State of Emergency (17 page)

'No! Absolutely not!'

Josh was talking to Mark Harrison using his wrist vidcom.
Pete was back in the Big Mac, preparing to bring the
machinery he needed down to ground level from the bowels
of the giant craft. Mai and Steph were waiting for Josh close
by the entrance to the CCC.

'Look, Mark. I don't have time for this.'

Mark glared back at him from the tiny screen. 'Now, you
listen to me, Josh. We agreed –'

'Yes, but things have changed.'

'Not as far as I'm concerned.'

'Well, that's the whole point, isn't it, Mark? You're not
here. We are. Pete can do this. He can be in and out of Hall
A in the Cage in only a couple of minutes. It'll at least give
the emergency services a chance to save lives without the
whole ceiling coming down on them.'

Mark looked away from the camera that was transmitting
his image some 1500 miles to Josh's miniature receiver.

'I have my orders,' he said finally.

'Yes, but you don't like them, do you?'

'No, I don't – but I will obey them.'

'That's your prerogative, Mark.'

'Josh.'

'Mark, we have to be allowed to make our own decisions on
the ground. We have to, otherwise this whole mission will fail –
every mission will fail! You have to extend us that respect.'

There was a faint crackle down the line. Josh stared at the
top of his commander's head. Finally Mark looked up.

'You have fifteen minutes, Josh. Not a second more. I'll
square it somehow.'

'Good call, Mark,' Josh replied, and snapped off the
vidcom.

'We have to do something,' Todd protested. 'We could go
down any minute.'

'Good at stating the fucking obvious, aren't you, Todd?'
Dave snapped.

'Oh! Pardon me for breathing.'

'That's the trouble with you, dude, it's all me, me, me,
isn't it? It's a wonder you don't get giddy watching the world
revolve around you.'

Todd reddened. Enraged, he rushed across the two yards
of the elevator, his good hand balled in a fist. But Dave was
too fast for him. He sidestepped Todd's swing and landed a
solid punch to the side of his head, knocking him away. He
landed on his bad arm and screamed in agony.

Dave went to kick him in the guts, but Marty Gardiner
got between them, holding Dave back with a surprisingly
powerful grip. 'You might have five decades on me, son,' he
said. 'But back in the day I was middleweight state champion.
I could still flatten you, believe me.'

Dave went limp and slid to the floor, his back to the
mirror. He buried his head in his folded arms. They could
see his shoulders heaving and hear the sobs he was trying
to keep back.

Todd shuffled to the opposite wall and nursed his arm.
Lines of pain were etched into his lathered face. The bandage
was wet with blood.

Marty tapped Dave on the shoulder. 'I think your friend
could do with a few more of those pills,' he said quietly, and
flicked a nod towards the backpack. 'May I?'

Dave put his hand in the bag. 'Here,' he said, handing
Marty the bottle. 'I've got another.' He glanced at Todd, who
didn't meet his eye.

'Hold on.' It was Kyle Foreman. 'The bag – Dave?' And
he held out his hand. The young man passed it over
grudgingly. Foreman pulled a pen from his shirt pocket
and stabbed it into the back of the bag, ripping open the
nylon.

'Hey, man!' Dave protested. But the senator had completely
disembowelled the backpack and was yanking at an
aluminium pole about a foot long and three quarters of an
inch thick. He pulled two identical poles free from the bag
and tossed the remnants back to Dave. At the elevator doors,
he rammed one of the poles into the tiny space where the
doors met.

He half-turned. 'Dave – get the other one into the gap at
the bottom of the door. I'll do the top.'

Dave stepped forward and picked up the pole from
between Foreman's feet. He knelt down and tried his best
to slip the metal into the narrow join. He couldn't get any
leverage – the gap was too narrow.

'Yes!' Foreman exclaimed. He had managed to force the
end of the pole between the doors. Leaning on it, the length
of metal slowly bent. 'Damn it!' he hissed, then quickly
removed the pole and stuck the bent end into the join. This
time it kept its shape and a gap appeared at the base of the
elevator door.

