Marduk's Rebellion

by Jenn Lyons

shaft of the anti-matter chamber.

  “Thank Keepers you’re here,” Vanessa told me as she saw me run in. “What is this supposed to do?”

  “You’ll see in a minute.” I bent down over the first one and started to dismantle it, revealing several important pieces of equipment. I slapped several of the parts against the retaining wall, and activated a magnetic lock so they’d stick. “Did you ever find out what happened to the Sarcodinay technicians? Did they run?”

  She shook her head. “No, they’re inside the core.”

  I paused to stare at her. “What?”

  She nodded. “I know. They...they walked inside the core. That’s why I can’t stop the antimatter core from reaching criticality. They physically destroyed all the safety regulators.”

  “I guess after Zaladin shut off the self-destruct using the Master Commands, Tirris wanted to make sure he couldn’t just stop the reaction using a computer,” Campbell added. “She sure does like to make things explode, doesn’t she?”

  “Apparently.” I picked up another smuggle ball. “Okay, this is how you open it. You want these two parts. Put them up on the wall, just like this. Make sure the nodes don’t have more than two meters between them.”

  Campbell frowned. “Those look like jump drive nexus points.”

  “They are jump drive nexus points.” I saluted Vanessa. “I don’t know more than you about antimatter, but I do know more about hyperspace. Let’s hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  Vanessa looked at the toy in her hands, then at me, and choked off a hysterical laugh. Merlin came in a few minutes later and Vanessa showed him the steps while Campbell and I kept placing nodes. I took a step back and looked at our handiwork.

  “Mallory—” Medusa began.

  “I know,” I whispered. “We don’t have enough.”

  I considered cannibalizing parts from the Aegis, but the wiring on those nodes was very purposefully designed to discourage easy removal. We could escape on the Aegis ourselves; the ship was parked just outside, probably to the very startled surprise of any number of street partiers who had no idea that they were only a dozen or so minutes from a terrible, if quick, death.

  I thought about sixteen million people dead, so fast and so brutal they wouldn’t even leave corpses behind.

  No, don’t think about the dead. Don’t concentrate on that.

  I ground my teeth together. “No. I won’t use the door you give me.”

  Merlin looked back at me. “Weaver?”

  “Placement’s wrong. Let me—” I pulled up Medusa’s full interactive display. “Medusa, I’m sending you data. We don’t have much time.”

  “We don’t have any time,” she corrected.

  “So young and such a pessimist.” My fingers moved over the inputs, tracing glyphs in holographic light. “They’ve shut down the regulators, but that works for us. If we ramped the controls all the way up, modify the antimatter output and...Vanessa come look at this. Would this work?”

  The scholar-caste saw what I was writing, studied the math and then blanched. “Mal, that’s—you’d be causing the explosion we’re trying to stop!”

  “No, no, using it. I can use it. I’ll need that energy.”

  “If you’re wrong, we all die!”

  “I’m not wrong,” I snapped. “This will work. Campbell, I need you to turn those controls back on. The ones over against the wall that Vanessa shut off earlier. Just press the red buttons.”

  “Mallory,” Merlin said, “Are you sure...?”

  “Merlin, we need to adjust the nexus nodes. Don’t spread them out. We want a circle of them at the base of the core.” I turned back to Vanessa. “My other idea would have worked if I’d had enough nodes, but this core is too large, so I have to try something else. I’m going to use the antimatter core to give us a giant blast of energy which will power the creation of a wormhole. The wormhole is going to absorb all the energy in forming. In theory, we’ll be safe.”

  “That’s insane,” Vanessa told me.

  I growled, “Thank you. Do you have a better idea? Because if you want to escape on the Aegis, the door’s right there. Medusa will take you.”

  She stared at me, then scoffed. “And leave you to do this all by yourself? What if you forgot to carry a number? Someone has to check your math.” Vanessa started pulling over data sheets from Medusa’s display and scanning the lines.

  The walls were starting to rattle and every warning alarm was going off as I ran to the core walls to help Merlin rearrange the nodes to their new locations. The computers made a last ditch effort to let us know just how desperately bad the situation was in the faint hope that we could somehow produce a miracle.

  Well. We were about to see if we could, weren’t we?

  “Pull it into the red, Vanessa. As high as it will go.”

  “The reactor’s already there. Thirty minutes was just a guess, you realize. This isn’t a bomb on a timer.”

