Apocalypse (49 page)

‘It didn’t have to be this way, Katherine,’ he said. ‘But you leave me no choice. Put her in the chamber. Put them all in there!’

Ethan was turned and manhandled toward the chamber’s outer hatch with Lopez alongside him. Katherine looked at them pleadingly as they were shoved toward their doom.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

Ethan did not respond, instead searching desperately for some way to break free of the giant man holding him. The sphere was surrounded by cables and wires but none of them looked close enough
that he could grab it, and the clinical neatness of the chamber and control platform meant that there were no weapons or implements he could use to fight his way out of trouble. The IRIS
soldiers’ weapons were all held at port arms and the troops were careful not to let anything get within his or Lopez’s reach, all of them far too professional to make such a basic
error.

There was, he concluded, nothing that he could do. He glanced at his watch.
20:26.

‘We’ve got about twenty minutes before this is all over. Any smart ideas?’ he asked Lopez in a whisper, as they reached the outer hatch.

‘Pray?’ she suggested, her dark eyes flicking left and right as she sought an escape. Her dark skin seemed to have turned a few shades paler. ‘Beg for mercy?’

Ethan shook his head.

‘I don’t think praying will help, and I’m not giving up my pride to that asshole.’

Olaf released him and walked to join Joaquin near the chamber’s portholes. The tycoon called over to Ethan as his men opened the outer hatch door.

‘Goodbye, Mr. Warner. I’d have imagined that a man of your caliber would put up a better fight, but it’s too late now. You’re literally out of time!’

Ethan ignored Joaquin and watched as the hatch beckoned, flickering intermittently as plasma energy flared violently in the chamber beyond. Katherine was shoved inside by one of the soldiers and
fell onto the metal floor as her legs failed her. Lopez was turned by a soldier and aimed at the open hatch.

‘Any last words, Miss Lopez?’ Joaquin asked.

‘Yeah, as it happens,’ she shot back. ‘Two of them. Fu—!’

The soldier shoved her into the hatch before she could get her parting shot out.

‘What about you, Mr. Warner? Anything that you’d like to say?’ Joaquin called, Olaf standing beside him.

Ethan looked at Joaquin for a long moment, aware of all eyes turning to see what he would say. Bright flares of energy flickered from within the black hole chamber’s narrow portals and
reflected off Joaquin’s features.

‘Yeah, there’s something that I’d like to say,’ he replied. ‘I’d like to point out something that your father would have understood about this device, but
that you don’t. Just because you’ve seen into the future doesn’t mean you know what’s going to happen next.’

Joaquin laughed.

‘Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case right now, does it? It looks like your future is assured!’ He turned to Olaf and clapped the giant on his shoulder as both men
laughed.

Ethan was about to be prodded into the chamber when Joaquin suddenly stopped laughing, his face contorted in confusion as he looked up at Olaf. The huge man stared down at the tycoon.

‘What is it?’

Joaquin stared at his own hand before speaking.

‘I clapped you on the shoulder,’ he uttered, ‘just like in the video footage Dennis showed us.’ Joaquin looked up at Ethan. ‘From when you’d died in the
chamber.’

Ethan said nothing, watching as Joaquin’s mind struggled to comprehend what was happening.

‘Dennis must have tampered with the footage,’ he mumbled to Olaf in disbelief. ‘He didn’t spin the timeline on the footage forward to show us
their
deaths, he span
it backward, to show us his own. Damn it, he must have edited the footage somehow before showing it to me. But then he must have known that he was going to die. Surely he couldn’t have done
that.’

‘Charles Purcell did it too,’ Ethan said to Joaquin. ‘It’s called personal sacrifice for people that you care about, something you wouldn’t understand.’

Joaquin screwed his face up in confusion.

‘But why would he be willing to die if he knew that I had won and—’

Ethan smiled quietly. All of the IRIS troops were watching him now as he spoke.

‘Because he saw something else.’

Joaquin shook his head. ‘That’s not possible!’

It was not Ethan who replied, but a deep and murderous voice that thundered across the dome from the entrance hatch.

‘Surprise, asshole!’

Ethan leapt sideways out of the grasp of the IRIS soldiers holding him as they all whirled to see Scott Bryson standing inside the bulkhead with an M-16 assault rifle cradled in his grip.
Without any further warning, Bryson opened fire and a cascade of bullets hammered into the IRIS troops, instantly cutting several of them down. Bryson turned toward Joaquin and Olaf as he fired,
chasing them with gunfire.

