Текст книги "Noah's Ark: Contagion"

Автор книги: Harry Dayle

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Fourteen

JAKE ROSE AT six in the morning. He was surprised to have slept so well given his state of mind. He was equally surprised not to have been woken by anyone coming to tell him that the virus had now reached epidemic proportions, or that the last of the food had gone, or that some other disaster had beset them. He dressed quietly, and leaving Lucya and Erica sleeping, headed straight for the bridge.

His trip through the ship was eerily quiet. Normally there was activity at every hour of the day or night, but now the corridors and public areas were completely deserted. There was only the gentle hum of electric strip lights to accompany the sound of his footsteps. He had seen the ship like this once before, when she was brand new and he had been given a tour by Captain Ibsen once he’d been assigned to the Spirit of Arcadia. She was still in dry dock, having a few finishing touches before her official launch. Back then, everything had seemed shiny and new. Now, so many years later, the carpet looked as though someone had turned down the contrast. The walls and doors bore the scuff marks of thousands of children paying not quite enough attention to where they were running in their excitement. Even the ceilings looked different, with the odd yellow stain here and there caused by leaky pipes or condensation. But the feeling of emptiness, of being in on a secret that nobody else knew yet, that feeling was the same. He could almost pretend that everything was fine.

But everything was far from fine.

“Good morning, Captain,” McNair greeted him as he walked onto the bridge.

“Is it? How are things?”

“Well from our perspective we’re doing great. We’ve made good time.”

Jake looked out of the huge windows. They were surrounded by land on three sides. The loch they were sailing through was about fifteen kilometres wide, and the end was just about visible to the naked eye. Much closer than the far end of the loch though, was Faslane. He had expected it to look much like Longyearbyen, but strangely, it seemed worse.

“Hell of a mess, isn’t it?” McNair asked, catching the look on Jake’s face. “Most of that debris is from the ship lift. It’s a monster. Was, anyway. It could lift sixteen-thousand-ton vessels out of the loch. I suppose that’s small fry to you cruiser sorts, but that’s a big sub.”

“It looks like it was stamped on by the foot of a giant,” Jake managed to say, still in awe at the level of destruction wrought by the asteroid.

“There was a shed over the top that must have been pulverised. I didn’t expect the concrete superstructure to be so,” he searched for the right word, “obliterated.”

Jake had seen what the asteroid had done to a concrete pier, but that was further north where the space rock had been gaining altitude and losing some of its destructive force. Here in Scotland it was clear that the base had felt its full might. A gigantic area, kilometres wide, had been flattened. The concrete frame of the ship lift lay strewn across the remains in chunks ranging in size from gravel like stones up to pieces the size of cars. A thick layer of toxic ash enveloped the whole mess like a woolly blanket, making the landscape look something like the surface of the moon.

“Eagle-eyes has been studying it for the last couple of hours from the Ambush, as soon as it was visible from the periscope array. He thinks a pressure wave built up in front of the asteroid and that’s what did the most damage.”

“Like an aircraft breaking the sound barrier?”

“Yes, exactly like that.”

“How many people worked there, on the base, McNair?”

“About six thousand, give or take. Plus the crews of any ships and subs that are in at the time. Were in at the time,” he checked himself.

“Six thousand people, wiped out in what, a second or two?”

“It’s hard to comprehend, I know. The only consolation is that it would have been over quickly for them, very quickly.”

Jake nodded slowly. He didn’t believe it was much consolation at all. Then he thought about the people suffering on his own ship and reconsidered. Perhaps, he thought, being vaporised by a pressure wave in a second was a better way to go.

He made his way over to the unmanned communications console and sat down. He put the phone on speaker and dialled the number for medical, without really knowing where the call would be routed.

“Medical, Mandy speaking?” The voice sounded exhausted.

“Mandy, this is Captain Noah. What’s the situation this morning?”

“Not good. At a guess I would say half of deck eight has gone down with the virus. Your call last night brought us five new nurses; they’re running around doing what they can. We’ve had cases reported on decks six, seven, nine, and quite a few on deck three.”

Jake closed his eyes. Deck three was where the crew cabins were located. He knew that every case was serious, but to hear crew were infected meant more of his friends were likely in danger.

“Are any of the drugs showing signs of working?”

“Not really, no. One or two people have shown a little improvement, but really, all we can do is try and make them comfortable. Kiera is very sick, and I saw Grau a couple of hours ago, he’s not in great shape either. David has also gone down with it.”

