by Dana Fredsti
He froze as Kha-Hotep turned his gun on him. The two friends locked eyes. Kha’s face was stone.
“I’m sorry.”
Kha-Hotep pulled the trigger.
The mechanism clicked.
Nothing.
In a flash Cam drew his twenty-third-century sword and brought it down toward Kha’s head. The Egyptian barely stopped the blow with an awkward parry of the gun barrel. The diamond-edged blade bit deep into the weapon, and Kha quickly reversed his grip to make a club of it.
Cam had the advantage now, and Kha knew it. With wild swings of his makeshift bludgeon, he drove Cam further down the gangplank, while Cam continued to hack away at him, chopping off pieces of the gun with every strike.
As Kha reversed his grip again to better parry Cam’s sword, the ultra-keen blade sliced off a tip of the gun barrel, striking at an angle—inadvertently turning it into a bayonet. Kha slashed a long red wound across Cam’s chest, and then plunged the sharpened barrel at his throat.
Cam only just dodged the thrust, and Kha followed up with another reverse, smashing the butt against Cam’s skull. Stars exploded behind his eyes.
Reeling from the hit, he fell back a step too far—only the slender guardrail kept him from toppling over to his death as Kha pressed the attack. The Egyptian charged, gun held out in both hands, and then suddenly threw the weapon at Cam’s face.
Cam ducked, and the battered Tommy gun spiraled away, falling out of sight. Kha used the feint to grab Cam’s sword arm and bend the Celt over the railing. Off balance, legs flailing and his body pressed over the edge, Cam threw all his strength into one last desperate try to break free.
He couldn’t.
Gritting his teeth, Kha pressed his hand over Cam’s, twisting the grip of the sword. Turning Cam’s own blade against him.
Cam cried out as the razor-sharp tip pierced his chest. He grabbed at the blade with his free hand, trying to halt its progress, but its preternatural sharpness slashed open his palm, nearly cutting his hand in half.
And then Kha-Hotep slid the sword into Cam’s heart.
* * *
Meta stared in horror, paralyzed by what he saw in the viewer. The containment field wasn’t losing integrity—it was being joined by other fields and other particles.
Where were they coming from? The screen began to glow with a deep violet intensity—some form of Cherenkov radiation? At the same time, a torrent of particles began streaming up toward him, rising like champagne bubbles in an endless cascade.
“Primary Chamber, controls are not responding to abort command. Repeat, there is no response to—”
The neural link cut out.
The light from the viewscreen suddenly roared to life as a beam of pure energy. Meta reached for the manual override, but the pulse struck him face first and the impact sent his body tumbling backward through the air. He landed on the catwalk with a painful skid, nearly losing consciousness.
* * *
Kha-Hotep’s face was a rictus of rage and anguish as he worked the blade into Cam’s chest. The Celt’s grip softened, the eyes lost their focus, and he could feel Cam’s death rattle shake against him as he gently lowered his friend’s body down to the catwalk.
At the far end of the walkway, a violet burst of light sent the scientist flying backward without warning. Kha looked up in surprise.
It begins, he thought.
A second blast of raw energy transformed the vast open space of the spherical chamber into blinding whiteness. Kha-Hotep pressed his head against Cam’s shoulder as the walkway quaked.
A scriptorium near the Palace of Cyrus the Great, Babylon
538 BC
Three seconds before the Event
His prayers done and tools laid out, the exiled scribe spread forth the fresh scroll of cured gazelle skin and, with exquisite care, set quill to page, opening his story with a single word in Hebrew.
B’reshith.
In the beginning…
59
Meta clung to the catwalk, fighting to remain conscious. His eyes burned, his vision a dizzy, jumbled mess. Shaking his head to clear it, he managed to scramble to his feet, shielding his eyes with one hand. It took a moment for his eyes to come into focus.
Where are the intruders?
No matter. He had to get to the safety cutoff before all was lost.
There was no platform anymore—the long walkway now ended in a fiery ball of multicolored plasma, burning freely like a new sun.
