2312

“This is part of a whole system,” Swan explained. “It was built to help with the construction of the tracks. Every tenth platform has a unit like this under it, and there’s a utilidor that connects them all. A work tunnel.” The sunwalkers were already checking some of the cabinet doors on one wall.

“So we could hurry underground in this tunnel and catch up to the nightside? Get to help?”

“Yes. But I wonder if the part under the meteor strike is still passable. I guess we can go see.”

“It’s all heated and aerated?”

“Yes. After some people died when they came down to take shelter, the stations have been made minimally survivable. Actually, I think you have to re-aerate the utilidor section by section as you go along. It’s like turning on the lights.”

One of the sunwalkers gave a thumbs-up, and Swan took off her helmet and Wahram did too.

“Do either of you have radio comms?” one of them asked. “Ours aren’t working, and we’re thinking maybe the sun fried them. And the phone here isn’t working. We won’t be able to tell people we’re down here.”

“Pauline, are you all right?” Swan said aloud, and fell silent.

“How is your qube?” Wahram asked after a while.

“She’s all right,” Swan said dismissively. “She says my head served as good insulation for her.”

“Oh dear.”

They followed the sunwalkers down the hall, took stairs down to a set of large rooms below.

The biggest room down there contained a scattering of couches and low tables, and the long bar of a communal kitchen. Swan introduced herself and Wahram to the three sunwalkers, who were people of indeterminate age and gender. They nodded politely at Swan’s introduction, but did not identify themselves. “How is your arm?” Swan asked the hurt one.

“It’s broken,” the person said simply, and held it out a little. “Clean hit, but the rock was small and just falling, I guess. Tossed up in the big hit.”

Now it seemed to Wahram that this one at least was young.

“We’ll wrap it,” one of the others said, also young. “We can try to straighten it, and then wrap it with a support, no matter how straight it is.”

“Did any of you see the meteor strike?” Swan asked.

They all three shook their heads. All young, Wahram thought. These were the kinds of people who walked around Mercury right before sunrise, torching themselves with solar visions. Although apparently Swan was also one of them. The young in spirit, then.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

“We can take the utilidor west till we get to the next spaceport on the nightside,” one of them said.

“Do you think the utilidor is still passable under the hit?” Swan asked.

“Oh,” the one said. “I didn’t think of that.”

“It might be,” said the one with the broken forearm. The third one was looking in cabinets against the wall. “You never know.”

“I doubt it,” Swan said. “But I guess we can go look. It’s only about fifteen klicks away.”

Only fifteen! Wahram didn’t say. They stood there looking at each other.

“Well, shit,” Swan said. “Let’s go take a look. I don’t want to just sit here.”

Wahram suppressed a sigh. It was not as if they had a great number of choices. And if they could get through to the west, and hurried, they could catch up to the night, and hopefully the spaceport where the people from Terminator had gone.

So they went to a door at the west end of the room and went through it into a passageway, lit dimly by a string of overhead lights that were part of the ceiling. The walls of the tunnel were raw faces of rock, in some places cracked, in others bare walls with drill bit marks angling upward on their left and downward on their right. They hiked west at a good clip. The one with the broken arm seemed to be the fastest of them all, although one of the other sunwalkers stuck close by the hurt one. No one spoke. An hour passed; then, after a short rest sitting on some cubical blocks of rock in the tunnel, another hour. “Did your Pauline get an image of the strike?” Wahram asked Swan when they were walking again. The utilidor was wide enough for three or four people to walk abreast, as the sunwalkers were proving ahead of them.

“I’ve looked, but it’s just a flash to one side. Only a few milliseconds of light before the explosion upward and out, coming down fast and hot. But why hot? There’s no atmosphere to heat it, so that doesn’t make sense. It kind of looks like it came from, I don’t know, somewhere else. From some other universe.”

“Seems like some other explanation will be forthcoming,” Wahram could not help saying.

“Well, you explain it,” she said sharply, as if speaking to her qube.

“I can’t,” Wahram said calmly.

They walked on in silence. Presumably at some point they were walking underneath the city. Above them, Terminator would be burning up in the day’s rain of light.