Roston shifted his weight in a very authoritative way, and Chris felt suddenly uncomfortable. "I'll destroy this entire place before I let it fall into the hands of anyone else," he announced. "Don't look so surprised, Captain. It was always part of the plan to destroy the machine once we were finished here. It's the only way to ensure no one comes in behind us and uses the machine to undo everything we've done."
"What have you done?" Chris asked.
Roston took a step forward. "I've placed a network of explosives throughout this chamber. Dozens of bombs. On a single trigger."
Before Roston could react, before the soldiers could get a bead on him, Chris rushed Roston, slammed into him, and launched the two of them over the railing.
Owen knew how to take advantage of a distraction, Trisha had to give him that.
When Chris toppled Roston and they both went over the edge, Owen alone didn't stop to see if the two landed. Instead, he launched himself toward the row of men and executed a blistering number of close-quarters, hand-to-hand fighting moves.
But there were too many of them, and he was soon overpowered by three men, holding him back, about to toss him over the edge.
"Go help Chris!" she said to Terry. She threw him a look that told him to keep Mae safe, and the two of them, hand in hand, snuck away from the fight.
She stood and threw an open palm into the face of one of Owen's attackers, and the man stumbled backward. She was about to follow up with another blow, but she froze at the cold touch of metal against her throat. It was the bayonet from one of the militia's signature rifles, but this one had been detached from its rifle.
She drew perfectly still, holding her neck high and stiff, away from the blade. From where she stood, she was directly across from Owen and the men holding him at bay.
"You know," said a rough voice Trisha recognized as Griffin's, "Roston told me you were a Marine before you were an astronaut, but I didn't believe him"
"I'll kill you if you hurt her," said Owen through gritted teeth, still struggling against the three men holding him down but watching Griffin with murder in his eyes.
Griffin grabbed her by the hair, pulled her neck back painfully hard, and whispered in her ear, "I've been Army since I was eighteen. And I hate Marines."
The blade came away from her throat, she was spun around in place, and a vicious fist made contact with the side of her face, sending her doubled over, facing away from Griffin.
"I'm going to snap your neck," said Griffin, whispering now. `Just like I did to your boy Paul."
Trisha made eye contact with Owen in her bent-over position, and she felt her face burn red.
Paul!
He clicln't ... ?
Griffin grabbed Trisha by the hair again and pulled until she stood at her full height. She watched as Owen was pulled up to stand tall as well. A pistol came up against Owen's temple and the soldier's finger touched the trigger.
"Oh yeah," Griffin went on, smiling. "He was making too much noise on his website about all the crazy stuff the machine made happen around the world. So Roston had me silence him. But he left it up to me how permanent your boyfriend's silence would be."
Paul didn't leave me.
He did love me.
He never stopped loving me.
Trisha eyed the gunman next to Owen, and forced a smile, even in her pained state, her hair near the point of being ripped out.
The man ripped off his face mask and glowered at her, savoring the moment. Griffin twisted her left arm, pressing it into the small of her back.
Trisha glanced at Griffin and relaxed her expression. "Thing about living with constant soreness ... it really raises your tolerance for pain."
She threw her free elbow into Griffin's face. He dropped the knife, and she snatched it out of the air and flung it straight down. It sliced through his foot, impaling it and pinning him to the metal catwalk.
Major Griffin yelled and dropped to the ground, trying to pull the knife free from his foot. One of the soldiers holding Owen suddenly lunged at Trisha, but she cocked her arm back and flung her sharp elbow up into the man's face. He landed on his back and she kicked him in the head.
When she pulled around, Owen was standing over the other two men who'd been holding him. He wasn't even out of breath. But his eyebrows were raised and he wasn't blinking as he stared at Trisha, not moving.
She frowned, lopsided, nonplussed at his reaction. "I really was a Marine!"
Owen's eyebrows were still up as he said, "Ooh-rah."
Thankfully the catwalk had a little give to it, because Chris landed on his side-ramming his bad shoulder into the catwalk-but the adrenaline took over immediately, enabling him to ignore the pain. He reached for the pistol he'd seen earlier sticking out of a holster at Roston's side, but Roston's hand was already on it.
Chris tried to land a punch to the face, but Roston blocked it, so Chris brought up his other arm into Roston's side. He made contact that time, probably with the colonel's spleen, he thought, but Roston didn't take time to rest from the blow. He rolled away and kicked Chris' bad shoulder as he went.
Chris involuntarily brought up his other hand to guard the place where the intense pain was surging, and in the process left himself open for Roston to ram him full-on in the abdomen. Roston charged at him until Chris was pressed against the catwalk railing. He felt his upper body bending backward, over the rail, and knew he couldn't maintain his balance. He did the only thing he could do-he grabbed Roston by the shirt to try to stay on this side of the rail.
But Roston's momentum carried them both farther on so they both went tumbling over the rail. Chris caught a single hand on the railing at the last moment, but Roston was not so lucky. The last Chris saw of him, the colonel was falling into the murky depths far below to the bottom of the machine. Chris never heard an impact.