Dave set to work again. He pushed down at the fissure
with all his weight, forcing an inch of metal into the space
between the doors.

'Lever it left,' Foreman instructed.

They leaned on the poles and the doors opened an inch.
Foreman got his fingers into the gap and yanked to left and
right, straining with every ounce of his strength. Marty and
Todd each went to a door to help.

The doors were not giving up easily. But with a gargantuan
effort the four men managed to separate them enough for
Foreman and Dave to step into the breach. They forced the
doors back and into their recesses.

They stepped back, breathing heavily. Dave leaned forward,
hands on knees. Marty rested his back against the
wall. They were all painfully aware of a new creaking sound
coming from the roof of the elevator. It was higher-pitched
than before. They stood still and the sound stopped.

They had almost made it to B4. They could see the top
of the opening where the elevator should have docked. It
was about two feet above the floor of the elevator. It would
have been enough to crawl through, but it was blocked.
Foreman grabbed one of the aluminium poles and scraped
at the blockage. Soil fell away into the elevator. Then a large
piece of concrete crashed down.

They all felt the elevator rock. Todd let out a desperate cry
that caught in his throat. 'Maybe not a good idea,' he gasped.

The senator ignored him and went at the blockage again.
More soil, more small chunks of concrete. A tangled piece
of metal slid onto the elevator floor. Then he hit something
big and solid. Attacking a different section of the opening,
he brought more wreckage onto the marble floor of the
elevator. They watched it scatter across the shiny surface. A
cylinder of reinforced concrete a foot in diameter and two
feet long suddenly plunged from above the opening. It came
to an almost silent stop, cushioned by the soil and small
fragments beneath it. Then it fell forward with a crash onto
the floor and smashed into a dozen pieces.

The elevator shook violently. They all heard the sound
of metal grinding against the lining of the elevator shaft.
Holding their breath, they strained to hear new sounds from
the elevator cable above their heads.

Foreman looked back at the opening. The falling concrete
had brought down a hundred pounds of soil with it. Now
the way was completely blocked. The soil up against the
elevator doors had been a tease. The opening was blocked
by a single huge piece of concrete that had settled against
the doorway on B4. There was no way on Earth they could
move it.

'What now?' Marty asked.

'We just have to wait. Try not to move too much.' Dave
responded.

'To hell with that,' Foreman snapped, glaring at the floor.
He felt like a caged animal. He took a deep breath, lowered
himself to the floor against the wall and leaned his head on
his raised knees.

For several minutes no one spoke. Then suddenly
Foreman's voice broke the silence. 'There'll be an access
ladder. We'll have to go through the roof.'

The four of them looked up simultaneously. In the centre
of the ceiling was a square hatch.

Marty was first up. Dave and Foreman made a stirrup with
their interlocked fingers and hauled him aloft. He prodded
at the hatch and it slid back easily. The others then hoisted
the old man further and his upper body worked through the
opening. He just managed to scramble through and onto
the roof of the elevator.

Lying flat, Marty helped Todd up through the hole. But
it wasn't easy. His injured arm made the process far harder.
Perched on Dave and Foreman's palms, he almost lost his
balance, started to fall, then caught himself. Marty leaned
forward as far as he could. Todd grabbed the edge of the
hatchway with his good, right hand and made it over the
lip, twisting himself to get his body and one leg through
the hole.

Todd surveyed the shaft. Looking up, he could see the
elevator cables had snagged on a fallen girder projecting
from the side of the shaft. The motion of the elevator had
put a terrible strain on the cable, which was shorn, leaving
the elevator dangling from a withered length of twined
steel no more than an inch and a half in diameter and
badly frayed. But on the wall furthest from the doors of the
elevator, and running the entire length of the shaft, was an
access ladder.

'Come on,' Todd yelled to Marty, and lay flat on his
stomach. The old man did the same. Foreman helped Dave
up inside the elevator and the two men on the roof leaned
down. Three hands grabbed Dave by his shirt and then
quickly under his arms. In a moment, he was through the
hole and crouching on the roof of the elevator.

