SANDSTORM sf-1

by James Rollins

  Across the courtyard, one of the commandos ran into view, angling to the side, a grenade launcher on his shoulder, pointed at the door of the palace. Bullets continued to pepper, suppression fire for the artillery soldier. A gutsy move. Something had lit a fire under Cassandra’s team in the last few minutes.

  Coral twisted around and aimed her pistol at the man with the grenade launcher. She was too slow.

  The gods above were not.

  From the roof, a dazzling bolt of energy struck the ground near the man, crackling for a half a breath, searing the retinas. It was not true lightning, just an arc of energy between the roof and floor. It did not blast a crater. It did not even knock the man down.

  It did much worse.

  The glass under the man instantly transmogrified from solid to liquid, changing states in one breath. The soldier fell into the pool, up to his neck. The scream that burst from his mouth was a sound only heard in the deepest pit of hell, the scream of a man burned alive.

  It cut short after an instant.

  The man’s head fell backward, steam rising from his mouth.

  Dead.

  The glass was solid again.

  The suppression fire died with the man. Others had witnessed it.

  In the distance, the fighting continued, echoing with rifle blasts-but here no one moved. Omaha raised his gaze. The roof was on fire, filling the dome. Other bolts jumped between ceiling and floor. Somewhere across the way another scream erupted, a twin to the one heard here.

  “It’s happening again,” Coral said.

  Omaha stared at the dead man, buried in glass. He knew what she meant.

  Fiery death had returned to Ubar.

  6:12 P.M.

  PAINTER BOUNCEDin his seat as the twenty-ton tractor flew over a small dune. He could see nothing now. The visibility of a few yards had dropped to the tip of his nose. He was driving blind. He could be blithely aiming for the edge of a cliff and he’d never know.

  A few minutes ago, the sandstorm had suddenly whipped up with a renewed ferocity. The buffeting winds sounded like giant fists striking the tractor. Painter’s head throbbed from the concussion of the forces.

  Still, he continued blindly forward. His only guidance glowed on the laptop beside him.

  Safia.

  He had no idea if she heard his radio call or not, but she hadn’t moved since the broadcast. She was still aboveground…actually about forty feet aboveground. There must be a hill ahead. He’d have to slow once he was nearer.

  A shimmer of reflection caught his eye. In the side mirror. The second pursuit vehicle. It was following the tractor’s larger lights. The hunter had to be as blind as he, following in his tracks, keeping to his packed path, letting him encounter any obstacles.

  The blind leading the blind.

  Painter continued. He dared not leave his post. The winds suddenly whipped even more savagely. For a moment, the tractor tilted up on one tread, then slammed down. Christ…

  For some reason, a laugh bubbled out of him. The gibbering amusement of the damned.

  Then the winds ended, as if someone had unplugged the fan.

  The lumbering tractor rode out into more open sands. The skies even lightened from midnight to twilight. Sand still stirred, and winds did indeed still blow, but at a tenth of the velocity of a moment ago.

  He glanced to the side mirror. A solid wall of blackness blanketed the view. He must have traveled completely through its heart and out the other side.

  As he watched, he saw no sign of the pursuit vehicle, its glow lost in the total darkness. Perhaps that last burst of winds had flipped the sucker.

  He focused forward.

  His sight line stretched for a good quarter mile. In the distance he could see a shadowy prominence of dark rock. A desert mesa. He glanced at the laptop. The blue glow lay directly ahead.

  “So that’s where you are.”

  He kicked up the speed of the tractor.

  He wondered if Safia could see him. Reaching out, he took the radio in hand. He kept one eye on the road. Throughout the region, mini-tornadoes whipped and snaked, joining desert to sky. They glowed with a cobalt radiance. Crackles of static charge spun up from the ground. Most stood in one place, but a few meandered over the desert landscape. He was close enough to see one etch down a dune face, sand coughing up around it. In its wake, it left a trail of black sand, a squiggled sigil, a pen stroke from some storm god.

