by Dana Fredsti
Cam stared at him with a raised eyebrow and gave a sudden laugh.
“I travel with Amber. I fight alongside her.”
The Celt turned and walked away, pausing just once to turn back to the dumbstruck Frenchman.
“I do not tell her where she goes or stays.”
40
Approaching Alexandria from the Western Desert
Dawn – Eight days after the Event
Once the sun dropped, Blake and Nellie’s progress on the stolen German motorbike dropped as fast as the temperature.
“Last time I was here,” he said, “there had been a highway running the length of the coast. During the war, our armies had seesawed back and forth across. But that was back in the twentieth century.”
“And now our present is in the twenty-third-century future,” Nellie replied. “Only we’re in the ancient past.” It was enough to drive her stark raving—a topic with which she was intimately acquainted.
The virgin ground presented an unremitting landscape of rocks and gravel, punctuated by outcroppings of camel thorn and the occasional treacherous mire of fine sand fit only for gumming up the bearings and sinking the wheels and treads of their mechanized transport. The two of them shivered in the chill as they picked their way blindly across the precarious terrain. The inky darkness forced them to proceed with excruciating slowness, the lighthouse of Alexandria beckoning to them all through the night.
The normally tactiturn Blake was unusually talkative during their nocturnal journey. She listened carefully to everything he had to tell her—she’d be relying on the information very soon. As the night’s gloom gradually relented to the dawn, the brightening sky enabled them to make better speed, bringing them within sight of the high Alexandrian city walls by break of day.
Nellie pointed up ahead.
“Blake, look! We’re almost there.”
Alexandria completely filled a narrow sliver of land, its walls stretching from the Mediterranean to a large body of fresh water. Long-necked brontosaurs waded in the marshy lake. Approaching from the southwest, the duo also found themselves driving past an assembly of solemn guardians—the granite monuments of the city’s necropolis. Its gardens, shrines, and mausoleums almost made it a second city.
The high iron-bound doors of the city’s Moon Gate were closed, awaiting the appearance of the morning sun. Atop the ramparts, the sentries of the night watch stared at the noisy contraption coming toward them, raising the alarm all along the walls.
Blake pulled the motorcycle to a stop at a discreet distance, letting the engine continue to rumble. Warily Nellie eyed the machine gun mounted in front of her on the sidecar, hoping she didn’t have to get acquainted with its use. She turned to her companion.
“You don’t think any of them will recognize us from before, do you? Or am I being hopelessly wishful?” She looked up at the agitated sentries. “I wonder if they’re still put out with us after all that unpleasantness with Mehta.”
“There’s no real way to tell, is there?” He shrugged. “Still, of the two of us, I’d wager you’re more the diplomat. Besides they’re less likely to chuck down a spear at a woman.”
She eyed him suspiciously. In his dust-powdered goggles, Blake looked like a deranged praying mantis, but she had to admit he had a point. Well then. Gathering up her skirts, she extricated herself from the sidecar with all the dignity she could muster, and then straightened her traveling clothes again. Blowing a stray hair off her face, she waved up to the city guards with a cheery smile.
“Hello up there!” she called out in Greek. “Is it too early to open the gates?”
They looked down, uncertainty stamped on their faces. As they did, the engine revved behind her. A sudden plume of gravel and dust kicked away from the bike as Blake wheeled it around. Nellie let out an inarticulate squeal of rage.
“Blake! What are you doing?”
He pointed back the way they came. “See that dust storm? The Germans are already on their way!” he shouted. “I’ve got to go back and slow them down!”
“What? Blake! No! That’s madness! You can’t leave me here by myself!” She looked from him to the wall and back again. “What do I tell them? What if they arrest me—or worse?”
“I’ll be back!” he answered. “Remember what I told you!”
“Blake! Don’t leave me!”
Equally enraged and frightened, Nellie stamped and cursed him out, but he was already gone, leaving behind a plume of dust and the vanishing drone of his motorized conveyance. She exhaled, watching him disappear, and then turned back to the baffled Alexandrian guardsmen. What other choice did she have?
