by Rexx Deane
‘Not at all,’ Wolfram said, through the pack’s speaker. ‘There is one problem, however. I cannot see.’
‘Hold on a sec.’ Aryx beckoned to Sebastian. ‘Pass me your bag, please.’ He rummaged through it and pulled out the AR glasses. ‘Here we are.’
‘I forgot about those,’ Sebastian said, taking back the rucksack.
‘Wolfram, I’ve got nanocam AR glasses. I’ll wear them so you can see.’ He put them on and a moment later a small red dot appeared in the bottom right of his view.
‘I have vision.’
‘Issue solved.’
***
Duggan, still wearing robes, greeted the five as they exited the ship; he had abandoned the mask and wisely given himself a haircut and beard trim to neaten his previously tatty appearance. Judging by the peculiar angle of his fringe, it wasn’t something he was used to doing.
He approached Aryx and shook his hand. ‘Good to see you again, young man.’ He clasped hands with Sebastian. ‘And you, my friend.’ He gestured to the others. ‘Are you going to introduce me?’
‘Of course. Duggan, I’d like you to meet Janyce Hafsteinsdóttir, my sister-in-law, and Erik Mikkaelsson, my nephew.’
He took Janyce’s hand and bent to kiss it. She flinched and giggled childishly. He moved to Erik and crouched in front of him.
‘Did you used to be the invisible man?’
Duggan cracked a grin. ‘Aye, that I did, lad.’
‘Can you show me some magic?’
Duggan straightened, and narrowed his eyes. ‘I don’t know what your uncle has told you, but magic is not a toy, nor something to be trifled with. It can be dangerous for us to use at the moment. Maybe in the future I will be able to show you how it’s done.’
Sebastian cleared his throat. ‘We’re taking them to Tradescantia. I thought they might be able to stay in Chopwood for a while. The terrorists, or the entities that possessed you, might try to use them to get to me, and I need to know they’re safe.’
‘And you were hoping I’d stay there with them to keep them out of harm’s way?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
Duggan turned, gesturing to the airlock door leading to the main complex. ‘If you’d all care to follow me?’ Aryx wheeled into the airlock behind him with the other three following.
‘I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news,’ Sebastian said, ‘but it looks like our suspicions were correct and the entities were trying to use you to destroy the cube in the lab. They know your location now – probably because of the one that has been controlling you. I’m hoping they don’t know how the purge was done, and are just trying to destroy the SI because they can’t control it.’
‘I won’t be the only target, my lad. Remember, they did try to possess you, too.’
‘I’ve not forgotten. Gladrin’s pretty sure they want to recruit me. Either way, I think it would be safest for me to work with him on that one – don’t worry, we have a plan in place.’
‘And what about wheely-fellow here?’
Aryx glared at the old man and a vein pulsed in his neck. ‘I am present, you know. And I can take care of myself. I’m not some brain-dead lump.’
‘Just pulling your leg.’
‘Oi, you’re not too old to thump, hermit-the-frog.’ He rolled forwards and bashed him in the shin with the frame of his chair.
‘Ow!’ Duggan rubbed his leg and grinned. ‘And you’re not too privileged a guest to go out of the airlock!’
Aryx laughed. ‘I like your style … But back to the issue at hand, what’s “emergency plan B”?’
The airlock opened and Duggan stepped into the corridor.
‘Plan B? Quite simple, old boy. I move the comet.’
Chapter 38
‘You what?’ Aryx had never heard anything so absurd.
‘I move the comet,’ Duggan said.
‘I heard you the first time. I just don’t see how. The amount of engineering that would go into moving an object as large as this would take weeks to set up.’
‘I didn’t build this entire place, remember? I only decked it out with the bells and whistles for a comfortable life, but it wasn’t merely a hollow rock when I found it, either.’ Duggan opened the familiar door leading to the lounge and ushered them through.
Sebastian took Janyce and Erik over to the couches and deposited his rucksack on the coffee table.
‘What else was here, aside from caverns and this stained-glass thingy?’ Aryx said, gesturing to the glittering lights overhead.
