Weatherby turned and saw Anne at musket point, raising her hands. They had somehow gotten the better of them all too quickly. Weatherby raised his pistol to fire at the man who threatened her, but the soft cock of a trigger near his ear told him otherwise.
He turned to see a man in the dress of a French naval officer pointing a pistol at his face.
“Monsieur,” Weatherby said in French, deftly flipping the pistol in his hand and surrendering it to the Frenchman. “We surrender. You will bring us to your commander.” He repeated the statement, loudly and in English, for the benefit of his men.
“Your sword,” the French officer said in accented English, muffled by the facial apparatus he wore; it seemed the French had canny alchemists with them as well, and St. Germain’s involvement was certainly far more likely now. Weatherby frowned, but handed the blade over. Often, surrendering officers were able to keep their swords until such time as they could be handed over to the highest enemy officer present. Then again, most blades could not cut steel in twain.
The Fortitude party was rounded up by the French—there were eight of them, as it happened, though some appeared to be recent arrivals—but at this juncture, Gar’uk was nowhere to be seen, which gave Weatherby some small hope that he was racing back to the ship for rescue or reinforcement. Once the French secured them, they were made to march into the shadows toward the back of the ruined temple. There was a large archway there, and they were brought through it into a series of anterooms and chambers. Most were strewn with rubble and ruined furnishings of some kind or another, and they seemed long-ago pillaged of anything valuable.
One such room had another door in it, one that cannily blended into the very wall. A secret door, as it happened, and one that led into the very hillside upon which the temple rested. A small corridor—small, at least, for the Xan, but wide enough for humans to walk two abreast—led deep into the bedrock, which was roughly hewn at first but seemed to become better carved as they progressed.
“Light ahead, sir,” MacClellan whispered. And indeed, the familiar flickering of torch-light grew brighter as they progressed. The French began to remove their masks, but a look from Weatherby told his men to keep theirs on.
After another turn, they came upon a doorway which led into what seemed to be a larger chamber. The French officer halted them before the portal, then entered the room and moved out of sight. Snippets of a conversation in rapid French followed.
Weatherby turned to Anne, whose eyes grew wide and jaw became clenched. And in that moment, he knew.
A voice called out from the room, and the guards pushed and shoved the party into the chamber. It was relatively small compared to the ruins above, but had numerous carvings on the walls—ones Weatherby and Anne had seen before on Callisto, at the Xan settlement there.
Inside, a number of men—and three Xan, as it happened, were excavating along one of the walls, away from the door. They were supervised, it seemed, by a tall, strapping man in the clothes of a fine gentleman.
When this worthy turned toward the group, Weatherby saw it was the Count St. Germain, the finest and most powerful alchemist humanity had ever produced. And as Weatherby feared, he was clearly no captive.
He looked quite serious, and spoke with no little compassion. “I am so sorry,” he said, primarily to Anne. “I had not thought you would seek me out as you did.”
Anne’s look was sharper than Weatherby’s blade. “Then you do not know your own wife, sir,” she spat. “Where is Philip?”
St. Germain glanced over at Weatherby, then turned back in surprise and recognition. “Ah! It makes sense now. What an unfortunate happenstance that they would send you, Mister . . . Weatherby, am I right?”
“Captain Weatherby,” he and Anne replied, in unison.
St. Germain smiled. “I’m sorry, I mean not to play with you, sir. I know full well who you are. Our opinion of you, Anne and I, has remained quite high over the years. And word has come to us of your great deeds and valiant efforts on behalf of the English. Sadly, I had hoped our time together would’ve taught you something of the futility of the affairs of nations, but it’s quite apparent that’s not happened.”
“Where is Philip?” Weatherby demanded by way of response. “And your French allies have several of my men, whom I would see released at once.”
