Doomsday Game, page 9
* * *
The four of them re-boarded the truck. Rather than spend the entire journey trapped in their suits, they re-pressurised the vehicle so they could at least remove their helmets and gloves.
It didn’t take Yuichi long to relocate the road that would take them to the EM facility—assuming, as Chloe had said, it hadn’t fallen over the edge of the expanding wormhole. Somehow, Jerry and Chloe managed to bicker the whole damn way. Nadia couldn’t even begin to imagine where they found the energy.
Fortunately, the truck was more than capable of traversing the roughest terrain. In reality it was closer to a mobile lab, designed for long-range reconnaissance in hostile environments. Even better, it was over nine metres in length, which meant that while Jerry and Chloe argued over what sounded to Nadia like literally nothing, the rest of them could stay up front where Yuichi was driving. Out through the windscreen, Nadia saw tangled and uprooted trees, smashed buildings, and tumbled and ruined vehicles piled up against each other in great droves of steel and glass.
Since Yuichi had been key to mapping the route to the edge of the wormhole on the previous expedition, he took the wheel, Chloe’s copy of the map spread out on the dashboard next to him. Nadia watched him, hunkered low over the wheel, eyes fixed on the horizon. From time to time he swore and muttered, usually when he had to navigate past some particularly tricky obstacle.
At one point they drove through the petrified remains of a forest. The great storm that had followed the appearance of the wormhole had ripped most of the trees from the ground, although a few had somehow managed to cling on by their roots and escape being sucked into the wormhole. Yuichi drove over or around their remains, the truck shaking and rattling and bouncing on its heavy suspension.
Nadia found herself wondering what it must have been like on the day the wormhole formed. She imagined a vortex, a single massive cyclone tens of kilometres across, snatching planes from the sky and ripping any building more than a storey in height loose from its foundations. That anyone could actually have got close enough to the vortex to see it without being instantly killed struck her as unlikely.
After a while, Jerry left Chloe to get on with the job of checking the spare oxygen tanks and other essential equipment and came up front to talk to the rest of them.
Nadia cast a significant look down the other end of the truck at Chloe, then moved her gaze back to Jerry. He lifted his shoulders and dropped them heavily.
‘I’d offer to speak with her,’ said Nadia, ‘but I’m really not any good at that kind of thing.’
Jerry slumped onto one of the truck’s passenger seats, just behind Yuichi. ‘Maybe don’t do that,’ he said in a quiet voice.
Yuichi glanced back at him and raised his eyebrows. ‘Spill.’
Jerry shook his head. ‘I’d rather not—’
‘We’ve had to put up with the pair of you acting like teenagers for weeks now,’ said Yuichi, his irritation showing. ‘So will you please—’
‘She’s been talking about whether we need to take a break for a while,’ said Jerry.
Yuichi returned his attention to the way ahead. ‘Maybe that’s not a bad idea. Give her time to cogitate her way through whatever’s in her head.’ His voice still had a soft Californian hilt, even after all these years. ‘Maybe she’s getting sick of being a Pathfinder.’ He shifted in his seat and glanced back at them both. ‘Fact is, none of us are getting any younger.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Jerry. He looked over at Nadia, his gaze narrowing suddenly. ‘You okay? You’re looking a little pale there.’
Nadia shook her head. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘I seem to recall she’s not too keen on heights,’ said Yuichi. ‘I suppose the idea of a bottomless pit isn’t too appealing, right, Nads?’
Nadia glowered at the back of his head. ‘Why the hell would you think I’m afraid of heights?’
‘Like the time I saw you standing on a ladder trying to change a lightbulb? You were sweating like you were hanging off a ledge halfway up the Matterhorn.’
She scowled. ‘Bullshit.’
‘He’s got a point,’ said Jerry. ‘I definitely remember one time on Beta Nineteen you wouldn’t come near a cliff-edge while the rest of us were looking over it. You looked the same then—sort of pasty and twitchy.’
‘It’s just…’ Nadia shook her head, unable to find the words.
