Ragnarok needed time to think, but as in all battle there was no time. “I thought it was the other way around- Disir’s are supposed help us?”
Tam Nok stepped closer. Ragnarok knew there was danger close by, but his gaze was drawn to her eyes, their strange slanted shape. Deep black, even darker than the night around them, they drew in his very being.
“I am trying to help more than just you,” she said. “Every Viking- all of mankind is in danger. If I die here, we all die. Make your decision now, Ragnarok Bloodhand.”
A distant part of Ragnarok’s mind wondered how she knew his name. “I cannot-” He whirled as an unearthly growl ripped the air to his left, the ax leading the way. The blade impacted in the chest of a beast in the midst of its leap. Ragnarok had a brief glimpse of bared teeth, a thick body, outstretched arms with claws at the end as he followed through the swing, throwing the body past him. A serpent’s tail flickered by, narrowly missing his face, as the beast made a dying attempt to kill.
Ragnarok shoved his boot into the creature’s chest and pulled the ax out with a cracking of bones. It had the body of a lion, the tail of a serpent, and the head of a monster with fanged teeth. Ragnarok had never seen the like.
“We need to leave,” Tam Nok pulled on his arm. “Now!”
Looking past where the creature had come from, Ragnarok could see a tall figure- over seven feet in height- cloaked in red, with blood red hair cresting over shoulders. The face was white and long and hard. No mouth that he could see, just two red eyes that bulged outward. The Valkyrie’s scream chilled Ragnarok’s blood, although there was no mouth from which the sound could emanate. The scream came from the entire being, twisting the air the surrounded it. Ragnarok squinted. The air was shimmering next to the Valkyrie in a way he had never seen. The creature held up its right hand toward him. The hand was covered in the same sort of white armor as the face with a bright gold stone held in the palm.
As Ragnarok stepped forward toward the Valkyrie, both hands holding the ax over his head, Tam Nok cried out “No!”.
A gold beam flashed up from the Valkyrie’s hand, hitting Ragnarok in the chest, searing through the leather. He screamed in agony and staggered back. The hand pointed toward him once more. Tam Nok stepped between them, whipping something shiny from under her cloak. The gold beam hit the object and ricocheted off into the darkness. Tam Nok jumped back, into Ragnarok, and the two of them slipped off the stone, falling.
The pain in Ragnarok’s chest was forgotten as he tumbled down the rocky slope. He came to an abrupt halt at the bottom, Tam Nok on top of him. Both were bruised and battered but still alive. He rose up, pulling her along with him.
“They cannot see well,” Tam Nok hissed. “We must go now!”
There were voices below, the men on the boat alarmed by the commotion. Ragnarok looked across the pebbled beach. His longship was in the water, oars manned, several warriors standing behind their shields slotted along the side, arrows notched to bows, peering into the fog and dark.
“Let us go,” he ordered, but Tam Nok was already moving. Ragnarok frowned and hurried after her. Something flashed out of the dark and Ragnarok reacted instinctively, pulling the ax up in front of him. What looked like a red rope lashed around the haft. There was a sizzling noise and the ax head fell off, the haft cut through.
Ragnarok stared in the direction the rope had come from. A very dark shadow, a pitch black huge blob in the darkness, was about twenty feet away on the shore. More rope, arms grasping for a victim, came lashing out. Ragnarok threw what remained of his war ax, spear tip forward at the dark mass. He rolled under the groping arms and came to his feet, running full out now after Tam Nok. Several arrows flickered by just missing him, aimed toward the monsters behind him.
The scream of the Valkyrie behind was echoed to the left and right, other Valkyries closing in. Something leapt out of the darkness at Ragnarok, a small whirring ball of claws and teeth that he caught and threw over his shoulder, feeling a slice of pain along his right shoulder.
He scooped Tam Nok under his right arm, tossed her over his shoulder and splashed into the water as his bowmen continued to shoot over his head, their eyes wide at the glimpses of the inhuman targets that they could make out in the dark.
