The airlock knocked for the second time.
This time, not with the impatient harshness of Ilya Rozanov, who was too proud to admit he was afraid. This time, it was a quicker, more haphazard knock. One that sounded less like a decision and more like someone who had taken a bad hunch too seriously, too late.
Ilya spun round.
Anya raised her weapon immediately.
Claudia looked at the terminal. The airlock display flickered, as if the reactor room itself had lost the will to accept new guests for a moment.
“Anyone else you told to wait?” Claudia asked Anya.
Ilya didn’t answer.
A voice crackled from the loudspeaker.
“Ilya?”
Shane. The name wasn’t in the room, but all three heard it anyway. Ilya was already at the airlock controls before Anya could stop him completely.
“Don’t open it!” she said.
“Yes.”
“We don’t know if he’s alone.”
“Then let’s ask.”
Ilya pressed the intercom.
“Shane.”
For a moment, only breathing came through the loudspeaker. Then Shane’s voice, strained and clearly too angry for genuine relief.
“You’re down here. Of course you’re down here. I thought she’d killed you because you didn’t come back, you idiot!”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
Anya stepped beside Ilya. “Anyone could say that.”
Shane’s voice grew sharper. “Is that the woman in green?”
“Black now,” said Ilya.
“Wonderful. At least the wardrobe has made progress.”
“He’s not coming in without a coat,” Claudia growled sternly.
Ilya pressed the intercom button again. “Protective clothing is hanging in the equipment room on the left. Put on a coat. Dosimeter. Gloves.”
“Why?”
Claudia leaned towards the intercom.
“Because otherwise you’ll appear in the report as an avoidable collateral error, Mr Hollander, and your children will be born with three heads.”
A brief silence. Ilya looked at Claudia in horror.
Then Shane said: “My children?”
Through the viewing window, they saw Shane searching for the protective coat in the equipment area. He was still half-dressed in the clothes he’d left Ilya’s suite in: shirt, dark trousers, open jacket, put on too quickly, not quite right. The grey protective coat didn’t make it look any more dignified, but at least a little less vulnerable. He fastened the dosimeter incorrectly. Claudia corrected him through the intercom with the patience of a woman who was already inwardly condemning three ministries of education.
“Not there. On the collar. Visible. No, visible means on the outside.”
Shane looked through the pane. “I hadn’t planned on learning fashion tonight.”
“Neither had I, and yet here we all are.”
At last, the dosimeter was correctly positioned. Ilya opened the inner airlock.
Shane stepped inside.
The cold hit him immediately. His gaze went first to Ilya, then to Anya, then to Claudia — and only then to the six oscillating neptunium rings.
He stopped.
“You’re the thief of the puck? And what’s that back there?”
“The reason Lind has disappeared. The puck was the key to the outer door, and I already regret not locking it behind me. And what’s back there is a  spherical-cluster microreactor and a neptunium-stabilised portal to the Pleistocene,” said Claudia.
Shane looked at the white window between the rings. Snow and wind.
“The Ice Age?”
“It was obvious you’d know what a Pleistogähn is; it’s as boring as you are.” Shane ignored Ilya’s hurt.
Ilya stepped towards Shane, but not too close. Between them still lay the suite, the searched coat, the lie, the false intimacy. Shane looked at him briefly. It wasn’t a forgiving look. But neither was it one that shut him out for good.
That would have to suffice for the moment.
Anya didn’t lower the gun quite all the way.
“You should have stayed upstairs.”
Shane laughed once, harshly and briefly. “I’ve been told that surprisingly often tonight. By people who all went down to the basement afterwards.”
Claudia pointed at the generator. “Long story short: that little reactor over there is an extremely efficient micro-spherical pile generator. The so-called tidal power station is a cover, cooling water logistics and PR fodder. The second device over there keeps a time window open with six neptunium rings.”
Shane looked at her. Shane slowly turned his head back towards the rings. The realisation didn’t come to him as scientific understanding, but as a physical reaction: his shoulders stiffened, his breathing grew shallower. Had he wanted to see Lind disappear? No. He’d just been given an assignment. A puck, a glance, and a man who’d been afraid of pursuers.
Claudia nodded. “The facility calls it subject displacement; we know Lind has vanished—he was probably sucked into the Ice Age somehow. Not a pleasant thought, freezing to death like that.”
Shane took a step closer to the portal. Ilya immediately grabbed his arm.
“Don’t.”
Shane didn’t pull away, but his gaze remained fixed on the white.
“He gave me the puck. He said I should give it to someone who realises it’s too heavy.”
Claudia touched the inside pocket of her protective coat, where the puck lay.
Shane saw the movement.
“You still have it.”
“Yes.”
“Then we have to go to de la Motte.”
