Spiral (52 page)

ONCE THEY WERE OUT
of the zero-gravity belt and moving into the cone-shaped opening, the rays of the second sun made everything shimmer as if they were underwater. Will continued to blip his booster to maintain their speed while Elliott checked the readout from the tracker. There was no way she could hear the clicking emanating from it: The rumble from the zero-gravity belt continued to drown everything out.

It was half an hour before Drake signaled that they should head for the side of the void. As soon as they touched down, he and Sweeney detached themselves from the raft of nuclear weapons and equipment. Then they slid one of the bombs into position behind a large rock, securing it in place with a rope. Drake immediately opened a hatch in its side and began to prep it for detonation.

“We did it,” Elliott sighed wearily, as she lay down in the scree.

“Yep. Never ever thought we’d be here again,” Will said, slumping next to her. They shared a bar of chocolate, washing it down with water from a canteen. There was a loud gurgling noise, and Will looked away in embarrassment.

“Ohhhh,” he groaned. “It’s messed up my stomach again.”

“Mine, too.” Elliott laughed. “It’s the low gravity, isn’t it?”

Will didn’t reply as he peered around in an attempt to find a feature he recognized from the last time they were there. He thought of the ledge where he, Elliott, and Dr. Burrows had landed, all of them immediately falling into a dead sleep because they were so thoroughly exhausted.

Will regarded the small Alpine plants around him — they were clinging on to the scree with trailing root systems like unraveled cotton, and there was also a number of the dwarf trees with tortured trunks. He could tell from the abundance of vegetation that they must have long since passed the ledge he’d been looking for. Realizing it was futile to try to find anything familiar — the vast scale of the place made that highly unlikely — he shut his eyes.

“Are you thinking about the Doc?” Elliott asked gently.

“The Doc?” he said, blinking his eyes open again. It took him a moment to work out who Elliott was referring to. She was using her and Drake’s nickname for his stepfather, Dr. Burrows.

“I suppose that means you weren’t,” Elliott decided after he failed to reply.

“No, I wasn’t, and, you know . . . I don’t think about him so much anymore,” Will admitted. “It’s funny — but you’ve got your dad back now, and I sort of feel as though mine’s gone. If all those years of Darklighting made him the way he was, then everything he did and said wasn’t really
him
. . . and he doesn’t seem so” — Will frowned, trying to come up with the right word — “
important
. . . so important to me any longer,” he said eventually.

“He was still your father,” Elliott reminded him.

Drake finally closed the panel in the casing of the nuclear weapon, replacing the screws to secure it, then rejoined everyone. Sweeney and the Colonel had attached a harness around the remaining bomb so that it would be easier to carry.

“Okeydoke,” Drake said, unhitching a radio detonator from his belt and pressing a sequence of buttons. Sweeney had an identical detonator in his hand. “Check?” Drake asked.

“Check,” Sweeney confirmed.

“Good — that’s one nuke ready to rock ’n’ roll,” Drake announced.

“
Was ist das
rock ’n’ roll
?
” the Colonel asked.

“Oh, sorry, I meant that it’s primed,” Drake explained. “I’ve also taken the precaution of installing an anti-tamper fuse on the inspection panel, and a trembler. So in the unlikely event that the Styx were to come all the way down here and stumble across our little surprise, it’ll go off as they attempt to open or move it . . . and the job will be done. This opening will be one almighty mass of fused silica, and nothing will ever get through again.” He turned to look down at the darkness of the zero-gravity belt. “Not that it’s a viable route to the surface for them, anyway.”

“And the second bomb?” Elliott asked.

“You and Colonel Bismarck know the terrain, so I want you to help me locate the Ancients’ passage,” Drake replied. He squinted up at the sun. “If we use both boosters on full power, we can really motor it as far as we can get to the top. Then we’ll lug the device the rest of the way. And thank God for the low gravity.”

The boosters did help, but when the frequent bursts from them weren’t enough to counter the increasing pull of gravity, everybody had to muck in. In pairs they took turns to haul the nuclear weapon up the forty-five-degree incline, and it was a good twelve hours before they arrived at the massive crater that marked the top of the void.

