by James Axler
Wild energies exploded from the false God Rod, burning a hole in the air, fizzing with their barely restrained fury. The sentries remained unmoving, their Gene-ager minds idling as they awaited new commands.
Rosalind gasped as she finally realized the enormity of what the device meant. With it, Wertham could control all of Authentiville, including every atom of salvaged alien tech that had been put to use there.
“Today, your whole world changes,” Wertham told her as he strode across the room toward the twin thrones.
Rosalind stood, blocking Wertham’s path, but he shoved her aside. She hissed like a cat as she was knocked against the side of her towering throne. Then Wertham slipped the silver rod into place in the mount between the thrones, guiding it inside the circles of gold where King Jack’s God Rod belonged. For a moment, Wertham’s rod glowed with sinister promise.
“Today, everyone’s world changes,” Wertham snarled as the base of the holder linked with his false God Rod, firing the palace’s power through its sleek lines. Now the throne was Wertham’s to control.
All around Authentiville the lights began to dim.
Chapter 19
Kane and Grant climbed from the pool.
“Got to admit, I feel refreshed,” Kane said as he reached for his clothes.
Grant agreed. “Yeah, nothing beats a dip in the nano-soup,” he said with a laugh.
As they spoke, both men noticed something almost subliminally, and Grant was the one who gave it voice first. “Did the lights just flicker?”
“I...think they did,” Kane agreed hesitantly.
A few paces across from them, King Jack was being helped back into his armored garb by two of the Gene-agers while a third proffered his freshly laundered cloak.
“Your Highness,” Kane began respectfully. “Do the lights often dim in this place?”
The king ran his left arm down the sleeve and into the golden glove of his armor. “They shouldn’t,” he said, bewildered. “Why do you...?”
Before the monarch could finish, the lights faded a second time. Only this time, it was more pronounced as the illumination slipped to darkness for fully three seconds.
“Now, that time I saw it,” Jack admitted as the lights came back on with no discernible hesitation. “This is most peculiar. I have never known the illuminants to fail like that.”
“How do they work?” Grant asked, securing his boots before reaching for his duster. The long coat was made of a Kevlar/Nomex weave, making it both flame retardant and able to deflect bullets. At that moment, Grant felt suddenly in need of the shield it provided.
“They’re a semiliving ecosystem that runs behind the walls of most of our buildings,” King Jack explained as he stomped across to the nearest wall. Beside him, the three Gene-agers kept pace, still holding his cape and God Rod, as well as one entire sleeve of his armor.
Jack stood at the wall, concern on his features as he ran the fingers of his ungloved hand along it. It was clear that he was searching for something, and in an instant he had found what he was looking for—a hidden panel. Three feet square, the wall panel opened on a hinge, revealing what appeared to be a growth of lichen beneath. The lichen glowed, providing the illumination. The Cerberus explorers had seen something similar some months back when they had found themselves exploring the Ontic Library, a grand storehouse of Annunaki knowledge located under the Pacific Ocean.
“Doesn’t need feeding,” the king explained, checking over the mossy growth. “Takes all it requires from the air. Place like this, with the pool—it’s ideal. Plenty of moisture in the air. Even if the lights fail elsewhere in the kingdom, this, of all places, should be immune to a problem.”
Kane was running over what Jack told him. “If this stuff is—what-chu-call-it?—semi-alive, then what would cause it to shut down like that?”
Still probing the moss with his bare hand, Jack shook his head. “Now that, son, is a very good question.”
Jack took the God Rod from the servant before running it swiftly over the lit wall. As he did so, the Gene-ager sagged, as did the others still holding segments of King Jack’s armor.
“What happened?” Kane asked.
All around, the Gene-agers were shutting down, each of them bowing head to chest the way that King Jack had demonstrated earlier.
“Are you doing that?” Grant asked warily.
“Not me,” the king admitted. He sounded worried.
As he spoke, the open wall panel flickered and went dark. All around the room, other walls switched to darkness along with the ceiling panels. Worried voices came now from the pool behind them, asking what was going on. The only glow remaining was from the golden rod of energy in the king’s hand.
“This is bad,” King Jack muttered as he ran the glowing God Rod before the open wall.
“Your doing?” Kane asked.
“No,” Jack stated. “And what’s more, it can’t be anyone else’s. Not without access to the God Rod. And there’s only one of those.”
* * *
DOMI VISIBLY FLINCHED as the lights dimmed in the water arboretum of the palace. There was still light in the vast room—a line of skylights set in the roof let through the multicolored glow of the warp—but it felt suddenly gloomy and dangerous.
“What’s going on?” Brigid asked, getting to her feet.
Domi shook her head. “I’ve not been here long, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “The lights don’t even dim with nightfall.”
Does a place like this even have nightfall? Brigid wondered. An experienced fighter, she had adopted a combat stance, keeping her center of gravity low, wary of an attack. Her emerald eyes scanned the darkness within the arboretum, the awe-inspiring fountains standing in thick shadow at points around the chamber.
Domi was on her feet, too, sniffing at the air, her ruby eyes shifting right and left as she searched for the source of the sudden loss of light. “Something’s happening,” she said. “Something bad. Just like the queen said.”