'Todd,' Dave said. 'Get onto the ladder. You can't do any
more. It'll lighten the load on the cable.'

Todd didn't need to be told twice. Turning, he clambered
onto the ladder and took two uneasy steps upward. He
gripped the edge of the ladder with his good hand, never
looking away from the wall in front of his nose.

'Right, Dave,' Marty said. Looking around him, he saw
what he needed, a huge metal clamp where the cables ran
through a hoop on the roof of the elevator. 'You lie flat,
brace yourself against that metal thing. Hold my legs. I'll
reach down into the elevator. Understand?'

Marty positioned himself over the hole. Dave twisted his
body around the metal bracket on the roof of the elevator.
With Dave gripping his feet, Marty then scrambled forward
and down the hole. As he slid into the elevator his shirt
sleeves rode up. He had muscular forearms. 'Fifty pressups
every morning,' he told Foreman, offering him a weak
smile.

'Glad to hear it, buddy. You ready?'

Marty nodded. Foreman leapt up and tried to grasp at
Marty's arms. He missed by half an inch.

'Again,' Marty said.

The second time, he made it. The senator was surprised
by the strength of Marty's grip. Dave helped by pulling on
the old man's legs, using the bracket on the roof for leverage.
Foreman finally reached the lip of the hatch, and between
them Marty and Dave got him under the arms and hauled
him up.

Marty hopped onto the ladder and took a few steps up. He
could see Todd a dozen or more rungs above him, halfway
to B3. The boy looked extremely shaky.

'You okay, Todd?' Foreman called.

'Just.'

'Keep going up.'

Dave stepped onto the ladder and had just climbed a rung
when the noise hit the four of them. It was like a thunderclap.
Contained by the elevator shaft, it was tremendously loud.

Foreman leapt from the roof of the elevator to the ladder
just as a steel girder tumbled end over end towards them. It
smashed into the sides of the shaft, ripping away a section of
the access ladder between B1 and B2. The ladder shuddered
and those clinging to it felt it move an inch away from the
wall, the support bolts straining and twisting.

The elevator's main cable came down a few feet behind
the girder. It was a deadly coil of reinforced steel, slashing
and weaving its way down the shaft like a giant cobra. The
elevator simply fell away, a dead weight plunging downwards.
It shuddered against the walls of the shaft, gashing a deep
groove in the concrete. Hitting the ground, its walls buckled.
Two edges of the roof broke loose and yawned inwards like
the serrated lid of an opened tin can.

The principle behind E-Force's stabilisers was a simple
one. If two powerful electromagnets are placed one above
the other some feet apart, they can be made to attract or
repel. To keep the unstable roof up, the magnets could
be set to repel each other, just like the opposite poles of
a magnet.
It sounds simple
, Pete Sherringham thought as
he entered Hall A,
but these magnets must have some kick in
them
. It had taken CARPA scientists the best part of eight
years to develop that kick.

Wearing the Cage, Pete felt incredibly empowered. The
nickname was entirely accurate: it
was
a cage, but – like a
Volvo's chassis – it was designed to keep danger out, not
the occupant in. It was seven feet high and had a titanium-carbon-fibre framework that was designed to shrug off an
impact force of half a million Newtons – equivalent to a
Steinway falling from a fifth-storey window. It also shielded
the wearer against fire and explosions thanks to blast-proof
windows made from specially formulated polycarbonate
resin.

Pete stood just inside the entrance to Hall A, aghast at
the destruction. Sure, he had seen it on the monitors, he
knew the stats, the number of dead. But experiencing it was
something else. The massive room was barely recognisable
as an auditorium. He saw shreds of chairs and the odd
square inch of fabric that once covered them. The podium
stood incongruously erect on the distant stage. These things
attested to the fact that, not so long ago, this room had been
filled with avid supporters of Senator Kyle Foreman.

