For a moment, Josh was sure that he was going to slit her throat, then the pharaoh’s eyes fixed on him and motioned for his guards to bring him forward.
They lifted Josh out of the coffin and carried him towards the altar.
Caitlin looked beautiful in the flickering lamplight, her naked body inscribed with ancient texts and hieroglyphs. Josh couldn’t help but linger on the curves of her thighs, her hips and breasts. It was impossible, no matter how hard he tried, not to desire her — even knowing this was probably the last time he would ever see her.
They forced him down to his knees on the altar steps. Dalton and Vassili joined Nynetjer, and they began to chant as one.
Josh desperately searched the grotesque masks of those around him for any sign of help, but found none. As he watched, Vassili opened the golden case, and Dalton brought out the broken skull of Daedalus and held it over his head. The fervour of the chanting heightened. Dalton passed the skull to Nynetjer. With an insane grin on his face, the crazed pharaoh stepped down towards Josh. The Daedalans were chanting — ‘the blood of the Nemesis’ — over and over again as Nynetjer’s eyes darkened to two black orbs.
Josh felt a hot searing pain as the copper sickle cut through the linen and into his skin. Blood flowed from the wound as Nynetjer drew the blade slowly across his chest. His heart was racing, blood hammered in his ears, each breath was like a knife in his ribs and his vision began to darken.
Then everything slowed.
The pharaoh’s face froze into a contorted mask of insanity. Dalton and Vassili stood behind, leering at the spectacle like posed marionettes.
Waves of temporal energy flowed from the blade, slowly weaving into the figure of Darkling.
‘Darkling?’ Josh gasped through clenched teeth.
‘We remember that name.’
Josh heard his voice, even though his lips weren’t moving. Darkling’s eyes appeared to be full of stars.
‘You’re Wyrrm?’
‘We have been called many things.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Your timeline attracts us — it is quite unique.’
‘Can you get me out of this?’ Josh asked, straining against the bindings.
Darkling looked thoughtfully at where the sickle had cut into Josh’s skin.
‘It is not fatal — you will survive.’
‘And Caitlin. Can you save Caitlin?’
Darkling-Wyrrm seemed to phase in and out of existence for a moment.
‘Her only chance lies within the maelstrom. We will guide her to a safe place.’
‘What?’
Again the figure faded for a second.
‘Tell Daedalus you’re from page two-eight-five.’
Darkling disappeared and time returned to normal.
Nynetjer handed the sickle to one of his acolytes, smeared the skull in Josh’s blood and turned back towards the altar. Josh looked down at the blood-soaked bandages and felt them give a little where he’d been cut.
62
The Great Breach
The air was stale and full of dust that caught in the back of the throat. De’Angelo led the team silently through the maze of passages, the scent of decay increasing as the sound of the chanting grew steadily louder. They had no idea where they were going as the passages twisted back and forth — only the noise of the ritual gave them any sense of direction.
Finally, they reached the entrance to the temple.
‘Nobody’s on watch,’ De’Angelo whispered, pressing himself flat against the wall out of sight.
From their voices, it was difficult to estimate how many people were inside. No one was keen to go in and find out. Bentley wondered if they were all secretly hoping the Twelfth Legion would arrive, but they were nowhere to be seen.
‘Can you see what they’re doing?’ Fey asked.
‘How do we do that without being seen ourselves?’ De’Angelo hissed. ‘I say we wait until the cavalry arrive.’
Bentley wasn’t listening to their conversation, he was focused on the chanting.
‘Shhh!’ he said, raising his hand. ‘They’re using some really ancient dialect. Not Coptic. Something about: “Blood of the Nemesis”.’ He pushed away from the wall and crept along the shadows towards the temple entrance.
‘Are you mental? You’re going to get us all killed?’ hissed De’Angelo, starting to walk after him.
Fey held him back. ‘Wait.’
‘We can’t just let him go in there alone!’
‘I’ve worked out what this is — I think it’s the Great Breach.’
‘You mean the one that killed all those Dreadnoughts?’
She nodded gravely. ‘We’re in a closed time loop.’
‘Shit, where the hell is the Twelfth when you need them?’ said De’Angelo going after Bentley.
63
Twelfth Legion
Nynetjer held the skull above Caitlin’s chest, and Josh watched the drops of blood fall onto her skin. The priest’s voice deepened as he began to recite the words of summoning and the faint outline of the colonel’s head manifested over the bone.
Caitlin groaned, her body tensing as the symbols on her skin began to glow with an iridescent blue. The pharaoh placed one hand on her head, and his arm was instantly covered in the fractal pattern of temporal energy weaving out of her body.
Josh was growing weak and light-headed from the loss of blood. He watched through blurred eyes as dark shapes formed from the energy leaching out of Caitlin. Dalton had to hold her down as she began to thrash around, and Josh realised that whatever they were doing to her was going to kill her.
The skull attracted the dark energy like eels to a corpse. It coalesced around the pale bone until there was no sign of the colonel, the eyes sockets glowing red as a hideous creature took form.
