The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (38 page)

Who, then, was in a place to notice a single sphere, fifty feet across, that dropped into the center of the maelstrom, but didn’t re-appear on the surface like the thousands of others? With the lake surface covered in tens of thousands of spheres, who even dared to imagine that under its surface that particular sphere was adjusting its propulsion and navigating farther down into the dark water and beginning its trek west toward the city of Geneva itself?

As soon as their terrifying freefall and whiplash collision into Lake Geneva was complete, Taveena and Annalise were out of their belted chairs and back at their consoles.

Shaw finished his deep breaths and looked over at Erling in the chair next to him. He was gripping his armrests, his eyes still closed.

“It’s over, Erling,” Shaw said.

Erling nodded, his eyes still squeezed tightly.

“You afraid of heights?”

“Not heights so much as falling from them.”

Shaw laughed loudly and Erling let a grin escape. Erling opened his eyes and looked around the room.

“No heights to worry about down here. What’s our depth, Annalise?” Shaw unbelted himself from the chair and stepped forward. His legs were wobbly—every muscle in him had been taut during the fall and impact.

“Twenty fathoms. On our way down to fifty.
Slowly
. I want to be able to bring her up a bit if we push the limit.”

“What’s the depth of the lakebed here?”

“Eighty fathoms. We’ve still got plenty of room to work with.”

“How are things looking on the surface, Taveena?”

“We have another sixty seconds of spheres still falling. But already we have a huge cover of them across the whole lake, practically right up to the Rhone. No one’s going to be looking for us down here.”

“Excellent. Thank you. It was a masterful display.”

The
Walden
creaked and groaned loudly, and everyone on the crew was silenced, looking up at the walls.

“Get used to it, people,” Annalise muttered. “We’re still diving.”

“The
Walden
is strong enough, right, Annalise?” Erling asked.

“The sound is normal,” Shaw answered. “You can’t put this much pressure on anything without getting some noises like that.”

Erling nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.

Annalise was watching her console, but she stole a glance at Shaw. “You sound like you’ve spent time on ships, Byron.”

Shaw shook his head. “Not much. My father loved boats. He fished, he sailed. But it was usually what he did to get time
away
from me and my mom and brother. I only picked up a bit from those times my mom made him take me with him. You?”

Annalise grinned. “Well, before designing spaceships, I specialized in a different kind of ship.”

“It’s in your blood, then.”

She nodded. “You can’t grow up in the Caribbean without being a sailor.”

“Any experience with submarines?”

Annalise laughed. “You’re witnessing my first.”

“We have movement in Nevada!” Wulf called.

Shaw’s eyes found the screens that still displayed the feeds from the Nevada Lattice. The spheres looked like they were forty or fifty feet deep across the floor of the dome. They were pushed up against the edges of the Lattice Installation’s outer buildings, but so far they hadn’t come in contact with the central tower that housed the Lattice itself. The buildings themselves hadn’t buckled under the pressure yet either. When the spheres encountered resistance, they pushed upward, stacking on top of each other and reaching toward the top of the dome.

Only when they started to hit resistance from the walls of the dome would the pressure on the buildings be enough to break them.

Shaw’s eyes went to the screen which showed the command room of the Lattice. So far as he could tell, everyone was still in there.

“How many are left inside, Erling?” Shaw asked.

“One sixteen,” he answered. Shaw waited for a response from Kuhn, but nothing was forthcoming.

“Kuhn? … Tranq? … Is our wireless working?”

“It’s the water,” Wulf answered. “We thought they’d be done by the time our attack began.”

Shaw nodded. “I’m still used to the Lattice where things like that don’t matter. Either of them have a ring?”

“Tranq does,” Wulf said.

“Get one of them on for a Lattice call and explain the wireless won’t work. At this point, I think the writing’s on the wall. They’re on their own. Wish them luck and give them my thanks. Even Tranq.”

Wulf put his ring to his temple and entered a jump.

Shaw looked at the main screen again. “Can I have some volume on the control room again? I want to hear what they’re up to.”

The volume came up mid-sentence on Iverson. “—no other options, sir! Shooting only destroyed twenty spheres. Fifteen seconds of sustained firing from three different laser rifles. You do the math.”

