Cosmic Rift

by James Axler

  The first guard reacted to Wertham’s flinch. “What th—?” he began.

  But already he was too late.

  Wertham’s arm thrust out, the straight edge of his hand striking the guard beneath his jaw, obliterating his windpipe with a single blow. The guard sagged back from the cot, his hands grasping up at the armored collar of his uniform, the awful, animal sounds of choking spewing from his open mouth.

  “Ben, what happened?” his colleague asked. His attention was distracted in that instant and he watched Ben limp back and down, tumbling to the deck as if he were a tower of clothes piled too high on laundry day.

  Wertham’s body was all sharp angles now, hard lines and furious energy that was barely restrained by its flesh. He moved from the cot in a whirlwind, a spinning, twirling dance from bed to floor, left leg snapping out in a blurring kick, the angle impossible. The foot connected with the second guard’s chest, slamming against the hard armor there with the clang of a bell being struck. The second guard was driven across the room with the impact, whirling through the air before striking the back wall—the translucent one that could be parted only by a guard’s key—in a drumbeat of soft flesh against solid barricade. He sank to the floor, eyes swimming out of focus.

  The third guard reacted swiftly, whipping himself out of reach as Wertham’s other foot cut the air toward him in a swishing arc. The foot missed by a fraction of an inch, and the guard drew his baton from its holster at the top of his thigh. The baton emerged seven inches in length and the thickness of a wineglass, but Wertham watched as the guard flicked his wrist and the length quadrupled, turning the short stick into a powerful club. He had never given his jailors cause to employ their defences before—objectively, he found this whole experience fascinating.

  Wertham’s flesh was following the pattern of the fight trace, slipping into a charge, body dropping low as he powered toward his remaining foe. The guard beside the wall was recovering, which meant he ought to curtail this before reinforcements could be called.

  The sentry with the baton stepped back, securing a two-handed grip on the weapon and holding it upright before him like a cell bar. Wertham had no time to acknowledge the irony; already his body was switching from the charge into an upward leap, effortlessly springing from the floor. His left foot connected with the extended baton, slapping against it with a clap of noise and using it to climb higher into the air even as the guard fell back with the sudden shift in weight and balance.

  The guard tried to change his attack, but he was too slow. To Wertham, deep in the fight trance, the guards moved with all the speed and purpose of a still photograph, each shift in the fight seen not as a motion but rather as a new pose to be accounted for and conquered at his leisure. Fight mathematics—simple for a mathematician of Wertham’s ability.

  Still balanced on the outstretched baton, the prisoner’s right leg whipped forward, pointed foot meeting the guard’s faceplate and shattering the visor he wore there. Toughened crystal composite spread across the room as the visor broke, sharp shards driving into the guard’s face in gashing red lines.

  The guard tumbled back, his grip loosening on the baton as he rolled to the floor. Wertham sprang as the guard fell, moving through the air almost as if afloat before landing on the far side of the room.

  Calculation: the baton-wielding guard would take 2.3 seconds to recover. In that time, Wertham turned his attention back to the guard slumped against the wall, reaching for him with both hands and yanking him from the floor by his collar. Like the rest of the guard’s suit, the collar was made of composite crystal, forming a shell-like armor over his whole body, which left only his mouth and a tiny section of his throat exposed. A helmet hid the rest of his face and head, the tinted visor disguising the vacuous expression on the vat-grown man’s face.

  Wertham hefted the guard up, using his powerful leg muscles to drive the startled guard toward the ceiling. Wertham had always been thin—dangerously so, some would observe—but he was wiry. Furthermore, he could access hidden reserves of strength that few men would ever stumble upon by using the alien drugs he had discovered and developed in his most productive years. The guard slammed against the ceiling with a crack and his neck caved in, spine crumbling in on itself—not through the power of Wertham’s attack but through the perfect angle at which the blow had struck. It was all mathematics.

  At the same instant, the guard who had tried to use the baton on Wertham was staggering to his feet. He heard the noise as his colleague’s neck snapped, felt it like a shock wave. Instinct kicked in and the guard ran, leaping the outstretched edge of the bed and darting through the open doorway that led to what had served as Wertham’s living quarters for the past seven centuries.

  “Attempted breakout in progress at the moral foundry,” the guard said as he dashed past one of the L-shaped seats in the room. A transference mic embedded in his helmet picked up the command automatically, relaying it to the sentry station two floors below. Wertham was the only prisoner Authentiville had ever known, yet by convention the guards had been trained to refer to the area rather than the prisoner—to keep things impersonal.

  Still deep in the fight trance, Wertham followed.

  Chapter 13

  Once again, they took to the skies. This time, they traveled on an open-sided disk over the rooftops of Authentiville, with King Jack standing at the control console, working the metallic bubble with a simple series of squeezes and turns.

  Kane recognized the configuration of the disk despite the surface differences. In their tussles with the Annunaki, the Cerberus rebels had seen sky disks in operation. Incredibly fast-moving while in the atmosphere, sky disks were saucer-shaped vehicles equipped with low-observable camouflage screens that made them appear as little more than a shimmer in the air. When that camouflage was powered down, the surface of the sky disks looked like mercury, a beautiful liquid silver. Each vehicle housed a cabin inside, where the pilot and passengers would sit. This one, however, was something different. While it ran on the same basic principles, this disk was smaller and open to the elements, more like a platform than what man had once called a “flying saucer.”

