The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (40 page)

Shaw adjusted his hands and pulled himself up onto the floor, ungracefully beaching himself and rolling away from the opening. He unhooked his spacesuit’s helmet and took a deep breath.

Moving back to the opening, he saw Wulf’s head bobbing in the water. Shaw helped to pull his bulk out of the hole, and then slowly pulled the rest of the team out.

Together they stripped out of their spacesuits and pushed them toward a wall. Already their beams of lights were exploring the space. The tunnel was fourteen or sixteen feet tall at its highest point. Pipes and conduits snaked against the walls at all levels. In the middle of the tunnel was a thick bright blue pipe that Shaw’s helmet had barely missed as he came up out of the hole.

“Where are we, Taveena?” Shaw asked.

“In the tunnels of the old Large Hadron Collider. Part of the seventeen miles of tunnel that form an enormous underground ring.”

“What was it for?” Annalise asked.

“They used to spin particles through here and smash them into each other to see what came out. That’s how they confirmed the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle, not to mention the squark and Vapnick photino.” She looked around in awe and touched the blue pipe in the middle of the room. “Everything happened inside of this. It’s a sacred space.”

“How long has it been empty?”

“Years. Science outgrew it. Still. They should have opened it as a museum. Not destroyed a piece of it in order to build a containment room for the Lattice.”

Shaw was looking around the tunnel, feeling that it was uncomfortably like the catacombs under Rome when he was a child. Geneva’s tunnel was bigger and made of concrete, but he couldn’t help but feel the similarities. “Which way is the Lattice?” Shaw asked, doing his best to put the memory aside.

Taveena pointed down the tunnel to Shaw’s left. “A mile in that direction.”

Shaw looked over his team. Without Tranq, he was suddenly feeling exposed. As far as he knew, he was the only one of the small group who had any combat training. Or even taken a punch in the boxing ring. Taveena was tough as nails, and Annalise had already proven her mettle on the side of the
Walden
. But that didn’t mean they could shoot.

“We don’t know if we’re going to encounter security,” Shaw said. “So I want everyone to have a laser at the ready. Don’t aim for the head, aim for the stomach. It’s easier to hit, and we’d still like to get through this with as few fatalities as possible, am I right?” Wulf was the only one who nodded, but the rest were getting their weapons out and ready.

“All right. Let’s move.”

There was little cover inside the LHC ring, save for the slowly rounding walls of the tunnel itself. Shaw went out ahead on the outer wall of the ring, with the remaining four staying near the inner wall, lingering back far enough that they could see Shaw, but not anything that he could see, letting him serve as a scout and a place to draw any opposing fire.

As they jogged, Shaw tried to envision the challenge ahead. The containment area was one hundred meters long, super-cooled to nearly absolute zero. A replica of the tower at the Lattice Installation in Nevada, but laid on end. At either end of the containment area were emergency hatches for maintenance access—access that required the severe cold to be raised to a mere negative three hundred Fahrenheit, warm enough that drones—or even workers in heavy duty suits—could gain access.

Unfortunately, his team wouldn’t have those suits, and the drones were disabled. Somehow they would have to get their sulfuric acid explosive into the containment area … without freezing solid in the process.

Shaw estimated that if Taveena was right about the distance to the Lattice, they were down to less than a quarter mile to go. The dark tunnel gave no sign of the distance remaining, and his headlamps couldn’t penetrate far enough ahead.

Straining his ears for any noise or hint of an ambush in front of him, Shaw was caught off guard when a man’s shout of alarm reverberated through the tunnel—from behind them.

They’d found the hole in the floor. Yang and the command center had sent security forces, but Shaw and his team had been faster.

They had a jump on them, but would it be enough?

Shaw felt a headlamp on him, and he beckoned the trailing group forward. He stayed put and waited for them to catch up. Behind them he could hear footsteps. Five people? Ten?

“Ready for a full-out run?” he whispered. “We make it to the containment area first, we destroy it, and if we live, we get into a shooting match with whoever’s behind us on our way out. Understand?”

