by M. G. Herron
The next row down near her feet showed a series of frames—a man being taken by other men in masks; that man being painted purple and smoked with incense; the decorated sacrifice being stretched across two rocks; and finally, the dead man with his heart cut out thrown off the outcropping of rock and tumbling into the hole in the ground—into the cenote.
“Oh my Gods!” Citlali said.
“Telling me,” Eliana mumbled in English.
“I didn’t know this was here.”
“How do your people teach the sacrifice ceremony?”
She shrugged. “I never thought about it. I guess the old shamans pass their knowledge to the younger ones. We all witness the ceremony our whole lives, so if you think about it, the only new thing is who holds the knife.”
Citlali glanced left, and her face paled as she noticed something out of Eliana’s line of sight inside the stone city.
She grabbed Eliana’s arm and pulled her away, back into the forest. Eliana stumbled after her.
“What’s the matter?” she said as she began to run.
Citlali didn’t answer.
“Wait! I didn’t take any pictures!” She dug her phone out of her pocket and wrenched her arm out of Citlali’s grasp as she turned to go back.
As she turned, Eliana came face to face with a tall, dark figure that towered over her. He wore black from head to foot, and his face was covered in a reflective helmet.
Xucha himself.
Her limbs froze. She tried to move her legs backward but she couldn’t. A faint humming sound came to her ears, and Eliana realized she was paralyzed by a stasis beam emanating from the shining orb hovering over his shoulder.
Citlali screamed and attacked the god with her bare hands. He drove a fist into her chest, and Citlali flew through the air and clipped the edge of the stone arch.
Xucha closed the distance between he and Eliana. She watched Citlali out of the corner of her eye. She struggled to her feet and stumbled around a tree. Xucha watched her go, and actually seemed to sigh when she was gone—his shoulder heaved up, then fell, and an exhaling sound came from beneath his helmet.
Finally, he turned to Eliana.
“I have been waiting for you,” Xucha said in a voice that echoed and seemed slightly metallic. He spoke, remarkably, in English.
Who was this man, and how did he know how to speak her language?
“We have much to discuss,” he said. “Starting with where your people found this stone. I want to know everything.”
Eliana shifted her eyes. Her ring with the round black carbonado glinted in the light. It was mounted in some kind of purplish-black object that fit in his hand.
Xucha lifted her paralyzed body, holding her lightly in front of him. Her head lolled back as he walked under the arch, turned left, and headed toward the pyramid. At the top of the steps, the black rift in the air was there again, just like the one she had gone through to get back here.
Was he taking her back to Earth? No. What she saw through the watery black veil of the arch was nothing like Earth.
Never in her life had Eliana regretted an impulse decision so completely. She had been a fool.
Amon, she thought. Paralyzed, she was unable to form the words on her lips.
How will I ever get back home now?
They stepped through the rift into inky black darkness.
30
Non
“It’s not even a possibility,” the CERN nuclear physicist said in French-accented English. “No one is using the Large Hadron Collider to power anything of the sort. No batteries, and certainly not this…thing.”
The man turned his nose up at the stabilization arch that rose to the vaulted ceiling. He swallowed and looked back at Amon before continuing.
“Our particle accelerator is old now, though it had been updated recently. The LHC was designed for—and is still used for—particle physics experiments, not nuclear fission on a large scale, like you’re suggesting. But you know this already.” He shook his hand to emphasize this fact.
Amon smiled patiently. “Your facility underwent construction six months ago, a temporary closure—”
“Routine maintenance. The equipment is getting old. We needed to make repairs.”
Amon pursed his lips and shook his head again. “What if your particle accelerator was modified to work both ways? Were you present during all of the maintenance? Did you personally oversee the work?”
The man huffed out an angry breath and gave Amon a hate-filled look, as if he’d sucker-punched his grandmother.
