The Spaces in Between (17 page)

The denizens of that Universe didn’t notice it, because the effects only lasted a second. The blast pierced through the weakened skin of the Universe and it popped like a soap bubble. Now this was not the end of that Universe. They are far hardier things otherwise there would be far fewer of them. The Universes float upon the violent seas of chaos and are always crashing into one another.

This is something more akin to a system crash, and the Multiverse immediately goes to work rebooting it. Now a very special function runs when a Universe is rebooted. Everything is restarted at the exact moment the Universe when down, but it runs a quick diagnostic to make sure there is nothing that would bring the Universe down again. One of the things on the top of that list is matter from another Universe. So while this Universe is being put back together anything found from another Universe is put back in its proper place.

16

“So our John Doe has finally woke up?” a pretty red head in a nurse uniform said. She was probably a nurse, but sometimes it’s hard to tell in this day in age. Maybe she just robs the elderly.

“The hell am I?” Cameron muttered. He listened closely trying to figure out what the song the machines were trying to hum, and groping in the darkness of his mind to recollect a strange dream. There was something about him being in the desert. Was it on a horse with no name? No, but there were many nameless things. Or rather he had no name for them.

“You just arrived at Ephrata Community,” the nurse said with an accent that dragged out each word phonetically. “Right outside of Intercourse.”

“Oh, never on a first date…” Cameron replied.

“Intercourse,
Pennsylvania
. That must have been one hell of a costume party.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t remember? Well you’ve been quite a medical mystery. A couple found you in a pirate costume lying unconscious on the side of Route 740. You didn’t have any I.D. on you. Remember your name at least?”

“Cameron Styles.” But at least a dozen other names came to mind as well.

“Specialists have been called from all over. The doctors are actually kind of scared of you.”

“Huh? Why?”
Did I bring back a disease…from wherever?

“You’ve haven’t shown any vitals signs, but you are clearly alive. Oh, you know you can open your left eye. You have one.”

His eye was instinctually clenched shut despite the removal of the eye patch.
You mustn’t open that eye unless it’s an emergency.
Cameron remembered why. “I’d rather not. How long was I out?”

“It’s really hard to tell since you don’t show any vitals, but you’ve only been here an hour or two now. Now I’m going to take a blood sample and go get a doctor.” She took a syringe from the instrument cart. “Those are some interesting tattoos by the way. The one on your chest and the one on your ankle. Are they in Arabic? What do they mean?” There was a pinch in his arm from the needle.

What Cameron read in her eyes was: Are you involved with any terrorists? Cameron glanced at the tattoo on his chest and then it all suddenly clicked.
How could I have been so stupid to forget all that? Is this what it was like for Warren Elliot?
Wait, the one on my ankle?

“What the hell are you?” the nurse gasped. There was another pinch in his arm.

You’re not going to get anything. I’m a fucking ghost.

Hatred boiled in her eyes, and he could see her next actions clearly. It was the typical response to something unknown. Those on the bottom of the vibrational spectrum are always terrified by the things higher up – no matter what those things were. Angels don’t appear to people, because the average Joe freaks out and tries to kill it. So they stay higher up in vibration and communicate through inspiration or dreams.

The nurse raked the needle down Cameron’s arm and screamed: “Why is there no fucking blood?” This was the Intruder effect. It wasn’t as drastic as in another Universe, but it was there. She lunged for him again, and Cameron deflected her with a well-placed kick to the chest. He tried to connect to her mind, but he still failed at connecting to the Astral on a whole. He closed his right eye and opened the left. His eye with the blood red iris met her’s, and she fell to her knees in tears.

“You will go to sleep now,” Cameron instructed now sitting up in the bed. “And you will remember none of this.” The red aura Cameron could now see around her faded to a pale blue and she slumped to the ground.
I might have hit her a little too hard.
He concentrated on closing the eye again, but it took all his effort. Cutting through a steel bar with a pair of scissors was very similar task, but far easier to do.

