“Look,” Molotov said, gripping her jaw and turning her head towards her melting father. “Look!”
Becca was powerless against the giant. This time, when she looked, there were two images, both of the same spot on the ice. One of empty ice and the other playing out the melting horror of a nightmare she’d never imagined possible.
“It’s not real,” Molotov said. “You see, there’s no one there.”
The second image in Becca’s mind shifted. This time it was of her and Molotov. He was cradling her protectively, arms wrapped around her, talking softly into her ear.
“I’ve injected you with an M1 nano,” Molotov said soothingly. “It might ache for a bit, but it’ll pass. It’s attached to your optic nerve. You’ll be able to see using the warhorses now. Whatever this radiation is, it doesn’t seem to affect machines. It won’t be able to trick us anymore.”
“I saw my dad,” Becca said, sobbing and pressing her face into Molotov’s chest. “It was my dad. I saw my dad…”
“I know,” Molotov said, cuddling her tightly. “It wasn’t him though.”
“They won’t come back will they, the others, they’re gone aren’t they?
“’Fraid so, hon,” Molotov replied. “This needs to end with us. No one else can come back here. We gotta stop this once and for all.”
Let there be Light
R eece landed on the ground spread-eagled, face first, his suit stiffening and absorbing the impact, his lip bursting as he struck the hard floor. He pushed to his knees, chest inflating painfully, air rushing down his windpipe like he hadn’t taken a breath in an age. The harsh intake made him cough so hard he thought a lung might come up. He leaned forwards and dry heaved, blood dripping onto the stone between his planted palms.
“Don’t panic, nobody panic!” Commander Blake spluttered.
“I’m panicking, I’m panicking,” Hadley cried. “Things are going sideways, Commander. What the hell just happened?”
“I don’t know. You two okay?”
“Think so,” a coughing female replied.
“Up and at it then. Be ready, people.”
“Becca!” Reece croaked, stumbling to his feet and clutching his chest, blood trickling down his chin. He looked towards the temple entrance. “What? Where is it? What the hell’s going on? Becca?”
He gazed stupidly at the blue darkness rippling off a wall directly ahead. Giant snails were crawling across the rock, feasting off the damp moss and algae. Pulsing antennae protruded from holes in their shells, resembling a wig of orange razor clam tongues. More than being the oddest creatures he’d ever seen, the bizarre snails told him he wasn’t in the temple anymore. There was no black glass to be seen anywhere, no doorway leading to the icy continent of Gondwana, and most terrifying of all, no Becca.
“No,” he said weakly, a sick feeling churning his stomach. “… we gotta get back, she’s on her own…”
Reece stumbled round on the spot, listening to the squad trying to make sense of their surroundings. He guessed they’d been transported to a cave whose recesses were too distant for the dim blue light to fully illuminate. His gaze fell upon a forest of towering support columns that reached into the darkness above. Each pillar was carved like a helix, tubular tendons of rock spiralling upwards around empty cores. They were incredible structures, massive. Each pillar would have taken a hundred master masons a year to chisel.
Stupefied, he continued turning on the spot, then stopped dead. Hadley and Schweighofer were walking as though bewitched towards an expansive window. It reminded Reece of the kind of window you might see at SeaWorld, but this was hundreds of times larger. The vista beyond the window had him questioning the fabric of reality. It appeared to be looking over a sprawling underwater kingdom.
Gargantuan stone towers reached towards the ocean surface, so many they faded into the distant ocean haze. The towers were connected by a network of great bridges, or passageways, colossal structures to rival the greatest feats of engineering ever accomplished. Each connecting branch bested the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt for scale, but the bridges were dwarfed by the towers, the girth of mountains. Indeed, they resembled mountains, irregular, lumpy, bulging at points, each tower unique, boasting spires and domes. It looked like new sections of rock had been gradually bolted onto the existing metropolis over time, giving the towers a haphazard, organic quality, exactly like an expanding city on Earth, architecture and building styles changing over time, forming an eclectic tapestry of design.