  “Feels sturdy enough. You make this baby yourself, Your Majesty?” Kane asked.

  “Not me,” Jack told him. “My pit crew came up with the modifications, but they’re tinkerers and the modifications are never ending. Always they see ways to improve on what we have. I think Ronald was a part of the original design team, in fact.”

  Grant warily eyed the bubble that Jack used to pilot the craft. “Looks kind of simplistic,” he observed.

  King Jack smiled. “The greatest technology is deceptively simple, don’t you find?”

  Grant nodded appreciatively as the disk soared over the golden rooftops.

  “Where are you taking us?” Kane asked as he watched the bright buildings idle past below.

  “Just for a look around,” King Jack replied in a booming voice.

  Kane estimated that they were three hundred feet above ground level—whatever that meant for a floating ville—but the disk felt steady enough. It was as if they stood on a travelator that imparted a slight sense of shuddering as it moved but nothing more.

  The floating vehicle’s passage was quiet enough, but the sound of rushing wind made it difficult to be heard at a normal speaking volume. The king was used to raising his voice.

  The platform cut a graceful line across the ever-changing sky, weaving between the taller buildings as it crossed the magnificent city. Other vehicles whipped past, one-person and two-person transports, along with larger vehicles like the steed, and even the single sets of wings that Ronald and Domi had called pegasuits. Grant spotted a woman followed by three children, the oldest maybe six years old, whipping through the sky wearing pegasuit wings. They hopped out from the corner of a high-rise like birds learning to fly before doing a circuit o
f the building’s upper levels and returning to the spot where they had started.

  “Learning to fly,” Grant said with a chuckle. It was truly another world.

  “I think that was Raka’ technology originally,” King Jack offered. “Made a heck of a difference when we stumbled upon it and figured out what it could do.”

  It was the second time Jack had mentioned the Raka’ or Rakashashas, Kane realized. Kane made a mental note to ask Brigid who or what these Rakashashas were.

  Beneath them, they saw people going about their business in streets paved with slabs of copper. The people wore elaborate costumes, supple armor often in garish colors, capes, cloaks and magnificent helmets on both the men and the women. Everyone looked in the peak of physical fitness, and while there was some differentiation between them, almost everyone was tall and slender with the muscular physiques of athletes. There did not seem to be any old people in the streets or the buildings that they passed.

  Far below, Kane spied a silver stadium with clear flags fluttering from its arches. The flags were made of some translucent material, capturing the colors of the rainbow sky as they whipped in the breeze.

  “What’s going on down there?” he asked.

  Obligingly, King Jack dipped the sky disk down for a closer look.

  The stadium was filled with several hundred spectators, their eyes glued to the action on the track. The track was sandy-yellow and featured several dozen land vehicles vying for position in a frenetic race. The vehicles were of several types built around a large single wheel to which the rider had been strapped. The vehicles looked both very fast and very dangerous, but King Jack gave a reassuring laugh at Kane’s surprised look.

  “Don’t worry,” Jack said. “The riders are mostly pilots from the scout division. They enjoy the speeds the wheel-rigs can reach, and they hardly ever crash out. There are trained apothecs on hand to handle things if anyone does, with a regen pool on-site.”

  Kane and Grant barely followed the man’s explanation. They recognized most of the words but it was almost as if he was speaking another language.

  “How many people live here?” Kane asked, raising his voice over the rushing wind.

  “At last count, Authentiville housed somewhere in the region of four thousand people, including children, plus the Gene-agers, of course,” King Jack told him as they pulled away from the stadium and its wheel-rigs. “But that was a few years ago now, I’m afraid. Record keeping never was my strong point.”

  “What are the Gene-agers?” Grant followed up. “You make it sound as if you don’t count ’em.”

  “Every society needs certain conditions to prosper,” Jack replied easily. “Workers, drones. The Gene-agers aren’t real men, just functions brought to life. They keep the ville operational.”

  Grant nodded. It sounded a lot like slavery to him.

  They continued hurtling across the sky, passing other flying vehicles and individuals wearing the pegasuit wings. Passing close to a tower shaped like a pepper grinder, Kane and Grant saw what appeared to be some kind of literary event through the windows. There were people dressed in gaudy clothes, unlike the supple armor the Authentiville citizens seemed to favor, and as they sped past, a figure wearing a giant puppet suit emerged from behind a curtain, using gestures to make the monstrous arms and legs move.

  King Jack directed the flyer low over a green field of grass that topped a golden rectangular building. Cows were chewing their cud and a herdsman—dressed in blue armor with a sweeping cape—stood watching them from close to the building’s edge. As they neared they saw the herdsman was holding something to his mouth—a long, narrow pipe like a wind instrument—into which he blew. The cows turned in unison and lowed at the king as he passed, while the herdsman waved a salute, his cape billowing out on the wind in the wake of their passage.

