The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (39 page)

Shaw studied the screen, which showed an older woman standing at a command console that very closely mirrored the one he was so familiar with in Nevada.

“—much longer until the surface is clear?” she asked, her commanding voice in English.

“We don’t know how many of them there are yet. We break one up, and it sinks, but it just allows one that was below it to pop up to the surface.” Shaw was caught by the voice, but it was coming from someone just off-screen.

“Is there any sign that these spheres have started growing?”

“None. They’re hollow, and they don’t grow—entirely different. It’s like they were built to be dropped into the lake and nothing more.”

“What could they be playing at?” The woman shook her head. “Any casualties from the shore?”

“None. The emergency signal sent to wraps seems to have kept everyone indoors or away from the water.”

“OK. Let’s review our street entrances and the sewers again. We need sensors and lights everywhere. I don’t want spheres sneaking up on us like they did on your friends in Nevada, Yang.”

Shaw gaped at the screen as Tim Yang stepped forward into the view of the feed’s screen. “Son of a bitch,” he cursed.
Of course.
He had originally been transferred from Geneva to work in the Nevada Lattice. After everything that had happened, he’d been sent back home.

“This attack is different,” Yang told her. “If they could have done it twice, they would have done it at the same time.”

Shaw couldn’t fully understand why seeing Yang in Geneva was so shocking to him. In a short week, the young man had become surprisingly close to him. He knew Iverson and Braybrook and some of the other faces around the Nevada command center. But he hadn’t traveled with them, or mentored them. Maybe he’d put in the effort with Yang and connected with him because he was overcompensating—
your evil twin nearly killed me, so I want to make sure I treat you right
. Whatever the reason, the emotion was real. His opponent had a face this time. A face he didn’t want to fight again.

Erling was next to him. “Do you think he’ll figure out we’re down here?” Erling asked. “And even if he did, what could he do to stop us?”

“We don’t know. I think that’s generally the lesson of the day. How big is our tunnel, Taveena?” Shaw asked.

“Twenty meters.”

“How long until we can squeeze in?”

“Working on it!” came the clipped reply.

It wasn’t essential that the
Walden
slip into the tunnel, but Shaw hoped to use the ship later for their escape, and he didn’t want it being discovered in the meantime.

“Annalise, can you give me a hand? The water’s complicating things,” Taveena asked. Annalise was at her side, and together they pored over the tunnel schematics, which were now incredibly wide at one end, narrowing to a small sliver of molecules just under the Lattice.

“Gabriel’s Horn,” Wulf said, catching what Shaw was looking at on the screen.

Shaw shook his head, not understanding.

“It’s a geometric shape, called Gabriel’s Horn. It looks just like the tunnel you’re about to plunge this ship into. And I suppose the name is rather fitting too. The horn to announce Judgment Day.”

“We’re freeing people, not standing in judgment.”

“We’re giving them a chance to experience the world to come. That’s what Gabriel announced.”

“You’re not helping, Wulf. I just want to give Ellie and my daughter a chance to grow up in a world where sick perverts aren’t jumping into their minds all the time.”

“You can start moving her in,” Taveena said, “but
slowly
! We’re going to be displacing a lot of water, and it’s got to fit through a narrow gap between us and the tunnel.”

“Helix, can you pilot us in while Annalise is helping Taveena?”

She nodded and changed console stations.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Shaw said.

Erling was suddenly at Shaw’s side again. “You need to be watching the screen.”

Shaw’s eyes flickered up, where Yang was arguing passionately to his commanding officer. “I know it leaves us blind, but it will leave them blind too! They are using the Lattice against us. We know they’re coming after Geneva—somehow. But it’s almost certain that they couldn’t do it without the Lattice.”

“We have no proof of that—”

“I don’t know how they transport spheres around the world, but I know it would help to have a guidance system that could help them target the exact point in a sea of atoms they want to beam them. Shutting down the Lattice removes their guidance system entirely.”

Yang’s commanding officer didn’t answer.

“Taveena?” Shaw called out, knowing she was listening.

“He’s right. The tunnel’s not finished. I can’t keep building it if I don’t have the Lattice.”

