by Bob Mayer
The Keep hesitated, Edith Frobish’s words about a shift and possible tsunami echoing in her troubled thoughts. “I’d prefer to err on the side of caution on this. Containment is a priority.”
The President nodded. “I’ll issue the order.”
* * *
“What is this place?” Ivar asked, eyeing someone who looked suspiciously like a pirate sharpening his cutlass about fifteen feet away.
Ivar was seated in an airplane seat set into the black “sand,” and since the ashtrays hadn’t been sealed shut, one from before 1990. Earhart was in a similar seat facing him. The camp was a hodgepodge of not only people, but gear. Airplane seats, canvas sails for overhead cover (did it rain here? Ivar wondered), wooden chests and barrels, and even a bronze cannon, which Ivar suspected was somehow connected to the pirate, since he was sitting on it as he sharpened his cutlass.
“The Space Between,” Earhart said.
“Between what?”
“Worlds,” Earhart said.
“Who are these people?”
“We’re the Outcasts. People who were taken from our timelines and can’t go back.” She leaned forward. “Listen. The world you are from. The timeline. I assume I disappeared on my round-the-world flight?”
“Yes,” Ivar said.
Earhart gave a sad smile. “I think I disappeared in every timeline. Would have been nice to know I made it in one of them. That event seems to be a constant, except for those where civilization didn’t survive long enough to invent the airplane.” She shook her head. “A different timeline is a different world, even though it’s still Earth. Has the Shadow attacked your timeline?”
“Um, I guess not,” Ivar ventured. “What’s the Shadow?”
“The Ones Before?” Earhart asked. “The Others?”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Ivar said. “But like, shouldn’t you be really old?”
“What year did you come from?” Earhart asked.
When Ivar told her, she sat back and considered him. “Interesting. Much further along than most who come through here. Your timeline must be doing well if you are not aware of the Shadow.”
“We’ve had some things called Rifts,” Ivar said. “And Fireflies came through.” He then explained the Nightstalkers’ experiences with those strange phenomena. When he was done, Earhart pondered it for a few moments.
“Very different from the way others have experienced the Shadow,” she finally said, “but who knows? Maybe it took a different form in your timeline. What are you doing here?”
Ivar’s mouth worked, trying to formulate something to say that sounded intelligent, but he couldn’t. Finally he fell back to habits learned as a PhD candidate: He pled ignorance. “I don’t even know where here is. I don’t know what this Space Between is. I was at work in the Archives at Area 51, then I woke up on the beach, or whatever you call what’s next to the water.”
“What is Area 51?” Earhart asked.
“A supersecret government base,” Ivar said, and then regretted it, because it was supposed to be secret. But then he wondered why he regretted it because this was just frakking insane.
Ivar had a hard time with change.
“I don’t understand any of this,” he said. “Did I get sucked through a Rift?”
“You must have come through a gate,” Earhart said.
“Is a Rift a gate?”
Earhart shrugged. “I don’t know what a Rift is, and it seems you don’t either, so I can’t tell you that. A gate goes from one timeline to another. Or to this place.”
“Okay.” Ivar thought about that for a moment. “So sort of Rifts. But probably different. So. Um. Who exactly are you people?”
Earhart gave a thin smile. “I told you: the Outcasts. People who got sucked in through a gate, whether on purpose or by accident.”
“But you look—” Ivar paused, because even he knew, even here in this strange place, that talking about a woman’s age and appearance was a subject fraught with peril.
“Not any older? I was thirty-nine when I came here,” Earhart said. “I know I’ve been here a while. How long, I don’t know. There’s no sunrise or sunset in here. But it has to be a couple of years at least. It seems none of us really age in this place. Or if we do, not in a way that’s noticeable. One small advantage of this purgatory.” She held up her hand. “My fingernails don’t grow. My hair doesn’t. We all seem suspended in time.” She nodded over her shoulder. “The one of us from the furthest back is a Phoenician sailor. From about one thousand years before the birth of Our Lord as near as we can tell. I ended up here in 1937.”
For Ivar, like most millennials, 1937 was as distant in the past as horse-drawn buggies and no video games. Incomprehensible. “What happened to you?” Ivar asked.
Earhart sighed. “We—my navigator, Fred Noonan and I—took off from Australia and flew to New Guinea. Then we took off on a leg to Howland Island.” She fell silent for a moment. “We hit a gate, although I didn’t know what it was at that time. I managed to ditch and then we were attacked by terrible sea creatures. Kraken. Noonan was killed. I blacked out. And when I awoke, I was here.”
“Kraken?” Ivar had visions of “Release the Kraken!”
“Like a giant squid,” Earhart said, “except worse. They seem to go in and out of gates when gates open in certain places. We’re lucky we haven’t encountered any here.” She looked about. “We currently have sixteen people. From various times and various timelines. We’ve learned to talk to each other.
“Since we have no night or day, we count sleep cycles, but even that is confusing. We have patches of earth soil, salvaged from various vessels. Seeds we’ve scavenged. We make do. Animals sometimes come through. If we can eat it, we do so.” She laughed. “Once there was something I could only describe as a small dinosaur. It wandered about for a while, terrifying everyone, then went into the water. We never saw it again.”
