***
Sam knew the Key was gone, but he had an idea about that. If he was going to take control of it, having control of the current bearer was going to be his ticket in.
Only four people in the restaurant, outside of the Walkers.
He didn’t want to kill anyone, it would attract too much attention, but he was prepared to if it came to it. But his instructions to his men were no shooting; threaten yes, shoot no. That would be his decision, and his job.
“Let’s go.”
The four of them walked into the restaurant, and instantly drew weapons. The daughter, Jessica, was apparently ready for them.
“Nobody move, nobody get’s hurt,” Derek said loudly, pointing his HK45 pistol directly at Jessica.
Sam noticed she didn’t cower, but kept a wary eye as they spread out around the restaurant. Most people flinch when having a gun pointed at them, and she didn’t even appear to regard it as a threat. Sam moved to the kitchen and kept his weapon trained on the parents, who regarded him with steely glares. The other pistol was hidden under his jacket.
“You don’t want to do this, trust me.” Jessica said to Derek, who was quickly approaching her.
Sam had warned him that she was probably still dangerous, crystal or not. He was right.
Jessica changed her focus to Derek’s gun. The magazine clip released, dropping the magazine to the floor, and at the same time the chamber slid back, releasing the live round. Derek stood dumbfounded, and with an empty gun.
Jessica made a pushing motion at him, and suddenly Derek was flying through the air backwards.
And it was just the distraction Sam needed.
In one smooth motion he removed the second gun from under his jacket, pointed it at Jessica and fired.
The blue dart struck her in the side, and she flinched, turning to Sam to try the same trick on him. Before she could, she collapsed on the floor. Sam turned his attention back to Jessica’s parents.
“Don’t even think about it. If you don’t interfere, she won’t be hurt.” He could see the rage pent up in Arthur’s face. All he could do was dangle the promise of her safe return, it was the only way he knew that would keep him in check, because as sure as he was of Jessica’s power, he was also sure that Arthur had probably spent enough time with the Key to learn some of the same tricks. Of course, these were mere tricks indeed compared to what Sam was capable of.
“If she is hurt, I’m not going to kill you, not quickly. But I will make sure you experience more pain than you can imagine for a very long time.”
Sam grinned at him. He looked at a block holding several knives and focused briefly. All seven knives suddenly jumped out of the block and landed, stuck, into the floor between him and the Walkers.
"If you think you can take me on, old man, you are welcome to try. At the risk of your daughters life, of course."
Sam backed away, then motioned for his two men still standing to gather up Jessica. Derek was just getting up, dazed slightly.
“Let’s go.”
They left, the two men holding Jessica unconscious in the back seat.
***
Catherine’s fingers almost clawed right through Arthur’s arm. “Arty, what are we going to do? We can’t leave Jessica!”
“We’re going to the rendezvous.” Arthur said with that look of steely determination Catherine had not seen for a very long time. “Pan’s around here somewhere, I can feel him. And I don’t imagine he’s left all of this up to chance. He’s going to need our help.”
***
Twelve hours until the moon was to pass in front of the Earth, a rare event arrived that would see an eclipse happen during a peak period of solar activity.
For the past four months the sun had been passing through a highly energetic area of the galaxy, absorbing nearly ten percent more plasma current activity than it was used to. The instability was going to come at a cost. Two massive solar flares were released, and NASA tracked both of them.
Both of them were not pointed at the Earth; had they been, mankind would have been ejected back to the stone age as every electronic and electrical device on the planet fried itself from the additional incoming energy from Earth’s sky.
The additional energy would graze the planet however. The only noticeable damage would be a few localized power outages, surprisingly some of them along the line of the eclipse as the moon would act like a focusing ring for the incoming storm.
One event would go unnoticed by all but a few. The Key knew what was coming, it could sense the buildup of energy the past few months. This was a dangerous time, and it had known that the bearer would be attacked prior to the eclipse. Time was a concept held by the bearer, not by itself. The Key was not sentient, exactly, but it was a focus of energy from other dimensions, other realms of life. It was not sentient, but it could, on occasion, reason.
It also did not take sides, but generally did not like change, which is why the elevated energies of an eclipse were required to change the bearer. All else being equal, it would prefer the company of those like the bearer, or at least closer in temperament.
For the first time in over ten thousand years it would be forced to remove itself in order to protect itself. Last time, the world was plunged into catastrophe as endless streams of meteors and comet fragments plummeted into the Earth, and wiped the civilization that had called itself Atlantis into history. They had been unable to use the Key to protect themselves, and almost ninety percent of all mankind was wiped out in that event. Man had been forced to rebuild literally from scratch.
All because the Key refused to take sides.
It could not sense any incoming meteor storm this time, but it would not have mattered to it in any case.
No, this time the bearer would not have an influence during the crisis.
It would let the two future candidates decide.
But even the Key could be surprised.
***
John was chilled in front of the fire, blanket or no blanket.
The woods were surprisingly silent this night, no moon to keep the animals awake. “The one thing I never liked about camping,” he said. “Cold food.”
