by Dean M. Cole
“BOb, I want you to …”
The robot wasn’t there.
Vaughn ran toward the far end of the corridor. “BOb!”
The robot jogged through the double doors. “Yes, Captain Asshole?”
Sliding to a stop, Vaughn waved over the bot. “Stay behind me and cover my back.”
The robot dipped its head. “Roger, Captain Asshole.”
Vaughn’s momentary smile faded as he looked over BOb’s shoulder.
Mouth falling open, he took an involuntary backward step.
The dozers were moving much faster than he’d estimated.
Rooster tails sprayed up behind the tracks of each giant machine.
He watched in stunned amazement as the enormous blade of the lead bulldozer reached the edge of the parking lot. The tractor trailer-sized steel plate peeled up the pavement like butter. The cars parked there flew into the sky, batted aside as if they had the mass of a beach ball. The resistance didn’t even slow the dozer. Unfazed by the impact, the machine ran headlong directly at the building.
The ground quaked, and the floor lurched beneath his feet.
Long-dormant dust rained down from hanging fixtures.
Creaking loudly, the building swayed around Vaughn.
A tremendous crash erupted from somewhere behind him.
Vaughn flinched. “Oh shit!” He turned and ran toward the stairwell. Over the cacophony, he heard BOb hot on his heels.
Reaching the open door, Vaughn launched himself down the stairs. Just as he crashed down onto the first landing, the entire shaft lurched sideways.
Chapter 23
Breathing heavily in total darkness, Rourke pulled his flashlight from his kit and flipped it on.
Bingham winced. “Get your bloody torch out of my face.”
“Sorry.”
Running footfalls cascaded down from above.
Major Lee flipped on her light and shined it up.
Angela rounded the bend and held out a hand to shield her eyes.
“Where’s Vaughn?” Rachel asked.
“He and BOb should be coming soon.”
Rourke and Monique exchanged nervous glances.
“I don’t hear him,” said Bill Peterson. “We’re three flights down. If the man is coming, he better shake a—”
The metal deck beneath Rourke’s feet suddenly lurched sideways, and the handrail drove into his hip.
Peterson’s arms flew into the air. “Son of a bitch!”
The entire stairwell continued to quake.
Raising her rifle with one arm and waving the other for them to follow, Rachel started down the stairs. “Move it now!”
Rourke turned to follow her, but then Captain Singleton burst into sight with the robot hot on his heels.
Seeing Rourke, the man waved his arms frantically. “Go! Go! Go!”
Someone grabbed the front of Rourke’s shirt and yanked him down the stairs. Looking ahead, he saw Rachel dragging him.
“Move it, Rourky! Don’t stop for anything.”
He realized then that she must have backtracked to grab him.
The major was taking the steps two at a time, dragging him bodily. It was all Rourke could do to keep his feet under himself. She pulled him past the other members, resuming her place at the front.
Rourke batted away her hand. “I’ve got this!”
The deep rumbling crescendoed into bone-shaking thunder.
Rachel released him. “Keep up!” She threw her weapon across her back and, grabbing the handrails with both hands, began to hurl herself down the stairwell three and four treads at a leap.
Rourke mimicked her actions and rushed after her.
Dust rained down, filling the atmosphere with the acrid stench of dank limestone.
The whole world suddenly lurched.
Rourke flinched sideways as a foot-wide chunk of masonry slammed into the stair tread next to his boot.
Someone above him cried out in pain. Then a baseball-sized piece of debris fell past him. It looked like a chunk of asphalt. Had that come from the parking lot?
Looking back, Rourke saw Monique holding her shoulder. She looked at him and shook her head. “I’m okay. Keep going!”
At each landing, the stairway cut back, descending another flight into the dust-filled darkness.
Insanely gyrating flashlight beams cut sporadic patterns through the inky blackness.
The shaft they were descending was about the width of a small, one-car garage. Its zigzagging stairs filled all but a narrow gap along the outside of the handrails.
Suddenly, it felt as if a building dropped onto the top of the shaft. The entire stairwell bounced.
