by Greig Beck
… But he couldn’t. He had his orders.
He placed it in his pocket and pushed on to where Sam Reid was sprawled on the floor, coughing blood. He lifted Sam over his other shoulder and then focused on the door – one foot after the other, like moving through viscous oil.
As he reached the exit, Alex looked back across the room. The remaining scientists and technicians were clutching onto the legs of chairs and tables as they felt the drag of the gravitational tide drawing them into the black hole. The equipment closest to the sphere room was starting to streak and stretch, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before the outer gravitational corona reached them and they too would begin their voyage to somewhere… else. Alex tried not to think about the deformed creature he had seen in the containment room one level up.
Once the outer door was closed, the solid steel shielding gave him some insulation and he was able to speed up. Down the stairs he raced, along the tunnel and through the caverns. He planted Sam’s last spider against the rockfall, and covered him and Adira with his body as the explosion opened a way back to the cave mouth through which they’d entered.
With Sam and Adira over his shoulders again, he ran. He ran at a speed faster than any living creature on Earth. He ran until he couldn’t feel the gravitational pull anymore; until he couldn’t feel his own legs. He ran for hours until his body simply switched off from fatigue.
A mighty horn sounded far behind him. He fell forward as the world spun and then went black.
Zach managed to keep the remaining power cubes working as he reduced the feed to the dark monster in the other room. He knew the typed codes by memory now and so was able to shut his eyes. He didn’t want to look at his hands anymore; his fingers scared him – they looked longer and thinner than he remembered, the legs of some spindly deep-sea creature crawling over the keyboard.
Something wet ran down his face and he knew it was blood. Blistering sores opened on his forehead and cheeks as the severe radiation peeled back his outer layer of skin.
‘Baruch Shem Kivod Malchito LeOlam Va’ed!’ he whispered, a last prayer to God, and the words gave him strength. Just a few seconds more, he thought, so they can get far away. He tried to pray again, but this time his mouth wouldn’t work. His tongue was too large and refused to bend around the shapes of the words.
He felt a tingling warmth on his face and opened his eyes. The black hole was fraying around the edges. It was so large and close now that the dark curtain had reached the edge of the window. Am I winning? Am I sending it back?
He looked into the entity’s very core – and saw something in there that no human being should have to bear. He screamed a single word as he felt himself pulled from his chair: Gehinnom! The ancient Hebrew word for hell.
FIFTY
The black hole had ceased to exist. It had evaporated, taking with it the entire Jamshid II facility and a large chunk of the mountain. Dr Zach Shomron had done his job.
Hammerson was screaming at someone in Israel to be put through to General Shavit. The Hammer and most of the US military leaders had been summoned to the Mole Hole, and the president was on his way. Strategic Air Command had picked up the heat signature of the Israeli missile as it was warming to countdown. If the missile was fired, there would be retaliation. There would be war.
Hammerson tilted his coffee cup to his lips and realised he had finished it ages ago. He looked at his screen again. From space, the crater was a perfect circle – three miles wide and one and a half miles deep. He reread the underlying data: in summary, a furious vertical burst of radiation, and then nothing. The hidden laboratory had ceased to exist; it had disintegrated, been digested, or, as the young Israeli scientist had theorised, perhaps been transported elsewhere.
Another screen on Hammerson’s desk showed a white bloom spewing from the hidden missile silo. A white nose-cone slowly lifted free from the billowing smoke. The Jericho was on its way.
‘Shit!’ Hammerson threw his cup across the room.
He was about to scream again at the calm young man on the phone when he was finally put through.
‘I’m sorry, my friend. Israel has decided that we must risk war today to avoid total destruction tomorrow,’ General Meir Shavit said.
The general sounded miserable. Hammerson knew that Shavit, like himself, hated war – but if he thought his country was being threatened, he would fight to the death, no quarter given.
