State of Emergency (27 page)

The slope down from B3 to B4 was surprisingly clear, but
the air was rancid with a cocktail of very nasty fumes. It was
unbearably hot. Inside the number one Mole, Pete Sherringham
was comfortably cocooned at an ambient temperature of
70 degrees Fahrenheit. But the view through the external
cameras displayed a barren scene of utter devastation.

As the Mole descended, Pete could see across B4 between
the support columns of the ramp. Most of the floor was
aflame, from the ramp right through to the western end of
the building. To make things worse, part of the floor of B3
had collapsed into B4, making it impassable on foot.

At the bottom of the ramp, Pete immediately swung the
Mole around, pointing the drill nose towards the down ramp
to Level B5. At that moment a sheet of flame leapt across the
ramp, igniting a river of oil and fuel that was running down
the ramp to B5. A wall of blue and purple flames shot up,
creating a corridor of fire.

Pete ignored it and pushed his way down the ramp. Then
the Mole stalled. The onboard computer screen turned blue
and the lights went out. The engine hummed for a few seconds,
the note descending in pitch to a dull rumble. Then it fell
silent. Two seconds later the emergency generator kicked in.
A faint light flickered to life above the control panels.

Pete stared in disbelief at the array of useless plastic and
metal at his fingertips. The control panels were blank, their
lifeblood cut off.

'Base One,' he said into his comms. His voice was heavy.
He didn't expect a response. None came.

Mark was in the number two Mole, twenty feet through the
obstruction in the drainage tunnel, when his screen died.
A second later the engines of the Mole shuddered to an
ominous silence and his comms went down.

The backup generator sprung to life and Mark turned
from the control panel to the Bullet, the module behind the
drill. Its walls were curved and lined with bench seats. He
walked over to one of the benches. There was just enough
room to sit upright, his head less than an inch from the
sloping ceiling.

He took a deep breath and leaned forward, his head
between his knees. He looked to the back of the Bullet.
There was a manual override to the back door of the Mole.
What should he do? Wait to see if the power came back on,
or climb out and see if he could dig through the obstruction
with a shovel?

He looked at his wrist but his cybersuit was down too. That
meant the whole system must be screwed, or at least a large
portion of it – no power, no suits, no comms. 'God!' Mark
exclaimed. 'I just knew something like this would happen.
Interfering politicians thinking they know best. Fuck!'

He pushed himself out of the chair and, crouching down,
made his way to the rear door. He turned a red lever to the
right of the door and pulled on another next to it. Then
as he pushed on the door the airtight seal hissed and the
door eased smoothly outwards on its hinges. Mark grabbed
a torch from the wall above the bench seat and shone it
through the opening.

The powerful beam lit up smooth walls of earth, a twenty-foot-long cylinder, eight feet in diameter, freshly produced
by the massive drill of the Mole. As the beam dispersed, it lit
up the first few feet of drain wall. Beyond that lay a seamless
black void.

'Why so surprised?'

'Francine friggin' Gygax. I might have guessed.'

'Well, it's nice to see you too, Tommy Boy.'

Tom checked himself. He was still fully armed. She hadn't
been able to touch his weapons. But what was the status of
the system? Jesus! Almost everything down. He checked it
out silently, fixing Francine Gygax with his toughest stare.

Sybil had been taken over. All comms were down – nothing
at all was getting through to LA. Almost everything at Base
One was frozen. The rest of the staff would be looking at
blank screens and wondering what the hell had happened.
As if on cue, someone came running onto the balcony to
find him. He had just enough energy to shoo them away.
He had plenty to contend with in cyberspace.

Tom gazed around. The two of them were floating in
uniform blackness. He studied Francine. She really did look
like a librarian, bespectacled and dressed in 'sensible' shoes
and a skirt. Her avatar was as different to her as Tom's was to
him. But then he noticed the tight knit top she was wearing.
It didn't do much to disguise her large breasts. This was not
the Francine Gygax he had known in 'real' life.

In the 'real' world Francine was blonde and blue-eyed –
a 24-carat babe. Tom Erickson had met her when he was
fifteen at a software convention in Minneapolis. She was
seventeen and had already made the transformation from
mouse to minx. They had stayed in touch, and hooked up
occasionally in cyberspace to exchange ideas, challenges.
Tom had met her again a year later at another convention in
Detroit, where he'd taken her on in a game of
Interstellar Life
,
a hardcore net-head's favourite. She had eaten him up and
he'd never forgotten it. He knew she was keen, egotistical
and brilliant, as well as totally amoral. She had actually
congratulated him via email when he had pulled off his
cyber-heist a year ago.

