In the midst of cornering, Taz felt the world swing out from beneath him. He fought to maintain his balance for two wild, stumbling strides before he slammed into the left-side wall. The CAR clattered to the floor and Taz threw himself into a forward dive, hoping desperately to capture the rifle before it slid down the long, downhill hallway. He pancaked the deck hard, stunned to find neither himself or the weapon in motion.

Flat, he realized abruptly, no slope.

Taz scooped the carbine and rolled to his feet, immediately resuming the single-minded track that led to his fellow Marines. The TAC put them one level up, just beyond the closed double-doors at the end of the hall. He snapped the CAR to his shoulder as he ran and squeezed the secondary trigger.

The larger barrel gave a throaty bark followed by the dull crump of the grenade's detonation. The left of two doors bowed outward, jumping the track that ran the length of the doorframe. "Close enough," Taz snarled as he closed the gap at a dead run. Shoulder down, he slammed into the door and ripped it from the wall.

Lobby, he recognized as he skidded to a halt. The great room echoed with an incomprehensibly booming rumble. On the catwalk above, three silhouettes ran straight at him, dark against the towering wall of liquid light that thundered at their heels. Taz gaped as the muzzle of his CAR drooped slowly to the floor.

b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l.

Merlin led the sprinting trio, running flat out. Monster and Ridgeway ran side by side in his wake. The radiant tsunami angled across the room, smashing the catwalk behind them to pieces. Outpacing them.

"Merlin!" Taz screamed, waving his arms, "down here!"

The engineer's only response was a sudden shift in direction. He broke right and hurdled the rail, launching himself across the void. Taz lunged out of the way as Merlin's armored form slammed down feet-first and tumbled into a forward roll. Monster and Ridgeway followed suit, the force of their tandem landing nearly tearing the balcony from its moorings. As he blew through the doorway, Monster's shoulder clipped the remaining door and sent the metal panel clanging across the hall.

Taz scrambled after them as deafening thunder blotted out the sound of his own feet on the hallway floor.

No way, he thought, no b.l.o.o.d.y way.

The wall behind him exploded beneath a t.i.tan's hammer-blow, every tear hemorrhaged jet-streams of brilliant blue. A frothing piledriver of coolant and mangled steel caught Taz from behind and swept him along like a cork in the rapids.

Taz tried to curl into a ball, wrapping his arms across the top of his head. Something huge rode up on top of him, a crushing weight that sc.r.a.ped him brutally across the floor. The freight train of debris surged forward with a terrible force, plowing through a second wall before it curled back against a third. Churning froth battered Taz with light and force before it finally subsided. With a deep, sucking backwash the radiant tide withdrew, leaving a tide-strewn tangle of wreckage and Marines.

A groan echoed from beneath a bent steel truss as Taz grabbed the end with both hands and shoved. The truss shifted, relieving the painful weight that pinned his left leg to the ground. "Oh b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," Taz grumbled as he pulled himself out from beneath the slab of steel. "Majah, gunny, you all right?"

A lone gauntlet rose slowly from behind a crumpled metal locker, forefinger unsteadily touching the thumb in a rough OK. Beyond Merlin a pair of oversized legs stuck out from beneath a pile of sodden garbage. Taz grabbed a lidless metal drum and tossed it aside as he reached for Monster's hand. The sergeant sat up groggily, shaking off strands of wet insulation. "s.h.i.t," the big man mumbled, "this is getting old."

Far to the right, Ridgeway rose to his feet, shedding garbage as he leaned back against the wall. Taz nodded in his direction, the senior Marine responding in kind.

"Crikey," Taz stammered, sloshing through shin-deep fluid, "what the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l was that on about?" He grabbed the edge of the metal locker and heaved back, tossing it aside as he clutched Merlin's hand. "What'd you do bright boy, leave the b.l.o.o.d.y tap runnin?"

Merlin rose to his feet and shook his head slowly. "Not me hoss," he muttered breathlessly, "something else, someone else had to--"

"Don't be balmy you stupid s.h.i.te, d'ya think we've never felt an AG kick on before?"

Merlin drew himself up and leaned forward until his facemask b.u.mped Taz. "I know the AG came on dumba.s.s, what I said was that I didn't fix it."