“I’ve got something that’ll slow them down,” Taveena said, reaching into a small sack tied to her waist. When her hand emerged it was holding a small object, something Shaw could barely see through her fingers. A sphere? He couldn’t tell.

“After I throw this,
run
,” she said.

Taveena turned and hurled the small object not down the tunnel toward the pounding footsteps as Shaw had expected, but instead she aimed it at the floor, less than ten feet away.

She started running, and the rest did too, but Shaw lingered, trying to understand what it was. In the beam of his headlight, he saw the small black object had flattened, a splat on the ground. Parts of it seemed to catch the light in a tiny oily rainbow of colors. And—was that movement? Was it growing?
Yes
. It was
rapidly
growing. A sinking feeling filled his stomach.

Three feet wide, then four. But it wasn’t growing in all directions. It was moving toward
him
.

A living, moving, conscious nanoshock. Taveena had turned the handheld weapon into a predator. And it was less than five feet from his shoes.

He felt his legs were immobile with fear, his body transported back to the shock in the Lattice control room. He had no idea how terrified of that feeling he’d been. How much despair had filled him in the Geneva hotel room. And here it was again.

It was almost to his feet.

“Damn it, Shaw, RUN!”

A hand was on his shoulder, yanking him back from the deadly black oil that was covering the floor. He stumbled, caught himself, and found himself running neck and neck with Taveena.

They raced down the tunnel, his beam sometimes catching the three running figures ahead of him. He felt the urge to pull away, but kept pace with Taveena, two steps behind her. He wouldn’t abandon her, wouldn’t let the nanoshock or anyone else get to her before they got to him.

In front of him, the running figures slowed, and Shaw knew they had reached their destination. The containment area of the Geneva Lattice.

Shaw and Taveena caught up. Winded, still a little frightened, he put his hands on his knees and studied the wall in front of him.

The thick metal walls that surrounded the Lattice had a single door with a simple wheel to close it with a tight seal. An airlock. Designed to keep the exterior from flooding with a deadly cold.

He felt the pouch on his shoulder and the heft of the sulfuric acid explosive inside. How were they going to get this thing into the containment area?

“Any ideas?” Wulf asked.

“We open the door and walk in the explosive,” Taveena said.

Shaw eyed her, and he knew from her hard look back at him that she was completely serious. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” he answered.

“We’re here because it
has
come to that.”

Before he could respond again, cries of anguish came from down the tunnel. Men’s and women’s screams. Pain like they’d never experienced. Shaw couldn’t hold in his shudder.

“We still have time,” he whispered, not sure if Taveena could even hear him over the incredible noise.

“There will be more of them.”

Shaw realized his hands were still on his knees. He stood up.

He couldn’t think. The confines of the tunnel were holding in the boundless dreaming Shaw had felt in orbit when he’d come up with this plan.

He pulled the pouch off his shoulder. “Can we get this in there without someone walking it in on a one-way trip?” he asked the group.

Annalise and Erling were staring at the stainless steel door. Wulf had his head toward the floor. Taveena’s eyes hadn’t left Shaw. No one else had any ideas either.

Taveena put her hand out. “Give it here.”

Wulf objected the loudest, but the rest of the team was shouting her down as well.

“We don’t have time to stand around arguing!” Taveena cried. She stepped toward Shaw to claim the pouch. Wulf was coming at Shaw, too—from the looks of it to take the pouch himself, or at least to stop Taveena from getting it.

Shaw felt their purpose, and he tensed, his body ready for a bout in the ring. Should he choose and give it to one of them? Or let them fight it out?

A red laser swiftly cut through the air, and he was out of time.

Shaw dove to the ground, and he saw the others do the same. No—not everyone had done the same. Wulf hadn’t jumped out of the way, he had
crumpled
.

Wulf was on his back, his feet pushing his body upwards off the floor like it was hot to the touch. His hands were clawing at the bulk at his stomach, and he was groaning, crying for help.

Shaw heard more lasers in the air, hitting and sizzling into the side of the tunnel. Where were they coming from?

As he scanned for people, he saw a dark hole in the tunnel wall, a gray panel sliding shut over it. That’s how they’d gotten past the shock.

