Chapter 3
Aurelius descended the boarding ramp in a daze. He still couldn't believe what he'd seen. A man had disappeared before his eyes! Snow and broken branches crunched underfoot as Aurelius cautiously crept toward the remaining combatant. The old man still lay face-down in the dirt, beating the ground with his fists and cursing nonsensically. He walked straight up to the old man without being noticed, and then cautiously kicked him in the ribs.
“Get up—slowly—or I'll shoot!”
The old man froze. “Be careful whom you threaten, elder.”
Aurelius began laughing. “Elder? Who are you calling old, Wrinkles? You must be four times my age.”
Suddenly the man turned and looked up at him with blazing blue eyes. His flowing white beard and hair was tangled with dirt and snow. “That's where you're wrong. You are far older than I.”
Aurelius frowned. “You're brainsick, old man. Get up.”
“As you wish.” With another whisper of that strange language, the man seemed to float to his feet, his robes rippling in the wind. Aurelius blinked. I must have hit my head pretty hard. . . . “We have to follow him, Aurelius.”
Aurelius gaped and quickly thrust his pistol up under the old man's chin, plastering his dirty beard to his wrinkly neck. “How do you know my name?”
“Your thoughts are not well guarded. It was a simple matter to see it in your mind.”
“You expect me to believe that you can read my mind without a probe?”
“I can read anyone’s mind I choose.”
“Prove it.”
“You are confused. The last thing you remember was coming through the portal. Your memories make little sense to me, but you were being chased through a rocky canyon. It was night; the stars were out. . . . Rocks were raining from the sky . . . and orange lightning was shattering the canyon walls.”
Aurelius's brow furrowed. “It wasn't night. I was in space. And those were asteroids, not rocks. Your synapses must be misfiring, old man.”
“Space?”
Aurelius gestured impatiently to the sky.
The old man's blue eyes widened appreciably. “You can fly in the ether?”
“Ahh . . .” Aurelius's head began throbbing again. Ether?
“It seems we have different words for the same things. Please remove your weapon from my throat before I disarm you.”
“You try anything and I'll burn you a new pastry hole.”
“Congela teru harns,” the old man whispered.
“What?” Aurelius demanded. The old man turned and began walking toward the Halcyon Courier. “Stop!”
But he kept walking. Aurelius tracked his target, took aim, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. His finger didn’t even move. He tried again with the same result. Suddenly panicking, Aurelius tried to move his other fingers and found to his astonishment that they wouldn’t even twitch. He stared with horror at his hands until the old man’s gravelly voice interrupted him.
“You’ll regain the use of your hands as soon as you promise not to harm me.”
“You did this to me?” Aurelius demanded.
The old man stopped to regard him with a crinkly smile. “Yes. I could have frozen your entire body, but that would take much longer to recover from, and I need you to operate your flight machine. If we do not catch up to Malgore soon, it will be too late.”
Aurelius went back to staring at his hands. “How?”
The old man sighed. “Stop wasting my time. I will explain to you on the way. We must hurry!”
Aurelius stumbled forward, putting one leaden foot in front of the other until they had both ascended the boarding ramp to his ship. He tried to place his palm against the door controls but found he couldn’t and turned to gaze pointedly at his wizened companion.
“Of course.” The old man waved his hand and whispered something.
Suddenly Aurelius’s hands regained their strength and his fist tightened around the butt of his pistol. Bringing his faceplate close to the old man’s nose, he glared into a pair of icy blue eyes set in flaccid folds of gray skin and spoke through gritted teeth, “If you ever do something like that to me again, I’ll kill you.”
“I’m sure you'll try. Open up,” the man said, slapping the door with his palm.
Aurelius continued glaring for a sullen moment; then he nodded viciously, almost head-butting the old man in the process, and he pressed his palm against the door scanner. The outer doors slid open with a swish. “Start explaining,” Aurelius demanded.
“Very well. You have been inadvertently brought to the future.”
Aurelius stopped just inside the airlock, doing a quick double take. “What?”
