by Greig Beck
THIRTY-SEVEN
The creature reached the hole in the tunnel wall. The small animals had passed through it and away into another cavern.
As it moved closer, a light winked on in a small box at the base of the wall. Spidery legs shot out of each of the box’s sides and it scrambled towards the monster. The creature pointed its long black proboscis at the scuttling explosive and, with unerring aim, splashed it with corrosive saliva. The box continued for another second, slowed and then started smoking. In another instant it was a puddle of rainbow-coloured electronics and liquefied steel.
As the creature placed one of its thick exoskeletal legs on the rim of the hole, a light sprang on in the other box. This device had a different calibration – it did not wait. The explosion blew the creature backwards, spraying a fifty-foot circle with metal shrapnel and collapsing the ancient cave wall. Hundreds of tons of granite rained down, sealing the small hole and partially burying the monster.
The booming thump echoed along the tunnels, bouncing away into the distance until it was no more than a whisper. For seconds, silence returned to the Sassanid cave, then a cardoor-sized sheet of granite was thrown into the air and other large stones were pushed aside like empty boxes as the creature flipped over onto its segmented legs. Its thick cosmoid scales were barely pitted by the explosive’s tiny jagged missiles, and the crushing impact of tons of stone had stunned it for only moments.
It cautiously approached a section of flat wall away from the rockfall, then struck out with one of its raptorial claws at an acceleration of over 10,000 gravities and nearly twenty-five miles per second. There was a boom as the shock wave travelled up and down the cavern, and a sharp echo continued for many seconds afterwards. But the granite’s crystalline molecular structure held.
The beast reared up on its four powerful rear arthropodic legs. Its upper carapace unfolded to expose its twin attack claws and the numerous smaller thoracic limbs used for grasping prey. Multiple antennae and fan-like whips waved in the air as if it was deciding on its next approach. Its eyestalks lengthened and moved independently of each other as it investigated its options. One eye swivelled towards the interior of the cave, followed by the other. It had decided.
A faint breeze wafted down the tunnel, carrying with it the scent of the small animals the creature was following and the irresistible radiation trace that had initially drawn it here. It sensed there were other openings that would give it access to the tunnel; its dorsoventrally flattened body could compress down and slide through the tightest crevices.
It dropped to the ground and sped into the dark, its chitinous legs making a clicking sound as they rubbed against each other in its haste.
Alex saw Zachariah jump from the explosion, and his HAWCs stopped in their tracks. All eyes swung towards him and then back down the tunnel. No one spoke; everyone listened. Alex knew they were all aware of what that detonation meant – the thing was still coming.
Adira tried to catch his eye and he ignored her to turn back to the dark tunnel. He cleared his mind; it was still there, but further away now. Satisfied, he swung back with a grim smile on his face. ‘Okay, people, the back door is closed. Only one way for us now – forward.’
Rocky didn’t seem to hear; he just stood looking back down into the darkened passage.
‘Let’s go, Rocky.’ The sound of Sam’s voice brought him back, and he trotted out to point, Zach shuffling a few feet behind.
After a few more moments, the small team came to a dead end – a wall made from huge blocks of stone. Alex could hear the hum of machinery, probably air conditioning.
Lagudi knelt and pressed his ear to the wall. ‘I can hear something that sounds like a washing machine.’
‘Maybe it’s an Iranian laundry.’ O’Riordan laughed at his own joke and examined the wall. ‘Looks like cinder block with a substandard mortar mix. Just need to disintegrate the mud around these stones and we should be able to pull ’em out by hand.’ He felt in one of his suit pouches. ‘I just got enough boom gel left to do a ring charge – it’ll give us a high-energy vibration over the bricks in a four-foot area. It’ll shake ’em loose like Grandma’s teeth. Gimme five minutes.’ He looked at Alex. ‘Okay, three.’
Alex walked over to Zachariah, took him by the arm and led him a few feet away from the others. ‘Dr Shomron, remember back at the base when you described the German scientist’s body as being washed back into our universe? If he hadn’t been washed back, then is it possible that something else could have come in his place – to restore some sort of universal balance?’