‘Hey,’ said Yuichi, pointing ahead. ‘Check this out.’
Jerry leaned forward, peering past Yuichi’s shoulder. ‘What?’
‘Ground’s angling downwards the closer we get to the wormhole,’ Yuichi explained. ‘I remember noticing the same thing last time I was here. The terrain surrounding the edge had caved in, creating a circular concavity around the mouth of the wormhole.’
Nadia tried to see where he was pointing, but mostly all she saw were murky black and grey shapes rolling past them on either side. ‘In fact,’ Yuichi continued, ‘I think that’s the wormhole boundary over yonder.’ He twisted in his seat, peering down the far end of the truck. ‘You were on the money, Chloe. The sucker’s way bigger than it was before.’
Chloe came up front, squeezing roughly past Jerry. She peered out through the windscreen. ‘Just look at that,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it the damnedest-looking thing?’
Past the truck’s headlights, the ground sloped downwards for several kilometres before coming to an abrupt end. A brilliantly clear full moon illuminated a grid of roads that terminated at the pit’s edge. Nadia saw the ruins of what might once have been a village just a hundred metres ahead, judging by what might have been the spire of a church.
Something about the sight of that clean black edge twisted her gut, as if it were in some way intrinsically offensive. The more she looked at it, the more her skin became clammy and sticky, her heart pressing hard up against the roof of her chest.
‘How far to the facility?’ she asked, her voice hoarse.
Yuichi glanced at the dashboard map. ‘Fifteen kilometres.’
‘That far?’ asked Jerry.
‘If the route I mapped last time hadn’t disappeared into that damn hole,’ Yuichi replied, ‘we could probably get there a lot sooner. But we’re going to have to follow the curve of the pit for a while before we can find out if the facility is even still there.’
Nadia saw Chloe looking at her with a worried expression. ‘You okay there, Nads?’
Nadia somehow summoned up the will to keep her voice from trembling. ‘I’m fine.’
It seemed hardly possible, but as they drove away from the ruined village the terrain became even more rugged and difficult to traverse. Nadia found her mind wandering, and pictured the truck sliding out of control towards the edge of the pit and tumbling into unending darkness…
She pushed the thought down hard. The pit’s edge briefly vanished from sight as Yuichi guided the truck past the remains of a jetliner that had come to rest against a stub of wall.
A faint tremor rolled up through the wheels of the truck.
‘What the hell was that?’ Nadia demanded, her voice pitched higher than usual.
‘Seismic activity?’ suggested Jerry.
Chloe laughed. ‘In Siberia?’
‘Slippage, I think,’ Yuichi said over his shoulder. ‘If the pit is growing incrementally, year on year, then it stands to reason that soil and rock are going to crumble off the edge pretty much continuously. If the chunks are big enough, that’d probably trigger tremors.’
Forty minutes later, Yuichi once again pulled to a halt. He hooked an arm over the back of his seat and turned to address them all. ‘This is as far as we can take the truck—we’re going to have to walk the rest of the way. The good news is, it’s just a couple of kilometres.’
‘Hey,’ said Nadia. She felt curiously light-headed. ‘You used robots to map out the facility on the last expedition, right?’ Yuichi nodded. ‘Why not send them to retrieve the EM, instead of us?’
He got up and stretched, then patted her on the shoulder. ‘Our objective’s too valuable to leave to machines, don’t you think?’
They got busy re-securing their helmets and gloves, then waited as Yuichi depressurised the truck. Just before she headed out through the open airlock, Nadia saw the look of sympathy on Chloe’s face and felt a sudden spurt of anger. She turned away from the others before they could see her furious expression.
Fuck the pit. Somehow, thinking of it as alive helped, making it into something she could defeat. Fuck it and its inky, abyssal depths. They were all survivors of the worst a multitude of alternate realities could throw at them. What was some stupid hole in the ground next to that?