Amon had forgotten his name. Dr. Emil something or other. The skinny Swiss man pushed wire-frame glasses up on his sweaty nose. He’d been visibly pale and shaken when Amon had first began to question him about his work at CERN—a sensible reaction to the violence strewn around them in the lab, and the black wormhole that hung like an existential dilemma in the air.
The physicist spoke confidently on the subject of his work. Amon wanted to believe what this intelligent man said. But he had to be certain, absolutely certain. So he pressed him again. “Do me a favor and just look into it.”
“Believe me.” Scorn-laced chuckles broke the Swiss man’s words. “I would know if anyone modified the Large Hadron Collider.”
“What if someone diverted energy from the experiments over time? The particle accelerator here doesn’t produce the energy we need for even a single translocation on demand. Like nuclear power plants of other kinds, we store energy continuously, and feed the power into the Translocator when it’s needed. A lot of energy can be siphoned off—”
The Swiss man threw up his hands. “Merde! Non. No, sir, is not possible. Trust me, if the LHC was being used as a nuclear reactor or storing energy in any way, I would know.”
“All right.” Agent Moreno held up his hands. “Thank you for your cooperation, Dr. Dirac. I just received word from to my superiors—you and your team are booked on the first flight tomorrow. We’ve got hotel rooms for you.”
“Finally,” he said. “Good. Thank you, agent.”
Moreno put his arm around Amon’s shoulders and gently pried him away from the CERN physicist. Two other FBI agents led the scientists out of the Translocator lab and down the long hallway toward the exit. Taxis would take them away, and with any luck Dr. Emil Dirac would double-check his particle accelerator and assure them that Lucas had not commandeered it for nefarious translocation experiments.
Agent Moreno put his hand over his face and rubbed his temples. The man was holding it together, but barely. He and Amon had managed to fend off the local cops and keep them on ground level, far from the carnage in the lab. The FBI showed up an hour later and began tagging and bagging bodies.
“We knew it was a long shot,” Agent Moreno said.
“I can’t understand what else could be powering the Translocator that Lucas has been using if it’s not the Large Hadron Collider. And where the hell is it? Where did you say they took you?”
“When we realized they weren’t Interpol agents, one of them sucker punched me. They tied us up, blindfolded us, and shoved us in a helicopter. It was a short flight, but I don’t know which direction.”
Amon nodded.
“Somewhere in the Alps, then?”
“That’s my guess.”
“The plans he stole from Fisk Industries require a particle accelerator as a power source, and he hasn’t had time to build one of his own—it took us five years to build this, and that was only because we had funding from the LTA.”
“Hawkwood has money,” Agent Moreno said. “They were fined 3 million for impersonating FBI agents last year and still reported a 20% profit in the same quarter. And their firm is still growing internationally, where they didn’t get the bad press they got here.”
“So either Lucas built a particle accelerator in secret, or…” He thought about the clever plastic containment unit Lucas had brought with him to steal the carbonado, and his gut twisted with sharp stabs of anxiety.
&nb
sp; “Or what?” Agent Moreno asked.
“I don’t know what,” Amon snapped. “I have no idea how he’s doing it.”
A spark shot up into air, and several scientists clustered on the ramp near the base of the Translocator yelped and stepped back.
“I think you have more important things to worry about right now,” Moreno said.
Amon nodded and hurried over to the Translocator. His scientists and engineers were gathered around the black wormhole suspended in the air near the sphere of rings. The whole team had been called in for this “emergency”—everyone had arrived within the hour, except Jeanine who was still missing.
“Hank,” Amon said. The junior physicist turned toward him. “Where is Jeanine? Call her, would you? Her thesis at Stanford was on black holes. I want to get her opinion.”
Amon was aware of Agent Moreno joining the group. The FBI agent stood in his blind spot, and all the scientists fidgeted and averted their eyes, nervous in his presence. Amon’s neck itched but he forced himself not to look at Agent Moreno. He hadn’t told the team about the mole yet, and didn’t want to give away that particular intention.
Jake nodded and went toward the lounge to make the phone call.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Audrey said.
