by Alex Bobl
I leaned toward him, slid my fingers under the garrote and pulled. A silhouetted figure moved in from behind the cabinet. A blow caught me on the temple but as I turned my head at the last moment, it glanced off me. I shielded myself with my elbow from the fist aimed at my cheekbone and chopped at thin air attempting to counter attack. Immediately, I got two swift and painful pokes to my solar plexus and stepped to the wall gasping. I kicked my assailant in the knee and forced him to move aside and pause.
A pause that lasted only a second, but in that second a barrage of thoughts stormed through my head. In front of me stood Wong. Wong who'd protected me ever since we'd arrived at Pangea; Wang who'd obeyed my orders and helped me all the way. And now...
He behaved like a machine. With a smile on his face he stepped closer, parried my lunge and smashed his fist into my chin. I'd foreseen the combination and ducked. Sticking my knee out, I stamped on his foot nailing it to the floor and tried to elbow the Chinese to the ground. But I missed. He squatted and pushed my arms up, sliced into my armpits and kept hitting me in the stomach, groin and thighs.
Too late I felt the pain and realized that the Chinese was more experienced and better trained than myself. With his combat potential of six units against my three, he was a professional killer, a puppet that the FSA had programmed to eliminate General Varlamov. I had led him to my father, and all Blank had to do was to unleash him at the right moment.
My arms dangled lifelessly. My body was paralyzed: I couldn't move or catch my breath and my legs felt wooden. Wong pressed his hand against my chest and slowly moved the other arm toward his waist preparing a coup de grace. Unclenching his fist, he twisted his hand concentrating and sucked in the air.
My father, like a giant, rose up behind his back and gave the Chinese a bear hug rendering him unable to move his arms. Struggling, Wong jumped up and backheaded him breaking the general's nose. And again. But father restrained him with all his weight, constricting him.
Circles flashed in front of my eyes. Wong and the general merged into one unproportional figure. Somewhere in the back of my mind the memory chip signaled an insufficient oxygen level in my blood. The infrared lens kept changing from one spectrum to another trying to calibrate the image when something in the room changed unperceivably.
The air thickened like a sponge, sticking to my body as a diver's suit. Crimson threads lit up on the walls and reached for me outlining all the objects and people in the room and filling them in with colorful pulsating auras. Among them, I recognized the clear receding signal of the general's memory chip. Having activated the stimulator in his aorta, it started up his heart which was now on the point of stopping again. His combat implants didn't function any more and God only knew what it had cost him to hold Wong in his grip.
I breathed in. Then out. And in again, gasping for air. My shoulders still hurt but my muscles could contract again obeying the signals from my recovering nervous system. The crimson threads entered my body pumping it up with strength. Another moment, another split second, and I'd crush Wong with a single blow. His aura breathed fire, its nucleus searing with overflowing energy in his head.
I realized that I could extend my father's life for a few moments by redirecting the flow of force emitted by the crimson threads. But then I wouldn't be able to kill Wong whose blazing energy had already reached its peak. The Chinese whooped and threw my father off raising his hands.
All I did was to put my palms together. I don't know why. It was as if I was controlled by someone on the outside who was prompting me what to do before I could even think. The crimson threads wound around Wong's neck. His scream turned into a croak as his aura started to fade slowly like the filament in an unplugged electric bulb receiving the last weak voltage.
The room before me came back to normal. The general lay dying on the floor. Wong stood with an unnaturally twisted neck, the back of his head touching his shoulder. A smile frozen on his dead face.
I pushed him hard, lost my balance and sank to the floor next to my father. I reached out to him but the room was filling with soldiers. They grabbed my shoulders, threw me toward the wall and kicked the shit out of my ribs winding me.
I shielded myself with my arms and kept looking at my father through my fingers. Life was leaving his eyes. His lips moved weakly but because of the soldiers' noise and swearing, I couldn't hear what he was saying.
