The Enceladus Crisis

by Michael J. Martinez

  Weatherby quietly relayed the question to Vellusk. “It is possible,” the Xan replied sadly. “The entire moon is covered in ice, with the Pool beneath stretching across the entire surface. But there are billions of souls therein.”

  “And you said your enemies,” Weatherby pressed. “These would include the souls you fought on ancient Mars?”

  Something dawned on Vellusk in that moment. “It is possible that your Philip has taken on the soul of a Martian. Or a Xan. Or even more than one of each. I cannot say for certain, but it is possible.”

  “And the Tablet . . .” Anne trailed off.

  Vellusk leaned over Weatherby, nearly crushing him, as he sought to reassure Anne. “The souls are inert, my good Countess. They cannot be so easily wakened, even through the Tablet’s power. Another piece would be required to empower them without the Xan’s consent, and that remains upon Earth, as was our intention when we split them up millennia ago.”

  And the final piece fell together in Weatherby’s head. “This piece, it was hidden in Egypt long ago, was it not?” Weatherby asked.

  “Yes,” Vellusk sang with a tremulous note.

  “The French are in Egypt now. They have invaded. And they are searching for something there with a veritable army of alchemists,” Weatherby said. “They know of this.”

  Vellusk was silent under his cowl for several long seconds before replying. “The betrayal of these partisans is even more foul than any had believed,” he sang finally, his harmonics taking on notes of sorrow . . . and anger.

  Weatherby turned to Anne and saw she was wide-eyed, tears forming in her eyes. “It is called The Book of the Dead. It is the counterpart to the Emerald Tablet. Light and dark, life and death. And I am sure the French have not told Francis of their efforts there, for he would not have let Philip partake of this Pool of Souls otherwise.”

  “What could happen?” Weatherby asked her.

  Anne closed her eyes a moment to compose herself. “If the energies of both are released, those that dwell beyond death could conceivably find new life,” she replied. “These items are of Martian origin, not Xan. From what Francis has told me, they were to be the final weapon of the Martians against the Xan. They could . . .”

  She was stopped by a sob which caught in her throat, and turned to look upon her son, who was now taking notes while gazing upon the Emerald Tablet itself, which now rested upon the large table in the room. It was a bright emerald green—the color of Althotas’ skin, if Weatherby’s memory served—and seemed to be glowing slightly of its own accord.

  “This is Althotas’ doing,” Weatherby said. “He has everyone in the dark again. The French believe they’ve found great alchemical power. The Count hopes for the secrets of alchemy. And the Xan . . .”

  Weatherby looked to Vellusk, who replied, “The Xan here, these partisans, believe they will finally have their war, and the means to defeat Althotas at his own game. From there, they may seek to rule over the rest of us—and perhaps the humans of Earth as well.”

  Before this could sink in, St. Germain began reading aloud from the Tablet itself. Within the room, there seemed to be an impossible, invisible yet wholly palpable shift, as if the very walls suddenly throbbed with power. The alchemist looked up briefly and smiled, then brought Philip over to stand next to him, pointing out something upon the Tablet and whispering to the boy, who nodded excitedly, even as the sweat upon his brow became more pronounced.

  “Francis! No!” Anne cried out. “It is a trap! They want you to do this!”

  One of the Xan walked over to Anne menacingly and stood over her. He raised his hand, but found it stayed by the count himself, who had to reach high above his head to grasp at the creature’s wrist. “No,” St. Germain said firmly. “You will not harm her.”

  The Xan’s head-tentacles flared and writhed as the creature’s two mouths creased in a pair of awful frowns, but lowered its arm and was satisfied to simply glare at Anne. Weatherby, for his part, began to struggle subtly against his bindings, hoping he might wheedle one of his hands free in time to act.

  St. Germain returned to the altar and read another passage, one which Philip echoed and added to, and Vellusk gave a plaintive sound in reply. “It is the language of the ancient Martians,” he sang quietly. “We are doomed now.”

  Weatherby frowned. He would be damned for time eternal if he’d give up so easily. Of course, his options were quite limited.

  Then, faintly, he began to hear the faint echoes of shouts from elsewhere in the massive temple complex. The clang of steel. A single, muffled pistol shot. A skirmish.