She got serious. “But those who have tried going into gates?” She shook her head. “I’ve seen two men try. Both went in and immediately reappeared, screaming in agony, their skin burned. Both died within an hour of their attempt. It could have been wherever they went to was in such terrible condition it caused that, or simply the traversing of the gate out of here did that to them. It was enough, though, to keep others from trying.”
“Where do these gates lead?” Ivar asked.
“Other timelines. This place—” she waved her hand, indicating the surrounding environment, “is the Space Between timelines.” Earhart paused, and then leaned forward once more, holding her hands out to demonstrate. “You understand engines, right?”
Ivar nodded.
Earhart continued. “Imagine that each timeline is a ball bearing. All the timelines are clumped together and spinning, touching each other but not really affecting each other, rolling smoothly, the places where they touch causing some slight friction, but not truly affecting things in the larger picture.
“But gates are pathways between adjoining spheres at those meeting points. Sometimes timelines directly adjoin each other and there can be direct travel. But otherwise you have to come here through the Space Between. For some reason, even timelines that don’t adjoin each other adjoin this place. I don’t know if it’s because this place is all encompassing, or what special properties it has. But I believe it adjoins all timelines. Maybe it’s the center of everything.”
“This is . . . remarkable. How, how do you possibly know all this?” Ivar asked. “If you’re isolated here, how can you know what’s beyond this place?”
“We’re not completely isolated,” Earhart said. “Travelers come through. Bad, good, and evil.”
Ivar sat back, a bit overwhelmed. “I’ll have to think on it. The physics of it.” Then he asked the question second uppermost in his concern. “Have you attempted to go back to your timeline?”
“Not only is it probably fatal, I also can’t,” Earhart said. “For some of us, our disappearance is an integral part o
f the sanctity of our home timelines. So we can’t go back.”
“Okay,” Ivar drew the word out. “You mean, like important people?”
Earhart shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Can I go back?”
“I don’t know,” Earhart said. “You’d have to find the gate you came through. And we really have little idea which gate goes where. And there is the possibility you could get burnt up doing it.”
“So what do you do here?” Ivar asked.
“We survive,” Earhart said. “And we fight.”
“Fight? Who are you fighting?”
“We fight the monsters. We’re the ghosts in the machine.”
Seven Hours
Where the annual Met Gala had held their dinner a week previously was now a hastily converted Level Three containment facility, since no one was certain what they were dealing with in terms of the body. How the glitterati who’d attended the Gala would respond to such a transgression mattered nothing to the Nightstalkers or their support team. Heavy clear plastic barriers surrounded the large banquet table on which the creature the team had killed was displayed, while pumps worked to push filtered air into the hastily constructed facility.
The area was mostly empty except for the body splayed out on the table, an autopsy half-completed. Hovering over it were several cameras on long arms.
“It’s human,” was the first comment, made by, of course, Roland, who was a master at observing the obvious.
“Indeed,” replied the Acme pathologist who’d been alerted to active duty to perform this task. “Homo sapiens.”
Blast shields had been hastily erected and the Acme pathologist was hunkered down behind one of them, staring at a computer screen, while a bomb disposal squad from the New York Police Department waited on call.
Moms and the team were with the pathologist on the safe side of the wall. “What’s the problem?”
“I was working,” the Acme said, “and when I did the chest incision and separation, I found that!” His shaking finger pointed at the screen. The Acme, part of the group of varied specialists the Nightstalkers kept on call, was a young man, obviously on his first live mission.
“Mac.” Moms called forward the team’s demolition expert. “What is that? Something like the couriers are wired with?”
Couriers for Area 51 traversed the country, transporting dangerous cargos between research labs, the Archives, and other facilities as needed. They had a catheter inserted into their heart in order to monitor something very important: whether they were alive or not. If the “not” happened, that would lead to the Nightstalkers alerting and scrambling to find out the cause of the “not” and, more importantly, get their cargo secure.
This had happened more than once.
Mac peered at the screen.
“Similar,” Mac said. “Something definitely got tripped when that thing’s heart stopped beating.”
“Any sign of explosives?”
“No,” Mac said, “but if I were wiring the body to blow, you wouldn’t see any sign. Could also be a remote to something built into the suit.” He turned to the Acme. “Which is where?”
“The suit is in another part of the building and experts are gathering to examine it,” the Acme said.
“I’d suggest they isolate it,” Mac said, “until I can check this out.”
“That thing was big in the suit,” Scout observed, remembering that this was the being who’d killed Kirk. “But that guy seems pretty normal size.”
“The suit arms and legs and torso were extended,” the pathologist said. “Internal controls. It didn’t exactly fit like a glove.”
Mac glanced over at the NYPD bomb disposal unit, and then shrugged. “If it were gonna blow, it would have blown by now.”
He walked around the blast barrier to the entrance to the decontamination facility.
“Wait!” the Acme called out. “You need to go through Protocol and wear a protective suit!”
Mac ignored him. “Moms, if that thing is contagious with something, I breached containment with my forty-mike-mike round that blew its arm off.”
“Roger that,” Moms said.
