Kill Switch (7 page)

On the other side of that moment the engines of every car on the track stopped.

There were no explosions. Not at first.

The electrical conduction within the transmissions ceased. Gone. Just as the video feeds from the cameras and the big screens mounted around the track went dark. Bang. The commentators' voices were silenced. Just like that.

Only the sound of the crowd pushed its way past the moment. They were screaming, cheering, yelling. And then when the first cars spun out of control and the next wave struck them, it was only the screams that lingered.

Lingered, grew, rose, detonated into shrill blasts of horror as every car crunched together. The drivers had no chance. There was no power at all. No steering, nothing. Only the bull muscle of feet on brakes and desperate hands on dying steering wheels gave the cars any chance.

It was too small a chance, though. The speeds were too great. The shock was too much.

Engines exploded. Electricity was not flowing and there were no sparks from damaged wires. No, the sparks that touched off the fuel were from metal hitting metal. Not many sparks.

Enough.

Enough was too much.

A fireball punched upward from amid the crunched fist of the collision. The screams of the crowd changed in pitch, rising higher, sounding like a great flock of birds in pain.

 

CHAPTER NINE

THE VINSON MASSIF

THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS

ANTARCTICA

AUGUST 19, 10:39
P.M.

Top pulled off his helmet and balaclava so he could see better as he applied a quick field dressing to Bunny's face. I stood guard. Nobody talked about the penguin. We probably should have, but we didn't.

Instead Bunny asked the only question that mattered. “What the hell is going on down here?”

Good question, but none of us had even a clue how to answer it.

Once Bunny's wound was dressed we began moving again. I checked the BAMS unit and got the same steady green, so I tugged down the edge of my own balaclava and sniffed the air. It smelled of machine oil, ozone, ice, and sulfur. Nothing more mysterious than that. Even the rotted meat smell seemed less evident the deeper we went into the complex.

We checked the rest of the storeroom, but it was empty.

Almost empty.

There were no more penguins and there were no people, but all along the back wall there was blood. Pools of it. Drops of it. Arterial sprays of it on the wall.

“Oh … shit,” breathed Bunny.

Against the wall was a stack of crates that was ten boxes high and went all the way to the ceiling, the wooden boxes pressed closed. Somebody had written across the face of the stack.

THE SEQUENCE IS WRITTEN IN THE STARS

“The hell's that supposed to mean?” asked Bunny.

Instead of answering, Top leaned close to the writing, then he winced and recoiled. He didn't have to tell us what had been used to write those words. The floor was covered with bloody footprints. In shoes, in military-style combat boots, and in bare feet.

“Looks like a parade's been through here,” said Top.

“Whoa, whoa,” said Bunny, kneeling by one set of boot prints, “look at this. That's not American.”

He was right. The tread marks of those boots were different from any of the patterns used on the boots and shoes of American military. In our line of work you learn these things. Just as you learn the tread marks of shoes worn by allies and others. This was an “other.”

“Russian,” said Top. “No doubt about it. Standard-issue combat boots.”

We spread out and checked the rest of the prints and found two other sets of Russian boots and five different sets of Chinese boots.

“So,” said Bunny, looking around, “this was an invasion? Does that mean this was an act of war or—?”

Instead of answering I called it in and told Bug, Aunt Sallie, and Church what we'd found. Bloody footprints. No bodies, no shell casings. No answers.

“That base is U.S. military property,” said Aunt Sallie. “That makes it de facto U.S. soil. If you encounter enemy combatants anywhere in Gateway and if they do not surrender their weapons, you will respond appropriately to protect yourself, your team, the Gateway staff, and the physical assets on site. In that order.”

“Copy that,” I said.

Church added, “Get us some answers, Cowboy.”

I promised that I would. Answers would be nice. Kicking some ass would be nice, too.