“How long have you been working, Mandy?”

“Since I was called to medical.”

“You mean you’ve worked round the clock?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Take a break, please, take a break. We need you on form, don’t kill yourself. If there are other nurses there, let them take some of the strain.”

“I suppose I could try and catch five minutes, if you think it’s okay.”

“Mandy, take more than five. Get some sleep, that’s an order. And afterwards, you’re in charge of medical, okay?”

“What about Janice? She has much more experience than me. I’m just a nurse!”

“There’s no such thing as just a nurse. All nurses are amazing, and that includes you.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

He ended the call, and returned to McNair.

“Listen, are you okay staying on here a bit longer? I need to go and see someone. Chuck should be up in another hour or so to take over.”

“Fine with me. Been a long time since I was at the wheel of one of these beasts. It’s been fun taking to the surface for a while.”

• • •

“Morning, old boy. How are things looking?” Coote asked, his tone less upbeat than usual.

“Not good. The virus is spreading throughout the ship, and my entire regular medical team are down. Is Vardy about?”

“He’s been working on those blood samples of yours all night. He won’t leave his lab until he has something. I’ll come with you.”

“I was rather hoping you would. I can never find my way around this thing on my own.”

Coote led Jake through the submarine to the doctor’s lab. Jake had made use of the medical bay the first time he had been aboard, but the lab was new to him. His first impression was that calling it a ‘lab’ was somewhat misleading. With space at such a premium, Vardy’s equipment was located in the corner of a tiny maintenance workshop towards the front end of the submarine. He had a series of technical-looking machines stacked one upon the other. One such device was filled with tiny vials of blood, much smaller than those Jake had brought over the previous night. They rotated and jiggled about slowly. Other instruments had digital readouts, dials labelled with indecipherable scales, and pulsing screens. The only thing Jake recognised was a good old-fashioned microscope, although a very powerful-looking one. It was over this microscope that Vardy was hunched. He looked up when he heard the two captains approach. His eyes were bloodshot, and Jake suspected that wasn’t from having them pressed to the eyepiece. Mandy wasn’t the only one to have pulled an all-nighter.

“Coote, Jake.” he nodded to them both.

“Anything?” Coote asked simply.

“Maybe. I think so. I mean, possibly. I don’t want to get our hopes up. The deceased man—”

“Scott,” Jake interjected.

“Yes, Scott. He was suffering from leukaemia. That’s the good news.”

“How exactly is that good?” Coote scratched his head.

“I understand he died within about twenty-four hours of contracting the virus? Messily?”

“Yes. At least, he died within twenty-four hours of being brought to medical,” Jake agreed.

“Right. And that’s because his body was already weakened from the leukaemia. That suggests the other patients may not go downhill quite so quickly.”

“Could it be non-fatal in the other patients?” Jake asked hopefully.

“I wondered that too. But on further analysis, I fear the answer is no. This is a particularly vicious little virus, I’ve never seen anything like it. As far as I can tell it appears to cause massive damage to the blood cells, rupturing them, popping them like balloons. I haven’t yet discovered the mechanism by which it does so, but its rate of destruction is remarkable. Scott died quickly, but I suspect other patients will only have a few hours more than him. Twelve, perhaps twenty-four hours more, but nobody who gets this is going to live more than forty-eight hours, it’s just not possible.”

“And the girl’s blood? Why is she not infected? What’s different about her?”

“The girl is also unwell. She is carrying the influenza virus.”

“Erica has flu? She seems fine to me,” Jake said.

“Most likely. She has only a very mild strain of the flu and her young immune system has managed to beat it off. The virus is almost gone. She probably had a bit of a high temperature, some aches and pains, maybe a headache for an afternoon, but nothing serious.”

“And you think that her having the flu is protecting her?”

“It is my hypothesis that the virus which killed Scott, and that is spreading throughout the ship, is a mutation of Erica’s mild flu. The relationship is clear to see; there are certain markers in the virus itself that show a link back to the flu. It’s like tracing ancestors through common markers in DNA,” Vardy added.

“Let me get this straight,” Coote said. “You think the girl caught the flu, got over it, but the virus in her body somehow spontaneously mutated and turned into something nasty that then killed her father?”

“That’s more or less it, yes.”

