Will brought up his Sten as Elliott very slowly swung the lid of the hatch open. She directed his attention to something just inside it, a package the size of a brick, with a wire extending from it. Or at least what was left of the wire after Elliott had attached the twine to it and cut it, rendering it harmless. Will didn’t need to be told that the package was some form of explosive device. The Limiter had rigged up a booby trap, probably putting it together from chemicals he’d found on the submarine. There was no other explanation.
Will followed Elliott inside the conning tower, where she mouthed the words “Wait here,” then slipped outside the submarine again. Clinging to the ladder, Will kept on his guard, watching out for the Styx. Elliott was gone for less than a minute, reappearing with both Dr. Burrows and Bartleby, who she was tugging behind her on a leash. She closed the main hatch, and they all crept along the ladder to the submarine’s bridge. Now that they were inside, the rumbling sound was considerably reduced, giving them the opportunity to talk.
“That was a close call,” Will said, shaking his head. “Another second and I’d have set that bomb off. Thanks.”
Elliott held her finger to her lips. “Not so loud,” she whispered, looking cautiously up and down the gangways at either end of the bridge. “And don’t touch a thing!” she hissed at Dr. Burrows, who had begun to inspect the banks of equipment. “There might be a second trap around here somewhere.”
“Chester? And Martha?” Will asked. “They didn’t come with you?”
Elliott shook her head. “Just me and the Hunter.”
She used Bartleby to make a thorough search of all the compartments, checking for trip wires as she went. Will followed behind, covering her with his Sten. The orientation of the submarine and the fact that they couldn’t use the gangways didn’t matter, because they were able to float along in midair, like divers swimming through a submerged wreck. As there was no sign of the twins or the Limiter, they made their way back to the bridge, where Dr. Burrows was waiting.
“I never expected you to come after me,” Will said to Elliott, in a half question. “You didn’t need to.”
“Lucky for you I did,” Elliott replied, but didn’t offer any sort of explanation.
“And Chester — do you know what he’s going to do?” Will asked her.
“No, he didn’t really say, although I think he might try to go to his Topsoil home. But he did say the next time he saw you he’d knock the living daylights out of you. He said you should’ve at least discussed it with him before taking a flying jump over the edge like that.”
“I was afraid he’d try to stop me,” Will muttered.
But Elliott was already thinking ahead. “So the Styx aren’t here, but because they rigged the explosive on the main hatch we know that at least one of them survived. So they’ve either hidden the virus somewhere in this submarine, or —”
“Or they’ve got it with them,” Will interrupted her.
“Correct,” she said. “So our job isn’t done yet.”
“I bet this was one of the new generation of subs with stealth drives the Russians and Americans were both developing,” Dr. Burrows suddenly piped up. “Maybe the Russians were using it to spy on England from the North Sea, and as a subsea plate shifted it was sucked down into this void.”
“Smoking Jean … I’ve named this void Smoking Jean,” Will said.
“After Celia’s sister … How very appropriate.” Dr. Burrows grinned momentarily, then he was off again on his theory. “And maybe no one knows this sub has been lost because the Russian government would hardly want to publicize th —”
“Focus,” Elliott cut him off sharply. “We need to focus. There’s absolutely no point hanging around here. I’m going to set a charge to blitz everything inside this sub, in case they’ve left the virus behind. Then we need to find out just where they’ve gone.”
“But how? In this place?” Will asked her, then glanced at Bartleby, who was cleaning his nether parts. “Use Bartleby the Traitor to sniff them out?”
She nodded. “We’ll do a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree search around the submarine,” she proposed. “It’ll be faster if we split up — I’ll take the area below the submarine. Will, you can take the shelf and the areas on either side, and —”
“No way,” Will countered immediately.
“Why not?”
“Because every time they do that in the movies something terrible happens. We stick together. And we make sure Bartleby stays with us, because whenever the cat runs off and someone has to go and fetch it, that’s really bad news, too.”
“You’re your mother’s son,” Dr. Burrows commented wryly.
Elliott glanced from Will to Dr. Burrows. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it makes you feel better, we can keep together,” she said with a sigh. “Now make yourselves scarce while I set the charges.”
Once she had returned outside, Elliott linked them all together with the climbing rope. Will watched her as she was doing this. Although she had risked everything to reach this phenomenal depth in the earth, and there might be no going back, there was a grim determination about her. She was set on doing her duty and finding the Styx. Will drew strength from this. Maybe he’d acted on a rash impulse when he jumped after his father, but he was proud that he’d also risked his life to do what he had to do. Just as Drake would have expected of him.
They made a thorough search of the fungal ledge around the submarine. Bartleby didn’t pick up any trails there, so they began to climb down the inclined side of the void underneath the ledge, on the lookout for any caves or openings, or any evidence that the Styx had gone the same way. As they reached another fungal shelf below, Bartleby was becoming increasingly agitated. Will didn’t know if the constant rumbling was putting him on edge, but whatever it was, he didn’t seem to be finding any trace of the Styx.
As they climbed still farther down the void, they found that there were no more fungal ledges below them, and were forced to cling to the bare rock face. The biggest risk remained that if one of them made a sudden movement, they might all be sent careering off into the void.