“I don’t have the patience to explain this more than once, so just listen, and keep moving.” Aurelius started for the inner airlock doors. The outer doors automatically slid shut behind them. “You are what we in Mrythdom call an elder, a lost race of humans which all but died out about five thousand years ago.”
“Time travel is impossible,” Aurelius stated as he stalked through the corridors on his way to the cockpit. Why am I listening to this old sherp? He’s completely lost his mind.
“Nothing is impossible with magic. The Elves created the relic sometime in the far future, but when they created it, it was created outside of time, so it exists in all times simultaneously. That is how it enables one to transcend time. Somewhere, hidden in your time lies a matching relic, yet these relics are all one and the same. If one were to be somehow destroyed, they would all be destroyed everywhere, and it would be as though they had never existed. On the other hand, if one is activated, they are all activated.”
“That’s a nice story. Are you with Freedom? Is this some kind of test? I have your shipment.”
“Freedom? Freedom from what? Never mind; stop interrupting me. Do you want me to explain or not?”
Aurelius snorted and rounded on him from the entrance to the cockpit. “Sure, why not?” He leaned against the doorjamb, affecting a bored look.
“You asked how I was able to freeze your hands. That was magic. I was also using magic to read your mind. And Malgore used magic to take advantage of the distraction you provided to transport himself and the relic somewhere far from here.
“Had I been paying attention I would have sensed his intentions and been able to stop him, therefore, I blame you, elder, for losing the relic, and it is your responsibility to set things right.”
“Yeah . . .” Aurelius aimed his gun at the old man’s chest. “Even if I believed your impossibly stupid story, I wouldn’t owe you or anyone else anything. The only person I owe is myself, and he’s getting pretty angry that you’re wasting his valuable time. Tell you what, why don’t you get out of my ship, and I’ll let you live.”
“If you ever want to get back to your time again, I suggest you accept my help.”
“I don’t need your help, Wrinkles.”
The old man’s face twisted into a grim smile. “My name is Gabrian, not Wrinkles, and unfortunately for both of us, I need your help.” Gabrian pointed imperiously to the pilot’s chair behind him. “SIT.”
Aurelius’s head swam, and he felt a hazy weight settle inside his head, as though his brain has suddenly turned to stone. He swayed unsteadily on his feet before turning to sit in the pilot’s chair. His brow furrowed as he realized that he hadn’t made any conscious thought to move. He was peripherally aware of Gabrian taking a seat in the copilot’s chair beside him.
“Now, how do I fly this machine?”
“You’re in the wrong chair.”
“MOVE.”
Aurelius stood up, feeling light-headed again. “Have you ever flown a spaceship?”
“No.”
“Then you won’t be able to.”
“I will be the judge of what I can and cannot do,” Gabrian said, pushing past Aurelius to sit in the pilot’s chair. He spent a moment frowning at the controls; then he whispered some strange words and went on frown
ing.
“You can’t do it, can you?” Aurelius asked.
Gabrian hesitated briefly before flicking a switch on the dash.
The interior lights snapped on.
“Drackla!” The old man stood and pushed Aurelius back into the chair. “You fly; I’ll guide you.”
“No.” But Aurelius’s hands flew over the controls of their own accord, going through his preflight checklist.
Gabrian sat fuming beside him. “Flying a dragon is far harder, I can assure you. It won’t take me long to learn how you make this piece of metal flap its wings.”
Aurelius grinned in spite of the heavy, hazy weight pressing hard against the inside of his head. “Flap its wings? That’ll be the day . . . wait,” Aurelius turned slowly to the old man. He shook his head as though unable to believe what he’d just heard. “Did you say dragon or dargon?”
Gabrian frowned. “Dragon. What’s a dargon?”
“It’s a troop transport. Never mind that! You really are brainsick, Wrinkles. Dragon’s don’t exist.”
“Really?”
