‘You saved my lifere damp as he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘It was a pleasure. Have you done it yet? Shut the gates down, I mean.’
‘No, but it shouldn’t take long.’
‘Good.’ She glanced uneasily towards the gate itself. ‘Do you need any help from me?’
Bailey had mentioned that he had a second code, which they might have been able to use to shut the gates down together, but now that code had died with him, and they were back down to just the one code again. Saul could only hope it would prove enough this time.
‘No,’ he told her, ‘I can take care of it on my own.’
Amy nodded, and sat down on the floor, with her arms resting on her knees. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll wait here,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty winded after all that running around.’
‘When I left you in the lander,’ said Saul, ‘I felt sure you were going to stay there.’
‘No, that was never my plan. I just . . . I just needed time to say goodbye.’ Her eyes glistened as she drew in a sharp breath. ‘Then I suited myself up and got out of there.’
‘Amy . . .’
She made a shooing gesture. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Do what you have to do to fix things. I’ll still be here when you get back.’
Saul nodded and stepped inside an elevator, watching her disappear from sight as he was carried downwards once more.
Saul sprinted past workstations and conference booths, feeling the seconds weighing heavy on him as he raced for the second elevator that would carry him even deeper beneath the Array. The EDP information overlay slid back into place as he stepped inside, and a minute later he was running along the hallway towards Fowler’s office and the terminal room there.
Once inside, he pushed the keycard back into the same slot he’d used before, and again entered the access code, quickly navigating through the menus.
A message appeared, telling him there had been a remote-server malfunction. Saul interpreted this to mean that the Florida communications server had finally failed.
‘CONFIRM TO RESCIND TWO-PERSON ACTIVATION PROTOCOL,’ advised another message.
‘EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN PROTOCOL INITIATED,’ read a new message. ‘TERMINAL WORMHOLE FAILURE IN 1800 SECONDS.’
1800 seconds: just thirty minutes from now.
He thought about the flickers of light he’d seen dancing beneath the concourse ceiling, and wondered if even only thirty minutes was too long. An alarm began to sound, low and urgent, and he turned to run back through the main office and down the hallway to the elevator.
Saul found Amy waiting for him when he stepped out of the elevator and into the main operations room.
‘What happened?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you were going to wait for me up on the concourse.’
She shook her head. ‘Couldn’t think straight up there. Whatever’s happening up there, it’s getting worse. Is it done yet?’
He nodded briefly, leading her back towards the elevator that would take them back up into the Array. ‘It’s done. We’ve got thirty minutes to get ourselves through a gate. Whichever way you look at it, we’re going to be cutting it close.’
Saul kept willing the elevator to move faster as it carried them back up. The strange noise penetrated the walls of the elevator car more clearly the higher they ascended, drilling into his thoughts. He glanced at Amy and saw she wasn’t having any easier a time of it.
The entire concourse shook as they emerged, the air now so thick and fluid it almost felt like being underwater. That dreadful ululation seemed to vibrate right through the atoms in Saul’s body. He looked up at the twists of light that now crowded the concourse ceiling. Something about them made his eyes hurt, so that he couldn’t look at them for more than a second or two.
‘Thirty minutes won’t be enough time, will it?’ Amy yelled to him over the din. ‘Whatever’s driving those clouds is going to get through before that. No telling what might happen then.’
Saul remembered something. ‘The HMX,’ he shouted.
‘The what?’
‘Explosives,’ Saul yelled. ‘Those troopers Mitchell killed had an APC filled with HMX explosives. They were wiring the Florida gate so they could blow it up.’
‘Would that work?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it might delay the clouds, but that’s about it.’
‘Better than nothing,’ she yelled back.
He nodded, and they made their way quickly over to the APC. Saul took the lead, but Amy struggled to keep up, so he put one arm around her waist and half carried her. She didn’t protest or try to push him away, which only showed how exhausted she was. In truth, he was running on little more than adrenalin himself.
All they had to do was keep going just a little longer.
‘I’m getting a bit too old for this,’ panted Amy. ‘Seriously.’
