Noah's Ark: Contagion (18 page)

• • •

“I think you four should all fall back to the
Ambush
,” Gunson said gravely.

“I’m staying. We can beat this; there has to be a way,” one of his engineers implored. The others made similar pleas.

“I could pull rank, order you to abandon ship.”

“What? What do you mean fall back, abandon ship?” Lucya demanded. “You think you can’t fix this?” She had been hovering out of the way of the men, trying to determine just how much progress they were making.

“We have to be realistic. Our chances are not looking good. Two of the battery banks have gone critical, and the other two will go any minute now. When all four are in the red, well, let us just say there is no point in my engineers going down with your ship.”

As Gunson finished speaking, a pipe burst behind him, sending scalding steam hissing out in a high-pressure jet. Somebody screamed and dropped to the ground.

“Johnson! Are you alright, man?” Gunson ran to his fallen colleague. “You three, get out of here now, that’s an order!”

Three mechanics who had been working at the base of the battery system stood slowly. They looked at Gunson, but without diverting his attention from the injured man on the ground he shouted simply: “Go! Now!”

They backed away, then turned and headed towards the door. Lucya stepped in front of them, blocking their path.

“Please! You can’t leave us here, we need you!” She grabbed one of the engineers by the sleeves, shaking his arms as she begged him to stay. “Three thousand people need you!”

“I’m sorry,” he said, avoiding her eye. He pulled his arms free of her grip and the men walked around her out of the engine room. She heard their footsteps disappear into the distance.

“Gunson, please, you have to do something!” Lucya begged, unable to hide the panic in her voice. “There has to be a way!”

“The cooling system cannot be repaired in time. I’m sorry, it’s too late. There is nothing to be done. I will remain here with Johnson. If you wish, you can take my place on the
Ambush
. Save yourself.”

Another pipe burst, sending more clouds of steam into the room.
 

“I’m not leaving this ship,” she shouted over the noise. “I’m not leaving!”

But her cries went unheard, lost beneath the sound of a siren that began wailing, filling every corner of the engine room as it announced the imminent demise of the electrical system, and very probably the ship.

Eighteen

J
AKE
WAS
FEELING
weary. His breathing had improved, but the gas was still causing irritation in his chest and he knew he was on far from his best form. And now the initial novelty of opening doors and discovering new spaces had quickly given way to monotony. Another office, another store room, another empty room, another dormitory.

It wasn’t until he had almost reached the central cross-corridor by the stairway that he had a revelation. He became quite sure they were looking in entirely the wrong place.

“Vardy? Vardy, where are you?” He shouted as loudly as his mucus-filled lungs would allow, his voice booming backwards and forwards down the passageway.

“Jake? You found something?” It was Ewan who answered. His head popped around a corner; the beam of his torch caught Jake full in the face, blinding him momentarily.

“No, not as such. But I’ve got an idea. We need Vardy.”

“Did someone say my name?” Vardy jogged towards Jake. “What is it? What did you find?”

“Nothing yet. Russell, tell me. You said when you worked in this lab that you stayed in it from Monday to Friday, that they only let you out at weekends?”

“You make me sound like a dog chained up in a garden.”

“Whatever.” Jake waved a hand dismissively. “Where did you stay? I mean, was there a bedroom in the lab?”

“Yes, of course. There was a dormitory. There are some just like it here; I’ve seen three so far.”

“Me too. And what about food? Was there a kitchen?”

“Yes, although not a huge one. Most meals were brought down to us, but there was a kitchen for making snacks, drinks, that kind of thing, and some tables and chairs so we could eat in a civilised fashion. I don’t see the relevance of all this, Jake?”

“How big was this lab? I mean, with the sleeping area, and the kitchen, and the actual laboratory where you worked, it must have been a fair size, right? You must have had a bathroom as well? How many people worked in the lab?”

“There were usually at least a dozen of us including lab assistants. So, yeah, it was pretty sizeable. There were cold stores too, and an office we could use for writing up our progress, and yes, a bathroom. We didn’t feel cramped by any means. I’m used to living on a submarine so maybe my frame of reference isn’t the same as yours, but a week shut up in that lab was okay.”

