by Dana Fredsti
“The spindle. It’s a psionic resonator, among other things.”
“Well, it scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know if I had just dreamt the whole thing. In fact, you’ve had me walking in my sleep all over the place ever since—you got me to change the course of the Vanuatu, without even waking me up!”
“I can explain—”
“Hypnotically controlling me, getting into my dreams…” She looked at him and shivered. “That’s creepy. I mean, you could have just talked to me about all this!”
DeMetta looked embarrassed. “Listen, you have to understand—I couldn’t talk to you. I’ve been asleep. All this time, my subconscious has been talking to your subconscious. We haven’t been dreaming about each other. We’ve been dreaming to each other.”
“But… how?”
“When you’re a telepath in suspended animation, you’re never really asleep. There’s a part of you, even in a deep REM state, that can communicate. I’m not particularly good at it— it’s slippery, like trying to eat with greased chopsticks.”
“Oh!” Amber said, suddenly making the connection. “That’s what your subconscious kept trying to tell me in my sleep. It wanted me to come find you.”
“I guess so.” He shrugged. “I can’t remember any of it very well, just flashes, really, all very surreal. I vaguely remember an artificial intelligence—I can remember scanning through it to get what I needed. That was your ship, the Vanuatu, right? And all those Egyptians, especially their priestess, Nefer-Tamit. She was hard to forget.”
“Okay, that sort of makes sense, I guess,” she said, then she stared as realization struck. “Then it all started when I first got close to the—that… the spindle, right? That’s how you found out about me?”
“Not exactly… I’ve known for years to be on the lookout for you. That’s the one thing that my subconscious seems to have locked in on during all this. Getting you to me.”
“But how?” Amber asked. “How could you possibly know anything about me? Are we even from the same dimension?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know anything about you at all.”
“Then how?” Amber gave an inarticulate cry of frustration. “And why?”
The soldier looked thoughtful, but didn’t reply. They sat there in awkward silence a little longer, until she spoke up again.
“What are you thinking?”
He looked up.
“Sorry,” DeMetta said. “It’s this ‘Event’ of yours—I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all. I don’t know where I am anymore, and then there’s them.” He gestured to Merlin lying in the coffin, and János Mehta, still glowering at the chessboard. “That one looks like my evil twin.”
“Pretty much,” Amber replied, her voice bitter. “The other one, the one in the coffin? He murdered him.”
Walking over to his doppelganger, DeMetta leaned over the table for a closer look. Mehta didn’t respond—didn’t seem to notice him. DeMetta frowned.
“What is that?” he asked. “Why are his eyes so strange?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“What do you mean?” He seemed genuinely puzzled. Amber concentrated, and handed him a mirror.
“See for yourself.”
He stared at his reflection in shock.
“What the hell happened to me?”
“I was hoping you would tell me.”
“So you don’t know why these two look like me, or what happened to our eyes?”
“Not a clue.”
Nonplussed, DeMetta came back and took his seat again, folding his arms and resting his chin on them as he stared off at nothing.
“So,” Amber said. “What next?”
DeMetta looked up.
“You remember the scare you got from the spindle? When it was, you know, ‘zapping’ you?”
“Yeah.”
“It makes sense to me now. That was just an activation sequence. Conditioning you, getting you ready so I can teach you.”
“Oh okay, that’s not totally creepy…” she muttered. “Teach me what?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“How to be a telepath.”
5
Somewhere in the Western Desert
Northeast of Alam el Halfa ridge
Nine days after the Event
Wachtmeister Schäfer sang as he drove the half-track.
Es rasseln die Ketten, es dröhnt der Motor,
Panzer rollen in Afrika vor!
Panzer rollen in Afrika vor!
The treads are rattling, the motor is droning, Tanks are rolling forward in Africa! It sounded like a sea shanty, and that was fine with him. In a strange way, he felt like a sailor. War here was more like being at sea than any land campaign he’d ever experienced. There was no real territory to seize—most parts of the Gott verdammt desert were indistinguishable from any other, and provided little cover. Few of the “ridges” on the map were much higher than the rest of the flat landscape.
