The smoke roiled along the ceiling, as though it were seeking some route of escape from the control room. As it grew thicker and darker, it started to fill the whole space, dark yellow flames lapping sulkily at the desk tops.
Despite his youth, dean was a solidly built boy, and Ryan was seriously weakened by the second jump. He ducked his head beneath a wave of flame and battled on toward the gateway.
“Emergency fire crews both active and standby immediate move to matter-transfer unit. Gateway evacuation grade-one priority. B12 clearance is waived for this emergency. Serious malfunction with cont”
The voice stopped dead in midword.
Ryan was halfway toward the anteroom, the stock of the rifle jolting at every step, but he couldn’t stop to adjust the sung without putting his son down in the pools of stinking, green-yellow water.
The fire was racing at incredible speed, consuming everything in its path, filling the whole large room with impenetrable choking smoke.
Ryan had peeled back his sleeve, and he blinked down at the chron. It was becoming difficult to see, but it looked like he was inside four minutes.
The liquid from the sprinkler supply didn’t just have a foul stench. It was also oddly thick and slimy, making every surface slippery to the touch, making the floor itself like an ice rink for Ryan and his burden.
“Can walk, Dad,” mumbled a faint voice in his ear, but he ignored it.
He could hear the swelling hum from the air-conditioning, struggling to overcome the smoke. Fortunately he was now close enough to the anteroom to be able to slip inside, heeling the door half shut behind himself, gaining a little ease in both breathing and seeing.
Then the lights all went out.
For a single moment he froze in midstride, his mind racing as he considered the awful possibilities. The sprinkler and the comp-warning voice had both malfunctioned. Now the lighting was gone. How long before some key part of the mat-trans unit controls also went down?
If that happened, then he and Dean were both off on the last train to the coast.
The fire was now so intense that they had no chance at all of making it to the sec door to try to get it open. In those few static seconds, Ryan had already made the decision to shoot his son and then himself if the end was inevitable and there was no way out for them.
Better that than burning alive.
Best was making the jump out of the place before it crumbled to ashes around their ears.
“Put the lights on, Dad.” The boy started to wriggle as though he wanted to be put down on the floor, but Ryan simply held him more tightly.
One foot at a time, he carefully walked across the little room, feeling the step into the gateway with the toe of his right boot. Ryan stepped up and into the chamber, stooping to lay Dean quickly down, dropping the rifle alongside him. He turned to grab for the edge of the door and slam it shut behind him, missing it first time, in the pitch darkness.
The only sound was his son, still barely conscious, whimpering at his feet, and the growing roar of flames. He could see the brightness of the fire through the half-open door of the anteroom, giving him just enough light to also make out the heavy gray armaglass door.
It finally closed with a firm, satisfying click, and Ryan flung himself onto the floor, reaching out and grabbing hold of Dean’s wrist.
“We’ll be all right,” he shouted.
“Not another”
“Be sick and bad, but we’ll live.”
The smell of burning plastic seared his throat, and the smoke was making his eye water. The disks had started to glow in the ceiling and all across the floor.
“So far” he whispered.
Ryan snatched a last glance at his chron, in the light from the metal disks.
It showed that twenty-nine minutes and fifteen seconds had elapsed since the last jump.
“Close,” Ryan muttered, before the darkness oozed up from the center of his brain and swallowed him.
DEAN DREAMED, but he didn’t know that it was just a dream. Every last detail was etched too finely across his brain for it to be anything but reality.