Another tremor shuddered through the station, nearly jostling him off the catwalk entirely. Even the three rovers seemed to be affected by the ripples. They seemed to be flying blindly in crazy loop-de-loops, systems hopelessly scrambled.
Meta clutched at the rail as the narrow walkway began to buckle beneath his feet. He pulled himself hand over hand back toward the entryway.
Someone stood in his way.
* * *
“Get out!” Meta yelled over the tumult. “It’s going to blow!”
Kha-Hotep nodded—and then another tremor shook the catwalk like a branch in a windstorm, its tortured frame giving a horrifying metallic groan. Both men grabbed at the rail and pulled themselves along.
Kha came to a sudden stop just before the walkway’s end. He turned, staring at Cam’s body.
“We have to go back.”
Meta stared at him, his eyes bright with cascading stars.
“He’s dead!”
“No—he’s not,” Kha yelled back.
“You’re insane,” Meta replied. “Do what you want, but I’m leaving.” Kha started to let the man pass, but a sudden impulse—instinct?—struck him.
“No,” he said. “You can’t leave yet.”
“He’s gone,” Meta insisted, an edge of hysteria in his voice, “and the pulses of time-space distortion are tearing the place apart!”
Kha knew the man was right—still something was eating at him. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t leave Cam behind. He couldn’t let Meta go, either. But why?
“We’re going back.”
“If we go back, we’ll die!”
“Then we die.” Another tremor shuddered down the walkway, and he shoved, sending Meta skidding back the way he came, toward the sun burning where the platform used to be. Toward Cam’s corpse. A strange calm fell over Kha-Hotep as he followed.
We’re not going to die, he thought. This is the way it has to be.
They reached Cam’s body. The sword still jutted out of his chest, and Kha-Hotep realized the blade was sticking through Cam into the catwalk itself, keeping the corpse pinned in place. He crouched down and, with an effort, pulled the blade free. He slipped it into his belt.
Meta stared at him, terrified and baffled. Kha-Hotep pointed beyond him at the ball of plasma.
“That is the source of the—the pulses?”
“Pulses of time-space distortion, yes!”
Kha held on to Cam’s body, and both men grabbed the rail tighter as another tremor rippled the catwalk beneath their feet. It was starting to all make sense. Leila had been right— they and their children… their entire life over the past eight years, were all proof that the aftershocks had stopped.
They had stopped because he was here, to make them stop.
But how?
“You have to end it here,” he yelled to Meta. “Now!”
“I can’t! It’s ignoring my commands!”
“But there was supposed to be a way, damn you! You told them yourself!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“A—what was it called?—an override!”
“There is no override! The override is buried in that!” He pointed to the blazing sun. It pulsed again, bucking the walkway with another screech of metal.
Kha-Hotep felt a stab of doubt. Had he just doomed his children? Had he just killed his best friend—and himself— for nothing?
Was all of this for nothing?
“Wait,” Meta said suddenly. “I can’t abort the seque
nce, and I can’t release the field, but…” He touched a hand to his head. “I can release the coupling that supports the staging area via my neural link.” He closed his eyes. The energy sphere suddenly dropped away toward the bottom of the chamber, leaving the platform behind, still pulsating with ripples of errant space-time.
“Em heset net Ma’at!” Kha-Hotep exclaimed, touching his eyes and heart. “You’ve done it. Go! I’ll finish it!”
“Are you sure? I can—”
Kha shook his head. “You’ve done more than enough.”
Meta nodded. “The cutoff is the big red switch on the far right. Thank you,” Meta said gratefully. “I won’t forget you.”
“You will, but no matter. All will be well.”
Meta frowned, then raised his hand in gratitude before sprinting down the catwalk and exiting through the great round doorway. Kha-Hotep made sure the man and his trio of rovers were gone before he made his way back to the end of the catwalk, and threw the override switch.
60
Kha-Hotep wasn’t sure what to expect, but he was surprised when nothing more than a final ripple went through the chamber, and then the catwalk was still again.
