by James Axler
“That still does not solve our major problem here,” Sinclair offered. “It’ll be nice to have Kane back with us, but even if he gets back—”
“Will get back,” Grant grumbled, his gaze flinty and hard as he regarded her.
“When he gets back,” Sinclair amended, realizing that she’d touched a raw nerve. “We’ve still got a group of out-of-control kongamato on the loose. They’ve attacked one city to the north and two of the installations along the Zambezi River.”
“I noticed how you stressed ‘out of control,’” Brigid said.
“Things acting too smart,” Domi agreed. “Hit and run. Herding us.”
“They hit the force sent to the redoubt. It was two companies of Zambian troops, but only three platoons survived,” Sinclair summarized. “So, things are a little more crowded down here.”
“Not too much,” Domi noted.
“The attack on the relief force might have been a random act, but they were far too swift,” Sinclair said. “It was a deadly ambush. That meant the kongamato had to be organized.”
Brigid and Grant nodded.
“The creatures left bait for us, drew us into the same hole in the ground as Durga. He claimed to have lost the control matrix for them,” Brigid stated. She grimaced. “That could have been what North was concentrating on.”
“Sending new instructions to his pets,” Edwards mused. “After all, it’ll take them some time to get from there to here, even flying.”
“But was it him or was it Durga?” Domi asked.
“If the Nagah prince had them under his control, that would have broken the moment he went comatose,” Brigid offered. “But what if he isn’t completely insensate?”
“Smaller words, please,” Edwards grunted.
“What if Durga’s in that state because part of him is hard at work coordinating the kongamato?” Brigid asked.
“So, he shuts down everything except the bare minimum to survive, and he’s riding in those things’ hive minds,” Grant suggested.
Brigid tapped her nose, indicating to him that he’d picked up on her train of thought.
“One problem. How does that explain Kane?” Grant asked.
“It doesn’t,” she returned. “Maybe the two of them connected through Nehushtan’s influence, and they attacked each other.”
“Durga overpowered Kane’s mind. So, he’s out cold?” Sinclair asked.
Brigid looked at her anam chara, dearest friend and soul mate, who sat straight in his chair. But there was no light in his eyes, no reaction to sound. He breathed. His eyes blinked as they grew dry. But other than that, he was a lifeless manikin, a semblance of a human being. The thought that Durga had telepathically incapacitated him, having done harm to his soul, chilled her. Ever since fleeing Cobaltville, they had stood side by side, taking any and every threat against them.
Now, he was gone. That left a cold void in her world. It was as if a leg had been kicked out from beneath the table that held her reality level. Things were sliding, collapsing off to one side.
She was inches away from completely toppling. The thought of Kane dead would have at least given her closure. The thought of him captured at least provided the hope for rescue or vengeance. But Kane was here...and yet not. She had never felt so helpless, so impotent. Despite all her fantastic mental skills, all she could do was make certain that Kane didn’t topple over and hurt himself. She dreaded how bad it would be if she had to spoon-feed the vacant body.
North and Durga were both likely suspects, but there could have been other factors at work. Durga had arrived in Africa utilizing Annunaki technology, so the potential for one of the overlords assisting the fallen prince was a given. If it were Enlil or Marduk, then Brigid could understand the targeting of Kane for this odd, comatose state. Kane had battled and blunted Marduk’s plans, both when he was Baron Cobalt, Kane’s former commander in chief, and after his awakening into his near-godly form.
Enlil, the head of the pantheon of terror, hated Kane even more, and in the past had nearly murdered him during a telepathic conference. Perhaps this time Enlil’s assault was more focused, leaving Kane’s autonomic system alone, rather than subjecting him to stresses that nearly drove him into cardiac arrest.
And mental attacks weren’t simply the realm of Enlil or Annunaki technology. Erica Van Sloane, currently an associate of the Millennium Consortium, had perfected SQUID technology, a mind-control net that had made men into her slaves when she controlled the Xian pyramid in China. Rebuilding the technology would be simple with the proper resources, especially working alongside the consortium, or tapping a technological storehouse, such as an unattended redoubt in Africa.
Narrowing down the cause of these troubles would be difficult.
“Brigid?” Grant’s voice cut in on her thoughts.
She realized that she’d been off in a trance for a moment, running lines of causality and relationship between opponents, technology and abilities in a mind’s-eye diagram. It was a web of possibilities, and she’d been running the odds of each situation. Things were trimming down nicely, but even if she managed to narrow this list, there was another side of her that was thinking knowing who was not going to help. She needed to know how. Kane had been left dumbstruck.
“Sorry, just going over our history and the available variations on mental attacks, which could steer us toward the originator of Kane’s symptoms. Once we figure out who caused this, we can then concentrate on reversing the process,” she explained.
“Yeah. For like, oh, ten seconds, your eyes were lit up. You’re usually not glazed over and lost in thought. When you think...it’s faster,” Grant said.
Domi frowned. “Not hopeful.”
