28. Nash
NASH
The download finishes at eleven minutes to six and the man from the gravel pit walks onto the north deck with four of his people behind him.
I know him before Erin does. No dust on his boots even now, in a chamber taking water, and he comes through six inches of it at a working pace like he's crossing a parking lot.
He's got a short weapon slung and he doesn't raise it, because he's already counted the room and decided he doesn't need to yet.
"Trent," one of his people calls, over the noise. "Sixteen minutes to stage three."
"Then we hold sixteen minutes."
Erin has the laptop off the chair and the drives in the bag and she's behind me before I've finished turning. That's the whole of my six weeks with her in one movement — she doesn't freeze and she doesn't argue.
"The regulator bank," I say, low. "Where exactly?"
"North deck. Gray cabinet on the cradle side, hard-wired, barely as large as a chest freezer."
"Which is directly behind them."
"Yes," she agrees. "There's a walkway on the far side of the cradle. It's a hundred and forty feet round and it's got no cover for the last fifty."
"Then I'll be the reason nobody's looking at the last fifty."
She grabs my wrist. Her fingers are white with cold and they don't shake at all.
"Don't die winning," she says. "That's the only condition."
"Noted."
I shift on the deck in a foot of water and go straight up the middle at them, and it is not clever and it doesn't need to be.
They shoot. Two hit and one of those goes through something that matters, and I take the first man off his feet and put him into a transformer skid and don't stop moving, because stopping is how you die in a room with four rifles.
The second one I get by the weapon and the arm and we aren't happy about the outcome.
The third breaks left and runs for the stairwell and I let him go, because Erin is already out on the far walkway and the whole point is that these people are watching me.
Trent doesn't shoot. He puts the weapon down on a cable tray, deliberately, and steps out into the water with something short and heavy in his hand, and he waits for me.
He's good. That's the honest part. He's been trained for something big and fast and he's not frightened, and the first pass he opens my shoulder to the bone and I only get a mouthful of vest. Second pass he goes for the eyes and nearly gets them.
Third pass I take his forearm and he uses it — lets me have the arm and drives the blade into my ribs twice while I've got it.
I don't let go. That's all it comes down to in the end. I've got four hundred pounds and a torn side and eighty-one people who got out of a drift tonight because somebody stood in it, and he's got a knife and a contract.
The water's up over my hocks by the time it's finished.
"Nash!" Erin's voice, ragged. "I'm at it! It's a load-bank cabinet, it's dumping into a resistor stack — Nash, I can't cut it, it's carrying current from the coil!"
I shift back and get to the rail and I can barely make her out through the spray coming off the dome.
"Then don't cut it! What does it need?"
"It needs cooling, same as everything else in this building — the stack's air-cooled and there's a fan bank on the top!" She's got a panel open. "If the stack overheats the regulator drops out and there's nothing left to catch the quench!"
"How do you kill fans?"
"Badly and permanently!"
She takes the fire extinguisher off the bracket beside the cabinet and puts it through the fan grille. Then again. Then she reaches in with a piece of cable tray and jams the blades, and the whole thing shudders and dies.
The stack starts to smell within forty seconds. Ninety seconds after that the coil above the ring changes its note.
What happens next takes about a couple of seconds and I'll be trying to describe it for the whole of my life.
The whine climbs into something that isn't sound. The frost on the casing goes off it all at once as a white cloud, and the field over the ring — the thickness in the air that's been pressing on my eyes since we came down here — collapses inward like a held breath let go.
Then the noise arrives, and it isn't from the coil. It's from the rock.
A hundred and eighty feet of granite with two hundred feet of Stillwater on top of it has been carrying tunnels itself for eighteen months, and everything holding that arrangement together has just changed at once.
The dome cracks along a line I can see. Water comes through it in a solid column the thickness of a truck.
Erin's over a hundred feet away on a walkway with her hand still on a cabinet.
I remember the deck plating lifting under me and the column of water walking sideways across the chamber, and I remember reaching the walkway and finding her already running toward me, because she never once needed rescuing and I keep having to learn it.
I get her over my shoulder at the stairwell door, and she swears at me the entire eight flights, and I would not trade it for anything in my life. The four-eighty level is a river.
We come out of the stairwell into water at hip height moving fast east, and the whole drift is a culvert now, and there's no swimming against that.
So I let it take us. Erin works it out at the same second I do and stops fighting, and we go east at the speed of the water with the roof lights going out behind us one at a time.
The raise is where the current wants to go, because water finds voids. It sluices us into the old workings and I grab the ladder and lose it, and Erin catches the rail and catches me, and for about four feet of that climb she is genuinely the only reason I'm on it.
Eighty feet of riser tube with a waterfall in it.
My arms stop working somewhere around sixty.
She gets under my shoulder on the last stretch and Wyatt hauls from the top with his bad leg braced against the hatch frame, and the two of them get two hundred and thirty pounds of Alpha out of a pipe by sheer bloody-minded refusal.
We come out onto the crib deck at twenty past six and the sun is up.
The reservoir over the drop-off has a slow dark rotation in it two hundred meters across, and as we watch, it drops and then heaves back up in a low gray dome and bursts — air, coming out under two hundred feet of water, all at once.
Erin sits down hard on the wet decking with the dry bag against her chest.
"That's the chamber," she says. "That's it going."
Caleb's people bring the boats in. Wyatt's already shouting numbers at somebody on shore. And on the north bank there are two hundred and forty people standing in the first proper light, watching the water where a machine used to be. Erin puts her hand flat on my ruined shoulder and holds it there.
"It's done," Wyatt says, grinning like a lunatic. "Nash — it's actually done."
I look at Erin. She doesn't say anything, because she's already told me what's on those drives, and neither one is going to take this minute away from him.
"Get us to shore," I say.