Offworld (49 page)

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.

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 from 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.

"Mae!" he shouted down toward the scaffolding she was running
along. She stopped in place and looked up at him.