Chapter 22
I stood in the deep, featureless black of an unlit cave and screamed.
I screamed into my helmet. I lost myself to a howling, powerless rage. It swept me up, a crushing, unstoppable force, weeks—decades—of frustration and loss pouring out of me.
Lyle.
Lyle was gone.
My bookish little seven-year-old son, gone. My son, who dedicated his life to saving me.
Gone.
“Wearer is showing physiological signs of emotional distress,” the cool voice said in my ear. “Administering counteractive agent as per combat protocol 41-A.”
There was a pricking sensation on my left arm, near the crook of my elbow, and a soft, billowing wave of light coursed through my body. Taut muscles relaxed. I stopped screaming and stood there in the silence and darkness, panting, my heart hammering in my chest. “Goddamnit.”
He’d spent ninety years of his life working to get me … what? Ninety years, to get me fifteen seconds. And I’d jumped again.
“Goddamnit.”
“Scott.” The voice in my ear.
I took a while to respond. The weight on my shoulders, that crushing weariness, was still there. I could feel it. The drug, or whatever the PDSAS had given me, was holding it at bay. “Yeah.”
“Ambient light levels are below human-visible levels. Suggest light amplification.”
The suit was still with me. It might’ve been a pain-in-the-ass military-sourced computer personality, but I wasn’t entirely alone. It had made the jump, and I was as grateful for that as I could be in that moment.
“Suit.”
“Yes, Scott.”
“Your name is Iron Maiden now.”
“Confirmed.”
“Can you give me night vision or something?” I wasn’t disconnected from myself the way I’d been inside the Second Device.
When the helmet switched to greenish light-enhancement mode, I saw why.
The Second Device was gone. I was in the cavernous room, standing on metal flooring pitted and scarred with age.
Above me, stalactites extended from a rock ceiling.
The room had been encased in metal moments before.
Ninety years before. The metal was gone.
I turned in a slow circle. The chamber was empty.
There was no hint of the Second Device, not even a few struts left from the exotic metal structure.
Lyle had been right, though. I’d made the jump, and the cave was still here, for the moment.
There was, glinting on one wall, a dozen paces away from me, a giant, hand-drawn arrow.
Above the arrow was a single word, written in uneven spray-painted script.
“Dad.”
The letters and the arrow glowed in the greenish haze of the night vision.
The paint shimmered and shifted as I walked toward it, and, after a moment, I realized the helmet was giving off illumination.
Otherwise, there would be no light to see in this underground room, no matter how strongly the helmet tried to amplify nonexistent photons.
The paint of the arrow and the letters was reflective, not illuminative.
The arrow pointed to a corridor. It was the corridor Lyle and I had used, only the bank-vault door was gone, leaving an empty hole in its place.
I walked through the hole. There was another arrow on the floor, glowing in whatever light—infrared, maybe—my suit was giving off.
The arrow pointed straight ahead, and I followed it to the elevator.
There was a third arrow on the wall pointing to the open elevator doors.
I stepped inside, testing the elevator car’s floor with one foot. It didn’t move under my weight. I turned and saw another arrow, much smaller, painted on the right wall of the elevator. It pointed at a control panel. There was a metal handle sticking out of the panel, covered in rust.
Under the handle was a barely legible word: “Pull.”
I grasped the handle—the PDSAS exoskeleton helping my fingers wrap around the rusting metal—and tugged. The handle resisted, and I pulled harder. The exoskeleton whined, and I felt the metal bracing shift behind my back and my legs, planting me to the floor, giving me additional leverage.
With a crack, the handle wrenched downward.
Lights came on.
Iron Maiden reacted in a fraction of a second, switching the light enhancement off before I even registered the flare of light. Still, the brightness made me wince and step back.
With a muted ding, the doors rattled and slid shut.
There was a moment when nothing happened.
Then the car dropped several inches, and I threw out both hands out like a trapeze artist. But the mechanisms caught and started moving.
Up, this time. Music played from somewhere overhead, conveyed to me through the suit helmet, hissing and popping and warbling but still audible and intelligible.
It was Zager & Evans. “In the Year 2525.”
“Lyle.” I shook my head.
