Apocalypse (48 page)

Ethan was prodded forward as Olaf shoved him toward the giant sphere in the center of the hangar.

‘Joaquin, what are you doing?’ said Katherine.

Ethan thought that he heard the first ripple of concern in her voice as they were led toward the giant sphere in the center of the dome. Nearby, he saw Dennis Aubrey being lifted out of a chair
by two IRIS soldiers and dragged toward the sphere.

‘It is time,’ Joaquin announced grandly, ‘to demonstrate the power that I hold over time itself.’

Joaquin reached the sphere just before Ethan and Lopez, and turned to face them.

‘Because,’ he said, ‘I hold the ability not just to see into the future, but also to erase any trace of the past.’

Katherine stared at her husband. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The black hole,’ Joaquin replied ecstatically, all of his previous rage forgotten now as he returned to his scripted plan. His mood swings were like those of a child, Ethan
realized, erratic and unpredictable. ‘Nothing, not even light, can escape from its grasp. Even suspended within this chamber, protected as we are from its influence, time still runs slightly
slower in this facility than it does in the outside world. It’s a shame for our guests, because were they not about to cease to exist I would have done them a favor. They would have aged a
little less than the rest of the population of our planet during the time they’ve spent down here.’

‘Sadly,’ Lopez uttered, ‘the time hasn’t exactly flown by.’

Joaquin grinned, not letting her jibe contaminate his obvious enjoyment.

‘But it’s about to,’ he said. ‘As one gets closer to a black hole, so time flows more slowly. If you travel to the edge of a black hole, the famous event horizon, time
will seem to flow so fast outside your frame of reference that, as you pass through the horizon, it is said that you will witness the entire future of the universe outside.’

Ethan scowled at Joaquin.

‘Why don’t you take a running jump into it and find out?’

Joaquin let out an abrupt burst of laughter.

‘An excellent idea, except that once material is inside a black hole it can never leave. Information cannot escape the event horizon, at least not in the same form as it entered. It can be
released only as pure energy over time, as the black hole evaporates. And that, my friends, will take billions of years.’

‘We’re in no rush to see you again,’ Lopez said.

‘Good, because soon you’ll be lost to history,’ Joaquin said. ‘But let me first demonstrate to you just how efficient this process is. Olaf?’

Joaquin clicked his fingers at the giant, who turned without a word and lumbered across to Dennis Aubrey. Olaf stooped and in one motion hefted the scientist onto his shoulder like a sack of
potatoes. Aubrey began screaming and pummeled Olaf’s muscular back with his feeble fists. Katherine stepped into Olaf’s path, forcing him to stop.

‘No, please, Joaquin, don’t!’

The giant turned idly to look at Joaquin.

‘This is for the best, Katherine,’ Joaquin said. ‘Dennis betrayed us and tried to send word to the outside world about my work. Fortunately for me, it was you he chose to
contact. He has to go, for the benefit of us all.’

Katherine’s features were suddenly taut with horror, as though, despite everything that Joaquin had already done, she had not imagined him doing this.

‘He’s innocent, Joaquin! He doesn’t deserve this!’

Joaquin shrugged his shoulders, as though he were considering nothing more important than what to have for lunch.

‘That is a matter of personal opinion,’ he replied. ‘But right now I cannot take the chance that he won’t betray us again.’

Olaf waited for no further encouragement and shoved his way past Katherine with the scientist writhing on his shoulder. Ethan watched as two IRIS soldiers opened a hatch attached to a small
chamber on the side of the sphere. Olaf stepped onto the edge of the hatch and pitched the screaming man inside before stepping back. The two soldiers slammed the chamber door shut and sealed
it.

Joaquin turned and gestured to Ethan and Lopez.

‘Make sure they see everything,’ Joaquin snapped, his voice taut with excitement. ‘I want them to see how they’re going to die in just a few moments’
time.’

Olaf lumbered up behind Ethan and with a weighty shove propelled him up against the side of the sphere. One shovel-like hand twisted his wrist up into the small of his back as the other clamped
the back of Ethan’s head and shoved it forcefully against a glass porthole looking into the chamber’s interior.

