2041 Sanctuary (Dark Descent) (41 page)

Creating a path back through the rubble that barred their way had been the first course of action. The danger had been that the whole area had become unstable, preventing removal of the debris by hand; not that that much rock could have been moved quickly anyway, far from it. So the decision had been made to use explosives. Hilt had said it would be a risk and his fears had turned out to be well-founded. The charges had been set and detonated. The result, a huge cloud of dust which settled to reveal they’d only made things worse, much worse. A quarter mile of the twisting, naturally occurring tunnels had completely caved in, ending whatever faint hopes they’d had of escaping the same way they’d entered.

Goodwin moved round the central table when Hilt gestured for him to take a look at the screen he’d been working on. In front of him a two dimensional digital map had been drawn, depicting the chamber they now called home.

‘There’s a lot more information on here,’ Goodwin said. ‘The last time I looked at this, it was less than half the size of what you have now.’

‘I’ve pushed my teams to the limit.’ Hilt stood upright and stretched his thick neck to one side to probe a shoulder with his fingers. ‘Our situation is becoming desperate,’ he continued, apparently feeling the need to justify his actions. ‘Our medical supplies are running low. We never envisaged we’d be spending so long away from a supply station. Not only are we having to deal with an increasing number of minor to mid-level injuries, it’s only a matter of time before more serious treatment is needed. People who have chronic conditions are running dangerously low on their medication and will most likely be the first to require emergency care. If we don’t get out of here soon, we could be facing our first fatalities since we arrived – and sooner rather than later.’

‘You’ve got no argument from me.’ Goodwin understood all too well the pressure Hilt was under. ‘We have to do what we have to do. If any of us civilians can help, just say the word.’

‘We have a limited number of torches as it is,’ Hilt told him. ‘More bodies scouring this place wouldn’t be feasible or safe. Besides, your people need to concentrate on keeping everyone fed and watered; the fish they’ve been pulling from the lake keeps us all going.’

Hilt was quite right. Goodwin’s twenty-five thousand strong, civilian workforce was doing a wonderful job, many working just as hard, if not harder, than the Darklight forces themselves. Everyone strove to maximise the materials at hand to produce a variety of fishing equipment. They’d even created rafts out of the ancient, long-dead tree trunks that littered the ground surrounding the ancient city, trees that lurked in the shadows, sprouting from the earth, their black crystallised forms yet another oddity that made up the complex riddle that was Sanctuary.

‘So, where do we stand now?’ Goodwin said.

Hilt cleared his throat and ran a hand through his short jet-black hair as he collected his thoughts. ‘We’ve finally determined where the cavern ends on two sides. Here and here.’ He pointed to two lines running down the left hand side and bottom of the map. ‘This section,’ he continued, tracing the line on the left, ‘is five miles from our location and two miles from the edge of the city’s southern border. As our remote drones don’t function down here, some kind of interference I’m told, we’re still to pinpoint where the chamber terminates to the north and east. My teams report the terrain further out becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, full of deep chasms and sheer cliff faces. As you can see by the scale here,’ Hilt tapped the graphical tablet to switch the image to a three dimensional render, ‘they’ve managed to penetrate almost thirty miles in both directions, with no end in sight.’

‘Thirty miles? That’s insane,’ Goodwin said in disbelief. ‘The professor said this place was big, but I never imagined an individual chamber could be this size.’

Hilt glanced at him. ‘Given it touches three miles high in places, is it so hard to believe? Some of the towers in the city are two miles in height. Everything down here is on a massive scale. Who knows how far this chamber could go, fifty, a hundred, a thousand miles?’

Goodwin’s mind reeled, and not for the first time, at the magnitude and reality shifting implications of this most mysterious of places. ‘I still find it hard to believe the U.S. military in the USSB don’t know this Anakim city is down here. We waltzed right into it, but according to the U.S. Army Decontamination Team we took prisoner on our way into Sanctuary, they never knew anything like this existed.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Hilt said. ‘Do you remember we walked through a section where the floor was covered with rocks and pulverised stone?’

Goodwin thought back. ‘Vaguely.’

