Agrippa laughed again, harder. “Because I didn’t want to reveal our weakness to you—at least not too quickly. I couldn’t know how you would respond.”
“Such thinking has inevitably led to great catastrophe for our people in days gone by.”
Agrippa nodded. “Very true—for our people, too.”
“What help do you require?”
Agrippa allowed himself to feel a bit of encouragement at those words. Perhaps, he thought, I have been too cautious—too paranoid. But then, Nonsense, he told himself quickly. Your troops are under your protection and are your responsibility and you had to do whatever was necessary to keep them safe and to return them to the Empire alive and well.
He returned Merrin’s gaze levelly. “From our dealings with Glossis,” he said, “we know that your people possess the means to travel in and out of the lower levels of the Above. Your presence here, now, attests to that.”
The alien nodded once in acknowledgement.
“We were led here by an individual—a being—that has since abandoned us, for reasons not yet clear. We need a way back home.”
“Ah,” the Dyonari said. “A lien-dahl. A doorway. Of course.” He emitted a sound that might have been laughter. “I had begun to suspect that your presence here indicated that your people, too, now possessed a means of entering this level of the Above.”
“We might,” Agrippa said, “but that was not the manner of our arrival here.”
Merrin nodded. “Very well. If you will assemble your warriors and have them move away from the Temporal Vault, I will order a portal to be opened that will take you back to your realm.”
“Thank you,” Agrippa said, but his tone changed before the words were entirely out of his mouth. Something was bothering him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Something…
“General!” came the call from one of his soldiers behind him. And even as the man spoke, Agrippa realized what was bugging him: Aurore had brought him and his Bravo Squad here to stop a galactic catastrophe she claimed was coming—and the instigators of that catastrophe, according to her, were… Dyonari. And who were the first beings they had encountered here?
It all seemed too convenient somehow.
Merrin was turning away and likely issuing mental orders to his own forces, who were still positioned off in the fog. Agrippa hurried back to where his squad were scattered, on the other side of the tomb. The corporal with the scanning equipment build into the sleeve of his armor had his helmet off and his expression was one of shock and astonishment.
“What is it now?” Agrippa demanded.
“The temporal waves coming from the tomb have ceased,” the man reported, his voice strained. “But everything else—electromagnetic, heat, all of it—has increased.”
“What does that mean in basic terms? What do I need to know?”
The corporal frowned for a moment, then met the general’s eyes. “Remember that I said before it seemed as if whatever was inside this tomb was far away in time, but coming closer and closer?”
Agrippa nodded, not fully understanding.
“Well, General,” the corporal said, looking from his commanding officer to the strange gray box and back, “whatever it is—it’s here. It has arrived.”
5
“Something has arrived? Where?” demanded Agrippa. “Inside the tomb? And better yet—what?”
The corporal looked back down at his indicators and shook his head. “I have no way of knowing precisely, General,” he said. “But if we wait just a minute, we may find out.” Whether we like it or not, he almost added.
Agrippa gazed back out across the open area in which he had been parleying with the Dyonari commander. He was uncertain as to how to proceed, and he didn’t like that fact. For a while during their discussion he’d attempted to keep as much secret as possible, for the protection of his squad and to provide as much leverage over the aliens as possible. Eventually, though, he’d had to admit that they needed a way out of this bizarre, barren dimension into which they’d been led. He was experiencing second thoughts now as to whether he should have shared that fact with a potential foe. It did, after all, reveal much about the depths of their plight as well as their powerlessness, and thus handed an advantage to the Dyonari. I’ve always been a soldier first and a diplomat a very distant second, he fretted. This sort of thing is not at all what I’m cut out for. Give me a quad-rifle and a gladius and I’ll carve my way into the enemy with glee. But force me to play a verbal chess match with a bunch of telepathic aliens, and…
No, he told himself firmly. That’s no way to think. You did as good a job as you could, and the Bravo Squad of III Legion is still intact. Don’t lose your nerve now. Just take the aliens up on their offer. Let them open a way to get out of here. What matter that they end up in control of the tomb thing? It’s just a big gray box. Maybe just a solid sculpture—a marker of some kind. What harm in them “claiming” it?