'So what's up, Francine?' Tommy Boy said.

'Oh, I'm in gainful employment.'

'So I see. So what's the deal?'

Francine smiled. She had a tooth missing, her left canine.
'Tommy Boy, I'd be shocked if you weren't able to put up a
fight.' She eyed him carefully.

'Well, I owe my employers a duty of trust,' Tommy Boy
replied with a smirk. Without warning, he drew a pistol from
a holster at his side and fired. Francine vanished before the
particles could reach her.

Then suddenly Tommy Boy was falling. There was no
sense of time or space, no air rushing past, no sound at all.
Tom closed his eyes involuntarily. Opening them a moment
later, he found himself in a garden that stretched away to
the horizon. It was carefully manicured, all neat hedges,
beds of rose bushes and uniformly spaced rhododendrons.
A bird flew low past his face and he ducked involuntarily.

A crash came from a few feet away. Tommy Boy spun
around and there was a second crash – closer this time. He
spotted Francine. She raised her gun as he dived behind a
hedge. Clutching at his shoulder, he found his impulse rifle
and rested its huge barrel lightly in his palm. He ran from
the hedge, firing at the spot where he had last seen Francine's
avatar. The flower bed vapourised and a tree vanished.

He saw Francine dash behind a wall and fired at it.
Francine jumped 30 feet into the air. Tommy Boy swung
the gun upward, just catching sight of a fluorescent net as it
sailed down towards him. It shimmered menacingly but he
just managed to spring away as it reached the ground and
vanished. Francine was gone.

Tommy Boy walked slowly between two high hedges,
sweeping his impulse rifle from left to right and back. It felt
good to be walking again. He heard a sound, a creaking, but
he couldn't focus on where it was coming from. He looked
up and saw a huge cluster of black dots forming in the sky.
They were growing larger.

Something hit him on the arm. He looked down at it.
A small black worm slithered along his wrist and stopped.
Another landed next to it. Then the pain came as the creatures
undulated on his arm. Tom realised with a start that they
were leeches sucking his blood. He felt two more spatter
onto his face. He tugged at them, suppressing his panic.

He clicked his fingers and a golf umbrella appeared in his
hand. It had a huge corporate logo, a Silverback poised above
the words 'E-Force – We're There For You'. The leeches pattered
onto the umbrella, some slithering to the ground at his feet,
others clinging on desperately. He plucked the two leeches
from his arm, tossed them to the ground and sped off.

As Tommy Boy ran, Tom felt the terrain change. Looking
down, he saw the neatly swept path transforming into
uneven rock. The leeches had stopped falling. He made the
umbrella disappear and gazed around. The garden had gone,
replaced by a landscape of ash and fire. Close by, a river of
lava rippled in the haze.

Tom felt the heat slam into him like a wave. He stumbled
and fell forward, cutting his hands on the jagged ground.
The rifle left his hands and clattered across the rocks and into
the lava, sizzling pathetically and exploding in a cascade of
crimson and yellow.

Tommy Boy stood up. He was clad in a cybersuit, floating
a few inches above the scorching ground.

Francine stepped out from behind a rock. She was lit up,
flames in her hair. She smiled. 'You've grown soft, Tommy
Boy. I thought Aldermont would have toughened you up,
not turned you into a pussy.' Francine's smile vanished and a
jet of flame flew out of her raised palm at incredible speed.

It almost had him, but he sidestepped the fire stream.
Catching his toe on a rock, Tommy Boy stumbled again,
coming down hard against a jutting outcrop of scorching
hot lava. He stood up, swung around and raised his own
palm outwards. A stream of ice shot out and met Francine's
second fire-bolt mid-flight. Fire and ice met in a ball of
steam.

Tommy Boy blinked. His opponent had vanished again.
The lava had dissolved, replaced by a shining metal floor
that stretched to the horizon, hard and featureless. He had
a new pistol in his right hand.

A voice came from behind him. He spun around. Francine
was there, a bazooka pointed at his head. 'Drop the gun,
Tom,' she said, her voice brittle.

He tossed it to the ground.

His mind was racing. She had been at least one step ahead
of him from the moment they had entered this cyber-reality,
forcing him onto the back foot, and now she would destroy
him. He had to think of something, anything.

For some strange reason Tom thought back to their other
life, as teenagers at conventions playing nerdy games. He
remembered how Francine always kept to the main hall
and never went into the smaller gaming rooms where you
could avoid the crowds. When they had done battle, she
had refused to go into a gaming booth. They had played
using headsets in the main meeting room, under powerful
lights and with just a few fellow gamers watching. Then
he remembered how jumpy she had been, even after she
had won. How she had promptly left. That's when it came
to him.

