by Hodden, TE
“No.” Barney shook his head. “Look, kid… we’re probably going to be elbow deep in aliens trying to kill us in a few hours. Think you can try and find things a little less amazing by then?”
The Dweeb shrugged. “I don’t know if I will ever find this less amazing.” He frowned. “Why do you think somebody will try and kill us?”
“Huh.” Matthew laughed, over the comm-link. “I guess it’s just the effect he has on people.”
“Hey!” Barney held up his hands. “I’m not saying every alien wants to kill people, I’m just saying in my experience it’s a… significant probability. If anything tries to crawl out my belly, I don’t want the slack jawed yokel marvelling at the wonder of it all, when he should be shooting it, and saving my life.”
The Dweeb shrugged. “I’ve seen things crawling out of people. This, though, being in space? Visiting other worlds? This is¬”
“Just a job,” Barney said. “You get used to it.”
The Dweeb slithered down to the floor, and folded his legs. “Yeah, they said that about magic too.”
“Right…” Barney muttered. He prodded at one of the computers. “Great.”
*
Four hours later, the alarm sounded to indicate they were within a hundred kilometres of Jupiter’s surface, well within the inner moons, closing upon the object.
It was a spaceship. An unarmed transporter, damaged and adrift.
Barney guessed it to be about the size of an aircraft carrier, with a shape more like a centipede, with a segmented hull scorched and wounded by battle, a crater where two of the three engines should have been.
The Dweeb leant over one of the consoles, and tapped the keyboard, bringing up a closer look at the vessel. “What is it?”
Barney cocked his head. “Do you think it could be a spaceship Professor?”
The Dweeb tilted his head. “Where is it from?”
Barney puffed his cheeks. “I have no idea. There are a lot of stars out there, a lot of worlds.”
Matthew tapped on the window, and mimed a telephone.
Barney turned on the comm-link. “Yeah?”
“I know what it is,” Matthew said, brightly. “That is the Palace Ship of a Trader Prince from the Atlantean Empire. It is…a very long way from home. They never come out this far.”
Barney gave the Dweeb a ‘there you go’ look. “So how long has it been out here?”
“Weeks,” Matthew said. “Maybe months. The harmonic core is still warm. It’s bleeding out energy. I guess the signal is some kind of a mayday.”
The Dweeb cleared his throat. “So, there could still be survivors?”
Matthew shrugged. “We should go check!”
Barney brought the Bumblebee about, and flew down the length of the wreck, and gently eased it down onto an airlock.
The clang of impact echoed through the ship.
The Dweeb looked nervous. “Does it always make that noise?”
Matthew tried not to laugh.
Barney rolled his eyes. “Yes. It’s fine. Want me to show you where to find a spacesuit?”
The Dweeb shook his head. “I don’t need it.”
“Erm…” Barney held up his hands. “He doesn’t need one. You and me? We need one. I already have mine.” He patted his suit, and flexed his thoughts. The suit grew a helmet, gloves, and utility vest, ready to face the cold of the void. “See?”
The Dweeb raised an eyebrow. “Oh. Okay. Me too.”
“You too?” Barney asked.
The Dweeb touched something on the underside of his wrist. The air shimmered and his clothes became a suit of armour, that had as much of the space suit about it, as it did the medieval, with a mail of fine scales, in many shades of green. The angular helmet had a thin, dark, visor, that seemed to stare into Barney’s soul.
Charlie didn’t look like such a dweeb, or a kid.
“Okay.” Barney gestured with his hands. “So… if we meet monsters, you are good to hunt them, right?”
The voice from the Yeoman’s armour was deeper, and flatter than the Dweeb’s. “Is that what you think I do?” He turned to the airlock. “We have work to do.”
Barney glanced back to the window. “Isn’t that what he does?”
Matthew tilted his head.
“Well…” Barney flustered. “Is that suit going to work? I mean, it’s going to be pretty embarrassing if he dies!”
“He’ll be fine,” Matthew promised. “I’ll meet you on the inside.”
