by Beck, Greig
*
Sorenson slid to a halt, seconds before bursting through the trees and into the centre of the group. His hand was on the hilt of his sword, but his rational mind had not left him – to engage them all would mean a certain defeat. He was bone tired, outnumbered, and out muscled. Even if he managed to grab the princess, he would be cut down, before he got to carry her ten paces.
He watched, sliding along behind the tree line to a better place of concealment. The princess was alive and for the time, safe.
Sorenson narrowed his eyes as he looked at the dark Wolfen still being held in one hand of the giant Lygon. He knew him, Bergborr – hurt, but alive. What was he doing here?
Odin give him glory, he thought, for managing to get the Princess Eilif this far from the Lygon and Panterran encampments.
He crouched lower. He would follow, he would wait, and soon an opportunity would present itself.
Chapter 12
I Think We Got a Breach
Harper watched as one of his guards escorted Rebecca Matthews into the facility. He sighed – he had to give the young woman ten points for dedication. But he didn’t think she’d be allowed back from here on, as he doubted the military would be amenable to relatives and friends attempting to badger information out of anyone on site.
With Briggs assuming control of the project, batting eyelids or sob stories – even common sense – would get you about as far as whistling in a hurricane. He’d wait for the girl to come up to him in the command centre rather than go and meet her. He squinted at the screen; besides, looked like she’d already been met by one of the security detail, even though he hadn’t sent one for her.
Harper looked back at the screen just as the two figures walked in through the front doors. He hadn’t recognized the guard – seemed rather small to be one of his detail. Maybe a new guy, or one of Briggs’ crew from inside the truck.
He shrugged and tidied away some sensitive material, sitting down to do some work while he waited for the persistent young woman to arrive.
*
‘Stand up a little straighter, will you?’ Becky said.
Edward did as he was told, but was still only about the same height as the woman he escorted. He kept his head up and shoulders squared, trying to improve his bulk, but he began to limp.
‘The things you gave me to put in my shoes are hard to walk in.’ Truth was he felt like everyone was staring at him… and not just because he was walking like a cross between John Wayne and Quasimodo.
Becky snorted. ‘They’re called lifts, and they give you another two inches of height. But if you keep slouching, you’ll look like my kid brother playing dress-ups. Keep your chin up higher.’
Edward straightened his spine even more.
She looked at him. ‘Better, but try not to stand next to any other guards, or you’ll look like their shrunken offspring.’ She laughed.
‘Thanks. You’ve got the card, right?’
‘Duh; of course, and as long as they haven’t noticed it gone, and rendered it invalid, it should take us where we want to go. And that is…?’
He nodded towards the end of the large room. ‘It all started in the underground acceleration chamber. That’s where all the action will be… so, that’s where we’ll be.’
‘Okay, then lead on, Captain McShorty.’
Edward pulled the black cap down over his eyes as they passed a soldier standing beside a closed door. He tried to lift himself up on his toes and square his shoulders even more, but knew he still only came to the man’s nose.
As they passed he turned and whispered to Becky. ‘Just pray we don’t have to fight our way in, okay?’
*
Harper handed the clipboard back to the waiting physicist, and then looked at his watch, frowning. He knew there was something nagging at him, something he needed to do.
He grabbed his coffee cup, and sipped at the cold dark fluid. Yech. Tasted like crap, and would probably make his breath smell worse than one of the dogs. Not that his breath mattered, as he only had one meeting… Oh, good Christ – the girl! Meet with the girl!
It’d been ages; what the hell happened to her? He went to his computer, and called up a list of contact numbers. Finding the one he wanted, he clicked on the code. Immediately the system displayed the image of a rugged-faced, forty-something male; Zackary Markson, head of ground security – at least until Briggs and her team arrived.
His voice came back over the screen’s speaker. ‘Hi Doc, what can I do for you?’
‘Ahh, Zach, the Matthews girl. Where did your man take her? I expected her to be up here by now.’ He checked his watch. ‘In fact, she should have been in my office more than thirty minutes ago.’
There was silence for a moment, and then: ‘Say again – the Matthew’s girl?’
Harper exhaled, already exasperated, but more annoyed with himself for not noticing fifteen minutes back that she was missing. ‘Yes, yes, Rebecca Matthews. I saw one of your men escorting her into the facility ages ago, but she hasn’t turned up.’
There was more silence, and Harper guessed that Markson would be checking with his crew and rewinding the footage from the gate and front doors. After about a minute, Markson’s voice came back at him.
‘Okay, I see her coming in, but that’s not one of our people, and frankly, I doubt that’s one of Briggs’ crew either. I think we got a breach.’
‘For the love of God. Not now, not with Colonel bloody Bulldog Briggs in the house.’ Harper dropped his head in his hands.
Markson came back on. ‘I found them, Doc. They’re on their way down to the basement.’
‘Good… what?’ Harper’s hand went for the alarm codes and then froze. If he initiated a security alert, he was liable to have Briggs and her team spraying bullets about the facility. A dead teenage girl would be the final straw, and he wasn’t sure just handing in your resignation would cut it with the military woman.