We followed the Russian prints out of the storeroom and down a corridor lined with closed doors. These opened into offices, bedrooms, small labs, an infirmary, and other functional rooms. No one was in any of them and there was no sign of disturbance. No blood, no damage, no shell casings. The bloody footprints had long since faded to paleness and then vanished.

Despite the coldness of the storage room, the temperature was up in all of the other rooms. Very high. The thermostat read 82.

I reached out to turn it down but found that the dial was broken. Someone had jammed a screwdriver into the gear. There were bloody fingerprints all around.

“Our bad guys don't like the cold,” said Top.

We pressed on and eventually cleared the whole floor.

“Nobody's home,” said Bunny. “Sort of feel happy about that.”

“You know what they say about assumptions, Farm Boy,” Top said quietly.

Suddenly Bug was in my ear. “Cowboy,” he said, “I've been digging up more stuff on this. It's all hidden behind black budget code and—”

I held up my fist and the three of us formed a triangle facing outward.

“We're kind of in the middle of something here, Bug,” I said, “so give it to us fast.”

“Okay, I'm checking the profiles of everyone on the team and it's really strange. Not the individual members, but what they do. The team leader is Dr. Marcus Erskine, a particle physicist from Cal Tech. His second in command is a quantum physicist named Rinkowski, and you have four top electrical engineers, a structural engineer, an astrophysicist, a geologist, an archaeologist, a professor of comparative anatomy, a psychologist, and—get this—three people with PhDs in parapsychology.”

“That's a weird damn posse for studying meteor craters or building EMP cannons,” said Top.

Bunny said, “Oh, man…”

“Anything on the BAMS units?” asked Bug.

I checked. “Everything's in the green.”

“Well, that's good, right? No Martian bacteria.”

Top made a disgusted noise. “Now what makes you think our BAMS units would pick up some kind of alien space virus—?”

“Bacteria,” corrected Bug.

“I'll hurt you, boy,” said Top. “I can fix your mouth so it won't hold soup.”

Bug gave a quick, uncertain laugh.

“Top's right,” said Bunny. “I do not want to catch something that's going to make me grow a third eye or turn my dick into a cactus.”

“Let's not lose our shit,” I said. “You have anything else for us, Bug?”

“Just equipment manifests. Hundreds of tons of building materials. And they brought down every kind of drilling and excavating equipment in the catalog. Big stuff, too. Earth movers and a hundred-ton crane.”

“For what?” demanded Bunny.

“Documents don't say,” said Bug, “but there's something else. We tried to hack the Russian team's mainframe. Their system is offline, but I was able to grab some stuff that had been uploaded to their satellite. They have two separate operations going on. Cowboy … it looks like the Russians are building a hadron collider down there.”

A hadron collider is a very large particle accelerator that's used to test all kinds of extreme theories in particle physics and high-energy physics. I didn't know a lot about them other than what I learned when I took Trident Team to keep an apocalypse cult from taking over the Large Hadron Collider in the Jura Mountains near the Franco-Swiss border. They believed that if it was ramped up to overload it would create a black hole that would destroy the entire solar system. Or something. I didn't delve too deeply into their rationale. We shot a bunch of them and freed the hostages they'd taken.

“Why in the wide blue fuck would the Russians be building a collider here?” I demanded.

Bug grunted. “You tell me, Cowboy. I just look stuff up. But, from the materials and equipment Erskine brought down with him, there's a chance he was building one, too.”

“How's a hadron collider tie into renewable energy research?”

“Not sure it does,” Bug said. “It's all weird, because from what we can tell, the EMP project, the crater excavation thing, and the hadron collider all seem to be parts of the same project. Don't ask me how.”

I didn't, and since he had nothing else, I ended the call. We stood for a moment, facing out, weapons in our hands, heads filled with questions.

“Anyone else feel like bugging the fuck out of here?” asked Bunny hopefully. “This place is freaking me out and we don't have enough boots on the ground to do this right.”

“It's not a job,” said Top, “it's an adventure.”