In this empty expanse between the Qattara depression and the Mediterranean coast, their tanks and armored cars might as well have been old ironclad ships sailing the high seas, lobbing cannon balls at each other. Sure, the wet salt spray was replaced by dry clouds of dust, and oceanic tempests by desert sandstorms. The pounding of rough seas became the rugged grind of the treads over rocks, and instead of being becalmed they got beached by the lack of petrol.
The thought of being stranded wasn’t entirely academic. His half-track was bringing up the rear, lagging behind the main column. The front of the vehicle had taken damage from an Australian mortar, and the engine was struggling along at half speed.
Still, there was no chance of getting strafed by a Brit fighter plane, or of having an enemy tank sneak up behind them. They were moving slowly but steadily, and while the battle at El Alamein had come to a bizarre and inexplicable end, at least the war against the Tommies, the Second World War, was finally over.
Alexandria lay dead ahead and, according to the scouts, miraculously restored to its ancient glory by the same inexplicable wonder that had brought back the pterodactyls and made the Allied forces disappear. The jeweled city would be their reward for months of bloody fighting. Rommel would only need a tank or two and a handful of infantry to get the job done—and the Germans had much, much more than that. With no trace of any modern defenses, the Korps need only roll up and take what they wanted.
A pleasant thought—as long as their half-track didn’t get left behind. Ahead of them, a few miles off, the dust kicked up by the rest of the column made a helpful beacon, even if it did look ominously like a sandstorm.
Schäfer squinted.
Something else, closer to their position.
He frowned. The Allied tanks and planes might have vanished, but there were still enemy commandos lurking about the Western Desert, harassing the main column. They had escaped from the base camp back near El Alamein, but not before throwing the camp into chaos—with a herd of wild elephants, rumor had it—stealing lorries and torching a good portion of the German petrol reserves before escaping into the night. It would be very bad luck to run into them out here. Most likely, however, they had fled ahead of the main column.
Whatever lay ahead now, it demanded a closer look.
He pulled to a halt.
“Hey! Driver! Why are we stopping?” one of the troopers called from the back. Schäfer lifted his gloved hand and pointed.
“Somebody’s left a Stumpy behind.”
It was one of theirs, a Panzer IV, and not a wreck, either. The big tank appeared to have taken its share of enemy fire, but it was intact and looked to be in better shape than their half-track. Its bulk listed slightly to one side. All the hatches were open.
Must have broken a tread, Schäfer thought. He called out to anyone who might be inside.
“Jemand da?”
No answer. Frowning, he pulled his goggles off his sunburned face. Stepping down from the driver’s seat, he approached the tank carefu
lly. Behind him one of the soldiers, Soldat Brenz, called out.
“What kind of vrwurschdeld Feuerzauber is that?” he asked in his thick Schwäbisch accent, pointing off to the right. A great patch of ground, more than a hundred meters long, and nearly as wide, was scorched black.
“It must be the crash site of the plane we saw come down,” Schäfer called back. He rapped his knuckles on the hull of the Panzer, then climbed up onto the hulk.
“Ja,” the Swabian agreed, “but where’s the debris?”
Schäfer poked his head cautiously into one of the side hatches. No one home. He hopped back down again, saw the soldiers clustered together, and went over to see what had caught their attention. The terrain certainly showed signs of the fire, but Brenz was right to wonder—where had all the wreckage gone?
The others headed back to the truck to take a cigarette break. He continued to study the crash site. His high desert boots crunched on the blackened, vitrified sand. Something strange caught his eye. He crouched down for a closer look.
At his feet, there was a slender rivulet, about as wide as his little finger. It snaked out to the edge of the scorched earth. It wasn’t flowing with water, however, but with a gentle steady stream of fine sand. He turned his head to trace the flow—it snaked all the way back toward the center of the blackened zone.
