‘No, I want you right here with me, because I can’t take any chances on you doing something stupid, not now. Come on.’
Mitchell stepped closer and took a grip on Saul’s upper arm. Saul tried to break loose and Mitchell yanked him closer still, twisting his arm behind his back, and then putting a stranglehold on him before pushing his face up against the wall.
‘Saul,’ he hissed in his ear, ‘be reasonable. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m genuinely trying to help you.’
The ululation had begun to infiltrate Saul’s brain, like a score of icy needles working their way into his skull. He was finding it harder to concentrate, to even think.
He realized that an icon was blinking in one corner of his eye. How long had it been there without him noticing?
Seeing it was from Amy Rose, he activated the link.
‘Let’s go,’ said Mitchell, stepping back while dragging Saul along with him, his other arm tight around Saul’s neck.
Barely able to breathe, Saul tried to break loose, but the slightest movement sent shards of agony shooting through his shoulder. Mitchell was meanwhile dragging him towards the escalators, closer to the strangely shimmering air.
‘Saul?’ he heard Amy say inside his head. ‘Give me a sign that you can hear me. I can see you, but where is he taking you?’
I’m not sure
, Saul tried to reply, but Mitchell’s grip around his neck was too tight.
Mitchell came to a halt. ‘You’re talking to someone.’
‘No,’ Saul managed to croak. How the hell could he have known?
‘Bullshit, you think I can’t tell?’
He let go of Saul, shoving him down on to the tiles, where he sprawled helplessly, his right arm completely numb.
‘I can see you,’ Amy muttered inside his head. ‘I’m some way back, next to a fountain in a courtyard. I could take him out from here.’
Mitchell checked the readout on his Cobra, then gazed intently across the concourse towards the courtyard. Had he, Saul wondered, somehow
heard
Amy over all that distance?
If Mitchell had any idea where Amy was, she wouldn’t even see him coming.
‘Mitchell,’ Saul croaked, ‘there’s something I have to tell you.’
Mitchell spared him only a brief glance. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t have the time,’ he muttered.
‘It’s about your brother, Danny.’
Saul licked his lips and struggled to avoid looking at the courtyard. He wondered if Amy had picked up one of the Cobras; there had been plenty of them scattered about. Of course, she was getting old, but the Cobra targeting systems were designed to do most of the work for their users.
‘Jesus, Saul,’ said Mitchell, his expression almost pitying. ‘I don’t know what you’re up to, but this is low.’
‘I never told you the truth about him,’ Saul persevered. ‘He wasn’t dead when I found him. He was still alive.’
Mitchell blinked and shook his head. ‘What?’
‘You asked me to try and find him.’ Saul remembered telling Olivia the same story back in Orlando, but with one vital difference. ‘Well, that much I did manage. I tracked him down, all right.’
It felt like lancing a festering wound, with all the old poison spilling out in a rush. ‘He’d been left there to guard the place and, when I turned up, I tried to talk him into leaving with me. I told him I could keep him safe, make sure that no one ever knew he’d been involved. Instead, he tried to kill me.’
‘No.’ Mitchell shook his head. ‘That’s not possible. Danny would never—’
‘He was in very, very deep, Mitch. He shot at me, but he didn’t know how to use the gun properly. All I got was a flesh wound.’
‘You told me you’d been in an accident,’ said Mitchell, his tone numb. He had turned his back towards the courtyard, the Cobra dangling forgotten from one hand.
‘I killed him. To save my own life, I had to. I never toldat because I didn’t think you could handle knowing what really happened.’
‘You’re lying!’ Mitchell screamed. ‘You miserable son of a bitch, you’re making this shit up!’
He lunged at Saul, enraged, locking both hands tight around his throat.
Do it now
, thought Saul, desperately pushing the heel of one hand against Mitchell’s jaw, to try and force his head back. The shimmering haze had spread, tiny specks of light like fireflies dancing everywhere under the high ceiling of the concourse.
Saul heard a damp cough, much like the one he’d heard before Colonel Bailey had died, and Mitchell jerked forward. He stared down at Saul, his mouth hanging open with shock, and a look of utter disbelief in his eyes. He staggered upright, with evident difficulty.
‘You don’t know what you’ve done,’ he gasped at Saul, then sat down hard on the tiles. There was a dark circle of blood in the middle of his chest, growing wider.
Saul pushed himself upright and grabbed hold of the Cobra that Mitchell had dropped. ‘I’m sorry,’ he wheezed, meaning it.
‘True?’ asked Mitchell. ‘About Danny?’
Saul nodded. ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
Saul peered across the concourse, and spotted Amy crouching to one side of the fountain.
Mitchell nodded. ‘I wish . . . I wish things had been different.’
Saul realized his own cheeks were damp as he levelled the Cobra between Mitchell’s eyes. ‘That makes two of us,’ he said, and squeezed the trigger.
Lunar Array, 11 February 2235
Saul let the Cobra rifle slip out of his fingers and
tried to make sense of the emotions warring inside him. There was anger, but also regret and sorrow, in equal measures.
He turned away from Mitchell’s lifeless body and saw Amy Rose come jogging towards him. She was still wearing her spacesuit, minus the helmet, her grey hair tangled into knots. She bent over, once she reached him, hands resting on knees and gasping for breath.
‘Wait here,’ said Saul, and quickly made his way back to where Bailey’s body lay. He dug through the dead man’s pockets until he found the same keycard Bailey had deprived him of.
‘You okay?’ she asked, standing up straight again as he came back.
‘You saved my lifeht="0">< he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘It was a pleasure. Have you done it yet? Shut the gates down, I mean.’
‘No, but it shouldn’t take long.’
‘Good.’ She glanced uneasily towards the gate itself. ‘Do you need any help from me?’
