Beyond Hades (The Prometheus Wars)

by Luke Romyn

  “No time to relax, princess,” snapped Wes.

  Talbot tensed, realizing how true the words were. They still had to find a way home, get into Atlantis – which was apparently destroyed – and close off a rift they had no idea how to shut down.

  They may have won this war, but their –

  “Hey! Snap out of it! We have to go.”

  Talbot nodded, turning to Zeus. “Is there an easier way for us to return to our world? We don’t have time to travel to Chiron’s village to access the Syrpeas Gate –” He suddenly remembered something. “But even if we could travel through it we’d emerge inside the rubble of a collapsed pyramid on the other end.”

  Zeus looked thoughtful for a moment. “We can recalibrate the coordinates on the gate here to link with the one you arrived through. This can then be shifted slightly so that you emerge in the same locale, but away from the original gate.”

  “Let’s do that, then, whatever the hell it is... with the thing, and the recalibration stuff,” said Wes.

  Zeus led the way back up the hill through the empty, war-torn streets, Wes and Talbot following with Heracles trailing further back, beset as he was by Olympians weeping with relief who wanted to thank him personally. The trip was swift, and they soon stood within the chamber of the rift once more, the rift itself still active and rippling within the hidden room. Zeus adjusted several things on the control panel, finally turning back to gaze at Wes and Talbot.

  “I do not know whether to thank you both or curse you. You have brought me the worst news I ever received, seen my son taken from me, enabled our enemies to bring war to our very doorstep, wreaking death and destruction upon the city I love and causing more pain than my people should ever have to endure. But my son has since returned, bringing me joy at a time when I never imagined it possible. You have also helped save my people, fighting alongside us at your own peril. I am torn; what am I to do?”

  “Well,” said Wes, “for starters, you could stop yapping so much and give me a kiss.”

  Zeus merely grinned and shook his head. “I am going to miss you. I would tell you to return one day, but I fear what would follow in your wake the next time.”

  “Sorry about the whole war and devastation thing,” muttered Wes.

  Heracles came to stand beside his father. “You both must succeed in closing the Syrpeas Gate,” he said sternly, his face impassive. “Otherwise this war will have been for naught; we shall all die if the dimensions collapse.”

  Talbot nodded somberly. He extended his hand to Heracles, who took it wrist to wrist in a warrior’s grip. “Thanks Heracles,” he said. The huge warrior merely grimaced, knowing what they still had to face.

  Talbot turned to Zeus, but no words could convey what he felt. This man, a legendary figure within Greek mythology, was now facing the rebuilding of his city along with the devastation to his people, only years after fighting a similar war. How could Talbot convey the sorrow he felt?

  “No words are necessary,” said Zeus, reading his thoughts. “Despite what I just said, I know you two are not at fault. The blame lies with the Titans, and they have paid the price. Your task lies ahead of you, and it is more important than anything you can possibly imagine. Beware what you think you know, and when all seems lost, remember the words of Kharon.”

  Talbot stepped back, confused. He searched his memory for what Kharon might have said, but for the life of him he couldn’t recall it.

  “Don’t worry, it will return when you need it,” said Zeus, sensing his panic. “It is within you – everything you need has always been locked within you. Never forget that, Talbot Harrison.”

  Talbot suddenly calmed, a cooling mist flowing through him. He felt instantly refreshed. He glanced at Zeus and smiled. “Thank you.”

  Zeus merely nodded, and Talbot turned toward the rift, his purpose clear. Knowing that Wes would be right behind him, Talbot stepped into the rift and disappeared.

  ***

  “I am not going to miss going through those damn things,” snarled Wes as they gathered themselves from the floor of the cave beneath Ayers Rock.

  Talbot appraised their surroundings, and saw that Zeus had somehow programmed the rift to deliver them beside the collapsed pyramid, into the huge chamber underneath Ayers Rock, where Chiron and his centaurs had so valiantly battled Porphyrion. The bodies of the dead centaurs had been viciously flung aside, lying scattered in the places where they’d dropped during their valiant fight against the king of the Gigantes. In fact, as Talbot looked, he saw Chiron’s body, and the arm seemed to be....

