As they tilted to rise again, he glimpsed the damaged shuttle – liquid fire spilling from it – rising with astonishing speed. Buddy was rapidly putting kilometres between them, but still they were far too close. From the way he was twisting in his seat, he was clearly struggling to keep them aloft.
As Kendrick turned to see the third shuttle streaking upwards he noticed a line of fiery pockmarks stitch itself across its hull, blossoming and expanding until they joined up to consume the spacecraft in seconds.
Kendrick watched in horrified fascination as the shuttle's hull buckled explosively in mid-flight. The nose of the craft spun away into the night air, twisting and turning as it fell through a long descending arc.
The rest of it disappeared in a mighty fireball, sending out a powerful shock wave that almost hurled the helicopter back to the ground.
Kendrick watched the base's mesa whirl below them as he waited for the end to come. But instead their course became gradually steady and smooth. He glanced at Buddy, who had pulled off his mask. A weak grin creased the pilot's mouth, then he whooped like a cowboy. 'Jesus, what a ride!'
Far below them, a ruined freeway wound its way toward the horizon. They flew on, passing over farmland where crops had previously grown across uncountable acres but where now only a grey pulpy mass streaked the soil. Asian Rot had taken its toll here.
A little while later, they dropped down to a landing in a low-ridged canyon where the vegetation appeared to have escaped the worst of the Rot. Wild flowers and pinon shimmered in the heat, growing on the banks of a stream that was barely more than a trickle.
They eased Caroline out of the helicopter and onto the sparse grass, keeping her wrapped in the same sheets that Kendrick had found her in. Her eyelids fluttered open to reveal pupils that were wide and unfocused. Her lips parted, as if she was about to speak, but then her eyes closed and she was asleep again.
Buddy glanced at Kendrick uneasily. 'You didn't tell me she was this bad.'
'She wasn't anywhere near as bad as this the last time I saw her. That was only a couple of days ago.'
'We can help her,' Buddy reassured him. 'Look, the launch is being run from an offshore site. They've got medical facilities there, so we'll make sure she's taken care of.'
Kendrick nodded. 'You know what I don't understand?'
Buddy tilted his head. 'What?'
'Why did the Bright do this to us? All our augments turned rogue at the same time, but the question is: why?'
'I don't claim to understand that.' Buddy looked exasperated. 'Perhaps the Bright triggered something in us, just by the simple act of communication.'
'Did you ask the Bright that?'
Buddy looked pained. 'You may have noticed their communication tends to be solely one-way.'
'It certainly makes it hard for anyone to refuse them if staying down here means we'll all die a lot sooner.'
'You're implying that they turned our augments rogue deliberately. But that's ridiculous.'
'Sure of that, are you?' Kendrick snapped. 'Can you just look at what's happening to Caroline and tell me you believe this is all for the best?'
'I…' Buddy's face coloured. He turned away without another word and headed back to the helicopter.
25 October 2096 New Mexico
Kendrick woke to a sky streaked with red. His face numb with cold, he sneezed in the chill morning air. The rest of him was wrapped in a thermal sleeping bag, and the helicopter loomed as a dark shape above him.
'Time to be going.' Buddy hovered over him and handed him a plastic thermos lid filled with hot instant coffee. Kendrick sipped at it, blinking himself awake and longing for just another twelve hours of sleep.
Against his better judgement, he let his mind roam back to the day when he'd killed Robert. The shame and horror of it were never far away from his thoughts. The incident – every word, every action – was etched eternally in his mind. Sometimes he felt as though he'd died that day too: as though he'd become someone else, someone with the same body, even the same thoughts but, on a level that he couldn't quite define, not the same person.
Caroline was still sleeping but he sensed that this was normal sleep now, rather than chemically induced. He stepped over to inspect her, brushing a strand of hair back from her face. She twitched, then a corner of her mouth crept upwards in an unconscious half-smile. Kendrick studied the myriad lines criss-crossing the once flawless skin of her face.
Buddy stepped over beside him. 'I think she's going to be okay,' he whispered.
Kendrick nodded down at her. 'You call that okay?'
'I call it a lot more okay than if she'd been stowed on one of those shuttles. You did good, Kendrick – real hero stuff.'
Kendrick gestured for them to move away, then began, 'Where are we right now?'
'New Mexico, heading west,' Buddy replied.
'And we're headed for this offshore launch base?'
'Yeah, hundred klicks or so out from the Californian coast. But we're going to have to stop off in LA on the way. There's a place – a safe house, if you like – and some people will be waiting there. They're Labrats, and I need to make sure everything's running smoothly before the last of them head out to the launch site.'
Kendrick digested this. 'How far are we from the Maze?'
'Not nearly as far as I'd like to be.'
'Could we get there from here?'
Buddy studied Kendrick for several seconds. 'If that's a joke, it's in bad taste.'
'I'm serious. I want to go there.'
'No comprende, senor.'
'I know this is hard to understand, but I really do want to go to the Maze.'
'Kendrick, why the fuck would you want to go there? Why would anyone who had to be there in the first place ever, ever want to go back?'
Because when Peter McCowan spoke to me about the Maze, he asked me to go there. That meant that, somewhere down there, in the darkness, part of McCowan still lived.
'I found something out. I… a source told me that if I can only get down there, I can find what I need to prove Draeger's absolute complicity in what happened to us. That's important, Buddy, you know how important. We'd have Draeger by the balls.'
Buddy fell silent, staring angrily off into the distance. Kendrick waited, listening to the wind blowing across the desert. It made a high, eerie sound.
'Look, I understand what you're saying,' Buddy replied at length. 'But right now, where we're going is more important than anything else. You know why.'
'If you help me, I promise I'll do whatever I can to help you get to the Archimedes.'
Buddy glanced at him sharply. 'You're saying you've changed your mind? You're going up with us?'
'Yes.'
'There's something you're not telling me.'
'Buddy, what's going to happen if you fail? If the wormhole never appears, and you stay right where you are?'
'Ken-'
'Either it's Draeger, or it's Los Muertos, or maybe it's even someone else. If the Archimedes stays put and any
