Dark Rising

FORTY-NINE

The Southern Israeli Desert

Thirty miles south of Dimona, the dry surface of the Negev Desert broke open. Coolant seeped into the air as a thirty-foot disc slid back to reveal a six-storey-deep silo. The rounded lump of a nose-cone could just be made out by anyone peering down into the dark hole, its top decorated with Hebrew script – a final prayer for those it was about to annihilate.

The Jericho-III missile was equipped with a 100-kiloton, 1000-pound thermonuclear payload. Its arrowhead technology could penetrate up to fifty feet into the ground before nuclear fission took place. The sleek, lethal spear was designed to seek out and melt deep-ground facilities. It was a man-made earthquake.

Lights flicked on and, deep under the earth, a wailing horn sounded as the countdown began.

Zach rushed to the bank of computer terminals, grabbed a keyboard and plugged it into the command console. The screen showed the hundreds of batteries at eighty per cent full and the remaining thermal power cubes filling rapidly. Soon the capacity to absorb the black-hole energy would be surpassed, and then it would break its bounds and be free to consume Earth. Zach began to type furiously. Nothing happened.

‘Achhh! Password protection.’ He pressed a combination of keys and brought up a command line. He immediately dived into the operating-system code.

‘Can you hack in?’ Alex asked.

‘With enough time, anything is hackable. But I guess time’s something we don’t have a lot of now.’ He lifted his arm to wipe his face with his sleeve. ‘Ah, I don’t feel well.’

Zach continued to type, but Alex saw that he was sweating and becoming pale.

In the sphere room, the power cubes were being pulled from the walls and into the centre of the black hole; they looked like a flock of tiny birds rushing back to their nests. Zach turned his head away from the keyboard and threw up. The distortion was starting to drag hard at his atomic structure. He wiped his mouth and turned to Alex, having to shout over the unearthly screaming from the sphere room.

‘The black hole is growing too fast and getting too strong. It will soon exceed its boundaries, and once the plasma is gone, its magnetic chains will be thrown off and it will be free to start swallowing everything around it – the entire planet.’

Zach shook his head as if to clear it. Alex knew what he was experiencing; the air seemed thicker and denser as the molecular structure of the atmosphere began to stretch, and it was getting hard to move.

Zach looked around at Alex for encouragement, or advice, anything. Alex nodded and tried to look confident, but all he could manage was a rueful half-smile. The fact was, he felt powerless. The mission wouldn’t complete and his team would be totally wiped out. They would be the first and last people on Earth to witness the genesis of a true apocalyptic event, but that wasn’t much consolation. He put a hand on Zach’s shoulder, hoping at least to give the young scientist some kind of support.

Zach wiped his eyes and turned back to the screen. He keyed different code strings into the computer – and this time was rewarded by a long string of binary code filling the screen. He yelled to Alex, ‘I’ve found a back door, but I need more time. Even if I begin to shut it down now, the radiation levels will still build to a point that will literally melt our flesh.’

Alex flinched as he felt a hand on his arm and he turned quickly. Adira stood beside him; she managed a weak smile through heavily bruised lips. One of her eyes was blackened and closing fast, and there was a trickle of blood from her ear. Alex knew she was seriously hurt.

She must have seen him examining her injuries because she straightened slightly and let go of his arm. ‘Sure, I’m not so pretty today, but so what? How much time have we got?’

Zach looked around and smiled at her, then whipped his head back to the console. ‘Next to none. All I can do is slow it and buy you some time. But you all need to get out of here – now!’ He glanced at Alex, ‘Please.’ He went back to his typing, his fingers flying across the keys.

‘Not without you, little brother,’ Adira said. She staggered towards him but Alex stopped her. She looked at him sharply and tried to pull out of his grip. He held on and shook his head.

‘He’s right, Addy. He stays or we all die. Zach is giving us – giving the entire planet – a chance. We mustn’t waste it.’

