Aftershock (10 page)

Harry had to force himself to slow down. There could be no telling what dangers lay a step away. But the urge to just run, blindly, was powerful. It seemed that now he had snapped out of his usual torpor, his mind had slipped into overdrive.

The strange dull light threw confusing shadows everywhere, but in this crazy topsy-turvy world it was impossible to know what was what anyway. A few minutes earlier, all had been ordered, normal, everything under control. Now? Now, the world had collapsed.

He led the others towards the north end of the vast ballroom. Or at least he thought that was the direction. It was hard to judge which end of the room was which. All the normal landmarks were distorted.

There was a loud crack. They all froze. The sound seemed to have come from directly overhead. Harry looked up.

‘That was the cap at the top of the dome,' Jim said, his voice hollow.

‘Can you see anything?' Danny asked. He was squinting up at the apex of the dome.

‘Too much dust and the emergency lights are too dim,' Jim replied.

‘Come on,' Harry said, and he pointed towards the emergency exit. ‘I can just see the sign. Directly ahead.'

Harry weaved a path through the debris, watching for stray electrical cables and live wires. They crouched to get under a collapsed girder covered in a mess of metal sheets and lumps of concrete. Reaching the far side of the obstruction, Harry made them all stop for a breather.

‘How are we?' he asked and looked at each of them in turn. Nick Xavier's filthy face was streaked with tears. He wouldn't meet Harry's eyes. Alfred and Jim nodded. ‘Okay, I guess,' Alfred panted and winced.

Danny Preston leaned back against a wall and took long, deep breaths. Kristy Sunshine looked completely dazed. She stared around at the five faces and burst into tears.

‘Time to go,' Harry said and squeezed the girl's shoulder. ‘This way.'

They reached the exit a few moments later. Harry leaned on the metal bar across the door, but it was locked. He pushed harder. Nothing. Alfred and Jim joined him and they all pushed together. Still nothing.

‘Locked or blocked,' Jim said. ‘Either way, it's useless.'

‘My dad reckoned there was a staircase,' Nick said.

‘He did,' Harry replied.

‘I think it's over there,' the boy added, pointing towards the west.

Getting over to the staircase was slow work. The floor was slick with liquid and strewn with lumps of plaster. Harry was in front. He stopped abruptly. Jim was immediately behind him. He almost crashed into the journalist.

Harry crouched down. At his feet lay a vaguely human shape. The others caught up. Danny knelt on one knee next to Harry and stared in silence as the Englishman pulled a swatch of fabric from the face of a dead man lying on his back. The victim's face had been sliced vertically almost in two. Sinews and lumps of muscle hung limply. One eye was pulped, teeth smashed to shards. Harry emitted a low moan and jumped up, throwing back the material to cover the face of his friend and producer Terry Mitcham.

Jim stopped Nick from looking at the remains, turning him away and guiding them around the body towards the foot of the emergency stairs. Harry stared blindly into space, his hand clamped tightly over his mouth.

Suddenly Kristy Sunshine screamed, a piercing ear-shattering banshee screech. ‘I can't stand this!' she cried. ‘I can't stand it. I have to get out.' She swayed on her heels, her eyes huge dishes in the half-light. She span round, looking like a cornered animal. The terror poured out of her.

Alfred took a step towards her. ‘Calm down, Kristy,' he said gently.

She glared at him almost uncomprehending. Then she screamed again, louder, more guttural, from the pit of her stomach. Alfred went to touch the girl's shoulder. She jolted, whirling on him. ‘Leave me alone, you old fuck!' she yelled.

Stunned, Alfred took a step back. Kristy started laughing hysterically and dropped to her knees, grabbing fistfuls of her hair. Alfred stepped forward again and pulled her up. ‘Get a grip, young woman,' he snapped, his face close to hers. Kristy fixed him with a totally blank look and started screaming again. Alfred slapped her, hard. She froze, took a deep breath and seemed to suddenly wake from a dreadful nightmare. ‘I'm sorry,' she said quietly.

They stood in silence for a few moments.

‘The stairs are there,' Harry said, breaking the tension. ‘They're blocked. Jim, Danny, Alfred. Help me.'

Harry led them over, leaving Nick and Kristy to follow. A huge metal strut and a mass of ragged chunks of tile and plaster lay between them and the staircase. The four men took up positions at each end of the beam. On Harry's command, they swivelled it away from the stairs. It was incredibly heavy and they could only shift it a short distance at a time, but after three goes they had moved the beam far enough away from the side of the stairs to squeeze past. They then set to work on the chunks of rubble and other debris.