Brigid looked to Domi. The feral girl was concise in her observation. Brigid left with her mental wheels spinning was never a good sign. When it came to mental challenges, Domi knew that Brigid was second to none. With her eidetic memory, she was able to access hundreds of years of history, thousands upon thousands of hours of science and data that would offer some kernel of information relevant to the situation at hand. If she was stymied, then Domi was worried.
Brigid was at a loss for words. Kane was not a drooling mess, but he wasn’t far from a vegetable. And right now, they were trapped in a stripped-bare redoubt, waiting for a siege of horrific beats from African myth to make their assault.
“We’ll let you concentrate on that,” Grant said. “The rest of us will put our more ‘blunt instrument’ skills together toward dealing with the muties.”
Brigid nodded, a little too numbly and quickly for her own comfort. She suppressed a grimace and a bout of self-reproach over that. She had mental hoops to leap through, her “murder board” to examine on the wall of her mind’s eye.
* * *
DURGA KEPT PACE with Kane as they soared spaceways that resembled the fragmented nightmares of a surrealist painter. They had crossed what must have been light years, but the two of them weren’t at all certain of the passage of time. There was no sun in the sky, and they had no technology with them, not even Kane’s cybernetically implanted Commtact.
And so they flew, moving along in grim silence as the psychic realm about them shifted and changed.
“Are we even moving?” Durga asked.
Kane didn’t answer. He didn’t want to think of the possibility that they could simply be spinning their wheels in a hallucinogenic star scape. With no real means of propulsion, nor any gauge of where they were going, they could have simply been deluded into stretching themselves out. The only sliver of hope was a faint, shimmering thread that spiraled out ahead of him, one that corkscrewed as he accelerated along it.
Kane had done some reading and research on psychic phenomena, as he’d been growing more and more sensitive to its presence in his life. He didn’t have any telepathy or other doomsay
er abilities, but ever since his first close contact with Balam, there seemed to have been a switch flipped in his mind, one that could pick up on the subtle vibrations of realms outside the senses he normally paid attention to.
“Kane, are we doing anything?” Durga snapped.
“I know you’re getting on my nerves,” he replied, barely controlling that errant thought.
Durga stopped, one hand grasping Kane and nearly jerking his shoulder out of its socket. There was reality here in this realm, physical sensation of gravity and breeze in what should have been an endless, featureless void. Amid the warmth and hospitality of this mind-bent dimension, both men had encountered things they could touch and handle.
But were those sensations also illusions?
Kane squeezed his shoulder, just as certainly as if he’d been in an actual body. “That hasn’t changed,” he muttered.
“What hasn’t?” Durga asked.
“Our ability to interact with each other,” he responded. “But is that merely our minds playing tricks on us?”
“That’s your worry?” the Nagah asked. “We’ve been hurled across a universe or two, and it may take aeons for us to return home.”
“I’ve been in this situation before. Well, a similar one to this.”
Durga rolled his amber eyes. “So tell me of your great wisdom.”
Kane thought of it, and as if by magic, a screen appeared beside him, showing the detailshe’d seen, or at least remembered as described by others. He recalled the attack on Thunder Isle, and Grant being sucked into a wormhole opened by the damaged time trawl.
There was the incident with the ghostly shadow of Grant, his memories trapped in the present, literally a fraction of himself, pure memories sans corpus, separated from another “shadow”—a tesseract body that had been trapped in ancient times, with spirit, but no memory. And both essences were in themselves only illusions of the real thing, Grant as an entity trapped in the void between time and spacial dimensions, in the membranes of reality where he was neither dead nor alive.
Finally, Durga was able to observe Kane’s traverse of the dimensions as he and Brigid Baptiste were sent there, thanks to arcane algorithms that enabled them to puncture the confines of even the wormhole channels opened by the time trawl or the mat trans. Kane, seeing himself, his own shadows, an existence stretching across multiple human lifetimes, as well as the entity that had battled alongside Sir Richard Grenville originally, his translated dream shown in contrast.
Back in his physical body, trapped in the fetters of cold, hard three-dimensional physics, Kane couldn’t remember. But here, he was not human, not limited by the nature of his mental chemistry or biological senses, so he could stretch out his awareness. As a being of pure thought, he could connect to the time worm that each living entity was, an undulating organism that spanned eternity and infinity, connecting Kane to earlier incarnations in this universe and others.
Durga’s amber-hued eyes widened as he watched the branching threads of Kane’s life explode into stark relief against the background of the multiverse.
“Time and space are not linear,” Durga murmured. “The brane theory is correct.”
“Brane theory?” Kane repeated.
Durga explained that the reality they observed was simply one of many, something Kane agreed with, having been sent to other universes, which he, Lakesh and the other Outlanders called “casements.” These “branes” were short for membranes, elastic universes, layered together like onion skin, but very rarely touching each other. When those membranes did touch, things like mat trans and psychic doomsayer powers were able to make use of resulting universal bumps. There had been theories in the twentieth century that sightings of ghosts and UFOs were not paranormal, but glimpses of neighboring dimensions viewed when the branes bumped against each other.
Certainly enough, Grant’s tesseract was evidence that hinted toward that truth.
“How did you return to your body last time?” Durga asked.
