by Abhishek .
Daniel bent down and made me stand on my feet. My legs wobbled and I faltered the first few steps like a child learning to walk for the first time.
“Where are the others?” I asked him once I felt confident about my stride.
“I don’t know!” He gasped, his face turning red with pain. “Neither Vivek nor Hikaru is in the two rooms next to ours. I don’t know where to look! Hell, I can’t even see a way out!”
It was true. We were in a tight corridor with three more of the blue doors that probably led into more such operation chambers. The corridor snaked forward and bent leftwards into another corridor. A labyrinthine complex full of such operation chambers, a piece in an elaborate organ harvesting scandal that chose healthy earthlings who happened upon this dimension to pry out their organs... for what purpose? Selling? Medical purposes? Or something way darker than that?
“Let’s just move. No point checking every room. We need to find another way.”
We raced through the corridors as swiftly as we could, unable to break into a run because of the incisions in our back and the energy-draining effect of the anaesthesia. Under my bare feet, the dark grey floor of the facility seemed like porcelain. Was it because of my clammy skin that the inside of the facility seemed extremely chilly? Every time I crossed a blue door, I touched it and felt the ice cold metallic surface bite into my skin.
A smell seemed to pervade every corner of this structure, a very clinical stench that is so characteristic of hospitals on Earth. It made me feel sick, vulnerable, delicate, oozy on the inside. My vision turned slightly hazy as I looked at the hexagonal plates tiled on the roof of the tunnels that glowed incandescently and dimly lit the entire facility. I looked back and all I saw was an encroaching darkness; a shiver coursed through my being as I felt like we were being followed by a shadow that would pounce upon us at the right moment. I turned back and continued walking briskly, feeling a little safe with Daniel walking abreast with me even though he seemed on the edge of his breaking point. I just hoped he’d not snap any time now.
Suddenly, we turned a corner and found ourselves in a massive hall with a domed roof, much like the inside of a planetarium. This was perhaps the heart of the facility, but it looked uncannily deserted in the darkness, a cluster of hexagonal tiles on the roof high above us provided light equivalent of a few candles, letting darkness conceal the various tiers, rooms and chambers hidden in the niches of this cavernous heart.
“Doesn’t seem like there are people nearby. But we’ll be exposed if we walk in,” I whispered into Daniel’s ears. “Should we?”
He scanned the darkness like a cat, trying to penetrate the ink and notice a slight movement, the sound of a breath, a footstep, the smell of sweat. “I have a bad feeling, like we are being watched.”
“How do you know?”
Daniel looked at me. “Years after working in the field, a soldier gains a very strong sense of intuition, Mathias. But I don’t think we have any choice. Just brace yourself for the worst and stay behind me. Be careful.”
Daniel walked into the hall and I followed him on his heels. We kept looking around us, our ears catching the slightest breeze of wind, our eyes trained on the shadows, but we saw nothing and heard no one. Maybe there actually was nobody here.
After that, things happened really fast. Shrugging off the feeling that someone was watching us, that we were simply being insecure, I came around from Daniel’s back and walked to his side. That was my undoing. I stepped on a small circular plate that vibrated beneath my right foot. The sudden shock made me jump away from the plate. The plate kept vibrating and glowed a brilliant yellow colour. Two larger concentric circles started glowing around it, the wirings and clockwork of their hidden mechanism glowing brightly in the same ochre light. Simultaneously, the hexagonal tiles on the roof emanated an exponentially stronger light, illuminating the entire cavern.
Daniel stared at the concentric circles with boggled eyes and a deadly pale face. He turned towards me. “Landmine. Mathias, landmine! Run! Run!”