‘Okay,' Jim announced. ‘I think we can get through.' He crouched down under a girder and could see a route to the steps. From there, the path was clear as far as the light would allow him to see. ‘Not sure we can reach the top, but we should be able to make some headway.'

Jim took the lead. Then Nick. Kristy ducked under the girder and crawled through the opening, Danny close behind. Alfred and Harry were last through. Emerging on the far side of the blockage, they could see the way to the mezzanine was clear. To the west, they could just make out the shape of the doorway through to Dome Beta.

‘Let's go,' Harry called from the rear of the group and Jim took the stairs two at a time, the others close behind.

Alfred was panting heavily and Harry stopped him a moment. ‘You okay?' he asked.

‘I'm fine,' the elderly man gasped. ‘Fine.'

‘No you're not. Here, let me help you,' Harry said, and got Alfred to lean on his shoulder.

‘I'm all right,' Alfred grunted.

‘Shut up.'

Alfred looked at him and produced a small laugh. ‘There was a time I would have punched you out for that.'

‘I'm sure there was,' Harry replied and heaved them up three more steps.

‘Stop a second,' Alfred said. ‘Just need to get my breath back.'

Harry wanted to press on. ‘Of course,' he said heavily, and they stopped a few steps from the top of the staircase.

Alfred leaned on his knees and took several deep breaths.

‘Better?'

‘Much.' Then Alfred looked up at Harry. ‘I feel bad about slapping the girl,' he said.

Harry stared back at him. ‘It was the right thing to do, Alfred,' he replied earnestly. ‘The kid was hysterical.' Then he produced a crooked grin. ‘Besides, I've been wanting to slap her since I heard her first single.'

A sensor on the retraction unit lowered from the underside of the Big Mac spotted the dead body floating in the water and moved into position a few centimetres above it. The unit was a cylindrical object about a metre long. Operating under its own power, it was remotely controlled by the Big Mac and could not stray far, but it was an incredibly strong machine equipped with an array of grapplers, pulleys and platforms.

Pete was controlling the device using a synapsecap. It consisted of a close-fitting plastic mesh which covered the top of his head. Two flaps hung down over his ears. The synapsecap took impulses from Pete's brain and translated them into electrical impulses that controlled the retraction unit. Under his instructions, a pair of grappling arms extended from the sides of the machine. The arms lifted the body a metre or so above the surface of the ocean. Once satisfied the weight was evenly distributed, the unit indicated to Pete that it was ready to return. He guided it back into a holding bay under the Big Mac.

Pete could hear Mai's voice through his comms. ‘God, what a mess!' she said, as she stared at the mangled body in the holding bay. This was the part of the job she found the hardest to deal with. She was a pilot, a scientist, with no inclination towards what she had been trained to think of as the ‘soft sciences' like medicine and biology. Ironically, she was filled with admiration for her team mate Steph, E-Force's brilliant doctor, who coped so easily with the damaged living and the dead. That was certainly not ‘soft'. But Mai knew her own skills centred on her ability to control machines. She felt comfortable solving problems that involved metal and plastic, data and mathematics – not human flesh. But she had been forced to overcome her squeamishness. What use was an emergency rescuer, she had told herself a hundred times, who felt uncomfortable around dead bodies?

‘Please tell me he didn't drown,' Mark said, his voice coming through Mai's wrist communicator and breaking her train of thought. He was still aboard the Silverback watching Mai through the videolink as she turned the body over.

‘Don't worry, Mark. This person was dead long before they reached the surface. Getting here a few minutes earlier would have made zero difference. They must have been on the top floor of Alpha.'

Mai crouched down beside the blackened form. The face was unrecognisable and the corpse's clothes were little more than seared fabric. She could just about tell the victim was female, and from the tattered remnants of a red, braided tunic, she was clearly one of the hotel staff.

‘Any ID?' Mark asked.

Mai moved some of the charred fabric to one side and found a melted plastic tag on a narrow chain. She turned it over and wiped the surface with her gloved hand. Using the optical implant she had been given when she first joined E-Force, she was just able to make out a few words on the plastic. ‘Michelle Lambert,' she said. ‘Assistant Concierge.' The photo of the woman was as disfigured as the real thing.

‘All right Mai. I'm sure poor Ms Lambert won't be the only floater we'll get tonight. Pete, keep scanning and bring the Big Mac down to the surface, I'm coming over. We need to get this show on the road.'

‘Okay,' Mark said. He was standing close to the big screen at the far end of the conference room on the Big Mac, pointing to Tom's latest schematic. ‘This is the Neptune.'

