The Alignment Ingress (11 page)

The doors that once stood here weren’t designed to keep something out. They were here to keep something in.

Conrad had already passed under the archway into the small rotunda beyond, and Hank decided to keep his epiphany to himself for now as they confronted the choice of two tunnels before them.

“Lady or the tiger, Hank?”

Hank looked at the tunnel to their left. It was a jagged crack, barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through. The tunnel to their right, on the other hand, was wide and smooth, the dirt packed with fresh bootprints.

The choice had been made for them.

“They beat us to the mines, Conrad.”

“The Queen of Sheba’s miners, or your friends Smith and Chen from Strategic Explorations?”

“Probably both. They’ll be waiting. It’s going to be ugly. Check your weapons.”

“Wait,” Conrad told him, and pointed his light up at a carving above the tunnel. “Hebrew inscriptions.”

“Can you read them, or do we need your girlfriend Sister Serghetti?”

“I don’t need her for this.” Conrad frowned. “It’s from Solomon, King of Israel.”

“What does it say?”

Conrad read it aloud. “Let us search out and examine ourselves, and turn back to the Lord.”

Hank saw something wrong on Conrad’s face. “What is it?”

“This is a verse in the Book of Lamentations, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple,” Conrad said. “But Lamentations was written more than three centuries after the time of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. So this warning here is either lamenting something that won’t happen for hundreds of years, or it’s referring to something in the past that we don’t know about. Something that happened to the Queen of Sheba and her people.”

“Whatever, it’s a warning,” Hank said, unconcerned. “A monster myth. Like that sign over the gates of hell in Dante’s poem that says ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’”

“Something like that, Hank.”

Hank put on a brave face and grinned. “Then what are we waiting for? If we’re lucky, Smith and his goons are already extra crispy, and all the gold and XM here are ours for the taking.”

NIANTIC LINKS

Luizi Crater

A
s they made their way down the big tunnel, weapons at the ready, Conrad could practically hear the sweet, soothing voice of Serena Serghetti in his head, as if she were teaching a school of African children in God’s great outdoors.

Enter through the narrow gate, little ones. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.

“Hank, maybe we’ve made a mistake,” he started to say when Hank cut him off.

“Shhh. Listen.”

There was a woman’s shriek in the distance, from somewhere deep and far below.

Hank bolted, and Conrad had to run to keep up with him, slaloming through shiny metal stalagmites to the lip of a gallery that spiraled down the side wall of an even larger subterranean structure.

Conrad couldn’t believe what he saw down below. He glanced over at Hank, who saw it too. Hank’s lips were moving, but if he said anything, Conrad didn’t hear him. He didn’t need to. Hank’s expression in the ghastly light was all he needed to see. Words could not have been more articulate.

Several stories below was some kind of cosmic lava pool. It reminded Conrad of the crater at Mount Nyiragongo, except it glowed an unnatural fluorescent purplish-red and crackled with shocks of energy.

Conrad asked in a hushed tone, “Is that the classified stuff you weren’t supposed to talk about?”

“Dark XM... Chaotic matter... Pick your name,” Hank said. “It’s only been theory until now. I saw it in Afghanistan, but I had no idea what it was at the time.”

Now and again a tesla-like bolt would streak out of the throbbing mass, and in the toxic light they saw what appeared to be demonic shapes at the side of the pool.

Devil figures.

“What the hell?” Conrad asked.

Hank replied, “You got that right.”

“What are those things?”

“Mercs from Strategic Explorations,” Hank told him. “They’re kitted out in the latest in extremo-ware. I’m guessing the tall one is Smith and the short one is Chen. If you get a chance to kill them, do it. Apparently, you get a drive-on right through the pearly gates to the top level of heaven.”

Conrad could see how the asbestos clean suits, oxygen hooks and guns at the waists and hanging off the shoulders conspired to make the mercs look more mythological than human.

Now, through the strobing light, Conrad watched in horror as the tall one Hank said was Antoine Smith gestured to two of his guards, who pushed a helpless African woman, hands tied and legs flailing, into the pulsating pool.

“Did you see that?” Conrad almost shouted in Hank’s ear. “Who was that woman? Where did they nab her?”

