Dark Rising (36 page)

Zach continued to type, but Alex saw that he was sweating and becoming pale.

In the sphere room, the power cubes were being pulled from the walls and into the centre of the black hole; they looked like a flock of tiny birds rushing back to their nests. Zach turned his head away from the keyboard and threw up. The distortion was starting to drag hard at his atomic structure. He wiped his mouth and turned to Alex, having to shout over the unearthly screaming from the sphere room.

‘The black hole is growing too fast and getting too strong. It will soon exceed its boundaries, and once the plasma is gone, its magnetic chains will be thrown off and it will be free to start swallowing everything around it – the entire planet.’

Zach shook his head as if to clear it. Alex knew what he was experiencing; the air seemed thicker and denser as the molecular structure of the atmosphere began to stretch, and it was getting hard to move.

Zach looked around at Alex for encouragement, or advice, anything. Alex nodded and tried to look confident, but all he could manage was a rueful half-smile. The fact was, he felt powerless. The mission wouldn’t complete and his team would be totally wiped out. They would be the first and last people on Earth to witness the genesis of a true apocalyptic event, but that wasn’t much consolation. He put a hand on Zach’s shoulder, hoping at least to give the young scientist some kind of support.

Zach wiped his eyes and turned back to the screen. He keyed different code strings into the computer – and this time was rewarded by a long string of binary code filling the screen. He yelled to Alex, ‘I’ve found a back door, but I need more time. Even if I begin to shut it down now, the radiation levels will still build to a point that will literally melt our flesh.’

Alex flinched as he felt a hand on his arm and he turned quickly. Adira stood beside him; she managed a weak smile through heavily bruised lips. One of her eyes was blackened and closing fast, and there was a trickle of blood from her ear. Alex knew she was seriously hurt.

She must have seen him examining her injuries because she straightened slightly and let go of his arm. ‘Sure, I’m not so pretty today, but so what? How much time have we got?’

Zach looked around and smiled at her, then whipped his head back to the console. ‘Next to none. All I can do is slow it and buy you some time. But you all need to get out of here – now!’ He glanced at Alex, ‘Please.’ He went back to his typing, his fingers flying across the keys.

‘Not without you, little brother,’ Adira said. She staggered towards him but Alex stopped her. She looked at him sharply and tried to pull out of his grip. He held on and shook his head.

‘He’s right, Addy. He stays or we all die. Zach is giving us – giving the entire planet – a chance. We mustn’t waste it.’

‘
Achhh!
’ She pulled her arm free and looked about to strike him. Alex dropped his arms, prepared to take the blow if she delivered it. Instead, she turned her back on them. Alex could tell she was struggling to discipline her emotions.

‘
Yasher koach aschoti
,’ Zach told her. ‘Have great strength, my sister.’ Adira didn’t turn or respond. The only sign that she heard him was a slight hunching of her shoulders, as if she were preparing herself for a blow.

Alex wanted to tell Zach he was brave, valorous . . . to thank him. But he guessed the young Israeli wasn’t looking for that, or about the sacrifice he was making. There were no other words, and no more time. He squeezed Zach’s shoulder once and turned to Adira. She had her fists up to her temples and staggered slightly, her body leaning in towards the shattered glass of the observation window. Alex could feel it too; the gravitational drag was pulling hard at the very organic fibre of their bodies. He had to use all of his great strength just to walk over to Adira. It felt as if everything around them was tilting towards the sphere room. He grabbed her around the waist and she slumped against him, unconscious now.

Alex hoisted her over his shoulder and pushed his way to the exit. He felt like a deep-sea diver, a mile down under water pressure that could crush steel. He stepped over the body of the little scientist whose neck had been broken only minutes before. The man’s face still registered the pain and anguish he had experienced in his last brutal seconds of life. Alex saw the small object clasped in his fist and recognised it as a storage device. He hesitated . . .
This is not good technology for any country to possess
– his own words rushed through his mind. He adjusted Adira on his shoulder and reached down for the device. It was small in his hand . . . he should crush it to powder . . . But he couldn’t. He had his orders.

