Cosmic Rift

by James Axler

  “It...can’t be,” Jack said, shaking his head.

  Grant peered behind him, checking that nothing was following them through the door. He just hoped Kane was okay in there. When he turned back to Jack, he saw the look of consternation on the old man’s face.

  “That glow,” Jack explained. “Someone’s lit the Doom Furnace.”

  “Which means what, exactly?” Grant asked.

  Jack’s eyes widened in horror. “The Doom Furnace is a maternity ward for weapons, Grant. If it’s active again, then it means someone plans to take us into war.”

  “With whom?” Grant asked. “I got the impression you were safe here in this...rift.”

  “The only war would be with the surface people,” Jack told him. “Your people. Earth.”

  * * *

  KANE WAS TRAPPED in a corner between two walls of the storeroom, the massive crates hanging overhead on their leather thongs. The Sin Eater bucked in his hand, unleashing a stream of 9 mm bullets. The bullets whined in the air, but the Gene-agers merely swept them aside, arms moving in a blur as they sped up. They had got the speed of Kane’s shots now.

  These people are human tractors, Kane realized. Grant’s Copperhead had enough punch to knock these maniacs down but not the Sin Eater—all its 9 mm discharge could hope to do was slow them for a moment. Worse still, these particular vat-grown men were so durable that they could recover from a few shots—maybe not indefinitely, but that was little comfort when one of them was swinging a steel bar at your head, Kane thought.

  Kane rolled, ducking under the metal bar as the Gene-ager on his right swung for his head like a baseball pitcher. He had nowhere to run now, trapped in a corner like this. It was all he could do to avoid that swinging hunk of metal.

  But before Kane could recover, the other Gene-ager—this one unarmed—came at him, delivering a powerful knee to the side of his leg. The blow seemed to reverberate though Kane’s leg bone, and he toppled to the deck, his right flank slamming against the wall as he sank. Kane gritted his teeth against the sharp pain in his leg. It would pass—he just had to stay alive long enough for that to happen.

  When he looked up, they were headed toward him, two of them, dull expressions like the simpleminded. They were feet away, coming at him with murder in mind. They could move faster, they were stronger and they were utterly fearless in their mission. If he didn’t stop them now...

  Kane’s mind raced, the experience of a thousand altercations running through his brain, a hundred different combat scenarios, a dozen different moves he might employ pared down in an instant to one option. Kane took careful aim with his Sin Eater and squeezed the trigger. A burst of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets blasted from the muzzle, whipping past Kane’s attackers, up toward the roof above them, and drilling through one of the leather thongs that held the crate above them in place.

  The crate was the size of a two-car garage, and it was held aloft by the application of perfect balance, two thongs keeping it high above the floor. Kane’s bullets clipped one of those tethers, fraying it as they passed through the material. Kane drove himself backward, pressing his back against the wall and drawing his legs toward him as the tether gave with a sound like a tree trunk splitting. The crate swung like a pendulum, sweeping in a swift parabola and knocking Kane’s attackers off their feet like bowling pins.

  The crate came to an abrupt stop as its leading edge met the floor, ripping into the decking there with a screech of metal on wood.

  Kane stood, breathing heavily. The crate had missed him by six inches. Maybe. Two figures lay mangled beneath it, slapped to the ground by the swinging box before getting their legs caught under it as it met the immovable floor. There was blood there, and flesh and bone, all of it mashed into a streak that spread across the floor where the crate had struck. Kane looked away, disgusted.

  * * *

  MOMENTS LATER, KANE joined Grant and Jack on the balcony outside the storeroom.

  “Everything okay?” Grant asked as Kane appeared.

  “Dandy,” Kane said, brushing a finger to his nose.

  Grant smiled. Kane’s gesture was known as the one-percent salute, a kind of ironic code between them. It highlighted that no matter how well things may be going, there was always that one percent margin where just about anything could and would go wrong. Kane and Grant generally employed the old code when things seemed at their most dire. And nine times out of ten, the situation got worse before it got better.

  “We have our own problem out here,” Grant explained, and he indicated the glow on the horizon. “See that? The king tells me it’s some kind of munitions plant that’s been called back into action.”

  Kane listened as Grant and King Jack explained what it meant. When they had finished, he turned to Jack and asked what they could do to stop the projected war with Earth.

  “I need to get back to the palace,” Jack said. “Powering up the Doom Furnace would have required the God Rod, and it can only be engaged from the throne hub. If we can get there, maybe I can turn things back somehow.”

  Kane nodded. “Archimedes once said, ‘Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I shall move the world.’ And you’ve got the big lever.”

  King Jack searched the street, getting his bearings. “But my sky disk is right across the other side of the building,” he explained. “Do you think you boys are up to facing off against more of the rogue Gene-agers?”

  Thoughtfully, Kane peered back at the building and then out across the street. There were vehicles there, some moving and some parked. As he watched them a plan started to form. “Your Highness, have you ever boosted a car?”

  * * *

  WARILY, BRIGID STEPPED from the steed and stalked across the towering walkways of the Doom Furnace. Beyond them, a sheer drop fell away to the burning pits of the forge, churning out space hardware for the first time in almost a thousand years.