If Blank hadn't appeared in the room, they would have beaten me to death. He blurted out a command and the soldiers stepped aside. One of them slapped me across the face but was shoved away by cyber troopers. Obeying the captain's order, they grabbed me under my arms and dragged me off along the hallway toward the main hall where the portal machine stood.
The unknown force that had allowed me to terminate Wong had now left me. My ribs ached, my jaw smarted and the eye with the lens in it practically didn't work. The memory chip kept signaling for me to go urgently to the medical center for a checkup. I tried to comprehend what had just happened in that room but couldn't concentrate; instead, I kept seeing the faces of Wong and my dying father who'd saved my life. He had proven to be a different person from what I'd recently believed him to be. He'd wanted me to live; his emotions had given him away during our first encounter yesterday. He just hadn't spoken of his plans in detail, or rather, he'd tried to but had seen I wasn't ready yet. I hadn't wanted to listen to him, I hadn't even wanted to try to listen to him. He was a stern strong-willed individual not taken to praising people, but he always had a particle of love within him and he used to share it generously with me at every opportunity, hiding warmth and tenderness behind the Spartan mask of severity. What a shame I'd grown up so quickly and forgotten about it.
Now I couldn't bring anything back. Time moved on relentlessly. I had only two important things left to do: free Mira and my daughter at whatever cost and take Blank out.
Neumann was by the portal machine alone when the protective membrane opened in the hall letting us in. In the last twenty-four hours, the professor had taken a turn for the worst. He seemed to have aged another ten years. An ancient old man stooping in a lab coat looked at me with pity and compassion, and also with what wasn't quite fear in his eyes but rather the agony of wishing to be in my place and die not seeing what was about to happen next.
The cyber hurled me onto the floor and stood on either side of the pedestal that supported the black hemisphere. Blank walked in. The transparent membrane sealed noiselessly behind his back and clouded over concealing us from the eyes of the soldiers manning the light-flashing equipment in the control center.
"You two," Blank pointed his finger at me, then at old Neumann, "power up the machine, now."
I struggled to my feet, ran my hand across my face and stared at my fingers sticky with blood and some weird goo.
"What are you gawking at, Master Specialist?" the captain stepped toward me and knocked my forearm. "Have you never seen blown-out brains before?" He pointed at the hemisphere covered in solidified little bubbles. "Explain to the professor how this thing works!"
The stooping Neumann looked up at me, pleading. His narrow line-furrowed face had turned gray. His eyes begged, do what they say, boy, let's get it over with and then at least the soldiers will kill us.
"Step aside, everyone," I said.
The cyber looked at their captain. He nodded. When Neumann and Blank stood at a distance, I stepped up to the hemisphere. I raised my hands over the uneven surface preparing to feel both the soaring heat and cold at once.
A long-forgotten memory stirred up something unknown and powerful that had as yet lain dormant inside me. It sharpened my perception making my fingers shake with the effort. If I touched the surface, it would flash up crimson. A radiant sphere would appear overhead under the rods' lower ends shooting lightning...
Blank drew forward and grasped Neumann's elbow pulling him along.
"What are you doing?" the captain gasped. "Tell him! Teach him how to use this thing!" He pushed Neumann toward the
pedestal.
I couldn't explain anything even if I wanted to. The professor wouldn't be able to do it. The Fore comers' machine worked by itself. For some reason it had mistaken me for one of its own believing me to be part of itself - or its master, or creator, whatever it was. It could be some peculiarity of my nervous system or it could be the biocide that Mira had injected me two years ago before my trip to the swamps. This was where I'd found the fifth beacon.
Back at the swamps, I'd gotten lost in the murky mist and had decided to take a break. I didn't mean to get inside. I squatted by the beacon's metallic wall splattered with mud. High above in the mist I saw the black silhouette of the beacon's receiving rod.
I had touched the wall and slumped into nothing.
