Prodigal by Marc D. Giller Page B

babbled something incoherent. He stared back at Lea, but nothing registered.
    “It’ll be a few minutes,” Tiernan said.
    “We don’t have a few minutes.” She grabbed another stim shot, and was just about to jam it in when Tiernan grabbed her arm. Lea jerked reflexively, but he only tightened his grip.
    “You’ll kill him,” he warned.
    Lea didn’t care. But she paused for a moment—long enough for Tiernan to snatch the ampoule from her hand. He did it discreetly, so as not to alert the others. They didn’t need to see him questioning her judgment.
    “Dead, he’s no use to us,” he said.
    Tiernan was right—but that didn’t stop Lea from hating him for it.
    “Major!”
    Her gunnery sergeant shouted from across the room, severing the heat between Lea and her executive officer. They turned away from each other and toward the commotion, where the rest of her team quickly gathered. Two of them pointed their rifles at the floor, while the others worked together to heave an old steel furnace off the bolts that held it in place.
    Tiernan started in to help, but Lea held him back.
    “Stay with the prisoners,” she said. “That’s an order, Lieutenant.”
    Lea watched his reaction long enough to be singed by his anger, then left him. By the time she joined the rest of the group, they had moved the furnace far enough to reveal what appeared to be a steam grate beneath. Oxidation had degraded the iron bars into rusticles, white powder caking the narrow gaps between.
    “Echogram picked up a hollow chamber,” Gunny said. “Best guess, this is the point of entry.”
    Lea crouched next to the grate, peering down through the jumbled light of rifle tracer beams. She caught a glint of brushed metal, along with the pale red emission of a lighted diode. She nodded at the others, who pulled the grate up and tossed it aside. The thing landed with a piercing, almost melancholy crash, which faded into the constant thrum that now enveloped the building.
    The team stood aside, ready to blast anything that might pop out of the hole. Lea, meanwhile, eased herself over the opening, and found what she expected to find. A brushed-metal hatch was there, securely in place, sealed with a magnetic lock.
    “What have we here?” Lea asked, and jumped down into the hole.
    The lock, like the rest of the security around here, was off the shelf—no more of a challenge than the biometric keys Lea had jacked moments earlier. She had the code cracked in a matter of seconds, then waited for the magnetic seal to disengage. It let off with a loud pop, releasing a puff of cool, refined air—stale with the trace of inert gases, but amplified like photons in phase.
    And there was energy : chaotic, violent, directed.
    Pale green light rose up from below. Lea stared down into that radiance, in awe of its beauty and power—but also frightened in a way that transcended mortal fear. Because she knew, from her time in the Paris catacombs, that some things were far more permanent than death—and far more difficult to escape.
    She looked up at the faces of her team, staring down at her.
    “Follow me,” Lea said.

     

    The hole was only wide enough to take one person at a time. Lea squeezed herself in first, her feet finding the rungs of a ladder directly below the hatch. She descended one cautious step at a time, holding on with one hand and aiming her pulse pistol with the other. In spite of the glow, visibility was poor—pseudolight alternating with amorphous shadows, creating a hallucinogenic effect. Her movements felt like slow motion, as if she had just immersed herself in a viscous gel, her extremities becoming so heavy that holding the pistol became a real effort. From there the sensation filled her lungs and constricted her throat, making it harder and harder to breathe the deeper she went.
    Lea panicked and flipped down her visor, checking the atmosphere for toxins. Trace elements, oxygen, radiation—it was an exotic blend, but everything