Reviled (Frankenstein Book 2)

by Dean C. Moore

  Lar focused his eyes back on the present, taking his mind out of the past, in time to find Ramon’s attention had shifted to the other walls in the chamber, and the ceiling. In a determination to find out why, rather than ask him, he started studying the other walls as well. Up until now, the one wall had captured the bulk of their attention.

  “The passage repeats,” Lar said.

  “A protective warding spell, maybe,” Ramon suggested, “that’s keeping the Frankenstein’s monster out of this chamber.”

  “There’s one way to find out.” Suddenly Lar was Spiderman. He scaled the walls freestyle, like a rock climber, using the slits between stone slabs on which the picture-writing was embossed, and the cracks in the walls to ascend them to get to the points where the images were still obscured. When in doubt as to the actual figure that needed restoring, all he had to do was look at the still intact figure on another wall or on the ceiling.

  Ramon had joined him, using less primitive methods, merely hovering over the ground, using the chi energy blasted through the chakras in the balls of his feet to levitate him. Evidently, if the mandalas were properly calibrated, even a mandala magician could duplicate well enough what a chi master otherwise alone could do. Especially on a power spot this powerful. It wasn’t like he had to power up enough to fight with chi energy alone; for that you needed a genuine chi master.

  When the last of the images were cleaned up, in some cases, necessitating that the mandala magician fill in the missing pieces that had fallen away by blasting laser energy from his eyes along a telescoping tunnel of mandalas, whose geometries protected his eyes—another chi master trick Ramon could emulate if he were standing on a power spot powerful enough…. The room took on an actual hum…maybe it was a vibration.

  And then Soren and the beast—fused in the distance and fuming—roaring and throwing rocks the entire time—disappeared.

  Ramon settled himself back to the ground and together, he and Lar surveyed the corridor leading to the cypher room to confirm the monster was gone. “The combination of symbols must produce an energy vibration that’s like a deafening whine to intruders wielding dark forces, especially if they themselves are using this alien language. The droning is enough to shatter the sensitive communication networks required for this kind of thinking, which includes factoring in so many moves ahead.”

  “You see what’s going on here, don’t you?”

  Ramon turned to Lar again, startled. “What?”

  “Whatever the beast is up to, he’s drawing us all into his web, making us unwitting tools in his master plan. Fucking with us just so to steer us in the direction he wants.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “This is Soren and the beast—fused as one now—we’re talking about. I think if he really wanted us dead instead of corralled in a certain direction—”

  “Maybe,” Ramon admitted begrudgingly.

  He nodded slowly as his eyes gradually went wide. Some part of his brain was already in agreement even as the rest of his mind continued to crack the meaning behind the mystery of Soren’s and the beast’s behavior. “It’s possible the Soren/Frankenstein’s monster dyad doesn’t yet know what their ultimate purpose is, if they’re still mastering the alien language. You think they want our help to master it?”

  “With their combined thirst for knowledge and power, the more they learn, the more they’ll want to employ the cabbalistic spirit science. Making them unwitting dupes of whoever is pulling their strings.”

  “Like the Dark Matter Man.” Ramon’s eyes lost their focus again.

  “It’s possible he’s using Soren and the beast as his ticket off this world. He may understand enough of us to know that our science and magic are too primitive for him. And if he stays here, surrounded by imbeciles, it’s just a matter of time until he loses his edge. But if Soren and the beast could open a path to this ancient predatory civilization, by now, more evolved yet….”

  “If I know Victor,” Ramon said, “he already has the broad strokes of the picture down on paper as involves the Dark Matter Man’s gamesmanship. He’ll be looking to us to fill in more of the smaller lines.”

  Ramon continued pondering those smaller lines until his eyes raised to Lar once again. “There’s no telling if that alien civilization still exists,” Ramon countered.

  “For us, no. But maybe not for the Dark Matter Man. Maybe he can sense their power and darkness, resonate to it, like a tuning fork that’ll take him to whatever time and place that civilization was at its peak, he just can’t open the bridge. For that he needs Soren.”

  Ramon sighed, thinking it over, not sure if he was convinced.

  There were noises in the distance, getting louder.

  Lar and Ramon approached the doorway to the chamber, saw the scientists hiking toward them. “They can’t be allowed to find this chamber,” Lar said. “If they decode the language, if it takes them ten years or ten lifetimes, the fools could very well open the bridge themselves.”

  “But if the chamber is destroyed, it’ll no longer be able to put out the frequency that acts as a barrier to that alien race, or perhaps just keeps us off their radar.”

  Lar glared at him accusatively. “Have Victor ward the chamber with his mandala magic if you’re not strong enough so anyone getting too close finds themselves in some other part of the pyramid instead, as if it just weren’t here.”

  Ramon nodded. He consciously boosted his excitement level, which wasn’t hard, considering the scientists getting closer with each step toward the chamber were spiking his adrenaline. That way, Victor could read his mind and take the necessary actions faster than he could if Ramon just tried to explain what was what to him.

  And in the next moment they were gone—teleported back to the lab Victor’s team was using. Ramon had meant to open the portal himself, but Victor must have been unwilling to give him the split second he needed. The guy must have been really worked up. That was never good.

