Terminal (2 page)

At the last moment, Jiggs arched his body, controlling their flight. Then they hit the rock.

With a resounding crack, the Limiter's skull took the impact full on. His body went slack – given a few seconds he might have recovered, but Jiggs wasn't about to allow that to happen.

He rammed his combat knife into the Styx's chest, just below the clavicle.

As he detached himself from the lifeless Limiter, Jiggs didn't have time to dwell on his victory. There was only one thought in his mind; he knew he was already far below the nuclear device that Drake and Sweeney had secured to the side of the void and then primed ready for remote detonation. And he knew that he had to put as much distance between himself and the device as he could.

Before it went off.

Jiggs didn't feel any guilt over saving his own skin. There was nothing he could do for Will and the others back at the top of the pore – he was too far away to help them now.

Grabbing the booster rocket from a side pocket of his Bergen, he spun the valve round to full thrust and, aiming it behind him, fired it up. A blue flame sprouted from the end of the propulsion unit, and he took off like a firework.

At the breakneck speed he was travelling, he exited the void in a matter of seconds and then shot out into the huge cavern beyond, as endless as the night sky. Although they were still many hundreds of miles away, his trajectory was taking him straight towards the suspended bodies of water behind
which ethereal lights flickered. Jiggs had already witnessed this illumination on the first leg of the journey to the inner world, and knew that it was being produced by triboluminescence in the Crystal Belt, where mountain-sized lumps of crystal ground against each other like some sort of perpetual motion machine. And this was also generating the rumbling sound that filled his ears. But, at that precise moment, Jiggs didn't care which way he was heading – he just had to get himself clear of the blast radius.

With the booster still on full thrust, he braced himself for the explosion, counting the seconds. He continued to count until he'd reached a full minute, then two minutes, then three. At that point he stopped, wondering if Drake and the Rebecca twin were still facing each other in some sort of stand-off, or even if they had agreed to a truce, unlikely as that seemed. Perhaps there wasn't to be an explosion after all.

Then the atomic device detonated.

As the roar shook every bone in his body, he braced himself for the first wave from the one-kiloton bomb – the blast of light and searing heat. He knew better than to look at it, making sure his head was tucked well down and that his eyes were protected by his arm. The heat on his back was so intense he really thought that his Bergen and clothing might burst into flames.

He didn't have time to worry further about this as the shock wave caught up with him. The wall of compressed air felt precisely as if a giant hand had slapped him, flinging him forward with such impetus that he could barely draw breath. He was reminded of the first time he'd gone on a roller coaster as a child; the sensation of falling at precipitous speed was identical, but this ride seemed to have no end.

Daring to remove his arm from his face as he sped along, he caught a brief glimpse of the torrents of light from the blast rebounding and reflecting from the far-flung corners of the huge chamber before him. As the whole area lit up, it was so vast and endless it made him feel vertiginous. The glittering masses of water and gargantuan crystal spheres were revealed in all their glory – perhaps as they'd never been before in this secret place deep within the planet.

And what made absolutely no sense to him was, for the instant in which the veil of darkness was lifted, he could have sworn that the line of crystal spheres was remarkably regular, as if they weren't simply some artefact of nature. And there was also something curious about the stretch of cavern wall he'd glimpsed through the haze in the extreme distance – it appeared to be marked with grids of lines, or raised sections of some description.

‘Pull yourself together!' he growled at himself. There had to be a rational explanation – the patterns he'd noticed must be due to the superheated air currents. Either that or the shock wave from the explosion had temporarily scrambled his vision.

And it had been one hell of an explosion. He peered over his shoulder, quickly locating the dull red glow that marked ground zero. Where the void had previously been, the rock had fused into one massive plug of silicate and completely sealed the way into the inner world, just as Drake had predicted it would.

