Apocalypse

68

Time seemed to stand still.

Ethan had spent half of his adult life being shot at, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, both as a soldier and as a journalist. It had happened so many times, there had been so many close calls, that he felt he had somehow become immune, as though he knew that he would never be hit himself. It had always happened to the other guy.

But not this time.

Ethan hit the deck hard on his back, his hands flashing protectively but uselessly to his chest as the wind was knocked from his lungs and his vision starred before his eyes. The deafening roar of the chamber breach and the wailing sirens receded for a brief moment, and with a sense of terminal despair he lifted his hands up, knowing that they would be smeared with warm blood spilling from his lungs and heart.

He stared at them for a long moment, briefly wondering whether the lack of pain meant that death was in itself such a shock that nothing could be felt. He allowed himself the thought that maybe getting shot wasn’t such a bad way to go after all. In fact, he realized, he felt absolutely fine.

Ethan sat up and looked at the two IRIS soldiers, who were staring past him in disbelief and backing away toward the exit, leaning back against the increasing gravitational pull of the black hole. One of them fired again, the bullets smacking the air nearby as they somehow zipped past Ethan.

Ethan turned, and felt a surge of jubilance that warred with a terrible dread that chilled his guts.

The side of the sphere was peppered with five dents, the marks of the bullets that clearly should have killed him, and several more from the second salvo now hammered the metal panels, the bullets having been dragged from their flight path by the black hole’s leaking gravitational field and the huge electromagnets, to pass harmlessly by just inches from where Ethan had stood. Only the shockwaves from the bullets had hammered his chest.

But what sent fear coursing through his veins was the growing breach in the chamber. Not only was every unsecured object now beginning to drift toward the breach, but the light around the breach was beginning to bend as though it were underwater, flowing into the sphere.

Ethan recalled the words of the scientist, Ottaway, at Cape Canaveral: once you get too close to a black hole’s event horizon, too deep inside the gravity well, nothing can escape, not even light.

He looked up and saw the power generators straining against their mounts, huge weights that would smash through the sphere from all directions and fully expose the black hole within.

‘Nicola!’

Bryson hurled himself across the void past Ethan and slammed down alongside Lopez, one arm wrapping around her as the other sought a handhold to prevent them both from lifting off the deck and vanishing into the breach. Ethan scrambled to his feet, aware of the cold emanating from the black hole as it drew even the atoms in the air toward its insatiable singularity. He struggled up the steeply inclined deck toward the control panel, where dense coils of electrical cable writhed like ranks of kelp flowing in underwater currents.

Ethan reached out and grabbed the cables in one hand as he hauled himself painfully up and away from the black hole’s gravity well.

Looking back toward the sphere, he had the dizzying impression of the entire dome appearing like a huge funnel, with the black-hole chamber deep inside its mouth, buried at the base of the funnel’s steep walls. Bryson was clinging to the deck panels, one arm around Lopez’s waist to prevent her from slipping any further toward the breach. Katherine was crawling toward Ethan along the deck nearby, flinching as bits of paper, pens and clipboards flew past her face toward the breach. He could see that the outer surface of the sphere was now a sparkling white in color, coated thickly with ice that reflected the savage bolts of plasma searing the air around it.

Alternating heat and cold, Ethan recalled from his school days, makes metals brittle. The sphere would not hold for much longer. He could see that the swirling blur of light was growing larger, twisting around the breach as though being bent by a giant lens. He had the terrifying impression that reality was melting and pouring like liquid toward the black hole.

Ethan worked his way back toward Bryson, the deck beneath his feet tilting ever more as he moved toward the sphere, as though he were crawling on the surface of an ever-steepening slope toward the black hole’s gravity well. The cold increased as he got closer to Bryson, a bitter, biting cold that condensed his breath on the air and was turning moisture to sleet crystals that swept toward the breach like a blizzard.

‘Throw me some cable!’ Bryson shouted. ‘Hurry up or we’ll be leaving our skin behind on here!’

Ethan nodded, seeing the surface of the deck frosted with sparkling particles of ice. He grabbed a handful of cables from behind the panel and pulled hard on them, yanking them free of their ties and lowering them toward Bryson. As he got closer, Ethan pinned his boots and shoulders against the deck to prevent himself from being captured by the black hole’s gravity.

‘The generators are failing!’ Bryson shouted.

Ethan focused on getting close enough to Bryson to pass on the cables. He was almost there when a cascade of bullets crackled across the deck around him. Ethan flinched and saw Joaquin shielding himself against the black hole’s gravity at the far end of the walkway, aiming one of the dropped M-16s. The tycoon was glowing blue as though enveloped in a halo of electrical energy. Ethan blinked, his vision strangely blurred, but then he realized that the entire far wall of the dome was tinged with blue light as the black hole’s increasing influence twisted time and space ever more tightly.

‘Ethan!’

Bryson’s cry focused his attention once again and he reached out as far as he could. Bryson stretched out for the cables and one thick fist grabbed onto them and pulled. Ethan grasped his hand and wrist, holding him steady as another shower of bullets clattered across the deck, the rounds ricocheting and zipping into the chamber breach as though plucked from midair.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Bryson yelled.

Joaquin, his aim frustrated as the black hole twisted the path of the bullets away from Ethan, began edging his way toward them, his boots extended out toward Ethan as he slid his way carefully on his back, aiming between his legs. Ethan realized that if he got close enough, his shots would find their mark.

‘Your time is finished, Warner!’ Joaquin shouted.

With an immense effort, Ethan pulled on Bryson’s hand as the big man kicked with his boots and scrambled up the steepening deck plates, Lopez’s prostrate body limp beneath his other arm. Ethan’s guts plunged as he saw the blood smearing her temple and face, his fear of losing her suddenly dwarfing that of being dragged into the black hole’s oblivion himself.

Ethan hauled Bryson the last twelve inches with a renewed sense of urgency, and the big man pulled himself to safety. Ethan rolled away just as Joaquin’s voice rang out in his ears.

‘Goodbye, Mr. Warner!’

Ethan saw Joaquin aiming from barely ten feet away and stared at the barrel pointed directly at him. And then Joaquin’s face collapsed into agony as he screamed.

In the weird and warped blue light, Ethan saw Katherine Abell appear like a genie from the distant exit hatch, moving impossibly fast like an old movie to zoom up behind Joaquin. He realized that, where she was standing, beyond the black hole’s gravity well, time was running faster. The bright red fire axe in her hand whipped down from over her shoulder and crashed through the rifle in Joaquin’s grasp, shattering the barrel and smashing through his fingers with a splatter of blood.

Ethan saw Katherine screaming at her husband as she pounded him with her fists and scraped at his face with her nails as they tumbled together across the deck and into the gravity well.

Ethan reached out for Katherine as they plunged toward him. Her nails dug into the metal plates and her fingers caught, enough that she began scrambling up and away from them. Then Joaquin Abell crashed into him and smashed both Ethan and Katherine down toward the black hole.