City of the Falling Sky (39 page)

Sanfarrow disappeared and returned moments
later from the lift trailing a long cable behind him. Whilst he and
Tippian connected it to the glove, Seckry joined everyone in
standing back towards the lift.

Tippian pressed the glove open palmed onto
the surface of the rock in front of him.

After a moment there were a few crackles of
discharged electricity.

“
Oh man . . .” Tippian said
worriedly. “My hand is really starting to bur–”

Tippian’s words were silenced by a deep boom
and a flash of ultra bright light. He yelled and shook the glove
off, cradling his hand to his stomach.

As Vance and Sanfarrow rushed to see if
Tippian was okay, Seckry noticed that a giant crack was ripping its
way outwards from the point at where Tippian’s hand had been.

“
Stand back!” he
called.

Everyone shuffled backwards and watched in
anticipation and fear as the crack spread like a spider web. As it
reached all the corners of the tunnel, it came to a standstill. But
just as Seckry was about to take a step forward, the earth began to
do something nobody expected. It began to wobble.

“
Oh my . . .” said
Sanfarrow, in horror.

The earth then collapsed like some kind of
muddy, giant jelly and spewed across their feet, knocking Tippian
over, and making everyone else grip the sides of the tunnel to
steady themselves.

As the movement stopped, Tippian crawled to
his feet, spat out a few little stones, and shook the soil out of
the bristles of his hair before readjusting his glasses and putting
his hands on his hips.

“
Well, that seems to have
done the trick,” he said triumphantly.

“
Oh, look!” said Loca,
pointing and shining her torch.

The earth had crumbled in more directions
than one, but one of those directions was forward, and above them,
about a hundred yards ahead, was a small patch of metal.

Seckry threw down his shovel.

“
This is it,” he said. “Have
you got the gimmypug blood, Eiya?”

Eiya held up the test tube to show him.

It took them all a little while to scramble
through the now spongy earth, but when they reached the metal, they
could see that it was bubbled with rust and acid erosion. Tippian
gave it a short blast with the glove (which was now back in battery
powered mode), and it melted away like silver lava.

Vance helped hoist each one of them up into
the chamber before pulling himself through. As Seckry stood up, he
saw Eiya’s eyes close in distress.

As he scanned the room around him, he saw
why.

Around the circumference of the circular
chamber were about twenty or so tubular water tanks, each lit from
underneath with blue neon and each containing a floating, naked
human being. Seckry resisted the urge to look away and focused on
the tank closest to him.

A man of about forty years old was suspended
in the water, his eyes closed and his arms drifting either side of
him. His body was covered in wires and at one end of the thickest
wire was a huge needle, impaled into the base of the man’s
spine.

Each tank had a large pipe trailing from the
bottom, and every pipe headed towards the centre of the room, into
a large, monstrous looking mess of metal and circuitry which Seckry
could only imagine was the Divinita machine.

Beside the machine was a huge, steel circle,
like an empty gateway that led nowhere.

“
We have to act fast,”
Sanfarrow said. “Darklight’s probably got this place alarmed. He
could be on his way here right now. First we need to–”

Sanfarrow was cut off by the sound of the
large titanium entrance hissing into action and sliding open.

“
No!
” Sanfarrow said,
in anguish.

Seckry had seen Darklight numerous times on
television, but seeing him in the flesh made his skin crawl.

“
That was quite an entrance,
Ropart,” Darklight said smoothly.

“
This is over, Kan!”
Sanfarrow said with defiance. “We’re finishing what we’ve come to
do, and you’re not going to stop us.”

Darklight sighed dramatically and stepped
further into the chamber, eyeing each one of them individually.

“
I see you’ve brought a few
friends. Including our very own Mr Worm Thief, Seckraman
Sevenstars. And . . . is this . . . Esertgate’s head of science?
Vance, is it? I suppose I should have assumed I would run into you
one day. You’ve been teetering on the brink of topping my hit list
for a long time. Sticking your nose where it doesn’t
belong.”

