羊毛战记 Part 5 The Stranded 56

　　56

　　• Silo 17 •

　　A tiny strand¹ of copper² wire stood at a right angle to the rest. It was like a silo landing shooting offthe great stairway, a bit of flat amid the twisted spiral. As Juliette wrapped the pads of her fingersaround the wire and worked the splice³ into place, this jutting⁴ barb⁵ sank into her finger, stinging herlike some angry insect.

　　Juliette cursed and shook her hand. She very nearly dropped the other end of the wire, whichwould’ve sent it tumbling several levels down.

　　She wiped the welling spot of blood onto her gray overalls⁶, then finished the splice and securedthe wires to the railing to keep the strain off. She still didn’t see how they had come loose, buteverything in this cursed and dilapidated silo seemed to be coming apart. Her senses were the least ofit.

　　She leaned far out over the railing and placed her hand on the hodgepodge of pipes and tubingfastened to the concrete wall of the stairwell. She tried to discern, with hands chilled by the cool airof the deep, any vibration⁷ from water gurgling through the pipe.

　　“Anything?” she called down to Solo. There seemed to be the slightest tremor⁸ in the plastictubing, but it could’ve been her pulse.

　　“I think so!”

　　Solo’s thin voice echoed from far below.

　　Juliette frowned and peered down the dimly lit shaft⁹, down that gap between steel step and thickconcrete. She would have to go see for herself.

　　Leaving her small tool bag on the steps—no danger of anyone coming along to trip over it—shetook the treads two at a time and spiraled her way deeper into the silo. The electrical wiring and thelong snake of pipes spun¹⁰ into view with each rotation¹¹, drips of purple adhesive¹² marking everylaborious joint¹³ she’d cut and fastened by hand.

　　Other wiring ran alongside hers, electrical cables snaking from IT far above to power the growlights of the lower farms. Juliette wondered who had rigged this stuff up. It hadn’t been Solo; thiswiring had been strung during the early days of silo seventeen’s downfall. Solo had simply becomethe lucky beneficiary of someone else’s hard and desperate work. Grow lights now obeyed theirtimers, the greenery obeyed the urge to blossom, and beyond the stale stench of oil and gas, of floodsand unmoving air, the ripe tinge¹⁴ of plants growing out of control could be nosed from severallandings away.

　　Juliette stopped at the landing of one-thirty-six, the last dry landing before the flood. Solo hadtried to warn her, had tried to tell her even as she lusted¹⁵ over the image of the massive diggers on thewall-sized schematic. Hell, she should’ve known about the flood without being told. Groundwaterwas forever seeping¹⁶ into her own silo, a hazard of living below the water table. Without power to thepumps, the water would naturally make its way in and rise.

　　Out on the landing, she leaned on the steel railing and caught her breath. A dozen steps below,Solo stood on the single dry tread their efforts had exposed. Nearly three weeks of wiring andplumbing, of scrapping¹⁷ a good section of the lower hydroponics farm, of finding a pump and routingthe overflow¹⁸ to the water treatment facility tanks, and they had uncovered a single step.

　　Solo turned and smiled up at her. “It’s working, right?” He scratched his head, his wild hairjutting at all angles, his beard flecked with a gray that his youthful jubilance denied. The hopefulquestion hung in the air, a cloud visible from the cold of the down deep.

　　“It’s not working enough,” Juliette told him, annoyed with the progress. She peered over therailing, past the jutting toes of borrowed boots to the colorful slick of water below. The mirroredsurface of oil and gas stood perfectly¹⁹ still. Beneath this coat of slime, the emergency lights of thestairwell glowed eerily²⁰ green, lending the depths a haunting look that matched the rest of the emptysilo.

　　In that silence, Juliette heard a faint gurgle in the pipe beside her. She even thought she could hearthe distant buzz of the submerged pump a dozen or so feet below the oil and gas. She tried to will thewater up that tube, up twenty levels and hundreds of joints²¹ to the vast and empty treatment tanksabove.

　　Solo coughed into his fist. “What if we install another—?”

　　Juliette raised her hand to quiet him. She was doing the math.

　　The volume of the eight levels of Mechanical was difficult to calculate, so many corridors androoms that may or may not have been flooded, but she could guess the height of the cylindrical²² shaftfrom Solo’s feet to the security station. The lone²³ pump had moved the level of the flood a little lessthan a foot in two weeks. Eighty or ninety feet to go. With another pump, say a year to get to theentrance of Mechanical. Depending on how watertight the intervening levels were, it could be muchmore. Mechanical itself could take three or four times as long to clear.

