Wolf of the Tesseract

by Christopher D Schmitz

  Hours passed in relative silence. The tedious, monotony of it all stretched forever. Time seemed to stand still, and the constant movement and crippling cold managed to suck every last shred of energy from her.

  Eventually, all vestiges of the faint daylight that guided them had completely dissipated. Rob found a broken boulder and the two travelers crept into the cleft, mashing their bodies together to share their warmth.

  Claire tossed and turned throughout the night. Both the extreme discomfort and the mental confusion kept rousing her. Rob seemed to sleep just fine she observed with ire. She squeezed her elbows in and tried to sleep in a new position. An unnerving fear kept her awake despite the desperate need for rest. Every time she slept, her mental connection to the princess seemed to deepen.

  She winced against a jagged knob in her hip and leaned more into Rob’s body. Claire feared that the more she connected with Bithia, the more she would feel compelled to act on her feelings. She really knew Bithia, and Claire felt she might slip and lose some sense of herself and fall into Bithia’s mind. Claire feared that she would either lose herself completely, or betray someone who she was growing to love like a twin sister.

  Looking at Rob, sleeping as easily as he did in these conditions, Claire felt fully capable of betraying the princess—and that scared her too.

  She squeezed her eyelids and concentrated on herself. The pain and worry over her father’s plight came crashing back to her. That was not a better solution.

  Claire smiled. But at least I can control it! I’m sure that I will be able to master my feelings in time. She relaxed, satisfied that she would not lose herself entirely. Her eyelids fluttered once more and she bit her lip to try and distract herself from the very real body heat of the man next to her, touching her. It radiated so powerfully. But I still can’t trust myself.

  She tucked her chin down and sighed, growing weary from all the mental exhaustion. Eventually, it tired her enough that she slipped into a dreamless state.

  Bruce Cannon opened the steel door of the nondescript factory. Nestled in one the more run-down parts of Detroit, it possessed the perfect camouflage. Cannon bid Victor Adams and Jacob Sisyphus a warm welcome as the factory belched dark smoke into the air. The active pollution was perhaps the building’s only distinguishing feature as its peers in the neighborhood had fallen largely silent following the economic downturn.

  “I trust you found it easily enough,” he made small talk as they wandered through the facility, until the grinding noises of the work overpowered any conversation. All the workers on the floor wore a lapel pin bearing a seven pointed star, identifying them as cultists from the Heptobscurantum.

  Near a giant turbine, Cannon threw a combination of levers. A hatch hissed opened revealing a secret passage leading below ground. As the three walked ahead, the portal sealed behind them. Behind the door, the factory noise was all but eliminated enabling the men to speak freely.

  “I think you will be quite impressed with Doctor Walther,” Cannon stated. “Pietro Walther has been working in the psuedosciences for his entire career.”

  “If he’s so brilliant,” Adams said with a hint of warning in his voice, “then why is this the first time The Seven has ever heard of him?”

  “Thornton has known of him all along,” Cannon hedged. “He’s financed the lab from his oil operations’ R and D budget. But to answer your question, this is perhaps the first relevant breakthrough for our purposes. It could radically impact our chances of completing the Great Awakening, even should Nitthogr attempt to prevent us from moving forward.”

  The stairwell emptied out onto a large laboratory. Technologies both old and new scattered the grounds; equipment and notes lay heaped over benches and desks as if some scientific hoarder had nested below the factory.

  Spotting the doctor as he worked on a project in the distance, Cannon paused with his accomplices. “I must warn you, neither Doctor Walther nor his assistants are members of the Heptobscurantum. He is interested purely in the science and accomplishment of discovery. To him, Sh’logath is an incorporeal idea… a philosophical ideal. Let us not mention the Awakening, or our true purposes.”

  Adams and Sisyphus nodded. They followed and Cannon made introductions, which Walther largely ignored as he tinkered; he only paused to do a double take at Sisyphus, but then discounted whatever thoughts had occurred to him.