It was then that I understood what had happened when I stepped on that plate. I swivelled on my heels and tried running as fast as I could with the pain of my surgical incisions, but it was too late. The mechanism came alive. Strangely, there was no blast. I expected to be thrown outwards by a thundering explosion, but instead, the vibration increased to such a frequency, that I could feel my entire body resonating with it, convulsing violently. I felt an invisible force pulling me backwards and before I knew it, I had fallen to the ground and was being pulled towards the circular plates on the floor. Beside me, I saw Daniel driving his nails into the ground, trying to resist the strength of the pull. A second later, both of us flew a couple of metres and rolled over on the other side of the plates before striking a short crystalline barrier. Instantaneously, the landmine deactivated. Daniel and I helped each other up and found the crystalline structure growing itself with a clinking glass-like sound to form a small dome around us. I took three steps and jumped on the other side to clear the gap that was left... but my actions were in vain. I slumped agains the thick transparent structure that enclosed us.
“We call it the Gravity Bomb!” A voice declared from the now receding darkness.
Soon the hexagonal tiles lit up the entire cavern in a light that seemed like sunlight, and there appeared nearly two dozen men standing at equal distances in a circle around the hall, arms behind their backs. They were dressed in tight black pants and a tight, red full sleeve T-shirt with thin scales covering the entire surface. Wires and circuits ran across their shirts, all connected to a flat device on their chest that seemed like a triangle inscribed within two concentric circles.
One of the men stepped out of the formation and, walking casually towards us with a gait reflecting invincibility, explained in a conversational tone, “The Gravity Mine, in essence, works in a principle completely opposite to that of traditional bombs. What is a landmine supposed to do? Explode and kill the victims? No! Just kill the victims who step on it, no matter how. This mine implodes and does the job.” By now he had stepped into bright light. “There is a sort of a fusion chamber inside the contraption, you see. Once you step on the plate, the reaction is set off, and all of the core is compressed into to an ultra high density of the size of a pellet. Something that small and obscure causes this immense gravitation that pulls its victims into its jaws.” The man stopped in front of the crystalline sphere containing us, looking at us with icy blue eyes. He looked especially striking, with a blemish-free, fair skin and a rippling body underneath his attire. “The Gravity Mine is especially significant to us in a rather philosophical sense, dear Mandaa. An organisation like us, concealed under the grandeur of this great civilisation, carries out something so shocking and yet so necessary that everybody knows of us and yet doesn’t talk about us.”
Suddenly, the circular contraption emitted a serpentine hiss and started spewing out a pale yellow gas. Daniel and I looked at it with eyes wide with fear. More scared about the fact that we didn’t know what this gas could do to us, Daniel started banging on the surface of the sphere with his thick muscular hands. Booming sounds reverberated throughout the structure, but nothing happened to the sphere.
“Let us out! You dogs let us out!”
The man kept looking at us with a cold look. “You know how old I am? One hundred and twelve revolutions have passed since my birth. Do you know why I am so fresh? I think you know that already. My entire body has been changed twice, replaced with fresh, warm, fleshy Mandaa organs. We have turned a flaw in the teleportation system into a booming industry. Over 70% of all Asurians rely on us for their longevity, and you both will also give your years to some old Asurian.”
By now, the sphere was almost completely filled up with the pale gas. I pressed my nose and mouth to the cold wall of the crystal surface, desperate to avoid any inhalation. Slowly, the gas seeped into my body through my nostrils, the cracks between my parched lips, the pores on my skin. My insid
es started burning and subsequently, started to lose sensation; first my face and then, ever so slowly, my entrails. I was afraid to blink, afraid that I would fall unconscious, never to open my eyes again.
We were being neutralised and this time for good.
Kapittel 74
Mathias’s story
Asr-Gawa
March 16, 2017, Thursday, 2305 hours Earth EET
My knees buckled but I still kept my face pressed against the warm, smooth surface of our crystalline confinement. My vision was growing hazy, my senses were dulling at a frightening rate. I pressed my hands to the surface and felt a booming vibration every second, followed by interspersed raspy breathing. Was this entire contraption alive...? Were we inside some incredibly advanced, man-made organism? The more I thought about it, the more I cringed like a fly in a Pitcher plant. No. It was Daniel. On the other side of the hemisphere. I turned slightly, holding my breath tightly, ignoring the burn in my lungs, but couldn’t see a thing through the thick accumulation of anaesthetic gas. Only a faint silhouette, slumped against the crystalline surface and the grey figure of a hand hammering the wall.