He took a step into the hall. At his feet were the remnants
of a cloth banner. He could just make out the words:
No
Blood For Oil
. It was soaked red, with a grey line of human
viscera staining one edge.

The Cage was bulky, but Pete had spent many hours
training at Base One and was able to pick a way through
the rubble without making the ruins even more unstable.
Ahead, he could see the main cause of the rescuers' concern.

The eastern half of the roof – the section nearest the entrance
to the hall, where it joined with the Main Concourse and
Reception – was sagging badly. In places, steel beams had
nose-dived through the concrete and plaster. Fire lapped at
the ceiling, compromising it further.

Inside the main entrance to the hall, Pete turned hard
right. Taking three paces, he found the source of the fire. He
slid his fingers over the surface of a console and a thick stream
of 'megafoam', a fluoro-protein fire-quenching compound,
flew from four jets built into the front of the Cage. In a few
seconds the megafoam had smothered the flames.

Sybil had calculated where the stabilisers had to go. Pete
could see the spots from inside the Cage. It was an equilateral
triangle, some 50 feet to a side. The first site was just a few
feet ahead of him. With great care he cleared a path, using an
angled plough at the front of the Cage and a grappling arm
to lift heavy beams and boulders of reinforced concrete.

The stabilisers were larger versions of the ones the team
had used during training. Roughly cylindrical, they were
about a yard long and two feet in diameter. Each had a
pressure pad at one end and weighed close to half a ton.
The great magnetic coils inside them consisted of almost
ten miles of copper wire. Each electromagnet was powered
by its own energy source, which produced an incredibly
powerful magnetic field using a technology known as
super-cooled super-conduction. The electronic components
of the electromagnets were kept at a temperature close to
absolute zero, turning the metal cores of the stabilisers into
heavy-duty attractors or repellers.

Reaching the first site, Pete fixed the ground stabiliser
into place. Next, he took the second stabiliser from its
housing on the outside of the Cage and levered it up to the
delicate ceiling directly above his head. Taking great care
not to compromise the ceiling further, he slowly eased the
stabiliser against the concrete roof. With a small electrical
pulse from the control panel in front of him, he sucked air
from inside the pressure pad and the unit glued itself to the
ceiling.

The path to the second site was almost clear. Pete sidestepped
a pile of rubber pipes and, beside them, the remains
of a workstation that had crashed through the ceiling and
shattered into hundreds of pieces. Using the grappling arm,
he moved aside yards of plastic air-conditioning duct.

He was soon at the second site. Repeating the attachment
process, he secured the ground stabiliser and nudged the
ceiling unit into place, sucked the air from the pad and
withdrew. Lowering the grappling arm, he was about to
turn towards the third site, some 50 feet to his left, when
he heard a growling sound from overhead. A second later,
the Cage rocked as a concrete boulder the size of a Harley-Davidson smashed into it directly above Pete's head.

Pete had been through all this in the simulators but nothing
prepared him for the reality. He caught a glimpse of a concrete
slab dislodging from the ceiling, and at the periphery of his
vision he could discern the object falling through space. Then
came the impact. He ducked down inside the Cage, and the
instinct to run made him lean onto the control panel. The
framework rocked backwards and forwards. But he had no
need to worry. The Cage shrugged off the boulder like an
armadillo being pestered by a mosquito.

Pete looked up and saw the hole where the concrete had
been and felt a sudden stab of anxiety. 'Tom,' he said into
his comms. It was the first time he had spoken since entering
the devastation of the hall.

'Pete.'

'You saw that?'

'Yes.'

'Do we need to realign?'

'Give me a second.'

Pete scanned the ceiling. A new network of deep cracks
had appeared overhead. He could see beyond the plaster and
concrete clear through to the floor above. Some white fabric
was flapping around. Suddenly the upper half of a man in
a white shirt, his tie still knotted perfectly, flipped over and
tumbled through the hole. A drop of blood spattered onto
the blast-proof window at the top of the Cage as the man
hit the floor of Hall A. His dead eyes stared towards Pete.

