James Axler - Ghostwalk

“What’s the problem, Baptiste?” Kane asked.

“I think what we’ve got here is a theta-pinch transmitter,” she said over a shoulder.

“A what?” Grant demanded, face drawn in a scowl.

“It’s a form of experimental fusion physics,” she said, speaking quickly, ducking under a low-hanging pipe. “By magnetically compressing electrically conducting filaments, it creates an electromagnetic field that implodes rather than expands. They occur naturally in electrical discharges such as lightning bolts.”

“What the hell is something like that for?” Kane asked.

“Research into the supergravity theory, from what I recall,” Brigid replied, breathing hard. “I think it’s set on a countdown to some sort of energy discharge. I’ll explain when we’re out of here.”

“Looking forward to it,” Grant said dourly.

They quickly retraced their steps, climbing back up the spiral staircase. As they ran toward the gate, Kane couldn’t completely suppress a sigh of relief when he saw it still hung open.

A towering figure suddenly appeared on the other side of the gate, and Kane’s sigh of relief turned into a curse. He snapped up the Calico, finger curling around the trigger.

Kane reflected grimly that they had been lucky so far—but now, typically, their luck had run out.

Edwards frantically hurled his body to one side, shouting, “It’s me!”

Kane gusted out a profanity-seasoned breath, feeling angry and ashamed. He, Brigid and Grant left the tunnel, slamming open the door. The other members of CAT Alpha stood in the crater, gazing at the spark-shedding and crackling metal transmission tower.

“What’s going here?” Edwards asked. “Where the hell is everybody?”

“How’d you get here?” Grant asked.

“We followed your tracks.”

Kane’s eyebrows knitted at the bridge of his nose. “You didn’t find a couple of consortium guys tied up?”

Edwards shook his head. “No, sir. Were we supposed to?”

Brigid eyed the dishes on either side of the metal tower apprehensively, noting the greenish aura shimmering around them. “I think we’ve been had. Let’s double-time it out of here.”

“We’re going to leave this place unsecured?” Edwards asked, gesturing with his rifle barrel to the tunnel entrance.

Brigid’s lips compressed. “I don’t think we have much choice. I think the consortium abandoned this place for a reason.”

“Like what?” Kane inquired. “Besides headaches.”

Edwards eyed him in surprise. “All of us have headaches…and I’m starting to feel sick to my stomach.”

“What’s causing this?” Grant asked. “Radiation?”

Glancing up at the indigo sky and the first emerging stars of the evening, Brigid answered bluntly, “I have no idea. But if they don’t want the place, we probably wouldn’t, either.”

Kane opened his mouth to voice a question, but the muffled boom of a subterranean explosion made him jump. He bit back a curse. A second later they heard another explosion, followed by a third. The ground trembled under their feet.

Several sharp cracks burst from the disks mounted atop the metal tower. They sounded like huge sticks breaking simultaneously. From the mouth of the passageway gushed a billow of flame and smoke. Acrid black fumes grabbed everyone by the throat and set them to coughing.

A tremendous explosion cannonaded up from the throat of the tunnel, and a brutal column of concussive force slammed into them like an invisible tsunami, buffeting them backward.

A series of hammering blasts thundered up. The entire crater floor shook and trembled. Rifts split the ground. Rocks and dirt, shaken loose from the mesa, sifted down. A fissure opened up around the mouth of the tunnel with a clash of rending rock and a distant shriek of rupturing metal.

Boulders toppled down from above, blocking the entrance to the tunnel. The people moved away, staggering on the convulsing earth. They ran out in the center of the crater to avoid being crushed by rocks falling from the mesa.

The metal tower bent and with a prolonged creak, it sagged downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The crackling, popping pyrotechnic display around the metal mesh disks didn’t ebb.

When the ground tremors ceased, Edwards demanded angrily, “What the fuck is going on?”

Brigid shook her head, fanning the dust-laced air away from her face. “The station was set to self-destruct. God knows why.”

“We can tell you.” The voice, amplified by a loud-hailer, was high-pitched but male.

The crater floor lit up with blinding rods of brightness. The searchlight beams stabbed through the night and intersected with the bodies of Cerberus Away Team Alpha, pinned like butterflies to a board. Squinting, Kane shielded his eyes, bringing up his Calico.

“Don’t move,” the voice said. “It’s very important that you stay as motionless as possible.”

“Fuck them,” Edwards growled, finger crooking around the trigger of his rifle.

“If they meant to kill us,” Grant muttered to him,

“they’d have done it already, not threaten us.”

“I think we’re being warned,” Brigid said, “not threatened. They didn’t tell us to drop our weapons.”

Trapped in the dazzling exposure of the light, Kane figured the Millennial Consortium really didn’t care one way or the other if they were disarmed. They had other matters occupying them.

Beyond the blinding circle of the handheld spotlight, he could barely make out man-shaped shadows arrayed on the ridgeline. He asked, “Who are we talking to?”

“Shh!” came the reply. “Call me Mr. Blue, call me late for dinner, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you don’t move until we tell you to.”

“Why?” Brigid asked.

“Shh!”

“Don’t shush me,” Brigid snapped irritably. “Are you responsible for blowing up the installation?”

“Shh! Don’t make any noise. Be as quiet as you can and don’t move. Stay in the light if you value your lives!”

Mystified, but feeling sweat form on his hairline, Kane cut his gaze over to Brigid. “Is he crazy or what?” he whispered.

She shook her head slightly. “For the time being, we probably should do as he says—until we can get a better idea of what’s going on here.”

“Nothing is going on around here,” growled Higson, a CAT team member. “Except we’re being set up to be slaughtered.”

Kane considered Higson’s words for a thoughtful second, then the sparks dancing along the rims of the disks suddenly faded away. He found the phenomenon worrisome, not comforting.

At the same time, the glare of the spotlight dimmed. He sensed it hadn’t been done to spare their vision. Faintly, he heard a murmuring from the people on the ridgeline. Mr. Blue’s voice whispered frantically, “Shut up! Be quiet!”

Kane blinked, trying to clear his vision of the amoeba-shaped floaters swimming over his eyes. His flesh suddenly prickled with a pins-and-needle sensation, almost as if a multitude of ants crawled over his skin. He felt rather than heard a feathery fluttering against his eardrums. His stomach surged with nausea.

Edwards shuddered and muttered, “Something is going on here.”

The spotlight dimmed even more, becoming little more than a faint yellow halo.

“It’s like the power is being drained,” Brigid said wonderingly. “Localized ionization of the atmosphere, too.”

Higson shifted his feet nervously and said in a guttural whisper, “What the fuck is that?”

Kane followed the man’s gaze toward the smoke-occluded opening in the base of the mesa. Movement shifted within the roiling vapors, and a green-hued light flickered in the haze. A faint, cold breeze touched his face, ruffling his hair, and he heard a distant hiss. The green light whirled, bathing the entire crater in an emerald glow. Then, slowly, the light contorted into the outline of a human figure.