  “Then this will have to do. Okay, everyone out of the room.”

  I paused as I didn’t hear anyone move, and looked behind me. “That wasn’t a request. MOVE!”

  Campbell, Merlin and Vanessa backed out of the room.

  I followed them.

  I admit there was a part of me that wanted to look, that wanted to stare back and see the moment, see my failure or my success.

  I wanted to look in God’s eye and see creation.

  But I’m not an utter fool. Even success might unleash a torrent of radiation I wouldn’t survive.

  I slammed the door behind me. “Punch it, Deuce.”

  “If you want to clear a little more distance...”

  “Do it!”

  There was a thunderous roar, and all of us were slammed to the ground by a shockwave. The door behind me disintegrated, and in spite of my earlier protestations of sanity, I turned my head and looked back.

  For a split-second, I saw a glowing, swirling rainbow of light, something I had seen enough before to recognize as the event horizon of a wormhole. Then it winked out, and plunged the room into total darkness.

  The power was out.

  “Um, anyone have a flashlight?” Vanessa asked.

  Campbell said, “I do,” in a tone that implied it was a stupid question. Of course he had a flashlight. Didn’t everyone? He pulled an LED lamp out of his jacket and switched it on, lighting up the corridor and some of the room we had just vacated.

  I began to laugh. I stood up. “Radiation readings, Medusa. Quick!”

  “I’m glad to say they are within safety margins...”

  I ran over to the door frame. The inside of what had been the control room and the reactor was gone—in its place was a large spherical hole where metal, ceramic and piping were sheared cleanly. The size of the sphere removed reached to the door itself, which is why the door was missing.

  Everything inside was gone, including air, the cause that tremendous shockwave and wind as the air had rushed in to fill the void.

  “Do you see that?” I pointed. “Do you fucking SEE. THAT! HAH!” I laughed and threw my head back, pirouetting to look at Vanessa. “Did you SEE what I DID!? YES! Take that Nicholas Rhodes, you piece of shit! TOP THAT, YOU PHONEY OLD GOAT!!”

  Campbell came to the doorway and looked too. “I don’t understand. You saved our lives. You saved everyone’s lives, but—”

  “Jump nodes transport what’s inside their circumference,” Merlin explained.

  “Yes, yes, YES! YES THEY DO!” I hugged Vanessa, hugged Merlin, started to hug Campbell and stopped myself. I held up a finger to the man instead. “What’s inside their area. Only inside. What’s outside is left behind.”

  “But this didn’t work like that. You transported the whole room—” Campbell looked back at me and looked awestruck. “You...you took the whole room.”

  “Yes I did!” I spun again. “Which means you have a hyperspace engine you can place inside a ship. INSIDE! Yes!” I gave a jaunty hip thrust and threw my hands up in the air, middle f
ingers extended, as if accepting the applause of an unseen audience I didn’t like very much.

  Merlin tilted his head towards Vanessa. “How long do you think she’ll keep dancing?”

  “Aw, give her a minute. She’s earned her moment.”

  Campbell shook his head. “I hate to be the spoil sport, but every MOJ in the City is probably on their way here to figure out why the power went out. We really shouldn’t still be around when they arrive.”

  I was laughing so hard I was very nearly crying, but I nodded. “Right. Yes, yes, of course you’re right. But seriously, did you just see how awesome I am?”

  He laughed. “Yes, I saw. Really, we need to go.”

  “Um,” Vanessa looked at the door frame, then at me. “Did you realize it was going to be this large?”

  “No, I must have dropped a decimal somewhere.” I raised an eyebrow at her significantly.

  “So, if we’d been inside that—” She frowned, “—where would we have ended up—?”

  “Somewhere around the Omega Nebula.” I tapped her on the shoulder as I walked past. “Try not to think about it. You’ll give yourself nightmares. Come on slowpokes, let’s move! MOJ’s on the way.”

  Campbell and the others followed. “I think I like you better when you’re in a bad mood,” he grumbled.

  TWENTYTWO.Randolph

  The apartment was spacious. I might even go so far as to say palatial, at least compared to the apartments the average Urban could expect to see in their lifetime. Decorated in gem colors it managed to somehow retain a charm and style that defied normal Sarcodinay conventions. Gold and red velvet tapestries separated areas of lush blue and violet embroidered sitting