by Jake Stone
Slaves of Dardekum
The Lightbringer: Book One
Jake Stone
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter One
I hate trips; always have.
I’d rather be kicked in the nuts by a toddler than have to travel across the globe to Geneva, Switzerland where I’m supposed to take part in one of the greatest experiments in human history. But here I am—ready to go.
I take a calming breath as I walk through the facility’s entrance, acutely aware of the armed guards checking identification cards up ahead. I just got mine last night, an envelope slipped beneath my door from Rachel. Hopefully she’s not playing a prank on me, as usual.
“I.D.?” the guard asks, an attractive young woman with dark eyes and auburn hair.
“Here ya go,” I say, trying to hide my nervousness.
“Alexander Cross?” she asks, arching a seductive brow at me.
“Xander,” I correct her.
Unimpressed, she looks back at my picture, her eyes narrowed as she begins to study the details of my face. Can’t imagine what the problem is. I still look the same. Mess of black hair. Two brown eyes. A face that could use a little fattening up. Maybe she’s into me. Dawning my best smile, I take the I.D. from her hand and shoot her a cocky wink. “Thanks,” I say, hoping she might reciprocate with a smile.
Nope.
“Next,” she calls out.
Sighing, I move on. From what I understand, security is never this tight. But you just have to gaze out at the cavalcade of black sedans and SUV’s parked out front to know that today isn’t like any other day.
The best of the best is here. High-ranking dignitaries. Famous politicians. Leaders of tiny countries. They hob knob in the elegant foyer of the facility, flirting with gorgeous young interns, who frolic in their tight miniskirts and high heels, showing off their long, toned legs and large breasts that press achingly through their business jackets. Just one look at those beauties and I nearly trip over myself.
Damn….
Up ahead, I spot Dr. Ralph Simmons waiting for me in the middle of the lobby. He’s the head of our project team and second in charge. He also happens to be the biggest pain in my ass.
“What the fuck, Cross?” he demands as he glares at me through black-framed glasses. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry,” I say, coming to a halt. “I got stuck in traffic with with a guy who could barely speak English. It’s a long story.”
“Always with the excuses,” he says, shaking his head in disappointment. “And where are the numbers I wanted? Why aren’t they in my email like I requested?”
“Uh, yeah, about that…” I say, rushing to pull the thumb drive from my bag. “I just finished them this morning.”
“Barely?”
Barely? The algorithms he sent me would’ve taken an entire support team to work them out in the amount of time he gave me. He’s lucky I even finished them.
“Look,” I say, holding back my anger. “I stayed up all night doing this crap. It wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t easy either. But it’s done. Here. Every problem—finished.”
He stares down at the drive and smirks, his asshole entitlement shining through his slitted eyes. “I guess I can give you a pass, but only this one time, you got me?”
“Whatever,” I say.
I watch as he turns to leave, his head lifting high as he notices one of the dignitaries, a bald man with a hot blond at his side, waving him over. But there’s one more thing I need to tell him.
“There’s something else,” I add. “Something I noticed.”
He stops to look back at me. “What?”
“After I finished the problems, I decided to go back and check the rest of the team’s work.”
“And?”
“I found some errors—a lot of them.”
“What are you talking about?” he demands, irritated.
“There seems to be a miscalculation in terms of the energy output. If you gave me some more time, maybe postpone the experiment for…a couple of hours?”
“A couple of hours?” Simmons is disgusted. “Some of the most important people in the world are here, Xander. You think they have time to hang around for a couple of more hours?”
“They might if you told them it was for their own safety,” I say.
“The calculations are fine,” he declares. “I double checked them myself.”
“You sure you don’t want me to just—"
“Enough,” Simmons says. “We’re not changing a thing. And don’t go telling anyone about this. The last thing we need is for you to start some unneeded drama amongst the other members. Now go join your team.”
Wanting to punch him in the face, I steady myself with a long, slow breath. It’s become a ritual of mine, a tactic I use whenever he pisses me off, which needless to say, is every day.
Setting off to join the team, I notice a young woman with black hair and blue eyes dressed in tight jeans and scuffed-up combat boots. She nods at me from afar, a sarcastic grin touching her lips when she sees my brooding stare. Instantly, I begin to feel better.
Rachel. Everyone I know has the hots for her. Sure, she’s got a rocking body with a pair of breasts that defy gravity, but to me, she’s just…Rachel. She always has been. She always will be.
“I see that you’re flirting with your boyfriend again,” Rachel mutters as I stand next to her.
“Is he still looking at me?”
She glances over her shoulder, pushing back her glasses to get a better look at him. “Yep, right at your ass.”
