RANDOM CHAPTER
TUESDAY 6:52 a.m.
Stenness Basecamp
Orkney Island, Scotland

“This is bollocks,” Bailey said. He held his soundsuit helmet at one side, waiting until the last possible moment to put on the heavy, constrictive headpiece. “I’m sure she’s thinking up some way to blame this mess on us.”

“We couldn’t have done it,” Golke said as the elevator cleared ground level. “Not even at payload. Marek proved it.”

Bailey ran a hand through his thick hair and then unfastened the acoustic recorder clip on his belt. He sneered. “It sure has her panties in a twist, though.”

Golke looked confused by the colloquialism.

“What? You’ve never heard ‘panties in a twist?’” Bailey asked.

“I can’t picture Dr. Thatcher in panties.”

Bailey snorted. “A thousand quid says that cow wears boxer shorts.”

Their laughter subsided as the elevator door opened. Breaking dawn illuminated the landscape. The moon was pale and full in the sky. Sheep wandered in the mist around the NCEC tents.

“Do you think God is punishing us?” Golke asked solemnly.

“What are you talkin’ about, Golke?” Bailey pulled his helmet over his head.

***

Thatcher joined the team in the helm just as Donovon and Marek finished routing Golke’s helmet video-feed to the monitor.

“We’ve almost got it,” Marek said, glancing up at her apologetically.

She ignored him. This was not over. He would get a piece of her mind soon enough.

Golke’s video feed appeared on the center flat screen, and an audible gasp sounded through the room as they realized the men were wading through a sea of sheep.

“Holy shit,” Bailey’s voice echoed over the sound system. “Can you see this, ladies?”

“Your audio is clear, Ballistics,” Marek spoke into his headset. “What about you, Golke? You got sound, brother?”

Bailey whistled into his transmitter. “Damn. There are thousands of them.”

“Bailey, we aren’t getting anything from Golke ,” Marek said. “Can he hear us?”

There was no response.

“Bailey?” Marek turned to Donovon. “Great. Neither of them has a working headset.”

“On it.” The Irishman typed furiously into his keyboard.

“What’s wrong?” Thatcher asked, watching Golke’s video feed. From a distance, Maeshowe looked small, almost insignificant, a lifeless dot on the wooly landscape.

“Everything was working before they left,” Marek said shrugging as Donovon fiddled with the audio receivers.

“Alright. Try again,” Donovon said.

“Yo, Bailey?” Marek pulled the mic closer to his mouth. “Do you read?”

“’Sup, dawg?” Bailey said in his best Ebonics.

Everyone sighed in relief.

“What about you, Golke?” Marek asked.

There was still no reply.

Donovon shook his head. “His helmet radio is bloody banjaxed. There’s nothing I can do from here.”

“Do you want them to come back?” Marek asked Thatcher.

She watched as Golke and Bailey approached Maeshowe’s entrance, momentarily dropping down into the trench that surrounded the grave.

“Dr. Thatcher?” Marek said.

Lee stood at the back of the room, arms crossed over his chest as he scrutinized Thatcher. She met his glare and shook her head. “As long as we’ve got communication with Bailey, we’re fine,” she answered.

As the men came out of the depression, Golke’s camera focused on the three massive rectangular boulders of the formidable doorway. One gigantic gray slab sat atop two others, forming a square arch entrance barely three feet tall. Entering the narrow passage of Maeshowe had to feel like passing through the birth canal, especially in a cumbersome soundsuit.

The screen went black as Golke followed Bailey into the narrow tunnel.

“Your torches, boys,” Thatcher said.

After a moment, both helmet lights flickered on, illuminating the passage that extended deep into the grave.

“We should be getting ambient noise on Bailey’s acoustic recorder—their footsteps, the soundsuits, something.” Marek pointed at three empty frequency bars on his computer screen.

“Don’t tell me the blasted acoustic recorder is crocked, too,” Donovon barked.

Lee stepped forward, pointing to the screen at the device clipped to Bailey’s waist. “It’s not broken. It’s just not bloody on.”

“Bailey, you dumb ass!” Marek yelled into the transmitter. “Turn on the recorder.”

There was no response.

“Ballistics?” Marek tried again.

Donovon frowned. “My computer says Bailey’s receiver is fine!”

“Well, it’s not,” Thatcher said, annoyed. The mission was already a failure.

They looked up at her.

“You only gave us two hours,” Marek said.

She stared up at the screen unforgivingly. “Fix it.”

The video feed showed the men were about fifteen feet inside, where Maeshowe’s passageway tapered almost to a close. Golke slipped sideways through the narrow channel, and his headlamp lit up the adjacent rock wall. The stones were covered with ancient and modern graffiti, Viking runes and messages from the early 1900s. Bailey leaned into the camera and pointed at a curvy petroglyph shaped like the figure of a woman. He moved his gloves over the image, making the universal hourglass figure, and flipped the okay sign into the camera.

“Quit messing about and turn on the damn recorder!” Lee grumbled.