The hail of rounds smashed into power cables, computer terminals and ventilation channels as Bryson forced Joaquin and his remaining men away from Ethan and Lopez. Sparks showered down across
dislodged metal panels as clouds of steam billowed from ruptured pipework filled the air as they dashed for cover.

Ethan hit the deck hard as Bryson’s rounds slammed into the torsos of the two men closest to him, hurling their bodies like rag dolls into the side of the outer hatch. Ethan took shelter
behind the hatch door and yelled in to Lopez and Katherine.

‘Get out of there!’

June 28, 20:28

Lopez leapt out of the hatch, dragging Katherine close behind her, and they both tumbled down alongside Ethan behind the nearby wall of the control platform.

Ethan jumped to where one of the IRIS soldiers was writhing on the ground, his chest a bloodied mass of impact wounds. Ethan grabbed the man’s rifle, looking down at him and recognizing
the face of the young man who’d spoken to him earlier. His once-defiant eyes were now pinched with fear and he coughed a thick drool of blood from his lungs.

Ethan scurried across to another fallen soldier as Bryson laid down heavy fire on the troops now sheltering behind the computer banks on the opposite side of the dome. Ethan picked up the dead
man’s rifle and then dashed back to where Lopez was crouching.

‘Where the hell did Bryson come from?!’ she shouted above the crackling gunfire.

Ethan squatted down alongside her and handed her one of the rifles.

‘You didn’t really think he’d take a walk did you?’ he replied. ‘After what Purcell told us, I thought it was prudent to hide our assets. There were television
cameras at the airport: I figured that if Joaquin saw Bryson leave, it might give us a chance.’

‘How did he get down here?’ Katherine asked.

‘The pressure suit on his boat,’ Ethan yelled back. ‘It’s just able to operate at this depth. The
Free Spirit
is too small for IRIS to track from down here, and
they’d never be able to see Scott’s pressure suit. It was the only way to maintain surprise.’

Lopez cocked her rifle. ‘Now what?’ she asked.

Ethan shifted position onto one knee and fired off two shots across the heads of the IRIS soldiers.

‘We need to get Purcell’s camera and then get the hell out of here,’ he said. ‘Cover Bryson. I’ll work my way around the far side and flush them out!’

Lopez nodded and opened fire across the dome toward Joaquin and his men as Ethan leapt up and dashed across the open ground into cover behind the black-hole chamber’s outer hatch.

The IRIS troops fired on Lopez’s position, and Ethan flinched and ducked his eyes away as a volley of rounds smacked into metal panels near his head and ricocheted into the control
platform. A shower of sparks fell like glowing rain onto the deck of the dome as the rounds smashed a computer monitor, and flames from an electrical fire started licking at the edges of the
panel.

Ethan looked up at the enormous black-hole chamber as a new and unexpected horror breached his awareness. Bryson did not know what was contained within the chamber, and an electrical fire could
cause havoc down here. Ethan peered around the edge of the hatch, and saw Bryson spraying bullets crazily across the IRIS position. One ricochet into the chamber’s panels would be all it
would take to cause the machine to go into meltdown, or maybe a shot that took out the power supply to one of the magnetic-field generators, destabilizing the black hole.

Ethan looked up at the control panel to his right. If the camera was anywhere, it would be there.

Ethan took aim and fired a salvo at the IRIS troops to keep their heads down, and then sprinted out across the open deck toward the control panel. Lopez saw him move, and shifted her aim to a
position just behind him, firing again on the IRIS soldiers. Ethan felt the shockwaves from her bullets thumping the air behind him, and glimpsed the rounds smacking into the metal panels shielding
Joaquin and his men.

A return volley smashed a pair of hard-drive units near Ethan as he vaulted up onto the control panel and hurled himself down into the walkway behind it. The unforgiving metal deck slammed into
his shoulder. As he rolled he smacked the side of his head on the back wall of the walkway, a spray of sparks and plastic fragments raining down around him.

Ethan got onto his knees and peered over the edge of the control panel, then spotted the camera lying on its side near the smashed monitor. He reached out, grabbed it and shoved it beneath his
shirt before crawling along the walkway toward where Bryson was sheltering behind a bulkhead on the far side of the dome, firing intermittently.