‘Achhh!’ She pulled her arm free and looked about to strike him. Alex dropped his arms, prepared to take the blow if she delivered it. Instead, she turned her back on them. Alex could tell she was struggling to discipline her emotions.

‘Yasher koach aschoti,’ Zach told her. ‘Have great strength, my sister.’ Adira didn’t turn or respond. The only sign that she heard him was a slight hunching of her shoulders, as if she were preparing herself for a blow.

Alex wanted to tell Zach he was brave, valorous… to thank him. But he guessed the young Israeli wasn’t looking for that, or about the sacrifice he was making. There were no other words, and no more time. He squeezed Zach’s shoulder once and turned to Adira. She had her fists up to her temples and staggered slightly, her body leaning in towards the shattered glass of the observation window. Alex could feel it too; the gravitational drag was pulling hard at the very organic fibre of their bodies. He had to use all of his great strength just to walk over to Adira. It felt as if everything around them was tilting towards the sphere room. He grabbed her around the waist and she slumped against him, unconscious now.

Alex hoisted her over his shoulder and pushed his way to the exit. He felt like a deep-sea diver, a mile down under water pressure that could crush steel. He stepped over the body of the little scientist whose neck had been broken only minutes before. The man’s face still registered the pain and anguish he had experienced in his last brutal seconds of life. Alex saw the small object clasped in his fist and recognised it as a storage device. He hesitated… This is not good technology for any country to possess – his own words rushed through his mind. He adjusted Adira on his shoulder and reached down for the device. It was small in his hand… he should crush it to powder

… But he couldn’t. He had his orders.

He placed it in his pocket and pushed on to where Sam Reid was sprawled on the floor, coughing blood. He lifted Sam over his other shoulder and then focused on the door – one foot after the other, like moving through viscous oil.

As he reached the exit, Alex looked back across the room. The remaining scientists and technicians were clutching onto the legs of chairs and tables as they felt the drag of the gravitational tide drawing them into the black hole. The equipment closest to the sphere room was starting to streak and stretch, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before the outer gravitational corona reached them and they too would begin their voyage to somewhere… else. Alex tried not to think about the deformed creature he had seen in the containment room one level up.

Once the outer door was closed, the solid steel shielding gave him some insulation and he was able to speed up. Down the stairs he raced, along the tunnel and through the caverns. He planted Sam’s last spider against the rockfall, and covered him and Adira with his body as the explosion opened a way back to the cave mouth through which they’d entered.

With Sam and Adira over his shoulders again, he ran. He ran at a speed faster than any living creature on Earth. He ran until he couldn’t feel the gravitational pull anymore; until he couldn’t feel his own legs. He ran for hours until his body simply switched off from fatigue.

A mighty horn sounded far behind him. He fell forward as the world spun and then went black.

Zach managed to keep the remaining power cubes working as he reduced the feed to the dark monster in the other room. He knew the typed codes by memory now and so was able to shut his eyes. He didn’t want to look at his hands anymore; his fingers scared him – they looked longer and thinner than he remembered, the legs of some spindly deep-sea creature crawling over the keyboard.

Something wet ran down his face and he knew it was blood. Blistering sores opened on his forehead and cheeks as the severe radiation peeled back his outer layer of skin.

‘Baruch Shem Kivod Malchito LeOlam Va’ed!’ he whispered, a last prayer to God, and the words gave him strength. Just a few seconds more, he thought, so they can get far away. He tried to pray again, but this time his mouth wouldn’t work. His tongue was too large and refused to bend around the shapes of the words.

He felt a tingling warmth on his face and opened his eyes. The black hole was fraying around the edges. It was so large and close now that the dark curtain had reached the edge of the window. Am I winning? Am I sending it back?

He looked into the entity’s very core – and saw something in there that no human being should have to bear. He screamed a single word as he felt himself pulled from his chair: Gehinnom! The ancient Hebrew word for hell.