“That fucker,” I say.
“Don’t act like you don’t like it.”
I laugh, despite myself.
Rachel’s cool. I’ve known her my entire life. She was there when I first learned how to ride a bike, when I accidentally threw a rock through Mr. Rodriguez’s window, when I stupidly built that tiny rocket in my garage and nearly burnt down my entire house. She was also there when my mom got sick and died in the hospital.
Come to think about it, she’s been there for pretty much everything—being my neighbor and all. We even attended the same space camps during the summers together. Turns out she’s pretty smart, enough to earn her a position as my superior.
“Did you do the numbers?” she asks.
“Yep,” I say.
“And?”
“And I think Simmons is a complete idiot.”
“Of course, he is,” she says. “He only got his position by stealing other peoples’ work.”
“Namely mine,” I say.
She shakes her head in frustration. “You should be the one running this project, Xander; not him.”
“You know that’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t start,” I say. “Not right now.”
“I’m serious,” she continues. “You’re the smartest one on the team. Everyone knows that. If you’d just show a little bit of initiative, you wouldn’t be stuck here with the rest of us on the support team.�
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“And what’s wrong with that?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “But you could really be someone.”
“I don’t need to be someone,” I say.
“You know what I mean.”
“Look, I don’t need a title and I don’t want money. For what? So I can buy a nice house and get married?”
Rachel’s features strangely turn downcast as she looks away. “What’s wrong with that?” she mutters softly.
“I don’t know,” I concede with a shrug. “Maybe it’s cool for some one else, but sometimes I think I’m just cursed to be alone forever.”
“Xander, you can’t let the past keep chasing you for the rest of your life. You need to get off the sidelines, make some friends.”
“Friends?” I say with a frown. “Who needs friends, when I’ve got you?” I give her a playful shove, expecting her to laugh, but instead, she just looks away, annoyed.
“Thanks a lot,” she says softly.
People crowd around a large window looking into a tunnel, where a mammoth machine of metal pipes and chambers sits, waiting. This is a collision point, a subsection of the world’s largest collider, where atoms smash together and form wild explosions of sub-particles known as heart events. It’s a project that has been nearly two decades in the making and it is truly a sight to behold.
Dignitaries from across the globe explode in applause as an older gentleman in a white lab coat takes the stage. Most know him as the head of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, an accomplished scientist who spearheaded the construction of this new massive collider. But to me, he’s the guy who gave me life.
“Thank you for coming,” my father says, gifting the crowd that fake smile I’ve come to know so well. “It’s always such a pleasure when…” His gaze turns to the stunning female interns in the front row. “…Healthy young minds such as yourselves, take an interest in science.”
A round of polite laughter lifts from the crowd.
My father and I don’t have the best of relationships. It all started a couple of years back, when my mother died. Our ways of coping were extremely different. He threw himself into his work, spending late nights at the office with only a pot of coffee to keep him company. While I, on the other hand, turned away from the world, sinking beneath the sheets of my life, where I gave up on everything, including my ambitions. My dad never forgave me for that. I don’t think he ever will.
“Over 13 billions years ago,” my father begins with a pensive stare, “the world was formless. Raging Temperatures, the likes of which could only be dreamt of in nightmares, kept particles from forming, thus keeping the universe in a constant state of flux. It wasn’t until space began to cool, that the first atoms began to form—tiny constructs of sub-particles that sought to hide its secrets from us. Well, ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in human history, mankind has constructed a machine powerful enough to find those secrets.”
“With this machine,” he says, motioning at the window, “we will be able to move past the tiny blip of the hadron discovered more than ten years ago, deeper into that hidden and twisted subatomic landscape, that…dark universe.
No more shall we be imprisoned by space and time. No more shall we be forced to conjecture about the start of existence, how it began, what it was, what it still shall be. No, ladies and gentlemen. Now, we shall see it for what it is.”
All around me, I see the faces of dignitaries begin to transform in wonderment. They basque in the light of his intellect, like people gawking at a golden statue. Even the young interns, ambitious women consumed with gaining political clout with their charm and beauty, appear transfixed with the vision he sells them, their faces still, their eyes unblinking.
“But like all great journeys, it must begin with a single step.” My father turns around to face the window, looking into the tunnel where the collision point awaits. With a raised finger, he glances at Simmons, who’s watching him anxiously from the sideline, and signals for the experiment to begin.
With the touch of a button, the collider awakes.
Dignitaries hold their breath as the 100 kilometer-long chamber begins to vibrate. Energy pulsates through its massive cables, filling the tunnel with an audible hum that begins to reverberate through the window and into our clothes, our very skin!