I turned back and pressed my cheek against the surface once again. The person who had been talking was now even closer to our hemisphere, an air of sinister rippling around him. This was hell! And if Heaven could be so... diabolical... I closed my eyes for a second and saw the faint glimmer of hope of a utopia existing—where everything good prevailed over everything dark—snubbed out.
“I suppose this belongs to you.” The man extended his right arm towards me. My vision had grown so cloudy that I could barely even make out his face. I blinked again and strained my eyes. And then I gasped, coughing loudly as the gas gushed into my trachea. I closed my mouth again, feeling as if I may pass out any second now.
“Well, we are working only on a supposition. But if this is well-founded, if this hammer-shaped amulet is really what it is, you have given us something unexpectedly marvellous! And I thank you heartily for that! The power we may be able to wield with this would be unparalleled, enough to consume the entire state of Asr-Gawa!” The man started laughing raucously while holding out the amulet in front of my eyes.
My amulet. It never crossed my mind. I felt my chest and found no bulge where the amulet used to hang. Instantly, the moment when the amulet had fired an energy beam and incinerated the Jargantaans in Meerut, when it had glowed brilliantly and led me to Noah’s ark, the moment when it pulsated sporadically and almost helped me bridge the gap between three and four dimensions flashed in my head. An instrument bestowed upon me by my parents, a tool of unimaginable power most of which I had not yet understood or learnt to control, was in this murderer’s hands.
But it was mine. I knew about the inexplicable connection I felt between my being and the amulet’s source of power, and also vaguely aware that I may, if I could concentrate just enough, to make it blast energy beams again.
I stared at the amulet now wrapped around the man’s arms. I was now attempting to do something I couldn’t fathom even when I was completely in my senses. The chances of me being able to control the amulet seemed especially diminutive at this instant, when I could barely even feel my legs.
I squinted my eyes and tried to imbibe the energy of the core. I tried, with the fumes of willpower I had left in me, to try to make the amulet do what I wanted it to. At that very moment, the four-dimensional world that I had glimpsed through the teleporter flashed in front of me.
It flashed once more. After that, just before I was about to give up and close my eyes, succumbing to the soothing effects of the gas, through a split in my eyelashes I thought I noticed a small flash.
I forced my eyes open one more time. Yes, there was another flash. And another. The amulet had started pulsating. I stared at it with all my energy, screaming inaudibly with delirium kicking in. If only it would expel a beam that could blast this sphere... and then I blacked out.
* * *
Mathias’s story
Asr-Gawa
March 17, 2017, Friday, 0125 hours Earth EET
“You infidels will never learn. You will never learn honesty and collaboration!” A woman yelled, her voice deeper than general women. “No, we will not because we don’t need to! Our system will not function with those puny niceties! You know this as well as I do!”
“All I am saying is that you come across something so valuable, and you still do not care about contacting us? After we....”
“After you did what? Patronise us? Subsidise us? We didn’t ask for your favours. All of you are the ones reaping benefits from our industry. Fact of the matter is that you are ashamed of this, ashamed to lengthen your lives at the cost of others!”
“Where did all this come from? We are talking about something completely different!”
I opened my eyes slowly, feeling spent. It was like waking up from a very, very deep sleep. I felt a sharp pang on the backside of my eyeballs, followed by a lingering headache. I rolled over on my left. I was lying outside the nightmarish hemisphere that now had a large chunk of it blown off with jagged edges of the crystalline structure around the gaping hole. Wisps of the pale yellow gas still lingered around the hemisphere, the tongues of fume slithering away and then vanishing like the breath of a deadly, ethereal creature, going to sleep after eating off us. My ears focussed on the conversation again.
