The apparent underground station they had left had the Victorian feel of Baker Street with its walls of uninterrupted glassy tiles. As the lights flickered on at their destination, however, it appeared as though they had arrived at some kind of secret laboratory. The walls were covered in matt white tiles with pipes running across them to mounted boxes of switches and displays. A couple of stencilled signs on the wall declared that the place was called “Interchange C”. A pit of dread sank into Brian’s stomach, sucking away his anger. The carriage doors hissed open and the trench-coated lunatic extracted himself from the driver’s cabin before jumping out of the carriage and marching down a tunnel away from the platform. Simon followed a little more slowly but the girl from the office (Did Michael call her Cat? Brian asked himself.) remained seated, staring into space. Michael’s head reappeared from the corridor.
“What’s the hold up?” he called back to them.
Brian leaned towards Cat and said quietly, “I think we’re going to have to go.”
Seeming to register him for the first time since she sat down, Cat looked at Brian with a hopeless expression and stood up. Brian followed. Out on the platform, Michael was leaning on the wall with a stern expression while Simon stood in the tunnel looking bewildered.
“I’m sorry, Cat, but you really don’t have any choice in the matter. You’re going to have to come with us,” Michael said. He brandished the electronic device that he had used to threaten her and the family in the park earlier. “I am still carrying this, you know.”
Brian winced inside. He wanted to tell the girl that Michael couldn’t really do her any harm with the little grey box, but he couldn’t. She didn’t know that their lives were at stake any more than she knew that Michael’s box was only a barometer. If Brian hadn’t believed that he and Simon were in danger until he saw the plasma weapons firing, how could he expect Cat to follow along with whatever Michael was planning? He had to err on the side of the scenario that meant they lived longer, whether he liked it or not. He kept mum. Without another word, Michael resumed his march down the brightly-lit corridor. Eyes cast downwards and looking like she was going to burst into tears again, Cat followed. The tiles and electronics continued down the walls of the tunnel, and Michael stopped periodically to check the displays on some of the wall-mounted boxes. Each time, he nodded to himself, satisfied, and moved on with an affable sense of urgency. Brian’s sense of trepidation increased.
Finally, they came to a door. There it was in front of them, the tunnel coming to a dead stop at a blank-faced metal panel with a keypad at the wall beside it. There were no turns left or right; whatever was behind the steel panel was the purpose of their journey. Michael tapped a six-digit code into a keypad on the wall and the door slid open with an almost pneumatic hiss. Almost, but not quite. The hiss seemed to come not from the mechanism of the doors, but from the chamber behind, as if there was a release of gas from somewhere in the room.
Michael stepped into the room and immediately gave his attention to a small control panel on the opposing wall to a bench. After a second, he looked back at his three reluctant companions.
“I’m afraid you can’t just hang around outside. I can’t open these doors until you’re in here.”
Somehow, Brian new knew that once he had stepped through the open door there would be no turning back. It was a rabbit-hole, and all he could do was pray he woke up from the dream afterwards. As he looked at Simon and Cat, he realised that they were thinking much the same.
“I’m going to have to hurry you,” Michael insisted. “They can disable this exit if we hang around too long. Once the launch is initiated, we’re safe, but we haven’t got much time.”
“Wait. Launch…?” Simon began.
“I’ll explain in a moment, but you have to get in.”
Simon considered for a second then stepped through the door. Brian followed and he felt Cat take a hesitant step in behind him. Michael touched the panel and the door slid shut behind them. There was another hiss and Brian felt a stuffy feeling like his ears were about to pop.
Michael was looking at the control panel, waiting for something with naked impatience.
As he tapped his foot nervously, he explained rapidly.
“They’d have cut us off if we’d tried to get to an airport and, besides, the checking in process would leave us like sitting ducks for hours. So I’ve had to find us another way out of here, one that puts waiting time on our side rather than theirs.”
The panel bleeped and Michael pressed a button. The stuffy feeling subsided. A door like the one they entered by slid open on the far side of the room to reveal a small antechamber that opened into a larger room mostly taken up with five padded chairs strung with safety harnesses. The two to the right faced what looked like the windscreen and controls of a commercial airliner. The trench-coated man dropped himself into one of the pilot seats and fastened himself in. Feeling his sense of urgency, Brian took one of the three rear seats as a wide-eyed Simon took the vacant control seat. Cat followed slowly, evidently bewildered.
Michael called back to them, “Make sure you strap in tight, but not so much that it restricts your breathing. None of you are trained astronauts are you?”
The three of them stared at him incredulously.
“Well, it was a long shot.”
He began pressing controls on the panel. The door slid shut and an aggressive hum began.
“If we can’t skip the country, we can at least skip the planet,” he explained without looking up from the panel as he pressed more buttons. “A century of faster-than-light travel and we still haven’t worked out how to overcome g-force on take-off, so I’m sorry to say this is going to hurt. In fact, you’re probably going to pass out. Try not to be sick, Simon.”
Brian was about to hurl the trench-coated lunatic a string of questions and abuse when the hum changed pitch and the air was blasted straight out of his lungs.
