Aftershock Read online

  noted, had single-handedly demolished two bottles of red over dinner.

  ‘Later,’ Harry replied, draining his glass and refilling it. ‘My crew are busy though. See over there?’ He pointed to a spot on the far side of the stage where a cameraman was filming the room.

  ‘Must be a very glamourous job,’ Jim said.

  Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘Can be, but not often, truth be told. Mainly involves a lot of sitting around and waiting, then a quick burst of activity and you’re supposed to remember your lines.’ He laughed good-naturedly. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘can’t complain about gigs like this.’ And he raised his glass, clinking it with Jim’s.

  Jim turned to Sheila Hoffman and was about to say something when he realised the music for the dance troupe had faded. A moment later, a familiar voice came over the PA.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Good evening.’ There was a murmur from the diners and all heads turned towards the stage to see Hollywood legend Danny Preston dressed in an elegant tux and holding a microphone.

  ‘God! It’s a talking fossil,’ Harry said in Jim’s ear.

  Jim produced a faint smile and sat back in his chair, arms folded.

  ‘Well, ain’t this something? I always wanted to play a part in a sci-fi movie,’ Preston said, and beamed at the audience. ‘The closest I got was in my first film, when I played the part of a telepathic cactus. Even I’ve forgotten the title of that one.’

  The audience laughed. Preston gazed around at the guests, pausing for a moment. ‘But this.’ And he waved towards the expansive view beyond the glass walls. ‘This is science fiction come to life. I’ve been here most of the day, ladies and gentlemen, but I can still hardly believe my eyes. It truly is a new wonder of the world.

  ‘Now, I won’t prattle on. My job here is to introduce the star of the evening and then buzz off. I’m told a glass of Dom Perignon awaits.’

  A ripple of laughter.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. There are few stars who can claim to be truly global superstars, but tonight, the Xavier family have arranged a special treat. A young woman, who had her first hit when she was just 16. It is hard to believe that was only three years ago because it feels as though her name has been known around the world for so much longer. I give you ... Kristy Sunshine!’

  There was a sharp tap on Johnny Xavier’s shoulder. He turned to see a short, solidly built man with greying hair and a lined, tanned face. It was one of his senior engineers, Miguel Bandonis.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ the man said. ‘I couldn’t reach you by phone.’ He waved a hand in the air to indicate the noise.

  ‘What’s up?’ Xavier responded, standing up and escorting the engineer away from the table. He glanced back at the guests and then led the way over to the edge of the circular pool. Kristy Sunshine’s intro music began with a throbbing drum and bass rhythm. Xavier cursed under his breath and was forced to shout to be heard. ‘Well?’

  ‘We’ve had a minor incident in one of the conduits, sir,’ Miguel Bandonis shouted back above the noise.

  ‘What sort of “minor” incident?’

  ‘A relay blew. One of my men was repairing it and a small fire started inside the wall unit. It was extinguished almost immediately.’

  ‘What’s the damage?’

  ‘Nothing really, sir. We replaced the relay, patched up some charred circuitry. One of the secondary systems is out of action, but...’

  ‘Precisely which secondary system, Bandonis?’

  ‘The emergency doors. But the fire was a long way from the primary door system. I’m just worried about the sensors around them.’

  ‘Why are you worried?’

  ‘They were one of the ... er ... cutbacks, sir.’ Bandonis gave Xavier a meaningful look.

  ‘Cutbacks? What do you mean?’

  Bandonis decided tact was essential if he were to keep his job. ‘I heard, er ... a while back, there were some budget cuts.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ Xavier retorted.

  Bandonis was smart enough not to push it. If Xavier wanted to play innocent, fine. ‘Okay, sir,’ he said. ‘If the primaries for the emergency doors showed any problems we’d know about it immediately.’

  Xavier looked around the room. The guests were on their feet, clapping excitedly, but nothing could be heard over the pulsing beat. Lights swept the stage. There was a palpable sense of expectation in the vast room. He looked away towards the ocean. ‘Yes. I think we would know about it, Bandonis,’ Xavier said dismissively. ‘Keep me informed.’ And he turned back to the stage as the engineer retreated.