Hammerson wasn’t authorised to send secret data, even to allies, but he encrypted the Arak images and sent them high priority to the general. ‘Arak is already gone,’ he said. ‘Look at the images being sent. I repeat, look at the images. There is no need for a strike.’ He was pacing as he watched the glowing white spear catch the sunlight and pick up speed on its deadly mission. It was almost beautiful.
‘I think it is too late, my friend.’
‘You can abort, you know-’ But the phone had gone dead.
Hammerson sat down and rubbed his face for a few minutes before typing a brief message to Alex’s SFPDA. Once again the failure message came up. He took the headset off and gathered some folders from his desk. Before he left, he looked one last time at the red circle on his screen. ‘I hope you’re well away from there, son – it’s about to get real hot.’
Then he headed for the secure bunker, where the president and his top-level military would observe the expected blowback from the Israeli first strike.
In Tel Aviv, General Meir Shavit looked at the images Major Hammerson had sent through. He compared them to his own satellite data and field reports from the Markazi desert, then reached for his phone.
Thirty-three seconds later, a fireball erupted in the sky over western Iraq. There would be no need for a retrieval mission as nothing larger than a baseball would fall to the ground.
Instantly, the Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs made contact with her counterpart in Iraq. It seemed there had been a misfire of an obsolete armament. Compensation for any clean-up was available on request.
FIFTY-ONE
Warmth, strange scents, the hum of life. Alex opened his eyes and had to blink as brilliant sunshine flooded his senses. He was lying on soft, sandy soil, partially shaded by the branches of a large tree. Small yellow bees buzzed around sticky-looking fruit nestled in amongst the leaves. He quickly looked at his hands and feet and felt his face. No elongation; and other than some tightness across his chest where the lacerations were healing, he felt fine.
Beside him lay Adira, her chest rising and falling as if she were deep in sleep. Except for a black eye and bruising on her top lip, she was perfect. Sam, too, was laid out on the sand, groaning now as he came around.
Alex moved across and helped Sam sit up. He pulled his drink flask from his waist and lifted it to Sam’s lips. The HAWC coughed, opened one eye and drank. He looked like he’d fallen in front of a cattle stampede and managed to get caught by every horn and hoof. He had open gashes on his cheeks and chin, and both of his eye sockets were purple. A huge knife wound ran from his collarbone to navel. Alex could see it had separated the skin and some of the deeper fatty tissue – horribly painful, but his innards wouldn’t come tumbling out.
Sam raised a blood-crusted eyebrow at Alex and smiled. One of his front teeth was missing. ‘You should see the other guy,’ he said, and coughed some more.
Alex laughed, and quickly checked the HAWC’s shoulders, arms and ribcage for breaks. Sam groaned as Alex extended one of his arms and then pressed his side.
‘Broken ribs as well, big guy,’ Alex said.
Sam coughed again, spat red onto the sand, and winced. He noticed the damage to Alex and got serious. ‘Sorry, boss, I tried to hold them. I saw Rocky go down, then that big bastard caught me a good one and everything went black.’
‘Take it easy, Uncle. I think he caught you with about fifty good ones. We’re all lucky to be alive. Those guys were bloody tough, like no one I’ve ever encountered.’
He paused for a second and sat back on his
haunches. ‘Sam, Rocky didn’t make it. Irish neither.’ He pushed one hand up through his sweat-soaked hair and looked down into the sand.
Sam’s brow creased. ‘Rocky and Irish? I never even saw Irish come back.’
‘No, he didn’t. He took on that thing from hell. Stopped it from ambushing us outside the laboratory and gave us the time we needed to engage. I couldn’t get to him in time.’ An image of Hex Winter burning in a chair pushed into his mind. ‘I never get to them in time, Sam.’
Sam groaned again as he sat forward. He saw Adira lying on the sand, then quickly looked left and right. ‘Where’s the kid?’
Alex just shook his head.
‘Ah, shit. They killed him too?’