  TWENTY-SIX

  When Lar and Ramon materialized back in the lab, Victor already had the images from the pyramid cypher chamber walls up on the big screens for his scientists to study. Victor himself paced the room, pulling at his lower lip pondering the other implications of Lar’s and Ramon’s reasoning, which he’d also sucked out of their heads the moment Ramon spiked his energy level.

  Ramon noticed that his previous dialogue with Lar was also up on one of the computer screens, verbatim—every word and every insight pertaining to the cabbalistic patterns. Aeros and Airy, Ry and An, of course, wouldn’t need the image to refer back to. The notes would already be stored in their mindchips, turned into search algorithms to refine the hacking of the cabbalistic etchings. Victor didn’t want to take the chance of Lar or Ramon forgetting any of their own insights—it was the only reason he’d have bothered to project the images. This guy wasn’t leaving anything to chance. That, and there were likely other AIs in the lab already working on the material.

  Ramon opened a portal back to Victor’s penthouse. “Why are you headed back to my place?” Victor asked, defensively and accusatively at the same time.

  “These cabbalistic images are ancient, Victor. I still suspect one of your medallions, many of which date back three thousand years or more, may have more answers for us.”

  Victor nodded, conceding the point. “I’ll be able to track the scientists working on the other pyramids in Antarctica. The instant one of them gets overly excited with what they find I’ll be able to record their thoughts and the images before their eyes for the team. So, I suppose sending you on safari again can take a backseat.”

  ***

  Ramon stepped through the portal in Victor’s lab, and was gone, the portal sealing behind him.

  Lar raised his voice to Victor. “Send me to one of the pyramids yet to be explored, please, the ones with no access yet.”

  Victor’s eyebrows pinched. “You’ll likely trigger every deadfall in the place.”

  “I know. I’m l
ooking to develop that talent into a superpower. Maybe I can use it to lead me to danger that no one else on the team can yet see.”

  Victor smiled vaguely. “What the hell happened in that temple?”

  Lar realized then that Victor’s mind pictures had limits on their resolution. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Very well.” Victor took Lar’s palms again, held them up, and beamed a pattern overlay from his eyes at the mandalas. “I’ve fine-tuned the mandala magic in your hands further, so you can just visualize what you need when you get there, and it will manifest for you, sucked in from wherever in space and time it needs to come from. You still remember how to use the palm mandalas to get your ass out of there in a hurry?”

  “Yes, not that it matters. I’m sure when my energy spikes high enough, you’ll know to pull me out of your own accord.”

  Victor nodded and opened a portal for him. Lar took a deep breath and stepped through it.

  ***

  The second Lar was through the portal to the latest temple in Antarctica to explore and the doorway had closed behind him, Victor returned to his pacing and fretting and lower-lip pulling.

  “What has you so worked up, Victor?” Naomi asked, observing him from her perch overhead. All the other scientists were too busy working with the latest data to much take him on; if anything, they’d turned ignoring him and anything extraneous to their work into a bit of an art form; that meant they’d also put her out of their minds.

  The rest of Victor’s team seemed to share their own special bonds. If Aeros got lost in thought, as now, Airy emitted visible vapors at him that communicated volumes in a private chemical language only he could decode. He snapped out of his reverie and smiled at her. Earlier, Naomi had seen him do something similar, in reverse, siccing his nanites on her with messages that perhaps would take lifetimes to an un-upgraded mind to read. As for Ry and An, if either started fretting too much about whatever piece of the puzzle they were stuck on, the other one would come around from behind, embrace his/her partner, with enough furtive kisses to start their shape-shifting. Both could sex change again, including An, now that she had made headway with the cabbalistic nanites. Liberating one another’s thinking in this matter from the bondage of sexually-biased reasoning, seemed to be a thing with them.

  “I can’t see any way out of this trap that doesn’t involve us playing the beast’s game,” Victor replied, “that’s what. We have to permit ourselves to be moved about like pieces on the chessboard and hope to divine the end game before he does—before that end game annhilates us all.”

  “We might be able to help with that,” Aeros said. Naomi was just as surprised as Victor that anything they were saying had registered with any of the scientists.

  Naomi was still trying to get used to Aeros and Airy; they were so semi-transparent, so mostly-not-there, it was a bit like seeing ghosts. An ability she had had once, which she’d since shut down; it creeped her out too much. Aeros and Airy were both wearing slippers that helped them to adhere to the ground and lent them sufficient gravity to walk about freely without their muscles unwittingly launching them off the floor; or without having to devote mindpower to manipulating their chemical and nano-reactions to resisting the tendency to drift with the slightest breeze—including that kicked up by someone simply brushing by them.

  “Help? How?” Victor remarked, his testy baseline tone as present now as ever.

  “I can surround each member of both our teams, and every major hitter in Syracuse he’s likely to go after, namely the districts’ master wizards, with nanite clouds that record everything going on with everyone in real time—no matter how many places Soren is able to be at once,” Aeros said.

  “The intel gathered, in turn, will be immediately presented to our supersentient AIs for analysis,” Ry explained.