00010
Brandi Summers snapped two pictures of the object in situ, freshly exposed in the crisp snow, beside her scale rules and find marker. The egg timer hung around on the screen for a painfully long time, before it let her see the finished photographs. She popped the floppy disc out of the dinosaur of a camera, and loaded another, out of habit.
Satisfied, Summers eased the object out of the snow and held it up to the light, in her gloved fingers.
It was a needle of crystal, like many others she had found in the dig, but this one was unbroken, and didn’t have the distinctive burning on the inside. The electrical contact on the tip was clearly defined, and she could even see the spider-silk thin circuits layered within the structure of the crystal.
She hopped to her feet, and held it aloft. “Professor!”
Professor Jeff Warner stepped carefully over from his square of the grid, and pulled his scarf down from over his face. He was a little past his prime, with blunted, slightly wolfish looks, and brow that was built for scowling. He smiled. “Ah! Can you begin to imagine what might be on here? What glimpses it could give us of another world?”
Summers laughed. “It’s probably just somebody’s drive time playlist or something.”
The Professor studied the needle. “Perhaps… wouldn’t that be amazing?”
Summers did her best to look like it would.
And there it was again. The nagging feeling at the back of her neck. The feeling that she was being watched. She put the needle in her tray, and took a moment to look around. The other members of the expedition were spread throughout the grid, crouching in their squares, fighting the frost hardened ground and fresh snow with their tools, cataloguing fragments of pottery, trinkets, the scraps that remained of long lost lives.
There was something about the ruins themselves that scared Summers.
The ruins were all that was left of a city so old, that if it ever had a name, it had faded from the history books in the countless centuries that the city had slept beneath the glacier. Amongst the rubble and fragments of the stone buildings, the crushed foundations and slithers of walls, there were suggestions of grand archways, hints of pyramids, bits of statues, and pieces of rooms, revealed as the veil of ice withdrew, and they fought their way free of the cascading icicles.
The city lay in a valley between the mountains, the jagged spires reaching up towards the white blue sky, seeming to twist their way up out of the snow.
The wind sang a low lamenting prayer through the mountains.
The archaeologists paused in their work, and turned to look towards the peaks, where the snow was being driven into clouds and flurries.
“Professor?” Summers asked.
Warner nodded, and cupped his hands over his mouths. “Quickly now! Cover your spot and peg it down! Careful there Mister James! More haste less speed! Good! Gather your tools, count them back, and get to the camp!”
Summers joined the scurry of activity, collecting her tools to her bag, covering her spot, and carefully carrying her tray of finds back to the collection of lightweight huts, semi-rigid tents, and modular cabins, connected by a network of plastic tunnels. One of the lab technicians booked her finds in for cataloguing. They spotted the needle, and gave Summers an impressed look.
She grinned back.
*
Hours later and the valley was still drowned in the blizzard. The sun, the sky, and even the mountains had been lost in the white.
Summers sat in the canteen, sipping
a mug of tea, her head resting against the window, as she watched the storm. Hans, one of her friends, sat on the other side of the table, offering her occasional smiles, whenever he looked up from his book. They were sharing the headphones for his personal stereo, passing the time with the same old album.
“Hey…” He said, after a while. “If we have a complete needle, do you think we will ever get it running? You know… see what these… people had on their computers?”
Summers shrugged. “I don’t know. We guess they are some kind of data storage device, but what do we know about the device it was meant to plug into?” She pointed to his stereo. “What if I gave that CD to a cowboy? They might figure it was a way of listening to music, they might understand it was something akin to a wax cylinder, or a record player that they had seen, but… what then? How would they guess it needs a laser, not a needle? Or the speed it plays at? Or… that some hold videos and computer games, not music or speech? Where would they even begin to place it all together?” Summers shivered. “And we know that CD was made by a person who does their maths on a base of ten. Those statues we found… none of them are human. None of them are even humanoid. We guess those things are the Gods of whoever lived here, that we are rewriting the history books to push the timeline of human evolution way back, but… For all we know this is the cradle of a very different civilisation. Something that lived and died before we learned to bang the stones together. You know?”