Ethan gasped, his guts convulsing with a mixture of vertigo and fear as he looked into a sphere of endless blackness suspended within, a void of such unimaginable depth that it made him feel as
though he was already falling into oblivion. Flares of plasma snarled and snapped within the chamber, flashing out toward him.

Somewhere behind him, he heard Joaquin’s voice.

‘Open the inner hatch!’

Dennis Aubrey lay curled up on the cold metal floor of the chamber. His guts had turned to slime within him, his bowels loosening as they gurgled and writhed, infected with a
fear far beyond anything that he could have imagined possible. Every muscle in his body was locked in a spasm of primal terror, his throat constricted and his eyes wet with tears that flowed beyond
his control.

Aubrey had never been a religious man. He had long considered those who leaned upon the crutch of blind faith to be crippled by far more than mere dogma. He had believed them to have forgone
real wonders for mythical ones, the genuine joy of discovery replaced by the hollow promises of religion. But now, faced with the might of nature’s ultimate uncaring creation, he felt a
lifetime of scientific confidence abandon him. Aubrey became what all human beings were before the fury of nature’s wrath: feeble, inconsequential, helpless.

‘Forgive me,’ he whispered into his own chest as he lay coiled upon the floor. ‘If there’s anybody listening, forgive me.’

A silence followed that seemed to last forever, and then suddenly he heard the hiss of hydraulics as the inner hatch opened. In a moment of morbid fascination, Aubrey peered into the darkened
maw of true oblivion and then screamed with all of his might as a roar filled his ears, the gruesome song of the black hole both as deep as eternity and yet howling like a banshee as every free
atom in the outer chamber was yanked toward it. The moisture in the chamber condensed into a writhing cloud of vapor and zipped toward the black hole as the latent heat energy was dragged instantly
from his surroundings.

Everything else happened in a flash, every millisecond seared into Dennis Aubrey’s last moment as he realized a terrible truth: he was lying with his feet pointing at the black hole. At
this range and with everything happening so fast, he would literally see and experience everything before the solace of death embraced him, for his eyes and brain would be the last parts of him to
enter the black hole. Even before the first electrical impulse from his brain reached his limbs in a futile attempt to turn himself around and meet his death head on, he lost the ability to move.
In an instant, as the inner hatch fully opened, Aubrey’s skin and body became immobile as the temperature began plummeting toward minus 270 degrees.

The sweat on his skin turned to ice crystals as all of the air and the heat of his body was vacuumed toward the black hole at tremendous velocity. Aubrey’s gaze registered tiny flares of
red light as countless atoms of nitrogen, oxygen and methane were dragged in their billions across the event horizon and into the black hole. A flare of plasma appeared around the black hole like
the rings of Saturn as other atoms on less direct trajectories were sent into rapidly decaying orbits around the black hole’s circumference, accelerated to the speed of light and heated to
thousands of degrees before vanishing beyond the event horizon.

Aubrey felt as though he were encased in a steel suit. The blood deep beneath the surface of his skin began to boil as though toxic acid were seething through every vein and artery in his body.
His scream, long lost along with the air, lay frozen in time on his face as his lungs turned to stone in his chest cavity. His glasses shot away and vanished, instantly melted, into the disc of
plasma orbiting the black hole.

Dennis Aubrey was lifted bodily from the floor of the outer chamber and flew toward the gaping black hole. The inner wall of the tokamak chamber flashed past as he caught a fleeting glimpse of
faces pressed against the glass portholes, watching him with expressions of mute horror.

Aubrey saw the wall of the sphere glow as the entire universe beyond the black hole was shifted into the blue portion of the light spectrum. He had the briefest impression of individual atoms in
their countless millions being dragged from his body as it passed through the event horizon. There was no pain, for his body was already too senseless to register any meaningful physical sensation,
the nerves and pores either rock solid with cold or melting in the storm of plasma energy seething within the sphere.

His legs, closer to the black hole’s singularity than his head, were stretched away from him in a nanosecond by the imbalanced gravitational field, tremendous tidal forces tearing his
atoms apart as their nuclei and orbiting electrons scattered into the fiery plasma.

