Tunnels 06 - Terminal

clavicle.
    As he detached himself from the lifeless Limiter, Jiggs didn’t have time to dwell on his victory. There was only one thought in his mind; he knew he was already far below the nuclear device that Drake and Sweeney had secured to the side of the void and then primed ready for remote detonation. And he knew that he had to put as much distance between himself and the device as he could.
    Before it went off.
    Jiggs didn’t feel any guilt over saving his own skin. There was nothing he could do for Will and the others back at the top of the pore – he was too far away to help them now.
    Grabbing the booster rocket from a side pocket of his Bergen, he spun the valve round to full thrust and, aiming it behind him, fired it up. A blue flame sprouted from the end of the propulsion unit, and he took off like a firework.
    At the breakneck speed he was travelling, he exited the void in a matter of seconds and then shot out into the huge cavern beyond, as endless as the night sky. Although they were still many hundreds of miles away, his trajectory was taking him straight towards the suspended bodies of water behindwhich ethereal lights flickered. Jiggs had already witnessed this illumination on the first leg of the journey to the inner world, and knew that it was being produced by triboluminescence in the Crystal Belt, where mountain-sized lumps of crystal ground against each other like some sort of perpetual motion machine. And this was also generating the rumbling sound that filled his ears. But, at that precise moment, Jiggs didn’t care which way he was heading – he just had to get himself clear of the blast radius.
    With the booster still on full thrust, he braced himself for the explosion, counting the seconds. He continued to count until he’d reached a full minute, then two minutes, then three. At that point he stopped, wondering if Drake and the Rebecca twin were still facing each other in some sort of stand-off, or even if they had agreed to a truce, unlikely as that seemed. Perhaps there wasn’t to be an explosion after all.
    Then the atomic device detonated.
    As the roar shook every bone in his body, he braced himself for the first wave from the one-kiloton bomb – the blast of light and searing heat. He knew better than to look at it, making sure his head was tucked well down and that his eyes were protected by his arm. The heat on his back was so intense he really thought that his Bergen and clothing might burst into flames.
    He didn’t have time to worry further about this as the shock wave caught up with him. The wall of compressed air felt precisely as if a giant hand had slapped him, flinging him forward with such impetus that he could barely draw breath. He was reminded of the first time he’d gone on a roller coaster as a child; the sensation of falling at precipitous speed was identical, but this ride seemed to have no end.
    Daring to remove his arm from his face as he sped along, he caught a brief glimpse of the torrents of light from the blast rebounding and reflecting from the far-flung corners of the huge chamber before him. As the whole area lit up, it was so vast and endless it made him feel vertiginous. The glittering masses of water and gargantuan crystal spheres were revealed in all their glory – perhaps as they’d never been before in this secret place deep within the planet.
    And what made absolutely no sense to him was, for the instant in which the veil of darkness was lifted, he could have sworn that the line of crystal spheres was remarkably regular, as if they weren’t simply some artefact of nature. And there was also something curious about the stretch of cavern wall he’d glimpsed through the haze in the extreme distance – it appeared to be marked with grids of lines, or raised sections of some description.
    ‘Pull yourself together!’ he growled at himself. There had to be a rational explanation – the patterns he’d noticed must be due to the superheated air currents. Either that or the shock wave from the explosion had temporarily scrambled his vision.
    And it had been one hell of an explosion. He peered over his shoulder, quickly locating the dull red glow that marked ground zero. Where the void had previously been, the rock had fused into one massive plug of silicate and completely sealed the way into the inner world, just as Drake had predicted it would.
    ‘Jesus!’ Jiggs cried, flinching as a white-hot lump of rock shot not ten feet away from him. As