When Mythric and Taren landed on the control deck of Inter-system Gateway Five, they’d not expected to find Kalayna alone and in tears. She was curled up in the control seat, oblivious to their arrival.
‘Kalayna?’ Mythric called to her gently, not wanting to startle her — but he did nevertheless.
She jumped to an upright position in the chair and, looking to him, was stunned to behold her old friend. ‘BA?’ she gasped.
‘None other.’ He held his arms wide.
Kalayna sprang from her seat to embrace him. ‘Thank goodness!’ The embrace brought her sobbing under control. ‘You have to help me,’ she pulled back to implore him.
‘Of course we will,’ Mythric assured her, as Kalayna looked to his companion. ‘You’re Dr Taren Lennox — I mean, Dr Gervaise,’ Kalayna corrected herself. ‘Your work is amazing! I’ve studied you.’
‘Coming from the girl who solved this old inter-system gateway paradox, that’s quite a compliment,’ Taren awarded.
Kalayna was a thaumaturge. Thaumaturgy was known as the ‘art mathematical’, an ability to construct complex mechanical devices that are ahead of their time. It had been theorised that this was how the inter-system gateways were first constructed, so it came as no surprise to Taren that Kalayna had managed to fix this old system gateway where all those before her had failed. Still, Taren was fairly certain that Kalayna was completely oblivious to the fact that her talent with technology was a Power, and one that the MSS would arrest her for.
‘What seems to be the problem then?’ Mythric queried his young friend.
‘And where is Telmo Decree?’ Taren had thought he’d be here on the control deck if they were about to reopen the gateway for traffic.
‘He’s the problem!’ Kalayna stressed. ‘I don’t know what’s come over him. After working for years on getting this gate to function, we are successful! There was this huge media bidding war to determine who got to travel through the gate first to get the scoop and interview Telmo and myself.’
‘Let me guess, EBN won.’ Taren quoted another side note of Zeven’s.
‘The Esponisa Broadcast Network, that’s right,’ Kalayna confirmed. ‘But how did you know —?’
‘Not important.’ Taren waived the query, although Esponisa was the capital of Maladaan, which explained how the MSS might have gained access to the station to arrest Telmo and Kalayna as predicted.
‘We are supposed to be opening the gateway for traffic this morning,’ Kalayna continued her tale of woe. ‘I have the Space Corp and the network on the intercom blasting me because we are running behind schedule.’
‘What’s the hold up?’ Mythric was grateful for it, whatever it was.
‘The gateway is no longer working!’ Kalayna stressed. ‘I don’t know what happened! I went to do a system check, and nothing is responding, so I can’t even figure out how to fix it.’
‘You think Telmo sabotaged the opening?’ Taren suggested, thinking this was either an odd stroke of luck, or a very meaningful coincidence.
‘Normally, I would say no way.’ Kalayna clearly didn’t like accusing him. ‘But he was kind of strange yesterday. Then this morning … the gate is no longer functioning, and he is gone … what am I to assume?’
‘Define strange?’ Taren probed.
‘Well, Telmo is normally an intelligent individual but not in a philosophical sense. But yesterday, he was spouting all sorts of deep musings. And I heard him muttering something to himself, when he thought I was elsewhere,’ she recalled. ‘He was mumbling something about how some guy was not going to out-time-hop him, or something to that effect.’
‘Do you remember who he was ranting about?’ Taren queried.
‘Um,’ Kalayna struggled to recall, ‘some name, it started with Z, I think?’
‘Zeven?’ both Taren and Mythric queried at once.
‘Yes!’ Kalayna was surprised. ‘That’s it? Do you know him?’
Kalayna knew Zeven, only he’d been going by the name Kale Tane when they’d all met on Frujia.
‘All too well.’ Mythric looked to Taren, wondering if she wanted to divulge any more than she already had.
But Taren’s mind was ticking over. ‘How does Telmo even know about Zeven? They’ve never met. Unless —’ She took her contemplation internal. If we’ve been through this already, Telmo would know Zeven. They went to the universe parallel, with me, in four years’ time and then crossed back into this universe to now. ‘Shit!’