  From up here, the whole system looked automated, great arms moving caldrons of boiling metal into ingot molds, vast banks of cooling jets hardening the results as each armored plate was produced. A mighty tower of water fed a miniature lake that was used for cooling, hanging high above the forge in a gigantic bowl.

  To one edge of the pit, a sunken platform ran almost the whole length of the underground factory. The platform contained finished items—gigantic gun emplacements, huge beam weapons like radar dishes, each one made mobile by a single, ball-like device locked to its base, and each as tall as ten men. There were vehicles there, too, two vast land tanks as long as battleships, gigantic caterpillar treads running the length of their bodies. And there were other, smaller vehicles that still dwarfed a baronial Sandcat. Figures were marching in file around the platform, priming the weapons and manning the hulking vehicles as they prepared for the first wave of Wertham’s assault.

  Brigid ducked as something came rushing upward from the depths of the forge pit. It was a one-man flyer, designed like a sled with a swept-back screen on the front, behind which a Gene-ager worked the controls. Brigid recognized a cannon-type nose poking from the front, and she wondered what ammunition it required. As she watched, a second flyer zoomed up out of the darkness, followed by a whole squadron, at least a dozen moving in formation up into the sky above Authentiville.

  Brigid moved across the walkway, feeling decidedly under-armed for whatever was coming next. “Where the heck is Wertham?” she wondered, eyeing the network of walkways that led down into the belly of the forge. A few figures moved around there, many of them carrying materials destined for the production plant.

  Then she spotted Wertham, his bright-green jumpsuit marking him out amid the sea of grays and blues of the Gene-ager workers. He was below her, striding purposefully along a wide walkway toward a boxlike unit that jutted from one wall, its proportions as large as a house. Brigid watched as he reached the box and slipped insi
de.

  “Okay, God Emperor,” she muttered, fingering her holster. “Time to meet someone who doesn’t take so kindly to your mind manipulation.”

  * * *

  THE WALL LIGHTS blinked on as Wertham entered the forgotten room on the edge of the Doom Furnace. His face broke into a giddy smile as he stepped into his old laboratory.

  Even in the strip lighting, it was clear that the room was vast, big enough to house a sporting event. Every wall was carved with handwritten notes etched into the walls themselves. There was a lot of empty space here that had once held items of alien salvage, and Wertham could see the cage that had once been the focal point of the nexus area where he would test the destructive limits of a new discovery.

  The lab had been located here, back when the Doom Furnace was active, to provide a place from which to test and oversee new prototypes as they were forged and put through their paces.

  Now it was a shambles. Things were broken, desks overturned, paperwork singed or burned away entirely, leaving only the covers of once-bound volumes remaining. His bed, as comfortable as it was practical, had been broken apart and only the legs remained, its base torn away for scrap.

  “I guess no one expected me to return,” Wertham stated archly when he saw the state of the bed.

  He kicked through the dusting of debris that littered the room. “Jack should have burned this place the moment he had the chance,” he said. But he hadn’t because he was scared of what he might burn, of what might explode or be set off to do untold damage. So he had ordered the place trashed, instead, believing that locking it away like this would somehow last forever.

  Wertham moved over to one of the upturned desks, searching a line of cupboards secured directly to the wall above it. The cupboards were missing their doors now, and their contents were strewn halfway across the floor, ransacked and destroyed. Wertham brushed the remaining debris aside and reached deeper into the center cupboard.

  “A warp in a warp,” Wertham muttered cryptically. “A rift in a rift. There.”

  As he said it, Wertham’s arm stretched beyond the back of the cupboard and disappeared into and through the wall.

  Many years ago, Jack had constructed this city inside a quantum field beyond the reach of normal man. Authentiville existed in a cosmic rift, ever in flux with the real world. For Wertham, it had not taken much to switch the frequency to create his rift within the rift, a place where he could hide his most ambitious designs should anything ever happen to him. Within that quantum pocket, Wertham grasped something metallic that looked like a bunch of tangled wires.

  Wertham carefully unfolded the wires until a circlet was revealed. The circlet was topped with three strips of wire, each no thicker than a man’s pinkie finger. Wertham took the strange item and placed it over his head like a crown. It felt just like he remembered from all those years ago, and already the impossible shapes were playing before his eyes.

  Sitting on the fire-scarred desk, Wertham scowled in thought. “The world’s a big place,” he recalled. “I’ll have to personalize it.”

  * * *

  “BEEN A WHILE since I did this,” King Jack admitted as he fed power to the lightracer’s control console.

  Barely wider than a man, the lightracer was shaped like a spear and stretched back to a length of fourteen feet. More than one half of that length was taken up with engine, a solar drive that fed a nuclear reaction through the vehicle’s synapses to power it. One single back wheel dominated the design, cutting through the vehicle and standing to the height of a man, two feet above the low-slung body of the lightracer itself.

  The king accelerated from a standing start to 90 miles per hour in less than two seconds, cutting a path through the street outside the regeneration baths, trusting the avoidance software to keep him safe as the vehicle wove through traffic. Despite the gravity of the situation, King Jack was grinning.