Cam suddenly coughed up blood and groaned. Kha-Hotep put a hand on his friend’s chest. The medical nanites had already formed a hexagonal mesh closing up the stab wound through his chest and heart. The Celt’s eyes fluttered open. Though his hand was still healing as well, he felt around for his sword.
“Easy, my brother,” Kha said. “Let your body’s sorcery do its work.”
“The world—”
“Be at peace. It still holds up the sky.”
“You forgot to cut off my head,” he replied, his voice faint. Kha laughed in spite of himself, even as he fought to hold back tears.
“No, I remembered.” He took Cam’s hand. “Forgive me, my brother. We were both right, and wrong. But now the thing is done. The storms are no more.”
Cam smiled in turn, then grimaced in pain as he sat up.
“Easy! Easy!” Kha admonished him. “You were dead only a moment ago.”
“I hate being dead,” Cam said, wiping the blood from his chest. Kha-Hotep helped him up to his feet, supporting him as they walked back toward the doorway.
* * *
“Cam!” Amber’s voice rang across the vast chamber as she ran to them. Nellie, Hypatia, and Harcourt came up behind. He yelped when she grabbed him in a fierce bear hug but made no complaint when she kissed him.
“You did it!”
“Kha did it,” Cam said, clapping a hand on the Egyptian’s shoulder.
“We all did it,” Kha-Hotep corrected him. “The storms are ended, and damn all the gods, we yet remain.”
“What in the bloody hell?” Harcourt raged, seemingly unrelieved to be back on Earth again. “You ignorant savages! What have you done? You haven’t fixed the world! You were supposed to return us all to our lives—it was supposed to be as though none of this ever happened, the man said!”
“Shut up,” Amber said quietly. Harcourt ignored her.
“Did Blake die for nothing, then?” he continued.
“I said shut your mouth right now!” Her voice crackled with grief and rage.
Taken aback, Harcourt swallowed his retort.
“Good lord,” Nellie said slowly. I hate to say it, but he’s right. After all we’ve been through, nothing’s really changed, has it?”
“Perhaps you have stopped the time-quakes for the time being, I couldn’t say.” Harcourt sniffed. “But what I do know is that you two have managed to ruin our only chance to get back home again!”
Kha-Hotep stepped up, fury and the pain of loss in his eyes. “Isfet and Set take your tongue! You think we have done nothing this day? That no sacrifices were made? If any of you are so shrouded in misery, go ahead and throw yourselves into the pit then—it lies here before you!”
“Think, man!” Harcourt said bitterly. “You had a life once, your home, your country, your ship, your family. We all did. Now our world is gone—all our worlds are gone—and we are trapped forever in this patchwork nightmare—madhouse and menagerie in one!”
“Our world is gone,” Amber said, her voice hollow. Was any of her family still alive? Her friends? What was left of San Diego now, if anything? Whatever remained, as much as she ached for something of her home to have survived, her old life was completely gone now. All of them could say the same.
“Not all our worlds are gone,” Kha-Hotep muttered, his eyes narrowed.
“Hold a moment,” Hypatia said, raising her hand. “We argue two sides of the same coin. It’s true, we haven’t saved our world. We all have lost much, and still have much to mourn. So we shall.” She was quiet for a moment before continuing.
“Now we all dwell upon a new world. New companions—” She reached out and clasped Nellie’s hand in hers. “—and new family. With what we have been given, much is asked of us, and great works we can do to make this our home. There are tasks ahead, cities and libraries to rebuild, crops and gardens to plant, and a boundless world to explore. Our ship awaits.”
“Amen to that,” Nellie replied softly.
“Indeed,” Kha-Hotep agreed, and even Harcourt nodded.
“Come on,” Amber said, pulling herself together. “Hypatia’s right, the whole world is waiting for us now.” And with Blake gone, she needed to step up. She wasn’t sure how they’d manage without him, but it was time to start practicing. “We’ll… we’ll need to find Blake. I don’t want to leave him here. He deserves a decent burial.”
She mentally reached out to the Vanuatu.
“Ship, have you regained contact with your drone? Sergeant Blake is dead. We need to get his body out of here and prepared for a burial.” She flashed an image of the last place she had seen him.