‘The answer is up there.’ Duggan pointed to the low cavern above the kitchen and looked down at Aryx’s chair. ‘I suppose you can’t get up there.’
‘You suppose wrong.’ Aryx hefted the mobipack from his lap, slung it over his back, and fastened the harnesses. The legs coalesced with a dramatic light show.
Duggan’s eyes widened. ‘Modern technology, eh!’
‘Oh, this,’ Aryx said, ‘is bleeding-edge stuff.’ He stood.
Gasps came from the sofa behind him, and he turned to see Erik and his mother staring back. Sebastian sat laughing, probably remembering his own initial reaction to the legs.
Aryx carried his wheelchair to the stairs. ‘I take it that it’s this way?’
Duggan watched with a bemused expression as he passed, and laughed. ‘Cocky sod, aren’t you?’ He looked back at Sebastian. ‘Will you and yours be alright here for a little while? Feel free to make yourselves at home.’
‘We’ll be fine, thanks.’
Duggan stopped halfway up the stairs and looked up at Aryx. ‘Where’s your little square friend?’
He tapped his right temple.
‘Up here,’ Wolfram said, voice projecting loudly from the mobipack.
‘Oh, Lord. I’m surrounded by technology,’ Duggan said. ‘What is the world coming to?’ He continued up the stairs with a dramatic sweep of his robes.
Aryx reached the top of the stairs, where the wall ended abruptly and levelled onto a smooth, icy-blue floor. The ceiling of the cavernous alcove had seemed lower from downstairs, but it was still at least fifteen feet high in the middle and arched overhead until it met the floor at a shallow angle either side. He dropped his wheelchair and sat down, leaving the legs active.
‘I’d half expected this to be your bedroom.’
‘Why would I need one of those? I have a very long and comfortable couch downstairs, and the temperature is constant, unlike on those wretched stations – why do they have so much trouble keeping the rooms at a decent temperature?’
Aryx shook his head. He preferred to have somewhere distinct to perform each activity in his life and couldn’t comprehend not having a specific place to sleep. He was about to labour the point, but then remembered his own apartment was also a single room.
‘Go on,’ Duggan said, waving him on, ‘down to the end.’
The cavern was at least fifty metres long. A faintly glowing light in the darkness ahead was Aryx’s only point of reference and the sole source of illumination. He wheeled down the entire length – by which time his eyes finally became accustomed to the dim light – and stopped. The wall at the end of the cavern was translucent; something behind it was glowing.
Duggan approached and pressed his hand against the wall. A three-metre-wide section in the middle flashed and disappeared at his touch, leaving an archway.
‘What was that? More magic?’
‘No. Believe it or not, it’s an alien technology, beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.’
He stepped through the newly opened portal into the space beyond and Aryx followed into a chamber with a low faceted dome ceiling. Faint, indistinct lights glimmered within the milky surface. The floor was perfectly smooth, and made from an identical substance to the ceiling. A large, jagged yet smooth-edged lump of the same material protruded from the centre of the floor, an architectural lectern. Duggan approached the pillar, which reached just above waist level, and extended his hand over the largest of the facet
s at the top. A faint glow emanated from beneath the surface in response.
Aryx wheeled closer. ‘What is it?’
‘Watch and learn,’ Duggan whispered.
A low tone softly hummed through the chamber. The ceiling above darkened and numerous tiny orbs of light appeared.
Aryx strained to make sense of the pattern through the distortions. ‘Is this a star map?’
Duggan nodded. Lines of concentration carved his face.
‘Aryx, there appears to be no circuitry or electrical activity in this device,’ Wolfram said.
‘Really?’ he whispered. ‘You’ve been scanning it? How does it work, then?’
‘I do not know. This technology is unfamiliar to me, and there is little information on similar materials in the information I have stored.’ Aryx’s view through the clear AR glasses flickered and a faint tracery of lines appeared, overlaid upon the structure in front of him. ‘As you can see, the object has uniform density. My sensors are detecting changes in magnetic flux and gravity.’
