Industrial Evolution

Industrial Evolution

For the Glorious House of Sinanju

DestroyerBooks.com

With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.

Copyright

First published in the United States in 2004 by Worldwide

First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016

ISBN: 978-0-7515-6086-2

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 Warren Murphy

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Sphere

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 35

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Epilogue

About the Authors

Chapter 1

To make matters worse, the phone kept ringing. The man with the craggy face and the salt-and-pepper hair ignored it, but the ringing became unendurable. With a curse he tried to lift himself, felt his arm muscles turn to wet noodles, and his cheekbone smacked hard on the iron floor. As he lay helpless, the throbbing pain and the chirping of the phone melded into a song of agony.

He was dying, no doubt about that, but couldn’t he at least die in peace? He just had to find a way to get to that telephone and yank it out of the wall—only then could he settle down to suffocate in peace and quiet.

It took all his strength, but somehow he made his cold, trembling arms drag him to the control console and grab at the telephone.

“Who is it?”

“Thank God I found you!”

“How did you reach me? Zee phone has not worked from zee beginning.”

“How? Calling a hundred times a day for a week, that’s how! Five times I actually got a ring, and then the signal went out. Anyway, how’s it going?”

The gray-haired man collapsed, gasping, in the padded chair. “I am dying, that is how I am doing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Cancer?”

“Asphyxiation.”

“Never heard of it. Is it, you know, painful?”

“It is not pleasant.”

“Well, how much time did they give you? I mean, do you think you’ll have time to finish helping me, you know…”

“Senator Herbie, my son was correct. You are a dweeb. Zee dweebiest. Right at this moment I am buried alive, maybe twenty meters under zee desert. If I could help anybody—”

“What do you mean, buried? How did this happen? What’s being done about it?”

“I don’t know what is being done about it I haven’t heard a word from the world above until you called.

I pray to zee heavens that your voice is not the last one I hear—”

“What about Jack? Isn’t he digging you out? I should go help him! Well, I would, except I have these burned feet, you understand. I’ll hire people, though. Lotsa Mexicans down there, right? Shouldn’t cost too much. What do you pay them, like two dollars a day? We’ll i get eight of them. Five, maybe. How long would it j take?”

Mercifully, the signal faded. The phone display said the batteries were depleted. Thank the heavens for small favors, he thought, and flopped onto the floor to expire in blessed silence.

But his peace didn’t last for long. Wouldn’t you know, if it wasn’t the phone it was the front door. Somebody was knocking insistently.

“Go away!” he shouted. No, he didn’t shout, because he couldn’t. Couldn’t even speak anymore. Had to have imagined shouting. Did that mean the knocking was his imagination, too? Now it was a grinding sound. Now it was a crackling hiss. A cutting torch? He passed out not caring.

The smell of canned air woke him, and there was a rubber mask attached to his face. He was breathing again, real oxygen, and he realized that the sound of a cutting torch had been an actual cutting torch.

He was still inside the Mighty Iron Mole, but now his son was with him. Just as improbable were the floating stars in primary colors, about the size of basketballs, that faded and flared with every flicker of his eyeballs.

Next time he regained consciousness the red, blue and purple stars were gone, and the green star had stabilized into a typical plastic glow stick around the neck of the phantom of his son.

“Hiya, Pops!” Jack Fast was grinning.