She got to work helping Jerry lift some of the oxygen tanks down from the truck and onto a trolley, then helped him push it as they all followed Yuichi past the twisted remains of an electricity pylon. Beyond the pylon, the ground sloped downwards at an increasingly sharp angle before ceasing to exist altogether. The thudding in Nadia’s chest grew until it boomed like a great bell. Any last shred of bravado she still clung to fled at the sight of that terrible blackness barely a few dozen metres from where they stood. The moon had risen, revealing faint striations in the far wall of the pit, kilometres distant.
She barely suppressed a whimper when another tremor passed through the ground.
‘Maybe let’s not get too close,’ said Yuichi.
They retreated further from the edge. Nadia looked along the curve of the pit in time to see the remains of a building crumble into dust as the rock and soil supporting it gave way. The moonlight sparkled on bits of glass mixed in with lumps of concrete and brick as they began their long, slow tumble into eternity.
‘Okay, I admit it,’ Chloe said over their shared comms. ‘This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.’
‘I could never work out the physics of the thing,’ said Yuichi.
Nadia looked at his bespectacled face, visible through the face plate of his pressure suit. ‘Huh?’
‘It’s a wormhole,’ he said, ‘but the dimensions are weird. It should look like a black sphere, any way you approach it. Instead, it looks like an actual hole in the ground. But the really weird thing,’ he added, ‘is that it appears to have internal gravity consistent with the local topography.’
‘In English,’ said Jerry.
‘If something goes over the edge of the pit, it falls, just as if it were under the influence of the Earth’s gravity. But there’s nothing down there except empty space. Nothing to pull anything down.’
‘I don’t think the Earth’s gravity just cuts off at the pit’s edge, Yuichi,’ said Chloe.
‘It must cut off eventually, though,’ Yuichi mused. ‘I’d guess there’s enough gravity at the mouth of the pit to accelerate any object falling into it in a generally downwards trajectory. And by the time the gravitational field stops having an influence, there’s nothing to stop that object falling at the same speed and direction forever.’
‘Do we even know yet if the facility is still here?’ asked Jerry.
‘I think I see it,’ said Chloe. She raised one gloved hand and pointed at a cluster of shapes a little further along the pit’s edge. ‘See that building teetering right on the edge? I hate to say it, but I think that’s where we’re headed.’
Nadia saw a blocky concrete and brick shell sitting atop a spur of rock and dirt overhanging the pit’s edge. By the looks of it, part of the building had already toppled into the darkness.
‘We’d have to be insane to even attempt to enter that building,’ Jerry protested. ‘Look at it! The whole thing looks like it’s ready to collapse over the edge.’
‘We didn’t come all this way just to turn back now,’ Yuichi said drily.
‘Even so,’ said Jerry, ‘it looks pretty risky.’
‘I’m not expecting anyone to do anything that feels like it’s taking too big a risk,’ said Yuichi. He turned towards Nadia. ‘Nads, if you’d rather hang back, then I’d quite understand—’
‘Let’s just get it over with,’ Nadia snapped before Yuichi could finish his sentence. She took the lead, walking parallel to the edge of the pit without waiting to see if they followed. ‘And don’t ask me something like that again.’
Nobody said anything more, and when Nadia glanced back a while later she saw all of them following in her wake, Jerry and Yuichi guiding the trolley over the rough terrain.
* * *
They felt two more tremors over the half hour it took them to walk the rest of the way to the EM facility. It looked like it had been cut in half; girders and chunks of concrete overhung the very edge of the abyss.
They found a door on the side of the building furthest from the pit’s edge. Stepping inside, they unclipped torches from their belts and played them around what appeared to be a foyer.
They stepped through a door that led into a tiled corridor, the far end of which yawned open. The part of the building it originally led to had long since gone tumbling over the edge. Yuichi, who seemed to know where he was going, guided them around a corner and along a branching corridor that was much shorter, terminating at a stairwell leading downwards.
Yuichi shone his torch into the darkness below to confirm the lower floors were still there, and still, so far as any of them could see, accessible.
‘You have to be fucking kidding me,’ said Jerry, his voice flat. ‘You want to go down there?’
‘That’s where the main storage area was,’ said Yuichi. ‘It had to be below ground in case of a containment failure. The surrounding rock would have absorbed the worst of an explosion.’