Rourke yanked his hand off the outer rail just as a torrent of gravel and rocks rained down through the gap between it and the wall. Overhead the rolling thunder ebbed, becoming muffled.
Staccato clangs rang out as rocks and boulders bounced off of metal treads and rails. Then they began to diminish as well.
Rourke looked back and then nearly fell as he ran into something. It was Major Lee. She had stopped her descent.
Standing on one of the landings, the stout woman grabbed his shirt and pulled him to a stop, preventing him from tumbling farther down the stairs.
He looked at her and felt his face flush. “Sorry.”
She shook off the impact and righted him. Then she looked up the stairwell. “That was a cave-in.”
Monique rounded the corner followed closely by Major Peterson and the cosmonaut. Hennessy and Bingham were right behind the two men. Dust covered all of them head to toe. Then Angela rounded the corner. She blinked as she stared into the beams of their combined flashlights.
Mark looked back at her. “Where’s Vaughn?!”
Angela blinked “He… He was right behind me!” Terror took over her features. She and Mark started back up the stairs. The lieutenant colonel craned his neck to look up the central gap. “Vaughn!”
Rourke listened breathlessly. His ears rang from the cacophony of the cave-in. However, he heard a new sound.
He exchanged a nervous glance with Monique.
Angela paused at the landing above them. Her eyes went wide as she looked up the next set of stairs. She screamed, “Oh God, Vaughn!” Then she and Mark ran out of sight.
Rachel pushed past Rourke and sprinted up the stairs after them. “Wait!”
Then, holding Vaughn in his arms, BOb rounded the corner with Commander Brown and Colonel Hennessy following him. Shocked looks twisted their features.
Blood was leaking from the captain’s head. It mixed with the dust, cutting muddy, ocher streaks across the man’s slack face. Tears in his uniform exposed cuts on his arms and legs.
As they reached the landing, Rachel pointed at the floor. “Set him down, BOb.”
The robot complied and gently placed Captain Singleton on the landing’s metal deck. Major Lee and Commander Brown dropped to their knees next to the man.
Rourke looked at BOb. “What happened?”
“Enemy operatives attacked the building with heavy machinery. When it collapsed, I threw myself across the captain in an attempt to shield him. Debris fell upon us. When I extricated us, Captain Singleton was unresponsive.”
Crying, Angela grabbed the man’s shoulder and shook him insistently. “Vaughn, please! Say something!”
Rachel produced a rag and poured water over it. She wiped the dirt and blood from the man’s face. Grabbing her flashlight, she inspected the lacerations on his forehead. “It doesn’t look too bad. Not very deep.”
She shifted the light to Vaughn’s eyes and then raised one of his lids. Then she did the same to the other. Releasing a pent-up breath, she nodded. “His pupils are responding normally. I think he’s going to be okay.”
The major looked at the robot. “Any chance you were followed? Do we have any company coming?”
BOb shook his head. “Negative, Major. Judging by our depth, I estimate forty cubic meters of dirt and debris currently block th
e upper portion of the stairwell. No enemy operatives will be approaching from that direction.”
Vaughn coughed and then opened his eyes. Blinking and squinting, he looked from Major Lee to Commander Brown. “Angela? What’s wrong?” Then his eyes widened, and he sat up. “What happened?!”
Wing Commander Bingham bent over the man. “There was a cave-in, chap.” He tilted his head toward the robot. “It appears the bloody toaster here saved your sorry arse.”
Rourke looked up to see that Major Peterson and Teddy had taken up the position of rearguard. They were aiming their rifles up the stairwell, covering their six, as the military people liked to say.
Seeing the same thing, Rachel pointed at the robot. “BOb, go down a few flights and cover that end of the stairwell. Hit anything that comes up the stairs with your EMP cannon.”
BOb dipped his head. “On it, Major.” Then the robot stepped across them and descended the stairwell, disappearing into the darkness below. With its infrared vision, the machine did not need a flashlight. BOb could see just as well in the dark as they could in broad daylight.
The major turned her attention back to Captain Singleton. “Anything broke?”
