James Rollins - The 6th Extinction

Stella spoke to her father, drawing his attention around. “He’s right.” She nodded to Kowalski. “We can’t stay here. Dylan Wright must know where we are and that we’re trying to reach the Back Door. By now, he must have discovered that you reengineered the bunker busters to be shut out from the main station. After failing to reel us back in, he’ll send a team after us.”

“Through this hellscape ?” Jason asked, purposefully mispronouncing the British installation’s name for emphasis.

“He could use our CAATs,” Professor Harrington said dourly. “Come by ground transport. We’re only a mile or so away.”

And three miles from the Back Door , Gray thought.

The older man hooked his arm around his daughter. Fear and worry etched the lines of his face deeper. She leaned into him, just as anxious about her father.

The lights grew incrementally dimmer. At first Gray thought it was his own terror narrowing his vision, but Kowalski swore, tapping at his goggles.

“When I decoupled us from the cable,” Harrington explained, “it cut us off from the power conduit running along the roof. We’re running on a battery charge right now.”

“How long until we’re out of juice?” Gray asked.

“A couple of hours at best.”

Gray gave his head a slight shake. He did not want to be sitting here in the dark, waiting for Wright’s team to discover them trapped in the dead gondola.

“What about that German sub?” Jason offered. “It’s only two hundred yards back. Is there any way we could make it over to that shelter? Perhaps hole up inside there?”

Gray turned to Harrington. “Is that possible? Can we evacuate out of this gondola?”

Stella slipped from her father’s arms and stepped to the hatch that blended into the floor. She tugged it open. A folded wire-and-metal ladder was stored inside. “If you pull that red lever, an emergency escape door will drop below and the ladder will deploy. It should reach the ground.”

“No friggin’ way I’m going down there,” Kowalski said.

Harrington looked like he agreed, glancing apprehensively toward his daughter. Still, he turned and opened another cabinet along the wall. Inside, racked one atop the other, were three rifle-like weapons with barrels twice as thick as those of a 12-gauge shotgun.

“Directed stick radiators,” Harrington explained. “Or DSRs. Built by the American Technology Corporation. They use a stacked series of disks in their barrels to amplify a pulse, producing the equivalent of a sonic bullet.”

Kowalski snorted and mumbled under his breath. “Give me real bullets any day of the week.”

Harrington ignored him. “The DSRs can also transmit speech or in reverse operation, be used as a directional microphone.” He tapped what looked like a rifle sight on top. “I added portable IR illuminators for deployment down here.”

“And these sonic rifles can protect us?” Gray asked.

“Mostly. They’re not as potent as the larger LRAD units, but they’ll send most life-forms down here scurrying away. But you need to be careful. The kinetic recoil of these guns is strong enough to knock you on your butt.”

Gray stepped forward and picked one up, examining it thoroughly. Once done, he passed it toward Kowalski, who looked like he’d been offered a rattlesnake. Jason took the weapon instead.

Stella moved forward and grabbed a rifle for herself.

“She’s a good shot,” Harrington commented with pride. “Bloody things give me migraines if I try to use one.”

Gray hauled out the last weapon, slinging it over his shoulder.

Harrington wasn’t done yet. He stepped over and opened the hatch that led down to the canopied bubble on the underside of the gondola. Dropping to his knees, he reached inside. When he straightened, he had a more familiar weapon in his arms, struggling under its weight.

“I heard what you said earlier,” he told Kowalski. “Thought you might like this instead.”

Kowalski grinned, lifting the M240 machine gun from the professor’s arms. He cradled it like a baby. He then dropped to a knee next to the professor and hauled out a long belt of 7.62x51mm NATO cartridges and flung the bandolier over his shoulders like a deadly scarf.

He stood up, puffing out his chest. “Now this is more like it.”

Jason eyed the folded ladder, looking suddenly less sure of the wisdom of his plan. “So we try to make it over to the German sub?”

“No,” Gray answered. “If found, we’d be trapped inside there. And even if Wright misses us, we’d leave the path open for his team to reach the Back Door first.”

“Then where are we going?” Jason asked.

An old Churchill slogan popped into Gray’s head.

If you’re going through hell, keep going .

He pointed ahead. “We’re going to strike out for that substation, try to reach the Back Door.”

Kowalski’s grin faded back to its usual scowl. “How the hell are we going to do that?”

He had no better answer — but somebody else did.

“I know what we can do,” Harrington said, still sounding none too happy. “But we’ll still have to trek some distance first.”

Hell became all too real, striking his every sense.

Jason descended cautiously down the rungs of the swinging ladder with his DSR slung across his back. Since lowering out of the gondola, the harsh world swallowed him whole.

Each breath brought in the reek of sulfurous brimstone, belched out from the volcanic forces underpinning this world. He could taste the foulness on the back of his tongue, while moist heat burned his skin, drawing beads of sweat from every pore. The silent world now whispered with creaks, croaks, laps of water, and a faint continual buzzing coming from a mix of nattering insects and a vague sense of ultrasonics bouncing off the walls, cast out by the life found down here.

The last set his teeth on edge, tickling the hairs on the back of his neck — or maybe it was simply the fear.

He stared below his feet. Gray and Kowalski had already reached the stone bank of the river. They had their weapons at their shoulders. The IR illuminator atop Gray’s rifle cast out a pool of illumination into the darkness. Kowalski held his machine gun up, its belt of ammunition dragging all the way to the ground.

Jason watched Harrington step off the last rung of the ladder and join the other two men. They spoke in whispers, following the instructions given to them by the professor: In this world of eternal darkness, sound is vision .

It was why the sonic weapons employed here were so effective.

At least I hope they are .

Jason shifted his DSR more securely over his shoulders and continued his descent along the shaking ladder. He eyeballed the river below. He might survive a fall from this height if he hit the water — but getting out alive from that river would be the true challenge.

Harrington had shared another nugget of wisdom before they vacated the gondola: Whatever you do, stay clear of the water .

The ecosystem down here was dependent on that main river and its lakes, all of it fed by geothermally melted ice from the miles of glaciers overhead, and drained under the continent to parts unknown.

Before the gondola had stalled, the professor had educated them about the primordial world down here, how it was mostly amphibious in nature, thriving at that boundary between solid ground and the flowing rivers and pools. Many of the life cycles had evolved to incorporate stages that transitioned between those two extremes: juveniles sheltering along the rocky banks, adults living in the water, or vice versa.

Harrington had described the ecosystem as being stuck in the Carboniferous Period, an era when the topside world was dominated by primordial swamp forests. The professor had noted parallels in the evolutionary pathways taken by the life down here. Only this isolated and insulated world had become stagnant, never experiencing the radical changes wrought upon the world above by the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea or by the ravages of meteoric impacts. Still, the highly adaptable XNA genetic matrix had compounded the inventiveness of life dwelling inside this cavern system.