Final Days

ONE

Gate Delta, Site 17, 1×10¹⁴ AD (Home Date: 5 January 2235)

They were making good time along the East Rampart, on their way back to Vault One, when all four life-support indicators for Stone’s team suddenly faded to black. Jeff Cairns came to a halt, his pressure suit informing him, in a soft contralto voice, of a sudden spike in his adrenalin and heart rate.

You don’t fucking say, Jeff thought sourly. He glanced automatically over the ramparts, his eye following the bright parallel lines of the path markers towards the truncated pyramid of Vault Four in the distance. He waited to see if the indicators would flicker back into life, his mouth suddenly dry and sticky.

Three other life-support indicators – representing Eliza Schlegel, Lou Winston and Farad Maalouf – still glowed on the curved interior of his visor. All three, along with Jeff himself, had been assigned to the first and second vaults for the duration of this particular expedition. Other icons – representing suit pressure, air supply and bio-functions – floated near the bottom edge of the visor, registering clearly against the black and starless sky.

Eliza and Lou, who had been walking a couple of metres ahead of Jeff, both came to a stop at the same time, their helmets also turning towards the fourth vault. Jeff listened, over the shared comms, as Eliza tried to raise Mitchell and the others, the strain becoming evident in the sharply clipped tone of her words.

The comms hissed as they all waited in vain for a response.

The East Rampart was one of four hundred-metre-high walls that connected the vaults together, forming a square when seen from above. For safety, the edges of the rampart were illuminated to either side by rows of softly glowing markers placed at regular intervals. It was a long way down if you somehow managed to wander too close to the edge.

Jeff turned to see Farad standing just behind him, his frightened eyes staring back at him through a smeared visor. The fingers of Farad’s gloves were wrapped tightly around the handlebar of a steel containment unit, mounted on four comically bulbous wheels, and his lips were moving silently in what Jeff suspected was a prayer.

‘Maybe we should go look,’ said Lou, sounding like he was thinking aloud.

‘No.’ Eliza’s voice was sharp, decisive. ‘The artefacts are our priority. We have to make our scheduled rendezvous with Hanover’s team at the Tau Ceti gate.’

Jeff turned to look back towards her. ‘We can’t just abandon them,’ he heard himself say.

‘Nobody’s abandoning anyone,’ said Eliza. ‘If something has happened, I don’t want to risk any more lives until we know exactly what we’re dealing with. Besides, it might just be a temporary communications breakdown.’

‘Might be,’ said Jeff.

Eliza turned and shot a quick, furious look at him. I’m tired of your insubordination, she’d warned him more than once.

‘Maybe Eliza’s right,’ said Lou, his tone conciliatory. ‘We have to be careful.’

‘So just what is it you’re saying we should do if we ;s abandonhear from them?’ Jeff demanded. ‘Just abandon them?’

‘You’re not in charge here,’ said Eliza, ‘and we have our orders from Hanover.’

‘I know we’re expendable,’ said Jeff. ‘I’m under no illusions on that count.’

‘Nobody’s saying anyone is exp—’

‘We can get to Vault Four with time to spare if we start out now,’ Jeff snapped, his fear flowering into sudden anger; all that adrenalin couldn’t go to waste. ‘Fuck the artefacts.’

‘Really?’ said Eliza. ‘Would you like to share that sentiment with Hanover when we get back?’

‘That could be us stuck in there,’ Jeff insisted. ‘If they’re trapped and still alive, a rescue team won’t get here from Tau Ceti for several hours, probably longer. They’d run out of air long before that.’

Eliza’s expression suggested she was contemplating murder. Typical military mindset, he thought, almost able to see the wheels spinning in her head. It wouldn’t be too hard to engineer an accident for him, not with a long, hard drop on either side of them. Unfortunately for her, everything they saw, heard or did was recorded by their suit’s A/V systems.

‘Dan,’ Farad spoke into the sudden silence, ‘his life-support indicator. It’s back online.’