“I don’t understand.” Jake was drumming his fingers on the work bench, frowning. “If it mutated, that means it’s a different virus now, right?”

“Right,” Vardy nodded.

“So why isn’t she sick with this new virus?”

“Because her immune system already learnt to fight the flu virus that this is based on. The new virus has enough similarities that her body’s defences can fight it off. They already learnt how when it was just a simple influenza.”

“Is there something special about her? Something that made this mutation happen?”

“No, I don’t think so. I have a theory about that too, though.”

“Go on?”

“Jake, when you were at Longyearbyen, you lost people to the toxic ash?”

“Yes. It sort of…ate them. Dissolved them. You’ve seen Dante’s hands, you saw what it did.”

“Yes. And now I think that Erica came into contact with the ash, and that it is that ash which has mutated her flu virus.”

“This is all well and good,” Coote said, growing impatient, “but how does it help? Can you cure it, is what I want to know?”

Vardy looked at the two captains and weighed his words before speaking, as if he didn’t want to create false hope, but at the same time was eager to share an idea. “I think we can fabricate a vaccine.”

“You think?”

“Erica’s flu virus is a common kind. We have vaccine kits on board the Ambush, normal operating procedure; we can’t risk an outbreak of anything contagious in a confined space. The kits contains a flu jab that can easily take on Erica’s mild virus. My theory is that if we can combine the vaccine with some of that toxic ash, we could create something that will tackle the new virus.”

“You mean you want to mutate the vaccine, like the ash mutated the flu?” Jake asked.

“Yes, essentially. There’s a bit more to it than that, but yes, that’s the idea.”

“Do it,” Coote said simply.

“Ah, and therein lies the problem. We don’t have everything we need.”

“You just said we have the vaccine kit?”

“He means the ash, don’t you, Russell?” Jake’s face fell. “We have to go and try and collect some of that ash and bring it back here.”

“It’s more complicated even than that. I can’t just throw the vaccine and the ash into a test tube and wait for them to do their thing; they have to be combined in a certain way. There’s a machine that can do it. We don’t have one, but there is one at Faslane. At least, there was. I don’t know if it’s still there. It was all a bit hush-hush. You see, it was in the biological warfare lab.”

“How do you know about that lab?” Coote snorted. “That’s highly classified. Officially it doesn’t even exist!”

“I was seconded there for six months a few years back. Sorry, it’s not on my record, it showed up as shore leave. Like you said, officially it doesn’t exist.”

Fifteen

AN EFFORT WAS made to arrange a committee meeting, but the idea was quickly abandoned. Ella Rose, Amanda Jackson, and Grau were all down with the virus. Lucya was on the bridge, accompanied by Erica, and Max hadn’t been seen by anyone. Jake and Coote understood full well that the responsibility for decision making was now theirs alone.

Whilst Coote remained on the Ambush and briefed his men on what was to be done, Jake brought his own bridge crew up to date with the developments. Martin had been called to the bridge too; his team had an important role to play.

“Disconnecting the Ambush isn’t just a case of pulling out the plug, Jake,” he said, a look of concern crossing his face. “There’s rather more to it than that. I mean, the diesel generator has been off line for about ten days; we don’t even know if we can start it. And even if we can, there’s at least half a day’s work to get it connected back up to the electrical system. When we wired ourselves up to the sub it was a rush job.”

“You told me that we’d be able to use our own power in case of emergency,” Jake said, agitated. He knew how touchy his chief engineer could be when others questioned anything technical.

“That’s the plan, Jake, the future plan. We’re not there yet. We’ve had other things on our plate, like getting the shared navigation systems working. Until then we’re totally reliant on their nuclear reactor. If they want to dive and try and enter this underwater base of theirs, we’re going to have to pull out the lines and go cold for as long as they are away.”

“Half the ship is down with this virus, and we’ve got no food. Jake, if we cut the power, we could have a riot on our hands!” Lucya said.

Jake paced around the map table, both hands on top of his head, fingers interlinked. “And if we don’t disconnect,” he said, “we’re as good as dead. This isn’t a choice, it’s not something we are debating. We have to enter that base if we want to beat this virus, you understand? The equipment we need is in there, and the entrance is underwater. Martin, liaise with the Ambush and get us cut off. I’ll make the call, let the ship know what’s happening.”

• • •

“Mummy, why are the lights off?”

