Ghost station, p.14
Ghost Station, page 14
But Ophelia meets his gaze without flinching and lifts her chin, fury simmering just beneath the surface. “Ready when you are.”
* * *
“Enjoying the walk, Doctor?” Severin asks, as the wind forces Ophelia to stagger sideways once more.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Ophelia castigates herself. Studying the human mind and how it affects behavior has certainly given her better awareness of her own foibles. It has not, however, made her any less prone to falling into the pitfalls of her own personality.
Yes, of course, taking this trip to the city ruins might help garner her more trust, more respect. And passing up the opportunity to have one-on-one conversation with the man in an environment he is probably far more comfortable in would have been shortsighted.
But neither of those reasons are why she said yes. And they both know it.
“It’s great,” Ophelia says, trying not to pant so overtly over the private channel that Severin has opened between them. “Bright, sunny day. Fresh air. Exercise. What more could I ask for?”
The blank, snowy sheet of their surroundings is as dull and eerie in the vague blue-gray light as it’s ever been. The only air is coming from the tank and recycler in her suit, and “fresh” would not be the word she’d use to describe it. Thick plastic, with rich metal overtones maybe. Or fume-y. Though obviously the air is clean enough to breathe or her suit would have been throwing an alarm.
The exercise part, at least, is true, though it feels a lot more like trying to chew through the thickened maple syrup filling in those weird cookies her sister liked to have shipped in from Independent Quebec. In other words, a lot of effort for very little reward. The walk to the outer edge of the city ruins might only have taken fifteen minutes in good conditions, but it’s twice that today. And they are only halfway there.
Severin—six or seven meters ahead of her in physical form but right in front of her face on her screen—snorts, shaking his head. But Ophelia is secretly pleased to see the flush of exertion on his cheeks as well, even if his steps, even and smooth, don’t show it.
Liana and Kate just broke off to head toward the towers, two spears jutting out of the snow. The towers look out of place, glossy and sharply angled at the ends, unlike the wind- and weatherworn edges of the rest of the ruins. Ophelia imagines that the Cloud Gate sculpture would look much the same to an outsider arriving to Old Chicago from another planet. Same with the tangled remains of the Calder sculpture, assuming any of it remained after the fire. Most of the former downtown has been permanently sealed off, cut off like a surgeon excising a margin of healthy skin around cancerous lesion.
“I don’t appreciate you using my team to manipulate me,” Severin says.
It’s Ophelia’s turn to snort. She did nothing of the sort. He’s the one who opened his mouth. Now, granted, she might have guessed that Liana would latch on to the idea, refusing to let go of it, if Ophelia volunteered to accompany him. But that’s his fault, too.
“And I don’t appreciate you refusing to take advantage of the assistance I can offer for the betterment of your team,” Ophelia says back. “So we’re both full of nonappreciation, I guess, Commander. What would you like to do about that?”
Being categorized as baggage, useless, tainted, garbage—they’re all tangled threads in her mind, leading to one giant hot button that she can’t resist reacting to when it’s pressed. Granted, plenty of people want to give her too much value, fawning over her, but that’s because of her last name, not in spite of it, and she’s never been tempted to believe in it.
Ophelia suspects Ethan Severin has a similar sensitivity, only his is about his team and people thinking he’s not doing enough.
He glares at her, and she can practically see him puffing up with the urge to defend himself. But he stops, his gaze darting to the side.
Ophelia freezes, her heart stumbles in her chest, and she automatically scans the horizon around them. But there’s nothing except the city ruins growing larger in the distance as they approach.
Then it clicks. He’s not looking out at anything.
The common channel remains open on the other side of her helmet screen, showing tiny images of Liana, Kate, Suresh, and Birch, though with the private channel open with Severin, she can’t hear them, only read their transcribed words below their faces.
Suresh:—completely disgusting! There’s still shit in here from however many years ago. This is not what I signed on for.
Birch: It’ll go faster if you … try the shovel.
Suresh: You try it!
Kate: Keep scooping, pod boy.
Liana: We’re supposed to keep this channel clear!
Birch: It’ll go faster if you … try the shovel.
Suresh: Bro, you said that already.
Ophelia frowns. Birch’s gaze seems distant and unfocused.
Severin sighs on their open line, sounding tired, as he starts forward again.
She follows, struggling for a moment to pull her booted feet free from the icy layer of snow.
“You’re genuinely concerned about him,” Severin says, but it sounds more like a question.
Ophelia resists the urge to shoot back, “As opposed to falsely being concerned about him to amplify my own importance?” Step away from the button, Ophelia. Instead, she takes a calming breath and answers the question, ignoring the possible subtextual jab.
“I am,” she says. And not just because the apparent response to someone’s possible disorientation within the hab is to search for them with a weapon, though, frankly, she doesn’t love that. It means the negative narrative about ERS and mental health in space in general is winning. “I don’t know him as well as you do, obviously. But he seems a bit … disconnected. More so than before we left the ship.”
“Do you think he was lying?” Severin asks, but she can’t quite read his tone. There’s something guarded in it. “About why he was in the airlock?”
