17. Erin
ERIN
We go down the raise at four in the morning with the fans already dead, and I notice that rock has stopped breathing.
Caleb's team took the lake-bank vent plant at ten past three.
Wyatt's people put the tunnel fans down four minutes later.
I've been counting since, because in a drift this long with no forced air we have somewhere between forty and fifty-five minutes before the atmosphere at the face goes from unpleasant to fatal, and the difference between those two numbers is a guess I made from a ventilation calc I found in a banker's box.
There are six of us. Nash on point, then me, then Caleb, then three from Marrow Creek who move like they've done this before.
The old workings are exactly as I left them, timber, rail spikes, the smell of wet granite. Then we come around the stope into the section they blasted, and everything changes at a line you could draw with a ruler.
Smooth wall. Poured invert underfoot. A cable tray bolted along the back with fiber and three-phase in it, and every forty feet a fixture still burning on emergency power.
"They ran services the whole length," I say. "Nash, that's not exploration. That's infrastructure with a design life."
Half a mile in, the drift opens. I stop walking and I don't mean to.
A chamber ahead is cut resembling a gymnasium, big, floored, lit, and full of the kind of equipment I've only ever seen in institutions with endowments.
A blue-and-silver insignia is printed across the nearest cabinet and repeated on the equipment cases: HELIX BIOSYSTEMS. It is the first actual name we have had for the people behind any of this.
Fume hoods. Two class-II cabinets. A cryogenic bank with ten dewars in a row, gauges live.
There's a bench with a sequencer on it that costs more than every piece of gear my department has ever owned.
"Twelve minutes," Caleb says behind me. "Nash."
"Erin. Work."
I photograph everything in a grid and I narrate into the recorder because my hands know that job even when my body has gone numb. The dewar logs are on a clipboard hanging off the rack, and I read them and have to brace my hand on the bench.
"These are tissue banks," I say. "Ten dewars, four hundred and something cryovials logged, and the source codes match the binder Nash pulled off the Fisk road.
" I flip the page. "There's a column here for yield, and it's got a species-equivalent conversion factor at the bottom of each sheet.
They've been calculating exchange rates. "
Nash doesn't answer. When I look up he's standing very still with his hand on the cabinet, and I remember that some of those codes have his cousins inside them.
The holding level is below the laboratory, down a ramp, and it's the part I'll be seeing forever.
There are twenty-two cells. They're not cages, they're modular units with observation ports and card access, built by somebody who read a primate facility manual and improved on it. Eleven are occupied.
Four wolves. I recognize a collar on one of them, four-one-seven's twin, and the animal inside is a woman who can't shift back because they've kept her sedated for weeks and her body's forgotten how.
Three from the drowned timber, in tanks with the water at eight degrees and the filtration running off the same doomed emergency circuit as the lights.
Two I can't classify at all and won't try.
And in the last two units, side by side, a boy of about fourteen and his grandmother, both from Bracken, both perfectly conscious, both watching us come down the ramp.
"Get them out," Nash says.
Caleb's already on the panel. The Marrow Creek three go down the row with a pry bar and a bolt cutter. I go into the tank room, because the aquatic ones are the problem nobody planned for and I'm the only person here who's ever moved a live animal in water.
"Caleb, I need the two stretchers and every tarp we brought. We're not carrying them dry."
"Half a mile? Up a raise?"
"Wet-wrapped, head elevated, gills kept flooded, and we go slow." I'm already soaking tarps in the tank. "If we run, they die."
The grandmother helps. She's seventy, she's been in a box for days, and she gets down on her knees on wet concrete and holds a tarp corner while I wrap somebody's daughter in it.
"You're the state girl," she says.
"I am."
"Bracken owes Stillwater nothing." She grips the tarp tighter. "I'll be revising that."
Eighteen minutes gone. The air's begun to change, not dramatic, just a thickness at the back of the throat, and my headlamp beam has picked up a haze it didn't have on the way in. Nash appears at my shoulder while I'm coupling a stretcher.
"Caleb takes the captives out now. You go with them."
"No."
"Erin…"
"There's a data room off the laboratory level.
I saw the door on the way past, card reader, HVAC penetration, that's a server room and it's the one place in this facility where the why lives.
" I straighten up. "You want to walk out with these people and no evidence?
Federal agencies don't prosecute on eyewitnesses who legally don't exist. They prosecute on documents. "
His jaw works. Behind him the Marrow Creek wolves are shouldering the first stretcher.
"Six minutes," he says. "Then I carry you out, and I won't ask."
"Six minutes."
The card reader is dead with the power down, which is the single mercy of the night. The door's on a fail-secure strike, so Nash takes the hinges instead, one shoulder, twice, and the frame comes out the block wall in a shower of grout.
Inside there's a two-rack cage on UPS, three drives blinking, and a workstation still logged in because somebody left in a hurry when the fans died.
I get four minutes on that machine. There's no time to read. I pull the drives, two hot-swap and one internal I take with a screwdriver and no elegance whatsoever, and while they're spinning down I photograph a directory tree on screen, and it makes my hands go cold.
The top level isn't organized by species. It's organized by phase. Phase I runs 2011 to 2019 and it's labeled characterization. Phase II is 2019 to now, and the folder name is SUBSTRATE ACQUISITION, and every one source code I found on the dewar logs sits inside it.
And there's a Phase III. Created eight months ago. Encrypted, and by the file sizes it's the biggest thing on the machine, and the label somebody typed on it is SCALE.
"Erin." Nash in the doorway. "Now."
"Got it. Go."
We come up the raise with the aquatics on stretchers and the air behind us going bad, and the last hundred feet are the worst feet of my life.
The boy from Bracken climbs it himself and then reaches back down for his grandmother. Caleb takes the top end of my stretcher when my arms give out and doesn't say a word about it. Nash is last up, and when he rises out of the pipe into the alders the sky is going gray in the east.
I sit down in the wet moss with three encrypted drives in a dry bag against my chest and shake for a while.
Nash crouches facing me. He's filthy, there's blood on his forearm from the hinges, and he looks at me like the drives aren't the thing he's counting.
He puts his hand over the bag. "What's on it?"
"Something they've been building toward for years and haven't done yet.
" I close my hand over his. "Nash, everything we saw down there, the labs, the dewars, those cells, that's not the operation.
That's the preparation. There's a phase after this one and it's the biggest folder on the machine, and I need three days and a decent computer to tell you what it is. "
Behind us, down the pipe, the mountain is silent. No fans. No hoist. Nothing at all except that low steady beat still running under everything, patient as a heartbeat, entirely unaffected by anything we did tonight.