Chapter 11 The Snare in the Server Farm #2
“So I have a genuine question,” Hansel said, “and I would take an answer. What number makes you stop? Not what is right. What number. Because if it is not forty thousand it is some other number, and everybody in the world who has ever done anything has one, and the only difference between us is that I have said mine out loud.”
Mina stopped in the middle of a two-hundred-and-eleven-meter hall.
She looked up at the ceiling speakers, because there was nowhere else to look.
“Mr. Brand,” she said, at conversational volume, to a room in which nobody could possibly hear her, “if you had asked them, some of them would have said yes.”
The plant roared on.
“That is the whole of it,” Mina said. “You never asked. You did the arithmetic in a room in Heidelberg and you never once went and stood on that bank and asked a single person on it what they would trade, and if you had, kuya, I think you would have been surprised, because they are not stupid and they have all lost somebody to something.” She started walking again.
“And you would have had to pay them. That is the actual reason. Asking has a price and drowning is free.”
Nothing came back over the speakers.
Which told her, more than anything he had said, that he had been listening on an open channel and had not expected an answer.
“The credential your colleague removed from my employee in Bonifacio was reported at oh two forty on Thursday morning,” Hansel said.
“I disabled it. Then I did the useful thing, which was to leave the facility code intact, and to lodge a duty roster with an economic zone compliance office that I have every reason to believe is porous, and to see what came.”
Mina got to the end of the row.
“You are a work party,” she said, to nobody, into an earpiece that was still open.
“Say again,” said Hal.
“There are no eighty-two men. Hal, get off this channel.”
“Mina.”
“The roster is bait, they left it to be found, get off the.” She stopped.
Because she had reached the end of the row, and the containment door at that end was not shut. It was standing open. And beyond it, on the wall of the cross-aisle, at eye height, mounted in a red steel cabinet with a glass front, was a bank of cylinders.
Mina Hermosa stood in a two-hundred-and-six-meter hall in a building commissioned this year and looked at the label on a fire suppression cylinder for about four seconds.
HALON 1301.
“Ay,” she said. “Ay, no.”
She started to run.
She got about forty meters, which was not bad.
There is a great deal of nonsense written about total-flooding suppression and Mina had done the course twice, in Lyon and again in Singapore, and both times the instructor had spent ninety percent of the time on the gas and about four minutes on the thing that actually hurts you.
The gas does not kill you. That is the whole point of the gas. Halon 1301 at design concentration will not kill a person, which is why every computer room in the world used it for forty years while people worked in them.
What gets you is that eight hundred kilos of liquefied gas at fifty bar, going through discharge nozzles into a room in under ten seconds, makes a noise.
It came at her from behind and above and both sides at once, out of nozzles she had run straight past, and it was not a sound in the sense that a thing you can describe is a sound.
It arrived as a physical event. It went through her from the outside in, and her left ear did something final and her right ear went to a whistle and a roar, and her balance left her entirely between one stride and the next, and she went into the floor and skidded on her forearm.
She lay in a hall full of white fog with her cheek on a slab and could not tell which way was up.
Cold. That was the second thing. The gas came out of the nozzles at temperature and the whole hall dropped thirteen degrees in ten seconds and every surface fogged, and she could not see the row she was lying in.
The third thing was that her earpiece was gone.
Not dead. Gone, physically, taken out of her ear by the discharge or by the fall, somewhere on a floor in a fog bank in a room the size of a football pitch, and she got up onto her hands and knees and swept a square meter of slab with her palms and found nothing, and understood with a clarity that cut through everything else that Hal Rivera was, at that moment, sitting in a boat in the rain four hundred meters away, listening to nothing.
If I miss two I am coming in.
She got up.
The gantry was four and a half meters up and there was nothing to climb.
That is the thing about a modern hall. The racks are sealed rows with smooth doors.
There is no under-floor, because they build on slab now and run everything overhead.
There is no furniture. There is no ledge.
