THE INFINITY ENGINES SERIES
BOOK III
Andrew Hastie
Contents
ESCHATON
Foreword
1. Coup d'état
2. Everything Changes
3. The Colonel
4. Mother
5. Mughal Empire
6. Eddington
7. Arrival
8. Talisman
9. Lenin
10. Nautilus
11. Solomon’s temple
12. Sword
13. Avatar
14. Chapter House
15. Reaving
16. Parabolic Chamber
17. Bedlam
18. Fermi
19. Derado
20. Difference Engine
21. Leverage
22. Bentley
23. Witch Trials
24. Rescue
25. Futures
26. Founder
27. E.R.D
28. Draconian HQ
29. Xeno
30. Fermi
31. Tibet
32. The Letter
33. Justice
34. Execution
35. Colonel
36. Escape
37. Wyrrm
38. Titanic
39. Timeship
40. Brother Valient
41. Maelstrom
42. Shimmering Sea
43. Bergson
44. Citadel
45. Reverse Exorcism
46. Augurs
47. Nihil
48. Survivors
49. Virus
50. Dissonance
51. Decompression
52. Reunion
53. Ravana
54. Dark Energy
55. Capture
56. Armageddon Gallery
57. Cerebrium
58. Briefing
59. Chief MacKenzie
60. Dressing
61. Headbolt
62. Heisenberg
63. Ahnenerbe
64. El Presidente
65. Time machine
66. Snowball
67. Cave art
68. Ice age
69. Shaman
70. The Grand Seer
71. Debriefing
72. Curing the colonel
73. Lady Anne
74. Choices
75. Copper Scroll
76. Dalton-Jinn
77. Fifth door
78. Ninth Legion
79. War rooms
80. Dangerous Myths
81. Interventions
82. Viking
83. Fundamental truths
84. Conflagrato
85. Inferno
86. Under Fire
87. East India Company
88. Stories of Kings
89. Anunnaki
90. The Bridge
91. Nemesis
92. Breached
93. Time Falls
94. Confined Spaces
95. Founder wakes up
96. Plan
97. Dark Water
98. Observatory
99. Father
100. Aetherium
101. Home-world
102. Battle
103. Leadership
104. X9009
105. XII
106. Lenin
107. The Wave
108. Father
109. Oglethorpe
110. Never Enough
111. Unabridged
112. Solomon's tomb
113. War
114. The Witness
115. Preparations
116. King's Gambit
117. Defeated
118. Decisions
119. Beginnings
Chimæra
1. Archangel
2. Memories
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © Here be Dragons Limited 2018
The right of Andrew Hastie to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
5.4
September 2018
To everyone that believed I could.
Thank you
Foreword
For all those that may need a quick reminder…
Josh and Caitlin were arrested while trying to change the course of history. They had planned to steal the skull of Daedalus and stop Dalton Eckhart from opening a breach into the maelstrom.
This event signified the third Eschaton Crisis. A theoretical set of events that would lead to the end of times. As a result, the Order was put under martial law by the Protectorate and Dalton was made head of the Eschaton Division by his mother, Ravana.
Before the founder was placed under house arrest, he told Josh to go in search of his father, and with Caitlin he follows the trail into the future, leaving her parents with an injured Daedalus and an Order in chaos.
1
Coup d'état
Lord Dee stood silently in the centre of the Star Chamber while the other members of the council waved their ballot papers and called for calm. He was having trouble standing but refused the offer of a chair.
Dalton Eckhart smiled, as did his witch of a mother, Ravana, both taking great pleasure in this public humiliation as their Protectorate officers surrounded him and snapped the iron manacles around the old man’s wrists.
‘Order!’ declared one of the clerks of the court, but no one took the slightest notice. Everyone was shouting, and the entire chamber was up on its feet, protesting at what Ravana had just done. Thousands of members were trying to make themselves heard.
This, thought the founder as he stood stoically observing the chaos around him, was precisely what the Determinists had wanted — the collapse of democracy within the Order. Ravana had spent years waiting to take control. At the point she indicted him, Grandmaster Derado and the rest of the Draconian guild had stormed out, refusing to take part in the mutiny, and left her so-called “Eschaton Martial Act” to be passed by the others.
