Chapter 11 The Snare in the Server Farm #3
It is loud on the good side and silent on the bad side, and the asymmetry does something to your balance that is worse than the deafness. She kept listing to the left. She could not tell, lying flat in the dark, whether she was going straight.
And it is slow. That was the thing that nearly broke her, at about the fourth hour, somewhere over Hall 2.
She was moving at something under a hundred meters an hour, and she had three structures to cross, and every twelve minutes she had to lie completely still for four while the ventilation cycled off and the void went hot and quiet enough that a thermal camera would have found her against the deck.
She used the four-minute stops.
That was the only useful thing about them. Flat on her front in the dark with her cheek on a cable tray, unable to move for four minutes at a time, forty-one times in six hours, Mina Hermosa did the arithmetic she had not had room for since Wednesday.
Eighty-two men on a roster that was lodged to be found.
Eleven diesel gensets running under load with the grid up.
A substation on the old grade, two meters below the campus fill.
And a tide at one in the morning.
At the fifth stop, over the cross-corridor between Hall 2 and Hall 1, it came together, and she lay in four hundred millimeters of dark with her eyes open and understood the whole shape of it at last, and it was worse than anything she had put on the whiteboard that morning.
They were not going to discharge into the basin and hope.
They were going to lose the substation. On purpose.
That was what the gensets were for, and it was not contingency, it was schedule.
At high water the North Harbor substation on the old grade would go under and every transformer in it would trip, and the whole district would go dark, including the pumping stations that still worked, including the barangay’s own supply, including every streetlight for four kilometers.
And a district-wide power failure during a Signal 4 typhoon at the highest tide of the year is not a crime. It is an act of God with a maintenance record, and it explains, afterward, in a report, why nothing pumped.
The discharge was the second half. The discharge was what made it deep enough to condemn.
The blackout was what made it nobody’s fault.
Mina lay in the void and thought about eleven steps on a barangay hall and a nine-year-old with a notebook, and about the fact that the only people on that water tonight who would be able to see anything at all would be the ones with their own light.
Then the ventilation came back on with a thump she felt through the tray, and she started dragging herself west again, toward the northeast structure, toward a man nine meters underground who had been counting the same eleven and four for three days.
At the eleventh stop she came to the wall.
The void ended. It ended the way voids do, at a structural line, in a block wall running the full width of the building from the deck down past the gantry into the dark below, with a rectangular penetration in it four hundred by two hundred millimeters through which the cable tray continued and a person did not.
Mina lay in front of it with her torch in her teeth and looked at four hundred by two hundred for a long moment.
She was not going through that. She had spent a career being lifted through gaps by men on winches and she knew her own dimensions better than most people know their own names, and four hundred by two hundred with a shoulder that did not work was not a gap, it was a wall with a joke in it.
So she went down.
The gantry crossed a plant room at the transition, and a plant room has a ceiling, and a ceiling has hangers, and Mina came off the tray onto a threaded rod and down a chilled water riser in a space the size of a lift shaft, on one arm, in the dark, at nine forty at night, and she was on the floor of the northeast structure at nine forty-four and she had no idea how she had done the last two meters.
She sat on the deck plate with her back against a pipe and shook for about forty seconds, which she permitted, and then stopped.
Then she took stock, the way she had been taught, out loud, in a whisper, because saying it makes it a fact instead of a fear.
“Left arm, no. Left ear, no. Water, none since three o’clock. Comms, none.” She flexed her right hand. “Two rattan, taped along the spine, both intact.”
She had carried them the whole way. Through two hundred meters of pipe, up a rack row, along a containment frame, through six hours of a four-hundred-millimeter void, taped in a line down her back where they would not catch, twenty-eight inches each, unfinished, off a prop cart in Studio 4 in Quezon City on the first afternoon of the worst week of her life.
Somebody in a wardrobe department was going to be extremely annoyed about those on Monday.
Mina Hermosa got up off the deck plate in a plant room nine meters under the North Harbor campus with a fire door in front of her and three hours and sixteen minutes until high water, and put her good hand on the door.
Then she stopped, and put her ear against it. The bad one first, out of habit, which gave her nothing at all.
She turned her head and used the other one.
Somewhere on the far side, faint, regular, in a rhythm she had been keeping herself for six hours without once thinking about why it was familiar, a man was counting.