  The music reached a crescendo and the lights snapped on, full power. Kristy Sunshine was standing centre stage, arms raised, head down. She was wearing an ABBAesque silver jumpsuit, long tassels hanging from her arms. Her hair was pulled back, partially covered by a sequinned bandana. The opening notes of her first hit single, a ballad, ‘You Are My Everything’ , spilled from enormous speakers at the sides of the stage, and she began to sing.

  The audience moved to the hypnotic throb of the bass line. The sound grew as the first verse ended and the band crashed into the chorus. Kristy’s voice soared above the music, a melody that had blasted from a million radios three years earlier, a hooky tune that had girdled the world. The sound reverberated around the dome, soaring and swooping into a solitary synthesiser riff. A hush as Kristy’s voice came in again, quiet and pleading.

  BOOM.

  For a second, everyone thought it was a bass drum. Everyone but the drummer, that is.

  BOOM.

  The room shook. The music stopped. The high-pitched hum of powerful amplifiers bounced around the glass dome. Then came a solitary shriek of feedback.

  Screams.

  BOOM.

  Screams.

  The room shook again. A lighting rig tumbled forward and smashed across a table.

  The entire dome shook.

  Screams.

  BOOM. BOOM.

  A metal beam crashed to the floor, crushing a score of people. Tables flew through the air, bottles and plates cascaded onto the carpet. Two huge chandeliers plunged to the floor, each smashing into a thousand pieces. Human bodies slammed together. A man somersaulted through the air and landed on a metal post, the pole skewering him. Blood spewed into the air.

  BOOM.

  The crash of breaking glass. Metal grinding against metal.

  Screams.

  BOOM.

  A massive rumble. The dome shuddered. The vast banqueting suite looked as though it had been filmed and the celluloid strip had caught, juddering, in an old-fashioned movie projector.

  BOOM.

  Silence.

  17

  Base One, Tintara Island

  It was close to midnight at Base One. The night shift was manning their stations in Cyber Control. Tom was in his motorised wheelchair studying the holoscreen on his laptop. He looked up as a loud buzzing sound reverberated around the room and zipped over to the control console where two techs were running some software checks.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  ‘BigEye 9.’

  ‘On the main screen. And get the others here.’

  The screen was filled with a green smudge, but gradually it cleared. The image was coming from BigEye 9, one of 32 satellites in geosynchronous orbit about the earth. Each BigEye was loaded with detection equipment supplied by CARPA. They could detect any form of what was designated as an ‘unconventional’ disturbance on the planet. They were also programmed to act intelligently – that is, to filter out any ‘disturbances’ that fitted acceptable parameters and analyse any form of explosion, landslide, seismic or volcanic activity, any unregistered troop massing, gunfire or other military signature. If anything untoward was detected, the BigEye raised the alarm and transmitted the information to Base One.

  The screen began to show the outline of an island. It resembled a larger version of Tintara. As the camera on BigEye 9 zoomed in, the image moved to a spot a dozen kilom
etres off the north coast of the island.

  ‘Sybil. What are the coordinates, please?’ Tom asked.

  ‘16’ 46” 39.9”’ North, 179’ 14” 31.8”’ East. A point 12.2 kilometres off the north coast of Fiji in the Pacific Ocean.’

  ‘Zoom in.’

  The middle third of the screen expanded and the outer edges of the image fell out of sight. The picture was now an unbroken blue.

  ‘What are we looking at, Syb?’

  ‘The Neptune Hotel.’

  ‘The what? Info on screen, please.’

  A block of text appeared.

  The Neptune Hotel. Construction recently completed. Designed by Felix Hoffman. Owned by an international consortium known as Bathoscope Holdings Ltd. CEO is Michael Xavier. Hotel is due to open in 24 hours.

  The Neptune Hotel is located 12.2 km off the north coast of Fiji. Grid reference: 16’ 46” 39.9”’ North, 179’ 14” 31.8”’ East.

  Structure stands 100 metres below the surface.

  ‘Do you have a schematic, Sybil?’