‘Jesus!' Jiggs cried, flinching as a white-hot lump of rock shot not ten feet away from him. As more of these missiles followed, he realised it was fallout from the explosion, like a shower of miniature meteors. But the main barrage was over almost as soon as it began, and he was far enough away for it not to be a serious hazard.

Even though there was no ‘up' or ‘down' in this place, Jiggs didn't need his finely tuned sense of direction to tell him that the explosion had sent him in completely the wrong direction. He checked his position in relation to the Crystal Belt. If he was to have a hope of navigating his way back to the outer surface again, he needed to find the mouth of the second void, called Smoking Jean, which they'd used on their journey to the inner world. He tried to use his booster to adjust his flight path, but such was his velocity that even several minutes with the propulsion device at full thrust made little difference.

But he had no option but to persevere if he ever wanted to get home again, so he kept using the blaster, all the time referencing his position against the still-glowing blast site.

That was when he noticed something curious. A streak of green light appeared in the distance, then faded away. Jiggs was wondering if his eyesight was playing up again when, several seconds later, it was followed by a second streak, although this time it was yellow.

‘Flares?' Jiggs wondered aloud.

Of the team, only he, Sweeney and Drake had been carrying flares in those particular colours. The green flare was a signal to report to an emergency RV, while the yellow one meant that the sender needed help – in effect it was a distress flare. Sending both up at once made no sense at all.

Jiggs frowned, briefly considering the possibility that something on the drifting corpse of the Limiter he'd killed had been set alight in the blast. But it was highly improbable that it would have been those precise colours. No. Jiggs quickly decided that it had to be either Drake or Sweeney, or one of the others.
But who?

And he knew the flares must have gone off because of the
intense heat, so there was no point in sending a counter-signal. Whoever it was had to be in trouble.

He didn't think twice about what he must do.

‘We never leave anyone behind,' Jiggs said, already setting himself on a new course to intercept where his team member – or perhaps members – were bound. There was enough propellant in the booster tanks for the detour, so that wasn't a concern. His main worry was that he'd miss his speeding target, whose flight path would eventually take it into the huge suspended masses of water or even beyond them, into the Crystal Belt. But in the endless black canvas of this huge space, broken only by the flickering muted light, it was tantamount to looking for a needle in a haystack, at midnight.

Taking out his light-intensifying monoscope, he put it on his head and adjusted it for the ambient light levels. Although Drake had tried his best to make him adopt one of his proprietary lenses, Jiggs had stuck firmly to his Soviet-made night scope. The electronics may have been primitive compared to Drake's design, but it had seen him through two decades of active service, and he knew how to repair it in the field if it malfunctioned.

But now all Jiggs was seeing through his monoscope was chunk after chunk of slow-moving rock that had been flung out by the explosion. Then finally he spotted something that looked more promising, and for a few seconds he continued to track it through his scope. It was further out than he'd expected, but nevertheless Jiggs angled his booster so he could home in on it, praying that it wasn't just another hunk of itinerant rock.

Jiggs finally steered himself onto a parallel trajectory, then closed the distance with blips from his thruster. As he made
out more through his monoscope, he was filled with hope when he saw what appeared to be one of the team from the Bergen and the booster rocket trailing behind on the end of a lanyard. With a final burst of speed, he was near enough to take hold of the drifting form. He seized the Bergen, which was still smouldering in places, then turned the body towards him.

‘My God! It's you, Drake!' he cried.

But it wasn't just Drake – there was someone else with him, although this second person was so badly hurt as to be almost unrecognisable.

Jiggs concentrated on Drake to start with. Even from a cursory inspection, Jiggs could tell that he was in a very bad way. Patches of his fatigues had been blasted completely away, and the flesh underneath scorched black. Some of Drake's hair was missing, and his head covered in angry red blisters from the crown and down one side of his face. Jiggs felt his neck for a pulse – he found one, but it was very weak. He must have been in close proximity to the bomb when it detonated, which explained why he'd been moving so fast. And it also probably meant that he'd been bathed in radiation.

