Had he heard that right? Had the British guy just asked for the man beside him to be killed?
Hades shrugged. ‘So be it.’
He nodded to Vacheron and Vacheron keyed his remote.
Blam!
The American’s head exploded and his headless body crumpled to the ground.
Only Jack seemed horrified. Everyone else around him seemed to accept it without comment, as if they had expected it.
A moment later, a heavy gush of liquid stone thundered into one of the chambers in the hostage train—presumably that of the dead Ranger’s hostages—drowning all its occupants.
When the cruel ceremony was over, Vacheron turned to the spectators. ‘The Second Challenge has been run and won. We shall let our champions adjourn for a short while to tend to their wounds and consult with their support teams, but not for long. The Third Challenge awaits.’
The spectators cheered.
Jack sagged with relief.
Lily threw her arms around Jack in a deep relieved hug when he entered the hostage carriage a few minutes later.
The two dogs, their tails wagging furiously, bounced up to him as well. Roxy, the smaller of the two, a little black poodle, barked with unconcealed delight.
Jack returned Lily’s embrace, holding her tight, closing his eyes. She was truly a young woman now, lean and beautiful, twenty years old, with long raven-black hair, olive skin, and a razor-sharp mind.
As he held her tightly, Jack glanced at Alby.
‘This isn’t a dream, is it?’ Jack said.
‘Definitely not a dream,’ Alby replied. ‘But we are through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole and certainly not in Kansas anymore.’
Alby was a different kid, too. Gone was the short, bespectacled, deaf, black nerd he’d been when he was eleven. Now he was twenty-one and while he still wore glasses—classy rimless ones—and a discreet hearing aid, he stood the same height as Jack.
Having been accelerated through his final two years of high school, he’d been fast-tracked to Caltech. It had been amazing for him. He’d blossomed there and he now spoke with a quiet and assured confidence that Jack liked.
Sky Monster clapped a hand on Jack’s shoulder. The big bushy-bearded New Zealander shook his head. ‘Hades? The Underworld? Creepy dudes in animal helmets? What is this place, Jack? And how did we get here?’
The Simpson Desert
Australia
In the years after they saved the world in 2008, life was good for the members of the West household.
For Jack, after discovering that he was the fifth of the ‘Five Greatest Warriors’ mentioned in an ancient prophecy and surviving a terrible showdown against his father in a giant underground shrine beneath Easter Island, the quiet life on his outback farm was just the ticket.
Long morning walks, reading books, going for drives in his Land Cruiser over the endless expanse of desert and generally avoiding cataclysmic world-ending events; he loved it.
War veterans often said the same thing: once you have encountered the adrenalised exhilaration of combat, you either step away from the world entirely because you can’t stand its more stupid elements or you re-up for more action.
For Jack’s wife, Zoe, it was largely the same. She and Jack would sip their morning coffees on the deck, watching the sun rise above the dead-flat horizon. Although truth be told, she was perhaps still a little more restless for adventure than Jack—Zoe liked to fly off to see what their old friends were up to on archaeological digs at remote places or at special seminars given at the elite museums of the world.
For Lily, their adopted daughter, however, life was much different: she had grown up.
She had been eleven during the heady events of 2008. And after helping to save the world, what did an eleven-year-old girl want?
A puppy, of course.
A trip to the city of Adelaide had been arranged and Jack, Zoe and Lily had visited a rescue shelter for dogs.
Lily had instantly fallen in love with a shy labrador named Ash. A gentle dog, Ash had flunked out of Guide Dog school because she wasn’t assertive enough, and her douchebag owners, when they suddenly moved overseas, had dumped her at the shelter on the way to the airport.
On that visit, Lily had cuddled her like a teddy bear. ‘This is the one,’ she said.
That would have been it had Jack not felt, as they were about to leave, a tiny tug on his pantleg.
He turned.
Sitting at his feet, pawing gently at his leg and looking up at him with beseeching black eyes, was a knee-high black poodle.
One of the women from the shelter came running up. ‘I’m so sorry. She’s an escape artist, this one.’
Jack looked down at the dog.
The dog just returned his gaze with steady eyes.
It was perhaps the least masculine dog in the world.
The woman tried to scoop it up, but the poodle ducked and dodged her, scurrying away. As Jack watched, he saw that it limped a little with each step.
Looking closer, he saw that there was something wrong with its front left leg: it was oddly crooked.
After a few tries, the woman finally caught it. ‘Let me put her back in her ca—’
‘Wait,’ Jack said. ‘What happened to her leg?’
‘Little Roxy here was living a very comfortable life in the suburbs when, one afternoon, the two pit bulls from her neighbour’s house dug a hole under the fence and attacked her.
‘They mauled her horribly, almost tore her apart. Broke her leg, ripped open her throat. But Roxy fought back, held them off till someone came running.
‘She arrived at our clinic soaked in blood. Looked like she’d been put through a meat grinder. We didn’t think she’d make it through the night and her owners, when they saw her lying on the operating table, a bloody whimpering wreck, said they no longer wanted her. Their eight-year-old daughter, they said, wouldn’t want a broken dog.