Hank shook his head. “Some villager from somewhere.”

Conrad said, “It almost looked like a sacrifice.”

“Yeah, to science,” Hank said. “They’re testing the effects of dark XM on humans, and we’ve already seen what that looks like.”

Conrad looked down at the bubbling cauldron. For a ghastly moment, the woman’s shape flashed green in the sludge, and then a wispy vapor rose upward like a spectre.

Conrad trained his M16. “Those bastards die.”

“Not yet,” Hank cautioned. “If you miss, they get us. They get us, they get out of here with dark XM. Ergo, end of world. So let’s pick our shots carefully.”

At that moment, the short guy—Chen—took out his phone and began tapping intently on it. His face glowed in blue and green.

“He’s making a call?” Conrad said. “Can he even do that down here? What do you think, pizza delivery or instructions from Dr. Evil?”

“No, he’s opening the Ingress app,” Hank said, pulling out his Nexus.

“More games?”

“This ain’t no game, Conrad. Take cover. When he resonates that thing, it could go bad.”

“How bad?”

“I don’t understand how or why it works, but I do understand what’s about to happen,” Hank explained. “We’re in an Anomaly.”

“A what?”

“A transdimensional vortex where exotic matter meets chaotic matter. In nature they’re kept apart. Think of it as dry ice hitting water. Look.”

Conrad watched as a glowing shield enveloped Chen and Smith at the edge of the black lake.

“You’re seeing something that’s usually visible only to scientific instruments like the Ingress scanner,” Hank told him, like this freak show was some great honor.

Chen deployed a resonator. The dark XM lava pool erupted. Dark matter rose into the air, grasping to take living form. Order and disorder tore at each other. For a brief instant, large tentacles of chaotic matter lashed out everywhere, while lightning blasted from the resonator.

Small clusters of XM drifted from the portal and burst in the air, leaving glowing flecks of plasma on the rotunda and wall. A flying drop sizzled past Hank, who watched as the spattered substance disappeared, leaving a smudge of gold.

So the dark XM creates the gold. We found the philosopher’s stone.

“Get ready for a fight, Conrad. They’re about to find out that we’re here.”

B
efore Conrad could hear Hank’s last word, a shockwave rocked the caverns. Conrad ducked for cover as the great XM pool erupted, its limbs of dark energy writhing. Exotic goo whipped out from the chaos, splattering him across the face. He expected it to burn like acid, but it didn’t. It simply tingled. Then he felt something like a pebble in his mouth and spit it out into his hand.

It was a tooth.

It had fallen out. He felt another spasm in his gums, and now a second tooth fell out, dropping loosely to the ground.

What’s happening to me?

“Hank!” Conrad shouted.

Hank was busy firing on Smith’s extremo-ware goons, who had now spotted them. He trained his sights on Chen, who was trying to deploy another resonator. The bullet was lost in the eruption of energy.

Hank!

Conrad pulled out his phone and peered into the camera. He started as he looked at himself on the screen. His right eye was no longer blue. The iris had dispersed into a galaxy-like spiral of red specks.

Something was horribly wrong, he knew with a stab of shock. And yet he could still see himself in the mirror through both eyes.

The phone shattered from a gunshot to his left. Conrad turned to see several figures running through a gateway. He hadn’t noticed it before. Even in the lambent, strobing light, he recognized Colonel Zawas and his handful of surviving troops.

Conrad fired off a round from his M16, taking one down. Two others fired back at him, raking the wall of stone over his head. The other Egyptians turned their attention to the SE mercs below.

It had just turned into a three-way furball. Total bedlam.

Antoine Smith methodically fired bursts of lethality throughout the stygian cavern. Chen deployed another resonator, adding to the cosmic chaos. Tentacles of energy whipped, lightning flashed and metal rained throughout the chamber. Hank deployed his shield, but it was too late. Conrad saw Hank’s body get splattered with glowing bits of chaos like a fluorescent leopard. When he turned to shout at Conrad, Conrad’s horror grew. Hank’s eyes glowed red, his face was an unnatural gray, and liquid metal dripped down his face.