There were more of them, he saw, all appearing to branch out from the center. He rose and followed the root-like little canal. It wound its way inside to a manhole-sized opening, where all of the rivulets came together. The pit reminded Schäfer of the underside of a sand dollar, with its spidery network of lines tracing out in all directions.
His curiosity growing, Schäfer began walking toward the pit, but a bright spot in the black crust caught his eye. He crouched down and picked up a pearl, the largest he had ever seen. At least the size of a quail’s egg.
“Heilige Scheiße…”
“Hey, what did you find there?” one of the others shouted.
He stood and held it up for them to see.
“Look! It’s a pearl!”
“What? Quatsch!” Brenz sneered.
“No, honest! Come see!”
Each of the three took a last puff and stomped over to see for themselves.
“I’ll be damned and stitched…” Brenz muttered. One of his comrades grabbed him by the elbow.
“Jesus Maria!” He gestured around. “Look! They’re all over the place!”
He was right—the blackened ground was riddled with the tiny spheres. He’d been so intent on the rivulet that he hadn’t noticed them. Muttering with enthusiasm, the four men scrambled to scoop them up.
“Hey! What’s this?” Brenz held out his findings. In the hollow of his hand, the clutch of tiny pearls was moving. First vibrating, then jitterbugging about like agitated little drops of oil in a frying pan. Then all at once, the dancing pips came together, coalescing into a single, bigger object.
“Menschenskind!” the wide-eyed Swabian gasped in disbelief, but didn’t drop it. He showed it to Schäfer. “Look at this—the pearls all came together, and it’s acting crazy. Like a mexikanische jumping bean!” The pearl was quivering again— and then it jumped from Brenz’s palm to Schäfer’s, merging with the pearl that lay there.
“Hey! You ate my pearl!” Brenz yelled. Before either man could react, however, the billiard-ball-sized object jumped to the ground and began moving across the scorched ground. It didn’t roll, but flowed away like a glob of mercury, heading directly toward the open pit.
It dropped into the hole without a sound.
The men stared in wonder. Abruptly a metallic wrenching sound came from behind them, and they spun. The Panzer began to wobble, then heave to one side before sinking into the blackened sand. They ran toward it, but there was nothing they could do. Though the ground had looked as solid as any other part of the inhospitable plain they occupied, it swallowed the tank as if it was quicksand.
Brenz whistled appreciatively at the spectacle of the big armored vehicle slipping below the surface. It did so at an angle, its tread rising up then vanishing, followed by the turret and, lastly, the long barrel of the 75mm gun—disappearing inch by inch until the entire tank was gone.
Schäfer broke the silence.
“We need to get the hell out of this place,” he said, his voice tinged with dread.
“What about all these pearls?” Brenz asked.
“Did your brain fall through your ass? Forget those things! We’re up to our necks in shit here!”
The others agreed, and the four sprinted back to the half-track. It started up without a hitch, and Schäfer punched the accelerator. The engine roared—but they went nowhere.
“Ach du Scheiße!” he swore, and he jumped out to make sure they hadn’t slipped the tread somehow.
They hadn’t.
The tractor tread was still connected with the wheels, but its frayed ends hung over the front and rear sprockets, dangling just above the ground. Below that, there was no tread to be seen.
The bottoms of all the wheels were sunk into the ground. No, that wasn’t it… They had been etched away, as if the entire vehicle had been dipped in acid. Shaking off numb disbelief, he poked his head down to look at the undercarriage. The crankshaft was swarming with a shimmering silver glaze, boiling away like ants.
“Get out!” he bellowed. “Get out of the truck.”
“But we have—”
“Get out now!”
The three didn’t argue the point. Jumping out, they moved away from the vehicle as if it was going to burst into flames at any moment. Schäfer wiped the back of his hand against his chin.