Hundreds of billions of protons traveling over miles and miles of magnets at close to light speed, slamming and banging, colliding and ramming, crashing every 25 nanoseconds to deconstruct atoms into subatomic particles.
It’s Incredible…
I feel my skin begin to tingle, my heart racing. The sensation is overpowering, and I have to take a deep breath just to calm myself.
And then, without warning, the chamber tragically begins to fill with smoke, and I start to see sparks shooting from the wiring. Something’s wrong.
“What’s happening?” my father demands. He turns to Simmons, his eyes filling with anger.
“I’m not sure,” Simmons stammers. He glances at his tablet, then at me, his face growing lifeless and pale. “There must’ve been an error with the voltage modulation.”
“God Damnit!” my father curses, a look of anger stretching across his face. The frown he wears can crack a rock. And it is here, as his fury flares, that everyone finally gets to see who my father really is. “I want this taken care of, now!”
“Someone needs to do something,” Rachel says, turning to me.
“Like what?” I ask. “I warned Simmons about this. If something happens to the collider, it’ll be his fault for ignoring me.”
“And it’ll be ours if we do nothing,” Rachel says.
She looks through the glass at the collision point, her eyes growing wide at the building smoke, and in that moment, I know what she’s thinking.
“Don’t,” I say. I can see it in her face, the need to save everyone, to put her life on the line for others. I know it because I’ve seen it on her face for most of my life. And it fills me with such fear because I know there’s probably nothing I can say to stop her. “Please, Rachel. It’s too dangerous.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, brushing past me toward the elevator that leads to the tunnel.
The crowd watches, startled, as within seconds, a young woman in a white lab coat appears in the tunnel below them, her body quickly engulfed by the leaking smoke.
They stand still, stiff in their confusion, and I have to shove my way through them all to get to my father.
“What the hell are you doing, Xander?” Simmons demands as he sees me. “Get back with the rest of your team.”
“You can’t let her be in there,” I say to my father.
“She knew the risks,” my father replies, his brow pinched as he studies the data streaming on his tablet pc. He could care less if she lives or dies. To him, as long as the experiment is a success, her death would be an acceptable loss.
The machine sparks again, and I see Rachel showered under a burst of light.
“Fuck that,” I say, stepping away from him. “And fuck you, too,” I say to Simmons.
Sliding through the crowd, I make my way to the elevator. Behind me, I can hear the other team members calling out to me, warning me to get back. But I don’t care. Rachel’s in there, and I’ll be damned if I let her get hurt.
Rushing into the tunnel, I reach her in a heartbeat. Her head lifts as she sees me.
“Xander?”
“What’s the voltage?” I ask.
It takes her less than a second to answer. “125 trillion and growing,” she says.
I gasp, frozen in horror. At that level of power the entire facility, and most of the city, would be destroyed. But I can’t freak out. I need to remain calm. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I offer with a shrug.
“Damnit, Xander,” she hisses through clenched teeth, “this is no time for your jokes.”
“Okay, okay.” I scratch my chin, thinking. I’ve never really examined the collision point’s design plans before.
But already, I’m drawing up diagrams in my head. Everything comes in a flash, and I realize that it has to be the faulty algorithms.
Damnit. How could they have done this? How could they have put so much at risk with such a messy construction? My father. That’s how. Ambition is never patient.
“Let me see this,” I say, taking the data pad from her hands.
“Goddamnit, Xander,” she says, snatching it back from me. “Will you stop playing around?”
“Look,” I say. “You wanted my help? Well, here I am. It’s only us now.”
Rachel glances up at the window and stares at the support team, at Simmons, at my father, realizing that none of them are going to help us, and her soft face is marred by a look of heartbreaking disappointment. “Fine,” she says, defeated. “Tell me what to do.”
“There are too many errors here,” I say. “By the looks of this, I’d say our best hope is to turn off the collider.”
“But this is your father’s reputation we’re talking about,” she says. “His life!”
“And this is ours,” I reply.
She pauses to think, her face hovering above mine as it has done so many times before. “Okay,” she finally says, reluctantly turning her attention back to the tablet pc and tapping in a ten-digit code. We wait for the device to shut down, for the rumbling to stop, for the light to diminish and for everything to settle back to normal. But it doesn’t.
“Uh oh,” she says.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s not working.”
The light of the chamber is growing, pulsating into a rhythmic frenzy that adds to the frightening array of smoke. This is not good. This is not good at all. “I’ll take care of it,” I say, taking the tablet from her. “In the meantime, why don’t you go up stairs with the rest of the team. I think better when I’m alone.”
