by Glenn Cooper
The barge made a hard landing under full wind power, jolting the Earthers on board. John and Bates quickly lowered the sails, while Trevor jumped off, pulling a line.
When they were disembarking, John passed Smithwick’s limp body to some of the men. Last off, he watched the barge drift downstream.
“Not a bad vessel,” Bates said. “Hope we don’t need it again.”
“You got that right,” John said. With Smithwick back on his shoulder, he shouted, “Everyone, follow Trevor and me.”
They were less than a mile from the hot zone but something ahead disturbed John. By the standards of Hell the day was bright and he squinted to better define what he was seeing in the marshlands and bulrushes.
“Is that a crowd?” he asked Trevor.
“Looks like it, guv.”
John swore and said, “We may be screwed.”
“Is the temperature stable?” Emily asked.
A scientist in Geneva remotely monitoring the MAAC magnet temperature came on one of the video screens and said, “Holding at 1.7 K.”
“All magnets online?” she asked.
Geneva reported the schematics looks good.
“We’re ready to initiate injection of the particle guns,” she said. “Paul, I’ve begun a one-minute clock.”
Loomis was hunched over a workstation and replied, “On your mark.”
As the clock ticked off the seconds, she looked increasingly brittle. “Begin injection,” she said.
Loomis checked the injection pressures and announced, “Uranium gas is flowing, boosters are functioning, the synchrotron appears to be filling normally.”
“Please let me know when filling is complete,” Emily said.
A minute later Loomis made the call and Geneva concurred.
Emily glanced at the control-room doors, hoping against hope they would fly open but they did not. “Fire the particle guns, Paul.”
Trevor was staring at the Hellers blocking their way. “Maybe we can go around them,” he said.
John grunted. “Maybe. Let’s get a closer look.”
Matthew Coppens had found a large crowbar onboard the barge and he was carrying it in both hands. He caught up with John and asked if they were going to have to fight their way through.
“We’ll see.”
Matthew kept up with him, stride for stride. “I’m ready if we do,” he said.
“You ever fight anyone before?” John asked, smiling at his crowbar.
“Never, but now might be the time to start.” Then he added with an air of desperation, “I’ve got to get back to my wife and son.”
“Good man. Stay close.”
There were dozens of Hellers between them and the hot zone, all with their backs to the approaching Earthers. They seemed to be watching and waiting, edging, but not rushing forward.
The ground to the south, nearer to Dartford village, was slightly elevated and as they got within a hundred yards of the Hellers John and Trevor spotted someone waving furiously at them a hundred yards past the crowd.
“Think that’s one of the good guys?” Trevor asked.
A shot rang out, the distinctive big-boy sound of an AK-47. One of the Hellers screamed in pain and the cordon surrounding the hot zone moved back a few yards.
“Music to my ears,” John said.
In the distance there was more waving and another shot was fired. Indistinct shouts from the SAS men came their way on the morning breeze.
The Hellers still had their backs to them, unaware of their presence.
“I think our guys want us to make our way through,” Trevor said.
“They’d help by letting a lot more lead fly,” John said.
“Maybe they don’t have the ammo,” Trevor said.
“You may be right.” John stopped and with his free hand motioned for everyone behind him to halt.
“What’s the plan?” Bates asked.
“We’re going to try to ram our way through,” John said. “When I give the signal, you all need to run like, you know, hell. Stuart and Matthew, help George. Leroy, you going to be able to hoof it?”
“Like Seabiscuit,” Bitterman said.
“I’m not sure I like this plan,” Trotter complained.
“You’re overruled,” John said. “You don’t like it, go back to your friends at the palace.”
Trotter sneered but kept quiet.
“Okay, Trev, concentrate your fire, make each shot count,” John said, getting a tighter grip on the moaning woman on his shoulder.
Trevor raised his rifle. “You know I’ve only got ten rounds, guv.”
“I know.”
Ben Wellington had choppered into Dartford that morning and was at the military staging area to the west of the hot zone monitoring two channels of chatter on a headset. One channel covered military operations, the other, a feed from the MAAC control room. In Manchester, the prime minister and Cobra were doing the same.
The radio came to life with an army report from Sevenoaks. “I see them! There they are! They’re coming through on the Belmeade playing fields. They’re making their way toward our position.”
“Are you sure it’s the SAS?”
“Got to be them. Standby, please. Standby …”
Ben heard the prime minister’s voice. “Did he say the SAS are coming through?”
“I can confirm now. Captain Marsh is here. This is A Group. He reports that all surviving men and the evac team have come through.”
Ben was breathing heavily. “Ben Wellington, here. Any sign of John Camp or Trevor Jones?”
“Negative. That’s a negative. Only SAS.”
Dispirited, Ben switched to the MAAC comms channel.
Emily looked at the elliptical map of MAAC displayed on the screen. Two dots, one red, one green, representing uranium proton streams traveled in opposite directions, making the circuit around London at near light speed. If all was going according to plan, evidence of proton collisions would begin to accumulate.