Jeff glanced down and saw that Dan Rush’s icon had indeed flickered back into life, and it was followed a moment later by Lucy Rosenblatt’s. Mitchell Stone’s icon remained dark, however, as did Vogel’s. The suit interfaces felt clumsy and old-fashioned, and again Jeff found himself wishing that a tangle of security precautions didn’t prevent them from using UP-linked contact lenses.

‘Dan, Lucy, can you hear me?’ Eliza shouted into her comms. ‘We lost track of you. Can—?’

She was interrupted by a brief burst of static, followed by a voice.

‘Hey! Hey, is that you?’ Jeff recognized Dan’s voice. He sounded panicked, very nearly hysterical. ‘Mitch and Erich are gone. It’s just Lucy and me. We—’

‘Slow down,’ urged Eliza, as the rest of them listened in silence. ‘Who else is there?’

‘Just Lucy. Mitch and Erich, they . . . they just . . .’

Dan paused, and for a moment they listened to the sound of his amplified breathing, sounding loud and urgent and close within the confines of their helmets.

‘What happened to them?’ asked Eliza.

‘We were up on Level 214. It’s filled with these deep pits, dozens of them. They were down taking a look inside one, while Lucy and me stayed up above. Then it started to fill up with some kind of liquid.’

‘And they didn’t get out again in time?’

For a moment, it sounded like Dan was trying to suppress a sob. ‘Not exactly . . . no. I’ll send a video squirt over, maybe it’s best if you just see what happened for yourselves. And . . . get here soon, okay? The tokamaks packed up all of a sudden, and it’s pitch black in here.’

Jeff found himself watching Eliza as they listened. She had turned away, to look back towards Vault Four, but from where he stood he could still see her face through her visor, and her lips were pressed together in a thin and bloodless line. She clearly didn’t want to have to go into Vault Four, but none of them did, not really, not when there was a chance that whatever had happened to the others might happen to them too. But Jeff knew that didn’t matter. He knew, deep in his gut, that they had to make the attempt, regardless.

‘We’ll be there soon,’ Eliza finally replied, glancing towards Farad’s cart filled with its precious treasures. ‘There’s no way you can find your way back out to us?’

‘No. It’s too dark to avoid the chance of getting lost, and this part of the vault hasn’t been secured yet. We can see some way with our suit lights, but not far enough to be sure exactly where we are. Don’t want to wind up like Rodriguez, right?’

No, thought Jeff with a shiver, nobody wanted to end up like Rodriguez.

Dan’s voice faded for a moment, and then came back. Jeff glanced down and saw the man’s life-support icon flicker in that same moment.

‘Lucy,’ continued Eliza, ‘how about you? Can you hear me?’

‘Yeah.’ Lucy’s voice sounded tense with pain. ‘I’m good.’

‘You don’t sound it.’

‘Hurt my leg,’ she replied. ‘Had a bad fall.’

‘Hang on and we’ll be there soon enough. But send that video squirt over so we can get some idea what we’re dealing with first.’

They watched the A/V from Dan’s suit in silence, projected on to the curved surface of each of their visors.

Standard operating procedure specified that, even once a chamber had been declared safe by the reconnaissance probes, and pressurized prior to a thorough eyeball examination by the artefact recovery teams, pressure suits must be kept on until a team leader was certain there was no danger of contamination or some other, less predictable risk. Mitchell Stone’s team had been tasked with just such an assessfont>

The A/V showed two suited figures, as seen from Dan’s point of view, kneeling at the bottom of a pit that looked about five metres deep, with a series of wide steps cut into the sides. The two men’s helmets almost touched as one pointed at hundreds of indentations drilled into the lower steps, and arranged in stylized, looping patterns. One turned to glance towards Dan, and Jeff saw Mitchell Stone’s face behind the visor.

The video blurred as Dan looked up suddenly at the shallow, copper-coloured dome of the chamber’s ceiling high overhead. Jeff noticed a fourth suited figure waiting up above, and Lucy’s face was visible through the visor: small and imp-like, loose wisps of her blonde hair pressing against the clear polycarbonate.

As Dan clambered up the wide steps, Jeff saw that half a dozen carbon arc lights had been mounted on tripods close to the chamber entrance. They cast incandescent light across dozens of pits, each one only narrowly separated from the next.

