Gravity

by Andy Briggs

  Double Helix’s gaze fell to Dev’s other hand. He was holding the graviton pod, ejected the same moment he had cast aside the gun. And if there was one memory Dev had inherited, it was never to eject a graviton pod when it was at full charge.

  With all his strength, he hurled the pod at one of the three remaining towers.

  “RUN!” he ordered, stooping only to retrieve Newton’s Arrow from the floor.

  Mason and Lot were already ahead of him. The pod shattered, unleashing a swirling mass of gravitons that formed a miniature black hole, suspended in space.

  By the time they reached the tunnel, the towers were all bent towards the black hole – stretching into fine tendrils as they were sucked into the gravity vortex, one atom at a time. It was a chain reaction: as it swallowed the synchro-cogitron, the black hole grew bigger, gobbling up even more.

  As Dev, Lot and Mason charged from the tunnel, the stadium was twisting like melted toffee as the black hole consumed it.

  “Run for the ship!” shouted Dev as the wind began to whip up around them in a gale. The swelling black hole inhaled the very air around them. With every three steps they took, the wind seemed to push them back one.

  “This is hopeless!” Lot wailed.

  The ground began to shake violently. The trio stopped in their tracks, clinging on to the side of a building for support. Above them, the tops of the skyscrapers bent like trees in a hurricane – the gravity force seemed to be stronger up there. The sound of wrenching metal came from ahead. Something was rapidly heading their way.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about—” Mason started to say before he was cut off. The Shadow Helix freighter crashed through the base of the tower in front of them. Debris didn’t have time to fall back to earth before they spiralled past the teens into the vortex behind them.

  The freighter’s hull scraped along the street in a massive shower of sparks, and the entire ship listed at a forty-degree angle as it was dragged inexorably towards the black hole.

  Dev pointed to the angled deck. “There’s our only chance!”

  The Avro was still locked in place by the giant claw mechanism. As the freighter rumbled past them, they saw that the mangled gangplank was still attached. The tongue of metal was crushed and bent, as the weight of the ship had fallen on it, but it offered a route to scramble on to the deck.

  They ran almost doubled over to minimize the effects of the wind rushing towards the void. Lot was the first to reach the gangplank, scrambling on-board on all fours. Dev followed, pausing to help pull Mason up as the fragile gangplank buckled under his weight.

  The smooth, steep deck was difficult to climb. Dev was thankful it wasn’t wet; he doubted they could have made it otherwise. They reached the helipad, the underpinning support gantry providing ideal handholds for them to clamber up towards the Avro’s ramp.

  The trembling motion of the freighter suddenly changed as the prow drew closer to the yawning black hole, which now looked like a buzz-saw blade as it lazily spun a debris field that increased in size as it chewed the island up. As gravity acted upon the freighter, the prow began to stretch in countless strands towards the void.

  Lot reached the Avro’s ramp, and Dev felt a thrill of hope. They were going to make it. The thrill rapidly changed to wooziness, and he felt another trickle of blood from his nose.

  Mason’s voice sounded distant. “Deeeevvv!!”

  Dev felt his fingers weaken, and the steel girder he was clinging to slipped from his grasp. Then he was falling. He slammed into the inclined deck and shot head first back the way they’d come. Straight off the edge of the deck—

  A sharp pain on his shoulder snapped him out of his malaise. The strap from Newton’s Arrow had snagged on a twisted part of the gunwale that had been blown away by the security drone. Dev was suspended over the drop, his legs cycling uselessly. He tried to pull himself up, but his arms trembled and he had no strength left.

  A third of the freighter had gone already, and the superstructure now looked like a snarl of flailing squid tentacles as it was pulled inside the black hole. Dev saw Lot on the Avro’s ramp, Mason clinging to the helipad just beneath her. He knew for certain he didn’t have the strength to reach them.

  “Go!” he bellowed, shooing them with his arm.

  Lot and Mason exchanged words, but Dev couldn’t hear them. His head felt like cotton wool, and he struggled to stay awake. It was a race between death by black hole or by his uncle’s self-destruct protocol. It could well be a draw, Dev thought bleakly.

  When he looked up again, he saw that the disc was powering up, and straining against the clamps that held it in place. Good for Lot, Dev thought; at least she’d be able to take Mason to safety. Dev allowed himself to hang limply from the strap; there was no use fighting whatever fate had in store for him.

