Cosmic Rift (11 page)

He wasn’t. That was a part of the mechanism he had employed. It shut down everything but continued to feed oxygen to his brain, a bubbling super-jet of oxygen that not only prevented any deterioration in brain operation but actually enhanced the functionality of the organ. It would burn fully an hour, if necessary, though with each passing minute the danger of such an input increased tenfold. The body of man was not designed to take such enhancements; Wertham had trained for this moment for fifty years.

“Did you get hold of the doc?” one of the guards asked, the one who had first come to Wertham’s aid.

“Ronald’s coming back now,” the guard farthest from Wertham confirmed. “He’ll be here in two minutes.”

Of course he will, Wertham thought. It’s all a part of the plan.

“Good. Seal the room.”

“What? You think Wertham could...?”

“Doc Ronald’s got a warp key,” the guard assured them. “He’ll unlock the shield wall when he arrives. Better not to take the chance until then.”

As they spoke, Wertham felt something being pressed against his face, a bulging muzzle of a mask clinched over mouth and nose. The hissing sound of escaping gas came to his ears, distant now as he crouched in his hidden pocket of time, behind the geometric shapes that no other man could ever perceive. They were trying to revive him. Chest compressions. More oxygen. But the body was dead, and it would remain so until he was ready to strike.

* * *

A
FTER
THE
MEAL
, the Cerberus companions were invited to join King Jack and Queen Rosalind at what they called “the Happening.” With Jack carrying the energy rod lightly in one hand like a walking cane, they strode through the magnificent corridors of the royal residence until they reached one of the upper stories.

“The palace is the hub of our operation here,” Jack explained. “Our citizens would be much impoverished without the work that goes on within these walls.”

The corridors were wide as highways, and though not busy there seemed to be a steady stream of people going back and forth, hurrying about their palace business. Many of these people looked identical to the hairless servants who had waited on the royal party at the meal, Kane noticed, and he wondered if they were some kind of clones or similarly artificial humans.

Other people seen in the corridors were wearing grand clothes, cloaks, capes and towering headdresses that loaned their figures sweeping lines as they moved. It gave the whole place the feeling of being inside a painting, each line a graceful sweep of the painter’s brush.

King Jack stopped before the open doorway to a room, inviting his guests to peek inside. The Cerberus warriors stepped closer. Within was a dark room illuminated only by what appeared to be glowing round portholes set within the walls, and it stretched back close to two hundred feet.

A figure sat at each of the portholes, peering into it, and all wore dark visors over their eyes. There were a hundred such figures in the room, and above their circular portholes loomed larger oval screens, like eggs resting on their sides. Each figure was dressed in the same black leather tunic and conical helmet, as well as the tinted visors. Kane noticed something else about the figures, too—they had heads and torsos, but no legs. Instead, their bodies seemed to be cut at the waist where they connected to fixed chairs bolted to the floor.

“What are they doing?” Brigid asked, pitching her voice just above a whisper.

“This is the tabulation room,” Queen Rosalind said. “The information they receive here comes from the operators of the Happening. It’s here that the data is pulled together and fed through our maps to find specific markers we’ve identified.”

“Like triangulating a site?” Grant suggested, at which the queen looked confused. “Um...figuring out where a location is based on other known locations,” Grant elaborated.

The queen nodded. “That’s a fair summary,” she said. “We work through the basic four dimensions, plus the quantum factor that can alter or distil time if we need to pluck an item from a particular period.”

Kane’s eyebrows rose. “Time travel? You’re capable of that?”

King Jack fielded the question with a chuckle. “Not time travel, as such,” he said. “The Vooers in this room are capable of manipulating very small sections so that we might slip an hour or two either way to capture what we need. It allows us to backtrack a little when we need to.”

Kane, Grant, Domi and Brigid watched as two golden spacecraft launched on the large oval screen. They were pebblelike, resembling the ones that had grabbed Grant’s Manta.

“More scout ships,” King Jack explained. “I guess we’re having a busy few days right now.”

Then, with a gesture of his golden energy rod, the king led the group farther down the corridor. As they walked, Brigid raised another question.

“You called those people—
Vooers?
” she asked.

