I didn’t dare touch it.
I heard Acantha calling my name and put the phone to my ear. “What the fuck?” I said.
“That,” she told me, “is an exact replica of the De Vermis Mysteriis. It’s safe to handle. We need you to substitute this for the one that Mr. Bolt and Violin are carrying with them. They will be going to the University of Pennsylvania because Violin will want to obtain the Manifesto, as well. She has only recently received intelligence that it is there. This is very important, Mr. Hunter, because Violin is taking an appalling risk to secure the Manifesto while trying to evade her pursuers. The fact that she is doing so is significant. She is risking much, because it’s likely she will be a key player in events unfolding on the West Coast.”
“And you know this how? Ouija board?”
She gave me a small, hard laugh. “Glib as it will sound, Mr. Hunter, it’s fair to say that we at Limbus ‘have our sources’.”
“Cute.”
“Not really,” she said with a sigh. “Knowledge of this kind does not make for a quiet or happy life.”
I didn’t know what to say to that so instead asked, “What makes you think Violin will bring the Worm book with her? Wouldn’t she squirrel it away somewhere to keep it safe while she makes a run at the University?”
“Violin will never let that book out of her sight.”
“And you want me to steal it from her and this Harry Bolt kid?”
“Yes,” said Acantha, “and it is imperative that they do not know you’ve swapped them out.”
“And this Violin chick is one of the most dangerous women on Earth?”
“One of the most dangerous people, male or female, yes.”
“And there are two other teams converging at the same place and probably the same time?”
“Yes.”
“One is an ancient order of killer monks?
“Yes.”
“And the other is a group of government killers with high-tech weapons?”
“Yes.”
“And if I fuck this all up the world ends?”
“Yes.”
I wanted so badly to bang my head on the hard top of my desk. Seemed like the best possible response to all this.
Acantha said, “Open the envelope.”
I did. Inside were three items.
A ring of keys with an attached keycard for the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
The second was a set of those little white cardboard things they give you at perfume stores so you can take scent samples home. I sniffed them. Nothing was Ralph Lauren or Chanel. Each of these carried a human scent. Acantha and her bosses at Limbus knew me a little too well.
The third thing in the envelope was actually four things. Each identical. Crisp, clean bills wrapped in mustard colored paper bands. One hundred bills in each bundle. It wasn’t the agreed twenty thousand dollars.
These were four bundles of one hundred dollars bills. New, but nonsequential.
Forty thousand dollars.
I wasn’t sure I was breathing.
“Although we believe you would take this case entirely on its own merits,” Acantha said quietly, “we feel that tangible incentives are always useful.”
-12-
Hiro Tsukino
Tristan da Cunha
1750 Miles from South Africa
South Atlantic Ocean
Three Years Ago
Hiro dangled on a rope seventy meters down into a dark hole.
He still had plenty of line, but his light did not reach all the way to the bottom. The climbing harness he wore was one he’d brought with him from Tokyo. Secure, time-tested and familiar. Priest had recommended bringing one thousand meters of rope, which was a lot for what Hiro had understood was a climb into a building that was thirty-eight feet high and which had only one level of basement.
Like most of his assumptions whenever it came to an excursion with Priest, Hiro had been wrong in almost every way. Or, perhaps it was that there was no way to adequately predict the kinds of things they encountered.
The laboratory here on Tristan da Cunha was a small two-story affair built onto a rocky shelf that geologists had assured the builders was the most stable point on the island. Still close enough to the slumbering volcano to use geothermal energy to power the labs and equipment. Priest told them that the geologists had deemed the volcano sufficiently dormant to risk building a lab.
Hiro hoped those geologists had been here when the mountain blew. It would be nice to know they all got roasted.
The entire landscape was shattered. Roads were twisted out of shape, the government building and the fishing factory had been smashed to sticks, a cell-phone tower was bent in half and all of its equipment crushed, vehicles had been hurled onto improbable perches on the ruined slopes. On the flat plain between mountain and water was a garbage heap that had been the small cluster of red-roofed buildings that comprised the town. Now that tiny town with the grand name of the Tristan Settlement of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas was a smoking ruin half erased by lava. Calshot Harbor, which had been spared during the ’61 eruption, had been covered by lava twelve feet thick, and the molten rock had oozed out into the water to create steaming islands. Charred stumps of boats littered the shore among thousands of dead rockhopper penguins and Atlantic petrels. A few bloated dolphin corpses bobbed in the foam.
Priest had skirted the destroyed town, not wanting to be caught up in any refugee confusions with the clock ticking like this, but he needn’t have worried. If anyone had survived the disaster, they were not in sight.
According to the data Priest had provided there were supposed to be three hundred people on this island, not counting the twenty-six at the laboratory.
So, where were they?
Why had no one come to meet them when they’d landed on the beach? Survivors of a disaster usually fell upon potential rescuers and wept. Hiro had seen it firsthand. At very least someone would be left, someone would be signaling for help.
But there was no one.
