Jaunt (48 page)

“At the bottom of the crater created by the detonation.”

“Nicolenko...our enemy.”

“Ah.” The Sherpa nodded. “Then you know what you must do.”

Gilmour nodded. “Will you help me?”

“No. I am only allowed to unimpede your progress in this lesson. I cannot assist you in any other way.”

“Than allow me to transmit a signal. I hoped not to be here when we did this, but....”

The Sherpa placed an open hand on the inner wall of the core, allowing the crystalline facets to impart their intelligence to him. He faced the agent. “It is done. The core will not impede your movement, either. You may leave, if you desire.”

“No,” Gilmour voiced, shaking his head. “I’ll make my stand here, with the core. Somebody from our species has to learn this lesson, don’t they?”

The Sherpa, his visage bathed in the core’s spectral light, did not answer.

Inhaling deeply, Gilmour activated the EM transceiver once more, praying he wasn’t ending life as he knew it.

“No signs of the lieutenant have been found, Captain!” the communications ensign bellowed.

Kuyneyov leaned back in his chair and thought about his next act with the utmost of caution. “Commander....”

“Yes, sir?” a burly, well-groomed man answered from the captain’s right.

“Strike my commands from the records. I want nothing recorded!”

“Sir? Yes, sir!” Acting with haste, the first officer whipped over to a station and toggled the command records, hitting erase. A squeak was emitted from the console, then the entire vox system went dead.

Kuyneyov rose from his seat and addressed the firing room liaison, “There will be no mistakes this time, understood.”

The young, well-scrubbed boy easily nodded his head, paying extreme attention to his superior officer’s order. “Aye, aye, sir!”

“Begin procedures to detonate
Strela
. Signal
Deputatsky
all is in order, all hands accounted for. All equipment is secure.”

“Aye, captain.” The communications ensign nodded to the crewman at the console, who opened a channel to the lead ship.

Kuyneyov sat in his chair, counting down the minutes until he was the most revered man in all the Confederation.

A slate grey gauntlet brought up a holograph labeled “TRANSMIT.” Gilmour’s index finger quickly pressed it down, erasing all doubt.

Vasily Nicolenko fired his RCS thrusters once more, bringing the crash into his sight. It was easily lit from the mysterious fountain of light emanating from the craft’s side, coming from what looked like a large corridor. He followed the metallic debris sandwiched into the ridge, none the worse after enduring the explosion almost ninety minutes ago that had devastated the southern portion of the trench.

After traveling down the few meters to the corridor, he would investigate this fountain and find out if it was Gilmour’s doing, a deception he had created to distract Nicolenko from detonating the trench. He could not win, Nicolenko knew; he had an entire fleet waiting for his very signal to detonate the rest of the warheads in this trench. Gilmour sending his lackey in an attempt to disrupt the detonations would not succeed, just as Gilmour had not succeeded in his earlier attempts to stop him. Finding the entrance into this corridor, Nicolenko began to unravel Gilmour’s plot. The IIA special agent was running out of time....

Kuyneyov swiveled in his chair. Looking to his firing liaison, he ordered, “Initiate detonation!”

The boy tapped the firing sequence on his panel, beginning the countdown.

Buried meters below the trench sediment, five warheads came to life. Red LEDs, adjacent to the EM frequency receiver, started the ten second descent to zero.

Nicolenko blocked the incredible light streaming past him. Slowly, he maneuvered in the tight corridor, his fatigue and the water’s buoyancy conspiring to defeat him. His eyes made out an iris of light just a few more meters ahead of him...Gilmour had to be here, had to be plotting his escape. But he would not escape his—

“What?! What in—”

Five sequential chirps in Nicolenko’s voxlink caught his attention. Pausing, he activated his HUD sensors, checking for the location of these familiar signals. Nicolenko’s eyes widened as he saw their origins....

...Zero.

Five pairs of Casimir plates pushed together, producing a gap of just micrometers, enough to begin the virtual particle/antiparticle process. Instantly, quanta filled the chambers of the five remaining
Strela
s, commencing a reaction that pulled the fabric of the universe itself.

