Kong hit the membrane; it seemed to stretch with his weight and then close behind him as he vanished.
And here we go, Nathan thought.
The membrane appeared to elongate as they hit it, to cling to them, like they were trying to punch through a sheet of rubber. Time slowed, somehow, even as they went faster and faster and acceleration pressed them back into their seats. The world went very strange. Color saturated everything; bizarre cavescapes that lived for an instant and then vanished into memory came and went at incredible speed. The HEAV shook, then shuddered and yawed, rattling as if it was on the verge of simply coming apart around them, and he felt like his ribs were trying to flatten against the back of his seat.
They could sell tickets, he remembered Dave saying. He was having trouble breathing.
It’s coming it’s coming it’s coming…
The moment. That last moment. Dave’s final instant of life. Maybe his as well.
It came, as they were thrown out with brutal force and incredible speed into … another world.
Below them, above them—for the moment up and down had no meaning. It was the world Nathan knew, turned inside out.
There was no sky; or rather, there was, but it was sandwiched between two different downs. “Below” them, from the direction they had come, he could see vast forests, mountains, rivers, stretching out in every direction. But ahead of them, through a veil of clouds, was another landscape, equally beautiful and rugged, with tree-covered mountains hanging like stalagmites. And those clouds between them centered on a storm, incandescing with interior lightning, illuminating the whole weird scene almost like daylight.
Which way was actually up? His inner ear was terribly confused. Behind him he heard Simmons making use of the bag he had given her.
At least he hoped she was.
The HEAV lurched toward the cloud. Kong had come out behind them, due to his greater inertia, but now he flew past them for the same reason. But the Titan suddenly came to a stop, reversed direction, and came hurtling back toward the HEAVs. At the same time, all sorts of noises started up in the cabin, some from alarms, some from the pilot.
Engine failure. It was all pretty surreal, because all he could think was, this was how it had ended for Dave, this is how it ended for him. So much for Apex and their miracle craft.
Simmons screamed, and Nathan saw Kong hurtling past, missing them by a matter of feet, staring right through the window at them. Maybe he was starting to form his own bond with Kong, because it seemed clear what the giant was thinking.
What the hell, man?
Then they hit the wall, the next gravity inversion point, and the “sky” became the “ground.”
Again, that should have been it. In the first gravity inversion—right when they came out of the Vortex—they should have been shredded by deceleration. Simmons’s miracle machines had saved them from that; the HEAVs had done their job, absorbing and dissipating their inertia into the gravitic anomaly. But it seemed to have been too much for the engines, because now they were caught in the interior gravity of the planet—they had, it seemed, chosen one of the competing downs, and they were now hurtling toward the forest floor with exactly the same acceleration as a fall from thousands of feet from the surface. Sure, the fall wouldn’t kill them, but the sudden stop at the end would. Unless they started flying again.
“All Delta,” Nathan said. “Reverse gravity propulsion now!”
In front of him the pilot flipped switches and pulled back, but they continued their tailspin as the system refused to reboot. He watched, unable to even scream as the alien topography seemed to rise to meet them. It felt to him as if Hollow Earth was a living, sentient thing, mocking him.
You thought you could do better than Dave? You stupid ass.
Then the G’s kicked in, and all of the blood drained out of his head, and brilliant light washed everything out like an over-exposed photograph. He clung to consciousness through the white-out—barely. Distinction came back first, then color. They were alive, and the ship was leveling out.
He watched as Kong dropped down and hit a mountainside, clawed at it, alternately falling and sliding until he crashed into a lush, misty rainforest like none Nathan had ever seen. Flights of aerial creatures of some sort teemed up from around the Titan, and as the terror drained away, Nathan found himself smiling.
They had made it. Alive. Holy crap.
And it was unreal. Or rather, it was very real, and more amazing than he had ever imagined.
Ladies and gentlemen, he thought, I give you Hollow Earth.
FIFTEEN
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea
“Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816
Hollow Earth
Kong came to ground like thunder, and with no hesitation whatsoever went down onto all fours and began to run, following a canyon that cut down the side of the mountain into a realm of complete amazement. Even from high in the air and behind him, Ilene felt that she could see the same feeling mirrored on the Titan’s face. This place was utterly strange, like no place on Earth—except Skull Island. She saw a flight of creatures that could easily be relatives of leafwings, or maybe they were more like pterosaurs—at this distance she couldn’t quite decipher the details. Waterfalls cascaded from soaring peaks, above them and below them. If there was a Kong paradise, surely this was it.
“It’s beautiful,” she murmured.
* * *
“This is HEAV 3,” the comm cut in. Nathan glanced at the radar, clocked its position just in front of him. Jia and Ilene were in HEAV 2; he didn’t know anyone on
