The oil had behaved purposefully, like something alive, which made Jeff think of childhood monsters, of yawning black shadows filled with imaginary horrors. Tears pricked his eyes but he couldn’t bring himself to stop watching.
The video jerked once more as Dan hurried back up and out of the pit, with understandable haste. Jeff saw Lucy step back, her face aghast, then, with a terrified cry, stumble backwards over the lip of an adjacent pit.
Dan said ‘Oh shit’ very softly, and Jeff watched with numb despair as he hurled himself down the steps of the neighbouring pit.
It was clear from the way one of Lucy’s legs was bent under her, as she lay on the floor of the second pit, that she was badly hurt. Dan grabbed her up in a fireman’s lift and rapidly made his ay back to safety. And, even though Jeff could see nothing but the chamber ceiling through Dan’s A/V, he felt an appalling certainty the second pit was already filling with the same deadly black oil.
And then, just as Dan reached the top, the lights went out.
They followed the rampart to where it merged into a tunnel leading deep inside Vault One. They moved on past branching corridors and ramps to either side, each leading up or down to other levels and chambers. The beams projected from their suits flashed reflections off hastily epoxied signs printed with luminescent inks, which were mounted near junctions that had not yet been fully explored. All carried explicit warnings never to leave the already lit paths.
Catching sight of these warnings, Jeff found himself thinking once more about Rodriguez.
David Rodriguez had been an engineer recruited to the ASI’s retrieval-and-research branch several years before to help run the remote reconnaissance probes, but instead had quickly become the stuff of legend for all the wrong reasons. He was the one recruits got told about during their training and orientation, as an example of how
not
to conduct oneself when exploring the Founder Network.
He had been part of a standard reconnaissance into a then unexplored level of Vault Two, and had ignored the warnings about sticking to the approved paths. Instead, he had wandered into a side chamber, trying to find a probe that had failed to report back.
He had found the probe and, some hours later, his team-mates found him.
Time, it turned out, worked differently in the side chambers of that particular level. It became slower, the farther inside them you got. Rodriguez had discovered this when he stepped up next to the probe, probably thinking it had simply broken down.
He was still there, to this day: right foot raised and looking towards the far wall, his face turned away from the chamber entrance as he headed forward, still clearly oblivious to his fate. That alone was what really sent the shivers down people’s spines; the fact that no one could see his face got their imaginations working overtime.
Rodriguez’s team-mates, when they finally found him, had been a lot more cautious. One had thrown a spanner just to one side of Rodriguez’s frozen figure, from the safety of the chamber entrance. It still hung there now, motionless, caught in the course of its long trajectory through the air, on its way to eventually landing in some future century. The reconnaissance probe – a wheeled platform mounted with cameras and a range of sensitive instrumentation – stood equally immobile nearby.
David Rodriguez, as new recruits to the most secretive department of the UW’s retrieval and assessment bureau were told, had been a fucking idiot. The vaults were filled with unpredictable dangers, which was why they had to stick to the paths already pioneered by the probes. You wandered away from them at your own risk.
The current popular theory was that these slow-time chambers were stasis devices designed for long-term storage. Time-lapse cameras had been set up at the entrance, to try to estimate how long it would take Rodriguez to set his right foot down, turn around and walk back out of the chamber. The best estimates suggested anything up to a thousand years.
Sometimes Jeff woke from nightmares of Rodriguez still standing there, his face turned away, as the years turned into centuries. Sometimes he
was
Rodriguez, waking to find himself lost in the darkness of some future age, all alone on the wrong side of a wormhole gate that bored its way through time and space very nearly to the end of everything – a hundred trillion years into a future where most stars had turned to ashes, and the skies were filled with the corpses of galaxies.
They re-emerged from Vault One and followed the North Rampart until they reached Vault Four, half an hour after receiving Dan’s distress call.
Beyond the vaults lay nothing but the blasted, airless landscape of a world that had been dead for immeasurable eons. The planet on which the vaults stood orbited a black dwarf: the shrunken, frozen remnant of a once bright and burning star whose furious death had long since stripped away any vestiges of atmosphere.
Dan, who was an expert in such things, had once told Jeff the vaults themselves were tens of billions of years old, meaning they had stood for longer than the entire lifespan of the universe as it had been measured back in their own time. They were constructed, too, from a material that resisted all attempts at analysis. Despite a near-eternity of bombardment by micrometeorites and other debris drawn into the planet’s gravity well, the exterior of the vaults appeared as smooth and pristine as if their construction had just been finished.
Jeff glanced up at the towering slope of Vault Four, at the moment before they passed into its interior. He could hear Eliza talking to Dan and Lucy over the general comms circuit, trying to keep them calm, assuring them that help was almost at hand. He found himself wondering what they’d have to say once they discovered Eliza had been all for abandoning them.
Farad came abreast of him and tapped the side of his helmet: a request for a private link. At least Eliza had let him leave his cart of goodies back at Vault One, rather than wheel them all this distance.
‘I have come to believe,’ Farad told him, his eyes wide and fervent, ‘that God must have abandoned the universe long before this time-period.’
Jeff regarded him in silence, but with a sinking feeling.
‘Do you know what occurred to me when we heard about Stone and Vogel?’ Farad continued, an edge of desperation in his voice. ‘I could not help but wonder what, in the absence of God, happens to their souls.’
This wasn’t a conversation Jeff wanted to be having right now. His feet ached, and the interior of his suit stank from the long hours he’d spent inside it. Stress knotted his muscles into thick ropes of fatigue.
‘Their souls?’