When Elliott’s charges in the submarine finally detonated, they had covered quite some distance, and heard nothing of the explosion over the unceasing rumbling. Nevertheless, as they all paused to watch the brief blaze of light above, Will felt a little strange, because with the submarine gutted they now had nowhere they could return to. They were very much alone in this alien environment, where trying to find three Styx was tantamount to searching for three needles in the biggest haystack imaginable, and in the darkest of nights, too.
After a while Elliott drew them to a halt and indicated that they should reverse direction. She obviously thought they’d gone far enough and that it was time to search higher up the void.
It was exactly at this moment that one of the group made an overzealous movement.
Before they knew it, they were sailing away from the wall at some speed and out into the middle of the void. Will could see Elliott’s panic-stricken face and her open mouth as she screamed, then he realized he was doing exactly the same. But he couldn’t hear anything except the jaw-rattling rumbling, and there was nothing that he or any of the others could do but grab tightly on to each other, with a very anxious Bartleby trailing several feet behind them on his tether.
Eventually their momentum diminished as the air resistance brought them to a halt.
But it wasn’t quite a halt. They were still drifting through the nothingness at the center of the void, similar to when the engine of a boat fails and it’s left to the vagaries of the currents.
Thoroughly confused, Bartleby hadn’t stopped thrashing his long limbs in an attempt to get back to the side. Now Will and Elliott joined in with him, paddling with their hands and kicking out, anything to get themselves into motion again, but it was all to no avail. As the hours passed, the three of them attempted to communicate with each other, but what could they do? There wer
e no fungal ledges to aim for, and even if there were, they had no means of reaching them. And while Will and Elliott remained in a state of panic, Dr. Burrows appeared strangely composed.
They gravitated toward a large boulder, which was spinning slowly on its axis, and were eventually able to seize hold of it. Its surface was pitted and rusty, like that of an asteroid. They clung to it for a while, then, at Dr. Burrows’s suggestion, they used it to push themselves off, precisely as though they were three divers jumping into a pool. Equal and opposite forces, Will thought as they went one way and the boulder the other — although it really didn’t get them anywhere. Using his headset, Will continued to check the space around them, hoping and praying there would be something else to help them. They bumped into pieces of rock and sometimes encountered small cloudlike formations of gravel, but nothing substantial. Will was still scanning all around them when, with a start, he realized he could no longer see the sides of Smoking Jean. They seemed to have disappeared altogether. Looking over his shoulder, he spotted them at some distance behind, growing smaller by the second.
Will knew then that they had gone beyond the void.
He pointed frantically in an effort to tell his father, but Dr. Burrows just shrugged in response. Slowly but surely they seemed to have floated into a totally new area. Into the area where the triboluminescent flashes came and went.
Will broke into a cold sweat as he saw that ahead of them was an infinite darkness. It was as though they had been shot beyond the stratosphere and into outer space, but this was some kind of inner space at the center of the earth.
All they could do was watch the triboluminescence as they gradually approached a continuous belt of what appeared to be floating mountains of crystal. As these crystals trundled ponderously around against each other, the evanescent but regular bursts of light zipped through the belt, allowing Will to make out that it stretched as far as the eye could see to the left and the right. The closest thing he could compare it to was the satellite photographs he’d seen of the rings of Saturn. There was a dreamlike quality to the lights, and as he stared at them, he found he was becoming almost mesmerized. This must be one of the wonders of the planet, he thought to himself, knowing that he might not be around long enough to tell anyone about it.
And it was impossible to judge distances. Wave upon wave of nausea washed through Will, and this wasn’t solely due to the effect of the zero gravity on his stomach. It was because he had the impression he was falling toward the lights from an incredible height. And at other times his mind played tricks on him; he really believed the lights were in touching distance and would try to reach out to them. They became a string of Chinese lanterns flickering on and off. But as he regained his sense of perspective, he knew that there was probably a vast distance between where he was and where the belt of crystal mountains lay. Will wondered if they would simply die of hunger as they drifted there, marooned in the night-black darkness; or if they ever did get as far as the rotating crystals perhaps they’d be crushed to a paste between them.
Then Dr. Burrows gathered them together and tried to explain something by scribbling on a scrap of paper and motioning with his hands. In the end, he gave up and simply took Will’s Sten gun from him. He slipped off the safety catch and, without any warning, he shot it. It was as though a retro rocket had been fired. Bartleby was startled by the muzzle flash from the weapon and Elliott had a heck of a job restraining him, but they were on the move again. The recoil from the Sten had propelled them at some considerable speed — not back toward the void, but deeper into the space where the crystal mountains were slowly turning.
For the life of him, Will couldn’t understand what his father was hoping to achieve, but he didn’t attempt to stop him. At least he seemed to have a plan. Dr. Burrows continued to fire the Sten, Will and Elliott reloading the magazines for him each time he emptied the weapon. Sometimes the shots made them wheel dizzily around as they went forward, but more often than not Dr. Burrows got them just right and they sped straight ahead.