  Behind Jack, Kane and Grant were kneeling on the low floor, wedged into a space no larger than the pilot’s seat of the Manta. Kane peered over the king’s shoulder as the dark city whizzed past at incalculable speed, wincing and ducking as they darted around slower vehicles on their passage back to the palace. Despite their velocity, the lightracer made a sound no louder than a gnat’s wing.

  “Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?” Kane asked, his heart racing.

  Jack laughed. “Ah, you can’t teach a new god old tricks, son,” he said, working the controls.

  Through the windshield, Kane saw what looked like a service truck pulling across two lanes as it made a turn. The lightracer clipped past it with inches to spare, nothing but a blur on the road.

  Pushed right up against Kane, his knees up against his chin, Grant closed his eyes in a slow, meditative blink. “You know,” he said, “if we make it back to the palace I’m telling his wife.”

  * * *

  BRIGID CLAMBERED DOWN the crisscrossed walkways of the Doom Furnace, moving as swiftly as she could toward the door through which she had seen Wertham pass. Somewhere in the back of her mind she could still feel the tickle of that bogus instruction to obey, and each time she became aware of it she would clench her hands tight, pushing her fingernails into the fleshy part of her palm until it hurt.

  “Keep with it, Baptiste,” she told herself, trying to think what advice Kane would give her.

  She slipped down a winding metal staircase to bring her level with the doorway she sought. As she reached the bottom step, she spotted five dull-faced servants trudging toward her. They carried boxes of tools and equipment, each one filled to the brim, each one heavy enough to require a wheelbarrow for a normal man to move.

  The Gene-agers stopped when they saw Brigid there, eyeing her suspiciously. “You don’t belong here,” the lead slave said, dropping his box of parts.

  Oh, boy, thought Brigid, here we go again.

  Chapter 29

  Wertham was alone in his all-but-forgotten laboratory. He had spent seven hundred years alone in the single prison cell of Authentiville. Solitude held no fear for him now.

  He reached for his hidden cache of mind drugs, a specially adapted mixture of Raka’ and Annunaki proteins and solvent compounds that he had stumbled upon and refined centuries before. Like the crown, the cache was where he had left it, hidden in a rift pocket disguised by one of the shapes that were impossible for a normal man to see with the naked eye.

  The drug looked like a tiny capsule, smaller and rounder than Wertham’s little fingernail. He slipped it onto his tongue, reveling in the unpleasant taste, familiar even after all these centuries without it. The pill melted with a fizzing sensation, much as a meringue will disintegrate on the tongue, and Wertham felt things begin to slip inside his skull and his body, the way a contact lens will slip over the eye.

  Hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste. Five senses.

  Become six. He could gloud the air now.

  Become seven. And now he could frieb the trace heat coming from the wall lights.

  Become eight. He could ize the trace he had friebed.

  Become nine. And to tomp the very room with all its angles and planes.

  They were senses impossible to describe without experiencing them firsthand, new senses that expanded Wertham the Strange into a whole other scale of being. An existence kaleidoscoped with glory.

  He felt the buzz of his new set of senses, four new abilities acting in conjunction with the old familiars. They would all be necessary for the Titan work he was to do next.

  The sensor rig was perched atop his head, its metal pads making contact with his cool skin. Wertham took up a position on the lip of an overturned desk, perching there like some hungry bird of prey, and gazed about the room. He could still see the shapes that hid themselves from human eyes, the shapes that only the alien races were supposed to see. They rotated in the shadows, glis
tening like diamonds, twinkling like stars seen between the clouds.

  Nine senses fed information to him as he slipped his consciousness into the new form, seeking it out with the headset, discovering it right where he had placed it all those hundreds of years before. The Titan.

  * * *

  BRIGID HAD FACED Gene-agers before, so she didn’t hesitate this time. Instead, she charged at the nearest, the one who had dropped the box he was carrying as he formed his accusation, pulling her TP-9 from its hip holster.

  The TP-9 sang its song of menace, a stream of 9 mm bullets launching from the sleek black muzzle and drilling into the chest of the artificial man. The Gene-ager stumbled back with the impact, surprised and wounded at the same time, dark ooze spreading across his overalls where his skin had been pierced.

  Brigid used the man’s surprise to her advantage, flipping herself in midrun so that her body dropped low, taking all of her weight on her right leg as her left kicked up. The toe of her upthrust boot connected with the Gene-ager’s jaw, and his teeth closed with a loud clack. The artificial man was knocked back with the blow, staggering to keep upright.

  Brigid continued to move, slipping from high kick into a crouch and sweeping the TP-9 in a low arc before her. As the first Gene-ager tumbled to the stone catwalk, Brigid’s bullets cut the legs out from under the next two, sending one of them staggering over the edge of the walkway while the other crashed to the floor. Brigid ignored the cry of surprise as the Gene-ager disappeared over the side of the catwalk, her heart pounding faster now, the pulse of adrenaline throbbing behind her ears.

  The last two Gene-agers were only now beginning to react to this mystery attacker with hair the color of the furnace below. They dropped the crates they were carrying and ran at Brigid, hefting long-handled tools over their heads as makeshift weapons.