Apocalypse

67

The metal of the sphere buckled violently under the blows, and then two rounds ricocheted off and hit one of the giant power generators. The bullets smashed their way into radiator vents, cables, wires and mounting bolts as a shower of sparks and metal fragments sprayed down onto the deck.

Ethan flinched, stopped firing, and looked up.

The panels held firm.

Joaquin’s laugh echoed around the dome and then he gestured to his men.

‘Kill him.’

Scott Bryson moved before any of the soldiers could pull their triggers. He grabbed one of them around the jaw and shoulders and lifted him off of his feet before yanking his head violently one way and then the other. Ethan heard a dull crackling sound as the soldier’s neck snapped like a dry twig. Holding the soldier’s limp corpse against his chest, Bryson grabbed the rifle that was still in the dead man’s grip and turned it toward Joaquin.

The tycoon leapt to one side, grabbed Lopez and shoved his pistol up under her jaw.

Ethan dropped onto one knee and aimed at the other two IRIS soldiers as they turned to defend their boss. In an instant, nobody could move. Bryson kept his rifle trained on Joaquin, the two IRIS soldiers held Bryson and Katherine Abell in their sights, and Ethan’s rifle was fixed on the soldiers.

‘Mexican stand-off,’ Bryson said as he looked at Joaquin. ‘Time for you to make your choice, little man. You want to die here, or in prison up top?’

‘Just shoot the asshole!’ Lopez shouted as she struggled against Joaquin’s grip.

Joaquin sneered at Bryson from behind Lopez’s long black hair.

‘You’ve already lost. You’ll never make it out of here alive and I already know that I’ll be in Puerto Rico tomorrow.’

Ethan’s eyes narrowed. ‘What the hell makes you think that?’

‘Because I saw tomorrow’s news!’ Joaquin shouted back. ‘I was there! This is all preordained, Mr. Warner. No matter what you do the future cannot be changed! It’s over for you, because you’re all going to die here and there’s nothing that you can do to stop that from—’

A deep cracking sound from behind Ethan cut Joaquin off in mid-sentence as it echoed across the dome. Ethan glanced over his shoulder, up at the sphere. Clouds of steam were drifting across the roof of the dome amid showers of sparks and the pulsing glow of warning beacons. From somewhere within the sphere emanated a deep humming sound, as though every atom in the facility were vibrating, and another deafening crack thundered through the dome.

Ethan saw the metal panel where his bullets had struck suddenly warp, the solid steel buckling like paper crushed in an invisible hand. A blast of steam and smoke billowed in a toxic cloud from the damaged electromagnet high above them and set off another smoke alarm. Ethan turned back to Joaquin.

‘Looks like everybody’s time is running out,’ he said with a tight grin. ‘We should all leave, right now.’

Joaquin shook his head, his face suddenly racked with panic and desperation.

‘We can’t leave!’ he shouted. ‘You’re not going anywhere!’

Katherine looked at her husband.

‘If you leave now, with us, then this is all over, Joaquin! There’ll be no hard evidence to convict you! We can fight this, together!’

Another pair of deafening cracks thundered out from inside the sphere. Ethan flinched in shock as he guessed that the failed electromagnets were destabilizing the containment field. With the delicate repulsive balance within the chamber lost, the black hole was beginning to drag on the sphere around it. It would only be a matter of moments before the panel failed, and with it the whole facility.

‘The chamber’s going to breach!’ Ethan shouted at Joaquin.

Joaquin shook his head and gestured to the control panel nearby.

‘Widen the field from the remaining generators,’ he ordered one of his men. ‘Compensate for the imbalance!’

The soldier obeyed instantly and ran across to the control panel to stare at the endless array of screens, dials and instruments.

‘How?’ he shouted.

Joaquin jerked Lopez toward the panel, one eye on Ethan and the other on the buckling panel high up on the sphere.

‘Use the touch-screens!’ Joaquin ordered. ‘Fourth on the left!’

More sirens began going off as the black hole began to collapse the sphere. Ethan felt the metal panels beneath his boots begin to vibrate, numbing his legs as he kept his weapon trained on the IRIS soldier still aiming his weapon at Bryson.

‘We’re wasting time, Joaquin!’ Ethan warned him. ‘We’re all going to die!’

‘That one there!’ Joaquin shouted at the soldier, ignoring Ethan.

