Cosmic Rift

by James Axler

  “We’ve lost Bingo,” Kane muttered as he watched the superheated golden rain fall from the sky where moments before there had been an aircraft.

  Freed from the triangulated gravity lock, the Titan’s hand moved once more, reaching to swat Grant’s Manta to the ground as it hurtled past its head.

  Inside the cockpit, collision alarms were going crazy, alerting Grant to the very real possibility that he was about to get batted out of the sky by a three-hundred-foot man. Grant pushed the joystick forward as far as it would go, sending the Manta on a downward trajectory that brought it just barely beneath the swatting hand.

  Grant’s Manta continued on its new path, hurtling toward the ground at a vertical angle, engine protesting. Treetops came rushing toward the viewport at alarming speed, alarms singing in Grant’s ears. Grant held the joystick in place, forcing the Manta to loop-the-loop in a forward roll. The wings cut through the highest branches of the trees and for a moment all Grant could see through the cockpit portholes was burning trees and ground as he was turned entirely upside down.

  Above him, Kane flew an evasive pattern around the towering Titan, launching two more missiles in quick succession. The missiles slapped against the Titan’s thick armor, exploding in great gouts of green fog, but the Titan merely stood there, absorbing the impacts without any effect.

  “We’re running out of options,” Kane said over the linked Commtacts. “Anyone have any ideas? Cerberus? Edwards?”

  * * *

  INSIDE THE TITAN control grid, Wertham the Strange was having the time of his life. He had never been an air jockey, and being given this opportunity to knock the grins off these pilots’ smug faces was one he could not resist passing up. There was no way that they could damage the World Armor, no way to penetrate its fabulous construction. It had been heat-sealed using the heart of a star dragged into the quantum rift—nothing could damage its skin. Nothing.

  In his mind Wertham turned his head, bringing the Titan suit’s head around before sending another burst of the heat ray at the retreating bronze vehicle.

  “I could do this all day,” he trilled.

  Cosmic Rift

  BRIGID REACHED FOR the static figure who waited in the steed exactly as she had left her. The woman’s eyes were blank, and she took no notice when Brigid wrenched the mirrored headband from her head and pushed it down over her own. The headband was connected by a thin tube to the box at the woman’s belt, and Brigid remained close as a bank of lights came to life across its surface.

  Suddenly, Brigid could see the woman in a different way. She was standing there and yet there was an aura around her head, a series of overlays in different colors, each one an oval, new colors forming where they met. The colors were dull, like lightbulbs without power, only the color of the glass remaining.

  Brigid spun as Wertham entered the steed, shoving back the door with his mangled right hand. His lips were peeled back, showing his teeth, and there was blood there. But there was something else, too, visible in the overlay that now appeared from the sensor rig’s data feed playing straight into Brigid’s ocular nerve.

  The ovals around Wertham’s head were bright and colorful, different shades of red and green clashing with one another as they vied for space. The largest of the ovals was huge, encompassing not just his head but almost the whole of the steed’s buslike interior. Intelligence? Telepathic communion? Something else? Brigid could only speculate.

  Behind Wertham, Brigid could see the Gene-agers where they waited for new commands, stock still and dead eyed. The ovals around them were small and washed out, made up of just three or four layers where Wertham’s were a hundred or more.

  Thoughts. The ovals were thoughts.

  Kane had been right about that when they had arrived and the two headband people had stopped and viewed them in the cockpit of the Manta. They had been scanning their thoughts, searching their minds for a hint of treachery. Brigid wondered what her mind had looked like to these people, what colors she thought in, but there wasn’t time to consider that. Wertham was coming at her, a glowing line of fire visible around the headpiece he wore, his thoughts turning darker like a thunderstorm.

  “I could do this all day,” Wertham trilled as he reached out to grab Brigid’s throat.

  Chapter 34

  As Wertham’s hands reached for her throat, Brigid fired a thought at his mind. Via the sensors she wore, it seemed to rip like a spear through the ovals that surrounded his brain.

  Wertham staggered, taking two steps away, his hands clenching and unclenching. “What...did you—?” he began, struggling to form the sentence.

  Brigid thought again, sending her thought like a weapon at the dizzying pattern swirling around Wertham’s head. It was his brain that she was looking at, she realized now, a visual representation of the processes, every thought he was having, conscious and subconscious. She recalled the parts of the human brain, plucking them from her eidetic memory. There was the medulla and the pons, the thalamus and the hypothalamus, the cerebellum, the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus and the ganglia. She ripped into each one, redefining it for Wertham’s mental processes, those floating discs of red and green.