“Here are we,” Drake said, putting on a pair of sunglasses. “Hope you all remembered to pack some sunblock.”

They were covered in the red soil, and so exhausted and cramped from the climb that they could hardly stand.

Sweeney stretched his back with a groan. As he removed his hat to mop his forehead, the full force of the globe in the sky above hit him. “Crikey!” he gasped. “That’s bright. It’s worse than the bloomin’ tropics.”

“Welcome to the Garden of the Second Sun,” Will said. “Or
,
according to what my dad thought,
Eden
.”

“Pretty bloody far from my idea of Eden,” Sweeney complained, putting his hat back on and surveying the surrounding foothills, which were covered with patchy woodland.

“Try jumping,” the Colonel suggested to Drake and Sweeney.

The two men regarded him for a moment, then Sweeney crouched down and leaped into the air. He reached three or four times the height he’d have been able to achieve Topsoil. They heard him chortling as he came back to Earth. He immediately jumped again, using his powerful legs to drive himself even higher. When he landed, he had a look of schoolboy glee on his face.

“Maybe this place isn’t so bad, after all.” He grinned.

Drake, Elliott, and Colonel Bismarck left with the nuclear device, and Sweeney found somewhere he and Will could wait out. He chose a depression on the side of the nearest foothill. It didn’t exactly give them much protection from the sun, but at least they weren’t in full view if any Styx decided to wander by.

Meanwhile, Elliott didn’t take long to locate the stream that would lead them to the waterfall and the entrance to the Ancients’ passage. But as they emerged from the jungle, what the three of them saw stopped them dead in their tracks.

The waterfall shielding the entrance had been dammed, and there was no sign of the idyllic pool, with the iridescent dragonflies, that it had originally drained into.

But that wasn’t what brought them to a halt.

As far as the eye could see, the trees had been cut down and the jungle turned into fields of sun-hardened mud. And on these fields an unbelievable number of tanks, personnel carriers, large-bore guns, and military aircraft had been assembled, all carefully arranged in ranks as if ready to bring into the tunnel at a moment’s notice.

“My army” was all Colonel Bismarck could murmur as he shook his head in disbelief.

“We didn’t get here a moment too soon,” Drake said. “If the Styx had finished widening the way through, this little lot would have found its way Topsoil . . . as toys for the Styx Warrior Class.” Drake was already scanning between the lines of equipment. “And there are bound to be sentries dotted about — we need to get in and out as quickly as we can.”

As Elliott kept watch, Drake and the Colonel took the bomb into the passage. Once they’d rejoined Elliott, Drake again used his radio detonator to prime it, pressing the sequence of buttons.

“Rock ’n’ roll?” Colonel Bismarck asked.

Drake nodded. “All done. Let’s get back to Will and Sparks at the rendezvous, then we can all go home again,” he said.

“I
am
home,” Colonel Bismarck pointed out.

Will and Sweeney had heard rumbles of distant thunder, but then there was a mighty peal, accompanied a moment later by a searing blue flash of lightning. It was visible even through the blinding sunlight.

“Whoa! What a buzz!” Sweeney said, clapping a hand to the side of his head. “That gave the old capacitors a jolt.”

“So lightning affects you, too?” Will asked.

“Only if it’s a full-on electrical storm,” Sweeney replied.

“Well, you get plenty of those in this place,” Will told him. “Are you going to be all r —”

“Hold on,” Sweeney interrupted him as he extracted his walkie-talkie from his pocket and read the small LCD. “It’s Drake. They’re not far now. It’s almost showtime.”

“And we only just got here,” Will said, but as tired as he was, he couldn’t have been happier that their mission was nearly over and that they would soon be leaving the inner world.

He and Sweeney heaved their Bergens on. As they started toward the crater, the wind picked up and the sun was obscured by angry black clouds.

Sweeney spotted Drake and the others emerge from the tree line in the distance. And, as the two groups came together by the lip of the crater, they found themselves in the middle of a full-blown monsoon.

“Nice weather,” Drake joked as soon as he was close enough to them. Taking his sunglasses off, he blinked the rain from his eyes.

“No problems with the locals?” Sweeney asked.