“Again,” Tommy added.
“Yeah,” Sean agreed. “Again.”
48
Svalbard
Tabitha held her pistol just below chest level, turning it from time to time so it aimed at a different member of the control room crew. Emily, Dak, and June all did the same while Alex and Tara scrolled through the tablet Klaus had been holding.
The German’s nosebleed had slowed but still seeped through his fingers. His lab coat was soaked in red, and he continued dabbing at his nostrils with the fabric to stem the flow.
“Can someone turn that stupid alarm off?” Alex shouted over the piercing sound.
Dak raised his pistol and fired a single shot at the device blaring from the corner of the room. The bullet shattered the klaxon, and the room quieted. Only distant sounds of the alarm drifted into the room.
“Thank you,” Alex said.
“I should have done that sooner,” Dak confessed. Then he turned to the rows of workers at the tables. “All right. All of you, into that conference room over there.” He motioned to a long, skinny room off to the right where a boardroom table ran nearly the length of the space.
“We can’t all fit in there,” Klaus said, his swollen nose muting his voice.
“Then I guess it’s going to be real cozy,” Dak said, motioning with his pistol. “Move.”
The workers stood up and made their way toward the boardroom, filing in one at a time until the glass windows along the wall were near to bursting. Klaus was the last to enter. He passed a scathing, fiery glare at Dak, who huffed in response.
“Get in there, Doc.” He kicked the man in the tail and sent him sprawling into the arms of his coworkers.
June slammed the door shut and kicked the latch with her boot, bending it at an awkward angle and effectively locking everyone inside.
“Now what?” Tabitha asked from across the room. She walked over to where the others stood by the rear table closest to the exit. “They’ll be sending guards in here any second.”
Emily pointed at the door. “This room makes a perfect kill box,” she said. “The first wave will rush in. We’ll cut them down. The second wave will be more careful, sending teams in by twos or fours to sweep the corners. That means we need to have someone positioned in each of the near corners, along with a frontal offensive from the center of the room.” She motioned to the third row of tables. “Tabitha, Dak, Alex and Tara, take positions behind that row. Flip over the tables in front to give you cover. That should be enough to keep any bullets from getting through. June, you and I will take the corners and pick them off from the flanks as they charge through.”
“You’ll be exposed,” Dak said. “No offense, ma’am, but I’ll be happy to take one of the corners.”
“Me, too,” Alex offered.
“I appreciate your chivalrous offer, boys. But we’ll be fine. Now, if we’re done discussing this in the committee, we need to get in position.”
Dak grinned. “I like you,” he said, waving a finger at her.
Then he turned and flipped over one of the tables. Tabitha and the others joined in until they’d established the makeshift fortification prescribed by Emily. The four hurried around behind it and crouched low.
Alex kept scanning through the information on the tablet, trying to find a way to reverse the flow of energy as Sean suggested. The other three readied their weapons, leaning close to the table’s underside as they waited.
Emily and June stood in the corners with pistols drawn. Each carried four additional magazines on their belts.
Footsteps echoed from down the hall near the elevator, signaling that the troops were on their way.
Emily looked over at June and held her pistol at an angle toward the back corner of the control room—making sure she wouldn’t hit her friend and partner with the crossfire. June did the same.
Eight guards rushed into the room, albeit somewhat cautiously. They entered with their knees bent, moving fast toward the center where the tables were flipped over. Five steps in, June and Emily unleashed a deadly volley of rounds, peppering the two men in the rear of the column. The two in the middle and two in front spun around only to catch hot metal from behind the tables as Dak and the others opened fire.
The gunmen dropped like bricks to the floor, all dying almost instantly as bullets tore through vital organs or skulls.
More poured into the room, this time fanning out wider, but running face-first into bullets flying in from every angle.
Within sixty seconds, eighteen guards lay dead on the floor at the entrance to the control room.
As predicted, the next wave entered with greater caution. Additional men emerged from the elevator and opened fire at the tables directly ahead, plunking rounds into the dense metal surfaces with no impact beyond.
Dak slid to the right and stabbed his pistol out from the far side. The attackers were focused on the center where the others huddled for cover, which made it easy for Dak to pick off three more before the others reacted and opened fire at his end.
Taking his cue, Tabitha scurried to the opposite end and blasted the gunmen from the other flank. The men fell through the entrance, dead before Emily and June even had to fire a round.
Dak and Tabitha ejected their magazines and replaced them, ready for the next attack. They both slid back to the center and looked to Alex.
“Any progress on that energy reversal thing Sean mentioned?” Dak asked with hope in his eyes.
“Maybe,” Alex said. He held the screen at an angle so Tara could see it. “These hieroglyphs were taken from the pyramid, based on the notes. It appears that—”
More gunshots popped, and Dak immediately poked his weapon over the edge of the table and took out two more men on the right side of the short corridor as they tried to sneak in and take out Emily.
“You were saying?” Dak urged as he ducked back behind their cover.
“These images—I think—are instructions on how to use the mechanism. You see this one where there is only one gem?”
“Yes,” the other three said together.
“Well, notice how this image is different than the one with twelve?”