She hesitates, and the only sound on their channel is their breathing, hers louder and far more ragged than his. “Yes,” she says after a moment. “His iVR numbers don’t match his story. But I think it would be a mistake to assume we know why. Trauma makes people do strange things.”
She expects Severin to immediately protest the idea that his team is experiencing any aftereffects from Ava’s untimely death. But he simply grunts an acknowledgment.
Ophelia sees an opening to continue. “I know you were concerned that he was trying to leave the hab, or that he was thinking about leaving,” she says cautiously. Like Ava. “But we need to keep in mind that it might be something else entirely. I don’t think he’s progressed to the point that she … to that point. Maybe he was sleeping in there to guard the door, to prevent someone else on the team from leaving.”
Severin’s gaze jolts to back to hers abruptly.
“Just to help himself feel certain that it wasn’t happening,” she adds quickly. “Or it could be something as simple as needing to be close to an exit, to feel like he could leave, if necessary. Claustrophobia isn’t unheard of as a reaction, even for an R&E team member.” Particularly because Ava died, as far as Ophelia could tell, from running out of air. Leaving the hab to walk on a planet where the air is not breathable seems a contrary reaction, but it’s instinctive in humans. Outside means more air. Period.
She stops, waiting to see if Severin will take the opening to ask another question or continue the conversation. But he doesn’t.
Instead he gives her a curt nod and closes the private channel, switching them back automatically to the common one and Suresh’s moaning about getting calluses.
Disappointment pings through her, but she pushes back against it. Building a therapeutic relationship takes time; she knows that. At least this is a start. That’s enough for now. They have weeks to go yet.
14
“Watch your step,” Severin says, as the ground dips unexpectedly beneath Ophelia’s feet. “We’re reaching the start of the excavation.”
Finally, finally, they’ve reached the edge of the city ruins. The remains of the buildings are larger, more substantial than she expected; her sense of scale is off.
Ahead of her, broken rectangles cluster together in an uneven half circle, covered in a thinner layer of ice and snow. From the angle of their approach, Ophelia can see that at least three or four stories are visible above the ground on most of the buildings, with probably that many or more beneath the level of the snow.
The ruins loom over her, casting vague shadows on the snow like an unwelcome mat.
The so-called towers are to her right and slightly behind, and it’s like she can feel them pulsing at her back, demanding attention, like a beacon. Probably because they’re the only things around here that aren’t white or gray or some shade of either.
On the other side of the towers, there’s another clutch of ruined buildings, worn tops barely peeking through the drifts of snow. A similar set huddles in front of the distant mountains.
But clearly any work that Pinnacle did in excavation has been focused here—on this closest set of buildings, in particular the central trio that is grouped together, two shorter ones leaning toward a taller one in the center, like grieving family members relying on the strong one.
“They started out here, probably just to be able to get equipment in and the snow out,” Severin says. Now that he points it out, Ophelia can detect the ongoing depression, almost like a pathway in front of them, leading to the targeted buildings.
“Field generators are still in place,” he continues, gesturing toward small devices on tripods, stabbed into the ground at varying intervals along the path they are now following, like a perimeter. “That would have kept the snow away, until they ran out of power. Not enough light to keep the solar panels juiced without help.”
She follows Severin down what’s left of the carved path, and eventually they descend into a larger dug-out space near the buildings, where they are more sheltered from the wind and snow. The structures bobbing in the corner of her helmet-obstructed peripheral vision make her feel like either she’s shrinking or they are unaccountably growing taller. As if she’s that infamous Alice and she’s lost her grip on what’s real and what’s not.
It sends shivers over her skin.
As they pass the first building in the trio, Ophelia can see now that it’s not just leaning but has fallen over. Only the taller building in the center is keeping it upright. The quarried stone exterior is cracked and crumbling, but spikey shards of a glossy, orangish finish cling to it here and there. At ground level—or what passes for it at this point—the curved upper edge of a circular opening disappears into the snow below. The space is dark and alluring, promising mysteries to solve if one were to crawl inside. Until Ophelia is close enough to see that inside that particular opening is nothing but iced-over rubble, apparently from an internal collapse.
The central building, the one that appears to be intact and still standing straight up, is covered in a loose framework of scaffolding, behind which a dozen or so of those same rounded entrances beckon.
This is where Pinnacle set up shop. And where she and Severin are headed, even though the plasti-fab boards and piping that make up the scaffolding look shaky at best.
As Ophelia watches, a gust of wind tears past above them and the uppermost level of the scaffolding sways away from the building.
The thought of being on the fragile structure makes Ophelia’s stomach lurch like she’s falling. Her hands and fingers tingle painfully, as if circulation has been cut off. “Severin,” Ophelia begins.
“Yeah, I saw it,” he responds. “We’ll look for another way.”
“Can’t we just go in down here?” Ophelia gestures to the nearest opening on her left side—dim, snow covered, but on the lowest level of the scaffolding. They wouldn’t even really have to use it so much as crawl across the plasti-fab boards.