  Weatherby smiled, his hope and faith confirmed. He would never let Elizabeth use Gar’uk as a toy ever again.

  “To arms!” he suddenly shouted for all he was worth, in hopes his men were within earshot. “Fortitude!” And he leapt awkwardly to his feet and, much to the surprise of the Xan in front of Anne, threw himself into the much larger creature, sending them sprawling to the floor in a mass of limbs and tentacles. It was a poor gambit indeed, but he hoped he would disrupt the ritual altogether, or at least delay it until . . . something else happened.

  The Xan he tackled, of course, was in no mood to allow for delay, grabbing Weatherby by the neck and lifting him bodily off his feet as it stood. “So weak,” it sang, with a dread tone and staccato pronunciation. “So terribly weak.”

  Yet down the hall, the sounds of the fracas increased, and there was another gunshot besides. As Weatherby had hoped, loyal Gar’uk had found the means to effect a rescue, whether the Venusian had alerted Fortitude or found the captured men from Franklin. He could only hope it would be enough.

  The Xan turned to peer down the hall, and Weatherby—spots appearing before his eyes as the creature crushed his throat—curled his legs to him. He lashed out, his boots connecting to the side of the creature’s head and one of its mouths.

  The Xan gave a loud, atonal squeal that set Weatherby’s hair on end, even as it dropped him. The captain tumbled a full eight feet to the ground, but managed to roll and come up upon his knees, where he was able to stand, though not without pain from his landing. He spared a glance toward Anne, who had been shielded by Vellusk’s large body. A strange low-pitched sound, like growling and humming simultaneously, emerged from the Xan representative, aimed at the other two aliens in the room, who were now approaching him.

  Philip.

  Weatherby turned and, his hands still bound, dashed toward the altarpiece. There would be something—anything—there to do, he was sure.

  But he was too late.

  Philip had begun convulsing, and a blue light began shining from his very eyes, much to the shock of the Count St. Germain, who was shaking the boy’s shoulders and shouting his name.

  “The French have The Book of the Dead!” Weatherby shouted. “They have played you for a fool!”

  St. Germain stopped and turned to stare in astonishment at Weatherby, then over toward Anne, who was hidden from his view by the Xan. “Dear God,” St. Germain said quietly.

  “Stop it,” Weatherby insisted, reaching the altar. “Stop this ritual. End it. Do something!”

  St. Germain looked around, casting about in his mind for some solution. “How?”

  Frowning, Weatherby jumped up to sit upon the altarpiece, then quickly found his feet.

  And he kicked the Emerald Tablet off the altar and across the room. If nothing else, he felt it would change the equation.

  “No!” St. Germain shouted. “The energies!”

  The Emerald Tablet shattered into a million glittering green shards upon the stone floor of the room. And in that moment, Philip screamed.

  Weatherby turned to see the young man writhing in pain and clawing at his own face while his mouth gaped open to a nigh-impossible degree. The boy’s screams became muffled, as if his very throat was blocked. He began to convulse further.

  Then, to Weatherby’s horror, a pair of clawed fingers, green and translucent in the dim light, emerged from the boy�
�s mouth and curled around his lips, prying them apart even further. As Philip gurgled and fell to his knees, a face began to emerge—small at first, but growing at a prodigious rate as it squeezed itself out of the boy’s body. It had a bald, misshapen head, mere slits for a nose, and a small, lipless mouth that gasped and grinned horribly, showing pointed teeth full of menace.

  Weatherby had seen such a creature before. It was an ancient Martian.

  Or perhaps the ghost of one, for as the creature continued to pull itself out of Philip’s body, Weatherby could see through it to some small degree. A spirit, a shade . . . one growing quickly as its arms emerged, long and gangly with hands tipped by razor claws. Then the skeletal, emaciated body, and long, muscled legs, which the creature lifted out, one by one, from the gasping boy’s unnaturally stretched mouth.

  As Philip collapsed to the floor, unconscious, the Martian stood tall . . . very tall, a full nine feet, rivaling the height of the Xan. Its eyes were black as night, and its skin had a viscous sheen to it, even though its body remained translucent.

