Chapter 29 #3
There was another, distant, explosion, far overhead. It rumbled through the stone walls, shaking the narrow walkway, sending down sheets of dust and making ripples in the water.
No answer.
My chest and throat constricted. I heaved upward, sucking in a hard breath, getting ready to shout, to scream for the voice of my dead son again.
Then a part of my brain that remained calm took a moment to think.
The earpiece had slid off my ear. It was pinned under the suit mask, down by my jawline.
I worked it up with gloved fingers. I didn’t want to take the mask off, not down here, in case there was no oxygen and I’d open it long enough to pass out and die. I pushed and prodded the sleek earpiece upward until it slid back over my ear.
“Dad,” Lyle said. “Are you okay?”
I flopped down on the ledge. “I think so. Are you?”
“The quantum-fold array housing my consciousness processing is undamaged.”
“That’s good.”
I lay there, tired and aching, forcing each breath in and out. I thought about staying there, trying to sleep, hoping the flying thing didn’t find me.
Or maybe let it find me. Crawl back up, find a way outside, and stand in the middle of the street with my arms spread.
I could see it, clearly, a romantic image: my arms up, my head back, face exposed as the energy spiked and the white lance burned down, transfixing me in fire.
Maybe I’d shout something defiant. Some poignant last words. Something like—
Just fucking do it.
I shut my eyes and clenched my fists.
Then I heard Lyle’s voice. Both in my ear and in my memories. “Dad, we need to move.”
Wake up, Dad, the same voice in my memories said. Face your reality.
Tears welled. With the suit mask, I couldn’t stop them from running down my cheeks. I clenched my jaw and forced myself upright, pressing against the curve of the tunnel wall. “Okay.”
“I’ll help you as best I can,” Lyle said.
“Lyle.”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you’re here. With me.”
“So am I, Dad,” Lyle whispered. “So am I.”
I started walking.
There were a few more explosions overhead, growing gradually distant. Then there was nothing but the sound of my footsteps and the gurgle of the water below. The tunnel branched often, but I kept going, following the main channel and walking in the same direction. I didn’t want to go in circles.
As I walked, I played with the suit touchpad.
Lyle had read-only access to the suit functions.
He couldn’t control anything, but he could see and hear.
With his guidance and suggestions, I dug through the unfamiliar user interface, looking up every few seconds to make sure I didn’t walk off a ledge or into a wall.
I found a navigation application, and although it could not link with any satellites or provide me with an exact position, it did give me the cardinal directions—I was walking west—and began mapping my route.
I also found a system-level survival toggle, which I set to Adaptive, hoping it might help keep me alive.
It took me longer than it should have to remember the tablet in my pocket.
I stopped mid-stride and slapped my hand over the cargo pocket.
I could tell by feel, even before I brought the tablet out, that it was damaged.
At least one of the hits I’d taken on my impromptu plunge into the tunnel system had shattered the tough crystalline face.
What had been a perfectly flat slate was bent into a distorted V.
Slivered bits of the tablet grated in my gloved hands.
I tried tapping on the shattered face anyway.
No response.
I stood there next to the gurgling water and nudged around the edges of what I was feeling. Grief? Waste? A lost opportunity to learn more about my brilliant son? All of those.
And was there, perhaps, a guilty mote of relief? Relief that I didn’t have to read what Lyle had written about me, read how he had cynically manipulated the impossibility of my life into religious dogma?
“Dad?”
I swallowed. “It’s okay.” I tossed the broken tablet into the water.
It sank, trailing bubbles, into the darkness.
I thought about asking Lyle if the suit, by some odd chance, had a copy of the Word in its memory banks.
Or if he did, in his memory … quantum-fold thing.
But I watched the tablet vanish, and I didn’t ask. “It’s nothing.”
I resumed my walk, head down. Step by step, on and on, until, without warning, the tunnel ended.
I was drifting, daydreaming, and almost ran into the stone wall.
I stopped and touched the hard surface, as though I needed to reassure myself that it was there.
“Damn.” I looked around. Water flowed below the wall.