‘This far beyond the mn time, the universe is dark; no new stars are being created. Most of the galactic clusters have retreated so far from each other that they are no longer visible to one another, and most of the galaxies themselves have been swallowed up by the black holes at their centre—’
‘I know all this, Farad. They covered it in the orientations.’
‘Yes but, if God is no longer here, what happens if you
die
here?’ he demanded, his voice full of anguish. ‘Where do you go? There is only one conclusion.’
‘Farad—’
‘Hell is, by its very nature, the absence of God, is it not?’ the other man persisted.
Jeff stopped and put one hand on Farad’s shoulder, finally bringing him to a halt. Farad stared back at him, his nostrils faring.
‘Listen, you need to calm down a little, okay?’ Jeff told him. ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you.’
Jeff glanced to one side. Eliza and Lou had moved ahead, apparently unaware that the pair had stopped. Up ahead lay a wide atrium, containing electric carts they could use for zipping about the ‘designated safe’ parts of the vaults.
Farad was a large, bluff man with a thick dark moustache, and he sometimes compared his attempts at picking apart the self-adjusting routines controlling the Vaults to a pygmy poking at electronic circuitry with a spear. He was intelligent and sharp, an excellent poker player – as some back at the Tau Ceti station had discovered to their cost – and also in possession of a keen sense of humour. But something about the black, unforgiving void that hung over the vaults, like a funeral shroud, could get to even the best of people.
It seemed to Jeff that the more intelligent people were, the harder it was for them to deal with witnessing a darkened universe far advanced in its long, slow senescence. Self-declared atheists began sporting prayer beads, while the moderately religious either discovered a new fervour for their faith or, more frequently, abandoned it altogether.
Farad refocused on him after a moment, and Jeff could see that his face was slick and damp behind the visor.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Farad after a moment. ‘Sometimes . . .’
‘I know,’ Jeff replied, with as much sympathy as he could muster. ‘But we’ll be home in a few days. Remember, we’ve got a plan.’
‘Yes.’ Farad nodded, his upper lip moist. ‘A plan. Of course.’
‘You just need to hold it together for a little while longer. Okay?’
‘Yes,’ Farad said again, and Jeff could sense he was a little calmer. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’
Jeff gave him his best winning smile. ‘You already said that.’ He nodded, indicating somewhere further up the corridor. ‘I think we’d better catch up.’
Eliza had glanced back once, but chose to say nothing as the two of them caught up.
They pulled a spare tokamak fusion unit from a pre-fab warehouse established in Vault Four’s primary atrium and loaded it on to the rear of an electric cart, before letting it zip them up a steep incline that switched back and forth the higher they rose. When they reached Level 214, they found the passageways and chambers shrouded in darkness, so had to rely on their suit lights while they swapped the new fusion unit for the failed one. There was no telling why it had shut down, but inexplicable power-outs were far from unusual.
The lights strung along the ceiling flickered back into life, revealing closely cramped walls on either side. An airlock seal had been placed across the passageway, and they stepped through it one by one, emerging into the pressurized area beyond.
Jeff wanted nothing more than to crack open his helmet and breathe air that didn’t taste like his own armpits, but Eliza would have none of it. He understood the reasons for her justifiable caution, but still felt resentful.
When they entered the chamber that Stone’s team had been studying, they found Dan had now managed to drag Lucy on to a narrow strip of ground located between four adjacent pits. The pit that had swallowed up Stone and Vogel was now full to the brim with black oil, its calm stillness looking to Jeff like a black mirror laid flat on the ground. It seemed strange that none of the reconnaissance probes first sent into this chamber had triggered a similar reaction.
The furthest walls of the chamber faded into darkness beyond the pools of light cast by the carbon arc lights. There were hundreds more of the pits, Jeff could see, stretching far out of sight. He watched from the chamber entrance as Eliza guided a limping Lucy back to safety, Dan following close behind. They had to shuffle along sideways, one at a time, wherever the edges of the pits came closest together.
He found himself wondering what purpose these pits might have served for the vault’s architects. A garbage-disposal system, perhaps, the black oil being some universal solvent for breaking down unwanted items? Or perhaps they represented something more inexplicable, a puzzle that could never be solved – like so many of the artefacts that had already been recovered and brought back to their own time . . .
Something suddenly moved just beyond the illuminated part of the chamber, snapping him out of his reverie. Jeff stared hard into the shadows, then stepped forward. Lou and Farad were too busy arguing to have noticed anything, as they discussed how to recover a sample of the black oil, should it prove equally adept at dissolving any type of container they might attempt to collect some in.
‘Did you see that?’ asked Jeff urgently, turning back to look at the two men.
‘See what?’ asked Eliza over the comms, audibly puffing with exion.
Jeff stared into the shadows once more. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe it’s . . .’
Maybe it’s nothing
, he thought. The vaults lent themselves effortlessly to the imagination, after all.
But he saw it again; a slight movement almost on the edge of his perception. Lou must have seen it, too, for he stepped up next to Jeff, unclipping a torch from his belt and shining its powerful beam across the chamber.
The torch revealed Mitchell Stone, naked and shivering, kneeling between two empty pits and blinking up into the light.
It’s not possible
, thought Jeff, in the shocked silence that followed. But a moment’s reflection suggested otherwise. After all, the lights had failed almost immediately, so Stone might have managed to crawl out of the oil-filled pit, unseen by either Lucy or Dan, and then got lost. But why hadn’t he called out for help?
‘Jesus!’ he heard Eliza exclaim, followed by a muttered prayer from Farad.
Stone raised one hand towards them, and then slumped forward soundlessly.
Without thinking, Jeff stepped forward and began to navigate his way towards him.