  The Avro pushed against the metal claws that held it in place. Dev could see the metal clamps shudder – but still they held.

  “Go on, Lot!” he yelled, but knew she couldn’t hear him.

  Again the Avro pushed against its restraints, but went nowhere and settled back on the pad. Dev didn’t believe for a moment that Lot would give up.

  And he was right.

  The Avro rose once more, but this time it began to spin, rapidly building speed until – like a buzz-saw blade – it struck the clamps. Sparks flew as the metal claws were torn in half, and with it sections of the aircraft’s hull. But it didn’t matter – Dev cheered as the Avro shot free.

  But instead of flying to safety, the Avro arced overhead and banked low next to the freighter. Then a yell of thrilled terror drew Dev’s attention back to the deck. Mason hadn’t boarded the aircraft after all. He slid down the incline – straight for Dev. And he wasn’t going to stop.

  Mason cannonballed into Dev so hard that the metal holding Dev in place snapped, and they both fell. . .

  But not far. They landed on the top of the Avro, which Lot was skilfully piloting metres off the ground – a task made all the harder by the thick, black smoke issuing from the fresh gouge in the fuselage and being sucked past the viewport by the black hole.

  Mason threw one arm around Dev to secure his friend, the other gripping the sunken rungs of the access ladder running across the hull.

  “We don’t leave a man behind!” laughed Mason as the Avro pulled into a sharp climb. Dev glanced behind as they accelerated away. He watched as the remains of the freighter were swallowed up seconds later.

  The black hole was gaining critical mass now, exactly as his implanted memories predicted it would. In seconds the rest of the city folded into the throat of the gravity monster. Then the black hole twisted shape as it began to consume itself.

  With an unspectacular POP! the black hole folded in on itself and crunched into nothingness . . . leaving only a silent ocean behind.

  The Avro quivered as more smoke spewed from the gouge and they rapidly lost altitude. Mason and Dev could only hold on tight as Lot landed on the water, skipping four times, like a stone, before slowing to a drifting stop, bobbing atop of the ocean surface.

  An access hatch opened, and Lot scrambled through. “We’ve lost all power.” She kneeled next to Dev. “How’re you feeling?”

  Dev didn’t answer. The aircraft’s soft, rocking motion on the waves was lulling him into darkness. . .

  The light hurt Dev’s eyes as he opened them. He’d heard tales of people surviving near-death experiences and seeing bright lights at the end of a tunnel, but he very much doubted any afterlife would look like the clinically white walls of the Inventory medical bay.

  He sat up – and banged his head on a Perspex canopy, which almost knocked him back unconscious.

  “Easy,” came Eema’s voice.

  The canopy opened with a hiss, allowing Dev to slowly sit upright, dangling his legs off the side of the pod he had been lying in. He knew about the BioPods, although he’d never been in one. They were supposed to be the last word in curing exceptionally ill patients, by creating a
perfect environment for them to recover. Judging from his damp skin, he guessed that at some point he had been immersed in a life-saving cocktail of drugs, and he was thankful for not having been conscious during that process.

  Eema rolled up to him, her holo-head registering concern. “How do you feel?”

  “Surprised to be alive.” And he was.

  “You’re better than new,” said Eema. “Welcome back.”

  “I take it that means I’m not going to be arrested as a traitor, then?”

  Charles Parker entered the room and stood next to Eema, his arms folded. “Not at all, Dev. You did what you were asked. We have Newton’s Arrow back, and it’s safely stored in the Red Zone.”

  Dev couldn’t help but notice his uncle’s first words were all business; he hadn’t even acknowledged Dev’s condition.

  “So you won’t be activating my self-destruct again?” From his uncle’s expression, it was clear Charles was unsure just how much Dev knew. “Oh, I had a long talk with your evil twin.” Dev took some satisfaction at the panicked look that crossed his uncle’s face. “He had a lot to say. Speaking of which, where are Lot and Mason?”

  Charles could hardly find his voice to speak. “They’re waiting for you,” he finally said.

  Dev jumped off the bed, only then realizing he was wearing a hospital gown. His dirty clothes lay on a chair in the corner. He looked his uncle straight in the eye. “So why didn’t your precious Dissolution Protocol kill me after all?”