Even so, that little voice continued to nag at the back of his mind. It wouldn’t stop. Scowling, he turned and motioned sharply for Major Torgon, the next-highest-ranking officer in the company. As Torgon nodded and hurried his way, the white and green Deising-Arry Mark V plate armor’s internal servos whining as he came, Agrippa wished for the dozenth time that Colonel Iksander was with him. Iksander was a shrewd man, gifted with insights that Agrippa could usually only see after the fact. Unfortunately, “the Lightning,” as he was called, was back on Eingrad-6, presumably mopping up the last of the enemy forces there in Agrippa’s absence.
“Yes, General?” Torgon asked, saluting, his helmet off and dangling from its strap at his side.
Agrippa led him off to one side and spoke in a low voice, carefully laying out his nagging worries about the Dyonari, the tomb, and the words of Aurore before she had disintegrated and abandoned them. When he was done, the major frowned and ran a hand through his dark hair. “I think I understand your concerns, sir, but we have no way of knowing if these Dyonari are the ones she wanted us to stop. If we start some sort of conflict with them for no real reason…” He trailed off for a second, then, “Even if we won the fight, we’d have no way back home.”
Agrippa nodded. “Absolutely right, Torgon,” he said. “And yet, I simply can’t shake the feeling that—”
“General! You need to see this!”
Agrippa and Torgon looked up from where they’d been huddling. What they saw caused both men to gasp involuntarily.
The top portion of the gray tomb was moving slowly down, like the lid of a box sliding open. Like a sarcophagus opening itself from the inside.
Agrippa suppressed a shudder and moved quickly to the side of the tomb. The other members of the squad gathered around, looking on in puzzlement.
“General,” came the voice of the Dyonari across the clearing—too far away and at the wrong angle to see the lid moving. “Is something the matter? Your men seem… agitated.”
“No, no,” Agrippa called back over his shoulder, his eyes not moving from the strange sight. “Just one moment, if you don’t mind.”
The tomb—the Temporal Vault, as the Dyonari would have it—continued to open, but slowly. Oh so slowly.
“There’s someone inside,” exclaimed one of the men in a relatively loud voice, earning a reproving glance from the general.
Indeed, as the lid slid down it revealed a humanoid shape lying inside. The inside of the box was very dark; as of yet, no details could be determined.
From across the clearing came the sounds of the Dyonari, curious as to what the humans were doing with the Temporal Vault, slowly moving closer.
Agrippa ignored them. He was almost in a daze. It was all very surreal to him. He nearly laughed as he visualized the old tomb raiders of ancient times, opening up Egyptian pyramids and burial sites. It was absurd, of course; this wasn’t Egypt and he was no archaeologist. And yet here he was, about to be face-to-face with—a mummy?
The lid had nearly moved halfway down now, and the b
ody inside was revealed to be entirely human. Human, and not decomposed at all. The skin was dark, the hair black and long. The eyes were closed, but as he gazed upon the face—a relatively youthful face—he was taken with the sense that those eyes could open at any moment.
And then they did.
Half the men and women of the III Legion Bravo Squad nearly jumped right out of their combat armor.
Agrippa fought to control his suddenly flaring emotions. A part of him found that puzzling; certainly this was disturbing and unexpected in a way, but he had always prided himself on his resolute determination in the face of the strangest things the galaxy had to throw at him. To be so spooked by a body in a tomb—albeit one that had just, apparently, come back to life—was on many levels embarrassing to him.
“What is happening?” came the voice of Merrin, the Dyonari commander, both telepathically and aloud. It was very near; the aliens had crossed the clearing and were almost on top of them now.
Agrippa prepared to make another denial but then saw that it was too late. The Dyonari commander was right behind him and could see exactly what was happening.