St. Germain turned to the French officer and began a new barrage of rapid-fire questions in that tongue. Finally, he turned back to Weatherby. “I’m told your men aboard Franklin put up a most ferocious struggle. Only nine remain, including the commander you put in place. They have been removed from the ship and brought here in case we had need of their labor. Which, as you can see, we do not as of yet.”
“And Philip?” Anne demanded once more. “I would see him. Now.”
“As you wish, madam,” St. Germain replied. “Philip!”
A moment later, the boy himself ran into the room toward his father, who nodded over toward Anne. The boy turned . . . and it was immediately apparent something had changed. He was sweating, his skin was quite pale, and his eyes appeared dark and sunken.
“Mother!” he smiled. “Have you come to see it?”
Anne looked aghast. “See what?” she asked, her voice breaking at the sight of her son.
Philip turned to Weatherby and bowed slightly in acknowledgement. “Father is going to make the finest discovery since the Philosopher’s Stone. And we will achieve such enlightenment from it!”
Weatherby’s eyes narrowed. “What discovery?”
St. Germain answered for his son. “The Emerald Tablet, of course. The key to understanding the very underpinnings of alchemy as set forth by the ancient Martians millennia ago. And Philip here,” he added, nodding toward the boy, “may very well be the key to it all.”
Philip smiled, and Weatherby’s heart broke for Anne, who could not stifle a gasp and sob. For the boy’s smile, it seemed, was not his own.
June 21, 2134
Diaz looked in horror as the tendrils of blue light began to multiply around the edges of the frame apparatus inside the containment chamber. “What the hell is that?”
She turned to her officers, both of whom stared in mute horror. Her next thought was to ask Greene, a mental reflex that didn’t reflect the fact that he remained at the front of the room, continuing the very experiment that brought those tendrils into being. Greene, Ayim and their team were working feverishly around the chamber, trading holodata at dizzying rates and shouting at ever increasing levels.
And as for the portal itself, she continued to see glimpses of people through the window, bathed in blue light and looking blurry and distant. Mostly, it was the guy wearing Egyptian clothing. Finch—was it really Finch?—was nowhere to be seen.
Each time the portal showed an image of . . . wherever it was, whoever it was . . . there seemed to be a spike in radioactive activity, and the techs’ level of animation rose. Diaz noticed that a few of them started to see the glimpses she was of the other side as well.
So they knew it was a portal, and they knew it was working. But it was also apparent that something was wrong.
“If that really was Finch, then we’re breaking through to the same dimension we did on Mars,” Diaz said.
“As I understand it, most likely,” Coogan replied.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Huntington interrupted. She pointed toward the front of the room, where Harry Yu was gesticulating wildly and yelling at Ayim, who was doing his best to ignore the executive while Greene tried to manage whatever the hell was going on. “Seems your friend Harry’s starting to lose his shit.”
“Seems like everyone is,” Diaz noted. She looked over at the goons guarding them; both seemed to be more focused on the strangeness in the containment chamber than in their charges. “Time for Operation Rainbows and Unicorns, you think?”
Huntington nodded. “On your mark.”
Diaz smiled grimly and flexed her wrists and hands a few times. It’d been a few years since she’d g
otten into a really good fight. But she kept up with her PT and could still give the youngsters a run for their money. “Remember, no matter what, we’ve got to get this shut down, in whatever way possible. Jimmy, you’re on point for that.”
The British officer seemed nonplussed, but nodded. “I’ll do what I can, ma’am.”
Diaz turned to Huntington and idly held up the piece of paper holding her doodled plan of attack. “As written, Captain?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the younger woman replied, visibly tensing.
“Go.”
Diaz swiveled around in her chair and lashed out at the kneecap of the guard nearest her, sinking her boot into his patella with a satisfying crunch. The man gasped in pain as Diaz sprang from her chair, uppercut first, connecting with his chin and snapping his neck backward. The guard’s head hit the wall, and Diaz’ followup hit his trachea to silence any more outbursts. She grabbed the man’s weapon and wheeled around toward Huntington, who already was proceeding toward the middle of the room, her target a crumpled, unconscious heap on the floor, with Coogan right behind her. The rest of the room remained, thankfully, oblivious.