“Now give that amulet to me, please Athmor. Don’t steal.” I turned again to see three pairs of boots in front of me. My eyes moved up slowly and a sense of deep relief washed over me. Nanna and Heimdallr were here.
“Why should I? What will I gain from this? This is the famed Hammer of Thor! And you expect me to give it away so easily?” The man called Athmor guffawed loudly.
“Have you got no sense of honour? The Hammer of Thor is a rare artefact that belongs to the boy! You have no right to take any of his belongings!” Heimdallr exploded in fury.
Athmor looked him right in the eye, pausing for a few seconds. “Do you think I need honour? Is the industry I’m the master of an honourable one? All the work I have done, the millions of lives I have extended using expendable Mandaas, is that worthy of any respect? No. I don’t need respect because I am getting something a lot more valuable. Power.”
“What do you want in return for that?” Nanna asked him, maintaining her calm.
“I see you want this really bad,” Athmor chuckled, “I don’t want anything at all. Everything is going just fine. Asking for an increase in the aberration percentage for teleportation, for more Mandaa organs, would be unreasonable for me to ask. A decrease would raise prices, disrupting the precarious balance we have set in the markets. But this Hammer is unparalleled. Using this, I can expand my empire into one that may... overshadow even As...,” Athmor didn’t finish. His eyes were gleaming in an uncanny, sinister way.
Nanna and Heimdallr seemed to be in the middle of tenterhooks. Negotiation and diplomacy wasn’t going to get this man to give away my amulet. Even though my head ached, I urged a sudden wave of freshness to wash over me and I started thinking really fast.
The amulet had to be extracted by force. It didn’t seem to me that Nanna and Heimdallr were in any position to call for reinforcements. The two of them weren’t enough to confront such a massive institution all by themselves. I looked around and noticed identically dressed men half submerged in shadows, prowling like vultures looking at their prey. It was time for me to do something.
The next moment slowed down rapidly. I could see the amulet dangling from Athmor’s clenched fist. The more intently I looked at the blue stone in the amulet, the more I felt connected to it. My mind suddenly started playing tricks. The world in front of my eyes distorted in a flash and then went to normal again. It flashed again, and again and again until it became very powerful. Everything warped in front of my, turning inside out like pieces of cloth. I felt a strange vibration within me and in the next instant, I felt more strongly connected to my amulet than ever. I closed my eyes.
A second passed. Then two, three four... nothing happened.
“AARGHH!” I heard a wretched scream pierce the air. I opened my eyes instantly and beheld the smouldering sternum of Athmor who had stumbled away and fallen to the floor. The amulet now lay on the floor next to his feet. Nanna bent down and before any of the other men could pounce on it, she had the amulet in her palm. Everyone stopped in their tracks. The excruciating grunts of Athmor rang through the place as he gripped his burning body. The amulet had fired an energy beam by my command. It took me a moment to sink this in. I had definitely reached a higher degree of control over my consciousness, but I knew that this would only make things more difficult. My visions of the four-dimensional spaces had grown stronger and crisper. I didn’t know where I was headed but all of this, even the strengthening go my mind and control had a meaning.
Kapittel 75
Mathias’s story
Asr-Gawa
March 17, 2017, Friday, 0205 hours Earth EET
From legend to real life, there’s always an ultimate weapon that get’s the oppressed out of the talons of the oppressor, a deus ex machina. In ancient Hindu text, it used to be called the Brahmastra. In the modern world, such ultimate weapons come in physical or intangible forms. However big the opponent might be, however large the Goliath might be, if the David has control over the ultimate weapon, the giant is compelled to bow down to him. When Nanna, Heimdallr, Vivek and I walked out of that facility, I knew at the back of my head that if it were not for that sudden moment of concentration, that sheer instant when I could break the preconceived barriers of the power of my mind, we wouldn’t have been able to escape, at least not with my amulet.
“This has never happened before. Anytime it’s fired before, it was an automatic response. Nothing I could do,” I spoke aloud, matching my pace with Nanna’s.