Pan shot him a sideways glance, and a grin. “So don’t eat it cold.”
John thought about it. His head was filled with ideas, swimming, drowning. How the hell do you undo thirty years of wrong-headed teaching? With drugs, it turned out. Not just any drug, the very one that history had called the Philosophers Stone. Philosophers stoned was more like it.
A white powder that Pan put into a bottle of water, and within seconds of John drinking it the world had changed.
The universe was nothing like he knew. The last hundred years of science were a lie, a misdirection. Other dimensions, other densities, the construction of stars, how the galaxy came together...Pan was trying to cram so much into him in such a short period of time he didn’t know if he could take all of it. Or if he believed it. Yet...
It was compelling, logically consistent, he had to admit.
And the Key at the centre of it all. No, not at the centre he corrected, but certainly a player in this ridiculous drama. An artificial construction designed to cross the boundary between densities, a power conduit, almost literally.
The entire concept of “you make your own reality” was something John had never believed, but it turned out to be true...just not for this realm. In the realm the Key was tapped into, however, not only was it reality, it was something possible for the bearer to tap into.
On top of all of this, John had some of the Key’s power. Because Pan had been a bearer, his offspring would have inherited his power. Or so he had guessed. Pan reasoned that the Key had changed his DNA, and since John was part of that DNA it had also changed him.
Again he had to correct himself silently; no, he didn’t have the Key’s power. He had power. Period. The Key was just an amplifier. He almost laughed at the analogy in his mind: Try taking a flashlight running on two AA batteries, then plug
it into the 30 amp plug behind the stove. Amplifier indeed. He hoped the job wouldn’t burn out the receiver, as surely as plugging a flashlight into a stove circuit would do.
He felt like there were connections being made in his mind. Everything from the origin of the universe, all the way down to the makeup of atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons. Time was a tough one, though.
“Time is an illusion, but it’s a damned good one,” Pan had said. How the hell do you wrap your mind around that? Wouldn’t the universe unravel were it not for time? Apparently not, but he couldn’t get it.
Everything was energy. Well, that he could have gotten from traditional physics, but the way Pan described it to him made it much less complex than the exotic mathematics that science insisted was necessary. Matter was literally being created every single second, and not the way that had been taught.
The surface of the sun was 5000 degrees, but the corona leapt up to millions of degrees. So? Science could not understand why there weren’t more neutrinos coming from the Sun, since fusion must be happening at the core. Well, it wasn’t. Fusion was happening in the corona, in that incredible furnace that produced unimaginable amounts of energy.
And all of that energy was being transmitted to the planets, and the planets were absorbing the energy directly and converting it to matter at their cores.
Then it got really strange. Since all energy was electromagnetic in one fashion or another, the electromagnetic pathways of the brain were capable of controlling it. Focusing it. Since matter and energy were so closely linked, as Pan had explained it, controlling matter from the energy of one’s thoughts was literally trivial. You just had to figure that out.
Even gravity and light were related; gravity was the extremely rapid compression wave that rode streams of neutrinos, light was the much slower, relatively speaking, transverse wave through the same medium. It explained what science had not, why light behaved like a particle and a wave at the same time. Because it was.
Simple. It seemed too simple, John figured there must be a problem with it if his little mind was able to grasp it. He was no learned scholar, and was certainly never one for physics. Yet here it was, all connected, all making perfect sense. Now he just had to use that knowledge.
Easier said than done.
John took the MRE meal pack and set it down, focusing on it. “I’m guessing I just focus on the molecules, give them more energy?”
“You guess correctly.”
He looked at the MRE. Focus. You can’t create energy, you can only focus it. The very ground beneath him contained more energy than he could ever use, so use it.
As he focused, the world began to fade around him.
No trees, no ground, no cold, no Pan, nothing. Only the MRE existed. He could almost see currents of energy everywhere around him. After a few moments he hardly noticed he was breathing hard, sweating, and probably seconds from passing out from the elevated blood pressure.
But he could see filaments of energy, faint, everywhere, twisted pairs of energetic strands, and suddenly they started coalescing on the meal in front of him.
He blinked. It was gone. He looked down at the MRE. No change. “So much for that idea.”
Pan smiled. “Indeed? Well, you best eat your meal then, cold or not.”
Disappointed, John reached down to pick up his MRE. He quickly dropped it as his skin registered the coming burn. “Ow!” It took a couple of seconds for it to sink in that it had worked. “Did you do that?”
“Nope.”
He had done it. Magic. Arthur C. Clarke’s old refrain came back to him; any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. “Holy shit.”
“Nothing Holy about it. It’s just knowledge.”
John’s head was reeling. If that had worked, then...possibilities started flashing through his mind. And something else, something...
“It’s not quite mind reading, but you can certainly sense the intentions of others, especially those close to you,” Pan answered his unasked query, as though reading his mind.
“I’m getting a very strong feeling of dread.”
