Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  The only thing was, he wasn’t ready for it.

  Without even contemplating the move, he reached up with his right hand and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the knife still protruding from his shoulder. He tried to pull it free but his strength faded with every passing moment. He tried again, felt the blade shift, sending knew tendrils of white-hot pain searing into every nerve in his body. He tried to scream but nothing came out.

  The burst of pain sent his last reserves of adrenaline flooding through his system and, with a war-cry that sounded terrifying in his head but a pathetic strangled whine in reality, he wrenched the knife free, upturned it, and slammed it into Gibbs’ thigh!

  Gibbs howled in pain, stepped off of Raine’s neck and staggered. Raine sucked a minute amount of air in through his bruised windpipe, hacked, rolled forward and wrenched the knife from his opponent’s leg before digging it back in his other limb.

  Gibbs dropped to both knees, coming face to face with Raine, his disfigured, horrific visage glaring at him in fury. But his fury was matched only by Raine’s own. Through the blood smeared across his burnt and bruised face, his icy blue eyes shot daggers into Gibbs’ own.

  He wrenched the knife free again and jabbed it into the soldier’s belly. “That’s for Sid!” he growled, his throat raw. Gibbs’ eyes went wide, blood spurted from his mouth. He reached forward to wrap his hands around Raine’s throat once more.

  Raine ripped the knife free them slammed it into his belly again. “That’s for Rudy!”

  Blood ran like a river down the other man’s chin, but still he would not surrender. His hands wrapped around Raine’s neck but he pushed them away, pulled the knife out one last time.

  “And this is for me,” he growled. Then he slipped the razor-sharp blade of the knife across Gibbs’ throat, feeling the flesh slice open. A look of shock registered on Gibbs’ face. He brought his hands up to hold the wound, as if he could hold the severed flesh together with nothing else. Then, realising he could not, he looked down at his bloody hands and rolled backwards. His body hit the rooftop and slid into the circular depression that had almost claimed Raine.

  There was a whine of motors, a squelch of flesh and then a burst of blood and gore. For a moment, the man’s feet, upside down, thrashed wildly, but then they too were sucked into the propeller-like blades of the fan and were gone.

  Raine wheezed in a painful lung-full of air then dropped face first onto the roof of the control room, exhausted.

  A booted pair of feet appeared before his eyes. He strained his neck to look up at an ugly brute of a man, levelling at assault rifle at his head. Defeated, Raine lowered his head to the roof.

  In halting English, tinged with a Russian accent, the man barked an order at him; “Get up!”

  62:

  The Power of God

  USS Eldridge,

  Pacific Ocean

  Nadia tried to hide her shock as she saw Raine stagger into the control room. His face was crusted with blood, his nose was twisted to one side, his hair was singed, his skin red with blisters, and an angry purple bruise was swelling around his throat.

  “Sit!” his escort ordered, pushing him into a chair next to King. King for his part, Nadia noticed, barely registered his ‘friend’s’ injuries. After she had established some sort of order in the control room following the destruction wrought by the Chinese jet, King hadn’t said a word. Instead, he glared defiantly at her, a simmering rage which bit into her every time she made eye contact.

  “Say please,” Raine quipped, his voice raw and husky.

  The Spetsnaz soldier, one of the three under her command, pushed him down hard, bringing the butt of his rifle up to smash his face.

  “Enough!” Nadia barked at the man.

  Raine smiled at her. “New boyfriend?”

  “No,” she snapped, and immediately felt a pang of annoyance for letting the comment bother her. Raine had gotten under her skin, in more ways than one. He had indeed ‘melted’ the Ice Queen and even now she felt her heart race at the memory of their night together.

  “If he moves,” she told the soldier, “kill him.”

  She slung her pack from over her shoulders and pushed her way to the semi-circular control desk. The lead blast door blocking the next chamber had been raised and she glanced for a second at the completed Moon Mask.