With his last moment of awareness, before even his eyeballs turned to solid ice, Aubrey glimpsed the outside world twist and spiral in a violent blur of colors as the light was distorted by the
black hole’s immense gravitational field, wrapping around it in dense coils like a light spectrum floating on the surface of a bubble.

In a blaze of energy, Aubrey crossed the event horizon. The kaleidoscope of colors turned suddenly bright blue and then plunged to black as Aubrey realized that no matter where he looked he saw
the same thing: the oblivion within the black hole’s dark heart, the singularity, where all paths inevitably led and where all histories were irrevocably erased.

And then there was nothing.

June 28, 20:24

Ethan stared in horror as he saw Dennis Aubrey’s body plunge into the black hole, his face a screaming mask. He glimpsed the scientist’s body stretched to oblivion
around the circumference of the black hole before the man’s agonized face turned a deep red as the light was shifted deep into the spectrum.

Then, he simply vanished from sight.

The writhing coil of energy around the black hole seemed to recede as it was gradually consumed, and then the interior of the chamber fell dark once more, punctuated only by the occasional
flares of plasma reaching out to the chamber walls.

Ethan felt his head yanked backwards as Olaf pulled him away from the glass.

He caught Lopez’s eye as they turned to face Joaquin once more. The tycoon’s face glowed with malice.

‘Now then,’ he began, ‘which one of you will be going next?’

Ethan glanced at Katherine Abell, who looked as though she were on the verge of a breakdown. She stared with wide eyes at the chamber where Dennis Aubrey had been crushed into oblivion.

‘Is this what you are?’ Ethan asked Katherine, ignoring Joaquin. ‘Is this what you’ve become, too?’

Katherine blinked as though refocusing on the here and now, and she shook her head vaguely. Joaquin walked across to her and yanked her arm, turning her toward him.

‘Don’t listen to them,’ he crooned. ‘They’re not worth it, not worth the worry.’

‘Is Scott Bryson not worth the worry?’ Ethan asked Katherine. ‘He saved your life.’

Katherine’s jaw trembled as conflicting emotions warred with each other. She looked at Joaquin.

‘This is wrong,’ she whispered finally. ‘This is all wrong.’

‘This is necessary,’ Joaquin insisted, ‘for the greater good of us all, of all humanity. They’re going to die, Katherine, I’ve already seen it on the camera.
There’s absolutely nothing that you can do to prevent that.’

Katherine shook her head.

‘This, all of this, it’s not about us or about humanity, is it?’ she said. ‘It’s about you and how much power you can have over people.’

‘No,’ Joaquin snapped. ‘It’s not about that at all.’

‘Then let them go, and take responsibility for your own actions instead of blaming it on the needs of a humanity that has no idea what you’re doing. Let them go: it’s what your
father would have done.’

Katherine’s challenge fell out of her lips almost of its own accord, and as Ethan watched he realized that Joaquin had again been cornered. The tycoon opened his mouth to answer his wife,
but nothing came forth. Katherine grabbed his arms and shook them as she spoke.

‘It’s the right thing to do and you know it,’ she said. ‘It’s what Isaac Abell would have done. He would have seen the error of his ways and tried to prevent any
further loss of life.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Joaquin snapped.

‘No?’ Katherine challenged. ‘Well, you tell me: would your father have released these people or would he have executed them?’

Ethan watched as Joaquin ground his jaw in his skull for several long seconds, staring silently at his wife. And then he sighed and shook his head as he turned away from her.

‘Katherine, I’m afraid it’s just too late for that now.’

‘You mean you don’t have the guts,’ Katherine snarled, ‘because you’re not a fraction of the man your father was.’

Joaquin whirled on the spot and his fist whipped out, cracking Katherine back-handed across the cheek. She sprawled onto the floor, her hair falling over her face. Ethan tried to leap to her aid
but Olaf’s huge hands held him in place like a vice.

‘You know nothing of my father,’ Joaquin shouted, pointing down at his wife. ‘Nothing!’

Katherine slowly struggled to her feet and stood before her husband with her chin lifted in defiance.

‘I’m sure that he was man enough never to have hit his wife.’

Joaquin clicked his fingers at two of the IRIS soldiers standing nearby and they hurried forward to each take one of Katherine’s arms in theirs.

Joaquin looked at her for a long moment and then shook his head.