The Nullification Engine (The Alchemancer: Book Two)

by Scott Marlowe

  "We're actually here to take a closer look at the machine," Aaron said.

  "Of course you are." Willum sighed. "I suppose I'll be the one giving you the grand tour." He did not sound happy at the prospect.

  "Actually," Aaron said, "I'm not here for a tour. I'm here to study the engine." Lord Phillip hadn't explicitly asked such a thing, but Aaron was confident it was the reason he'd brought him here.

  "Oh, really?" The professor looked at them with a bit more scrutiny now. "What would you like to see first, then?"

  Aaron didn't know if he was being sincere or not. "I wouldn't mind taking a look at the core."

  Professor Willum shrugged. "Fine with me." He gestured with his chin at Serena. "And what about you? Are you here to just stand there and look pretty, or are you here to study the machine, too?"

  "I am here to offer my unique perspective as a sorceress." It was true enough. Aaron intended to ask for her help, anyway, as he valued her opinion.

  "A sorceress? Just be careful. We've not had much time to study this contraption. Not entirely sure what your presence might do to the core's reaction. In fact..." The professor's hands found their way out from the pockets of his lab coat. In one of them he held an encorder very similar in design to the ones Aaron often used. "Let's see here..." Professor Willum made a few adjustments before turning the device on Serena.

  Serena placed her hands on her hips. "Whatever are you doing?"

  "He's taking a baseline reading," Aaron said.

  Willum nodded. "Quite right, quite right. Not that different from the first thing a doctor does during an examination. If your presence alters the frequency of the machine—or vice versa—we'll at least have somewhere to start, eh?"

  Aaron nodded in agreement, for it was a prudent measure to take.

  Serena wasn't exactly in agreement, as she pursed her lips in annoyance. "If you're quite done, can we get on with it?"

  Professor Willum snapped the encorder closed. "Yes, yes, of course." He directed his attention back to Aaron. "You said you wanted to see the core?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then follow me. Might as well start with the first step in the reaction, which starts at the lower platform. We're calling it the 'collection deck.' We can work our way up from there."

  They followed the professor to a single, metal ladder enclosed within a cage-protected chute. The chute went up and down, spanning all three platforms. The other researchers, who stood before an instrument panel covered in dials, knobs, levers, and gauges, glanced their way, but none of them said anything as they returned to their work.

  "Now," the professor said as they went down the ladder, "before you ask, let me just say we don't know who built the machine, when they built it, or why they built it. Once you take a look, I'll be happy to answer any other questions you have."

  A fair distance separated each platform, so it took Aaron and Serena some minutes to complete the descent. The lowermost platform was built of metal grating just like the other. It also had no railing surrounding it. Just below them, the arms spun in a motion which, this close, was dizzying to observe. The engine's core, which extended below the platform, was capped at its bottom by a hub of brass gears and mechanical workings. The arms were attached to the rest of the machine at this hub. Aaron saw much work ahead of him before he'd figure out the exact configuration and methodology behind the hub's design, but right now he really wanted to take a closer look at the core. From a distance, he'd assumed the composition of the cylinder's shell was crystal, glass, or some similar material. This close, though, he saw it was not anything material at all, but some form of energy sheathing. Within, the core's energy was predominantly golden, but Aaron now saw coruscating deposits of white, green, blue, and red flickering to life, swirling or otherwise moving around, then dissipating.

  "Beautiful, isn't it?" the professor asked.

  They both nodded in agreement.

  "May I borrow your encorder?" Aaron asked, his eyes still fixed somewhere within the core's depths.

  Professor Willum handed it over without question.

  Aaron took a moment to double-check the device's calibration before holding it up to the core. The needles on the measuring device immediately went haywire, jumping back and forth across their individual spectrums. With an expert hand, he re-tuned the instrument and again tried to take a reading. It took one more time to fine-tune the calibration before the needles moved to a set of precise figures and held.

  "It's a concordium containment field," Aaron said. "I didn't think that was possible."

  "We didn't, either. Not until we saw it with our own eyes. Took us a fair bit longer than it just took you to get the encorder tuned just right, along with taking a number of other measurements, before we verified it, though. Where did you say you studied?"

  Aaron was too lost in thought to answer. Concordium was a fusion of solid metals, but transmogrified into an energy blend which, in theory, was stable and pliant enough to shape into containment structures. But he didn't think it existed outside theory. Aaron had never heard or read of anyone actually stabilizing such a thing. Still awestruck, he turned his attention to what the field contained. It almost looked like liquid. In fact, that had been his first assumption. But that was before he'd known about the concordium field. Energy fields were not typically used to contain liquid. They were used to contain other forms of energy or, in this case, gas. A shifting, coalescing mass, its color cycled through every shade of gold from light to dark and back again in the span of twenty seconds. Again, Aaron relied on the encorder to yield some clue as to the gas's composition and purpose. This time, the results were not as satisfying. Just as the gas shifted and changed, so too did the frequency reading. It proved impossible to acquire a steady reading.

  "What is it?" Serena asked. She must have noticed the furrow of his brow.

  "The frequency is oscillating," he said.