  He was moving!

  Talbot raced across the floor of the chamber, oblivious to everything else. He heard Wes curse before chasing after him. Both were still dressed in the armor of the Olympians, and Talbot staggered as his scabbard banged between his thighs. Pushing down on the hilt of his sword and lifting the sheathed blade out of the way, he ran smoothly for the rest of the distance.

  Skidding to a halt, Talbot dropped to the ground beside the head of the dying centaur. “It’s okay, Chiron,” he gasped. “We’re here.”

  Chiron looked up at him quizzically, his bestial features furrowing. “But... I saw you both....” he gasped, his voice no more than a whisper. “You entered the pyramid... no... no more than a moment ago....”

  Talbot followed where the centaur indicated and his jaw dropped. The last time they’d been in this cavern there’d stood the largest pyramid the world had ever seen – an identical twin of the submerged one in Atlantis. In its place now lay an outside perimeter of huge stone blocks, its interior completely caved in, like Lego blocks smashed by an unruly child. This was all that remained after Wes had detonated the grenade inside as a last ditch effort to stop Porphyrion from catching them.

  Dust was still settling from the collapse of the structure, and Talbot realized that only seconds had passed since they – or rather their former selves from a previous time – had stepped into the rift! The complexity of these worlds, each running on different systems of time was really beginning to confuse Talbot now, but at least it was to their advantage. They’d hardly lost any time from their trip – or rather, trips – and they were now back where they’d started.

  Suddenly, one of the huge blocks of stone shifted... and then another. Talbot watched in amazement as the entire center of the pile of broken stones started shifting. It was almost as though....

  As though something huge were beneath it, trying to climb out!

  “Go...!” gasped Chiron, his hind hoof twitching slightly.

  Talbot nodded down at the dying centaur, and stood once more. The rubble was heaving and crashing like a stone ribcage, and he knew they only had minutes before....

  Too late!

  With a violent explosion, blocks of stone blew outwards, crashing and tumbling into the walls of the cavern. Dust covered the area, but Talbot knew what had caused it.

  “Porphyrion,” he groaned.

  Within the rubble stood the king of the Gigantes, a huge gash running down the left side of his head, bone protruding from his left forearm. He stumbled slightly, looking dazed for several moments. Finally his vision seemed to clear and he looked –

  “Man, he looks pissed,” muttered Wes, ending Talbot’s thought.

  “I think we should be running,” said Talbot.

  Porphyrion spotted them and roared, the vibration causing dust to drift down from the roof of the cavern.

  “Definitely running,” agreed Wes, as the huge figure kicked rocks aside and pounced toward them.

  They took off, sprinting as fast as they could toward the side tunnel which would lead them back to the surface.

  But only if Talbot could repeat the miracle of the Aboriginal dot painting.

  Talbot raced, side by side with Wes, while the ground thundered beneath them from the pounding strides of Porphyrion. Talbot desperately held the hilt of his sword to keep it from tripping him again, and by the time they reached the side-tunnel both men were gulping for ai
r. Without pausing, they shot into the narrow crevasse and kept going. Talbot knew the passageway was too small for the enormous Porphyrion to fit into, but he had a feeling the enraged giant wouldn’t be deterred so easily.

  They entered the cave which had controlled their descent from the surface, and suddenly Talbot panicked, realizing he no longer had Wes’s phone. Without it he couldn’t play the tune which would return them to the outside.

  Talbot calmed his terrified mind with difficulty and thought back. He remembered when they’d dropped into the earth. He recalled smashing his face into the floor of the cave and then –

  The phone was still here!

  He must have dropped it when he’d crashed into the ground the last time they’d been in this place. Talbot immediately dropped to the ground and began feeling around in the dark for Wes’s smart phone.

