Carrick snapped up in bed, staring in puzzlement at the dim LED on the wall opposite his bunk. What had woken him? His first impulse was that it had been some nightmare he couldn’t remember, but other men also sat up around him, similarly puzzled looks on their faces.
“Must have been an earthquake,” Bigfoot muttered, and lay back down.
Maybe it was simply that. At any rate, no more sounds broke the night. The ground shook no further. No sirens burst through the silence of the few hours of sleep the prisoners were afforded.
Troubled, Carrick slipped back into sleep.
***
The next morning, Carrick made his way to the truck which he continued to drive by himself. A message waited for him on the truck's display panel, one which he assumed had been likewise sent to each other vehicle in the fleet.
Last night, a power bank or something similar exploded. It wasn't near any active work site, so pay it no mind. Within twenty-four hours, we will pinpoint its exact location and issue a hazard warning. The explosion will have destroyed any items of value and will have created an environment hazardous to government property, so do not seek it out.
Carrick tapped the dashboard as he waited for the cab to heat. A power bank had exploded? He looked through the viewscreen, past the long line of trucks making their way down the ramp into the heart of the facility. He stared beyond the strands of ghostblade which glowed faintly in what was, so early in the morning, still the moonlit night. He thought he could see a plume of steam or smoke faintly rising on the horizon. It whispered up and dissolved softly against the corona of the moon above.
Carrick was immediately distrustful of the official transmission. He was in the habit of mistrusting anything that came directly from the mouth of a government agent. Perhaps this whole event related to the reason additional bases of operation had never been constructed deeper into the Wasteland. Perhaps the government had already set up a base far under the facility and had already begun experimentation in the same manner as the Accident. Maybe the event last night had been a smaller Accident, and the government wanted to keep prying prisoners from seeing something secret enough that would require their execution and the loss of their labor.
Carrick withdrew from his parking space, joining the caravan of trucks. He opened a blank console on the truck's dashboard and began punching in mathematical functions, estimating the distance and direction of the plume of smoke.
Carrick plugged the resulting coordinates into the truck’s wayfinder and compared to them to the existing tunnel map. The coordinates lay about three hundred miles to the north, and someone's old, abandoned work site came very close to it. If Carrick followed this path, he'd be required to dig for about half a mile to reach the estimated center of the explosion, assuming that none of the work site had collapsed from the event.
The prisoners were not curious people. Carrick had realized that after his first work day's conversation with Apple. From his personal experiences with the guards, Carrick couldn't blame them. He himself had been beaten for bringing back too much scavenge that was not worth anything. When you combined the lack of expertise with such punishment, you created a person who had tunnel vision for a very specific goal and asked few questions whose domains lay outside that goal.
There was an alternative scenario, Carrick decided, to the one which he had initially considered. Perhaps the government didn't want all the prisoners bee-lining for the scene of the event. It could be that something like a meteorite had fallen, or that there had been a minor volcanic eruption that might bubble up rich veins of elements not usually found in other places. Perhaps the government was waiting to find the most trustworthy and reliable technicians to send on a special expedition rather than letting everyone have at it.
Were this the case, perhaps Carrick could earn a place as a reliable technician if he showed the initiative of excavating and returning whatever was possible. Carrick knew he had a better mental index for the values of elements such as precious metals than any other prisoner did. Among the murderers and thieves and rapists, Carrick was certain he was the only one who had experience telling fake jewels from real ones and worthless alloys from ingots of platinum.
And maybe the guards would simply shoot Carrick in the head for taking this upon himself. With every day that passed, Carrick was finding the simple state of being alive less intrinsically appealing.
He was aware of how malnutrition worked. He knew that his body was devouring his own muscles for nutrients with every passing moment. It would not be long before Carrick looked as nearly skeletal as everyone else.
There was a chance Carrick could improve his life by seeking the site of this event. It seemed to him at that moment his only hope of escaping a life of torturous misery and watching everyone else die around him.
***
Carrick drove for nearly five hours. Almost none of the travel was along a pre-established railway, but almost entirely along passages which had been dug by prisoners who came before him. Though Carrick had known no one would likely attempt what he did, the utter isolation of his path was eerie.
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He drove toward an abandoned worksite, a journey which took him very early on from the paths of any other truck. Even during the last few days when Carrick had driven alone, much of his journey had been with other trucks in fairly close proximity, close enough that he could see their taillights in the darkness before him before they eventually veered off to their own work sites.
But not today. Today, Carrick drove alone down a road which had not seen a human intruder in who knew how long. Carrick glanced constantly at the wayfinder, ensuring that he did not take a single wrong turn. The tunnels he followed after the first hours were narrow, not having even enough room for him to turn the truck around. These were the paths of individuals. He had long since diverged from stems that carried carried crowds of people to different sites.