Bailey had mentioned that he had a second code, which they might have been able to use to shut the gates down together, but now that code had died with him, and they were back down to just the one code again. Saul could only hope it would prove enough this time.
‘No,’ he told her, ‘I can take care of it on my own.’
Amy nodded, and sat down on the floor, with her arms resting on her knees. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll wait here,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty winded after all that running around.’
‘When I left you in the lander,’ said Saul, ‘I felt sure you were going to stay there.’
‘No, that was never my plan. I just . . . I just needed time to say goodbye.’ Her eyes glistened as she drew in a sharp breath. ‘Then I suited myself up and got out of there.’
‘Amy . . .’
She made a shooing gesture. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Do what you have to do to fix things. I’ll still be here when you get back.’
Saul nodded and stepped inside an elevator, watching her disappear from sight as he was carried downwards once more.
Saul sprinted past workstations and conference booths, feeling the seconds weighing heavy on him as he raced for the second elevator that would carry him even deeper beneath the Array. The EDP information overlay slid back into place as he stepped inside, and a minute later he was running along the hallway towards Fowler’s office and the terminal room there.
Once inside, he pushed the keycard back into the same slot he’d used before, and again entered the access code, quickly navigating through the menus.
A message appeared, telling him there had been a remote-server malfunction. Saul interpreted this to mean that the Florida communications server had finally failed.
‘CONFIRM TO RESCIND TWO-PERSON ACTIVATION PROTOCOL,’ advised another message.
Yes
, Saul confirmed, working his way through several more menus until he found what he was looking for. He reached out with a trembling hand, and ordered the ASI’s computer systems to close down every last wormhole within the Array.
‘EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN PROTOCOL INITIATED,’ read a new message. ‘TERMINAL WORMHOLE FAILURE IN 1800 SECONDS.’
1800 seconds: just thirty minutes from now.
He thought about the flickers of light he’d seen dancing beneath the concourse ceiling, and wondered if even only thirty minutes was too long. An alarm began to sound, low and urgent, and he turned to run back through the main office and down the hallway to the elevator.
Saul found Amy waiting for him when he stepped out of the elevator and into the main operations room.
‘What happened?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you were going to wait for me up on the concourse.’
She shook her head. ‘Couldn’t think straight up there. Whatever’s happening up there, it’s getting worse. Is it done yet?’
He nodded briefly, leading her back towards the elevator that would take them back up into the Array. ‘It’s done. We’ve got thirty minutes to get ourselves through a gate. Whichever way you look at it, we’re going to be cutting it close.’
Saul kept willing the elevator to move faster as it carried them back up. The strange noise penetrated the walls of the elevator car more clearly the higher they ascended, drilling into his thoughts. He glanced at Amy and saw she wasn’t having any easier a time of it.
The entire concourse shook as they emerged, the air now so thick and fluid it almost felt like being underwater. That dreadful ululation seemed to vibrate right through the atoms in Saul’s body. He looked up at the twists of light that now crowded the concourse ceiling. Something about them made his eyes hurt, so that he couldn’t look at them for more than a second or two.
‘Thirty minutes won’t be enough time, will it?’ Amy yelled to him over the din. ‘Whatever’s driving those clouds is going to get through before that. No telling what might happen then.’
Saul remembered something. ‘The HMX,’ he shouted.
‘The what?’
‘Explosives,’ Saul yelled. ‘Those troopers Mitchell killed had an APC filled with HMX explosives. They were wiring the Florida gate so they could blow it up.’
‘Would that work?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it might delay the clouds, but that’s about it.’
‘Better than nothing,’ she yelled back.
He nodded, and they made their way quickly over to the APC. Saul took the lead, but Amy struggled to keep up, so he put one arm around her waist and half carried her. She didn’t protest or try to push him away, which only showed how exhausted she was. In truth, he was running on little more than adrenalin himself.
All they had to do was keep going just a little longer.
‘I’m getting a bit too old for this,’ panted Amy. ‘Seriously.’
They now came to the barricades, where the bodies of Merrill and Dallas still lay alongside a crate filled with bricks of HMX. Amy picked one up and studied it for a moment.
‘Demolition charges,’ she said, glancing towards him, then slumped against one of the barricades, looking pale and ill. ‘By the looks of it, the detonators are already in place.’
‘I didn’t know you were some kind of demolitions expert?’
‘We used HMX when we were building biomes out on Newton. Good for excavating land real fast.’
Something about the ululation made Saul’s skin itch like it was burning. ‘The question is, how were they going to set off the detonation?’
‘Remote trigger?’ she replied. ‘That’s my guess, anyway.’
‘You mean through their contacts?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That way there’s too big a risk that somebody might hack your contacts and then trigger an explosion from a long way off. They’d have planned to use a dedicated device of some sort.’ She nodded towards Merrill’s butchered corpse. ‘Check him out. Maybe he’s got something on him.’
Saul grimaced as he bent over Merrill’s body, pushing his hand inside pockets soaked with the dead man’s blood. When he found nothing, he moved over to Dallas, and soon found a slim device sporting several inlaid buttons.
‘That’s it,’ Amy said, as he showed it to her. ‘Same as what we used ourselves. Nothing like having a nice fat button to press when you’re blowing shit up.’
‘Then we can blow the HMX remotely, before we head through the Galileo gate? The starship gets there in a couple of months, and we’ll be able to survive until—’
‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Amy. She stood up and glanced towards the APC parked nearby, with the rest of the crates of explosive still piled in the back. ‘That’s what they used to transport the HMX here, right? So how many of those bricks do you think they managed to place already?’
Saul studied the APC, still mostly filled with unopened crates. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I reckon not that many.’