Loomis had moved to the muon spectrometer workstation and was studying the data feeds.
“What’s the strangelet activity, Paul?” Emily asked.
“No change. They’re still within the system at elevated, baseline levels.”
A technician in Geneva called out, “Approaching 20 TeV.”
“That’s the level that got us into this mess,” Emily muttered.
“Sorry, what did you say?” Loomis asked.
“Nothing. What are you seeing, Paul?”
From Geneva: “You’ve exceeded 20 TeV, now 30 TeV and rising.”
“I’m seeing collision tracings, lots of them,” Loomis said. “Hold on, Emily, this is bad. I’m seeing a big spike in strangelet formation.”
Ben heard the prime minister ask what the spike in strangelets meant. Someone in Manchester, presumably a scientist-advisor, said, “It means the connections between the two dimensions are likely to increase in size and perhaps in number.”
Trevor aimed his first shot at a broad-shouldered man in a brown coat. The bullet tore through his back, swiftly dropping him. Hellers turned at the gunshot and began shouting. Trevor calmly walked toward them firing twice more until there were three bodies on the grass.
John was keeping track. Seven rounds left.
He heard another shot, this one coming from the SAS. Another Heller fell onto the pile.
“They’re going to help as much as they can!” John shouted to Trevor. Then he turned to the others, “Get ready to run when I run!”
Another SAS round hit home.
John bellowed, “Okay, Trev, charge!”
Emily felt her chest tighten as the collision energies rose to levels she thought she would never see.
40 TeV
50 TeV
60 TeV
“Paul?”
He clearly knew what she was asking. “Strangelets are off the charts.”
Ben heard the prime minister announcing that he was being advised to order all personnel surroundi
ng hot zones to immediately move back from their positions.
A colonel at the Leatherhead HZ asked for specific instructions. “How far?” he said.
“How far?” Lester asked someone in his conference room.
A voice said, “I have no idea. How about two hundred yards for a start?”
The colonel in Leatherhead started to give the order but stopped. “We’ve got activity here. Men coming through. Men approaching. Hang on. SAS coming through. It’s Gatti. It’s C Group.”
Ben listened until it was confirmed that all surviving members of the group and the evacuation team were accounted for before asking about John and Trevor, only to be told they were not present.
The army colonel in charge of the Dartford HZ ordered a pullback and Ben began following the retreating personnel.
All of them were running, following Trevor who kept up a slow but steady rate of fire. John counted three more shots coming from the SAS side then no more.
They were thirty yards from the Hellers cordon. Some of them were armed with swords but they didn’t look like soldiers, just ordinary men lured by the promise of crossing to Earth. They couldn’t go forward toward the SAS gunfire or backwards toward Trevor’s so they scattered laterally but not fast enough to make a clean corridor. There were still a half dozen Hellers standing their ground near the growing pile of writhing bodies.
John lost count of how many rounds Trevor had left. Two? Three?
Trevor fired at close range and one of the remaining men fell.
He fired again and dropped another one.
He was ten yards away when he pulled the trigger again but nothing happened. On empty and five yards away, all he could do was scream at them at the top of his lungs.
Two men ran one way, two the other and Trevor hit the gap running.
John turned, and shouted for the others to keep up. George Lawrence had stumbled. Henry Quint lifted him partway and Matthew and Stuart finished the job. They began running, one on each side, transporting him in a seated carry.
Captain Yates was running toward them with some of his men, shouting, “Come on! Move it! Move it!”
Trevor reached Yates first. “You guys out of ammo?” he said.
“We are now,” Yates said. “Are those the MAAC people?”
“Yeah,” Trevor panted.
“Christ, we’ve got to hurry. We’re being evacuated. They’ve got the fix in the works.”
John arrived next and took up the offer to transfer Smithwick to a couple of troopers.
“Help that man too,” John said pointing toward Lawrence.
A soldier hustled over and got Lawrence on his shoulder.
“Run!” Yates shouted, heading toward the hot zone. “For God’s sake, run!”
From Geneva: “You’re at 220 TeV.”
Emily was standing behind Loomis now, watching the flood of spectrometer data and every few seconds, glancing toward the doors.
“Paul …”
“I see it,” he said. “The strangelet activity has stabilized. It’s high but it’s definitely plateaued.”
“220 … 240 … 260 …”
“I think the levels are falling,” Emily said.
“I agree,” Loomis said.
“270 … 280 … 290 …”
“Oh, John,” she whispered.
“300 TeV. Maximum energy level.”
She stared at the doors.
“Look!” Paul said. “Are you seeing this?”
She turned back to the screen. The strangelet activity had dropped to zero.
“It worked?” she asked.
Loomis got up and hugged her. “Yes! It worked! It actually worked!”
Ben heard the prime minister asking for confirmation. “Are we sure this has been effective?” he asked several times. “Call directly into the control room. I need confirmation.”