‘Sure. It’s all theoretical, but just about everything is when you’re talking about black holes or dark matter anomalies,’ said Zach with a shrug.
‘Even theoretically how is that possible?’ Alex asked. ‘How does something come out of a black hole – I thought matter only went one way?’
‘From what we know so far, that’s true. Once you pass the event horizon, there is no return of anything – matter, heat, light, colour, nothing. But there is another theory that says black holes could be doorways, portals; that they are only one side of a wormhole. I, for one, certainly don’t think that matter is destroyed – or even can be. For over a hundred years we’ve had a theory of mass conservation – you know, that matter can’t be created or destroyed. Sure it’s being challenged now, but my view is that the theory is still sound if you regard our planet, solar system or universe as just bigger closed systems.’
‘Okay, but a wormhole – you mean like a warp-in-space-type wormhole?’
‘Yes, but not just in space – in time and even between dimensions. And warp isn’t really the right term. It’s more like a short cut – a quick way to traverse two points in space and time in our universe, or between multiple universes. A more scientific term is a space-time topological nontrivial tunnel. But I actually like “wormhole”. I’m pretty sure that’s how Hoeckler ended up in your backyard, through a wormhole.’ Zach nodded to himself as he spoke, his hands working as if he held a pencil and was drawing mathematical equations in the air. ‘It’s my theory that there’s an osmotic gradient that operates between existences. Matter is universally balanced, and if the concentration in one existence is suddenly upset, then the system will try to restore the balance by some means. Like a swap or transference from one to the other. In fact -’
‘Okay, okay, I think I understand,’ Alex said. ‘Now the million-dollar question – could something have been deposited here through the opposite end of a wormhole? Something… living?’
Zach looked at Alex with a creased brow, then slowly his eyes widened. ‘You think… Yes! Yes, of course, on paper, sure. I was starting to think the same thing. It couldn’t have been a mutation as it was too complete, too efficient. There was nothing about it that inferred deformity – more… precision.’
Zach stepped in closer to Alex and grabbed his upper arm. ‘This is bad, very bad. This means they’re opening black holes and sending matter through… and somehow allowing matter to be pulled back. This is beyond dangerous. What if they pull through some type of infection, or a universal parasite plague? Not to mention what the black hole itself will do. We need to shut this off immediately. We need to destroy it.’
Alex patted Zach’s shoulder. ‘Just help us find it first, Dr Shomron. Then we can decide what course of action to take.’
A low-frequency hum followed by the sound of sand raining down signalled the end of their conversation.
‘I think we have a breakthrough, so to speak,’ Alex said with a grin. ‘Let’s see where we’re up to.’
He moved back to the group, leaving Zach standing in the dark. Alex didn’t need to see the scientist’s face to know it was troubled.
The HAWCs worked quietly and efficiently in the darkness, removing the cinder blocks until they had a hole roughly four feet across. They held their position, waiting, listening for the slightest sound of habitation. After a few minutes, Alex nodded his head to proceed. They broke throug
h about five feet above a dirty moist floor in a tunnel lined with pipes. The cool air was like a balm against their perspiration-and dust-streaked faces, but there was no time to rest. The whine of the air conditioning was louder now that they were through the wall. Faulty fluorescent tube lighting cast a white flickering glow every dozen feet along the tunnel.
Lagudi went through first and shot ahead to provide forward cover. One by one the others slithered through, with Alex last. He lifted O’Riordan up above his head so the HAWC could turn off the light tube near the hole in the wall so the breach was less noticeable.
The HAWCs moved quickly down the tunnel in single file until they reached a nexus of corridors. The Iranian signs were meaningless to everyone except Adira, who pointed to one that indicated both elevator and exit.
