Anna Beck wasn’t sure what to do. She’d just touched down on the floor after clearing the immediate area with another LED burst and then twisted to look back and up at White One. She was just in time to see a plummeting salamander land on top of his chute and collapse roughly half of the cloth with its weight before bouncing off and down toward the floor.
White One’s body swung out to the left of his collapsing chute and his body began to plummet horizontally toward the top of her own still inflated chute. Beck ran under her chute and dove toward the floor on the other side of it, just clearing the body of the falling salamander, which hit the ground to the side of her with a loud thump. With Beck’s body pulling her chute as she dove, it stayed inflated somewhat. White One slammed into the top of it. The chute partially softened his fall, but he continued his plunge toward the floor, crashing hard into Beck’s back and knocking them both onto the salamander as it struggled to right itself.
Beck groaned from the impact and tried to disentangle herself from the cords and folds of two parachutes. When she crawled out from under the fabric, she saw the beam of the Wagan spotlight across the floor in the distance. The orange glowsticks illuminated the nearby area. And three large squat black heads were approaching her at eye level across the floor.
“One, eyes shut now!” she shouted.
Then she turned her head and held out the LED grenade just as the salamanders were reaching her. The burst of light caused the three to shriek in pain, and when she looked back, they were a few meters away and retreating fast.
Beck switched her experimental LED grenade to a mild strobing pattern and clipped it back to her chest. Then she tugged and pulled at the fabric of the tangled chutes to get to White One.
“You alive?” she asked him, as he was beginning to stir.
“That sucked.” he said groggily. “What happened?”
“A sal deflated half your chute and you broke your fall on me.”
“Crap. Sorry.”
She quickly ran her hands over his shins feeling for broken bones, then moved her hands up to his thighs and squeezed the meat of his muscles. White One jerked back away and shouted. “Aaahh.”
“Broken?” she asked him.
“No, just ticklish. I’m fine.”
Beck laughed and then stood and whirled, the strobing pattern of her light making the advancing salamanders retreat once again. She raced over to where the Wagan had fallen and marveled that it still worked. White One was extricating himself from the fabric, when he started shouting “What the fu—”
Oh yeah, the bastard that broke our fall.
“Forgot to mention, there’s a sal under you, One. He helped break your fall too.”
White One scrambled away from the fabric as it squirmed and thrashed on the ground. He stood and activated the spotlight function of the LED grenade he wore clipped to his jacket and pointed it at the emerging salamander, which let loose a shivering shriek that echoed around the cavern. It started to flee, dragging the tangled chutes and White One had to act quickly to detach the cords from his harness before he was tugged away with it. The fabric and cords fled across the floor of the cavern as if it was alive. Beck chuckled.
“Sweet Holy Moses, I’m gonna have nightmares after this shit. Now where’s the bomb?”
“I think that’s it behind you, One.” Beck strode over to him and pointed her strobe light down toward a body on the floor. Next to the body was a small daypack with the flap opened. Beck squatted and changed her strobe to a steady beam of LED light. Something shiny was extended from the top of the backpack. White One squatted next to her after turning his LED light in a 360° circle to ward off any ambitious salamanders. This time, none were attempting to sneak up on them.
Beck played her light along the body and saw that both of the legs were missing below the knee. They had clearly been gnawed on. “Ugh. Sorry, One.”
“It was White Five. I sent him here to Labs to find a way in.”
“Looks like he did it and tried to deactivate the bomb.” Beck stood and pointed her beam from the Wagan spotlight around the echoing chamber again. Then she looked up. “He must have fallen down here. His chest is crushed and there’s no rope or chute. That he lived long enough to try to defuse the bomb is insane.”
She turned back to White One, but he was standing and holding the device in his hands for her to see. “We have a problem.”
She looked down at the device through the Plexiglas facemask of her rebreather. A clear plastic window showed the timer counting down in red LED numbers. It was at 46:15. The rest of the device, roughly the size of a silver serving platter with a cover on it—Beck thought of a turkey like her grandmother used to make for Christmas—was sealed into its metal shell. She looked closely and saw that the seam where the top of the metal shell met the bottom had been welded shut. There was no way they’d be able to defuse the bomb.