“I read you, Amber. Please permit me to extend my condolences to you all. I am dispatching the rover to look for him in Engineering Sublevel Alpha.”
* * *
It seemed like only a few minutes had passed before the Vanuatu’s rover drone sailed into the chamber.
“Pardon the interruption, but I have located Sergeant Blake.”
Amber wasn’t ready to see Blake’s body yet, didn’t think she ever would be. But she owed it to him to bear witness to his sacrifice. “Thank you, Ship. Take us over there.”
“Forgive me, but I have taken the liberty to send a med unit. Sergeant Blake is not dead. He has suffered serious injuries and is being taken back to the ship for treatment.”
* * *
The stretcher floated Blake down the station’s hallways. Its robot tentacles were already hard at work administering first aid and field surgery. Amber walked alongside him, one hand laid over his, while the rest followed behind.
“You got shot twice and fell onto concrete?” Amber said. “I’m surprised you’re still alive.”
“The ship was surprised, too,” Blake replied, his voice a pale imitation of its usual brisk certainty. “But not dead. Just broke every bone in my body—feels like it anyway.” He gave her an uncharacteristically mellow smile. “Whatever morphine they use now sure does the trick, though.”
“There are multiple transverse fractures along the left side of his body, and he has sustained considerable blood loss. However, his primitive gunshot wounds were fortunately not critical. I give excellent odds of his recovery.”
“Good,” Amber said. “Because there’s a whole new world out there, just waiting for us.”
“We saved the world, did we?”
They reached the open doors leading out of the station and went out into the cold.
The Shatterfield was gone, the sky an unbroken expanse of blue. The Vanuatu stood ready for them, its prismatic wings unfolding in the sun.
Amber smiled. “The next best thing,” she replied with certainty. “We saved this world.”
EPILOGUE
The Palace of Cahokia
Eight years after the Event
Leila rose early
and sat at the window, wrapped in her robe, watching the rising sun gleam off the great silver arch across the river. From the moment her husband had put on his riverboat captain disguise and set off in the royal barge, sleep had been impossible.
She rested her chin on her crossed forearms while worries churned in her mind and stomach. It had had to be done, at any cost, she knew—but just how high a price would they pay in the end? How many would return with him?
Would Kha-Hotep return at all?
Josephine, whom she loved more than anyone but her husband and children, came in with a tray of sweetgrass tea and honey.
“You slay me, sister,” she said, setting the tray down and hunkering down next to Leila.
“What?” Leila asked.
“You haven’t slept a wink.” Josephine slipped her arm through Leila’s and kissed her friend’s cheek. “Me, neither, but don’t you worry none, Bearcat. He’ll be back soon.”
Leila sighed and nodded, fighting back tears. Resting her head against her friend’s, she snuggled closer and the two women watched the river for the returning barge. If Josephine had her own fears and doubts, she kept them to herself.
The two looked up and quickly stood at the sound of footsteps out in the hallway, signaling the approach of the guard, who halted at the door and announced themselves. Leila assumed a more regal stance, and bid them enter. A pair of the royal guardsmen entered.
“What news of my husband?”
“This man brings news, my lady.” The captain stepped aside to let a tall figure in a gray hooded cloak enter. Leila’s heart dropped, and Josephine quickly put a steadying arm around her shoulders.
A priest? Oh no, no, no…
“Tell me, Priest, is my husband alive?”
“No.”
The man pulled back his hood.
“Not a priest.”
Kha-Hotep stood, resplendent in an immaculate new kilt of bright white Egyptian cotton, gauzy tunic-shirt, and jeweled collar.
“Kha!” Leila flew into his arms. Josephine beamed, heaving a heartfelt sigh of gratitude. Laughing with gusto, he swung her around, and when he stopped she clamped her legs around him and kissed him until he finally pulled back. Leila touched a hand to his cheek. “Oh, Kha—are you alright? Did everything—” She was afraid to finish the question. He stared at her intently, tried to speak, and had to swallow before trying again.
