Branch Off

by Dario Solera

  “They’re gone. I’m taking charge.” Emminger was the team leader, but the officer heading the operation was in the other jeep. “Dubois, which direction to the nearest access shaft?”

  “Six hundred meters this way,” he said, pointing somewhere into the light fog.

  Sarah was no longer in control of her own movements. Her body trembled and her teeth rattled, and it was not for the cold. Her muscles were so stiff that they ached. Her mind flew between consciousness and absence as rumbling sounds of explosions came from the nearby fields.

  Four more men had just vanished into ashes.

  “We must go back,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.” Tears formed at the sides of her eyes.

  The soldiers ignored her and kept talking. Their words reached her ears, but she did not understand them. For a moment she wondered if they were speaking in another language.

  “We should go back,” she repeated.

  Mairengo, the one who had been sitting to her right in the jeep, shot her a glance. “That would be a fantastic idea, Doctor, but our orders are different.”

  Perhaps she could make it to the car. With something to think of, her mind got clearer and she imagined getting in the driver seat, putting it in reverse, turning around—no. Manual transmission. That would require pushing the clutch, putting it in reverse, gently giving gas, and releasing the clutch.

  As she watched it, the jeep erupted in a ball of flames.

  A split second later, the shock wave came. Everyone ducked behind the bushes until the noise and the mushroom of smoke faded.

  “So we’re stuck here,” Emminger said. “We better move. Dubois, Geiger, lead the way.” The two soldiers began moving toward a nearby group of trees. “Follow them,” he told Sarah. “Mairengo and I will cover your back.”

  The professionalism of these men shocked her. They had just lost half their companions, they had no viable way home, and yet they pushed forward.

  “Faster,” he said from behind her.

  Sarah ran in a bent position. The bulletproof jacket felt like a block of lead on her shoulders, and it compressed her chest, making her breaths labored. The idea of ditching it darted in her mind.

  “They’ll find the empty jeep and come after us,” Mairengo said from farther back.

  Exploiting the cover that a grove provided, they stopped for a moment. From there the black smoke was almost invisible through the thin morning mist. That same fog that contributed protection had caused her to lose sense of orientation, and she could hardly tell the direction they had come from.

  “No vehicles. The area is not safe. I call this plan B.”

  She had never heard of plan A, much less B. “What’s plan B?” she asked with an unsure voice. She had to talk to keep her mind clear, preventing it from succumbing to the fear, even if she dreaded the answer.

  “We get into the nearest access shaft.”

  “Then what? It’s about ten kilometers to the labs.”

  “Correct. There are electric carts inside the tunnel every two thousand meters.”

  “Of course.” She had forgotten them. It was a reasonable plan.

  Machine guns rattled in the distance. Short, professional bursts that were killing people.

  “There are armies trying to gain control of the anomaly,” Sarah said. “It doesn’t make sense. Why is it happening on this side and not on ours? And where are the aliens?”

  “You’re the scientist.”

  “It’s completely fucked.”

  Emminger laughed through his nose. “That has been obvious for a while.”

  The battle seemed to rage with more fury, sending explosion rumbles and gunfire across the misty air. The noise of a helicopter resounded in the sky, invisible and hard to place in terms of its position.

  “Boss, we should get going,” Dubois said.

  “Yeah. Let’s move.”

  Sarah shot one last glance back and then resumed pacing after the two soldiers that led the squad.

  “Three hundred meters.”

  It was cold, but not enough to keep the snow frozen. The fields were dark with muddy grass and occasional traces of battle. Things had happened here, although the conflict had moved elsewhere.

  Walking slowly near trees and bushes, Sarah recognized the place. It was the same path she had followed before, first alone and then with Richards, but it looked a little different, like in a dream. Her brain told her to keep going and find Frank’s car a bit farther, where she had left it two days ago. No, it couldn’t be there—it had been towed away. For all she knew, it could very well be a wreck by now. Frank could be gone, killed by a bomb. “This is not my world,” she said to herself, shaking her head. But what if she found him at the labs? She was dead in this dimension. How would he react?

  “There,” Dubois said.

  The small building that came into view through the fog encased one of the access shafts to the accelerator.

  Memories of Christine and her son, appearing right there near the fence, ran in her mind. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  One of the soldiers produced a wire cutter and chiseled an opening in the fencing. Dubois went in first, then Sarah and the others. “Stay back,” Emminger said as his man fired a couple rounds at the door’s lock.

  The sudden noise made her jump even though she knew it was coming.

  Dubois and the others stepped inside the building, powering tiny flashlights on their submachine guns.

  “Clear.”

  Dubois and Geiger descended into the vertical shaft, their boots making a rubbery sound on the steel rungs. From above, the tunnel seemed a million meters deep below ground level, but it was only seventy, and a dim light seeped up through it from the dozens of lamps it had inside.

  “No one’s at home,” crackled Emminger’s radio after a few minutes.

  “Copy that.” He looked at Sarah and bent his head toward the shaft. “Your turn.”