It was the same at the lab, which was on the windward side on that supposedly unshakable shelf. Huge fissures cleaved the ground and one had cracked the laboratory open like a melon, collapsing the structure into two mounds of jagged debris. This crack ran deep and split the earth itself to a surprising depth.
It was hot as hell in that chasm, but even so it wasn’t as hot as Hiro had expected.
This island had damn near torn itself to pieces, and yet the thermometer clipped to his rig said that it was only one hundred and eleven Fahrenheit.
Why?
How?
Where had the heat and lava gone?
He released some pressure on the figure-eight descender to drop a little faster. The chasm was deeply fractured and it revealed geological marvels that continued to astound and confuse him. The rock here should have been predominantly basalt from ancient lava flows separated by thin pyroclastic layers, and though he saw ample evidence of that, he also saw huge chunks of shattered crystal, like the massive selenite spears he’d climbed among in the Giant Crystal Cave in Naica, Mexico. Hiro was no scientist but he’d learned enough about geology to recognize when things were wrong. Crystals of this kind didn’t form in active volcanoes. As far as he knew this kind of gypsum was more often found in meteor impact craters, like the ones on Devon Island in Canada. This island simply wasn’t built to create crystal spears that had to have been three hundred feet long before the earthquake cracked them apart like rock candy.
Even this was not the greatest mystery Hiro contemplated as he went down, down, down.
Built into these walls, cut into the rock, was a manmade tube of concrete and steel. The laboratory had been a front for something bigger and stranger. This had to have taken months of work and millions of English pounds. There were power cables as thick as telephone poles running down into the darkness and at first Hiro thought that they were there to handle the load of geothermic heat converted to electricity, but again he noted the lack o
f intense heat. There was even a downdraft that pulled cooler air from above into the bottomless black, and that made no sense at all. Heat rises. So what, then, was happening here?
Machinery of exotic design had been built into slots in the walls, but now most of it was blackened, the guts torn open to spill broken wires.
“What are you seeing?”
The voice in his earbud was so sharp and clear that Hiro jerked as if Priest was somehow right behind him. He stopped his rate of descent.
“It’s dark below,” he said.
“Can you see the bottom?” asked Priest.
“No. Wait, let me drop some glow-sticks.” Hiro removed two from a pouch on his thigh, snapped and shook them and watched as the green bars fell down into the chasm.
They fell for a long time.
Far too long.
He never saw them land. The green lights fell and fell, and then they were gone. Just like that.
“What the fuck?” he gasped and it came out almost as a whimper.
“What is it?”
“They’re…gone. I mean, they’re just gone.”
There was a pause at the other end, then Priest said, “Shit.”
“Shit? What do you mean ‘shit’? What the fuck’s happening?”
Priest said, “I think it’s still open.”
“What’s still open? Christ, don’t leave me hanging,” he yelled, aware that it was a joke but not a funny one.
Another pause, longer this time. “Can you see the stairway?”
Hiro had to bite back an obscenity. Priest was never straight with him. Even in moments like this. But Hiro took a breath to calm himself—an action that had far less success than he would have liked—and turned slowly on his rope, aiming his powerful flashlight downward. Although the building above him had split apart and this shaft had cracked wider, the destruction was less severe the deeper he went. It was like a plant—the flowering destruction spread wide at the top but left the stem more or less intact. Another forty feet below him was a section that was hardly damaged at all, and yes, there was a steel platform bolted to the curved wall, and a set of metal stars that zigzagged down into blackness.
“I see it,” he said.
“Can you get to it?” asked Priest.
Hiro wanted to tell him no. As much as he loved exploring ruins, there were too many things about this trip that did not make sense. There were too many variables and he was in no way sure that he could deal with new problems. Not with an active volcano and a completely unknown destination.
But he found himself answering that he could. “It’s right below me.”
“Does it look solid?”
Hiro lowered himself to a point just above the platform so he could study the wall. There were a few cracks down here, but none of them radiated out from the plates bolted to the walls. He swung carefully over and reached out with one hand to grasp the rail. With his other hand firm on the descender, he shook the rail. It did not budge. No dust fell from the boltholes.
“I think it’s secure.”
“That’s great,” said Priest, sounding hugely relieved. “Get on to the platform. If the stairs are still safe, then go down one level. There’s a door there with a keypad. I’ll dictate the sequence.”
“How do you—?” began Hiro, then stopped himself. He didn’t need to know how Priest had obtained this information. He was clearly being bankrolled by someone with very deep pockets and the right connections. Money and power were the only things needed to get virtually anything. And clearly Priest had deep knowledge about what was going on here on this island. On it, and beneath it.
He hooked onto the rail and climbed over to stand on the platform. It was as solid as it looked. That was something. He kept his rope firmly attached to his rappelling rig, however. Trust was hard to come by in his line, and doubly so since Poliske.
Hiro crept down the steps, trying not to make a sound and failing. The tunnel seemed to magnify every noise. He reached the first landing without incident, though he didn’t like the feel of the air. There was a steady stream of cool outside air blowing downward into the darkness, and no heat at all rising. To his fertile imagination it was like the slow inhalation of a dragon before he exhales his burning fire.