His right eye opened again with a soft click in his eyelashes. He pulled his foot into his lap and gazed down at the markings on it. No doubt it was written in the Logos. He quickly committed it to memory. He hopped down from the bed to pick up the syringe from her limp hand. He placed his foot on the bed and scrapped through the skin until the word was disrupted. His connection to the Universe flooded back to him. The best translation he could come up with the word on his ankle was Anchor.

The Silver Chord to his body did not return, but he could feel the
Soulforge
calling to its rightful master. The Mehmet talisman peeled off his chest with ease. His tangibility faded, and he passed through the ceiling of the hospital then eventually the roof. He passed out of the hospital and into urban legend.

The vanishing patient was becoming a popular one in the Northeast.

17

After twenty minutes of sitting in the cabin Ryoma, using Cameron’s brain, concentrated on a certain gun. A graser, the kind that the archives in Cameron’s brain told him would contaminant the mechanical armors, but he didn’t fully grasp what that meant. This particular graser was sold to Cameron at an intergalactic garage sale…and it was in decent condition? He kept it in a drawer in the table.

Ryoma opened the drawer and found nothing in it. He closed it. He saw the graser in Cameron’s mind, felt its metallic touch, and it tasted…also metallic. He opened it again and the gun was there just as he had pictured it in his mind. Except the picture in his mind looked like crap. He completely forgot the dials needed to control the gaser’s output.

Suddenly Ryoma was not only one inside of Cameron’s head.
I step out for a minute and this is what happens.

Hey, I kept you alive!
Ryoma said.

Barely! Why the hell are my pants wet? All your various Gods, nature spirits, and revered ancestors damn you! What the hell have you been doing?

Well the entire brigade of Paladins has boarded the ship, which I couldn’t stop since I’m not you. So I thought what would you do?

And this is what you came up with?

I was going to shoot them with the gun.

The entire unit of the Paladins are storming the ship, and you’re planning just to shoot them with a graser that doesn’t work. Sure with a working one you could contaminate the armor, but only if you shot all twelve before they could fire the sonic disruptors. The corrupted armor can’t house pure spirits like them, but they’re so powerful just you couldn’t hold them off.

And what exactly would you do?
Ryoma tapped Cameron’s toes.

I wouldn’t do anything. Let’s just say that many of the ships electronics are powered by the same kind of gamma radiation. That just so happens to line that particular corridor. Now a sonic blast would be enough to say loosen one of those cords and irradiate them all. But why don’t we go ahead with your stupid plan anyway.

Cameron wrested control of his body away from Ryoma and stepped out of the sanctuary. The blast from the Paladins weapons was enormous and overkill. The pain was excruciating. A blood vessel exploded in Cameron’s eye. One of his teeth cracked – an incisor. Blood drizzled down from his ears and there was only silence. He was lifted off his feet and thrown down the hall.

The line above the Paladins’ head burst and radiation too high on spectrum to be seen leaked into the hallway. The blast had knocked Cameron clear of the contamination zone. The radiation changed the blessed metals of the armor too profane and purged the spirits within. Now this does not nullify all of the threat that is the Paladins. They are ascended masters and on the spiritual food chain they are more powerful than a god outside his domain. They are divine entities that only a larger divine entity can bind.

Cameron! Wake up!
Ryoma screamed in his head.

Cameron pulled himself up slowly. He staggered for a moment and lost his balance. If his equilibrium was a bank account he would be overdrawn by a million. He blurred for a moment and appeared good as new. The ship suddenly roared to life and cool air blew through the vents again. The
Soulforge
placed an N-force field around the gamma radiation leak, and pondered for a moment if that line was always there. A coincidence like this is child’s play to Cameron, but to create something from nothing that would require big magic.

Dread Pirate Cameron!
shouted St. Germaine where only those sensitive enough to hear things on the Astral could hear him.
Surrender to the will of the Ashtar Command, and turn yourself in peacefully!