‘What?’ both Mythric and Kalayna begged to know.
‘I’ve got two timekeepers AWOL!’ She turned away to pace out her frustration — why had two of her crew chosen to run a mission without her? ‘What the fuck is going on?’
‘My question exactly.’ Mythric wished to be enlightened.
‘So Telmo is gone from here?’ Taren put the query to Kalayna.
‘I know that sounds impossible,’ she defended, ‘when none of our transports are missing, but, before you arrived, I was the only life form on board.’
‘Do you want me to go after him?’ Mythric volunteered.
Taren shook her head. ‘Not at this point. We have other commitments today.’
‘So we just take Kalayna and run,’ Mythric suggested, as everything else was seemingly peachy.
‘What are you talking about?’ Kalayna was suddenly alarmed. ‘You have to help me get this gate functioning, BA, I’m in a lot of shit here!’
‘No, you’re not,’ he advised her calmly, with a smile. ‘We came to get you to shut the gateway down.’
‘What! Why?’ Kalayna was shocked to the core.
‘Because the EBN will bring the MSS and once they screen you and Telmo with their new photon camera, they’ll arrest you both on psychic grounds.’
Kalayna was doubly shocked. ‘Not just me, but Telmo too?’
‘You don’t think your understanding of this hi-tech ancient system is something you picked up during your Space Corps study, do you?’ Taren tried to make light of the news.
‘How could you know what hasn’t happened yet?’ Kalayna clearly doubted the claim.
‘Because I’m a pre-cog,’ Taren admitted openly, which was even more shocking to the poor girl.
‘Oh shit!’ Kalayna began to go into shock. ‘What am I going to do? My career is over!’
‘No, baby, no.’ Mythric moved in to reassure her and stroke her hair. ‘Your career is just beginning!’
Kalayna was perplexed by this and her gaze drifted back to Taren.
Taren nodded to assure her this was quite true. ‘Welcome to AMIE.’
4
BREAKING LOOSE
Zeven manifested in Khalid’s cell, but he maintained an invisible state of being to observe.
Khalid looked like hell, slouched on his bunk watching the news in just his trousers, which didn’t appear to have been changed in a while. The cell was so filthy, Zeven had to wonder if it had ever been cleaned. Had they just dumped Khalid in here and left him? As one of the most high profile psychics in prison, he was probably considered too dangerous to escort anywhere. It was only because Sermetica had no death penalty that Khalid was still breathing.
A news report about the opening of Inter-system Gateway Five, and a shout out from Kalayna to the crew of AMIE on interstellar TV, had been the trigger for Khalid’s escape attempt this day. Their nemesis got it in his head to kidnap the two hotshot engineers who’d solved the ancient mystery and use them to devise a huge photon camera that could find the source of the timekeepers’ protective power. Khalid had managed to find Oceane, and his attempt to destroy Azazèl-mindos-coomra-dorchi had seen him dragged into the universe parallel with some of the timekeepers. This quantum leap had severed Khalid’s attachment to the evil forces he’d allied himself to all his life, and that’s when the timekeepers realised that Khalid the man was a very different entity to the demon they took him for.
If Taren had acted upon Zeven’s memo this morning then the news report that would trigger al
l these events would not happen. A timekeeper could just leave the situation at disaster averted, but Zeven knew his very righteous friend, Wu Geng, was in Khalid somewhere. An extra-terrestrial metaphysical master, Dorje Pema, had whipped Wu Geng into spiritual shape over a thirty-year period — Zeven had less than four years to aid Khalid to achieve the same. He hoped he was not being egoistically optimistic about his chances of succeeding in his quest, but that was really beside the point — he had a promise to keep. Hyper-aware of the HUGE risk he was about to take, the intent was to provide a trigger for a very different sequence of events in Khalid’s life.
First things first. Zeven wanted to see everything in the cell, including Khalid, spotlessly tidy.
‘What the fuck!’ Khalid was startled by the sudden change in environment — he actually rousted the energy to sit up.
Next Zeven changed the bright yellow colour of Khalid’s trousers to deep midnight blue, which had been Wu Geng’s favourite colour.