Ragnarok tossed Tam Nok over the edge of his boat and jumped up, Hrolf grabbing hold of his arms and hauling him aboard.
“Row!” Ragnarok yelled. “Row!”
Ragnarok peered backward. The beach was disappearing into the dark. The howls of the Valkyries echoed across the water, as they discovered their prey had escaped. The wind was picking up again, as abruptly as it had stopped earlier.
“Drop the sail,” Ragnarok ordered Hrolf. Ragnarok wrapped both large hands around the worn wood for the rudder adding his strength to that of Bjarni, the helmsman.
The old warrior looked worried. It was a dangerous move in the narrow fjord with such a strong wind blowing, but he did as ordered. The wind grabbed hold of the cloth and the ship picked up speed. Ragnarok leaned into the rudder, helping Bjarni steer a course directly between the outcroppings that defined the entry into the fjord.
Hrolf threw his powerful shoulder against the wood, helping Ragnarok and Bjarni as the wind pushed them further to the left, toward the southern rocks. Ragnarok was surprised when Tam Nok joined them, her lean form next to Hrolf.
A chill ran down Ragnarok’s spine. He looked up.
“Beware!” Tam Nok screamed.
Ragnarok let go of the tiller and spun about. One of the Valkyries swooped out of the dark fog, clawed hands outstretched, ruby eyes glistening in the otherwise blank face. It was closing rapidly on the ship.
Ragnarok grabbed a spear and held it up, braced against his chest. The Valkyrie swerved at the last second, narrowly missing being spitted on the spear and flew along the left side of the ship. Thorlak the Hardy swung at the beast with his sword, his shield held in his other hand, and the beast dipped a wing under the metal. A clawed hand grabbed Thorlak’s extended arm and snatched him off the deck as a mother might grab a child. Thorlak swung with his iron rimmed shield even as his feet cleared the edge of the boat.
The metal connected with a hollow clang, as if it had hit fellow metal, and the creature abruptly rose straight up, then the free hand, claws extended, sliced down and neatly separated Thorlak’s shield arm from his body at the elbow. The Valkyrie disappeared back into the fog, Thorlak hanging below, his screams fading.
“Ragnarok!” Hrolf yelled.
The Viking leader turned his attention back to the boat. The longship was heading straight toward rocks. Ragnarok threw his shoulder back into the tiller, every muscle straining to bring the boat about. Warriors in front of him were grabbing bows, spears, and shields, their frightened eyes scouring the fog, tensed for a reappearance of the demon.
Slowly the dragon head on the high prow swung to the right. They cleared the southern promontory with less than twenty feet to spare, the howls of the Valkyries fading as they sailed into the open sea.
Chapter 5
THE PRESENT
1999 AD
Night or day no longer mattered as soon as the elevator began going down. The electric lights on the top of the cage reflected off the dark walls, showing the layers of rock going by as the elevator descended. Professor Nagoya had made the trip many times and it held little interest for him. He’d already called ahead with the coordinates to be checked and he knew his team would be hard at work.
He’d taken the bullet train north from Tokyo, traversing the two hundred kilometers in less than an hour. A helicopter had been waiting in the parking area of the station he got off at and whisked him here.
Rock walls on four sides guided Nagoya straight down. The Kamioka Mozumi mine was the deepest in Japan. Its lowest level was over three miles below the surface of the Earth. At a steady rate of four hundred feet per minute, the cage descended. Nagoya had to switch cages three times, and cross three horizontal tunnels to get to the deepest sha
ft that led to his destination.
These last three vertical miles took him almost as long as the hundred and twenty horizontal miles from Tokyo. At long last the final cage thumped to a halt. Nagoya impatiently pulled aside the gate. A young woman was waiting for him, Ahana, his assistant. She bowed as she greeted him.
“What have you found?”