I could dive in and try to swim. I might reach the ocean.
Or I’d end up in an underground aquifer or something, with no way back out again.
There was a rusty ladder embedded into the wall on the opposite side of the tunnel.
I jumped over the water—grabbing the ladder to keep my balance—and looked up.
The ladder disappeared into a vertical crawl space.
Even with the glow from the touchpad, the night vision of the suit struggled to resolve what was up there.
I glanced at the dirty water and up into the crawl space. “Lyle?”
“I’m not sure, Dad. This survival suit is good, but it’s basically a futuristic equivalent of something you might’ve bought at an outdoor-goods store when I was a kid. Consumer-grade, in other words. Not even military spec. I don’t think it will give you enough air for a long swim.”
Into the water or up the ladder. Or sit and wait for the hours to pass until I traveled forward through time again.
Then what? I could appear in the middle of the ground, alive and in agony as tons of rock and rubble pressed down on me, bones splintering and organs bursting as I was crushed to death.
Or would whatever was doing this not let that happen, and instead set me on the ground above? Did I want to risk it?
“Not much choice, is there?” I said.
“No, I don’t think so.”
I made my way up the ladder. It rattled against the stone wall with each step, but it supported my weight.
I clambered until I bumped my head, then I pushed at the dark circle of metal above me.
It didn’t move. I climbed a few more steps, bent, put my back and shoulders against it, and used my legs.
I missed the power of the exoskeleton, long since disassembled by the Vale Riders.
It would have made short work of this. I strained, the muscles in my thighs quivering.
The ladder step creaked, but something rusty broke near my head and the metal plate shuddered upward.
I heaved, and it came up enough for me to move it sideways.
I shoved and the plate fell onto hard flooring with a clatter.
I froze for a few seconds, listening, breathing hard. There was the dark curve of a roof overhead. After several seconds, I climbed out of the hole.
I was in a utility room, filled with shelves stacked with containers.
Cleaning supplies. The lights were off, so I held up the touchpad, illuminating the narrow space.
There was a door set into a cement wall beyond the shelves.
It was old style, my style, complete with an actual handle I could turn.
I took a breath and pressed down on the handle.
It took some force before the rust gave way and the tumblers turned.
I opened the door. Light streamed in. The suit adjusted, dimming the vision augmentation so I wasn’t blinded.
In front of me was a marble walkway. To the left of the walkway was a long wall.
The room to the right was enormous, at least forty feet to the ceiling.
Pale light streamed in through a glass roof, which was intact even though large chunks of broken concrete rested on it.
I turned off the touchpad glow. No reason to make myself visible to something beyond the glass.
As the night vision adjusted again to the change in ambient light, I took stock.
In the center of the large room was a massive skeleton.
It took me a few seconds to understand what I was looking at.
A dinosaur. Brontosaurus, if I remembered from my days as a kid obsessed with all things larger than life.
A display. There were other displays around the room.
I shuffled to the nearest marble pillar. “We’re in a museum.”
“Yes,” Lyle said.
“Do you think it’ll have anything we can use?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
I started along the walkway, keeping myself against the left wall and as far from the glass ceiling as possible.
Even at an angle and through sections of broken concrete I saw the swirling gray-black clouds beyond the glass.
No sign of the immense black object. My boots squelched on the marble floor.
I passed the dinosaur skeletons, following the corridor into a wide room with a lower ceiling not made of glass.
I walked by a mammoth. An open-mouthed saber-toothed tiger.
A family of cavemen crouched around a glass fire.
I moved along the timeline of history, on to the Greek, then the Roman exhibits.
Christ was there, crucified and staring at me with dull wax eyes, bleeding from the wrists, the ankles, the crown of thorns, and the stab wound in his side.
Christianity, or versions of it, had existed for two thousand years by the time I was born.
It made sense it would still be around, or at least the history of it, here, fourteen hundred more years later.
I sensed there was a great deal more to the exhibits than I was seeing, interactive elements requiring power that should react to my approach.
But even unpowered they were impressive.