They avoided the lift – if they were being pursued, no one wanted to be caught in a steel box jammed in a vertical concrete pipe. The solid wooden fire door they encountered was old-style and low-tech. The heavy frame and solid steel lock casing was sealed tight; tough luck if there was a fire. Lagudi reckoned he could pick it in under two minutes. O’Riordan said he could blow it open in one. Alex shook his head and took the handle – he exerted a gradually increasing enormous pressure to the frame and was rewarded by a soft splintering sound. The door swung open.
‘Hey, must have been unlocked,’ he said, and winked at Sam, who gave him an oh really look.
The HAWCs were now travelling blind; neither the American nor Mossad information networks had been able to obtain any intel on the inside of the Jamshid II facility in Arak. Alex knew they didn’t have time to do a floor-by-floor sweep of the multi-level facility, so he based his judgment on a Western military design – first level for meeting rooms; second level for scientifics, where there was probably more shielding; lower levels for storage and perhaps staff quarters. ‘Level two,’ he told his team.
They went up the stairs like wraiths. They only halted when they heard the elevator coming down, but it continued past their position and so they resumed their rapid climb.
Al Janaddi was in the sphere room, shouting instructions, when a guard interrupted him.
‘Professor Al Janaddi, one of the motion sensor alarms has gone off down in level five,’ the young bearded soldier informed him. ‘There’s movement in the eastern sub-basement.’
‘Achhh, what now?’ snapped Al Janaddi. ‘I can’t deal with everything personally. It’s probably rats – send some of Bhakazarri’s madmen down there to shoot them. I’m busy!’
The man spun on his heel and left. Ahmad Al Janaddi was about to turn back to his monitors when he paused – could it be the intruders that the Takavaran were meant to be guarding against? What if they were American agents come to steal his work? Maybe they knew its potential and wanted it for themselves.
He tapped his pursed lips with a stubby finger. They wouldn’t need to steal it – he would gladly trade it to go with them. After all, he was the secret to the process, not the machines. He just had to make things a little easier for them. The sub-basement didn’t have electronic locks, but everywhere else…
Al Janaddi looked quickly over his shoulder. No guards were in the room and all the technicians were deeply engrossed in their preparation for the test run. His fingers flew over the keyboard and he dived into Jamshid II’s electrical security grid. Just a few open doors should help, he thought as he changed the small green security lights to red.
Although he couldn’t hear the whirr of the electronic locks being disengaged, he imagined it occurring throughout the facility. The doors were now open for everyone… and everything.
Al Janaddi shut the screen and glanced over his shoulder once more. Satisfied, he smiled and then moved his lips to practise again. ‘Hello, I live in New York. How are you?
‘How are you doing? I live in New York.
‘Howrya doin’? I’m a NooYarka.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
It didn’t take long for the Takavaran to find the break in the wall. Of the fifty soldiers deployed to the inside of the Jamshid II facility, ten had been sent to the lowest level. Now Makhmoud Ajhban, the squad leader, called in to report the wall intrusion to the unit leader, who ordered all his men to break into ten-man teams and perform a floor-by-floor search.
Ajhban sent eight men through the hole to investigate if there were any more enemy agents outside. He hoped so; he would put his men up against anyone or anything. The tall Takavaran was looking forward to breaking the boredom of what had, up to now, been a babysitting job in the middle of the desert.
*
The eight men cautiously entered the tunnel. They only had small handheld torches against the darkness, which enveloped them like a velvet curtain once they had moved away from the hole in the wall. Akhbin Ramsheed crouched down and examined the floor of the cave. Multiple footprints led back into the dusty tunnel: a party of at least five, perhaps six, military men; all large, with one exception – a youth or maybe a woman. He smiled at the thought of capturing a Western woman.
The Takavaran passed through the skeleton room without stopping – these men had witnessed violent death a hundred times and a few more cadavers didn’t interest them. They stopped at the rockfall and looked in silence at the tracks that disappeared into it. Ramsheed felt the cool granite – the ancient rocks were newly broken. Just blown, he thought. His neck prickled and he looked around and sniffed. There was a lingering sweet smell, like overripe fruit and vinegar.
