"...well, Odell now for the important part. Your...escape...from the Borealis. What made you run?"
Odell took a long draw on a fresh cigarette. "Well, we had already been on the Borealis for some time, almost a week, and we had been fiddling around with some of the packing crates, you know, opening them up, just doing a quick check of the whole ship. Then, we managed to clear through some more ice and get down into some of the closed off storage areas."
"By this time, some of the guys had said they were...uneasy. It was the bodies, really. All stacked up like that, and inside locked rooms, too. Anyway, we were nervous as to what else we might find. We had planned to cut through to the final stores when...Davids went. He'd taken one of the artefacts with him...said his was checking something out. We had a look for him, but he never showed up. Like the ice had swallowed him up, Rachael said."
The Elite unholstered his pistol, and advanced with slow, deliberate movements. Beyond the corpses, a tall, rusted iron door stood ajar. D-9 drew back his boot, and delivered it a swift kick that shattered a porthole set into its middle. Pistol raised, ocular lamp brightened so as to blind any enemy, D-9 burst in -
"Then the others went, the three who went to look for Davids. They must have seen something, however, because we heard them screaming and yelling for a good few minutes. Again, no traces. By now, the rest of us were freaking out. Not Mossman, though. She knew that Chan could fly our chopper, so she sent him and Rachael down to the Aurora to send out a distress call. We knew that would probably bring the Combine down on us, but we didn't care then. Shit scared, we were."
"Where were you when this was happening?" Kleiner interjected.
"I was on the bridge with Mossman. We both saw the chopper try and land on the ship – stupid really, we knew the berg was unstable."
"Unstable?"
"A big hunk of ice broke off. Must have been the rotor wash. Came crashing straight down through the chopper, and carried on through until it landed in the Aurora. She didn't break, though; the weight just pushed her down until she... slipped away." Odell shuddered.
"Then what?"
"Well, after all of that, there was only me, Phillips and Dr Mossman. Phillips grabbed the doctor and pulled her out of the bridge, towards one of the rooms we used for sleeping. I went to follow them, but the door got blown shut behind them, and I heard this horrible grating sound...and I just panicked. I kicked the other door down and ran for the ship's rail. The whole thing was on a nice incline, so when I tripped up on a cable and went over the edge, the berg acted like a kind of slide, and in just a few seconds I'd slid about a hundred feet down the side of the berg, and into the water. Fortunately, I was close to where the Aurora had gone down, so before I got too cold I found a lifeboat and hauled ass out of there."
Kleiner leaned back, his brow furrowed in deep thought. "Did you turn back at any point?"
"There was a moment, about an hour later, when I heard a kind of...roaring noise. Lots of cracking too. The Borealis was obscured by another berg, but for just a moment the whole icefield was lit up by a brilliant green and blue light. I rowed around to get a better look, but it was too dark to see back that far."
– and discovered it was empty. This small room was, he noticed, a goods lift. He consulted the schematics. This lift shaft led from the store rooms, up through all the floors to the top loading bay and down to the bilge pumps a floor below. Judging by the absence of snow and ice on the floor, someone-or something- had been standing here recently. The roof inspection hatch was ajar, and D-9 looked up. The gloomy shaft rose away above him, but D-9 could see that the maintenance ladder was both free of ice and rust, but also bent and distorted, as if something heavy had climbed it.
It was then that he heard Alyx scream.