第8页
"Go!" Adam cried, waving them off. "I'll hold them."
Tom didn't break stride. Adam knew what had to be done: keep fighting until there was no fight left in him.
The core was a hundred meters ahead. It was impossible to miss, so bright Tom's faceplate automatically polarized to maximum tint, and it was still hard to look at. The core was the size of a ten-story building, pulsing like a huge heart, fed by glowing conduits and steaming coolant pipes, and encrusted with crystalline electronics. It was a marvel of alien engineering, and complex—which hopefully also meant easy to break.
"Main coolant ducts there and there," Tom shouted over TEAMCOM and pointed. "I'll jam the dump valve." He moved to the base of the core.
Lucy's and Min's acknowledgment lights winked.
Tom helmet's display fuzzed with static, then popped and went black. The reactor plasma and its intensely fluctuating electromagnetic field was wreaking havoc with their electronics.
He found the dump valve, a mechanism the size of a Pelican dropship, just below the main chamber. He unspooled the thermite-carbon cord and ran it around the valve twice. He then primed and activated the charge. A line of lightning brilliance flared and sizzled through Covenant alloy, fusing the valve into a solid lump.
Tom glanced at Lucy. She set an explosive charge on one of the two main coolant lines that fed the reactor, and then set the timer on the detonator.
Min was setting his timer, too—then vanished in a flash of smoke and thunder. The core flared brighter than the sun. Coolant fumes screamed from twisted pipe and alarms blared.
"No!" Lucy screamed.
She ran past Tom toward the billowing cloud of toxic coolant. He caught her wrist, jerking her to a stop.
"He's gone," Tom said. "EM field must have triggered his charge."
She wrestled out of Tom's grasp.
"We have to get out of here," he told her.
She hesitated, taking one step toward Min.
The support structure groaned and started to melt and sag from the superheating core.
She turned back to Tom, nodded, and they ran out of the chamber—deeper into the factory complex, through a jungle of struts and hissing ducts, and splashing through lakes of leaked, boiling coolant.
The charge Lucy had set went off and silenced the reactor's alarms.
Even with their backs to the reactor, running at a full-out flat
sprint, the glare from the core doubled as it reached near supercritical phase. It was too much to endure, even through a polarized faceplate, and Tom squinted his eyes nearly shut.
They turned a corner, slid down the railing of angled stairs and onto a catwalk that protruded over a ledge. Five hundred meters below, an ocean churned against rocky cliffs.
They had made it through the factory, out the back side, where massive tubes sucked in the ocean water for processing.
Lucy looked back at the factory and then to Tom. She offered her hand.
He took it.
They jumped.
In free fall, Tom struggled, pumping his legs. Lucy released his hand, and straightened her body. He did the same and then pointed his feet down a split second before he hit the water.