Anya said straight away: “No.”
Shane turned to her. “Yes. Lind wanted that. Francine de la Motte is a representative of the World Energy Organisation. If this thing is a reactor, if Stromberg is down here in the middle of Copenhagen—“
“Not just a reactor,” Anya interrupted.
“All the better. Then it has to be taken out even more.”
Ilya nodded. “He’s right.”
Anya looked at him as if he’d personally let her down.
“Of course you think that’s a good plan. You’ve already romantically defended several bad decisions tonight.”
“De la Motte has authority,” said Ilya. “She can stop Stromberg.”
“She can stop the reactor,” said Anya. “Perhaps. But as soon as the portal becomes public, it can’t be stopped. Then WEO, the services, states, alliances, admirals and every man with a port will know that something like this is possible.”
Shane stepped closer. “So we’re just going to bury it under a hotel?”
“We’re securing it.”
“For whom? The Soviet Union?”
Anya held his gaze like a straight stalk of asparagus without sauce. “Better for the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union than for Stromberg.”
“That’s not the reassuring answer you think it is.”
“I don’t believe in reassuring answers.”
Claudia raised her hand.
“The reactor must be documented.”
Anya turned to her. “Not now.”
“Yes. The reactor technology is too good to bury with Stromberg. The microsphere generator could make power stations smaller, safer and more economical. Stabilise cities. Replace old plants. Save wind turbines—perhaps not just wind turbines.”
Anya pointed at the rings. “And that?”
“Not that.”
“You can’t cleanly separate the two.”
“You have to separate them.”
“Technology doesn’t separate itself just because scientists want it to.”
Claudia’s eyes narrowed. “And intelligence agencies don’t make technology safer by stealing it.”
“Sometimes they do.”
“No! They just make it more secretive.”
Shane looked from one to the other. “That’s absurd. Lind has vanished. This machine is keeping a hole open in the ice age. Stromberg might want to use it to cool the oceans or freeze waterways or God knows what. And you’re arguing over publication rights?”
“Over control,” said Anya.
“Over responsibility,” said Claudia.
“About life,” said Ilya.
Everyone looked at him.
Ilya stood between the portal and the airlock, his hands half-raised, not like a diplomat, but like a referee trying to stop two opponents from locking horns after the whistle.
“If Shane brings in de la Motte, the WEO gets the reactor. If Anya is right, too many people get the portal. If Claudia is right, Stromberg mustn’t be allowed to burn the reactor technology with his madness. So we need data, evidence and a way to close the gate before anyone else comes down.”
“I already said that,” muttered Claudia.
“You said it was too complicated.”
“I said it more precisely.”
Shane walked over to the terminal next to the portal. “Where do you close it?”
Claudia spun round. “Don’t touch anything, you oaf!”
“I’m just asking.”
“With men who’ve played ice hockey, that’s often the first step towards causing damage.”
Ilya stepped up to Shane. “Step away from the terminal.”
Shane looked at him. “Don’t tell me what to do again.”
“Then don’t do something stupid again.”
“I’m here because you went after Anya.”
“I’m here because you accepted a time puck.”
“From a scientist who wanted help.”
“And you didn’t even realise that Claudia had stolen it from you.”
The words were out before Ilya could take them back.
Shane’s face changed.
Claudia said dryly, “Shall we get down to business?”
But it was too late. Shane took half a step towards Ilya and slammed his gloved fist onto the display.
“Do you really want to talk now about what I didn’t notice this evening?”
Ilya exhaled. “No.”
“Good.”
“But step away from the terminal.”
Shane didn’t move.
Anya had been watching the readings. “The rings are becoming unstable.”
Claudia turned immediately to the displays.
The readings were running faster. Phases one and four were drifting apart. Ring three was oscillating in short, irregular bursts. The white patch in the air flickered as if a storm were suddenly lashing against a window behind it.
“What have you done?” asked Claudia.
“Nothing,” said Shane.
“That’s what everyone says just before a protocol.”
Ilya stepped between Shane and the terminal. He wanted to pull Shane away, but his reach was too wide in the protective suit. His elbow struck a side control panel, barely more than a press on a recessed field.
A sound rang out, not an alarm
A line appeared on the main display.
PHASE ANCHOR DEACTIVATION INITIATED
Claudia froze.
“No.”
Anya raised her weapon as if one could shoot a command.
“What was that?”
Ilya looked at his hand.
“I—”
“You’ve deactivated the portal stabiliser,” said Claudia.
“Is that a good thing?” asked Shane.
“Not like this.”
The six Neptunium rings lost their harmony.
At first it sounded like glass coming under pressure far away. Then the wind tore open. The white at the centre of the rings billowed forward, as if the ice age on the other side had suddenly realised its door was no longer being held steady.