“Mountains,” he mumbled, glancing behind at one of the spiralling pillars, thinking the only way to construct something on this scale would be to carve it from an entire mountain range, something like the Andes or the Alps. The underwater kingdom would have taken a thousand years to build on the surface, but underwater, with all the additional hurdles and dangers, it was unimaginable.
The towers tapered upwards, needling points that pierced the ocean surface. Weed fronds billowed in the current across the towers, luffing like flags across a mythical realm. The structures were supported by columns that disappeared into the ocean deep, perhaps miles down. A ring of flattened rocky spines protruded from the nearest and most massive tower, giving the appearance of a sea urchin. Had the spines not had flattened upper surfaces, it would be easy to imagine they were for defensive purposes, but Reece knew better. He’d landed on enough aircraft carriers to recognize runways when he saw them. He immediately realized he was looking down on an advanced civilization’s waterport.
“Atlantis,” Hadley said, holding a hand to the window, his shocked reflection mirrored in the glass. “Guys, I think we just found Atlantis.”
“We must have been warped under the ice, somewhere out in the ocean,” Commander Blake said, walking up beside Hadley and Schweighofer. “Would you look at that, there’s an entire civilization down here. Nori, any idea where we are?”
“I’m not sure, it’s confusing,” Nori said. “My internal clock is indicating over a day has passed since that red barrier came down. I don’t recall the time passing. We must have been put into some kind of stasis. But you’re right, we’ve been teleported, that much is clear.”
“Feels like on one breath,” Fang said, checking herself up and down. “All my bits seem in the right place. I… I can’t connect with my horse, that’s weird. My nanos are working, I’m sure of it. It feels like I can access them, but they’re not connecting. I don’t get it.”
“Me either,” Scarlet said. “I’m reaching out but there’s nothing there. That means we must be over a thousand miles away.”
“Are we in a Zoo?” Schweighofer said, gazing out the window. “Last thing I remember was that alien whistling like an Ewok on crack. You think it transported us into a cage, to be show creatures, like an exhibit, or maybe we’re food, lobsters in a tank?”
“That’s what they do!” Hadley said, spinning to Schweighofer. “They round up exotic foods, for the rich, or their kings and queens, you know. We’re the exotic food, they’re gonna eat us!”
“No one’s eating anyone,” Commander Blake growled. “We still have our weapons. I refuse to be dinner.”
“Seconded,” Fang said. “I’m the people kind of Chinese, not the food kind. I’m getting seriously fed up of everything wanting to eat me.”
“I’m not detecting any transmissions or life signs,” Nori said. “I can’t see any animal life moving out there either. If they meant us harm, they wouldn’t have left us our weapons. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Our javelins could be pathetic as peashooters against their technology,” Hadley said. “Look at this place, advanced isn’t a big enough word. It’s… it’s… I dunno, advancamundo.”
“Advancamundo?” Fang said. “What are you a Ninja Turtle?”
“Got a better word?”
“Not off the top of my head, not right now.”
“Well then.”
“Nori’s right, nothing’s moving,” Schweighofer said. “There’s no fish, no ligh
ts. There’s nothing... it’s all dead...”
“What if they polluted the ocean to death,” Fang pondered. “That could be why they left the planet. Maybe they wrecked the environment so bad they had to leave. They could be out there looking for a new home because they killed this one.”
“Sounds familiar,” Hadley said. “Could be all civilizations end up doing that in the end.”
“But the ocean on Jurassic Earth isn’t dead,” Reece said, an unsettling thought entering his mind. “It’s full of life, abundant. There’s more life than in our time. Also, if somewhere like this existed on Earth, there’s no chance we wouldn’t’ve found signs it existed. To build this and leave no trace… I don’t… there’s no way. We would’ve found something. There’d be an archaeological record, surely. They would have travelled around the world.”
“What are you saying,” Fang said, her eyebrows creeping up, “that this isn’t Earth?”
“That could explain the time loss,” Nori said thoughtfully. “If we’ve been transported to another planet, it would take time. It would also explain why you can’t connect with your horses.”