Five ripples appeared in spacetime, spreading their influence throughout the trench. Expanding faster than light, the disturbances soon flooded the planet within a nanosecond, sending a cascade of virtual particle collisions streaming across the continuum.

Gilmour and the Sherpa writhed as the neutron core pulled itself apart, reknitting its lattice particle by particle, a cascade of luminescence rivaling the fountain that had brought them inside its very being.

Across the Earth, the crust vibrated with life....

In the Central Asian Conglomerates, Nepalis and Chinese alike gathered to witness a mountain retreat glitter in light. An arc of mountains cradling a particularly secluded valley danced with luminosity, as its mountainside opened spectral light to the heavens above....

Sakha natives danced to the gods...a field reserved for those who had died in a horrible battle was consecrated by the rainbow of colors stretching to the sky from the Ulahan-Sis peaks beyond....

Stacia Waters, Carol Marlane, Javier Valagua, Alik Ivan, Cory Crowe, Hollis Lux, Ryan Jaquess and Richard de Lis marveled as the jewel specimens lit up the trembling Lockbox, casting an eerie, spectral glow across the many subdivisions of the theoretical studies laboratory....

Millions of light rays streamed past Gilmour and the Sherpa, all converging on the empty scar created so many decades ago, above the Earth. One by one, the facets arrived and rearranged themselves within the healing neutron core, positioning themselves as they had been before they were lost. Gilmour watched the rapture curiously, as if witnessing the return of long-forgotten children to a heartbroken mother.

The core’s resonance echoed throughout Gilmour’s body, filling him with warmth. The kaleidoscope that had been so mighty and impressive before was no match now for this experience, an entire universe ablaze. Within seconds, the streamers waned in number, but the core’s brilliant intensity only increased, creating a sense of what could possibly occur next to transcend that.

The scar immediately reknit along to the rest of the lattice, completing the core’s healing. Growing brighter still, a wave of white light poured forth from the core, cutting a swath through Gilmour and the Sherpa.

Outpacing the fountain’s progress, the light wave broke free from the confines of the craft, illuminating the trench. Trapped inside the mousehole, Nicolenko screamed as the light enveloped him and the supine metal structure.

Five kilometers above, at the very surface of the Okhotsk Sea, the submarine
Valeska
, the destroyer
Deputatsky
, and the other members of the Confederation North Pacific Fleet were eclipsed by the onrushing white light, a warmth that brightened night to morning. The ocean water boiled, tossing the submarine about. Inside, crewmen desperately sealed off vulnerable compartments, while bulkheads cracked and shifted, threatening to take the ship to the bottom as well.

Towering ridge walls on the bottom of the trench shifted under the pressure pouring forth from beneath their masses. Sturdy shelves slid to the floor, coating the sediment with broken and jagged stone. Barite columns disappeared under tumbling walls, causing massive quakes to erupt all along the trench floor’s kilometers-long subduction zone.

Under the collapsed ridge shelf that had imprisoned the craft for two hundred years, metallic supports moaned and creaked. Huge structural beams dislodged from their moorings and spiraled towards the neutron core, their matter swiftly swallowed by the hungry core. Metal debris flew into the interior of the ship and were subsumed, as were bulkheads from the ship, all eaten from the inside out, gradually lowering the millions of tonnes of earth above it back to the seafloor.

A massive fault developed along the rim of the trench wall, breaking the ridges into scores of sliding masses. Until moments ago a dominant landscape, the northeast trench wall collapsed, falling inward from the implosion of twenty decades’ worth of structural support.

More and more material was launched towards the neutron core, a disk soon growing around its equator, setting the core spinning at a tremendous rate and its sole inhabitants inside flailing.

The ever decreasing sphere departed its last rays of light, then crumpled in on itself, emitting a horrific, sucking moan before its own version of the spacetime vortex extirpated it from the known universe.

Space split open, howling from an unnatural wound. A pinprick of matter, a mere mote against the ocean of stars, was expunged from the spiral fissure by the awesome powers of the universe itself, battering it with such force as if to forever rid the universe of a terrible irritant.