“You heard the captain, Chloe. The submarine that makes all the electricity is going away for a bit. Only a little while.” Martine tried to speak as naturally as possible. She didn’t want her children to see how much pain she was in.

“Don’t they like us any more?”

“Of course they like us, darling. But they need to go and get some medicine, to help Mummy get better, and the other people who are sick too.”

“Cool! Can we go with them? I wanna go in the submarine!” Oliver leapt onto the bed, his expression bright and full of life.

“Me too! Oh, but we have to stay and look after Mummy.” Chloe’s face fell.

“They don’t have space for passengers on the submarine. But when they are back, and everyone is better, we’ll ask the captain if you can visit, okay?”

“Yay! Thanks Mum!” Oliver leapt off the bed and proceeded to pretend he was under the water, exploring the sea bed and scaring the fish.

“I’m hungry, Mummy. When are we going to get some food?”

“When they come back with the medicine. Then you can go to the restaurant.”

“But I want to go now! I’m starving.”

“Me too!” Oliver popped his head above the level of the bed on which his mother and sister were lying.

“It’s better you two stay here. If you go out there, there’s more chance you’ll get sick like me. Besides, Mummy needs you. You have to look after me, okay?”

“Okaaaay, but if I don’t eat soon, it won’t matter about being ill because I’ll already be dead from hunger!”

• • •

“How long have they been gone?” Lucya asked.

“It’s been almost an hour,” Jake said, checking his watch.

“That’s good, right? I mean, we haven’t heard anything, so they must be in the base. That’s good,” she repeated, trying to convince herself as much as anyone.

“I hope so, I really do.” Jake took her to one side and lowered his voice to a whisper. “When are we going to tell her about her father? She has to know, she’s only going to keep asking to see him.” He peered over Lucya’s shoulder. He could see Erica talking to Chuck. He had sat her in the captain’s chair and was showing her what some of the controls were for.

“I don’t know, Jake, how do we even tell her a thing like that? She seems happy. It’s going to tear her world apart when she finds out. I don’t know if I can do that to her! Wouldn’t it be better to wait, until, you know…” she left the words hanging in the air.

“You want to wait until she gets sick? Lucya, that’s hardly the time to tell her!”

“No, but maybe, if she’s sick, she won’t be thinking about him. We might never have to tell her at all.”

Jake looked incredulous. “You’re hoping she’ll die? That she’ll never find out? How can you be so cruel?”

“Is it cruel, Jake? Look at her! She’s enjoying herself. Is it so bad if she spends her last days or hours believing her father is being looked after? Surely that’s better than spending them mourning him?”

Jake was lost for words. He couldn’t fault Lucya’s logic, yet there seemed something terribly wrong about hiding the truth from the child.

“If Vardy is right, if he makes a vaccine and it works, then we tell her, what do you say, Jake? But not before. It just doesn’t seem fair.”

“If the vaccine works, it’s going to hit her even harder. She might be young, but she’s a bright kid. When she sees others getting better, or rather, if she sees them getting better, then she’s going to want to know why her dad isn’t better too.”

Lucya said nothing, but she didn’t need to, Jake could read her thoughts in her eyes. He looked at the girl again. She was laughing and smiling. In any other circumstances it would have been a pleasure to watch her, he thought. But this still seemed wrong to him. “As soon as the vaccine shows the first sign of working, we tell her. I’ll do it; it’s my duty as captain.”

Lucya opened her mouth to speak, but she was cut off by the radio crackling into life.

“Spirit of Arcadia, Ambush, do you copy?”

She lifted her headset into place hastily. “Ambush, Spirit of Arcadia, loud and clear.”

“We are aborting the mission. I repeat, aborting the mission. We will be surfacing shortly. Suggest you standby to reconnect your systems as soon as we are back. It must be getting cold up there.”

“He’s not wrong about that,” Jake said, shivering.

• • •

Captain Coote wasted no time in coming aboard the cruiser as soon as the walkway was reinstated. By the time he had reached the bridge the electrical connections were still being made and only the most essential systems remained powered up, running on the emergency backup batteries.

“Jake,” he said solemnly in greeting. He nodded curtly to Lucya and the others on the bridge.

“What happened?” Jake asked. “Is the base destroyed?”

“No. Or rather, not in as much as we can tell. The problem is one of access. The deep-water dock is protected by a gate. We don’t want all and sundry waltzing into our bases, you know. The Ambush and her sister ships transmit a coded signal when approaching the base. The gate should automatically open when the signal is in close proximity, but that has not happened.”

