The pilot considered briefly, then nodded. “Raise Lanfleet, flash precedence.”
On the bridge of the carrier crossing toward Hampton Roads, the commanding admiral turned in the flag chair as his CO arrived to brief him.
“Admiral, Lanfleet’s ordering us to change course and steam at flank speed to investigate an irregularity at Project Deep Six, restricted zone.”
“Very well.”
Orders were dispersed, commands relayed. As a precaution and just as they had been on the sub, battle stations were sounded throughout the carrier task force group of more than twenty ships. Battle stations were always in order whenever Project Deep Six was involved.
In this instance, however, no one on any of the course-changing vessels realized how relevant that particular order was going to prove.
Ennui filled the lecture hall like gas at a tailgate party. Students sat and stared blankly at the new textbooks they had been compelled to purchase in order to take the current class. Some texted. A few surfed the Net. A great many had their Netbooks or other recording devices programmed and ready to record the lecture in its entirety so that they would be spared the arduous process of actually taking notes.
The oversize and old-fashioned blackboard was covered with complex equations. Flanking the auditorium, posters of the ancient constellations exposed the knowledge of the ancients to both admiration and ridicule. Striding to the podium down on the floor was the class instructor, the natty and eminently self- satisfied Professor Colan. He had chalked up the opening day’s selection of equations himself. They were as familiar to him as his scarf and fedora, and the closest he could come to actual art. Simply seeing them up there, on the board, filled him with the contentment that is known only to the long happily married, those who have inherited large sums of money, and professors who have achieved tenure at institutions famed for the size of their endowments.
He opened with a grand sweep of his hand that encompassed the entire auditorium. “The constellations. Leo, the Lion. Orion, the Hunter. Early mankind’s first crude yet in their own artistic way
admirable attempts to bring order to a cosmos they could not comprehend. The first glimpses of the infinite and ever-expanding universe that lies beyond this small, out-of-the-way, unimportant world. A vastness so profound, so immense, that the best minds of every generation have quailed before its beauty and mathematical precision. The universe is a clock whose workings we have only just begun to comprehend and which none of you could possibly understand at this larval stage in your educational process. It is this profound ignorance that this class hopefully will, in some small measure, seek, to ameliorate.” Looking back, he indicated the equation-filled board.
“Behind me, a sampling of the work of Albert Einstein—once a professor, like moi, in these very same hallowed halls. His famous equation E=MC2 defines the formation of energy throughout the universe—as most of you doubtless already know but will be reminded of yet again when you open your new textbooks to page—one.”
Sighs filled the room like steam from an old radiator as the somnolent mob dutifully complied. Inside the cover was a photo of the book’s author—Colan himself. Sam glanced at it only briefly. He was doodling in a notebook, but his efforts were not the typical male teenage obsessions; rather, they were an assortment of symbols that almost seemed to make sense. Absently, he flipped the textbook open to the second page, glanced at it, then flipped to the third.
And the fourth, and the fifth, and . . . the nine hundred and third, featuring the last of the book’s footnotes, whereupon he let the book fall closed.
“Fourteen billion years ago, when infinity’s infiniteness began . . . ,” Colan was saying. He never finished the sentence. Instead, he found himself gazing perplexedly at an arm attached to an otherwise unremarkable-looking student in the approximate middle of the auditorium. The arm, astonishingly, was vertical.
Seated at Sam’s right, Leo gawked at his roommate. “Man, are you out of your freakin’ mind? What’re you doing?” As he delivered himself of these questions, Spitz was also trying to shrink as far as possible down behind his own desk.
“You.” Colan had the manner, if not quite the voice, of an annoyed tax inspector. “The one with your hand up. Have you any idea how much I despise having my stream of consciousness interrupted? Especially on the first day of class?” He smiled humor- lessly at the offender. “As I have spoken but few words and proposed no questions, I shall be fascinated to hear the nature of your inquiry. As I am sure we all will. Please do not keep us in suspense.”
