59
ABOARD THE
ONYX, Kurt ran and fired and ran again.
He emptied his second magazine, loaded another, and kept moving,
pushing Katarina ahead of him.
Clear of pursuers for
a second, they ducked into an alcove between two of the ship’s
storerooms and listened.
Some kind of strange
alarm had begun sounding. It almost resembled the Whoop, Whoop heard on a submarine before it was
about to dive.
“What’s that?”
Katarina asked.
“I don’t know,” he
said.
Seconds later a
recorded voice came over the ship’s loudspeaker. “Fulcrum deploying. Stand clear of midships array. Repeat.
Stand clear of midships array.”
“We’re running out of
time,” Katarina said. “Can’t be more than a couple minutes
left.”
“And we’re going the
wrong way,” Kurt said.
They’d had no choice,
each pack of crewmen they’d run into had forced a detour. Since
they’d left the cabin, they’d actually moved farther forward
instead of aft.
In their favor, the
ship was mammoth yet crewed by no more than a hundred or so. Some
of those had to be at duty stations to pull off whatever Andras was
doing with this Fulcrum array. And at least six were now
dead.
Working against them
was the ship’s architecture. The Fulcrum compartment was between
them and the coolant room at the aft end of the ship. Since the
Fulcrum took up the top half of the ship, and ran from beam to
beam, the only way to get past it was to go deep into the ship and
use one of the bottom decks to cross under it.
The alarm and
recording continued, and Kurt imagined the giant fan-shaped array,
larger than a football field, emerging through huge doors on the
top of the Onyx’s hull.
“Let’s go,” he said,
pulling Katarina up and getting on the move once
again.
She was struggling to
keep up but had yet to make the slightest complaint.
Kurt found a ladder
that dropped through a hole in the deck. He took it, sliding down
with his feet on the outside rails.
“Come on,” he said.
As Katarina came down the ladder he noticed the rag around her hand
was soaked right through in red.
He went to look at
it.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Keep going.”
Another ladder
dropped them down a few feet to one more deck. And this time, Kurt
stopped. He could hear machinery throbbing in an odd pattern, on,
off, and back on.
It gave him an
idea.
“Wait here,” he
said.
Kurt crept forward.
Markings on a pair of closed hatchway doors read “Thruster
Unit.”
Behind him, Katarina
leaned against the wall and slid down it in slow
motion.
“I’m okay,” she said
as he started back toward her. “Just . . . taking . . . a little
rest.”
She wasn’t going to
make it much farther. At least not running through the ship at
breakneck speed. And they were running out of time
anyway.
The Whoop, Whoop alarm stopped, and even down in the
bowels of the ship the hull shuddered slightly as something big
locked into place.
“How much time?” he
asked.
“A minute,” she said
through her exhaustion. “Maybe less.”
She slumped onto her
side, the blood-soaked rag over her hand smearing blood across the
metal deck.
He couldn’t help her
now. He had to do something about the Fulcrum before it was too
late. With a fire ax he pulled from a bracket on the wall, he broke
open the lock on the door in front of him. The sound of throbbing
machinery echoed throughout the room.
He stepped inside.
Down below were the powerful electric motors of the bow thrusters.
By the way the system was acting, it was struggling to keep the
ship in some kind of perfect alignment.
Kurt guessed that
redirecting a particle beam would require exact precision. If he
could stop the thrusters, or throw them off, that might ruin either
the beam’s cohesiveness or its aim.
OFF THE COAST OF
SIERRA LEONE, Djemma Garand studied the field of battle from his
vantage point in the control room of platform number 4. He had
forced the Americans back. Twice he had repelled their assaults.
Now he would strike with a vengeance.
“Bring all units back
to full power!”
Cochrane was beside
him, looking nothing like a man who was about to become infamous
for all eternity. He looked like a rodent who would rather have
scurried under a bush and hid than a man ready to claim his place
in history. But he did as he was told, and he had trained Djemma’s
other engineers well enough to operate the machinery if he
balked.
“All units at a
hundred one percent design load,” Cochrane said. “Magnetic tunnels
are energized and reading green. The heavy particle mix is
stable.”
He looked over at one
more screen, a telemetry display from the Onyx. “The Fulcrum array is locked in position,” he
said. “You may fire when ready.”
Djemma savored the
moment. The Americans had attacked him with missiles and aircraft,
and now his sonar readings detected two of their submarines
entering the shallows. They were breaking themselves on his
strength, and now, as he promised, they would feel his
bite.
Once he gave the
order, the system would energize. It would take fifteen seconds for
the charge to build up in the tunnels of his massive accelerator,
and a quarter of a second later the energy burst would race forth,
cross over the Onyx, and be directed
down onto Washington, D.C.
For a full minute it
would spread across the American capital, panning back and forth
and wreaking havoc and destruction.
He looked over at
Cochrane. “Initiate and fire,” he said calmly.
IN THE THRUSTER ROOM
of the Onyx, Kurt found what he needed:
the thick high-voltage lines he’d seen in the reactor room. The
blue lines, he thought, remembering the schematic. They were routed
through the accelerator and then back to the Fulcrum.
That was his only
shot. He stepped toward them, swinging the ax and releasing it at
the last instant to avoid being electrocuted when it cut into the
cables.
The blade hit, and
released a massive shower of sparks. A blinding flash of
electricity snapped across the gap like man-made lightning, and the
entire ship was plunged into darkness.
Kurt was thrown to
the deck by the blast. His face felt burnt. For several seconds the
compartment was in absolute darkness. The motors of the bow
thrusters rattled loudly and began winding down. Finally, the
emergency lights came on, but, to Kurt’s great joy, nothing else
seemed to have power.
He hoped it was
enough. He hoped it had been done in time.
UP ON THE SHIP’S
BRIDGE, Andras stared. The ship had gone black, and in the dark of
the night it seemed as if the world had vanished. Seconds later the
emergency lights had come on.
At first he feared
the array had somehow overloaded the system. He reached forward,
tapping at the Fulcrum’s controls and flicking the toggle switch on
the side of the unit. He got no response, not even a standby
light.
A second later some
of the basic systems came back online, and Andras looked around
hopefully.
“It’s just the
one-twenty line,” one of the engineers said. “The high voltage is
still down.” The man was flicking a few switches of his own to no
effect. “I have no thrusters, no power to the array. No power to
the accelerator.”
Andras leaned forward
to check the Fulcrum array visually. It stood there, spread out
like the canopy of a giant tree that had somehow sprouted from the
center of the ship, but it was dead. Not even the blinking red
warning lights were illuminated anymore.
He grabbed the
joystick that had raised it into position and fiddled with it for a
second, then flung the controller aside with great
bitterness.
“Damn you, Austin!”
he shouted.
After a moment to
reflect he realized that power could be restored. He just needed to
make sure Austin wasn’t around to cut it a second time. He grabbed
his rifle and checked the safety.
“Get somebody down
there to reroute the high-voltage lines,” he ordered. “We’ll try
again, once it’s up and running.”
The engineer
nodded.
Another man looked
over at Andras from the far corner of the bridge. “What do we tell
Garand if he calls?”
“Tell him . . . he
missed.”
With that, Andras
stormed out of the bridge, a single thought burning his mind:
Austin must be destroyed.