Doomsday Game, page 5
She shrugged. ‘A few thousandths of a gram, but more than enough to cause a great deal of damage were it mishandled.’
‘I understand.’ Kip didn’t need any specialist scientific insight to know that just half a gram of antimatter could trigger a detonation on the scale of a medium-sized atomic bomb.
‘I’m glad that you do,’ she said, her expression increasingly grim. ‘Whoever stole it didn’t carry out the proper safety checks before they departed.’
‘And that’s what caused the explosion?’
‘I am quite certain, yes.’
Kip glanced again towards the door, then reached down and again opened his briefcase. He extracted a photograph and passed it over to Katya.
‘It’s a picture of a rifle,’ she said, studying the photograph with some bemusement. ‘Although it’s quite an odd-looking one.’ She looked up at him. ‘Why are you showing me this?’
‘Two days ago, Randall and Oskar intercepted an unauthorised expedition to Delta Twenty-Five—the same alternate where you once discovered a working Hypersphere.’
Her eyes grew round. ‘Please tell me they were not looking for other Hyperspheres.’
‘I’m afraid they very much were, by their own admission, according to Randall Pimms. They used that same rifle to blow a hole in a door located in the lower caverns thirty kilometres from Site A.’
She frowned. ‘My understanding is that those doors are impassable.’
‘Based on Randall’s observations, a single bullet from that rifle was enough to punch a hole through one of those doors.’
She shook her head. ‘No single bullet could—’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Chert vozmi,’ she muttered.
‘Excuse me?’
‘This casing around the barrel…it could be some form of coiled magnet.’ She glanced at him with a frightened expression. ‘You have this rifle?’
‘Yes. Back on Alternate Alpha Zero.’
‘You must be extraordinarily careful with it,’ she insisted. ‘In fact, I recommend you get rid of it. Program a stage to null coordinates and cast it into the void.’
‘You’re saying it’s dangerous. We’d guessed as much.’
‘Does it have an internal magazine? Were there any cartridges loaded in it?’
Kip nodded. ‘Just two. We’ve never seen anything like them. They’re certainly not conventional firearms cartridges by any means.’
She seemed to shrink a little in her wheelchair, as if suddenly ageing before Kip’s eyes. ‘If I were to make a wild guess, I would say that the rifle has been modified to fire bullets laced with antimatter.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘I would imagine the antimatter itself would be held in place inside the shell of each bullet by tiny but powerful magnets. The propellant, I imagine, would be conventional.’ She stared off into space, clearly thinking hard. ‘The amount of antimatter in each would be minuscule, but…’ she shrugged.
‘But still enough to blow a hole in a door we hadn’t previously been able to so much as scratch.’
‘Quite so, yes. These people—who are they?’
‘This has to remain between us,’ said Kip, his voice low. His gaze drifted towards the door, and back to Katya.
Katya, born to a lifetime of imprisonment and skulduggery, understood immediately. ‘Of course,’ she said, so quietly Kip almost couldn’t hear her.
Kip moved his chair closer to hers. ‘You’re aware there are forces within the Authority that would like to experiment on a functioning Hypersphere, if one can be found. No expedition to find another one has ever been legally sanctioned.’
‘But someone went ahead anyway?’
He grimaced. ‘So it appears.’
‘I received many requests to supply small quantities of exotic matter to your military for “research purposes”. I refused them all.’ She sighed. ‘I see now I was naïve to think that might be the end of the matter. Now tell me more about this illegal expedition.’
Kip filled her in on the details. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Oskar…I’m so sorry. I didn’t know him well, but he was a good man.’
‘We’ve all been hit hard by his loss,’ said Kip.
‘And Randall? How is he coping? You should check him for radiation exposure. An antimatter explosion releases an intense burst of gamma radiation in its first moments.’
‘We already checked him over at the clinic,’ said Kip. ‘It looks like he had a mild dose of radiation, but he’ll live.’ At least for now, he didn’t add. There was no way to be sure the Pathfinder wouldn’t have serious health problems further down the road.
‘And what was on the other side of the door?’ asked Katya.
‘More machines,’ Kip explained. ‘But no Hyperspheres—at least not yet.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Very.’
Katya made a disgusted sound. ‘I’m sending in more teams to carry out a thorough search,’ he reassured her. ‘If they find any such thing, they’re under orders to destroy them immediately.’
‘And Merritt? What’s happened to him?’
‘He hasn’t been back to the island since the incident, nor do I expect to see him again. For the moment I’ve decided to do without a second-in-command.’
She gripped the wheels of her chair, her knuckles white. ‘Even so, we should be deeply concerned.’ She swallowed, and he could see she was choosing her words carefully. ‘If there are elements within your government actively looking for Hyperspheres—’
‘The Authority is facing enormous challenges, as I’m sure you’re aware.’
‘Challenges?’ she spat, her voice rising. ‘How many dead worlds do you people have to see before you understand the same thing could happen to you?’
Kip’s mouth worked. ‘I’m not your enemy, Katya.’