  "Yes," Professor Willum said. "Back and forth between two values. But watch long enough, and you'll find those values change as well. No one is quite sure why just yet. Come! There's something on the control deck I think you will find interesting."

  As soon as they reached the center platform, they found Lord Phillip there waiting for them.

  "What do you think so far?" he asked, smirking.

  Excitement seemed endemic amongst his other guests.

  "It's amazing, sir," Aaron said. Amazing didn't begin to explain it, but it would do for now.

  "I thought you might think so. Have you any insights at this point?"

  "Yes, sir. But I'd like to see the remainder of the machine, as well as some of Professor Willum's data, before giving you a full analysis, if that's all right."

  Phillip's face broke into a full smile, something which Aaron felt had been sorely missing in the young earl since he'd met him.

  "Perfectly all right!" he said. "By all means, finish your inspection. I'll not hold you up any longer."

  At the control deck, they congregated around an instrument panel lined with the gauges, dials, and knobs Aaron had spied earlier. Though the instrumentation panel wrapped the core all the way around, the professor concentrated their attention on one section in particular where temperature, pressure, and energy resonance were on display.

  "This level," he said, tapping his finger on one of the pressure gauges, "was lower when we first discovered the machine."

  He indicated with his finger the initial value. The difference was nothing extraordinary.

  "When was the first reading taken?" Aaron asked.

  "Three days ago."

  "Which means, roughly, the pressure is increasing at a rate of..." It took him a few moments to do the calculation in his head. "Seventy-eight hundredths of a bar per twenty-four-hour period."

  Willum was impressed. "Yes, but the pressure isn't rising at a steady level. By our calculations, the increase is accelerating."

  "By how much?" Serena asked.

  Professor Willum reached beneath the inst
rumentation panel to a shelf where a number of books and scrolls were stored. He selected one of the books—a data log, Aaron figured, based on the tables upon tables of numbers he saw written there—and started thumbing through it. Serena took in every page as the professor turned them.

  Meanwhile, the earl coaxed the others up the ladder to the machine's third and highest level while instructing them on some point of history. Over the hum of the core and the whoosh of the arms spinning below, he made out the words 'hidden,' 'beneath,' and 'long time.' One of the earl's guests, the eslar woman, was missing. But not for long, as she rounded the machine looking very engrossed with her own inspection. Aaron saw an opportunity to find out more about her.

  "What do you think?" he asked her.

  The question startled her. But she took one look at him and smiled. "It's marvelous! A concordium field containing a gas mixture, collecting rods attuned to the four elements, and an instrumentation panel to rival anything I've ever seen before. Who built such a thing? And to what end?"

  Her inquisitiveness and obvious scientific background came as a surprise to Aaron. So much so, he felt willing to share his insights with her, despite the fact that he hadn't even shared them with the earl yet.

  "The ones who built this machine were called elementalists," he said.

  "Elementalists." She said the word several times, rolling the word over her tongue. "I've not heard of them. Who are they?"

  "Who 'were' they is a better question. They don't exist anymore. They haven't for five hundred years."

  She accepted his explanation without question. "It would seem their creation has outlived them by a good long while then." She offered her hand. "I am Ingrid Kane."

  "Aaron," he said as they shook. She'd a firm grip, and her hand was warm despite the chill in the air.

  "Aaron," Serena said, waving him over, "come look at this."

  Aaron obliged. Ingrid came with him.

  Serena had taken Willum's book from him and was looking over the figures herself. Meanwhile, the professor adjusted dials and scrutinized gauges. "Something's not right," he said.

  Aaron was just trying to see what had so caught Willum's interest when Serena jabbed her elbow into him.

  "Ow! What?"

  "These are the data points the professor took from the core," she said, jamming a finger onto one of the book's pages.

  Aaron examined the figures. From over his shoulder, Ingrid did the same. Row upon row of numbers, they took up the entire page and even went to the next. Aaron saw the pattern immediately.

  "An oscillating convergence."

  Ingrid saw it as well, for she said, "The numbers range between an upper and lower bound, but those bounds are narrowing with each passing moment. Eventually, the frequency will converge on a single value."

  "So what's 'not right'?" Aaron asked, raising his voice to address the professor.

  Serena answered. "That's what I was trying to show you." She held the book of figures up next to some of the instruments and flipped back several pages. "Here. These are the temperature, pressure, and energy resonance figures from yesterday." She flipped forward. "And here are the figures for this morning and afternoon."

  Aaron reached out to flip the page back while Serena cast a sidelong, expectant look at him. Aaron saw the reason for concern. "Everything's rising much faster now."

  Based on the tabulated data, many of the readings had been increasing, but at a steady, predictable pace. No longer. Now, pressure rose rapidly. Temperature, too. Resonant energy, which was a sort of exhaust, also built at such a rate Aaron thought he felt tiny vibrations, not there before, now coursing throughout the machine's structure.

  On a hunch, Aaron took the encorder from the professor's pocket and turned it on the machine's core. The oscillation remained, but the values taken to their next progression were no longer consistent with the previous data. The upper value was too high and the lower one too low. The frequency no longer converged, but diverged.