Conrad said, “You look like a damn monster.”

“You should see yourself, Conrad. Welcome to hell! Get ready to run!”

If Conrad hadn’t believed in transdimensional matter before this, he did now. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to deploy a power cube. I don’t think we’re going to make it. I think we’re going to die. But it might counter the dark XM.”

“You said a power cube almost blew up CERN!” Conrad shouted. “You said it’s unstable as hell.”

Hank nodded. “That’s what I’m hoping.”

All of a sudden a glowing object materialized and flickered before them. A floating cube, relentlessly pulsing in and out of their dimension. It looked like a videogame object, but it was very real.

This can’t be the end. It wasn’t the end. Not for the Queen of Sheba. There had to be a way.

And suddenly he knew.

“I know where to go!” Conrad shouted. “Follow me!”

In the poisonous strobing light, Conrad could barely see his way out, and he couldn’t see either Zawas’ men or the mercs below. Multiple resonators crashed, tentacles and shocks radiated out. The air was electric. Everything tingled.

Conrad charged toward the entrance of the tunnel, maybe 50 meters away up the dirt ramp. Bullets whistled through the air. Hank ran after him, covering his back and firing at the area where the Zawas troops had been and then blind-spraying at the mercs, now obscured by the chaos of tentacles, lightning and metallic mist.

Conrad stumbled on a short stalagmite and nearly impaled himself on another. Hank tripped over him and slid along the metallic and rock ramp, nearly falling over.

The power cube began to pulse critical behind them, turning everything bright.

Conrad glanced at Hank, who grinned and said, “We’re not gonna make it...”

“Move your ass!” Conrad barked with a whistle through his remaining teeth.

“Save your breath,” Hank said when they made it out the tunnel into the small rotunda behind the great arch with the two pillars and missing doors. “I can’t understand a damn thing you’re saying.”

Conrad pointed to the inscription above the tunnel they had just emerged from. “Turn back to the Lord,” he said, enunciating the words with precision, and then ran into the narrow tunnel on the opposite wall.

“Of course!” Hank said, sprinting behind him as the narrow, jagged walls seemed to close in.

Conrad tore his shoulder on a protruding rock and realized he had actually left a chunk of his flesh behind. He was completely breaking down at some biological and even molecular level.

Then the walls seemed to part to reveal an octogonal cavern with a floor of gold. On either side were two great sculpted cherubs, also made of pure gold. The two cherubs faced one another, their outstretched wings touching each other and forming a canopy over Conrad and Hank in the center.

“They replicated the Ark!” Hank shouted, as flashes of light seemed to swirl through the gold around them. “This is the tech Solomon gave the Queen of Sheba! Lightning in a box!”

Unfortunately, it was a box. As Conrad looked up and beyond the wings of the cherubs he could see the roof of the chamber. There was no opening, no outlet, no escape.

All of a sudden the world went white as the power cube Hank had set exploded in the distance.

For just a moment, Conrad thought he saw an entity standing in the cube flash. It was 15 meters tall. Not human, but definitely a living being.

Conrad felt his body disintegrating into bits and swept into a twister of energy, rising up into a tunnel of light. At the end of the tunnel he saw the face of an angel, and when she pressed her soft lips to his own, he recognized Serena Serghetti. Then everything faded away in an explosion of blinding white.

I
t was raining when Conrad awoke in the middle of the jungle, flat on his back and surrounded by eight metallic pillars. The raindrops on his face felt…cleansing. He sat up and saw Hank on the ground about ten meters away, groaning. His eyes opened and they looked, well, less green.

Conrad put his finger to his mouth and felt a full row of teeth. “How do I look, Hank?”

“Like hell.”

Conrad breathed a sigh of relief. “Did what I think happened actually happen?”

“Yeah,” said Hank, slowly sitting up. “I think we just got teleported a few hundred miles. This portal must be connected to the one under the crater.”

At that moment there were loud voices coming from the jungle. Leaves parted and out came none other than Serena Serghetti and a party of officials from the Sudanese government.

She was looking straight at him, and Conrad suddenly doubted it was for the first time that day. “Are these the men, Garamba?” she asked a tall, slight man.