  “Some Tuatha genetics in those beasts,” Jack told them casually. “The herdsmen use harmonics to make the bovines responsive.”

  * * *

  “YOU HEAR THAT?” the first guardsman asked his colleague. “A breakout?”

  A light flashed to life on their console, and a map of the cubelike apartment in which Wertham the Strange was incarcerated spun continuously on the fifteen-foot-high screen behind them.

  “Impossible!” his colleague insisted, though his hands were already in motion over the master control panel. “Lock down everything to ensure that nothing can come in or out of that cell until we give the all clear.”

  “That would, of course, mean damning your colleagues to death,” another voice said.

  The two guards looked up and saw Dr. Ronald gliding into the reception area from his parked transport outside.

  The guards looked at him hopefully. “What can we do, then?” the Gene-ager operating the control board pleaded.

  Hidden from their view, Ronald’s hand brushed against a switch located in the left arm of his motion chair. Twin darts launched from the chair, flitting across the room like insects before finding their targets in the throats of the two men. “I suggest dying,” Ronald told them as he guided his chair behind the desk until he was at the control panel.

  Both guards slumped in their chairs, making hacking noises as they struggled with the fast-acting Annunaki poison that was now coursing through their veins. The poison was a derivative of a very successful anesthetic that the good doctor utilized in his operating theatre. The mixture had been tweaked ever so slightly, on Wertham’s instruction, to induce an immediate allergic reaction that, coupled with the anesthetizing properties of the mixture, left the guards unable to move their chest muscles and breathe.

  Gently, almost lovingly, Ronald pushed the closest of the guards from the operating panel so that he could reach its controls.

  * * *

  WHILE THE QUEEN worked the unfathomable Happening device, Domi drew Brigid aside and spoke to her in a low but giddy voice.

  “Brigid, it’s so good to see you again,” said Domi. “I’m so glad you guys made it here.”

  “We wouldn’t leave you for the world,” Brigid reminded her. “Plus, Lakesh would have killed us ten times over if we hadn’t willingly volunteered to find you the very second you went missing.”

  Domi looked pensive. “Missing? Yes, I suppose I am. Oh, but it’s so wonderful. You’ve seen this place. These people—they live among the stars.”

  Brigid nodded warily, sensing her colleague’s enthusiasm.

  “And Brigid, they take me for who I am,” Domi continued. “They’ve shown me more acceptance here than I’ve ever felt out there—on Earth.”

  “You’re—we’re still on Earth,” Brigid reminded her. “At least, technically.”

  “But it’s different here,” Domi continued, a broad smile lighting up her face. “Brigid—I want to stay.”

  Brigid was taken aback and, wrong-footed, she struggled to respond. “Domi, I...” she began. “We have the means to get home now.”

  “No, I’m not a prisoner here,” Domi said a little more forcefully than Brigid expected. “I hadn’t thought about Cerberus since I got here, not until I was told you guys had arrived. I want to stay. I fit here.”

  Brigid didn’t know what to say to that. Domi was, without doubt, an outcast at the Cerberus headquarters. Her strange appearance, coupled with her often primitive outlook, made her an anachronism among the scientists and technologically adept warriors of the Cerberus operation. More than once Domi had felt rejected, pushed out by the very people who should be her friends there, and while Brigid herself had never turned Domi away, she knew that others—including Grant—had.

  “You mustn’t make any hasty decisions,” was all Brigid could think to say. Yet even as the words left her mouth she knew it was a ridiculous thing to say to a free spirit like Domi: every decision that the albino girl had ever made had been hasty and barely conside
red. She lived by instinct and wit, not by planning the way the other supposedly sophisticated members of Cerberus did.

  Brigid wanted to say something else, something about Lakesh and how much he would miss her, but at that moment she struggled to frame it into a sentence without its sounding like emotional blackmail. “Domi, I think that maybe you need to think...” she began. Then her eye was caught by the queen. “What is it?” Brigid asked, leaning closer.

  “Trouble,” Queen Rosalind bit out. “Trouble’s coming. Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon enough. It’s so catastrophic that it blocks out everything else,” said the queen. “I can’t see past it. That’s why I couldn’t peer into events in the water.”

  The two Cerberus warriors watched as the screen showed the golden city in the cosmic rift, just as they had seen when they approached it on their landing vectors. But this time there was smoke pouring from the buildings, darkening the rainbow sky.

  Chapter 14

  King Jack’s sky disk hurried on, cutting its silent path above the city, past the anvil-shaped building whose walls were dominated by the waterfall. The water glistened with rainbow highlights as it caught the swirling colors of the impossible sky.

  “How long have you been here?” Kane asked King Jack.

  “Out here in the warp or the city itself?” King Jack asked. A question for a question.

  “Either. Both,” Kane clarified.

  The armored king looked wistful for a moment, rubbing his chin with his free hand before answering. “Time tends to lose its meaning after a while, don’t you find?” he said.

  “What about you?” Kane asked. “You mind my asking how long you’ve been on the throne, Your Majesty?”

  Jack laughed, easing the disk down to a section of the city characterized by lower buildings. “As long as I can recall,” he said, “they’ve always called me ‘the king.’ The more things change here, the more they stay the same.”