  Painter frowned. He had never seen such a phenomenon.

  But it was none of his concern.

  He had more pressing worries. He raised the radio to his lips. “Safia, if you can read me, let me know. You should be able to see me.”

  He waited for a reply. He didn’t know if Safia still had one of their radios. It was the frequency to which he had set the tractor’s transmitter.

  Noise burst from the receiver. “-ainter! Go! Turn back!”

  It was Safia! It sounded like she was in trouble.

  He hit the transmit button. “I’m not turning back. I’ve got-”

  An arc of electricity leaped from the radio receiver to his ear. Yelping out, he dropped the radio. He smelled burning hair.

  He felt a surge of static charge throughout the vehicle. Every surface shocked him. He kept his hands on the rubber-coated wheel. The laptop sizzled, then gave off a loud pop. The screen went dead.

  The sound of a foghorn reached him, blaring, persistent.

  Not a foghorn…a truck’s horn.

  He glanced at the side mirror. From the storm’s black wall, the pursuit truck flew out into the open. The last winds slapped the back end. Its frame tilted, beginning to flip.

  Then it was free. It struck the sands, the tires on one side, then the other. It bounced, skidded, and spun a full turn. But it was out of the storm.

  Painter swore.

  The truck’s driver must have been as shocked to be alive as Painter was to see him. The flatbed idled. It looked like hell. One tire was flat, the bumper was curled into a steel smile, the tarp over its load in back had been blown to one side, tangled amid the ropes.

  Painter pressed his accelerator, racing forward, putting as much distance between himself and the truck. He remembered the RPG bombardment. He wanted a little breathing room, then he’d take care of this truck.

  In the side mirror, the truck followed, limping after him.

  Painter prepared to fight, setting the cruise.

  Ahead the desert was a forest of whirling sand devils, glowing in the twilight gloom. They all seemed to be on the move now. He frowned. They were all moving in unison, some unearthly ballet.

  Then he felt it. A familiar lurch in the sand.

  He had felt the same when the grenades had triggered an avalanche over the dune face. The shift of sands under his treads.

  But he was on flat ground.

  All around the whirlwinds danced, static electricity sparked, and the desert loosened under him. Against all odds, the twenty-ton tractor was becoming mired. His speed slowed. He felt its back end fishtailing. The tractor swung around, dragged by unknown forces. Then he was trapped, stopped.

  His side window now faced toward the pursuit truck. It continued toward him, closing in on its wide, knobby sand tires. Then the sand under it became powder. It sank to its rims…then axle.

  Bogged.

  Both hunter and prey were trapped, flies in amber.

  But this amber still flowed.

  He felt it beneath him. The sand was still moving.

  6:15 P.M.

  SAFIA GAVEup on the radio. She could only watch in horror, alongside Kara and Lu’lu. It was a landscape out of a nightmare, a painting done by Salvador Dalн. The world melted and stretched.

  She stared out at the whirlwinds, the deadly electrical discharges, pools of black sands, streaks of the same, carved out by skittering devils. The dusty clouds in the sky glowed from the amount of energy flowing into them, fed by the snaking columns of sand and static charge.

  But that was
not the worst.

  For as far as she could see, the entire desert floor had begun to churn in one giant whirlpool, spinning around the buried bubble of Ubar. The sandstone mesa was a boulder in the current. But there were smaller rocks: Painter’s tractor and another truck, mired in the churning sands.

  Whirlwinds closed in on the vehicles, etching the sand with molten fire.

  A crash echoed to the left. A piece of the mesa tore away, tumbling into the sand, a glacier calving into the sea.

  “We can’t stay here,” Kara said. “It’ll tear this island apart.”

  “Painter…” Safia said. Her clothing sparked and crackled with discharges as she stepped toward the mesa’s edge. He had come to rescue them, driving to his doom. They had to do something.

  “He’s on his own,” Kara said. “We can’t help him.”

  The radio suddenly crackled in her hand. She had forgotten she was holding it. Painter…

  “Safia, can you hear me?” It was Omaha.

