Gone was the old man and in his place was the body of Emmy’s former best and most trusted friend, Lucas Black.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘You have no right.’
‘I have every right,’ he replied, bitterness coating his words. ‘You must accept that we are the same, you and I. The same blood flows through our veins.’
As he spoke, his physiognomy altered once more. This time the face staring back at her was her face. It was like looking at a reflection.
She took a step backwards.
‘Does this make you uncomfortable?’ he asked.
‘Just stop!’ she shouted. ‘I’m nothing like you. You killed people. I could never do that. Do you understand? Never!’
He smiled, cruelly.
‘You cannot stop me. I am a part of you. I will always be a part of you.’
She turned to go for the door, but it was no longer there. The small wooden shack had now become a fully enclosed tomb with no way out.
She spun back around to see that her grandfather, still in her form, had begun to glow like there was a fire burning inside him. Then his face - her face, it began to crack like the surface was composed of molten rock.
He opened his mouth as if to scream, but all that came out was light. This radioactive glow was now being expelled from every aperture of his being. He had become a human disco ball. Before Emmy could even begin to make sense of it all, there was an explosion of pure atomic energy bursting outwards from the being once known as Jackson Fox. She felt an intense blast of heat and the last thing she saw was her own hand dissolve as she tried to use it to shield her face from the oncoming fireball.
‘Emmy, are you okay?’
Her vision was groggy and she struggled to make out the shadow looming over her. The air was now cold and damp. There was no cabin, no Jackson Fox and no explosion. There never had been. She was still in the mountain tunnels.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘You were having a nightmare,’ replied Esteban. ‘I heard you whimper in your sleep and then you cried out.’
‘Really?’
‘I am not one to lie. Tell me, what troubles you?’
She looked around. Jimmy was watching, waiting for her answer as intently as Esteban, but Jack was paying her no attention at all. Instead, he was focused on keeping sentry, making sure there were no others in the tunnel with them.
‘It’s not important,’ she told them. ‘It was just a dream.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m positive. It’s probably just the claustrophobic atmosphere in here playing havoc with my subconscious. We should get moving as soon as possible. It’s not good to be spending so much time underground.’
‘Relax, we’re safe here. This mountain could shield us from a nuclear blast.’
A chill ran up her spine.
Did he know what she had just dreamt?
Of course he did not. That would be crazy. A person could be driven insane by reading too much into such things. She needed to clear her head and the best way to do that was to focus on the mission at hand.
‘Do we know how long it will take us to navigate the tunnels?’
‘It’s hard to estimate. Jimmy will find the optimum path, but it’ll still take the best part of a day.’
‘In that case, we should get moving right away.’
‘You’re the boss,’ said Esteban.
Emmy smiled back at him.
‘Only when it suits you.’
Chapter 26
‘Have you anything new to report, Professor Nguyen?’
‘Everything is proceeding as you planned, General. The Americans are still months away from rearmament. They are likely to be concentrating on establishing some form of defensive capability before they resume astral testing. As such, I have suspended all surveillance on their base. It is highly likely that our presence would be detected otherwise.’
‘That should not be a problem. They are nothing without Dr Rayne to guide them. What is her current status?’
‘She left the complex two days ago. They tried to cover her tracks, but thanks to her repeated astral journeys she emits an energy signature greatly different to anybody else. I would recognise her anywhere.’
‘She’s infected?’
‘No, she’s clean. It is just a side effect of undergoing so many astral journeys that her life energy is less static. For lack of adequate words, she has a pulsating aura. Everyone who has undergone the trials has.’
Something on Charlie’s desk caught the general’s eye. It was the scientist’s personal tablet computer and it displayed a blurred image of an indistinct figure on a mountainside.
‘What is this?’ he asked.
Charlie quickly locked the screen, removing the picture.
‘It is nothing, General. Just a badly developed image taken by a mountaineer. Sooner or later this was to be expected. With the recent advancements, exposure was inevitable.’
‘Is it going to be a problem?’
‘No, General. The photograph is unfortunate, but there is no risk of it being traced to us. It was taken by a European on a mountaineering trip who then posted it online. It is being interpreted in relation to local folklore and superstition. According to the message boards, most believe it is a fake. I mean, who can blame them after it was linked to Meh-Teh?’
The general delicately bowed his head.
‘That was why we chose this location. If anything else appears, I want to know immediately.’
‘Yes, General.’
The general then left the scientist to carry on with his work. Charlie did not feel any more relaxed in his absence. The base was covered in surveillance cameras and with each day he was beginning to suspect more and more that any feeling of control he may have regarding the project was an illusion.
***
The subject to be used as bait was chosen at random from a group deemed the least significant within the town’s hierarchy. If Emmy had been there she would have objected without hesitation. Dr Stark, however, was not tied by her younger colleague’s moral principles. Therefore, a teenage girl named Sally Ritchie was to act as her guinea pig.