  Attaching the Ushakov flying submarines to the Eldridge’s hull below the waterline, they had gained access to her lower levels from a submerged maintenance hatch which led them into the lower part of the particle accelerator. From there, she and the three Spetsnaz soldiers had made their way up the ladder to the control room just before the Chinese plane had struck.

  Now, emergency lights bathed the control room in red. Glass was smashed over the deck, shattered from the screens of the numerous computer monitors. The acrid stench of burned ozone permeated the air, the air-conditioning system evidently off line. The two American technicians had both been killed in the blast. The lead scientist, Doctor Tobias, sat beside King, shaken and bruised. Around her, throughout the length of the particle accelerator, the sound of the ship’s tortured hull groaned. Weakened by the impact, she would not hold up well to the storm raging outside, Nadia knew.

  She pulled a laptop out of her pack and proceeded to connect it to the work station’s main computer terminal. She brought up a schematic of the ship and frowned.

  “The particle accelerator is still functioning,” she told one of her three soldiers. “But the nano-fibres have been damaged. Reconfigure for Plan B.”

  “Plan B?” Tobias scoffed. “If the nano-fibre network has been damaged and you try to activate the process again, you’ll rip the ship apart. Different sections will fall out of phase with one another-”

  “The nano-fibres in the mask chamber are still intact,” she replied, annoyed at having to explain something so simple. “We’ll simply disengage all other fibre bundles, lower the lead shield and confine the effect in there. The ship won’t go anywhere,” she admitted, “but the wormhole will still open. All we have to do then is step through it.”

  “The wormhole won’t open,” Tobias told her with a sneer. “It doesn’t work. The mask doesn’t emit enough tachyons to reach the energy level required.”

  Nadia smiled at him cunningly. “I know,” she replied, patting him condescendingly on the cheek before returning her attention to her laptop.

  “Then what the hell are you doing here?” Raine demanded. Nadia glanced up from inputting commands into her laptop and looked at her former lover. Despite his dishevelled appearance, there was no denying his rugged handsomeness. She toyed with the idea of asking him to join her. After all, he couldn’t go back to America now. But she knew that he would never accept the offer.

  She shifted her gaze to King. He sat in the chair, shoulders slumped, his eyes staring distantly into nowhere. His attempt to save Sid had failed and she saw the defeat in him and regretted her part in it. No matter what she had done, she had honestly considered King and Sid friends and felt sickened by what had happened at Yonaguni. But Sid, in her self-righteousness, had left her no choice. It was a matter of shoot, or be shot.

  A loud creaking sound echoed through the accelerator then, bringing her back to the matter at hand. She returned her attention to the laptop, but nevertheless offered an explanation to her audience, if only to gloat at the Americans inferior understanding of the technology they had created.

  “The Moon Mask is constructed from a superconducting meteoric metal, yes? Xibalbanite, if you want to call it that,” she reminded them all. “It is the exact same metal as the ‘fake’ mask, except for one difference: the fake mask does not emit tachyons. Why does it not emit tachyons?” she glanced up from the screen. “The same reason that not all individual pieces of metal capable of conducting electricity do so- because, at some point, that metal needs to have been given an electrical charge.” She returned to the laptop, downloading her updated software
into the Eldridge’s quantum computers, complete with a carefully calculated new temporal destination.

  “At some point in the distant past, either before or after the Moon Mask was carved out of a lump of space debris, but before it was divided into five segments, it was subjected to tachyons, whereas the ‘fake’ mask was not. Over the corresponding millennia, the superconductivity of the metal has decayed, and the amount of tachyon particles spinning around inside it has decayed also.”

  She had begun to consider this after reviewing the history of the Moon Mask with King. The intensity of the detrimental effects to the human body, and to local communities, had diminished over the years. The civilisation that had flourished at Xibalba was decimated when the mask had been brought to them in an unknown epoch. The Bouda tribe in Africa, however, many hundreds, even thousands of years later, had suffered only relatively minor afflictions before a genetic resistance had developed in them.

