Chapter 90 - Echoes in the Sump
The hatch swung upward on counterweighted steel hinges, revealing a vertical shaft that dropped down into total darkness. A ladder made of solid bronze rungs was welded directly into the titanium lining of the tube.
"I'm going down," Jared said.
"Like hell you are alone," Marcus snapped. "You don't know what's down there, Jared. The air could be poisoned. The radiation—"
"Arthur lived to be eighty-six," Jared said, checking the dosimeter pinned to his coat collar. The needle was dead in the green. "He worked in this bay every week until the day he died. Whatever is down there, it recognized the key. If Vance's people hit the outer gate with that microwave rig, they’ll trigger a feedback loop that will take out the entire power grid from here to the county line."
He strapped an emergency oxygen rebreather to his chest, clicked a halogen headlamp onto his tactical helmet, and stepped onto the first rung.
"Keep Pete on the children," Jared ordered, looking up at Marcus through the open hatch. "If you see headlights on the timber road, drop the timber bridge. Do not let anyone reach this silo."
"You've got twenty minutes," Marcus said grimly, chambering a round into his carbine. "Then I come down after you."
Jared descended.
The descent was silent save for the scrape of his heavy work boots against the bronze rungs. Every ten feet, an amber indicator light set into the titanium wall pulsed softly, activated by the biometric transponder embedded in the brass key at his belt.
Down, down, through the layers of the earth. He passed the metamorphic slate. He passed the deep granite bedrock. At sixty feet down, the temperature should have climbed; instead, the air grew crisp, clean, and dry, smelling faintly of pine needles and ionized rain, identical to the air at the peak of the ridge after a midsummer lightning strike.
At the bottom of the ladder, he stepped off onto a platform of dark, seamless slate.
He switched on his halogen beam.
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The chamber before him was vast—not carved by dynamite or bored by heavy diamond-tipped tunneling machines, but shaped with an impossible, glass-smooth symmetry. The walls arched overhead into a vaulted dome three hundred feet across, completely unsupported by pillars.
And in the center of the floor stood the source of the signal.