  She lifted her radio. “I’m here.”

  His voice sounded distant, as if from another planet. “Something strange is going on down here. The static is arcing all over. It’s zapping the glass. Melting spots. It’s the cataclysm all over again! Stay away!”

  “Can you get up here? To the stairs?”

  “No. Danny, Clay, Coral, and I are holing up in the palace.”

  A commotion by the tunnel drew her eye. Sharif climbed out.

  Kara moved to meet him.

  He pointed to the tunnel. “We’ve retreated to the stairs,” he said, panting. “Captain al-Haffi will attempt to hold the enemy off. You should-” His voice died as he suddenly caught a view of the desert. His eyes widened.

  Another splintering crack erupted. Rocks crashed. The rim of the mesa crumbled.

  “Allah, preserve us,” Sharif prayed.

  Kara waved him back. “He’d better. Because we’re bloody damn well running out of places to hide.”

  6:16 P.M.

  CASSANDRA KNEWtrue terror for the first time in ages. The last time she had felt this gut-level fear was as a child, listening to her father’s footsteps outside her bedroom door at midnight. This was the same. A fear that gelled the insides and turned bone marrow to ice. Breathing was a talent forgotten.

  She cowered inside a tiny glass building, more a chapel, enough for one person to kneel. Its only entrance was a short door that had to be ducked into. No windows. Past the door, the lower city spread below her.

  She watched the continual arcing bolts of discharge. Some struck the lake, grew more intense, then sucked back to the roof, brighter for the effort, as if the storm above were feeding off the waters below.

  The same was not true when it struck the glass. Every surface absorbed the strange energy, becoming a liquid pool, but only as briefly as a lightning flicker. Then it turned solid again.

  She had watched one of her men succumb to such a bolt. He had been sheltering behind a wall, leaning on it. Then the bolt struck the wall. He fell through it, his support suddenly gone. The wall solidified again. Half his body on one side, the other half on this side. Between, he had been burned to bone. Even his clothes had caught fire, a human torch, on two sides of glass.

  All across the city, the fighting had stopped. Men sought shelter.

  They had seen the mummified bodies. They knew what was happening.

  The cavern had gone deathly quiet, accept for the occasional gunshot by the back wall, where the enemy had sequestered itself in some passageway. Anyone who approached was shot.

  Cassanda clutched her electronic tracker. She watched the spread of red triangles. Her men. Or those few that were left. She counted. Of the fifty on the assault team, only a dozen were left. She watched as another blinked out. A shattering scream fluttered through the city.

  Death stalked her men.

  She knew even such enclosed shelters were not safe. She had seen the mummified bodies within a few of the homes.

  The key seemed to be movement. Perhaps the amount of static in the room was such that any stirrings attracted a bolt to stab out at it.

  So Cassandra sat still, very still. She had done the same in her childhood bed. It hadn’t helped then. She doubted it would now. She was trapped.

  6:17 P.M.

  OMAHA LAYflat at the entryway to the palace. The quiet pressed upon him. Beyond the courtyard, the firestorm worsened. Bolts crackled, shattering into brilliant forks. The dome shone like the corona of a blue-white sun.

  Omaha watched and knew death was near.

  But at least he had told Safia he loved her. He had made his peace. He would have to be satisfied with that. He glanced upward. He prayed Safia was safe. She had relayed another short message, describing the chaos upstairs.

  Death above, death below.

  Take your pick.

  Coral lay with him, studying the storm. “We’re inside the world’s largest transformer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  They spoke in whispers, as if afraid to draw the sleeping giant’s attention.

  “The glass cavern with its energized antimatter solution is acting like a massive insulated superconductor. It draws energy to itself like the iron camel did at the museum. In this case, it collects the static energy of any passing sandstorm, sucking it down from above. But as energy builds in the chamber, crossing some threshold, it must need to shed its excess energy, like lightning does during a thunderstorm. Only this is aimed from sand to sky, shooting upward again in immense discharges, creating those momentary blasts of deadly whirlwinds on the desert’s surface.”