Harper dropped his hand, his mind working furiously. He pulled his key card from his pocket and sprinted for the door.
*
‘This way, miss.’ Edward tried to lower his voice a few octaves as he approached the guard. He also managed to keep his head and hat down, while maintaining an upright posture, but was sure he was dislocating every vertebra in his neck.
He lifted the magnetic pass card in front of the guard’s face who briefly scanned the name and picture, looked at Edward and his uniform’s rank, then nodded and stood back. Edward swiped the card across the elevator’s panel, and the huge silver doors slid open.
Once inside with the doors shut, Becky flew into action. ‘Phase two.’ She pulled a lab smock from her bag, flapped it once to straighten the material, and then grabbed the dark cap from Edward’s head.
Edward took the coat, pulled it on, and then pinned the pass card to his pocket. With his glasses and nerdish looks, it was a much more natural disguise than the military uniform.
On the way down, he looked at Rebecca. Her face was pale but her blue eyes shone like sapphires – she looked both nervous and excited. She turned and grinned.
‘Almost there.’
He sucked in a deep breath as the elevator slowed. As the doors slid open, there was a pull of air, and everything not secured rushed from their bodies towards a grill gate that had been set-up over a large newly-cut door into the outer wall of the acceleration chamber.
Edward felt his teeth vibrate in his mouth, and a tingling at the base of his scalp. He had to hold onto his glasses, or they too would have been torn from his face.
Quickly looking around while trying to remain nonchalant, he noticed the other changes since he was here months back – racks for weapons, flashlights, water, and all manner of items necessary for a long trek. It was now an armory and goods depot, a bit like those rest cabins bu
ilt high in snow-covered peaks for weary climbers.
A single guard sat at a empty desk, staring at them with a gaze that reminded Edward of a pair of colorless buttons. His expression was just as disinterested.
Edward nodded to the man, who didn’t even blink in response. He felt his pulse start to race. Be cool, fool, he thought, and slid his hands into the lab-coat pockets, like he’d seen on a thousand medical shows on television.
‘Dr Harper is on his way down. Final test on the chamber’s integrity before the next trip.’ He nodded and the guard ignored him, eyes instead sliding to Becky.
Edward guessed his own cover story was plausible, but why the hell would Becky, a student, be involved? Her cover was just to be herself. They continued to approach the man, who looked Becky up and down, his brows coming together in small frown.
She pretended to stumble and lean forward so her blouse swung open, letting her breasts jiggle before the man’s eyes.
Good grief, Edward thought. That’s never gonna work. He felt his face go hot. He was standing beside the man, who had pushed his chair back and was standing, towering over Edward by at least a foot.
‘Going to have to see the paperwork, ah, Doctor…?’ He went to step around the desk, his eyes remaining fixed on Becky’s blouse. Edward grabbed one of the long mag-lights from a rack, and swung it like a club, hitting the base of the man’s head, just above the neck-line. In the sealed room, the blow sounded like a baseball being struck with an aluminum bat. The man’s head went forward, followed by his body as he collapsed to the floor.
‘Yes!’ Becky punched the air.
All Edward felt was dismay, and ran to the man, feeling his pulse and checking there was no serious damage. ‘That’s probably assault you know.’ The guard was breathing heavily, out cold and probably concussed.
‘Probably assault? Yeah, and he’ll probably be angry when he wakes up.’ She laughed. Behind them the elevator doors slid closed, and they heard the low whining sound of the large machine making its way back to the upper floor.
‘We gotta hurry.’ She kicked off her fashionable shoes, and pulled a pair of trainers from her bag, flinging the large carry-all to the floor. She motioned with her head as she hopped on one foot, pulling on a shoe. ‘Whatever is happening, it’s happening in there. Grab the guard’s key.’
The metal mesh grill across the hole in the wall had an electronic control panel with a card slot – there was a matching flat metal card hanging from the fallen guard’s uniform. Edward unclipped it and turned it over in his hand – it would work, or they were stuffed. Either way, they had no choice now.
He stood and dashed to some of the racks, grabbing flashlights, water, food packets, and then his hand hovered over one of the pistols.
‘Good idea, and grab one for me.’ Becky stomped her foot into her second shoe and dashed towards him, plucking the key-card from his hand, and jamming it into the small slot. A light the size of his thumbnail went green, and the gate pulled open.
She stuck her head into the hole, and then yelled back over her shoulder. ‘Smells like burning electricity wiring or something.’
‘Ozone’.
‘Huh?’ Her head popped back out.
‘When oxygen is exposed to a huge plasma field, like when near some sort of powerful gravitational or electrical anomaly, the oxygen atoms are pulled apart, to immediately recombine in a three oxygen atom form – ozone.
‘Huh?’ She shook her head.
‘Forget it.’ He finished dressing.
