17

So far, so good, thought Dantec, or good enough anyway. He’d probably make it through. His head had been aching ever since he got into the goddamn sub. Or, if he was to be honest with himself, for weeks now. Pills didn’t seem to help. Whatever he did, it was still there, not unbearable, just always throbbing quietly, keeping him from sleeping, destroying his concentration. He hadn’t felt so strung out since the moon skirmishes. For that matter, he hadn’t felt this confined—this trapped—since then. He hadn’t realized how much being in a sub underwater was going to feel like being in a jettison pod in space. It brought all sorts of things flashing back at him from the moon skirmishes, that weird war that wasn’t officially a war, where all it took was one little tear in the fabric of your suit for you to die and where, by the end, if you wanted to survive, you had to stab a knife in a buddy’s back just so you could steal what was left of his oxygen. How many men had he had to kill to stay alive? All that had changed him, hardened him. He thought at first that it had lifted him above things, had made it so he wouldn’t feel fear, wouldn’t be subject to the same emotional weaknesses as others. But he was beginning to realize that that wasn’t quite right. True, he’d managed to avoid those parts of himself for a long time, but they were still there. And now that they were forcing their way up to the surface, they were raw and red, more sensitive than an exposed nerve.

And that bastard Hennessy. It didn’t help being stuck with him. He was a real, genuine fucking chucklehead, that was for sure. First he had been like a kid in a toy shop, unable to contain his delight at the F/7, at his new toy. Then put him in the thing and he does a Jekyll/Hyde, becomes nothing but panic and nerves and slow collapse into madness. That was the last thing you wanted in a confined space like this. In the moon skirmishes, he’d killed men for less.

Not like the thought didn’t cross his mind. But Tanner didn’t want him to do it. Tanner had been good to him over the years. Though if Tanner had understood what had really happened during the moon skirmishes, Dantec knew, he might treat him a lot differently.

During the skirmishes, Tanner never realized that Dantec was not interested in saving him so much as stealing his air supply. Dantec had planned to kill him and take his oxygen tank, and he would have done it, too, except that, while looking for a safe place to kill Tanner, he’d stumbled onto a working transmitter, a technician’s severed and frozen arm still stuck to it. So, instead of killing Tanner, he called the dropship to pick them up. Tanner never understood that the reason he blacked out and almost died before the ship arrived was because Dantec had turned the airflow on his tank down. Just in case the ship didn’t come fast enough and he needed Tanner’s air after all.

But loyalty and guilt toward Tanner weren’t the only reasons that Dantec hadn’t killed Hennessy. He didn’t like the idea of killing someone in such a confined space, where he couldn’t dispose of the body. He just couldn’t imagine sitting there, knowing the body was behind him, feeling its dead eyes on his back. Add to that the fact that over the last six or so hours, he’d actually become a little afraid of Hennessy. Panicking, then whispering to himself, speaking to the bulkhead to his left as if there was actually someone sitting beside him. The man was out of his mind, and Dantec didn’t want to do anything to provoke him. He knew, from personal experience, that when people went out of their minds, they became unpredictable. They could do things you’d never expect and they’d do them with a strength you’d never expect them to have.

He just wanted to come through this alive. They’d made it halfway. They were here now, right beside the monolith, which, he had to admit, also scared the shit out of him. But it filled him with awe as well. It had been there more than fifty million years if the geological data was to be believed. Which meant it predated humankind. But it was clearly man-made—or made by some intelligent life. It was mind-boggling.

Hennessy was staring out the porthole at it, lost in contemplation of the thing, looking like his brain had been switched off.

Dantec had the core sampler primed. It was readied and partly extended. He’d tested the molecular cutters that would slice into the stone. Carefully he extended the arm until it was touching the monolith itself, and then he thrust it forward and started to cut.

Almost immediately his head was filled with a piercing pain, so intense that he felt he was going to pass out. His vision first seemed as though it had been coated in blood and then it vanished entirely, being replaced by an empty white expanse. He gripped the control panel, struggling to breathe. Hennessy was screaming behind him.

Very slowly, the pain began to ebb away. His vision crept back. Hennessy was moaning, all but passed out behind him. The core sampler had kept cutting—very slowly, but it was still cutting. All they needed was a little bit, just a little bit, and then he could turn the F/7 around and get the hell out of there.