“
I’d like to see you try to
take me out, you corrupt piece of dirt,” said Vance,
confidently.

“
How did you know we were
here?” Sanfarrow said. “Do you sleep here now? Is that how much
this sick project means to you?”

“
No, no Ropart. Only
tonight. I knew you were coming, you see.”

Sanfarrow shook his head slowly. “How?”

“
Because I’ve been watching
your movements on a map via a tracking device.”

“
Tracking device?
”
Sanfarrow said incredulously.

“
Yes, Ropart. In that
beloved locket of yours.”

Sanfarrow was silent for a moment, before
falling to his knees.

“
No . . . not Jenniver,” he
said softly.

Darklight turned and flicked his two fingers
at somebody, beckoning them to enter the chamber also. Jenniver
Layne strolled in and pressed a button which closed and locked the
door behind her.

“
Jenniver,
” Sanfarrow
whispered, pained.

Darklight chuckled.

“
Did you really think she
still loved you? I mean, Ropart, come on, look at you. She never
loved you. How could anybody love you? Your own mother didn’t even
love you.”

“
Jenniver, you didn’t . . .
how could you do this?” Sanfarrow said to her.

“
It was ingenious really,”
said Darklight. “All this time I’ve been searching for you, I
should have realised that all I had to do was get somebody else to
do the searching for me. This Sevenstars brat was perfect. We knew
he’d stop at nothing to find out what was going on here, and if we
told him that you had all the answers, we knew he’d do everything
he could to find you. And here you are. You’ve walked right into my
little trap.”

“
And what are you going to
do with us, now that you have us trapped?” Sanfarrow said
angrily.

“
I’m going to kill you,
Ropart. I wasn’t intending to bloody my hands to this extent
tonight, but I didn’t realise you had invited so many guests. I’m
afraid I will have to kill your friends too.”

“
Just like you did to
Kevan,” Sanfarrow said disgustedly.

“
Yes, Ropart. Just like I
did to Kevan.”

“
Just tell me one thing,
Kan. Did you murder Elenya too? Did you murder his
wife?”

Darklight smiled. “Of course I did. That was
the best thing about it. I killed Elenya first. And Kevan had to
watch. He had to watch as I stuffed this very gun into her mouth,
and he had to watch as saliva drooled down her cheeks because she
couldn’t swallow, and then he had to watch as her brains cascaded
over the wall behind her.”

Sanfarrow roared in agony, his beard
speckling with spit.

“
She was everything to
him! Everything, you Gedin forasaken son of the
Antiseck.
”

Sanfarrow quickly pulled his gun out of his
pocket, but before he could even aim, the gun blasted out of his
hand and flew across the room.

Seckry hadn’t even seen the movement happen,
but Darklight had beat Sanfarrow to it, and had fired a single
bullet straight at Sanfarrow’s gun.

“
Ropart, you were never very
quick, were you? Just another one of the things that makes you an
inferior human being. This is why I’m the president of Endrin and
you’re living in some underground cave in exile. I’m going to kill
you now, Ropart, but before I do, there’s something I want you to
see.”

Darklight grabbed Jenniver and pulled her
into him, kissing her violently.

“
She’s mine now,” he said
when he’d finished, and aimed the gun at Sanfarrow’s
head.

“
Wait,” Jenniver said. It
was the first word she had spoken since she had joined them. “Let
me do it. I want to kill him. I want to be the one to do it. It’ll
hurt him even more if it’s me that pulls the trigger.”

Darklight hesitated for a moment and then a
big grin spread across his face.

“
That’s my girl,” he said,
and handed her the gun.

Seckry’s mind was moving so rapidly he
couldn’t even keep up with it. He had to think of something to stop
this. Something right now.

But as soon as Jenniver got a grip on the
pistol, she flung it up in front of her, pointing directly at
Darklight’s forehead.

Darklight’s expression changed from one of
smugness to confusion, then doubt, then anger.