‘Someone is screwing with us.’ He stood, gazing down at his clean, dark blue trousers in horror, and then gasped as he looked to the camera monitoring his room. ‘Oh shit.’
‘That’s right, the guards are coming for you,’ Zeven spoke and startled the life out of Khalid.
‘Who the fuck —?’ Khalid was irate, and wary of how vulnerable he was, he turned circles hoping to get a fix on his invisible stalker.
‘A friend,’ Zeven replied.
‘I don’t have any fucking friends! Never did! So fuck you!’ he spat.
Zeven didn’t know anyone who swore quite so much as this guy when he was angry. ‘Just shut up, stand still, and take your medicine like a man.’ Zeven gripped hold of Khalid to prevent him moving, and used him as a human shield when the door slid aside and several guards fired sedation darts into the cell.
‘Fuck!’ One planted itself in Khalid’s right thigh, and Zeven deflected the rest. ‘Let go!’ Khalid wrenched himself from Zeven’s grasp at the sight of the open door.
Feet first, he launched himself towards the doorframe and slid across the floor to use an ankle as a doorstop. When the door closed, it crushed his psychic restraining device into his ankle, effectively disabling it. With a great howl of pain, Khalid passed out.
‘So that’s how you broke out of prison.’ Zeven followed as Khalid was rushed to hospital. ‘I could have gotten you out much less painfully, but,’ he shrugged off the slight deviation in his plan, ‘whatever works.’
Through drowsy eyes, Khalid deduced he was in a hospital room alone. There was no guard inside the room, nor even an orderly to report on his return to consciousness — perhaps he was under visual surveillance?
Despite appearances, Khalid was never really alone — he’d not had a thought or an action all his own since the spirit of Chironjivi, the last prince of Phemoria, was trapped in his body with him — five endless years ago. He should never have allowed the entity to co-habit his body, but he’d been so filled with visions of grandeur at the time he’d not considered the worst that could happen. And even if he had, his imagining would not have matched the nightmare that had become his everyday reality. He’d thought his prior life in service to his father’s bloodlust was wearisome; having a constant telepathic insight into his nefarious thought process and memory was a wretched misery that defied description. Fortunately the spirit had to rest, just as Khalid did, so they took the body in shifts. Every waking minute that he had sole occupancy of himself, Khalid dreamt of the day that he was anywhere that he might find an implement to cut the amulet out of his hand and sever his bond to the vampiric spirit of his father. With any luck Chironjivi was still unconscious and now was Khalid’s chance.
‘You don’t have any luck, you worthless piece of treacherous excrement! Do you think I don’t know that you’ve been planning to be rid of me?’ His hand unexpectedly slapped his own face. ‘Why didn’t you mention you have your Powers back!’
‘I haven’t!’ Khalid growled. ‘It was one of those bloody light-fuckers screwing with us! And if you hit me again, I’m going to cut off my overworked dick and there’ll be no more jerking off for you!’
‘Why would one of them want to free us from prison?’
‘How the fuck would I know? But I know it was one of them, because they are the only thing in existence that makes me feel nauseous, besides you!’ Just thinking about their energy made him feel queasy. Yet Khalid was more concerned with why his ankle wasn’t killing him. He raised the bed sheet to take a look at the injured limb, to find that the neutraliser had been removed. The ankle itself was still badly swollen and bruised, and was a dead weight as it had been numbed. It made him smile to see the restraining device gone; it only took an hour for the effects to wear off. But a glance across to his other ankle crushed his aspiration to freedom as a psychic neutraliser had been attached to it instead. ‘Son-of-a-bitch!’
‘Looks like we’ll be staying together after all,’ Chironjivi taunted.
‘You didn’t have to go bust your ankle; I was going to free you anyway.’
‘He’s still hanging about.’ Khalid recognised the voice as the same man who had been speaking with him earlier in his cell. ‘That’s why I still feel revolting.’
‘I took precautions to keep your adverse reaction to a minimum, but it will not be an issue once your curse is ended.’
‘We need to get out of here!’ Chironjivi took control of the body, ripping monitoring sensors from his skin in a frenzy. But when he planted his feet on the ground, the numbness of his foot gave way to pain, and he was forced to grab for the bed to prevent falling over.
