64.

June 28, 20:24 Ethan stared in horror as he saw Dennis Aubrey's body plunge into the black hole, his face a screaming mask. He glimpsed the scientist's body stretched to oblivion around the circumference of the black hole before the man's agonized face turned a deep red as the light was shifted deep into the spectrum.

Then, he simply vanished from sight.

The writhing coil of energy around the black hole seemed to recede as it was gradually consumed, and then the interior of the chamber fell dark once more, punctuated only by the occasional flares of plasma reaching out to the chamber walls.

Ethan felt his head yanked backwards as Olaf pulled him away from the glass.

He caught Lopez's eye as they turned to face Joaquin once more. The tycoon's face glowed with malice.

'Now then,' he began, 'which one of you will be going next?'

Ethan glanced at Katherine Abell, who looked as though she were on the verge of a breakdown. She stared with wide eyes at the chamber where Dennis Aubrey had been crushed into oblivion.

'Is this what you are?' Ethan asked Katherine, ignoring Joaquin. 'Is this what you've become, too?'

Katherine blinked as though refocusing on the here and now, and she shook her head vaguely. Joaquin walked across to her and yanked her arm, turning her toward him.

'Don't listen to them,' he crooned. 'They're not worth it, not worth the worry.'

'Is Scott Bryson not worth the worry?' Ethan asked Katherine. 'He saved your life.'

Katherine's jaw trembled as conflicting emotions warred with each other. She looked at Joaquin.

'This is wrong,' she whispered finally. 'This is all wrong.'

'This is necessary,' Joaquin insisted, 'for the greater good of us all, of all humanity. They're going to die, Katherine, I've already seen it on the camera. There's absolutely nothing that you can do to prevent that.'

Katherine shook her head.

'This, all of this, it's not about us or about humanity, is it?' she said. 'It's about you and how much power you can have over people.'

'No,' Joaquin snapped. 'It's not about that at all.'

'Then let them go, and take responsibility for your own actions instead of blaming it on the needs of a humanity that has no idea what you're doing. Let them go: it's what your father would have done.'

Katherine's challenge fell out of her lips almost of its own accord, and as Ethan watched he realized that Joaquin had again been cornered. The tycoon opened his mouth to answer his wife, but nothing came forth. Katherine grabbed his arms and shook them as she spoke.

'It's the right thing to do and you know it,' she said. 'It's what Isaac Abell would have done. He would have seen the error of his ways and tried to prevent any further loss of life.'

'You don't know that,' Joaquin snapped.

'No?' Katherine challenged. 'Well, you tell me: would your father have released these people or would he have executed them?'

Ethan watched as Joaquin ground his jaw in his skull for several long seconds, staring silently at his wife. And then he sighed and shook his head as he turned away from her.

'Katherine, I'm afraid it's just too late for that now.'

'You mean you don't have the guts,' Katherine snarled, 'because you're not a fraction of the man your father was.'

Joaquin whirled on the spot and his fist whipped out, cracking Katherine back-handed across the cheek. She sprawled onto the floor, her hair falling over her face. Ethan tried to leap to her aid but Olaf's huge hands held him in place like a vice.

'You know nothing of my father,' Joaquin shouted, pointing down at his wife. 'Nothing!'

Katherine slowly struggled to her feet and stood before her husband with her chin lifted in defiance.

'I'm sure that he was man enough never to have hit his wife.'

Joaquin clicked his fingers at two of the IRIS soldiers standing nearby and they hurried forward to each take one of Katherine's arms in theirs.

Joaquin looked at her for a long moment and then shook his head.

'It didn't have to be this way, Katherine,' he said. 'But you leave me no choice. Put her in the chamber. Put them all in there!'

Ethan was turned and manhandled toward the chamber's outer hatch with Lopez alongside him. Katherine looked at them pleadingly as they were shoved toward their doom.

'I'm so sorry,' she said.

Ethan did not respond, instead searching desperately for some way to break free of the giant man holding him. The sphere was surrounded by cables and wires but none of them looked close enough that he could grab it, and the clinical neatness of the chamber and control platform meant that there were no weapons or implements he could use to fight his way out of trouble. The IRIS soldiers' weapons were all held at port arms and the troops were careful not to let anything get within his or Lopez's reach, all of them far too professional to make such a basic error.