It was then they heard the clicking, like furiously working rug-picking sticks. Ramsheed gave a small signal whistle and the men moved into a back-to-back defensive formation, torches placed on top of their handguns and held in front of them to throw weak yellow pipes of light into the gloom.
The creature was already there with them, standing motionless just a few feet from Ramsheed. In the dark he had mistaken it for a large stalagmite. Even when he shone his torch full onto the gigantic, glistening frame his brain refused to comprehend what he was seeing.
A huge claw shot out and cleaved his body from the navel up. His fellow soldiers were bathed in a warm spray of blood.
The men fired instantly, but their bullets glanced ineffectively off the hardened carapace plates. A single bullet penetrated between the gristly jointed segments on the monster’s slightly softened underbody – the projectile was not large enough to cause any significant trauma, but the spark of pain inflamed the creature. It moved at a blurring speed into the midst of the unit, spitting its corrosive venom and striking out with its claws until six bodies lay in pieces or liquefying on the tunnel floor. The remaining two men ran for their lives towards the hole in the wall. One managed to dive through, but the other was grabbed in a deadly embrace.
The creature’s mandibles parted and it extended its feeding tube and inserted it slowly into the soft skin at the base of the man’s neck. His hellish screams changed to a strangled, wet gurgling sound. Already his face and torso were beginning to collapse as his insides were liquefied and sucked out from his body.
Makhmoud Ajhban struck the jabbering man full in the face to try to make him more coherent. He had no time for this; he had heard the gunfire and the screams from inside the tunnel and he needed information. Spittle was running down the terrified Takavaran’s chin and his eyes were like those of a horse about to bolt. He was babbling about Azih Dahaka – an ancient monster from Persian stories to scare children and old goat-herders on dark nights. Azih Dahaka, the stinging dragon, was a fearsome demon from the time of creation, a horn-headed monster with the tail of a scorpion and a great armoured body. It was said to eat men and horses and would eventually destroy the world. Azih Dahaka had been defeated in battle by a great warrior who blinded him and chained him beneath a mountain.
Ajhban was about to strike the useless man again when a small sound from the opening in the tunnel wall attracted his attention. Two foot-long eyestalks came through the hole, followed by a waxy, insectoid head that was sharp at one end and telescopi
ng out from under an enormous armoured hump.
The thing’s dark green shell was spattered with fresh blood, and as Ajhban watched, a vertical split at the front of the face broke open to reveal the tip of a black spike that eased out and back. As the barb re-entered, more blood dripped from the dark bristled maw. The black bulbs of its eyes fixed on the two remaining Takavaran, and it climbed through into the passageway and perched upside down on the ceiling like some sort of giant flattened cockroach.
Ajhban had seen enough. He threw the convulsing soldier roughly to the ground and turned to run.
The creature dropped down on the fallen man and snatched up his body. The front of its torso opened and a series of smaller thoracic limbs held the struggling soldier tight against its plated chest like a parcel of meat. The whole time its eyestalks were on the squad leader as he sprinted down the corridor. For a hunter, fleeing prey was irresistible. It shot after the running man, knowing it could catch him with ease.
The solid white door from the stairwell into level two had no lock, just a bar embedded in a steel plate. It opened easily when Sam pulled lightly on the handle. The HAWCs went through fast and fanned either side of the doorway.
All quiet.
They were in an immaculate corridor with gleaming white tiled walls and a ceiling that had recessed lighting every few feet, giving it a surgical brightness. Good, means we’re either on the right floor or very close, thought Alex.
‘Stay alert,’ he ordered his team. He knew that the better the facilities, the better the security – and he expected it to be formidable here, given what they had encountered at the Persepolis facility. He motioned them to proceed.
Jamshid II was based on a circular silo design: most of the important rooms were in the centre and the exits and storage on the outside. He knew that if they continued along the curving corridor they would eventually return to where they’d started – no corners or dead ends. Great for surveillance, not so great for Special Forces insertions.