  She glanced into the narrow passage once more. The place was tight, and she felt gawky inside her clothes and protections, certainly not suited for going down a bottomless well. With tentative motions, she set her right foot onto the first rung. The handlebars were stinging cold on her hands.

  Mairengo watched her with a pitiful expression.

  “One at a time,” Emminger said. “No need to rush.”

  It was not the ladder that frightened her; instead she was unsure if descending there was a good idea. What the hell were they going to do when they reached the labs? How would they explain their presence? She didn't bother pointing that out—it was too late—and commenced stepping downward.

  Moving her arms and legs with a slow but steady rhythm, she imagined introductions at the labs. “Nice to meet you, I'm Sarah Davinson.” And then the answer. “Of course you are, but weren't you dead?”

  Above, Emminger and Mairengo moved swiftly down the ladder and reached her, with just one or two free rungs between her head and their feet.

  What they were doing was foolish.

  Sarah jumped off onto the raw concrete of the tunnel’s floor. The accelerator towered to one side, a massive steel tube interspersed with enormous supercooled electromagnets.

  “Is it off?” Mairengo asked.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Were it on, we’d be in big trouble.”

  “How do we know if it gets powered on?” Emminger asked.

  “The standard procedure would be to sound an alarm ten minutes in advance. Safety systems will detect movements in the tunnel. Those big red buttons stop everything.” She gazed up and down the gallery. “But anyway, I doubt that there’s enough energy to power it up right now.”

  “Or ever.”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Let’s move. Dubois?”

  “That way, southward.” The group began walking. Steps resounded in the empty cavity. Emminger and Mairengo often checked behind them. “Eight hundred meters.”

  Sarah had only been in the tunnels a couple of times, and not t
his far from the main labs building. The tunnel here was small, just wide enough to allow assembly and maintenance, and nothing like the grandness of the sections near the Institute’s central structure, where press and media were allowed to take pictures.

  Emminger walked up close to her, leaving Mairengo a few meters behind. “So, Doctor, how did you end up working here?”

  Glancing at him a little sideways, she answered, “I’m a physicist.”

  “I see.”

  “This place is the sanctum sanctorum of physics.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know what happens here?”

  “Not really, no,” he said with a polite smile.

  She waved at the structure to her side. “This thing, this accelerator, is the most powerful connection to the laws of physics that we have. It’s a way to push our knowledge further.”

  “It caused all of this this mess?”

  “Yeah. It was a mistake, and probably my fault.” She looked at the floor. “But it’s wonderful. We’re so close to the truth.”

  “Isn’t it too disconnected from our daily lives? I mean, I heard you worked on black matter, but how does that help us?”

  Dubois glanced behind, curious about what was being said.

  “Understanding the way the universe works would be a sufficient reason, but there’s more. When Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, she didn’t know what it could be used for.”

  “Like nuclear bombs.”

  “Yes, but also x-rays, energy, and a host of other useful things such as radiocarbon dating.”

  “She died studying that.”

  He was not as ignorant as she had assumed. “Indeed.” Every step in the tunnel brought her closer to the goals that Requin had set for her, but that was rather the goal the world expected her to reach, even without knowing it. Her shadowy plans of finding her biological parents felt distant now, irrelevant. Silly. “I don’t plan to let that happen to any of us. To anyone.”

  Twenty-seven

  Hurried steps came from the corridor. The on-duty guard appeared, fingers on the handgun in his holster. He bent his head to inspect Gagnier’s face, pale and dirty with coffee and chewed cereal. The man, who could be in his twenties, shot a glance at Léa.

  “He’s chocking, he needs help!”

  His look seemed unsure. He glanced back at Gagnier and shifted weight on his feet.

  “Quick!”

  “I don't…”

  She was desperate. Vital seconds ticked past while this idiot had frozen in fright. “I'm a doctor, let me out and I’ll do it.” Tears were streaming down her checks already. She had known this man for only a few days, but losing him was out of the question, and it wasn’t even her doctor-self that commanded it.

  The man hesitated for a couple more seconds and then walked over to the door of her cell, opening it with a large brass key. He repeated the procedure with Gagnier’s and stepped aside.

  Léa rushed in and bent near her friend. “Hey, can you hear me?” She felt for his pulse on one wrist. “There’s a heartbeat.” She put two fingers in his mouth to clear his throat, but nothing substantial came out. “The lump must be lower down. Help me stand him up. Take him under his arms, I’ll give him abdominal thrusts.”

  Grunting, the guard raised Gagnier’s weight. His head hung low on one side.

  “Higher,” she said.

  Gagnier was tall and fit, and the soldier struggled with his eighty kilos.

  With her right cheek pressed between his shoulder blades, Léa grabbed Gagnier’s belly with both arms in a tight embrace, but as she was preparing to deliver the first thrust, his body suddenly jerked.

  His muscles turned rigid and he rose a few centimeters. The guard blabbered something, but before she could figure what had happened, Gagnier had already broken free from her hold and was kneeling on the floor, punching the man’s face. The knuckles hitting bone and flesh produced sickening thumping sounds.

  She remained there, stunned, watching her friend stand up, breathing hard, and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes were full of fury, but as they met hers, they turned soft in an instant.