“One more question,” Jake said impatiently. “Is all of level three laid out like this? In this grid system? Or is some of it different?”

Eric joined the group, out of breath from running to meet them. “No, it’s all on a grid,” he said.

“Almost all,” Vardy confirmed. “There’s the dry dock at the end, big enough for a sub, but everything outside the dock is the same pattern. All the levels are. Nine long corridors running north-south, crossed by twelve shorter corridors running east-west.”

“Right. So my question to you, Russell, is would your lab—dormitory, kitchen, work areas and all—fit into one of the blocks on this level?”

Vardy considered the question, and as he did so, his eyes widened. “Oh. Oh my!”

“Because from what I’ve seen so far, there are six rooms per block, three each side. And they’re not big rooms.”

“No, they’re very small. Bloody hell, Jake, you’re right. The lab complex would never fit between these corridors. It’s much bigger than these blocks. It has to be the size of at least twelve rooms, probably even more. It can’t be on this level at all. We’ve been wasting our time!”

• • •

“If we close that bulkhead, we might be lucky.” Gunson was screaming to make himself heard over the siren and the constant hissing from the burst cooling pipes. “When those batteries explode, they’re going to rip a hole in the hull. This engine room will flood, but the bulkhead should contain that. The ship will list terribly, but she might stay afloat.”

“We’re going to drown!” Lucya sobbed.

“Maybe not. We will close it from the outside. We can only hope the explosion doesn’t take out the deck above, too. Help me get Johnson out of here. He’s burnt his arm badly, but he’ll live.”

Lucya did as she was told, and as Gunson lifted his engineer’s shoulders, she grabbed his ankles. They carried the engineer, swinging between them, towards the door. He was a lot heavier than he looked.

Time slowed. Everything felt quite unreal and distant to Lucya. The impending disaster was too much to take in. Her mind tried to block it out, to pretend it wasn’t really happening. But her mind had to contend with the din of the screeching siren and the constant strobing of red warning lights. With so much going on, she barely noticed the other man walk calmly through the engine room main door. Gunson was more alert.

“You, man! Get out of here! This place is about to blow!”

The man didn’t respond. It didn’t even appear to register that someone had addressed him. Instead he walked straight to the control panel with the warning lights and meters. He looked it over once, methodically, clockwise from the top, and nodded to himself, apparently satisfied. Using both hands, he held down a combination of buttons. The siren stopped wailing and the spinning strobe lights ground to a halt.

“What are you doing?” Gunson shouted. “Step away from there, man! Get out of here before she blows!”

For the first time the man glanced up at Gunson, a look of mild irritation on his face. He turned back to his task and, getting to his knees, opened a hatch underneath the control panel.

“Come on, we have to get Johnson out. I’ll deal with him after,” Gunson urged Lucya. She nodded automatically, and the two of them continued to struggle on with their load. They finally reached the door and heaved him over the lip of the bulkhead. After laying him down gently on the floor, Gunson ran back to find the stranger. Lucya followed. Something was nagging at her. She’d seen that man before somewhere, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember where.

Back in the engine room, the man was pulling at a lever underneath the console. There was a strange clanging noise, like air trapped inside pipes. The hissing of the steam escaping from the burst cooling pipes began to drop in pitch; the pressure was reducing. At the same time, Lucya heard the sound of an engine starting up somewhere, and what sounded like the whine of an electric motor spinning up.

The unknown man pulled himself back to his feet and clapped and scraped his hands together, brushing off the dust. He peered at the meters, and smiled.

“What the…?” Gunson was by his side. “The temperatures are dropping!”

Lucya joined the two men. Gunson was right; the needles on all four meters were turning slowly but surely anti-clockwise. Two of them were outside of the red critical zone, and the other two were not far behind. She looked up at the stranger again. He was tall and slender, with thinning white hair. Older than her, older than Gunson. Older, she thought, than most people on board. Then she remembered.