“Visual Observation Operatives,” King Jack explained. “It’s a meticulous and exhausting task. The Vooers are bred specifically for the job.”

Brigid nodded as though accepting this at face value. However, it added strength to her suspicion that this society had perfected the art of genetic manipulation, growing a workforce designed for specialized functions.

A few yards farther along the corridor they came to another doorway, inside which stood a long room filled with equipment and manned by four women. The room was barely illuminated by a faint glow of blue radiating from the walls. Huge machines covered the ceiling and floor, and as the Cerberus crew looked more closely they saw that it was all interconnected, feeding to six strange-looking constructions posed at intervals around the vast room.

Within the room, each of the women was sitting before a bulky unit that was vaguely reminiscent of an old cathode ray television set, with a flat, oblong screen behind which was a thick block of machinery. The machinery was mostly hidden behind metal sheeting, but there were vents through which a throbbing white glow could be seen, as well as snaking pipes and chimneylike constructions that chuffed exhaust into the air of the room. The exhaust by-product was invisible, but it created a heat haze above the chimneylike towers. Despite this, the room itself was ice-cold—so cold that the coolness seemed to seep from the doorway as they neared.

The units themselves included a chair and visual screen, a little like a flight simulator.

Women were working three of the units, while another woman sat making notes as one of the users dictated, her face close to the illuminated screen. There were three further units, but they showed darkened screens.

The women at the units looked young and slim, and Kane guessed that none of them was over twenty-five. They were dressed in white minidresses that came down just past their hips, thigh-high boots and hair bands that held back their long tresses.

“Of course, you don’t stumble on alien material by chance,” Jack explained as they entered the room.

It was notably cooler in here and there was icy condensation on the walls.

“This here’s the Happening,” Jack explained. “It clues us in on what’s out there before it happens.”

“Before—?” Brigid queried.

“The Hyper Advanced Prediction Prophesying Engineered Nodule with Integrated Nano Gate—that’s its full name,” Jack explained. “It sorts the quantum pathways and detects the most likely outcome of any given event.”

“A fortune-telling device,” Grant translated. He had seen similar items before, and they rarely amounted to anything more than a way to trick the minds of the people watching, usually to scam them for money or possessions.

“Let me show you,” Jack said.

As he spoke, Queen Rosalind stepped over to the nearest functioning unit and spoke a few words to the female operator. The young woman dipped her head courteously to the queen before stepping out of the chair and helping the blue-haired queen into the seat. As the Cerberus team watched, Rosalind adjusted a headpiece that enshrouded her whole head until only her mouth could be seen.

“We have six of these units in all,” King Jack said as his wife calibrated the settings. “Three of them will be functioning at any one time, checking the quantum pathways in the search of useful tech that might otherwise have been left abandoned and unnoticed.”

“Three?” Brigid queried.

“We need three because it’s all about probabilities here, not absolutes,” Jack told them.

The operator who had been using the machine stepped in to help the queen, guiding Roz’s hands to the control panel where she took hold of twin grips with her slender fingers. “It sticks a little, Your Majesty,” the operator said with obvious embarrassment. “Be careful when looking fourteen weeks hence, it can get stuck and we have to reignite the system.”

“Thank you, Betassa,” the queen said. “I’ll keep that in mind. Take a break and find yourself something to eat. I won’t hog this unit for very long.”

“As you will, Your Majesty,” the operator said.

Betassa departed with a timpani drum of receding heels.

“I don’t trust this,” Kane muttered, pulling Brigid to one side. “A cache of alien technology—it’s too good to be true.”

“But it makes sense, Kane,” insisted Brigid. “We’ve been investigating the fallout of alien interference ever since we left Cobaltville—in fact, it was that same alien interference that set us on the path of exiles cast to the Outlands.”

“Even so...” Kane began uncertainly.

“Think about it,” Brigid stressed. “All that alien tech had to end up somewhere, right? We’re looking at it. A whole city of it. Every invention here owes its existence to alien technology.”

“Which puts us where, exactly?” Kane wondered.

“If we could trade with these people,” Brigid mused, “acquire their technology—it could literally change the world.”

Kane nodded. “Lakesh would have a field day,” he said. “That’s for sure.”