Zager & Evans reached ten thousand years and man had cried a billion tears when the elevator stopped. There was a ding and the doors rattled open.
I’d thought, through the muted haze of the tranquilizer Iron Maiden had given me, that the elevator would bring me back to Lyle’s room.
It had taken me much higher. I stepped into the vast, echoing hangar where Hayward and her troops had driven the armored car into the bunker.
When I’d last been here it’d been full of equipment and vehicles in various states of disrepair.
Hundreds of soldiers and staff had worked and prepared for war. Now, it was empty.
The big electric panel lights in the ceiling were on but they flickered, dimming, then brightening, then dimming again.
There were more arrows along the walls of the hangar, reflecting the light overhead.
I followed them, my footfalls echoing across the empty bay.
The arrows led me to what I realized was the path to an exit.
I almost turned back. I didn’t want to leave, not without some resolution, something more from Lyle.
He’d thought to leave me markers that had lasted nine decades.
He’d at least partially reconfigured the bunker so I’d have a straightforward route out, and he’d primed the elevator and the bunker’s power plant for my arrival.
He would have left me something more. I clung to that hope, and because Lyle had left the arrows, I kept following them, passing through open security doors, down long, empty corridors with their flickering, dull lights.
I felt, distantly, I was still under the influence of the drug, just accepting things and moving on.
At last, I came to a heavy-looking metal door embedded in concrete.
The door was sealed shut. Unlike the series of three massive doors we’d gone through in the armored car, this was closer to human-sized.
Still a big door, but closer to what I associated with a bank vault than the gargantuan entrances to the hangar bay.
There was a small arrow next to the door, pointing downward this time, toward a little black box resting on the metal floor.
“Play me,” the glowing letters said next to the box.
The box was sleek, black, and featureless. Probably a child’s toy from fifty years ago, but it was nearly incomprehensible to me in my tranquilizer-addled state. I eventually found a recessed button under a thin layer of dust and pressed it.
There was a distant whir and a hiss and crackle.
“Dad,” Lyle’s voice came out of the box.
It was raw and scratchy—the ninety-something Lyle I’d left behind.
The word echoed in the metal corridor. “I’m so sorry.
My calculations … my Second Device, just as big a failure as the first. Bigger even.
They weren’t wrong. My calculations. I was right.
As always, I was right, everything was right.
Just horrifically, hilariously incomplete.
I am but a babe in the woods of the universe, after all. ”
A strange sound emanated from the box. I realized after a moment it was a laugh, or what Lyle intended to be a laugh, but it was too bitter and broken a noise to ever be mistaken for genuine laughter.
“I don’t have much time,” Lyle said. “I can’t say goodbye again.
There’s never enough time, is there? I didn’t see your face.
I regret that. I told you to put on the helmet, but I regret not seeing your face, one last …
time. Time.” There was a thin, rasping, drawn-out cough.
“The Legion is here. Bearing down on us. Pursuing us for our sins. For my sins. No more calculations to save us, not anymore. I’ve done what I can for you.
I sent you forward with the best weapons and armor I could.
That’ll have to do. I don’t have anything else.
We must go. Jennifer must live. I see that now.
I’ve rigged the door, here. If you’ve made it this far, then the elevator will have worked, and the reactor came back on as designed.
If not … then I’m not talking to anyone, am I? ” That bitter, terrible laugh again.
I stared down at the box. The tranquilizer was wearing off, and the weight, that shroud of mental darkness, was falling back on my shoulders.
“Jennifer’s been helping me. She’ll lead them after me.
For you.” There was a short pause. When Lyle’s voice came back it was stronger.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I listened to what I’ve recorded so far and it’s not helpful, but I don’t have time to go back and record it again.
It doesn’t matter. I’m a rambling old man, and I’m days from my death.
Here’s what’s important. The Second Device failed because it could never work, and I now have no hope your transits can be stopped, not without an intelligence and power exponentially greater than my own.
So, you need to prepare yourself for the reality of this.
“It is going to keep happening. For how long, I don’t know. The mathematics ascend to a sphere of complexity utterly incomprehensible to me. But you must accept it’s going to continue.