  Léa tried to speak, with nothing coming out of her lips.

  “I’m sorry. It had to look real.”

  Her eyes searched for the guard’s face, only finding a bloody mess.

  “He’ll be fine.”

  “I thought you were dying.”

  “You can be upset with me later. Now we must go.” He bent and grabbed the guard’s key ring from the floor.

  Gagnier grabbed Léa by her elbow and pulled her toward the cell’s open door. She stumbled forward and followed him.

  The corridor was empty. The action had been quiet enough not to attract anyone else. “Surveillance should be minimal around here. We should be able to get out easily.” He led the way down the long hallway until they found a tiny guardroom near a closed door with a foggy reinforced glass window. Gagnier tried the handle. “Locked.” He fumbled with the keys, trying one after another, until he was able to crack the door open and peer on the other side. “I know the place. It should be no more than a hundred meters to the fence.”

  “How do we get out?”

  “We can’t climb it as there’s barbed wire on top. We must go through the main gate, but that’s guarded.”

  Cold air seeped in from the thin opening. The cell wasn’t very warm, but the difference with the outside temperature was enough to make Léa shiver.

  He closed the door and backed away from it, looking around. “Of course.” He stormed into the guardroom and yanked the camo coat that was hung on a battered hanger. “Wait here.”

  Léa watched him going back into his cell and emerging a couple minutes later, wearing the guard’s clothes and adjusting the pistol holster on his belt.

  “You’ll be my prisoner,” he said as he donned the coat and cap. “He’s a sergeant. It will come in handy.”

  “It will never work.”

  “Any other ideas?”

  She shook her head.

  “We can stay here if you want, but it’s a dead end. I’d rather try to return to my world than rot in this place. But that’s me.”

  Léa thought for a moment, but her thoughts were foggy. Maybe it was the hangover from the blow she had gotten on her forehead. What did she want to do? She didn’t have a clear answer, and she could only think about how she felt tired, both in her body and in her brain. Sarah had convinced Requin to let her go, and Léa wanted to be with her. It could be their second chance, and all the rest didn’t matter. “Let’s go.”

  Gagnier nodded and his lips produced a little smile. “You have to wear these,” he said with handcuffs hanging from his right hand.

  “No, please.”

  “We must look legit. Trust me. I’ll keep a key and you’ll have the other.” He removed one of the two keys from the little ring that held them together, pocketing it and placing the remaining one in her coat’s breast pocket. Gagnier showed her the cuffs. “The key goes here. Turn it and they unlock.”

  “Got it.”

  “Ready?”

  “Not really, but yes,” she answered, extending her arms before her.

  The cold handcuffs clicked shut around her wrists. “Too tight?”

  “No.”

  “Good. There won’t be many men outside. I guess most are guarding the anomaly, but we’ll find some. If you feel scared, look down in front of you. I’ll walk behind you, so never, ever turn toward me.”

  “OK.”

  “If we meet someone, let me talk. Don’t do anything. And don’t run away.”

  Léa nodded.

  “This is the plan. We will walk to the garage and take a jeep, a car, whatever. My orders are to bring you to the Institute because you have important information to pass on to the scientists.”

  “Won’t they need to see papers?”

  “Yes. I’ll think of something.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “T
rust me. I know how these things work. I’m a soldier, remember?”

  She closed her eyes and made another nod. She was giving herself up to him completely this time.

  “So once we have a vehicle, we’ll reach the gate and leave the base.”

  The plan looked so flawed, so impossible that she laughed.

  “What?”

  “It’s so stupid.”

  “Look, the worst that can happen is that they discover us and take us back to the cells. You, at least. Now we must go, or that guard is going to wake up and find us here arguing.”

  Léa bit her lower lip.

  “This place used to host the 1st Armored Brigade, but it’s now just a logistics base. Most hangars are empty and there’s minimum personnel. We’ll be fine.”

  “OK,” she said with a sigh.

  Gagnier straightened his clothes and opened the door wide. “After you.”

  She went outside and glanced at her surroundings. Soldiers were walking up and down, and the noise of an engine came from afar, but no one was close to them.

  “Don’t look around. Look straight in front of you.” He grabbed her right arm and they began moving. “The garage is that building,” he said.

  Midway, from what she could see at the edge of her vision, they hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention. Her heart beat fast nonetheless, and she had the urge to run and hide behind every obstacle they found on their path.

  “You’re doing great. Keep walking.”

  After a minute they reached the nondescript structure, with greyish, flaking paint on the walls, and several steel garage doors. One was open, and Gagnier pushed Léa in that direction.

  Inside was a man sitting at a small desk in one corner. While she would have run away, her fake jailer walked her to the soldier with a purposeful pace.

  “I need a light vehicle to transfer this woman.”

  The guard looked at them with a slight frown, and Léa noticed his eyes stopping on the ranks on Gagnier’s stolen uniform. “Nobody told me about it, sir. Where are you supposed to transfer her?”

  “To the Institute. Apparently,” he said glancing over at her with a spiteful look, “she has important information for the scientists.”

  “I see, but I received no notice for this. May I see your orders?”