Brigid turned back to the king and queen, indicating to Kane to do likewise. It seemed that Queen Rosalind was ready to show them the full extent of the Happening’s powers.

The cold lights flickered and dimmed as the machine whirred to life.

Chapter 12

The Happening hummed in the darkened room, a low growl at first that grew higher in pitch as its engine fed more power to its software. In the control chair, Queen Rosalind was barely moving, the golden helmet covering her features almost entirely so that only her mouth showed. Her mouth twitched in the slightest of smiles as her hands worked the ball-like controls on the machine’s surface.

As his wife worked, King Jack outlined the procedure. “We’ve been scouring the planet for alien artifacts for a long time,” he said. “In fact, it’s alien technology that formed the foundation of this whole city.”

“How long ago was that?” Brigid asked.

Smiling, Jack shook his head. “A long time,” he said wistfully. “We’ve been here a lot longer than you’ve been alive, Brigid.”

“This whole place is founded on alien tech?” Kane probed.

Jack nodded. “I don’t expect I need to tell you folks that there’s a lot of alien material all over the globe, with more of it appearing periodically. There was an alien craft docked in orbit until not much more than a year back, for example. When the thing went kaboom, we had people in place to pick up the debris.

“And that’s where the Happening comes in. See, it’s drawn to alien technology—stuff that doesn’t belong, you might say. The machinery is sensitive to the appearance and use of that technology, which is to say if someone fires up a Tuatha de Danaan music gate, the Happening will get a bead on it and start working out where that technology will most likely end up.”

“So you steal it?” Kane asked.

“No,” King Jack assured him. “We’re not interested in getting into squabbles of who owns what. We tried that for a while, back in the early days of Authentiville. Lot of bloodshed on both sides—you can probably imagine. Wasn’t worth it. There’s plenty of stuff that’s been left out there unguarded and forgotten about. Most people don’t even notice it, though from what your friend Domi told us, I’m guessing you folks are the exception.”

Grant nodded. “We’ve met with our fair share of alien problems over the years,” he lamented.

Around them, the other operators were continuing with the monitoring of their units, oblivious now to the presence of the monarchs and their guests. The room had a curious stillness to it with a kind of tension to the atmosphere, like a packed theater moments before the performance begins.

“What the Happening does is put together the pieces of the puzzle,” King Jack continued. “An alien spaceship appears in orbit, the Happening is on it, figuring its vector and probing the future to figure where it’ll wind up—could be two, three months from now. As that moment gets closer, the Happening sorts through the possible options and the information becomes more definite.”

“Then it’s Schrodinger’s Cat technology,” Brigid said with sudden understanding. “You work out what’s there and then factor in all the likely outcomes until one emerges that’s right.”

Jack looked at her with his open, kindly face. “I can’t say I know about this dingy cat you mention, but your summary sounds about right. The Happening draws together echoes of the future and forms a likely outcome for any given event. Once we’ve got that, we can set our scouts out there to pluck the artifacts we need at the optimum moment.

“Of course, that’s only half the process,” the king continued. “Once we have it in hand, we still have to comprehend and refine that material to find its best use.”

Brigid’s eyebrows raised with surprise. “You’re improving on alien tech?”

Jack shrugged. “Nothing to say we can’t, is there?”

As the Cerberus warriors pondered that, Queen Rosalind spoke from behind the metallic veil of the Happening headgear. “Something’s coming through now,” she told the others, and the screen on the front of the machine flickered to life.

A mist appeared on-screen, and then an overhead view of the ocean formed from the mist. The view was very high up, for even once the mist had parted there were still clouds obscuring the blue-green water, wisping through the foreground like trailing steam.

“Ocean,” Rosalind said, her mouth carefully forming the word. “I see the ocean.”

“We all see the ocean,” Domi agreed, and Brigid shot her a look to quiet her.

“Something beneath the waves,” Rosalind continued, either ignoring Domi’s comment or unaware of it. “A shape, like a pyramid.”

The view rotated and closed in on the ocean surface, and the Cerberus companions became aware that something odd was happening. While the eighteen-by-twelve-inch screen appeared normal enough, flat like a picture or a television monitor, an added dimension seemed to be taking form behind the image, granting an incredible sense of depth to the picture as it shifted on-screen. Both Brigid and Kane had seen its like before, recognizing the effect.