“We are still coordinating with the Americans,” Ahana said, “but the results are looking positive. There is something at the coordinates we were given by Mister Foreman.”
Nagoya felt his pulse quicken. After all these years, every little discovery about the gates and those on the other side was like a drink of water to a man in the desert. They knew so little. Given that he had managed to get his government to invest over a hundred million dollars in this project it was good that it was finally paying results. Of course the project has ostensibly been done for other research reasons; indeed it was used for various research projects by numerous organizations and it paid dividends that way, but Nagoya had been the one who had accomplished what many had said couldn’t be done.
They walked down a corridor carved out of solid rock, over eight feet wide and ten high. After two hundred yards, the tunnel opened into a large natural cavern that had been discovered during drilling years ago, before the mine was tapped out. The cavern, over eighty meters deep and eighty wide had been exactly what Nagoya had been searching for.
The tunnel came out near the very top of the cavern. A steel grating extended out over the open space, with several work stations where the crew that manned the site worked. Underneath, a highly polished stainless steel tank, sixty meters wide by sixty deep had been painstakingly built, section by section. Along the walls of the tank over 20,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) had been attached. PMTs were extremely sensitive light sensors that could detect a single photon as it traveled through water and reacted with it. They were all linked together with the output displayed on the computers in the work station.
The tank was filled with very pure water. The surface was dark black and mesmerizing. Nagoya often found himself simply sitting and staring at that totally smooth surface, lost in thought.
“What do you have?” he asked once more as Ahana took her place at the main console.
“The computer is still processing the data, sir,” Ahana typed in some commands. “Another few minutes please.”
Nagoya put his hands behind his back, trying to appear calm. The entire complex went by the name of Super-Kamiokande. In technical terms it was a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Foreman, Nagoya’s counterpart in the United States, called it the ‘Can’, a rather simplistic term in Nagoya’s opinion for a device that was the only one of its kind.
Cerenkov light was produced when an electrically charged particle traveled through water. The reason the Can had to be so far underground was to allow the miles of earth and rock above it to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet. Thus researchers could study the much stronger cosmic rays given off by the sun which could pass through the rock in an almost 'pure’ environment much like astronomers put their telescopes on the highest mountains.
The other reason- and one that only Nagoya knew of- that it was deep underground was to look in the other direction; into the Earth. Since charged particles should not be emitted by the Earth itself, no other researchers even considered that a possible use. It looked for a particular charged particle that Foreman had stumbled across as being significant to the gates and the effect they produced.
For that reason, Nagoya did not mind the name the American CIA man had given the Super-Kamiokande, which had been developed as a joint US-Japan research project. Both Nagoya and Foreman tweaked their governments into doing something even the governments didn’t really understand the need for at the time.
Nagoya knew that Foreman over the decades after World War II had focused on various locations where strange things seemed to happen: the Bermuda Triangle was only the most prominent to the public. There was also the Devil’s Sea off the coast of Japan, the area that had first drawn Nagoya’s interest. There were many more spots on the face of the Earth that propagated strange electro-magnetic and radioactive properties.
The Russians, interestingly enough, had been the foremost investigators of these areas, looking beyond the spots inside their own borders. At a secret meeting brokered by Foreman shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, Nagoya had finally been able to meet his Russian counterpart, Kolkov, and learn much history and theory.
The Russians had lost a submarine not only in the Devil’s Sea, but two inside the Bermuda Triangle gate during the Cuban missile crisis. Additionally, the Soviets had sent ground recon elements into the Angkor gate area in Cambodia in 1956 and 1978, losing both groups without a single survivor. Only Kolkov knew how many people the Russians lost over the years into the gates inside their territory, three of which Nagoya knew certainly existed- Tunguska, in the waters of Lake Baikal, and near the Chernobyl reactor.
Indeed, survivors from the gate were few and far between, Foreman having two of them working for him in the man named Dane and the woman Sin Fen. Nagoya had never met Dane but he often wondered about the woman, whom he had met several times. She made him feel very nervous, as if her dark eyes could see into him, into parts he himself wasn’t aware of.
