Above he thought he heard a small clicking sound, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a stylus being tapped on a table. He looked around and saw nothing close to him that could produce it.
He looked upward into an infinity of tubing. If the sound was coming from the cavern, it would have to be damned loud to reach him at this depth. A chill went through him.
He turned up his bulky helmet’s aural apparatus, amplifying the sounds. Hollow, echoing booms. Explosive booms. They were coming from the cavern.
His pad was beeping in his ears. He tapped to hear Lanie’s anguished voice. “Crane! Please answer!”
“What’s happening? Lanie!”
“Men … with guns! They’re destroying the place, they’ve already shot at me, I—”
“They’re scanning!” Crane said, “Get off the fiber! Hide!”
“But wh—”
He cut her off and levered up, the cage swiftly starting to glide along its track. “Hurry,” he whispered, holding the lever down, trying futilely for more speed. “Hurry.” The cage’s top speed was about thirty miles per hour, over six minutes to the top. Anything could happen.
He knew it was NOI. He knew it was Newcombe, come to finish their danse macabre. His only hope lay in reaching the cavern and offering his life in exchange for Lanie and Charlie.
He hit “open signal” on his pad. “Whoever’s listening,” he said, the helmet’s mike transmitting through the pad, “this is Crane. I will surrender myself to you, do whatever you ask. Please, let my wife and son live. They are innocents.”
“Everyone is innocent,” came Ishmael’s voice in return, “and no one. Life is cruel. God is great.”
He could hear explosions as he passed the two-mile marker. They were bringing down the whole cavern! Something came falling down his tube, passing him in a blur.
Ten seconds later, the bottom of Tube #63 exploded, the light flashing, followed seconds later by the sound. The tube rumbled, his cage strained against its rail. Fire burned below, thrown everywhere, phosphorous eating through the lining of lead shielding that covered the hot material.
His cage kept creaking upward, threatening to jump its rail in the last mile. He finally reached cavern level to see carts retreating around the snaky bend in the distance, back toward the main cavern. At that moment, an explosion went up at the far end of his corridor. Supports tore, hunks of the ceiling fell as a rush of dust and stone fragments blew down the corridor.
His cart was still parked against the corridor wall. He stumbled to it, feeling his way, protected by his helmet. He jumped in and opened the focus as the next explosion went, shaking the chamber, rock powdering down on him from above, bouncing off his helmet as more dust obscured his vision.
He raced forward by memory, bumping the right wall to avoid running into the tubes as another explosion went, the entire chamber behind him collapsing as he made an S turn into another corridor.
Focus open full, he raced through the weaving corridor even as tubes exploded to his left. Crane’s world and his life were disintegrating all around him. None of it mattered except Lanie and Charlie. He had to get to them.
He hit the main cavern at full throttle, men in black charging toward the stairs, fire pluming out of the computer room, main room tubes rumbling, belching smoke and fire. The whole cavern was shaking, rock shearing from the ceiling to explode on the concrete floor.
It was perdition, hand-delivered by Brother Ishmael. He drew gunfire as he sped toward B Corridor, slamming his cart into a man running out, hearing distant explosions as that corridor collapsed in on itself from the far end.
The radiation warning horns were blowing loudly, the wall monitors flashing at the top end of the red zone. His cart popped into a clear space and he saw a full picture of destruction in an instant. A man in a cart was laughing, aiming a weapon down Tube #21. The rail had been knocked away; a cart had fallen in the tube and blocked the descent of the service cage.
He had only one shot and took it instantly. Foot to the floor, he broadsided the gunman’s cart. The blow knocked man and machine into the tube as Crane turned hard to keep from going in with the enemy.
And the man exploded.
Crane jumped out of the cart and ran to the tube. Burning phosphorous was strewn over the cavern floor. Two burning carts were jammed between the tube side and the middle post; fire everywhere threatened to set off the plastique. A cage had torn loose from the track and was balanced precariously atop the wreckage of the two carts five feet down, all of it threatening to lose its fragile wedge and fall the tube’s length. Lanie and a hysterical Charlie were in the cage, fire all around them. Lanie had a death grip on the boy as she crouched fetally within the cage, staring up through its torn back.
“Climb up!” he called, reaching down. “Grab my hand.”
“I-I can’t!” she called back. “I’m dizzy … my knees won’t … God, help me, Crane.”
The word hit him. Vertigo. She was frozen, out of the game. He went to his stomach, leaning into the hole, reaching. Her eyes widened in horror. And Crane realized she was living her dream.
She reached up with her left hand, Charlie in the crook of her right arm. She couldn’t stand and was shaking uncontrollably. The mass of wreckage creaked loudly, then jerked, Lanie screaming as everything moved.
He leaned way out and grabbed her wrist with his good hand. The wreckage screeched loudly on the inner tube, then broke free and fell. Crane’s arm jerked hard, and nearly dislocated at the shoulder. Lanie was dangling above the abyss. Fire clung to the surface of the tube and flared out to burn her.
“Hang on!” he yelled, but she couldn’t hear him through the helmet. He tried to pull her up, but the weight was too great and he had no leverage. Sweat was pouring from him, dripping on his faceplate, fogging it.
He had nothing to anchor to. He tried to rise enough to get to his knees, but he couldn’t. She screamed as flames bit her leg.
“Take Charlie!” she yelled, trying to raise the boy within the embrace of her right arm.
The sound was loud in the suit, rumbling round and round Crane’s head. He brought his bad arm around, dangled it in the tube. “I can’t!” he shouted in response to the question in her eyes. “My arm! My bad arm!”
“Take him!’ she screamed. “Please, take him!”
“I can’t!” An explosion farther down the corridor rocked them, and she started to slide from his grasp, his hand cramping as he tried to hold on. Lanie squirmed, trying the impossible—to hand her screaming child up.
“Oh God, Lanie … Lanie!”
She slipped.
Just like that. He watched her fall, clutching Charlie. In his mind’s eye, she froze in that position, forever hanging in midair like the imprint on the event horizon of a black hole. Forever pristine. Forever alive. He had a single goaclass="underline" to follow Lanie and his son into the well of death.
“So,” came a voice behind him, and Crane turned. Mohammed Ishmael kicked him down and stood over him with a shotgun. “The seed is gone. Now we must uproot the weed from which it sprang.”
“Thank you,” Crane said, for he understood that, finally, this man would give him lasting peace.
Then Ishmael half turned. Crane saw Burt Hill running toward them, his eyes crazed, his shovel already half through its slashing arc.
He caught Ishmael on the back with the sharp edge of the shovel, the man going down hard, his body vibrating wildly.
Hill raised the shovel again, high over his head.
“No!” Talib shouted from behind. Hill swung around to go after him. “Don’t, Burt!”