Tunnels 06 - Terminal

was.’
    Jürgen was shaking his head. ‘None of this makes the slightest bit of sense. It was as though there was an explosion here. But why didn’t we feel or hear anyth—?’ He fell silent as his walkie-talkie crackled and his brother’s worried voice came over it. Jürgen listened for a moment, muttering, ‘Oh, thank God.’ He looked quickly over at Will and Elliott to tell them what he’d just heard. ‘Karl and Werner were pelted by debris in their vehicle, but they’re both safe.’ He spoke into the radio again. ‘Werner, as far as we can tell it seems to have originated from here, but …’
    The radio crackled and Werner was saying, ‘Hello, hello, are you there?’, but Jürgen was holding it away from his ear.
    Just as Will and Elliott were doing, he was staring into the distance, at the intersecting point between the three pyramids.
    Where something was causing the soil and the crust to be thrown skywards in a huge spout.
    There was a low rumble as, all of a sudden, an enormous needle-like structure erupted from the ground itself, thrusting up higher and higher.
    ‘Just when I thought this couldn’t get any weirder,’ Willsaid under his breath.

    Soil and rocks were spilling from the top of the structure as it reached its full height, several times that of the pyramid they were on.
    ‘A tower?’ Elliott murmured.
    ‘Werner, er … let me get back to you,’ Jürgen muttered into the radio. ‘No, I’ll call you. You and Karl stay exactly where you are until I do.’ Werner’s anxious voice could still be heard over the radio as Jürgen simply switched it off.
    ‘Where’s the bushman?’ Elliott asked, as she noticed he wasn’t with them.
    ‘There he goes,’ Will said, spotting the lone figure making its way purposefully over the bare earth in the direction of the tower. ‘I reckon we need to get after our friend Woody and make him give us some answers.’ Squinting at the tower in the distance, Will chuckled. ‘Besides, we need to take a closer look at that!’

    Parry was escorted down through the airlock first, followed by Chester. Once inside, they were taken through to the bridge where Chester was peering around at the various terminals manned by the crew. Some of the men looked up from their instrumentation panels to give him and Parry curious but fleeting glances, as if they knew they weren’t meant to show too much interest. Chester felt light-headed; he’d been plucked from a seventeenth-century farmers’ croft that relied on a generator in an outhouse for its electricity, to a state-of-the-art nuclear submarine stuffed to the gills with electronics. And it belonged to the world’s leading superpower, no less.
    It was all rather unreal, as if he was in a film. Except in a film you couldn’t get a sense of how rank it smelt, with so many men in an enclosed space. It reminded Chester of when he and his parents had joined a long-haul flight on their way home from their holidays one summer.
    Two people in dark blue suits suddenly appeared. ‘Homeland Security,’ the young woman announced, flashing a badge to Parry.
    ‘Watch the birdie,’ the man accompanying her said, as he aimed a device at Chester and Parry in turn.
    ‘Facial recognition. They’re making sure we are who we are,’ Parry said to Chester, as the man scrutinised a screen onthe back of the device and turned to his colleague.
    ‘Both positive,’ he said.
    ‘Me too?’ Chester asked Parry. ‘But how do they know who I am?’
    Parry was about to answer when the woman held something up. Chester recognised it immediately.
    ‘It’s one of Danf—!’ he began to exclaim, catching himself before he uttered the name of the man he most reviled in the world. ‘It’s a Purger,’ he corrected himself quickly.
    ‘Yes. Nothing like having your own technology turned on you, is there?’ Parry said.
    ‘Please don’t talk. Focus on this point here,’ the woman snapped, indicating the small lens at top of the small cylinder with her finger.
    ‘Sorry,’ Chester muttered as she played the purple beam into his eyes, then Parry’s.
    ‘They haven’t been Dark Lighted,’ the woman confirmed, typing the result into her PDA.
    ‘Actually, it’s Darklit ,’ Chester piped up before he knew what he was saying.
    The woman shot him a frosty look as another man came up to them. ‘Commander,’ he said to Parry. From his age and insignia, Chester guessed who he was before he shook hands with them