  And Wertham—a genius, an inventor, a schemer—was unable to resist. He had entered the fight trance when Brigid had arrived in his laboratory, leaving his body to run on autopilot, a series of mathematical equations resulting in the perfect fighting maneuvers for any moment of combat.

  Outside of his mind now, Wertham could only watch as the body he had been born in began to crumble at Brigid’s mental onslaught. It sank to its knees, and the eyes lost their luster, gazing away into infinity while Wertham’s mind stood to one side and watched.

  Teeth gritted, Brigid took a single step forward, as far as the tube that connected her headband to the control box would allow, and sent another wave of emotion at the struggling figure in green. Wertham’s face turned red, blood rushing to his brain and from it, and Brigid saw the veins throbbing there, fit to burst. She could feel the pressure, see it in the colored ovals that seemed to hover in the air around Wertham. Whatever that headpiece was that he wore, it sparkled like diamonds through the altered vision of her mind-tool, containing and constraining his mind as he tried to fight back.

  Brigid did not expect what happened next. Wertham’s head continued to redden and then suddenly the skin sank as the skull beneath cracked.

  Wertham felt the blow to his mind like a kick to the head, and he retreated, running for the nearest vessel where he might yet be safe.

  Serra do Norte, Brazil

  SUDDENLY, WERTHAM’S MIND was entirely inside the Titan suit, searing a great line of fire across the landscape as the twin aircraft circled him, blasting with their pathetically inadequate weapons. There was a third vehicle up there, too, poised higher than the others and retaining its distance from the conflict now that its partner had been melted down to its component atoms.

  Wertham reached forward, commanding the Titan suit to grab one of the irritating things that flew at his face. A missile impacted uselessly on his wrist, and then his fist snagged around the Manta, wrenching it from the sky as it hurtled toward him.

  * * *

  GRANT WATCHED IN horror as Kane’s Manta was grabbed by the towering Titan. Kane’s velocity was so great that the Titan was pulled the length of his arm as he strove to hang on.

  “Eject!” Grant shouted, hoping Kane still could.

  * * *

  SEATED INSIDE HIS cockpit, Kane was yanked against the safety harness as the gigantic red hand plucked him from the sky. The Manta’s internal compensators worked overtime as they fought to keep the pilot from careening through the windshield. Kane felt his breath wrenched out of him as the pressure wave slammed against his chest.

  For a moment his vision went dark and Kane feared he was about to black out. But the voice
in his ear wouldn’t let him. Grant was shouting at him over their linked Commtacts, urging him to eject.

  Blindly, Kane reached for the eject button, slapping his palm against it. The lid blew and Kane was suddenly climbing in the air, still seated in the pilot’s chair, a gigantic hand beneath him holding his Manta like a child holding an insect.

  Cosmic Rift

  “NOT SO FAST,” Brigid whispered, seeing the way that Wertham’s mind was escaping from his body. Whether the man would last two minutes out of his physical form, Brigid didn’t know—she only knew that she had to bring him back.

  The mind web strained, reaching out to grab for Wertham where he had retreated into the World Armor. Brigid’s mind reached for him, clawlike wisps grabbing his thoughts and pulling them back in fluttering tendrils that tore like cobwebs. She couldn’t do it, couldn’t pull him back. She could only grab bits of his mind and watch as they disintegrated before her eyes.

  So Brigid did the only other thing she could think of. She reached forward and plucked the crown of wires from Wertham’s head, wrenching it from him and tossing it into the corner of the steed.

  She only hoped that it would be enough to stop him.

  Serra do Norte, Brazil

  MOVING THE MIGHTY arm of the Titan suit, Wertham reached for the fluttering figure of the Manta’s pilot while his other hand clung to the straining aircraft like a trophy. His hand opened to snag Kane as he fell through the air strapped in the seat, and then...

  The arm stopped moving, the hand locked in midreach.

  Wertham tried again, but the body would not move. Something had happened; the connection had broken. The woman had done something and now he couldn’t operate the Titan suit. He could only wear it, locked inside a suit designed never to degenerate. Locked inside forever.

  Wertham’s solitude had just begun again, imprisoned once more, as he had been for seven centuries. And this time, he could not even speak.

  Cosmic Rift

  WERTHAM’S BRAIN DIMMED before her eyes as Brigid watched him through the technology of the mind reader. The vibrant ovals had diminished in number and size, and slowly their color paled to a bland whiteness which, in turn, became clear before finally fading to nothingness. It was over.