“Sorry what?” Hadley said. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t have heard you right. My brain was too busy screaming help, help, we’re gonna die. Not on Earth? Oh, that’s fantastic. As if being a hundred and fifty million years in the past wasn’t scary enough, now we’re on a dead alien planet too?”
“It’s a wrinkle, sure,” Nori said.
“A wrinkle!”
“It’s not all dead,” Fang said, pointing to the wall. “There are snails. There’s still life.”
“Have you ever eaten a snail?” Hadley said. “It’s like collecting ten years of boogers and squeezing it into a little ball. Does that sound fun, because that’s all that’s on the menu… yeah, that’s right, booger meat until you die.”
Fang’s face warped in silent disgust.
“I think I’ve found something,” Scarlet’s voice echoed. “Over here.”
The group turned. Scarlet was standing beside a window about fifty meters away. She was running her gloved hand across an enormous bronze disc, hanging in a recess in the rock. It looked like an eastern gong, similar to something you might see outside a place of worship, just scaled many times larger. The great gong hummed softly as scarlet ran her fingertips across its face. Little lights, bright and dazzling, splaying rainbow striations, began popping in and out of existence beyond the window, which overlooked a metallic doughnut shaped chamber. Its central core was filled with a tall glass cylinder, the height of a four-storey building, through which streams of tiny bubbles were ascending. Scarlet continued to brush her hand across the gong, causing more bubbles to become brilliant points of light, then fading away.
“In the beginning there was darkness,” Nori said, walking up beside Scarlet and flicking the gong with a metallic finger, making it resonate deeply. The sound swelled into a warbling harmonic frequency that vibrated through Reece’s body. It felt both powerful and wonderful. Hundreds of the rising bubbles in the glass cylinder began shining like burning diamonds, like a universe full of stars. “Let there be light,” Nori finished, drawing back his hand.
“Whaaaa …” Hadley gasped.
Spots of glowing purple gas began materializing against the concave metallic walls of the doughnut shaped chamber, forming clouds that drifted down and congregated, an ethereal ring of luminous purple gas that curled around the glass cylinder, gently undulating. The curved metallic walls inside were steadily becoming white hot, the air shimmering.
“That purple gas is plasma,” Nori said. “It’s a fusion reactor, powered by sonoluminescence by the looks of things. This is incredible. They’ve harnessed the breath of stars.”
“I saw something about this once,” Scarlet said. “Sonoluminescence, free energy. They’re trying to do this at home, green energy, powered by sound. You pass soundwaves through bubbles. It makes them collapse. When they bounce back out they produce energy so great they ignite to tens of thousands of degrees, like stars, tiny stars, hot as stars.”
“Star in a jar,” Nori said. “That’s what they call it. These beings have learned to harness the heat generated through sonoluminescence to power a fusion reactor, enough energy to power entire cities at the flick of a finger. Thimble sized stars to power the world. Cheap, clean and so easy to produce an infant could do it.”
“That’s all good, free energy sounds great, but it still doesn’t explain why this whole place is a ghost town?” Schweighofer said. “If these things had free clean energy, and they didn’t kill the planet, and everything still functions, then why are they all gone? What happened to them and why’s there no life out there? You think it could be an infection, like a virus?”
Lights cracked on in the room around them, neon orange, threading through the stone pillars. The underwater kingdom outside burst alive with fantastical luminosity, lights strobing in sequence along the runways of the waterport.
“Power’s back,” Hadley said. “Looks like we just switched on the world.”
“Watch out!” Scarlet yelled, jumping back as a rotating purple holographic cube appeared out of thin air beside her.
“Get ready, people,” Commander Blake said, lifting his rifle. “It’s waking up.”
“Uh, is something supposed to happen?” Fang said after a few moments of watching the holographic cube, little lights whizzing along pathways on its surface, similar to electrons racing around a computer’s motherboard.
“It’s changing,” Hadley said, fumbling for his rifle. “This is gonna be bad, I know it.”