The landing had a recessed walkway of solid bedrock at the end of which was a steel security door. Hiro unclipped his line and attached it to the rail. If things went badly he could run and grab that rope and even reattach it to his rig in mid-jump. That was something he’d done before. He was fast and agile and experienced.
He was also sweating heavily despite the cool downrush of air.
Fear keeps you sharp, he told himself. So stay fucking sharp.
“I’m down,” he said into the mic. He bent and examined the keypad. It was surprisingly high-tech for a lab way the hell out here. “I’m at the door and there are lights on it. The keypad still has power.”
“Good,” said Priest. Excitement made his voice sound clipped and high-pitched. “Enter this code in sequence with a one second pause between each number. Got it? Good. Here it is…23, 119, 7, 16, 11.”
Hiro carefully tapped out on the keypad. When he pressed the last number there was a click and a hydraulic hiss, and then the door slid sideways into the wall. A ball of heat instantly rolled out at him and Hiro staggered back, coughing at the awful stink that was carried with it.
“Jesus Christ!”
“What is it?” demanded Priest.
Hiro coughed and gagged, his stomach churning from the smell. It was truly vile, like rotting fish and wet mold and feces all swirling together and then amplified by the furnace heat. It was even worse than the corpse-choked mud flats that had once been fishing villages near Fukushima in the days after the tsunami. Worse than that. Worse than anything Hiro had ever experienced and he spun around and vomited onto the floor.
“Hiro,” growled Priest, “what’s happening? Are you in? Are you in?”
After the first blast of fetid air the stench was less. Not gone by any stretch, but less. Hiro pulled off the World War II rising sun-patterned dew-rag he wore and wound it around his nose and mouth. He tottered forward, his eyes watering and his head aching from the assault on his senses
“I—I’m in,” he gasped. “It’s okay. I’m in.”
But it wasn’t okay.
Within a few steps Hiro knew that nothing in his world was likely to be ‘okay’ ever again.
Inside the doorway was a cavern that had been structurally reinforced with titanic struts of steel—massive pillars that were as big around as oak trees. Forty of them at least, upholding the roof and angled slantwise to reinforce the walls. Hiro goggled. He’d never seen structural engineering on this scale anywhere and the cost of building it must have been astronomical.
There were dozens of computer workstations enclosed in cubes of foot-thick clear plastic with steel reinforcing. Each workstation had a self-contained air supply and dedicated power lines. These cubes were empty and arranged in a wide semicircle and angled to face something that squatted on a trestle made from more of the heavy steel. It was round, segmented, and it angled downward into the heart of the mountain. Hiro’s mouth went dry because he recognized—or thought he recognized—what this was. This technology had been all over the news the last few years.
It was an Orpheus Gate. A massive one, much bigger than the one in Poliske. Different in design, too. It reminded Hiro of pictures he’d seen of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, beneath the France-Switzerland border. This machine had to weigh a million tons. Maybe twice that much, and it filled a cavern that was incredibly vast.
What are they doing here? He thought. What’s this thing for?
As if reading his thoughts, Priest’s voice whispered in his ear. “You see it, don’t you?”
“Y-yes.” Hiro said nothing. His throat felt like it was choked with dust. He stood there, his heart hammering as sweat poured down the sides of his face.
“What you are seeing is the
world’s most advanced accelerator technology married to an Orpheus Gate,” continued Priest.
“Why…why…?”
It was all of the question Hiro could manage.
“Because, my friend,” murmured Priest, “we will never save the human race by repairing our biosphere or colonizing the Moon or Mars.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There are other worlds, Hiro. Countless worlds. And they are so close you can touch them.” Priest’s voice was filled with wonder, with awe. “The Orpheus Gate is a doorway to an infinite number of other worlds. Other Earths, yes? Worlds that are rich with all of the natural resources we could ever use in ten billion lifetimes. And they are all like ripe fruit for the plucking.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No,” said Priest, “it’s merely difficult. There is a mathematical code hidden in the pages of the Unlearnable Truths. Find it, solve it, and you can align the Orpheus Gate so that it opens a doorway. Do it right, and the doorway is stable. Do it wrong, or try to align it without the full code, and you…well, you tend to blow things up.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“And, if you are very, very unlucky you also crack the wrong door open and things come out. You saw one of those things—or part of one—in Poliske. That was nothing. The smallest fragment. It is like seeing a thing and thinking that it is the worst imaginable horror and then learning that it is no more significant than a flea. There are so many things greater and more terrible than that,” said Priest, his voice now a soft and eerie whisper.
Hiro closed his eyes. “Why did you bring us here, you maniac?”
“Shhh,” soothed Priest, “this door is ajar but nothing has come through yet.”
“How do you know?” demanded Hiro. “How can you possibly know if anything came through?”
“Because,” said Priest, “you’re still alive.”
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 28