Dan then turned to look back down at the suited figures of Mitchell Stone and Erich Vogel, still crouching at the bottom of the pit. Without any warning, a viscous, oil-like substance began to gush out of the indentations, flooding the pit with astonishing speed. Jeff heard Lucy yell a strangled warning, and Stone and Vogel both jerked upright as if they’d been scalded. The liquid was already covering the top of their boots.

It was Rodriguez, all over again.

From the subsequent sudden blurring of the video, it was obvious that Dan had descended into the pit once more, in order to try and reach the two men. Stone and Vogel were already making their way towards the steps but, even as Jeff watched, he saw their movements become slower, as if the oil were congealing around them. By now it was up to their knees.

The oil appeared to defy gravity, racing up the sides of their suits and soon swallowing them both up in a black tide. Stone was the first to collapse, followed by Vogel a moment later. Jeff watched in mounting horror as their suits began to disintegrate, the metal and plastic dissolving and falling away from their bodies with astonishing speed. Jeff had one last glimpse of Stone’s eyes rolling up into the back of his head, before they were both swallowed up by the still-rising tide.

The oil had behaved purposefully, like something alive, which made Jeff think of childhood monsters, of yawning black shadows filled with imaginary horrors. Tears pricked his eyes but he couldn’t bring himself to stop watching.

The video jerked once more as Dan hurried back up and out of the pit, with understandable haste. Jeff saw Lucy step back, her face aghast, then, with a terrified cry, stumble backwards over the lip of an adjacent pit.

Dan said ‘Oh shit’ very softly, and Jeff watched with numb despair as he hurled himself down the steps of the neighbouring pit.

It was clear from the way one of Lucy’s legs was bent under her, as she lay on the floor of the second pit, that she was badly hurt. Dan grabbed her up in a fireman’s lift and rapidly made his ay back to safety. And, even though Jeff could see nothing but the chamber ceiling through Dan’s A/V, he felt an appalling certainty the second pit was already filling with the same deadly black oil.

And then, just as Dan reached the top, the lights went out.

They followed the rampart to where it merged into a tunnel leading deep inside Vault One. They moved on past branching corridors and ramps to either side, each leading up or down to other levels and chambers. The beams projected from their suits flashed reflections off hastily epoxied signs printed with luminescent inks, which were mounted near junctions that had not yet been fully explored. All carried explicit warnings never to leave the already lit paths.

Catching sight of these warnings, Jeff found himself thinking once more about Rodriguez.

David Rodriguez had been an engineer recruited to the ASI’s retrieval-and-research branch several years before to help run the remote reconnaissance probes, but instead had quickly become the stuff of legend for all the wrong reasons. He was the one recruits got told about during their training and orientation, as an example of how not to conduct oneself when exploring the Founder Network.

He had been part of a standard reconnaissance into a then unexplored level of Vault Two, and had ignored the warnings about sticking to the approved paths. Instead, he had wandered into a side chamber, trying to find a probe that had failed to report back.

He had found the probe and, some hours later, his team-mates found him.

Time, it turned out, worked differently in the side chambers of that particular level. It became slower, the farther inside them you got. Rodriguez had discovered this when he stepped up next to the probe, probably thinking it had simply broken down.

He was still there, to this day: right foot raised and looking towards the far wall, his face turned away from the chamber entrance as he headed forward, still clearly oblivious to his fate. That alone was what really sent the shivers down people’s spines; the fact that no one could see his face got their imaginations working overtime.

Rodriguez’s team-mates, when they finally found him, had been a lot more cautious. One had thrown a spanner just to one side of Rodriguez’s frozen figure, from the safety of the chamber entrance. It still hung there now, motionless, caught in the course of its long trajectory through the air, on its way to eventually landing in some future century. The reconnaissance probe – a wheeled platform mounted with cameras and a range of sensitive instrumentation – stood equally immobile nearby.