"Oh and I suppose the b.l.o.o.d.y gravity faery came along and nogged it with her little wand then, eh?" Taz felt the rush as adrenaline and frustration boiled together, "C'mon, who the b.l.o.o.d.y else on this tub knows how to fix a sodding gravity coil? You almost got us killed you stupid git!"

Merlin shoved Taz and snarled something that garbled with a deeper voice that barked off to the right. Neither one registered as the Aussie's composure snapped like an over-stretched rubber band. He stepped forward and threw a left hook at Merlin's skull.

The blow never landed. His left arm flailed wildly as he slammed to the deck, blind-sided by a tremendous impact. Taz rolled to his feet and looked up as a deep voice coalesced into a clear roar.

"I said STAND DOWN!" Monster loomed over him like a storm.

Taz felt his right leg tighten, felt the push as his weight shifted forward. His right arm drew back to his hip, fingers closing.

"Don't even think about it." Monster's husky whisper had lost all emotion.

His perception became crystal clear, the taut muscles of his arm and fist, the ma.s.sive form of Monster standing unflinchingly. An unfamiliar sensation wriggled in the back of the Aussie's mind, one that straddled the hazy line between fear and common sense. Taz felt the muscles of his back twitch, tension and anger draining into the puddles across the floor. "I...I just--" he groped for words until his head dropped with a slow shake. "Ah f.u.c.k all."

Silence hung in the air, broken only by the random raindrop noise of coolant that dripped from the ceiling. The three men stood breathing heavily until Ridgeway's weary voice cut in from across the room.

"If you three are done playing, come look at this."

Taz saw Monster's head snap to Ridgeway, then back. The sergeant grunted brusquely before he turned away and sloshed across the room. Taz fell in alongside Merlin as they followed suit, trudging quietly. At the broken wall he moved to Monster's right and drew up alongside a silent Ridgeway. Following their focus, Taz gazed into the room beyond.

Fancy, Taz realized with a start, not your run-of-the-muck pipes and cables here.

Shadows wavered as the ankle-deep coolant threw uneven puddles of moving light. In contrast with the grim industrial design that comprised the rest of the ship, the room before them struck Taz as oddly decorative.

And useless, he amended, mentally separating the wash of debris from the otherwise spartan interior.

The walls were made from interlaced panels of marble and a bronze-colored metal. Eight in all defined the small octagonal room, each panel curving up to the peaked, dome ceiling where a lone light fixture glowed. The conical beam fell straight down atop a fluted stone column that stood a meter high in the center of the floor. Something was affixed to the beveled top, a plate of the same bronze-like metal.

"What?" Taz queried, "Some kinda chapel?"

Ridgeway high-stepped over a pile of junk and moved along the left side of the column, wiping at the plaque with one hand. Taz felt a wave of ice pa.s.s through his belly as he heard his commander's voice, flat and hollow.

"Holy s.h.i.t."

Monster moved forward and peered over the top of the column while Merlin and Taz swung around to either side. Taz could see the plaque fully now, some two feet wide, octagonal like the room. Across the top, large embossed letters spelled out the word ASCENSION. Beneath the t.i.tle, smaller print listed senior officers and some flowery quote about new horizons.

Ridgeway shook his head slowly, hands braced on either hip. Merlin leaned in and muttered "You gotta be f.u.c.kin' kidding me."

Taz waited for a moment, expecting some great shock of awareness to fall upon him. He scanned the plaque again but drew only a blank. "Uh, not trying to be a total nog here," Taz interjected, "but what's the big b.l.o.o.d.y deal?"

Merlin looked up abruptly, "You're kidding, right?"

Taz folded his arms across his chest. "No, why should I?"

Merlin reached out and tapped the nameplate as if for emphasis. "The Ascension? One of the biggest disasters in s.p.a.ceflight history?"

A tickle of memory burned in Taz' mind, followed by an even greater sense of irritation. "Oh what, the b.l.o.o.d.y ghost stories they tell to scare witless cadets? I'd sooner believe in the Gravity Faery."

"Oh she was real all right." The somber voice from behind startled the h.e.l.l out of Taz and he spun around.