　　“What about another pump?” Solo insisted.

　　Juliette felt nauseous. Even with three more of the small pumps from the hydroponic farms, andwith three more runs of pipe and wiring to go with them, she was looking at a year, possibly two,before the silo was perfectly dry. She wasn’t sure if she had a year. Just a few weeks of being in thatabandoned place, alone with a half-sane²⁴ man, and she was already starting to hear whispers, to forgetwhere she was leaving things, finding lights on she swore she’d turned off. Either she was goingcrazy, or Solo found humor in making her feel that way. Two years of this life, of her home so closebut so impossibly far away …

　　She leaned over the railing, feeling like she really might be sick. As she gazed down at the waterand through her reflection cast in that film of oil, she suddenly considered risks even crazier than twoyears of near-solitude.

　　“Two years,” she told Solo. It felt like voicing a death sentence. “Two years. That’s how longthis’ll take if we add three more pumps. Six months at least on the stairwell, but the rest will goslower.”

　　“Two years!” Solo sang. “Two years, two years!” He tapped his boot twice against the water onthe step below, sending her reflection into sickening waves of distortion. He spun in place, peering upat her. “That’s no time!”

　　Juliette fought to control her frustration²⁵. Two years would feel like forever. And what would theyfind down there, anyway? What condition would the main generator²⁶ be in? Or the diggers? Amachine submerged under fresh water might be preserved as long as air didn’t get to it, but as soon asany of it was exposed by the pumps, the corrosion²⁷ would begin. It was the nastiness of oxygenworking on wet metal that spelled doom²⁸ for anything useful down there. Machines and tools wouldneed to be dried immediately and then oiled. And with only two of them—Juliette watched, horrified²⁹, as Solo bent³⁰ down, waved away the film of grease at his feet, andscooped up two palms of the brackish³¹ filth³² below. He slurped³³ noisily and happily.

　　—Okay, with only one of them working diligently³⁴ at salvaging³⁵ the machines, it wouldn’t beenough.

　　Maybe she’d be able to salvage³⁶ the backup generator. It would require less work and still provideplenty of power.

　　“What to do for two years?” Solo asked, wiping his beard with the back of his hand and lookingup at her.

　　Juliette shook her head. “We’re not waiting two years,” she told him. The last three weeks in siloseventeen had been too much. This, she didn’t say.

　　“Okay,” he said, shrugging. He clomped up the stairwell in his too-big boots. His gray overallswere also baggy³⁷, as if he were still a young boy trying to wear clothing tailored for his father. Hejoined Juliette on the landing, smiled at her through his glistening³⁸ beard. “You look like you havemore projects,” he said happily.

　　She nodded silently. Anything the two of them worked on, whether it was fixing the sloppy³⁹ wiringof the long-ago dead, or improving the farms, or repairing a light fixture’s ballast, Solo referred to asa “project.” And he professed⁴⁰ to love projects. She decided⁴¹ it was something from his youth, somesort of survival mechanism⁴² he’d concocted⁴³ over the years that allowed him to tackle whatever neededdoing with a smile instead of horror or loneliness.

　　“Oh, we’ve got quite a project ahead of us,” Juliette told him, already dreading⁴⁴ the job. She startedmaking a mental list of all the tools and spares they’d need to scrounge on their way back up.

　　Solo laughed and clapped his hands. “Good,” he said. “Back to the workshop!” He twirled hisfinger over his head, pointing up at the long climb ahead of them.

　　“Not yet,” she said. “First, some lunch at the farms. Then we need to stop by Supply for somemore things. And then I need some time alone in the server room.” Juliette turned away from therailing and that deep shaft of silver-green water below. “Before we get started in the workshop,” shesaid, “I’d like to make a call—”

　　“A call!” Solo pouted⁴⁵. “Not a call. You spend all your time on that stupid thing.”

　　Juliette ignored him and hit the stairs. She began the long slog up to IT, her fifth in three weeks.

　　And she knew Solo was right: she was spending too much time making calls, too much time withthose headphones pulled down over her ears, listening to them beep. She knew it was crazy, that shewas going slowly mad in that place, but sitting at the back of that empty server with her microphoneclose to her lips and the world made quiet by the cups over her ears—just having that wire linking herfrom a dead world to one that harbored life—it was the closest she could get in silo seventeen tomaking herself feel sane.

 

分享到：