“If you shoot, you will die,” Braxton pleaded, “But if you don’t, you will live. These are your only options!”
A gunshot rang out, just as loud as it did on the street that day when Diana died. Braxton fired a full surge of electricity at the men’s weapons from both of his hands. A deafening thunderstorm ripped through the hallway, scorching the surrounding walls and killing two uniformed men in the process.
Braxton would probably never know whether or not the bullet missed him entirely or if the superheated lightning intercepted the round and disintegrated it completely. Feeling spent, he turned around and headed toward the elevator again. A moment later, he finally located the elevator at the end of the hall. He hit the call button multiple times, hoping to rush it along. After what felt like an eternity, he noticed a door beside it labeled with a blue silhouette of a staircase.
Rather that waiting any longer out in the open, he pulled the door open and rushed into the stairway. He raced down the stairs, past floors 38 and 37, all the while assuming that the anxious voices he heard several floors above belonged to his enemies. Before he reached level 36, he glanced down the center of the winding staircase and realized his cables might permit him a much quicker escape.
He heard an echoing voice shout about some security guards being killed on floor thirty-nine. Someone else replied about the police already being on their way. Braxton was running out of time to think. He raised his right fist and shot a cable into the side of the stairs. He then hopped over the railing and jumped into the small opening in the center of the stairwell that led all the way to the bottom.
He released some slack in his cable, permitting himself to swing out and drop four stories in two heartbeats. He launched the cable from his left wrist while detaching and retracting the cable on his right. He continued the process of swinging out and dropping multiple floors, while alternating between cables. He made it to the ground floor much quicker than he’d expected.
Braxton yanked the mask off his face and tucked it under his arm. Then he opened the door to the main level and shoved his hands into his pants pockets so no one would see the gloves. He ran through the lobby and out of the building as quickly as he could in the hopes that no one would recognize him.
There were three vehicles parked immediately outside the building with circling blue and red beacons on their roofs. Braxton just kept his head down and burrowed through the crowd who all seemed intent on finding out the reason for all the excitement. He finally made it to the other side of the crowd, when suddenly the déjà vu came back full force.
For the second or third time in a row, he walked down the sidewalk toward a familiar man leaning against a light post smoking a cigarette. The smile on Jack’s face was priceless the moment he saw Braxton slip out of the crowd. For the second or third time in a row, Braxton smiled back. Then for the second or third time in a row, Jack admitted to believing Braxton had died in there.
The world was moving in slow motion and even the words that were spoken seemed drawn out. He was seeing the Earth through the eyes of a fish underwater. Then as quickly as it had come, everything was back to normal.
“What took you so long?” Jack asked.
“I had to prove my friend wrong. I’m definitely a super hero in the same respects as the ones in my comic books,” Braxton said, patting his friend on the arm, “I never missed a single shot in there.”
Jack laughed, then flicked his cigarette butt into the street. He took the mask from under Braxton’s arm and slipped it back into the brown bag.
“We’d better get out of here and before someone recognizes you,” he said.
“Where are we going?” Braxton asked, keeping his hands tucked into his pockets.
“We’re going back to the Fortress of Solitude to discuss how we can get ‘The Mystic’ back into the good graces of New York City.”
“You’re the boss,” Braxton said.
Underworld
I took a shortcut that I’d discovered as a child. I knew I’d be able get to the Winian Library in half the time if I used the ventilation tunnel near the clothing factory.
I climbed the ladder in the ventilation tunnel and knocked the grate open on the wall of the upper promenade. I was a little frightened to find the streets deserted. The library was just a short distance away from me and I heard nothing coming from that direction. I rushed toward the library and opened the door.
A voice muttered something from behind me, just outside of the library. I turned quickly to discover an uplander holding one of their weapons. He continued to talk in his foreign language, approaching me slowly. I took a step back, but found myself pressed against the wall of the library. He reached out and touched the side of my face gently, almost a caress. I closed my eyes as he combed his fingers through my hair. I finally opened my eyes when his alien lips pressed against my own.
Suddenly someone struck him in the side. It wasn’t enough to knock him off balance, but it was enough to make him angry. He lifted his weapon and fired at the person who was coming at him again. He shot three times, and that was the moment I recognized her. It was Reqora.
“Reqora!” I screamed, running to lifeless figure of her on the ground, “No, Reqora! What were-”
Suddenly I was drunk on the spirits, submerged beneath the sea, and replaying this very scene before me. Even as I moved my hands over Reqora’s face, I knew I was just doing something I’d already done moments before. As I touched her closed eyelids, I knew I’d done this very thing.
I looked up toward the uplander who was now backing slowly away from us. Another uplander had approached him and was now pointing at the walls as he shouted something. The other seemed to argue with him. Then suddenly, they clutched their heads in their hands and started screaming.
I backed away from them, worried at what I was seeing. Then to my shock, they completely disappeared along with the drunken underwater feeling I had been experiencing. I stood up and looked around, wondering if somehow I’d been part of an awful joke.
“Purlinscz?”