  The machine he tweaked looked like a hybrid of ancient artifacts that were attached to the internals of a space shuttle; a wheeled section of carpentry scaffolding contained the body of the turboencabulator-style machine. Circuit boards hung at random places and an entire spool of industrial copper wire had been emptied; the cables wrapped all around the scaffolding and snaked away in trails across the floor.

  “I assume you gentlemen are here to see my work?” He glared sidelong at Cannon. “And if it doesn’t perform adequately I suppose you will defund me?”

  Cannon sighed and shook his head. “For the last time, Pietro, I am not going to pull your funding. These men are merely here to see it. And besides, I’ve already seen it work. You have nothing to worry about.”

  Walther finally looked at his guests. He glanced again at the newest of The Seven. “You. Has anyone told you that you look like Jacob Sisyphus?”

  The massive man only grinned through his ever-present five o’clock shadow. He ran his fingers through his thick hair and shook out his mullet. Besides the growing paunch on his belly, he was a very recognizable figure in some circles. “I should. I’m the one and only. You are a fan from the golden, glory years?”

  Walther’s lip curled in a smile. “I’ll admit that professional wrestling has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. How ironic. I had no idea that you were interested in science.”

  Cannon shot Sisyphus a look of warning.

  “Always,” Sisyphus merely replied. “I’ve never believed that this,” he pinched his flesh for emphasis, “is all there is.”

  “Then be prepared to have that belief empirically proven.” He turned to an assistant. “Mizz Heiderscheidt, a vial of blood, please?”

  His aide quickly walked to a gurney nearby. A sedated man, homeless by the looks of him, lay strapped to the rails of an old medical bed. The lab assistant drew a full syringe of blood and returned, handing it over to Doctor Walther.

  “Gentlemen,” the eccentric scientist emphatically announced, “prepare to see the laws of reality broken.” He turned, injected the blood into a catheter tube, and cranked a dial. The ancient pieces of technology seemed to vibrate and glow with a supernatural light.

  Walther pulled a set of welding goggles over his eyes and slammed a large red button affixed to the scaffolding with duct tape. Three brilliant beams of energy shot out from laser projectors welded to the machine; they met at a blinding point of impact fifteen feet from the machine. Walther wheeled on an industrial dial; the beams shifted apart slowly as he turned the wheel and a triangular portal opened.

  The observers’ jaws dropped and their eyes widened as the triangle grew larger. Within the boundary of the energy beams they could see another dimension.

  “It’s quite stable,” Walther stated, taking a pigeon from its cage nearby. He walked to the portal and released the bird at the mouth of the energy gate; it flew through, crackling with a pop like static electricity as it crossed over. It immediately emerged on the other side of the portal and flew away, no worse for wear.

  Walther turned and bowed. “We have broken the barrier between dimensions.” He pointed to a row of whiteboards boasting calculations spanning the distance. “I have identified twenty-seven specific dimensions so far, but my figures indicate either thirty-two or thirty-three that exist. But this one,” he pointed to the glowing door, “this one is the easiest to access. It is the root. We call it Prime; the rest of the realities, including our own, seem to derive from this singular plane of existence.”

  The gate began to flicker slightly. “As the blood diminishes, the gate loses stabi
lity.” He took another pigeon and released it just as the portal flickered. The bird flew through as before, but when the signal strength slightly sputtered, the pigeon split into three pieces as if perfectly sliced apart. The dead creature fell to the burnt grass on the other side of the dimensional window. “Of course, the answer is to keep the machine powered. Feed it more blood.”

  The three men nodded excitedly. “Now it is I who am a fan of you,” Sisyphus shook the doctor’s hand.

  “Gentlemen,” Cannon stated. “We have some business to discuss.” He nodded with pleasure and bid farewell to the doctor, then he guided Adams and Sisyphus back towards the stairs.

  “So,” Adams began, “you will finally tell us your purpose for this meeting? How do you suggest we use this technology to our ends?”

