“I tend to agree with Hank,” Edaro said, not looking up as he worked. “You don’t start up something this big in the middle of a city as an experiment. I’m sure this was a tried and trusted form of technology before the city was even built.”
“So what happened?” Bogle asked.
Edaro shrugged. “Any of a thousand things. A plague and no one turned off the lights. Maybe the city got caught by the Maelstrom on one jump and sucked in and that caused the destruction.”
“So what happened to all the inhabitants?” Lee asked.
Bogle pointed. “Maybe we’re looking at the few survivors right down there.”
“Speaking of Sand,” Cort said, “I’ve still got a dozen of them coming at us. How much longer?”
“Need ten more minutes,” Edaro said, “to get a complete set of molecular cross sections of that machine. I’m taking them every few meters. We get that and we can build one if we want to.”
His words excited Hank. Maybe the mission might just be a success after all, if they could escape with such revolutionary knowledge. He turned to Private Cort. “Guess we’re going to have to stop them.”
“Better find some cover from the winds,” Cort said.
Hank didn’t like the sound of that. But at that moment, as the Sand slowly came up the ramps toward them on both sides and the air around them got colder and colder, it looked like very good advice.
20
Time: 5:02 P . M . Pacific Time
15 hours, 31 minutes after Arrival
Stephanie was ordered to a spot in the corridor leading to the outer door just before Private Cort gave the order to fire on the Sand advancing up the ramps. From there she could see the approaching creatures, plus part of the floor below covered with them.
It would be a slaughter of the Sand on the ramp, but she knew it had to be done. The closer they came up the ramp, the colder it got, as if the Sand actually sucked the heat energy from the air. She couldn’t imagine what would happen if they touched a human, but she didn’t want to have to find out.
Just seeing them down there had shocked her. She’d heard the descriptions of them from the first battle, but actually seeing the creatures milling about in their black robes startled her. It was as if seeing them was the one piece of evidence her mind needed to accept the fact that they turned to sand when shot.
Now it looked as if she was about to see that event for herself, firsthand.
Around them the air was getting colder and colder. Her breath was freezing in front of her, and she could feel the cold pulling the heat of her body through her jacket. How cold was it on that floor around the machine ten stories below? She couldn’t imagine.
Hawk and Marva opened fire on the group coming up from the left.
Waters and Vasquez on the ones ascending the right ramp.
The shots echoed off the walls of the thirty-story-tall room. The Sand went down into piles of black robes, dotting the wide ramp like the mounds of a burrowing animal.
Below, around the big machine, the other Sand seemed oblivious to the sound of weapons fire. None even tilted their heads to look up. They just kept milling around the monster phase generator that filled most of the center of the gigantic building.
Stephanie watched as the piles of robes on the left ramp seemed to dissolve into piles of black sand. It had happened. Before her very eyes they had actually become sand. All of her medical training protested against what she had just seen. Yet her eyes had seen it.
And not once in any of those piles did she catch even a glimpse of a body part like a stray arm or leg. Yet the soldier’s bullets had downed them.
Then, after only an instant, the robes were completely gone, also became just sand.
And then the cones of wind started from each one.
Small at first, then they got bigger and bigger, becoming small tornadoes, sucking the black grains into the air.
Energy was being released from each body. Seemingly massive amounts of it. And she had no idea what, how, or why it was happening. In all her professional career, she had never felt so totally uneducated. She didn’t like the feeling.
“Back to shelter! Now!” Cort shouted.
The four soldiers who’d fired scrambled back into the hallway with the rest of them. At her feet Dr. Edaro broke off doing his molecular cross-sectioning of the large machine to hold on and ride out the expected coming winds.
The funnels of wind over each Sand grew and grew, picking up the remains of the bodies in black swirls, climbing higher and higher in the huge space inside the building.
One story, then two stories tall.
Then five stories up the winds swirled.
The growing monsters of whirling winds yanked at her jacket, pulling at her as if the Sand wanted her to join them. She held on to the wall, watching as best she could as dust from the ground and walls around her pulled upward.
The piles of Sand were now completely gone.
The winds pounded her one way, then the other, with almost bruising force. The temperature around her had dropped by at least fifty degrees and the winds seemed also to want all her body heat, just as the Sand had.
Beside her Hank fought to keep the commlink secure on his head with one hand while holding on to his rifle with the other. He had his feet braced wide and his shoulder against the wall.
On the ground below her, Edaro bent over and put his entire body over his machine to protect it.
Stanton fought to remain in place as he tried to video what was happening.
Slowly the funnels of winds started to merge, growing bigger and bigger still.
Below them, the wandering Sand seemed totally unaffected. Their robes didn’t move, even though dust swirled around them.
Finally, all the funnels had joined into one big, swirling trail of black sand, its tip rising twenty stories over her head.
Then, as if being pulled, the top of the funnel seemed to turn toward the large machine, pouring downward like water from a fountain.
