So she had leaned on her connection to the Anomaly study and gotten a plane from the Army to carry her up to the site. An airlock had been installed vice the former plate and she had first gotten into an environment suit then had herself decontaminated. Then she went through to the other side.
The Army had wanted to send a security team through with her, but she had cited the possibility of contamination. Actually, she just was tired of dealing with soldiers.
The far side had been as described but Susan had noted something that had passed right by the survey team. Yes, it looked like an abandoned primordial planet from one perspective. But Susan had grown up in the phosphate mining zone of Florida where the highest hill in the region was mine tailings. And if you let your mind wander you could imagine you were in the middle of a giant strip mine. Maybe one that was as big as the world.
She put that aside and walked well away from the gate until she got to the edge of a hill that she was pretty sure the survey team hadn’t tested. She got down on her knees and started collecting samples. Technically she should throw a ring and make sure that it was random sampling but at the moment she was only trying to satisfy her own curiosity.
As she was tipping a sample into a canister it fell over and she noticed that the ground was shaking. She considered the possibility of earthquake but the shaking was rhythmic and rapid, BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, more like artillery fire or something. She looked up and around and that was when she saw it.
There were mountains to the east, how far away was hard to tell in the thin atmosphere, and without anything for a comparison she had assumed they were far away, maybe twenty or thirty miles, and quite large. But they must have been closer and smaller because walking around the edge of the nearest was a giant green daddy longlegs. It was half the height of the mountain, at least. Her mind buckled as it tried, and failed, to put the beast into anything like normal reference. Then she noticed that, following it and running among its six legs, were smaller creatures. Even at the distance she could recognize the rhinoceros and centipede tanks of the Titcher. There were other things, as well, like smaller spiders, about twice the height of the rhino-tanks. But the thing about all of them were that they were tiny, like grains of sand, next to the giant daddy longlegs. The thing was as big as a mountain, maybe as much as thousand meters high.
And it was headed this way.
“What happened?” Miller said as his eyes opened. He was in a hospital again. This was getting annoying. And he had another blinding headache. He pushed that aside, willing himself to ignore it; pain was weakness leaving the body.
“You’re in Shands Hospital,” a female voice answered. “There was an explosion at the gate.”
“Not again,” he muttered. “Look, call my wife and tell her I’m alive this time; she was furious the last time I disappeared.”
“I’ll make sure she knows,” the nurse said, giggling.
“How’s Dr. Weaver?” Miller said, sitting up. He felt incredibly weak, like he had the flu or something. He put that aside as well. There were things to do.
“I don’t know,” the nurse replied. She was a mousey female with short brown hair. “There was no Dr. Weaver admitted with you.” She put her hand out as he started to get out of bed. “You’re really not in any condition to go anywhere, Mr. Miller.”
“The hell you say,” the SEAL replied, sliding his legs out of the sheets and sitting up. There was an IV in his arm and he noticed that this time it was a yellowish liquid that he recognized as plasma or platelets. “Where’d I get hit?”
“You didn’t,” the nurse replied. “But you did sustain some severe radiation damage. It appears that a nuclear weapon was detonated on the other side of the gate. It apparently sent out a lot of radiation.”
“Oh, hell.”
“The gates in Eustis, Tennessee and Staunton are all closed, with a big burst of radiation at each. And there’s an admiral that’s been calling for you every couple of hours.”
“Shit, shit, shit, shit…”
Bill tried to open his eyes and realized that he didn’t have any eyes to open. There was no sensation of heat, of cold, of having a body at all. There was no sound, no light, no sensory input at all. The universe was formless and void.
“Sensory deprivation,” Weaver thought. Okay, what happened? He remembered stepping back to the gate. And a flash, he thought. “Am I alive?”
Well, sure, otherwise who is asking the question.
“What am I?” he asked. Where am I? could wait. Get down to base principles. “I am a thinking being.” Good, so he at least existed in some form. But sensory deprivation was tricky. The brain anticipated continuous feedback, little signals sent down the nerves and received back like a computer network that is constantly sending out packets. If it didn’t get feedback it sent out more and more packets until it overloaded. Which was why sensory deprivation was such a great tool for torture.
“On the other hand, that assumes I have a brain,” he thought. And nerves.
“This really sucks,” he thought, bitterly. So, what had happened? He and Miller had shot the cone thing as they were retreating out the gate. Something had happened after that. There had been quite a few attack units in the gate room, like they were staging for another assault. So the cone thing was probably supposed to follow up the assault. Maybe some sort of weapon. A nuke? Possibly. So had they predetonated it? If so, as close as it was to the gate, the wormhole, it could have destabilized it. If so, what did that mean to him? Maybe he was dead and this was the afterlife. If so, where were the angels? Then he thought about a few of his life experiences and considered the alternatives. Okay, where were the demons with pitchforks?
“Neither a particle nor a wave,” he thought. Caught in Schrödinger’s box. I’m a cat that might be alive and might be dead. Now if I just had some equivalent of opposable thumbs, or, by preference, a crowbar. “Excuse me? Would you let me out of here?”
He suddenly found himself in a car, going down a winding mountain road. There was a huge semitrailer in his rearview, riding right on his tail. He instinctively knew that if he slowed down the semi was going to run him right over and he really would cease to exist. But he couldn’t go too fast because around every turn there were low-slung police cars with beady-eyed officers clutching radar guns. If he went too fast the police would catch him and then he would cease to exist as well. He didn’t know how he knew that but it was an absolute certainty as strong as the fact that he had to breathe.
He looked down at his speedometer and slowed down, slightly, but nearly ran off the road, actually bouncing off a guard rail and barely regaining control of the car. He got back on the road but by that time he had lost track of how fast he was going and tried to look at the speedometer again. It was impossible; he couldn’t know how fast he was going and where he was at the same time.