‘Anyway, we patched her up as best we could and waited to see how she recovered. Within a week, she was standing gingerly. Within three weeks, she wanted me to throw her a ball and it was like it never happened.’
Jack smiled. ‘“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself,”’ he quoted. ‘D.H. Lawrence. That’s what I like about dogs. They don’t feel sorry for themselves.’ He glanced from Roxy's crooked left foreleg to his own artificial left arm.
Behind Jack’s back, Lily had thrown a questioning look at Zoe.
Zoe shrugged as if to say: I don’t know where he’s going with this.
Then Jack smiled and said, ‘How about we take Roxy, too?’
And so life on the farm became life with two bounding dogs.
Lily loved Ash: played with her, fed her, let her sleep on her bed.
As for Roxy, she adored Jack. He was her world. Nothing else mattered. Whether he was riding in the Land Cruiser or reading in his office, she wouldn’t leave his side. She followed him everywhere, often running several kilometres to find him somewhere on the farm. She was smart, too, and loved to be trained. Jack taught her to play dead, do a high-five, and even fetch his slippers.
The dogs, it had to be said, were a bit of a shock to Jack’s falcon, Horus.
The old bird tolerated them like a teenage girl tolerates a little brother. Horus would often sit on Jack’s chairback studiously ignoring Roxy as the little black dog jumped up and down, begging her to play.
If Horus was particularly irritated by the poodle, she would fly down, pick up the dog’s favourite pink tennis ball in her beak and place it on top of a bookshelf, way out of reach, while the dog barked in protest.
At these times, sitting at his desk, unseen by either animal, a small smile would creep across Jack’s face.
As they had grown into their teens, Lily and Alby had remained friends, but Jack could see that in some ways they had g
rown apart.
For one thing, their university educations were very different. Alby was at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, just outside L.A., the pre-eminent astrophysics school in the world. Home to the Mars Rover project, the Hubble Telescope and at least four Nobel Prize–winning physicists, it was the perfect place for him.
That said, to the shock of some of his fellow students, who were all mathematical whizzes with little interest in something as mundane as history, he took on a second degree at USC in Ancient History and Mythology. The closest his classmates got to mythology was playing World of Warcraft or reading The Lord of the Rings.
‘I just like history,’ he’d tell them cryptically. ‘You never know when ancient history comes in handy in modern life.’
Lily, on the other hand, while certainly gifted and clever, had not been accelerated through high school.
This was not entirely a bad thing, Jack thought.
She had learned how kids and regular people operated; how kind they could be and how petty. It grated on her when other girls were bitchy and many were the times when she complained to Jack: ‘We saved the world for people like them?’
Jack would just smile sadly. ‘Most people are good, kiddo. In the end—and this applies to every single person in the world—the only person anyone has to be true to is themselves. We all have to look at ourselves in the mirror and like what we see.’
After graduating from high school, Lily had also gone to university in the US, to Stanford, where she studied Ancient History and a few ancient languages. While she didn’t let anyone know that she was a member of a 5,000-year-old line of Egyptian oracles, gifted with the unique ability to read a superancient language, the Word of Thoth, it certainly helped with her studies.
Stanford was also just south of San Francisco, not far from Alby in L.A., and Jack was pleased to know they kept in contact.
But Stanford was not the same as Caltech.
An Ivy League school situated right on the edge of Silicon Valley, it was a university flush with talented and brilliant students. It also had a significant population of wealthy and privileged kids.
Lily had become friends with some students whose parents were gazillionaires, ultra-rich types from some of the wealthiest families in the world.
She had become especially friendly with a handsome twentysomething lad from that crowd named Dion DeSaxe.
They’d been on a few dates and she was quite taken with him.
He was boyfriend material, she’d told Jack during one FaceTime call.
Jesus, Jack thought. It was scary enough to think of his little girl dating. But a boyfriend . . .
Dion, it turned out, was the scion of a very old-money French family. Jack met him when he swung through Stanford one time. He was handsome, clean-cut, with a square jaw, flowing jet-black hair and the easy confidence of a young man who had grown up never wanting for anything.
Lily had nervously introduced them. ‘Dion, this is my dad, Jack West.’
‘Great to meet you, Jack,’ Dion had said familiarly as they shook hands. ‘Heard a heck of a lot about you.’
Jack? Jack had thought.
He saw Lily shoot a worried look at him. She’d noticed it, too.
Jack wondered, What ever happened to ‘Great to meet you, sir. It’s a privilege to be dating your daughter.’
He let it go.
Kids these days.
All things considered—dogs and boyfriends notwithstanding—life was pretty good.
And then came the day when General Eric Abrahamson called and invited him to Pine Gap.
‘Jack. Eric Abrahamson,’ the familiar voice on the phone said. ‘We’ve found something we can’t explain and thought maybe you could help us.’
‘Where?’
‘Pine Gap.’
‘When?’
‘Now would be good.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s about the scar.’
That got Jack’s attention.