Shaw cursed.

Yang was still arguing with his boss on the screen. “—all our security measures, they turn against us! They converted the space-based lasers into propulsion for their hovercraft on their first raid. And just now they turned the dome that was supposed to be impregnable into a trap and crushed everything inside of it. Turning off the Lattice is the only thing we have that can hurt them,” Yang pressed. “We have to cut off their flow of information.”

“And what about us? How do we defend Geneva without the Lattice?”

“Either taking the Lattice offline cripples them and they can’t continue their attack, or they come in person. And we can handle that. Because we know where they’d be headed. Right here.”

Finally the woman nodded. “I’ll try. I can’t make that call on my own. How long of an outage do we want?”

“I think that is a decision we can make once the Lattice is off,” Yang said, his hand up to indicate the floating presence of all the potential listeners. Including Shaw himself.

“Taveena, how long until the tunnel’s big enough to release a drone and have it reach the Lattice?”

“The tunnel’s only a few inches wide under the Lattice right now, and not nearly close enough. But that’s not the real problem …”

“What’s the real problem?”

“All our drones use the Lattice for navigation …”

“Unbelievable. Can none of you see the goddamn irony of this situation?”

“Irony is best enjoyed when we’ve been successful,” Wulf said, scratching his chin.

“They’re going to turn the Lattice off within the next few minutes, and we need to be ready. Taveena, map the exact coordinates of our best entry point right now.”

“How can you know that they’ll turn it off? It’s too essential to too many people to just flip a switch because they think they’re under attack,” Erling said.

“Yang’s right, and everyone above him will see it. Trust me. I know how they work, and how they think. They’ve got nothing to punish us with, and Yang’s just offered them their first good idea. They’ll take it. We’re not going to get much more time.”

“I’ve marked our best point of entry. It’s in an unused section of the old tunnel. It’ll be a trek to get to the Lattice, but it’s the best we’ll get in the next few minutes,” Taveena said.

“Then we’ll take it. Get the coordinates and maps and anything else we need into a system that doesn’t rely on the Lattice.”

Taveena worked, and said. “OK, I’ve formed a hole in the tunnel at our best exit point. We’ll still have to cut through their flooring, but at least not through the nitrogen.”

On screen the commanding officer strode back into the room. Yang and everyone else in the room’s eyes were on her. She took a deep breath. Everyone in the
Walden
was holding theirs, waiting to hear what she had to say. “Shut it down.”

Eighty-one seconds later, all the screens in the
Walden
went grey and then black.

“All right. I guess we don’t have to worry about them finding us at the bottom of Lake Geneva anymore. We’re on our own,” Shaw said. “They’re going to be moving fast to defend the facility, but they don’t know how close we already are. It’s time for a swim.”

“See you on the other side,” Helix said through the airlock. Helix alone would stay behind and wait in the
Walden
.

Shaw, Wulf, Erling, Taveena, and Annalise would make the final leg of the journey to the Lattice, leaving Helix to work out whether the
Walden
was still navigable after being submerged for so long. If all was well, she would meet them at midnight in Geneva’s Parc La Grange and whisk them out of a city likely on a manhunt for them. Shaw wasn’t sure she would follow through, remembering her anger at the rest of the crew after Jpeg’s vote. But he didn’t want to drag that up right now.

Shaw held up his hand, as much of a wave as he wanted to give her, but she closed the door without returning the gesture. The Lattice gone, and the
Walden
underwater, the raiding party wouldn’t be able to communicate with their ship.

As water began to pour into the airlock, Shaw turned away from the interior door in his modified spacesuit, waiting for the exterior door to open.

Despite the plan, something told him that he would not be seeing this ship for some time. Part captors, part teammates, he couldn’t see any reason to continue with them after their task was done. If the crew of the
Walden
was truly willing to ferry him across the Atlantic to St. Louis, he would freely accept the ride—it would be much easier than having to book travel elsewhere when he was supposed to be dead. Otherwise, he was done.