The voice startled me. I turned quickly to discover Reqora seated on the ground in perfectly good health.
“Reqora? How did you… how…”
“Was I sleepwalking or something? How did I get here?” she asked, rising from the floor.
“You… you just got shot by an uplander. You don’t remember?”
“Purlinscz? I’m starting to think that maybe it was you who was sleepwalking. Why would uplanders be in our tunnels?”
I turned back to the library and rushed inside. To my ever-growing shock, there were three or four people browsing the bookshelves and the regular librarian was casually leafing through some papers at her desk. I wanted to ask these people about the uplanders from just a moment ago, but I was afraid it was going to turn out that I was the one who’d lost her mind. I turned to leave the library and bumped into the priest I’d spoken to earlier.
“It’s happened, Purlinscz,” he said, “Your son is going to save our world. Or perhaps I should say that your son has already saved our world.”
“You remember?”
“You and I are probably the only ones who remember,” he replied.
Judgment
Book IV of
The Mystic Saga
Scott McElhaney
Prologue
Anger… frustration… disgust… horror… fear… all words that couldn’t even begin to express the feelings in Elix’s heart right now as he struggled to accept the impossible world around him. His mother was gone as well as the home they once shared down in the lower tunnels. Elix didn’t know how long he’d been away, but he was certain now that it was a significantly longer time than he initially presumed.
“There are no tunnels below this level, dear boy. I’m sorry, but if you believe you lived in a lower tunnel, it’s simply not possible,” one of his kind hosts explained.
It was as though he returned to a completely different world altogether. These people
claimed there were no lower tunnels, but they admitted that their governing officials approved digging further to accommodate the growing population in the underworld. They insisted that there was no such thing as uplanders. And worst of all, they claimed they never heard of Purlincsz – his mother.
They must have thought he was crazy, but that was before he held out the metal hand-sized weapon. That was the moment they started taking his fantastic stories of being brought up to the heavens and back seriously. That was the moment they chose to pay a child’s words some heed.
He’d already figured out how to fire the weapon, so when he showed them the damage it could do to a log of wood, they realized it wasn’t just a child’s toy. It was a weapon of the gods and Elix was a child who had visited those gods and survived to tell about it. This was what brought all the leaders and priests of the underworld to Elix.
He explained everything he knew of those uplanders that apparently didn’t even exist in this alternate reality. He told them everything and let them decide what they wanted to make of it all. It was fortunate for Elix that there were some very smart people amongst his hosts who came up with some scary theories of how to explain his current situation. The most favored theory which somehow made a lot of sense to Elix was the fact that the gods returned him to a period in the past – a time before the uplanders would ever exist.
Elix was faced with living many generations before his own lifetime. This theory agreed with all his surroundings. Then, once Elix described all the history that he personally recalled of the uplanders and the damage they were causing to the world above their home, they asked for his assistance – a child’s assistance – to formulate a plan that would prevent such atrocities.
“I’m just a kid,” he replied, “How can I come up with any plan against these things?”
“You’ve been there! You brought this weapon back to us,” one of the scientists said, “Surely you have something in that head of yours that can help us.”
He shook his head, looking at all the expectant faces in the room. Then suddenly, a thought came to him.
“They desire a lot of the poison black rock that exists in these mountains. No one cared about that stuff until their flying machines arrived when my mom was a child,” he said.
“You’re talking about the swelling-stone far above our tunnels?” one of the hosts asked, “The stuff that causes flesh inflammation, then makes us sick?”
“Yes, I watched them from the mountaintops. My mother always…” he began, then paused and shook his head to rid himself of the thought, “The uplanders were digging it up and shipping it by the cartload to a giant smoking structure where they did something to purify it or clean it.”
A few of his hosts whispered amongst themselves, muttering formulas and scientific statements that made no sense to Elix. Some of the people in the room even seemed angered at the thought of a deadly stone suddenly achieving a status beyond that of “garbage.”
“How could they even be near the stuff? It’s deadly to all living things,” their governor stated, “We’ve tested the rock in many ways and it’s complete junk.”
“Junk that probably makes these weapons shoot or their vehicles fly to the heavens!” one of the scientists interrupted, “I think we need to consider its scientific value.”
“And just how do you propose we do that when we can’t even touch the stuff without getting sick or dying?” another added.
The chief scientist turned to Elix, looking for some input.
“My mom said that before they started mining the poison, they spent two harvests mining the gray-ore near the Wetland tunnels. Maybe it’s the same stuff they coated their poison-handling clothing in since it also bore the same color as our tunnel ceilings in the Wetlands,” Elix said, “Can you experiment with the poison rock using this metal or others to see if it could somehow deflect the poison of the rock?”
“Where are the Wetland tunnels? We don’t have anything called that,” the governor asked.
“They’re… well, they branch off the…” he started, then pointed to the ceiling above them, “I can take you above and show you where they should be. It’s built far beneath the swamps of the world above.”
“But can you find these swamps at night?” one asked, “We can’t be up there during the day.”
