One of his men was not so quick to react, looking up in shock at the noise—
The falling slab hammered him flat. The crystal he was using as a walkway exploded into pieces, splashing back into the eitr from which they had been formed. The broken bridge rolled over, demolishing more spars and black stalagmites and crunching over the tops of spikes growing just beneath the lake’s surface before coming to rest in a nest of rubble.
Nina watched in horror. ‘Eddie!’ she cried, darting to the edge of the outcrop to see him sprawled precariously thirty feet below. It was hard to be sure in the pale light of the globes, but it seemed possible to climb down and circumnavigate the shaft’s outer wall in a spiral to reach him. ‘Hold on, I’m com—’
Another sharp crack, this time under her feet.
The outcrop’s edge splintered away. She threw herself backwards, but was already falling—
One hand caught the newly torn edge — and she shrieked as razor-like shards cut into her skin. Her grip faltered…
And failed.
Fear punched her heart as she dropped, nothing below but the simmering black pool of eitr—
Berkeley grabbed her wrist.
Nina yelled again as her shoulder joint abruptly took her full weight, muscles and tendons crackling. ‘Hold on, hold on!’ Berkeley gasped. He had dived to catch her, lying on his belly with both arms over the edge of the broken outcrop.
‘Pull me up!’ she wailed.
‘I can’t — get enough leverage!’ He strained to wriggle backwards, but couldn’t raise his arms any higher. ‘Grab the wall!’
‘I’m trying!’ She flailed her free hand, trying to find purchase, but the newly exposed surface was glassy-smooth. In the corner of her eye she saw a more ragged piece of broken crystal level with her thigh. She stretched for it — but in the process her Kalashnikov slipped from her shoulder.
She flicked her arm up just as its strap slithered over her fingers, casting it across a gap to clatter on to one of the spans below. Freed of the unbalancing weight, she managed to reach the protrusion and steady herself — but with no footholds she couldn’t lift herself any higher. The eitr pool swayed hungrily below her.
The man at the lake’s surface had almost fallen into it as the slabs around him shuddered, having to drop the pump to grab the sample container’s carrying strap before it toppled into the ooze. ‘Keep hold of it, for God’s sake!’ Lock yelled, clinging to a narrow crystal pillar. ‘What the hell just happened?’
‘You won’t fuckin’ believe this,’ Hoyt snarled, emerging from cover and looking up the shaft. ‘It’s Chase!’ He unshouldered his assault rifle.
Eddie felt nothing beneath his feet. He looked around to discover that his legs were hanging out over the side of the crossing. Wincing from the pain of his landing, he pulled them back—
Bullets ripped into the crystal under him.
‘Chase, you motherfucker!’ bellowed Hoyt as he blazed away with the SIG. Both Eddie and Maslov scrambled along the top of the natural bridge as more rounds chipped away at its underside. ‘Come on, you Limey bastard!’
The other mercenaries joined the attack. The cavern echoed with the deafening roar of automatic fire. But even over the noise, Eddie still heard the shrill crunch of fracturing crystal as the bridge beneath him weakened…
More gunfire — but from higher up.
Kagan’s AK-12 blazed. One of the mercenaries reeled backwards as the Russian’s bullets ripped through his torso, flopping into the black lake. The others ducked for shelter behind the snaking pillars.
Eddie seized his chance and leaned over the bridge to take aim with his Wildey. He had lost track of Hoyt’s position in the confusion, but the light from one of the floating globes cast a crouching shadow from behind a small crystal spire — which exploded like a bomb as a Magnum round hit it, the bullet continuing through the stalagmite to hit a lurking mercenary in the throat. The last Russian soldier joined the assault, sending bursts of Kalashnikov fire at the mercenaries.
Above, Berkeley was still struggling to pull Nina back up. ‘Hold on!’
‘Whaddya think I’m doing?’ she protested.
‘There’s a — a rock,’ he rasped. ‘Going to try to — brace myself against it.’ The scientist changed tack, squirming sideways rather than backwards. One leg found purchase against a chunk of stone…
Bumping the steel canister as it did so.
Berkeley had dropped it when he dived to save Nina. The only thing preventing it from rolling away was a wedge-like stone chip — and now that had been knocked away.
The container clunked across the ledge, picking up speed. Berkeley let out a stifled shriek as he saw it trundling towards oblivion, but could do nothing to stop it without dropping Nina. ‘Thor’s Hammer!’ was all he had time to gasp before it went over the edge.
Kagan glimpsed the flash of metal above. ‘No!’ he cried, breaking off from his attack to stare in helpless horror at the canister as it fell past Nina towards the oily lake—
It clipped a small crystal jutting out from the wall, snapping it off at its base — but the impact was just enough to jolt it on to a new trajectory. It hit a span and bounced down it before falling again. This time, it made a solid landing on another crystalline bridge in the chamber with a noise like the ringing of a dull bell.
Lock heard the sound and looked up to find its source. ‘Sons of bitches,’ he muttered on seeing the container. ‘Slavin was right — they were working on a counter-agent.’ He raised his voice. ‘Hoyt! Don’t let them get near that canister!’
‘Only thing they’ll be getting near is the Pearly Gates,’ Hoyt shouted back. He changed his hold on the SIG, bringing his hand to the attachment mounted beneath its barrel.
An M203 grenade launcher.
He lined it up on the bullet-scarred span above. ‘Fire in the hole!’
Eddie heard the warning shout. ‘Oh, fuck!’ he gasped, scrambling forward as a flat shotgun-like blast echoed from below—
The 40mm grenade hit the crystal bridge — and detonated.
Maslov was almost directly above the point of impact. The blast disintegrated the slab beneath him, sending his shredded body cartwheeling across the bottom of the shaft to slam into a dagger-sharp crystal growing from the wall, the black point bursting out of his chest in a spray of blood. The man hung grotesquely for a moment, limbs swaying, before his weight tore the spike loose. He fell into the cavern, landing with a crack of bones on a bed of broken shards.
Eddie was flung into the air as the broken bridge kicked upwards beneath him. He made a hard landing on the stump of the destroyed crossing, his momentum sending him skidding over the edge.
He fell—
And landed on one of the inflatable light globes.
It ruptured with a flat bang, but still cushioned him just enough to survive the drop without breaking any bones. The touchdown was far from painless, though, the battery pack and light clusters inside the globe leaving heavy bruises. The destroyed bridge plunged past him to crash down on top of the rubble piled up below.
Hoyt quickly reloaded the launcher. ‘Oh, I got you now…’ he said with a cruel grin, lining up his sights on the dazed Englishman—
‘Don’t!’ Lock shouted. Hoyt looked at him in surprise. ‘We still have to get out of here, you idiot! If you take out any more of the big crystals, we won’t be able to climb back up!’
Annoyed, the mercenary leader brought his hand back to the SIG’s trigger — only to see Eddie jump down and drop out of sight behind the debris. ‘God damn it!’ he snarled.
Kagan had flinched back from the explosion’s shrapnel. Now he recovered and brought his gun back towards the targets below—