Blink: Leviathan (Book 2)

17

For the longest time, all he could do was stare down into the chasm. When the quake finally subsided he had scrambled his way over the mountains of debris, past gaping black rents in the floor and finally over the enormous collapsed support. All he found was a bottomless abyss where Amber had been hanging only moments before. Darien sank into a crouch at the edge, his hands tightening into fists as he looked into the dark. Not like this. Please not like this.

He silently cursed the twists of fate that had brought the operatives to this dank, deadly corner of space. At the very least, the only other time he'd lost an operative he'd known what they were walking into. Here, with so many unknowns, it seemed like he'd been cheated. No commander in Blink could have done anything differently, and that stung most of all.

"Darien! Are you..."

Idas voice trailed off as he hauled himself up over the hulk of the fallen support. Darien glanced back at his friend.

"Where...where's Amber?" he asked, his usual bravado gone.

Darien nodded toward the chasm. Idas's eyes widened and he walked slowly over to the edge of the collapse as though in a daze, like he didn't quite believe what he'd just been told. One look over the edge and he seemed to visibly deflate. A moment later Hekket, too, came clambering over the ruins of the supporting pillar. Fortunately it was the only one that had been brought down by the quake. The sheer mass of the underwater city had been enough to withstand the shocks this time.

Hekket joined them at the precipice and after a moment he looked to Darien. "She fell?"

"Yes."

"Space."

"We don't know anything for certain," Darien grated, although even he didn't believe that. He tried to reach her on the radio, but his earpiece just crackled with static.

Hekket shook his head. "Darien, I...that looks bottomless. There's no way-,"

"That's enough!" he snapped, standing up and facing the medic. "I'm not about to write her off until I'm looking at her damned corpse! Do you understand?" Before the other boy could reply Darien's earpiece buzzed with an incoming message and he knew full well who would be calling.

"This is Hammerhead," he said icily.

"Hammerhead, this is Link," said the sub pilot, and her voice lacked all trace of its usual levity. "We just recorded a huge quake emanating from the base of the complex – and we've lost Operative Garret's feed from her mono-rig. Can you give us a status update?"

"Operative Garret," Darien replied, fighting to control his voice. "Just went over a cliff edge thanks to that quake." For a moment the comm simply buzzed with faint static as his words filtered through to the crew back on the Manitta-Vanna.

"Acknowledged, Hammerhead," this time it was Lieutenant Tyndall who spoke, and his tone was that of one military man to another. "Are you able to contact your missing operative?"

"Not yet."

"Do you believe there's a chance she survived the fall?"

Darien hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "I do."

"Very well," Tyndall continued. "Then we must assume she is incapacitated and unable to contact us. Can you reach her location?"

"At this point we're not sure exactly how far down she fell."

"Then listen to me, Operative." Tyndall's voice took on a hard edge. "You won't want to do this, but right now you need to focus on your main mission. Get down to the Coring Well at the city base and figure out just what is causing those quakes. We've been running constant scans of the tectonic plates beneath the city and they haven't so much as quivered in the entire time you've been down there. There is something, however, that's causing the area immediately around the city structure to become unstable. It seems like there's some sort of large, loose object that is shifting its position. We have no real idea where the main power generator for the complex is, but it would follow that it's in a central location. Something that could power a complex of this size would have to be immense, and if it's been damaged or started malfunctioning over the years, it may account for what's happening down there. Whether this has been inadvertently caused by your arrival, or simply bad timing, we just don't know."