“Starting with my brother, because he was onto your little scheme. Even though maybe he didn’t realise it at the time.”
“Little?” Dashwood shrieked. “You call ten years of planning to restore the might of the Third Reich little?”
“And just how much longer do you think he’s going to let you two live for, now that he’s accomplished his insane scheme?” Ulysses asked the assassins, looking Chapter and Verse straight in the eye.
Their guns didn’t waiver, but the look in their eyes did.
“The moment you murdered my brother you doomed yourselves.”
An expression of quizzical incomprehension clouded Veronica Verse’s face. Lars Chapter appeared to sport a never-changing expression of bewildered confusion.
“What is this obsession with your brother?” Dashwood said. “Especially if he’s dead.”
Ulysses turned to face the arch-manipulator again.
“You heartless bastard! He was just another obstacle to be removed, as far as you were concerned, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Dashwood said with a dismissive chuckle.
“There’s no point denying it now, after all you’ve done!”
“I quite agree; there wouldn’t be. But I didn’t have him killed.”
Ulysses suddenly felt like the insides had dropped out of him. He turned back to the assassins.
Understanding his unvoiced question, Veronica Verse shook her head.
Everything that had brought him to this point had been motivated by the hunt for his brother’s killer. And now he had uncovered an audacious, empire-threatening plan, but at that moment it all seemed for naught.
Dashwood started to laugh. “That’s what all this was about, for you, wasn’t it? You’ve been hunting your brother’s killer all this time and still he eludes you.”
The fires of his hatred and his rage blazed in Ulysses’ furious gaze.
“But I’m onto your little plan now, aren’t I?”
“Your mind cannot fathom the audacity of my master plan!”
“Let me guess. You plan to use the Sphere to travel back in time to the Second Great European War and provide Hitler with the means to win the conflict, and so ultimately conquer Magna Britannia.”
Dashwood remained stubbornly silent.
“Am I right?”
“I was right,” the other scowled, “you cannot begin to comprehend the magnitude of my scheme.”
“So why don’t you enlighten me? After all, you have yourself a captive audience, and I’m sure you’ve been simply dying to boast of the magnificence of your master plan, haven’t you?”
“Time travel is only the beginning,” Dashwood hissed.
“Fire from heaven, that’s the key,” Shurin announced proudly.
At that Dashwood whirled around to face his co-conspirator and Ulysses saw the younger man flinch. “Silence!”
“Fire from heaven you say? Interesting,” Ulysses said. “Like some modern day Prometheus.”
“Perhaps,” Dashwood mused. “But that will be as nothing, compared to the might of my army.”
“Your army? What army? I’d hardly call a pair of so-called boffins, a coerced inventor, an aspiring megalomaniac and a deranged Nazi-loving freak an army!”
Ulysses tensed, waiting for the blow that was surely to come. Only it didn’t. Instead Dashwood began to laugh once more. It started as a ripple of mirth but then swelled into something uncontrolled and less than sane, until the roaring laughter of a maniac echoed from the curving walls of the vaulted mooncrete chamber.
“Here, let me show you,” he said, once he had managed to recover his composure. “What army, you say. Fire it up!” he snapped, stabbing a finger at Wentworth and Smythe.
Switches were flicked, levers were pulled and the Sphere began to run up to speed once more.
“Set the temporal jump to one second into the past!”
Wentworth and Smythe, and even Oddfellow, then set about monitoring their stations, focusing on the many dials and cathode ray displays that formed part of the banks of machinery required to run the dreadful device.
Atop the dais the hurtling metal rings seemed to melt, becoming a whirling sphere of light. A pulsing hum filled the air. Under the throbbing force of the vibrations Ulysses felt as though his teeth were rattling inside his head. The walls of the chamber began to shudder in sympathy and Ulysses could now feel the pounding pulse through his feet as well.
“Now, watch this!” Dashwood said and stepped between the whirling rings.
There was a flash of actinic light, and all present were forced to shut their eyes against the glare.
A split second later, Ulysses forced himself to open his eyes a fraction. It felt like the searing light was burning through into his brain and he wondered whether he might go blind if he stared for too long.
But there, in the centre of the dazzling white glare, he could see the silhouette of the man. No, two silhouettes. There was another flash and now there were three. Another flash and, was it a trick of the light or were there really four figures inside the Sphere now?
Only they weren’t inside the Sphere, there wasn’t room to contain them any longer. They were stepping clear of the light onto the platform. Suddenly there were six. Then seven.
Ulysses blinked.
Ten.
Twelve.
Fourteen.
He was struggling to keep count.
There were so many now that their number blocked the dazzling glare of the spinning Sphere so that Ulysses’ vision began to mercifully return to normal. Ulysses blinked away the grey spots from before his eyes and stared in horror at the veritable battalion of figures stepping clear of the machine.
There had to be more than thirty of them now, pouring down the steps, those emerging from the Sphere behind forcing the others down the wrought iron staircase and into the chamber. And still they kept coming.
Ulysses stared in horror. Alexander Oddfellow gave a pained cry of shock.
There were more than fifty of them now, but really there was still only one.
They were all the same man.