Hans wasn’t listening.
He was staring out the window.
“What?” Summers asked.
“No.” He rubbed his face. “It’s nothing.”
Summers scowled at him. “What?”
“Well…” He shook his head. “It’s trick of the light. Shadows and movement. But for just a second there… I thought maybe I saw something…”
“The ghost?” Summers asked, in a playful whisper.
Hans laughed. “I think maybe you have been here too long, if you believe that.”
Summers smiled, and shook her head.
She really wished she didn’t still feel the tell-tale prickle on the back of her neck.
Just like somebody was watching her.
00011
Catherine Willow laughed as she ran.
With the spear in her hand, with the power of the singularity flowing through her, the butterflies of excitement in her belly, and the giddy elation of pure speed, it was hard not to laugh. Even when there was danger, and lives were on the line, even when things got desperate, there was at least a part of her that was having fun.
The spear warped time and space, letting her move on a different plane to the rest of the world. To her, here in the shallows of the warp, the sky was dulled and dark, the shadows thicker and richer. The few people on the streets were moving like they were wading through treacle, their voices stretched into whale song.
The stolen armoured car skidded around the corner in slow motion, the smoke from the tyres seeming to hang, weightless over the street. The robber hanging out the back, with his submachine gun, had his finger on the trigger. Muzzle flashes were blossoming, as slow as flowers unfurling to greet the sun, and the bullets wallowed slowly, spinning towards the police car, that was in hot pursuit, just beginning its screech into the corner.
Catherine sank deeper into the warp, slowing time almost to a halt. She wore loose scarlet robes, with a deep hood, over an armoured bodysuit, and reinforced goggles.
She sprinted past the police car, and ran at the bullets, brushing them aside with a swipe of the hand. The impact flattened the bullets, and shattered them into harmless sparks. She reached the armoured car, and stamped down on the back step, in the same instant that she released her grip on time and snapped back to the shallows of the warp.
The back of the truck grounded out, buckling the wheels and shredding the tyres.
Catherine caught the robber, before he tumbled out of the van, and snatched the gun from his hand. His wail of shock was slowed and deepened to a fog horn blare. Catherine tossed the robber back into the van, and he landed on a bag of fresh bank notes, in a heap.
She sank deeper into the warp, slowing time further, and drove the gun to floor. The stock shattered and the barrel crumpled into scrap. With a satisfied chuckle, Catherine walked casually to the front of the van, and jumped onto the hood. She surfaced from warp.
The front of the truck ground out, the wheels gave out, and the airbags fired.
The truck skidded to a halt on its belly with a shriek of complaining metal.
The police car skidded past, and screeched to a halt.
“Good morning officers!” Catherine said, with a bright smile. “Is anybody hurt?”
The officers shared a look.
Catherine’s communications link chimed. She tapped her earpiece. “Scarlet Knight!”
It was Phoebe on the other end. “Hey! So… Are you able to talk?”
“I’m about done here, what’s up?”
Phoebe hesitated, as though ordering her thoughts. “Harry found the Croft girl. He’s taken her to a hospital in Miami, but… the gangsters who kidnapped her seem to have drugged her, and it… Whatever they gave her is doing something weird.”
“Weird?” Catherine pursed her lips. “You know what? I’ll come take a look myself.” She flashed the Police Officers an apologetic smile. “Sorry guys, it looks like it’s turning out to be one of those nights. You know where to send the paperwork, right?”
Before they could answer, she sank into the warp, and ran North.
*
The grassy parkland of Pelham was starting to turn towards autumn. The first signs of yellow and orange were just starting to show in the trees.
Catherine sped through the park in a blur, and skidded to a halt at the gates of the Honour Guard Headquarters. It was a venerable, austere, building built on the same scale, and with the same eye for the classical and the gothic, as Pelham’s mansion houses. Set behind high walls, and within neatly ordered gardens, the building had the same imposing air as a courthouse.