Vaughn patted his arms and legs and then shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He touched one of the areas around a tear in his pants and winced. “But it feels like I’ve been run through a meat grinder.”
Rachel dug into her kit and produced some first-aid supplies. She and Angela went to work on the man’s wounds, cleaning and bandaging each of them. While they worked, the major gave the captain a meaningful look. “What do you think?” She looked up and nodded her head toward the ceiling. “Was this intentional? Are we under attack?”
Vaughn gasped as Angela applied disinfectant to a cut on his leg. Grimacing, he stared back at Rachel and shook his head. “I … I don’t know. They came pretty fast and went straight at the building, but this could just be them doing the same thing here that they already did to all of the other access points.”
Major Lee nodded slowly as she placed a bandage on the last wound.
Nodding his thanks, Vaughn stood, wincing again as he did. Angela kissed his cheek. “Sure you’re alright?”
Vaughn nodded. “I’m fine. Just got my bell rung. That’s all. He caressed her face and wiped away a tear with his thumb. Then he glanced down the shaft. “I just hope you’re right about this going all the way down to the collider.”
She nodded and gestured at their surroundings. “This is the emergency exit stairwell for the CMS experiment.”
Massaging a temple, he returned her nod and then looked at the group. “Whether they know about us or not, we need to get the hell out of here. It’s a dead-end vertical corridor with only one way out. If the Necks are coming for us, I’d rather have the seventeen-mile circumference of the ring to maneuver in than this shaft.”
All of the military members nodded their agreement.
Angela shook her head. “We are fine going into the CMS experiment, but we can’t use the collider tunnels.”
Bingham cocked an eyebrow. “Why on earth not? I’ve seen pictures. There’s a roadbed down there. It might just be a glorified walkway, but there’s plenty of room for us to maneuver.”
“Yeah, that works great when the collider is shut down. But not so much when it’s running.”
“Why not, Command-Oh?”
“Synchrotron radiation, Teddy.” Looking at the cosmonaut, Angela pointed downward. “When the collider is in operation, particles are circling the entire seventeen-mile circumference eleven thousand times per second. We use powerful magnets to bend the protons into a circular path, but a fraction of their energy escapes laterally, like water flying from a spinning wheel. The radiation can be everything from low-frequency to high-frequency, visible light to hard x-rays. In this case, it’s mostly the latter.” She pointed at Bingham. “He’s right. There is a walkway. It follows the inside circumference of the tunnel for that very reason. Additionally, there are motion sensors in the tunnel. If anything moves down there while the collider is running, it’ll automatically cut the power.”
Rourke instantly saw a flaw with her logic. “I don’t think those are still active.”
Turning toward him, Angela raised her hands. “What makes you say that, Doctor Geller?”
Everyone turned to look at him.
“I-I just remember you and Captain Singleton said a bunch of the Necks rushed you last time you overloaded the collider.”
In his peripheral vision, he saw Vaughn nodding. “He’s right. A lot of them came from the side of the experiment, but some of the Necks came from the tunnel itself. If the power had dumped, the collider would have shut down before you could’ve overloaded it, and we wouldn’t be here now.”
Angela considered it for a moment. Then she shrugged. “It really doesn’t matter. We can’t go in there. The radiation will kill us.”
Bingham leaned forward. “I thought you said that the radiation sprays outward. If we stay on the inside passageway, we should be fine, right?”
Angela rocked her head equivocally. “The backscatter off the walls will still be enough to cause damage to our tissues.”
Vaughn waved a dismissive hand. “None of that matters. For now, we need to focus on getting the hell out of this shaft.”
Rourke felt his gut knotting up. He didn’t understand how they could be discussing their options so calmly when they were so completely fucked. He raised a hand.
Bingham looked at him and rolled his eyes. “This isn’t kindergarten. Spit it out, Doctor Geller.”
Haltingly, Rourke lowered his arm. He felt his face flush as everyone stared at him again. Finally, he found his voice. “Aren’t we forgetting something?”
No one spoke.
He pointed toward the ceiling. “We’re trapped in here with no way out, and all the other access points are full of giant caterpillar bots.”
