Cosmic Rift

by James Axler

  For a fraction of a second, Brigid wondered what to do. Should she shoot to wound? Fire a warning shot? Take one of these monsters out?

  Caution won out. Brigid shifted her aim until it was above the heads of the approaching figures before squeezing the trigger and firing a single 9 mm bullet. The discharge sounded loud in the corridor, and the Gene-agers slowed momentarily as the blast went over their heads, ripping into the wall to their left in a burst of splintering wood. Then they started moving again, faster this time, charging what was left of the distance between themselves and their prey like a football scrimmage.

  “Join the line,” they said in imperfect unison. “Follow the group.”

  Brigid lowered her aim, centering herself as she targeted one of the two figures in the middle. Better to pick one of those off where the others could see and have it act as a warning.

  Aiming for the central figure’s legs, Brigid squeezed the TP-9’s trigger and sent another bullet hurtling through the air. It struck the Gene-ager in the fleshy portion of his right hip, but Brigid felt little satisfaction as the false man flipped over himself and dropped to the floor.

  Again, his colleagues slowed, but only for an instant. In that moment, Brigid saw the fallen Gene-ager roll back up to a standing position and begin charging at her as though nothing had happened. Her bullet had struck him—but whatever they were made of it was a lot stronger than human flesh.

  Brigid stood in the path of the charging brutes, her finger steady on the trigger. Shooting them was not the answer—or at least, it offered no guarantees. Then what?

  “Stay back!” Brigid cried.

  Out of options, she blasted again. Her bullets sounded loud in her ears, and she heard several strike flesh with a familiar dull, wet sound.

  And then the first of the monstrous figures was upon her, and Brigid felt the hard impact as he slammed against her. Her breath blurted out of her lungs in something between a cough and a growl, and Brigid skipped backward while the figure kept running, forcing her back.

  Faster and faster Brigid scrambled as the Gene-ager drove her onward, unable to get her feet under her. The TP-9 blasted another shot into the air without her aiming, its thunderclap echo loud in Brigid’s ears. Suddenly she struck something, slammed against it so hard that it gave, breaking with the impact of the two bodies.

  The next thing Brigid knew, both she and her assailant were toppling out of a shattered high window of the palace, with the street a distant golden streak somewhere far below them.

  Chapter 22

  Kane and Grant followed King Jack as he led the way down a tight tunnel within the depths of the bathing house. The floor was pitched at an angle, sending the three of them deep below the surface. Kane wondered how deep they could go, knowing that the city resided atop a floating disc. The tunnel itself smelled of damp and metal polish, and there were pipes running along its ceiling and walls, with couplers and valves located at roughly every fifth step.

  The tunnel was narrow, too, just four feet wide and barely seven feet in height. It seemed somehow more cramped after the endless wide expanses of corridors and rooms that defined the palace and the bathing house.

  “You come down here often?” Kane quipped.

  “Not for a few years,” King Jack answered without turning to address at Kane. “Probably not since this place was built, now that I think about it.”

  “And when was that?” Grant asked. He was reloading his Sin Eater as the group jogged down the tunnel, slipping the dead clip into a pocket of his duster.

  “Before you were born,” Jack told him.

  Having experienced the Ageless Pool, Kane and Grant realized how difficult it was to guess the king’s age or that of the rest of the population of this incredible hidden realm. With their constant access to a Chalice of Rebirth, it was entirely plausible that these people were as close to immortal as any human could get. The question was not how long they would live, but rather when they had been born. What moments in history had Jack and his people witnessed? Been a part of, even?

  After a couple of minutes, the cramped tunnel opened up into a huge unlit room that stretched back farther than anyone could see in the darkness. The room was cluttered with what looked like the early products of the Industrial Revolution. Great brass cooling towers and storage units dominated, reflecting the glow of Jack’s rod as it played on their polished surfaces. A labyrinth of pipework ran across the ceiling, linking each containment unit and pumping materials between them. Clouds of vapor hung heavy in the air, and the walls were slick with condensation.

  “What is this place?” Kane asked, but he could already guess. “Pump room?”

  “Precisely so,” Jack confirmed, motioning with his glowing rod, unaware of how his companions could see with their special lenses. “These units power and filter the pool water, regulating the chemical compounds and ensuring the Ageless Pools remain topped up and fully functioning.”

  His words echoed from the pipes, reverberating around the room in whispers long after the king had finished speaking.

  Grant looked around warily, the nose of his Sin Eater poised before him. “And this place is unmanned?” he asked.

  “Not usually,” King Jack replied, a furrow of vexation showing on his aged brow. “I guess once the—whatever it was—signal was sent out, the assigned Gene-agers came topside to hunt for me.”

  “I’ll check around,” Grant said, slipping deeper into the shadows, “and make sure we don’t have any nasty surprises waiting.”

  Kane remained with Jack, reloading his Sin Eater as they spoke. “So, you finally acknowledge that they’ve turned against you,” he said, scanning the vast room.

  “I’m not a fool, Kane,” Jack chastised him. “An optimist, maybe, but never a fool. I just didn’t want the Gene-agers to turn rogue like that. What would make them do such a thing?”