Knowing it would take precious time to cut through the red tape and secrecy of Bathoscope Holdings Limited, the corporation who had financed the building of the Neptune, Tom had simply hacked into their systems. It took him less than three minutes to find the files he wanted – the latest plans for the hotel complex, showing every aspect of the building's infrastructure down to the last conduit and junction box.

‘As we learned from Sybil and Tom, the hotel is located approximately 100 metres below us on the continental shelf,' Mark continued. ‘Half a kilometre north-east of here the ocean floor starts to drop away a thousand metres. We're using everything we have to get sensor readings of the ocean floor for a kilometre around the hotel, but at the moment the water is so churned up we hit trouble as soon as the floor falls below a few hundred metres. Tom's looking at the tectonic plates and searching for fissures anywhere on the continental shelf up to a 5 kilometre radius. So far, he's found nothing significant.'

‘Which implies no quake,' Mai commented. She was sitting at a secondary control station nearby, her white plastic chair swivelled round to study the screen.

Pete was perched on the corner of a table to Mai's left. ‘I've run a scan for explosives,' he said. ‘Nothing.'

‘And I've had the computer search for any hull breaches other than the top of Alpha,' Mai said and tapped at her control panel. A new schematic appeared on the screen. ‘There are some fissures, here and here,' she said, moving her fingers over the panel to control a pointer on the screen. ‘But all those sections have automatically sealed themselves off.'

‘Well, that's something,' Mark commented. ‘So let's concentrate on how we can get the survivors out of there. We've made another satellite sweep of the hotel and, just as I feared, many of those warm red dots we saw on the thermograph at Base One have changed to blue – bodies grown cold.'

‘How many are we talking about?' Mai asked.

‘Tom's found the guest list for tonight's extravaganza. Ninety-five guests and 107 staff. More than 150 people were in Gamma, which was the worst hit dome. There are only 27 life signs there now. There are nine more in Beta and six in Alpha.'

‘Just 42 survivors!'

‘At the moment. It's impossible to tell how many of those will die from serious injuries.'

The room was silent except for the hum of the Big Mac's systems and, far off, the sound of waves lapping against the aircraft's hull.

Mark tapped at a virtual keyboard, a simple pattern of light on the surface of a plastic panel close to the screen. ‘The Hunter is sending back some images,' he said, and the screen filled with a grey murk. It began to clear as the Hunter drew close to the domes and they could all see the sharp outline of the stricken hotel. Gradually, the definition improved and a digitally enhanced visual appeared, taken from the west of the hotel some 35 metres from Dome Alpha.

From this angle the damage did not appear too bad. They could see some holes in the outer casing of the enormous dome and the passage connecting it to Beta was buckled, but it had held. The Hunter, a sophisticated surveillance device that hovered over land, could withstand extremes of heat and cold and was also able to deal with the pressure up to an ocean depth of 2000 metres. It moved forward slowly, then swerved towards the south, giving the team a clear view of Beta and Gamma.

All the domes were blacked out with a few patches of dull radiance, but nothing of the inside of the hotel could be seen. There were large cracks in the casing of Beta and it had been twisted by the shock of whatever it was that had hit the building. The dome was tilted at an angle of approximately 5 degrees from the vertical. The walkway between Beta and Gamma was contorted. But this too had held, which meant all three domes were still connected.

Gamma was a real mess. It was leaning to the north. At the southern end, closest to the Hunter, parts of the dome's foundations had been wrenched away from the rock of the continental shelf. Two sections had been ripped from the main body of the structure, but emergency bulkheads had confined the damage and stopped water rushing into the rest of the building. The Hunter moved around the dome, skirting its base. From the north, the team in the Big Mac had a clearer view of the damage done to the top of the dome. The metal cap at the apex of the huge glass structure looked sturdy enough, but they could see fissures in the glass, dark jagged lines running down randomly from the cap. Some of these stretched almost halfway to the dome's base. From this angle, the Hunter was just able to pick out shifting patterns on the other side of the glass.

‘Are they people moving around?' Mai asked, astonished.

Mark didn't answer. Instead, he let his fingers skitter over the plastic control panel and they could all see the image shift. The Hunter was moving closer.

‘I don't want to alarm anyone,' Mark commented. ‘So I think we shouldn't let the Hunter go too close. But there. Yes ... human shapes.'

They could just make out the form of four men moving east across what remained of the banqueting suite. By ramping up the definition and shifting the lens on the Hunter to maximum magnification they could get some idea of the devastation inside the building. Metal beams dangled from the ceiling. Huge tables had been reduced to matchwood. There were heaps of rubble everywhere.

Mark touched the controls and instructed the Hunter to return to the Big Mac. Then he turned to the others. ‘Looks like we've got our work cut out, guys.'