Becky climbed in. Just as Edward followed behind her, the elevator doors slid open, and around two-dozen people poured forth like a black-clad waterfall. The mass of security guards exploded towards them, with the small figure of Albert Harper in amongst them screaming Rebecca’s name. Edward pulled the gate shut, and then reinserted the card key – deep – bending it and snapping it off half way. It would be fairly easily extracted, with the right instrument, but it would buy them just a few more minutes – with luck, all the time they needed.
Edward fell the last few feet to the floor of the acceleration track tunnel. Becky was already standing before the bulge in the pipes where the particle collisions were monitored. Dozens of cameras and other equipment studded the walls and the equipment itself. She was hunched over, holding onto a length of the pipe, her hair streaming forward, blown by a hurricane that didn’t exist. Strangely, there was no noise, just the odd dragging sensation, as if every atom in his body was being drawn toward the same place as Becky’s hair.
She looked at him, squinting. ‘It feels bad.’ She pointed into the upper corner of the room.
He followed her hand. There it was, just as he expected, the small oily smudge that he had first seen on the screen in Dr Albert Harper’s office, just a few months ago. It was bigger, now grown to the size of a dinner plate. The anomaly hurt his eyes and scrambled his logic, and even now it looked like some sort of glitch on a video screen, not something that was real. It hung in the air, floating, but it wasn’t some sort of hot air balloon, it was a doorway.
Edward’s eyes started to water as he continued to stare. He knew his brain was being tricked – the thing wasn’t really the size of a dinner plate. Instead, Tardis-like, it was a doorway to something much bigger – a doorway to an entire world. He took a few steps closer.
‘Are you ready?’
Becky stood rooted to the spot, grinding her teeth and still squinting at the strange phenomenon. Her hands clenched and unclenched. Edward understood what she was feeling. She was one of the few people on Earth to witness an actual rip in space and time. It defied comprehension, and even seeing it, knowing his friend had been pulled through to another place – he’d seen it happen – he still found it hard to believe. And if he found that hard to believe, then imagine if he ever tried to explain it to anyone else.
A noise from behind told him it was time to unfreeze Becky and move. He turned to where she stood.
‘I said, are you rea —’
He never finished. The girl sprinted forward, and then dived. Like Alice in Wonderland sliding down the rabbit hole, she hung in space for a second, her body elongating, and then she was simply… gone.
Edward’s mouth dropped open, and he felt a sensation in his stomach that worried him – excitement maybe, but more likely terror. Behind him, he heard the sound of the metal gate being wrenched open.
Go!
He ran and dived.
*
‘Oh, god, what is that awful fart smell?’
Edward was waving his flashlight back and forth in the small tunnel and at the sound of Becky’s voice, turned the beam back towards her. She was frowning and holding one hand over her mouth and nose, beckoning at him with the other. He immediately handed over another of the long black cylinders, and she snatched it from him, flicking it on, and pointing the beam down at her feet.
‘Yuck, there’s green water down here… and I think, poop.’ Despite being hunched over in the small tunnel, Becky tried to get up on her toes, which were already waterlogged.
He nodded, knowing she couldn’t see him anyway. ‘Smells like rotting vegetables, and a thousand other dead things.’ He moved his beam of light along the dismal corridor, and then turned to sweep it behind them. He brought the beam back once again. ‘Judging by all the tracks, I’d say everyone went…’ he pointed with his flashlight. ‘… thatta way. Let’s go before someone follows us through and drags us back.’
Becky maneuvered herself into a stooped crouch, and started to head down the corridor, trying to step over the deeper putrid puddles, and around lumps of fallen stone or twisted metal. She stopped and turned. ‘This is horrible.’
He came up behind her. ‘Sure is, but imagine if you fell into here, without a light, and without any idea of how you got here, or where to go… like Arn. The poor guy
must have been freaking out. At least we know now that plenty of soldiers have been through and probably cleared it for us.’
She didn’t move on. ‘Cleared it of what? You mean the debris? They did a pretty crap job then.’ She turned away from him, and started to crab-walk further away in the dark.
Behind her Edward shrugged; that wasn’t what he was referring to, but decided not to elaborate. Besides, he didn’t really know what he meant, it was just a feeling he had. He turned around and sent the beam of light down the tunnel behind them.
‘Hey! Bring that back to the front, I need the extra light.’
Her voice made him jump, and he did as he was told. When he spoke he sounded timorous, even to himself. ‘Now, as we planned, we’re gonna give this twenty four hours right?’
‘I didn’t agree to that. I said it’d only be for a day or so. And the “or so”, could be as long as we need to be here. Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.’ She laughed lightly and turned to scuttle further along the tunnel.
Her voice echoed, and the laugh seemed to go on and on, up and down the dark tunnel. Edward stopped; the giggling seemed to be coming from far behind him, and didn’t quite sound like Becky’s echo anymore. He had the urge to look over his shoulder, but was frightened of what he might see.
He hurried after her. Nothing here but us chickens, he thought, and hurried to catch her up.
*
Harper stood near the elevator doors and watched as the last of Briggs’s soldiers came back through the hole cut into the wall. The tallest, a mean looking fellow with a blond crew cut and more scars than a back-alley pit-bull, stood quietly conferring with her, nodding as she give instructions.