Everyone watched the soldier as he began pressing buttons on the screen before him. Ethan moved further away from the sphere as he glanced up at the damaged panel to see it bowed inward like a convex lens, rivets trembling under the unimaginable force.

‘It’s too late,’ Ethan shouted. ‘It’s going to fail.’

The IRIS soldier finished his adjustments and Ethan felt the vibrations in the panels beneath his feet cease as the deep hum faded away. Joaquin’s face illuminated with a bright smile as he laughed out loud.

‘It is over! Nothing anybody does makes any difference!’ he cried out in delight. ‘The future cannot be changed. I cannot die here today!’

Lopez stared up at the trembling panel in the dome, ignoring the pistol at her throat. Bryson, still holding the dead soldier against his chest, glanced up at it, too, just as a tiny sound tinkled above the hiss of steam and alarms. Ethan turned his head and saw a single rivet bounce down the side of the sphere to hit the metal floor plates with a high-pitched twang.

Ethan turned to Lopez.

‘Cover, now!’

Joaquin’s face collapsed into terror as with a final rending screech of metal torn through metal the panel imploded inward, ripped like tissue paper as it vanished from sight to be replaced by a writhing bolt of blue-white plasma that snaked from within to envelop the power generator like a ghostly hand.

Ethan hit the deck as a screaming noise wailed through the dome. He glimpsed rippling streams of water vapor and ice that were plucked from the air of the dome, flowing like a writhing river into the unimaginable blackness within the chamber. In an instant the failed power generator was torn from its roof mountings and smashed through the wall of the sphere with a terrific crash and another blaze of pure energy that seethed across the ceiling of the dome and fell like white hot rivulets of rain down toward the deck.

‘The singularity’s been exposed!’ Joaquin bellowed above the din of rending metal and screaming alarms.

To Ethan’s amazement the falling globules of energy were snatched from midair and zipped back into the breach. Suddenly Ethan lost his balance, as though the whole dome was tilting onto its side like a capsizing ship. The previously flat deck became a shallow ramp with the exit hatch at the top and the black hole’s chamber at the base. Yet despite the alarming sensation, his brain told him that the deck was still level.

Ethan instinctively grabbed at the deck plates beneath him and searched for a hand hold. He realized that the black hole’s immense local gravitational influence within the facility was overpowering that of the earth, and that now the singularity in the hole’s dark heart was the direction that gravity was taking.

Ethan saw the IRIS soldier behind the control panel scream as he was hauled upward from the walkway and span through the air toward the sphere, slamming into its wall with a crunch of shattered bone as his legs crumpled beneath him. The ragged breach in the chamber folded further inward in a cacophony of failing rivets, like a giant black mouth with rows of sharp metal teeth, and the soldier screamed a final horrified cry as he was dragged into the breach and vanished in a flare of energy.

Ethan felt a bitter, unimaginable cold creep toward him, saw the air in the dome vaporizing in clouds before his eyes as it lost pressure and was dragged toward the terrifying maw of the black hole still entrapped by the remaining magnetic fields within the chamber. He realized that if the field failed entirely then the black hole would be able to move freely, and there would be nothing on earth that could stop it.

‘Ethan!’

Ethan turned his head and saw Lopez clinging to the edge of the control panel. Joaquin was scrambling away from her and slammed his boots into her shoulders as leverage to get away from the black hole’s devastating pull. Lopez grabbed Joaquin’s ankles as he struggled, and then they both were dragged off the control panel and slammed down onto the deck, Lopez sliding past Ethan toward the chamber for several yards before she managed to grab hold of the deck plates.

Joaquin cried out and grabbed at the deck plates with one hand as with the other he aimed his pistol at Lopez. Ethan shouted out a warning as Lopez scrambled to her feet, as though she were climbing a steep hillside, and then Joaquin fired.

Lopez’s head jerked violently to one side, her long black hair flew across her face and her legs collapsed beneath her. She hit the deck hard and instantly slid toward the black hole.

‘Nicola!’

Ethan launched himself onto his feet and was about to leap for Lopez’s prostrate form when the two IRIS soldiers before him aimed their rifles at his chest. Ethan desperately tried to raise his own rifle in time but before he could take aim both of the IRIS soldiers fired, bright bursts of flame leaping from the barrels as Ethan felt a series of thumps hammer his chest.