“Your name is Tom,” she said. “I saw you before. You’re bolt-cutter man. You helped me, with the lifeboats. The day of the asteroid. I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Tom Sanderson. What have you done to the electrical system? We normally play bingo after lunch, at least those of us not suffering from this rather horrible sickness, which I am sorry to say is very few of us now. Some of us are still fighting fit though, and I have been on a bit of a winning streak of late. We can’t run the machine that picks our bingo balls without power.”

“Mr Sanderson,” Gunson said incredulously. “What did you just do to stop the back-up batteries from exploding?”

“What? Oh, I switched to the back-up cooling system, naturally. It runs off a little diesel generator. Can we get the electricity from the submarine connected now? I really would like to get at least a few rounds in before afternoon tea.”

“How, may I ask, did you know there was a back-up system?” The engineer was trying to keep calm, but his patience was being tested.

“Because I designed it, of course!”

• • •

“All the levels are the same layout, so it can’t be on any of the levels,” Vardy said.

“That doesn’t make any sense. You are sure the lab is on this base?”

“Ewan, I’ve been in and out of this place enough times, I’m hardly likely to confuse it with somewhere else!”

Jake sat down on the floor, his back against the wall. He was feeling weaker than ever, and the frayed tempers of those around him weren’t making matters any better.

“Jake? You alright? Here, drink some more water. That gas is dehydrating you.” Eric handed him a clear plastic bottle. He sipped at the liquid, not really thirsty, but not wanting to appear ungrateful.

“Russell, take us through how you got taken to the lab again. From the top,” Jake said, rubbing the palms of his hands into his eyes.

Vardy sighed, irritated at having to repeat himself. “I would go to the personnel entrance, the one we came through. My escort would take me to the lifts, we’d get in, they’d block the lift so nobody else could call it, then they would put the blindfold on. The lift went down. When we got out, we walked for a few minutes. It felt like we were going round in circles. I assume that was to throw me off. Then they took the blindfold off, and there I was, in the lab.”

“Did everyone get blindfolded?”

“All except Doctor Marshall. He was in charge of the lab. He came and went freely. Everyone else I worked with was on secondment from somewhere. None of us had clearance to know where exactly the lab was located.”

“Sounds like overkill. We’re all on the same side. What did they think they were hiding?” Eric muttered, shaking his head.

“I thought so too, to start with. The more I saw in that lab though, the more I understood. There were some horrific things under development. One lab assistant wanted out; she couldn’t deal with it. Imagine if she had decided to make trouble, to talk to others about the programme, or worse, the press. She would never have been able to prove a thing, because she would never be able to find the lab. The whole programme was off the record, deniable.”

“This isn’t helping us find it,” Jake said. “Are you sure the lift went down? Could it have gone up? Could the lab have been on the surface?”

“No, it went down. Deep down.”

“Hang on.” Ewan’s face lit up. “You said they blocked the lift so nobody could get in. Did they do that with a key?”

“Yes. The escort had a key, on a chain attached to his belt. How did you know?”

“In the apartment block where I lived, there’s a sub-basement. It’s where the heating systems are. They don’t want anyone going down there. The only way to access it is by putting a key into the control panel in the lift.”

Jake looked up. He understood at once. “That’s what your escort was doing! Ewan’s right. There must be another level, a hidden level, one you can only get to with the key!” He scrambled to his feet. “We have to go to the lifts!”

“Hold your horses,” Vardy said, sticking a hand in the air. “You could be right, it makes sense, a deeper level makes sense. But the lifts need power, and in case you hadn’t noticed, there isn’t any.” He spun his torch in his hand to underline the point. “And quite apart from that, we don’t have the key.”

“No, but the lift shaft must go down there, right, Jake?” Eric said, smiling.

Jake nodded. “We don’t need the lift, we just need to climb down the hole.”

• • •

The atmosphere in the engine room had changed considerably. Panic and fear had given way to a mix of relief and confusion. Relief because the battery meters had returned nearly all the way to their normal level. The immediate crisis had been averted; there would be no explosion. Confusion because after locating and starting the emergency cooling system, this strange old man had then begun connecting up the power supply from the
Ambush
. He whistled while he worked, and seemed annoyed by the questions Gunson and Lucya were throwing at him.