“Is that...Annunaki technology?” Kane whispered uncertainly.

Brigid nodded.

Although the setup was different, it was recognizably derived from the astronavigation chairs that were in use on the Annunaki mother ship,
Tiamat.
At least two of those chairs had made it to Earth after the destruction of the great dragon ship itself. One had cropped up in the Louisiana bayou, where it had been mistakenly called a “Voodoo Chair” and been used in conjunction with opiates to generate startling visions in the user’s mind. Brigid Baptiste had very nearly been consumed by such a chair as it attempted to synergize with her, hooks anchoring themselves into her flesh until Kane had pulled her free.

Kane had encountered another astronavigation chair under less fraught circumstances and had utilized the chair’s mapping functionality to locate Brigid during the period when she had been in the thrall of the Annunaki god-prince, Ullikummis. That chair had been stored among the many incredible artifacts inside a museum in the hidden city of Agartha, whose guardian, Balam, had allowed Kane access to the chair during the God War.

Neither Kane nor Brigid truly understood the functionality of the astronavigation chairs beyond their observation that they operated concurrently on both the physical plane and the mental one. The way in which they cooperated with a user’s thoughts made the chairs seem almost alive.

Standing protectively behind his wife, King Jack nodded at Kane’s query. “We learn to mix and match here,” he told his guests. “A bit of Annunaki know-how in the right hands can work wonders.”

“Is it safe?” Brigid asked, recalling her experience with the Voodoo Chair.

“We’ve been using this stuff a long time, Red,” Jack assured her with a smile. “I wouldn’t put my wife in something I’d not had checked over with a fine-tooth comb.”

Turning her attention back to the screen, Brigid saw that the view of the ocean had become an overlay to the pyramid shape. The pyramid was dark, as if it was a shadow projected against a wall by a bright light, its silhouette visible but its details uncertain.

“I can’t tune in on the details yet,” the queen admitted with a note of strain in her voice. “Let me try...”

On screen, the image shifted, rotating 180 degrees as the Happening software tried to generate a clearer view. Around the image, dark spots had appeared, like ink bubbles in the blue of the ocean.

“What’s she doing?” Grant asked.

“Tapping the quantum pathways,” King Jack explained. “The Happening doesn’t just show pictures of the future—it works the odds. The path of least resistance is usually the most likely outcome of a given event, is what they tell me. But sometimes finding that path can take a little patience.”

Brigid nodded in comprehension while her companions still looked mystified.

“Sounds like a load o’ mumbo jumbo to me,” Grant muttered.

“No, it’s not,” Brigid told him. “The Cerberus computers use a similar system, running analysis software to predict everything from earthquakes to system overloads. What this Happening unit does is fundamentally the same—it applies a complex logarithm to discern the most likely result of a given set of circumstances.”

Overhearing this, King Jack strode across to where Grant and Brigid stood and looked the ex-Magistrate in the eye. “You don’t believe in this stuff, do you, son?”

“I have trouble with it,” Grant admitted. “Some of the time.”

“And yet, you and your friend came here piloting Annunaki TAVs. You’re obviously familiar with stuff like this chair,” Jack said with a kind of kindly sincerity, as though trying to pierce the veil of Grant’s distrust.

“I’ve seen a lot of bad come out of that technology,” Grant said before gesturing to his colleagues. “We all have.”

“The Annunaki,” Jack stated, “the Tuatha de Danaan, the Rakshashas—they’re all gone now. Only their hardware survives. The old gods are dead and we’re what took their place—the people of Authentiville.”

“Then you’re the new gods?” Kane asked. “Is that it?”

Jack patted Kane on the arm and smiled. “Gods crave to be worshipped. All I crave is a hot bath and the company of good friends from time to time,” he assured them all. “Let the deities worry about the things we don’t care for. I’m just an ordinary man living an ordinary life.”

Looking around the room, Kane bit back his response. Now was not the time to tell Jack that his life was anything but normal.