  Cannon nodded. “We know we must pull Vivian to our side and set her against Nitthogr. This is the way we do that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Cannon indicated Sisyphus. “For all his occult training and mastery, he cannot match Nitthogr’s raw power, no offense, Jacob, but it is fact, just as I could not best Vivian in a physical fight. There is some inherent strength in the people of the Prime, a kind of power.”

  Intrigued Sisyphus nodded and asked, “And how does this help?”

  “If you notice, this machine did not open at the portal locations, which Nitthogr seems to control. Science burrowed a way through the stuff of reality and forced open its own window. We can access the other dimensions without Nitthogr ever knowing, and we are not limited to the portal locations.”

  Adams followed his train of thought. “We can send Vivian through to see what her mentor is up to behind her back?”

  “Exactly! She is a true disciple of Sh’logath—I am sure of it. If she sees him secretly act contrary to the part he has publicly played for so long, she will come to our side.”

  “But what if she tells him of our coup, instead?”

  “Then he learns of it only a little earlier than anticipated,” Cannon said. “Very little changes except that we potentially gain a powerful ally against Nitthogr if he has truly departed from the true faith. And if he has not, then we might also learn that, too.”

  His accomplices nodded. “And how do we convince her to spy on her master?”

  Cannon grinned. “That part is easy. We need only tell her the truth: show her the facts and logic. These will demand that she vindicates his character. Her affection for him should motivate her. In her efforts to defend him, she will prove his defection.”

  Adams nodded. “I will meet with her immediately.”

  “Good,” he replied. “I have a slightly different job for you, Jacob Sisyphus.”

  . . .

  A pale, hollow light greeted Claire as her eyelids fluttered open in the morning. The cold had woken her; Rob’s body heat no longer warmed her in its absence. She crawled out from the split in the rock and found him staring into the distance.

  He turned and greeted her. “I did not think we had gotten this far yet.”

  She offered an inquisitive look.

  “We are already well inside the Plains of Neggath.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Perhaps,” Rob said. “I’ve never actually been here before. I always thought it was further from Limbus, according to maps in the history books. The plains harbor many potential dangers—worse than mere unaligned vyrm rovers.”

  Claire dug through the duffel and sorted through the food packets. She hoped to load up on calories before the hard trek. Only a few rations remained. “How much longer until our next stop?”

  “Straruck lies that way,” he pointed to the horizon. “If we keep this pace, we may reach it this afternoon, even. An ancient religious university lies upon the flats surrounded by Straruck village.”

  Finishing a bland applesauce packet, Claire nearly choked on the unpleasant texture. “Then let’s get moving. I always wanted to study abroad.”

  Rob smiled. “I don’t think it’s anything like what you would expect. Long before the wars, Straruck was a hub of philosophy, religion, law, and medical research. In fact, they say that the cult of Sh’logath formed there as a joint venture between the religion and philosophy students.”

  “Yeah,” Claire remarked. “Sounds an awful lot like Stanford, if you ask me.”

  Her sarcasm didn’t go unnoticed. “I have only seen stills from the war era. It appeared that the sands have laid claim to much of it. Perhaps karma has cosmically repaid them for their part in creating The Devourer? Nonetheless, I am excited to see it with my own eyes.”

  Claire grinned at him as they plodded onward. “You sound a lot like my father.” She trailed off, thoughts turning dark.

  Suddenly, both travelers stumbled and the ground trembled. Rob’s hand flew immediately to the Glaive at his back and he drew it from the scabbard. He held the bulky, engraved shard at the ready. Long seconds passed and its weight quickly tired his forearms. There were no immediate aftershocks and so he sheathed the weapon.

  They traveled in silence for the next several hours, until the dim outline of foreign structures became visible in the distance; they ignored the minor, intermittent quakes. Towers and buildings bent at odd and broken angles as their foundations had shifted and crumbled through the long, harsh years. The land had done much to reclaim itself from the vyrm occupation.