The others nodded.
“My guess is, if we destroy the other eleven gems and leave in the red diamond, it will change the flow of power through this cube,” Alex pointed at a blue square in the picture.
“Will that be stable?” Tabitha asked.
“Probably not,” Tara answered for him. “But it looks like the only way.”
Alex agreed with a nod. “Yeah. I think so.”
“Call it in,” Dak ordered.
He popped back up and opened fire again, while Emily and June gunned down four more brave villains as they tried another mad charge into the control room. A thick haze of acrid smoke hung in the room, covering the piles of bodies accumulating at the entrance.
“Only a matter of time until they use tear gas,” Dak said. “Assuming they have it.”
“Tear gas?” Alex looked worried. “Okay, yeah. I’ll let Sean know.”
He pulled up the radio and pressed the button on the side.
Sean and Tommy cautiously stepped off the elevator, sweeping the corridors to the left and right. Adriana and Niki moved forward and down the hall toward the door at the end that led to the gigantic pyramid.
The debilitating sound of the alarms tempted everyone to cover their ears, but they pressed ahead quickly, desperate to reach the pyramid before Sorenson activated the machine.
Just as the group passed a pair of doors, one on either side of the hall, something slammed open behind them. Niki spun around in time to see a group of Sorenson’s goons rush around the corner from one of the other hallways.
“Trouble,” Niki said to the others as he flung open the metal door on the right a second before the men behind them opened fire.
Their suppressed weapons spit bullets by the dozen at the intruders, but the door proved a worthy shield, absorbing every impact with onl
y scratches and minor dents to the surface.
Niki stabbed his pistol around the door and squeezed the trigger. He half aimed, hoping to get off quick shots that would drive back the enemy, rather than take any of them down. It would be a bonus if the latter happened.
The eight men ducked back around the corner near the elevator, taking cover from the counterattack.
“Go on,” Niki ordered. “We will hold them off as long as we can.”
“Not leaving you—”
“Go!” Niki shouted. “Take out Sorenson for me.”
Sean knew that was difficult for the young man to say. He’d been betrayed by the man, the father figure who’d taken him from the streets and molded him into something strong, powerful.
“I’ll stay with him,” Adriana offered.
“Wait. No.”
“I wasn’t asking.” She cast him a commanding stare.
“But this is your family’s task,” he protested. “It’s your mission.”
Another round of muted pops barreled through the corridor. Bullets pounded the door again. One struck the glass window in the top center and sprayed shards onto the floor, as well as onto Sean’s left shoulder.
“These men are going to be a bigger problem than Sorenson. You take the easy way for once, Sean.” She winked at him and then smacked him on the rear. “Go get ’em, tiger.”
He shook his head as she stuck her pistol around the door and fired. One gunman fell to the floor by the corner. He clutched at a wound near his collarbone that leaked blood onto the shiny white floor. The rest of the attackers fell back once more.
“Go,” she ordered again, this time more sternly.
With a nod, Sean and Tommy took off down the corridor at a dead sprint.
More clicks and pops followed. Bullets zipped by them and struck the wall and ceiling. Reaching another door, Sean reached out and yanked it open, pulling the door stop down in one fluid motion to keep it ajar. The farther they ran, he knew, the better angle the shooters would have. But Sean and Tommy had the advantage of distance, and by opening more doors along the way, they would be nearly impossible targets.
Sean heard Niki and Adriana return fire again with the doorway at the end only twenty feet away.
The two friends were nearly there when a random round tore through Tommy’s left shoulder. He groaned and dove into the corner as their allies fired back once more, driving the goons out of sight.
“You okay?” Sean asked, peeling away his friend’s fingers to examine the wound.
“It hurts,” Tommy said. “But I’ve had worse.”
Sean scowled at the wound. “I’ve had worse from a bicycle accident when I was seven.”
Tommy looked offended. “Hey. Come on.”
Sean grinned at his friend and pulled him away from the wall. “Come on, you big baby. We have to stop Sorenson. And I know you want to pop Kevin Clark.”
Tommy nodded, and an invigorated smile spread across his lips. “Oh, yeah.”
Sean pulled open the door and shoved his friend through, following immediately behind.
49
Svalbard
Kevin stared at the blue cube with rapt attention, as if hypnotized by its rhythmic pulsing. The object stood on top of a shimmering golden plinth. The low relief was carved to look like swirling strands—almost like arms—that wrapped around the stand from the base to the top where a square platform held the cube in place. A beam of blue light shot up out of the cube and struck a golden plate in the ceiling overhead. Golden lines stretched out across the ceiling just as Kevin had seen in computer circuitry. The lines appeared to be powering the glowing hieroglyphs, though Kevin could not come up with a hypothesis as to why that would be necessary.
Surrounding the pillar and cube were twelve smaller replicas of the plinth. The only difference being, these platforms didn’t hold a cube. Instead, they each contained a gem of a different color, inserted into a hole in the center. Every one of the brilliant stones glowed brightly, pulsing in rhythm with the subtle beat of the Quantium cube.
Kevin also noted that the hum had faded upon entering the big control room.