—–

Bailey surveyed Maeshowe’s cramped inner chamber. The roof towered overhead, nearly twenty-five feet tall. Three small antechambers jutted off in the edges of the rounded room in the form of a cross. The ground was a mixture of sand and pebbles. But the place was empty. There was no sign of life. No acoustic cannon, no terrorists, just another dead end.

A quiet swooshing sounded behind him, the noise of a bird flitting passed his head. Instinctively, he ducked and turned his helmet light toward one of the dark recesses.

Nothing but dirt and rock.

“Nobody’s here,” he said. “We’re wasting our time.”

Then he heard it again. This time the noise was louder. A moth hovering beside his ear, flapping its feather wings faster and faster. He tapped his helmet and looked over at Golke. “Can you hear that?”

Golke pointed to his helmet and shook his head. Bailey could see Golke’s mouth moving beneath the helmet shield. Their radio connection wasn’t working.

Brilliant. Just perfect.

“Let’s get out of here.” Bailey gestured toward the passageway, but Golke was busy scanning the walls with his helmet camera.

The static din began to throb inside his brain. Vibrating against his skull, inexorable and irritating, it sounded like the buzz of electricity from a television set when first turned on, right before the picture appears on screen. The ringing stung his eardrums. He tapped his helmet with his glove. There had to be some sodding technical glitch, some goddamn irritating hum inside the speaker.

“Marek, something’s wrong with my helmet,” he tried to communicate with basecamp.

There was no answer. All communication was down.

He turned to Golke. “They can’t hear us!” he yelled. As if yelling would help. Golke couldn’t hear anything in his soundsuit.

The distortion intensified, now a tornado blowing through his brain, raging harder with each passing second.

Something was very wrong.

A bubble of fear erupted in his stomach.

Oh, God. He cringed, realizing the sound wasn’t coming from his helmet speakers. It originated inside him. Some earsplitting pick axe goring at his brain. The noise quickened into a thunderous roar, and he grabbed at his helmet, trying to shake the scream from his head. “Can’t you hear that?” he screamed at Golke.

Golke still had his back to him. The man searched through the dirt as if nothing was wrong.

Sweat broke across Bailey’s forehead. The cacophony forced him to his knees. He pulled frantically at his helmet. “Get it off! Get it off!”

—–

“Bailey!” Golke’s voice exploded over the basecamp speakers, his radio connection finally coming through.

Everyone looked up at the screen.

Bailey’s feet kicked and thrashed wildly across the monitors, his body rolling in and out of the frame.

“What’s wrong with him?” Thatcher’s voice cracked. It looked as if Bailey was performing some ridiculous dance, twisting on the floor of the passage grave and grabbing at his helmet. “Did anybody see what happened?”

They had been so absorbed with solving the audio problem, no one had been paying attention.

A cloud of dust swirled up from the chamber floor, twisting in the air, and obscuring their view.

—–

Thatcher felt panic choke her throat. “Get me radio contact now!”

“Bailey!” Golke tackled Bailey, forcing him onto his back.

Bulging outwards from their sockets, Bailey’s eyes pulsated behind his helmet and rolled back into his head. His body shuddered, and the acoustic recording device fell from his belt to the chamber floor. Under his helmet, his face began to swell. Capillaries burst in his cheeks. His mouth dropped open in a silent scream, and with a cataclysmic burst, his head exploded.

Blood splattered across the inside of his face shield.

Golke fell backwards, retching as he scrambled away from Bailey’s body.

A low-pitched hum buzzed inside his ears. Growing louder, it reverberated off his face shield back into his brain, vaporizing every thought. He ripped open the neck of his soundsuit and pulled off his helmet to reduce the pressure. Chamber dust engulfed him. The cloud filled his lungs. He collapsed, spitting and sputtering, digging his gloves into the earth. Every nerve was on fire, exploding with noise. Searing hot noise.

Golke grabbed at the sand. His gloves found the recording device. He flipped it on.

 —–

The basecamp speakers blared Maeshowe’s low rumble.

“160 dB, 100 Hz!” Marek yelled. “220, 30! 280, 2.5!”

The visual feed cut in and out, the view from Golke’s helmet sideways on the chamber floor.

Golke appeared on screen, helmet off, eyes wide, ripping out fistfuls of hair. Completely mad, spinning and twisting in the dirt, he was unaware of anything but the noise, a clamorous supernova so powerful that cavitation bubbles formed within the cavities of his pounding brain. The bubbles divided, doubling, tripling, and then collapsing in an implosion of liquid rupturing air. With one static blow, his head burst in subsonic combustion. A trillion droplets of cruor disintegrated into a cloud just above his neck, nebulous particles of brain matter mixed with Maeshowe’s rising dust. His body slumped into the dirt and landed on his helmet. Blood spilled over the lens.

Thatcher turned away in horror as the camera lost its feed.

The ground began to tremble.

—–

A sound wave erupted from Maeshowe. The blast rolled over Stenness, killing everything in its path. The distortion stretched well beyond the village and then stopped in silence.