  Cautiously approaching, Rob and Claire often stopped to watch and wait, spying out any potential enemy positions. A magnificent structure at the center of the decayed village rose above the others; it was their obvious destination. The large dome may have once been splendorous and proud. Now, a huge section of the cupola had been blasted away and age had ripped wounds across the rounded top, exposing structural ribs beneath its stucco skin.

  They slogged ahead at a quickened pace. Underfoot, fine-grained sand dunes had overtaken the ankle-biting shards. The silt caked most of the larger debris to the ground. Ground tremors seemed to increase as they neared the edge of Straruck. They rumbled as if they embodied the sickly heartbeat of a broken city.

  Rob and Claire stalked silently through the maze of broken buildings. With no windows or doors remaining, there were few places for enemies to set ambushes for them. Still, despite the cover of darkness they’d had since Limbus and the promise of the Tarkhūn leader, they were reluctant to completely take Basilisk at his word.

  As they rounded a final corner they entered the edge of the central campus. Most of the buildings had been either blasted away or fallen to the extreme decay of age and neglect. Those derelicts that still remained had become nearly cocooned within the fine silica sand.

  Claire almost stepped around the corner when Rob grabbed her and pulled her back out of sight. He pointed and motioned to remain silent. He pointed to several sets of footprints in the sand ahead. They watched and listened for a few moments.

  Following their patrol route, they spotted a group of well-armed Tarkhūn walking their circuit. The vyrm battle garb was well suited to the terrain and provided a modicum of camouflage within the rugged Plains of Neggath. They talked in a clicking kind of language.

  Rob cocked his head, trying to understand it. The grimace on his face told Claire that he was unable to interpret it. “That’s not the traditional vyrm tongue.”

  Claire felt a tingling rush in her mind. “The Tarkhūn commonly speak in a dialect of the old royal vyrm language. It was a part of Bithia’s studies.” She paused and listened. “They’re talking about an insect invasion and the boredom of guarding the travel portal. Apparently, sentry duty is not a high calling for the Tarkhūn.”

  She cocked her head and blushed. “Also,” she smirked, “the one talking now enjoys telling dirty jokes.”

  The guards suddenly started yelling and shooting at the sand. A crevasse formed near the Tarkhūn as Rob and Claire watched incredulously. A massive, grub-like worm erupted from the dune. Fiery plasma blasted from the lead Tarkhūn’s pistol. It tore through the translucent skin of t
he writhing monstrosity.

  Shrieking, the worm leveled its multitudinous bank of shiny, black eyes at the guards. With hideous antennae twitching, its jaws elongated and it vomited forth a small army of dog-sized terrors. The heavily carapaced crawlers snaked towards their prey upon a thousand cilia-like legs. Their slimy feet crackled with a kind of necrotic energy as enzymatic electricity bounced around their millipede-like undercarriage.

  Bellowing with rage, the two vyrm bravely stood their ground, blasting at both the wave of smaller crawlers and the giant parent that had carried them. One vyrm shouted a warning into the communications fob clipped on his shoulder. The momentary disruption was just enough for the swarm to surge forward and envelop him. They knocked him over, twisting around his feet.

  The toppled guard screamed in anguish as the chemical electricity wreathed his body and wracked him with pain. His Tarkhūn companion quickly executed him with a single shot to the head. His communicator flooded with the sounds of another incident and he clicked a short response before fleeing the overtaken courtyard. Smoke erupted on the far side of the campus and the echoes of blaster fire drifted through the air. The surviving vyrm sprinted directly for the distant fracas.

  Washing over the cadaver, the creatures writhed all over the dead Tarkhūn’s body. Their caustic feet fed upon the flesh of the fallen. Within seconds, the teeming mass cleared away. Nothing remained of the victim except for bones and inorganic material.

  Rob turned away from the grisly scene as the giant queen sank back below the sands. Her minions roamed the courtyard ahead, infesting the ground with their presence. “Carrion worms?” he wondered aloud. “They aren’t native to the Desolation,” he concluded. “Someone must have intentionally released them here, possibly in order to soften up the local garrison before an invasion.”