“You have opened it,” the alien nearly gasped. “Why have you done this?”
“We didn’t do anything,” Agrippa snapped back. “It happened by itself.”
“By itself?” Merrin appeared wrong-footed by that bit of information. He recovered quickly. “But that can only mean…”
“What?” Agrippa demanded, turning to look at the tall alien. “It’s time for answers, Commander. What exactly is this thing—and who is that?” He pointed at the seemingly human body that lay inside, unmoving, eyes now wide open but staring unseeingly straight up. “And what did you want with him? Because, I would point out now, the fact that the person inside this thing is a human gives me a bit more legal jurisdiction over this tomb, and him, than I had a few seconds ago.
The alien commander said nothing for several seconds. His eyes darted from those of the general to Torgon’s and back again. At last he moved his head from side to side in what was possibly the Dyonari equivalent of a shrug. “You have been honest with me—somewhat—General,” Merrin said. “I am now obligated to return the favor.” He nodded toward the tomb and its strange, apparently comatose inhabitant. “This Temporal Vault, and the being inside of it, were spoken of to my people by our greatest seers. The Vault and its inhabitant are supposed to represent the best hope of saving the entire galaxy from an approaching threat of incalculable magnitude.”
Agrippa listened to this, the wheels in his head turning. “So,” he said at length, “you and yours are here to try to save the galaxy, just as we were brought here to do.”
“That is so,” Merrin replied.
“Then we should work together.”
“Agreed,” Merrin said, nodding. “That would seem best.”
Satisfied at least for the moment, Agrippa turned back to the tomb and the figure within it. He leaned over the edge and gazed down. The man was relatively young in appearance; somewhere in his thirties, probably. His eyes were dark and his lips were full and he was very clearly breathing, if very shallowly.
“Faraday,” Agrippa called, motioning for his medic to approach. “Take a look at this…person…and see if you can determine what’s wrong with him and—”
At that moment the man in the tomb gasped loudly and sat straight up.
Agrippa involuntarily moved back a half-step, then gave the medic a quick glance. “Never mind,” he said.
The dark man in the tomb looked around almost frantically, taking in the faces of the armored men and women who were staring down at him.
“Where—when—am I?” he asked, clearly very confused.
“Tough one to answer,” Agrippa said as he reached out and steadied the man with one gloved hand. “We’re not entirely sure ourselves.”
Hearing that, the man’s expression grew even more frantic. “Why was I awakened here and now, then?” he asked, glaring at the general. “Why have you brought me here?”
“Brought you here? We did no such thing. In case you don’t know it, you’re inside a casket of some kind. That’s not our doing. You were here when we arrived.”
“Actually, General,” the scanner corporal interjected at that point, “he may be telling the truth. When we came here, I would’ve sworn to you this casket was empty. And I definitely saw readings that indicated something was approaching… approaching from the inside of the box.”
Agrippa glared at the corporal. “So you’re saying he wasn’t here before, and something we did caused him to come here—both in space and in time?”
The corporal appeared to consider how ridiculous that sounded. Then he shrugged and nodded. “I believe so, General.”
Agrippa made a sour expression before turning back to the man who sat in the big gray casket. “Does any of this make sense to you?” he asked. “Did you travel here from elsewhere—or from some other moment in time?”
The man nodded slowly. “I believe so…” He brought a hand up and rubbed at his eyes. “It is...difficult to think...”
Agrippa’s piercing blue eyes regarded the dark-haired man carefully, taking his measure. “You’re saying you’re a time traveler, then?” He gestured broadly toward the gray box, made of some strange substance that seemed neither stone nor metal yet smooth like both. Within it the man now sat in a shallow recess, very much like a mummy’s sarcophagus. “This—this thing is a time machine?”
The man rubbed at his eyes and then returned Agrippa’s gaze. “In a manner of speaking, yes,” he said. “I ask again—why am I here, and why now?”
“And I say again, I do not know,” Agrippa answered. “We did nothing, to my knowledge, to wake you—or to bring you here.”
