Rings of light shot all around her, changing colors as they swooped past. She bent her head and tried to ignore the overbearing glare. “Stanley, damn it! Turn around!”
The throbbing rings filled the tunnel, spiraling from white to intense purplish-blue down the spectrum to bloodred — and then she could no longer see it… but a sudden intense heat bathed her skin from the front, as if she were walking toward a supercharged heat lamp.
The temperature quickly became unbearable, and she crashed into van Dyckman, where he stood in the center of the tunnel, his head down against the overwhelming infrared radiation. He stretched his arm toward the elusive vault door, now only tens of feet away, as if trying to pull himself forward.
Adonia’s face stung and burned, but she managed to grab his shirt and pull him back. He struggled. “It’s… it’s right there, just a little further—”
“You’ll die before you make it.” She yanked and he stumbled back into her, but she caught him, kept him upright, and dragged him toward the others. Once she turned around, even just a few steps away from the pulsing infrared, she felt her front cooling off, although the heat now slammed against her back like a physical force.
Van Dyckman stopped resisting, then he lurched along with her, retreating toward the others. As if the systems were rewarding them for making the right decision, the heat dissipated swiftly as they retreated. After only a few seconds, Adonia felt as if she had spent a day in an intense tanning bed.
Soon, the concentric rings of brighter lights flashed around them, visible again, as if they really needed motivation to keep going. Adonia felt van Dyckman sag against her. His shirt was soaked with sweat. “That wasn’t smart, Stanley.”
“It’s not supposed to work like that.”
As they reached the rest of the group, the light behind them spiraled back up to a steady white, casting long shadows on the concrete floor and all the scattered construction equipment and debris. The ceiling LED lights brightened, taunting, beckoning them in the direction the systems wanted them to head.
Into the descending tunnel.
Adonia said, “Who am I to argue against stubborn countermeasures?”
Shawn joined her, concerned. “Your face is red, like a bad sunburn.”
“I could use a dip in a nice cool swimming pool. Did I mention this isn’t the way I wanted to spend my Sunday?”
“And I’d rather be rock climbing,” he said. “Maybe later. Once we get out of here.”
“You got it.” Adonia wiped the sweat from her forehead. She looked down the tunnel that led to the lower level. “We better get going before the next defensive measures kick in.”
Undersecretary Doyle joined them, ignoring van Dyckman. “In a few hundred feet the tunnel starts sloping down. There’s a guard station before you reach the lower level — it should be manned. We can hole up there until this madness is over.”
Adonia looked at the Undersecretary. “How do you know that?”
“Some of my own programs were located in Hydra Mountain. Remember, DOE used to deliver nuclear weapons to the military here. The lower level was used for storing plutonium pits, back in the good old days.”
Adonia didn’t need to hear any more. “If we get to the guard portal, we can shelter there. I bet we’ll find some kind of telecommunications to contact Rob Harris.”
Shawn frowned. “Why would the old countermeasures herd us down to the former pit-storage level? That makes no sense.”
When Adonia ran a hand through her dark hair, her fingers came away wet with perspiration, and her red dress was rumpled. “No idea, but we’re not getting to the main exit through that infrared wall.”
Dazed, van Dyckman gazed back toward the glaring barrier of white light, knowing their exit was only a few hundred feet away. “So close.”
Senator Pulaski struggled to his feet again, gingerly putting weight on his sore ankle. He started walking in short stutter steps. “Just get me the hell out of here.”
They moved as a group, working their way down the tunnel, away from the pulsating lights. Garibaldi nodded, as if this scenario were merely an experiment. “The system is responding as if we’re intruders, but the wires are crossed. Literally.”
Van Dyckman threw him a disgusted look as they passed more construction material and debris against the tunnel wall. “Impossible. I told you we installed new systems. State of the art.”
“Then the countermeasures should be driving us out of the Mountain, not deeper into it.” Garibaldi raised his eyebrows. “Think about it, 1950s analog hardware interacting with artificial intelligence? Back in the Cold War era, they used copper wires, not fiber optics, and mechanical, analog switches rather than digital logic. Instead of being able to computationally simulate a million test cases a day guided by self-learning algorithms, Hydra’s old interface might be able to run only a few tests a day — if they’re lucky.”
Van Dyckman said, “We’re under intense pressure from the President, and each test would have brought down the facility for hours. If we did all that, we’d never move anything in.”
“Shouldn’t have been a problem,” Garibaldi said sarcastically, “so long as you’re willing to put up with a few minor glitches, like this disaster.”
17
Rob Harris’s stomach roiled, and he wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Being out of contact with the team members trapped inside the Mountain was making him frantic. His ops center screens showed an increasing cascade of alarms inside, but he didn’t know what they were doing in there. Hydra Mountain’s safety and security systems were working at cross-purposes, triggered by that unauthorized cell phone transmission immediately following the Class A incident.
He’d been forced to reboot the facility’s entire system — the only way to unfreeze the lockdown now — but that entailed a six-hour process that involved bringing up thousands of obsolete analog devices as well as newer digital equipment, all interconnected. They ranged from truly antique water-cooled processors and decades-old PDP and VAX computers hardwired by the military to van Dyckman’s newest DOE networked clusters.
As site manager, he had pored through all of his manuals, searching for something he had missed, some workaround or shortcut. None of the procedures covered circumstances like this. He desperately needed outside input. He had to know what else he could do, how far he could push the facility.
Sitting in his Eagle’s Nest office and looking through the wide windows at the urgent activity below, he once again waited for the DOE Secretary’s call. A software failure in the security lockdown had blown most of the old analog intercoms in the deep tunnels, and he couldn’t make contact with the stranded team. The inspection group had inadvertently triggered several unexpected crossovers in the installed countermeasures — and that wasn’t even the problem that Harris had wanted them to discover! No, not what he had intended at all.
Here, above the busy ops center floor, Harris should have felt like a king in a high tower. Below, his exec Drexler and fifteen staff members urgently worked on internal operations, paying little attention to the separate video feeds from outside the Mountain, which were splashed as overlapping windows on the giant wall screens. As his team worked with obsessive focus to override the automated defensive systems, Harris longed to be down there with them, getting his hands dirty and hoping to offer some helpful insight, but those people were good at their jobs — and much better versed in the complexities than he was. He would only get in the way if he went down among them. His job was here.