“Then we go in through the top,” Braybrook countered. “We fire all orbiting lasers on a single point on the dome and we burst through it. Those have enough firepower to take out all the spheres.”

“It’s not fast enough!It would take at least an hour to cut a hole through it. We need to give it up, transfer control to the Geneva Lattice, and then get the hell out of here.”

“Geneva’s under attack! You saw what’s happening.”

“They have a better chance than we do.”

“Nukes, then!” Braybrook hollered. “We can bring a tactical nuke inside the dome within ten minutes. Place it far enough away from the tower, and the Lattice should have a fighting shot at surviving.”

“All you’d do is turn those spheres into massive projectiles, bouncing around inside the dome and taking everything out in their path. It’s over, sir,” Iverson said quietly. “I strongly recommend you order a full evac before we get crushed in here, and ask Geneva to spool up their Lattice to full capacity. If they get started in time, there won’t be any downtime during the transfer.”

Braybook stared, hoping for some idea to spark. But he eventually nodded, resigned. “Manza,” he called out. “Call our old friend in Geneva. I’m sure they’re watching, but we should do this by the book. Tell them they’re up.”

“Yes, sir.”

Braybrook went to a microphone and ordered a mandatory evacuation of all personnel through the tunnel.

That done, he turned to Iverson. “God damn Zella Galway and the rest of her CEO friends. This dome was practically shoved down our throats … and here it’s trapped us from any possible way to stop these things. Pitiful.”

Iverson motioned up to a screen in the control room. “Look at that, the spheres stopped falling over Lake Geneva.”

Braybrook looked up at the image of the lake surface covered with spheres and sighed. “I have no idea what the raiders think putting a bunch of spheres into the lake is going to do. But I wish the boys in Geneva better luck than we’ve had.” Braybrook turned his body to address the whole room. With the same booming voice that Shaw instantly remembered, Braybrook called out to the room, “You did good work today, everyone! But this one was out of our control. Drop what you’re doing and let’s make for the tunnel. We live to fight another day. Move out!”

“You can cut the feed,” Shaw said. “But leave the interior of the dome up on the screen. I want to see this one through till the very end.”

The interior of the control room disappeared.

Shaw turned to Wulf. “Tranq and Kuhn?”

“They’re going to wait it out in the hills. They don’t want to start moving until both Lattices have been destroyed. Tranq says to tell you, ‘Don’t fuck it up.’”

Shaw smirked. “I’ll do my best. How far are we from our target, Annalise?”

“Five hundred meters,” she answered.

“How close do we need to be for you, Taveena?” Shaw asked.

She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I’ve never tried this through water before. Let me know when we’re a hundred meters away.”

“Will do,” Annalise answered.

Shaw watched the spheres on the feed from inside the dome as the
Walden
continued through the dark water. Each sphere had grown to be more than thirty feet tall. Wulf had reset the screen to show a new feed from near the top of the dome, which the spheres were nearing. “It can’t be much longer now,” Shaw said.

He was right. Suddenly the free space around the edges of the dome was all used up—but the spheres were programmed to keep growing. The only room left to grow was through the walls of the Lattice Installation. Their strength, when compared to the nitrogen diamond structure of the spheres and the meters-thick lead walls of the dome, wasn’t enough.

As if it were nothing more than an empty tin can, the building was pushed in on itself, the weight of the spheres pulverizing its steel and glass and concrete.

Without warning, Shaw’s view of the action—and every view screen in the room—flickered, faded to a dark gray, and then turned off entirely.

A cheer went up and filled the
Walden
. Taveena ,Wulf, and Helix were joined in a big group hug; Erling was letting out boyish whoops of joy; and Annalise had taken her eyes off the console long enough to wrap her arms around Shaw’s neck and plant a kiss on his cheek. “I never thought I’d really live to see the day. Thank you, Byron.”

Breaking off any chance for Shaw to reply, the screens suddenly illuminated again, and reversed the process. From black to gray to a live feed. The mood in the room dropped.