Ethan yelled out above the deafening reports echoing around them.

‘Watch your fire! Don’t hit the sphere!’

A clattering series of bullet impacts smashed along the edge of the control panel near Ethan’s head and he crouched down, praying that the rounds were not strong enough to punch through
the metal panels shielding him.

Bryson yelled back between shots.

‘To hell with the damned thing! I’m almost out of ammo, we need to move!’

‘Keep their heads down,’ Ethan replied. ‘I’ll get behind them and finish this!’

Bryson nodded as Ethan turned, running back along the walkway toward the opposite end. He reached the edge, where Katherine was sheltering behind Lopez, who was still firing shots at the IRIS
troops.

‘I can’t hit them!’ she shouted at him. ‘I can only keep them pinned down!’

Ethan knew that the soldiers might break out any moment, regardless of the risk of getting hit. They were doomed where they were, unless they were carrying extra ammunition and could afford to
wait it out. Either way, it was a risk Ethan could not afford to take. They had to get out of here and fast.

‘Just keep their heads down!’

Ethan leapt out of cover as Lopez fired off a volley, and slid down behind the chamber’s outer hatch once more. He checked his magazine, counting twelve rounds plus one in the barrel, then
got up and jogged round the back of the giant sphere, leaping over thick power cables and exhaust vents. Clouds of dense steam billowed up from shattered pipe-work near the black-hole chamber, the
warning beacons of the dome glowing through the whorls of vapor like rising suns.

He was almost halfway round when an IRIS soldier appeared and rushed toward him through the diaphanous swirls, aiming his rifle at Ethan’s head. Ethan dropped instinctively to his knees
and brought his pistol up as the soldier’s first shot zipped past, Ethan’s sudden movement and the M-16’s recoil fouling the soldier’s aim.

Ethan squeezed the pistol’s trigger and saw a misty spray of blood from the soldier’s back as the bullet passed through his chest and exited between his shoulder blades. The soldier
shuddered midstride and stumbled over the dense tangle of cables, collapsing onto his face with a thick pillar of steam blasting in billowing clouds around his body.

Ethan got up and kept his pistol trained on the motionless body as he stepped carefully forward. He saw a large exit wound in the soldier’s back, already thick with blood as the man bled
out internally. He wouldn’t be waking up from this encounter.

Ethan stepped over the body and then saw the huge form of a man lunge at him from the other side of the pillar of steam. Ethan turned and whipped his pistol up, but before he could pull the
trigger Olaf batted the weapon aside and ploughed into him like a freight train.

June 28, 20:32

Ethan was hurled backwards by the impact of Olaf’s immense bulk and crashed down onto a thick tangle of cables. Olaf’s knees dropped down either side of
Ethan’s waist as a huge fist plummeted toward his face, the Nordic giant’s features glowing demonically in the diffuse light.

Ethan swung both of his arms sideways to intercept Olaf’s punch and drive it aside. Olaf’s thick knuckles cracked against the metal plates in the deck and the big man growled in pain
as he grabbed Ethan’s pistol and tore it from his grasp. Olaf hurled the weapon out of Ethan’s reach and then plunged his hands down onto Ethan’s neck, leaning forward and driving
all of his weight behind his muscular arms.

Ethan’s eyes bulged, his throat choked shut and his lungs swelled. Olaf, his eyes poisoned with hatred, his teeth gritted with fury, squeezed with a tremendous, unimaginable force. Stars
of light sparkled and whirled in Ethan’s vision, his own arms ineffective against Olaf’s immense strength.

Ethan reached out and grabbed Olaf’s face before driving his thumbs deep into the killer’s eyes, pushing with his fingernails as he felt the soft tissue beneath the eyelids compress
like a squashed orange. Olaf gagged and pulled his head back as he struggled to escape Ethan’s hands, before releasing his stranglehold and smashing Ethan’s arms apart to break his
grip.

Ethan jerked his hips up and then yanked them down as he flicked his upper body forward and smashed his forehead into Olaf’s face. Olaf’s broad, thick nose collapsed with a deep
crunch of shattered cartilage as a thick stream of dark blood splattered down across his vest. Ethan reached up for the pistol in Olaf’s shoulder holster, but the big man gripped his wrist
and forced it aside.