  “Like it’s draining its battery,” Omaha said. “But what’s going on in here?”

  “A storm in a bottle. The megastorm is pouring too much energy down here. The bubble can’t discharge it fast enough, so some of it’s lashing back.”

  “Zapping itself.”

  “Redistributing charge,” she corrected. “Glass is a great conductor. It merely takes the excess energy it can’t discharge to the surface and passes it down to the floor below. The glass here captures the energy and disperses it. A cycle to keep the charge spread evenly throughout the entire glass bubble rather than just the dome. It’s that equilibrium of energy that keeps the antimatter lake stable during this storm. A balance of charges.”

  “What about those pockets of molten glass?”

  “I don’t think it’s molten glass. At least not exactly.”

  Omaha glanced questioningly in her direction. “What do you mean?”

  “Glass is always in a liquid state. Have you ever seen antique glass? The flowing streaks that slightly distort the clarity? Gravity affects glass like a liquid, slowly pulling it down in streams.”

  “But what does that have to do with what’s going on here?”

  “The energy bolts aren’t just melting the glass. They’re changing its state, instantaneously breaking all bonds, liquefying the glass to the point that it borders on gaseous. When the energy disperses, it resolidifies. But just for a flash, it’s in a fiery state between liquid and gas. That’s why it doesn’t flow. It keeps its basic shape.”

  Omaha hoped this discussion was leading to some solution. “Is there anything we can do about it?”

  Coral shook her head. “No, Dr. Dunn, I’m afraid we’re fucked.”

  6:19 P.M.

  THE FIERYexplosion drew Painter’s attention to the mesa.

  A truck parked near the sandstone prominence flipped in the air, spewing flaming fuel. One of the roving sand devils continued past it. It left a steaming trail of blackened sand.

  Molten glass.

  These sinuous columns of static charge were somehow discharging astronomical amounts of heat energy, burning their way across the landscape.

  Painter remembered Safia’s warning over the radio before it shorted out. She had tried to warn him away. He hadn’t listened.

  Now he was trapped inside the tractor as it slowly spun in a vast whirlpool of churning sand. For the past five m
inutes, it had carried him along, sweeping him in a wide arc, slowly spinning him in place. He was a planet orbiting a sun.

  And all around death danced. For every whirlwind that blew itself out with a sharp discharge of static, another three took its place.

  It was only a matter of time before one crossed his path, or worse yet, opened up under him. As he spun, he saw the other truck. It was faring no better. Another planet, smaller, maybe a moon.

  Painter stared across the sands that separated them. He saw one chance.

  It was a madman’s course, but it was better than sitting here, waiting for death to come knocking. If he had to die, he’d rather die with his boots on. He stared down at his naked form. He wore only his boxers. Okay, he’d have to forgo the whole boot dream.

  He stood up and crossed to the back. He’d have to travel light.

  He took a single pistol…and a knife.

  Outfitted, he stepped to the back door. He’d have to be fast. He took a moment to take several deep breaths. He opened the back door.

  The clear expanse of desert suddenly erupted yards away. A devil spun up from the sand. He felt the backwash of its static. His hair flumed around his head, crackling. He hoped it didn’t catch fire.

  Stumbling back, he fled away from the back door. Time had run out.

  He darted to the side door, shoved it open, and leaped.

  Hitting the ground, he sank to his calves. The sand was damnably loose. He glanced over a shoulder. The devil loomed behind the tractor, crackling with energy. He smelled ozone. Heat pulsed from the monster.

  Fleet feet, little skeet.

  It was a nursery rhyme his father had often whispered in his ear when he was caught dawdling. No, Papa…no dawdling here.

  Painter hauled his feet free from the sand and raced around the front end of the tractor. The whirlpool dragged at him, bordering on quicksand.

  He spotted the flatbed truck. Fifty yards. Half a football field.

  He sprinted for it.