The Infinity Engines Books 1-3

by Andrew Hastie

  ‘It doesn’t matter now that we have him!’ Dalton shouted, pointing at Josh.

  Caitlin stared open-mouthed as the old man carefully placed the parts back into the case. ‘How long have you been a Daedalan?’

  ‘Since the beginning,’ Vassili said, closing the box and turning back towards her. He motioned to Dalton to release her.

  ‘You’re not going to try and deny it?’ she snarled, rubbing her neck. Josh could see there were red lines where the dagger’s edge had been.

  Vassili shrugged. ‘Why should I? I’m far too old to change now.’

  ‘All that time, when grandfather was trying to have the book banned.’

  ‘I was recruited because I was close to him.’ Vassili smiled. ‘He was a brilliant man. I couldn’t have asked for a more interesting mission.’

  Her face flushed with rage. ‘You’re a spy? All those years and you were observing him?’ Her hands clenched into tight fists.

  ‘I was his friend too. Not everything was so black and white in those days. I knew him better than your damned tight-ass godfather — who I’m surprised you haven’t told already.’

  ‘He trusted you,’ Caitlin growled.

  ‘He was supposed to,’ Vassili said, folding his arms over his chest. ‘So what exactly were you hoping to gain by taking the skull?’

  ‘I know who it is,’ said Josh.

  Vassili’s eyes went wide. ‘The prophecy unfolds.’

  The others repeated his words.

  ‘We should go — we have everything we need now,’ Dalton reminded Vassili.

  Caitlin crossed her arms defiantly. ‘You know I can have the grandmaster here in a heartbeat.’

  The old training master walked towards Caitlin without the aid of his staff, his limp seemingly gone.

  ‘Your grandfather was always so quick to dismiss the stories of the ancients. He closed his mind to other possibilities. Daedalus showed us that this is not the only way.’ His eyes were glistening as he placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘My dear Lisichka, you remind me so much of him. You’ve always been like a granddaughter to me. Let us see if we cannot convince you of the power of the Djinn.’

  Josh tried to get to his feet, but Dalton brought the handle of the sickle down on the back of his head and the world went black.

  57

  Missing

  When Bentley walked back into the dorm the next morning, he’d visibly aged overnight. His face was haggard, and there were dark shadows under his eyes.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ asked Fey, ‘and what have you done with love’s young dream?’

  Bentley slumped onto his bunk. ‘They’re not back yet?’

  She blushed. ‘No one’s seen them since yesterday afternoon — we assumed they were... busy.’

  Bentley closed his eyes. ‘I was with them until —’ He stopped himself. ‘I mean, I left them about four. They were going to see the training master,’ he lied. He’d spent the whole night creeping around the lower levels trying to find his way out of the maze while avoiding the Daedalan’s — they must have caught Josh and Caitlin red-handed.

  Someone screamed, and De’Angelo chased Iolanda out from the showers. They were half-naked and flicking towels at each other.

  Fey looked at Bentley’s hands; the long nights of work on the zenoscope had left them blistered and raw with temporal field burns. ‘I have something for that,’ she said, walking off to her locker.

  ‘So, where do you think they’ve gone?’

  ‘No idea,’ muttered Bentley, wincing as Fey applied the salve to his blistered palms. The cream smelled of lavender and tea tree, and he relaxed as the pained eased. ‘Herbal remedies?’

  She grinned. ‘I rewound and did both classes. How exactly did you get these?’

  ‘Messing around with Hubble enclosures, they’re fiddly little buggers.’ Lying had never come easily to Bentley, his cheeks always flushed when he tried to hide the truth.

  Fey studied the burns. Her hands were soft and delicate compared to his fat, calloused fingers. She’d become quite introverted since Darkling’s death. Bentley wanted to say that he was sorry, but part of him wasn’t that sad to see him go.

  She pursed her lips, squinting at the patterns that extended up his arm. ‘These look like temporal lesions.’

  ‘I... I’ve been working on a project. It was supposed to help, but I think I have made things a lot worse —’

  He realised he was going to cry if he didn’t stop talking.