  Two diagrams appeared, artist’s impressions showing the view from above and another from the side. The first showed three circles in a linear arrangement. They were linked by passageways approximately 20 metres long, 5 wide. To the north of the middle circle lay two smaller circles with a channel running from each to the central dome. The side view was from the south and portrayed the three huge domes constituting the hotel. It offered no sense of scale.

  ‘How big are those things?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Each dome is 60.34 metres high and 51.2 metres in diameter.’

  He whistled.

  At that moment, Mark and Mai strode in. Mark looked tired. He had just finished a double shift. Mai had been in the shower when the alarm sounded. She was in a fresh jumpsuit, her jet black bob still wet. Without makeup, her high cheekbones were even more striking than normal. She somehow looked younger. Pete arrived a few moments later, dumping a backpack on the floor. He had just returned from a training exercise on the other side of Tintara.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Not sure yet. The epicentre of the trouble is this place.’

  The three new arrivals stared at the screen. ‘What the hell...?’

  ‘A hotel complex 100 metres beneath the Pacific. Quite amazing,’ Tom replied. Then he turned to the two technicians. ‘Anything more from BigEye 9?’

  ‘Just in.’

  The screen lit up with a live image of the Neptune Hotel. It was obscured by churning water and sediment, but it was obvious something terrible had happened to the building. The most easterly dome was tilted as though its foundations had been damaged.

  ‘An earthquake?’ Mai queried, standing next to Mark.

  ‘Anything?’ the E-Force leader asked, turning to Tom who had returned to the main control console. ‘Data are coming in now,’ he said and tapped at his laptop. Numbers and symbols skittered across the holoscreen. ‘Looks like a quake,’ he said after a moment. ‘Sybil? Project data from BigEye 9 on the screen.’

  A set of coloured graphs appeared. Pete took two steps towards the screen and scanned the information. ‘Hard to tell from this if it was a quake or a bomb, to be honest,’ he said. ‘Could be both of course. A bomb that caused a quake.’

  ‘I seem to remember Fiji sits on the boundary of two tectonic plates,’ Mai said. ‘Sybil, show the plate arrangement on screen.’

  The screen split. The graphs moved to the left, a new map appeared on the right. The map showed Fiji and the ocean around it. Superimposed onto this was a series of jagged lines.

  ‘Fiji is located at the boundary of the Australian and Pacific plates,’ Sybil said. ‘These two plates are opposite-ffacing subduction zones.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Mai asked.

  ‘The plates move in opposite directions which means their movements have caused transform faults in the past. Fiji was also once a volcanic island but has been inactive for a long time.’

  ‘Seems like an odd place to put a hotel, don’t you think, Sybil?’ Tom remarked.

  ‘I would have to disagree,’ the computer replied. ‘My analysis shows that the region to the north of Fiji where the Neptune Hotel has been constructed is, in fact, unusually stable. The ocean floor in this region is known as the Fiji plateau, a relatively flat and rocky area formed millions of years ago. Furthermore, the nearest fracture definitely produced by tectonic activity within the past million years lies approximately 298 kilometres to the north.’

  ‘Well, what about a quake some distance away that caused a disturbance under the hotel?’ Pete asked.

  ‘BigEyes 9, 16 and 21 confirm no sign of seismic activity within a 1000 kilometre radius of the site during the past 48 hours.’

  ‘All right,’ Mark said. ‘Tom, we need more information on this place. Was anyone in it at the time of the shock?’

  Tom touched the keys of the virtual keypad – a strip of lights on a plastic plate under the holoscreen of his laptop.

  Mark ran his hand over his cropped hair and turned to the techs. ‘I need a full infrared scan asap,’ he said. Then he glanced back at Tom. ‘Anything?’

  ‘There’s almost nothing online about the place. Just permits for construction, design drawings and schematics. There’re a couple of very vague articles about the Xavier family, the bunch behind the scheme, plus lots of hits for the designer, Felix Hoffman. But he’s put nothing on record about working on the project. It’s sealed pretty tight.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ Mark retorted and whirled towards the techs. ‘Guys? Anything from BigEye?’

  ‘Coming through now.’

