Final Days

THIRTY-ONE

Lunar Array, 11 February 2235

Saul let the Cobra rifle slip out of his fingers and tried to make sense of the emotions warring inside him. There was anger, but also regret and sorrow, in equal measures.

He turned away from Mitchell’s lifeless body and saw Amy Rose come jogging towards him. She was still wearing her spacesuit, minus the helmet, her grey hair tangled into knots. She bent over, once she reached him, hands resting on knees and gasping for breath.

‘Wait here,’ said Saul, and quickly made his way back to where Bailey’s body lay. He dug through the dead man’s pockets until he found the same keycard Bailey had deprived him of.

‘You okay?’ she asked, standing up straight again as he came back.

‘You saved my lifere damp as he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘It was a pleasure. Have you done it yet? Shut the gates down, I mean.’

‘No, but it shouldn’t take long.’

‘Good.’ She glanced uneasily towards the gate itself. ‘Do you need any help from me?’

Bailey had mentioned that he had a second code, which they might have been able to use to shut the gates down together, but now that code had died with him, and they were back down to just the one code again. Saul could only hope it would prove enough this time.

‘No,’ he told her, ‘I can take care of it on my own.’

Amy nodded, and sat down on the floor, with her arms resting on her knees. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll wait here,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty winded after all that running around.’

‘When I left you in the lander,’ said Saul, ‘I felt sure you were going to stay there.’

‘No, that was never my plan. I just . . . I just needed time to say goodbye.’ Her eyes glistened as she drew in a sharp breath. ‘Then I suited myself up and got out of there.’

‘Amy . . .’

She made a shooing gesture. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Do what you have to do to fix things. I’ll still be here when you get back.’

Saul nodded and stepped inside an elevator, watching her disappear from sight as he was carried downwards once more.

Saul sprinted past workstations and conference booths, feeling the seconds weighing heavy on him as he raced for the second elevator that would carry him even deeper beneath the Array. The EDP information overlay slid back into place as he stepped inside, and a minute later he was running along the hallway towards Fowler’s office and the terminal room there.

Once inside, he pushed the keycard back into the same slot he’d used before, and again entered the access code, quickly navigating through the menus.

A message appeared, telling him there had been a remote-server malfunction. Saul interpreted this to mean that the Florida communications server had finally failed.

‘CONFIRM TO RESCIND TWO-PERSON ACTIVATION PROTOCOL,’ advised another message.

Yes, Saul confirmed, working his way through several more menus until he found what he was looking for. He reached out with a trembling hand, and ordered the ASI’s computer systems to close down every last wormhole within the Array.

‘EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN PROTOCOL INITIATED,’ read a new message. ‘TERMINAL WORMHOLE FAILURE IN 1800 SECONDS.’

1800 seconds: just thirty minutes from now.

He thought about the flickers of light he’d seen dancing beneath the concourse ceiling, and wondered if even only thirty minutes was too long. An alarm began to sound, low and urgent, and he turned to run back through the main office and down the hallway to the elevator.

Saul found Amy waiting for him when he stepped out of the elevator and into the main operations room.

‘What happened?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you were going to wait for me up on the concourse.’

She shook her head. ‘Couldn’t think straight up there. Whatever’s happening up there, it’s getting worse. Is it done yet?’

He nodded briefly, leading her back towards the elevator that would take them back up into the Array. ‘It’s done. We’ve got thirty minutes to get ourselves through a gate. Whichever way you look at it, we’re going to be cutting it close.’

Saul kept willing the elevator to move faster as it carried them back up. The strange noise penetrated the walls of the elevator car more clearly the higher they ascended, drilling into his thoughts. He glanced at Amy and saw she wasn’t having any easier a time of it.

The entire concourse shook as they emerged, the air now so thick and fluid it almost felt like being underwater. That dreadful ululation seemed to vibrate right through the atoms in Saul’s body. He looked up at the twists of light that now crowded the concourse ceiling. Something about them made his eyes hurt, so that he couldn’t look at them for more than a second or two.

‘Thirty minutes won’t be enough time, will it?’ Amy yelled to him over the din. ‘Whatever’s driving those clouds is going to get through before that. No telling what might happen then.’

Saul remembered something. ‘The HMX,’ he shouted.

‘The what?’

‘Explosives,’ Saul yelled. ‘Those troopers Mitchell killed had an APC filled with HMX explosives. They were wiring the Florida gate so they could blow it up.’

‘Would that work?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it might delay the clouds, but that’s about it.’

‘Better than nothing,’ she yelled back.

He nodded, and they made their way quickly over to the APC. Saul took the lead, but Amy struggled to keep up, so he put one arm around her waist and half carried her. She didn’t protest or try to push him away, which only showed how exhausted she was. In truth, he was running on little more than adrenalin himself.

All they had to do was keep going just a little longer.

