. Punch ran for the stairs, anxious to get higher before seawater washed him into the ocean.

Punch crossed the deck. Devastation lit by moonlight. He stood at the edge of the smoking acre where D Module used to sit. Ragged, twisted girders. Broken pipes. Metal glowed red. Spars part-liquefied by heat. Steel hung in petrified drips. The mangled superstructure ticked and creaked as it quickly cooled in sub-zero air.

Plenty of smoke, but no flames.

The cargo pallet stalled four metres above the deck. The crane was dead. No power. Ghost hung from the pallet and let himself drop. He rolled. He lay on the deck. Jane dropped beside him. She helped Ghost to his feet. He coughed and retched.

‘You okay?’ asked Punch.

‘I’ll be all right.’

Jane and Punch explored the remaining habitation block.

They stood in the canteen. Moonlight shafted through the windows. Spectral smoke haze hung in the air. The tables and floor were dusted in a fine layer of soot.

Punch tried the lights.

‘Everything is dead.’

‘We better check the powerhouse.’

The powerhouse. They surveyed the destruction with an old Aldis lamp. Three John Brown generators, each the size of a bus. The generators were still and silent.

They climbed steps to the mezzanine level. The generator controls were fried. Cabling had burned through.

‘You know,’ said Jane, ‘for a while there I thought we would be okay.’

Jane brought Ghost to the powerhouse. He walked with his arm round her shoulder. She helped him climb the steps to mezzanine level.

‘Well, there it is,’ said Jane.

Ghost examined the scorched ruins of the generator controls by flashlight. He could barely stand. He leaned on a railing for support.

Two of the control stations were burned and warped. Cracked dials. Cracked screens. A side panel had fallen from one of the consoles exposing melted clumps of cable that hung in tangles like jungle vine.

Ghost coughed and cleared his throat.

‘One and Two are fried. Generator Three seems pretty intact. I say we get Three running and maybe cannibalise One and Two for spares.’

‘You need to rest. You have a bad case of smoke inhalation. It’ll get worse before it gets better. You’ve damaged your lungs. They’ll start to fill with fluid over the next couple of days. Rye wants to get you on oxygen, soon as she can. Give you a chance to heal.’

‘You seem okay,’ said Ghost.

‘Buddy breathing. You gave me most of the air.’

‘Honestly. I’m fine.’

‘Not for long. If you start chasing round trying to fix that generator you could do yourself serious damage. You could keel over with pneumonia, and there isn’t much anyone could do to treat you.’

‘If we don’t get the generators running we will all freeze to death. I can’t sit around and convalesce. And if I get pneumonia then all the more reason to tap my expertise while we still can. We have to get to work right now.’

‘Christ.’

‘Do we have any amphetamines? Anything that can give me a boost?’

‘We’ve got some pre-loaded adrenalin shots in the survival kits. It’ll crank you for a couple of hours, but once it’s metabolised you’ll be a wreck.’

‘Go and get them.’

Jane fetched the shots.

She found Ghost sitting on the deck with his back to one of the charred control panels. She sat beside him.

‘How you doing, fella?’

‘Pretty fucked up,’ he croaked.

Jane gestured to the broken instrumentation.

‘Reckon you could fix it?’

‘I’m not an electrician.’

‘Neither is anyone else. You’re the best we have.’

‘Wish I could stand without coughing my guts out.’

Jane held up a yellow, pre-loaded epinephrine syringe from a survival pack.

‘Do it.’

Jane stabbed the hypo into his thigh and pressed the plunger.