The security designers were good, but not quite good enough. I managed to intercept the signal that zipped over to the door to tell it to lock down and sound the alarm, and converted the energy into the all-clear electronic pulse.
The door popped open, and I stepped into a sterile little anteroom, with another, identical scanning system at the far end. Protective gear was neatly stored, and I put on a suit, more for blending in than for what it would offer me. Second door, same verse, and then I was inside a hallway. There, a large, colorful map indicated that I was in a blue section.
Blue section was the least dangerous, I gathered.
There were a few workers in this part of the plant, but a confident walk, a wave, and a badge seemed to do the job nicely. Nobody was doing much at the moment; operations were at an idle, and boredom had set in. I followed the color-coded maps to the elevators at the far end. More biometrics, which was a pain in the ass; I hoped they hadn't security-locked the bathrooms, too.
Finally, after the third biometric I had to destroy, I decided to take an end run around the problem. Fire codes said that all security doors had to open in the event of a fire emergency.
I created one. Not a big one; I didn't want to bake anybody, or even give them smoke inhalation, but I pulled some jittery power from the electronics and built myself an impressive-sized fire in a nest of empty boxes in a storeroom. Fire suppression kicked in, but with a little concentration, I was able to keep the fire blazing despite the countermeasures.
Thirty seconds later, the biometric scanners began flashing FIRE EMERGENCY, and I heard the clicks as secured doors began to unlock. The elevators stopped working, but I could get around that; it was a simple mechanism, and I needed to go all the way to the bottom anyway.
I stepped inside just as three people in protective gear--one with an automatic weapon slung over it--entered the corridor and looked straight at me. He had fast reactions, and I couldn't jam his gun and keep the fire going at the same time. Too many balls in the air.
He got off five shots, aiming straight for my chest.
Chapter Nine
I don't remember getting hit; my entire concentration was on slamming shut the elevator door, cutting the cables, overriding the friction brakes, and letting the car drop in a free fall. At first I felt sick and dizzy, and figured that was an effect of the falling, but then I smelled blood. I looked down and saw two separate wounds in my side, ragged holes puncturing my protective white suit. I unzipped it and stepped out. There wasn't any pain yet, or a lot of bleeding, though red rings were steadily forming on my lab coat around the bullet holes.
"Fantastic," I said. "That's just great."
Gravity was definitely a harsh mistress, and never more than at a time like this. I watched in Oversight, gauging how far I'd fallen, how much farther still remained, and trying to do complicated math in my head. I was approaching seriously terminal velocity, and I was going to have to start slowing my descent.
"Jo!" David's voice, blasting unexpectedly from the speaker in the elevator. I jerked, and my concentration shattered. Pain began an insidious drumbeat in my side, dammit, too soon....
I pushed it, and David, aside and concentrated harder. I was sweating now. Shaking. And there was a growing pool of blood forming around my shoes, how had that happened?
Didn't seem right.
I dropped to my knees, then pitched forward flat on my stomach. I screamed at the impact, because damn that hurt, but it was important to try to distribute impact force over as wide an area as possible.
I reached out for power in the air around me, found it, and began building a thick, cold cushion of air beneath the falling elevator. I increased its density, and felt a significant decrease in the speed at which I was falling.
But I was still falling.
David was saying something, but I couldn't pay attention, not anymore. I needed more power, more braking, and I needed it now.
I couldn't get it. When I reached out for power, it slid through my grasp like oil. I felt weak, clumsy, and wet--oh yeah. I was wet because I was lying in a pool of blood.
David was almost screaming at me now. I couldn't spare a second of concentration; I had to maintain what I'd already done, keep slowing down, try to make this crash survivable. I was running out of elevator shaft.
I threw one last, ultimate effort into it and eased the car to a sliding, jerking stop.
The button dinged, and the doors opened.
For some reason, I couldn't get to my feet. Maybe because the blood was slippery. I was a mess, and I needed a bath, a nice warm bath to let all of this float away... . That sounded good.
But I forced myself up, bracing myself with both bloody hands on the doors of the elevator. My vision was spotty, with circles of darkness swallowing the glare of white lights. Everything seemed to be moving except me.
Walk, I told myself sternly. You have to do this. Now.
Because deep down inside, I knew that I wasn't going to have the strength to wait and do it in a more orderly fashion.
I didn't make it very far, but then I didn't have to--this whole area was hot and live with the kind of thing I needed. This was a storage area, deep underground, and the doors were massive affairs on hydraulics. There were six doors. I fell at the first one, flailed around on the floor for a while, and left a hell of a bloody mess trying to get up. The control pad was way the hell up there. That seemed wrong. Why didn't they build them closer to the floor, for convenience?
Oh, the hell with subtlety.
I blew the door off its hinges in a massive burst of superheated air. It flew over my head, slammed into the far wall with an impact hard enough to be felt in Switzerland, and embedded itself in the concrete to a depth of at least a foot.
Inside that storage locker, about the size of a medium-sized residential home, were stacked row upon row of containers marked with vivid red radiation warning stickers. All very neat and orderly. The aetheric here seethed black, and my own distress didn't help much.
One more thing to do.
I triggered a reaction.
It wasn't really all that hard; destruction never is. All I had to do was put some chemical chains together, add heat, pour in energy, stir to a rolling boil.
I didn't have enough left in me to set up any kind of protective shielding--not that I thought it would have worked in any case. I hoped that the evacuation had worked. I hoped that Dr. Reid and his people were safely outside the facility.
Right now, though, that was a very moot point.
I rolled over on my back, staring up, and my last conscious thought was of David. How much I wished I could die in his arms, if I couldn't live in them.
I heard his scream echoing through the hallways a second before the brilliant flash of light, and then it took all the power I had left to hold the explosion in, point it down, driving it like a spike deep into the skin of the Mother.
Then there was just ... light.
And dark.
I didn't expect to ever open my eyes again--who would, really? After exploding a stockpile of nuclear material? Who the hell survives that?