“Because there’s no power to the base?”

“That is the most likely explanation, yes. There should be an emergency battery backup system for the submarine entrance though. There were generators too, but those were housed on the surface. All gone now.”

“If the battery backup isn’t working, doesn’t that suggest serious damage to the base?” Lucya asked.

“That is a possibility. Quite likely, even. But there are other possibilities. The backup system could have been switched off prior to the asteroid, as a safety precaution.”

“Isn’t there some way to override the system? Can’t you send a diver to open the door manually?”

“This isn’t like a garage door, old boy, it’s a hefty piece of kit. High security, designed to withstand a direct hit by a torpedo. Even a team of divers wouldn’t be able to move it.”

“So we’re screwed? If there’s no way in, Vardy can’t get his machine!”

“Well, we are not entirely lost. There is another way in. That gate is the entrance for submarines, but the people who worked in the base had their own access. The Admiralty may have many faults, but they don’t expect everyone to swim to work, you know.”

“Why didn’t we try that first then? Why cut off our power supply by trying to get the Ambush in there if you could just go in through the front door?”

“Calm down, old chap,” Coote said softly. “As with every aspect of this mission, it is not that simple. For one thing, the entrance is on the base, the base which as we have all seen, has been flattened and is now covered in toxic ash. And for another thing, the entrance, if it remains intact, is a high-security affair. It is, however, easier to penetrate than the deep-water gate.”

“So we need a landing party?”

“Indeed we do. A small team of my men are preparing themselves right now. We are going to need some additional supplies though, in order to safely traverse this bothersome ash.”

“Such as?”

“We require diving gear. Specifically, neoprene diving gear. Vardy thinks it will provide protection against the corrosive qualities of the toxic ash.”

“Thinks? He isn’t sure?” Jake looked worried. He’d seen first-hand the horrible and painful effects the asteroid ash could inflict. Anything less than certainty seemed to him a risk too far.

“He’s fairly sure. There’s only one way to find out though! We have a couple of wetsuits on the Ambush, diving kit used for emergency hull maintenance. More would be helpful. I assume a ship like this must have some scuba enthusiasts on board?”

“Usually, yes,” Jake agreed. “But this was an Arctic cruise. We mostly see divers on the Caribbean cruises. I’ll see what we can do.”

“I’m on it,” Lucya said, pleased to have something useful to do. “The census will help; I’ve seen diving listed as a hobby on those forms.”

“They do need to be neoprene!” Coote reminded her as she left the bridge. “We’ll be needing that raft we picked up too, in the absence of anything more substantial. It should be sufficient to get three men over there.”

“Three?”

“I’m sending Eric and Ewan; they’ll get the door open. Vardy has to go as well; he’s the only one who knows where the lab is and what his machine looks like.”

“I’m going too.” The words burst out of Jake’s mouth even before he realised he had spoken them.

Coote raised his eyebrows.

“I know it makes no sense,” Jake said quickly. “I know my place is here on the ship, but I have to do something. Besides, someone from the committee should be part of the landing party. Lucya needs to look after Erica, you’re too important to the Ambush to go, and the others are all sick.” He knew his reasoning was weak, but he was determined to be part of the team. Clearly his commitment was evident, as Coote made no attempt to argue.

“As you wish, Captain,” he said. “My team will be ready within the hour.”

• • •

Jake felt ridiculous in the wetsuit. The flippers only made matters worse. As they weren’t planning on any actual swimming, the flippers had been trimmed back, and the sleeves of another wetsuit had been cut off and pulled over the stubby plastic, making him look like he was wearing enormous shoes. He was beginning to regret having been so insistent on making the trip to shore, but then caught sight of the three submariners who were similarly outfitted, and didn’t feel quite so daft any more.

“Jake, we brought a gas mask along for you,” Vardy called out from his position on the hull of the Ambush.

“What’s in the big box?” Jake asked. He was making his way across the walkway and had a good view down into the raft. Eric and Ewan were positioning a long flat crate atop two oars, which themselves were suspended between the air-filled chambers of the life raft.

“Oh, you know, just a few essential supplies.”

“I thought we were bringing stuff back, not taking it over there?”

Vardy did not reply; instead he concentrated on clambering aboard the raft. It wasn’t an easy manoeuvre, nor a graceful one as he slid down the side of the submarine and landed in the little inflatable.