Then Jiggs moved on to the second person, twisting the head round so he could see their features.

It was Rebecca One.

Drake had obviously employed the same tactic as Jiggs and swept her over into the void to take her out of the running. Then they'd been involved in a struggle, which explained why she was tangled up in a coil of rope attached to the side of Drake's Bergen.

Jiggs didn't bother to check her for a pulse. Her body was so charred that there was no question that the Rebecca twin
was dead. ‘Hah! Fashion victim!' he observed, as part of her coat crumbled at his touch. ‘That's what you get for wearing black round a nuclear explosion,' he added without a shred of sympathy.

He was correct – the non-reflective surface of her matt black Styx coat had done an admirable job of absorbing the pulse of heat and light. And, as Jiggs tried to disentangle her arm from the rope, it cracked as if it was made of charcoal. He could see that, of the two, she'd come off far worse than Drake. Indeed, she must have helped him by shielding much of his body from the blast.

Jiggs quickly searched the twin's body for anything useful, but other than a few items in the pouches on her belt, it was difficult to tell what was her and what were the remains of her incinerated clothing. Everything had been fused together by the heat.

For a moment Jiggs simply regarded the slight body of Rebecca One. For someone so young, she had been responsible for so much suffering. ‘You don't deserve any last words,' he snarled, then unceremoniously heaved her away into the darkness.

Jiggs was checking Drake's pulse again when he heard him trying to say something, although it was little more than a murmur. ‘Take it easy there, old man. Just you hang on,' Jiggs tried to comfort him, forced to shout over the din of the Crystal Belt. He unhitched his medical pack from his belt, fishing out a syrette of morphine. ‘Something for the pain,' he said to Drake, as he jammed the syrette against the injured man's thigh.

It was only then that Jiggs felt the moisture on his face and looked up sharply. He had become so accustomed to bowling
along at speed through this low-gravity environment that he'd completely forgotten he and Drake were still very much on the move.

‘No!' Jiggs just had enough time to yell as they ploughed straight into a huge globule of water. Although Jiggs didn't have much of an opportunity to gauge its size, it was around twenty feet in diameter. At least, it was until they hit it.

Their momentum was such that it disintegrated into thousands of smaller droplets. And then there were more of these suspended mega-droplets of all sizes in Jiggs' path. Coughing from the water he'd inhaled, he simultaneously tried to shield Drake's face, dodge the larger droplets and fire up his booster, which had taken such a dousing that it had gone out.

As he attempted to protect Drake from another soaking, Jiggs' feet skimmed the circumference of a droplet the size of a house – this one didn't break apart but wobbled like a giant jelly. ‘Space surfing!' Jiggs exclaimed, as he managed to restart the booster, then frantically sought some unoccupied air space. He needed a safe place to stop and administer some urgent first aid to Drake.

In a clearing of smaller droplets, he made out an angular and familiar shape.

‘What the …?' he yelled. He really couldn't comprehend what he was seeing. He tried to use the booster to reach it, but overshot and had to backtrack. As he jetted them both closer, he was able to confirm his first impression.

It was a Short Sunderland – a seaplane that had been out of regular service for nearly fifty years and was these days more likely to be found in an aviation museum. It was a sizeable aircraft, capable of carrying a good twenty-four passengers. One wing had been torn off and the cockpit was badly damaged,
but the rest of the fuselage seemed to be intact apart from a few holes in the tail section.

Still not believing what he was seeing, Jiggs manoeuvred towards it as he remembered the Russian submarine in Smoking Jean, and what Drake himself had said about pores opening up on the surface from time to time. So could some twist of fate be the reason that this seaplane had been sucked down too? Caught in a whirlpool that had brought it all the way down to this inner space?

Much of the white paint remained on the fuselage, although it was stained by patches of rust, particularly around the rivets. And long tendrils of some kind of black algae had anchored itself in clumps all over the exterior, waving in the air currents like fine black hairs.