Broken: A Plague Journal

beautiful. He held his spotlight like a gun, so far outside his conception of reality now than any reassuring contact with metal helped his feet move.

A lattice of passages, he followed the other members of A down what appeared to be a main shaft, his rubber soles grasping for purchase on the canted floor. Whoever had designed this bunker had a bad eye for level lines. Maybe it was art.

Up ahead, the hallway ended at a swingdoor. He thought it’d be the end of the line, but he saw that douche Monagan successfully pull the door’s halves apart. Someone had left it unlocked for them.

He watched Monagan take a few steps forward, his light back and forth, before he tumbled and disappeared, his shout of surprise interrupting the mortuary silence of the expedition.

People ran. A few more fell.

By the time Chavez got to the front, people had stopped falling, instead stood out on a landing within the chamber. The talking stopped even more.

“What’s the—Jesus.” He crossed himself.

The double-dozen spotlights swished around the chamber in near-solid lines. Even at the bottom of the room, the three men and one woman who had fallen were sitting up, their lights arcing forth and back across the expanse.

They’d fallen off the landing and slid harmlessly down a big metal bowl, slight depressions in its surface. Above, the room’s ceiling was that same bowl, mirrored. They were inside a gigantic sphere, or “spear,” as Chavez would have pronounced it.

At the center of the room, exact center, hung a dull gray orb. Free-floating. Just sitting there in the air. The four fallen soon realized there was nothing attached to that ball, and they tried to climb up the bowl’s slick sides, lest it fall on them.

“Fuck,” Moore Chavez said to no one.

“Fuck,” David Smith Jennings said to Antonia Cervera.

“Are we seeing this right?” She turned to an engineer running the playback. “Is that thing floating?”

“I—I don’t know, sir.” He zoomed. “Looks like—”

The screens became white.

Moore Chavez quickly yanked the melting communications band from his head, tried to slap out a dozen burning holes on his uniform. His eyes stung from the blackened, smoldering plastic. He found himself on his ass, slammed up against the back of the railing rim.

The room was brighter. He realized that the new illumination was coming from the nearest unsteady light at the chamber’s center, the floating ball of whatever the fuck.

He grappled with his own disoriented body and crawled to the edge of the walkway, looked down into the bowl. The four members of Assault A at the bowl’s bottom weren’t moving. Others around him were. More moaning and confused cries than moving.

“Hey,” he barely whispered down the bowl, but still it felt too loud. “You guys alright?”

He’d never forget the look on the woman’s face at the bottom of the chamber. Her mouth hung open and his beam revealed a wet line of spittle looping out. Her eyes were gray, and he wondered how he could possibly know from that distance, but

the floating ball flashed again, not as brightly, or maybe it was and he’d adjusted, but Chavez thought he saw a passageway open directly across the expanse, a passageway exactly like the one he’d used to enter the chamber. With the flash came a great tendril of energy that lashed out, down that passage. At the same time, the four people at the bottom of the bowl began to fly up. He didn’t believe it, but they did, flew up, flew through the floating ball of purest white light, a thin stream of their constituent parts splashing out the other side, guided down that passage, and then he died as he was pulled in and through and

“Assault A, come in.” The command center was a fury of chatter. “Assault A, report.”

“Eyelines are dead, sir.” The engineer watched the last of the head-mounted cams blink out.

What the array of cameras had displayed after the initial white had been confusing at best: twenty-four displays suddenly savagely displaced as twenty-four people were knocked back. Eyeline-04A lolled as if its carrier’s neck had been broken, but the image focused briefly on the center of the room, giving the assembly a brief glimpse at the floating orb, a swirling, building illumination, and then white nothing.

“Send in Assault B, god damn it!” Cervera had a way of barking orders that any dog would have envied.

“Tony, we—”

Jennings hated it when she narrowed her eyes at him, so she did. “We need to know what’s going on down there.”

“So we just keep sending in more troops? What happens when we run out?”

“You’re safe, Mr. President. Send in Assault B.” She repeated her command, and her underlings communicated wordlessly with nods and tappings. New eyelines snapped into life on the display. “Fancy up and filter that last transmission. And someone get me some fucking physicals! Are we in any danger here?”

“Physicals run, sir.” Another nameless engineer stuttered out from his panel. “Normal across the board— radiological, chemical—”

“Any change, you tell me.” Cervera had a way of gripping any situation and steeling herself. “Status, Assault B?”

“B ready, sir.”

“Insert. Get this to Richter.”

Somewhere above the planet flying roughly over Nebraska on a wedge of composite and titanium, James Richter responded to the chime. He removed his link from his wallet; his heart jumped a little at the incoming superblack icon.

He was the only passenger in the compartment, indeed, on that flight, so he slid the link into his seat’s display. He exhaled slowly, his eyes closed. He cleared his throat and opened his eyes to the second-long burst of data that flashed from the panel.

He gasped, his hand reaching instinctively to his heart as his latticed mindwork began to puzzle over and assemble probabilities and contexts. He thought the name Holmdel for the first time in one year and seven months, really devoted thought to Titicaca for the first time in three years and eight months. He’d learned to bury.

If it’s true—

It couldn’t be true.

But if it is—

He put his link back in his pocket and attempted to will the wedge forward to Wyoming.

“You what?”

Jennings at least attempted a look of the guilt he genuinely felt. Cervera just met Richter’s gaze and threw it back unused.

“We’ve sent more teams in.”

“How many?”

Without hesitation: “Five. We’re gaining valuable new data with each attempt.”

Richter just scoffed in disbelief. “Don’t we have robots for insertions in threat zones? You know, threat zones inside of alien fucking vessels buried underneath mountains? Little tank-tracked numbers, with instruments and cameras and weapons? Or did I just make that up?”

“Yes, sir. I mean—We have robots.” An engineer, listening in, turned from his console, surprised at his own volunteering of an opinion in the charged atmosphere of the command center. “But Secretary—”

“We thought it best to get a first-hand look.” A gofer handed Cervera another glass. She scanned it and threw it onto the growing pile.

“The Holmdel Directive specifically states—”