  Fey gently rubbed more cream into his arm, her dark eyes widening as she smiled. ‘Start from the beginning.’

  Bentley took a deep breath and told her everything: about the zenoscope, Dalton and the Daedalus cult and who Lisichka really was. As he spoke, De’Angelo and the others came and sat wide-eyed, listening intently to his story.

  When he was finished, there were many, many questions. Bentley was relieved, by sharing the burden it had given him a new sense of purpose. He’d never really had a good group of friends, and looking at what was left of Aries226, he realised how close they had all become.

  ‘I think they’re in a lot of trouble — we need to help them.’

  Everyone nodded, all eyes on him, and he realised they were looking to him for leadership. He had no idea what to do next, but the decision was taken out of his hands by the sudden arrival of Dalton’s cronies.

  There was a manic quality to Jarius’ expression, his eyes wide and staring, an arrogant smirk plastered across his face. It made Bentley want to punch him very hard. He was like a kid with a secret he was dying to tell.

  ‘What do you want?’ demanded Bentley, striding over to him in a very un-Bentley-like way.

  Jarius produced a scroll and handed it to him. ‘Emergency orders; every available Draconian is being called-up.’

  As he unrolled the parchment, Bentley’s lips began to move, trying to decipher the hieroglyphs.

  ‘Ren-nebum’ he read slowly. ‘Golden calf?’

  ‘Nynetjer,’ Jarius corrected. ‘Egyptian Pharaoh, second dynasty.’

  ‘What kind of emergency?’ asked Fey.

  ‘Breach, a bad one by all accounts.’

  ‘Shouldn’t Vedris be delivering this?’ Bentley asked suspiciously.

  ‘She’s with the masters working on the plan. Gemini has been tasked with rounding up the rest of the teams. Although you’re rather low on members,’ Jarius sneered, looking around the dorm. ‘Maybe you should volunteer to help the medics.’

  Fey was glaring at Jarius so hard there should have been a smoking hole in the middle of his forehead. Her hands were balled into fists — the knuckles turned white.

  Jarius turned to leave. ‘See you at the Pyramids!’

  ‘That’s fourth dynasty, you twat!’ Fey shouted, as the rest of Gemini trailed out behind him.

  ‘You okay?’ Bentley asked Fey, knowing it was possibly the stupidest question ever.

  ‘This is serious. Bentley’s right — Josh and Caitlin are in serious trouble,’ Fey told the others.

  ‘Why?’ asked Michaelmas.

  ‘The second dynasty has been off-limits since the Great Breach. If the Daedalan’s are trying to get into the maelstrom, Dalton could use Caitlin’s timeline to get close to the event, her parents would lead him straight to it’

  ‘And Josh?’

  ‘If they believe he’s the Nemesis… he’s a dead man.’

  58

  Briefing

  ‘From what we know so far this is a level-seven breach. Aries has been assigned to recon the period ten years prior to the death of this mysterious Pharaoh. The Dreadnoughts want causation data; anything that can explain why his reign would have been redacted from Egyptian records.’

  Corporal Vedris was in her element; this was everything she’d trained for. Whatever reason they had to keep her out of active service was forgotten. This was her chance to shine, and she was relishing every minute of it.

  Team Aries, on the other hand, was struggling with the
basic task of getting into their Dreadnought armour.

  ‘Closest most of you are ever going to get,’ Vedris observed while they were admiring themselves. Each uniform seemed to fit perfectly, as if tailored for them. ‘Prescient,’ was all that the corporal would say when they asked about the material. No one was quite sure what she meant by that.

  ‘The Copernicans are divided on where the centre of power was during the second dynasty. Our objectives are located around Memphis and Saqqara, as three of the previous kings were buried there.’ She pointed to a map of the area that was pinned to the wall. Lines and notes were changing on it constantly. ‘Does anyone have any idea where Jones and Lisichka have got to?’ She tapped her clipboard with her pen. The silence was deafening.

  ‘Since our numbers are depleted, we’ll be paired with another squad, and the other teams will be designated to Thinis and Abydos respectively.’

  ‘Who?’ asked De’Angelo.

  Vedris consulted her notes. ‘Gemini.’

