This earned Haight a few appreciative nods.
“Hear, hear,” said Newcastle. General Hill patted Glade on the back.
“The sun? The supernova? Gentlemen, I should have been more explicit from the start. We have learned a great deal about how the Avatari create a supernova by studying the reaction they caused in the Templar System. If the Avatari were to begin working on Nigellus, it would be at least twenty thousand years before it began to supernova and another ten thousand years before it incinerated this planet.”
“Excuse me?” General Glade asked.
“Twenty thousand years,” Sweetwater repeated.
“Twenty thousand years?” Newcastle asked. “You made it sound like it would happen immediately.”
Sweetwater stifled a laugh. “I believe it was Dr. Breeze who discussed it with you. This is more his area of expertise.”
“What are you saying about twenty thousand years?” General Hill asked.
“I understood what Arthur meant. It never occurred to me that …well, the destruction of the sun in the Templar System took place over a fifty thousand-year period. We’ve documented the entire cycle by observing it from different locations across the galaxy.
“From the far end of the galaxy, one hundred thousand light-years from Templar, the solar system is unchanged. From approximately eighty thousand light-years away, we can detect slight variations in the size of the sun.”
“So much for the goose getting cooked,” Glade said.
“For the immediate future, I suppose you are correct, but they are still saturating the planet with a highly toxic gas. The atmosphere is already permeated. If they continue pouring gas into this planet, we will die.”
Freeman liberated a jeep when he got back to Valhalla, and we drove through the graveyard that had once been the capital city of New Copenhagen.
“You missed all the action,” I said, as we pulled away from campus. Had he known, Freeman might have pointed out that I had spent most of the battle stretched out on a cot. Freeman being Freeman, however, said nothing.
“I heard that Dr. Breeze is missing,” I said, still trying to drum up a conversation. We were driving on surprisingly safe roads—the Corps of Engineers had sent teams out to clear a path between the university campus and the hotel.
“I found him,” Freeman said.
I smiled. “Maybe that’s a good omen.”
“He’s dead,” Freeman said.
“Oh,” I said.
We drove the next two miles without a word. I took in the sights—dunes where skyscrapers and office buildings once stood; parks and alleys filled with bodies; dogs brazenly gnawing at the bodies of the servicemen who used to hunt them.
The engineers had cleared the roads all the way to the hotel, but with trucks, jeeps, and emergency- equipment vehicles blocking the driveway, we had to park our jeep along the street and walk to the ruins of the hotel. I climbed out for a look around. Wind rustled past. The mild winter was ending.
In the distance, I could see that the engineers had cleared the rubble and debris from the entrance to the garage. The arch of the garage opened like a man-made cave with a road vanishing into its darkened maw. From here, the whole thing looked untouched except that there was supposed to be a luxury hotel on top of it.
“So, do you like spelunking?” I asked Freeman.
He said nothing.
“At least there aren’t any giant spiders mining the garage,” I said, trying to sound optimistic.
“Just a couple of nuclear bombs,” Freeman said.
“Well, yeah, there are the bombs …and all kinds of unexploded shells …and probably some chemical weapons.” Engineers scurried about us, ignoring us, surveying the damage. There were engineers everywhere. They reminded me of ants walking about an anthill.
I saw a flashlight sitting on a table and decided to borrow it. As I took it toward the garage, I heard somebody yell, “Hey! Who took my flashlight?”
“Let’s go have a look,” I said to Freeman.
“I mean it! I want it back now!” yelled the guy at the table.
The concrete arch at the front of the garage did not have so much as a crack in it. Light from the ion curtain seeped in, through the open archway, and I could see everything around me quite clearly. The structural integrity seemed intact.
The ramp entered the garage as a four-lane highway, then, just after the ticket booths, it narrowed to two lanes of traffic as it dropped toward lower levels at an acute angle. Jagged glass teeth hung from the windows of the booths.
Beyond the booths, the light from the ion curtain faded, and I switched on the flashlight. Standing a few feet behind me, Freeman switched on the torch he had brought. The ramp spiraled down about twenty feet, then spilled into the first level of the garage—a cavernous expanse that had once been as wide as the hotel itself. It wasn’t anymore, though; a solid wall of debris rose from the floor to the ceiling.
The air was colder down here. My breath turned to steam. I blew on my hands to warm them. When I paused to survey the area around me, I stomped my feet to keep them warm.
“Dead end,” I said.
Ahead of us, little bubbles of light marked the places where engineers were conducting stress tests on caved- in areas. Their voices echoed softly.
“I bet they could dig this whole thing out,” I said.
Freeman shook his head. “If they had a month.”
“So we find another way in,” I said. “Maybe we can tunnel our way in from outside.”
I saw a trace of red mixed in with the concrete and rubble and went to have a closer look. From a distance it looked as if it might have been blood, but it was dry. When I shined my flashlight on it, I saw that it was a wedge of the red carpet that had once covered the lobby. Stepping over concrete boulders and splintered wood, I gave the carpet a tug. It frayed before I could pull it loose.
This far into the garage, the floor seemed strong, but that did not mean much. Deeper in it might have collapsed under the weight of everything that had toppled onto it. I did not see any bodies or blood. As far as I knew, every Marine was on the streets when the Hotel Valhalla came down.
I saw a metal bar sticking out of a mound of cement chunks and pulled on it. The bar did not budge. I gave it a harder yank. It did not come out, but it wobbled freely. As I pulled it again, a small avalanche cascaded down the pile of debris covering the bar. Plaster and concrete rolled down and struck the floor.
They expected Freeman and me to go rooting through this and come up with nuclear bombs? I didn’t like the idea of hauling live nuclear weapons through a collapsed structure but didn’t see any alternatives. Being crushed under a mountain of concrete did not seem any worse than being shot by an Avatari rifle. I might die faster. In the end, though, it wouldn’t matter whether a million tons of hotel fell on our heads or an atomic bomb exploded in our faces or the Avatari shot us through the head with their specking light bolts, dead is dead.
“We’re not getting in through here,” Freeman said, his voice almost as soft as its echo in the underground vault. He turned to look for another route.
Go spelunking in a crumbling underground parking lot? Sure. What’s the worry when you only have days to live?
Freeman drove me to the dormitory, then went on to the Science Lab. He said he would pick me up when the engineers found a way into the garage.
The clock was ticking. We needed to get into that underground garage, liberate at least one nuke, fly it to the