Rachel gave him an understanding smile. “Rourky, that won’t matter if we win. Once we reset the timeline, all of this gets undone.”
“What if we don’t win? What if this doesn’t work? We’re sealed in with what looked like hundreds of caterpillar bots.”
Major Peterson shifted nervously.
Captain Singleton shrugged. “Guess we’ll just have to succeed, then.” Turning from Rourke, Vaughn addressed Angela and pointed toward the bottom of the shaft. “Still think you’ll be able to overload the collider from down there?”
She nodded her head rapidly. “Yes, yes. This will take us straight to the CMS Experiment. Its computers are tied into the facility’s intranet.”
Momentarily setting aside his concerns, Rourke nodded with her. “I’ve read quite a bit about CERN’s HiLumi network upgrade. I think she’s right. If her credentials are still intact, any one of us should be able to do it.”
The decking trembled beneath his feet as a low rumble cascaded down the shaft. Dust drifted from above, and he heard the clatter of falling gravel.
They all looked toward Major Peterson and Mission Specialist Petrovich who had been standing on the landing above them.
Both men had ducked and scrambled down a few steps, but then the sound faded, taking the tremors with it.
Returning to the upper deck, the cosmonaut and the major glanced up the previous flight. Teddy looked down on them and extended a thumb. “Hunky-dory. No robots here … so far.”
Rourke exchanged nervous glances with several of the team members.
Wing Commander Bingham shrugged. “They don’t appear to be actively seeking us out. Either they think they’ve killed us or that they have us cornered.”
Rourke raised hopeful eyebrows. “Maybe they don’t know we’re here at all.”
Bingham looked at him as if he were staring at a piece of crap stuck to his shoe. “You go ahead and hope for rainbows and unicorns. We adults will be planning for reality.”
Rachel gave the wing commander a sour look, but Angela spoke up before she could say any
thing. “He may be right, Chance. When the Necks discovered Vaughn and me, they always sent a Tater to do the job. They never sent heavy equipment.”
Monique tilted her head. “I don’t know. That could just be because they haven’t had time to bring them through the wormhole yet.”
“Whichever the matter,” the Brit said, waving a dismissive hand. He gestured at Vaughn. “I agree with Captain Arsehole. It’s high time we bugger on out of here. Otherwise, we may soon be up to our twigs and berries in robots.”
Singleton frowned at the man but nodded. “Everyone locked and loaded?”
It took Rourke a moment to realize what he meant. The intent of his question only became obvious when he saw the other members of the team slide the bolt of their rifles back and verify a round was chambered.
After momentarily fumbling with the mechanism, he slid back his bolt and glimpsed the brassy glint of a live round.
Looking up, he saw Vaughn staring at him.
Rourke released the handle, and the bolt snapped back into position. He returned the man’s gaze and nodded. “L-Locked and loaded.”
Captain Singleton dipped his head. “Good.” He stepped back and looked down over the railing. “BOb! Your EMP cannon hot?”
“Does a one-legged duck swim in a circle?”
One corner of the captain’s mouth twisted downward. “I guess it does, but that’s enough of that shit. Resume tactical mode, BOb. Stay a few flights beneath us.”
“Roger, Captain Asshole.”
The muscles along Vaughn’s jawline flexed as he cursed under his breath. Shaking his head, he gestured at Angela. “You stay just ahead of Bill and Teddy. They’ll cover our six in case an eager-beaver bot tunnels through all the shit behind us.”
She nodded.
The major and the cosmonaut exchanged glances. Then Bill held up a thumb. “Knee seems better now.” He flexed the leg and nodded. “Won’t be a problem.”
Vaughn dipped his head. “Glad to hear it.” Addressing the entire group, he added, “If you’ve got a grenade launcher, use it first on anything that gets past BOb. If you wait till they’re too close, the grenades won’t be armed. They’ll just bounce off the target. So keep them trained down the central stairwell. We’ll need to hit anything before it gets too close. No matter what happens, one of us has to reach that terminal. Otherwise, all this has been for nothing.”