Apple had not had time to teach Carrick all the ins and outs of the crawler truck. There were nearly a dozen instruments on board which Carrick was completely unfamiliar with. He had long since graduated from being merely a driver for the family, and even those vehicles he drove when he was a young boy were not complex tools. They were sedans with little more than navigational and entertainment systems, not construction and excavation vehicles like the crawler trucks.
There was a rudimentary documentation system on board which read out difficult to understand instructions in a monotone voice to Carrick as he drove. He had to shut these off after about an hour, for the voice was so steady and expressionless that he felt he would fall asleep if he listened to one more minute of it.
But during that time, he learned how to engage the excavator on the front of the truck, providing the appropriate tool was attached to the front of the truck. He likewise learned how to engage the short-range scanner, and, immediately upon learning this, flipped it on.
Carrick’s viewscreen lit up with projections which showed cracks and pockets in the surrounding stone, each one filled with red shading to denote nothing of value lay within.
Carrick kept this scanner active for the rest of his drive, grateful for the additional visual stimulus it provided.
Eventually, Carrick slowed the truck to a little faster than walking speed. He was approaching the coordinates he had marked, and as yet had seen nothing like the cave-in he had anticipated. He keyed for a medium-range scan, one which reached up to a half mile out, and read through the visual documentation presented alongside the program. It was much more complicated than the short-range scanner, and required him to scan for individual sets of data at a time rather than simply collecting everything and projecting it as the short-range scanner did.
after a few attempts to find the right syntax for programming the scan, Carrick successfully scanned for recent collapses. The scan returned nothing. He tried to find an option to scan for nearby recent seismic activity, but this seemed to be beyond the scanner’s capabilities.
Finally, returning to his earlier theory that the event might have instead been a meteor or volcano, he performed a thermal scan.
This time, he had a hit.
Excited, Carrick leaned over the dashboard and stared at the pulsating dot which had been added to his wayfinder. The temperature was not exactly as hot as molten rock, but it was significantly hotter than either the cool stone around it or the ice above. About a quarter mile to the northwest lay Carrick's destination.
He stopped the truck and opened his cab door, grateful there was at least enough clearance in the tunnel for him to do this, and walked around the truck until he reached the tools. Carrick pulled open the tool bay door and rummaged around until he found the wheel-like device, which had magnetic brackets on its backside to attach to the front of the truck.
It was tremendously heavy, but Carrick managed to drag it back around and heave it up until it fell with a clang into place on the front of the truck. He heaved against the lever which locked it in, and a safety light on its front turned brilliant green.
Carrick climbed back into the truck, slammed his door shut, and engaged excavation mode. The truck settled itself onto the ground and projected hydraulic pistons to its sides and back to anchor and brace itself against the tunnel. Plasma jets ignited on the front of the truck, and the wheel began to spin.
Carrick gently leaned into the truck's controls, and the antigrav repulsors on its rear pushed it forward and westward, shoving the spinning plasma jets directly into the tunnel wall.
The air was filled with a chattering sound like a million skulls, all laughing at him, but Carrick gritted his teeth and pushed the power harder. The wall disintegrated before him, not only the portion directly in contact with the plasma, but stone all around the truck as well. Unlike when he held the plasma pick, much of the vibration was transferred to the truck itself, and Carrick had a hard time keeping his focus as the truck moved forward.
The clattering vibration was so intense that Carrick quickly lost sense of time and couldn't tell how fast he was progressing. He later realized, reading the trucks chronometer, that he had only excavated for fewer than ten minutes before the truck punched through the wall ten feet above the ground of what had once been the Capitol Building of human civilization on the planet Dirt.
It took a half-second for Carrick to realize that the vibration had stopped and that he was plunging nose-first toward the ground. He hauled up on the controls and the rear thrusters stopped just as the excavator’s safety function triggered, designed for exactly this scenario.
The antigrav tried to compensate, but Carrick was still jarred so hard by his impact with the ground that he bit deeply into his tongue, filling his mouth with blood.
A light flashed on the dashboard, warning him that repair would be necessary to the front bumper. For a few moments, Carrick simply spluttered on his own blood and fumbled for the switch to activate the truck's external lights.
Carrick grabbed the can of first aid adhesive from the door at the same moment he flicked on all the lights. Hoping he wouldn't seal his throat closed, he stuck out his tongue and sprayed into his mouth, shooting pain through his entire head as the flesh of his tongue bubbled and the wound healed closed.
And Carrick saw before him crumbled ruins of seamless marble and gleaming black metal. He saw a metal cube ten by ten feet hovering in the air, a faint green light emanating from each of its faces despite no visible LEDs or bioluminescent elements.
And he saw what appeared to be a sleek fighter jet buried half into the ground, surrounded by tremendous chunks of ice, illuminated from above by watery sunlight which filtered through a plume of steam or smoke that rose from the still-glowing jet on its tail.