  Aaron stifled a growing sense of alarm. "I think we should get the earl and everyone else off the machine."

  Willum agreed. He went to the ladder chute and shouted at those above. "Lord Phillip! I must ask that you and your guests—"

  The machine shuddered.

  Starting at the core, it spread outward uniformly, sending vibrations across the control panel, the grated flooring, and into the rotating arms such that their motion, unbalanced now, set the machine wobbling. Everyone grabbed onto something.

  "What is going on down there?" Phillip demanded.

  A noise, like oil sizzling in a hot pan, rose up from the core.

  "We think..." Willum said. "That is, the machine—We're not entirely sure—"

  "The concordium field is failing!" Aaron shouted over the rising clamor. "The core energy is escaping!"

  Up and down the core's length, short tendrils of gas and eruptions of energy like tiny lightning bolts burst forth. The occurrences were many, their locations ever-changing, for as soon as one rupture formed, it closed, and another took its place somewhere else. Aaron recognized the fragmentation effect. Regulators somewhere deep inside the machine's inner workings were compensating and correcting for the field's sudden instability, but he knew a complete field failure was imminent. All that energy released at once would kill everyone inside the chamber, and maybe beyond. Aaron was trying to think of a way to keep that from happening when Serena staggered back.

  "Aaron, I—I don't feel...so..."

  She gasped. The data log fell from her hands as her entire body convulsed. Then she started to fall. Only the earl, who'd just returned to the control deck, kept her from hitting the floor.

  "What's wrong with her?" he asked, easing her down.

  No longer conscious, the skin of Serena's face and neck, already pale from too much time indoors, whitened even further as Aaron knelt down next to her. He checked her pulse, which was faint, and growing fainter. Also, her skin continued to grow paler with every passing moment, as if the very life was being sucked out of her.

  "It's the machine, isn't it?" Phillip asked. Louder, to his researchers, he asked, "Can you turn it off?"

  Professor Othini and the others' hands were scrambling across the instrument panel. Othini answered. "No, sir, there's no way to shut it down."

  "He's right," Aaron said. He touched Serena's cheek. It was cold. Too cold. "The core has built up too much energy. Shutting the machine down will collapse the containment field, which is exactly what we're trying to avoid."

  Aaron brushed a stray lock of hair from Serena's face even as his mind raced with thoughts. The machine had been functioning for days with no mishaps. Until now. Something had changed to disrupt its operation. If he was correct about the machine's origins, then it was at least five hundred years old. So much time, sitting idle in an underground cavern, had to have affected some of its componentry.

  Another shudder went through the structure, throwing them all off balance. The whooshes the arms made as they spun by, so regular, sped up in frequency as the arms' motion grew more rapid. Their increased velocity sent a persistent trembling throughout the machine.

  People outside the chamber had felt the disruptive effects, for guards from the surface came running into the chamber and down the catwalk. The ladder chute between the second and third platforms was crammed with the earl's guests as they made their way down. Lord Phillip gave the first guard to arrive the order to see everyone to safety. He instructed the second to carry Serena to a healer straightaway. Aaron watched the guard carry Serena across the walkway until Lord Phillip's voice brought him back to the dilemma at hand.

  "If we cannot turn the machine off, what can we do?" he asked.

  Aaron didn't think 'we' included the earl. Willum agreed.

  "For your own safety, sir," Willum said, "I think it would be best if you left the chamber."

  Guards escorted the last of the visitors down the walkway. Ingrid Kane was amongst them. Another shudder from the machine hast
ened their progress. All of the researchers remained, including Othini.

  "I must concur, sir," Othini said. "There may be resonant waves extending well past the perimeter. I will go with you to make sure—"

  "I'm staying," Phillip said. His tone offered no opportunity for argument. "And so are you, professor. Now, put me to use. I'm no scientist, but surely there's something I can do."

  Aaron still didn't like it, but there wasn't any more time to argue. They gathered in a circle to discuss their options. Othini hovered close by, but the man was not handling himself well as he stared open-eyed at the core and fidgeted with his lab coat more than he listened. After a few moments of discussion, it became obvious no one had any idea how to stop the field from failing. Aaron, though, fell back on the fundamentals. They needed to first determine the problem, then worry about a solution. No one disputed the direction he set as duties were quickly assigned. One person went to the top platform while Willum and Aaron descended to the collection deck. The rest, including Phillip and Othini, remained at the controls.

  Professor Willum pulled back a panel to reveal the mechanics of the hub. Ingrid had called the arms extending out from it 'elemental collecting rods,' and so they were, gathering energy from the environment as they spun. Something had to have happened to either disrupt their rate of absorption—Aaron traced the energy flow from the collection hub toward the core—or, more likely, something had changed in the conversion process from elemental energy to the combinatory form it took inside the core. Professor Willum, his thought processes following the same line of thinking, directed Aaron's attention to the conversion mechanism itself. Right away, they both saw the source of the problem. Inside the collection hub was a series of energy enhancers and modulators. One of the modulators was blackened and burned out. But the flow of energy through it persisted, causing seepage and a discombobulation of energy which ran right into the primary concordium regulator.