“Hello!” she called out once more, doing her best to offer another smile.
The great gate to the city opened its doors.
* * *
As he sped across the burning desert, Blake found himself troubled. While his skill set didn’t include a lot of empathy, he felt a small but toothsome sense of guilt at leaving Nellie on her own.
In his own way, it was an unspoken token of deep respect for her. He had every confidence in her abilities, yet there was just enough uncertainty to stoke the embers of guilt should anything happen to her.
No time for that now.
He compartmentalized it for later and carried on with his mission.
Ahead of him, on the distant horizon to the west, the plumes of a minor dust storm rose, churning bright blue sky into a sickly rust-tinged yellowish tan—the telltale indication of a mass of tanks and lorries rolling across the desert. He headed straight for it.
* * *
After a few more hours of picking his bumpy, uncomfortable way across the unforgiving topography, he came to the first group of approaching Panzers, crossing the open desert in a broad flying wedge formation. Blake felt a keen sense of cautious relief. The commanders riding in their open turrets scarcely paid any attention to the lone DAK motorcyclist coming back to their lines. Just another fellow trooper.
We’re all friends here.
He smiled grimly.
Behind the tanks was a big petrol lorry, flanked by a pair of armored cars. Not enough support for all these, Blake noted. There had to be more support vehicles further back, and likely infantry, as well. These were just the advance wave of the incoming force.
He counted the number of tanks in the vanguard. Twenty-three total, all from the German 21st Panzer Division, identified by the regimental markings. Three Mark IIs. Five of the big Panzerkampfwagen IVs. The rest were all Mark IIIs, the Afrika Korps workhorse.
There were no captured British tanks, nor any of the outmoded Italian models. No, he corrected himself. None of them would be outmoded against the Alexandrians. Even the most antiquated rattle-trap piece of junk would pose a major challenge. Any of the Panzers on its own would be able to bring down the city walls, and crash through anything the defenders could throw in its path.
Well, almost anything.
He had some ideas on that score.
No one knew better than him that even a tank could be beaten by brave men with the right equipment—but close to two dozen tanks? With what did the Alexandrians have to fight? Bare hands and shortswords. Bows and arrows. Defending the city against these mechanized behemoths wouldn’t be easy. It was going to take canny thinking.
A minor commotion broke Blake’s concentration. The closest tank commander was excited, calling out to the others. A jolt of adrenaline sizzled through him. Had he blown his cover? Instinctively, he put on the brakes and came to a halt, kicking up a small flurry of sand and leaping gravel. As he tensed for the desperate lunge toward the 50 cal, he assessed the better targets. The tank commander to his nine. Motorcycle troopers at one and two. Another tank’s commander at eleven.
Then cut through the gap and ride like hell.
Belay that.
No need to pull off such a risky maneuver. It was a false alarm—the German wasn’t talking about him at all, but pointing overhead at a flock of leathery pterodactyls, flappi
ng lazily westward in a flying wedge of their own. He exhaled in relief, breathing heavily as he shook off the fight-or-flight chemical rush still tingling through his bloodstream.
He and the German spectators watched the bird-like reptiles pass by. Then he started up the motorcycle again and drove on, following the prehistoric airshow.
* * *
Slightly less than an hour later, Blake rode past signs of a recent battle. Burnt-out hulks of tanks, fresh dug graves, scattered rubble of gun emplacements, tangles of barbed wire, and everywhere bomb craters. An uncanny sense of déjà vu washed over him as he realized he recognized this shard. He had fought here, at El Alamein, over a decade ago. And yet here it all was again, no more than a week old.
He was back in the Devil’s Gardens.
Blake was careful to stay with the boundaries of the freshest tank tracks. There was no telling how many of the landmines were still around. He crossed the vestiges of the north-south Rahman Track and went over Aqqaqir Ridge. Topping the rise, he again pulled his stolen cycle to a halt.