There is a floor, and there are two rows of identical steel boxes with hot air coming off them, and above it all there is a cable tray carrying six thousand amps, and between you and it there is four and a half meters of nothing whatsoever.
Mina stood swaying in the fog with one working ear and worked the problem the only way she knew, which was as a rigging problem, because she had spent eleven years being flown across television studios on wires by men who did this for a living.
You do not climb to a gantry. You go up a rack row end frame to the containment roof, which is a polycarbonate panel rated to hold nothing at all, and you do not stand on the panel, you stand on the two-inch steel frame member that carries the panel, and you walk that frame in the hot aisle exhaust at forty-one degrees, and at the third bay there is a vertical support that ties the containment back to the ceiling structure.
That is the way up. It is the only way up. She had it inside five seconds.
She got to the top of the end frame with one arm.
That was the part that nearly finished it, and afterward, in the crawlway, she would allow herself to look at it properly.
She went up a two-meter end frame with her whole left arm useless, on her right hand and her feet and her hip, in a fog, deaf, at speed, with a fire door opening somewhere down the hall behind her, and she made the containment frame with the tips of the fingers of her right hand and hung there for a second and a half with her feet off everything.
Then she was up on the frame member, walking a two-inch steel line above a sealed hot aisle in forty-one degrees of exhaust with her arms out, which was a thing she had done a great many times, on stages, with a crowd, in heels.
She was laughing by the third bay. She was aware that this was a bad sign.
She went up the vertical support and got a knee onto the cable gantry and rolled, and lay in the tray on top of six thousand amps of shielded busway with the whole hall roaring under her, and looked up.
Four hundred millimeters above her face was the underside of the roof deck.
And running away from her into the dark, between the gantry and the deck, in every direction, for two hundred and eleven meters, was the void.
Down in the hall, men came in through the fire door with lights and worked the rows.
They did it properly, in pairs, calling the aisles.
It took nineteen minutes. They found a smear of blood on the floor of row nine and a smear on the end frame of row seventeen, and one of them found an earpiece, and put it in a bag, and did not turn it off, because it was not his job to think about earpieces.
Above them, lying full length in a cable tray four hundred millimeters below a roof deck, Mina Hermosa did not move for the entire nineteen minutes.
She could hear about a third of it, on the good side, in fragments, over the roar.
They were not frightened, which told her they had done this before or something like it. They were methodical and slightly bored and one of them was annoyed about the fog because it was getting into his light. Twice she heard the word dalawa, two, which she took to mean they thought there were two.
And once, close underneath her, in English, one of them said to the other: “It is fine. They want her found by six.”
By six.
Not found. Found by six.
She lay in a cable tray on top of six thousand amps and turned that over, and did not like any of the shapes it made.
Six was two hours before the roster surge.
Six was when a night shift would want a site clean.
Six was, she realized, going cold in a hot void, four hours before high water and exactly enough time to put a body somewhere the water would take it.
She had one arm. She had no comms. She had a hall full of men below her and a facility she was nine meters above and three structures away from the only thing she had come for, and she had, by her own arithmetic, nine hours and forty minutes until the tide.
She lay in the dark and made herself do the only useful thing available.
She started counting the ventilation cycles.
Eleven minutes on. Four minutes off.
Somewhere below her and to the northeast, nine meters under the ground, a fifty-eight-year-old man with a slow lymphoma had been counting the same rhythm for three days and had gotten to somewhere over four thousand.
The void was six hundred millimeters at its best and four hundred at its worst, and Mina Hermosa spent the next six hours in it.
Here is what that is actually like, because it is not what films are like.
It is not crawling. There is not room to crawl.
It is a thing closer to swimming, on your front, dragging with one forearm and pushing with the insides of your feet, along a cable tray that has a rolled edge which will open your hip if you let it, in a space where you cannot lift your head more than a hundred millimeters and therefore cannot look at where you are going for more than a second at a time.
It is hot. Everything below is exhaust. Within twenty minutes she had sweated through everything she had and had started to think about water in a way that she recognized, clinically, as the beginning of a problem.