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Back Final Days Save as PDF
Chapters (32)
  1. ONE
  2. TWO
  3. THREE
  4. FOUR
  5. FIVE
  6. SIX
  7. SEVEN
  8. EIGHT
  9. NINE
  10. TEN
  11. ELEVEN
  12. TWELVE
  13. THIRTEEN
  14. FOURTEEN
  15. FIFTEEN
  16. SIXTEEN
  17. SEVENTEEN
  18. EIGHTEEN
  19. NINETEEN
  20. TWENTY
  21. TWENTY-ONE
  22. TWENTY-TWO
  23. TWENTY-THREE
  24. TWENTY-FOUR
  25. TWENTY-FIVE
  26. TWENTY-SIX
  27. TWENTY-SEVEN
  28. TWENTY-EIGHT
  29. TWENTY-NINE
  30. THIRTY
  31. THIRTY-ONE
  32. THIRTY-TWO

For a moment, it sounded like Dan was trying to suppress a sob. ‘Not exactly . . . no. I’ll send a video squirt over, maybe it’s best if you just see what happened for yourselves. And . . . get here soon, okay? The tokamaks packed up all of a sudden, and it’s pitch black in here.’

Jeff found himself watching Eliza as they listened. She had turned away, to look back towards Vault Four, but from where he stood he could still see her face through her visor, and her lips were pressed together in a thin and bloodless line. She clearly didn’t want to have to go into Vault Four, but none of them did, not really, not when there was a chance that whatever had happened to the others might happen to them too. But Jeff knew that didn’t matter. He knew, deep in his gut, that they had to make the attempt, regardless.

‘We’ll be there soon,’ Eliza finally replied, glancing towards Farad’s cart filled with its precious treasures. ‘There’s no way you can find your way back out to us?’

‘No. It’s too dark to avoid the chance of getting lost, and this part of the vault hasn’t been secured yet. We can see some way with our suit lights, but not far enough to be sure exactly where we are. Don’t want to wind up like Rodriguez, right?’

No, thought Jeff with a shiver, nobody wanted to end up like Rodriguez.

Dan’s voice faded for a moment, and then came back. Jeff glanced down and saw the man’s life-support icon flicker in that same moment.

‘Lucy,’ continued Eliza, ‘how about you? Can you hear me?’

‘Yeah.’ Lucy’s voice sounded tense with pain. ‘I’m good.’

‘You don’t sound it.’

‘Hurt my leg,’ she replied. ‘Had a bad fall.’

‘Hang on and we’ll be there soon enough. But send that video squirt over so we can get some idea what we’re dealing with first.’

They watched the A/V from Dan’s suit in silence, projected on to the curved surface of each of their visors.

Standard operating procedure specified that, even once a chamber had been declared safe by the reconnaissance probes, and pressurized prior to a thorough eyeball examination by the artefact recovery teams, pressure suits must be kept on until a team leader was certain there was no danger of contamination or some other, less predictable risk. Mitchell Stone’s team had been tasked with just such an assessfont>