‘No. No, he stayed. Look around – nothing eating the planet, no incinerated landscape. He shut it down. He knew it would kill him, but he did it anyway. We’re alive because of him. He saved us all.’
Alex got to his feet and brushed the sand from his hands. ‘Anyway, soldier, patch those wounds. We’re not home yet.’
‘You got it, boss. Hey, by the way, where are we?’
‘I’ve no idea. Can you take some scans? I seem to have lost some of my kit.’
Sam laughed. Alex looked as though he had been shot out of a cannon and landed in some thorn bushes. His super-toughened suit with the ceramic armour plating was just a tattered rag circling his waist, and the pants were punctured and red with blood.
Adira groaned, and Alex went over to her and lifted her head. ‘Slowly, slowly, we’re safe now. I think it’s all over.’
Adira sat forward and put her elbows on her knees and drew in some deep breaths. ‘It’s over? Where’s Zach?’
Alex exhaled slowly through his nose and wiped sand from her cheek before responding. ‘I’m sorry. He didn’t make it.’
Adira’s eyes went a little dead for a moment, then she looked up at the sky. ‘No one weeps for heroes in Israel anymore, Alex. The tears would drown us all.’
Alex allowed the silence to stretch, giving her time to recover. He looked around at the horizon and then back down to her. ‘I think we’re lost.’ He raised his brows at Sam.
Sam shook his head. ‘It’s all fused, nothing works.’ He dropped the useless scanners and communication devices to the sand. ‘But it still looks like Iran to me.’
Adira looked up at the branches above them. ‘That’s a wild desert fig tree – they only grow to this size near Kashan. I have people there – we’ll be safe.’
‘Safe.’ Alex tested the word in his mouth. It felt strange, unnatural, and no longer relevant. He now knew there was another world hidden behind the one most people knew. A world where monsters existed, where horrific things crept in the dark, dropped from the sky or slithered up from the depths.
He lay back and closed his eyes against the sun and thought about a beach somewhere on the east coast of Australia. He inhaled salt and heard waves crashing on the sand. ‘Yes, safe now.’ Soon, he thought, very soon.
FIFTY-TWO
General Meir Shavit sat at his desk, the transcript of Captain Adira Senesh’s debrief in his hands. After his niece’s retrieval from the Iranian desert, she had spent just one hour in hospital having her wounds tended to. While there, she had agreed to a short military interview. The general gave a half-smile; he knew his niece well – there was no way anyone could make her do anything she didn’t want to do.
The black hole technology she detailed in her report was astounding, and he prayed its genesis was an aberration – an invention by accident rather than by design. He also hoped that with the destruction of the laboratory, all knowledge of the technology’s capability and creation had ceased to exist. Such power is the rightful property of no country, he thought.
The old man sat back and looked at the ceiling for a moment, his eyes tracing the plaster flowers in the ornate moulding. Humans were creative and self-destructive in equal measures, and once they had managed to imagine something, it was only a matter of time until they brought it into existence. We have merely bought ourselves some time, he thought.
He drew a deep breath, poured himself some more thick, dark coffee, and turned to the last page of Adira’s report, headed ‘EWP – Enhanced Warrior Project’, with a subheading: ‘The Arcadian Subject’. His eyebrows rose slightly as he read her account of the subject’s capabilities. As he had expected, the Americans had sent their secret weapon on the mission and Adira had witnessed it in action. But although she had been close enough to record its features in detail, she hadn’t managed to get any new data, not even a tissue sample. He looked at the grainy photograph she had supplied of the HAWC: Francis ‘Irish’ O’Riordan, a red-haired warrior, according to the report; an awesome soldier in combat. It was a shame he had been vaporised in the explosion.
The general blew air through his closed lips and shook his head. Without any body for the Israelis to retrieve, any samples or concrete evidence, the Americans still held all the cards – while Israel had nothing. He narrowed his eyes. Just because the primary subject was gone, the Arcadian project would not end, he was sure of that. But there was no reason for the Americans to share their results with Israel; they wouldn’t even admit the project existed.