‘Well, I think that area used to be blocked off but a seismic event, which we know occur in that area, could easily have brought it down, opening up whole new sections of the cave system. If that’s true, then any previous exploration would have finished at a dead end. This could well be virgin territory.’

‘For humans anyway,’ Goodwin said.

‘Indeed.’ The gravitas of Hilt’s tone emphasising the seriousness with which he now viewed the notion of the Anakim, their existence and the implications therein.

‘How are the USSB soldiers settling in with your men and women of Darklight?’ Goodwin asked the Commander. ‘They’ve been working with you for a few weeks now, any trouble with them following your orders?’ Goodwin was keen to find out if the two factions were getting along; it was his idea to release them from Darklight’s custody when it became apparent they weren’t getting back to civilisation anytime soon. Initially Hilt had put restrictions on their movements, coupled with round the clock surveillance. As their situation progressed from dire to critical, it had slowly dawned on the small captured unit of U.S. military personnel that Goodwin, his Steadfast GMRC civilians and Darklight weren’t the enemy they’d initially believed them to be. Obviously, when they had been sent from USSB Sanctuary to carry out decontamination procedures on Goodwin and a handful of civilian personnel, they had been expecting a routine job. What had greeted them was a small army of heavily armed and armoured Darklight mercenaries escorting in twenty-five thousand civilians. From their perspective, Goodwin and his cohorts were a huge hostile force and, after they’d been compelled to surrender, they’d reacted as their training dictated – only giving out their name, rank and service number when questioned. The irony was if they had helped Goodwin at the time they’d all be safely tucked up in the USSB; sadly, it seemed, things were never that easy.

‘They’re a pain,’ Hilt grumbled in a rare show of emotion.

‘Really?’ Goodwin was surprised. ‘I thought they were getting on well. There are only thirty of them, how much trouble can they make?’

‘Sergeant Alvarez, their C.O., and his corporal, Walker, keep pestering me to let them have their weapons back. If it isn’t that, it’s Alvarez sticking his nose in; he seems to think, as he’s from Sanctuary, he knows best.’

‘His insight is invaluable isn’t it?’ Goodwin said.

‘That’s the problem, and he knows it too.’

‘I’m sure you’ll get a handle on it.’

Hilt grunted and Goodwin took the hint; the commander didn’t want to discuss the subject any further.

‘I was speaking to a couple of them the other day, the Decontamination Team, I mean,’ Goodwin said, changing the subject slightly and looking about to make sure no one was around to overhear. ‘It appears they’re not aware of the next wave of asteroids either.’

Hilt shot him a look, his brows furrowing in concern.

‘Don’t worry, I haven’t told them or anyone else,’ Goodwin said. ‘I just posed some searching questions, very subtly, and it’s clear they only know about the first one, AG5.’

Hilt looked at him impassively, perhaps wondering what Goodwin was leading up to.

‘I think,’ Goodwin continued, ‘that no one else in Sanctuary can know either. If the military personnel are clueless, then it goes without saying that the civilians within the USSB are also in the dark. It may be that even Sanctuary’s generals have no idea what is to come.’

‘Someone knows,’ Hilt said with an ominous air.

He was right. There must be at least a few within Sanctuary who knew the full truth. Joiner did – that was for certain – and he could probably move in and out of Sanctuary as he pleased, too; nothing would surprise Goodwin now about the reach of the GMRC’s Intelligence Director. The professor had been bound for USSB Sanctuary before he’d decided to stay at Steadfast, but surely others knew too? Everyone within the GMRC Directorate had to know, but what about the politicians? Not for the first time, Goodwin felt a headache coming on as he tried to unravel the complexities of the cover-up.
It’s no good worrying about it now
, he chided himself, his mind returning to the here and now.

‘They all know about these Anakim, though,’ Goodwin continued, referring to the U.S. Army personnel once more. He was pleased to be able to talk freely in front of the commander. With things as they were, Hilt and Goodwin, the appointed leaders, rarely found time to converse in private and it made a change not having to watch what he said all the time for fear of revealing something he shouldn’t. ‘It sounds like the existence of these giants is common knowledge within the USSB, from what they say.’

