by James Axler
“Through here,” Ronald encouraged, leading the way.
Through the doors, the Cerberus warriors found they had entered an even larger room. Its floor was made of translucent red-and-green strips like polished ruby and emerald, while its rafters were so high that clouds had formed beneath the distant ceiling. Birds sang as they flew through those clouds, alighting on huge constructs that depended from the ceiling in odd shapes, each one made from purest gold. This was the court of King Jack.
“I take back what I previously said,” Grant muttered. “Now, this is a big room.”
Kane nodded, eyeing the surrounds with amazement. There were no statues in this room, but there were towering pillars that stretched up until they were lost in the wispy clouds. People worked at desks placed at the edges of the room, great rows of them wired into the desk machinery, eyes enshrouded in goggles that plugged directly into their desks.
Other figures moved about the room on wheeled vehicles, single-person conveyances made of a short strut on which the user stood, with a control stick poised in a graceful curve that belled out from the front of the vehicle, enabling them to be operated one-handed.
“Y’know,” Kane commented drily, “I think I’ve seen countries smaller than this room.”
As the Cerberus rebels entered the room, one group of vehicle drivers settled into position at their flanks, accompanying them as they strode across the vast space toward the thrones that stood in the room’s center. The escort riders were dressed in matching uniforms—and they clearly were uniforms—with ear protectors and dark goggles that hid their eyes. They wore the fixed expressions of bored soldiers the world over, using their strange conveyances to keep pace with Ronald and his entourage as they crossed the red-and-green floor to the raised dais where the thrones stood.
There were two thrones, both elaborate with high gold backs and an abundance of gemstone decorations. The backs of the thrones stretched thirty feet into the air, and colorful birds settled on their high tops, singing delightedly as Grant, Kane and Brigid approached. At a glance, the thrones appeared to be constructed from many parts, giving the impression of something industrial or mechanical rather than designed for comfort. Sitting on the thrones were two figures—a man and a woman—with a glowing shaft of energy sparking between them, lancing from the floor to the height of their seats.
The man was dressed in golden armor that had been polished to mirror brilliance and was decorated with a bright red sash that covered one shoulder and hung down past his waist like a cape. The armor featured a golden kilt and a high collar that sat snugly to his neck, above which his face had been left unadorned.
It was the face of an old man, square and strong, and above it grew wiry gray hair that showed no sign of receding. Kane guessed the man was in his sixties but he was a young sixty, still tough-looking with the steely determination of an experienced magistrate or military man.
This was King Jack. His eyes smiled as Kane and his companions approached the thrones, and Ronald instructed them to wait.
Beside the golden king sat his queen, a striking woman with dark eyes and long hair that was colored neon-blue with a brilliance that glowed. Her hair was held back with a dark-colored tiara that reflected the changing vibrancy of the hair. Like her husband, the queen wore armor, hers dark and flexible with a low cut that was reminiscent of a ball gown, and with a beaded necklace on her bare décolletage.
Between the two thrones was a low, circular unit made of burnished golden metal. Roughly fourteen inches across, the unit was formed of concentric rings, each one detailed with carved letters and glyphs eerily similar to those found on the wings of the Mantas. Each ring was slightly higher than its larger predecessor, creating a mound effect that peaked just a few inches from the floor. Within this mound, a golden rod had been placed, fourteen inches long and held firmly by the center circle. The rod crackled with barely restrained energies that flickered around it in a halo, glinting from a rubylike jewel embedded at its crown. This was the strange lancelike source of the crackling energy.
“My lord, my lady,” Ronald announced as they reached the podium containing the thrones. “May I present our guests from the surface clan called Cerberus.” Then he turned to Kane, Grant and Brigid. “Cerberus visitors, this is King Jack and his wife, the Queen Rosalind.”
There were an awkward few seconds in which none of the Cerberus team knew quite what was expected of them. And then Brigid took the initiative, curtseying separately before both the king and the queen and hissing to her companions to do likewise. Feeling self-conscious, Kane and Grant bowed before the royal couple.
“It is an honor to meet you both,” Brigid announced, taking the lead. “I am Brigid Baptiste.”
“The honor’s probably ours, lady,” King Jack replied with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We don’t get many surface folk coming up here these days.” Strangely, he didn’t sound regal at all—in fact, he sounded decidedly ordinary.
“You pledge fealty to the Cerberus clan?” Queen Rosalind asked. “Is that correct?”
“It is, Your Highness,” Brigid confirmed.
“Then we have another of your people here, don’t we, my dear?” She consulted her husband. “An entrancing and delightful young waif by the name of Domi.”
“That’s why we came here,” Kane began, stepping forward to get closer to the beautiful queen on her throne. As he did so, the guards on their mechanical sleds whirred nearer, as if in warning that Kane should not get too close. Kane noticed that none of them wore weapons and he automatically wondered if he and Grant could take them with their hidden blasters should the need arise. Neither Kane nor Grant ever traveled far without their sleeved Sin Eaters.
“That’s all right,” the king said, waving the sentries back. “These folks aren’t here to hurt us, are you?”