  Everyone groaned.

  ‘This is serious, we’re not playing some game here. There’s only ever been one other category seven breach in the history of the Order — a lot of good officers died that day.’

  59

  Cairo Stone

  [Museum of Antiquity, Egypt. Date: 11.882]

  ‘Little is known of this period.’ Commander Brïghtfyr stood beside a carved stone stele. ‘Nynetjer’s forty-five year reign appears to have been expunged from their records.’ He pointed to a series of blank spaces on the grey slab.

  ‘This is the Cairo Stone, created during the last eight years of his life. I know it’s hard to weave with organics but we don’t have a lot of choice.’

  The teams were crammed into one of the storage vaults beneath the museum. They were all wearing Dreadnought battlesuits and had been issued with the legendary GunSabre. Part rifle, part sword, the weapon made them realise that this was no test.

  Brïghtfyr flicked a switch on a small metal box and a four-dimensional holographic sphere of timelines expanded out from it. There was a collective gasp from the room as they all realised it was a type of holo-lantern.

  He moved his hand through the model, and it rotated to show a faint red line encircling a clustered node of events. ‘The Twelfth Legion has already been deployed to contain the situation. You will be working on the periphery of the event; no one from the academy is allowed to enter the ten-year exclusion zone.’

  A team of Draconian doctors appeared with cases full of medicines. ‘Synchronise your tachyons to return to this location. I don’t want any of you getting lost back there. There’s also a high risk of contamination from pathogenic fungi so we’re immunising as a matter of precaution.’

  ‘I hate needles,’ said De’Angelo as they filed past the medics.

  ‘You’d hate Tuberculosis a lot more,’ said one of the technicians, injecting Bentley.

  ‘Or the parasitic flatworms ,’ Fey grumbled, rubbing her arm. ‘Don’t drink the water.’

  One by one the teams touched the Cairo Stone and disappeared. Bentley looked around the rapidly thinning crowd. ‘Where’s Vassili?’

  Fey nodded towards Jarius and the rest of team Gemini. ‘No sign of Dalton either.’

  60

  The Old Kingdom

  [Egypt. Date: 7.320]

  ‘Damn. Stone is so bloody hard to navigate,’ coughed Bentley, getting off his knees.

  De’Angelo was helping Fey to her feet, and the rest of Aries were in various states of recovery.

  They’d arrived in a temple. Lamps of burning oil hung down from the high ceilings, their flames illuminating the stone sculptures of evil demons carved into the walls.

  Fey was frantically checking her almanac and comparing it with her tachyon. ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’ asked De’Angelo.

  ‘We’re off course.’

  ‘Not possible,’ replied Michaelmas. ‘Not all of us at the same time.’

  Fey, who they all agreed was their best nautonnier, was holding up the book and pointing at the symbols that were redrawing themselves across the page.

  ‘Eight, maybe nine years south of where we should be.’

  ‘We’re inside the exclusion zone!’ exclaimed Bentley.

  ‘Shh! I’m trying to think,’ she snapped, and began to talk to herself, making calculations in the margins of her journal.

  De’Angelo took Iolanda, Nin and the twins and established a perimeter. They soon discovered that the temple was in the middle of a vast interconnecting labyrinth of chambers deep below ground. Following standard procedure, they scoured each room for reference objects, but found nothing but grave goods and sarcophagi — it was as if they were in a vast Egyptian mortuary.

  ‘What the hell is this place?’ asked one of the twins, coming out of a room of Coptic jars full of body parts.

  ‘I was beginning to ask myself the same question,’ said De’Angelo.

  ‘The house of the dead.’ Iolanda translated the hieroglyphs on one wall. ‘It’s the same in every room.’

  ‘Not a house I’d want to hang around in,’ De’Angelo joked nervously.

  ‘Shh!’ hushed Iolanda, listening intently.

  When they first arrived the place had been ominously quiet, and like a tomb the walls seemed to swallow sound. She’d assumed it was the rock and sand that had muffled their voices and footsteps, but now there was a distant murmur, a low rhythmic hum of voices chanting something over and over again.

  ‘Monks?’ asked the twins in unison.