“
Are you mad?” he
said.

Jenniver wiped her mouth with her free arm
and shook it.

“
Don’t you
ever
kiss
me again, you filthy pig,” she said vehemently.

“
Jenniver,” Darklight said
calmly, through gritted teeth. “What. Are. You.
Doing?
”

“
I’m doing exactly what I’ve
been planning to do all along,” she said. “I’ve never been working
with you. Everything I’ve done here has been in an attempt to
remove you from this company, and abolish these horrific
experiments of yours. You think getting Ropart and Seckry and the
others here was part of
your
plan? Well it wasn’t. It was
part of
mine
. It was the only way I’d ever be brought inside
the Divinita chamber, and it was the only way I’d ever get you in a
situation where you’d be outnumbered by your enemies, away from all
your bodyguards, and free to be handcuffed and arrested for crimes
against humanity. Something that should have happened years
ago.”

Darklight breathed in deeply and said,
“Jenniver, Jenniver, Jenniver. So I was wrong about you.” He
clapped slowly. “This was your plan all along? I’m disappointed,
Jenniver, I really am. I thought you had more sense. I mean, do you
think I wouldn’t be prepared for something like this?”

Jenniver shuffled uncomfortably on the spot,
still aiming the gun at Darklight’s head.

Darklight pulled something out of his pocket.
It was some kind of remote control.

“
What’s that?” Jenniver
demanded. “Drop it now or I shoot you.”

Darklight laughed. “Come on, Jenniver, we all
know you’re not going to shoot me.”

“
What does that thing
control?” Jenniver demanded.

“
Even my closest staff have
to be kept in the dark about some things,” Darklight
said.

“
Drop it now!” Jenniver
shouted, but as she did, Darklight pressed a button.

A square partition of flooring underneath
Jenniver flashed a blinding blue light and she seized up, dropping
the gun, which fired a stray bullet into the ceiling. She dropped
to the floor herself, lifeless.

“
Jenniver!” screamed
Sanfarrow.

“
I really overestimated her
intelligence,” Darklight said, musingly. “Did she really think I
wouldn’t be prepared for revolts from my own staff?”

Seckry looked down. He hadn’t noticed it
before now, but the floor they were standing on was divided into a
grid by very faint lines.

“
I’m surprised you hadn’t
noticed the grid,” Darklight said to Sanfarrow. “Especially since I
designed it from prototypes I found in your own files when I raided
your office.”

Sanfarrow began to march forward but
Darklight pressed a button again and Sanfarrow’s square lit up,
almost propelling him into the air with a loud crack. He hit the
floor, motionless, just like Jenniver.

“
I wanted to kill him while
he was awake,” Darklight said, irritated. “I wanted him to see that
gun pointing at his head. I’m not going to do it while he’s
unconscious. It’d be a waste. I’ll have to wait until he comes
around. In the meantime, I’ve got an important procedure to attend
to.”

He stepped up to the podium, next to the
machine in which all the wires eventually ended.

“
If what you’re saying is
true,” Vance said, “and you’ve worked out how to travel back to the
year zero, and you’ve actually managed to put Hindglubber’s
theories into use, then you’ll be altering history. Do you even
understand the consequences of that? You won’t just be murdering
these innocent innoya, you’ll be putting the fate of the whole
planet in your hands.”

Darklight smiled. “It’s a lot of
responsibility, isn’t it? Don’t worry, Mr Vance, I have no
intention of returning here to a barren wasteland. I am going to
steal Seckraman after he has destroyed the meteor, not before.”

Vance shook his head. “You’re going to steal
the messiah, bring him back to the present and drain him of his
divine powers? Do you understand what you’re saying? I’m not a
religious man, but if Seckraman was truly the son of Gedin, do you
think the Almighty is just going to sit back and let you do this to
his son?”

“
Do you know what, Vance? If
Gedin disapproved of my work, don’t you think he would have stopped
me already?”

Vance said nothing in reply.