Drake caught the edge in the boy’s voice. “For lack of any other alternative, that was my original idea,” he answered. “I agree that our chances of hitting the right fungal ledge at exactly the right depth are slim at best. Particularly as there isn’t a radio beacon to guide us.”
Drake slipped a tracker from a pouch on his belt. It resembled a strange-looking handgun with a dial on top of it and a small dish where the muzzle should have been. The tracker was able to detect the VLF, or Very Low Frequency, signals that the radio beacons broadcast. Will had planted these beacons at various points along the route he’d taken with Dr. Burrows and Elliott when they’d somehow found their way through to the inner world the first time.
“Haven’t seen one of those in a while,” Will said as Drake aimed it at the Pore and depressed the trigger. It emitted a single click, then remained silent. Will frowned. “That’s weird,” he said. “Is it working properly?”
“It should be. Don’t forget the beacon you left at the jump-off point on the second Pore is quite some distance from us,” Drake reminded him.
“Yes, by Smoking Jean,” Will said, recalling his name for it.
Drake nodded. “And I also agree with you that it’s going to be a bit hit-and-miss if we do a swan dive with the nuclear weapons tied to our ankles.”
Will was frowning. “You don’t have a plan at all, do you?” he accused Drake. “You’re just making this up as you go along!”
“That’s the way it works,” Drake replied.
Will was shaking his head angrily. “Wow, that’s just great. So you don’t actually have a clue what we’re going to do next.”
“Will,” Elliott intervened, reaching out as if to touch his shoulder but then lowering her hand to point at the ground. “Look at the tracks you’re on.” It was clear that something heavy had passed that way, because the rocks had been pulverized. “Lots of Coprolite machines went by here.” She raised her rifle to peer through the scope. “And I can see one of them way over there . . . around the side of the Pore. Drake and I think we should recce it.”
Drake indicated the balloons by the huts. “The Styx must have been using those to get up and down, but from the state of them, they obviously switched to another method some time back. And I ask myself what that could be — did they find or even make themselves an alternative route? I think we owe it to ourselves to find out, don’t you?” He punched Will gently on the arm. “Happier now?” he asked, smiling at the boy.
“Much,” Will replied, smiling back.
With Will beside him in the cart, Colonel Bismarck drove the stallions along the tracks by the edge of the Pore. Will was soon able to make out the Coprolite digging machine. The cylindrical body of battered steel shone like quicksilver as he squinted through his lens.
They came nearer and the Colonel slowed the horses, but there was no sign of either Elliott or Drake by the machine.
“Where are they?” Will asked as Sweeney caught up with the cart. “And why aren’t they keeping in touch over the radio?”
“Wait here,” Sweeney replied, and went to find out.
As Will saw him reach the digger, he, too, disappeared from sight. It was a good twenty minutes before the horses began to stamp the ground and become agitated. Then Will heard what he thought was the distant rumbling of a vehicle. And it sounded heavy.
“What’s that?” he asked, angling his head and looking around. “And where’s it coming from?”
“There!” said the Colonel, pointing.
Where Will had last seen Sweeney, a Coprolite digger rose into view. As it came at full pelt toward them, the Colonel struggled to control the horses. It stopped, spinning a hundred and eighty degrees on the spot, boulders popping beneath the massive rollers that bore it along.
The rear hatch swung open, and Elliott and Sweeney dismounted into the cloud of smoke issuing from the machine’s exhausts. “Got ourselves a ride!” Sweeney called over to Will.
It turned out that Drake had found the Coprolite digger fueled up and ready for use. Will didn’t question it — he was just relieved that there was an alternative to jumping down the Pore.
Once all the equipment was on board and lashed down, the Colonel freed the stallions and watched them gallop off. “I do hope they make it back to the station,” he said with some regret.
Then everyone boarded the digger. The interior of the vehicle was fabricated from beaten metal — most of it was grimy except for several areas that shone brightly from their regular use. Will took in the display at the navigator’s station, and the red glow coming from an inspection port in the boiler.
Drake, sitting at the front of the vehicle, pushed in and twisted a rod to engage the engine, then depressed a pedal. The digger lurched forward, and he steered it around to face the opposite direction. Will joined Elliott and Sweeney to watch from the open hatch at the rear of the vehicle as the digger’s nose dipped down an incline.
“Some tunnel!” Will shouted over the thunderous din of the vehicle.
It was approximately forty feet to the roof, and easily as wide.
“The Styx rounded up some Coprolites and forced them to bore this out with one of their megamachines!” Elliott shouted back. “But get a load of what’s coming up!”
They roared past scores of the diggers parked at the side of the massive tunnel. Then there were what had to be spoil movers, judging from the scoops mounted on their fronts, and the long trains of trailers behind them. Will had never seen this second type of vehicle before, but he remembered Drake had told him that as the race of master miners dug into the rock, they were careful to infill crevices and open faults with the spoil as they went. They regarded the Earth as a living entity, treating it with respect and not wanting to cause it excessive damage with their excavations.