They were all Daniel Dashwood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Armageddon
T MINUS 12 MINUTES
ALEXANDER ODDFELLOW RUBBED his eyes and then read the result of the equation displayed on the glowing green screen in front of him again. It didn’t change anything.
Behind him the infernal device throbbed with malignant power and he cursed the day, for the umpteenth time, that he ever sat down to create the matter transporter.
There was no escaping the facts, no matter how hard he might wish that he could. If they continued to run the Sphere as they were, the more the very fabric of reality would be weakened. Left unchecked, the final, undeniable outcome was inevitable.
Helter skelter. Total dimensional collapse. The end of everything. Ever.
And it would occur in twelve minutes, and counting.
“TURN IT OFF!” Ulysses heard Oddfellow shout.
The old man wasn’t looking at the bank of machines in front of him anymore. He was staring at the ceiling.
Ulysses followed his gaze. A crack had appeared in the structure of the mooncrete dome. As the chamber continued to shudder and shake under the influence of the strange forces being exerted against it, the crack continued to widen.
“Turn it off!”
Ulysses flinched as a chunk of masonry hit the floor not three feet away from him.
“TURN IT OFF!” the old man screamed again, flattening swathes of switches at the same time with the flat of his hand.
Another piece of the roof – this one the size of a billiard table – hit the ground with a dull thud, bringing with it a cascade of powdered dust.
Ulysses ducked his head to stop any of the grit getting into his eyes as the dust shower turned his hair even more grey than it already was.
He glanced behind him. The hitman and his female com
panion were both now more concerned with the crumbling roof above them than the captives in front of them. Their guns were pointed at the floor as their eyes anxiously followed the splintering spider’s-web of cracks in the dome.
He looked around for Nimrod, not seeing him at first, until he looked down.
Nimrod lay unmoving on the floor of the chamber, a slab of masonry broken across his back and blood the colour of rich claret oozing from a wound on the back of his head.
“Nimrod!”
His butler groaned.
And then the high-pitched whine of the machine began to drop and the seismic tremors reduced in power. Wentworth and Smythe appeared to have heeded the old man’s advice.
Ulysses assessed the situation facing them. The myriad Dashwoods were still piling down the steps from the platform – there had to be over a hundred of them by now – but at least there weren’t any more emerging from the Sphere.
The spinning discs of the device were slowing, the brilliant glow fading, although the after image seared onto Ulysses’ retinas still remained.
Despite the threat facing his daughter, Oddfellow had obviously felt compelled to act. Certainly, to Ulysses’ eyes, it appeared that if the Sphere had kept functioning as it had been, it could have brought the roof down, ensuring the deaths of all present. At least by stepping in to prevent the total destruction of the dome he was giving his daughter a fighting chance – no matter how slim it might be – but was it an opportunity Ulysses could exploit?
Perhaps if Nimrod had not been laid out cold.
Shurin still had his gun pointed at Emilia but the look on his face had morphed from one of supremely cocksure arrogance to that of uncertain anxiety. Was that change in mood something that Ulysses could exploit?
The Dashwoods appeared unperturbed by the cracking of the dome, as far as Ulysses could tell, and were more concerned by the fact that Wentworth and Smythe had shut the device down.
A hundred pairs of lidless eyes fixed on the two cowering scientists.
“Why did you –” one began.
“– turn it off?” another finished.
“I told you –”
“– to keep it running!”
They all seemed to be talking at once but Ulysses only heard one voice speaking.
“The old man was right,” the deformed Wentworth said with a feeble sigh. “We had to shut it down or –”
“You disobeyed –”
“– a direct order!”
“Take a look around you!” Smythe wailed, casting his gaze at the cracked egg of the dome and the chunks of masonry littering the floor. “If we’d left it running we’d all be buried under a hundred tons of mooncrete by now.”
“You think –”
“– I care –”
“– about that?”
“The device would have been destroyed.”
The Dashwoods were silenced by that simple statement.
“You do realise you’re weakening the very fabric of reality, don’t you?”
The Dashwoods turned to face the old man’s challenge. Alexander Oddfellow looked drawn and pale, as if he had aged ten years since Ulysses had last seen him.
“The more you run the machine the more damage you do. I wish I’d never created the damn thing! Keep going like this and it won’t just be us you’ll kill – the whole of existence will unravel like a frayed piece of string. I’m talking total dimensional collapse. Helter skelter.”
The Dashwoods listened to the old man’s tirade without saying a word, two hundred bulging, bloodshot eyes boring into him. After a decade of waiting and planning and searching for the means to fulfil his insane scheme, there was no point denying the facts now. Daniel Dashwood might have been driven mad by his long years in the wilderness and his virtual addiction to his use of the Sphere, but he wasn’t stupid. He recognised the truth when he heard it.
The mooncrete floor still shuddering beneath his feet, Ulysses took a stumbling step forward and felt a hundred pairs of eyes fix on him.
Where had they all come from? Had Dashwood turned the Sphere into some kind of cloning machine or had he somehow collected them from somewhere?
Even if he had been armed and Nimrod had still been in a fit state to help, he would have struggled to fight his way through the Dashwoods before sheer force of numbers overwhelmed him and put paid to any breakout attempt.