  “I’ll be able to constantly refine the data-mining algorithms as the team continues to decode this language,” An added.

  “This spirit science, you mean,” Airy chimed in. Their cabbalistic specialist was making more headway than anyone else on the team, who could do little but serve in ancillary support. “It does a hell of a lot more than enable the mind wielding it to see many moves ahead.” She demonstrated for them by highlighting a band of figures she was studying and projecting them in the middle of the group with her laser pen.

  “Aeros, if you wouldn’t mind lining the symbols with your nanites?” Airy said.

  Aeros emitted a swarm of nanites from the porous cavities of his aerogel body that drifted, cloudlike toward the letters, and took up residence in them, evenly distributed throughout the entire pattern.

  “Victor, if you wouldn’t mind hitting those nanites with energy, from left to right, one symbol at a time?” Airy coached.

  Victor did as requested, blasting the images with chi energy as he traced the outline of the figures, his chi focused and amplified for him by the mandala over his right palm chakra, and narrowed to a point at the end of the cone of energy where the point met the symbols.

  The pattern of symbols duplicated. “Hit them with more energy this time,” Airy said.

  Victor obliged. This time the pattern duplicated twice, not once. There were now four rows of symbols, all identical. “So this is how Soren is able to be in more than one place at a time.”

  “And I think it’s safe to predict that as he grows more powerful, he’ll be able to fight a war on more and more fronts,” Airy explained.

  “I’ll have our two errand boys, Surf and Superman, get the nanite surveillance teams out to the master wizards in each district,” Victor said.

  “Victor!” Naomi chastised, raising her voice from the rafters above, then drifting down to the ground. “You’d think if only to save your own ass, you’d learn to play nicer with others.”

  Victor grunted, and opened portals to Surf and Superman, both currently flying over the Transhumanist district—no doubt powering up with new nanotech by visiting as many tech wizards as were still available; possibly because the remaining transhumanist free agents had joined the group mind consortium in time to resist the Dark Matter Man—for now.

  Both flyers paused where they were, stood up straight and focused on Victor, then nodded as they received his thought broadcast. The nanite swarms were leaving Aeros’s body in swarms, aggregating into silver spheres that were then linking together like beads on a necklace. They then strung themselves around the necks and wrists of both fly boys. “Just toss one of the spheres at the wizard as you zoom by and the nanites will deploy from there,” Aeros explained.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Victor said, “now you look like every other drag queen in the Transhumanist district.”

  Surf and Superman smiled, refusing to be goaded, before zooming off, divvying up the various sectors’ chief wizards between them.

  The wizards themselves would be shielded from Victor’s thought broadcasting—they didn’t exactly like anyone getting inside their heads, understandably. Some of them might well be able to shield their thoughts from Victor, as well, so he was forced to concede the nanite surveillance teams were a good idea.

  Victor pinched off the portals. “You’re fretting again, Victor,” Naomi said. “It’s becoming a thing. I’m even getting good at knowing when it’s on account of some seriously troubling insight, like now.”

  He gazed at her as if he didn’t much care for someone in his head either. “The Dark Matter Man, in his female guise as Dracus, has yet to leave his apartment or stop dancing. If we can interrupt that dance, maybe we can break the trance holding Soren prisoner.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Naomi said. “You saw what she did to you, our most powerful wizard, without even breaking a sweat. No, it’s true the longer this game plays out, the more she learns about us and our weaknesses, but the more we learn about her as well. And we may only get one shot at taking her down. Going in blind is no option at all.”

  He grunted, but didn’t really argue the point. “Also, I wouldn’t count
Soren out just yet,” Naomi said. “If I know him, he’s still carrying his weight on this team, same as ever. Consider him your inside man.”

  “Cute. The hope of the hopeless. For those of you who do hope, I suppose, why not imagine as much? Don’t really care what powers you across the finish line.”

  They all eyed one another testily. “Better get back to work,” Airy said.

  “Better get back to letting Soren yank our chains, you mean.” The bitterness was evident in Victor’s voice; it was really eating him not knowing what Soren’s endgame was. Naomi supposed he had a right to worry.

  “Yes, but the question now is, who’s yanking whose chain?” An said, trying to end on a positive note.

  “Soren says you never used to miss a dare with him,” Naomi goaded. “You loved racing him to the finish line. So, what’s so different now that the contest boils down to who can manipulate who the best and the fastest?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Soren says’?” Victor asked suspiciously.

  “He spoke to me from the tank just now.”

  Victor smiled. “Nothing. Nothing’s different now. The game’s afoot, my friend,” Victor said, turning to project his last few words at the frozen Soren, before opening a portal overhead and zooming off on his mandala bridge, growing out from the bottom of his feet. He lit up the night sky over the city like a meteor.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  In the blackness of night, where anything could be out there, cloaked, Augustus’s peripheral nerves, prickling his skin, were acting more sensibly than him. Something was definitely stalking him; he just couldn’t tell what.

  The six blind huntresses materialized about Augustus, who’d broken from his run, sensing the presence virtually upon him, even if he couldn’t ascertain its nature. They had been cloaked in an invisibility spell. “You should have anticipated this, you fool!”