A deep and throaty roar began thrumming through the deck as Aurelius started the ship’s reactor. He considered the Halcyon’s position for a moment before applying 5% braking thrust to reverse out of the ditch his ship had plowed with its nose. The Halcyon Courier shuddered and the blanket of white that was draped across the canopy began shivering, sticks and stones rattling across the transparalloy surface. With a loud scraping noise, his ship broke free and the tail end thudded to the ground, sending a jolt up Aurelius’s spine and instantly clearing the canopy of snow and debris. Aurelius grimaced. Flying without inertial compensators was going to be very difficult. He would have to keep that in mind lest he crush himself with excessive g-forces.
“If dragon’s don’t exist, then what pray tell is that, elder?”
Aurelius’s gaze followed the old man’s crooked finger out the forward viewport to where a craggy black knoll poked out of the dirty snow. His eyes narrowed as he pressed down on the bottom rudder with his foot, and his ship shot straight up, rising quickly above the trees. The knoll looked strange enough that for a moment Aurelius was frozen with indecision. Could it be a dragon? It wasn’t moving. Sleeping? He shook his head abruptly. Dragons don’t exist. Aurelius smiled wryly. “Nice try, Wrinkles. That’s just a mound of rock.”
Gabrian shrugged. “Deceive yourself if you must, elder.”
Aurelius snorted and applied more bottom rudder. He rose ever higher above the trees, revealing an endless vista of barren gray branches clawing through a carpet of mist toward a blank white slate of sky.
“Where are we going?” Aurelius asked.
“Due south.”
Aurelius swung his ship in a half circle, and a glimmering gray-white lake swam into view. He carefully applied 10% forward thrust, and almost lost his grip on the thruster controls as his ship shot forward, plastering both him and Gabrian to their chairs. Aurelius grinned with exhilaration.
He heard the old man gasping beside him, and Aurelius cast him a quick, worried look. Gabrian’s face was frozen in terror, and he was clutching his armrests with white-knuckled claws. “Are you okay?”
“Do all flying machines move so quickly?”
Aurelius shrugged. “No, for her size the Halcyon Courier is about as fast as they get, but interceptors and fighters are far faster.”
“Faster than this?” the old man asked as they roared across the lake in mere seconds.
“Much faster, but I’m only using 10% of the Halcyon’s potential right now. She could go 10 times this speed had she not been damaged in the crash.” Gabrian gaped at him. “Speaking of speed, Wrinkles, we’d better strap in or we’ll be thrown out of our chairs the minute I change course.” Aurelius snapped his emergency seat restraints into the buckles on either side of his chair, and Gabrian released his death grip on the armrests to do the same. Aurelius noticed that the old man’s hands were shaking violently, and as Gabrian let go of his right armrest, his staff which had been clutched in that hand, clattered to the deck. Suddenly Aurelius felt an enormous weight lift and his mind cleared. He sent the old man a cold look and brought his elbow up in a vicious sideways hook to Gabrian’s jaw. Something cracked and the old man screamed.
“You fool!” Gabrian shouted, spitting blood against the canopy as he reeled in his seat restraints. “Can you not see I am trying to help you?” Aurelius had his pistol trained on the man again.
“I warned you, Wrinkles.” Suddenly everything was clear. The old man had drugged him, that was why he, Aurelius, had temporarily been content to follow Gabrian’s commands.
Gabrian struggled in vain against his seat restraints to reach his fallen staff, but his arm was too short. Aurelius pulled the trigger and a brilliant flash of blue light connected with the old man’s skull. Gabrian slumped in the copilot’s chair, and Aurelius grimaced. “Good riddance,” he muttered as he holstered his pistol.
Chapter 4
Aurelius continued flying south over the forest for lack of any better direction to travel. He was struggling to get his bearings. He didn’t recognize any of the terrain was flying over, and for some reason his maps didn’t correspond at all to his actual location. According to the maps, there should have been farms and orchards below him, but all he could see for miles were the twisted gray forms of barren trees poking through a blanket of white mist. Occasionally clearings broke through the trees to reveal clean, white expanses of snow. Icicles glinted off branches as the sun began to peek through the clouds overhead.