Severin shakes his head. “I don’t know if there’s a clear internal path between levels. It looks like they were using the scaffolding for ingress and egress.”
“Everything okay?” Liana asks, her smile uncertain on Ophelia’s helmet screen. As uncertain as the fucking scaffolding they’re probably going to have to climb.
“We’re fine. Just contemplating another way in.” Severin sounds easy, unconcerned, as he strides forward along the building front, looking for something, but Ophelia wonders how much of that is for Liana’s benefit. She’s beginning to suspect that Liana’s concerns about a cave-in or other disastrous outcome for this little adventure might not have been so outlandish. This line item on the mission assignment requires a thorough survey, with visual documentation of the entire excavation site. Montrose is desperate to figure out what Pinnacle was up to when it was here.
“Just come back tomorrow with the drone,” Kate says. Her sharply angled bangs are hanging in her eyes, and she huffs a breath upward to move them. “We don’t need trouble on this one. Liana and I are almost at the towers.”
“Can’t risk it getting tangled up in something we can’t see,” Severin responds, but he sounds distracted. Ophelia can’t quite see him anymore; he’s lost to the snowy background on the far side of the scaffolding, except for a few sharp motions that make him stand out. Whose idea was it to make envirosuits uniformly white, anyway?
“Here,” Severin calls. He steps back into view and waves Ophelia forward.
She makes her way toward him, stepping in his footsteps, or trying to, despite his longer stride.
When she reaches him, he’s standing at the base of the uncovered portion of the building, holding on to a ladder.
No. It is an assemblage of fraying dark green straps formed into a ladderlike structure, dangling from the upper-story window.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says, unable to stop herself.
“It’s probably how they first gained access, working their way down,” Severin says. “We’re lucky they didn’t remove it when they built the scaffold.”
“Lucky,” she repeats.
“It’s perfectly safe,” he says, a hint of exasperation entering his voice. “It’s a portable ladder, probably pulled from their ship kit. Designed to withstand virtually any kind of environmental conditions. For a time, anyway.”
He doesn’t wait for her response but pulls on the ladder, and then even steps onto it with his full weight.
Snow falls from the rounded opening above, but nothing else. But the entire contraption scrapes from side to side just with his movement, let alone the wind.
“See? It’s good.” Severin steps back onto the ground but gives the ladder another tug for good measure. “Let’s go. The snow is coming down faster now.”
The harsh flecks of icy moisture do seem to be clicking against her helmet at a faster rate, that’s true.
“Roger that. Same over here,” Kate adds. “We’re bagging and tagging samples now.”
Ophelia is not afraid of heights, but being out of control? Being attached to wildly chaotic conditions with only the faintest grip on what’s happening around her? She swallows hard, her palms damp with sweat inside her gloves. There’s a limit to how far she’ll go to get a patient to trust her.
Severin arches his eyebrows at Ophelia, looking at her directly through his helmet faceplate. His image does the same through the common channel, so it’s a double dose of disapproval. “I assume that telling you it would be faster and more efficient for you to wait out here is pointless,” he says.
Ophelia immediately feels a rush of returning fury. He thinks she can’t handle it.
“I’ll trade you,” Suresh offers.
Everyone ignores him.
“You shouldn’t go in alone,” Liana pipes in.
“I’m here to help. Let’s go,” Ophelia says, all but daring Severin to take it back.
“After you,” he says, holding the base of the ladder steady with one foot and a hand, waving her forward with the other hand. But she doesn’t miss the self-satisfied smile flickering at the corners of his mouth.
Son of a bitch. She freezes, her foot caught in the first rung of the ladder.
He manipulated her. And well.
She’s not sure which she’s more unsettled by—that she didn’t catch it or that he already seems to know how to effectively do so.
“We didn’t have time to argue, Doctor,” Severin says, when she glares at him. But beneath her irritation, grudging admiration pokes its grumpy head up.
That’s all she has opportunity for, though, on that line of thought. Her entire focus is on gripping the rungs above her, one at a time, and pulling herself up onto the next without losing her balance. Severin’s weight at the bottom helps, but not enough.
When she reaches the opening, she leans her upper body through it and half scrambles, half falls inside, kicking her legs free from the tangle of the second-to-last step.
There is a reason she has an office job. This is not her forte.
She lands on the floor hard enough to jar her teeth. The floor is gritty beneath her palms—not a sensation, obviously, with her suit gloves in the way, but a sound that comes through loud and clear on her external mic. She pushes herself up to her feet to look around, breathless.
Severin joins her in a matter of moments, neatly boosting himself inside.
“It’s empty,” she says, gesturing around herself. The space is essentially a block of rooms within a larger room, crumbled stone piles indicating where walls once stood. The ceiling is cracked and falling in in one corner. More rubble. The two metal stakes—she’s not sure what else to call them—pounded into the stone floor to hold the ladder in place are pretty much it.
It’s not as if she was expecting to walk in and find anything recognizable as furniture or tech—especially as the original residents weren’t human, and how would she even know what she was looking at? But to find nothing but snow, rocks, and a thin layer of fine black grit over everything is disappointing.
