by Dean M. Cole
Chapter 54
Standing in a long hallway, Angela pointed at a door. “This is it. This is the control room.”
Vaughn knew she was correct. He recognized the door’s position and the reinforced glass frame within it. Last time the two of them had been here, a Neck had pulverized that window to the point of failure. That had been just before Angela had reset the timeline and returned them to their starting points.
Peering through the window, he couldn’t see the wormhole or the light wave. A large set of cabinets blocked the sphere from observation.
It had taken less than five minutes to reach the control room this time. They’d started off slow, clearing each new corridor, but Bill had been right: the place was a ghost town.
Vaughn had heard the light wave’s eerie wail the moment they left the janitorial supply closet. It had steadily grown louder since.
He tilted his head toward the door and looked at Angela. “Hear it?”
She nodded wordlessly.
“Hear what, El Capitan?”
“The light wave. Sounds just like it did back on Mon Calamari.”
“Oh … Da, the Fish-Head world.”
Bill nodded. “The world full of Admiral Ackbars?”
“It used to be,” Angela said plaintively. “They’re gone now. We couldn’t stop the Necks from wiping their planet.”
Vaughn looked at her. “We did our best. It wasn’t our fault.”
Eyes darkening, Angela turned and gazed into the control room. A look of immense sadness clouded her features. “And here we are, about to do our best all over again.”
Vaughn pointed to her watch. “If we don’t hurry, we won’t be doing anything.”
After glancing at her wrist, she continued to stare through the window. “Twenty minutes. I’ll get it done.” She shook her head again. “But what about them? We’re leaving all those worlds we passed through unchanged. The only thing this reset accomplishes is denying the Necks our world. All those other peoples … they’ll still be lost.”
Bill and Teddy watched the two of them with mixed levels of confusion.
Extending an arm past Angela, Vaughn reached for the door handle.
She batted away his hand. “I’ve got this, Captain!” She stared at Vaughn. The cold, hard looked returned to her eyes. Turning away, she opened the door.
The squealing wail rose precipitously.
After a slight hesitation, Angela stepped into the control room.
Vaughn exchanged glances with the two men and then pointed at BOb. “Guard the door. If anything comes this way, kill it.”
“Wilco, Captain Asshole.”
He blew air through his nose and then followed the other three into the control room.
Stepping around the cabinet, he stopped and stared at the mercurial sphere that hung beyond the glass wall. Angela, Bill, and Teddy were already doing the same.
A wide cone now shone out of the top of the wormhole, an inversion of what they’d seen on Mon Calamari. However, instead of shining down through the planet, this one sent up a spreading fan of energy that cut through the ceiling of the control room.
Vaughn knew that, some distance away, it was emerging as a ring of blue-white light. At this very moment, the aurora-like curtain of fluorescing energy was racing across the planet’s surface with CERN at its epicenter.
As he watched the top of the widening cone creep across the ceiling, slowly lowering over their heads, Vaughn pointed to Angela’s computer console. “I’ll settle for banishing them from our world for now.”
Staring up at the descending wave of light with wide eyes, Teddy gestured sideways, pointing at Vaughn. “Da. What he said.”
Chapter 55
“BOb, any movement out there?” Bill said, looking back nervously.
“Negative, Major Peterson.”
“None of them caterpillar bots, right?”
“No, sir.”
Vaughn pursed his lips. “Major? Sir?”
Continuing to scan the corridor, the robot nodded. “Affirmative, Captain Asshole.”
Ignoring the exchange, Bill pointed through the control room window. “You sure they can’t see us in here, sense us through that wormhole?”
Shaking his head and trying to sound more certain that he felt, Vaughn said, “No. The other side is mirrored, designed to shield against radiation. Besides, I think they believe we’re dead.”
Teddy pointed at the light still streaming overhead. The curtain of white energy was now only a few feet above their heads. “Then why are they still firing that light?”
Angela continued to work on the computer, her fingers dancing across its keyboard. Without looking up, she said, “They don’t know we were the only ones. The Necks see us as an infestation. Like Captain Asshole said: if you see one cockroach, there’s probably a hundred more hiding in the walls.” She pulled her hand away from the terminal long enough to point up at the light. “This is planetary bug killer.”
Dropping her hand back to the keyboard, Angela released a growl. “Shit! They’ve cut off my access!”
Looking at her screen, Vaughn blanched. “What!?”
“Oh, shit, Command-Oh! Password not working?”
As Teddy asked the question, another log-in fail message flashed across the terminal’s screen.
Shaking her head, Angela pounded her fist into the desk’s off-white surface. “The bastards locked me out.”
A wave of nausea swept over Vaughn. He looked from the screen to her reddening face. “Please tell me there’s another way, a backdoor or something.”
Angela started to shake her head, but then she paused and sat bolt upright. “Wait. Maybe …” She reached tentatively for the keyboard. “I wonder if …?”
“What? What?” Vaughn barked.
Angela didn’t answer. Her fingers started dancing across the keys again. Several screens later, she reached a new log-in window. She peered over the top of the display, her eyes losing focus. Then she nodded again and punched in a series of characters.