  A black outline appeared, superimposed over the distorted live image. It was a computer-generated image of the way the structure of the hotel should have been. They could see how all three domes were now misaligned and how the top of the most westerly dome to the left of the screen had shattered. Then, as they watched, scores of red dots appeared within the outline. Most of these were concentrated at the top of the dome on the right of the screen. Each one represented a warm human body.

  ‘Hotel staff and guests,’ one of the techs commented gravely. ‘Some alive and some newly dead.’

  18

  Dome Gamma

  When Harry opened his eyes, he thought he must be dead. All he could see was a blurred yellow light. It took his eyes a moment to focus, and his brain a few more to process the fact that he was actually looking at a flame, a couple of centimetres from his nose. Then he felt the heat. He recoiled, and realised he was lying on his side. Rolling over, he felt a stab of pain in his left arm and shoulder. He kneeled up and wiped a hand across his face, and it came up wet with blood.

  The room was almost black, the only light coming from fires dotted about the vast expanse. Then, as Harry tried to see through the gloom, the emergency lights flickered and stuttered into life. They cast a greenish, unhealthy aura over a scene of abject horror.

  There was dust everywhere. It fell like fine rain drifting down onto twisted human shapes. There was debris scattered all around – paper, tablecloths and cutlery, pieces of crockery, food, smashed wine bottles, shards of glass and lumps of twisted metal. Harry had been thrown against a column, and remembered how he had grabbed at it as the room swayed and the world seemed to be ending. Now he pulled himself to his feet, using the column to steady himself. He was covered in fine powder, from head to toe. His jacket was ripped to pieces and there was a gouge in the leather of his right shoe. Something had cut through it, narrowly missing his foot.

  He tried again to rub the dust from his face, but only succeeded in driving the powder into his eyes. He blinked away the pain and felt again a sharp stab in his arm and shoulder. He pulled off his jacket and his shirt sleeve was red with blood. He tore at the sodden fabric and saw a deep cut in his upper arm, just above the elbow. It jolted him. He felt a rush of adrenalin, snapping him into the moment.

  ‘Help me, please.’ The voice came from behind him. He turned and saw Jim Kemple.
He was pinned under a table.

  Harry crouched down and tried to pull the table away, but it was too heavy. ‘Can you push up, Jim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On three. One, two...’

  The table began to lever up and Harry suddenly felt the weight lighten.

  Turning, he saw Jim’s partner, Alfred Taylor. He had his shoulders under the edge of the table. ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Get Jim out.’

  Harry ducked down, squeezed his hands under Jim’s shoulders and dragged him to his feet as Alfred let the table go with a dull thud.

  ‘You okay?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  Alfred stepped over and hugged his partner. ‘Nothing broken?’

  Jim patted himself. ‘Nope. Just the usual maddening knee,’ Jim replied, rubbing where his cartilage hurt. ‘You?’

  Alfred looked down at the fabric of his trousers clinging wet to his right leg. ‘Cut leg and a few bruises but otherwise...’

  They turned in unison as a horrible scream cut the air. In the half light they could just see a figure a few metres away. The person sat up from a prone position on the floor, convulsed then fell back, lifeless.

  Harry was first over there. It was a woman who had been at a nearby table. He didn’t know her name. She was dead.

  He stood up. ‘What the fuck happened?’

  ‘No idea. A quake?’ Alfred offered.

  Their eyes had begun to adjust to the light and now they could see the whole room, albeit through a haze. The stage had collapsed, and the lighting rigs had crashed down onto it. The dance floor was dotted with shattered bodies. Harry jumped back suddenly as he realised the lumpy object at his foot was a human arm, mangled, red and grey. ‘Fuck,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Okay, what do we do?’ Jim asked.

  Harry was about to try and answer when they heard another sound, a child.

  It came from their left, near the edge of the circular pool. They made their way towards the source of the sound, picking a route through the mess. The light was fractured, a pallid, sickly glow. A few moments later, they had reached the edge of the pool. There was nothing there but piles of debris. Then they heard the voice again, a child calling for help. They edged their way along the rim of the pool, the green glow producing a sinister pallor in what they knew had been pristine water just a few minutes ago.