A few nervous laughs greeted the professor’s speech, none of their progenitors quite certain whether they were giving in to honest amusement or to sucking up. Regardless, every face in the room was now gazing in Sam’s direction. Aware of the attention he had drawn, he lowered his arm. But despite his roommate’s warning he felt oddly, forcefully, compelled to follow through.
“Sorry, sir, it’s just that I—I just read your book, Mr. Colon.”
More laughter, this time without any thought toward
sucking up. The professor was not amused.
“It is Col-an,” he corrected dryly. “At the risk of wasting yet more of this class’s precious time, young man, I must ask—what do you mean you ‘just read my book’? It’s a brand-new edition, just out and available a few hours ago at the campus bookstore— fortunately for you all—in time for this school year. Unless you happened across a set of publisher’s galleys, which I strongly doubt, you could not possibly have ‘just read’ it.”
Sam found himself nodding assuredly. “Yeah, just now, the whole thing. Found one little problem. You forgot to mention: Einstein was wrong.”
This time the laughter that filled the hall was suffused with giggles. Unable to reduce his physical exposure any further without actually sliding beneath his desk, Leo had covered his face with papers. “You’re killing me, man ...”
Colan regarded the youthful speaker calmly. The young man appeared quite cool—or more likely, quietly stoned. The professor pursed his lips. “I must admit that your assertion does indeed present me with a bit of a dilemma. To wit: should I simply fail you now, and save us both the weeks yet to be wasted? Or would you care to elaborate? Those being your two choices, since your impolitic interruption is already too late for apology.”
“Sure, yeah, no sweat,” Sam replied blithely. “I mean, Einstein’s not a total idiot. Energy does equal mass times the velocity of light squared—in this dimension. But your book doesn’t address the physics and mathematics of the other seventeen dimensions, which if entered can provide access to physical energies that operate according to entirely different formulae. Nobody ever talks about the other seventeen—what’s that about?”
Fearing further loss of time, not to mention a potential swing in the focus of amusement, Colan interrupted. “Young man, you have entered my sanctuary. We have not gathered here for your amusement, but to try and learn something.” His crocodilian smile returned. “Of course, if you have a bit of actual knowledge you would care to impart, I am sure the rest of us poor deprived souls would be delighted to share it.” More laughter, this time unquestionably directed at Sam.
It didn’t faze him in the slightest. Leaping to his feet, he rushed down the nearest aisle and up to the board. Picking up the chalk stylus and the eraser, he began obliterating the professor’s carefully reproduced Einsteinian equations and replacing them with alien symbols. As one line of higher mathematics after another fell to the student’s energetic efforts, Colan’s expression grew less and less amused.
“No problem,” Sam was saying. “Okay, clear example for you. If you break down the elemental components of Energon, assume a constant decay rate, and extrapolate for each of the fourteen galactic convergences it took for the Sentinel Prime expedition to
receive an echo on its signal, you end up with a formula for interdimensional energy creation that m
ass and light alone can’t possibly explain. Even if you throw dark energy into the mix, the figures still don’t zero out. I mean, c’mon. Guys, we learn this in the drone stage—am I alone here?”
Colan’s eyes widened. It all made sense to him now.
The young man standing before him was not actually a student, seriously intent on taking the class. He was a—fan. Of certain movies and television shows. Probably not even enrolled at the university. And he, Colan, had let it go on too long already. He had been suckered, and on the first day of class, too. His face reddened.
“Young man, I will not be pranked ... I will not be ‘punked.’ Not by a freshman. You mock me! Einstein, and me. Well, this is my universe, understand?! I am Alpha and Omega here! And you, young man, are nothing but a statistical insignificance. You are banished, sir. Banished from my classroom and, if you find it further amusing, from my galaxyl Get outtttt/”
Colan’s tone, if not his words, was sufficient to shake Sam out of the daze into which he had fallen. He blinked, glanced at the stunned, amused faces of his fellow students, and then looked back at the professor.