Getting slow, Diaz groused to herself as she followed Huntington, weapon at the ready. A couple of techs and scientists toward the back scattered in their wake at the sound of the scuffle, but most were busy contending with whatever was going on in the containment area. There were two more guards near the front of the room, but they were raptly watching the hypnotic dance of blue tendrils along the containment frame’s edge. Getting to them would require Diaz and Huntington to pass unnoticed by several workstations and techs. Even with everything going on, that wasn’t likely.
Diaz paused just behind a tech, the first she encountered. She held up a hand to stop Huntington, then turned to put the barrel of her gun at the man’s neck. “Not a word,” she whispered, leaning in toward his ear. “English?”
“Yeah,” the man whispered back, already visibly trembling.
“Shut down whatever the fuck’s going on here,” Diaz growled.
“We can’t,” he replied. “Don’t know how. Energy levels—”
Diaz cut him off with a hiss and a nudge with her weapon, which caused the man to shiver more noticeably. She hoped he’d hold it together long enough for Plan B. “Get those guards out of here and lock the doors behind them.”
The tech’s trembling fingers tapped out commands on his holocontrols. A few moments later, the two guards, hands to their earpieces, hustled out of the room. Diaz watched as the guy at the controls locked the doors behind them.
“Good boy,” she said. “You behave yourself now, OK?”
She was rewarded with a pale, nervous nod. Diaz turned to Huntington and gave a hand signal. They were about to go overt.
Huntington rushed forward and fired her rifle into the air, causing everyone in the room to jump. “All right!” she yelled. “Playtime’s over. This thing gets shut down NOW!”
The techs all stared at her for a moment, then went back to their work. Trading confused glances, Diaz and Huntington proceeded to the front of the room, where Harry, Greene and Ayim stood looking at them—Ayim and Greene worried, Harry pissed.
“What do you think we’re doing?” Harry barked. “Stop shooting up my fucking lab and let us do our jobs.”
Diaz kept her weapon trained on him and did her level best to resist the urge to shoot him where he stood. “Tell me what the fuck is going on.”
Harry glared daggers at her before finally nodding over at Ayim, who replied. “We’ve cut all power to the accelerator, but the chain reactions are continuing and power levels are rising. The . . . artifact . . . in the floor is somehow fueling it. As for the effect around the containment frame, the glowing is a Cherenkov byproduct of something else.”
Diaz turned to Greene. “Evan, get this shut down. Harry, you need to sound evacuation and get everyone out of here except for the people you need in this room.”
Harry pulled out a datapad and punched a number of commands into it. “Fine, have it your way. Evan, shut it down.”
Before Greene and Ayim could even begin to huddle again, another massive blue-white flash came from the containment area. As her eyes settled and focused, Diaz could see the guy in the Egyptian clothing once more, his arms wide and mouth moving.
But the tendrils . . . they were bigger. And they were growing longer, and swaying more. There were hundreds . . . no, thousands of them.
“Evan, what are those?” Diaz asked.
“We have no idea,” he said crossly as he began to swipe through holodata alongside Ayim. “Right now I need to see if we can—”
“Radio signals!” one of the techs shouted. “I’m getting an unknown radio signal!”
Ayim stared back at the tech. “We’re shielded down here. How can we get a radio signal?”
“It’s coming from the containment area,” the tech replied, pointing at the chamber and glowing blue frame. “Running a match algorithm now.”
Harry turned to Diaz. “You think your pals on the other side invented radio somehow in the past two years?”
Greene interrupted before Diaz could respond or shoot Harry. “Signal identified. It’s . . . God, that can’t be right.”
“Report,” Diaz barked. Old habits died hard.
Greene stared at his data for several moments, then his hands flew into the air, rearranging streams of numbers and images, his eyes darting around. “It’s . . . it’s a JSC remote survey signal. From a planetary probe.”