  “Beats me,” Kane said. “You said your God Rod controlled them?”

  “Absolutely,” Jack agreed with a nod of his head. “The rod works as an omni-key, operating the main systems of the city and accessing all minor functions through them.”

  “Like a kind of master program,” Kane mused, slowly beginning to comprehend. “But you said you have the only one. The queen doesn’t have one?”

  The aging monarch shook his head. “Nobody but me,” he said.

  “And there’s no possibility that someone could copy it? Clone it?” Kane asked.

  “The technology involved is unique,” Jack said. “It’s a combination of Danaan harmonics and Annunaki organic channeling.”

  “But it can’t be replicated?” Kane pressed.

  Jack shook his head heavily. “The only man who was able to bind those two facets together like this was Wertham, and he’s...well, he’s no longer in the picture.”

  At that moment, Grant returned from scouting, the Sin Eater poised and ready in his hand. “You said you have a big slave population, chief.” He checked King Jack as he materialized in the tiny circle of light cast by the God Rod.

  Jack thought for a moment. “We employ various strands of Gene-agers to run municipal facilities like the pool, act as construction detail, work the transport system and...” He sighed. “I’d say there must be close to fifteen hundred active genetic servants, Grant, if that’s what you’re asking me.”

  “Different types?” Kane asked, seeking clarification.

  “We grow them for specific roles,” King Jack explained. “Some are more hardy than others—the repair workers who keep Authentiville afloat are able to survive in a vacuum, for example.”

  Kane raised his eyebrows and let out a low whistle. “Pretty tough.”

  “There’s a real possibility that all of them have been reprogramed to hunt you down,” Grant said. “All fifteen hundred of them.”

  While King Ja
ck tried to comprehend this, Kane’s mind raced back to something he had said a few moments earlier.

  “You said one other guy could work your God Rod,” Kane recalled. “Wertham?”

  The king nodded his head heavily. “Wertham the Strange,” he said with a sigh. “One of the most brilliant minds that the world has ever known. The man had what one can only call an instinct, a gift. He was able to look into the alien technology we discovered and create uses for it like no one before or since. Wertham helped design the system of filtration that the Ageless Pool operates on, so that we no longer had to rely on the fixed locations of the Chalices of Rebirth. That innovation changed our society.”

  “What happened to him?” Kane asked.

  King Jack sighed heavily once again. “Wertham saw new ways to utilize alien technology, but his experiments took him beyond that. He was a close friend of mine and we would talk at length about his dreams. He wanted to tap into the aliens’ way of thinking, to see things as they saw them. So he began to experiment with Annunaki foodstuffs, nutrition systems, medicines. He distilled them, imbibing sufficient quantities to alter his way of thinking.”

  “You mean he drugged himself?” Kane asked.

  Jack nodded. “At first it was occasional and very controlled,” he continued. “Wertham would use the effects of these alien proteins to, as he put it, make his mind run sideways. He once told me that we all have clockwork brains, and if we could only make the mechanism run backward we would be able to see the whole world in a new fashion.”

  “Alien narcotics,” Grant grumbled. “Now I’ve heard it all.”

  “Wertham became fascinated by the things he saw,” Jack told them. “Little wonder, given the things he told me about. And I suspect that those were merely the tip of the iceberg.”

  “What happened to him?” Kane asked. “Overdose?”

  “No,” Jack said. “Wertham’s insights became muddled, dangerous. He began talking of invasion, of domination of the surface people. It was nonsense—we had already renounced arms after my son was killed. I would suffer no warmongering among my staff, not even talk of such.

  “Wertham built something in secret,” Jack continued solemnly. “A suit powered by will, which he believed could conquer the surface without any loss of human life. Our human life, that is. The surface people would die.”

  “But they’re—we’re—all the same, aren’t we?” Kane asked.

  “Yes,” Jack said. “I started my life on the surface, as did many of the people here. Chance allowed us to create the Authentiville and everything you’ve seen here.”

  “But this Wertham guy,” said Kane, “wanted to start a war with the rest of humanity.”

  “Just so,” King Jack said gravely. “And some people even thought he had the right idea. ‘We can expand beyond the rainbow horizon,’ they said. ‘We need never hide away our miracle technology.’”

  “Why did you hide it, anyway?” asked Grant.

  “In my heart, I’m a pacifist,” Jack said. “I’ve always been one. Before this, I was a peaceful man. I tried to promote that message throughout the world.

  “When I found my first crashed spaceship and all that was inside, it opened my eyes to a world I hadn’t even imagined. But I realized how most men would employ it. Sooner or later, someone would see the military value in such technology and they would either use it or sell it to someone who would use it on his fellow man. I didn’t want that to happen so I kept it to myself. And slowly I gathered like-minded individuals around me to help guard and protect it, to hide it from prying eyes. Hence—Authentiville.”

  Kane nodded in admiration. The old man was right, of course—given the opportunity, it didn’t take long for humans to slip into tribes and start killing anyone who didn’t belong. Hot-shot technology would only create an arms race—the kind of arms race that had resulted in the nukecaust that created the Deathlands.