Whatever else he might have had in mind, he would have to deal with the threat posed by this veritable army of Dashwoods first, which seemed an impossible task from where he was standing.
It was the machine that had created the problem. Perhaps the solution lay with the device as well. It had brought them all here, somehow, perhaps it could be used to send them back again.
Ulysses took another step towards the bank of cogitators at the foot of the dais.
“And where –”
“– do you think –”
“– you’re going?” the Dashwoods asked.
Ulysses froze. It took him a moment to realise that the Dashwoods weren’t paying him any attention. Following their gaze, he glanced back over his shoulder.
Chapter and Verse were already at the entrance to the chamber and showed no sign of stopping, despite the Dashwoods’ demands that they do just that. “Stop!” the warped figures shouted with one voice.
And then the freaks were pouring down the steps, spreading out through the chamber, moving after the escaping assassins, screaming in rage, eyes wild, mouths flecked with foam, gloved hands raised as palsied claws.
“Stop them!” the Dashwoods screamed. “Kill them!”
“Sir!” The shout rang out over the heads of the milling maniacs, amplified by the strange acoustics of the chamber. It was Smythe.
The Dashwoods froze and, as one, turned to face the scientist.
“Sir, if we’re going to go at all, we have to go now.”
The Dashwoods hesitated for a moment. Ulysses was surrounded. He remained exactly where he was, deciding that it was better to watch and wait and avoid doing anything that might draw the freaks’ attention back onto him.
“Very well,” one of the warped figures said at last.
“Set the target co-ordinates –”
“– and recommence the –”
“– initialisation sequence.”
“Yes, sir!” Wentworth and Smythe replied briskly with what sounded to Ulysses like heartfelt relief.
It was clear what they intended to do next. They were back on track with their original plan. They were going to open a doorway to the past, using the Sphere to transport them to the Second European War, that they might hand the Führer the tools he needed to conquer the mechanical armies of Magna Britannia and ensure the Nazi conquest of the world.
It wouldn’t matter what happened to the Sphere after that. Dashwood and his henchmen – and perhaps even his army of simulacra too – would be long gone.
And it didn’t matter that he was outnumbered a hundred to one anymore either. Ulysses was the only one in any position to bring a halt to such an insane plan.
Ignoring the risk involved in awakening the ire of the multiple Dashwoods, Ulysses sprinted across the chamber. As the Sphere began to run up to speed for the last time, the chamber was bathed in sick white light as arcs of lightning burst from within its whirling coils.
The air was alive with the humming of the machine and the seismic tremors – that had never truly passed – increased in force once more.
Realising what was going on, the Dashwoods began to close ranks.
Ulysses sent two of them tumbling out of his way and was halfway to the Sphere’s control consoles before all of the freaks had grasped what he was doing. But a moment later they were on to him in force.
“I said where –”
“– do you think –”
“– you’re going?” a trio of Dashwoods demanded as they turned on him.
Ulysses lashed out with a fist as one of them swung a punch at his midriff and batte
d the blow aside. He ducked another poorly-aimed swipe from a second but then felt a sharp pain in his shins as another two kicked his legs out from under him. He hit the juddering ground hard, immediately struggling to get to his feet as the rest of the Dashwoods closed in around him.
There came a shout from the entrance to the chamber behind him – although he couldn’t make out any specific words over the rumble and crash of the shattering dome – and a moment later the Dashwoods’ attention was elsewhere entirely.
As they cleared from around him, Ulysses stumbled to his feet, dazed and confused. Before him lay the steps to the dais. On top of the raised platform, rattling like a jar of shaken nails, the Sphere. In that moment, Dashwood’s lackeys left their workstations and began to climb the steps, clinging onto the handrails as the force of the vibrations tearing the dome apart threatened to send them tumbling back down to the bottom. And Dashwood was with them, but only one version of the insane Nazi spy, and, Ulysses guessed, the original.
With a crack like thunder the ground at Ulysses’ feet fractured, a great void opening between him and the Sphere platform. With another thunderous retort the mooncrete floor splintered again and Ulysses found himself rising as the surface he was standing on cantilevered upwards. Dripping moon rock, the sundered shard of the Moon’s crust in front of him dropped away just as abruptly.
As the Moon’s crust came apart, Ulysses’ thoughts turned from the insane Dashwood to his companions – to his loyal servant Nimrod, to his one true love Emilia, and to her father.
And it was only then, as Ulysses turned to see what had happened to them, that he understood the reason for the other Dashwoods’ abrupt diversion of attention.
Pushing their way into the chamber, through the same entrance that Ulysses and Nimrod had used, came a horde of intimidating inhuman figures clad in plates of chitin armour and wielding sharpened bone blades.
“The Selenites!” Ulysses gasped. “They didn’t abandon us.”
More and more of the alien soldiers were pouring into the chamber and engaging the multiple Dashwoods in battle. The altered Nazis still outnumbered the aliens, but the Dashwoods were brutally outmatched. Fists and feet, and even teeth, backed up with a manic purpose and insane resolve, were still no match for a warrior’s training, toughened armour and deftly-wielded glass-sharp blades.
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