“What was that spark?”
“Audrey poked it with a magnet,” Christine said. She was another engineer, middle-aged and brunette with a heart-shaped face. “Bad reaction.”
Audrey sheepishly held up a magnet duct-taped onto the end of a rubber-coated rod.
“Are you serious?” Amon said.
“No one else would touch it.”
“For a good reason! No one touches it, hear me? No one.”
He slowly circled the rift. The light bent and disappeared around a point the size of a softball. Or maybe it was more like a knot of air, bent around itself. The sphere of rings, seen through it, appeared as a mirror image, as if reflecting off water. But there was no surface of water there, just a dark spot in the air.
He didn’t dare touch it.
“Magnets?” Amon asked again, bewildered.
“Everything else we tried was pulled into it. Wood, iron filings, Jake’s ballpoint pen. But the magnets…”
“Is this how you test your meteorites?”
Audrey shrugged. “Subtlety is not my virtue. Better we know how it reacts to things before it becomes an emergency, right? Maybe if we find something that bends it we can at least try to make something to contain it. Or maybe you can just translocate that spot of air somewhere else.”
Amon grunted. Jake returned a moment later.
“No answer from Jeanine,” he said. “She must be sound asleep still.”
“Wasn’t her mother sick yesterday?” someone else asked.
“That’s a morbid thought.”
“Just saying. You never know. Give her the benefit of the doubt.”
This time Amon met Moreno’s eyes, briefly. Audrey frowned.
Wes McManis stomped down the hall, his cowboy boots striking the hard floor and echoing in the Translocator lab.
“Amon,” Wes said. “Amon!”
Amon heaved a deep sigh.
“You should all hear this, I guess.”
“What is it?” Amon asked.
“Listen for yourself.” Wes held out his phone and tapped the screen. Reagan Gruber’s nasally voice came through the speakers.
“What did I tell you? Just a matter of time. The police were at Fisk Industries for several hours last night, called in response to a suspected armed robbery. No suspects were found on site when they arrived. And what’s there to steal? That’s what I want to know. You can’t just walk away with a Translocator. And that happened just after the lunar base reported—and I’m reading from the Lunar Terraform Alliance’s own press release, published at 7am this morning—an ‘unexpected dome depressurization event’ shut down the whole facility.”
The co-host chimed in like a chorus. “And we thought these kind of incidents were behind us.”
“That’s not all. According to a source of my own, the police only left Fisk Industries after the FBI showed up and claimed jurisdiction. You ask me, this is exactly what’s wrong with the situation—it’s only a matter of time before Amon Fisk and the LTA make a fatal error. Aren’t there enough problems on Earth for these scientists to solve? Why do they have to go inventing new, astronomically expensive problems to solve on the moon? And why do they have to use our tax dollars to do it? Wouldn’t it be better if the US pulled out of this arrangement and put your money to work protecting your real interests at home? What about the borders, through which immigrants are now flowing freely? What about the jobs those immigrants are taking from hard-working Americans? What about our country’s rampant illegal voting problem? What about the global and increasing threat of radical Islamic terrorism?”
“Uh,” Amon said. “Did he just conflate our work with radical Islamic terrorism?”
“What a nutjob,” Audrey said.
“Hang on a second,” Reagan Gruber said. “I’m getting reports of breaking news from my producer. What?” Reagan seemed momentarily distracted. “Really? Yeah? Wow. Okay people, listen up. One of our long-term anonymous sources in military intelligence, someone I trust, is reporting that a cache of weapons—we don’t know what kind, exactly—was stolen from an Army base outside of San Antonio, TX.”
Agent Moreno swore and pulled out his cell phone.
“I repeat, this is breaking news. A military supply depot near San Antonio, TX, was robbed today. That’s all we know right now, folks. We’re going to go to a commercial break while we try to sort out the details. We’ll be back in just a moment.”
Amon swore. The scientists and engineers arrayed around him in a semi-circle watched him with frightened looks in their eyes. Jake swallowed and rubbed his neck. Audrey twisted a lock of hair in her fingers.