Sweeney pointed. “There!” he said.
Coprolites — a group of around thirty of them — were milling around. Although their mushroom-colored and bulbous suits were almost indistinguishable from the surrounding rock, light poured from the luminescent orbs mounted in the eye openings of their suits.
“And some ex-Stickies,” Sweeney added.
Will saw the bodies of Limiters sprawled on the ground and looked at Elliott, who nodded. It was clear a four-man team had been supervising the Coprolites. Will was wondering if Drake or Elliott, or both of them, had dispatched the Styx soldiers, when Drake yelled from the front.
“OK! Batten down the hatch and buckle up!” Then when everyone was seated and strapped in, he floored the accelerator.
The digger was capable of impressive speed. Sweeney, Will, and the Colonel kept the boiler well fed and well stoked as they went, always heading downward in this new tunnel.
They passed what must have been a Limiter checkpoint along the way. They only knew this because they could hear the bullets striking the thick crystal windshield as the Styx soldiers tried to stop the digger. But their efforts were completely ineffectual, and everyone in the vehicle laughed and gave each other the thumbs-up.
Elliott was in the co-driver’s seat beside Drake, continually checking the tracker. When Drake eased off the accelerator to allow Sweeney to tend to the boiler, Will took the opportunity to undo his seat harness and come forward.
“We’re dead on the signal,” Elliott shouted, showing Will the twitching needle on top of the detector.
Drake leaned over from the driver’s seat. “If this tunnel has been completed all the way down, we’re going to reach Smoking Jean in record time!” he said. “Maybe a few hours!”
Will frowned. “But the journey from Martha’s shack to the submarine in Smoking Jean took us a week!” he pointed out.
“You were following natural fault lines then, and wandering all over the shop. This is as the mole burrows,” Drake said. “It’s direct.”
Despite the fact
he was being jostled around by the vehicle, Will dozed off in his seat. He had no idea how long it had been until he was rudely awoken by shouting. He at once realized that they were no longer traveling down an incline but were on the flat. Then he caught sight of a well-lit area through the windshield.
“Yee-ha!” Drake yelled as he drove right at several Limiters in front of some sort of shack. They leaped from the path of the vehicle, and the digger exploded through the structure.
“Straight ahead!” Elliott yelled, checking the tracker.
Multiple shots struck the digger all over its hull, then an explosion lifted it clean into the air.
As it landed, Drake was shouting and laughing. He kept his foot pressed firmly to the floor. There were rock outcrops in the way, but he simply smashed through them.
Will caught sight of something familiar. Although he couldn’t hear what she was saying to Drake, Elliott was pointing at it. It was the tall boulder with the carving where Will had hidden one of the radio beacons, and where his father had leaped into Smoking Jean.
But for the life of him, Will couldn’t think what Drake was intending to do next. The shots continued to rain on them from behind, so there was no way they could stop or go back.
They were almost at the void, and still Drake kept the vehicle moving at full throttle.
“Drake . . . what are you —? . . . DRAKE!” Will screamed at the top of his lungs as they careered past the tall boulder where the beacon was hidden. Will knew he was right about this because he could just make out the rash of clicks from the detector in Elliott’s hand.
There was a crash as the roof of the digger caught the top of the opening on the side of Smoking Jean. But the digger simply crushed the rock.
Then they weren’t on firm ground any longer.
They were tipping into the void.
Falling.
Drake killed the engine, leaving just the sound of rushing air as they gently turned over.
“Stay strapped in — in case we hit anything,” Drake advised.
A few loose stones floated around the cabin — even now the gravity was becoming less powerful.
And through the front windshield Will caught glimpses of the red glow of lava veins on the sides of the void.
“You bloody hooligan!” Will said. “I can’t believe you just did that!” But he was laughing.
AS THE COPROLITE digger plunged downward, it caught the tip of a fungal ledge protruding from the side of Smoking Jean, slamming straight through it. The obstruction caused the vehicle to flip end over end. Everyone was holding on tight, the motion making them feel more than a little disoriented, and increasingly ill.
Worse seemed to be in store for them.
The digger was rotating inexorably toward the side of the Pore. They watched the intermittent view through the windshield with bated breath, but the collision with the rock wall they were all dreading never came. Instead the temperature inside the cabin rocketed due to the proximity of the molten rock. Will was seriously asking himself if they’d all be barbecued where they sat, when, luckily, the digger drifted away from the lava veins and back toward the center of the Pore. And as they continued, coming ever closer to the bottom of Smoking Jean, the digger settled down and was hardly spinning at all.
On several occasions a hammering echoed around the hull when they passed through bands of suspended rock debris, like a spaceship striking asteroid belts.
Then, with a last jarring impact, the digger came to a standstill. An unceasing groaning sound reverberated through the vehicle, but at least they were no longer on the move.
Drake unstrapped himself and floated toward the rear hatch. “Everyone OK?” he asked, looking around. “Someone wake Sparks up!” he exclaimed.