“Grab the water cans,” he said. “We have a long walk ahead of us.”
As the men rushed to obey his order, a stray gleam from below caught his eye. The edges of his boots appeared rimmed with a glistening, silver hoarfrost.
It spread rapidly.
6
Palace of the Prefect in Alexandria
Nine days after the Event
Seven and a half centuries earlier, a twenty-five-year-old Macedonian general had strode the beach, gazing out at the glittering Mediterranean Sea and the rocks of Pharos island.
The place had been called Rhakotis then, no more than a string of five sleepy Egyptian villages harboring fishermen and pirates. They stretched along a slender needle of land between the briny sea and the marshes of a freshwater lake. But the Greek general saw much more—a fine harbor, access to the Nile, ample freshwater, a pleasing climate, and an eminently defensible location.
Drawing in the sand with his finger, the Great Alexander had begun sketching out the plan for a massive seaport. A palace, a gridwork of streets arranged to capture the cooling sea breezes, a canal to the Nile, and stout walls at either end to protect the only two ways to approach from land. And a great lighthouse—the tallest in the world.
Thus the city of Alexandria had sprung into being.
* * *
Distant screams and sounds of violence came up through the open windows, faintly echoing off the marble floors of the council chambers. The sounds did nothing to sooth Hypatia’s apprehension as she stared down at the city map.
Small wooden latrunculi tokens marked areas of rioting throughout the five districts of the city. A cluster of tokens marked the gates and walls of Delta, the Jewish quarter and the northernmost district, a city unto itself. The Jews were used to the fragile and uncertain nature of their rights outside those walls.
In response to the reports of his soldiers, the prefect Orestes added tokens to the Rhakotis district—the native Egyptian quarter in the city’s southwestern corner, as well as major thoroughfares and the agoras—even along the harborside outskirts of the Broucheion, the Greco-Macedonian noble quarter enclosing the palace and its grounds.
Hypatia started to comment to her colleague Calix, the prefect’s special agent and her friend, but he was dead—killed only yesterday by the same kind of fell device that had later rescued her fr
om certain death. The fresh memories still cut deep.
Stifling a sigh, Hypatia looked to Nellie, the pale-skinned woman who stood silently by the far window, staring out to the southwest with sharp gray-green eyes. The morning sun lit her cream-colored skin and soft brown hair. She was still a mystery, this Nellie. A slave who had escaped the marvelous aerial craft commandeered by János Mehta, and had saved Hypatia’s life.
At first Hypatia surmised that Nellie was Galatian, or possibly from one of the Visigoth tribes—her unfamiliar garb seemed ill-suited to the heat, and her pale complexion and slave status hinted at origins in the barbarian north, even if her command of Greek was flawless.
Yet the truth—if the woman could be trusted—was stranger still. Nellie had told them she was from a land on the other side of the world, centuries ahead of their own time. It sounded insane, yet Hypatia had seen the evidence with her own two eyes.
Nellie had shared what had happened to her and her companions before and after Mehta had taken over the airship Vanuatu, spoken of Mehta’s mind-controlling drugs, and how she had returned to Alexandria after the ship had been destroyed. The young woman did her best to explain the events that had shattered their world, but by her own admission, she didn’t really understand it herself.
“It was some kind of machine,” she’d said, but what kind of machine, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say.
Hypatia chose to believe the former.
* * *
Nellie Bly kept a close eye on everyone while ostensibly staring out the window, a strategy that served her well as a reporter. She only wished she had a view over the city walls so she could watch for Blake’s return, as well. How he expected to slow the German army, she couldn’t fathom. Still, if anyone could do the impossible, it was the British soldier.
This would have been the story of a lifetime, she thought with a pang. Funny, but she hadn’t thought about her lost career since the Event. Between the pirate attack, the giant shark, nearly being burned at the stake, and the incredible technology of the Vanuatu—so far beyond her imagining it still boggled her mind—she’d hardly had time to consider what she’d lost.