Finally, a new window opened. Angela pumped both fists overhead. “Yes! Yes, yes, yes!”
Vaughn shifted his gaze from the screen to her triumphant face. “You’re in?”
“Pfft, yeah.” Angela started typing commands into the keyboard. Apparently setting aside her earlier sadness, she gave him a lopsided grin. “Stupid robots can’t stop me.”
“Holy shit!” Shaking his hands, Vaughn released a pent-up breath. “You scared the shit outta me.”
Bill scoffed. “Ya think?”
“I got this, guys. Just had to use my old sys-admin log-in.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you had another log-in, Command-Oh?”
She cast an embarrassed grin at the cosmonaut. “Didn’t think it would work. IT was supposed to delete that one when I left for NASA.”
“You didn’t think it …?” The words fell from Vaughn’s lips. He shook his head. “That … That was just dumb luck?”
She held her palms out and gave him a toothy grin. “Hey, even a blind squirrel is right twice a day.”
Bill did a double-take. “I’m pretty sure that’s not how the saying goes.”
She waved a dismissive hand and then continued typing. “Whatever. Bottom line: we’re in. It’s about time something broke our way.”
Looking up at the slowly descending fan of blue-white light, Vaughn sighed. He dragged his gaze from the encroaching curtain of energy and stared at the computer screen. Lines of code streamed across its surface. It was all Greek to him. From the instructions Angela had given each of them, Vaughn understood the basics of what she was doing, but the data currently crossing the screen was inscrutable.
He tapped her on the shoulder. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m accessing the alien code.” The data on the screen paused. Angela pointed at a set of numbers. “Here it is!”
“What?”
Angela looked at him and smiled. “These are the space-time coordinate
s for the first set of collisions.”
Returning her attention to the computer, she quickly copied the data and then opened a new program. A moment later, she finished, pressing the enter key with a flourish. Then she looked up. “The reset is ready to go.”
Vaughn looked at her from beneath raised eyebrows. “That was faster than last time.” He stepped forward for a closer look. His foot brushed against something under the desk.
Angela shrugged. “Practice makes perfect.”
Vaughn bent over and blindly probed the area beneath the workstation.
“Like I told you back in the wheat field, I’m coming at the problem from multiple directions. This reset will take us back to the formation of that first micro black hole, but if the interference pattern works, it’ll disrupt the flow of protons and stop it from ever forming in the first place.”
She paused and looked at Vaughn. “What do you have there?”
He stood and placed the item on the desk next to the computer terminal. “It’s a camcorder. Someone must’ve dropped it here just before the light took them.”
Angela nodded absentmindedly and then continued talking as she worked on the computer. “I’m encoding the SOS into the pattern now, but even if they don’t see the message, the reset should give me enough time to call Doctor Garfield before he reinitiates the collisions.” She looked up. “We’ll stop the Necks from ever finding us. They won’t know we exist.”
“What’s on the video, El Capitan?”
“Let’s not worry about that right now. How about we just activate the reset?”
Angela shook her head. “No, Teddy is right. There’s something else I need to add, but first I want to see what’s on that video.”
Snatching the camcorder from the countertop, Vaughn activated it. The screen flared to life and promptly displayed a low-battery message.
Jabbing a finger at the device, Angela said, “Push play.”
He pressed the button, and the face of a self-important older gentleman suddenly filled the screen.
Angela’s eyes widened. “That’s him. That’s Doctor Garfield, the director of the HiLumi upgrade. He was going to oversee the first proton-proton collisions that day.”
The little speaker in the side of the camcorder came to life. They all leaned closer, listening intently.
“Today, vee shall plumb the deepest reaches of the quantum realm,” the man said with a thick German accent. “The collider’s High-Luminosity upgrade vill shine the light of discovery upon hidden dimensions und singularities.”
Vaughn looked at Angela and frowned. “He was right about that, but the light was shining the other way. The only thing it illuminated was us.”
Angela shushed him. “Quiet! Fast forward. I need to see what happens.”
Vaughn growled his impatience. “We need to get this thing moving.” He tapped her watch. “Time is ticking.”
“Then hurry.”
Vaughn narrowed his eyes. Angela was working on a new idea, but as usual, she was reluctant to share it. This tendency of hers had really pissed him off when she’d done it before, and it wasn’t helping to improve his mood at the moment.
“Fine!” Grinding his teeth, Vaughn jabbed the fast-forward button. They watched as the camera panned left and right quickly. It aimed at two other people: a woman in a dress suit and a man in a lab coat. Then the point of view lurched, and suddenly it was pointing at the ATLAS detector. Moving at an accelerated pace, the large, cylindrical device crumpled and then collapsed.
As Vaughn knew it would, the detector apparatus shrank down until it was a sphere hanging suspended in mid-air, just like the one that currently levitated beyond the control room’s observation window.
Then it flashed, and something emerged from its top.
Vaughn pressed the pause button.
The four of them stared silently at the motionless Neck that now jutted from the top of the mercurial sphere. It had frozen in the act of reaching out with one of its arms. Its extended finger sat inches away from the protruding digit of the facility’s mechanical manipulator. The image looked similar to Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one where God bestows life to Adam through the touch of a finger.
