Reverberations

by Aaron Frale

  “That felt good,” DeAndre said. “But if you want to search one of them for a code, be my guest.”

  While Meathook rummaged through their pockets, the door clicked. The vault slid open, and they walked into a ten by ten room with rows of lock boxes on each wall and a table in the middle. He found Box 87, an inside joke to whoever had set this up in the first place, and he pulled it out. Inside was a remote control with a single button. DeAndre put his TF3 up to the remote and entered a code into an app that Hector had given him. He held his breath and looked to Meathook. His friend nodded. He hit submit.

  The button on the remote turned green. DeAndre pressed it, and a portal with swirling purple energy around an inky black center appeared in the back of the vault. They both relaxed a little. They were lucky that Ludie didn’t have access to all the security files. Hector had triggered the remote detonation on the computer in his office when they had evacuated HQ. All the various codes were now stored in his noggin. The wrong one would have tuned them and the entire contents of the safehouse to a known void dimension. Now they were standing before a direct pathway to a room that floated in the space between universes, just like Tuners HQ.

  It was another piece of Universe One tech that they didn’t quite understand why they were made in the first place, but they were sure useful in a pinch. There were lots of remotes just like the one DeAndre held in his hand that would open a static portal that anyone could walk through without the aid of a Tuner. It wasn’t precisely traveling outside the universes but more like what would happen if a person pinched a balloon. A bubble would appear on the edge of it with a narrow bridge for air to travel from the larger space to the smaller one. The bubble was the safehouse, and the bridge was the portal.

  The important thing was that if Ludie didn’t have the code, all they could do was guard the entrance to them, and they already seemed to have gotten past the gate guard. They stepped through the portal to a room no more prominent than the vault. It even had the same metal walls of Tuners HQ. It was stacked high with TF3s, medical supplies, and other Universe One tech. Most of it was spare parts for HQ. It was as if the people of Universe One had prepared for every possible problem that could go wrong with the station and scattered the solutions throughout the multiverse. However, they never accounted for the fact that it would fall into the wrong hands. There were never any weapons in the safehouses.

  However, today wasn’t about weapons, more TF3s, or medical supplies. It was about a micro black hole generator. U-42 didn’t have the power for Patel to get a barrier to prevent tuning up and running, so they needed a Universe One generator, which was a three-foot by three black box that weighed the same as the average truck. Just as the people of DeAndre’s universe moved faster than most others, the people of Meathook’s lived in much higher gravity. The heavy metal loving Tuner could lift an average truck with minimal problems.

  DeAndre turned to see his companion stuffing his invisibility backpack full of TF3s and medical supplies.

  “What are you doing?” DeAndre asked his friend.

  “Bro,” Meathook said, “just thought I’d pick up some supplies while we were here. What if one of us lost our TF3?”

  “Then we’d raid another safehouse!” DeAndre said. “You heard Hector. Get the generator and get out.”

  “Yeah, but we are—”

  “We don’t know that we got every cultist. And you know as well as I that the only way back is through that vault,” DeAndre said, which was true. Typically, they could listen for nearby universes and pop into any one of them. Since the safehouses were pockets inside an ordinary world, there was only one way in or out.

  “Yeah but—”

  “Even if Ludie doesn’t know we are here, the authorities of that world are bound to figure out that someone broke into their vault and the quickest way back to 42 is at the mall. I don’t know about you, but I am not going to go to prison in this world.”

  “At least you can grab some supplies while I do this,” Meathook said.

  “Fine, just get to work.”

  “Hey,” Meathook said when he bent down and started pressing buttons on the generator. “Shouldn’t we fire this thing up to make sure it works?”

  DeAndre slapped his partner’s hands and said, “Stop that. You almost disabled the cooling system.”

  “So?”

  “So we all die in a fiery explosion. Turn it off, and let’s get it out of here.”

  Meathook powered it down and disconnected it from the wall while DeAndre filled his backpack with whatever he could grab. Hector wouldn’t be pleased about the shopping trip, but his companion did have a point. They were running low on everything, and they didn’t need two people to get the unit.