The strange cube’s sides began folding inwards before reforming, like a living tesseract, the cube endlessly sprouting from within itself.
“How curious,” Nori said, circling and observing the hologram, his robotic face aglow.
“I wouldn’t mess with that thing,” Commander Blake said. “Last time their lights turned on we ended up being warped to the ass of existence.”
“Maybe this one’ll warp us back,” Reece said. “It could be our ticket home.”
No sooner had Nori completed one circuit, an electric bolt shot from the holographic cube, which abruptly disintegrated into vanishing sparks. Electric current whizzed around Nori’s joints and eyes. He dropped backwards, dead-weight, clanking onto the flagstones, fizzing electric bolts worming under his torso plating and up around his neck.
“Nori!” Reece yelled, rushing forwards.
“Idiot!” Commander Blake barked, grabbing the neck of Reece’s suit and yanking him back. “You wanna get fried? That’s electricity.”
“What now?” Hadley cried. “We’re totally screwed without Nori. Our only chance of getting home just got barbequed, man!”
“There’s something in here with me,” Nori managed, his voice strange, an electric storm crackling behind his eye lenses. The sentence that followed was terrifying. “I’m not alone anymore,” Nori said with disquieting calm.
Reece’s skin crawled. Prickling with fear, he looked towards Fang. He was sure they were both wearing the same expression. Petrified eyes wide, faces draining of color.
“There, there… that’s it, the creepiest thing anyone ever said,” Hadley croaked. “Oh, we are so screwed.”
“Nori?” Commander Blake growled, pointing his weapon at the robot. “Are you compromised. Is that still you in there?”
“No, don’t shoot!” Reece cried, slapping Commander Blake’s weapon aside. “What the hell are you playing at?”
“I don’t play, son. And when I do, it’s for the win. I will not allow you to endanger my team. Touch my weapon again and you will reap the whirlwind.”
“Wait,” Nori said, holding up a hand. “I don’t think it’s malicious. It’s scanning my memory files.”
“Can we trust that’s even him anymore?” Fang said.
“Maybe we should… uh… get back a bit,” Hadley said, slowly backing away and checking the setting on his rifle. “Gotta be explosive.�
��
“None of us are getting home without Nori,” Reece said. “You wanna win, put your damn guns down. He’s our only chance.”
“Suke,” Nori announced, sitting up, the electric charge in his eyes dissipating.
“Uh, sorry what?” Fang said. “I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to say things like that in the workplace anymore.”
“Suke,” Nori repeated.
“He said it again!”
“That’s what it’s saying,” Nori said, pushing to his feet. “It’s replaying memories from my past, when people were in need, when they needed help. It’s emphasising one word, every time it was spoken throughout my life. Suke. It’s the Japanese word for help, protection.”
“The first aliens we meet and they speak Japanese?” Hadley said, looking confused.
“No,” Nori replied. “It’s learning from me, from my memories. It’s trying to communicate. Suke is the first word it’s learned.”
The echoing bark of a dog came from deep within the chamber.
“Be ready,” Commander Blake said, spinning and aiming his javelin into the forest of helical pillars. “They’re coming.”
A husky type dog bounded out of the chamber, tail wagging, pink tongue flapping. Dismayed, Commander Blake’s weapon dropped.
“It could be a trick,” Schweighofer said. “Send in the sweetest thing you ever saw so we put our defences down.”
“Like Ghostbusters, the Stay Puff Marshmallow man,” Hadley said. “Our destroyer’s a dog!”
“Daisuke!” Nori cried, stooping down and holding out his arms. “It’s my Daisuke.”
The dog charged towards Nori and leapt into his arms. Nori gushed Japanese words Reece didn’t understand as the dog enthusiastically licked his robotic face.
“Daisuke, my Daisuke,” Nori said adoringly, like an overexcited child who’d just been given their first puppy.
“What’s happening?” Scarlet murmured. “This is so damn weird, but so damn cute at the same time. I’m so conflicted.”
Jurassic Earth Trilogy Box Set Page 52