Deep inside the bowels of the ancient craft, the newly healed neutron core burned with the ferocity of a thousand suns, twin streamers of blinding energy flowing from its magnetically powered poles. Spinning at a rate of five rotations per millisecond, the neutron core seized its inhabitants within its crystalline lattice, who were now beholden to the core of the ancient craft and its whims.

Flung around the core’s heart, witness to their past, present and future as if lived out before them, the trio of confined beings braced themselves to the core’s multitude of facets, unsure of what was real, of what was illusion.

Gilmour felt his flesh bubble and rake across his body. Paralyzed by the ghostly images ripping past him, he screamed in terror, the spectral lines weaving a streak of many Gilmours, of many Sherpas, of many...Nicolenkos.

Cranking his head to the left, Gilmour’s eyes met Nicolenko’s, whose body now flooded forth and melded with the special agent’s, whose in return melded with the Sherpa’s opposite him. The trio were chained to the spinning top that was this neutron core and the carnival game that was the spacetime continuum.

Gritting his teeth, Gilmour pushed his arms away from the crystalline wall, forcing himself forward, immediately introducing a stream of color into the uninhabited central part of the neutron core. Wasting no momentum, Gilmour leapt into the southern pole of the core, capturing Nicolenko’s attention. The lieutenant followed Gilmour down, meeting him about two meters away, both men now standing steadily against a hurricane of swirling, spectral energy.

“GGGGGGGiiiiiilllllllllllllmmmmmmooooooooooouuuuuurrrrrrrr!!!”

Nicolenko

painstakingly reached to his torso ring and produced his double-bladed axe, holding it forward to his nemesis.

Gilmour watched the lieutenant waste his angular momentum, then charged at Nicolenko. Nicolenko swung the axe at Gilmour’s helmet, but the agent reached out with his gauntlets and grabbed the axe’s handle, forcing it to his right flank, Nicolenko’s weak side. The pair wrestled with the weapon until their jockeying allowed both men to lose their grip, which flung the axe into the swirling spectrum. Following the lost weapon with their combined gaze, the axe whirled around the core, gradually losing inertia until it struck the crystalline wall and hung there, fixed upon the latticework with its hilt upright.

Catching Gilmour before he could defend himself, Nicolenko jumped up and kicked Gilmour’s faceplate, rocketing the agent into the swirling river of light. The agent’s limbs turned and twisted viciously until he lost inertia after three rotations and crashed into the crystalline wall, tumbling end over end, then halting with his helmet cemented to the faceted wall.

Nicolenko growled and leapt at the hapless Gilmour, sensing an easy victory. The lieutenant’s boots found the wall just a few paces from Gilmour and held him there while Nicolenko gathered his bearings. Nicolenko rose to his feet, now standing nearly upside down to his fighting stance a few moments ago, and approached the agent’s back. Drawing closer, Nicolenko held his gauntlets to his face, and utilizing a voice command, extended two seven-centimeter-long talons, one from each gauntlet back.

Towering above the prostrate Gilmour, Nicolenko recoiled his right hand and swiftly struck, piercing the agent’s left shoulder and penetrating the protective outer layers of his haz suit. As Gilmour’s helmet reverberated with screams of pain, Nicolenko repeated with his left arm, then extracted both, allowing the wounded agent to writhe on the sphere in front of the lieutenant, who watched in grotesque amusement.

“Dddddddddddddiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

lllllllliiiiiikkkkkkkkeeeeee IIIIIIIIIIIIII hhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaavvvvvvvvvvvv iiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmmmaaaaaagggggggiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnneeeeddddddddd

ffffffffffffffooooooorrrrrrrrrrrr ssssooooooo

llllllllooooooooooooonnnnnnnggggggg!!”

Nicolenko grinned like a cat ready to pounce on his battered prey. Crouching down, Nicolenko snatched Gilmour’s left arm and exposed his chest and torso, then, using his right gauntlet, lifted Gilmour’s helmet and the adjacent locking rings underneath. Nicolenko recoiled once more with his right talon and lunged for the agent’s unprotected upper chest.