Cold swept through the room.
Not as a draught, but as a blast.
The transparent shields were instantly covered in frost. Metal creaked. A lamp burst. The dosimeter on Shane’s collar began to beep.
Claudia screamed, “Back!”
Anya grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her behind a control cabinet.
Shane was standing closest to the depression.
He had looked at the portal for just a moment too long. In the white, a dark depth appeared for a breath’s duration—no longer an image of an icy landscape, but a maelstrom of light, snow and distorted time. The space before him warped. The water in the sump froze instantly.
Shane’s feet slipped across the frosty floor.
Ilya reacted faster than he thought.
He threw himself hard against Shane, with all the weight of a player who knew how to knock a body off balance. Shane was knocked off his feet and slammed into the floor behind the trough. Ilya landed half on top of him, half beside him, his protective suit sliding across frozen metal.
At that very moment, the portal collapsed.
The six rings shot out of their phases. One screeched in its mount, a second tilted a few centimetres off its axis. The white between them contracted into a blinding point and then tore inwards, as if someone were cutting the air out of the room.
A temporal eruption struck where Shane had just been standing.
A vertical fissure of cold, pressure and impossible distance. For a split second, Claudia saw through it something that did not belong in this cellar: snow over black rock, a grey sky, a movement in the storm. Then Lind’s body lay in the snow. And suddenly it was gone. The bang came only afterwards.
The shockwave hurled loose tools off the table. The terminal went dark. The rings went into emergency mode one after the other, heavy, metallic, dead. The micro-spherical cluster generator remained on, but its hum had changed.
For a few seconds, all that could be heard was breathing.
Shane lay on his back, Ilya’s arm still across his chest. Both were gasping. Their faces were white with frost, their hair studded with fine crystals.
Shane blinked.
“What was that?”
Ilya didn’t answer straight away. Then he said, “I pushed you.”
“I noticed.”
“Good.”
“I meant the other thing.”
Claudia emerged from behind the control cabinet. Her hands were shaking with anger, not fear. At least, that’s what she would have claimed.
“The other thing was the Pleistocene’s attempt to freeze you as Lind’s successor.”
Anya didn’t visibly help her. But she stayed close enough to catch her should Claudia decide to show human weakness after all.
Shane sat up slowly. He looked at the now empty rings.
“Is Lind in there?”
No one answered. That was answer enough.
Anya stepped up to the terminal. “Status?”
Claudia almost pushed her aside, not roughly, but decisively. She checked displays, switches, emergency protocols.
“Portal closed. Phase anchors heating up passively. Generator running unchanged. Cooling import zero. Power export at 96%. That means someone in Denmark is currently noticing a massive surge in energy on the public grid. It won’t be long before Stromberg knows about it. And up there, the ice will start to melt if it’s no longer being cooled.”
“So we shut it down?” asked Ilya.
Claudia turned to him.
“You shut it down in such a way that we would have had to catalogue Mr Hollander palaeontologically alongside a mammoth.”
Ilya accepted that.
Shane looked at him.
This time, there was no anger at first. Just the harsh realisation of how close it had been to something he didn’t even understand.
“Thanks,” said Shane quietly.
Ilya looked away. “You’re welcome.”
Anya took a deep breath. “There’s no doubt about it now. No one outside a very small circle must find out that the portal worked.”
“Didn’t work,” said Claudia sharply. “Works. It can be closed. It can be opened. It moved Lind. It would have taken Shane. And if Stromberg builds larger versions, this is just the prototype. If you operate it correctly and don’t stand in its line of fire when it opens and closes, then it’s a working technology.”
Shane stood up slowly. “Then we’re going to de la Motte.”
Anya said, “No.”
Claudia looked at the dead rings, then at the generator, which was still running.
“We’re going to de la Motte,” she said. “But not with everything.”
Anya turned to her.
Claudia continued: “The WEO needs to see the reactor. The generator. The cooling water genius with the tidal power plant as a tertiary cooling circuit. The danger of an unauthorised nuclear system beneath a hotel full of guests. That’s enough to stop Stromberg.”
“And the portal?” asked Shane.
Claudia looked at the rings.
“We’ll secure the portal first. Copy the data. Lock the controls. Remove the neptunium rings, if possible.”
Anya nodded slowly. “Even Stromberg can’t restore that much neptunium so quickly, not with all the reactors on his ships combined. But what do we do then?”
“Then we carry on arguing.”
Ilya helped Shane to his feet. For a moment, they held each other for too long. A muffled hissing sound suddenly came from the airlock.
Anya raised her pistol. Claudia reached for the puck in her bag. Ilya stood in front of Shane again, as if he had learnt absolutely nothing and yet everything from the last ten seconds.