‘Which is still very little.’ Hilt continued to add data to his map. ‘There’s a lot they’re not telling us. As soon as you ask them about the USSB they clam up tighter than a gnat’s ass.’

‘I know,’ Goodwin said. ‘But can you blame them? We had them tied up for days and then held prisoner for weeks on end. When we finally set them free, we keep their weapons from them. How would you feel in their shoes?’

Hilt didn’t respond to the question, typically keeping his thoughts to himself. Goodwin had noticed over the months they’d been together the Commander had let down his guard ever so slightly. He wasn’t as stand-offish with him as he had been at the beginning. The Darklight officer was an enigma and Goodwin was sure he’d only begun to scratch the surface of the man that lay beneath. What he did know was that he could put his trust in him one hundred per cent; you got the feeling that when Hilt accepted you as a friend that was it, he’d back you all the way. And Goodwin did feel like they’d created a friendship of sorts, or if not yet that, then a definite mutual respect had been forged between them; at least that was his take on it.

‘So, have there been any other developments I should know about?’ Goodwin asked.

‘The teams I sent back into the city have returned empty handed again. Every tower they’ve searched is completely devoid of anything, just large, strangely decorated, hollow shells.’

‘Perhaps whoever used them, lived in them, had no need for furniture or possessions.’ Goodwin leant against the rock wall at the back of the room due to the lack of any seating. ‘Who knows how they lived? Their way of life could’ve been totally alien to ours.’

‘Whatever the case there’s nothing of use to us in them,’ the Darklight man said.

‘And it would take years to search them all thoroughly,’ Goodwin added, ‘and from what you’ve said before, they can’t access the upper levels of the towers as there are no staircases.’

‘Yes, they must have used a mechanism we’ve been unable to locate. One of my teams did enter the first floor of one the smaller structures. The grappling gun they used just reached one of the windows. They have no glass in them; they’re just open apertures into the building.’

‘The same thing, empty interior?’

Hilt nodded in confirmation.

Goodwin wandered around the room, picking up and perusing random maps brought back by the reconnaissance teams. ‘Where are we at, then? How the hell do we get out of this place?’

Hilt sighed and squeezed the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. ‘Okay, our options are running out.’ He picked up a large knife that had been doubling as a paperweight and pondered the polished blade as he turned it over in his hands. ‘We can’t stay here forever, but there is no obvious route out. The lake has underwater caves within its structure, according to our scanners, but we have no equipment to even attempt to explore them. Sergeant Alvarez suggested the caves might lead back to the USSB, although he refused to elaborate on why he thought this. My guess is this water source is used in the USSB, if not for drinking water, then for other utilities within the base. Such a large resource would not be ignored, if access to it was at hand. The cave system that led us here is now even more congested, unstable and impassable after our disastrous attempt at blasting our way out and the tunnels we’ve found beneath the city are a veritable labyrinth, the most promising of which have proved to be dead ends.’

‘So far,’ Goodwin said.

‘Indeed.’ Hilt seemed unperturbed by his director’s interruption. ‘Although the tunnels that keep on going all descend into the bowels of the Earth, which is the wrong direction. The areas to the south are a mass of deep crevasses, gaping wide ravines and vertical and reverse angled cliffs, all of which require a host of climbing equipment to circumvent, equipment we don’t possess. According to Alvarez and his U.S. Army Decontamination Team, there’s no point exploring this chamber any further east, as that leads us in the opposite direction to the USSB. So as far as I see it, we’re left with three choices, all of which are shots in the dark.

‘One, we send a team north as far as they can go. Behind this team we place units at specific intervals to act as a supply chain, enabling the unit on point to roam much further before having to return. Hopefully they’ll find a route out.

‘Two, we use the same tactic in the tunnels under the city, a roving unit backed up with a supply chain. And finally, three, we fabricate climbing gear from other bits of kit and send our best climbers south, although without any support their range will be limited and chances of success, slim.’

Goodwin didn’t want to state the obvious, except he had little choice but to do so. ‘None of those sound particularly promising,’ he said, his mouth set in a grim line of displeasure, his frustration mounting.