At first I'd thought I was hallucinating with the swamp's toxic fumes. I searched my belt for the cartridge pouch where I kept gas mask filters when I realized I was actually inside the beacon tower. The floor was rough and basalt-like. The light-colored walls veined with gray emitted a weak glow. Part of the rod showed in the ceiling overhead.
"Atmosphere suitable for breathing," my protective suit's built-in gas analyzer reported to my helmet monitor. Just in case I rebooted it and repeated the tests. They produced the same results: the air inside the beacon was good and clean. After a moment's thought, I took off the helmet, pulled off the mask and took a deep breath. I coughed as the dry close air tickled my throat - apparently, the beacon didn't have any air vents.
I took my bearings, then looked up at the ceiling and touched the rod. Everything changed. A cold breeze chilled my face. My spine and the back of my head exuded heat. I happened to stand in the way of two energy currents, short-circuiting them. The currents lashed out at me from both sides trying to connect, but my body stood in their way like a resistor in an electric circuit. Rerouted, they then flowed into nothing - a beckoning abyss that for an instant opened before my inner eye, showing countless paths to distant worlds that until then I'd believed to be the shimmering pattern on the beacon's walls. I realized I was seeing a 3D diagram, a map whose scale was inconceivable to human imagination.
The map was crossed by a short protuberance that pulsated red: the wormway connecting Earth and Pangea. By now overcharged with energy, it threatened to explode at any moment like a boiler in need of letting off steam.
It had ended before I got scared. One thought of Mira, and I had found myself not at the swamps but under the gasometer, teleported to the hall by the portal machine. My hands lay on the red-hot semisphere. Neumann opposite stared at me speechless. Above our heads blazed a bright-white globe whose sparks and flashes suppressed the halogen lamps around the pedestal.
When I had pulled my hands away, the semisphere had grown black again. The globe overhead had disappeared leaving little bolts of lightning crackling at the ends of the rods that reached out for me although some force pushed them away redirecting them upward.
"Talk!" Blank's voice brought me back to reality. "How do you control it? Tell him what to do!"
I could touch the semisphere and choose any of the paths it offered. But then the captain would keep Mira and my daughter. He knew it well. He remembered not only my return from the swamps, but also my escape from Pangea on the day I'd learned of General Varlamov's real plans. His plans...
Two years ago I had acted on impulse. I'd run away from Pangea like a little boy without first talking to my father. I'd wanted to warn people on Earth about the danger they faced. Instead, the Feds had gotten their hands on me straight away. They started studying me like a guinea pig; they disemboweled my memory; and once the general had bluffed them into thinking he'd discovered some new course of action, they'd modified my identity and sent me and Wong back: him, as a killer to eliminate the danger - my father. Me, as a guide to lead him to the general.
In the silence that followed, I heard weak mumbling. The professor's lips moved as he repeated, "We need to stop it immediately. Immediately. Stop it. We.."
"I'm the only person who can control the machine," I finally said to the captain. "We need to come to an agreement. You bring Mira, the baby and my friends. I'll start the device."
"Non-negotiable," Blank snapped.
I shook my head. "Tell me what you want. What's your objective? Do you want to go back to Earth? Or do you want to travel in space?"
"I want to finish what we started," he articulated. "Your father turned out to be a coward."
I cracked my clenched fists.
"Stand still," Blank smirked. "The general bluffed all the way. He didn't intend to exterminate people. It was just his way of blackmailing the government. He used to say that threats were the best form of pressure." His face strained, eyes glaring with hatred. "We've been stuck here for two extra years, all for the pleasure of rescuing you." He stepped toward the pedestal and shoved the mumbling Neumann aside.
"You're going to disconnect Earth from Pangea," Blank pointed at me, "as soon as the cargo clears the jumpgate."
"What are my guarantees?" I wasn't going to let him browbeat me. "Mira, my daughter and my friends must stay alive. Otherwise..."
"I already told you. It's non-negotiable. You choose," he made a fist and untucked his thumb. "You either do what you're told and wait for us to come back from New Pang or," Blank unbent the index finger and made a gesture as if pulling a trigger, "all of your so-called friends, your daughter and your broad are history."