‘That’s strange.’ Was it some kind of crystalline circuitry?
‘Now,’ Duggan said, scratching his chin. ‘Where was Achene?’
‘V376 Pegasi,’ Wolfram said.
‘Ah, yes. I’d forgotten, but you knew that already.’
The orb-stars slowly shifted overhead and faint blue lines appeared between several of them. The view continued to move, following the path traced by the lines from one system to the next, until it eventually settled on a star Duggan had apparently chosen simply by concentrating. The orbs became more widely spaced until three large, blurry spheres appeared. It was a view of V376 Pegasi – the home system of Achene! Duggan brought his hand down until it touched the crystal, and the low hum increased in intensity.
Aryx’s chair rolled backwards. ‘We’re moving!’
‘That’s right. We’re on our way.’
‘It’ll take years to get there.’
‘Of course it won’t – we’re not going directly. We’ll use the node network – the navigation system seems accurate enough.’
‘How does it all work? There’s no circuitry or anything!’
Duggan shrugged. ‘As far as I can tell, it’s a kind of geometric technology. It seems to focus the properties of the materials it’s made from using shape alone. It just works – which is more than I can say for most Human technology.’
I’m guessing this place isn’t just a comet with technology installed, so what is it for?’
Duggan stroked his beard. ‘I’m not sure, but given that the outer crust of the comet appears to have built up over millennia, this place was probably built by an advanced civilisation with technology long forgotten. I don’t know what it looks like without the covering and, for all I know, it could be a giant crystal-shaped spacecraft.’
Aryx leaned forwards to examine the dais. The material blended seamlessly into the floor; the pale ice-blue milky lustre reminded him of calcite or translucent quartz. He lightly ran his hand over the side of the device. The edges of the smooth, glassy facets flowed subtly into each other. ‘Do you know what it’s made from? Wolfram can’t identify the element.’
‘Not really. I’ve done some preliminary examinations, but without destroying it, there doesn’t appear to be any adequate way of analysing the technology. None of the scans I’ve managed to perform have turned up anything other than its basic external structure.’
‘It is possible,’ Wolfram said, ‘that the devices operate on a similar principle to the acceleration nodes. They also have no discernible internal mechanism, and repairs that have been performed by the Bronadi and Antari simply involved welding in additional material.’
Duggan rubbed his chin. ‘Interesting. How do people get close enough to repair them?’
‘The nodes will only accelerate you if you’re not on a collision course with them,’ Aryx said. This guy really was out of his time.
‘Let’s be sure not to crash into one, then.’ Duggan looked up at the map depicted in the ceiling. ‘It’s going to take a couple of hours to get there, so we’d better go down and see how the others are doing.’
Aryx followed him back along the cavern towards the living area. ‘How did you find this place?’
‘I got the idea from Sollers Hope. I scanned several systems for low-density objects with the intention of finding a planetoid with caves that I could kit-out, and I stumbled across this place. It wasn’t originally in this system.’
‘No?’
‘It was a rogue asteroid, not attached to any star. When I back-calculated its trajectory, it seemed as though it was originally orbiting the same sun as Achene.’
‘Now that’s some coincidence!’ In the sheer vastness of the universe, the likelihood of stumbling across something that had originated in the same system that Duggan had left was infinitesimal. ‘Sebastian will never believe it. Speaking of which, we haven’t told you what’s been happening …’
***
Sebastian looked up from his grandfather’s journal as Aryx and Duggan clanked down the stairs. Janyce busied herself in the kitchen making drinks.
‘Aryx has been filling me in on what’s happened,’ Duggan said. ‘It sounds like you’ve had quite a time of it.’
‘You’re telling me,’ Sebastian said. ‘I’m glad the worst of it’s over now, though.’
‘So, these dreams you’ve been having … Aryx says you didn’t remember them clearly before, but you think the demons in them may be the entities.’
Janyce beckoned to Erik. ‘Come and help Mamma in the kitchen, will you?’ The boy ran over to her and started rooting through the cupboards.
