Tunnels 06 - Terminal

by the broken lid to pick something up from amongst the pieces. The lid hadn’t been completely solid – inside it there had been an object.
    She stood up with it. It was some sort of baton, almost two feet in length.
    ‘My God!’ Will exclaimed. ‘It looks exactly like the tower!’
    And it did; with the same section at the tip, it could have been a model of the tower from the inner world. It also seemed to be made from the same material as the tower, its surface smooth and grey.
    And when the bare skin of Elliott’s hand had come into contact with it, a band around the shaft glowed with an intense blue light. It was identical to the light that they had witnessed before in both the tower and the pyramid.
    ‘Ah, so the batteries are still good,’ Will whispered, trying not to laugh with the strangeness of it all.
    ‘This is what I came for,’ she murmured, as she got to her feet and held the object reverentially up before her.
    ‘But what is it? A weapon of some kind – a mace?’ Will asked, then something occurred to him. ‘I hope it won’t suddenly change into another tower, will it?’
    ‘It’s a sceptre, and I have to take it back,’ Elliott said, her eyes locked on it.
    At the mention of the word, Will gave a small shrug. ‘Okay, it’s a sceptre then, can I see it?’ He stepped forward with his hand out, but Elliott snatched the object away.
    ‘No, don’t,’ she said sharply. ‘You shouldn’t touch it.’
    ‘Fine, be like that.’ He shrugged again, instead going to examine the broken parts of the lid from the sarcophagus where the sceptre had been concealed. There was a circular channel bored right into the middle of the thick stone of the lid, which of course was now empty. ‘So this sceptre thing of yours could have been hidden in there for centuries, and nobody had the faintest idea,’ he thought out loud. ‘And, ofcourse, all these relics were brought back to England by Victorian collectors, like, a century or two ago, so this sarcophagus would have been in Egypt for all the centuries before that. Is that where your sceptre was lost?’
    But Elliott had already gathered up her rifle and Bergen and was heading out of the room.
    ‘Hey, you with the magic stick! Where are you off to now?’ Will shouted as he heard the door slam shut behind her.
    Grabbing his Bergen and Sten, he rushed across the walkway and had just caught up with her several flights down when there was the sound of gunfire hammering away so loudly windows were rattling. Both of them froze on the spot.

    ‘That’s close,’ Elliott shouted. ‘And it’s an automatic weapon.’
    ‘Could be the army?’ Will suggested.
    It was coming from outside the museum, and Elliott was right – it was very close. They raced further down the circular staircase until they could see through the main entrance.
    There was another burst of gunfire and a huge crash.
    ‘A tank!’ Will shouted. ‘Bloody hell!’
    It had shot up the front steps and rammed straight into the doors, crashing through them and mangling the metal and glass.
    It stopped there, half of it in the building and half outside. The automatic fire came again – the volume ear-splitting in the confines of the museum, as the forecourt beyond the tank was sprayed with rounds.
    The hatch opened and someone climbed from it.
    Elliott was the first to recognise who it was through her rifle scope.
    ‘Drake!’ she cried.
    ‘Elliott?’ he yelled back.
    Will and Elliott flew down the stairs. Drake had climbed down from the tank. ‘We picked up the signal from your beacon,’ he said, as Elliott threw her arms around him and held him tight. ‘But I didn’t believe it could really be you two!’ he added. Shaking his head, Drake smiled at Will. ‘But how did you get back here?’
    ‘That’ll take a bit of explaining,’ Will said, then interrupted himself as his friend’s appearance registered with him. ‘Drake, what happened to you?
    Elliott had also taken a step back so she could see his deathly pallor and not only that his arm was strapped up, but that his head and hands were covered in dressings.
    ‘It was the explosion in the pore,’ Drake replied. ‘The radiation caught me.’
    ‘Oh, no,’ Elliott said, barely audibly.
    Just then the machine gun began to hammer away again. As it stopped, there was urgent yelling from inside the tank.
    ‘Who’s that?’ Elliott asked.
    ‘Jiggs,’ Drake said. ‘The Armagi are building up outside, so we have to