  This was because, she had realised, the intensity of tachyons in each piece of the mask had diminished over the years. The rate of decay seemed to have increased as time pressed on, so that while in 1942 a single piece of the mask had just breeched the energy level needed to create a 0.002 second time jump, almost seventy years later, the combined tachyons from all the pieces had dropped to such a level that they could not hit the energy requirements necessary.

  “So I ask again,” Raine cut in. “If there isn’t enough tachyon energy to do your Jules Verne mumbo-jumbo, then what the hell are you doing here?”

  The ship shuddered suddenly and Nadia heard the tell-tale hiss of water. She moved to a window and peered into the depths of the accelerator. Down below, a small fountain of sea water had breached the hull.

  She didn’t have long.

  “Give me your pack,” she demanded of one of the Spetsnaz soldiers. He handed it to her and she opened it, pulling the fake mask from its cushioned interior. She glanced at Raine and King, ignoring Tobias. King’s dark eyes cruelly met hers, then drifted to the mask. His brow knit together in consternation.

  “I thought you said the fake mask didn’t emit tachyons?” Raine queried.

  Nadia’s face broke into a triumphant smile. She saw the flash of pleasure in Raine’s eyes as he looked at her attractive face. They had a connection, she knew. More than just physical; just as he had melted her, she had broken through his defences and found his heart.

  But would he go that extra step, she wondered? He had been betrayed, for the second time, by his country. He had no life to return to, no future. Would he even entertain a future with her?

  “Not yet,” she admitted, replying to his question.

  It had been when she was submerged beneath the waves off Yonaguni Island that she had been struck by an epiphany. The entire underwater monument had been constructed from the same meteoric metal as both masks. As she shone her torch over it, she had seen the way it conducted the light, revealing intricate carvings on its exterior. All she had needed to do was introduce the substance to be conducted in the first place.

  She moved to the airlock door in the centre of the glass partition. The Moon Mask on the other side was still held in the claw of one of the robotic arms. Without the lead shield she knew the radiation would be eking out, affecting all in the room except Raine and King. But limited exposure could be treated, just as she had been after Sarisariñama.

  She opened the airlock door and placed the fake mask on the floor before sealing it once more. Then she returned to the control terminal and activated one of the spare robotic arms. She automatically opened the inner airlock door and deftly manoeuvred the carefully calibrated arm to gently pick up the fake mask.

  Raine, King and Tobias all watched as she worked the robotic arm, bringing the fake mask up close to the original. With the gentle caress of a lover, she carefully worked the control stick, the arm responded by moving the two masks together.

  They touched.

  Nadia smiled and released the controls. She turned back to her audience, focussing her attention mainly on Raine. “Right now,” she explained, “billions of subatomic tachyon particles are jumping from one mask to the other. Charging it, I guess you could say. And, as its superconductivity has not yet started the decay process, in a few minutes it will emit more than enough energy to power this machine.” She stepped closer to Raine, her black combat gear clinging to the contours of her body.

  She knelt down before him and caught his eyes with hers. “Then, I will be a master of time, Nate,” she whispered. He frowned at her, and despite his resistance, she could see intrigue there also.

  “We could go anywhere, do anything.” She reached out, her fingers almost touching the stumble on his face. Then she pulled away. Nervous. Afraid. For that one night, Nathan Raine had accepted her for who she was. To have him reject her now would break her heart.

  She hated this weakness she was showing. “Think of it, Nate. We can go back-”

  “What are you doing?” the lumbering Spetsnaz soldier guarding Raine demanded.

  “Stand down,” she barked at him, shifting quickly back to Raine. “All the wrongs that have been done against you. All the betrayals. All the sacrifices you have had to make. They can all be undone now. The last great threshold of human existence has been breached. Life, death . . . it has no meaning now.” She leaned close to him, shutting all else out of their world so that only they existed.

  “We can make our own rules. Our own destiny. We can shape the course of history to suit our needs.” Their lips touched, sending an electrifying tingle down her spine. She pushed away slightly, needing to read his eyes, to ensure there was no deception there.