  An ominous rumbling from the cavern behind them made Talbot pause momentarily, panic roaring in his ears once more. In the dim light, he glimpsed some sort of movement coming down the tunnel. Something was moving rapidly through the dark, something which almost filled the tunnel with its bulk. At first he thought the giant must be thrusting his arm down the tunnel in hopes of catching them, and Talbot relaxed slightly, knowing it could never reach. And then he saw fangs glistening in the gloom, a cavernous mouth racing toward him.

  The massive snake, one of Porphyrion’s legs, shot down the tunnel and exploded into the cave – all fangs and venom. Talbot instinctively leaped backward while Wes darted forward, Chiron’s sword whistling through the air, smashing down on top of the snake’s head –

  – only to bounce off!

  The sword which Talbot had witnessed slicing and dicing a myriad of creatures with no problem clanged like it had hit stone, rebounding from the head of the snake. Talbot remembered the same thing had happened before when the centaurs had attacked Porphyrion: the Olympian weapons had had little or no effect on the King of the Gigantes.

  “Find that fucking phone, and get us out of here!” yelled Wes, slashing at the snake’s head again to keep its attention trained on him.

  Talbot resumed feeling around on the ground for the phone which would hopefully see them escape. The snake thrashed and snapped at Wes, but it seemed to have reached the limit of its length. For a moment, Talbot had the obscure image in his head of Porphyrion squatting in the main cavern with his leg stretched into the tunnel – like a person who had half-fallen into a deep rabbit hole.

  His hand smacked into something plastic and knocked it, skidding away across the cave floor toward the thrashing head of the cobra. Through the dim light coming from the tunnel, Talbot could discern the outline of Wes’s smart phone, now sitting directly beneath the head of the thrashing serpent.

  Nice.

  “Wes,” he yelled, “I need you to keep this thing occupied, okay?”

  “What the hell do you think I’m doing? Does this look like foreplay?” The sword crashed discordantly once more against the serpent. “Do it quick!”

  Talbot nodded, realizing such a motion was pointless in the dark. Diving forward, he skidded along the ground and snatched the phone up, rolling aside just as the massive head crashed down once more – avoiding being crushed by a hair’s-breadth. Wes smashed his sword into the beast once more, and Talbot shuffled out of the way.

  He stood, turning toward the wall paintings and realizing something horrifying: Talbot couldn’t see the paintings!

  The dots and lines of the Aboriginal painting denoting the codes he needed to interpret into musical chords were nothing more than a murky smear in the darkness. The cave was close to being pitch black. He could barely see a smudge of white along the wall where he guessed the painting was, and he couldn’t get closer because of the gigantic snake filling half the cave.

  Furiously, Talbot racked his brain for a solution. His mind drifted around the tune he had played the last time, but he couldn’t recall it exactly. If he played a single note out of tune, the entire enterprise was doomed and they would be stuck down here until the giant’s leg-snake ate them or they starved to death.

  The phone glowed slightly at his touch, and Talbot slid his thumb across the screen in order to illuminate it fully. Immediately the screen shone in the darkness, and he tested the light against the opposite wall. The cave was still too dim. He could see Wes standing over the other side, just out of reach of the gaping jaws of the enormous snake. Occasionally he would slash at it with his sword, causing a crash to sound, but otherwise the weapon did nothing.

  Talbot glanced at the screen of the phone and saw the synthesizer application still on the display since the last time he had used it, the end of the tune still visible.

  And then it came to him.

  Fumbling with the phone in the gloom of the cave, he searched through the program for the thing he needed. Finally Talbot had found an option which allowed the tune programmed in to be played in perfect reverse – same pitch, same speed. He hoped against hope this was the equivalent to pressing the ‘up’ button in an elevator.

  The tune reverberated around the cave and dust once again began to fall from the ceiling, the floor lurched, and both men fell to the ground moments before the cave exploded upwards, pinning them to the floor with its velocity.