Such was the strength of the sedation the girl was under, she would not be able to survive without life support. The machine keeping her alive was switched off by one of the lab technicians whilst the remaining scientists and select members of the military watched on from behind a glass partition. The expectation was that the girl would instantly flat line just as Mrs Johnson had.
This assumption turned out to be false.
As she sprung into an upright position, Sally’s screams disturbed even the colonel. Her hands were pressed against the sides of her head, but she was not trying to cover her ears. She was trying to squeeze the disturbing mental images from her brain.
She did not react to the medic at her bedside. He may as well have been as insubstantial as the phantoms in her head for all the notice she took of him. Instead, her vision fixed on random points in space, if not time. Then without warning she dropped her hands and started scratching at her left arm.
‘I need to get in there,’ said Dr Stark. ‘That medic is completely out of his depth.’
‘Then we pull him out,’ replied the colonel, ‘but nobody is going in – not even you, Doctor.’
‘I’m already in there, can’t you see?’ she told him.
To illustrate her point she held up a hypodermic needle for the colonel to see. When he looked back into the room he now knew why the girl was scrabbling at her arm. She was fighting against the phantom vision of the scientist injecting her with a sedative.
‘How do you know that will work?’ the colonel asked. ‘She should never have regained consciousness to begin with. We have no idea what we’re dealing with.’
‘You’re right, but we have to try. We literally have no choice.’
They looked through the glass. The girl had stopped trying to prevent the imagined needle from going into her arm and was in
stead just looking at it with a mixture of confusion and wonder spreading over her face.
‘Okay, Doctor, you’ve got the green light. Just make sure you get the subject back under sedation. As long as she’s experiencing any kind of vision we cannot allow her to remain conscious.’
Dr Stark entered the room. The medic tried to leave at the same time, but was prevented from doing so by a soldier acting on the colonel’s orders. He was sent back into the room and the two of them approached the girl from opposite sides of her bed. As Dr Stark reached out with the needle, the patient contemplated her as if she was nothing more than an illusion. When she had previously seen her try to inject her it had not been real so why would this be any different?
The needle contained a strong enough dose to knock the girl out within seconds. Unfortunately, given the radiation this was not enough. Once the medicine was administered Sally pushed herself off of her bed and rushed past the scientist. Dr Stark was taken by surprise and could not stop her, but the girl did not get far before visions once again clouded her judgement. Confused and disorientated, she could not figure out where the door was and as before, she became spooked by imagined figures in empty spaces.
With no visible way out, she zigzagged between beds. At first, she seemed oblivious to her fellow patients, but as the reality of her predicament began to sink in she panicked. She haphazardly pulled power chords linking the patients to their life support. The doctor screamed out for assistance, but by the time help arrived, Sally had disengaged three other patients. Of these, two of them awoke like Sally, whilst the other slowly faded away.
A team of three soldiers entered the room, awaiting instruction. They were all armed and trained to carry out orders without question or hesitation. The doctor pleaded with the colonel to command them to stand down.
‘The mission is a fail,’ the colonel told her. ‘We have to lock this thing down before it gets any further out of hand.’
‘The mission is not a fail,’ she shouted back at him. ‘Tell me, Colonel, what do you see on the observation monitors?’
The colonel glanced at the monitors. There were nine active energy signals in the room as well as the dormant signatures of the still comatose patients. This meant the flat liner was still in the room, albeit in spirit rather than body.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Can you see it?’
‘No more than you can when you’re not facing the monitor,’ replied Dr Stark. ‘I think these three can though. Look at them, they’re transfixed.’
‘That’s a negative, Doctor. The patients aren’t looking at the disembodied energy signature. I’m tracing its trajectory now and it’s not even close to their line of sight.’
Constance felt nervous. She noticed that all three of the conscious patients had their attention focused on the same spot. If they were not looking at the spirit of their dead friend, what were they looking at?
‘There’s another one!’ the colonel called out.
‘Another what?’ asked Dr Stark, but her intuition answered the question before the soldier could. Something else had entered the room, be it an astral traveller or a ghost. ‘Describe it to me,’ she added.
‘It’s no different to you, the patients or that other disembodied thing in there. Wait, no, it is different. It seems less powerful. It seems weaker somehow. I think its energy is fading.’
‘Where is it?’ Dr Stark asked.
‘Follow the eyes. Those three are all staring right at it.’
The scientist willed herself to see something, but there was only an empty space. Her eyes could not see what her mind knew to be true. In a state of frenzied excitement she decided to try establishing some other form of connection. When two astral beings made contact they were able to communicate so she reasoned that a psychic bond could also exist between the real and the ethereal.
The moment she passed into the space where the disembodied life force was she became aware of it, but only in an indistinct way. She felt cold and the hairs on her neck buzzed with static electricity. Then the lights went out. When she came to she felt disorientated and was not where she expected to be.