Tommy Boy held his hands up. Francine took a step
towards him and lifted the bazooka to his head. He looked
around and swept his hand in front of him, causing the floor
to shrink. The horizon rushed towards them from every
direction. Tommy Boy looked up, and four walls crashed
into place. He mouthed a word and a rectangle of steel fell
from the sky, thumping onto the four walls.

Francine glared at him. 'What are you doing?'

He ignored her and glanced over her right shoulder
towards the wall behind. It started to move towards them.

'
What are you doing?
' Francine's face was frozen in panic.

She glared at the walls and they stopped moving. But the
effort had distracted her. Tommy Boy grabbed the huge gun
from Francine's small hands, spun it around and rested his
finger on the trigger.

'I just remembered. Confined spaces – a no-no, hey,
Francine? I know what an egomaniac you are, and although
your avatar
looks
nothing like you, I kinda knew you would
put as much of your mind into it as possible, claustrophobia
and all. Mistake, baby!'

He pulled back his finger and Francine's body exploded
into a hundred messy pieces.

The silence in the earth tunnel was even more oppressive than
the darkness. It was hard to believe that such unspeakable
horrors lay directly overhead. Mark crawled back to the
opening into the drain and clambered down to the floor
of the tunnel. He slid down the final three feet and almost
went over in the slimy mess underfoot – a cocktail of mud,
waste and filthy water.

Twenty feet along the tunnel Mark heard a clanking
sound and froze. It had come from some distance away.
He swept the space with his torch. There was nothing but
tunnel walls, slime and darkness. The sound came again.
Then a faint illumination appeared, close to where the Mole
had ploughed into the drain from the shaft running down
from the surface.

He turned his light off and crouched down close to the
wall. He could just make out someone descending from
the roof of the tunnel on what looked like a rope ladder. The
figure was alone, but he could not see clearly. A torch beam
cut through the black, running along the walls as the shape
approached. Mark shielded his eyes and threw himself flat
to the floor. The torch light ran along his body.

'Mark!' a voice called.

'Steph – thank Christ!'

He clambered to his feet, brushing away the clinging
soil.

'The Mole's down too?'

'Yep. The Big Mac the same?'

'Yes. Looks like the whole system is offline. I don't know
what the hell has happened.'

'You got out of the Big Mac through the emergency
hatch?'

'Yeah. The manual override. How far into the barrier are
you?'

'20.16 feet, to be precise,' Mark replied.

Stephanie handed him a long metal tube – a Sonic Drill.
She had another slung over her shoulder. 'Not quite the
Mole, but it seems the only option we have.'

He smiled at her. 'Good thinking, Steph.'

Pete gazed around the cramped interior of the Bullet at the
back of the Mole. The emergency light cast a depressing
sombre glow. His suit was down. That was to be expected.
It was obvious that E-Force had suffered a complete system
failure. Kneeling up on the seat that ran along one wall
of the machine, Pete lifted a metal shutter covering one of
four opaque panels made from glass doped with terbium
and dysprosium, which made them strong enough to stop a
Magnum bullet at close range.

What he saw made his heart sink. Blue flames surrounded
the Mole, licking at the body of the machine. Normally
this would be of little concern – the machine could travel
through a furnace for an hour. But with the system down,
coolant would no longer flow through the nanotubes under
the outer skin of the vehicle. This would make it warm up
with surprising speed, and then only the metal structure
itself would provide protection from the searing heat.

The blue flames, Pete knew, came from burning fuel,
and they would be particularly hot – around 3000 degrees
Fahrenheit. He didn't need a thermometer to tell him that.
He'd made a close study of the engineering details of all the
machines used by E-Force. They were pretty sturdy pieces of
technology. The shell of the Mole was made from maxinium,
an alloy five times more resilient than the strongest titanium-steel
composite. In its own right, it could resist heat, corrosive
chemicals and high-powered impacts. But not forever. And
he couldn't climb out. With his cybersuit not operational he
would never make it through the flames.

How long did he have before the structural integrity of the
Mole and the Bullet was compromised? He ran through the
numbers in his head and was horrified by the conclusion.

He was sitting inside a pressure cooker. If the system stayed
down, he had no more than four minutes before the hull
started to heat up beyond the critical limit. Immediately
after that, thermal energy would flow from the outer shell
straight to the interior of the Bullet. Then Pete would slowly
cook.