There was, he concluded, nothing that he could do. He glanced at his watch. 20:26.

'We've got about twenty minutes before this is all over. Any smart ideas?' he asked Lopez in a whisper, as they reached the outer hatch.

'Pray?' she suggested, her dark eyes flicking left and right as she sought an escape. Her dark skin seemed to have turned a few shades paler. 'Beg for mercy?'

Ethan shook his head.

'I don't think praying will help, and I'm not giving up my pride to that asshole.'

Olaf released him and walked to join Joaquin near the chamber's portholes. The tycoon called over to Ethan as his men opened the outer hatch door.

'Goodbye, Mr. Warner. I'd have imagined that a man of your caliber would put up a better fight, but it's too late now. You're literally out of time!'

Ethan ignored Joaquin and watched as the hatch beckoned, flickering intermittently as plasma energy flared violently in the chamber beyond. Katherine was shoved inside by one of the soldiers and fell onto the metal floor as her legs failed her. Lopez was turned by a soldier and aimed at the open hatch.

'Any last words, Miss Lopez?' Joaquin asked.

'Yeah, as it happens,' she shot back. 'Two of them. Fu-!'

The soldier shoved her into the hatch before she could get her parting shot out.

'What about you, Mr. Warner? Anything that you'd like to say?' Joaquin called, Olaf standing beside him.

Ethan looked at Joaquin for a long moment, aware of all eyes turning to see what he would say. Bright flares of energy flickered from within the black hole chamber's narrow portals and reflected off Joaquin's features.

'Yeah, there's something that I'd like to say,' he replied. 'I'd like to point out something that your father would have understood about this device, but that you don't. Just because you've seen into the future doesn't mean you know what's going to happen next.'

Joaquin laughed.

'Well, that doesn't seem to be the case right now, does it? It looks like your future is assured!' He turned to Olaf and clapped the giant on his shoulder as both men laughed.

Ethan was about to be prodded into the chamber when Joaquin suddenly stopped laughing, his face contorted in confusion as he looked up at Olaf. The huge man stared down at the tycoon.

'What is it?'

Joaquin stared at his own hand before speaking.

'I clapped you on the shoulder,' he uttered, 'just like in the video footage Dennis showed us.' Joaquin looked up at Ethan. 'From when you'd died in the chamber.'

Ethan said nothing, watching as Joaquin's mind struggled to comprehend what was happening.

'Dennis must have tampered with the footage,' he mumbled to Olaf in disbelief. 'He didn't spin the timeline on the footage forward to show us their deaths, he span it backward, to show us his own. Damn it, he must have edited the footage somehow before showing it to me. But then he must have known that he was going to die. Surely he couldn't have done that.'

'Charles Purcell did it too,' Ethan said to Joaquin. 'It's called personal sacrifice for people that you care about, something you wouldn't understand.'

Joaquin screwed his face up in confusion.

'But why would he be willing to die if he knew that I had won and-'

Ethan smiled quietly. All of the IRIS troops were watching him now as he spoke.

'Because he saw something else.'

Joaquin shook his head. 'That's not possible!'

It was not Ethan who replied, but a deep and murderous voice that thundered across the dome from the entrance hatch.

'Surprise, asshole!'

Ethan leapt sideways out of the grasp of the IRIS soldiers holding him as they all whirled to see Scott Bryson standing inside the bulkhead with an M-16 assault rifle cradled in his grip. Without any further warning, Bryson opened fire and a cascade of bullets hammered into the IRIS troops, instantly cutting several of them down. Bryson turned toward Joaquin and Olaf as he fired, chasing them with gunfire.

The hail of rounds smashed into power cables, computer terminals and ventilation channels as Bryson forced Joaquin and his remaining men away from Ethan and Lopez. Sparks showered down across dislodged metal panels as clouds of steam billowed from ruptured pipework filled the air as they dashed for cover.

