CHAPTER 31
David Vale had tried the doors and control panel more times than he could count. He had even gone and stood in the tube, hoping it might activate an escape route. The room hadn’t changed since he had awoken. He could feel himself getting weaker. He had a few hours left, maybe.
He needed to make a move. He walked to the damaged Atlantean suit that lay crumpled on the floor. Maybe if he put it on… He held it to his chest and let the legs hang down. They barely cleared his calves. David was six-foot-three and broad-shouldered. The owner had been under six feet and rather small in stature, a woman perhaps. He dropped the suit and looked over at the other suit—the Immari colonel’s uniform, crisp and new.
He sat on the bench next to it for a long while. It was the only thing he hadn’t tried. What choice do I have? He grudgingly slid the pants on, then the boots. He stood and held the tunic for a moment. The four oval glass tubes in the room each reflected a warped view of his figure, like angled mirrors in a carnival fun house. He was just as muscular as he had been when Dorian had first shot him, but his body was “new”—even the skin was as smooth as the day he was born. Gone were the fresh gunshot wounds in his chest and shoulder that Dorian had inflicted technically days ago. Across his chest, older scars had also been erased: burns from a falling building that had trapped him in the 9/11 explosions, a stab wound just below his ribcage he had received during an operation outside Jakarta, and a smattering of shrapnel impacts from Pakistan. He was a new man. But his eyes were the same—intense but not hard.
He ran a hand through his short blond hair, exhaled, and stared for a long second at the tunic, the last piece of the ensemble. He pulled the tunic on, and it glistened as it adjusted to the light. The tunic’s flicker swept across the tubes like a crowd doing the wave at a baseball game.
The tubes. Would he wake up in one again if he died? As if reading his mind, a small crack sprinted up the length of the first tube. Spider-like smaller cracks erupted at every angle, multiplying and expanding like cells dividing in a petri dish. The other tubes followed suit until the four clear glass tubes were so clouded with cracks they looked white. A series of soft pops rolled across the tubes and the tiny pieces of cracked glass began falling inward.
Where the four tubes had stood, a series of cone-shaped piles of glass now lay, twinkling in the sharp light like stacks of diamonds.
Guess that answers that question, David thought. Whatever happened beyond this room, there would be no resurrection here.
The door to his right hissed as it slowly broke free from the wall and slid open. David walked to the threshold and peered out. A narrow, tight corridor spread out as far as he could see. Beady lights on the floor and ceiling barely illuminated the space.
He began down the long hallway, and the door to the tube room closed behind him. There were no doors on either side of the corridor, and it was smaller than the passages he had seen before. Was it an escape conduit or a maintenance tube? After a few minutes, the hallway ended at a larger, oval door. It opened as he approached, revealing a round room that must have been an elevator. David stepped inside and waited. It didn’t feel like he was moving, but he did have the sensation that the platform was rotating.
A minute passed, and the door opened with a shudder. The rush of air threw David against the back wall, but the force quickly dissipated.
The air was damp, definitely subterranean. The space beyond the door was dark as night. David crossed the threshold. The walls were rock, but they were smooth—a machine had bored this hole. Where am I? It was cool, but not freezing. This wasn’t Antarctica. Gibraltar?
The pathway was on an incline, maybe twenty degrees. Did it lead to the surface? There was no light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe it turned up ahead.
David spread his arms out and set off, dragging his fingers across the sides of the shaft, hoping to detect any change. None came, but the air grew warmer and dryer with every step. Still the end was dark. Then an electric wave swept over him, like a field of static electricity crackling and pricking across his skin.
The cool, dark tunnel was gone, and David stood outside in a mountainous place. It was night, and the stars above shone bright—brighter than he had ever seen them, even in Southeast Asia. If this was Europe or northern Africa, then all the light pollution was gone. And if so… In the distance, over the closest rock ridge, the sounds of gunfire and explosions echoed into the night. David rushed forward, stumbling over the uneven rock, and steadied himself at the top of the ridge.
To his left, the mountains dived into a coastline that stretched into the distance. David struggled to understand what he was seeing—it looked almost as though two worlds from different times had been thrown together.
Some kind of post-apocalyptic “fortress,” or maybe an army base from the future, lay on a peninsula with a long harbor. The peninsula jutted at least five kilometers into the sea and narrowed to perhaps only a hundred meters where it met the landmass—the perfect chokepoint to defend the base from ground attacks. A large wall rose there, towering above a burned-out wasteland beyond it. Waves of soldiers on horseback charged toward the wall, shooting and shouting. It looked almost like a medieval raid on a castle—a castle from far in the future. David stepped closer to the edge, marveling, trying to get a better view. The lead riders unleashed something.
A massive explosion erupted and a mushroom of fire rose from the wall, sending David staggering back and illuminating the area around the fortress. On the other side of the narrow sea, David caught a glimpse of a massive rock cliff jutting high above the water. The Rock of Gibraltar. He was in Northern Morocco, across the Straits of Gibraltar. The peninsula was home to Ceuta, an autonomous Spanish city. Or had been, before someone turned it into a fortress. There were still traces of the city, but—
Behind him, David heard trucks cranking. He turned just in time to see a spotlight snap on, blinding him. The light from the explosion had revealed him to someone in the mountains.
A man’s voice called down to him from above. “Don’t move!”
He jumped off the ridge as bullets raked the cliff. He stumbled back to the rock face where he had emerged and felt around desperately for the entrance. It wasn’t there. Whatever he had passed through was a one-way door, some kind of forcefield that looked and felt like rock out here.
He heard boots pounding rock behind him. He turned just as Immari soldiers poured onto the ledge and surrounded him.