“No, sir, that’s not our intention,” Kane confirmed. “We lost Domi about thirty-six hours ago in the same region where you picked up my friend Grant, here.”
“Grant, is it?” King Jack asked, looking at the dark-skinned ex-Magistrate. “What about the rest of you? You know me and Roz—you folks have names, I take it?”
“Kane,” Kane told him before gesturing to Brigid. “And you already met Bap—”
“Brigid,” Brigid interrupted as Kane started to say her surname.
“Brigid, yes,” the golden-armored Jack repeated, rolling the name around his mouth as if he was sampling a fine wine. “So you’re the bridge between these two, is that it?”
Brigid blushed. “Well, I never really thought of it like that, Your Highness. If I am, then it’s just a coincidence.”
“Names can hide a lot, young lady,” King Jack assured her. “You’d be surprised how much of our destinies are decided on the day we’re named.
“Anyway, I’m talking here like you kids don’t have some place to be. You came looking for your friend, Domi, is that it?”
“It is, Your Highness,” Kane agreed.
Before either the king or the queen could respond, Ronald spoke up. “I’ve already placed a summons for her, my lord. She will be with us presently.”
For a moment, the conversation cooled while King Jack discussed the matter with Ronald. The chair-bound man appeared to be some kind of aide and was clearly well thought of by both the royals.
Waiting in silence, Kane felt strange standing in this vast room before this couple. He was more used to combat than he was to negotiation, and making a good impression didn’t come naturally to him. He was still trying to put together the puzzle of what had happened.
From what Brigid had suggested, they were in a city that was locked inside the quantum fold of a teleport jump, hidden in nonlinear space. The glistening ion stream had been a kind of docking system that drew the Mantas and their escorts here. As if that wasn’t unbelievable enough, the technology that was casu
ally on show was incredible.
Reaching for the crackling shaft of energy, King Jack caught Kane’s eye and smiled, and he spoke almost as if he had read Kane’s mind. “I guess you kids have a lot of questions you want to ask. Why don’t we get out of here and you can join us for a little bite to eat. You will eat, I take it?”
Kane nodded. “Right now, I’d eat anything you put before me, Your Majesty.” His companions agreed. Too long waiting around in the Mantas’ enclosed cockpits had left them all ravenous.
King Jack stood, plucking the energy lance from its holding pen in the circular construct between the thrones. Beside him, the neon-haired Queen Rosalind also stood. As Jack pulled loose the energy shaft, hidden lights in the room seemed to dim, switching the bright daylight feel of the vast throne room to a kind of evening warmth.
Together, the royal couple, Ronald and the Cerberus warriors made their way toward one of the imposing exits. It was located between two towering pillars, the door so well camouflaged that it looked as though the room continued behind it.
Perhaps it does, Kane thought, still trying to process the concept that they were within a quantum wormhole.
* * *
“SO, YOU’RE TECHNOLOGISTS?” Kane asked as he blew on his soup to cool it. The soup smelled kind of like duck, but Kane could not identify the spices that had been employed to flavor it.
The banquet hall was, if anything, even more impressive than the throne room, despite its smaller proportions. The walls were carved from wood in such a way that they looked like a forest, each carved tree trunk placed in line one after another. Leaves fluttered constantly through the air as if on an autumn breeze, but on closer inspection, each leaf turned out to be a holographic image, allowing diners to see through them when peering across the table to address their fellow guests.
The table itself was constructed in three joined circles, the largest of which was fifteen feet in diameter and placed in the center where it held various dishes that had been prepared for the occasion, despite the lack of warning. The other tables were ten feet across and constructed in such a manner that they appeared to almost bud from the first, joined to their central companion along one smooth edge to allow the food to be brought and served easily.
The room’s centerpiece was a circular fire with a ruby-red flame that seemed able to dance in upon itself in the way a fire spirals under a strong draft. It gave off no heat, and the Cerberus teammates realized that, like the falling autumn leaves, it was holographic and designed solely for decoration.
King Jack sat beside Queen Rosalind at one of the smaller tables, assuring his guests that he liked to be well placed to see what was being served next. He seemed friendly, his manner unthreatening, and Kane felt his guard begin to drop as he spoke with the man.
Jack had invited the Cerberus companions to take up places next to him and his wife. “We can all share one table,” he said. “There’s plenty of room and it saves on too much shouting to be heard.”
Ronald declined the offer to join the king, retreating from the room but leaving his two companions to enjoy the monarch’s company. They remained standing while the food was served, taking up positions at the back wall overlooking the table, their expressions fixed in studied disinterest.
Kane noticed that Jack had brought the strange golden rod with him, and he had placed it in a slot similar to the circular design on throne room’s floor, this one a pace behind the treelike seat in which Jack sat. The rod appeared to be held by some kind of magnetic field, Kane saw, not clamped in place as he had first assumed, and it stood upright, fixed in position and sparkling with unknown energies.
The guests were brought drinks of iced water and some fruit juice that had a sweet tang before being served soup by the palace staff. The staff had lusterless skin and wore blank expressions, and they shuffled as if they had little energy. Their presence made Brigid uncomfortable, reminding her of corpses, and she asked about them.