  “Two worlds, one soul, soon to be freed,” the creature intoned, its voice a horrific, buzzing whisper, as if echoed by every soul of every destroyed Martian of old. “I am Rathemas. And in this world, and the other, I have been reborn. The Pool of Souls will be destroyed. The rise of Mars is at hand.”

  Perhaps, Weatherby thought, his earlier gambit had been especially poor indeed.

  June 21, 2134

  “Armstrong, this is Jain. I’m on approach for docking. Please respond.”

  The comms continued to be maddeningly silent ever since Shaila piloted her little ship off the surface of Titan. If nothing else, the sensors remained active, which allowed her to track Armstrong as well as the Chinese lander . . . with Stephane aboard.

  She also used the time to think. The carvings on the walls down in that room looked nothing like the ones she saw back on Mars. If Weatherby’s old journal was correct—and she had seen enough to believe that it was—the other alien race in his dimension were the Saturn-dwelling Xan. It stood to reason, then, that the runes on Titan may have belonged to them. Of course, the potential for another encounter with Weatherby’s dimension was one of the reasons Armstrong was sent to Saturn in the first place, and Shaila and Stephane were added to the crew.

  Stephane . . .

  Shaking her head, she ran through her sensor data from her EVA on Titan. As she feared, the only hits of Cherenkov radiation came when Stephane handled the green slab for the first time. Mars, on the other hand, was overflowing with Cherenkov radiation when the ancient ruins appeared there two years ago. The radiation likely signaled the presence of tachyons, likely the byproduct of the dimensional shenanigans that went down.

  No Cherenkov meant no discernible tachyons . . . which meant either the room down on Titan was firmly in Shaila’s dimension, or there was something else at work there. Exactly what was at work, she couldn’t say. All she had was a name—Rathemas. It sounded a little too much like Althotas for her tastes.

  Shaila’s thoughts were interrupted by a blinking light ahead, about thirty degrees to the left of Saturn in her viewscreen. Sensors identified the light as coming from Armstrong. A second, dull light right next to it would be Tienlong.

  Those lights shouldn’t be blinking. Armstrong’s running lights didn’t do that. Unless . . .

  She keyed a series of commands into the computer. A moment later, her hunch was correct. Armstrong’s lights were blinking out a signal in good old-fashioned Morse code. Figures Archie would be old-school enough to think of that. Shaila quickly had the computer translate, since she had probably missed some of the letters.

  JAIN REPLY. Over and over.

  She keyed on her running lights and, with the computer’s help, sent out a signal: JAIN HERE.

  A moment later: CHINESE AT TIENLONG NO WORD FROM MARK COMMS OUT

  “Shit,” Shaila muttered. That meant Nilssen and Conti were sitting ducks. They’d see Stephane, assume he was a friendly, and probably end up captured or killed. She keyed out a reply: MARK IN TROUBLE WARN HIM USE MORSE.

  It took a moment, but Armstrong responded: UNDERSTOOD. Then it started blinking again, for Tienlong’s benefit: DANGER DANGER. Over and over again. It would have to do.

  Shaila overrode the speed governor on the lander and made a bead for Armstrong, covering the space in just fifteen minutes. However, it seemed the Chinese lander had done so much earlier—or was just plain faster—for as she approached Armstrong for docking, she could see both Chinese landers already attached to Tienlong. Shaila momentarily thought about trying to head over to the Chinese ship, but that would require a suited EVA into space, and it wasn’t like they’d simply let her in through the airlock if Stephane and his new friend had taken the ship.

  The helplessness was almost overpowering.

  Shaila hit her reverse thrusters hard and came to a stop neatly under the Armstrong’s docking ring. At any other time, she’d be proud of her piloting skills—and concerned about JSC’s reaction to that kind of cowboy flying—but right now, she needed to get aboard her ship and find a way to stop whatever the hell was going on.

  As soon as the ship hit the docking ring and began the pressurization sequence, Shaila keyed on her internal comm. “Archie, come in.”

  “I’m here,” he replied. “Command center. Get up here.”

  Shaila bolted out of the pilot’s seat and waited impatiently as the ship’s mechanisms finished docking. She was out the upper hatch in record time, tossing her helmet and gauntlets aside and hurtling through the length of the ship toward the command center.