“There’s bad and there’s bad,” Brigid replied as she led the way through the room at a trot.
Domi kept pace with her and in a moment the two women were back at the tall, open doorway through which they had entered this wing of the palace. Through the door they saw that the whole palace had been thrown into darkness. The walls and ornate light fixtures had lost their glow, leaving the interior of the palace in thick shadow.
“It’s you, right?” Domi whispered, adopting a position just behind Brigid.
“What?” Brigid whispered back.
“Wherever you go, trouble follows,” Domi teased.
Even in the diffuse light coming from the skylights, Brigid could see the glint of Domi’s teeth as the feral girl smiled. Brigid smiled back.
“We better check things out,” Brigid said. “Find out where the queen is in this...power blackout. I have a feeling we may not like the answer.”
Domi agreed, nodding her head resignedly. The two Cerberus teammates had infiltrated too many places and seen too many things to believe that this was simple happenstance.
* * *
SEEING HER CHANCE, Queen Rosalind began to run, scampering away from the twin thrones as the lights of the palace flickered and died. The only light in the throne room now came from the imitation God Rod, a sparking upright line between the thrones as energy coruscated across its metal surface.
With alarming speed, Wertham reached out and grabbed her, snagging her flowing blue tresses and bringing her down to her knees with a whiplike gesture. Her capes spread around her as she crashed to the hard floor.
Queen Rosalind shrieked as Wertham dragged her up the few steps and back to the towering thrones. She could hardly keep up with him as he tugged her hair, kept slipping on the polished floor and dropping down to
her knees. But he would not slow down.
“Let go of me, Wertham,” the queen yelled. “What you’re doing is insanity!” The queen’s words echoed across the throne room.
Without slowing his pace, Wertham glared at her, revealing his teeth in a fearsome grin. “Isn’t that what you said about me at the trial, Roz? Didn’t you call me insane then?”
Wertham slung the queen back onto her throne as though discarding trash. He paced along the steps of the dais, eyes growing wider as he examined the empty throne of the king. It had changed since he had last seen it: the filigree was more delicate while the thrones themselves were more sturdy, larger and more imposing. Ceremony again.
“Wertham...” Roz pleaded again, but Wertham shot her a cruel look and she sank into silence, but only for a moment.
Ronald glided closer, bringing himself to a halt at the foot of the tiny flight of steps that led to the thrones.
Queen Rosalind lay sprawled in her seat, clutching at her scalp where Wertham had pulled her hair. She warily eyed the false God Rod that Wertham had put into the space vacated by King Jack’s own device. The rod was glowing brightly, fluctuating with powerful energy. But to Rosalind’s eyes, the energy spewing from the rod looked wrong. It was a darker color than King Jack’s, full of purples, indigos and sickly yellows, like the changing colors of a bruise.
“What have you done?” Roz choked, barely able to say the words.
“My God Rod,” Wertham said, settling into the king’s throne. He looked uncomfortable, squirming there like a child. “I made it with all the little forgotten pieces that were left behind. Ronald helped me acquire them.”
Roz shot a look at Ronald as he glided over in his hover chair. “Ronald? Is this true?”
“Nothing will change very much,” Ronald told her. “Not for you. You’ll still be queen, but the kingdom you oversee will be bigger—much, much bigger.”
“What are you talking about?” the queen demanded, pulling herself up in her throne.
“Wertham had the idea,” Ronald explained. He maneuvered his chair up the steps until he was in line with the thrones, sitting beside the queen. “We’ve spent our lives hidden in this rift, peeking out only to scavenge before we go running back to our little bolt-hole in the ether. That’s Jack’s fault, Your Highness.”
“He’s still your king,” Rosalind reminded him.
“Not for much longer,” Wertham said in a singsong voice as his hand played across the hilt of the silver God Rod. He closed his eyes, feeling the energies in flux and guiding them with his mind. He could see the hidden shapes, and he still remembered the four extra senses he had discovered that had granted him a fuller appreciation of the world.
“What are you planning to do?” Rosalind demanded.
“Two kingdoms, working in tandem,” Ronald said as Wertham sank into a trance, communing with his God Rod. “One here, functioning as it always has, generating new uses for the old technology...”
“And one down there,” Wertham interjected, pointing to the room’s polished floor, “on the surface of the planet.” Open, his eyes glowed with a sickly green luminescence, the force of the palace energies now running through him.
Rosalind gasped when she saw Wertham’s eyes. “And what?” she spat out. “You’d rule them, you lunatic?”
“Not me,” Wertham confirmed. “Not both, anyway. Ronald here will be taking Authentiville to new and greater heights. He’s been doing the king’s development work for the past three centuries anyway. And yet, Jack never repaired his ruined limbs.”
“He couldn’t,” Roz began. “He tried but the neural pathways proved...”
Wertham hushed her with a look. “And me—I’ll be down there among the old race, putting things together the way your precious, short-sighted husband should have done a thousand years ago when he had the chance. Instead of falling asleep at the tiller and squandering all our marvelous advances.” Before Rosalind could say a word, Wertham held up a hand and corrected his statement. “All my marvelous advances,” he growled.