‘There is no surrounding rock,’ said Jerry. ‘At least, not any more.’
‘From what I saw out there,’ said Yuichi, ‘the spur of rock this building is sitting on has to be a good sixty or seventy metres deep. I agree it’s a long way from ideal, but as long as it holds and we’re in and out of here quickly, I think we can do this.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Chloe, her voice full of uncertainty. ‘Maybe Jerry’s right. Maybe this is too dangerous.’
Yuichi paused and looked at them each in turn. ‘Then let’s make it a vote this time. Do we retreat, or do we go on? Raise your hand if you want to stay.’
Some seconds passed while they all looked at each other through the face plates of their helmets. Then Chloe hesitantly raised her hand, followed by Yuichi. Jerry muttered something under his breath, then followed suit.
They all looked surprised when Nadia also put a hand in the air, her expression defiant.
Yuichi nodded and dropped his hand back down. ‘Then we’re agreed: we keep going. Two of us can go down first. Nadia, you stay up here and monitor our progress in case there’s any problems. Me and Chloe will—’
‘I’ll go down with you,’ Nadia said firmly. ‘Chloe can monitor things from up here.’
‘Nadia—’ Yuichi started to say, a warning in his voice.
‘I don’t mind,’ Chloe interrupted. ‘Really.’
Yuichi looked at her like he was about to say something, then didn’t. He pointed his torch at Nadia and she saw the resigned look on his face. ‘Then I guess it’s you and me, Nads. Jerry, I’d like at least one of us outside the building—just in case.’ He looked back at Nadia. ‘I want you to stay put until I reach the first landing, then follow me down once I give the signal. Clear?’
She nodded. ‘Clear.’
* * *
Once Yuichi reached the next-down landing and confirmed it was safe, Nadia joined him. She waited there while he progressed to the sub-basement, then followed him down once he gave another all-clear.
Her heartbeat had smoothed out a little, although her skin still prickled with nervous energy. The shadows surrounding them were hard black in the vacuum.
Nadia’s torch showed concrete walls, painted green. Yuichi shone his torch ahead of them, revealing a basement area.
‘Doing all right?’ Yuichi asked over the radio as he panned the torch. His own voice sounded shaky.
She shrugged inside her suit, then remembered he couldn’t see it. ‘Fine, under the circumstances.’
They walked forward, their boots stirring up ancient dust. The basement was filled with shrouded equipment of indeterminate purpose. Two doorways were set into the left and right walls, leading into what looked like anterooms. Each of them was illuminated from the inside by a faint blue light that unnerved Nadia, as if it were some supernatural manifestation.
‘What is that?’ she asked, pointing towards one of the anterooms with her torch.
‘That’s where the EM storage units are,’ Yuichi explained. ‘If there’s still light showing, that means the dedicated generators are still running.’ He grinned from inside his helmet with apparent satisfaction. ‘Let’s take a look.’
She followed him into the room on the right. Dials and screens covered one wall. It was strange to see something still powered and active amidst so much silent desolation.
Yuichi pointed at what looked to her like suitcase handles embedded into a wall. There were six altogether, arranged vertically one above the other. Each handle was attached to a flat plate of steel with a readout screen.
‘Bingo,’ said Yuichi. ‘I’m starting to think this’ll be easier than we thought.’ He motioned to Nadia. ‘Bring your torch here.’
Nadia shone her torch onto a wall-mounted keyboard while Yuichi tapped at it. He used a stylus gripped in one thick-fingered glove, pecking out one letter at a time.
In response, a screen flickered into life, and text began to flow down it.
A fresh tremor shook the ground beneath them just then. They both stood stock-still until it had passed, then looked at each other.
‘Thought we were done for there,’ said Yuichi with a shaky laugh. ‘Okay. Now, each of these containers should be equipped with a dedicated radioisotopic battery to keep it running for a day or so after we remove it from the main power supply. So long as we don’t take too much time to get them to a power supply, the EM matter inside them should remain stable.’
