Evolution

Snowy had pressed Ahmed about the CO. Ahmed showed him. Barking Madd’s body was shriveled and shrunken, literally mummified, just hardened flesh over the bone. The rest, the other fourteen, were the same.

Sidewise, predictably, couldn’t keep his mouth closed. Sidewise was an air warfare officer. He was a thin, intense man, and he had earned his handle for his habit of making sideways crablike moves whenever he got on a dance floor. Now he glanced around at the little group. "Fucking hell," he said to Snowy. "So much for the safety margins."

"Shut it," Ahmed snapped.

Bonner asked Ahmed, "So what was the tally?"

Tally, for tally-ho, was the slang for a wake-up call. "There wasn’t one," Ahmed said bluntly.

"So if not a tally, what woke us up?"

Ahmed shrugged. "Maybe the Pit has an automatic timer. Or maybe something just failed and it pitched us out."

Bonner was a good-looking kid, though one of the gen-enged plagues had left him hairless from head to toe. Now he ran his hand over his bare scalp. His accent was faintly Welsh. "Maybe we just pushed it too hard. The Pit was supposed to be a cryostore for seeds and animal embryos and stuff. Insurance against the mass extinction. Not for humans—"

"Especially not humans like you, Bonner," Snowy said. "Maybe your farts blew the gaskets."

The bit of low humor seemed to relax the group, as Snowy had hoped.

Ahmed said, "This Pit might have been originally built for elephant embryos or whatever, but it was man rated. We all saw the lectures on the safety parameters, the reliability of the systems."

"Sure," Sidewise said. "But any system will fail, no matter how well it’s designed and built, if you give it enough time." That silenced them. And Sidewise said, "Anybody noticed the clock?"

Most of the Pit’s instruments were dead. But there had been a backup mechanical clock that had drawn on a trickle of thermal energy from deep roots planted in the earth below. Before they submitted to the cold sleep they had all been shown the clock’s working — the cogs made of diamond that would never wear out, the dials that spanned the unthinkable time of fifty years, and so on. It had been a not-so-subtle psychological ploy to reassure them that no matter how long they were in the ground, no matter what became of the outside world, no matter what else failed in the Pit, they would know the date.

But now Snowy saw that the clock’s hands had jammed against the end of their dials.

Snowy thought of his wife, Clara. She had been pregnant when he had gone into cold sleep. Fifty years? The kid would be born, grown, with kids of its own. Maybe even grandkids. No. He rejected the thought. It made no sense; you couldn’t have a human life with a gap of fifty years in the middle of it.

But Sidewise was still talking. "At least fifty years," he said relentlessly. "How long do you think it would take for Barking’s body to mummify like that, for all our clothes to rot away?" That was the trouble with Sidewise, Snowy thought. He was never shy of saying what everybody else didn’t even want to think about.

"Enough," Ahmed snapped. He was short, stocky, squat. "Barking is dead. I’m senior here. I’m in charge." He glared around at them. "Everyone happy with that?"

Moon and Bonner seemed to have withdrawn into themselves. Sidewise was smiling oddly, as if he knew a secret he wasn’t sharing.

Snowy shrugged. He knew Ahmed had served as a watch chief — the navy equivalent of a sergeant major. Snowy thought of him as competent, oddly thoughtful, but inexperienced. And, incidentally, not popular enough for a nickname. But there wasn’t anybody better qualified here, regardless of rank. "I suggest you get on with it, sir."

Ahmed gave him a look of gratitude. "All right. Here’s the deal. We’ve had no tally. In fact, no contact from the outside. I can’t even tell how long since we last got a contact of any sort. Too many of the systems are down."

Moon said, "So we don’t know what’s happening out there?"

Snowy said briskly, "Tell us what we do."

"We get out of here. We don’t need protective gear. Enough of the external sensors are working to tell us that."

That was a relief, Snowy thought. He wouldn’t have welcomed relying for protection on his NBC suit — nuclear-biological-chemical — if it had been subject to the same ferocious aging as his other clothes.

Ahmed hauled a steel trunk out from under one of the bunks. Inside were pistols, Walther PPKs, each packed in a plastic bag filled with oil. "I checked one already. We can test fire them outside." He handed them around.