Wormhole (54 page)

Add that to the wind that howled through these passageways from the powerful fans designed to clear the heat from the cooling machines and you had something Dante would have loved to include in his description of the lower pits of hell.

Pulling the Cage schematics to the front of her memory, Heather calculated how long it would take her to make the GF2 access door, the closest to her position. Overlaying time-sequenced imagery of her and her opponent’s anticipated intercept paths, she managed to pull just a bit more speed from her adrenaline-fueled legs. She would beat spidey to the Cage, but getting the door open and getting inside before the alien ripped her apart was going to be close.

Her pursuer was adapting to each new twenty-five-millimeter impact, having compensated for the last hit in half the time the first recovery had taken. Without the explosive force provided by a fully armed round, another slug into its body wasn’t going to do it. And having lost the Glock and her extra magazines in the fall over the railing, she was down to three rounds remaining in the M25’s six-round mag.

She hit the steel gate with a downward swipe and pulled at the lever handle, sliding through and closing it behind her as the
alien’s bulk hit it, denting the metal frame inward and jamming the door latch. Heather turned sideways, sliding along the access way until she reached the first junction. Squeezing into the passage on her right, she heard the squeal of tearing metal as the alien ripped the gate from its hinges and flung it into the cavern.

At the first ladder, she began climbing.

A glance through a narrow gap between equipment and cables showed the alien squeeze into the narrow space, bones flexing and dislocating like a giant hamster’s as it adapted to this new environment.

Heather climbed faster. Twenty meters up she shifted her body off the ladder and into an even tighter crawl space that forced her to lie on her back and wriggle her body forward along a shaft that scraped her back and sides. She knew what she was headed for, and although the alien had shown the capability to rapidly adapt, it was still quadruple her bulk, and the Cage would extract a price for that bulk.

Because the crawlways and chimneys between equipment were so tight that tool belts and hand-carried toolboxes were impractical, electrical tool cases had been bolted to the racks at strategic points throughout the Cage, providing engineers and technicians with an extensive set of test and repair equipment within ten meters of any point. Squeezing through a space not meant for passage, Heather took advantage of her small form to take a significant shortcut to one of these tool cases.

Popping open the latch, she found what she wanted. Ejecting the M25 rifle’s magazine from the butt stock, she popped one of the high-explosive air burst rounds into her hand and set to work on it. Carefully cracking open the lower portion of the case, she gained access to the safe-and-arm circuit. Working with all the speed and dexterity her Bandolier Ship neural enhancements and
Jack’s training had provided her, she made a simple logic circuit modification, bypassing the thirty-meter safety mechanism, setting the round to arm immediately upon firing.

A guttural roar of frustration three meters to her left alerted her to the alien’s arrival at the point where she’d squeezed between equipment racks. Good. So there were limits to how much the creature could contort its body. It would have to find its way around. And unless it had a complete schematic of the Cage, as she did, that would take a while.

As she worked to put the round back together, Heather’s mind tracked the alien’s progress. Not good. If it didn’t have the complete Cage schematic, it had a damn good approximation.

Rushing through her final task, Heather placed the modified round topmost in the magazine. Slapping it home, she chambered the new round, ejecting its predecessor from the right ejection port. The ejected round clipped the railing and spun away, the cling-clang of its passage sounding all the way down to the Cage floor, sixty-seven feet below.

Heather reached a new ladder and began climbing once again, the knowledge that she was now down to two rounds tugging at her mind. She shrugged it off. If the modified round didn’t do the job, whether or not she had one or two additional shots wouldn’t make a bit of difference.

“Dr. Ivanovich. Prepare for anomaly transport within twenty seconds. Initiate on my mark.”

Dr. Stephenson’s voice nudged Jennifer into action. The data on the six flat-panel displays that wrapped halfway around her swivel chair felt like a demon, reaching out to grab her by the throat, nine-inch nails penetrating into her windpipe, shutting off both blood and oxygen flows to her brain. As fast as Stephenson had been in transferring stasis field control to her workstation, he’d taken longer than they’d projected, that delay funneling in extra feed matter to the anomaly, a creature that existed and changed on a femtosecond scale.

In a second light could race almost seven and a half times around the Earth. In a nanosecond light traveled almost a foot. In a femtosecond light barely got past one hundred thousandth of an inch, roughly three times the diameter of a human hair. In
a femtosecond you could die before the electrochemical impulse traveled from one synapse to the next. All things considered, not a bad way to go. If you were dead set on dying.

The anomaly was on a decaying spiral with an acceleration curve that scared the shit out of Jennifer. And although they had very little time left, Mark and the alien were locked in a battle directly in front of the gateway. And as long as her brother was between the anomaly and the gateway, there was no way Jennifer was going to thrust the anomaly containment field through that portal.

