Apocalypse

47

‘What the hell are you doing?!’ Tyler bellowed in terror as he struggled. ‘Put me down!’

Congressman Goldberg tried to grab one of the guards, who whirled and drove the lawman back, slamming him to the ground with a savage blow from the butt of his rifle.

‘Stop them, Joaquin!’ MacKenzie shouted. ‘This is insane!’

‘There was only one thing missing from my presentation to you,’ Joaquin replied, his features hardening as he spoke. ‘A demonstration of my determination to succeed.’

The guards carried Tyler to the black hole’s outer chamber, opened the access door and roughly bundled the businessman into it before slamming the steel door shut. Tyler banged desperately on the thick glass, but like the news broadcast of his demise, no sound reached the horrified onlookers. Quickly, one of the soldiers carried a video camera on a tripod and stood it outside the chamber, this one looking in. Almost immediately, one of the giant plasma screens showed the black hole, flares of searing energy writhing in blue-white coils against the walls of the chamber.

Joaquin looked up at Dennis Aubrey, whose heart had begun to hammer against the walls of his chest. Prickly heat tingled across his collar as he stared back at Joaquin.

‘Dennis, if you will, prepare to destabilize the black hole as soon as our unfortunate friend Mr. Tyler has been…’ Joaquin searched for an appropriate word, ‘cured.’

Aubrey, unable to believe what he was seeing and yet unable to intervene, flipped switches like an automaton on the console before him. Joaquin turned to face his guests, his expression cold.

‘Gentlemen, should any of you be tempted to interfere with my campaign…’

He let the sentence hang in the air for a long moment and then nodded at one of the soldiers now standing beside a control panel at the black-hole chamber. The soldier flicked a switch before him and then yanked down on a large handle, tiger-striped with yellow and black chevrons.

Wailing sirens echoed around the hub and beacons span and flashed. From his vantage point Dennis Aubrey watched the screen, frozen immobile with horror, as the chamber’s interior door opened agonizingly slowly.

Benjamin Tyler was hauled off of his feet by an incredible force, flying through the air toward the terrifying chamber beyond. His hands managed to grab the inside of the door as his body was held horizontally in the air as though in the grasp of a hurricane, but he wasn’t able to hang on for more than a split second before the immense gravity of the black hole yanked him away.

A bright flare of electrical energy shone within the chamber, and Aubrey watched with morbid fascination as Benjamin Tyler’s body shot toward the black hole. Aubrey glimpsed the tycoon’s face, laced with a sheen of sparkling ice crystals as the latent heat of his body was vacuumed out, his flesh turning hard as stone and his horrified eyes turning to brittle balls of ice. Tyler’s pain-racked face froze with fear as, in a millisecond, his body was unwound from its normal height to an infinite length, stretching him around the black hole’s orbital axis at the speed of light as he was torn apart, atom by atom, in a flare of radiation that glowed in a brilliant disc around the black hole’s circumference.

The last thing Aubrey saw was the image of Tyler’s head turn a deep red as it vanished beyond the black hole’s event horizon, the time dilation red-shifting the light to the extreme end of the spectrum until it could no longer emit radiation and Tyler disappeared altogether.

Aubrey realized that his breath was fluttering awkwardly in his throat, his caged heart now hammering like a convict trying to batter down the bars of a cell. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and felt cold sweat on his skin. With everybody below him staring at the screen on which Tyler had vanished, Aubrey reached out and grabbed the satellite phone from the control panel and slipped it into his pocket. Joaquin spoke to his horrified guests below, his voice devoid of any emotion.

‘Gentlemen, Benjamin Tyler no longer exists. Every atom that made up his body has been destroyed within the oblivion that is the black hole.’

Joaquin turned to Aubrey and pointed at the control panel.

‘Begin the second part of the demonstration,’ he snapped.

Aubrey took a breath. If ever he had needed confirmation that Joaquin Abell had lost his mind as well as his humanity, then this was it. He could hear Joaquin’s words ringing in his ears. Katherine has gone to work on one of our charity projects in the Dominican Republic. She won’t be coming here. Joaquin was not only demonstrating the power he wielded: he was attempting to murder the only person left ashore who knew what he had achieved. Dennis made a decision that he knew could threaten his own life, but which was unavoidable.

‘I’ll need all of the staff’s door passes,’ he replied, as he grasped for the most confusing scientific terms he could summon. ‘The gravitational cavitation we’ll experience is capable of scrambling the polarity of the magnetic access chips at this close range.’

Joaquin glared up at him. ‘You did not tell me about this.’

‘You didn’t tell me you were about to cause an earthquake,’ Aubrey shot back, finding his rhythm. ‘So I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about the effect that the ensuing gravitational waves will have on magnetically polarized circuitry, or on our communications hub. The frequencies will be so high that they could rupture antennas, reverse magnetic polarity and maybe even fry circuitry. I hope that nobody here has a pacemaker? Or cares about the life-support systems that keep the air breathable down here and the lights on?’

The gathered dignitaries gawped at Aubrey as he stepped down from behind the control panel holding a small box.

‘I have a pacemaker,’ Murtaugh said, and tapped his chest with one crooked finger.

‘This is a Faraday cage,’ Aubrey explained, holding up the box. ‘It will protect the access cards. Once the experiment is over they can be retrieved and will be none the worse for wear. I’ll go to the communications hub and shut down the antennas and re-route the power to life-support until the experiment is over. Mr. Murtaugh, I advise you to remain at least twenty feet away from the chamber, just as a precaution, when the experiment begins.’

Aubrey boldly reached up to Olaf Jorgenson’s chest and unclipped his card. Without any further prompting, Joaquin Abell removed his own and dropped it into the box. His men automatically followed suit, and Aubrey sealed the box shut and turned for the exit.

‘Olaf will take the box,’ Joaquin said. ‘You will go to the communications hub. Olaf?’ The big man raised his chin questioningly. ‘Shut off the comms from here.’

Aubrey reluctantly handed the box to Olaf, who smirked down at him. Aubrey walked up to the control panel and with a heavy heart pressed a single button. Immediately the chamber began emitting a humming sound, and on the screen above them the black hole began deforming into an oval.

‘It’s stretching,’ Congressman Goldberg said, pointing at the screen.

‘No,’ Joaquin corrected him. ‘We have reduced the magnetic field in the lower right quadrant of the chamber. The black hole is now cavitating within the chamber at immense velocity and releasing its energy. As you may recall from high school, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.’

Governor MacKenzie turned and stared at Joaquin in horror.

‘My God,’ he uttered. ‘You’re no philanthropist. You’re nothing but a mass murderer.’

‘A revolutionary,’ Joaquin corrected him. ‘There is no gain without loss, no enlightenment without sacrifice. Mankind only moves forward through catastrophe: better one that is controlled, than one that is entirely unpredictable, I say.’

Aubrey felt snakes of disgust slither through his belly as he considered the scope of Joaquin Abell’s insanity. But at the center of his thoughts was Katherine Abell. As he caught Joaquin’s eye, he saw a man committed to his cause and yet quite aware of the crimes he was committing.

‘I’ll head for the comms hub,’ Aubrey said.

Joaquin flicked his head dismissively toward the exit hatch before turning away from Aubrey, who strode from the chamber toward the exit. He didn’t see Joaquin glance across at Olaf before he left.