Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [4]
But, Maddox realized, sooner or later something was bound to get through. Out loud he said, “Well, this is inconvenient.”
Vaslovik shrugged and said, “But we weren’t too far along. We can shut down now and resume when the storm has passed.”
Maddox set his tricorder down on the windowsill and sighed, “I suppose you’re right, but I was hoping we would be able to complete the tests tonight.”
Suddenly, a bolt of lightning seared across the sky. Vaslovik stumbled back away from the window, but Maddox caught the old man before he could fall. “Sorry,” Vaslovik said. “That caught me off guard.” A moment later, a rumble of thunder set the window to vibrating. Another flash of lightning gave Maddox a momentary glimpse of the wind stripping the leaves from a nearby tree. Something crashed against the window, bounced off, and rolled away into the darkness.
“Haven’t seen one like this before, have you, Bruce?” Vaslovik asked.
“No, I haven’t—” Maddox began to reply, but then watched in stunned amazement as a blue-white bolt of lightning shivered down from the sky and slashed into the ground not ten meters from the lab. Maddox swore he could feel the ionized oxygen molecules prickling his skin as they swirled away, then rushed back in. A clap of thunder shattered the air and left Maddox momentarily breathless. Then, a second, even fiercer explosion tore through the courtyard and Maddox saw a sickening greenish flame leap up from the ground. He turned his head away and covered his eyes from the intense glare.
When he opened his eyes again, Maddox could see nothing except a red smear, a ghost image on his retina from the bright flash. “The power’s gone out,” he said. “That lightning bolt must have hit the main grid.” He looked down and saw the tiny lights of the tricorder’s control surface. Maddox picked it up, comforted by its familiarity. The instrument had been programmed to look for surges in microvoltage, the kind you find with poorly aligned isolinear chips, but the electromagnetic burst from the lightning bolt had caused it to reset. Maddox tapped the control to run a diagnostic function and, by the light from the display, saw that Vaslovik had silently moved away from the window toward the center of the lab.
“How did you do that?” Maddox asked.
“Do what?” Vaslovik asked.
“You walked all the way over there without running into anything. I didn’t even hear you move.”
“Counted my steps,” Vaslovik said calmly. “Twelve steps from the window to the control console. Six steps to the experiment chamber. Five steps from there to the door.”
“And how did you know that?”
“I always do that. An old habit.”
Maddox thought, What an eccentric old man, but said, “If that was the substation over by the xenolab, then power across the quad will be out. We shouldn’t expect help anytime soon. Do you think we should put the experiment back into the prep room?” Maddox heard Vaslovik grunt in agreement, then small sounds of tinkering. Switches being thrown, latches unlatching.
Vaslovik was working at something very quickly, probably making sure the experiment was fastened down before they tried to move it. He had been pretty shy about letting anyone see their work before it was ready, though how the guards were going to make out anything in the dark lab was another question entirely.
Maddox worried about the old man hurting himself wandering around in the dark, but then decided he should probably be more concerned about himself. He probably knows how many steps it is to the prep room, he decided darkly. I’m the one who’s going to trip and kill himself.
Maddox started to reply when another lightning flash cut through the dark, and the world suddenly seemed to come crashing in around him.
Or something very near it. Something beneath the floor of the lab exploded, taking out the entire corner of the building