Amon stepped up to the wormhole. The hair on his neck stood on end. He held one hand out and passed it carefully above the rift by a foot. Then he did the same thing on either side, and below it, passing his hands around it on all sides but not touching it. He nodded once and turned back to his team.
“Forget trying to figure out what this thing does. It’s too dangerous to leave in the open. As long as it’s active, we can’t use the Translocator, but neither can Lucas send anyone else in here with his. Build a secure barrier around the wormhole—a very thick, very secure barrier. If anyone else—or anything— comes through it, I want them trapped in an indestructible prison that we control. If it were Superman we were after, this would be his kryptonite cage. Understood?”
The scientists and engineers were nodding enthusiastically now. That was within their grasp. Amon was skeptical about how well it would work, but at least they would have something to do with their hands. In the meantime, he could work with Agent Moreno to chase down their other leads.
“All right,” Amon said. “Let’s get to it!”
31
What Kind of Traitor
Rakulo launched to his feet from the crouching position he had been waiting in. The whistle came again, but weakly, breathless and unfinished. Was it Yeli, back early from their turn at perimeter lookout? He peered out through the bushy branches they had dragged over to help further disguise the cave’s opening from the woods beyond.
The camouflage might work for Maatiaak’s men and the others who hadn’t spent much time at the cave, but Rakulo’s warriors all knew exactly where to find it.
A figure limped through the forest in the distance, caught a foot on the uneven ground, and stumbled.
Rakulo was already moving. He was at Citlali’s side in an instant, like a swift wind. He caught her as she fell, put his shoulder under her arm, and helped her toward the cave. Her chest heaved and he noticed a large purplish bruise on her exposed ribs beneath her tunic. She took low, shallow breaths.
“I tried—” she said.
“Shh,” he said. “Wait until
we’re inside.”
Quen and Thevanah helped Rakulo lay her down. Gehro coached her to breathe through her stomach, and her breathing calmed somewhat after she got the hang of it. Every time her chest expanded she hissed air out through her teeth in pain.
“She’s got two broken ribs,” Gehro explained, prodding her side gently with his fingers.
Reuben was there, hovering behind the group, rubbing his hands together, a worried expression deepening the crevices in his wrinkled forehead. White strands of hair on his head stood out wildly. He babbled something that Rakulo couldn’t understand until he heard Eliana’s name.
“Easy,” Rakulo said. “Let me speak to Citlali first. Then, I’ll do what I can to help Eliana. Yes, yes, I will help her. I promise. Please, old man. Give us a minute.”
He hoped he sounded more reassuring than he felt. In truth, a nervous tightness had settled in around Rakulo’s throat.
Reuben sighed heavily and sank down with his back against the wall. He began fidgeting with the device at his wrist again.
Rakulo turned back to Citlali. Her face was drawn and pale.
“I’ve never seen him in the daylight,” she said. “Xucha took her, Rakulo. She’s as good as dead.”
“Did you see him kill her?” he asked.
Citlali shook her head. “He froze her. Knocked me away. Then carried her off. No one the dark god takes has ever come back. You know this.”
“We’ve had many firsts lately, haven’t we? Do not despair. If Xucha had wanted her dead, he would have killed her on the spot.”
“Rakulo, no—”
“Yes,” he said. “I am certain of it. Still, I’m glad you’re safe, and that you came back to bring us this news.”
Rakulo stood. Citlali let her head fall back. She groaned and clutched her side where the broken ribs gouged at torn muscles.
Rakulo gestured Quen over. “It’s time we put an end to this infighting,” he said. “I want you to search out Maatiaak. When you find him, tell him I want to parlay at—”
Quen’s head snapped toward the woods. Rakulo strained his good and his bad ear. Something rustled in the woods outside the cave. Rakulo crept up to look out. Men bearing spears and staves and bows stepped out from behind tree trunks and into the daylight.