It was evident that she’d been working on the divisions between the guilds behind his back, insinuating herself with the weaker members of the High Council, creating, for the first time in its long history, disunity within the Order. That fact, more than the irons that were clamped around his wrists, was the thing that disturbed Dee the most.
Ravana walked through the jeering crowd that was gathered around him. They moved aside, no one brave enough to challenge her directly until she was staring into his face.
‘You’re a fool,’ she said with a smirk. ‘Trapped in the past.’
He looked deep into her eyes. ‘Better that than a world with no future.’
‘Take him away,’ she ordered.
The founder bowed his head and allowed her masked officers to escort him out through the crowd of protestors; he could only hope Joshua Jones had escaped.
2
Everything Changes
[Richmond, England. Date: 11.580]
Sim was still calculating the best escape route in his head when he grabbed his almanac and slide rule from his desk and hastily stuffed them inside his robes. He knew it was a mistake to go via the central hall, but he had to see it with his own eyes. His friend Astor had already warned him they were shutting down
the difference engine, but he couldn’t believe it.
Word of the founder’s arrest had spread quickly through the Copernican news channels, and even though it was a shock, it paled next to the rumour that Professor Eddington had ordered the shutdown of the Copernican’s computing system in protest.
Breathing deeply to steady his nerves he walked towards the centre of the vast, complex machine that formed their headquarters. The corridors that wove between the clockwork mechanisms were full of analysts and statisticians running around like frightened children with no sense of direction. Some were carrying everything they owned: armfuls of journals, abacuses and strange collections of divination tools, while others wandered past with blank expressions following random people in the hope of finding someone who knew what to do, but no one did — the entire guild was in a state of panic.
When Sim reached the central computing hall, he heard a distinct change in the machine’s pitch. The usual clack and clatter of the gears were winding down, and then, for the first time in its history, the hall of Copernicus fell silent.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened — it was as if time itself had frozen. Sim reached the gantry that overlooked the main atrium and saw for himself that the hands of the enormous clock that hung at the far end of the grand hall were still.
The silence was violently broken by the sound of the Protectorate storming into the building.
From high up in the gantries, Sim watched as the black-armoured guards flooded into the hall, arresting anyone who got in their way.
‘We’ve got to go!’ begged Astor, pulling Sim away from the balcony. ‘Norman says Dalton is rounding up every Copernican he can find.’
Sim nodded to his friend and followed him back into their department.
‘Where are you going to go?’ Sim asked while Astor packed a rucksack with random things from his tiny cupboard of a desk.
Astor shrugged. ‘Jefferson says the Protectorate want to control the continuum — that’s why Eddington shut it down. I’m heading for the library — going to find the most obscure book I can and hide out in the dark ages somewhere. They won’t go back there.’
Sim wondered how many Copernicans were thinking precisely the same thing. The dark ages was a period most of them chose to avoid, being a statistical black-spot in their models and one that most actuaries excluded from their equations. It was the perfect hiding place unless of course, the entire guild had all decided to head for it.
He had his own escape plan, one that had already factored in the likelihood of others doing the same. His analytical brain had processed many different possibilities and reached the only feasible conclusion — he had to go forward, towards the frontier.
Although they always treated the past as if it were a vast and unexplored territory, it was still only accessible via known artefacts, whereas the frontier, the point where the future becomes the present, was chaos to most Copernicans and they abhorred it, even though they spent most of their careers trying to predict it.
Sim had decided he would hide amongst the linears: that unfortunate part of humanity who had to take each day as it came — not knowing what might happen next. It was something he’d always wanted to try, ‘living on the edge’, as Lyra called it, but it wasn’t until he’d met Josh, that he knew it was something he had to do.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Astor, hefting his pack onto one shoulder.
‘Not sure,’ Sim lied, ‘but before I go, I need to find Professor Eddington.’
Astor’s face paled at the name. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
Sim shook his head. ‘What?’
