Time Shards--Shatter War
Page 4
Without warning he found himself ascending in the elevator, coming to a stop in the common room on the main floor. It should have been bursting with a crowd of media people, yet it was a ghost town. He looked around, calling out to someone, anyone. Issuing new commands to the rover cameras, he sent one to the main control room, the others to sweep the facility and the immediate exterior of the complex.
The trio set out on their appointed tasks and immediately began to relay reports directly to his visual cortex. Project Control was just as deserted as the commons, and no one could be found either in the corridors or huddled outside in the cold. There was no longer anyone anywhere in the entire facility or its environs.
A small city’s worth of personnel had just vanished.
Waves of neural distortion struck Meta. He fought to keep from vomiting as the room spun crazily, his anguished figure reflected back at him in each mirrored wall like a cruel carnival maze, face red and blistered where the beam had struck him. His body’s nanomedical first aid system was hard at work repairing the skin, but something worse was wrong with his reflection.
He moved closer, horror growing with each step.
His eyes had been altered, transformed from light brown to a dark violet. As the image came into focus it was there—that bizarre rising torrent of subatomic particles he had seen in the quantum viewer, only they were now reflected in his eyes, like a cascade of tiny pinpoints of light falling down an endless well…
Yet another tremor rocked the complex. Meta backed away from the unearthly reflection and ran for the exit, bursting out into the open air, the drones on his heels. Overhead, the unforgiving brightness of the blue Antarctic sky had given way to rippling, multicolored patterns of light. He had seen the Aurora Australis many times. This was not the Southern Lights.
Running for the hangar, he passed the rows of small craft and ground vehicles—he needed something with range. There were plenty of cargo haulers and various small aircraft chartered by the media outlets, and one of them would do, if he could get in.
And then he saw it.
It was unmistakable—a gleaming double-decker pleasure ship built for the sky, one hundred feet long, a stately Avialae-class StratoYacht, just as gorgeous as Gifford had described. The name emblazoned on the vessel read Vanuatu. Hurrying up the ship’s gangway he spoke to the intercom.
“Is anyone there?” he asked urgently. “I need to come aboard.”
“This is the Ship speaking,” a smooth artificial voice responded. “I’m sorry, no one is aboard at this time and the vessel is secured.”
Meta cursed, draping his head and forearm against the hull. Of course it would be shut up tight. He’d have to find another vessel soon. If not, he’d be trapped here until help arrived. If any was even coming…
A sudden thought occurred and he turned back.
“This is Dr. Jonathan Meta, the project director,” he said, keeping his voice as calm as possible. “I believe you have me on the guest list?”
The hatch slid open.
“Why, of course, Dr. Meta. You are our guest of honor. Welcome aboard.”
8
Aboard the Vanuatu
Six days after the Event
“As for the rest…” Merlin picked up his coffee mug and took a sip. “After spending hours trying to raise anybody on the comm, I finally gave up and told the autopilot to take me to Greenwich Observatory. That simple task proved every bit as baffling, since it no longer existed. I circled for ages trying to find any trace of modernity before I had to bring the ship down to start recharging the generators.”
“That’s not all of it,” Amber said.
“What’s she talking about?” Blake demanded, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“Tell them what you told me,” Amber insisted. “The aftershocks. All of it. They need to know.”
“Yes, of course.” Nodding slowly, Merlin took in a deep breath, and exhaled. “You’re ri—”
Suddenly the cabin windows filled with blazing light.
“Brace for evasive maneuvers,” the Vanuatu’s voice announced. Then it was drowned out by a burst of deafening thunder and the deck pitched, the sudden drop throwing Cam painfully across the floor. Amber and the others clung to their chairs as the vessel dove sharply to the right, then they were secured by swiftly-extending safety harnesses composed of the same malleable material.
As they plunged down through the sky, Amber stared out the windows, mouth open as she saw what had endangered their ship. Dead ahead, a pillar of pure lightning, a mile or more across, had burst up from the earth’s surface and speared through the retreating clouds, reaching as high as she could see—an oncoming wall of blistering high-energy plasma.
The feathers of the Vanuatu’s wings, arrays of prismatic hard-light energy, folded inward like the wings of a hunting hawk, sending the vessel into a desperate power dive to avoid contact. Amber’s stomach lurched and her whole body tingled with the adrenaline surge from the ship’s roller-coaster drop.
Someone screamed—Nellie? Harcourt?—as the curtain of twisting, chaotic brilliance roared up alongside, the blinding light overwhelming the bank of portside windows.
Amid shouts and cries from her companions, she heard Cam call her name. Then…
Nothing.
The Vanuatu gave no physical sign whatsoever that it had brushed against the energy surge. There was no shudder or vibration—nothing more than the strangest sensation that time had stopped.
Once, as a child on the playground, she’d been the last player left on her team during a game of dodgeball. She had managed to avoid one throw after another, but in that instant when the ball had finally struck her, everything stopped—the sounds of the children, her leap in the air, all thought and movement, all frozen in place. Even years later, a part of her felt as if she was still there, caught in midair.
