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.
He didn’t have a lot of faith he could crush that skull or break its neck, but he could damn sure try. In the meantime he began flexing his pinned right wrist, making short sawing motions with the sword blade within the alien’s torso.
Adopting Mark’s tactic, the alien twisted its head and sank its teeth into the flesh of his thigh. Shrugging its shoulders up, it shoved hard with its three good arms, breaking Mark’s grip and sending him tumbling across the cavern floor.
Ignoring the pain shooting through his leg, Mark rolled to his feet, prepared to meet the charge that didn’t come. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out why. Watching the alien’s fist and injured stomach knit themselves back together, he knew this was a battle of attrition he couldn’t hope to win.
Mark spat the alien blood onto the floor, trying not to swallow any. Well, if killing the thing the old-fashioned way wasn’t going to work, he’d just have to see how it got along without a head. As he readied himself for his next attack, high up, near the top of the massive power cage, a loud explosion sounded, its echoing report followed by the blare of a new alarm.
“WARNING. PRIMARY STASIS FIELD COOLING SYSTEM MALFUNCTION. PRIMARY STASIS FIELD POWER FAILURE IMMINENT.”
Feeling his ears pop from the pressure change, Mark dropped the alien sword and lunged for the portal’s titanium edge, his fingers closing on its lip as a blast of hurricane-force wind lifted his feet from the ground, trying to suck him into the wormhole behind him.
A quick glance over his shoulder made the situation clear. The alien had managed to grab the portal’s far edge, but several of the scientists had been swept from their workstations as they and some of the monitors and keyboards tumbled into deep space. A glance up at Jennifer showed that she had managed to wrap her arms and legs around a steel rail, while, at his command perch, Dr. Stephenson clung to the elevated support structure.
Meanwhile, the November Anomaly sat unmoving, held in place by the stasis field containment bubble, glowing considerably brighter than the last time he’d looked at it. Now was the time to thrust it through the portal. Unfortunately, neither Jennifer nor Stephenson was able to let go to enter the required commands into a control station.
The howl of the wind nearly drowned out the screams of those swept from the scaffolding along the walls, but not the screech of tearing sheet metal and the crash of equipment flung against structural steel and concrete on its path into the wormhole. As Mark clung to his handhold he knew the wind wouldn’t be stopping anytime soon, not with the LHC’s twenty-seven-kilometer primary beam tunnel providing plenty of air, not with everything ventilated from the outside.
As a steel-case desk ricocheted off the portal five feet above him, Mark’s thoughts turned to Heather.
Hey, babe. If you have any last save-the-day ideas, I’d appreciate them. Cause I’m fresh out.
Donald Stephenson screamed into the microphone connected directly to the secondary stasis field control station. “Dr. Ivanovich. I told you to move the anomaly through the portal. Do it now!”
She didn’t respond.
Glancing down at the containment bubble around the anomaly, he saw the problem. One of the technicians was fighting the Kasari in front of the gateway portal, blocking the anomaly’s path.
He leaned closer to the mike. “Ivanovich. Move the anomaly now. We have less than a minute to get rid of it and redirect the gateway, or everyone on Earth dies.”
No response.
Shit. The woman had frozen up.
To make matters worse, the sensor array had detected unusual gravitational variances moving around within the cavern, variances consistent with Rho Ship worm fiber technology. Raul.
For reasons beyond Stephenson’s ken, the young idiot was trying to subvert the gateway for his own ends. So far he hadn’t managed to grab gateway control again, but using the Rho Ship’s neural net, he might manage it at any time. And if the anomaly was still sitting here in the ATLAS cavern when he did, everything Donald Stephenson had spent forty years working on would wink out in one sudden cosmic gulp.
Rising to his feet, Stephenson stepped toward the grated steel steps leading down to the third tier. If the Russian bitch couldn’t do it, he’d take over her station himself.
The alarm sounded as he reached the bottom step, and if he hadn’t braced himself against the structural support railing, he’d have been one of the first people sucked through the unprotected wormhole. Above his head, a large section of his primary control station tore free under the force of the explosive decompression, tumbled into the portal, and disappeared.
Death didn’t scare him. Failure did. And as he clung to the railing, watching his staff and equipment being sucked out through the gateway, for the first time in his life, he found himself staring failure dead in the face.