They now came to the barricades, where the bodies of Merrill and Dallas still lay alongside a crate filled with bricks of HMX. Amy picked one up and studied it for a moment.
‘Demolition charges,’ she said, glancing towards him, then slumped against one of the barricades, looking pale and ill. ‘By the looks of it, the detonators are already in place.’
‘I didn’t know you were some kind of demolitions expert?’
‘We used HMX when we were building biomes out on Newton. Good for excavating land real fast.’
Something about the ululation made Saul’s skin itch like it was burning. ‘The question is, how were they going to set off the detonation?’
‘Remote trigger?’ she replied. ‘That’s my guess, anyway.’
‘You mean through their contacts?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That way there’s too big a risk that somebody might hack your contacts and then trigger an explosion from a long way off. They’d have planned to use a dedicated device of some sort.’ She nodded towards Merrill’s butchered corpse. ‘Check him out. Maybe he’s got something on him.’
Saul grimaced as he bent over Merrill’s body, pushing his hand inside pockets soaked with the dead man’s blood. When he found nothing, he moved over to Dallas, and soon found a slim device sporting several inlaid buttons.
‘That’s it,’ Amy said, as he showed it to her. ‘Same as what we used ourselves. Nothing like having a nice fat button to press when you’re blowing shit up.’
‘Then we can blow the HMX remotely, before we head through the Galileo gate? The starship gets there in a couple of months, and we’ll be able to survive until—’
‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Amy. She stood up and glanced towards the APC parked nearby, with the rest of the crates of explosive still piled in the back. ‘That’s what they used to transport the HMX here, right? So how many of those bricks do you think they managed to place already?’
Saul studied the APC, still mostly filled with unopened crates. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I reckon not that many.’
Amy nodded. ‘That’s what I thought too. Looks like they barely got started before Mitchell killed them.’
‘Then there’s nothing we can do,’ Saul said grimly.
Amy rubbed her mouth pensively. ‘No, I think we’ve got one other option.’ She glanced towards the escalators that led up to the departure area. ‘Is there any way to get that APC up to where the actual wormhole gate is?’
‘Why? What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking,’ she said, ‘that if someone could get all that HMX up there and close to the gate, it could do an awful lot of damage.’
‘No way,’ said Saul. ‘You’d never have enough time to get back out before it was too late.’
‘Whether or not I get out doesn’t really matter, Mr Dumont.’ She reached out a hand. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d let me have the detonator device.’
‘Just look around you,’ he yelled. ‘I don’t know if the explosives would make any difference at all. They built the machinery maintaining the wormholes to sustain an awful lot of damage.’
‘You said yourself that we could at least slow it all down,’ she yelled back. The noise and the shimmering light were intensifying. ‘We’ve got less than twenty minutes, so there isn’t time to argue over this.’
‘You’ll kill yourself.’
‘Yeah, like I hadn’t figured that out. Go now,’ she said. ‘I can take care of this.’
‘No, wait, maybe I should—’
‘I don’t have time for this bullshit!’ she shouted, snatching the detonator from his grasp. She then picked up some of the bricks of HMX, clutching them close to her chest. ‘All my life I had Lester, and now he’s gone. You still have family on Galileo, right? Now tell me how the hell to get this APC up to that level.’
‘There’s a passageway running up behind the centre pair of escalators, over there,’ Saul pointed. ‘It leads to some cargo elevators big enough to take even the APC up.’
‘Fine.’ She nodded curtly. ‘Don’t say anything more now. No goodbyes or sentimental crap or anything like that, okay? Grab one of those other vehicles over by the courtyard and get yourself the hell through a gate already, will you?’
Saul nodded wordlessly, then turned and ran.
He pulled himself inside an empty APC, reversing it in a half-circle before taking one last glance back at Amy. He watched her get inside the one packed with HMX, and drive it away towards the tunnel accessing the service elevators.
Saul turned away and gunned his own vehicle towards the main transport lane linking all the concourses. Warnings flashed at him as he pushed the vehicle to its limit, whipping the wheel around and accelerating hard. He figured he had at best fifteen minutes to make it all the way to the Galileo concourse, which lay at the farthest end of the Array; that left him barely enough time to get on board a shuttle-car that would transport him to the starship carrying the far end of the new wormhole gate, before the wormhole collapsed.
If he was lucky, he might even manage it with a few minutes to spare.
The constant noise and shimmering faded as he put distance between himself and the Florida gate, and soon it felt as if a heavy fog had lifted from his thoughts. He guided the APC through a series of concourses in turn, each as eerily silent as the last. Everywhere he noticed more abandoned APCs and barricades, and more corpses, but of civilians this time.
A powerful roar surged along the lane far behind him. Saul glanced back, but a gentle curve to the route now