‘I’ll be there right away.’
As it turned out, the call had come during university holidays, so both Lily and Alby were at the farm. They would come, too. Jack also contacted Pooh Bear and Stretch—his loyal companions from several past missions. They would meet him at Pine Gap.
Zoe, however, would not go. Two days earlier, she’d been called away to, of all places, the Mariana Trench off the coast of the Philippines by their good friends, Lachlan and Julius Adamson, the wonderfully geeky, freckle-faced identical twins who had also been part of their previous missions.
The Adamsons had been working with an American colleague of theirs, the renowned oceanographer and geophysicist Professor David Black, an expert on deep-sea ocean life and hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. Working with Black in the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on the planet, they had found something.
The twins had sent Jack and Zoe a coded message: There’s something here that shouldn’t be: a stone gate-like structure with text written on it in the Word of Thoth.
Restless for some adventure, Zoe had volunteered to go and investigate while Jack had stayed at the farm with the kids, not expecting to get his own call shortly after.
And so, with Zoe away in the western Pacific Ocean, Jack had flown with Lily and Alby to Pine Gap on the Sky Warrior, his black Russian-made Concorde-like jet, piloted by Sky Monster.
After a short flight, the plane landed at the remote base outside Alice Springs in the barren heart of Australia.
Jack stepped out of the Sky Warrior onto the airstrip servicing the base, dressed in his way-too-casual clothes.
The black asphalt runway shimmered in the desert heat.
Lily, Alby and the dogs hopped out of the plane after him. Sky Monster, as usual, said he would stay with the plane to tinker with a few things.
They were met by General Abrahamson and his soon-to-be replacement, General Beard, and guided inside the secret base.
Pine Gap is a very secret place, so secret that few know what really goes on there.
Some say it is a listening post. Others, a high-tech satellite-tracking facility. Others still claim that beneath the base, a giant iridium antenna bores down deep into the Earth and can track the slightest tremor: something which helps the United States (which owns the base) pinpoint any nuclear weapons test anywhere in the world.
As he stepped inside the base, into its clean and cool air-conditioned offices, Jack knew what was really there.
It was all of the above, plus one more thing.
Pine Gap was the data-collection and evaluation centre for the SKA telescope array.
SKA stood for Square Kilometre Array, although people tended to tautologically call it the ‘SKA Array’. It was a collection of radio telescopes in Africa and Australia that, when combined through complex computing algorithms, would give the highest-resolution images of stars and star clusters in the history of astronomy.
Indeed, the SKA processed so much information, it required specially built quantum computers that every day processed more information than passed through the entire Internet in a year.
It was a major project and a majorly secret one. The world’s media had been told that the SKA would not be operational till 2020 but that, as Jack knew, was not true.
It was already operational.
After passing through the entry atrium of the base, General Abrahamson stopped in an air-conditioned waiting room.
‘I’m afraid the kids and the dogs will have to wait out here. This is classified.’
Lily and Alby understood and dropped into the couches of the waiting room. Roxy was less enthusiastic about being parted from Jack. She barked softly as he headed through an inner door with Abrahamson and Beard.
They arrived in a subterranean room filled with large-screen monitors. It looked like Mission Control at
NASA.
‘So,’ Abrahamson said. ‘The SKA Array. The greatest telescope ever constructed. It cost four billion dollars to build and is capable of seeing farther into space than we’ve ever been able to do before. Isaac Newton would have killed for a telescope like this.’
‘And . . . ?’ Jack prompted.
‘And we turned it on a month ago,’ Abrahamson said. ‘And saw this.’
He indicated the main viewing screen.
On it was a peculiar image:
Jack found it oddly beautiful. It looked like a galaxy of some sort, with four large curling arms and four smaller inner arms that also curled slightly.
‘What is it, a galaxy?’ he asked.
‘It’s a galaxy all right,’ Abrahamson said. ‘A runaway galaxy, hurtling through space at incredible speed, rocketing out from the centre of the universe.’
‘How fast?’
‘About 12 billion kilometres per hour.’
‘That’s impossible. That’s ten times the speed of light.’
‘We know, but it’s what our readings say,’ Abrahamson said. ‘It seems to be riding on the crest of some kind of expanding gravitational wave, which moves like a ripple in a pond, expanding outward from the centre of the known universe. This galaxy also possesses something called “negative density” which allows it to travel faster than light without expanding catastrophically. I asked our physics geniuses and they said it’s legit. Apparently, if gravity can keep light from escaping a black hole, it can also do the reverse and propel something faster than light.’
Jack felt the back of his neck begin to tingle.
‘How big is it?’ he asked.
‘It’s approximately four hundred times the size of the Milky Way.’
‘And its course?’
Abrahamson said, ‘It’s coming directly toward us, Jack.’
The implications hit Jack immediately.
A galaxy that size, thundering across space at phenomenal speed, would wipe out everything in its path. When it came to our galaxy, the Milky Way, it would crash through it like a semitrailer running over an anthill.
The Four Legendary Kingdoms Page 4