  A horrific sound, like a gigantic pumpkin being squashed, echoed momentarily, followed by a muted howling coming from the cavern where Porphyrion still was. The howling was cut off in a fraction of a second, the rocketing cave hurtling toward the surface. His eyeballs were being pushed into the back of his skull and his chest felt like the ribs were being crushed beneath the foot of a giant.

  Talbot was on the verge of blacking out when the cave suddenly stopped moving upward with such a jolt that his entire body lifted several feet off the ground before slamming back down, winding him horribly.

  Gasping for breath, he rolled to his belly and squinted against the yellow sunshine pouring in through the open cave mouth. Climbing slowly to his feet, Talbot recalled that they’d returned only moments after having departed. So that meant –

  An awful shrieking cry, like that of a large bird, sounded and both Talbot and Wes rushed to the front of the cave, gingerly avoiding the giant severed snake’s head that was Porphyrion’s foot. They gazed out, but Talbot already knew what would be there... waiting to attack him once more.

  Below them, about a hundred yards or so away, was Wes’s ship, disguised as a septic truck in order to ‘blend in’ once more. Just beyond that he saw something he’d hoped to never encounter again, the thing which had sought him out from the beginning of this hellish quest: the gryphon.

  It was dead, slightly charred-looking, perhaps twenty yards away from the ship. The screech they’d heard must have been its death-cry as the electrical defenses of Wes’s ship had finally ended it once and for all.

  Talbot exhaled.

  “What are we going to do now?” asked Wes, interrupting his thoughts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what the fuck are we going to do now?”

  Talbot stared at Wes, nonplussed. “We get back to Atlantis and close the rift,” he said.

  “Atlantis. You mean the place under the ocean which is probably flooded once more after that minotaur smashed his way through everything, including the generators which kept the water out. That Atlantis?”

  Talbot gasped. He hadn’t thought of that.

  “But can’t this ship fly under the water?” asked Talbot.

  “Well, yes... in theory. I know when I screwed up it didn’t fuck it up too badly crashing into the ocean, but it’s not designed for it. Besides which, we don’t have any diving gear, especially for that depth. It’s no good if we can get down there but not exit the ship, is it?”

  Talbot thought about arguing that they could fly somewhere to collect some gear, but knew it was useless. They had maybe a little over an hour to get to the other side of the world and down to Atlantis. Even if they had the diving gear with them, he knew they woul
dn’t make it. There was no way they could navigate through Atlantis and destroy the Syrpeas Gate – if they even figured out how to destroy the gate – in the time they had left.

  It was over.

  They had failed.

  Talbot felt hopelessness well up within him, and he slumped to the ground, tears forming in his eyes. It had all been for nothing. They’d travelled through four different worlds in an attempt to save this one, and had still fallen short.

  Talbot’s tears fell silently, striking the orange dust of the Australian desert.

  “There is one thing we could try,” said Wes softly.

  Talbot half turned. “What?”

  “Well, I screwed the pooch when I tried it the first time, but we could try to do it again.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Talbot, turning fully and staring at the commando.

  Wes looked uncomfortable. “I wasn’t completely honest before, when I said it was an accident that I travelled through time. That was a lie I told your government in order to keep them off my back about certain things. The entire thing was planned. I went AWOL in the future, stealing that thing in the process,” he indicated the ship. “I tricked Bessie into traveling back in time, but I stuffed up with my calculations and ended up here instead of where I really wanted to go.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “We could try to use the ship to travel back in time. If we could do that, we might be able to shut down the rift.”

  Talbot felt hope rise in his chest once more. “Let’s do it. What do we have to lose?”

  “Well, if we stuff it up it could mean the end of civilization as we know it, but I figure that’ll happen if we don’t try, so what the hell.”

  “Fuck yeah,” grunted Talbot.

  Wes laughed. “Man, you sound like a kitten trying to imitate a lion when you talk like that, but I think I like it.”

  Talbot grinned, rising to his feet. “Let’s get a move on,” he said. “Time’s wasting.”