Ethan hit the deck hard as Bryson's rounds slammed into the torsos of the two men closest to him, hurling their bodies like rag dolls into the side of the outer hatch. Ethan took shelter behind the hatch door and yelled in to Lopez and Katherine.

'Get out of there!'

65.

June 28, 20:28 Lopez leapt out of the hatch, dragging Katherine close behind her, and they both tumbled down alongside Ethan behind the nearby wall of the control platform.

Ethan jumped to where one of the IRIS soldiers was writhing on the ground, his chest a bloodied mass of impact wounds. Ethan grabbed the man's rifle, looking down at him and recognizing the face of the young man who'd spoken to him earlier. His once-defiant eyes were now pinched with fear and he coughed a thick drool of blood from his lungs.

Ethan scurried across to another fallen soldier as Bryson laid down heavy fire on the troops now sheltering behind the computer banks on the opposite side of the dome. Ethan picked up the dead man's rifle and then dashed back to where Lopez was crouching.

'Where the hell did Bryson come from?!' she shouted above the crackling gunfire.

Ethan squatted down alongside her and handed her one of the rifles.

'You didn't really think he'd take a walk did you?' he replied. 'After what Purcell told us, I thought it was prudent to hide our assets. There were television cameras at the airport: I figured that if Joaquin saw Bryson leave, it might give us a chance.'

'How did he get down here?' Katherine asked.

'The pressure suit on his boat,' Ethan yelled back. 'It's just able to operate at this depth. The Free Spirit is too small for IRIS to track from down here, and they'd never be able to see Scott's pressure suit. It was the only way to maintain surprise.'

Lopez cocked her rifle. 'Now what?' she asked.

Ethan shifted position onto one knee and fired off two shots across the heads of the IRIS soldiers.

'We need to get Purcell's camera and then get the hell out of here,' he said. 'Cover Bryson. I'll work my way around the far side and flush them out!'

Lopez nodded and opened fire across the dome toward Joaquin and his men as Ethan leapt up and dashed across the open ground into cover behind the black-hole chamber's outer hatch.

The IRIS troops fired on Lopez's position, and Ethan flinched and ducked his eyes away as a volley of rounds smacked into metal panels near his head and ricocheted into the control platform. A shower of sparks fell like glowing rain onto the deck of the dome as the rounds smashed a computer monitor, and flames from an electrical fire started licking at the edges of the panel.

Ethan looked up at the enormous black-hole chamber as a new and unexpected horror breached his awareness. Bryson did not know what was contained within the chamber, and an electrical fire could cause havoc down here. Ethan peered around the edge of the hatch, and saw Bryson spraying bullets crazily across the IRIS position. One ricochet into the chamber's panels would be all it would take to cause the machine to go into meltdown, or maybe a shot that took out the power supply to one of the magnetic-field generators, destabilizing the black hole.

Ethan looked up at the control panel to his right. If the camera was anywhere, it would be there.

Ethan took aim and fired a salvo at the IRIS troops to keep their heads down, and then sprinted out across the open deck toward the control panel. Lopez saw him move, and shifted her aim to a position just behind him, firing again on the IRIS soldiers. Ethan felt the shockwaves from her bullets thumping the air behind him, and glimpsed the rounds smacking into the metal panels shielding Joaquin and his men.

A return volley smashed a pair of hard-drive units near Ethan as he vaulted up onto the control panel and hurled himself down into the walkway behind it. The unforgiving metal deck slammed into his shoulder. As he rolled he smacked the side of his head on the back wall of the walkway, a spray of sparks and plastic fragments raining down around him.

Ethan got onto his knees and peered over the edge of the control panel, then spotted the camera lying on its side near the smashed monitor. He reached out, grabbed it and shoved it beneath his shirt before crawling along the walkway toward where Bryson was sheltering behind a bulkhead on the far side of the dome, firing intermittently.

Ethan yelled out above the deafening reports echoing around them.

'Watch your fire! Don't hit the sphere!'

A clattering series of bullet impacts smashed along the edge of the control panel near Ethan's head and he crouched down, praying that the rounds were not strong enough to punch through the metal panels shielding him.

Bryson yelled back between shots.

'To hell with the damned thing! I'm almost out of ammo, we need to move!'