‘Djinn,’ De’Angelo whispered in awe, staring at the tentacle-headed monster with glowing eyes that was floating above Caitlin. Dalton and Vassili had all fallen to their knees. The rest of the congregation was bent over, touching their heads to the floor.
Behind the creature, a sphere was forming, distorting space like a molten bubble as it blistered and grew.
‘Aperture,’ added Bentley, flicking the safety off his gunsabre.
Distorted black figures appeared inside the breach.
‘Monads!’ Bentley moaned as they clawed their way out of the maelstrom. The grotesque creatures fell on the congregation, tearing through the still-kneeling assembly with a brutality that froze the members of Aries to the spot. The despair that emanated from them was overwhelming, and no one thought to run — there was no point: they would all be taken.
The aperture widened until it spread across the entire wall, and only those closest to the priest, who’s skin was now covered with sigils, were spared by the spawn that flooded out of the swirling rift in time.
‘Stand aside,’ ordered a heavily armoured Dreadnought, pushing past Bentley, a Hubble enclosure already primed in one hand and a gunsabre in the other.
The Twelfth Legion swarmed into the temple.
Time slowed as Josh struggled to his feet. He felt the gravitational waves of the aperture flow through him as it dilated, the event horizon reaching out to envelop them.
The tentacles of the red-eyed Djinn curled around Vassili. The old training master try to scream as the demon invaded his body, the sound dying in his throat as darkness poured into his mouth.
Dalton was in some kind of trance, standing directly behind Caitlin with his hands on each side of her head. Josh guessed he was trying to control the creature, but something was wrong. Nynetjer was gibbering like a lunatic, spitting and frothing at the mouth while still holding the skull aloft.
‘NO!’ Bentley screamed, watching the graceful arc of the Hubble enclosure as a Dreadnought threw it into the mass of monads spewing out of the expanding aperture.
Josh summoned what was left of his strength and ripped off the linen bindings.
He hit Dalton
as hard as he could, knocking him back and out beyond the range of the Djinn. Caitlin and the pharaoh were still too close to the creature. The empty husk of what was left of Vassili crumbled into dust on the floor and the Djinn turned its attention towards them.
Caitlin’s eyes opened. She smiled when she saw Josh standing over her, but it dissolved as the monster loomed up behind him. ‘Djinn!’ she cried.
Josh grabbed the sickle from the acolyte and sliced through the ties on her arms. ‘I know.’ He helped her to sit up and held her face in his hands. ‘I don’t have time to explain, and this isn’t going to make a lot of sense yet, but I will find you.’
Her eyes widened slightly as she realised what was about to happen. Words formed on her lips but were stolen away by the time-vortices that washed over them.
Bentley watched helplessly as Josh, Caitlin, the pharaoh, and lastly the Djinn, all disappeared into the aperture. Chaos surrounded him as more Dreadnoughts arrived and tried to stem the flow of evil that was pouring out of the breach. The stone walls of the temple cracked and columns crumbled as the aperture disrupted their atomic structure. Large blocks of stone crashed to the floor, crushing monads and men alike.
He spotted De’Angelo and Fey trying to fight off a monstrous looking creature with a Hibbert Lance. Bentley shouldered his gunsabre and fired three shots into its bloated head. The recoil from the gun bruised his arm, but he ignored the pain — his anger giving him a singular focus, and he was already targeting the next monster as his friends ran back to help him.
The Twelfth moved amongst the bodies scattered all over the temple. Displaced and disjointed, parts of them had shifted, and others remained. Limbs were fused into the floor and walls as if they had been caught in some volcanic lava flow.
Dalton was found alive and escorted out of the room under heavy guard. Commander Brïghtfyr began to issue orders to his artificers, who were unpacking heavy pieces of containment equipment.
All the members of Aries were rounded up and brought before him.
He looked at each one of them in turn with cold eyes. ‘Today, you have witnessed first-hand what it is to be a Dreadnought. I expect some of you may be regretting your choices. For those that don’t, I welcome you to the Twelfth.’
A few seconds later the Protectorate arrived, one of their senior officers walked over to Fey and saluted her before handing over a sealed document.
Her face seemed to change as she read the report. Bentley had no idea what was going on, and when she looked up, he tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him and gave a rapid series of orders to the officers, she turned and walked out of the chamber.
‘Shit,’ Bentley cursed under his breath. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Jonesy.’
64
Singularity
[California. Date: Present day]
Fermi studied the complex three-dimensional models that rotated slowly on his screens, each one plotting lines of probability — branching and bifurcating in real time.
He was exhausted. The last few weeks had been stressful, and the times when he had managed to get some sleep were disturbed by caffeine and a nagging headache that painkillers couldn’t seem to shift.
But it had been worth it: the numbers were good. After thousands of simulations Fermi knew he was close, and yet something escaped him. According to all his calculations, the technology he developed should have shown at least a ten-fold improvement after the last adjustment.
He’d tried adding more computing power: more GPUs and data centres with thousands of networked machines, all trying to recreate what the watch could do effortlessly.