“Dude,” Teddy said reverently. “It’s like The Creation of Adam.”
The grinding wail of the light wave’s overhead passage rose a notch. They all looked up. The energetic curtain had accelerated.
“Shit!” Vaughn reached to push play again but missed the button in his haste.
“Push it!” Angela ordered.
“I’m trying!”
Bill looked from the two of them up to the light and then back at Angela. “Why did it speed up?”
“Less resistance, I guess. There’s no animal life for it to beam out, so it’s going faster.”
She looked at Vaughn. “Start the video already. I need to see how it ends.”
He growled with frustration and then finally managed to finger the play button.
Coming back to life, the Neck suddenly spasmed and looked down. It pointed at something off-camera. Then the video zoomed out, and Vaughn saw two people had entered the chamber, stepping in from the left side of the ATLAS facility.
The Neck leaned over and, extending both of its free arms, pointed a pair of accusing fingers at the new arrivals.
Vaughn thought he could hear the thing’s siren-like scream, but with the wail presently coming from the energy curtain, he couldn’t be sure.
A moment later, the Neck dropped out of sight.
Then a beam of light shot from the sphere, and the two humans vanished.
Bill Peterson jerked as if jolted by electricity. “Son of a bitch!”
The camera’s point of view fell to the floor and came to rest aimed at two pairs of shuffling shoes.
A moment later, white light washed out the video.
When the image returned, the shoes and the people who’d been in them had vanished.
Vaughn and his three teammates stared in silence.
The screen went black, and a small, red, dead-battery icon popped up.
Angela thrust out a hand. “Give me the SD card!”
Searching the exterior of the camcorder, Vaughn quickly found the small memory chip and ejected it. Then he handed it to Angela. “What are you going to do?”
She grabbed the card and jammed it into a reader on the side of the computer terminal.
“Initially, I had planned to use Morse code because I wasn’t sure how much bandwidth there’d be, but now that I have full access, I can see there’s plenty. I can send this video.”
Teddy nodded approvingly. “Strong work, Command-Oh!”
Bill knitted his eyebrows. “How can you do that?”
Angela’s fingers blurred as they sprinted across the keyboard. Not looking away from the screen, she said, “I’m uploading the file now. The video will form the interference pattern.”
She hit the enter key a final time and then sat back. “Done!”
Vaughn heard a loud clunk followed by the familiar sound of ramping electrical energy.
Angela glanced at her watch and then looked back at the three of them. “Eleven minutes to go.” She smiled at Vaughn. “Good thing you added that extra five. Now we just have to hope that someone on the other end recognizes the pattern as being video.”
Casting a nervous glance toward the janitorial supply closet, Vaughn asked, “Should we add more time?”
After consulting her display, Angela shook her head. “The overload will peak four or five minutes before that.”
Vaughn nodded. “Okay, but we’re cutting it close.”
Angela looked through the window, eyeing the wormhole warily. “It’s still possible that the Necks somehow discover we’re here. If so, they’d beam us to Hell just like they did on Mon Calamity.”
“Mon Calamari,” Vaughn corrected.
“Whatever. We’d survive being beamed out, but not if I leave them enough time to als
o find the bomb and send it after us, you know, just to keep us company.”
The noise of the building overload had doubled, and Vaughn could already feel the floor starting to vibrate.
Bill nodded but cast a nervous glance at the overhead energy curtain. “Alright, Angela, but you let us know if you change your mind.”
The four of them fell quiet as they looked up and gazed into the still lowering fan of white light.
Vaughn gestured at it. “Judging by its speed, I think we might have ten minutes before we’ll be lying on the floor trying to stay out of its reach.”
Bill raised an eyebrow. “I sure as hell hope we’re gone before that. Otherwise, things are gonna get real hot.”
Angela pursed her lips and nodded.
Teddy made a sour look. “If it speeds up again, we might get another trip through Hell before the reset can send us home.”
Vaughn fought back a shiver as visions of circling, ravenous animals rose unbidden in his mind.
Shaking his head, he banished the mental image and glanced at the observation window. He nodded toward the sphere. “Now that Angela has started the overload, everything should be in the bag. Once it finishes, the timeline will reset, regardless of where we are, here or in Hell.” He looked at Angela. “Right?”
“One can always hope.”
“Thanks,” Vaughn scoffed. “You’re a beacon of optimism.”
Bill looked from her to the computer screen. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
Angela puckered her forehead. “I’m not sure of anything. We know that the wormhole touches every point along its path in both time and space. I’m hoping there’s enough of a quantum disturbance between the creation of the two micro black holes to allow us to link with the first one. That way we’ll travel back to that point when the overload reaches its peak, but like I said, I’m also trying to send a message that prevents both of them from being created. If any of the approaches work, it’ll collapse the wormhole and send us back to the beginning.”
Bill sighed. “That’s a lot of ifs.”
Angela shrugged. “Several minutes passed between the formations of the two singularities. If we fail to stop the first one, I should have time to stop them from creating the second.”