Rosalind looked shocked. “You mean—to kill the surface people?”
Wertham shrugged. “We’ll sort the wheat from the chaff,” he said calmly, “and bring the old and short-lived human race up to scratch. They’ll wear my face and live only to chant my name. Perhaps I’ll train them to sing my name so loud that even you will hear it, out here in the cosmic rift.”
Roz looked from one man to the other, unable to believe what she was hearing. It was a coup. “And which of you will be the king?” she asked, her voice taking on a taunting tone. “The madman or the cripple?”
Ronald lashed out, striking the queen across the face so hard that she sank down in her seat, horrified at what Ronald—trusted aide and advisor to the throne—had just done.
Wertham took her goading more calmly. “A kingdom for each of us,” he said.
Roz wiped at her mouth, tasting blood there. “The people will never accept it. They love Jack.”
“Jack will be dead inside of an hour,” Wertham assured her. “The Gene-agers will see to that.”
“No, you can’t!” the queen shrieked.
Wertham looked at her, his eyes afire with that terrible green flame. “I control them now,” he trilled. “They perform my will. I designed this system, remember? Ultimately, it answers to me.”
“You can’t,” Rosalind repeated, sobbing.
Wertham ignored her. “And as for the people of Authentiville,” he said, “they will accept it because we shall have a continuity of ruler. You, my dear Queen Rosalind, shall be at Ronald’s side once we put things in motion.”
Chapter 20
In the darkened regeneration baths, Kane detected movement to his side. He turned, bringing his empty fist up as a figure approached the king from out of the darkness.
It was one of the Gene-agers, back to life once more, with arms held out, hands open. Behind him, the two who had been holding the king’s armor had also emerged from their mental coma, and they began to stride toward the king where he worked at the wall panel.
“It’s all right, Kane,” King Jack assured him. “These guys won’t hurt you.”
He was wrong. In the darkness, Kane and Grant saw the Gene-ager reach for and grab King Jack, pressing hands to his throat and squeezing. King Jack gagged, sinking to his knees as much in surprise as with the force of the sudden attack.
“Wh-what are y-you doing?” Jack choked. “Let...go of me. I am your...king.”
The blank-eyed Gene-ager wasn’t listening, or if he was, he didn’t have any respect left for the aging monarch’s authority. King Jack waved the God Rod uselessly, but it didn’t affect the Gene-ager’s stranglehold. His hands tightened around Jack’s throat, squeezing tighter and tighter. They were hands grown in a vat, designed for the most arduous of manual labor. Each one could crush a walnut without straining. Jack felt the raw pain in his throat as his windpipe began to mangle, saw bright spots rush across his vision in the darkened room. “Hk...”
“Step away from the king,” Kane ordered.
At the same moment, he heard Grant rumble a warning. “Kane.”
Kane glanced back, saw more figures moving in the darkness. They were also Gene-agers and they were moving quickly, swarming across the walkways and dropping down from the overhead catwalks, converging on the point where Kane and Grant stood with the king by the wall. They ignored the other patrons of the baths, instead cutting a path to just one target—their king.
Without a second’s hesitation, Kane locked his arm around the one who had grabbed King Jack and pulled from behind, using leverage to drag the man back. Surprised, the Gene-ager let go of the monarch and slid backward across the slick decking. Kane thrust his knee into place as he loosened his grip, tripping the Gene-ager so that he crashed down on the deck.
While Kane was dealing with the first attacker, Grant had slipped on the electrochemical polymer lenses he carried in his duster, placing them like a pair of sunglasses over his eyes. The lenses drew on all available light and enhanced it, granting the wearer a form of night vision even in pitch darkness.
A blank-eyed figure—one of the two who had been assisting the king with his armor just minutes before—swept the empty armored glove at the king’s face like a club. Still kneeling, Jack tried to duck back as it sailed at his head. The bulk of this strange makeshift weapon missed, but the metal fingers sheared across Jack’s cheek, scoring three parallel lines where they struck. Moving fast, Grant grabbed the Gene-ager by the arm and yanked hard, dragging him back and down with all his prodigious strength.
Caught unaware, and solely focused on his assignment to assassinate the king, the Gene-ager staggered in place. Grant played the advantage, driving a fist into the creature’s face like a hammer blow. The Gene-ager’s nose caved in with an audible snap, and the dead-eyed man swayed in place.
To his credit, the Gene-ager tried to fight back. He drew the metal glove up again, raising it like a baseball bat and swinging it at Grant’s head.
Grant sidestepped, turning his head as the golden glove swished past. Then he took a step closer to his foe and grabbed the front of the man’s tunic with both hands, pulling him down and to the side. Wrong-footed, the servant-turned-killer caromed over Grant’s shoulder and slammed to the floor with a crunch of bones.
Grant turned back, assessing his foe through the enhanced vision of the lenses. The Gene-ager wasn’t moving and Grant figured him to be unconscious. There wasn’t time to check—not with figures converging on them from all sides.