  “What about Wertham?” Kane prompted.

  “We held a trial,” Jack said, “where Wertham was given the opportunity to speak and to justify his actions. He was found wanting and was sentenced to incarceration. Wertham the Strange remains the only criminal in the entire history of Authentiville.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was imprisoned.”

  “Where is he held?” Kane asked, a familiar feeling of dread pounding at the back of his mind.

  “In a humane prison in the far east of the city,” King Jack said. “The prison is genetically coded to his body. There is no possibility of escape.”

  Kane shook his head. “Respectfully, Your Majesty, if he’s the only guy who can make a God Rod and it takes one of those to turn the Gene-agers against you, I’d conclude that that prison isn’t as secure as you might believe.”

  King Jack scratched at his chin. “Wertham has been locked in there for seven centuries,” he said. “Why would he come out now? Why like this?”

  “Seven hundred years is a long time to nurse a grudge,” Grant said dourly.

  “And a long time to come up with a plan,” Kane added ominously.

  Chapter 23

  Serra do Norte, Brazil

  “Radiation levels are pronounced in this area,” Roy Cataman confirmed as he consulted his computer screen.

  The party of four had reached the spot where Mariah and Domi first discovered the crash-landed lifeboat and had set up a minilab to run on-the-spot analyses.

  “We can also detect a vapor trail running from this point to the north,” Cataman continued, flicking the view on the laptop over to a diagrammatic representation of the area.

  “Meaning?” Sela Sinclair asked. She was holding a Geiger counter with which she had been gathering readings while Cataman and Falk entered the data into their portable computers. Edwards sat nearby, keeping his eyes open for danger.

  “In time, we’ll put the story together and trace where all our colleagues have disappeared to,” Cataman explained.

  “How long will that take?” Sinclair asked.

  Cataman looked thoughtful, his brow furrowing beneath his wild salt-and-pepper tangle of hair. “We require precision,” he said, “which will take several hours. But for the immediate, I can confirm that someone’s been activating an interphaser unit in this area. Or something very much like one.”

  “An interphaser?” Mariah and Sinclair said in surprised unison.

  Though based on alien technology, the interphaser had been developed by Lakesh and his team at the Cerberus redoubt. Indeed, it was something of a pet project of Lakesh’s, designed to replace the mat-trans, which he had helped research back in the twentieth century. To learn that someone else was using that technology was nothing short of incredible.

  Sinclair voiced the thought on both women’s minds. “Is that even possible?”

  Roy nodded slowly. “The chances of two entirely separate entities developing the same basic technological advance independently are not as rare as one might imagine,” he said. “History is full of such coincidences. For instance, the television system that became popular was Marconi’s, not John Logie Baird’s.”

  “Even so,” Mariah began, but Roy held up his hand to silence her.

  “As I understand it,” he said, “the interphaser accesses a system of nodes called parallax points. These points existed many centuries prior to Lakesh’s involvement, evidence of their importance can be found over and over in the historical documentation. Furthermore, a section of the United States military was involved in triangulating and listing these specific locations in its Parallax Points Program.

  “However,” the wild-haired scientist continued, “what the information I have before me suggests is that an additional parallax point, if we may call it thus, is in residence above our heads, albeit some distance to the north of our current location.”

 
Mariah looked relieved. “That would explain how Domi’s kidnappers managed to appear in a clear sky without warning,” she said. “And it would also explain how Kane and Grant’s Mantas were apparently plucked out of the sky while we watched on the satellite feed.”

  Standing beside Mariah, Sela Sinclair had put the Geiger counter down and was busy working the locks on the interphaser carrying case. A moment later, she had the pyramidal unit free and was setting it up on the ground. “If there is a parallax point above us,” she said, “this should be able to access it in the database.”

  The three of them watched as the lights on the control console at the base of the interphaser blinked to life. The tiny screen flickered for a moment, showing a map of the area over which was laid a grid. The parallax point that they had used to reach here was a fixed yellow spot on-screen. The interphaser went through its protocols, searching the database for other nearby parallax points. For half a minute, the interphaser continued to scan, finding nothing of interest. The Cerberus group felt their tension rise until suddenly a second parallax point was identified.

  “There it is,” Sinclair cheered. “There’s our point.”

  Cataman peered over his glasses, leaning a little closer to view the evidence before eyeballing the sky. “Two point three miles distant,” he mused. “But that’s the one.”

  “So, what do we do now?” Mariah asked, her eyes fixed on this imaginary marker in the sky. “Jump there?”

  Cataman shook his head. “If we do that, Mariah, we run a risk of materializing two thousand feet above the ground with nothing to walk on.”

  “And...splat!” Mariah said, pulling a face.

  “Splat, indeed,” Cataman said sagely. “Let’s speak to the ops room and see if they can survey the area with our eye in the sky.”

  “On it,” Sinclair confirmed as she engaged her Commtact.

  A few seconds later, Sinclair was having what appeared to be a one-sided conversation with empty air as the Cerberus operations center acceded to her request. “They’re bringing the satellite around now,” she told her companions.