If only the anomaly had been a bit more stable, she could have funneled off a little of the containment field and used it to pluck Mark out of the way before jamming the anomaly through the opening. But it was all she could do, using every bit of the energy available to the stasis field generator, to keep the micro black hole from becoming an instant big one.

Diverting just a touch of her concentration, Jennifer contacted Mark.

Can’t hold it much longer. Get the hell out of the way.

Operating in a maze of intertwined futures, Heather slithered through the tangle of pipes, cables, and machinery, steadily working her way up toward that point ninety meters above the ATLAS cavern floor where the Cage touched the ceiling, up on the skywalk that ran from the Cage’s highest gate to the cavern exit. That’s where she wanted to be, but she wasn’t going to make it.

Behind her, the gorilla-spider continued to adapt to the tight spaces, and as it did, its speed increased. Heather reached a turn and threw her body into the crawl space to her right, feeling a puff of air on her cheek as one of the clawed hands sliced the air where she had just been. The alien body hit the turn, all eight legs propelling it after her. From this angle Heather could see a toothy maw along the thing’s underside. She assumed the horrible smell came from this orifice, although it wasn’t helped by the human blood and excrement that still dripped from its body.

Grabbing a cable above her head, Heather swung herself up like a gymnast, twisting her body to miss protruding steel cable supports. The maneuver gained her three feet. The decision point was rapidly approaching, the moment she would be forced to fire the twenty-five-millimeter high-explosive round, danger close. And when she did, she wasn’t the only thing likely to suffer collateral damage. The super-cooling system for the primary stasis field wrapped all the power cables in this section of the Cage, and that equipment wasn’t exactly designed to withstand explosives. As she scrambled hand over hand up a two-inch vertical pipe, she looked up. Another twenty-five feet and she’d reach the ramp that would dump her onto the skywalk.

The claw speared her left calf, tearing an inch-deep gash in the muscle and almost tearing her loose from the pipe. Heather scissored her legs, the kick breaking the alien hand and ripping the claw free, sending the creature tumbling six feet down the shaft before it caught itself.

Heather focused on her leg, shunting away the pain and using her fine muscle control to constrict the torn veins, reducing the wound’s blood flow to a trickle. But she was out of time. She would make her final stand right here and now. Swinging herself behind a metal panel, she swung the M25 back into the shaft, visualized the bullet trajectory, and pulled the trigger.

The concussive blast penetrated the thin steel plates, coating her body in alien slime as it lifted her from her perch and flung her against the outer railing, sending a tidal wave of pain through her right shoulder. Fighting to stay conscious, Heather saw that a foot-long sheet metal shard had speared her just below the right collarbone, a third of its length extending out her back. Her other symptoms pointed to severe concussion.

Struggling to a sitting position, she braced herself against the railing that had prevented her from falling 250 feet to the cavern floor below.

Shit. When does this get fun?

Then a new alarm Klaxon sounded, accompanied by a digitized voice over the PA system.

“WARNING. PRIMARY STASIS FIELD COOLING SYSTEM MALFUNCTION. PRIMARY STASIS FIELD POWER FAILURE IMMINENT.”

As a new vision filled her mind, Heather wrapped her good arm and leg around the support strut.

Then, with a hurricane squall, the primary stasis field died, opening the portal to the vacuum of empty space.

Mark was one with the dance. Once he’d thought he was meant for basketball, but he’d been born for this.

Adrenaline coursed through his system unchecked, fueling his attack. Dodging the alien’s counterstroke, his black sword swept an arc that removed the alien’s top left arm at the elbow, sending the clutching hand to the concrete floor between them.

The alien ignored the loss of a hand, lunging forward onto Mark’s blade, its momentum aiding Mark in driving the full length through its thick torso. Only as one of its hands closed around his right wrist, preventing him from pulling the sword free, did Mark realize his mistake.

Twisting to the left, Mark grabbed the alien’s sword arm with his left hand as the remaining alien hand grabbed his throat and squeezed. With electric sparks arcing across his dimming vision, Jennifer touched his mind.

Can’t hold it much longer. Get the hell out of the way.

Bracing his arms like a gymnast performing the iron cross, Mark brought both knees up to his chest, leaned back, and hammered his heels into the alien’s face, breaking what would have passed for a nose and rocking its head back. As the alien hammered at his ribs with its amputated stump, Mark scissored his legs around the thing’s head, locked his heels, and squeezed.

Feeling the alien grip on his throat loosen slightly, Mark twisted his head to the side and bit into the alien fist, feeling bones snap between his teeth as the acrid alien blood filled his mouth, stinging his lips and gums. The alien’s grip on his throat loosened another notch and Mark felt the blood flow return to his brain. Sucking in a rattling breath, he increased the pressure his legs were applying to the alien’s head and neck.