As if a part of her always would be.
She felt that now. The ship careening at an insane angle. The portside windows transformed into shifting rectangles pouring blazing white brilliance into the cabin. Cam’s body hurled sidelong. Cups spilling archipelagoes of coffee flying through the air. Arms raised and mouths captured in mid-scream. All silent. All preserved in clearest crystal.
Forever…
Forever…
Forever.
Then, time and motion resumed—with screaming and chaos. The Vanuatu eased out of its power dive, extending its wings once again. As suddenly as it had appeared, the gargantuan column of pure energy vanished and the clouds began to close in as if nothing had occurred.
* * *
“Is everyone alright?” Merlin asked. The deck shuddered, as though the ship was struggling to right itself.
Cam regained his footing. There were red welts on his arms, but they already were fading, thanks to Merlin’s magic.
“Look at this!” Blake called out, pointing toward a portside window. Merlin’s chair released him. He and the others moved to take a look. The tip of the Vanuatu’s wing had been clipped—the outermost feathers sliced away.
“We’re doomed!” Harcourt wailed. They all ignored him.
“How serious is the damage?” Blake asked Merlin. “Will she be able to stay airborne?”
Merlin nodded. “No need to worry about that. The field projector was cropped, but the ship is already repairing the damage.”
“What was that?” Nellie asked.
Merlin and Amber exchanged a look. “You need to tell them,” Amber said. Merlin nodded, and turned to the others.
“That was a schizochronolinear aftershock,” he said. “A result of the Event which, to the best we can calculate, was just one of many more we can expect.”
“Do you have any idea when they’ll stop?” Nellie asked.
Merlin hesitated.
“They won’t,” he said bluntly. “Their frequency will only increase, and with each one, the existing shards will be whittled away.”
Harcourt made a peculiar noise, a sort of distre
ssed harrumph. Cam’s linguistic aids couldn’t quite keep pace with the unfamiliar terms and concepts, but he understood the gravity of the situation. Nellie, Blake, and Amber exchanged anxious looks. Nellie spoke up.
“So you had said these… aftershocks… will continue, over and over until…” She grimaced. “What? Every last thing on earth is shattered to smithereens? Until nothing remains?”
Merlin nodded. “If we don’t stop them, that is precisely what will occur. Continual fracturing down to the subatomic level.”
“How can you know that?” Blake demanded, half-rising to his feet. Harcourt nodded, a worried frown on his face.
Merlin remained unperturbed. “The notes are available, if you want to double-check my calculations,” he said. “Otherwise I’m afraid you’ll just have to take my word for it.”
Blake growled something inaudible and took his seat again. The rest were silent until Nellie spoke again, asking the question on everyone’s mind.
“How much time do we have?”
Merlin shrugged. “Right now, I can only guess. We don’t have enough data to measure the rate of decay. Days, perhaps? A week or two at most. I can’t imagine the timeline’s structural integrity remaining intact for much longer than that.”
“And how do we stop it?” Amber asked.
“When the Event first occurred, I wasn’t able to shut down the warp progression. For some reason—one I still haven’t been able to pin down—the containment field attracted unexpected anomalies. Our worse fear was that the containment field would suffer a rupture, but the problem wasn’t with the containment. It was with the field itself. The subatomic particles suspended within our force field somehow gave rise to additional particles, even additional fields…”
They all listened, spellbound.
“There was a blast… several of them. The manual override was caught up in an out-venting of some kind. I couldn’t go near it, and then the station itself was rocked so badly I was afraid the entire facility was going to go critical and be lost to a massive explosion at any moment. A colleague tried to warn me…”
His voice lowered again, trailing off as he stared off into the distance before resuming his story.
“Everyone at the station—hundreds of people—simply vanished. I still can’t understand why or how. Or what’s happened to my eyes—” he touched his temple, the gesture almost unconscious. “This bizarre ocular effect.
“Still,” he continued, his voice once again sounding self-assured, “all isn’t lost. Not yet. If our math is right—mine and the Vanuatu’s—as long as the containment field is pulsing outward with these waves of space-time displacement, the Event will continue. If we can get back to the primary chamber and manually shut down the warp field, we can put the world back the way it was. It will be just as if this all never happened.”
The mood of the room brightened somewhat.
“Thanks to the damage,” Merlin said, “we’re not able to travel at our full speed, but even so, we’re making good time. With any luck, we should reach the Antarctic station by tomorrow morning.”
“Where are we now?” Nellie asked.
“I’d estimate by now we are somewhere over Mali, approaching the bay of Guinea and the South Atlantic Ocean.”
Amber looked out one of the windows. “Um, Merlin, am I missing something?” She pointed to the terrain below. There was no hint of ocean in sight, only an endless vista of red desert. “I don’t see the ocean anywhere.”
Merlin’s face darkened. “Ship, are we still en route to the Omnia Astra Project’s lab facility in Antarctica?”
