He shambled back through the drill tower as it trembled around him, the great hot water drill swinging from side to side like a pendulum. Beams were falling, walls collapsing. Clouds of boiling steam blew up from the massive borehole itself. Although he was in terrible pain, he forced himself foreword. He didn’t know exactly what was happening, but it was a bad omen. Something was being released down in the lake and he knew it would be a horror beyond imagination. He ducked beneath flying debris, stumbling, falling, crawling, inching his way until he got to the doorway of the command pod where all the technology of the drill system, the LSB below, and the Neptune habitat down in the lake was monitored and controlled. One of its windows shattered and shards of glass cut his face open.

The drill tower was burning.

He gagged on smoke and was scalded by hot steam, but he did not stop. In the pod, he activated the backup generator and all the screens, peripherals, and readouts lit up.

The code.

Enter the code.

Send it.

Yes, the very thing he had memorized from the classified folder in his safe on the LSB. The thing which had terrified him because his orders were most specific: if the operation failed and there was danger of contamination from the city itself, the doomsday scenario had to be activated. He logged himself onto the ONI’s system, entering his security codes. It was online. There was still connectivity with the satellite above.

Do it.

Bring hell down upon you.

Swallowing, the drill tower literally coming down around him, he entered the final codes which would activate the device that was hidden in Kharkov Station. He had worried that it would be activated by the puppet masters of the Lake Vordog project, but in the end, his was the hand of God that initiated it.

The screen blinked red.

Ten minutes.

Ten fucking minutes.

Jesus.

45
BIRTH

Orr made it to the doorway of the tower and he knew he would never get any farther. He was out of fight. He would await the inevitable. Maybe the tower would collapse and crush him like an insect.

No matter.

No matter.

“Mission…complete,” he muttered, shaking hip-deep in the slush which moved with sluggish waves and ripples.