From his new position, Ben didn’t have good visual lines on the MAAC complex.
“Does anyone have eyes on the Yates group?” he asked.
No one did.
Then he heard Lester’s side of a phone conversation with Emily.
“You’re saying the strangelet activity is zero? They’re all gone? Permanently? Yes, I suppose that would be premature. But are the connections severed? Is that the only way to tell? Really? All right, keep me informed, and Dr. Loughty, congratulations. Yes, pass that on to Dr. Loomis as well.”
Ben listened to the prime minister address his cabinet and heard Jeremy Slaine say, “If the only way of finding out if the connections are severed is to enter the hot zone then we’ll need a volunteer.”
Ben didn’t think it through. He didn’t think about his wife or his children. He didn’t think about himself. “I volunteer,” he said into the headset.
“Who is speaking?” Lester asked.
“This is Ben Wellington. I’m at Dartford.”
“Are you sure, Ben?” the prime minister asked.
“I’m sure.” He started walking. “I’m heading toward the MAAC complex now, approaching from the west.”
Five minutes passed, then ten.
Emily sat collapsed in her chair, a depression as black as she had ever felt, enveloping her in a shroud of sorrow.
“It’s still zero,” Paul said. “I think it’s over.” He looked at her and when he saw her anguish he said, “I’m sorry, Emily. I really am.”
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” she said. “I can’t go on without him.”
Loomis stood and came over to her. “You’re young,” he said, “you’ve got your whole …”
The doors swung open.
Emily looked up, her momentary hopefulness dashed by seeing Ben Wellington come through, the doors closing behind him.
“I walked directly into the hot zone,” he said to her. “I didn’t wind up in Hell. I wound up here.”
“Then it’s really over,” Emily said. Her voice was not much more than a whisper.
“But I found something along the way,” Ben said, opening the doors again. “I found this.”
John came through.
In an instant she was transformed. She sprang up and threw herself at him. He caught her in midair and held her against him.
“Never,” she whispered to him.
“Never what?”
“Never leave me again.”
Trevor was next through, then Bates, Bitterman, Quint, all of them, followed by Yates and what was left of B Group.
“You found them, you really found them,” Emily said to John. “Stay there. I’ll be right back.”
She began tearfully hugging her people, Matthew, David, Chris, all the techs.
When she got to Henry Quint he couldn’t make eye contact with her.
She still despised him for exceeding the approved energy levels and causing all this misery, but she said, “I’m sorry you had to go through this, Henry.”
All he could do was mumble, “Most people would say I got what I deserved.”
No one noticed Trotter slinking off on his own.
“Where’s Brenda? And Kelly?” she asked.
Chris shook her head. No more needed to be said.
“Trevor,” Emily said, hugging him too. “You must ring Arabel right away.”
His smile lit up the room. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Excuse me?” one of the troopers, the group medic, called out. “Is there a first-aid kit about? This woman needs attention. She’s dangerously dehydrated.”
Emily said, “It’s over there, in that cabinet.”
Smithwick was laid onto the floor. After a few tries, the medic found a vein and began pouring saline into her.
The next five minutes were a blur.
The technical people crowded around Paul Loomis and the spectrometry workstation, happily losing themselves in data.
Ben had, what he hoped would be his last call with the prime minister for a long time, and when he was finished he called his wife and told her the ordeal was almost ove
r. Then he told her what she really wanted to hear—that he loved her.
Bitterman and all the VIPs picked up available phones and began making tearful calls to loved ones in England and America.
Captain Yates used Ben’s headset to debrief his superior, Major Parker-Burns, then passed the headset from soldier to soldier, so they could get patched into their loved ones.
Trotter spent the time scouring the control-room floor, looking for something. He eventually found it where Emily had slid it under a table.
And Emily and John sat against a wall, just holding hands. They didn’t need to talk. There was time for that.
Yates made an announcement that everyone needed to stay put for a few more minutes until an army medical and extraction team arrived.
On her second bag of saline, Karen Smithwick blinked and began looking around. She tried to sit but the medic told her to lie still. From her vantage point, she searched the room and saw Trotter.
Emily and John heard her loud, insistent grunts and got up to see what the matter was.
“Is she all right?” Chris asked.
The medic said her vital signs were improving.
“She’s trying to tell us something,” Chris said.
Emily saw she was making hand gestures, one hand moving over her palm and asked her, “Do you want to write something?”
Smithwick nodded vigorously.
Emily got her a pen and notebook.
When Smithwick finished writing she waved the notebook at Emily who quickly read the scrawl.
“My God,” Emily whispered.
“What’s she saying?” John asked.
Emily read it, loud enough for everyone in the control room to hear it. “Anthony Trotter did this to me. He is responsible for Brenda’s death. I think he killed Kelly.”
John saw red.
He spotted Trotter across the room and went for him, screaming, “You fucking bastard!”
“John, leave him,” Trevor shouted. “He’s not worth it.”