‘I’m getting a bit too old for this,’ panted Amy. ‘Seriously.’

They now came to the barricades, where the bodies of Merrill and Dallas still lay alongside a crate filled with bricks of HMX. Amy picked one up and studied it for a moment.

‘Demolition charges,’ she said, glancing towards him, then slumped against one of the barricades, looking pale and ill. ‘By the looks of it, the detonators are already in place.’

‘I didn’t know you were some kind of demolitions expert?’

‘We used HMX when we were building biomes out on Newton. Good for excavating land real fast.’

Something about the ululation made Saul’s skin itch like it was burning. ‘The question is, how were they going to set off the detonation?’

‘Remote trigger?’ she replied. ‘That’s my guess, anyway.’

‘You mean through their contacts?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That way there’s too big a risk that somebody might hack your contacts and then trigger an explosion from a long way off. They’d have planned to use a dedicated device of some sort.’ She nodded towards Merrill’s butchered corpse. ‘Check him out. Maybe he’s got something on him.’

Saul grimaced as he bent over Merrill’s body, pushing his hand inside pockets soaked with the dead man’s blood. When he found nothing, he moved over to Dallas, and soon found a slim device sporting several inlaid buttons.

‘That’s it,’ Amy said, as he showed it to her. ‘Same as what we used ourselves. Nothing like having a nice fat button to press when you’re blowing shit up.’

‘Then we can blow the HMX remotely, before we head through the Galileo gate? The starship gets there in a couple of months, and we’ll be able to survive until—’

‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Amy. She stood up and glanced towards the APC parked nearby, with the rest of the crates of explosive still piled in the back. ‘That’s what they used to transport the HMX here, right? So how many of those bricks do you think they managed to place already?’

Saul studied the APC, still mostly filled with unopened crates. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I reckon not that many.’

Amy nodded. ‘That’s what I thought too. Looks like they barely got started before Mitchell killed them.’

‘Then there’s nothing we can do,’ Saul said grimly.

Amy rubbed her mouth pensively. ‘No, I think we’ve got one other option.’ She glanced towards the escalators that led up to the departure area. ‘Is there any way to get that APC up to where the actual wormhole gate is?’

‘Why? What are you thinking?’

‘I’m thinking,’ she said, ‘that if someone could get all that HMX up there and close to the gate, it could do an awful lot of damage.’

‘No way,’ said Saul. ‘You’d never have enough time to get back out before it was too late.’

‘Whether or not I get out doesn’t really matter, Mr Dumont.’ She reached out a hand. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d let me have the detonator device.’

‘Just look around you,’ he yelled. ‘I don’t know if the explosives would make any difference at all. They built the machinery maintaining the wormholes to sustain an awful lot of damage.’

‘You said yourself that we could at least slow it all down,’ she yelled back. The noise and the shimmering light were intensifying. ‘We’ve got less than twenty minutes, so there isn’t time to argue over this.’

‘You’ll kill yourself.’

‘Yeah, like I hadn’t figured that out. Go now,’ she said. ‘I can take care of this.’

‘No, wait, maybe I should—’

‘I don’t have time for this bullshit!’ she shouted, snatching the detonator from his grasp. She then picked up some of the bricks of HMX, clutching them close to her chest. ‘All my life I had Lester, and now he’s gone. You still have family on Galileo, right? Now tell me how the hell to get this APC up to that level.’

‘There’s a passageway running up behind the centre pair of escalators, over there,’ Saul pointed. ‘It leads to some cargo elevators big enough to take even the APC up.’

‘Fine.’ She nodded curtly. ‘Don’t say anything more now. No goodbyes or sentimental crap or anything like that, okay? Grab one of those other vehicles over by the courtyard and get yourself the hell through a gate already, will you?’

Saul nodded wordlessly, then turned and ran.

He pulled himself inside an empty APC, reversing it in a half-circle before taking one last glance back at Amy. He watched her get inside the one packed with HMX, and drive it away towards the tunnel accessing the service elevators.

Saul turned away and gunned his own vehicle towards the main transport lane linking all the concourses. Warnings flashed at him as he pushed the vehicle to its limit, whipping the wheel around and accelerating hard. He figured he had at best fifteen minutes to make it all the way to the Galileo concourse, which lay at the farthest end of the Array; that left him barely enough time to get on board a shuttle-car that would transport him to the starship carrying the far end of the new wormhole gate, before the wormhole collapsed.

If he was lucky, he might even manage it with a few minutes to spare.

The constant noise and shimmering faded as he put distance between himself and the Florida gate, and soon it felt as if a heavy fog had lifted from his thoughts. He guided the APC through a series of concourses in turn, each as eerily silent as the last. Everywhere he noticed more abandoned APCs and barricades, and more corpses, but of civilians this time.