‘They’ve taken him. He refused to hand over the keys to the map room. He’s been hauled off by Dalton’s Eschaton Division.’
That changes everything, thought Sim. Now he would have to follow Eddington’s orders.
‘Astor, I need you to do me a favour.’
Astor looked scared. ‘What?’
Sim scribbled a series of numbers onto a scrap of paper. ‘Find every book you can on the Eschaton and meet me at these coordinates.’
3
The Colonel
[Nautilus. Maelstrom]
Rufius’ breathing was erratic and his pulse rapid; if she didn’t know any better, she would have thought he’d taken a serious dose of amphetamines. Juliana Makepiece checked the clock and added another entry in her journal. Rereading her notes of the last few hours she could see he was deteriorating. His condition had declined dramatically since they’d pulled him out of the Cambridge mission.
‘Thomas, we have to put him outside,’ she said, turning to her husband. ‘Get him out of linear time.’
‘And do what exactly?’ he replied, looking out into the swirling maelstrom through the large circular window.
‘For starters, we could find someone who knows what they’re doing. I’m not a medic.’
Thomas walked over to join her. He looked tired; neither of them had slept much in the last two days, and the stress was starting to show. ‘But he was the last man to see Cat before she disappeared.’
‘I know darling, but if he stays in here any longer he’s going to die,’ she warned.
She looked over at the photographs of the timesuit scattered across the table.
‘Whatever technology that guy was using — I don’t think it’s a linear infection. Every drug I’ve tried so far simply reverts to an inert state. This pathogen isn’t following any known pattern.’
‘So who would know?’
She crossed her arms and frowned. ‘Not Bedlam. This is way out of Crooke’s field. We could go back and ask Dangerfield before he died, but I think our best bet is Alixia and the Xeno department.’
Thomas sucked air in through his teeth. ‘Alixia De Freis? She’s going to take some convincing.’
‘But in the meantime, we need to keep him in stasis.’
‘Where do you suggest?’
She looked up into the broiling clouds of chaos. ‘How about that battleship cemetery we found near Cassiopeia? That looked like it’d been pretty stable for a century or so.’
‘You mean the Cassandra nebula?’
She shrugged. ‘That’s why you’re the navigator.’
‘The one which just so happens to be where we stored the last of our chocolate supply?’
She held up her hands in surrender. ‘Well, you’ve got to give a girl credit for trying.’
He put his arm around her. ‘I do. I just hope our daughter has at least half your brains.’
‘She certainly didn’t get my taste in boys!’
Thomas smiled. ‘I thought he was quite a decent chap.’
She punched him in the arm. ‘Don’t lie. I know what you were thinking.’
‘His eyes were a bit shifty.’
4
Mother
[Protectorate HQ. Date: 11.890]
Dalton looked up from the latest report and smiled as his mother walked into her office.
‘Mother, how goes the war?’ he asked, getting up out of her chair and coming forward to greet her
She winced at his snide remark, turning away as he kissed her cheek. Any maternal instinct had long since withered, and a thinly disguised animosity had taken its place.
‘We have a lot to discuss,’ snapped Ravana, taking off her long Protectorate cloak and hanging it carefully on the neat row of pegs. ‘Who authorised the raid on the Copernicans?’
Dalton’s smile vanished. ‘I did.’
‘Stupid boy!’ She slapped him across the face. ‘Are you trying to undermine everything I’ve worked for?’
He stood, unmoved by the attack, the red mark flaring up on his skin, staring defiantly at her. ‘No, Mother, I was trying to ensure that we controlled the continuum,’ he explained through tight lips.
Her cheeks flushed as she tried to control her rage. ‘You arrested Eddington! The one man who may actually be able to resolve the Eschaton Cascade!’
‘He openly defied us by shutting do
wn their difference engine! Surely it’s better that he’s in our custody.’
‘Is he? Do you honestly believe for one second that he will cooperate with us now?’
Dalton smirked. ‘There are ways to ensure his compliance, mother. But I don’t see why you still concern yourself with that ridiculous theory — it was just a means to an end — you don’t actually believe the sky is going to fall on our heads?’
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