  There was none.

  Nathan Raine was hers.

  “We can be gods,” she sighed, giving herself to him, her lips hungrily meeting his, her arms wrapping around his head. His hands wrapped around her back. She heard a grunt of protest from her soldiers but they knew better than to question her. She heard a groan of complaint from Tobias and a snarl of disgust from King, but none of that mattered.

  She had the only man she felt had ever loved her for who she was, the only man she herself had ever loved. His hands, strong and protective, moved down the arch of her back, cupped her buttocks, the back of her thighs, up to her hips-

  He breathed into her ear, sensual and exciting, his whispered words taking a fraction too long to register in her distracted mind.

  “Not such a genius after all, huh?”

  She gasped as she realised her mistake a second too late.

  Raine wrenched her holstered pistol from her hip. The lumbering guard saw the move and lurched forward but Raine fired blindly, plucking a line of bullet holes across his chest.

  Nadia reacted instinctively. “No!” she slapped him hard but Raine pushed up off his seat, sending her sprawling backwards. The other two soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons. Raine lunged behind the control booth as it shattered in a spray of sparks. Tobias coward under it, hands clamped to his ears.

  King erupted back to life.

  Instead of charging for cover, like a man possessed, he charged the nearest gunman and shouldered into his mid drift, ripping a handgun from the man’s holster. The second Spetsnaz saw the attack and swung his rifle to him. Raine jumped from cover and landed a head shot. The man fell.

  King spun on the spot and fired at Nadia. She rolled out through the control room door, bullets sparking in her wake.

  “Benny!” Raine called to him but he wasn’t listening. He ran to the control station. The sequence Tobias had entered in earlier was still on the screen and he slammed the ENTER control. It overrode Nadia’s updated program and, with a hum of static and a rumble of machinery, the accelerator lit up once more.

  “Ben, what are you doing?” Raine demanded. He rushed to meet him, but the soldier King had floored was back on his feet and firing. Raine dived for cover, King charged towards the airlock!

  “Stop him!” Nadia screamed from her
hiding place. The soldier aimed at King but he was too fast. The airlock door slammed shut behind him, the bullets danced off of the reinforced glass. He locked the door from the inside, then, without hesitation, he pressed the release button on the inner airlock and stepped inside.

  Instantly, the invisible tachyons slammed into his head, exciting his Parietal Lobe and overloading his nervous system.

  He dropped to his knees.

  “Sid,” he choked out.

  63:

  Tapestry

  USS Eldridge,

  Pacific Ocean

  Images, thoughts, sounds, smells, memories all bombarded Benjamin King. It was as though he stood outside of his body, looking down at his pathetic form kneeling on the deck in front of the two masks, held firmly in the grip of robotic arms.

  It all made sense. For the first time in his life, since General Abuku had pulled the trigger and ended first his mother’s, then his sister’s life. It all made sense!

  The sequence he had forced Doctor Tobias to input had been activated.

  Though they were invisible, he fancied that he could see the tachyon particles jumping from the pieced-together Moon Mask to the whole and unbroken fake one. First there was one, then there were dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, an entire universe of them whipping around the superconducting metal that had fallen to earth from outer space.

  Even though they travelled many times faster than the speed of light, he fancied he could see the tachyons emanating from the fake mask like the rays of a sun. One by one, the enormous particle accelerator built into the heart of a naval warship picked them up and whisked them down its length at tremendous speed, around the far end of the tunnel and then back again.

  Even though theoretical quantum physics were far beyond the understanding of a humble archaeologist, he fancied that he understood the supercharged tachyon particles interactions with the fabric of the space-time continuum. He saw the fourth dimension of reality, as Langley had described it, as a block of sandstone. The Eldridge was the pressure washer, the tachyons the jet of water. They found a hole in the flat surface of time and punched through, one at a time to begin with, and then untold billions, all pouring into the defect, stretching it, widening it.