  She found Archie in there, and he quickly tossed her a visor and comm unit. Once she put it on, she saw he was surrounded by holoimages of ship schematics for both Tienlong and Armstrong, overlaid atop the view of space around them.

  “Where’s Stephane and Hall?” he demanded.

  Shaila settled into the seat next to him and buckled in. “Hall’s dead. Stephane’s been compromised. He’s working with the Chinese.”

  Archie looked dumbfounded for several long seconds before he continued on. “Then we got serious problems here. I finally figured out the damn comm issues aboard Tienlong, but now we’re jammed to hell and back by something else.”

  “The Chinese dug up some kind of artifact that’s jamming all our signals,” Shaila replied. “What was the problem on Tienlong?”

  Archie enlarged the schematic of the Chinese ship, his hands darting through the data with an impressive grace for his age. “Well, I was thinking that all their hard rad shielding was to blame, and that’d be true at longer ranges, but not this close. There’s some kind of low-level interference going on in there. If I had to guess, someone jury rigged something on that ship to keep things quiet.”

  “So they walked into a trap,” Shaila said. “Any response from the Morse code?”

  “Nothing. I’ve got cameras and sensors on all their windows and hatches, too. Haven’t seen much movement aboard. I—what the fuck is that?”

  Shaila looked over to where Archie was pointing, one of the feeds from Armstrong’s external cameras, trained on one of Tienlong’s airlocks. The door was open . . . and an astronaut was floating out of it . . .

  . . . without a helmet.

  “Identify,” Shaila ordered, her voice tremulous.

  The camera zoomed in. It was Nilssen. There was a red mist coming out of a vent in his suit along his abdomen, and up around his head as well. He wasn’t moving.

  If he wasn’t dead, he would be in the next fifteen seconds.

  “Good god,” Archie breathed.

  Shaila sat in stunned silence for a moment. “Any sign of Conti?”

  Archie’s fingers dashed across the holocontrols. “No.”

  Their options were growing slimmer, and they still didn’t know what they were really facing. But two members of the Armstrong crew were dead, including the commander. “Note that Colonel Mark Nilssen is hereby reported dead. As of t
his timestamp, I’ve assumed command of JSCS Armstrong,” she said quietly.

  Archie nodded somberly. “Noted,” he said hoarsely.

  “Fire up the external emitter,” she ordered next. “We’re going to try to disable Tienlong.”

  “Whoa there,” Archie said. “We don’t have the capability to do that. It’s not like we can independently target the damn thing unless there’s an outage in the ship’s collision sensor system.”

  “So unplug the damn sensor!” Shaila growled. “Then we’ll manually aim it.”

  Archie paused a moment, but finally pulled up a series of command codes and prompts. “It’ll take a few minutes.”

  “Work fast. We—”

  A new alert stopped Shaila in mid-sentence. Their comms were back online. Just like that.

  “What the hell?” Archie growled. “How’d that happen?”

  Shaila keyed on the comm. “Tienlong, this is Armstrong. You are to stand down immediately or we will fire on you. Repeat, stand down immediately and surrender yourselves or we will fire on your ship. Over.”

  Nothing. It was worth a shot.

  “Their dish is turning,” Archie reported. “They’re cutting off their feed from Earth. Moving it toward . . . well, hell, I don’t know where.”

  “Track it,” Shaila ordered. “Who the hell else is out here?”

  A new holoimage sprang to life in front of them, tracking the swiveling dish aboard the Chinese ship and the various places it might try to reach. Earth was gone, then the Moon, then Mercury, Jupiter . . . until the dish finally stopped.

  The only world in the solar system in range of Tienlong’s communications dish was Enceladus.

  Shaila quickly called up all the sensors they had left on Enceladus. All were operating normally. The cameras still showed a pristine white landscape, the underwater probe was still sending back images and data, the survey satellite had a solid orbital view, and the ExEn demolitions unit . . .

  “Who put a demo unit on Enceladus?” Shaila demanded. “That wasn’t on the manifest.”

  Then Shaila remembered. Stephane’s experiments.