As she watched, the downward motion of the leading edge of the black stream sucked the rest of the funnel up and then back down behind it, like a long tail following a body.
The leading edge of the wind smashed head-on into the massive machine, releasing the black sand and dust onto the floor in front of it.
There the black sand re-formed into a pile of robes.
And the pile of robes stood up and moved away, joining the others.
A dozen of them re-formed, the same number that had been shot.
Then there was no more wind in the monster room.
Just silence and the hum of the machine, much louder now.
The dozen resurrected Sand were no longer at all distinguishable from the rest of their kind circling aimlessly on the floor below.
Stephanie and the rest of the scientists and soldiers all stood and just stared for a long instant. Stephanie wasn’t even sure she was breathing.
The air around them was quickly warming up. She tried to swallow and just couldn’t. Her throat was too dry, her mind too confused.
Then Lee said, “Someone want to explain to me what the hell just happened?”
Stephanie looked at Hank, who only shrugged. From all the laws of physics and medical science that she knew, what she had just seen wasn’t possible.
Period.
But neither was the Earth being in the Maelstrom, so maybe some of those rules should now just be tossed away. Actually a lot of them.
“I hope someone recorded that,” Hank said softly. “Because no one back at the facility is going to believe us. Hell, I don’t believe it, and I just watched it.”
“Got it all,” Stanton said, holding up a miniature camera.
“So did I,” Lee said, holding up another miniature camera that fit inside his palm. Stephanie hadn’t even noticed he was filming.
“Good,” Hank said.
“Tell you what, people,” Edaro said, staring at his screen. “Let’s try not to shoot any more of t
hem.”
“Why?” Stephanie said, kneeling next to where he sat on the ground with his machine.
Edaro pointed at a spike on a graph that filled the screen of his weird-looking computer. “Because by doing so,” he said, “we just fed the energy supply below.”
He looked up, first at Stephanie, then at Hank. “It means we have less time until the entire city phases and takes us with it.”
“How much less?” Stephanie asked.
“Significantly less would be my guess,” Edaro said. “Those creatures pumped a lot of energy into that thing.”
“Damn,” Hank said softly.
Stephanie looked down at the milling Sand and their monster machine. She knew it was crucial that they take this information back with them. They had come too far, paid too high a price to not get it back now. Who knew what Union scientists could do with what they were getting here? Future phase generators on armor maybe.
Or quicker transport to any place on the planet.
Or stronger building materials even.
But if the city jumped with them, none of that would happen.
She looked up at Hank. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Hank nodded. “How soon until you’re finished, Chop?”
“Three minutes,” Edaro said.
Then Hank turned to the others. “Have we gotten everything we can possibly get from here?”
Everyone nodded, so Hank turned to Private Cort. “Up or back outside to get out of here? What are your plans?”
“If we go up,” Cort said, pointing at the ramps, “we will be exposed on those building faces.”
Stephanie shuddered at the thought. From what she could see, the ramps around the sides of the building above about five floors were all transparent. The only reason they were even visible was that the bottoms were like normal wall material. And the sides of the building along each ramp were transparent.
She studied the room above her. Each ramp circled exactly halfway around the building to climb one floor. To climb the fifteen floors, they’d have to walk around the inside of this building seven and a half times on transparent ramps, then cross a transparent sky bridge.
She could do it, but she wouldn’t like it.
“Yeah,” Hank said, “but outside we take the chance of running into the Pharons. And the only way to cross that barricade is to cross over it from above.”
Cort nodded, looking up and studying the ramps.
“I don’t much like either choice,” Bogle said.
“I agree on that one,” Stanton said.
“I think we’d be better off making a run for it up the ramps in here,” Hank said. “And try to reach those sky bridges as quickly as we can.”
“Why?” Cort asked.
I get it,” Stephanie said. “The Pharons, more than likely, have been trying to get something from this place for years. We have to assume they understand what killing a Sand does to the energy.”
“More than likely,” Hank said. “So you think they might not want to fight in here if they show up?”
“After what just happened,” Stephanie said, “do you?”
“No,” Cort said. “We go up.” He clicked on his commlink. “Vasquez, Hawk, get up that left ramp. Spread out and cover us as you go. We’re taking that way out.”
“This is going to be rough,” Lee said, his smile gone.
“We’ll get you up there, Doc,” Private Cort said.
Lee only nodded.
Stephanie looked up at the transparent building walls and the transparent ramps and shuddered again. What had she been thinking?
At least they were heading back.
That thought alone could get her over a lot of transparent ramps.
She hoped.
21
Time: 5:39 P . M . Pacific Time
16 hours, 08 minutes after Arrival
The ramps that sloped at a gentle angle up the inside of the massive, hollow building were over six meters wide, with no railings of any sort. They were as wide as a large living room, yet for Hank’s taste, they weren’t wide enough by far. Especially at the fifth floor, where they became transparent.
And the exterior walls also became transparent.
It was like stepping out into empty space.
“A ramp to heaven,” Bogle had said.