He placed it in his pocket and pushed on to where Sam Reid was sprawled on the floor, coughing blood. He lifted Sam over his other shoulder and then focused on the door – one foot after the other, like moving through viscous oil.

As he reached the exit, Alex looked back across the room. The remaining scientists and technicians were clutching onto the legs of chairs and tables as they felt the drag of the gravitational tide drawing them into the black hole. The equipment closest to the sphere room was starting to streak and stretch, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before the outer gravitational corona reached them and they too would begin their voyage to somewhere . . . else. Alex tried not to think about the deformed creature he had seen in the containment room one level up.

Once the outer door was closed, the solid steel shielding gave him some insulation and he was able to speed up. Down the stairs he raced, along the tunnel and through the caverns. He planted Sam’s last spider against the rockfall, and covered him and Adira with his body as the explosion opened a way back to the cave mouth through which they’d entered.

With Sam and Adira over his shoulders again, he ran. He ran at a speed faster than any living creature on Earth. He ran until he couldn’t feel the gravitational pull anymore; until he couldn’t feel his own legs. He ran for hours until his body simply switched off from fatigue.

A mighty horn sounded far behind him. He fell forward as the world spun and then went black.

Zach managed to keep the remaining power cubes working as he reduced the feed to the dark monster in the other room. He knew the typed codes by memory now and so was able to shut his eyes. He didn’t want to look at his hands anymore; his fingers scared him – they looked longer and thinner than he remembered, the legs of some spindly deep-sea creature crawling over the keyboard.

Something wet ran down his face and he knew it was blood. Blistering sores opened on his forehead and cheeks as the severe radiation peeled back his outer layer of skin.

‘
Baruch Shem Kivod Malchito LeOlam Va’ed!
’ he whispered, a last prayer to God, and the words gave him strength.
Just a few seconds more
, he thought,
so they can get far away
. He tried to pray again, but this time his mouth wouldn’t work. His tongue was too large and refused to bend around the shapes of the words.

He felt a tingling warmth on his face and opened his eyes. The black hole was fraying around the edges. It was so large and close now that the dark curtain had reached the edge of the window.
Am I winning? Am I sending it back?

He looked into the entity’s very core – and saw something in there that no human being should have to bear. He screamed a single word as he felt himself pulled from his chair:
Gehinnom!
The ancient Hebrew word for hell.

FIFTY

T
he black hole had ceased to exist. It had evaporated, taking with it the entire Jamshid II facility and a large chunk of the mountain. Dr Zach Shomron had done his job.

Hammerson was screaming at someone in Israel to be put through to General Shavit. The Hammer and most of the US military leaders had been summoned to the Mole Hole, and the president was on his way. Strategic Air Command had picked up the heat signature of the Israeli missile as it was warming to countdown. If the missile was fired, there would be retaliation. There would be war.

Hammerson tilted his coffee cup to his lips and realised he had finished it ages ago. He looked at his screen again. From space, the crater was a perfect circle – three miles wide and one and a half miles deep. He reread the underlying data: in summary, a furious vertical burst of radiation, and then nothing. The hidden laboratory had ceased to exist; it had disintegrated, been digested, or, as the young Israeli scientist had theorised, perhaps been transported elsewhere.

Another screen on Hammerson’s desk showed a white bloom spewing from the hidden missile silo. A white nose-cone slowly lifted free from the billowing smoke. The Jericho was on its way.

‘Shit!’ Hammerson threw his cup across the room.

He was about to scream again at the calm young man on the phone when he was finally put through.

‘I’m sorry, my friend. Israel has decided that we must risk war today to avoid total destruction tomorrow,’ General Meir Shavit said.

The general sounded miserable. Hammerson knew that Shavit, like himself, hated war – but if he thought his country was being threatened, he would fight to the death, no quarter given.

Hammerson wasn’t authorised to send secret data, even to allies, but he encrypted the Arak images and sent them high priority to the general. ‘Arak is already gone,’ he said. ‘Look at the images being sent. I repeat, look at the images. There is no need for a strike.’ He was pacing as he watched the glowing white spear catch the sunlight and pick up speed on its deadly mission. It was almost beautiful.

‘I think it is too late, my friend.’

‘You can abort, you know–’ But the phone had gone dead.