Catherine placed her palm on the scanner, and the gates opened before her. She spent the brisk walk from the gate to the front door shaking off her cheesy smile, and replacing it with a more business-like and professional expression.
Phoebe and Melisa were in the Operations Room.
Each was sat at one of the computer consoles built into the long conference table, each with one eye on the bank of video monitors on the far wall.
Melisa (Codenamed Melody) was Catherine’s niece, and ward. She was sixteen, and a little elfin, with hair dyed candy pink, big, expressive eyes, and thick framed glasses perched on a button nose. She wore a plain hoodie over a plaid skirt and steel-toed boots. She had a take out on the table, and was dipping her fries in the milkshake.
Phoebe was an older woman, with a round face that was mostly dimples and a kooky-aunt smile. She wore a floral headscarf over untamed hair, a dark sweater, and comfy jeans. She was nursing a mug of coffee.
Catherine snapped off her goggles, and pulled down her hood, as she stepped into the room. “Hey! What’s going on?”
Phoebe held up a finger and tapped at her keyboard. A few of the wall monitors blinked over to show the patient records for the First Daughter, taken as she was admitted into hospital. They were all wildly wrong, from the fluctuating blood pressure and pulse rate, to a body temperature that peaked into fever and dropped dangerously close to hypothermia. There were photographs of the Croft girl, breathing through a tube, with dark veins bulging under her skin.
Phoebe gave her a helpless look. “I have no idea.”
“Huh.” Catherine walked over to the screens, and ran her fingers over the pictures. “The notes say she was fed something on a drip? Looks like… a Hell of a cocktail of sedatives. This should have been lethal, but her body is reacting entirely the wrong way. It shouldn’t even be able to produce these kinds of hormones.”
Melody glanced up from her screen. “The FBI raided the mano
r and took her guards into custody, but they are all tight lipped, refusing to answer any questions.”
Catherine tapped her lip. “Okay… So… I can’t work from the data alone. I need to go take a look at the patient. Let Harry know I’m on my way.”
Phoebe nodded.
Catherine paused, and looked back at the screen. “What did Matt find out in space?”
Melisa sighed. “Some kind of spaceship. We don’t know much yet.”
Catherine put a hand on Catherine’s shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
Melisa gestured to the screen. “It’s one of those nights.”
Catherine chuckled, stealing some fries, and stuffing them into her mouth. “Right?” She shifted her grip on the spear, and let the energy flow into her soul. “Okay folks. I am out of here…”
She plunged into the warp, until the clock hung between a tick and a tock, and the world froze.
It was a long way from New York, to Miami. She had plenty of space to lose herself to the speed, and let herself loose. With her hair flapping wild, and her heart full of raw power, she laughed with the weightless sensation.
*
Catherine let time lurch back to speed in the corridor outside the hospital room. The snap of displaced air tore some pages from the notice board, and scattered them over the floor. She let the butterflies and adrenaline fade, as she lifted her goggles from her eyes, and gave the three Secret Service agents an apologetic smile. She dug her ID from her robes. “Gentlemen?”
The agents relaxed, and put their pistols back in their holsters.
Scimitar stood in the door to the treatment room, his arms folded across his chest. “Are you finished?”
“I could nip out for coffee?” Catherine suggested.
Scimitar snarled. “This way. No jokes. The President is not in a joking mood.”
“Right,” Catherine sighed. She shook off the buzz of the warp. “How is she?”
Scimitar gestured to the room. “She’s not improving.”
Catherine stepped into the treatment room.
President Rupert Croft was sat by his daughter’s bed, his anguish written in the lines of his face. He was a short, squat, bulldog of a man, with a jowly face, and a shaven scalp. His tie was loosened, his shirt stained with sweat. His wife Grace, sat on the other side of the bed, stroking her daughter’s hair. The Secretary of State, Luther Allistaire, sat on the far side of the room, his chin resting on his hands.