‘Then who is?’ she demanded. ‘They brought me here, to your Washington, when they granted me asylum. But do you know what I remember the most? Looking out of a car window and seeing people with their heads bent and shoulders hunched against freezing winds in the middle of August.’ She made a disgusted sound. ‘Even then, I gather, much of the population had already fled south.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘I heard a rumour they are about to evacuate New York. Is it true?’
Kip swallowed. ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’ Tent-cities had been prepared in several of the southernmost States. Mexico had been reinforcing its borders with the US, fearing another influx of refugees.
‘The truth is,’ she continued, acid in her voice, ‘there are people in your government who would rather see their citizens starve or freeze to death in their millions than let slip one iota of their power and wealth. I’m sure a Hypersphere must seem very enticing to such people—never mind what happens to those who get left behind.’
‘I can’t argue with your logic,’ said Kip. ‘But in the meantime we need to focus on repairing the facility or we won’t have any hope of saving more than a few thousand.’
She fixed her gaze on him. ‘It can’t be done.’
He blinked at her. ‘Surely—?’
‘The damage is too great. Highly sensitive systems were damaged by the radiation released during the explosion. Repairing them would take years.’
‘Oh.’ Kip smoothed his hands across his knees and got ready to stand, except all the strength seemed to have gone out of his legs. ‘Then I suppose we have to consider more drastic plans,’ he said weakly. ‘There was talk of a lottery—’
She put up a hand. ‘I may have a solution.’
Kip watched as Katya picked up a file marked CONFIDENTIAL and leafed through it. ‘Under the circumstances,’ she explained, unable to hide her eagerness, ‘I thought we should explore radically different approaches to the problem.’ She tapped a finger on a page. ‘These are summary reports on alternates previously explored by the Pathfinders.’ She passed the file over to him. ‘Take a look at this one in particular.’
He studied the page. ‘Alternate Gamma Three?’
Katya nodded. ‘It was first explored and catalogued five years ago.’
Kip paged back to the introduction and summary. Gamma Three was a Category 2 NTPD—“NTPD” standing for “Near Total Planetary Destruction.” A high-energy particle accelerator on that alternate had somehow punched a hole through the space-time continuum, creating a bottomless pit into which the planet’s entire atmosphere had drained within days. All that remained was a barren, airless ruin.
He glanced back up at Katya. ‘How does this solve anything?’
‘The report suggests the pit was somehow created by a physics experiment on that alternate. Their civilisation, while roughly contiguous to your own in its politics, was nonetheless several decades more advanced in its science. They had learned how to create and isolate significant quantities of exotic matter.’
He passed her back the file and she flipped to another page before returning it to him. This time, he saw a photograph of a factory-like building set amidst grey and black devastation. ‘I believe that building may have served as a storage facility for exotic matter,’ she explained with barely-concealed excitement. ‘My guess is they were close to developing their own transfer stage technology. But instead of creating a solid link to a parallel universe, they instead created a one-ended wormhole.’
‘Where is this building, exactly?’ he asked. ‘I mean, its location on their Earth.’
‘Seventy-five miles south of the Tunguska region,’ she replied. ‘Not too far from the mouth of the pit itself.’
He rubbed his hands over his cheeks, wondering if he dared hope she might be on to something. ‘What else does the report say about this…storage facility?’
‘Nothing,’ said Katya. ‘I’ve read the full report as well. None of you could have identified its purpose before I was around to tell you. Now, there are other pictures in the report that suggest backup power systems may still be running inside the building—most likely radioisotopic thermoelectric generators similar to the ones we use to store our own EM.’
‘But you can’t be certain if we went there we’d find any kind of exotic material, or in the quantities we need.’
‘If their containment systems had failed,’ said Katya, a gleam in her eye, ‘the building and everything around it would have been blown to atoms.’ She shrugged. ‘And of course I could be wrong and there’s nothing there. But we have to at least look.’ She sat back, looking exhausted. ‘I wish I’d thought of this years ago. It would have saved us a great deal of trouble.’
‘So just to be clear,’ said Kip, ‘if we find EM there in the right quantities, we’ll be able to fuel our new transfer stages?’
She nodded. ‘Undoubtedly. If it’s there.’
Kip stood at last. Katya’s excitement had proven infectious. ‘I’d like to take those documents with me, if I may. I need to show them to some people.’
‘By all means,’ she said. ‘Although I would be grateful if a second copy might be made for me.’
‘Of course,’ he said, adrenaline flushing his skin pink. My God, he thought, I only came here to offer my condolences, and she’s sending me away with a whole new plan for action!
If only the idiots who didn’t trust her solely because of her accent could have been here. But by God, he’d make sure they knew soon enough.
‘So are we going to do it?’ she asked as he headed for the door. ‘Are we going to Gamma Three?’
He stopped, his hand on the door-handle. ‘Consider it a foregone conclusion.’
Rozalia
Lambda Thirty-Two, ruins of Chicago
Rozalia and her team were most of the way back to the transfer stage when they ran straight into a King Crawler. They split up, running in different directions through the city ruins, before finding their way separately to the stage. Splitting up gave each of them a far better chance at outrunning or outwitting the beast.
Rozalia supposed she ought to be flattered the damn thing chose to come after her rather than any of the others.