‘Easy, Doctor,’ said the colonel. ‘You blacked out. For a moment we were worried you weren’t coming back at all. I took the liberty of having you placed onto a bed just in case.’
The scientist looked across to her left and saw the resting form of Sally Ritchie lying just feet away on an adjacent bed.
She felt sick. For the first time she realised that in the colonel’s eyes, she was just as expendable as the test subjects.
Not wanting to give him further cause to keep her in this state she quickly sat upright and swung her legs around, ready to stand before anybody had the chance to administer a sedative.
‘You seem nervous,’ the colonel said.
‘I’m okay,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know what happened, but I assure you I’m feeling fine now. With your permission, I’d like to return to work immediately.’
‘Permission denied. I want you to take the rest of the day off. You can resume work tomorrow. There’s nothing more we can do for the time being.’
‘What about the unknown energy source; have you found a way to contain it?’
The colonel paused, unsure of exactly how to explain to the scientist what had happened in the five minutes since she lost consciousness.
‘The energy source has gone and so too has the one created by the flat-lined patient. They made contact and in doing so vanished. No trace of either remains. It is my belief that the spirit we released is now in the hands of the enemy.’
Constance’s emotions betrayed her. There was something about her reaction to what the colonel had said that suggested to the military man that she knew something. That she was holding out on him.
‘Is there something you want to tell me, Doctor?’ the colonel asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ replied the scientist. ‘It’s just that when I stepped into that spirit’s path...’
‘Spirit?’ interrupted the colonel. ‘I thought we agreed to keep this strictly scientific.’
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Colonel. The entity wasn’t what we previously thought. For the briefest moment, I sensed something unusual. It was like confusion. It was as if the energy didn’t know what was happening to it. Whatever it was, I don’t think it has anything to do with the kind of technology we’ve been using. In fact, I don’t think it has anything to do with technology at all.’
‘Are you saying you no longer think the Chinese are behind this?’
‘Yes, sir.’ And then remembering Emmy’s mission, she quickly added; ‘is that a problem?’
The colonel did not even bother to answer. It was a very big problem. He had sent a team to infiltrate the Chinese compound on the explicit understanding that they were mounting a counteroffensive. It was too late to call them back. Without provocation, the mission had no grounds for justification. Emmy was about to lead her small group into committing an act of war.
Chapter 27
The tunnels exited onto a concealed valley not dissimilar to the one from which they had entered on the other side. According to the GPS trackers, this placed the team within just a few miles of the Chinese base. Obviously, their opponents were relying on the mountain location to offer them shelter from prying eyes, but in reality it had allowed the group to sneak up on them unnoticed. To avoid detection for as long as possible, they divided into two teams. As with the parachute jumps, Esteban was paired with Jimmy, whilst Emmy was partnered with Jack.
As they descended, the scientist began to realise just how far from her comfort zone she had strayed. Everything was alien to her. It was not just the scenario of a covert espionage mission that could escalate into open battle, but the environment too. A day earlier she had never trodden on snow, yet here it was everywhere. Like the sand of her home town, it completely dominated everything.
The target base, like the American base in Australia, was partially undergr
ound. This was primarily to make disposing of the radiation easier, but it also helped to shield it from prying eyes. The visible portion consisted mainly of a large power generator unlike anything Emmy or the soldiers had seen before. The huge metallic coils rose out from the ground like giant snakes ready to strike.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Emmy. ‘It makes no sense for them to leave their power source so exposed. They obviously have a different technological set up to what we had anticipated. Maybe we should hold back a little until we figure out what we’re dealing with.’
‘Try telling Jimmy that,’ replied Jack.
The young psychic was already on the move with Esteban close behind. Emmy knew that if he was experiencing one of his visions there was nothing she or anyone could do to stop it. He viewed time differently to normal people. To him the laws of cause and effect had been flipped on their head. Jimmy’s temporal path was set.
Or was it?
Emmy had heard all about Esteban’s intervention to avert the train crash. From her studies into quantum mechanics, she knew that particles also acted as waves. This wave function represented all possible outcomes, but could not be experienced in the macroscopic world due to a process known as decoherence, which effectively reduces all infinite possibilities to one irreducible finite certainty. But now she was questioning whether Jimmy could foresee a different quantum outcome to the path that he would ultimately take. If so, his visions were fallible. The only problem was that thus far they had only failed once and she did not know why that had been.
‘We have to stop them,’ she told Jack. ‘Something isn’t right. I think Jimmy is leading us into a trap.’
‘That’s impossible,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve read the file on him. I didn’t believe it until I saw for myself. He never fails.’ The soldier paused for a moment, considering things from a different angle. ‘Unless you count his prediction about our parachute jump the other day,’ he added.
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