The water was up to his chest, and he looked around at the rest of the team through his helmet.
Were they prepared for what lay in front of them?
The water level was swirling past Shaw’s vision, and then it was to the ceiling, and finally the room was full of water. The pressure was equalized and the outer door of the airlock opened, the full darkness of the lake in front of him.

Shaw checked the pouch slung around his shoulder. Ideally, this explosive charge of sulfuric acid would have been delivered right into the heart of the Lattice by a metal-cutting drone. It wouldn’t have cared about its exposure to the impossibly cold vacuum surrounding the Lattice—a cold so deep and deadly, the merest hint of it would freeze a person solid in less than a second. Now it was his duty to get it into the Lattice … somehow. While trying not to get everyone killed by security or frozen by the Lattice’s atmosphere … somehow.

He didn’t know what his opponents would do, but at least Yang couldn’t predict his moves, either. It wasn’t enough, though. Yang held the advantage. He knew where they had to go. And because of Yang’s quick thinking, Shaw and his team were flying blind. No working drones, no communication back to the
Walden
. No Lattice. Ever since the invention of radio, it had been a useful tactic—jam up the battlefield so your enemy couldn’t communicate, even if it imperiled your own communications.

Shaw felt like they should have been more prepared for this eventuality. It wasn’t as if it had caught them completely off-guard. Shaw, Tranq, and Wulf had considered it as a possible response to their attack, but had rejected it as unlikely during planning; they thought that it would be too difficult politically for Nevada or Geneva to turn off the Lattice, even temporarily as an emergency measure.

They’d overestimated the world’s need for connection, Shaw thought. Which led to an uncomfortable question—what else had they overestimated?

The doors of the airlock were open, and the team began to filter out into the black abyss, flashlights illuminating their way in beams of light through the water.

Shaw and Erling were the last out of the
Walden
and into the tunnel. Shaw looked up and illuminated the ceiling of the tunnel with his own flashlight. It looked just like the pipe he’d crawled through with Tranq and Erling. He turned to look at the hulking sphere behind him, so snugly fit into the tunnel. He realized it was the first time he’d actually seen the
Walden
, since the last time he was outside her hull she was invisible. The ship was beautiful, and yet it looked like any other sphere he’d seen over the last few days.

The swim through the glass tunnel was like diving in a lava tube in Hawaii, something Shaw had actually experienced, and not just imitated via the Lattice. Except this lava tube was narrowing quickly as they swam. What started out as a wide open space quickly became noticeably cramped. Where they had been swimming as a group, they soon found they had to swim in smaller and smaller groups, until they were swimming two-by-two down the narrow passageway.

He hoped none of them were secretly claustrophobic.

Shaw and Wulf were swimming together at the front of the group, and just as Shaw was about to indicate that they should start swimming in single file, Wulf pointed. About ten feet in front of Shaw, the smooth surface of the tunnel was rippled, pulled back around a wide and dark opening, maybe three feet in diameter. Taveena’s exit.

Wulf moved in front of Shaw, the laser cutter already in his hand.

Shaw maneuvered to see into the dark opening. It was filled with dirt, but before Wulf used the laser cutter, he pulled the dirt away, muddying the water below him. When it had cleared up, Shaw saw the underside of a concrete floor.

Shaw looked behind him, and motioned for everyone in the group to swim forward.

Taveena was at the back of the group. She turned and ran her hands along the walls of the tunnel, releasing her specially prepared molecular machines. Almost imperceptibly at first, but then gathering speed, Shaw saw the edges of the tunnel began to close in around her.

Soon the end of the tunnel was entirely sealed off from the depth of Lake Geneva. With the disc in place, they were safe. Cutting a hole into the tunnels of CERN would not cause the great pressure of the water behind them to rush into the Installation, filling the void, and sweeping them away in the process.

At the same time, with the tunnel sealed, there wasn’t any option for going back. Taveena gave a thumbs up, which Wulf returned. He began cutting into the concrete above him.

The concrete slab Wulf had cut away fell through the water to the base of the tunnel. Shaw moved past Wulf and pulled himself up into the opening. He poked his head above the surface and looked around. Save for a red glow from an emergency light, the space was dark and apparently empty.