  De’Angelo shrugged.

  ‘I think we should go back,’ suggested Iolanda.

  Bentley left Fey to her calculations and wandered around the temple. He was fascinated by the effigies of their strange gods. They weren’t the usual Egyptian deities, but more like the creatures of nightmares, with tentacled heads and grotesquely twisted bodies. Between them were painted scenes of battles, with the Pharaoh leading lines of mounted cavalry and chariots against an army of terrible monsters. The hieroglyphs roughly translated as the ‘End of Days’. He’d only just managed to intuit a few basic lessons in hieroglyphics before they jumped, and the memories were still embedding.

  ‘There’s been some kind of temporal deviation,’ muttered Fey, ‘a bifurcation.’

  ‘Someone’s been screwing around with time,’ Michaelmas translated for the others.

  De’Angelo’s team ran into the room. They were breathless and scared, and looking back over their shoulders as if something was chasing them.

  ‘We think we should abort,’ De’Angelo said defiantly.

  ‘No,’ growled Fey, ‘not again. We’re going to sort this.’

  ‘But protocol states —’

  ‘Bugger protocol,’ Fey interjected. ‘I think Josh and Caitlin are in here somewhere.’ She held up her almanac for all to see. ‘I just need to work out where.’

  De’Angelo and Iolanda exchanged a knowing look. ‘We think we know where they might be.’

  61

  Sacrifice

  Josh opened his eyes slowly, blinking until they grew used to the lights of the temple. He couldn’t tell where he was exactly, but the ceiling above him was covered in some kind of ancient star map, and the Egyptian gods that looked down at him were a dead giveaway.

  His arms and legs were bound tightly with linen bandages, like a mummy, and placed upright in a wooden coffin — which smelled of cedar and almonds. The inside was painted with hieroglyphs which spoke of the afterlife and the journey of the deceased through the Duat, the underworld.

  At the far end of the temple, an Egyptian priest was standing over Caitlin, his bald head glistening in the light of the oil lamps. He hadn’t noticed that Josh had woken — he was too busy reciting prayers and painting glyphs onto her naked body.

  Josh tried to move, straining against his bindings, but the more he flexed his muscles the tighter the bandages became.

  ‘You’ve got to hand it to the Egyptians,’ Dalton’s voice began from o
ut of Josh’s eye-line. ‘They really know how to hold a funeral.’ He walked into view, resplendent in the robes of a jackal-headed god. ‘Osiris. God of the Dead. Quite appropriate don’t you think?’

  He drew a copper sickle from its ceremonial sheaf and let the blade catch the light — it was razor sharp. ‘I thought it only right that I should use Darkling’s blade for this.’

  Dalton took off the mask and leaned in close to Josh’s face. ‘I have to admit I’m going to enjoy this. Not just because you’ve been screwing my girlfriend, but if Vassili is right and you are the Nemesis — you’re my ticket to eternity.’ His pupils were wide, like he was on drugs, and there was a manic quality to his voice. ‘There’s a poetic justice in that… some would even go so far as to say, fate.’

  He chuckled to himself as he walked slowly towards Caitlin, who was still unconscious.

  ‘She, on the other hand, has a less auspicious future. Our host, Pharaoh Nynetjer, is a master of dark arts. He’s estimated to have sacrificed over a thousand subjects in his attempts to commune with the elder gods. Quite mad, of course, but useful with the right guidance.’

  Dalton stroked the symbols on her thigh. ‘Such artistry — a literal book of the dead.’ He sighed, as his hand lingered. ‘She never really knew what happened to her parents. My poor lost girl, it was as if a part of her was missing.’

  Nynetjer stopped what he was doing and spoke in harsh Egyptian to Dalton.

  ‘Indeed, my dear Pharaoh, the time is coming,’ Dalton agreed, putting the jackal head back on.

  Vassili arrived with an entourage of Daedalans, each one of them wearing a twisted, demonic mask of a Djinn.

  They knelt before the altar. Nynetjer took the sickle from Dalton and used it to gently open Caitlin’s mouth, chanting over her body in a language that was crude, guttural, not so much speech but modified cries of anguish and pain.