Page 132 of Almost Midnight

Nick looked back at Walker.

“I don’t,” he said. “Remember it.”

Walker hesitated, seemed about to ask, then glanced at Wynter and shrugged. “Well, regardless, you couldn’t have picked a more inaccessible part of the world for your portal. Assuming it’s even still there.”

“I thought you were on board with this, Forrest,” Wynter said, sounding faintly annoyed. “You said before you wanted to reach the portal, too.”

“I do,” Forrest affirmed. “But I want everyone here to know what they’re getting themselves into. I’m working on finding us some shielded transport that’s designed to withstand the contamination, but even the very best shielding they have only lasts a few hours, especially once you get that close to the coast. I’ve been in contact with a research team out there, and they inform me that the nearest dome is roughly ninety minutes each way to Nice, and possibly longer to get to thegrotteitself. Which makes the parameters very tight.”

Walker’s voice grew openly warning.

“Remember, wherever we go, we have to time in areturntrip, in the event we can’t get inside,” he added. “And we would be foolish not to work in some padding, in case we encounter any problems. We have no idea what we’re going to find in Nice. I doubt anyone’s been out to that particular spot in years, although hopefully the science team can tell us something. They should at least have current maps, either from satellites or heavily-shielded drones.”

His mouth firmed as he looked back at Nick.

“The whole area could be collapsed,” he pointed out. “The cave itself might be completely inaccessible… and the dirt is often even more toxic than the air, so the likelihood that we could dig it out is pretty much nonexistent. In any case, we’re going to have to watch every minute, because there’s no room at all for error on the shielding.”

“But we can try again, right?” Kit said. “We can do a scouting trip first, maybe, then go back if we run out of time? As long as we’re careful, we could probably get out there even a second or even a third time, right?”

She sounded so hopeful, Nick couldn’t help but glance at her.

He wondered, again, why she was so eager to get off this world.

She had family here. As far as Nick knew, there were no problems with her family, no serious ones at least. He’d always thought Kit was close to them.

But she seemed as anxious to leave this dimension as Malek.

He looked back at Walker when he realized the hybrid was answering her.

“…but when the time runs out, wemustgo back,” he was saying seriously. “And yes, we canmaybetry again, maybe even a handful of times, like you said… but each trip will require a new and/or re-shielded vehicle, which is very expensive. And each trip gets more risky for that reason alone. Large transfers of credits between my accounts and Nick’s and whoever else’s, all going to the same research center in the south of France will send up red flags. The H.R.A. will likely get curious. They monitor accounts of non-humans even more closely than they do human beings… and we’re talking numbers that would definitely pique their curiosity, even in normal times, much less right now. I’ve already paid for our first trip out, but I think it would be foolish to assume we could conduct endless trips out to the site and not alert the authorities.”

Nick scowled a little, but nodded.

It was a good point.

His accounts were likely frozen by now, anyway.

Wynter’s could be frozen, as well.

They couldn’t count on having enough, in any case, not if the equipment was as expensive as Forrest was saying, and Nick had little doubt it was.

“What about when we arrive?” Nick asked, gruff. “We can’t drive the vehicle into the cave, even if the passageway is open. I’m assuming that wasn’t the plan?”

Walker nodded.

“Suits,” he said. “Semi-organic, plasma-field, molecular-shielded suits.”

Everyone groaned a little, and Nick felt his jaw harden.

A fully-armored vehicle lasted only a few hours in that level of radiation, but they were supposed to walk around in the worst of it wearing nothing but fucking suits?

Walker didn’t dissuade them from their skepticism.

His voice grew openly warning.

“You’re right. It’s not ideal,” he said. “The suits are heavy, and the shielding on those only lasts aboutfiftyminutes, and that’s on the high end. We should assume we only have about fortysafeminutes once we leave the vehicle, which is twenty minutes, each direction. After that, we start losing years off our lives with every second we’re out there. And that’s assuming we can even get inside the cave without touching any of the contaminated materials with anything but the boots.”

Walker’s grim look met Nick’s.

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