Then the forest was behind him. The sun broke cleanly through the clouds and he was racing towards the blue, traversing a broad, rolling expanse of snow-covered ground. To his left, far in the hazy blue distance, lay a soaring range of mountains. According to his map, they were The Cauldrons. They looked just as he remembered them, which was very strange, because if the mountains corresponded to his maps, then everything else should have, too. They must simply look like the Cauldrons, Aurelius thought, reasoning that his maps had been somehow scrambled in the crash. The confirmation of that fact was no farther off than the horizon, where Aurelius saw what looked to be a massive metropolis, yet his maps said there should have been only forest there. The skyscrapers rose up like a wall, soaring in places almost as high as the mountains. Sensors confirmed that they were over half a mile high, some more than a mile.
Yet as he drew nearer to those skyscrapers, they began to take on strange, twisting shapes. A frown wrinkled Aurelius's brow as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. Before his astonished eyes, those towering structures resolved into a wall of coniferous green trees. He shook his head and checked his sensors, unable to believe it. Surely they couldn’t be as high as his sensors were reporting. No trees in existence were a mile high. It simply wasn’t possible! Yet the closer he flew, the more those trees began to loom over him.
Pulling back on the stick, Aurelius flew higher until he could clear the tops of the trees. He soared out over a canopy of green needles covered in a thick blanket of snow. The canopy was unbroken, and but for his altimeter telling him he was over a mile above the ground, he might easily have mistaken the treetops for the surface. After about ten minutes of flying, the tree canopy fell away sharply, and Aurelius’s stomach fell with it. Far below he could see the snowy white ground. The clearing was large enough that the trees were just a blurry green wall against the horizon, and in the near distance, he saw two very strange things.
The first was what looked like some massive ruins. Old, rusting, tangled webs of concrete and rebar were poking out of the snow and reaching a few hundred meters into the sky. It looked like the moldering remains of a city after it had been bombed, yet the Dominion wasn’t at war except from within, and Freedom had never hit an entire city before. The second strange phenomenon was further off in the distance. It looked like an ancient tribal village. There were wooden cabins and log homes with thatched roofs and smoke curling from their chimneys. Surroundi
ng it all was a high wooden palisade, ringed by a second palisade. The outermost was made up of giant wooden stakes jutting out at a 45 degree angle. It was the most curious thing he’d ever seen. Where in all of the Dominion did such a place exist? Perhaps it was some type of historical site, or an elaborate set for a movie?
That had to be it. He was looking at a movie set.
Aurelius smirked at his own foolishness. For a moment he’d been tempted to believe that old man’s wild story about having been accidentally brought through a portal to another time.
Then Aurelius remembered the massive trees and a frown touched his lips. His head swam dangerously, and he shook it to clear the spots from his vision. Panic crept around the edges of his consciousness, just waiting to pounce, but he managed to keep it at bay by ignoring the questions nagging at the back of his mind.
In a snap decision, Aurelius pulled back on the throttle and began bleeding altitude and speed for a landing. He’d go visit the people on the movie set to get the answers to his questions. There had to be some explanation for all of this. He must be in some part of Meridia he’d simply never visited or heard about before. That’s all it was. Just plain ignorance. He’d never gone to an academy after his primary education, and such was the extent of his ignorance that he didn’t even know there existed a place with such incredibly tall trees.
Once he landed, he’d find someone who could tell him exactly where he was, and then he’d resync his computers to his actual location and everything would line up perfectly with what his ship already knew about the world.
As Aurelius triggered the landing struts and hovered in close to the ground for a landing, the old man beside him stirred and groaned, drawing his attention for just a moment. For the first time Aurelius noticed the man’s clothes: coarsely woven fabric, strange styling . . . and then there was that staff. Gabrian certainly didn’t look like anyone Aurelius had met before.
Something wasn’t adding up.
Mrythdom: Game of Time Page 3