She stopped with her hands on her knees, sucking down air and watching her sweat drip onto the dusty rubble underfoot. The transfer stage was handily located inside the ruins of a defensive tower that stood taller than almost anything else around it; all she had to do was look up and see it rising over the ruins to know which way she had to go. The tower in turn formed part of a long, crumbling wall long since traversed by the beasts that were now the dominant species on this alternate.
She couldn’t see the King Crawler, but she could sure as hell hear it. It let loose a roar that echoed through the ruins like thunder. She looked around and finally caught sight of it at her two o’clock. It emerged from the shadow of a collapsed tower block, thumping along the shattered remains of a broad street. Its four stubby legs could carry it along a lot faster than a human being could run. Its long, spade-shaped head swung from side to side, its tongue tasting the air as it hunted for her.
Then it turned in her direction.
She shrank back into the shadows of a stub of wall before it could see her, her heart feeling like it was trying to punch its way out of her rib cage. She glanced the other way, towards the tower about sixty metres distant: there was nothing between her and it but pulverised concrete and brick, and no place to hide. If she broke out into the open and ran for it, the King Crawler would catch her with ease.
But if she stayed where she was and it found her…
She chanced a peek out from cover and saw the beast still standing where it had been, its patterned flanks rising and falling with every breath. This particular King Crawler was a little smaller than the average, being about the size of a school bus. It had multi-coloured chitinous skin and a mouth that bristled with huge, flat teeth like spades. Rozalia had seen video of one of the beasts digging through concrete before tunnelling through the soil beneath at phenomenal speed.
The King Crawler’s tongue flicked in and out. Then it began to move towards her.
Rozalia’s muscles tensed in readiness.
All of a sudden the King Crawler again came to a halt, opening its mouth and chewing at the rubble underfoot. She watched with a mixture of awe and horror as it rapidly dug a pit in the ground before pulling itself down inside it. In less than a minute, it had disappeared entirely from sight.
The ground beneath her feet rumbled and shook as the creature passed somewhere beneath her. The thought it might emerge directly beneath her galvanised Rozalia into action, and she ran as hard as she could towards the tower.
I’m getting too old for this, she thought. There was a touch of stiffness in her lower spine, and recently she’d been getting more tired and less able to exert herself.
Not to mention opportunities to get out in the field were increasingly rare. How often had she been on missions in the last year? Twice, including this trip. The longer they all sat around the island with nothing to do, the duller their instincts became.
She ran past the remains of tanks and whole blocks that had been razed in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Crawlers at bay.
She saw Jerry in the doorway of the tower, beckoning to her. The ground still rumbled beneath her, as if the creature were keeping pace with her, and she remembered the creatures were supposedly able to follow a person by the sound and pressure of their footsteps.
Which meant, she realised, the King Crawler was heading for the tower as well.
She wanted to yell a warning, but her lungs already felt fit to burst. Despite her terror, the closer she drew to the tower the more she could see that Jerry was holding himself stiffly, his jaw clenched as if he was holding down his temper.
She guessed that he and Chloe had been arguing. Again. Whatever the hell it was going on between the two of them, she wished—really, really wished—they’d damn well sort it out. Life was hard enough without having to deal with their bickering.
She reached the door and collapsed onto the cool concrete floor inside. ‘The stage,’ she managed to gasp. ‘Power it up. The Crawler is right behind me.’
Chloe hurried to her side, but she came to a halt as the floor beneath them began to shake. It occurred to Rozalia it was probably too late already.
Then the rumbling faded; the King Crawler had passed them by—for the moment.
‘Let’s get out of here before it heads back this way,’ said Yuichi. Rozalia could see him out of the corner of her eye; he sat crosslegged next to a temporary transfer stage, a laptop balanced on his crossed legs, his long grey hair tucked untidily behind his ears.
‘It felt like you were out there for ages,’ said Chloe. ‘Which way did you go?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rozalia, seeing the way she angled her body so she didn’t have to look at Jerry. Rozalia looked past her and gave Jerry a meaningful look, but his only response was a small shrug. ‘All I know is I saw that damn thing come tearing up out of the ground and I ran like hell.’
Chloe nodded. ‘I never want to be that close to one of those critters again.’
‘I’ve been closer,’ said Yuichi, his gaze still locked on his laptop.
Rozalia stood back up and looked over at him. ‘What about the reactors?’
‘It’s a wash.’ He looked up at her. ‘They weren’t where we thought they were going to be.’
‘Guess that’s it,’ said Jerry, still keeping an eye out through the door for any signs of movement. ‘No pocket fusion generators for us.’
‘Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still keep looking,’ said Rozalia. ‘Especially given how long they’re saying it’ll take to rebuild Katya’s facility.’
Yuichi closed his laptop and got back up. ‘Two years, just to get back up to where things were before the accident. That’s what I heard.’
‘I heard it could be up to five years,’ said Chloe.
The ground rumbled again, although more faintly this time. They all looked towards the door and the ruins beyond, and heard a drawn-out animal shriek echoing from somewhere far away.
‘Time to go,’ said Yuichi, stepping inside the circle formed by the stage-components.