  Once Meathook entirely disconnected it, the lights in the room shut off. They were in pitch black. For a moment, there was an eerie silence in the darkness. DeAndre turned on the flashlight feature of his TF3, and Meathook hefted the generator onto his back.

  “All right, bro,” the heavy metal enthusiast said, unaware of the irony of the heavy metal object on his back.

  DeAndre nodded and cycled through his tuning app on his TF3. It was just music. The noise in the background that allowed him to home in on one universe over another wasn’t there, and it was strange to hear. He was so used to hearing the static. It was unnerving to hear silence between the notes of his songs. He imagined what he heard now was what most people heard. They had no idea of the noise that the cosmos had generated, much less how to distinguish one universe from the other.

  Finally, when he dialed to the one they had just come from, the familiar hisses and pops underneath all his music returned. He entered the code on the remote, and the portal opened again. They stepped into the darkness and appeared back in the bank vault.

  Ludie stood just outside with several cultists on either side of him. Meathook cursed and dropped the generator. He put on his big beefy skull headphones and frantically dialed for a tuning point.

  Ludie had somehow avoided getting the standard scars for members of the cult. Perhaps the kid had weaseled his way into a deal to avert the mutilation. DeAndre wondered how long that would last. From the metal frame on Ludie’s hand, DeAndre could tell that the former Tuner was also wearing the power suit that had allowed him to move freely on the cultists’ homeworld.

  “I thought you would have been thrown into the pit of fire by now,” DeAndre said. “Being that you can’t even walk in their homeworld without that thing.”

  Ludie’s legs clunked as he walked. “It’s as they say. The strong survive. The weak die.”

  “My case in point.”

  “And we both know there are other attributes than physical ones that can make a person strong. Isn’t that right, Hector? Isn’t that what you said to me when you recruited me to the Tuners years ago. That you wanted me for that big old brain. There is no use in pretending you can’t hear me. You and I both know that I can’t trace the signal back to whatever backwater universe you are calling home these days.”

  Hector’s voice came through DeAndre’s speaker on his TF3. “I told you that your intellectual capacity could help us innovate new technology.”

  Ludie frowned. “So that’s why you held me back from missions. Only gave me a satchel of medicine to fight off the cultists.”

  “You didn’t seem that interested in weapons training and were doing great where you were. I would have been happy to give you the training had you asked for it.”

  Ludie laughed. “Hector, you were always so good at lying. At least I know where I stand with my new brothers and sisters. Now, if you excuse us, I am the leader on a mission, which I intend to complete.”

  “Ludie, I—” Hector began.

  Ludie hit a button on his TF3, and Hector’s voice cut out. There was a shrieking noise that blared on the Tuners’ TF3s. DeAndre popped his earbuds out, and Meathook yanked off his headphones. Ludie smiled and said, “Sorry, guys, I know your ears are more sensitive than most, but suffic
e to say you aren’t going to get another deal like this. If you give up the rest of the Tuners, you’ll be indoctrinated as a three-star priest, which comes with privileges, mind you. Your own room, acolytes who will do anything you want, and more importantly, you can skip all the purification through pain the one-stars have to go through.”

  “You’re offering us a deal that you won’t take yourself? Where're your three stars?”

  Ludie laughed. “I have abilities no one else can offer them, and just between you and me, the religion nonsense is crap. It’s power, pure and simple. You can either be the one with power, and one religion is as good as any other for grabbing it, or you can be the ones trampled by those with power. Just so you know, this is a legitimate offer. I am not screwing around with you like you did with me.”

  “When did we ever mess with you? Ludie?” DeAndre said.

  “Don’t play dumb with me. You both were always screwing around. Meathook trashed my experiments one time when he was looking for something spicy to put in his chili.”

  “What?” Meathook asked. “I like spicy chili, and most universes’ ghost peppers are a joke.”