“Don’t let the Gene-agers worry you,” Queen Rosalind told her, patting her hand over Brigid’s on the table. “They have no desires of their own, other than to serve us. They won’t hurt you.”
That was when Kane had posed his question about King Jack and his people being technologists.
“Not really,” the king told him. “Although I can see that it may look that way to an outsider. We’re really just searchers—what you see here is the application of technology we’ve scouted for across the globe.”
“I suspect you’re being coy, Your Highness,” Brigid said as she took soup onto her spoon. “We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s very advanced.”
King Jack laughed. “We employ what we find in a number of ways. We’ve been...fortunate.”
“What you ‘find’?” Kane inquired, placing special emphasis on the word.
“Let me ask you this, Kane,” Jack began. “How did you get here? Where did your air vehicles come from? You didn’t develop them, I can tell you that. They’re found technology. And that’s what we have here—found technology. Do you see?”
Kane nodded as he swallowed a mouthful of the soup. He was beginning to understand what was behind this city of miracles. Found technology, much of it alien, the detritus of numerous alien excursions onto planet Earth.
The Cerberus team had spent most of its existence repelling the plans of an alien race called the Annunaki who had been manipulating mankind since the very dawn of recorded time, posing as their gods when the human race was very young. There had been others, too—the Tuatha de Danaan, a peaceful race who had emphasized the spiritual in their music and their art, and who had supplied the Annunaki with much of their more elaborate machinery; the Archons, or First Folk, a race derived from the Tuatha de Danaan and the Annunaki as a bridging gesture between the species, and of whom Cerberus’s ally Balam was the very last.
There were doubtless others, too, like the Naga, whose role in the development of human society might only have been tangential and whose place remained in the shadows even now. For the people here in this hidden city to pillage and reuse that tech was both incredible and logical.
It was like a cargo cult from olden days, where the inhabitants of a remote island would come to rely upon and worship the strange artifacts that were washed ashore from passing ships in error, and later dropped from the air during periods of strife such as the Second World War. Primitive islanders in New Guinea and Micronesian societies had formed whole religious rituals around the acquisition and safekeeping of such objects from the more technologically advanced quarters of the world, believing them to be gifts from the gods themselves.
The people of Authentiville seemed likewise enamored of the forbidden tech of alien visitors, and they were employing it in a far more sophisticated way than the usual cargo cult society.
“I thought I recognized the matter-transfer system as an adaptation of something we’re...familiar with,” Brigid said, but Kane shot her a warning look. He was unsure how much to tell these people, despite their apparent friendliness.
“You mean the Ion Bridge?” Jack laughed. “I haven’t been on that in a long time.” As he spoke, he finished the last mouthful of his soup and smiled, delicately wiping his mouth with a napkin.
“You seem to know a lot about us,” Grant said, gently replacing his spoon in his empty bowl. “Where are you guys from?”
Rosalind snickered. “Oh, Earth—like you. Only it was a long time ago. So long, I can scarcely remember how it looked.”
“How long, exactly?” Kane pressed.
The queen shook her head, the rays of blue neon swinging to and fro like sunlight seen from beneath the ocean. “Time is...” she began, then changed tack. “The years flow by and none of us are bothered by their passage. Isn’t that right, darling?” she said, locking eyes with her husband. There was love there, Kane could see—genuine human emotion, despite
the strange clothes and trappings of these people. Clothes maketh the man, perhaps, but love gave his life purpose.
“I supposed that once our son, Neal, settled, our need to go surface-side became less pressing,” said Jack wistfully, and his eyes took on a faraway look. Then he peered around the table at his guests and smiled that broad, engaging smile he had first shown them when they had entered his throne room. “My son hasn’t walked these halls in many years now. You’ll forgive an old, old man his reminiscences.”
The Cerberus team waited while the main course, which consisted of some kind of meat and vegetables, was served by the emotionless waiting staff that Rosalind had called Gene-agers. They were thorough, performing their functions without a word.
As the staff filed out, a young woman dressed in a long dress of metallic purple that clung to her slim figure like paint hurried into the room and spoke discreetly with the royal couple. King Jack dismissed her and addressed his guests as she hurried out of the room.
“My newfound friends,” he said, “you came here seeking your companion. Ursula tells me she’s just entered the building and will be with us momentarily.”
The Cerberus field team looked at one another with surprise. They had become so used to things being difficult in their travels that to meet someone so genuinely engaging and helpful was...well, unsettling.
A few minutes and a mouthful of food later, Domi entered, accompanied by a posse of sentries dressed in the same manner as the ones who had kept pace with Kane’s team in the throne room. She wore supple armorlike clothing in a dark jade that covered her torso, arms and legs, leaving only her pale hands and face uncovered. Her usually bone-white hair had been streaked with highlights of purple and, for once, she wore boots on her feet. She also wore a pair of artificial wings on her back, folded in on themselves now but of the same type that Ronald had called pegasuits. Strangest of all, she was wearing an expression of absolute bliss.