Sebastian shrugged. ‘Well, it’s just a guess, given they look a lot like the things you showed us in that old book of yours.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the entities don’t actually look like that,’ Duggan said. ‘It’s most likely your subconscious filling in the details with something it finds appropriate. Your idea about them testing your responses is also interesting. Have you got this Gladrin chap to shut off the program?’
Sebastian shook his head. ‘If he turns it off, there’s every chance that news of its deactivation could get back to them via the terrorists, and they’d know we were on to them.’
‘A wise move. And you’re convinced the terrorists are being run by the entities?’
‘With everything that’s happened, the timing is too coincidental, and Gladrin said one of the ITF members fitted the description of someone possessed.’
‘I see. That’s quite disturbing.’ Duggan rubbed his chin. ‘I wonder if it might be possible to learn more about the entities directly through the dreams. If you were able to practise lucid dreaming …’ He trailed off into contemplation.
‘What’s that?’ Aryx asked.
‘Oh, sorry, old boy. Normally, when you dream, you aren’t in control. You find strange things to be normal and accept them. It’s only afterwards, when you wake up, that you realise the memories don’t fit in with other experiences you’ve had. During lucid dreaming however, you become aware that you are dreaming. You notice things that are out of place and so are able to control the dream to some extent.’
‘Actually, Alvarez used to talk about something like that. He said it takes years to learn. I thought it was a load of rubbish, to be honest.’
‘That is very true, under normal circumstances.’ Duggan waved a finger about while he spoke. ‘But I believe that if Sebastian learned to use thaumaturgy, he could potentially use a spell to induce the state and guarantee its effectiveness.’
Sebastian put down the journal. ‘You think I could do it?’ After discovering magic was real, he hadn’t even entertained the idea of trying to use it. It seemed far too dangerous and didn’t fit in with his view of a rational, ordered universe.
‘Yes, I think you could. You’ve got the right personality to be able to do it. You see the underlying patterns and rules in things that others might miss – you just need to muster
up a bit of faith in yourself. I can see you’re having a hard time getting your head around it. I might have something that will help you to accept it. Let’s have a look.’ Duggan darted over to the same bookcase from which he’d taken the medieval book days before and drew out another book with a heavy, ridged spine and coarse paper binding. He sat by Sebastian and carefully rested it in his lap. Inside the cover was a print depicting clouds with figures standing amongst them, each appearing to represent a different skill or school of thought. The writing was hard to read, a form of English so old Sebastian couldn’t understand any of it.
Duggan flicked through the pages. ‘This is Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid’s Elements,’ he said, ‘written in 1570 by John Dee. It’s a work on mathematics and physics but, back in his day, people thought him to be a conjurer simply because they didn’t understand the physics and maths employed by the mechanisms he described. He talks about “art mathematical”, which he called thaumaturgy.’
A small symbol printed in the corner of one of the pages caught Sebastian’s eye – a right-angled V with another, acute, upside down V overlaid. It looked familiar somehow, but Duggan closed the book and put it back on the shelf before Sebastian had time to take it in.
‘Surely, to you or I, or anyone who understands it, this would just be science?’ Aryx said.
Duggan waggled a finger at the pair. ‘Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, my boy. While John Dee was just a mathematician, there is still logic to thaumaturgy.’
‘Are you saying there’s a science to it?’ Sebastian asked.
Duggan nodded rapidly. ‘Yes, yes. All it takes is for you to be open-minded enough to accept the possibility of a system, and you’ll see it. Many secret societies held hidden knowledge for centuries that hinted at thaumaturgy being more than mere science. The Illuminati, the Freemasons … even the Church accused the Templars of being involved with magic.’
‘I suppose you’re right. If it is logical, I could try it.’
Aryx glared at Sebastian and folded his arms. ‘You think this is a good idea, do you, going along with a nutso plan like that? What about the demons?’ He frowned at Duggan and waved his arm in Sebastian’s direction. ‘I don’t want him running around trying to bloody strangle me—’