  Ludie frowned and said, “Do you think you are innocent too? You dashed into my room one morning when I left the door open too long and put itching powder in my underwear drawer!”

  “We always razz the new recruits.” DeAndre almost couldn’t hold back a laugh. He remembered Hector’s face when Ludie couldn’t stop scratching his crotch at the staff meeting that morning.

  “Yeah, bro,” Meathook said. “I’m lactose intolerant, and they switched out my almond milk with real milk in my first week. I was on the toilet for days.”

  “Okay,” DeAndre said. “So maybe we were tough on you, but that’s because you were one of us, and you can be one of us again. Maybe we can meet up in a neutral universe, and we can get Hector to hear your side of the story. For what it’s worth, Hailey still thinks you were coerced in some way. Between her and Jon, I’d bet they can at least convince Hector to hear you out.”

  “Shut up. Shut up,” Ludie said. “Don’t mention his name.”

  DeAndre figured it out. “Oh, so that’s what this is about. You thought Hailey—” DeAndre couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m sorry. I really am. But girls like that don’t really go for guys like you.”

  Patel’s head popped into view when she pulled down the hood of her invisibility cloak. “DeAndre!” she scolded. “Show a little compassion. Love is hard on anyone. Especially when it is unrequited.”

  “What?” DeAndre asked. “I’m just telling the truth.”

  “Kill them all!” Ludie yelled, and the cultists roared. This particular clan had large nodachis they carried strapped to their backs. Half of their body was burnt by a screwed up initiation ritual. Patel tossed Meathook’s war hammer to him, and DeAndre slipped out his nunchucks from his backpack. She made herself completely visible and drew her katana. She parried most of the blows coming her way, but her skin blocked the rest.

  Meathook kissed his war hammer and yelled, “Time to pound the bacon!”

  With one mighty swing, three cultists were knocked through a wall into a boardroom full of confused executives.

  “What the hell was that?” DeAndre asked as he wrapped the nunchucks around the blade of one cultist and kicked another. Patel parried and blocked blows, going for the kill when she had an opening.

  “Pound the bacon,” Meathook said. “You don’t pound bacon?”

  “I think we need to work on your catchphrases,” he said and yanked the blade from the cultist's hand. He used his speed to climb over the disarmed man and then dodged a knife meant for him. Two more stabbed at him, and he ducked their blows and used his weapon to break their kneecaps. He fought his way to Ludie, who stood at the back, watching the fray.

  The kid was no match for DeAndre in a fight. The former Tuner was wearing the power suit that gave him the strength that could match Meathook, but speed was always the problem the kid had in sparring. A good fighter could learn to anticipate a fast opponent and put their fist where DeAndre’s face would end up, not where it had been, which hurt like hell. But Ludie never mastered it. Hector didn’t bench him for any lack of trying. It was just that the kid had other strengths as a Tuner. He was smart, and that made the cultists more dangerous than when the group could be written off as brutes.

  However, a one-on-one with Ludie, and just about any Tuner could take him. Even Jon, who was still green in a lot of ways. That’s why DeAndre fought his way through the waves of foes to get to Ludie as fast as he could. He wanted to be there before the kid ducked out on them. Lucky for him, as quickly as he could was only a few seconds. He pummeled the last henchman and stopped right before Ludie.

  “Last chance,” DeAndre said. “You know you could never beat me at sparring, and this time, I won’t go easy on you.”

  “I don’t expect you to,” Ludie goaded.

  “Suit yourself.” DeAndre shrugged and raised his weapon for a knockout blow. While some of the others were okay with being judge, jury, and executioner after what Ludie had done, DeAndre thought that everyone deserved a fair shake, even Ludie.

  He struck with his nunchucks, and it stopped short of the former Tuner’s head. It took a moment for DeAndre to release that the blow was blocked and another split second to realize that Ludie held the other end of the nunchucks. His opponent must have plucked it out of the air. There was no way the kid was that fast.

