Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [12]
'What the hell was that?' yelled Ming.
She switched a monitor over to English 37 and The Bad News Show, Yak Harris caught between slots, frozen solid with his mouth open. There was a sudden pixel flicker and Yak's suit changed colour.
I'll be damned, thought Ming, he really is a computer program.
'Well,' said Yak Hams, jerking into life. 'Well, we seem to be having some technical problems from the Acturus Terminus.'
You and me both, thought Ming. Up on the status boards a silver line pierced into the station's heart. 'Give me an op-stat on the stellar tunnel.'
'It's down,' said a controller.
'Down?'
'Just the carrier wave.'
'Can't be down,' Ming checked the status board again. 'We pumped twenty-two gigawatts into the bloody thing.' Enough to fry a small town. 'Any contact with the terminal?'
'Nope.'
'Why not?'
'Break down at the terminal end.'
'Hardware or software?'
'Your guess is as good as mine.'
'Get maintenance for me,' said Ming, 'and the KGB.'
The master console in her office chimed for her attention. Threat analysis catching up with the real world displaying an options panel on the screen. The computer wanted Ming to choose between a technical malfunction or external threat. She glared at the screen.
Not yet, she thought, not until I know what's going on.
A timecode at the top of the screen counted down from thirty minutes. When it reached zero the computer would make up its own mind. Ming wanted to know what moron had thought of that.
It was three minutes since the Stunnel was supposed to have opened, four minutes since they lost contact with Acturus Terminal. Ming's instincts were to boot the problem upstairs but the senior management had all been attending the opening ceremony.
She was on her own.
She tore the comer of her last packet of zap and dumped one in a cup full of dead coffee. It started to fizz. She ordered the controllers to isolate the terminal and start pulling the trains out of the depots and whack them back into the tunnels.
The President was at the opening ceremony too. Which meant she should have heard from the security services by now, from Event Horizon at the very least.
On the media feed Yak Harris was talking to a panel of experts. A good sign that the media didn't know what had happened either. Ming wondered whether the pundits were computer-generated as well.
The Stop
The air was the colour of dust and there was no memory of a warning, no precognition, no transition, just a sudden birth into this confusion of falling stone. Instinct and training dragged her forward towards a rectangular patch of light ahead. Left hand clamped over her mouth, shallow breathing through her fingers, forcing herself to stay upright, smoke rises but dust falls.
She had a sense of a heavy mass shirting above her and she stumbled faster. Shadows crashed down behind her, shock waves billowed through the dust, streaming around her and into the light. For an instant she saw the figure of a woman framed in the rectangle ahead. An image of herself, hunched and stumbling.
No warning, like an orbital strike, like a missile in terminal phase, sprinting ahead of its sound wave. Not even a whisper before it hits and strips the houses down to their bare bones.
From in front, she thought as she met the impossible shadow face to face, the light is coming from the front. Then she knew, even before the dust veil lifted to reveal the face.
'Mother,' she wailed, hands groping forward, grasping and meeting nothing. Dust filled her throat and eyes, stopping up the tears. Left her blindly struggling forward. 'Mother,' she tried to call out but the dust choked off the sound. Blindly she fought to get further but it felt as if the dust was piling up around her, drifts creeping up her thighs and back. Her mind became filled with the heavy thud of her heartbeat, her chest filling up with an awfui vacuum, as if some membrane had torn as she fell forward into space and clear air.
Terminal phase, the final fail to ground zero.
Impact.
Stale air blew out of her lungs, saliva and dust spewing upwards in an