“Did I—say something?”
“BANISHED!”
Another series of blinks. Reality clashed with memory in Sam’s brain. He was not merely confused, not just embarrassed—he was scared. When your thoughts aren’t your own, and when those thoughts impel you to do things and say things that likewise aren’t your own, then—where are you? Whirling, he bolted up the aisle, past the row where he had been sitting, and out the nearest door, not even bothering to recover his class materials.
Leo Spitz watched until the door finished swinging shut behind his departed roommate. Then he turned to the attractive and equally thunderstruck girl sitting next to him.
“I do not know that guy. He just sat down here and started talking to me, that’s all. Total stranger.”
The girl was trying to see past him. “He’s kinda weird, but cute.”
“However,” Leo continued, clearing his throat as if something stuck there had now been dislodged, “he is my roommate. Hamilton Hall, three-twelve. Stop by, I’ll introduce you. And if he’s not there, well...”
There were not as many students in the library stacks as there used to be. The Internet was too easy to use, the Web too full of information to ignore. But not everything had been digitized, not every book put online. Especially older material of little apparent significance. There were so many books, so many tomes devoted to obscure topics. Doubtless they, too, would in time appear online. But scanning and recording required labor and money, and there was much yet to do.
One such volume that had yet to be put up on the Web was of particular interest to Sam Witwicky.
Pulling The Arctic Grail: An Expeditionary History from its shelf, he found an empty, isolated reading table, set the dusty tome down, and began to flip through entire chapters in less time than it would have taken someone else to peruse the entirety of the first page. It took seconds to locate the short section he sought. The heading said it all:
ARCHIBALD WITWICKY: TRAILBLAZER OR CRACKPOT?
Tales of the “Mega-Man”
Sam speed-read avidly. It was all there: the falling through the ice; the discovery of the mysterious “Mega-Man,” ne Megatron; the glasses. Reproductions of his institutionalized great-great grandfather’s “lunatic” writing. Sam knew those symbols as well as he knew the rest of the story.
And he had just inscribed them on his physics professor’s auditorium blackboard.
“Oh, my God . ..,” he mumbled under his breath.
Somewhere.
The world itself was dead. Frozen, uninhabited, isolated, a planet circling a cooling star no longer able to give light or life to the worlds held in its orbit. The surface of the planet was torn, shredded, convulsed by gravity, and forgotten by tectonics. Its core had likewise cooled, leaving behind little save an ice- covered, twisted mass of rock tormented into splintering mountains and winding gorges.
It was into the depths of one such chasm that Megatron plunged, following ancient memory as well as the seemingly endless fragments of torn metal and composite that lined the bottom of the rift. The metallic trail terminated at the stern of an immense ship partially embedded in the solid stone that had finally put an end to its forward momentum. Like the rest of the planet save the lonely wind, the ship was motionless.
But it was not empty.
A huge rip in one side allowed Megatron entry to the hulk of the Nemesis. Deep within, he came to the chamber he sought. One wall boasting nothing but sarcophagi towered high. Each sarcophagus contained a single inert cohort. Each an individual, silent and immobile. They would wait thus, if necessary, until the end of time.
As Megatron stood waiting, the deck before him began to shift and flow. Millions of tiny mechanisms rose to form a single visage: the Decepticons’ own death’s-head. It was at once a symbol and a face.
The face of The Fallen.
In all the known cosmos, before this image and this image alone would Megatron himself stand contrite.
A voice that conjured visions of great expanses of time and space echoed in the chamber: “So ... my apprentice has awoken. Now reunited with my ship. While I assemble forces in other dimensions ...”
“I have failed you, Master.”
“No. Our race may yet survive,” intoned the voice of the millions of components. “There is another means of creating Energon—one that was stolen from me long ago. The Allspark knew where it was hidden.”
“But the Allspark was destroyed—by Optimus . . . and his pet insect.”
“Ah, but was it truly?” came the reply. “Were you}”
Megatron’s eyes brightened. “The Allspark—lives still?”
