Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘There’s nothing through there,’ she said. ‘Gaia. .’ She barked a bitter laugh. ‘Great name Melinda came up with there. Gaia had its apocalypse forty years ago.’

‘Forty years. .’ Jonah said, and the shock was profound. This has all happened before .

‘There are survivors,’ Holly said. ‘I emerged close to their Coldbrook and met Drake. He told me a little.’

‘But the thing that came through,’ Jonah said. ‘All those things in Control. Forty years old?’

‘They call them furies.’

‘Furies. Good name.’

‘But there’s hope!’ Holly said.

‘Hope?’ he blurted, feeling the attention of something unknowable focused on the back of his neck. He glanced around, but there was nothing to see. When he looked back Holly had her eyes closed.

‘There’s hope hidden in the deep basements of their Coldbrook,’ she said. ‘His name’s Mannan, and he’s immune to the furies’ bite.’

‘Immune,’ Jonah said. He breathed in the word and let it settle. In his mind’s eye he saw that Inquisitor monster watching him, waiting.

Jonah poured a drink while Holly fired up a laptop. As she accessed the CCTV log to see what had happened moments before the power outage, she recalled the Gaia survivors projecting images of her own world’s destruction onto fluid screens. Her own technology suddenly seemed inferior; the program froze for a few seconds, screen flickering. She felt disassociated from what she was doing, as if she had left a part of herself back through the breach, and she realised that no one knew what effect passing through might have.

‘Maybe I’ve doomed myself,’ she muttered.

‘I think we’ve all done that,’ Jonah said. He placed a glass containing warm orange juice beside her.

‘I always said you should have let me show you how to use these things,’ Holly said.

‘I can use computers.’

‘Sure. But you don’t understand them.’ She sat back and viewed the screen, tapping the mouse button to advance the log instant by instant.

‘That’s what you’re paid for.’ Jonah sipped his own juice and stared at his glass, and she knew that he was thinking the same as her.

‘So, the Inquisitor,’ she said, failing to sound casual.

‘What did your Drake tell you?’ Jonah asked.

She shrugged. ‘Not much. Just that it was there too.’

‘He haunts me,’ Jonah said, and then he stretched back in his chair and closed his eyes. Holly glanced sidelong at him and saw an old man made older by this disaster. Then she concentrated on scanning systems until she found what she was looking for.

‘Well, seems I’m owed overtime. And a bonus. Because I can tell you why the power went off.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘Maybe.’ She froze the screen and turned the laptop to him.

Jonah leaned on her shoulder and glanced at the screen. ‘What am I looking at?’

‘Schematic. Look.’ Holly pointed at the routings indicated, and the red-boxed area that showed where the problem was. ‘There’s a duct around the core. Carries cables from the ancillary generator to feed Coldbrook’s life-supports and energy requirements. And it’s fucked.’

‘So what fucked it?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Can you un fuck it?’

Holly laughed, unused to hearing Jonah swearing so harshly.

‘What?’

‘You. Trying to sound American. “Unfuck.” Would they know that word in your Welsh valleys?’

‘Unfuck the problem, Miss Wright. That’s an order.’

‘It’s Ms I’m a modern American lady.’ She tapped a few more keys and memorised the location of the fault, trying pointlessly to access some of the webcams that had been set up in the duct. Their playback logs had been damaged. Power surge, she guessed. She tried some other routes, working hard, concentrating, and if it hadn’t been for the darkness that was all she could access she might have believed for a moment that nothing was wrong.

‘Jonah,’ she said. ‘I know where the problem is, and I might be able to fix it. But I’ll need a gun, just in case. And. .’ She looked up, briefly blinded against the darkened room by the computer screen’s glow. For a second she thought there was something standing behind Jonah. But it was only his shadow.

‘And?’ he asked.

‘Will you be all right?’

He didn’t answer right away. The silence made Holly uncomfortable, because it was Jonah betraying weakness and fear. However badly things had gone wrong, she wanted him to be her rock.

‘To be honest, I thought I’d come with you.’

And Holly was happy with that.

They headed for the narrow staircase that led down to the maintenance levels surrounding the core. Each of them carried a heavy torch, and Holly had stopped by an equipment room to collect a tool belt. She’d also accepted a gun from Jonah and tucked it into her waistband.

They’d passed the gym door from behind which came a steady, insistent scratching. Two in there , Jonah had whispered.

‘Here,’ Holly said when they reached their destination. ‘You been in here since?’

‘No.’

The door to the small plant room was closed. It housed two large electrical distribution boards and an access walkway into the secure housing around the core. If she’d read the diagnostic information correctly, the problem had occurred somewhere between the plant room and the core.

‘Right.’ Holly hefted the gun, feeling awkward. She hadn’t fired a gun in years. ‘Maybe I should take that.’ She nodded at the crossbow that Jonah had brought with him.

‘Confined space?’ he said, raising one eyebrow.

Holly opened the door while Jonah stood back, his gun and torch aimed. She prepared herself for a surge of activity — movement, shouting, gunshots. But after a few moments her old boss sighed quietly and nodded.

‘Don’t nod off while I’m in there,’ she said. ‘I know what you old guys are like.’ She turned away from his glare, smiling as she entered the small room. The tool belt was heavy around her waist, and she held the gun in her right hand, pointing the way.

She swept the torch’s beam around the room. It was as she remembered it — it seemed to have been left untouched by what had happened. She gave the distribution boards a cursory glance and saw no immediate problems. The space was narrow, and she had to turn sidelong to squeeze past the boards and into the narrow passageway beyond.

The walls here were bare concrete, lined with cables and wire ducts, old routes marked out by pocked holes. Her belt scraped one wall, and a shower of grit and dust fell softly to the metal gangway. She shone the torch down into darkness.

‘Okay in there?’ Jonah called. His voice was muffled, even though he was only about twelve feet away.

‘Yeah. Nearly there.’

She shone the torch along the gangway and moved on. When she reached the end it split and curved left and right around the outer extremes of the core-containment wall. A deep darkness dropped below to where the core’s base was cast into rock. It was to the left that she hoped the problem lay.

She spotted them from several feet away. At first she thought it was a pile of old clothing, perhaps left there by the maintenance crews. But then she saw that the dim shape was more than a heap of discarded clothes.

‘Anything?’ Jonah called, and she could barely hear him. The gap she had crossed swallowed his voice.

‘Won’t be long,’ she said, and, as her own voice echoed away above and below, shadows around the shape moved.

But it was only the shifting torchlight. Holly stepped forward and saw two people who’d been fried by the massive electrical current that had passed through them both. One — she thought it was a man — was holding a long metal pole. The other corpse was beyond identification, and it had its arms wrapped around its burned chest, face buried against its stomach. Clothes had burned. Flesh and hair had burned as well, and she wondered how the fire had not spread further.