Apocalypse

65

Lopez leapt out of the hatch, dragging Katherine close behind her, and they both tumbled down alongside Ethan behind the nearby wall of the control platform.

Ethan jumped to where one of the IRIS soldiers was writhing on the ground, his chest a bloodied mass of impact wounds. Ethan grabbed the man’s rifle, looking down at him and recognizing the face of the young man who’d spoken to him earlier. His once-defiant eyes were now pinched with fear and he coughed a thick drool of blood from his lungs.

Ethan scurried across to another fallen soldier as Bryson laid down heavy fire on the troops now sheltering behind the computer banks on the opposite side of the dome. Ethan picked up the dead man’s rifle and then dashed back to where Lopez was crouching.

‘Where the hell did Bryson come from?!’ she shouted above the crackling gunfire.

Ethan squatted down alongside her and handed her one of the rifles.

‘You didn’t really think he’d take a walk did you?’ he replied. ‘After what Purcell told us, I thought it was prudent to hide our assets. There were television cameras at the airport: I figured that if Joaquin saw Bryson leave, it might give us a chance.’

‘How did he get down here?’ Katherine asked.

‘The pressure suit on his boat,’ Ethan yelled back. ‘It’s just able to operate at this depth. The Free Spirit is too small for IRIS to track from down here, and they’d never be able to see Scott’s pressure suit. It was the only way to maintain surprise.’

Lopez cocked her rifle. ‘Now what?’ she asked.

Ethan shifted position onto one knee and fired off two shots across the heads of the IRIS soldiers.

‘We need to get Purcell’s camera and then get the hell out of here,’ he said. ‘Cover Bryson. I’ll work my way around the far side and flush them out!’

Lopez nodded and opened fire across the dome toward Joaquin and his men as Ethan leapt up and dashed across the open ground into cover behind the black-hole chamber’s outer hatch.

The IRIS troops fired on Lopez’s position, and Ethan flinched and ducked his eyes away as a volley of rounds smacked into metal panels near his head and ricocheted into the control platform. A shower of sparks fell like glowing rain onto the deck of the dome as the rounds smashed a computer monitor, and flames from an electrical fire started licking at the edges of the panel.

Ethan looked up at the enormous black-hole chamber as a new and unexpected horror breached his awareness. Bryson did not know what was contained within the chamber, and an electrical fire could cause havoc down here. Ethan peered around the edge of the hatch, and saw Bryson spraying bullets crazily across the IRIS position. One ricochet into the chamber’s panels would be all it would take to cause the machine to go into meltdown, or maybe a shot that took out the power supply to one of the magnetic-field generators, destabilizing the black hole.

Ethan looked up at the control panel to his right. If the camera was anywhere, it would be there.

Ethan took aim and fired a salvo at the IRIS troops to keep their heads down, and then sprinted out across the open deck toward the control panel. Lopez saw him move, and shifted her aim to a position just behind him, firing again on the IRIS soldiers. Ethan felt the shockwaves from her bullets thumping the air behind him, and glimpsed the rounds smacking into the metal panels shielding Joaquin and his men.

A return volley smashed a pair of hard-drive units near Ethan as he vaulted up onto the control panel and hurled himself down into the walkway behind it. The unforgiving metal deck slammed into his shoulder. As he rolled he smacked the side of his head on the back wall of the walkway, a spray of sparks and plastic fragments raining down around him.

Ethan got onto his knees and peered over the edge of the control panel, then spotted the camera lying on its side near the smashed monitor. He reached out, grabbed it and shoved it beneath his shirt before crawling along the walkway toward where Bryson was sheltering behind a bulkhead on the far side of the dome, firing intermittently.

Ethan yelled out above the deafening reports echoing around them.

‘Watch your fire! Don’t hit the sphere!’

A clattering series of bullet impacts smashed along the edge of the control panel near Ethan’s head and he crouched down, praying that the rounds were not strong enough to punch through the metal panels shielding him.

Bryson yelled back between shots.

‘To hell with the damned thing! I’m almost out of ammo, we need to move!’

‘Keep their heads down,’ Ethan replied. ‘I’ll get behind them and finish this!’

Bryson nodded as Ethan turned, running back along the walkway toward the opposite end. He reached the edge, where Katherine was sheltering behind Lopez, who was still firing shots at the IRIS troops.

‘I can’t hit them!’ she shouted at him. ‘I can only keep them pinned down!’

Ethan knew that the soldiers might break out any moment, regardless of the risk of getting hit. They were doomed where they were, unless they were carrying extra ammunition and could afford to wait it out. Either way, it was a risk Ethan could not afford to take. They had to get out of here and fast.

‘Just keep their heads down!’

Ethan leapt out of cover as Lopez fired off a volley, and slid down behind the chamber’s outer hatch once more. He checked his magazine, counting twelve rounds plus one in the barrel, then got up and jogged round the back of the giant sphere, leaping over thick power cables and exhaust vents. Clouds of dense steam billowed up from shattered pipe-work near the black-hole chamber, the warning beacons of the dome glowing through the whorls of vapor like rising suns.

He was almost halfway round when an IRIS soldier appeared and rushed toward him through the diaphanous swirls, aiming his rifle at Ethan’s head. Ethan dropped instinctively to his knees and brought his pistol up as the soldier’s first shot zipped past, Ethan’s sudden movement and the M-16’s recoil fouling the soldier’s aim.

Ethan squeezed the pistol’s trigger and saw a misty spray of blood from the soldier’s back as the bullet passed through his chest and exited between his shoulder blades. The soldier shuddered midstride and stumbled over the dense tangle of cables, collapsing onto his face with a thick pillar of steam blasting in billowing clouds around his body.

Ethan got up and kept his pistol trained on the motionless body as he stepped carefully forward. He saw a large exit wound in the soldier’s back, already thick with blood as the man bled out internally. He wouldn’t be waking up from this encounter.

Ethan stepped over the body and then saw the huge form of a man lunge at him from the other side of the pillar of steam. Ethan turned and whipped his pistol up, but before he could pull the trigger Olaf batted the weapon aside and ploughed into him like a freight train.