From thin air the anchor talisman that had been branded on Cameron’s ankle appeared in Cameron’s hand dangling from a gold chain. The bodiless Paladins would have stopped in their tracks if they had any. He unsnapped a flask from his hip and opened it. He whispered words of power. First St. Germaine was sucked into the bottle followed by each and every one of his men.

It was simply a demon trap, but nothing that could hold twelve ascended masters without…modification. He hung the gold charm from around the mouth of the flask and closed it. He watched it a moment and when he was satisfied that it was working again he pocketed it. The exertion of using big magic was now beginning to set in on Cameron. His temples were throbbing and some jacktard seemed to have driven a needle through his right eye.

A large blue trapezoid stood down the hallway behind the dozen of abandoned mechanized suits of armor. Cameron sidestepped the armors and approached the trapezoid. The trapezoid was now shaking and a crack ran down the middle. He tapped it three times and it burst into millions of electric blue specks. He inhaled the particles, and his aura flared around him the same color for a moment. Sitting in the floor was the disease spirit Xibulba, free of the psychic prison.

Cameron shouted his name and sent the spirit chain through Xibulba’s abdomen.

He was beyond annoyed, beyond angry well into the realms of pissed off, and his headache only heightened this. If Xibulba made a sudden movement Cameron would undoubtedly take it out on him, but his real target was Harvey, the man in black. In the last twenty-four hours Cameron was killed, stranded with a hand me down spell, his property stolen, and his ship violated all by the man in black. This was an act of war and Cameron had every intention to bring it upon him.

Cameron knew as along as he still held the Mehmet talisman the man in black would come to him.

18

The man in black’s ship stayed shrouded in the Astral until the Paladins had cleaned out Cameron’s ship for him. He watched from a large screen in the bridge. Since his battle with Cameron he knew that Cameron was sitting on at least one more fragment of the Source Code. With the Mehmet talisman the man in black’s count will now be four; bless his alliance to the Old Ones.

The
Soulforge
remained dead, and the Ashtar ship broke their connection. The Ashtar ship vibrated into the Astral and vanished. The man in black’s ship
Hallow One
shifted back into the Physical, and glided across the cosmos like a Jack Rabbit vibrator. She was an Atlantean dreadnaught class starship, which was highly illegal for civilian use as it could fit the
Soulforge
in her cargo bays ten times over. She would have weapons to match, but there was a reason that neither the Ashtar Command nor the Atlantean government had noticed a rogue dreadnaught.

She had been decommissioned fifty years ago. All weapons, hyperspace, and sublight drives were all removed; they were now long obsolete anyway. Much in the way that an AK-47 is obsolete but is still illegal to own. The Old Ones lead the man in black to the ship, and for the low affordable price of his name, showed him how to refit it to become their church, and so it had remained for over thirty years now.

[“Now bring us the Logos,”] whispered the Old Ones. The man in black had never seen them directly, but he could always hear them loud and clear. Sometimes out of the corner of his eye he could spot one of them. A gnarled, gray hobbit of a man with large black eyes, but as soon as he knew what he was actually looking at the man would fade away.

The
Soulforge
remained centered in the screen during
Hallow One
’s slow approach. She rocked from an impact of something slamming into her shields, but not really her shields since the deflector arrays were five decades gone. Still the same forces that powered the ship also protected it.

“Bring something on screen!” the man in black screamed. A popular television program about a doctor that solves crimes despite his crippling lycanthropy (over half of them are his fault) broadcasted over the wireless came on. “Something relative to this situation!” The ship rocked from another impact. “And…record this.”

“In case of ship breach,” an attractive woman in a lavender mini-dress on screen said, “There are escape shuttles located at the front and rear of the dreadnaught. In the bridge and engines rooms lockers will open containing suits capable of surviving the rigors of space. Please secure your own suit before assisting-“

The ship rocked again. “Find out what is doing that!”

The automated systems on the ship were obsolete before the decommission. It was one of the major factors leading to this decision.