Shaw rolled onto his back, his own laser ready, but he still couldn’t see the source of the fire. He heard a voice, though, shouting over Wulf’s groans. “Hold your fire, hold you fire! You’ll hit the containment wall!”

Shaw looked up at the wall and saw that there were dark burn marks in the metal. Was a handheld laser truly enough to break the containment? He looked at his own laser and imagined himself firing into the wall. How long would it take? Would enough cold air escape that the containment around the Lattice would fail, and the rhodium inside would fall apart—its crucial lattice structure literally melting into a lump of inert metal?

And wouldn’t that leak of cold air be enough to kill them all right now?

Shaw turned his rifle away from the wall. He wasn’t prepared to take that step just yet. The laser fire had stopped, he realized. He risked raising his head, but couldn’t see anyone in the dark of the tunnel.

“There’s nowhere to go,” the voice called. “There’s nothing left to do. Surrender now, and you’ll get a fair trial.”

Shaw couldn’t believe his ears. He hadn’t spent very long with that voice. But he knew it just the same. Yang. And knowing the voice might be the only play he had left.

“Yang!” Shaw shouted. “Thank God, Yang, it’s me! Byron Shaw!”

Silence.

“Byron Shaw is dead.”

“They faked it! The shock just faked death. They’ve been holding me prisoner for weeks. They threatened to kill Ellie if I didn’t help them. They wanted me to walk in the containment area and kill myself, taking the Lattice with me. I swear to God, Yang.”

“Stand up. Let me get a good look at you. No one else better move. We have twenty lasers on all of you.”

Shaw let go of his laser. What kind of a prisoner was armed? He rolled over and slowly stood. First to his knees, and then slowing bringing the rest of his body up, his hands open and far from his body.

Hoping he wasn’t going to get shot by a nervous soldier.

Hoping they would let him get close enough he could work without a rifle.

Hoping no one on the ground would give him away.

Shaw stood tall, his hands in the air.

Yang stepped forward out of the darkness and into the dim light cast by the single bulb above the airlock to the Lattice.

It was definitely Yang. He was looking hard at Shaw, his laser at the ready.

“Tim, it is so good to see you again,” Shaw said, and meant it, despite everything else.

“The first time you met me, someone else had my face,” Yang said. “How do I know that you’re not just wearing Shaw’s face to fool me?”

“That’s absurd. It wouldn’t make any sense to put on a face on the off-chance we bumped into you.”

“That face would have worked against a lot more people than me. Everyone knows you. Everyone saw you die.”

“But you were there.”

“Prove to me that you’re Shaw.”

“I can’t without the Lattice.”

“Try,” Yang said, moving a step forward.

“We visited Ada Dillon at the church at Stanford. I took off my helmet, but you didn’t. You—”

“Those are just facts. Anyone could have researched that.”

“Damn it, what else do you want?”

“How did it feel?”

“How did
what
feel?”

“
Us
. When we talked, when we traveled together. How did it feel?”

Shaw had never been asked, at gunpoint, how he
felt
.

And yet he understood entirely. A personal connection, a shared moment, a feeling of total understanding based on tone and body language, were the hardest to pin down using the Lattice.

“It felt like I was your teacher, or a mentor. Maybe even sometimes like … like I was your father. I know that sounds weird. I’m only ten years older. But sometimes that’s how it felt.”

Yang kept the laser steady. Shaw couldn’t tell if he was about to squeeze the trigger or lower the weapon.

Yang eventually lowered it, and Shaw lowered his hands at the same rate.

Suddenly they were both in motion, risking the few last steps between them before they embraced, the traditional hand on the shoulder too formal for them now. Yang was clutching fiercely to Shaw, and for his part, Shaw held him tightly.

It was almost tempting to abandon the team he’d led this far and walk out the door with Yang. But however much he cared for the young man, and however much Yang looked up to him, it wouldn’t last forever. At some point the Lattice would be turned back on. And the truth of his actions these last few days would be known.

He wanted to pretend that the bond he’d formed with Yang could last. But that feeling of father-son camaraderie was playacting—practice for the real daughter who would be waiting at home. And nothing was going to keep him from that.