“OK, folks, we knew that Geneva was going to pick up the slack,” Shaw said. “Let’s not forget, we just did what no one in the last thirty years has been able to do. And without a single life taken. We’re not ready for celebrating. The Nevada Lattice might be destroyed. But we’ve still got one more to go.”

“It’s your show, Taveena,” Shaw said.

The
Walden
was resting just off its target on the lakebed, 280 feet below the surface of Lake Geneva. They were still several hundred meters from Geneva and the Lattice itself was farther than that. But Taveena’s molecular machines were ready to bore into the silt and the rock, creating a straight line to the underground tunnels that housed the Lattice.

“Annalise, can you bring us down another two feet?” Taveena asked. “We’re a little higher than I’d like.”

“We’re exactly two hundred eighty feet below the surface,” Annalise said.

“I know. I’m guessing the forty thousand spheres we dropped into the lake raised the surface level.”

Annalise played with her console.

“Hold there!” Taveena called.

“Holding,” Annalise answered.

Taveena kept working. “OK, we’re underway. Ten minutes until we’re ready to go.”

“So how does this work exactly?” Shaw asked Taveena, moving over to her console. “I saw the tunnel up the
USS Maine
Memorial, but I never understood how you grew it.”

“It’s fairly simple,” Taveena said, her fingers moving over her consoles. She brought up a diagram of a cross-section that showed the
Walden
, the lakebed, the levels of the lake surface and city street, and the long distance under them to the CERN tunnels. To Shaw’s eye, the
Walden
was at the same level as the tunnels if not a hair lower. “Big picture: I’m transporting a series of molecular machines in a straight line from here to directly underneath the Lattice. If all goes as planned, the tunnel will end directly underneath the containment room, and it should be a small matter for a drone to drill in and release our sulfuric acid bomb. The only problem is that it can be damned tricky to shoot through solid ground. So I’m actually growing the pipe in sections. That way I’m always transporting the machines through pipe that’s already grown.” She stole a glance at him. “I briefed you on all this already, you know.”

“You told me you could do it. I guess I tuned the rest out. Tunneling through bedrock’s really not a problem?”

“The molecular machines are actually converting atoms in the rock into something new. So it doesn’t matter how strong the rock is. I can still grab those atoms and use them to create the material for the pipe.”

Shaw watched on her cross-section as the needle-like edge of the pipe crawled its way toward the Lattice, while the sections closest to the
Walden
slowly expanded. Once it had grown to three meters the whole way through, they would release a drone. It would drill into the Lattice and place the explosive sulfuric acid charge. He and Annalise would don their spacesuits, now tailored for underwater wearing, and swim the length of the pipe, accompanying the drone as backup.

Everything seemed to be moving forward fine. The leading edge was now under the tunnels of CERN, but not yet to the tunnel that stored the Lattice itself.

“I guess we should get ready to suit up,” Shaw said, and Annalise nodded.

There was a noise, muffled and distant. An explosion? He couldn’t tell, and Annalise’s face looked confused as well. “Is that something your pipe is doing?” Shaw asked Taveena.

Taveena’s brow was furrowed, and Shaw knew her answer before she said it. “No. I don’t know what that is.”

“Wulf? Are we getting noise from the Nevada feed?”

“No. Volume’s off. I’m trying to locate the source now.”

“It’s coming from the surface!” Erling said. A view of Lake Geneva appeared on a screen in front of them. Piercing red blasts of laser light were descending from the sky, their beams exploding floating spheres all over the surface of the lake. Each beam lasted for just a few seconds until a sphere exploded, and then found a new target.

The air over the lake was a sea of splintered glass, catching the rising sun and twinkling like deadly fairy dust.

“Anyone near the water is going to get massacred. How could they do that?” Erling asked.

“They’re panicking,” Shaw said. “They don’t know why the spheres are there, but they saw what happened in Nevada.” He continued to watch the exploding spheres in shock. “Wulf, find me a feed on the Geneva control room. We need to know what they’re planning … Damn it.”

“What?” Erling asked. “Those spheres don’t affect us now that we’re down here.”

“They’re irrational, they’re scared. Trust me, it affects us.”

“I have a feed of the Geneva Lattice control room for you,” Wulf said. “Raising volume.”