As he fought his way through the mass, the sound of a Storm blasted once again, and suddenly he had cloth in his hand and he pulled, and he drew to him first a shoulder, then an arm, then her whole body, and he and Gina rolled out of the mass of flesh together. Gagging, Gina clambered to her feet.

Behind them, the remains of the creature lay in heaps on the tunnel floor. Farther back, the operators worked at their Storms, preparing to fire again.

“You’ll kill us,” Gina shouted.

They did not respond. In moments, the whole tunnel was going to be literally sterilized by a hurricane of supersonic beads.

“Run!”

As they dove ahead, the Storms blared, and the concrete walls around them spat geysers of dust.

“Why are they doing this?”

“Those are real Deltas out there. Some unit dropped in and found its way here. They’re gonna just be fighting. They might not even know who we are.”

There was a series of clicks. Another Storm was about to be fired. He threw Gina to the floor of the tunnel and dropped down, covering her. But as he did so, he saw ahead a drop-off and knew that they had reached the pump station.

“Flicker,” he shouted, “now!”

As they rolled into the tangled complexity of the pump room, full of equipment and pipes, Mark saw two dark objects—the bombs.

But they weren’t intact. There were no firing mechanisms. These were only the plutonium cores.

The bait. The hybrids had known that they would be detected, and Mark and Gina would certainly try to get them. They’d carefully been dismantled so that their beacons continued to register that they were armed.

On each was a red, flat area, the target point that would have taken the impact from the detonator.

“Too heavy,” she said as they attempted to lift one of the bombs.

“We have to do it.”

Straining, she asked through clenched teeth, “How much does this thing weigh?”

He stopped trying. “Too much.”

Pushing equipment aside, he searched until he found the opening he knew would be there—a perfectly round, absolutely black space about ten feet across. It had been here when he was a boy. He remembered what Dr. Turner and Sarge had called it then: the most dangerous place on Earth.

“We have to roll them.”

“We can just drop them in and get out of here, Mark.”

“No, we have to be certain they hit impact points first or they won’t detonate.” He rolled one until the red plate was visible. “Shock to this point. Otherwise, the neutron initiator won’t be activated and the bomb will fizzle. Minor explosive yield at best.”

“What do we do?”

“We go with them and control their position.”

“While we’re falling?”

“With them. Holding them.”