The Secret Bunker Trilogy: Part One: Darkness Falls (18 page)

‘It’s a long story!’ laughs James, and he lets her get on with her tests. ‘No concussion at least,’ the doctor announces, ‘I suggest that you rest
here until the mission briefing at 20:00 and if you’re feeling okay by
then, you’re clear to return to your station.’

‘No problem,’ said James.
It was the perfect solution.
With clearance to be away from his station, that should give him time
to catch up with Amy and find out what’s going on.
After all these years, why should they have been brought together
once again - and in
this
place?
There’s
no way
this could be a coincidence and he needed to find out
why as soon as possible.
Especially as they’ve both seen equipment like this before.
It’s just like the room where they shot each other all those years ago.

Stealth

Although he’d never actually been inside this place, he knew the drill
already.
With the alarms now sounding throughout the bunker, he’d be able to
slip in unnoticed during the confusion that followed.

This bunker was standard procedure for The Consortium, with its
Green, Red, Blue, Purple and Black Zones.
Green Zone was available to everybody who had biometrics clearance
for Consortium buildings. That included him fortunately, which meant that ducking into one of
the first rooms that he encountered resulted in his grabbing a uniform
and name badge. Red Zone was management level, he
should
be able to access those
areas too.
Nothing too secure at Red Zone level, just MedLab facilities, Control
Room areas, Stasis rooms and some limited weaponry where it was
required. Blue was Military operations only.
He’d had Blue Zone access previously, but it tended to be mission
dependent, the sort of access given to serving troops on a particular
mission. Purple Zone was well out of his clearance level - at that stage you were
dealing with some serious issues.

If E-Troopers were involved, something
really
nasty was going on.
And then there was Black Zone access. He’d never even got a sniff of that, it was security clearance at the very
highest rank.
Even Global leaders within the Consortium didn’t get that.
Black Zone access was in the hands of a very small group of
designated people in whose charge rested massive power and
responsibility.
It was probably in those Black Zone areas that the answer to this
mystery lay.

He quickly changed into a uniform so that he blended in. He had sufficient access to this place to be able to make his way
around without any trouble, but he was going to need to find a way to
access other Zone areas.
If he could get to the child, it was his guess that that problem would be
solved.
Instant access to all areas. As he opened the door to re-enter the corridor, he quickly ducked
back into the room again to avoid the security team who were
escorting the man he’d just seen at the bunker entrance.
He’d caught his name badge as they passed: ‘James’. Judging from the colour of that man’s uniform, he was Control Room
staff which meant that there would probably be an unmanned
terminal available in the Control Room.

If he could access the internal mainframe, he’d be able to get an idea of
where the heart of this place was.
Once he’d located and accessed the Black Zone, the chances were that
the answers he was seeking would be found there.

Extraction

This final mission was more hurried than The Consortium would have
liked - a year ahead of schedule - because the drilling had hastened the
planet’s doom. A process that had begun so innocently in the Nineteenth Century,
perfected at scale in the 20th Century and then unleashed across the
surface of the planet in the 21st Century. It was as if men couldn’t help themselves.

But with industry and commerce hungry to consume resources, this
destructive, ravaging process couldn’t be stopped even though at the
very highest levels of world leadership, it had long been understood
where this would all lead. And how soon it would all begin to happen.
But the people who denied the planet of its natural resources hadn’t
the instruments to measure the damage that they were doing.

So they’d continued in ignorance since the beginning of the industrial
age, believing that the end would be some distant time far away in the
future. A problem for future generations to solve in hundreds or thousands of
years’ time.
But the problem was very real and it had to be solved
now
.
Even sooner that even
they
had anticipated.

Undercover

If anybody had actually been able to monitor the cameras in the long
entrance corridor, the bunker would have looked like the most
insecure facility that you could possibly imagine. But if nobody is expecting anything to happen, then nobody is looking
for it.
This was a routine operation, there were no security issues
anticipated.
It was James who’d marked the perimeters clear, James who’d
disabled the cameras and James who’d opened the bunker door.
Nobody else was any the wiser.
So Amy and her young companion, following only minutes behind the
armed man who’d just sneaked by them at the bunker entrance,
managed to exit from the long corridor just in time to avoid Kate and
the security team.

It had been a real ‘skin of the teeth’ moment though. As they’d reached the end of the corridor, they’d tried to duck into the
first door that they came across.
Amy had pushed it, tried sliding it and then realised that entry must be
given via the pad to the side of the door.
At first she pressed it, then she pushed it, then she thumped it.
The door didn’t open.
The sound of footsteps could be heard approaching along the corridor.
Her young companion touched the pad and the door slid open.

They got in just in time to avoid a determined-looking Kate and her
security team.
Amy was desperate to talk to her new companion, but knew that
they’d need a plan first.
They had to try and blend in in some way, but everybody else here
was dressed in a uniform. They were in civilian clothing, that didn’t look like a good bet for going
unnoticed in this place.
The room they’d entered was a dormitory, so it was lined with beds,
small wardrobes and bedside storage tables.
Pretty sparse really. It was a pretty good bet that there would be some clothing in here, so
she started to search frantically, looking for one of the grey uniforms
that James had been wearing. Frustrated, she found an orange uniform first, but that’s what the
security staff wore, that was perhaps not the best thing for to her to
wear right now. More searching and finally success.
She found a grey uniform and the sizing was good.
She got changed as quickly as she could and turned to the child to see
if they’d be lucky enough to find a second uniform.
But her young companion had gone.

