‘You don’t sound it.’
‘Hurt my leg,’ she replied. ‘Had a bad fall.’
‘Hang on and we’ll be there soon enough. But send that video squirt over so we can get some idea what we’re dealing with first.’
They watched the A/V from Dan’s suit in silence, projected on to the curved surface of each of their visors.
Standard operating procedure specified that, even once a chamber had been declared safe by the reconnaissance probes, and pressurized prior to a thorough eyeball examination by the artefact recovery teams, pressure suits must be kept on until a team leader was certain there was no danger of contamination or some other, less predictable risk. Mitchell Stone’s team had been tasked with just such an assessfont>
The A/V showed two suited figures, as seen from Dan’s point of view, kneeling at the bottom of a pit that looked about five metres deep, with a series of wide steps cut into the sides. The two men’s helmets almost touched as one pointed at hundreds of indentations drilled into the lower steps, and arranged in stylized, looping patterns. One turned to glance towards Dan, and Jeff saw Mitchell Stone’s face behind the visor.
The video blurred as Dan looked up suddenly at the shallow, copper-coloured dome of the chamber’s ceiling high overhead. Jeff noticed a fourth suited figure waiting up above, and Lucy’s face was visible through the visor: small and imp-like, loose wisps of her blonde hair pressing against the clear polycarbonate.
As Dan clambered up the wide steps, Jeff saw that half a dozen carbon arc lights had been mounted on tripods close to the chamber entrance. They cast incandescent light across dozens of pits, each one only narrowly separated from the next.
Dan then turned to look back down at the suited figures of Mitchell Stone and Erich Vogel, still crouching at the bottom of the pit. Without any warning, a viscous, oil-like substance began to gush out of the indentations, flooding the pit with astonishing speed. Jeff heard Lucy yell a strangled warning, and Stone and Vogel both jerked upright as if they’d been scalded. The liquid was already covering the top of their boots.
It was Rodriguez, all over again.
From the subsequent sudden blurring of the video, it was obvious that Dan had descended into the pit once more, in order to try and reach the two men. Stone and Vogel were already making their way towards the steps but, even as Jeff watched, he saw their movements become slower, as if the oil were congealing around them. By now it was up to their knees.
The oil appeared to defy gravity, racing up the sides of their suits and soon swallowing them both up in a black tide. Stone was the first to collapse, followed by Vogel a moment later. Jeff watched in mounting horror as their suits began to disintegrate, the metal and plastic dissolving and falling away from their bodies with astonishing speed. Jeff had one last glimpse of Stone’s eyes rolling up into the back of his head, before they were both swallowed up by the still-rising tide.
The oil had behaved purposefully, like something alive, which made Jeff think of childhood monsters, of yawning black shadows filled with imaginary horrors. Tears pricked his eyes but he couldn’t bring himself to stop watching.
The video jerked once more as Dan hurried back up and out of the pit, with understandable haste. Jeff saw Lucy step back, her face aghast, then, with a terrified cry, stumble backwards over the lip of an adjacent pit.
Dan said ‘Oh shit’ very softly, and Jeff watched with numb despair as he hurled himself down the steps of the neighbouring pit.
It was clear from the way one of Lucy’s legs was bent under her, as she lay on the floor of the second pit, that she was badly hurt. Dan grabbed her up in a fireman’s lift and rapidly made his ay back to safety. And, even though Jeff could see nothing but the chamber ceiling through Dan’s A/V, he felt an appalling certainty the second pit was already filling with the same deadly black oil.
And then, just as Dan reached the top, the lights went out.
They followed the rampart to where it merged into a tunnel leading deep inside Vault One. They moved on past branching corridors and ramps to either side, each leading up or down to other levels and chambers. The beams projected from their suits flashed reflections off hastily epoxied signs printed with luminescent inks, which were mounted near junctions that had not yet been fully explored. All carried explicit warnings never to leave the already lit paths.
Catching sight of these warnings, Jeff found himself thinking once more about Rodriguez.
David Rodriguez had been an engineer recruited to the ASI’s retrieval-and-research branch several years before to help run the remote reconnaissance probes, but instead had quickly become the stuff of legend for all the wrong reasons. He was the one recruits got told about during their training and orientation, as an example of how
He had been part of a standard reconnaissance into a then unexplored level of Vault Two, and had ignored the warnings about sticking to the approved paths. Instead, he had wandered into a side chamber, trying to find a probe that had failed to report back.
He had found the probe and, some hours later, his team-mates found him.
Time, it turned out, worked differently in the side chambers of that particular level. It became slower, the farther inside them you got. Rodriguez had discovered this when he stepped up next to the probe, probably thinking it had simply broken down.
He was still there, to this day: right foot raised and looking towards the far wall, his face turned away from the chamber entrance as he headed forward, still clearly oblivious to his fate. That alone was what really sent the shivers down people’s spines; the fact that no one could see his face got their imaginations working overtime.
Rodriguez’s team-mates, when they finally found him, had been a lot more cautious. One had thrown a spanner just to one side of Rodriguez’s frozen figure, from the safety of the chamber entrance. It still hung there now, motionless, caught in the course of its long trajectory through the air, on its way to eventually landing in some future century. The reconnaissance probe – a wheeled platform mounted with cameras and a range of sensitive instrumentation – stood equally immobile nearby.
David Rodriguez, as new recruits to the most secretive department of the UW’s retrieval and assessment bureau were told, had been a fucking idiot. The vaults were filled with unpredictable dangers, which was why they had to stick to the paths already pioneered by the probes. You wandered away from them at your own risk.