We moved off. There was a tunnel that connected the main building to an oversized equipment shed. But when we got there it was empty. No cranes, no drills. The BAMS units kept reading in the green, which was comforting. What we found was not.

What we found instead was a big goddamn hole in the ground.

It was in one corner, but it took up nearly a quarter of the floor space—maybe forty yards across. Like I said, a big hole. It dropped down into shadows.

“Look here,” said Top as he squatted down on the far edge. “See this? This isn't a sinkhole, not a proper one. They started digging right here, and from the drill marks on the edge, they got down to a certain point and then something happened. Looks to me like a big-ass chunk of the floor fell in.”

Top shone his light down. There was a rough ice slope angling down, steep but walkable. His light swept back and forth, then stopped on a pool of blood. Bunny touched the edge of the pool with his boot.

“Boss,” he said quietly, “this hasn't even had time to freeze. Whatever's happening here is still happening.”

They looked at me, and I nodded. “Rules of engagement are as follows. Pick your targets, good muzzle discipline. Let's not cap any friendlies … but gentlemen, I don't intend to bleed for this thing, whatever it is.”

“Hooah,” they said. I could see their inner hardness rising to the surface to supplant their fear. Well, some of their fear. I turned my face away, not wanting them to read whatever expression was there.

The ice slope dropped down into shadows. Everything around us was dead quiet. We were too deep underground to hear the howling winds, and all of the machinery here at Gateway was still.

The silence felt wrong, though. It was not the quiet of something empty, something over. It was the quiet of the poised fist. The tension in my chest was like a vise being tightened around my heart.

I licked my lips, which had gone very dry, and then took one single step down the slope. That's when a shrill scream shattered the silence and something came rushing at me out of the shadows.

It was a man. A soldier. Not a Russian. Not a Chinese.

The man was dressed in the camo pattern of the Marine Corps. His eyes were wide and wild, with no trace of sanity. Bloody drool flew from his lips as he shrieked nonsense words.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

His clothes were torn and splashed with gore and he drove straight at me, stabbing at my heart with a bloody bayonet.

 

CHAPTER TEN

THE VINSON MASSIF

THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS

ANTARCTICA

AUGUST 19, 10:41
P.M.

There was no time to dodge out of the way.

He was right there. The blade was falling.

I was dead.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Then suddenly the man was turning, spinning, twisting, breaking apart as bullets tore into him. I heard the gunshots almost as an aftereffect.
Bang! Bang!
Shot after shot as Top and Bunny fired.

The marine slammed into the wall, rebounded, spun halfway around, and dropped face-forward onto the ground, making no attempt to break his fall. The bayonet clattered to the cold stone and the echoes of the gunshots banged and bounced all around me while I simply stood there. I had not moved at all. I hadn't reacted. Not to evade, not to defend myself.

“Cowboy,” said Top. He had to repeat it again, more sharply this time, before I snapped out of it. I blinked at him, then down at the dead marine.

“What—?” I asked.

Bunny hurried over and turned me toward the light, checking to see if I'd been injured, but the blade hadn't touched me. I saw the frown of uncertainty carve itself onto Bunny's face.

“You okay, Boss?” he asked.

“I…”

It was all I could manage. Top came over and they both studied me for a moment, all of us ignoring the dead man.

“You in there, Cap'n,” asked Top gently.

I blinked again and suddenly the strange paralysis was gone. I was myself again and I was back in the moment. It was like waking up from a dream. One of those dreams where you think you're awake but you aren't. You're trapped in that sleep paralysis that keeps you half in one world and half in the other but belonging to neither.

I pushed myself back from them and shook my head. “What just happened?”

No one answered. The facts were all there. Facts, not answers.

I squatted down next to the corpse and rolled him onto his back. He was a Latino man, maybe twenty-three or -four. Probably a good-looking kid in life, but death made him ugly; it made him strangely alien.

“Cowboy,” said Bunny, still using my combat call sign, “what happened to you just now? What was that?”