“From which probe?” Coogan asked.
“According to the manifests, this is the underwater probe Armstrong took with them for use on Enceladus.”
“How is that possible?” Diaz demanded. “That’s a short-range signal.”
Greene turned toward her. “The tendrils. They’re not just lights. They represent dozens of tiny . . . wormholes. And they’re connecting this frame, this space-time point we’ve created, with Enceladus. I have no idea how.”
There was another flash from the chamber, and Diaz could see the Egyptian guy again, gesticulating wildly, and what appeared to be flashes of light near him or around him as well. He was doing something on the other side that didn’t look good. And seemingly in concert, the tendrils began extending themselves toward the thick, reinforced glass that kept the reaction chamber contained.
The first tendril simply extended itself through the glass as if it weren’t there at all, and began to enter the lab itself, to the sound of numerous alarms and panicked looks. Then another. And another. Soon, dozens of and hundreds of strands of light began poking out of containment, into the room. An alarm sounded, and a few of the techs in the back decided enough was enough, abandoning their stations.
Diaz turned to Greene. “What did you do?”
The physicist simply gaped in horror at the sight before him. “I don’t know.”
October 18, 1798
With a French soldier grasping each of his arms, Finch watched helplessly as Berthollet chanted through his ritual, as the portal before him winked in and out of existence, becoming slightly more solid, and real, upon each visitation. Beyond, he could see the others. For a moment of madness, he thought he recognized the silvery mane of hair belonging to that future-doctor, the one whose name, at the moment, fully escaped Finch’s memory.
Finch turned toward the audience beyond the altar, for those present had begun whispering amongst themselves, and not without a sense of alarm. He quickly saw the reason:
The amulets upon the participants’ chests. They were glowing blue.
“Let me go,” Finch whispered to his guards. “We must flee, all of us. You must see it, do you not?”
But they were not listening. Both wore the copper amulets. Both looked panicked and began to tremble. And when Finch peered closely, he saw the blue glow of the amulets mirrored in the depths of their eyes. Berthollet looked about, and seemed quite lost as he did. He had not completed the ritual. The crowd’s murmurs began to take on a
certain uniformity, and Finch could see that some had begun swaying back and forth themselves, all while trembling.
They were chanting. And doing so in a language Finch had never heard in all his travels.
“What have you done?” Finch called out to Berthollet. “Can’t you see that you’ve lost control of it?”
“We must continue with the ritual!” Berthollet said, grimacing, as much to himself as to Finch, it seemed.
Finch cast about for something, anything to do, and noticed that the grip of the guards had slackened to a degree. He would have to find the right balance between the guards’ lassitude and the potential danger of letting the ritual continue unabated—but Finch had a feeling that Berthollet’s efforts were moot at this juncture. Escape was paramount.
Thankfully, another flash of blue light from in front of the altar gave him the chance, for it temporarily blinded everyone near it. Finch wrested his arms from the guards’ grip and flung himself backward, performing a surprisingly adept roll that brought him right next to the side door from which he entered.
The guards stood where Finch had left them, swaying slightly and chanting.
“Well, that was easy,” Finch muttered.
“The rest won’t be,” came a voice from behind him.
Finch whirled around to see Deodat Dolomieu. He had no idea whether to ally with the young materia alchemist or attempt to subdue him. So he simply waited to see what Dolomieu would do.
As it turned out, Dolomieu simply stood in the doorway, peering around the corner apprehensively. “I made my escape as soon as that portal appeared,” the Frenchman said. “What is happening?”
“I’ve no idea, honestly,” Finch replied, opting to move into the doorway for the partial cover it afforded. “I’d say Berthollet has no idea what he’s uncovered, and it seems that there are those in the other . . . dimension, I suppose, or universe . . . that are doing the same damned foolish thing.”
The Enceladus Crisis Page 32