David Rodriguez, as new recruits to the most secretive department of the UW’s retrieval and assessment bureau were told, had been a fucking idiot. The vaults were filled with unpredictable dangers, which was why they had to stick to the paths already pioneered by the probes. You wandered away from them at your own risk.

The current popular theory was that these slow-time chambers were stasis devices designed for long-term storage. Time-lapse cameras had been set up at the entrance, to try to estimate how long it would take Rodriguez to set his right foot down, turn around and walk back out of the chamber. The best estimates suggested anything up to a thousand years.

Sometimes Jeff woke from nightmares of Rodriguez still standing there, his face turned away, as the years turned into centuries. Sometimes he was Rodriguez, waking to find himself lost in the darkness of some future age, all alone on the wrong side of a wormhole gate that bored its way through time and space very nearly to the end of everything – a hundred trillion years into a future where most stars had turned to ashes, and the skies were filled with the corpses of galaxies.

They re-emerged from Vault One and followed the North Rampart until they reached Vault Four, half an hour after receiving Dan’s distress call.

Beyond the vaults lay nothing but the blasted, airless landscape of a world that had been dead for immeasurable eons. The planet on which the vaults stood orbited a black dwarf: the shrunken, frozen remnant of a once bright and burning star whose furious death had long since stripped away any vestiges of atmosphere.

Dan, who was an expert in such things, had once told Jeff the vaults themselves were tens of billions of years old, meaning they had stood for longer than the entire lifespan of the universe as it had been measured back in their own time. They were constructed, too, from a material that resisted all attempts at analysis. Despite a near-eternity of bombardment by micrometeorites and other debris drawn into the planet’s gravity well, the exterior of the vaults appeared as smooth and pristine as if their construction had just been finished.

Jeff glanced up at the towering slope of Vault Four, at the moment before they passed into its interior. He could hear Eliza talking to Dan and Lucy over the general comms circuit, trying to keep them calm, assuring them that help was almost at hand. He found himself wondering what they’d have to say once they discovered Eliza had been all for abandoning them.

Farad came abreast of him and tapped the side of his helmet: a request for a private link. At least Eliza had let him leave his cart of goodies back at Vault One, rather than wheel them all this distance.

‘I have come to believe,’ Farad told him, his eyes wide and fervent, ‘that God must have abandoned the universe long before this time-period.’

Jeff regarded him in silence, but with a sinking feeling.

‘Do you know what occurred to me when we heard about Stone and Vogel?’ Farad continued, an edge of desperation in his voice. ‘I could not help but wonder what, in the absence of God, happens to their souls.’

This wasn’t a conversation Jeff wanted to be having right now. His feet ached, and the interior of his suit stank from the long hours he’d spent inside it. Stress knotted his muscles into thick ropes of fatigue.

‘Their souls?’

‘This far beyond .

‘I know all this, Farad. They covered it in the orientations.’

‘Yes but, if God is no longer here, what happens if you die here?’ he demanded, his voice full of anguish. ‘Where do you go? There is only one conclusion.’

‘Farad—’

‘Hell is, by its very nature, the absence of God, is it not?’ the other man persisted.

Jeff stopped and put one hand on Farad’s shoulder, finally bringing him to a halt. Farad stared back at him, his nostrils faring.

‘Listen, you need to calm down a little, okay?’ Jeff told him. ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you.’

Jeff glanced to one side. Eliza and Lou had moved ahead, apparently unaware that the pair had stopped. Up ahead lay a wide atrium, containing electric carts they could use for zipping about the ‘designated safe’ parts of the vaults.

Farad was a large, bluff man with a thick dark moustache, and he sometimes compared his attempts at picking apart the self-adjusting routines controlling the Vaults to a pygmy poking at electronic circuitry with a spear. He was intelligent and sharp, an excellent poker player – as some back at the Tau Ceti station had discovered to their cost – and also in possession of a keen sense of humour. But something about the black, unforgiving void that hung over the vaults, like a funeral shroud, could get to even the best of people.

It seemed to Jeff that the more intelligent people were, the harder it was for them to deal with witnessing a darkened universe far advanced in its long, slow senescence. Self-declared atheists began sporting prayer beads, while the moderately religious either discovered a new fervour for their faith or, more frequently, abandoned it altogether.