‘Argh! You idiot!’ Khalid yelled at the spirit co-inhabiting him, as he seized back wilful control of his body. No sooner had he accomplished this, than he was swooped up — not by a man but a psychic force — and plonked back on the bed.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ their invisible company said, as the force bore down on them, pinning Khalid’s body to the bed. ‘I haven’t finished operating on you yet.’
Khalid and Chironjivi attempted to rise against the force, but it felt like they were buried to the neck in sand. ‘Go fuck your mother!’ they snarled in unison, as Khalid felt his father commandeer his vocal cords.
‘You already did,’ came the reply.
‘Even better,’ Chironjivi’s unearthly voice snarled, and he wriggled his tongue in a fashion to imply cunnilingus.
‘And now it’s time for a little payback.’ The voice sounded suddenly up-vibe and uncomfortably smug.
‘Wait!’ Khalid regained control of his vocal cords. ‘Don’t listen to me! I never fucked your mother —’
‘You did, actually. Her name was Satomi.’
The name struck a dagger of horror through his chest, not because Khalid regretted raping and gutting her, but because her only child, who they had killed that same day, was prophesied to bring about his destruction.
‘You can’t be Spyridon’s bastard, I stuck a dagger through it myself.’ Khalid rejected the claim.
‘When I was flat on my back and unable to defend myself,’ the voice concurred. ‘Pretty much as you are right now.’
‘I fucking hate this little prick already! I’m going to rip his bleeding heart out and —’
‘Kill me, for pity’s sake!’ Khalid was beyond caring any more. ‘Just get me away from this demented, dead fucker in my head!’
The invisible stalker was heard to laugh. ‘I’m not going to kill you. The dark unknowable forces of this universe are just patterns unseen, begging to be understood.’ Their captor employed a compassionate but ominous tone as he took hold of one of Khalid’s hands. ‘Our secret desires are but signposts to our destiny.’
As Khalid watched his palm turn upwards and his fingers splay wide apart, he realised that the hand of interest was the same one that contained the amulet that bound him to his dead father.
‘One should never be put off from a defining experience by the prospect of a little suffering. All great achievemen
t comes at a cost.’
Was their captor hinting at his intent? If he was of the mind to rip the cursed trinket from his hand, Khalid had dreamt of little else! ‘Yes, do it!’ Khalid implored, as he felt a tingling and a shifting movement inside his hand.
‘No!’ Chironjivi fought back, and clamped the hand into a fist. ‘This is my body now, I made it and it’s mine!’
Once again their captor sounded most amused. ‘You are no more Khalid’s father than I am.’
The claim sent shocking pangs of anger through Khalid’s being, heat upon heat. In the dark, shadowy depths of his being Khalid had always suspected that Chironjivi was lying about his paternity; and it really pissed Khalid off to think that he might have been sucked in, like the gullible infant he was when Chironjivi first made contact with him.
‘Lying pissant, he’s trying to divide us and weaken our position!’
‘Your blood father was of the Old Ones, Khalid,’ the voice insisted.
Chironjivi’s laughter mocked the grand claim to crush the aspiration in Khalid before it could arise. The premise was bordering so close to preposterous that Khalid’s anger broke over his disbelief — Chironjivi was right, he was surely being taken for a ride.
‘There exists a recording of Maiara Vidor in a trance, spouting a prophecy that states this fact,’ the voice informed. ‘The same prophecy that predicted the demise of your curse. I have seen this with my own eyes, and I don’t believe that I am the victim turned victor who would destroy the curse, Khalid … I believe that victor is you.’
Could he be right? Khalid’s fingers began to bend to his will. If there was such a recording, Maiara Vidor was never wrong — that’s why they had targeted Satomi’s child in the first place.
‘A fucking fantasy if ever I heard one!’ Chironjivi hissed venomously. ‘That is how these light-fuckers operate, by enticing you with promises of leading the life you’ve always dreamt of! But what you’ll get will be nothing like it! You are a prince of death, forged from bloodlust and revenge —’
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