“What happened to the sound?” he asked as he approached the enormous cube. “Is it safe to be so close to this without any protection?” He motioned to the block.
“The sound diffuses in this room. It is insulated all around, and we believe that might be one of the reasons for the liquid Quantium paint, but again, we can’t prove that yet. In this room we are safe, I assure you. And the cube does not put out any harmful radiation, not to us.”
Kevin flicked a glance at the man following his last few words. He knew what that meant. Magnus was referring to the powerful radiation that would circle the globe and wipe out billions in minutes.
“How does it work?” Kevin asked.
Magnus turned and indicated an empty plinth, the only one in the half circle of stands surrounding the cube that didn’t contain a cylindrical gem.
“Once I insert this, it will activate the mechanism.” He pointed at the plate overhead. “That plate will slide away, and the beam will fire up through the shaft. From there, the energy will be converted by the sphere in the scepter atop the pyramid and the one on top of the mountain before it is distributed around the world.”
Kevin’s forehead tightened. He wasn’t fully convinced. “How do you know all that?” He looked around the room, noting hieroglyphs that depicted beings standing by a pyramid with a red beam coming out of the top and spreading into a dozen beams like rays of crimson sunshine.
“The instructions are all around us.” Magnus splayed his hands out wide, showing off the walls of images.
“But how do you know what it does? You said it was radiation, but you also alluded to other potential ways it works. Do you even know or are you guessing?”
Disappointed with the lack of faith, Magnus lowered his hands. “I’m surprised, Kevin. I offered you sanctuary here, in this place. I have taken good care of you, paid you more than anyone in your field could ever imagine. And for that, you question me, the most powerful person in the entire world?”
“It’s just that, how do I know we’re going to be safe in this place? With all due respect, sir, it seems like there are a few questions that need to be answered.”
“We will have our answer soon enough, Dr. Clark. But trust me when I say nothing is going to happen to us in this room.”
He turned and faced the empty plinth and raised the red diamond over the hole in its center as if about to plunge a dagger into a sacrifice.
“I’m not so sure about that, Doc!” a new and familiar voice shouted from behind Kevin, who whirled around in time to catch a right hook from Tommy.
The fist smashed across Kevin’s jaw and knocked him sideways. Dazed, he fell to the floor nearly unconscious.
“Nice one, Shultzie,” Sean said, keeping his pistol aimed at Sorenson’s back. “Sometimes I forget how strong you really are.”
Tommy grinned over his shoulder. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to do that.”
“You’re too late, Sean!” Magnus yelled as he held the red gem over the hole in the pillar. He turned and faced Sean while keeping his left hand and the diamond in place. “Oh, what are you going to do, Sean? Tell me to drop it? That’s going to happen whether you shoot me or not. And when I do, billions of people will be wiped from the face of the earth.”
“You don’t have to do this, Magnus. What happened to the man who taught me about honor, perseverance, doing what is right?”
“This is what is right, Sean. Don’t you see? This is how the universe works. For there to be creation of the new, there must be destruction of the old. If I don’t do this, how many billions will die in far more painful ways? This is the most merciful thing I can do, my boy. That we can do.”
“You know I can’t let you do that, Magnus. Take the diamond away from the…whatever that thing is, and step down. Don’t make me shoot you.”
The Swede laughe
d deliberately. “You’re a good shot, Sean. But you’re, what, thirty, forty feet away? At that angle? You may hit me. You may not.”
“You willing to take that chance?”
“Always the one with the witty answer.” Magnus noticed Tommy shifting to the side. “Don’t try to flank me, Tommy. It’s not going to stop anything. Put your guns down, boys. You’ve done well. Truly. I am proud of you, of the men you’ve become. After all, you two helped make this possible with all those wonderful discoveries you’ve made. Oh, sure, some were dead ends, but there were others that truly helped me put all of this together. So many pieces to the puzzle may have gone unfound if it weren’t for you two.”
Sean wavered for a second. He glanced over at his friend, and both shared a look of doubt for half a second.
“Yes, that’s right,” Magnus went on. “Your agency helped lay the foundation for this next step in human evolution, Tommy. In a way, I’m glad the two of you are here to see it.”
Sean kept the pistol extended, unwilling to surrender.
“You can kill me if you want to, Sean,” Magnus said when silent seconds ticked by. “But it won’t save all those people. Nothing will. This is the only way to make sure they don’t suffer.”
Sean shook his head slowly, inching it side to side. “No, Magnus. Humanity deserves a chance. People deserve a chance to dig themselves out of the hole we’ve created. No one made you judge, jury, and executioner of our entire species.”
“Quite the contrary, my boy. I am all of those things. As I’ve said before, I do not want this task, Sean. But it must be done. For the good of humanity.”
Sean’s finger tensed on the trigger. “You’re right, Magnus!” he shouted.
The Swede regarded him with suspicion.
“I can’t stop you from activating the machine.”
Magnus smiled at the comment.
“But you’re wrong about one thing.”
Magnus cocked his head to the side with mocking interest. “Oh? And what might that be, my boy?”
The Milestone Protocol Page 41