“Yes,” the Vanuatu answered pleasantly, adding, “although the new heading is no longer optimal.”
“What new heading?”
“We are currently following the new heading authorized four hours and twenty-eight minutes ago. It will delay our arrival at the South Pole considerably.”
“What?” Merlin demanded. “Who authorized a course change?”
“I apologize, but I’m unable to provide that information at this time.”
“Emergency override. Tell me who authorized the course change.”
“That particular emergency override protocol is not available at this time.”
Merlin ran his hands through his hair and took in a deep breath. Amber could see that he was laboring to remain calm, but he looked more than ever like a crazed wizard.
“Ship, where are we?”
“We are currently crossing over the Qattara Depression of the western Egyptian desert.”
Merlin lost his composure at that and stormed off down the central hall toward the cockpit, a stream of profanity trailing in his wake. Amber and the others followed close on his heels.
Reaching the end of the hallway, Merlin grabbed the handle to pull the hatch open. It didn’t budge. He tried it again, then again, then slammed his fist against the door. When he turned to face them, his anger had turned to frustration laced with fear.
“We’re locked out.”
An Unknown Vessel, on suborbital trajectory toward Egypt
Currently 158 km West of Karnataka, India
Six days after the Event
The Vanuatu was not an attack vessel. However, the small, deadly, suborbital stealth craft—currently tracking it from just over three thousand miles away—was.
The interceptor’s solo pilot had locked on to the Vanuatu’s energy profile hours ago, from across the globe. Now he was in hot pursuit. His ship cruised high above the Arabian Sea, its sleek, black, diamond-sharp form virtually undetectable. In flight it was as invisible as a cloaked dagger, and just as silent.
The ship’s crew would never see it coming.
9
Aboard the Vanuatu
Six days after the Event
“Ship, open the door to the bridge, please.” Dr. Meta kept his voice measured and calm, almost masking the undercurrent of his frustration.
“With all due respect, I am not at liberty to permit entry to the bridge at this time.”
“Where is the manual override?” Meta asked.
“That is not an option.”
“There has to be a verbal password or physical key.”
“It appears I can neither confirm nor deny either of those possibilities.”
Meta took a deep breath. “Ship, can you provide any information about this lockout, or the change in course?”
“Apparently, I cannot.”
“Damn it, open up the door now!” Blake snapped.
Meta shot him an irritated look. “I’m trying.”
“Obviously not hard enough.”
“The current status appears to be causing personal agitation,” the ship said. “Please understand that I am unable to permit entry to the bridge at this time. My apologies.”
“Let’s break the door down,” Professor Harcourt suggested. “What can we use as a battering ram?” Cam and Blake nodded their approval.
“I’m sorry, Professor Harcourt. Currently there is nothing aboard that possesses the necessary physical characteristics to overcome the door’s compressive or tensile strength.”
“Damnable automaton,” the professor fumed. “I wasn’t speaking to you!”
“This is a very unusual set of circumstances,” the ship responded. “Under my normal protocols, I would be able to render much more assistance. Again, I apologize for this temporary inconvenience.”
“Are there any tools we can use?” Nellie asked Dr. Meta. The ship chimed in again before he could answer.
“Fabricating multiple sets of laser cutting tools and employing them could prove effective, providing coordinated cutting efforts achieved the end result faster than the polyductile restructuring capacity of the ship’s interior. If you wish, I can diagram a suggested methodology.”
“Well, by all that is wonderful,” Nellie said, “whose side are you on?”
“I endeavor at all times to provide as much assistance as is permitted by my current behavioral protocols.”
“I am unable to provide a satisfactory answer to that question, but extrapolating from the current circumstances, that would appear to be a reasonable assumption.”
“Does it have a riddle?” Cam asked. The others turned to him in surprise. Seeing their confusion, he continued. “Is there a riddle we must solve before the door opens?”
“Speak ‘friend’ and enter,” Amber said softly.
“What the deuce are you two on about?” Harcourt groused.
“A riddle to break the magic,” Cam pressed on. “The spirit of the ship is enthralled by some spell, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly,” Meta said, “but I suppose you could say it’s something along those lines.”
“Whatever has possessed the vessel, can that kind of druidcraft be done from a distance?”
“Druidcraft?” Meta said. “Well… that is—no, I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
“If it cannot,” Cam explained, “then one of us aboard this flying ship must have cast the spell.” He looked at each of them in turn.
Prof. Harcourt harrumphed, and turned to Amber.
“See here, Colonial Girl,” he said, poking a finger at her. “Tell your pet barbarian to cease his superstitious twaddle. We are in a dire situation here!”
“Hold on, Harcourt,” Dr. Meta said sharply. “I think he’s on to something.”
Encouraged, Cam continued his line of reasoning. “The ship’s spirit must be compelled by one of you as its master,” he said. “If this is true, then it must do as it is told. Whoever cast the spell need only bid it to open the door. Then we will know who the master truly is.”