Nagoya also knew that the Russians were greatly interested in the gates for some very specific reasons. First, there was the natural tendency for paranoia on the part of every Russian. Numerous invasions over the years and betrayals had engendered a certain mindset in that country. Second, the Soviet Government had supported Kolkov with tremendous amounts of resources once it was determined that a gate opening in the vicinity of Chernobyl had caused the disaster at that nuclear power plant. There was also considerable speculation that the massive explosion in 1908 at Tunguska had somehow been associated with the gates.
Like Foreman and the CIA, Kolkov had worked in the dark hallways of the KGB for decades searching for answers when no one was even sure what the questions were.
Nagoya, with less resources but more technical expertise at his beck and call, had focused on scientific answers to the gate anomalies. The Japanese over the centuries had lost ships and more recently planes in the Devil’s gate and there were many legends about the area.
Nagoya wanted to step forward and look over Ahana’s shoulder to see how the data was progressing but he knew to do so would cause her some loss of respect among her peers, so he forced himself to continue waiting, standing over the tank, looking down at totally smooth black surface.
The Super-Kamiokande- the Can- had been developed because Foreman had discovered something rather strange about the gates. Using research money that poured down from the United States government to various university for projects, some of which even the American public considered quite arcane and bizarre, Foreman had had the Bermuda Triangle gate checked with just about every type of scanner science had ever invented in the desperate hope of uncovering any information that might yield data on what exactly the gates were and what was on the other side. Up until a year ago the gates had been simply a black hole to all imaging and sensing devices, recording nothing.
But last year one of those research projects discovered that the gates discharged muons which was strange information indeed. As a physicist, Nagoya knew the history of the muon.
In the 1930s, physicists had been very confident that the building blocks of matter were the proton, electron and neutron. There were three other basic particles that scientists were aware of but knew little about- the photon, neutrino and positron.
But there was a problem with the physics of the time- scientists also knew that the protons in the proximity of the nucleus, holding equal charges, should strongly repel each other, yet they remained there. Nagoya was very proud that it was a Japanese scientist, Hideki Yukawa, who came up with the answer and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his brilliance.
To explain why the proto
ns were held in place, he proposed a new force in the nucleus formed by a new particle, which he called the meson. He also determined that the ratio of the force of this new particle was inversely proportional to its mass which made the meson 200 times more massive than the electron.
Other scientists around the world searched for mesons, mostly by studying cosmic radiation from the sun, the strongest electro-magnetic field they could find, infinitely more powerful than anything man could produce. The researchers discovered that it wasn’t quite as Yukawa had predicted- there was more than just a meson, there were two particles under that heading. One held the strong charge with little mass- now named the pion- and the other held a lot of mass with little charge- now called the muon. Both the pion and muon were very unstable and decayed rapidly when separated. The muon decayed into an electron, a neutrino and an anti-neutrino.
These discoveries were the beginning of particle physics which opened the doorway to quantum mechanics as well as a new perspective on special relativity and Einstein’s energy-mass relation.
The fact that the gates emitted muons which did not decay as rapidly as established equations for physics predicted they would was troubling to Nagoya and the other scientists who were investigating the gates. Fundamentally it meant that the physical rules on the other side of the gates were different than that on the Earth side- or, and this was even more troubling- it meant that whoever or whatever was on the other side was manipulating particles at the very basic level in order to make the gates work. Nagoya thought it was likely both. He also felt that the gates were tears in the very fabric of the Earth’s physical nature and, deliberately done by some force at another place, probably another dimension.
It was a staggering concept and one that Nagoya was determined to resolve. He had to admit that the Russians had suspected as much before anyone else, seeing a link between the gates. In the 1960's, three Russian scientists had published an article in the journal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences titled: Is The Earth A Large Crystal?
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