St.i.tch stood framed in the breached wall, backlit in wavering shades of blue. The medic nodded to Ridgeway as he approached. Stepping into the light, St.i.tch reached out with one hand, pausing briefly before he touched the polished metal surface. He exhaled forcefully as if he had been holding his breath, then looked at Taz.

"She was a colony ship back in the day, biggest one we ever built. Crew alone ran four thousand, with some ten thousand colonists. She had terraformers, manufacturing, heavy construction, the works."

"Some of the top scientists of the day as well," Merlin chipped in, "engineers, geneticists, real cutting-edgers."

"We are talking about the same b.l.o.o.d.y brainiacs who blew their own b.u.ms to bits, right?"

St.i.tch shrugged, then looked back at the plaque. "That was the official line. Sensors picked up a huge emag event at the launch point. Rescue ships hauled a.s.s out there but all they found were pieces of wreckage floating in s.p.a.ce. Just sc.r.a.ps, not enough to prove what happened or where the rest went."

"Went? It b.l.o.o.d.y well got atomized."

"Maybe not," Merlin's voice had become energetic, "at least it sure doesn't look like it now. We read about it back in Marine Engineering, you know, study what went wrong so you don't make the same mistakes. Most of the theories ran around the drive system. Conventional wisdom always said that it failed to maintain a stable warp bubble and just imploded in its own little black hole. But this," he placed his own palm on the plaque, "this changes everything. Geez, you think about every wild theory that got floated out, unstable wormhole, temporal rifts." He turned, holding up both hands. "h.e.l.l, this could re-write everything we know about physics."

"You're missing something," Monster interjected. "That accident happened what, maybe a hundred and fifty-some years ago? You said yourself that this thing's been down here a lot longer than that. And how'd the Rimmers get a hold of it?"

"I'm not sure they did, Gunny." Merlin gazed down at the plaque once again. "I'm beginning to think the Rimmers didn't even knew it was here."

"Come again?" Ridgeway prodded.

Merlin took a deep breath, hesitant only for a moment. "What if one of those crazy theories was right? Imagine something like a brief wormhole or a rift in s.p.a.ce-time."

Four impa.s.sive facemasks stared in silence.

"Oh s.h.i.t," Merlin groused under his breath, "didn't anybody go to science cla.s.s?" Before anyone could answer, Merlin held up his hand. "OK, look, simplified physics. We're all good with three dimensions, length, width and height, right?" He continued amid a series of nods. "Right, so time, duration, whatever you want to call it, that's a fourth dimension. We can travel in any direction through the first three, and only one way through the fourth."

"A rift." Merlin held up both hands. "You tear a hole in s.p.a.ce and for lack of a better explanation, you can fall through that hole here," he wriggled the fingers of his left hand, "and blink, you end up over here." The right hand mirrored the gesture.

"Nice trick," Monster muttered, "but how do you steer?"

"That's just it. So far this stuff is all theory. n.o.body knows what would actually happen. According to a number of theories, you could end up not only any place... but at any time."

"What, like pop out in the middle of the sun?" Monster's tone conveyed the obvious disdain for such an outcome.

"Or the middle of a planet," Merlin stated firmly. "That explains the stalact.i.tes-- they didn't grow through the ship, the ship appeared in the middle of them."

Oh crikey, Taz sighed and shifted his weight. Scientific mumbo-jumbo gave him a headache and he was relieved when Ridgeway cut through the boring ramble.

The Major's voice was sharp as he turned to St.i.tch. "Why aren't you in Sickbay with Jenner?"

"I told you this morning I was gonna scout around for any med supplies that might have been overlooked. I left Jenner..."

Any relief Taz might have felt evaporated as St.i.tch turned to face him, an index finger rapping his breastplate.

"with you."

CHAPTER 25.

Darcy stood in the Sickbay door and stared at the carnage. A section of the left wall was missing, revealing a maintenance corridor beyond. The ceiling was ravaged as well, an elliptical hole torn into the room overhead.

The sniper studied the edges of the damage. It looked as though someone had carved the ceiling and walls with a hot knife. A downward smear of the ripped metal marked the direction of the blow.

