As the two men pushed on, the party beyond the rock played out the sturdy nylon rope, keeping just enough tension to have a bit of a tactile connection to the recon team, letting them pull the rope on as they advanced. All the while, Sergeant Keller was keeping a close watch on the condition of both men with his helmet visor, relieved that they remained solid green.
Then one man went yellow and he immediately ordered the team to halt. “Scout team. Stand where you are,” he said quickly. “Reverse five paces.”
He watched, seeing the yellow light, Private Barret, shift from yellow to green. He told the men to look as far ahead as they could for any sign of the Corporal, but nothing was reported. “Very well, hold position there and await further orders.” The Sergeant turned to Morgan. “Sir, this is about the spot where I lost contact with Corporal James. I just saw one of the scouts losing signal integrity, and so I’ve halted the team.”
“How far in have they gone?”
“Looks to be about 50 meters from the rope we’ve played out, and I’m not sure why we can’t maintain a signal hold. These rocks aren’t all that dense and the TALOS suits should be able to broadcast out 500 meters under these conditions. It’s been well tested.”
They soon found that even normal voice communications were starting to show interference, prompting the Sergeant to order the men to fall back another five meters until they recovered signal strength.
“They’ve seen nothing?” asked Elena.
“Not yet,” said the Sergeant. “But Barret reports the passage makes a bend to the right and seems to descend ahead of their present position. That could be the spot where we lost the Corporal. Shall I have him edge forward? The second man can keep a firm hold on him with the rope.”
“Very well. Proceed.”
The Sergeant ordered Barret to narrate every step he took, so he could hear him as long as possible. As he advanced, there was rising static on the voice line, until his voice was lost in the wash.
“Hold fast to that tether,” the Sergeant cautioned his other man. Cooke was still in signal range, and Keller could hear his breathing over the open connection. His condition dot was safely green, but the yellow dot for Barret had him worried. Then it happened.
Cooke had his helmet lamp focused ahead on his mate, the rope between the two men kept taut as Barret advanced. He saw the other man reach the bend in the passage ahead, and then disappear around the corner. Seconds later, the rope when completely limp and fell slack to the stony floor of the passage. Quite surprised, he called out to Barret, for the man could not have been more than fifteen meters ahead of him. All he heard was the echo of his own voice. He tried calling on his helmet radio, but there was nothing but static.
“Damn,” he swore, reporting the incident to the Sergeant, who already suspected the worst. The yellow dot for Barret had gone red… Cooke was ordered to pull on the rope, thinking the other man may have fallen, meeting some unseen stumbling block that may have taken down Corporal James as well. That might account for the rope going suddenly slack like that. Barret could be on the floor of the passage now, but it was not so.
As Private Cooke pulled slowly on the rope, it offered no resistance at all, yet it had been firmly clipped to the other man’s waist belt on the TALOS suit, and with a very sturdy clasp. As he gathered the rope in, he soon came to its end, seeing there was now no clasp at all. The end of the rope seemed singed and burnt, fused as if cut clean through by a laser, or perhaps an acetylene torch. There was no knife work involved. The charred end was ample evidence that it had been severed by some kind of heat. He activated his radio and reported what had happened.
“We’ve lost Barret,” said the Sergeant. “Cooke says the rope went slack, and it’s been burned clean through.”
“Burned?”
“He says the end is seared—still warm in his hand.”
“Can’t say I like the sound of that,” said MacRae rubbing the stubble on his chin. He eyed Miss Fairchild, seeing the worry in her eyes.
“Well, what’s happened to them?” she asked. “We should have rigged out a video on the second man.”
“Wouldn’t have helped,” said Morgan, coming over after huddling with Sergeant Keller. “There’s a blind turn, about fifteen meters ahead of the second man. Private Barret vanished after he made that turn, so the other man would have to be right on his heels to see anything, and we might have lost the two of them in that instance. Cooke has called out for him, and Barret should hear him easily enough, but nothing comes back, and the TALOS suit reads no signal at all, just like the Corporal.”
“Alright,” said Elena. “I think it’s fair to say we’ve found the source of our magnetic anomaly. If the information we have about the time rifts is accurate, then I think we may have found one right here.”
“Unsecured?” said MacRae. “I thought these rifts were to be under lock and key. That’s what all this bloody business with the keys is about, right?”
“So we believed. Who knows, these passages and caves twist off in all directions down here. We may have just uncovered an approach to this rift that the key makers never found.”
“The key makers? Who are they?” Captain MacRae was getting too many questions and not enough answers.
“Somebody had to engineer these keys and place them in the artifacts where they’ve been found. Someone had to put that key into the Selene Horse.”
“Aye,” said MacRae, “and when did he do that? And Why? For this little foray here? If that key was supposed to secure something here, then what’s happened to our men?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out now,” said Elena, determined.”
“But we don’t even have the key that was supposed to correspond to this place—assuming we’re on the right coordinates that man Dorland reported. We’ll never have that key, Elena. It went down with Rodney.”
“Never say never,” she winked at him. “We won’t find it here—not in this time, but who’s to say we couldn’t find it in some other time.”
“What? Some other time? You act as though we’re at liberty to just shift about as we please. We’re marooned, the way I see things. You believe that box sent us here simply to retrieve the key that was aboard the Rodney. Well, that’s all gone to hell, and what I see here in this little jaunt is just sour grapes. If there is another door here, and built of the stuff like we saw at Delphi, then we’ll never get through it with demolitions. That site looked to be damn near impregnable, save for that key—and where did that one come from?”
“Gordon,” she said with an admonishing look, “we can deal with all of that later. Right now I’ve two missing men to worry about.”
“Aye, you’re right, but how do you want to proceed?
“Something is odd about these disappearances. It would seem to me that those men might simply backtrack and get to where they were before they vanished.”
“At the moment, we have no way of knowing what’s around that bend up ahead in the passage, and anyone who gets cheeky enough to have a look goes missing. The path may drop off to a bad fall. It could be anything.”
“What we do know is that getting forward seems easy enough, but getting back must be quite difficult. This bit with the rope getting severed like that is eerie. It’s as if the man was sent somewhere else, entered some kind of rift like those the American Physics Professor talked about. After all, that’s what we think these keys are supposed to secure. One was aligned right along that stairway at Ilanskiy, as Captain Fedorov reported.”