The man pulled himself up higher so that he could better see over the edge and out. Beyond the Kings of Oblivion soldiers that stood in a long arc around that side of the tomb, he could see only the barren ground stretching a short distance away before disappearing beneath the waves of fog. He stared for a moment and then gasped. “The Desolate Stretches,” he said. “The lower Above. So.” He looked up at Agrippa with eyes now wide, perhaps in surprise. “It returns to me. I have come to the place I saw before.” He brightened. “All is as it should be. The time has come at last.”
Agrippa frowned at this. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t understand—”
The man had started to turn the other way. As he did, he saw Commander Merrin and his alien troops approaching, and his scream cut Agrippa off in mid-sentence. Frantically he began to scramble to pull himself out of the tomb.
“No—no,” Agrippa attempted to reassure him. “They are friends. They are—”
“They are Dyonari,” the man growled, eyes fierce now.
“Yes, but—”
“Kill them,” he shouted. “For the sake of all existence—kill them all! Kill them all!”
6
Agrippa, to his credit as a wise leader and for many reasons, did not immediately follow the strange man’s counsel and order the Kings of Oblivion to open fire on the Dyonari. But he did take note of the sharp rise in tensions among his troops as they heard the man’s strident cries. At the same time he saw the Dyonari halt and gaze warily at the man. Instinctively Agrippa knew that they all teetered on the edge of a disaster. He also understood that the game had just changed again, and again he cursed the fact that he was the senior officer present, charged with making sense of it all and handling it. Quickly he raised both hands and gestured for all present to calm down.
“Torgon,” he said to the major to his left, “help this man out of there.”
As Torgon and one of his other troopers moved forward and assisted the man in climbing up and out of the gray tomb, Agrippa glanced in the direction of the Dyonari. Commander Merrin and his officers were standing only a short distance away, unmoving, taking no actions provocative or otherwise. It was likely they were conversing mentally among themselves. He waited a moment, the
n called aloud, “Commander. Would you object to me taking a few moments to converse with this man and attempt to come to some greater understanding of our situation?” He nodded toward the open tomb. “We will not tamper with this...” He searched for the perfect word and couldn’t find it, so he said, “...This sarcophagus.”
The Dyonari leader appeared to consider this for a moment, then nodded once. Within Agrippa’s mind, he heard the words, “That is acceptable. But please hurry. Our mission presses upon us.”
“Thank you.” Agrippa nodded back to the alien, then moved closer to the strange man. The man had removed some sort of cloak from the tomb and now had it draped over his shoulders, covering all but his head and neck. “Let’s start with this,” Agrippa said in a quiet tone. “Who are you?”
The man still appeared agitated; he kept glancing over at the Dyonari as if deeply suspicious of them. “I will tell you,” he said at last, “though you will not believe me.”
“Let me decide that.”
The dark-skinned man chuckled at that. “I am Solonis,” he said.
Agrippa blinked, processing what the man had said. He started to reply, then hesitated. Next to him, Torgon simply laughed. Agrippa shot the major a look that shut him up quickly.
“You did say I wouldn’t believe you,” Agrippa pointed out. He was peering at the man closely.
“Yes.” The man looked back at him, dark eyes meeting blue ones, both sets unflinching. “And yet, you do.”
Agrippa’s frown deepened. “I do?” He snorted; it could’ve been a derisive snort, but it also could have been an ironic laugh.
“Yes. I sense it. I see it, plainly. You are not so much the simple warrior as you would have others believe.”
Agrippa smiled flatly at that. “I would scarcely be General of the III Legion if I was.”
“Yes.” The man now scrutinized Agrippa carefully. “It is possible,” he said, “that you are part of the vision—part of what I have witnessed.” He brought one dark hand up to his forehead and closed his eyes, as if in pain. “It is so unclear now. It was all perfectly obvious to me when I departed to come here.”
The Shattering: Omnibus Page 64