Terry and Mae came running up behind him, soon followed by Trisha and Owen. The great machine growled and shuddered as they approached, as if it knew its life was nearing its end and was protesting.
"You all right?" asked Trisha, eyeing his shoulder, which looked dislocated again.
"Doesn't matter," he replied. "Roston's out of the picture."
"Here," said Owen, passing out enough radio earpieces for all five of them. "We took these from Roston's men."
"Good thinking," said Chris. "Look, we're out of time. This thing is starting to crumble, so we have to do what we came to do, right now. Terry, I want you to stay here and keep Roston's men from following me as long as you can. Keep Mae with you, make sure she's safe. Trish, find the main data terminal and input the fail-safe code; call me when it's done. Beech, Roston may have been bluffing about a bomb-or maybe not. I want you to find it, or find the trigger, and disarm it if you can. If it's real, then any one of these men could have the trigger on them, and we need to buy some time."
Chris squared himself, and looked each one of them in the eye before stating the obvious and inevitable: "I'm going to find the Box."
"Commander-!" shouted several voices at once over the din of the machine.
"No arguments!" Chris yelled over them. "You were there, you heard what my father said-one of us has to send that thing in the Box back to where it came from, and there's no one but us who can or will! It was my father who was sent to tell us about it, so the message was meant for me! I'm doing it, and that's final! Now go!"
With reluctance yet with an urgency they couldn't fight, Terry, Owen, and Mae left. Trisha moved to follow, but hung back momentarily.
Her features were strained as she began, "Chris ... "
"Don't worry about ... what I told you before," he said. "I meant what I said. But it wasn't meant to be. I have to finish this. And you have to bring everyone back."
She watched him with confusion, desperation, uncertainty. He embraced her, and spoke softly into her ear, "It was an honor to serve with you, but being your friend meant even more. Now please go."
He heard her sniffle from his shoulder, an
d her embrace tightened. He forced her to pull away, and couldn't bring himself to look at her again. It was too hard; she was crying, and he wouldn't have the strength to commit to this if he met her eyes again....
Chris turned and ran.
The maze of the machine was like the world's biggest obstacle course, only arranged in as chaotic a fashion as possible. Chris climbed, dropped, ran, and squeezed through countless twists and passageways, working hard to find his way to the beacon of light somewhere ahead of him.
The light from the beacon intensified, and he turned up the strength of his visor to compensate. The machine was making so much racket that he found it hard to think. If he hadn't known better, Chris might've thought the immense collection of metal and wires was breathing.
He turned a corner as a flash of sparks spit out from a circuit board to his right, and had to duck to miss being sprayed by the redhot flicker. The temperature was definitely increasing the deeper he went, and some of the spaces he crawled in and out of were so tight and packed so dense with equipment and technology he wondered just how many of the people who'd worked on this thing over the years had ever made it this far into its center.
Chris jumped through a narrow hole, arms first, rolled on the ground, and kept running. The heat and sweat, mixed with his rising exhaustion, was making it harder to ignore the pain scorching through his shoulder. It was definitely dislocated again, and worse than before.
No time. There was no time to worry about it now. It didn't matter. Soon he'd send the artifact in the Box back to where it came from, and he'd be dead. Just a few more meters, he could almost see it....
Will I see Dad again after I'm dead?
A powerful blow struck him on the head from behind, and Chris went down.
"I knew it was going to come to this, Captain!" shouted Roston.
Chris' vision was hazy from the hit, but he looked up to see Roston standing over him, covered in grime and sweat and soot from the inner workings of the machine. He held a long piece of the catwalk's metal railing in his hand like a crowbar. A steady stream of blood zigzagged down his face, under his visor, coming from a deep gash in his forehead, which Chris guessed had happened when he fell. But Roston was otherwise intact, so he must not have fallen as far as Chris had thought.
"The funny thing is ... I'm not crazy!" Roston shouted, his eyes wide with madness. "I'm standing here, ready to blow us all sky high, and I'm not crazy! My big plan, everything we've been doing-I know it's extreme, fanatical, maybe even insane. But I'm not!"
He raised his makeshift crowbar and brought it down hard on Chris' had shoulder.
"I know you're a good person and you don't deserve any of this!" Roston went on, shouting over the machine's clatter. "And some part of me knew all along that at the end of the day, none of this was ever going to work!"
Chris saw stars, clutching at his shoulder. But he spotted a loose circuit board on the ground nearby. He rolled over on his back in the direction of the circuit board and looked up into Roston's wild eyes. "Then why did you do it?" he asked, cringing through the throbbing.
For a moment, Roston stopped in place, the metal rod held behind his head like a hat, but unmoving. "I had to try," he said. "I just couldn't go back to a normal life. Not after what we did in the war. The world is an ugly place-you know it, you've seen it. I had to try, Captain ... I had to try to make it better."
Chris grabbed the circuit board with his good arm and flung it at Roston. He hit the target, and the metal rod spun out of the colonel's hand.
But Roston was undeterred. "I know it's madness," he said, pulling something small from a side clip attached to his belt. It was black and plastic, about the size of a credit card but thicker. "I know it's not the right thing to do. I'm an honorable man, Captain. I hope you know that. But I won't go back. I won't let the world go back to the way it was."