  Carefully, Brigid peeled off the headband. She was sweating, a slick line of saltwater over her forehead and running down her face. She was exhausted, too, mentally tired and physically shattered. Pacing over to the panoramic windows of the steed she stood there a moment and gazed out at the Doom Furnace. It was darkening, and the Gene-agers who had worked it were lined up solemnly, awaiting their next command. Above, Wertham’s war fleet waited for an order that would never come.

  Chapter 35

  The quantum window opened one last time, disgorging two Mantas over the starlit forest of Serra do Norte.

  “Clear skies,” Grant said over the Commtact as he piloted the trailing aircraft.

  Kane nodded where he sat in the pilot’s seat of the lead vehicle. He knew how Grant felt—the comment wasn’t a good luck motto or an observation of the, for once, lack of hostile activity in the vicinity; it was merely a greeting directed to familiar stars twinkling over their heads once more.

  “We still have a couple of hours’ flight time before we get home,” Kane said, engaging his Commtact. “You and Domi going to be okay or you want to stop off somewhere and get a bite to eat?”

  There was a brief pause while Grant discussed the options with his passenger. Then Domi’s voice came over the Commtact, cheery as ever. “Let’s just go home,” she said. “I miss that place.”

  Kane heard Brigid laugh where she was seated behind him in the Manta’s cockpit but he didn’t know why. Only Brigid knew how taken Domi had been with Authentiville and how she had proclaimed her desire to stay there back when she and Brigid had been alone in the golden city. However, the attempted coup on King Jack’s domain had rather put a damper on the woman’s enthusiasm and she had elected to return home after all.

  “Better the devil you know?” Brigid had suggested when Domi had told her.

  “Better the friends you know,” Domi had responded. And that was all that needed to be said.

  King Jack had resumed his duties as monarch even before Brigid had defeated Wertham. Jack, it seemed, liked to keep things in order, and once he was in commune with the city’s operating system, care of the God Rod in the palace hub, he could go about getting things back the way they had been before Wertham and his ally had mounted their attack.

  The Gene-agers would be checked over individually and safeguards would be put in place to ensure they couldn’t be turned on their rulers ever again. Dr. Ronald had been placed in charge of that task, and he proudly accepted, grateful to the king and queen for giving him another chance.

  Jack had shut down the hidden broadcast signal that Wertham’s Devil Rod had placed in the sound system, too, which meant people could start thinking for themselves again. Everyone agreed that Jack was a leader they would choose if it ever came down to it, which it wouldn’t.

  After the battle with the Titan, which had ended abruptly once the armored suit seized up where it stood, Grant had picked up Kane where he landed in the forest. Kane was a little shook up but, typical Kane, keen to get right back in the thick of things until they won. Hearing the World Armor had simply stopped operating came as something of a disappointment, but Kane did his best to hide it. After all, he figured, you take saving the world any way you can get it, even if you’re not the guy who lands that decisive, knock-out punch.

  Accompanied by the remaining scout, Kane and Grant had returned in Grant’s Manta to Authentiville and the court of King Jack.

  “The loss of Scout Alphred will be mourned,” Jack assured the Cerberus men. “But it won’t take away from what you two did for us. And, most of all, for me. You’re heroes, both of you—don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

  They figured that meant something coming from King Jack. He was a man who knew a hero when he saw one.

  So, secure in their own Mantas once more, the Cerberus warriors returned home, passing through the quantum gateway one last time and seeing the stars of their own world waiting above the forest of Serra do Norte like favorite friends. Edwards and his field team had long since put out the fires and returned to Cerberus by interphaser by the time the Mantas re-emerged in the sky. Below them, Kane, Brigid, Grant and Domi saw the statuelike figure of the Titan looming above the treetops, one hand crushed around the remains of the Manta that Kane had piloted. It was an artifact now, just like the ones King Jack’s people scoured Earth to salvage. Maybe they’d come back for it someday.

  The Mantas banked in unison, turning northward, heading home.

  * * * * *

  We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin ebook. Connect with us for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!

  Subscribe to our newsletter: Harlequin.com/newsletters

  Visit Harlequin.com

  We like you—why not like us on Facebook: Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks

  Follow us on Twitter: Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks

  Read our blog for all the latest news on our authors and books: HarlequinBlog.com

  ISBN-13: 9781460321737

  Copyright © 2013 by Worldwide Library

  First edition November 2013

  COSMIC RIFT

  Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now
known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com