Unbuckling himself, Will swam over and nudged the big man.
“Are we there already?” Sweeney asked, yawning.
“You’re unbelievable,” Will muttered, then he joined Drake by the hatch. Drake swiveled the handle and pushed. The groaning, now deafening, filled the interior. As Elliott, Sweeney, and the Colonel joined them, all they could see were rounded boulders bobbing up and down like apples in a barrel of water.
Drake closed the hatch so it was easier to hear him. “Right,” he said. “We’re going to rope ourselves together, then we might as well make a start across this zero-grav belt of yours, Will.”
“Um, there’s two things about that,” the boy began nervously. “First is that it’s bloody humongous, and there’s this thing my dad called the crystal belt across it. I really don’t know if I’ll able to find the way.”
Drake had the tracker in his hand. He let go of it, allowing it to spin several slow revolutions in the air before he caught it again.
“Trippy,” Sweeney said. “Never been in space before.”
Drake moved the tracker around until it let out a burst of clicks, and the needle twitched with the strong signal. It was pointing at the floor of the digger. “That’s the beacon you left by the Russian submarine,” he said.
“We landed upside down!” Elliott observed. The complete lack of gravity where they were in the Earth actually meant that this made no difference to them.
Then Drake pointed the tracker in the opposite direction — at the roof of the digger. Although the reaction was far weaker, it again registered a signal. “And that’ll be the beacon you planted in the opening on the other side of the belt, which is our way into the Colonel’s inner world. What could be simpler?”
“Suppose,” Will sighed, still not convinced.
“And what was the second thing on your mind?” Drake asked.
“Can’t we go across in this Coprolite machine?” Will proposed. “It would be safer.”
“It’s heavy and I want to conserve the propellants in the boosters,” Drake replied. “Better if we travel light.”
With that they all got themselves ready for the crossing. As though they were survivors from a shipwreck, they were each linked by a length of rope to a makeshift raft, which comprised the two nuclear devices and their other equipment, all lashed together.
When they exited the digger, both Drake and Will had the boosters ready. Since there was no way they could hear each other over all the noise from the crystal belt, Drake pointed at Will, who angled his booster and gave it the tiniest blip on the trigger.
The blue flame lanced from the funnel and they were off, but in completely the wrong direction. With several more attempts, Will was feeling more proficient at using the booster and steered them around the loose aggregation of boulders where the digger had come to rest. Then they were on the way out of Smoking Jean and rushing toward the huge emptiness, the far-off flicker of the lights from the crystal belt an unimaginable distance ahead of them.
Both Will and Drake took turns on the boosters, with Elliott continually checking the direction with the tracker.
Will intentionally gave the crystal belt a wide berth, just as he and Dr. Burrows had when they’d made the same journey. The boosters were far more effective than using the recoil from the Sten gun. Will had no conception of how fast they were actually moving, but the wind in their faces was so strong it snatched their breath away.
And after hours passed and they worked their way around the ethereal lights of the crystal belt, Will finally spotted the column of sunlight in the distance. He knew then that they were going to make it to the inner world.
ONCE THEY WERE OUT of the zero-gravity belt and moving into the cone-shaped opening, the rays of the second sun made everything shimmer as if they were underwater. Will continued to blip his booster to maintain their speed while Elliott checked the readout from the tracker. There was no way she could hear the clicking emanating from it: The rumble from the zero-gravity belt continued to drown everything out.
It was half an hour before Drake signaled th
at they should head for the side of the void. As soon as they touched down, he and Sweeney detached themselves from the raft of nuclear weapons and equipment. Then they slid one of the bombs into position behind a large rock, securing it in place with a rope. Drake immediately opened a hatch in its side and began to prep it for detonation.
“We did it,” Elliott sighed wearily, as she lay down in the scree.
“Yep. Never ever thought we’d be here again,” Will said, slumping next to her. They shared a bar of chocolate, washing it down with water from a canteen. There was a loud gurgling noise, and Will looked away in embarrassment.
“Ohhhh,” he groaned. “It’s messed up my stomach again.”
“Mine, too.” Elliott laughed. “It’s the low gravity, isn’t it?”
Will didn’t reply as he peered around in an attempt to find a feature he recognized from the last time they were there. He thought of the ledge where he, Elliott, and Dr. Burrows had landed, all of them immediately falling into a dead sleep because they were so thoroughly exhausted.
Will regarded the small Alpine plants around him — they were clinging on to the scree with trailing root systems like unraveled cotton, and there was also a number of the dwarf trees with tortured trunks. He could tell from the abundance of vegetation that they must have long since passed the ledge he’d been looking for. Realizing it was futile to try to find anything familiar — the vast scale of the place made that highly unlikely — he shut his eyes.
“Are you thinking about the Doc?” Elliott asked gently.
“The Doc?” he said, blinking his eyes open again. It took him a moment to work out who Elliott was referring to. She was using her and Drake’s nickname for his stepfather, Dr. Burrows.
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