Chris realized too late that Roston was holding a remote trigger for the bomb he'd mentioned earlier, and his thumb was already on the button-
Two shots cracked above the cacophony of the machine and Roston's body twitched, his face showing surprise. Two holes opened in his torso, blood pooling at the wounds, and the colonel went down.
When Roston hit the ground, Chris saw Owen standing fifty feet away, a gun still aimed, smoke rising from its barrel.
"What are you doing here?" Chris questioned, fighting to try and get hack on his feet. He found it harder than he expected and had to have Owen's help.
"You told me to find the detonator," Owen replied, looking clown at Roston's body. "I found it."
"No ... " said Roston, his voice so faint that Chris almost didn't hear it. "You're too late.... "
His hand was still on the trigger, and even though Owen dove on top of the older man and reached for it, he was too late.
Roston's thumb mashed down on the button as his final act in life.
Chris braced himself, but opened his eyes again when nothing seemed to happen.
"Is it broken?" he asked Owen, who still hadn't gotten up from the ground.
"No," Owen replied, standing up with the little black box in his palm. He held it up so Chris could see.
Above the button was a red LED display of numbers, and it was counting down ...
From seven minutes.
TWENTY
Trisha ran down a flight of narrow stairs, turned a corner, and came to a dead end. The machine was shaking so hard she could barely hold onto the railing as she screamed in frustration.
As she doubled back, her legs sore and tired while climbing up the stairs, Chris' voice blared over their transmitters.
`Everybody out."
She almost stopped in place, but mentally willed herself to keep going, back around the last turn and farther on, running, scrambling, looking for the exit and the main data terminal that was supposedly so close to it.
She put a hand to her ear and covered it so she could hear over the breaking machine's noise. "What's going on?!" she yelled.
"Roston triggered his bomb, but it's on a timer," Chris shouted back. "We've got less than seven minutes before the whole place goes!"
"I haven't found the terminal yet!" she cried.
"I'll help you look!" shouted Terry. "Mae and I are on our way out, and I think I can see the exit. It's on the south-facing wall!"
"What about Owen?" Trisha asked.
"He's here with me, but I'm sending him your way. Listen, we have no time!" Chris screamed. "Input that code now and get out of here!"
"What about you?" Trisha asked, turning another corner. If her bearings were right, she thought she could see the south wall of the Vault, but she was still too high up in the machine. She needed to find more stairs....
"I'm sticking to the plan," replied Chris. "I'll open the Box before the timer reaches zero. I just hope this machine doesn't kill me first!"
Trisha was about to argue that it was too late, that they should just forget the Box and the artifact inside it and let the powers that be find somebody else to dig the thing out and send it back to wherever it came from after all this was over. But before she opened her mouth, the world blinked, and she was no longer inside the machine.
Chris wasn't sure if he should breathe. He knew he shouldn't keep his eyes open. One quick look had told him all he needed to know.
He was weightless inside a small, enclosed space that was roughly spherical in shape and just big enough to hold him. But it wasn't a true sphere, because the sides weren't round. They were flat segments, like a polygon with fifty or one hundred sides. Sticking out from every surface, as well as floating through the air around him, was what looked like hundreds or maybe thousands of fragments of glass.
Chris didn't keep his eyes open long enough to determine if it really was glass, or if it was something else, like a reflective mineral or maybe pieces of a mirror. He covered his eyes and face with his good arm, trying to keep perfectly still so that he didn't float near any of the thousands of razor-sharp edges sticking out f
rom the walls.
It was impossible, of course, and he brushed up against the shards repeatedly, but his clothes and shoes protected most of his skin. He felt the blink happening again, but it didn't happen fast enough. Just as he was leaving this place and returning to the world he knew, a small fragment of glass floated by his head and lodged itself in the side of his neck.
"Commander!" shouted Owen, trying to awaken Chris, who had collapsed on the ground the second they were returned to the machine.
Owen had survived his own little roomful of glass more or less intact, though he had plenty of shallow cuts across his bald head and upper arms. But nothing serious.
He rolled Chris over and spotted the two-inch piece of glass or gemstone or whatever it was sticking out of his neck. He yanked it out and put his hand over the cut from which flowed warm blood.
Owen looked up at the Box, then glanced at the countdown timer attached to Roston's chest. Under six minutes now. That might be just enough time to make it.
Chris' original plan wouldn't work now. They needed a new one.
Quickly.
He had three minutes to drop off Commander Burke with Trisha and Terry, and get back here. He didn't let himself think about the fact that he wouldn't be reunited with Clara and Joey now. But he did comfort himself with the knowledge that they would survive, no matter what.
He would make sure of it.
Terry rounded a final corner at the outer edge of the machine and looked down over the rail to see Mae, who was still ten feet below him on another catwalk. Up some two hundred meters ahead was the exit, and it looked to be on the same level as Mae. He saw someone down there at a terminal and knew it had to be Trisha.
His leg was in tremendous pain, but the adrenaline coursing through him was powerful and he clung to the inhuman energy it gave him.
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