Farad refocused on him after a moment, and Jeff could see that his face was slick and damp behind the visor.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Farad after a moment. ‘Sometimes . . .’

‘I know,’ Jeff replied, with as much sympathy as he could muster. ‘But we’ll be home in a few days. Remember, we’ve got a plan.’

‘Yes.’ Farad nodded, his upper lip moist. ‘A plan. Of course.’

‘You just need to hold it together for a little while longer. Okay?’

‘Yes,’ Farad said again, and Jeff could sense he was a little calmer. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

<

Jeff gave him his best winning smile. ‘You already said that.’ He nodded, indicating somewhere further up the corridor. ‘I think we’d better catch up.’

Eliza had glanced back once, but chose to say nothing as the two of them caught up.

They pulled a spare tokamak fusion unit from a pre-fab warehouse established in Vault Four’s primary atrium and loaded it on to the rear of an electric cart, before letting it zip them up a steep incline that switched back and forth the higher they rose. When they reached Level 214, they found the passageways and chambers shrouded in darkness, so had to rely on their suit lights while they swapped the new fusion unit for the failed one. There was no telling why it had shut down, but inexplicable power-outs were far from unusual.

The lights strung along the ceiling flickered back into life, revealing closely cramped walls on either side. An airlock seal had been placed across the passageway, and they stepped through it one by one, emerging into the pressurized area beyond.

Jeff wanted nothing more than to crack open his helmet and breathe air that didn’t taste like his own armpits, but Eliza would have none of it. He understood the reasons for her justifiable caution, but still felt resentful.

When they entered the chamber that Stone’s team had been studying, they found Dan had now managed to drag Lucy on to a narrow strip of ground located between four adjacent pits. The pit that had swallowed up Stone and Vogel was now full to the brim with black oil, its calm stillness looking to Jeff like a black mirror laid flat on the ground. It seemed strange that none of the reconnaissance probes first sent into this chamber had triggered a similar reaction.

The furthest walls of the chamber faded into darkness beyond the pools of light cast by the carbon arc lights. There were hundreds more of the pits, Jeff could see, stretching far out of sight. He watched from the chamber entrance as Eliza guided a limping Lucy back to safety, Dan following close behind. They had to shuffle along sideways, one at a time, wherever the edges of the pits came closest together.

He found himself wondering what purpose these pits might have served for the vault’s architects. A garbage-disposal system, perhaps, the black oil being some universal solvent for breaking down unwanted items? Or perhaps they represented something more inexplicable, a puzzle that could never be solved – like so many of the artefacts that had already been recovered and brought back to their own time . . .

Something suddenly moved just beyond the illuminated part of the chamber, snapping him out of his reverie. Jeff stared hard into the shadows, then stepped forward. Lou and Farad were too busy arguing to have noticed anything, as they discussed how to recover a sample of the black oil, should it prove equally adept at dissolving any type of container they might attempt to collect some in.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Jeff urgently, turning back to look at the two men.

‘See what?’ asked Eliza over the comms, audibly puffing with exion.

Jeff stared into the shadows once more. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe it’s . . .’

Maybe it’s nothing, he thought. The vaults lent themselves effortlessly to the imagination, after all.

But he saw it again; a slight movement almost on the edge of his perception. Lou must have seen it, too, for he stepped up next to Jeff, unclipping a torch from his belt and shining its powerful beam across the chamber.

The torch revealed Mitchell Stone, naked and shivering, kneeling between two empty pits and blinking up into the light.

It’s not possible, thought Jeff, in the shocked silence that followed. But a moment’s reflection suggested otherwise. After all, the lights had failed almost immediately, so Stone might have managed to crawl out of the oil-filled pit, unseen by either Lucy or Dan, and then got lost. But why hadn’t he called out for help?

‘Jesus!’ he heard Eliza exclaim, followed by a muttered prayer from Farad.

Stone raised one hand towards them, and then slumped forward soundlessly.

Without thinking, Jeff stepped forward and began to navigate his way towards him.