Others hadn’t been so lucky navigating the German minefields. Some tanks had careened into one another, while others had blundered right into their doom. An armored car remained fatally mired in a dust-bog. The body of its driver still lay stretched out in the sand beside it.
Blake had seen plenty of similar scenes during the war—quite often, he’d created them. He’d long since hardened himself to the sight of such carnage, and yet, he found himself strangely affected by the wreckage of men and machines in front of him. A prickling sensation gripped him, raising the hairs on the back of his neck and forearms.
Something wasn’t right.
The needles on his motorcycle indicators began to jitter madly. The air itself seemed to vibrate with a strange, unnerving tone that hurt his ears, and then an eruption of scarab beetles came streaming out of the sand everywhere around him, skittering away in all directions. A sudden explosion sent dirt and debris flying, and Blake dove to the ground for cover.
To his left and right, more explosions rocked the earth. A mortar strike? No, he realized. Something was setting off the mines. And then it struck.
A few yards away, the howling energy surge of another aftershock tore skyward. Blake covered his head, gritting his teeth against its banshee wail. He felt as though he was caught outside in a hurricane, but shielded his eyes to risk a look at the blinding channel of raw power. It was right out of the Old Testament, a pillar of fire in the wilderness, demanding fear and worship.
And then, just like that, gone again.
Blake got up, dusted himself off, and turned his attention to the new shard that lay before him. Terrifying as it was, this aftershock had been smaller than the one that had nearly swallowed up the Vanuatu. And this time he had a chance to see what was left behind. A glittering line of sand, fused into glass—still faintly smoking and softly hissing—marked the boundary. It was roughly flame-shaped, perhaps no more than six to ten meters across at its widest.
Time to investigate.
He had not forgotten he was still in a minefield. Carefully keeping to the tracks he’d been following, Blake came as near as he dared for a closer look, then he frowned. At first, he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. The affected area enclosed the armored car and its dead driver. Only now there were several cars and drivers—or rather, pieces of them.
Like a broken mirror, this newborn shard had splintered into a dozen or so smaller fragments, each one a fractured reflection of the original. In one or two of the new fractures, the driver’s dead body—or bodies, rather—lay intact. In some, there was just his head and a part of the torso, while in others no more than part of an arm or leg. The armored car lay in similar cross-sections, doubled and redoubled in segmented bits and pieces.
The site was a graveyard of fragmented doppelgangers.
Blake rubbed his chin, taking in the kaleidoscopic nightmare, and then quickly returned to the motorbike and drove off again. He didn’t want to be caught hanging around if the Germans sent any soldiers to investigate—and he knew he didn’t have much further to go.
41
At the Hikaptah, New Memphis
Eight days after the Event
Kha-Hotep felt restless… uneasy. Cam and their host were off in a private discussion, while Amber and Leila engaged in conversation with the envoy from the Arabian lands. It frustrated him to speak neither language.
So he took advantage of the lull to speak with the various Egyptian servants tending to the temple. The soldiers didn’t interfere, but he noticed they kept him under a watchful eye. He was talking to servants in one of the side chambers, a shrine-turned-kitchen, when Amber came to find him.
“There you are,” she said in his language. “Leila and Ibn Fadlan went off to do their prayers. What have you been up to?” While her turn of phrase was strange to him, he understood what she was asking.
“I’ve learned some interesting things,” he told her. “For one thing, it seems as if very few of the people here are from the same time.”
“What do you mean? They aren’t all ancient Egyptians?”
“Indeed they are,” Kha-Hotep replied, “but scattered across five thousand years. My time was during the nineteenth dynasty, but there are people here who say they are from the twenty-sixth dynasty, others from as far back as the first dynasty, and some of the peasant farmers here come from a time before the Pharaohs—even before the gods.”
Even as he said it, he realized how strange the concept was. Stranger yet was the fact that he was able to accept it.