'Tom? Speak to me, man.'

'We're in luck, Pete. Sybil reckons just a minor adjustment
will bring us back to the original level of stability. Place the
third stabiliser three feet closer to number two, and reduce
the angle to 54 degrees. Got that?'

'Loud and clear,' Pete responded. He retraced a couple
of steps then moved left towards a huge hole in the floor
of the hall, its edges ragged. Great chunks of concrete lay
all around. Over everything lay a fine powder – insulation
from a large water tank on the floor below had been thrown
upwards and pulverised. Settled across the debris, it looked
like orange snow. A fountain of water jetted upward from
the tank, splashing across the lip of the crater.

Pete picked his way around the edge of the hole, reaching
a point directly opposite. Two strides further, he reached the
desired spot. It was then that he heard a low moan.

He tried to figure out where the sound was coming from but
it stopped as suddenly as it had started. He forced himself to
concentrate on the job in hand. He could not allow himself
to be distracted. He knew there could be dozens still alive
in this devastated room, but he couldn't drag them all out
from the rubble. He could save lives by propping up the
ceiling.

He quickly got the third ground stabiliser in place and
was extracting the ceiling stabiliser from its bracket when
the sound came again. A low moan, then a single word
mangled by pain. 'Help . . .'

Pete paused for a second, the stabiliser unit poised a few
feet short of the ceiling. Holding his breath, he strained to
hear.
Where the hell was the voice coming from?

Two yards away he saw a small arm poking from under a
pile of chairs. It was moving. He didn't stop to think. One
pace and he was beside it. The voice came again, pleading.

'Okay,' Pete said softly into his comms. The sound spilled
from a speaker on the outside of the Cage. 'Lie still. I'll get
you free.'

Pete's fingers darted over the control panel and a holographic
representation of the pile of shattered wood and
metal appeared. A thermal filter showed the body inside the
mess. It was small, a child. The image glowed red and orange
with life. A few more taps on the virtual keyboard and the
computer had ascertained the correct order to remove the
debris burying the child.

Pete lowered a grappling arm, lifted a row of three seats
and placed them on the floor behind him. Turning back, he
saw the child staring up at him, terrified.

'It's okay,' he said again. 'Lie still.'

He plucked up a steel strut as though it were a toothpick,
then pulled aside a sheet of corrugated iron, a length of
plastic piping and a rectangle of wood. The child, a little girl
of about six, was uncovered.

'What's your name?'

The child was too terrified to speak.

Pete forced a smile. 'I'm here to help you. What's your
name?'

'Consuela,' the girl said.

'Can you move, Consuela?'

The girl tried to move a leg, but nothing happened. She
shook her head and started to cry.

'Consuela, listen to me, lass.'

The girl tried to stop sobbing.

'Consuela, this machine can pick you up and get you
outside. But you have to trust me. You understand?'

The girl nodded.

'You just stay right there. I'm going to extend a metal
arm. It's a very friendly arm. It won't bite.' He smiled again.
'I'll tell the metal arm to lift you very gentle, like, and then
we'll turn round and go. You got that, Consuela? Is that cool
with you? Great. Okay. Ready? Here we go.'

With the stabiliser still suspended above him, Pete used
the second arm. It was red, could extend almost ten feet and
had splayed 'fingers' at the end. Moving as fast as he could,
but with great care, he eased the arm forward. The little girl
recoiled. Her face was bleached with pain and fear. She had
witnessed things no six-year-old should ever see.

'It's alright, Consuela. Lie still, love. Relax.'

Pete tucked the fingers of the grappling arm under the girl
and lifted her slowly above the rubble. She could only move
her head. Her eyes were wild and staring around her.

'Easy,' Pete reassured her. 'No probs, Consuela.'

Pulling the child close to the Cage, Pete swivelled the
larger grappling arm up to the ceiling, sucked the air from
the pad and left the final unit in its proper place.

'Tom – we are go,' he said into his comms.

'Copy that, Pete. Slick work, man. Now get the hell out
of there.'