Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

“No time. I’ll be fine. I’ll be up top right behind you.” Before she could say more, he continued. “I need you to do something too.”

“I’m already on it,” she said. “I’ll do it and then help with the survivors.”

“I know what you’re planning,” he said. “What I need is for you to not do it, if it looks too risky.”

“I have to try—”

“No you don’t. Not if it jeopardizes your life. If it’s too dangerous, just skip it and go right to the wounded.”

She started to protest, but he spoke over her again. “Promise.”

A second passed. She looked frustrated—but understanding.

“I promise.”

Then she was gone, down the stairs after the others.

Travis turned and sprinted up the flight they’d just come down.

He passed the hole the bunker buster had punched in the floor, and entered Defense Control, its workstations and its wall of screens dark and dead. He turned to the flat wall, with its row of giant, semi-portable mainframe computers—eight in all.

They were on wheels. Big industrial swivel casters the diameter of salad plates, with brake levers that could be locked or unlocked by stepping on them. Travis saw to his relief that only the front casters of each mainframe had been locked. He ran along the row, slamming his heel down on each lever and freeing each wheel. When he’d finished he ran back to the first mainframe in the line, the one nearest the door. He got a hand on its back corner, braced the other against the wall, and pulled.

For a second the thing didn’t budge. It had to weigh five hundred pounds. Then one of its casters pivoted and the whole unit lurched outward, exposing its power cord and data cable. Travis ripped both from their sockets, got hold of the mainframe once more and heaved it farther out. It protested again, clinging to its inertia even on the room’s slanted floor, but once it’d traveled even a few inches, all four casters fell in line with its direction of travel. It rolled smoothly, gaining momentum as Travis pushed it toward the wide-open door.

He eased it into the hallway and slipped past it, positioning himself on its downhill side. For the moment the huge machine, its wheels still cocked sideways, held still where it’d come to rest. Travis, facing it, turned and looked over his shoulder at the hallway dipping sickeningly behind him. Forty feet away, the low point. The weak point.

How weak, exactly?

Travis doubted the sudden addition of five hundred pounds would make a difference.

Maybe four thousand would.

If it didn’t, he and all the others would probably be dead within a few hours, hunted down and captured after Holt’s people connected the dots here.

Travis stepped backward—down the slope—and pulled the mainframe gently toward him. The moment its wheels realigned, the thing came at him like a brawler. He dropped his shoulder against it and dug his shoes into the carpet and stopped it, then carefully walked it down the slope, one foot at a time. When he’d gone what he judged to be fifteen feet he stopped again, and keeping one heel braced on the floor, used the other to step on both caster brakes on the unit’s lower end.

He let go of it.

It stayed put.

He looked at his phone. Three and a half minutes left before the deadline he’d imposed.

He stepped around the mainframe and sprinted back to the door into Defense Control.

Paige’s first glance at the residence twisted her stomach. It’d been her home for over a decade. She’d shared it with Travis for more than a year now. The best year of her life, by an absurd margin, and almost everything that’d made it good had happened here on B16 in this little sanctuary.

Which had now been sliced in two.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, rocked by what lay beyond it. To her left was half of the living room. To her right was nothing at all. Just darkness and churning dust. The wall that’d held the LCD screen was gone, along with ten feet of floor space that’d extended from it. The couch was right on the brink, facing out into the void like some image out of a surreal magazine ad. Behind and to the couch’s left was the short hall that led to the bedroom, just out of sight from where she stood.

She stepped out of the doorway, crossed the room to the hall, and stopped at the bedroom’s threshold. The same ten feet had been lopped off here as in the living room. The bed was gone. The doorway to the closet was half gone—it’d perfectly straddled the cutoff. The closet itself lay mostly to one side, beyond the door, and had largely remained intact. Even from where she stood, Paige could see its back wall, and the built-in safe that now held the Tap.

She looked at the closet’s doorway again, and focused on the floor that passed through it—what little was left. While half the doorway itself remained, there was hardly anything to stand on beneath it. A two-inch ledge at one side. To get beyond, to the intact closet floor, would require holding onto the trim at the doorway’s remaining edge and swinging her body past it. Her center of gravity would be out over the emptiness during the bulk of that maneuver.

She moved forward across the room, slowing as she neared the closet’s doorway and the edge. There was no telling how strong the floor might be along the drop-off—or here where she was standing, for that matter. The carpet hid any cracks that might’ve been visible in the concrete beneath her, but she assumed they were there; the wall was spiderwebbed with them, surrounding the closet doorway and leading away from it in all directions.

The doorway’s trim was three feet from her outstretched hand now. She took another step. Leaned forward. Put her fingertips to the fluted wood and tested its strength by pushing outward on it, toward the chasm.

The cracked wall around the doorway disintegrated almost at a touch. The trim and three inches of concrete around it simply broke free and pitched out into the darkness and fell away.

Paige flinched and stumbled back, sprawling on her ass on the carpet. She stared at the ragged opening where the doorway had been.

She might still make it through into the closet. Where she’d planned to hold onto the trim, she could press the fractured wall between both hands and swing her body over the drop as planned.

Promise , Travis had said.

She stared at the opening and the wall safe ten feet beyond. Stared at the dust-filled abyss below.

From the levels above she heard the voices of the others, calling out and locating the injured.

She got to her feet, turned, crossed out of the bedroom, and sprinted for the corridor.

Travis pushed the last of the eight mainframes into the hallway and eased it into position with the others: they formed a single line extending down the slope, each butted up against the next, the whole mass held back by the first unit Travis had put in place. That one alone had its brakes on.

He watched the formation shudder and slip downward an inch as number eight settled into line.

Footsteps pounded past up the stairwell. Not the first he’d heard in the last minute. He looked at his phone again: thirty seconds left.

More footsteps, some running, some struggling. He turned toward the door and saw it draw open. Paige leaned through.

“Eleven survivors,” she said. “All but two can walk.” She frowned, her forehead creasing. “I couldn’t get it.”

“We’ll be okay,” Travis said.

Paige took in the mainframes for the first time. She saw the idea. Her eyes widened a little.

“Everyone’s above us?” Travis said.

Paige nodded slowly, most of her attention on the computers.

Travis ran to the low end of the line. He studied the two brakes, then stepped forward and jammed his foot hard onto the pedal nearest the wall. As it released the wheel, the entire formation groaned and moved six inches, then halted again.