  Before DeAndre could pull his weapon back, Ludie tore it from his hands and tossed it to the side. DeAndre used the moment to strike with the other one, and just as with the first, Ludie caught it and threw it to the side.

  Ludie smiled. “I modified the programming of the strength suits. Now they are just as quick as you and twice the strength of Meathook.”

  As if being summoned, Meathook finished off the last cultist and charged Ludie with his hammer and slammed the kid in the chest with a fearsome blow. The clang on Ludie’s chest piece reverberated through the room but didn’t seem to stop the former Tuner. Patel followed up with a few ineffectual attacks.

  The little snot laughed and said, “I also used some of the metal from the cultists' homeworld to strengthen the suit, and I am as tough as Patel.”

  “But you’re not as smart as me,” Hailey said and dropped from a grate in the ceiling. She aimed her dagger at a chip in the back of the suit near the neck. She struck it with such high intensity that it sparked and blew her back against the wall. The entire outfit began to short out. It was the same chip that powered the armor and ran the interface. Since the chip was Universe One tech, it could survive the tunes and power the suit. Without it, Ludie was just inside a hunk of metal.

  He cried out in frustration and hit a button. Ludie disappeared, and Jon jumped down from the same grate and ran towards Hailey. He scooped her into his arms and asked, “Are you all right?”

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “Yeah, but I think my TF3 took the brunt of it. It’s a good thing I had it on my right side.”

  She pulled out her fried TF3. The electricity from Ludie’s suit must have coursed from her dagger in her right hand to her TF3. Had the shock traveled from her right to left side, it would have gone through her heart, and she wouldn’t be talking right now. Her arm was a little singed, but overall, she was all right.

  “Let me help you up,” Jon said as he lifted her from the floor. “It was a pretty awesome shot, babe.”

  “I didn’t shoot anything,” Hailey said.

  “It’s just an expression.”

  “I’m also not an infant.”

  “That’s an expression too.”

  “Why is your universe so weird?”

  “Hey, lovebirds,” DeAndre said, “we got some important stuff to do.”

  “Not to mention that if Ludie was able to tune without a weak point in the universes, that means they got their machine back up and running, or at least some form of it, and it is only a matter of time u
ntil…” Patel trailed off.

  “Until what?” Meathook asked.

  “That.” She pointed to a group of cultists who had appeared in the hallway. A few more materialized behind them.

  “Escape plan is in place?” DeAndre asked.

  Jon said, “Yeah but—”

  “Just go!” he yelled, and Patel followed Hailey into the grate. Meathook had to toss up the generator and then be hoisted up himself. DeAndre helped Jon inside and then threw his bag full of supplies that he had gathered into the vent.

  Jon slung DeAndre’s bag onto his back and held out his hand.

  “I’m going to bide you some time.”

  “But—”

  “Go! I will meet you on the roof!” DeAndre yelled. He gathered his weapons and turned towards the cultists running down the hall. He cracked his neck and dashed through the corridor and knocked the first two into a second group. There was an opening in the third group, and he used the opportunity to punch through. A few more appeared as he ran by. He dodged weapons and struck with his nunchucks while he ran past.

  The cultist turned their efforts towards him, and they chased him down the hallway with new people appearing behind him. He eventually lost the pursuers and made his way to the front reception area.

  The woman behind the desk was shocked to see him. He hopped over the counter and struck at the chain binding her feet. He hit it a few times, and the manacle popped open. She looked at him in shock.

  A large group of cultists charged down the hallway, screaming at a deafening roar. She looked at DeAndre, and he said, “Go; they are here for me. Not for you.”

  He ran towards the elevators, and she dashed for the stairs. He pressed the button and waited. The crowd was almost upon him when the door opened. He stepped inside, much to the surprise of two white executives. DeAndre smiled and said, “Top floor, please.”

  One of the men hit the button, and the doors closed just as the group of cultists slammed against the metal. While the elevator went up, the two men looked back at DeAndre with a combination of fear and awe.

  DeAndre smiled and said, “So what do you two do for a living?”