Something about the ululation made Saul’s skin itch like it was burning. ‘The question is, how were they going to set off the detonation?’
‘Remote trigger?’ she replied. ‘That’s my guess, anyway.’
‘You mean through their contacts?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That way there’s too big a risk that somebody might hack your contacts and then trigger an explosion from a long way off. They’d have planned to use a dedicated device of some sort.’ She nodded towards Merrill’s butchered corpse. ‘Check him out. Maybe he’s got something on him.’
Saul grimaced as he bent over Merrill’s body, pushing his hand inside pockets soaked with the dead man’s blood. When he found nothing, he moved over to Dallas, and soon found a slim device sporting several inlaid buttons.
‘That’s it,’ Amy said, as he showed it to her. ‘Same as what we used ourselves. Nothing like having a nice fat button to press when you’re blowing shit up.’
‘Then we can blow the HMX remotely, before we head through the Galileo gate? The starship gets there in a couple of months, and we’ll be able to survive until—’
‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Amy. She stood up and glanced towards the APC parked nearby, with the rest of the crates of explosive still piled in the back. ‘That’s what they used to transport the HMX here, right? So how many of those bricks do you think they managed to place already?’
Saul studied the APC, still mostly filled with unopened crates. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I reckon not that many.’
Amy nodded. ‘That’s what I thought too. Looks like they barely got started before Mitchell killed them.’
‘Then there’s nothing we can do,’ Saul said grimly.
Amy rubbed her mouth pensively. ‘No, I think we’ve got one other option.’ She glanced towards the escalators that led up to the departure area. ‘Is there any way to get that APC up to where the actual wormhole gate is?’
‘Why? What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking,’ she said, ‘that if someone could get all that HMX up there and close to the gate, it could do an awful lot of damage.’
‘No way,’ said Saul. ‘You’d never have enough time to get back out before it was too late.’
‘Whether or not I get out doesn’t really matter, Mr Dumont.’ She reached out a hand. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d let me have the detonator device.’
‘Just look around you,’ he yelled. ‘I don’t know if the explosives would make any difference at all. They built the machinery maintaining the wormholes to sustain an awful lot of damage.’
‘You said yourself that we could at least slow it all down,’ she yelled back. The noise and the shimmering light were intensifying. ‘We’ve got less than twenty minutes, so there isn’t time to argue over this.’
‘You’ll kill yourself.’
‘Yeah, like I hadn’t figured that out. Go now,’ she said. ‘I can take care of this.’
‘No, wait, maybe I should—’
‘I don’t have time for this bullshit!’ she shouted, snatching the detonator from his grasp. She then picked up some of the bricks of HMX, clutching them close to her chest. ‘All my life I had Lester, and now he’s gone. You still have family on Galileo, right? Now tell me how the hell to get this APC up to that level.’
‘There’s a passageway running up behind the centre pair of escalators, over there,’ Saul pointed. ‘It leads to some cargo elevators big enough to take even the APC up.’
‘Fine.’ She nodded curtly. ‘Don’t say anything more now. No goodbyes or sentimental crap or anything like that, okay? Grab one of those other vehicles over by the courtyard and get yourself the hell through a gate already, will you?’
Saul nodded wordlessly, then turned and ran.
He pulled himself inside an empty APC, reversing it in a half-circle before taking one last glance back at Amy. He watched her get inside the one packed with HMX, and drive it away towards the tunnel accessing the service elevators.
Saul turned away and gunned his own vehicle towards the main transport lane linking all the concourses. Warnings flashed at him as he pushed the vehicle to its limit, whipping the wheel around and accelerating hard. He figured he had at best fifteen minutes to make it all the way to the Galileo concourse, which lay at the farthest end of the Array; that left him barely enough time to get on board a shuttle-car that would transport him to the starship carrying the far end of the new wormhole gate, before the wormhole collapsed.
If he was lucky, he might even manage it with a few minutes to spare.
The constant noise and shimmering faded as he put distance between himself and the Florida gate, and soon it felt as if a heavy fog had lifted from his thoughts. He guided the APC through a series of concourses in turn, each as eerily silent as the last. Everywhere he noticed more abandoned APCs and barricades, and more corpses, but of civilians this time.
A powerful roar surged along the lane far behind him. Saul glanced back, but a gentle curve to the route now made it impossible to see all the way back to the Florida concourse itself.
It’s worked, he thought, his hands still clamped tightly around the wheel. He steered around a truck slanting across the lane ahead, and shot through another concourse, feeling the seconds tick away.
As he passed through another concourse, and then another, it occurred to him that he might very well be the last living person on the Moon, until he remembered that there was another Mitchell Stone somewhere out there, not so very far from the Array itself, even now beginning his decade-long slumber.
Saul finally reached the last concourse, separated off from the rest of the Array complex by a tall temporary barrier that had stood in place ever since the original Galileo gate had been sabotaged. A single security entrance was set into the high barrier, and it was clearly far too narrow for his APC to squeeze through.
He abandoned the vehicle and sprinted through the security door into the concourse beyond. It was as devoid of life as the rest, yet lacked the evidence of violent conflict such as he had observed in most of the others. There were small open trucks parked here and there of the type used by maintenance crews, along with evidence of recent preparations for the reopening of contact with Galileo. Before the growths had appeared, the news feeds had been full of speculation about the reception that might be expected from whoever turned out to be currently in charge of the colony, and whether the Coalition governments might attempt an invasion.
A second great roaring sound set the ground beneath him shaking. Saul stumbled and then stared around him. That wasn’t the HMX, he thought wildly.
He climbed a stairway to a platform raised several metres above the concourse, from where he could get a clear view through the windows. He glanced halfway along the curving length of the Lunar Array to where the Florida gate was located. Thick smoke, like ashes, billowed out across the lunar landscape from a rent in the wall. Light danced inside that smoke, like something alive.
Saul backed away, dry-mouthed, realizing Amy’s sacrifice hadn’t been entirely in vain. But, then again, it didn’t look like it had done more than gain him a few minutes of a head-start.< />
He turned to run back down the steps and across the concourse, fatigue already clouding his thoughts. He climbed inside a maintenance cart, then cursed as it began trundling towards the elevated departure area with not nearly enough speed. There he jumped off, throwing himself up on to a stationary escalator and stopping at the top just long enough to momentarily recover his breath.
The ground beneath his feet was shaking, and the air further along the Array howling as it vented on to the lunar surface. A wind picked up, growing stronger within seconds, until Saul was forced to claw his way forward, past abandoned security cordons, and towards the waiting shuttle-cars.