A powerful roar surged along the lane far behind him. Saul glanced back, but a gentle curve to the route now made it impossible to see all the way back to the Florida concourse itself.

It’s worked, he thought, his hands still clamped tightly around the wheel. He steered around a truck slanting across the lane ahead, and shot through another concourse, feeling the seconds tick away.

As he passed through another concourse, and then another, it occurred to him that he might very well be the last living person on the Moon, until he remembered that there was another Mitchell Stone somewhere out there, not so very far from the Array itself, even now beginning his decade-long slumber.

Saul finally reached the last concourse, separated off from the rest of the Array complex by a tall temporary barrier that had stood in place ever since the original Galileo gate had been sabotaged. A single security entrance was set into the high barrier, and it was clearly far too narrow for his APC to squeeze through.

He abandoned the vehicle and sprinted through the security door into the concourse beyond. It was as devoid of life as the rest, yet lacked the evidence of violent conflict such as he had observed in most of the others. There were small open trucks parked here and there of the type used by maintenance crews, along with evidence of recent preparations for the reopening of contact with Galileo. Before the growths had appeared, the news feeds had been full of speculation about the reception that might be expected from whoever turned out to be currently in charge of the colony, and whether the Coalition governments might attempt an invasion.

A second great roaring sound set the ground beneath him shaking. Saul stumbled and then stared around him. That wasn’t the HMX, he thought wildly.

He climbed a stairway to a platform raised several metres above the concourse, from where he could get a clear view through the windows. He glanced halfway along the curving length of the Lunar Array to where the Florida gate was located. Thick smoke, like ashes, billowed out across the lunar landscape from a rent in the wall. Light danced inside that smoke, like something alive.

Saul backed away, dry-mouthed, realizing Amy’s sacrifice hadn’t been entirely in vain. But, then again, it didn’t look like it had done more than gain him a few minutes of a head-start.< />

He turned to run back down the steps and across the concourse, fatigue already clouding his thoughts. He climbed inside a maintenance cart, then cursed as it began trundling towards the elevated departure area with not nearly enough speed. There he jumped off, throwing himself up on to a stationary escalator and stopping at the top just long enough to momentarily recover his breath.

The ground beneath his feet was shaking, and the air further along the Array howling as it vented on to the lunar surface. A wind picked up, growing stronger within seconds, until Saul was forced to claw his way forward, past abandoned security cordons, and towards the waiting shuttle-cars.

He pulled himself into the first one he came to and collapsed on to a seat, his lungs screaming with pain as the doors slid shut. The shuttle-car jerked slightly, then began to slowly move towards the gate’s entrance.

Saul pulled himself upright and staggered to the front of the vehicle, watching the heavy steel doors slide apart at the car’s approach. Beyond lay a wide tunnel ringed with steel and dense clumps of instrumentation.

Almost there.

He touched the curving glass of the car’s window and felt it vibrate – the tremors increasing and decreasing in a way that reminded him of the throbbing that had filled the Florida concourse.

A second set of doors slid open, and the shuttle-car glided inside the body of a starship light-years across the galaxy. His weary muscles protested as Saul came under the influence of the ship’s deceleration-induced gravity.

As his UP connected with the shipboard network, he squeezed through the shuttle’s doors almost before they’d had a chance to open fully. The network then surrounded him with frantically blinking alerts to warn of terminal wormhole failure.

Only seconds left, he realized with desperate alarm. Really, he had no time left at all.

Saul hurtled out of the shuttle bay just as the ship shook with such terrifying violence that he was thrown to the floor of the service corridor beyond. He hooked his fingers through the black-painted metal grid comprising the floor, and held on tight. Meanwhile the ship was struggling to correct the spin resulting from the sudden collapse of the wormhole, its emergency thrusters firing as the one tenuous thread linking it back to Copernicus vanished in a blaze of dissipating exotic particles.

Panting furiously, Saul crouched in that same spot for what felt like a very long time, while the ship continued to shudder all around him. Slowly, one by one, most of the alerts faded away. He let himself close his eyes, just for a moment . . .

He woke up again some indeterminate amount of time later, his fingers still hooked through the gaps in the metal grid. Saul stood up uneasily, wincing at the sharp pain in his muscles.

After that, he wandered through the silent starship until he found the emergency bay, kitted out with freeze-ed food supplies and tanks of water, enough to keep him alive for a long time if need be. He drank until he’d slaked a raging thirst, then wandered through the ship until he found an observation bay, its overhead display revealing a sprinkling of stars.

One star in particular was far brighter than all the rest. He collapsed on to a couch and stared up at it. 94 Aquarii, more than a hundred light-years from Earth – home to the Galileo colony.

Saul stared up at it for a long, long time, knowing that the rest of his life lay somewhere in that single bright point of light.

Over, he thought, in the last moments before consciousness deserted him and he passed out once more.

It was over.