Kane frowned. “When you go through a mat trans or a time trawl, you’re broken down into a wave form that has a specific frequency, which can be picked up by the transmitter. In the mat-trans network, the other end is set to receive that, but the trawl, as it sent us between the branes, as you called it, put out a carrier signal that our waves could home in on,” he responded.
“So what signal are you following?” Durga asked.
“To me, it looks like a silver thread,” Kane told him. “It trails off that way.”
Durga squinted, and Kane concentrated, fanning the glow within the connection. Durga’s eyes went wide again.
“So, we have a route back. Know how?” Durga asked.
“Maybe it’s Nehushtan,” Kane offered. “Or maybe it’s just that this is semifamiliar terrain. Or maybe it’s a mix.”
“I can...I can nearly see my own thread,” Durga replied.
Kane looked and saw it. He reached for Durga’s tether, but the Nagah prince bared his fangs.
“I’m not going to harm you. I risked a lot trying to get you to stand once more,” Kane reminded him.
Durga frowned. “And yet you assumed I’d crush a world?”
Kane shook his head. “You seemed to have a gleeful gleam in your eye when you saw an entire planet you could crush.”
Durga grimaced. “Well...you might not have been far off from my intent.”
“That’s the difference between us. You think I’m like you,” Kane accused.
Durga sighed. “We’re in this together. You kind of know the way home, and I do owe you. But we both know each other’s past. You haven’t always been Saint Kane, noble hero.”
Kane sneered. “Why do you think I’m trying so hard? I took my job as a magistrate seriously. I thought the world needed what I’d been doing. And then the scales finally fell from my eyes. I see a world desperately in need of so much. You had a city where you were a prince.”
Durga glared. “You’ll never understand power....”
Kane snatched at Durga’s thread. “Power? You mean the ability to decide life and death on a whim? The same power I wielded over everyone as per the orders of Baron Cobalt? You forget. I was the fist of royalty. I was power. I understood that rush. That prestige. And I also was smart enough to understand when it was being abused, when it was too cruel. That’s why I fought against it. Because power isn’t worth anything unless it’s used to dig the whole out of a hole.”
Durga looked at the angry man clutching the thread that linked the Nagah to his body.
“You had gifts. You had a beautiful wife-to-be. And you had a mother, a family,” Kane spit with a grimace. “And you had a father.”
Kane let go of the silver thread. “You had things I didn’t. And what did you do? You murdered both your parents. You threw away the love of your people. You destroyed it, along with your city.”
“That’s your problem with me? Your own daddy issues, Kane?” Durga asked.
“My problem is that you had so much you didn’t need to be greedy. You didn’t need to be insane. You didn’t need to murder,” Kane retorted.
Durga looked down at the silver string stretching from him into the depths of infinity. He’d felt the constricting, strangling grasp as Kane had clutched it, knowing he’d felt Kane’s steely fingers around his throat in prior battles. If anything, this felt worse, as if Kane had tried to rip his soul out by the roots, a twisting, tortuous strangulation that made Durga feel as if he had been dragged through a rock-strewn wilderness.
“We get home, and we won’t remember this, not when we get there,” Kane rasped. “But we will have some feelings, and maybe some flashes of recognition and epiphany in dreams, though once our eyes open, all this will be dashed against rocks. It happened in the casements. It happened when I sought out Grant. And it’ll happen with this. But her
e and now, you’ll know why I consider you the lowest of the low, a belly-crawling coward, a bottom feeder whose blindness took the closest thing to a utopia and turned it back into a third world nation ripped by civil war and greed,” he growled. “Garuda was a beautiful realm. A place where human and posthuman were able to live in the same society, where prejudice wasn’t the norm, where blind hatred was pushed aside to create a prosperous, advanced realm. Now, the tools that could have rebuilt a country are scrap metal. And even then...”
“And even then, my vengeance against Hannah and Manticor is blunted because they can’t hate the seeds I planted in her,” Durga said, disgust mixing with defeat. “You forget how much hope has survived in that damned hole in the ground. How much those people forgive. Forgive rotten genetics and being forced to live as worms beneath feet, not dragons across the sky.”
“Poor you,” Kane mock whimpered.
“You never were a second-class citizen, were you?” Durga asked. “We were the children of a lesser god, Enki. And then we were hidden in the catacombs when man rose and burned this world.”
“Sins of the past,” Kane growled. “We tried to undo that history, but it didn’t work.”
“The history where this planet was destroyed? Sure. Because it was just you naked apes at stake. You didn’t know who you shared this mud ball with,” Durga said.
“We didn’t care who we saved,” Kane said. “Just like I didn’t care about saving you because maybe, just maybe, you’d have been a bit of help to protect my friends and all those people stuck with them. I don’t care that you’re not ‘human.’ You’re someone who could do something to redeem yourself, or at least do me a solid for getting your damned feet back under you.”
Durga curled his upper lip. “Fine. But don’t ever touch my thread again. It felt as if you were killing me.”
Kane nodded. “I won’t. Now, if you can see your line, maybe we can get back a little faster.”
“Maybe,” Durga said. He looked around at the ersatz starscape around them. “But I think we’ve got miles to go before we’re back in our heads.”