For the last two years, the military had sponsored him without question. They’d been more than happy with the advanced medical technology that his company developed. Their lack of interest in the science behind the rapid healing devices had made it a profitable business — one that could fund his secret obsession… his research into time travel.
The lower levels of his headquarters were equipped with the most expensive quantum computing available, yet still it wasn’t enough.
He had sent many things into the future, starting with simple inorganic objects like metal bolts, paper clips and any other random items from his desk. But nothing larger than a postage stamp, and no more than a few seconds forward.
All of them had failed to materialise.
Each time he tried, the power required would have kept the lights on in a city for a month.
Until, in his attempts to boost the displacement fields, he overloaded the circuit and took out half of the state. The incident brought his facility to the attention of the NSA, and the next day a whole fleet of ‘spooks’ arrived, parking their Chrysler vans all over the campus lawn.
No one was that interested in his ideas about time travel. Fermi knew it would be professional suicide to tell them what he was really trying to achieve. So he fed them a half-truth, something to explain away the millions of dollars of equipment that was humming away in his nuclear bunker of a basement.
‘Singularity?’ Deputy Director Sanderson said incredulously, staring at the endless racks of servers.
‘Artificial Intelligence. Battlefield AI and strategy modelling,’ said Fermi, using terms that the military were extremely interested in.
Some of it was relevant. He was using machine learning to help process the mass of data required to instigate a quantum divergence — that would be a good enough defence if he needed it later on.
Sanderson wasn’t wholly convinced. It was obvious he was thinking about revoking Fermi’s green card.
‘It’s a defence project, top-secret,’ Fermi added.
‘We know. Although no one will tell us exactly which department you’re working for.’
Fermi shrugged.
‘Damn skunkworks,’ Sanderson added as he turned to leave.
Three weeks had passed since the NSA visit, in which time all of his military contracts had been frozen. Tomorrow they were coming to see him — he needed to show them something.
65
Maelstrom
There was a silence, or rather an absence of sound, within the breach. Like flying through the middle of a snowstorm at night. Icy cold sensations brushed against her skin leaving the faintest trace of cold which lasted no longer than a breath.
She had no sense of up or down. To Caitlin, it was as if she were standing still and everything was moving around her — like a child standing in the middle of a carousel, one that was spinning at a thousand miles-per-hour.
The time fields strained to hold her as she approached the outer layers of the chronosphere. Then she experienced a singular moment of dislocation as her lifeline was cast off like the mooring lines of a ship, and she knew she was no longer connected to the continuum.
Segments of disjointed time collided with her as she entered the maelstrom. It was like being inside a tornado of disconnected events: random sequences of forgotten moments caught and held her for a few seconds before being replaced.
Instinctively, her mind tried to make sense of the chaos, searching for a pattern or meaning, but there was none. A door in a nineteenth-century Viennese hotel opened onto a street in an ancient, deserted Saharan city. A cry of a child became the screech of brakes on a train, the walls of an abandoned house dissolved into a tomb of a long-forgotten king.
She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself. Focus on the problem, she told herself, assess the situation. She was alone, thanks to Josh, with no idea what the hell he was planning to do. The only book that existed about this place had been written by a so-called mystic who ranted on about primeval gods and demons.
If he hadn’t just made it up, she thought.
For Caitlin this wasn’t a fabled netherworld full of magical beings, it was where her parents had died. When she was a child, she’d tried to convince herself it was like heaven, but her mind would never quite accept it. ‘Time’s graveyard,’ her grandfather used to call it.
In the infinite numb
er of seconds since she had entered, something her internal clock was having trouble estimating, there were only a few certainties: the first was that she wasn’t dead, so that was a bonus. The second was that there weren’t any signs of threats. And finally, there were parts of linear time here — if she could stay in one for long enough she might be able to get her bearings and maybe some clothes.
‘Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.’ The words of her father came back to her. She’d always cherished those idyllic summers spent in the Mesolithic and Pliocene: making camps, living off the land, shadowing the nomadic tribes of early man as they fought for survival. He’d taught her how to keep herself alive in some of the bleakest epochs that had ever existed.
Back then she had been obsessed with breaches. The idea that monsters lived outside of the continuum, threatening to burst through at any point, had given her nightmares. Her favourite memories of him were the stories he would tell by the campfire to calm her terrors.
‘There are so many things in this world to scare you,’ he would say to her, ‘and you choose the ones that live in another dimension.’
‘Tell me about them, the ones you killed,’ she would insist in the way that only six-year-olds could. Knowing her father could defeat them made the world safer. She would fall asleep listening to his stories of monads and strzyga — imagining how he drove them all back into the maelstrom.
‘Caitlin?’
For a second, she mistook the voice for her father, but her eyes snapped open to find that floating before her, unaffected by the chaos, was Darkling.
‘How?’ she said, wondering whether to try to cover her modesty and then giving up. Her body was painted entirely in hieroglyphs, like wearing a second skin.
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 57