Hammerson sat down and rubbed his face for a few minutes before typing a brief message to Alex’s SFPDA. Once again the failure message came up. He took the headset off and gathered some folders from his desk. Before he left, he looked one last time at the red circle on his screen. ‘I hope you’re well away from there, son – it’s about to get real hot.’

Then he headed for the secure bunker, where the president and his top-level military would observe the expected blowback from the Israeli first strike.

In Tel Aviv, General Meir Shavit looked at the images Major Hammerson had sent through. He compared them to his own satellite data and field reports from the Markazi desert, then reached for his phone.

Thirty-three seconds later, a fireball erupted in the sky over western Iraq. There would be no need for a retrieval mission as nothing larger than a baseball would fall to the ground.

Instantly, the Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs made contact with her counterpart in Iraq. It seemed there had been a misfire of an obsolete armament. Compensation for any clean-up was available on request.

FIFTY-ONE

W
armth, strange scents, the hum of life. Alex opened his eyes and had to blink as brilliant sunshine flooded his senses. He was lying on soft, sandy soil, partially shaded by the branches of a large tree. Small yellow bees buzzed around sticky-looking fruit nestled in amongst the leaves. He quickly looked at his hands and feet and felt his face. No elongation; and other than some tightness across his chest where the lacerations were healing, he felt fine.

Beside him lay Adira, her chest rising and falling as if she were deep in sleep. Except for a black eye and bruising on her top lip, she was perfect. Sam, too, was laid out on the sand, groaning now as he came around.

Alex moved across and helped Sam sit up. He pulled his drink flask from his waist and lifted it to Sam’s lips. The HAWC coughed, opened one eye and drank. He looked like he’d fallen in front of a cattle stampede and managed to get caught by every horn and hoof. He had open gashes on his cheeks and chin, and both of his eye sockets were purple. A huge knife wound ran from his collarbone to navel. Alex could see it had separated the skin and some of the deeper fatty tissue – horribly painful, but his innards wouldn’t come tumbling out.

Sam raised a blood-crusted eyebrow at Alex and smiled. One of his front teeth was missing. ‘You should see the other guy,’ he said, and coughed some more.

Alex laughed, and quickly checked the HAWC’s shoulders, arms and ribcage for breaks. Sam groaned as Alex extended one of his arms and then pressed his side.

‘Broken ribs as well, big guy,’ Alex said.

Sam coughed again, spat red onto the sand, and winced. He noticed the damage to Alex and got serious. ‘Sorry, boss, I tried to hold them. I saw Rocky go down, then that big bastard caught me a good one and everything went black.’

‘Take it easy, Uncle. I think he caught you with about fifty good ones. We’re all lucky to be alive. Those guys were bloody tough, like no one I’ve ever encountered.’

He paused for a second and sat back on his haunches. ‘Sam, Rocky didn’t make it. Irish neither.’ He pushed one hand up through his sweat-soaked hair and looked down into the sand.

Sam’s brow creased. ‘Rocky and Irish? I never even saw Irish come back.’

‘No, he didn’t. He took on that thing from hell. Stopped it from ambushing us outside the laboratory and gave us the time we needed to engage. I couldn’t get to him in time.’ An image of Hex Winter burning in a chair pushed into his mind. ‘I never get to them in time, Sam.’

Sam groaned again as he sat forward. He saw Adira lying on the sand, then quickly looked left and right. ‘Where’s the kid?’

Alex just shook his head.

‘Ah, shit. They killed him too?’

‘No. No, he stayed. Look around – nothing eating the planet, no incinerated landscape. He shut it down. He knew it would kill him, but he did it anyway. We’re alive because of him. He saved us all.’

Alex got to his feet and brushed the sand from his hands. ‘Anyway, soldier, patch those wounds. We’re not home yet.’

‘You got it, boss. Hey, by the way, where are we?’

‘I’ve no idea. Can you take some scans? I seem to have lost some of my kit.’

Sam laughed. Alex looked as though he had been shot out of a cannon and landed in some thorn bushes. His super-toughened suit with the ceramic armour plating was just a tattered rag circling his waist, and the pants were punctured and red with blood.