Mac unzipped the first barrier and quickly made his way through, leaving everything behind him open.
“That’s not proper Protocol,” the Acme complained.
“Mac had a good point,” Moms said. “You put it in containment, but not us, which doesn’t make sense.”
The Acme had no response to that. Mac appeared on-screen, leaning over the body. He pulled out a Leatherman tool from his combat vest and began prodding and poking.
“Oh!” the Acme exclaimed in dismay. “He’s messing with the evidence.”
“Where do you work?” Moms asked him.
“City coroner.”
“Don’t worry,” Moms said. “This isn’t ever going to see the inside of a courtroom, so don’t worry about the evidence. Our job is to kill things like your evidence. Obliterate them.”
“Oh.” This time it was said with no exclamation point.
Mac’s voice came over the team net. “There’s no explosives. It’s similar to what we use with couriers but more sophisticated. More like a medical tracker, not just indicating whether the heart is beating, but leading into the bloodstream. I’d say it’s a pretty comprehensive health status monitoring system. More advanced than what we use. Although even with the surgery, this guy doesn’t look very healthy.”
“Transmitter?” Moms asked.
“I don’t see one, but we should do a body scan and also check the brain.”
Moms looked at the coroner, who wasn’t privy to both sides of the conversation. “Did you x-ray the body?”
The coroner nodded.
“Well?” Moms was getting tired of leading him by the hand. “Want to bring up the images?”
The man quickly typed into his computer.
“Doc,” Moms said. “Tell me what I’m seeing.”
Doc pushed his way forward as several x-rays of the thing’s head appeared. “Whoa! Not good.” He pointed at a dark mass at the base of the skull.
“What the frak!” Mac said, jerking back from the body. “Is this thing rigged with something in the head to blow?”
“No, no, no,” Doc quickly said over the net. “Sorry about that, Mac. Something different. That’s a tumor in its brain. A bad one.” Doc leaned closer to the screen. “Hmm. And there is something mechanical in there, at the base of the skull. Very small.”
“Mac?” Moms said.
Mac picked up a small saw and began cutting.
The pathologist made a whimpering sound, like an artist who’d just seen someone take a can of spray paint to his masterpiece.
“Yep,” Mac said, holding up something small and bloody in his hands. “A transmitter.”
“Come on,” Moms said, walking around the blast barrier and leading the way. They all followed as Moms headed into the makeshift containment facility and they gathered around the autopsy table.
“That is indeed a human,” Moms said.
“And with tattoos,” Scout said, half bored already with the obvious, wanting to move to the less obvious.
“Yes,” the Acme said. “Should this young lady be in here?” The Acme indicated the naked body splayed out on the table, cut open, various organs resting to the side.
“She’s part of the team,” Nada said in a way that brooked no argument and gained him an adoring look from Scout. “We killed this. She was with us.”
The Acme shut up.
“Go ahead with the rest of your report,” the Keep said.
Everyone gathered round, Scout up front along with Moms and Doc and the Keep and Foreman. The second rank was Mac, Nada, Edith Frobish, Frasier, and Eagle.
The pathologist was a typical Acme, meaning a typical scientist, focused first on impressing everyone with his presentation. He picked up a clipboard and began. “Male, Caucasian, approximately thirty-five years old.”
“What’s that?�
� Scout asked, no longer bored. She was pointing at the man’s left side. The skin was rippled and red.
The Acme was once more thrown off-balance. “Burns. I’ll get to it.”
“Let the man finish, Scout,” Moms said.
“Roger that,” Scout said.
The Acme checked his clipboard. “Cause of death, multiple wounds in upper right chest as well as severing of right arm, all leading to exsanguination.”
“He bled out,” Mac said quickly as Roland began to open his mouth.
“There were two postmortem, ventilation wounds to the skull via the right eye,” the Acme said.
“Nada’s double-tap after he was dead,” Mac interpreted for Roland.
“Yeah, yeah,” Roland said. “We know we killed the S.O.B. Tell us something we don’t know.”
The Acme was flustered, but pointed at what Scout had already noted. “Those burns were caused by exposure to radiation. Checking his thyroid, where radioactive iodine concentrates, we found high levels. In his bones”—the Acme pointed at an incision along one thigh, where the skin and muscle was peeled back, exposing bone—“we found traces of strontium-90 and radium-226.” The Acme looked up from the clipboard. “In essence, this man was dying.”
“Mercy killing then,” Nada said.
“The odd thing, though,” the Acme said, “is that he’s apparently been dying for a long time. Which doesn’t make sense.”
“Explain,” the Keep said.
The Acme shook his head. “I can’t explain. But from the data we’ve accumulated on the radiation he absorbed and the state of the body, he should have been dead long ago. I have no idea what’s kept him alive this long.”
“Hold on,” Moms said, processing the information. “You’re saying he should have been dead based on your analysis, but he was still alive. And alive enough to attack us?”
“Yes.”
“Could the suit have been keeping him alive somehow?” Moms asked.
“Doubtful,” the Acme said. “But here’s the more interesting thing.” He picked up an internal organ; which one wasn’t quite clear as it was part of a mass of red goo. “He’s had several transplants.”