“Its essence can never be lost. Its power, its knowledge will under circumstance and stress only change form, to be absorbed and retained elsewhere. In this instance, on the human planet.” The voice became a
hiss. “By the insect child who bested you. I have felt this.”
Megatron’s contempt was mixed with astonishment. “The boy} Let me avenge myself, Master. Let me strip the very flesh from his body ...”
“Patience, my apprentice. First he must be found. And when our war is won, as I have promised, I shall bestow upon you the powers of The Dynasty. You will have what you have always sought. For you, too .. . shall be a Prime. Only one boy stands in your way. ”
The encounter was at an end. Silent once more, the face of The Fallen melted back into the hull of the Nemesis. Not until the last vestige of the ancient visage had vanished did another figure dare to appear. Powerful in its own right, in the immensity and chill loneliness of that place, the new arrival seemed reduced and uncertain.
“Forgive me, Lord Megatron,” Starscream began, “but in your absence someone had to take command. I have deployed spy drones to the insect planet. They have already located the child who—bested you.”
It was not the wisest choice of words. A whirling Megatron slammed a fist into the subservient Decepticon and knocked him skidding across the deck. It felt good to strike out again.
“Even in death,” he roared, “there is no command but mine. My words ring truer in my absence than do yours when you are present, self-server!” He started toward the recumbent Starscream, who scrambled to recover his footing. If this was to be the final battle, then .. .
But Megatron halted. The cosmos was vast, and the all-powerful had a need for servants. Even the inadequate and inept. Leaning toward the apprehensive Starscream, the leader of the Decepticons lowered his voice.
“I want the boy. ”
“The boy, Lord Megatron? We are already watching ...”
Turning, Megatron issued an electronic command. No terrestrial monitor would have understood it, but it was received and acted upon by the great ship. The Nemesis was grounded, but it was not dead.
Across from the two Decepticons, the covers of thirteen immense sarcophagi
began to open.
As was her practice, Mikaela beat sunrise to the shop. Light was just brightening the horizon when she punched in the code to disarm the alarm and keyed the lock. The interior was quiet and calm, populated by bikes in various stages of disassembly and repair. Marching in, she dropped her purse on the front desk and headed for the custom job that had commanded the bulk of her attention and skill for the past week. Several parts remained to be installed, and she pondered which to begin with this morning.
She did not notice the toy truck lurking in the shadows. Wheels tried to draw farther back as she started in his direction, but was saved from the need as she was diverted by the ringing of her cell phone.
Picking up the phone, she checked the ident. “Sam” was all it said. Mouth set, she answered without hesitating.
“You stand me up on our first I-chat?”
The voice that replied was unquestionably that of her erstwhile boyfriend—yet somehow different. There was something in his tone, a quality that she recognized from a previous occasion: Mission City. It took only an instant to put a name to it.
He sounded scared.
“ ’Kaela, listen—something’s happening to me!” Not only scared, but dead serious. She was immediately alert. She knew him well enough to realize that this was no joke, no attempt to put her off guard or turn the subject away from his failure to respond to her previous call. Something important was up. Where Sam Witwicky was concerned, that could mean anything.
“What’s wrong?”
He replied without hesitation, talking way too fast—and way too freely. “My great-great-grandfa- ther’s arctic mission, he got zapped by Megatron, started seeing symbols in his head and ...”
She cut him off as fast as she could. “We’re on cell phones. You’re aware of that, right?”
Her warning had no effect as he rambled on, hardly pausing for breath. “I’m seeing them too! And there’s more—more that I don’t understand. Like I just read a nine-hundred-and-three-page astrophysics book in thirty-two point eight seconds and then had a full-scale mental meltdown at the beginning of class! I all but called the professor an idiot and he threw me out. I would’ve thrown me out, too. It’s like some part of my brain’s going haywire ever sin—ever since ...”
Transformers-Revenge of the Fallen Page 10