Hank found it disturbing to suddenly be moving up a transparent ramp along the side of a transparent wall high over the heads of the mob of milling black-robed Sand.
Within ten steps out onto the transparent part of the ramp, he felt his hands sweating, and he could barely move. Yet they all had to keep going. There were still a good fifteen floors of this above them.
Privates Vasquez and Hawk were almost to the top to set up cover positions.
Hank kept moving another hundred paces, then stopped and looked back.
None of the troopers seemed to be bothered by this strange ramp in the slightest. Or more than likely, their training was so good, they just didn’t show fear. Just then Hank wished he had the same training.
He half leaned against the solid, but transparent outer wall, feeling as if he were actually standing in open space. It was amazing to him that after all the years of wear and tear, these ramps and walls could remain so perfectly transparent. Or more than likely, what had been surface markings on the transparent surfaces had worn off. Either way, it made for one very disconcerting experience.
Stephanie was behind him, and he waited for her to catch up shakily, letting the solid feel of the wall and the ramp under his feet reassure him. Her face was white, and she was having problems breathing. There was no chance she was going to make it all the way to the top. None at all.
Not this way at least.
“We’re going blind,” he said to her. “Neither one of us will make it any other way.”
She looked at him like he was mad.
“Put your hand solidly against the outer wall.”
She did as he told her.
“Now close your eyes and tell me what you feel under your hand and feet.”
“Hard wall, hard ramp,” she said.
“Exactly. Keep your eyes closed until I tell you to do otherwise. Don’t take your hand off the wall, and you’ll be just fine.”
She nodded without opening her eyes.
“I’ll be right in front of you every step of the way. So trust me; I’ll tell you if you need to open your eyes again. Okay?”
“Thanks,” she said. “This is better.”
“Don’t start yet,” he said. He looked back down to where the other scientists were having their own problems negotiating the transparent ramp and wall. Lee seemed unable to move at all. He had frozen after about ten steps out onto the clear surface, and Cort had ordered Waters to help him.
“Close your eyes, Lee!” Hank shouted back at them. “Walk with your hand along the outside wall as a guide. It helps take away the visual problems.”
Lee nodded and did as Hank suggested.
So did Bogle.
So did Edaro.
“I’ll bring up the rear,” Stanton shouted. “This doesn’t bother me.”
“Great!” Hank shouted back. “Dr. Lee, just walk smoothly and quickly along the wall, tracking it with your hand. You’ll be fine.”
Lee only nodded without opening his eyes.
“Let’s move out, people,” Cort said, motioning at Hank. “Marva, stay behind Dr. Stanton and make sure nothing comes up at us.”
“Understood,” Marva said over the commlink.
Hank didn’t wait to watch how they were doing. Instead he glanced at Stephanie, seemingly standing in midair beside him, her eyes closed, her hand resting against the transparent wall. It was a very weird sight. If it hadn’t been so damned scary, it would have been funny.
He let the feeling of the solid wall under his hand give him confidence. “Ready to walk?”
She nodded. “Ready.”
“Then let’s go. Take it at whatever pace you feel comfort
able with. We have some climbing to do before we reach heaven.”
Stephanie laughed as she stepped toward him hesitantly. “Solid, brown dirt would be heaven right about now.”
“That’s exactly where we’re heading,” he said, staying just ahead of her.
Slowly she picked up momentum. Behind them the others were doing the same.
They were all moving again.
Hank kept his hand firmly on the transparent wall as they moved upward, his eyes closed for ten of every twelve steps. It was enough to keep him focused on the solidity of the ramp.
Enough to keep him going.
Twenty of the longest minutes of his life later, he stood beside Stephanie at the top of the ramp, looking back down at the massive phase generator and the myriad Sand milling around it. From that height the Sand almost looked like tiny ants. And none of them had tried to follow, which was good.
He was sweating.
She was pasty white and sweating. But at least they had made it this far.
The rest of their group looked as if they were walking on air coming up at them.
Around them Hank could see the towering skyscrapers and the four sky bridges leading across to them. The sky bridge to the south looked fine, and ten stories up higher in the building to which it led was another sky bridge leading even farther south. With luck, it would be far enough to get over the barricade.
But from here he couldn’t tell.
“South sky bridge looks good to me from here,” Hank said into the commlink.
“Be right there,” Cort said.
A few seconds later Cort cleared the top of the ramp behind Dr. Bogle.
“Jenkins, Vasquez,” Cort said, “take up point across the south sky bridge and secure the stairs over there.”
“We’ve got to go up another ten, I’d guess,” Hank said into the commlink, looking up.
Cort nodded.
Bogle smiled ruefully at Hank, the sweat dripping off his face. “That was a real fun-house ride.”
“The builders of this place were real sadists,” Stephanie said between gasps of breath.
“They just had no fear of heights, loved beautiful views, and enjoyed climbing stairs and ramps,” Hank said. “I can think of much worse.”
“They would have been interesting to meet,” Stephanie said. “But it doesn’t seem—”
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