“Yes, I’ve spent many long moments in the world above. My mother hated that about… about…” he struggled against the tears to find his voice again, but after a while, he simply shook his head.
“We definitely have to do something. It’s a safe bet that there’s some scientific value to this poison vein of rock or the gods wouldn’t spend so much time and resources on it,” one replied, “We have to learn what we can so we can be prepared for them once they arrive.”
“I have to agree,” the governor stated, “We will divert our current resources to the swelling-stone. I want all of our best scientists on this. When the Night Orb rises, take Elix above and have him show you where the gray-ore is abundant.”
Arrival
Time didn’t pass for the occupants of the Judgment Pod as it neared the end of its long journey between the stars. If it weren’t for the computer guidance systems, there would be nothing aboard to even verify any passage of time. But indeed, time did pass. It was just a question of what method you used to gauge that passage of time.
The pod’s computer system cared nothing of time’s passage. A week or a thousand years were all the same to it since it had the power as well as all the necessary upkeep systems to maintain itself for either span. It could however provide a detail of how many course adjustments it made since the moment of its launch (18) or how many scans it performed during its transit between the stars (3,277,650), but it couldn’t tell you how many hours have passed since it departed its point of origin.
The Judgment Pod entered an orbit 1,100 miles above Violation – a name its creators had given to the home of the Violators. The pod released two small satellites – one to remain in a geostationary orbit of 1,000 miles and the other to drop to a much lower and varying position of 20 to 30 miles above the surface. Once the larger satellite achieved its permanent orbit, it telescoped out its arrays, antennas, and scanners.
The lower-orbit satellite plummeted through the atmosphere cocooned in a heat resistant material designed not only to protect its delicate electronics, but also to protect the two high-altitude balloons it would deploy to maintain its relatively low orbit. The cocoon slowly burned away as expected, leaving nothing behind to smash into the world below. The deployment of a triple chute slowed its descent enough to allow its balloons to safely unfold and begin filling with the hydrogen/helium mixture. Like its higher-altitude partner, it also deployed multiple antennas and communication arrays around the time it hovered in its final orbit.
The pod itself, still maintaining a position at 1,100 miles, performed a language scan, searching for a language that closely matched the Violators they had captured and interrogated. After many long days spent learning their language, it would be much easier to continue with the familiar.
A landing site was chosen in an arid region of a continent where many spoke the familiar language. At this point, the pod induced life into the sleeping IX7 robotic unit it had carried for such a long distance. Two processors came online instantly, followed by the revival of its movement functioners. It took several minutes for the unit to perform a self-scan, then report to the pod computer that it was fully operational.
The pod computer responded by downloading the three identities of the Judgment Committee into the IX7. This particular download would take the better portion of a day since a person’s identity took up a significant amount of processing space. And that didn’t even take into consideration that this particular unit would be forced to contain three complete and separate identities – something never attempted before.
The Judgment Committee was comprised of three people who were voted to be the most responsible and capable of handing down
an unbiased and intelligent decision regarding the Violators. The three people had their complete identities scanned, then converted into a googolplex of binary computer code. The three identities would be kept separate even after being inserted into the unit.
While the last of the Judgment Committee was being downloaded, the pod’s navigation systems came online and plotted its course to the planet below. It began its descent, slowly arcing through the upper atmosphere, gradually increasing its speed. The hull insulation was put to the test as friction heated the outer sensors to over 2,600 degrees. Anyone watching the sky from the planet below would see nothing more than a flaming meteorite entering the upper atmosphere.
A few minutes later, the pod was able to slow its descent and change course, finally dropping the amount of friction and the temperatures of the pod itself. The computer was now finishing up the download of the Judgment Committee and preparing to relinquish control of the IX7.
A message came in from one of the satellites above during its final three miles of descent. It was also a warning that would be instantly transmitted into the IX7. The computer changed its priorities and searched for a place to land as quickly as possible. The satellite message was insisting on a change of plans.
“This race has aviation technologies as well as radio technologies and both are being used in conjunction to intercept our arrival. Recommend immediate deployment of the IX7 followed by sabotage of all systems within the pod.”
LEGACY
126 AfEl (After Elix)
“So explain this to me again, Wiltrix. You’re telling me that the energy-metal is made of something even smaller than the micro-orbitals and the nucleus?” Styzum asked, placing his inspection glass on the table.
“Yes, and I already know you’re thinking I’m crazy, but I’m certain this leads to the secrets of the uplanders. We already know that splitting the nucleus of the energy-metal will create wonderful amounts of energy as a chain reaction is instituted. And it’s common sense then that this can be used as a power system and as a potential weapon if we were crazy enough,” Wiltrix said, holding out a sheet of paper, “But that’s all we’d ever have if we didn’t look deeper. We’d be at a standstill. But, the micro-particles are made up of even smaller particles. Look at this drawing. I did some tests that proved they exist and they are so unpredictable that… that I promise there’s definitely something there.”
The Mystic Saga Omnibus (Books 1 - 5) Page 27