I gnashed my teeth and leaned forward.
"They'll all die," added the captain, "each and every one of them, right in front of your own eyes.
Chapter Three
An Important Link
I had to admit to defeat. In the first round at least because I knew that Blank wouldn't give up. He'd keep Mira and my daughter hostage while he still needed me, and then...
Keeping my cool, I again told the captain that the machine wouldn't obey anyone but me. No one but me could sever the link between Earth and Pangea.
For a few seconds, Blank fell silent, thinking. Then he drew his gun and shot the professor in the head. The bullet went through the old man's temple; he flapped his arms and fell face down onto the semisphere.
Blank shot Neumann three more times. The bullets left ragged holes in the professor's bloodied lab coat. Then he slid down onto the floor next to the pedestal.
"It's up to you if you want the others to live," Blank put the gun back in its holster. The protective membrane cleared up. An opening started to grow in it.
"Clean it up," the captain nodded at the body and stepped into the opening.
The cyber troopers lifted the dead professor like a rag doll and dragged him out after Blank.
I couldn't understand why Blank killed Neumann. The old man had probably known too much about Pangea and the Forecomers. Blank didn't want to leave us two together fearing that the professor might have come up with a way out for us both. Or maybe he'd wanted to break me: if now he told Mira that I'd caused her father's death, she would see me in a completely different light. No, he wouldn't go that far. Blank wasn't that stupid to alienate me: if I lost Mira and the baby, I wouldn't do jack shit for him.
Once the cyber troopers passed through the opening, the membrane sealed shut. Within a minute, the command center was empty apart from the operator by the control panel, his face illuminated by the glow of his monitor.
Now what? This simple question drove me mad. I had no idea how to get out of this trap. If I stayed behind the membrane, I wouldn't be able to stop Blank.
Wait up. Who said I couldn't?
I glanced at the semisphere. The 3D map of the universe reappeared in my mind. Immediately, the memory chip zoomed in on it and sent the plan of Pangea to my lens monitor.
Oh wow. I shook my head. It looked like the late Neumann had been right and human technologies did indeed resemble the Pangean ones - or rather those of the Forecomers. The portal machine and the chip in my head exchanged data like server-based protocols. Apparently, either my nervous system had somehow linke
d up with the machine or the device itself had tied itself to my memory chip and studied the software in my head while I'd been busy bargaining with Blank. I sort of divined the symbols on the plan but I still had no idea exactly how my brain communicated with the portal machine.
I sat cross-legged on the floor and started staring at the equipment in the command center. The cabinets, the control panel and the monitors' glow swam before my eyes. I tried to relax and see the crimson threads that had helped me to defeat Wong.
There could be a fault or two in my reasoning but I didn't care anymore. Apparently, the device and the program that controlled it - which was possibly an artificial intellect for all I knew - had mistaken me for some part of itself, a main link within a flexible system. Yes, link was the right word. This was why two years ago in the swamps the fifth beacon had activated sensing me inside. This was why the machine's preprogrammed protective shield hadn't allowed me to die when the Chinese was about to deal me a lethal blow. Now we were one and the same, and if danger threatened me, the portal machine would protect me. Now that nothing and nobody posed a threat, the defensive program had gone on standby so no matter how much I concentrated, it wouldn't respond.
From the corner of my eye I sensed a movement in the control center. I got up off the floor. Behind the membrane stood Blank, Wladas, Kathy and their guards - the very same cybers who had shot the raiders at the river.
The captain's lips moved soundlessly as he gave orders. Then he opened the entrance through the membrane and stayed there while letting in my friends and their escort.
"We're leaving, Master Specialist," he pointed at the officer at the control panel. "We'll keep in touch through the operator."
"Where's Mira and the baby?" I stepped toward the opening.
"They're going with us," Blank turned away and ordered the soldiers to prepare the mobile reserve group to set off.
The membrane between us sealed up and clouded over.