A minute later, Jake followed him down, landing with a slap on the rubber floor of the tiny boat. As soon as he was in, another submariner who Jake recognised as Brian, the conning tower guard, carefully untied the rope that held the raft in position, coiled it, and threw it to Eric. Protected from the wind by the towering ship to one side of them, and the bulk of the Ambush on the other, they didn’t drift far. Jake wondered if anyone had considered the question of propulsion, but before he could voice his concerns aloud, the young navy men produced more oars, and started to paddle. Silently, the raft snuck out from its safe haven and headed for the remains of the base. Behind them, two men emerged from the submarine. They were carrying Vardy’s equipment. It had been decided that a better lab would be established on board the Spirit of Arcadia, where there was considerably more room to work.

Above, the grey sky turned darker still. They had seen no rain since the asteroid had ended almost all life more than two weeks earlier. It was as if the destruction and the blanket of ash had somehow interrupted the normal cycle of weather. Since arriving in Scotland though, there had been progressively more and more cloud. Jake shivered. The wetsuit didn’t offer much protection against the cold; he hoped they would soon be inside the base.

“Here, try this on, you’ll need to adjust the straps. Best get it done before we get too close to that ash.” Vardy handed the gas mask to Jake. “With this wind, we don’t want to take any chances of breathing that stuff in.”

“Is it just the ash that’s worrying you, Russell? Or is there anything in that lab we should know about?”

Vardy smiled, and turned to look towards the land they were slowly creeping towards.

When they had covered a little more than half the distance, the others donned their own masks. The wind chopped about their heads. It wasn’t so strong as to slow their progress, but they could see little eddies of ash swooping and dancing across the land. The ungainly footwear and diving attire began to feel rather comforting to Jake, like a security blanket.

It took a good half an hour for them to reach the shoreline. The loch was deep, and clear of any obstacles, but whilst that made for smooth passage across the water, it meant getting out of the raft would be more difficult. Eric and Ewan paddled gently, bringing them close in to where the ship lift had once stood. The remains of a concrete pillar that Jake assumed must have been one of the corners of the superstructure, stuck up out of the loch like the trunk of a giant tree. In-between it and the remnants of the concrete dock, huge chunks of rubble had piled up like stone blasted out of a quarry.

“Here,” Ewan said, pointing at the accumulation of debris, his voice muffled by the gas mask. “We can tie up here and climb over the wreckage of the lift.”

Eric nodded, and the two men picked up one end each of the carton still resting on the oars, and heaved it over the side of the raft and onto a massive and relatively flat wedge of concrete which served them well as a jetty. They clambered out too, and while they secured the raft, Jake made to follow, but Vardy held him back.

“No, we need to wait here. Let the boys clear the way.”

“I came along to help. I can’t just sit here and watch,” Jake said, feeling frustrated at not being able to participate.

“Trust me, they know what they’re doing. It’s safer here, for now.”

Jake sank back onto one of the inflatable benches and watched as the two submariners lugged their plastic cargo from one piece of broken superstructure to another, making their way up towards the land like ants crawling across pebbles. The rubble was wet. It looked like the wind had whipped up the loch before their arrival, sending waves crashing over the concrete, washing it clean of the poisonous ash that Jake so feared. By the time they reached the top though, it was a different story. The flat dock was covered in a thick layer of the evil substance.

Before stepping onto it, Eric opened the crate and extracted a large square of black material, which flapped around in the breeze. Jake understood at once that it must have been cut from the same wetsuit as the chunks of neoprene now protecting his feet. He watched as the submariner very carefully placed the rubber square on top of the ash. Nobody spoke; all eyes were on the material, waiting to see how it would react. From their position in the raft, Jake and Vardy couldn’t really see clearly enough, but they soon got confirmation that the wetsuits would provide the protection they needed when Eric emitted a muffled whoop and held his thumb aloft for all to see. Ewan retrieved the cut-out wetsuit and held it high. Ash fell away from the underside, but the material was whole and intact.

“Great, it works. Can we go now?” Jake asked.

“Not yet. They need to get the entrance open first.”

“How hard can that be?”

“You’d be surprised. This isn’t a local corner shop, it’s a naval base. You don’t just ring the doorbell.”

Jake wondered how you did get into a secret base, especially when there was almost certainly nobody inside to open up.