Chapter Five
Solution

It had taken only a couple of hundred years of industrial activity for
humans to destroy the planet. As it would turn out, their consumption of Earth’s resources had
proven as foolhardy as thinking that you could sail off the edge of the
earth or that the earth is the centre of the universe.

Theories that are easily debunked when you have the tools and
knowledge to disprove them.
Hilarious when viewed with the benefit of hindsight.
So it would be with man’s industrial phase on earth.
In centuries to come, scholars would laugh at how men once thought
that they could endlessly plunder the earth’s resources with impunity.
‘How could they
ever
have thought that?’ they would cry in
astonishment.

There was only one solution to rescue this dying planet, and The
Consortium knew that it would have to be done.
It was a matter of survival now, the planet had maybe 10 years left
before the critical point was reached.
It couldn’t be done without
their
help, they’d have to accept the only
real prospect that was still available.

The Earth was going to have to be saved using very drastic measures.
It would require environmental alteration.
Carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere. It would be seeded with algae to convert nitrogen, carbon dioxide and
water into organic compounds.

Microbial life would be introduced, geophysical and geochemical
processes would be implemented.
The earth’s geology and planetary biosphere would require complete
recalibration. These processes had once upon a time been proposed for Mars and
Venus.
Now they were urgently needed on our own planet.
If earth was to survive this impending catastrophe, it would require
something radical and unique.
The entire planet was about to be terraformed.

Clarity
Amy was momentarily stunned.
Only moments ago she’d left her companion standing by the door, now
she was on her own.
She allowed herself an expletive.
Normally she was very controlled in front of the children, but she was
an adult and this situation
required
a swear word.
Her emotions were running furiously, she’d had a lot to take it in a
very short amount of time.
And she needed to know what had happened to her family - she was
desperate to find out if they were okay.
Amy made for the door and had her previous lack of success with
opening it.
First she pressed - as was instinctive - then she pushed, then she
remembered how it had opened the first time.
She placed her hand on the pad - it opened.

She stepped outside in the corridor, scanned for any other bunker
staff in the area, and when the coast was clear, she tried her hand on
the door pad again. It wouldn’t open.
Okay, so it looked like you needed special access to get inside rooms,
but once inside, you could easily get out again. She’d need to be careful to follow
other people
into rooms, try to avoid
getting caught without access.
There was a long list of people that she needed to locate.
And she hadn’t even worked out yet if there was a problem with her
being in the bunker.

She knew enough about military life to understand that it was
very
unlikely that there would be freedom of movement for civilians, so
stealth mode seemed to be the best bet for now. She would need to summon the nerve to walk confidently through the
corridors, any hint of looking furtive or suspicious and they’d be onto
her.

Amy walked along the corridor, aware of the surveillance cameras
overhead and trying to get a sense of what this place had become since
she last walked along here. It was very obvious that some amazing changes had taken place, and
whatever was going on outside, the people in this bunker were clearly
connected with it all in some way. Everything here had the feel of military efficiency, but this was not the
Military that
she’d
known.
Here there was no expense spared, the quality, newness and
technology used in everything that she saw was beyond her own
experience.

She decided to try to pick up a main flow of movement through the
bunker and to follow that to the centre.
Wherever she ended up, it would probably enable her to glean a little
more information at least - and get a feel for what was going on here.
As she walked along the corridor, she became suddenly aware of a
person walking quickly behind and gaining on her. They were walking with purpose, at some pace.
She wanted to hurry, to run - and even to look back - but she knew she
had to stay calm and continue walking at a steady pace. The person caught up with her and grabbed her arm.
‘Come with me!’

Glimpse

So Dr Pierce is connected with all of this in some way. I’d never known his first name - he’d always been ‘Dr Pierce’ when I’d
encountered him at school - but this
has
to be the same person, it’s
just too much of a coincidence. And in the video message from Dad, he’d been with Dr Pierce at the
time.
Dad had told me to find Level 3.
Well, here I am and this is Dr Pierce’s desk … but no sign of Dr Pierce
himself.
I’m
supposed
to find out what’s going on here.
I lay my mobile phone on the desk, might as well get rid of this
somewhere safe, it’s no use to me right now.

I scan the screens at the workstation, but everything seems to be set
on that graphic of the earth. The darkness appears to be at 98% now, looking at the time, I’m
guessing that we get the mission statement at 8pm, when it reaches
100%. That would make sense, but I’m only guessing here.
Maybe putting 2+2 together and ending up with 5.
There’s nothing more to be done here as far as I can see.

I scan the work area once again, there’s no sign of Dr Pierce, nothing
on any of the screens that gives me a clue and no sign even that
anybody has been here recently.
A dead end. I decide to move back towards the lift to check out Level 4.
I have a nasty feeling that I’m not going to be able to gain any ground
here, I think I’ll have to wait until the briefing at 8 o’clock to get some
clarity.

As I head towards the lift I can hear movement beyond the doors.
The lift is moving.
If I’m not mistaken, that was heading upwards
from
Level 4.
That means somebody else has access to these levels - it could be Dr
Pierce.
I call the lift and it arrives at Level 3 swiftly. As I press the button to Level 4, I notice that one of the two buttons
that are unusually marked is illuminated.
Just like it was when I had tried these mystery buttons earlier.
That means somebody else with my access rights has to have been in
this lift only moments previously - and they were heading to Level 4.
I press the Level 4 button and the lift descends.
The doors open.
Once again I am confronted with the black corridor with the thick red
stripes all along it.

It has an ominous feel about it.
I make my way along the corridor and hear a door slide up ahead.
Everything
here is Black Zone, just like Dr Pierce’s work area in the
level above.
I ignore the other doors that I pass and make directly for the one
which I believe has just been used by somebody else.