He picked up his cup but held it without drinking. As his mind worked, he looked across the room and caught sight of his aged visage staring back at him from within a long gilded mirror. He continued to stare trance-like at the image as his thoughts turned inwards. Israel needs these new soldiers, he mused. We are the smallest army in the Middle East and surrounded by an ocean of hatred. It is only a matter of time before that ocean drowns us all. He blinked, and looked down at Adira’s report again. If Israel cannot have more men, we must make more of the men we have. We need to get a little closer.
He looked again at the transcribing officer’s notation at the foot of the report. Unusually, Adira had requested immediate leave to escort the two Americans to their waiting transport plane. Hmm, what are you up to, Addy? Shavit thought. Perhaps there was a bond there, something he could use. He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand; they needed someone inside the Americans’ tent, someone who had already been exposed to the Arcadian’s capabilities… Someone Israel could rely on, and someone the Americans trusted.
Yes, she would be perfect. Jack Hammerson owed him, and he wouldn’t be able to refuse a soldier of Captain Senesh’s capabilities.
The general made a small notation in the file and closed it. ‘Your job isn’t quite finished yet, Addy.’
Parvid Davoodi, the newly elected leader of Iran, cleared away the possessions of the former president, preparing the office for his own inhabitation. He picked up a framed picture of a smiling Mahmoud Moshaddam and shook his head. ‘How could you not know that all false prophets go to hell? Though perhaps now you do.’ He dropped the picture into the waste bin beside the desk.
One of Davoodi’s first acts in office had been to call the American president to assure him that the secret facilities at Natanz, Persepolis and Arak would be closed forever. During that conversation he had accepted an invitation to visit the United States – the first time in a generation that an Iranian leader had been invited by an American president onto their soil. Perhaps this is a new beginning for Iran, he thought.
He picked up his Qur’an, already open at his favourite page. From an open window, a warm square of sunlight lit the beautiful writing as he began to read.
*
At USSTRATCOM in Nebraska it was night and the weather was not so benign. Rain smashed against the dark window of Hammerson’s office. He was working late, and had turned off the lights so he could enjoy the storm passing over the base. He liked just sitting and watching nature’s power and raw aggression.
The secure phone beeped and he contemplated ignoring it. The mission was a success, but, he guessed, not quite over yet. Fuck it. He picked up the call. He squeezed the phone tight when he heard the deep voice on the other end.
‘Arcadian has secured the info
rmation as instructed, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s on its way to us now – potential unlimited energy for
… Yes, sir, we believe weaponisation is possible.’
He listened some more and his eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not sure I agree with that assessment, sir. His value in the field is undeniable. Yes, sir, I understand that, so far, we can’t reproduce his result without a more invasive study, but his capabilities develop every day – there is so much more to learn while he’s active. Once we retire him, that line of research will be lost forever. It is my recommendation that he stay on active duty, sir. His new capability development and this success compels it. Give me another year, sir. Science can wait at least that long.’
Hammerson inhaled and held the breath for a few seconds as he waited and listened. He exhaled when he heard the response.
‘Very good, sir.’
He hung up the phone just as the sky outside flashed, then boomed with rolling thunder. He had managed to extend Alex Hunter’s lifeline for just one more year. For the first time in his life, the Hammer felt old.
EPILOGUE
Warmth, strange scents, the hum of life. Mahmoud Moshaddam opened the capsule door a little farther and more of the thick, humid air rushed in.
He stepped out into a mist-shrouded, boggy landscape lush with ropey vines and twisted vegetation. Bulbous hair-covered leaves and plump fruit-like protuberances hung low from rampant foliage in an impenetrable tangle. He stepped forward and sank to his calves in brackish water. Already his ankles itched as if something were crawling over them.