“That’s probably because of Jessica. She was abducted at gunpoint today.”
Jessica abducted! How was that possible? She was the bearer, the controller of the Key, with all of those mystical powers! With a wave of her hand she could have turned her attackers into dust.
“Don’t forget she doesn’t have the Key,” Pan said. “She still has great power, but I’m sensing someone else who also has a good deal themselves. In any case they have abducted and drugged her so she’s not a threat. They intend to use her to transfer bearership of the Key.”
“Can they do that?”
“Certainly. The Key probably disappeared because it foresaw this coming, and it’s decided not to make itself part of the battle.”
“So then how do they transfer the bearer from Jessica to someone else?”
“Assuming Jessica doesn’t want to cooperate, they probably have to kill her, but only at the exact moment of the eclipse. And whoever is left holding the blade will have the burden of the Key placed upon them. I get the sense that at that moment it will return.”
John’s head was beginning to spin again. He didn’t like the way this was shaping up. If they abducted Jessica, surely her parents were powerless to interfere as well. That hinted that whoever did it knew exactly what they were doing, and probably had a few of those magical tricks up their sleeves.
Only hours remained until the eclipse. How was he going to learn everything he needed to? But he did heat the meal, maybe it was possible.
Maybe.
Eight: Dominoes Fall
The sun had long since set by the time Derek pulled the sport utility vehicle to a stop in the wooded National Park. Sam was no woodsman, so he depended on his hired help for that expertise. In seconds the three men he hired had emptied the car of its contents save one, the unconscious female in the back. All of them put on night-vision goggles. The trek would be hard enough in the moonless night.
Derek and one of the other men, Alex, Sam recalled, assembled a stretcher, placed it on the ground, then transferred Jessica from the vehicle onto it. She moaned.
“Better give her another shot,” Sam instructed. “We can’t risk her coming around.”
Derek removed a syringe and small bottle from a pocket, measured out an amount of some fluid, and with a smooth confident motion injected Jessica. Sam liked his second in command. He was stable, competent. He had asked the right questions, not taking anything on faith, and Sam appreciated his boldness.
When confronted with the reality of magic, he hadn’t simply scoffed at it, instead becoming thoughtful, then asking for proof, and Sam had offered it. Afterwards he simply integrated it into his preparations.
He wasn’t afraid to “chip in” and get the job done, but he also wasn’t afraid to delegate. And this was one task he delegated. The other two men picked up the stretcher.
In moments they were off hiking into the woods. Sam monitored his GPS occasionally. They had to be within 100 meters of the path of the eclipse, or the transfer wouldn’t work. He knew enough about the legend that had been handed down, nonsense about being able to concentrate solar energy. Well, he hoped it wasn’t nonsense. But at this point they were still more than a few kilometres away, so he was more concerned about their general direction than the actual location.
Thankfully, the hike was smooth. Though wooded, the terrain was still fairly flat; another fifty kilometres to the west and it would have been a different story. Sam dreaded the idea of trying to do an actual hike through steep mountain rock.
At least the sky was clear; more than enough starlight to help their goggles make the terrain look as clear as day. Certainly Sam would have said he was more “up” on technology than most, but the night vision goggles still amazed him. The headgear required for them was a bit cumbersome, but that was more than made up by their performance.
Sam had
to admit it was going to be a tough hike. He wasn’t used to this kind of walking, but the end result was certainly going to make it all worth it.
Only a few more hours, then everything would be different.
***
Arthur and Catherine didn’t have the benefit of night vision goggles, but they hardly needed them. Their eyes adjusted easily to the darkness, and in truth they had spent hundreds of years walking across every continent on the planet.
Nonetheless, it was a slog, and their mood didn’t help matters.
“Don’t worry my love,” Arthur told his breathless wife, “she’ll be safe. Pan is somewhere out here, I can feel him.”
They stopped for a moment to catch their breath. Their backpacks were light, but they were hardly taking their time and the trip was wearing on them. Plus there was the fact that there was about two hundred square miles of area they had to cover when the eclipse came. On a solar scale it was pinpoint accuracy, but on a human scale it was a day’s walk in either direction. The only saving grace was their history with the Key. Arthur would sense its location long before the eclipse hit its peak. Or so he hoped.
“I’m less worried about Jessie, and more worried about that fellow who took her. Arthur, if he manages to get the Key, we’re all pretty much going to be buggered.”
Arthur was forced to agree with his wife’s assessment. This fellow who took his daughter was dangerous, but there was something else too. He could probably be managed easily enough with Pan around, so his sense of dread was not as strong as it could have been.
As with all things in life, however, they rarely went as planned, though in this circumstance that could work for them.
They continued on as the sky began to lighten in the east.
***
Every once in a while the fog would clear just enough for Jessica to see she was being carried through a forest, flashes of green and brown mixed with sky blue. But before she could do anything about it she would feel a prick on her arm and the fog fell again.
But in those brief moments of lucidity, she called for help to the only person she could think of.
The Syker Key Page 4