As shots rang out, Karla ripped the door open and charged into the lab, the HK’s muzzle following her gaze right, then left as she cleared her position.
A gray-haired woman and a man wearing a lab coat almost fell over themselves as they scrambled up the stairs on all fours. At the bottom of the steps, some bald-headed guy in black-frame glasses huddled down beside the giant machine as if he were petrified.
Reid Farmer had his legs spread, the pistol raised in a two-handed hold. Even as he drew a bead on Gray where she sat at a control console, Karla felt her skin prickle, a static crackle in the air.
Karla heard Reid say, “Valete.” The pistol shot rang out just as a peculiar and disorienting wave rolled through Karla’s body.
The sound nearly deafened: an ear-shattering pop, as if a giant glass ball had imploded. Karla’s entire body turned electric, prickled, buzzed, and tingled. For an instant she felt herself begin to turn inside out, and then reality slammed back through her.
She’d felt like this once before outside Gray’s door in Grantham Barracks. Out of it, but not quite. Again, she wasn’t sure how long it lasted.
She blinked in darkness, struggled to remember where she was, and thought she lay on concrete. Instinctively, she felt for her Surefire and twisted the beam on.
Got to save Kilgore. Got to save the world. The words echoed hollowly in Karla’s memory, as if heard from another time and place.
She lay at the top of stairs, and not alone. A tall, lanky woman in a gray wool suit was raising herself to all fours. A man wearing a tie and a lab coat was huddled in a fetal position.
Moments later, lights flickered and came on. Emergency backup.
She looked beyond the short stairs and gaped in disbelief. A huge amorphous sphere of energy seemed to pulse, half-visible, half-vanished—a pearlescent gray that rippled with fluctuating bands of emptiness. Other times, rainbows of muted colors swam in the thing’s impossible depth.
Transected at the sphere’s edge, the left half of Reid Farmer’s body appeared human. The right half, vanishing into the interior, had become an amorphous mass. The flesh seemed to merge, dissipate, morph into a rubbery solid, only to become liquid.
And then the sphere vanished.
A shallow bowl remained, scooped out of the concrete; while Reid Farmer’s half of a nightmarish body lay at the edge along with severed electrical cables and a slice of floor bracket from Domina’s control console.
“What the hell just happened here?” Karla rasped.
“Domina activated the machine.” The woman dropped onto the stairs beside Karla; her gaze fixed on the emptiness. “She’s gone.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere in the future.”
“How far?”
The stunned woman shook her head. “Five seconds, five years, five hundred years, a thousand? We’ll need some time to figure, do some math, calculate the energy involved. Assuming we can work out her equations. And there’s no telling what that black box of hers can actually do.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Maxine Kaplan, head of research and administration at the lab.” She jerked a thumb at the man. “That’s Virgil Wixom, head engineer.”
“Well . . . can’t you just turn off the electricity? Stop it?”
“Too late.” Wixom was rubbing his face with a nervous hand. “It’s like launching an artillery shell. Anything we try here, it’s already in the past. After the fact.”
Karla worked her jaws and pressurized her ears the way she’d do on a dive. Her hearing finally crackled and cleared. She glanced down, seeing Bill Minor’s blood where it still dried on her vest and pants.
Stupid bastard never had a chance. Still, she’d been slow. Out of practice.
She climbed awkwardly to her feet, stepped down a couple of steps, and stared at Reid Farmer’s body where it lay half in and half out of reality. “Wish you’d got that shot off a half second earlier, Doc.”
Wixom wavered as he climbed to his feet. “Mr. Jackson was inside the event horizon. And if we’d been there, too?” He shivered, gaze fixed on what was left of Farmer’s body.
“What about Gray?”
“Who?” Maxine had stepped down beside her.
“Domina.”
Maxine blinked her eyes, rubbed them, as if staring at the weird gray sphere had hurt. “I thought she wanted that control platform way too close to the generator. My guess is that she knew exactly what the sphere’s containment zone was given the kind of wattage available.”
“So we just wait, and she reappears here?” Karla asked.
“Maybe. Unless she went far enough into the future that she could find the computational power to interface with her navigator. The entire computational capacity on this planet certainly couldn’t handle the kind of data she needed.”
Wixom said, “I once overheard her promise she was going to meet someone there.”
Karla heard her earbud. “Chief? Anyone? What’s just happened? Power’s out all over the mountain.”
Karla touched her throat mic. “Savage’s down with a lung shot. Dr. Farmer’s dead. Gray’s gone. Have Winny set down at the front door for extraction. I’ve got to render aid to Savage, find Yusif, and we’re out of here.”
“And the machine?”
“Gone somewhere clear past tomorrow, Skipper.”