Will found he’d completely lost track of time. They hadn’t eaten anything or slept for what seemed like ages, but the whole scale of the place was so mind-blowing and so terrifying that none of them dwelt on this for very long.
And words such as up or down, left or right held little meaning in this place — there was only the crystal belt to orient themselves on.
It may have taken them as much as a day — Will really couldn’t tell — but they entered an area where dust particles and water droplets hung in the air, making everything hazy. Many hours later, it seemed to Will, they’d passed through this area and were moving away from the crystal belt. Just as he was wondering if the dust they’d traveled through was at the very edge of the belt, he thought he caught a glimpse of what his father was aiming for.
Dimly visible in the distance, he spotted a beam of light. It was different from the triboluminescence — it was constant. And it gave them all hope.
With each shot from the Sten, the beam of light was coming that little bit closer. And when Will looked back, they definitely seemed to be leaving the crystal belt behind. But as Dr. Burrows fired the weapon time and time again, Will began to worry that they’d run out of ammunition. Then he found they were actually in the beam of light. There was a quality to it, a warmth, that prompted him to think it could be sunlight, but that notion didn’t make much sense to him.
At one point, Dr. Burrows stopped using the Sten and became terribly animated as he jabbed a finger toward the crystal belt. The column of light penetrated it like a searchlight, enabling them to see that it was not only composed of the huge rotating crystals. No, between them were suspended large bodies of water, like huge raindrops, but these suggested the size of lakes, seas, or maybe even oceans. And in these bodies of water, there appeared to be moving objects. It may have been a trick of the light, but they all swore later that they had caught sight of huge snakelike creatures and fish as large as whales.
Dr. Burrows continued to use the recoil from the Sten to drive them toward the source of the light, which grew so strong that Will switched off his headset. He saw that Elliott was smiling, and then he realized why. They seemed to have left the huge area and entered a new void. The illumination allowed them to see its walls around them. They were still moving toward where the light was originating, moving deeper inside this void. And little by little, gravity was returning. And the rumbling sound was diminishing, too.
It was hard to tell because of its scale, but the new void appeared to be conelike, with steeply angled sides. Dr. Burrows drove them closer to one of the sides, where they could see no sign of the ubiquitous fungus, but something much more surprising. They began to notice small specks of green in among the rocks: alpine plants growing together in clumps in the scree. These specks of green became more numerous the farther in they traveled, until eventually they were joined by gnarled, knotty trees — sorry-looking specimens with twisted trunks and very little foliage that gave the impression they were hanging on to the steep sides for dear life. And when, finally, Elliott spotted a ridge on the sidewall, Dr. Burrows took them over to it.
Like survivors washed up from a shipwreck, they crawled a little way and then just lay there, panting and more grateful than it was possible to express that they were back on terra firma. Elliott had the presence of mind to rope them to one of the trees — the last thing they wanted was to drift off again.
They passed around a canteen of water, and although the rumbling sound was at more bearable levels and they could hear each other, they barely exchanged a word, because none of them knew quite what to say. But they were alive, and as they realized this, their sheer fatigue overtook them and they slept.
“And do the Princes fade from earth, scarce seen by souls of men,” the old Styx declaimed as he stood by the very edge of the Pore in the Deeps.
A little distance around the perimeter, ranks of soldiers in formation were lining up and leaping from the edge. As these L
imiters deployed their parachutes, they resembled wind-borne seeds drifting gently down into the wide expanse of darkness. Each soldier was loaded with equipment, and a number had large bundles dangling below their feet, which writhed and growled.
“Takin’ the dogs with them, too?” said a perturbed voice. “Why are so many of yer soldiers takin’ the plunge? Either this is a suicide mission, or yer know something I don’t.”
“But tho’ obscur’d, this is the form of the Angelic land,” the old Styx continued. He turned slowly to regard the misshapen human form, its head draped with filthy cloth, that had materialized beside him. “I wondered how long it would take for you to show up, Cox,” the old Styx said.
Cox was silent for several seconds, and when he spoke there was indignation in his voice. “Nobody told me ’bout this. What are yer Limiters up to? And what’s with the dogs — why do they need stalkers with them?”
“We have recently learned that the twins are still alive.”
“Down the Pore?” Cox gasped. “No, can’t be.”
“It can be — our information is indisputable. So there’s every chance we can recover the Dominion phials.”
“Ah, that’s good. So —” Cox gushed, but the old Styx silenced him with a flash of his obsidian eyes.
“Let me finish. Not only did the twins survive, but also the Burrows child and so, it transpires, did Elliott.”
“Burrows? Elliott?” Cox gulped. On hearing this, his head twitched like a bird’s and he took a hasty step back from the old Styx. As nebulous as his body was, from the way he was holding himself there was no doubting that this piece of information had made him acutely nervous.
“Yes, they’re both down there somewhere,” the old Styx said, rubbing his chin absently. “And if I recall correctly, your side of the bargain was to deliver up Will Burrows and anyone who’d had contact with him, and in this you have failed us singularly. And to add insult to injury, Drake is loose Topsoil, where he’s been a minor but very real irritation.” The old Styx raised his black-gloved hand and a pair of Limiters immediately appeared on either side of Cox, hoisting him into the air between them.