That's some big-a.s.sed knife, Darcy mulled. The slab of missing wall measured an easy three feet in thickness; the mangled ceiling had been even thicker.

These factors made the flattened smear on the floor all the more difficult to understand. While the rough oval footprint encircled the mangled wall and ceiling, the volume of c.r.a.p on the floor could not have been five percent of what had fallen from above.

She looked down carefully. The layer of debris was compressed into the floor itself. She could see no sign of heavy metal having been dragged from the room, no sc.r.a.pes in the smooth floor outside of the damaged area. A huge hydraulic press might just as well have slammed down on the floor above, crushing everything beneath it.

Amid the slick of dull greys and shiny silvers, a splatter of red glistened vividly at one edge of the impacted floor. The blood trail curved away from the damage and angled out the door.

Fresh, Darcy noted, her boot sweeping the nearest droplet into a crescent streak. Whoever it was couldn't have gone far.

The hiss of a turbolift preceded the sound of boots rushing up the hallway. Darcy reached across the doorway and grabbed the opposing frame to block the five Marines who rounded the corner. A flurry of curses filled the air.

Ducking under Darcy's arm, Ridgeway took one measured step into the room. His helmet tracked slowly across the damage.

Darcy knew what would be going through his mind. Explosives would be the first a.s.sumption, discarded immediately on the lack of scorch marks or frag damage. Heavy equipment would be next on the list, something capable of pounding a section of ceiling and wall down into the floor.

Not pounded, she now understood. Pulled.

"What the h.e.l.l happened here Darce?"

She casually pulled the rifle to her shoulder, the railgun aimed over the center of the damaged ellipse. "Watch."

Before anyone could yell the gun roared and a heavy bullet streaked from the muzzle on a razor-straight tail of ionized air. Straight for several feet at least, when it crossed into the damaged zone and hooked down like a rock and slammed into the floor. Not a fragment of spalled metal splattered from the impact.

"I'm not the math whiz," Darcy said dryly. "What do you figure Merl, twenty, maybe twenty-five G's?"

Merlin responded with a long, low whistle as he slowly edged around the right side of the room. He paused at half a chair that lay next to a smear of grey plastic and slivery chrome flattened into the floor. With a short snapping kick he launched the remains of the chair into the ellipse. As it crossed the edge, it crumpled into the floor, splattering flat as though stamped with incalculable weight. He exhaled softly as he drew out the single word. "s.h.i.t."

"Yeah, no kidding," Darcy quipped, her tone laced with sarcasm. "Y'think maybe when you chopped through all those safeties that you mighta cut the ones that regulate the artificial gravity coils in the floor?"

Merlin's fingers tapped along his thigh. "Guess so, but I wasn't expecting AG to be an issue." He moved along the right wall and slid under a console to the open panel where he rummaged through the wires. Fishing out a heavy cable, Merlin wrapped a loop around either hand and yanked. The cable snapped with a brilliant arc. "That ought to do it."

Darcy looked at the room and noted no visible difference. "Fine, you walk in there."

Ridgeway's head snapped around and fixed on her for a long moment before he grabbed another chair and tossed it into the zone. It bounced along the pebbled floor until it banged into the far wall.

"OK, but how do we know it's going to stay off?" Making an effort to lose the att.i.tude, Darcy posed the question with a flat sincerity.

"s.h.i.t LT, I don't know how it came on in the first place." Merlin pulled the two ends of wire farther apart, wrapping one in a wadded coc.o.o.n of black tape. "I'll make sure the power here is squared away, but I don't have a d.a.m.ned idea why half the s.h.i.t on this boat is doing what it's doing. It's like it has a mind of its own."

"Maybe the b.l.o.o.d.y Rimmer done it." Taz moved abruptly into the room, swinging wide of the damaged floor. "Set it like a b.l.o.o.d.y trap." The Aussie's CAR was tight to his chest as he swept along the wall in an aggressive forward hunch.

"Our boy isn't here." Darcy watched Taz stop dead in his tracks as she pointed to the stains on the floor. "He's hurt, but he's mobile."

Monster stooped and gathered a handful of empty wrappers from the floor. "Looks like our food went with him."