“Tell you what,” Jack said. “Looks like Roz is going to be a little time tapping into that pathway there. Why don’t you and I go take a look around the city? Bring your friends, too, those who want to join us. I’ll show you how things work around here, give you a better handle on how it all fits together. Figure I can maybe open your eyes to what the
ills—
” he winked as he said the word “—of all that alien technology have actually brought us.”

“I’d like that,” Kane admitted, and Grant nodded, too. The two of them had been nearly inseparable since their days as Magistrates—whether Grant cared for the royal tour or not, he would stick with Kane and provide backup if it proved necessary.

Brigid continued to watch the screen where the shadow pyramid was taking shape. “I’ll stay here,” she informed Kane without looking up. “I’d like to get a clearer idea of how the scouting procedure works.”

Domi shrugged as Kane turned to her. “Seen the place already,” she said in her clipped way. “You go. Want to talk to Brigid, anyway.”

Kane and Grant followed King Jack out of the darkened room, leaving Brigid and Domi to monitor the predictive machinery with the queen. Jack’s staff lit the way in a glow of fearsome energy.

* * *

W
ERTHAM
WAS
IN
the fight trance now, his whole body coiled and ready to attack while his mind swam in tranquillity, watching the clock.

All three sentries had been poised close to Wertham’s apparently dead body when it had moved. The movement had been sharp and sudden, the way a dead frog’s legs will scissor at the introduction of an electric current.

Wertham himself was still a half step outside of his body, waltzing in the alien geometry that hid itself from human eyes. His body followed his commands now, but not in the way a man might command his arms to rise or his legs to walk. No, this was more akin to the manner in which a farmer will instruct a sheepdog, sending it this way and that through a sequence of yips and whistles, commanding each turn of the body remotely in a synergy of master and devotee.

Wertham saw the guards only as luminous hard planes, their beating hearts held strong in their cores like traffic lights.

The first guard reacted to Wertham’s flinch. “What th—?” he began.

But already he was too late.

Wertham’s arm thrust out, the straight edge of his hand striking the guard beneath his jaw, obliterating his windpipe with a single blow. The guard sagged back from the cot, his hands grasping up at the armored collar of his uniform, the awful, animal sounds of choking spewing from his open mouth.

“Ben, what happened?” his colleague asked. His attention was distracted in that instant and he watched Ben limp back and down, tumbling to the deck as if he were a tower of clothes piled too high on laundry day.

Wertham’s body was all sharp angles now, hard lines and furious energy that was barely restrained by its flesh. He moved from the cot in a whirlwind, a spinning, twirling dance from bed to floor, left leg snapping out in a blurring kick, the angle impossible. The foot connected with the second guard’s chest, slamming against the hard armor there with the clang of a bell being struck. The second guard was driven across the room with the impact, whirling through the air before striking the back wall—the translucent one that could be parted only by a guard’s key—in a drumbeat of soft flesh against solid barricade. He sank to the floor, eyes swimming out of focus.

The third guard reacted swiftly, whipping himself out of reach as Wertham’s other foot cut the air toward him in a swishing arc. The foot missed by a fraction of an inch, and the guard drew his baton from its holster at the top of his thigh. The baton emerged seven inches in length and the thickness of a wineglass, but Wertham watched as the guard flicked his wrist and the length quadrupled, turning the short stick into a powerful club. He had never given his jailors cause to employ their defences before—objectively, he found this whole experience fascinating.

Wertham’s flesh was following the pattern of the fight trace, slipping into a charge, body dropping low as he powered toward his remaining foe. The guard beside the wall was recovering, which meant he ought to curtail this before reinforcements could be called.

The sentry with the baton stepped back, securing a two-handed grip on the weapon and holding it upright before him like a cell bar. Wertham had no time to acknowledge the irony; already his body was switching from the charge into an upward leap, effortlessly springing from the floor. His left foot connected with the extended baton, slapping against it with a clap of noise and using it to climb higher into the air even as the guard fell back with the sudden shift in weight and balance.

The guard tried to change his attack, but he was too slow. To Wertham, deep in the fight trance, the guards moved with all the speed and purpose of a still photograph, each shift in the fight seen not as a motion but rather as a new pose to be accounted for and conquered at his leisure. Fight mathematics—simple for a mathematician of Wertham’s ability.