“I knew Egypt was ancient,” Amber said, “but I had no idea how old it really is.”
“The Mother of the World,” Kha-Hotep said proudly. “But come, see something truly wondrous.” He took her over to a pair of artisans, a middle-aged man and a young boy, working together to restore the paint on a nearby obelisk. They paused in their work to greet them politely. The man was perhaps in his forties or fifties, the boy a young teen. The family resemblance was unmistakable.
“This is Tek the older, and Tek the younger.”
“Father and son?”
“So I thought, but no. They told me when the Event struck, the wall of lightning went through the middle of their house, yet the walls on either side still stood.”
“It is true,” Tek the older said. “We can show you the scorch marks on the walls and ceiling.”
“Can you tell my friend what happened that night?” Kha-Hotep prompted.
The man nodded. “I awoke in my house to a wall of fire, so bright I shielded my eyes from the blinding white flames, terrified that Ra himself had unleashed the sun to destroy the world. And when that terrible curtain of fire abated, I beheld my mother and father on the other side of the room, sitting at breakfast with a young boy—this boy here.”
The youth grinned. Tek the older continued.
“My mother and father looked at me in wonderment, and did not know me. Their appearance was very strange, for they were both young people—younger than me, young enough to be my children. But you see… my parents lived long and died many years ago. Yet here they were, looking just as I remembered them from my youth.”
Realization crept over Amber’s face.
“You mean… you and he…” She looked from man to boy. “One and the same person?”
“We are the same person,” the youth said. “Look, see the scar on my forearm? He has it, as well.”
“Tek the older…” she said softly, “and Tek the younger…”
Kha-Hotep nodded. “Truly, wonders surround us at every turn.”
* * *
They went back to the main hall to find Cam waiting for them—his chat with Géroux apparently finished. The lieutenant rejoined them, though now his manner seemed a bit prickly. He doffed his hat with what seemed like a strained smile.
“My apologies, but I regret I have important business I must attend to,” he said. “I hope this evening you will all join me at my tab
le for a celebration of your arrival and the successful founding of our new colony. Until then, you remain our honored guests.” He gave a courteous little bow before striding away.
“Well, he certainly left in a hurry,” Amber said.
Cam nodded. “I think I disappointed our host.”
“It is bad manners to disappoint a host,” Kha-Hotep chided.
“His bad manners disappointed me.”
Before Amber could ask what he meant, Kha-Hotep cleared his throat, and discreetly looked around to see if anyone was eavesdropping on their conversation.
“Do you think he means to keep us here?”
“If I had all things at my will, we’d slip away tonight,” Cam said softly.
“They still have your weapons,” Kha-Hotep pointed out.
“He said they’d return them,” Amber said.
“Did he?” Cam said, sounding unconvinced. “We’ll know in the morning,”
The three fell quiet for a moment, none of them overly optimistic about the how things would play, or what they would do if things got ugly.
* * *
Returning to the temple complex, Lieutenant Géroux made his way through the flickering, torch-lit inner hallways and entered the sumptuous quarters that had belonged to the late High Priest. Géroux’s own spartan military gear was spread around the room, looking out of place against the richly decorated walls.
Durand was there, painstakingly sketching a schematic on a sheet of papyrus. A series of other drawings were spread out close at hand. The belts holding Cam and Amber’s machetes lay on a wide dining table, alongside Kha-Hotep’s khopesh sword, one of the strange crossbows, and all of the curiously-shaped clips. The other crossbow also lay on the table, although in pieces, having been meticulously disassembled.
“How goes our progress, Sergeant-Major?” Géroux asked. “Do you think we can replicate the design?”
“Well, that remains to be seen.” Durand put down his quill and crossed his arms. “The materials are entirely unknown to us. To judge from the smoothness, I would have guessed the casing was made of some polished horn or ivory, but it is far too durable for that. Perhaps we could use finely carved hardwood. The inner workings are as intricate as Swiss clockwork, though I think with the proper tools, we could replicate it.”