  “It seems when you used synaesthesia on an active particle accelerator, it changed something inside of you.”

  Dev knew his uncle was holding something back, but he didn’t have the energy for an argument. He was just happy to be alive. “Did you find any signs of Double Helix? Kardach? The Collector?”

  “Sergeant Wade arrived moments after you blacked out. Luckily, they had seen the smoke from the Avro. She conducted a thorough search of the area afterwards, but found nothing. However, Consortium satellites detected a strong energy signal from the area moments before the vortex collapsed on itself.”

  “Meaning they could have got away?”

  Charles shrugged. “We may not understand the energy signature of these kinds of phenomena as well as we think. On the other hand, we know parasites are very hard to kill.” Then he placed his hand on Dev’s shoulder. It was an awkward gesture. “Devon, I am so pleased you’re back. We shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about you.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have.” Dev slipped his uncle’s hand off his shoulder and began to dress in his own clothes. He had been surprised by his uncle’s gesture; but rather than make him happy, it angered him.

  Too little too late, he thought.

  In the canteen, Dev was crushed by Lot and Mason in a tight hug. They were delighted to see him up. Mason joked that he’d been jealous that Dev missed several more days’ worth of school than they had, but assured him not much had changed there.

  Even more unexpected was the round of applause from dozens of Inventory technicians, led by Sergeant Wade.

  “You should have seen the naval fleet Sarge led to find us,” said Mason excitedly as they detailed the story of Wade picking them up from the ocean.

  Wade congratulated them all on an amazing job – not only in retrieving the artefact, but also bringing Shadow Helix down. It was a phenomenal achievement. Dev wondered just how much Wade knew about Uncle Parker and Double Helix’s connection, as nothing about it was said. Lot and Mason must have been thinking the same thing, but they too kept that nugget of information quiet.

  “The only downside so far is the incident in Hong Kong,” said Wade. “The city is a mess. Gravity decided to revert to normal twenty-six hours ago, and everything came crashing down. Luckily the authorities had evacuated everybody. But here’s the thing: a lot of people there have already forgotten what happened.”

  Dev thought about that. “Well, Hong Kong wasn’t that far from where Double Helix activated Project Nevermind. He was always talking about conquest by stealth, so he wouldn’t have wanted people knowing about all that tech. Could he have implanted the thought for them to forget what had happened?”

  “It seems that the aurora had time to travel that far, so I suppose that could make sense. The rest of the world is still talking about aliens, but we have set a good disinformation campaign in motion, blaming it on natural events. People will soon forget. They always do. My concern is what other message Double Helix was trying to get out to the world.”

  So their catch-up continued, with Wade almost casually dropping in the news that Professor Liu had passed away in Hong Kong’s aftermath. Dev felt incredibly saddened by the news, although he wasn’t too sure if that was more an effect of sharing the old man’s memories. He wondered whether the professor had planted more things in Dev’s subconscious than he was aware of.

  He touched the TelePath in his pocket. It had survived the madness in the city, and he had no intention of declaring it to his uncle. It wasn’t the Inventory’s gadget, it was his very own. His first. And he intended to use it.

  The conversation changed to the improved security measures in the Inventory, now that they had the first Red Zone artefact back. On a holo-screen, Wade showed them the complex’s layout, and she highlighted the various improvements, but Dev wasn’t really listening. He was searching the map, wondering where Charles had triggered the Dissolution Protocol. He had surfed the Inventory’s computers for long enough to know that it wasn’t part of the main system. Did that mean there was a secret place he didn’t know about?

  There was nothing there.

  Storage closets, air-conditioning vents and toilets were all marked up, but the chamber that had almost led to his death wasn’t there.

  He examined the curving corridors, and the various colour-coordinated warehouses nested into one another, but the map revealed nothing. Then the Collector’s words came back, uttered in Tartarus Prison.

  The Black Zone. . . But there was no black zone. Had he made it up, just to sow confusion?

  Then Dev saw it. A simple optical illusion, like when an image of two faces suddenly becomes a vase. You can see the faces or the vase – but not both, and he had been looking at the map in just one way. The map with huge concentric black spaces between the corridors, an area that took up almost a third of the Inventory’s space.

  A zone within a zone.

  Dev felt the familiar sensation of curiosity bubbling inside of him. It seemed that the Inventory had many more secrets left to tell. . .

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