Tunnels 06 - Terminal Read Free

target, whose flight path would eventually take it into the huge suspended masses of water or even beyond them, into the Crystal Belt. But in the endless black canvas of this huge space, broken only by the flickering muted light, it was tantamount to looking for a needle in a haystack, at midnight.
    Taking out his light-intensifying monoscope, he put it on his head and adjusted it for the ambient light levels. Although Drake had tried his best to make him adopt one of his proprietary lenses, Jiggs had stuck firmly to his Soviet-made night scope. The electronics may have been primitive compared to Drake’s design, but it had seen him through two decades of active service, and he knew how to repair it in the field if it malfunctioned.
    But now all Jiggs was seeing through his monoscope was chunk after chunk of slow-moving rock that had been flung out by the explosion. Then finally he spotted something that looked more promising, and for a few seconds he continued to track it through his scope. It was further out than he’d expected, but nevertheless Jiggs angled his booster so he could home in on it, praying that it wasn’t just another hunk of itinerant rock.
    Jiggs finally steered himself onto a parallel trajectory, then closed the distance with blips from his thruster. As he madeout more through his monoscope, he was filled with hope when he saw what appeared to be one of the team from the Bergen and the booster rocket trailing behind on the end of a lanyard. With a final burst of speed, he was near enough to take hold of the drifting form. He seized the Bergen, which was still smouldering in places, then turned the body towards him.
    ‘My God! It’s you, Drake!’ he cried.
    But it wasn’t just Drake – there was someone else with him, although this second person was so badly hurt as to be almost unrecognisable.
    Jiggs concentrated on Drake to start with. Even from a cursory inspection, Jiggs could tell that he was in a very bad way. Patches of his fatigues had been blasted completely away, and the flesh underneath scorched black. Some of Drake’s hair was missing, and his head covered in angry red blisters from the crown and down one side of his face. Jiggs felt his neck for a pulse – he found one, but it was very weak. He must have been in close proximity to the bomb when it detonated, which explained why he’d been moving so fast. And it also probably meant that he’d been bathed in radiation.
    Then Jiggs moved on to the second person, twisting the head round so he could see their features.
    It was Rebecca One.
    Drake had obviously employed the same tactic as Jiggs and swept her over into the void to take her out of the running. Then they’d been involved in a struggle, which explained why she was tangled up in a coil of rope attached to the side of Drake’s Bergen.
    Jiggs didn’t bother to check her for a pulse. Her body was so charred that there was no question that the Rebecca twinwas dead. ‘Hah! Fashion victim!’ he observed, as part of her coat crumbled at his touch. ‘That’s what you get for wearing black round a nuclear explosion,’ he added without a shred of sympathy.
    He was correct – the non-reflective surface of her matt black Styx coat had done an admirable job of absorbing the pulse of heat and light. And, as Jiggs tried to disentangle her arm from the rope, it cracked as if it was made of charcoal. He could see that, of the two, she’d come off far worse than Drake. Indeed, she must have helped him by shielding much of his body from the blast.
    Jiggs quickly searched the twin’s body for anything useful, but other than a few items in the pouches on her belt, it was difficult to tell what was her and what were the remains of her incinerated clothing. Everything had been fused together by the heat.
    For a moment Jiggs simply regarded the slight body of Rebecca One. For someone so young, she had been responsible for so much suffering. ‘You don’t deserve any last words,’ he