Cosmic Rift (15 page)

“Why?” Wertham replied, a cruel edge to his voice. “They didn’t let me go—why should I do any different for them?”

As he spoke, another great swathe of the perfect grass winked out of existence, leaving in its place a chasm down into the guts of Authentiville. Sounds of shrieking filled the air.

Chapter 18

Its name was the Doom Furnace and it had lurked beneath Authentiville for almost a thousand years, like a sleeping creature of myth waiting to be reawakened. Wertham the Strange strode across its high catwalks to the song of screaming, staring down into the seemingly bottomless chasm that was the Furnace’s kiln. Around him, park-goers were still falling, dropping into its abysslike depths, unable to foresee where the narrow catwalks would materialize as the ground beneath them winked out of existence. Only Wertham saw that, thanks to the Devil Rod.

Up ahead, a child stood on the narrow walkway, staring down into the darkness, screaming for his mother.

“Your mother’s dead, child,” Wertham said as he approached. “But whatever’s left of her body will be recycled to make something new and wondrous, a whole new complexity of human.”

“Wh-wha—?” the child stuttered, unable to comprehend the man’s strange words.

Wertham sneered and slapped the child across the head, knocking him so hard that he slipped from the narrow walkway and disappeared into the dark. “Children,” he muttered. “They ask for everything to be laid out for them, and yet they still don’t understand.”

Down below him, just a few hundred years before, fires had burned as weapons of cosmic destruction were forged and perfected. Great burning pools of lava had been tamed and utilized to make the greatest weapons that man would ever know. Each of those weapons had been based upon the designs that Jack’s people had found—great Annunaki warships and flyers, mobile cannons that used sonics to fell whole populations or to superheat water so that it turned to steam so swiftly that it burned the flesh from their enemies’ bodies in the blink of a now-lidless eye.

Like so much of Authentiville, the Doom Furnace was hidden beneath the streets, way down in the guts of the platform upon which the city was balanced. Through a careful manipulation of quantum mechanics, those guts extended almost infinitely, creating a tesseract of near-limitless space in which to house the great industrial complex on which the city relied. The food its citizens ate, the water they drank, even the air they breathed—all of it was produced beneath the city itself, vast plantations and moisture farms and air farms located beneath the streets and manned by the Gene-agers who never tired and never questioned.

But this part had been sealed off, all entryways blocked, disguised and covered by Pacifist Park and its illusory idyll. A hardlight projection of quietude paving over the glorious industry of war.

“How long has it been?” Wertham asked, taking in a deep breath of dead air. He asked the question of the skies around him, as if interrogating the cosmos itself.

“It’s a thousand years since Jack shut this down,” Ronald said. “He did it after his—”

“Yes, I recall why he did it,” Wertham interrupted. “To think that the man would halt the Doom Furnace like that, when so much could have been built here.” He looked down into the vertiginous chasm, spying the glint of smart-metal far below where the old warships waited, mothballed for a millennium.

Ronald watched as Wertham closed his eyes, consulting and manipulating those hidden shapes he had spoken of time and again, twisting the batonlike device in his hand.

Below them, deep in the bowels of tesseract space, a flame lit, igniting the ancient forge for the first time in ten centuries.

Wertham sneered as the great industrial machine came to life around and beneath him, the nightmare shapes of warships lit in bloodred by the burning flames of the forge, weapons of delusion waiting in the shadows. The Doom Furnace was operational once more, its song of war reverberating through the streets around Pacifist Park.

* * *

M
INUTES
LATER
,
R
ONALD
’
S
mule pulled up at the service entrance of the palace to disgorge its two occupants. They entered the vast kitchen of the palace like a storm rolling in from sea, brushing past the cooks and waiting staff as they hurried toward their destiny.

Identifying the head chef on duty, Ronald guided his chair over to him and addressed him with authority.

“The king?” Ronald demanded of the head chef. “Where is he?”

The chef wore a towering white headpiece within which a thermal gauge constantly informed him of fluctuations in ambient temperature that might affect his culinary masterpieces. The information was fed from the hat straight to his brain, bypassing any need for him to look away from his hot and cold creations.

“Where?” Ronald repeated, grabbing the chef by his lapels and dragging him down to his level in the chair.

“The king left,” the chef stuttered. The chef always knew of the king’s movements, for it was his responsibility to feed the man—and some would say that this, in itself, was the most important job in the whole kingdom. “In the company of the visitors. I don’t know where.”

“And the queen?” Ronald snarled.

“In the throne room,” the head chef replied, wide-eyed. “She requested a small meal of nutritional exactitude, Your Honor.”

“I remember where the court is,” Wertham assured his accomplice. “Let us surprise her with a little dessert to go with her nutritional request. Something—semilethal.”

The head chef watched bemused as Wertham the Strange exited the kitchens via the service elevator, rocketing up through the levels of the palace to the royal court.

The head chef let out the breath he had been holding as Ronald left the room. He wondered not what this augured, but rather what meal would be best to serve in its light. But then, as a Gene-ager, the head chef was given to little in the way of free thought.

* * *

A
T
AMBER
.

The color swirled around their bodies, running over muscles made tight by their time in the cramped cockpits of the Manta craft. It felt warm and relaxing, like the embrace of a familiar lover.

“You know, Your Highness,” Kane remarked, “this is just what I needed.”

“Me, too,” Grant agreed.

It was remarkable, really. Both men had seen a Chalice of Rebirth before—several times, in fact—but to find one so large and so readily accessible to any inhabitant of this incredible city was beyond their wildest imaginings.

The Chalice of Rebirth utilized nano technology to re-create tissue cells, replenish blood and otherwise repair damage to the human body. Kane had been dunked in one of the pools by accident not so long ago, and the effect had been to repair a gunshot wound he had sustained, as well as accidentally mixing his DNA with that of an alien chip of rock embedded in his eye. The experience had affected his comprehension for a while, leaving him with memory echoes of another creature.

Here and now, there was no damage to repair. Neither Kane nor Grant had been wounded; neither man needed this fix. Yet they had agreed to join King Jack in the pool as a show of solidarity.

Around them, at the edges of the rippling pool, a dozen Gene-agers waited patiently, ready to fulfill the orders of any Authentiville citizen without question.

“I try to take a dip once a week,” Jack explained. “Keeps the old aches at bay and helps the mind relax.”

“I dunno,” Grant said. “Seems to me you have a pretty relaxed setup here anyway. In the palace, I mean.”

King Jack looked at him, his clear blue eyes amused. “You’re still worrying about the Gene-agers aren’t you, son? They won’t hurt you.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about,” Grant told him. “Any society predicated on slavery falls apart sooner or later. That’s a historical fact.”

“That’s
your
history,” Jack told him, “not ours. Things are different up here. We bred the Gene-agers to perform the tasks we require and they’ve done so for as long as most people here can remember. What’s more, they’ll keep doing so after you’re long gone. Things don’t change. We’re a captured sliver of time out here, away from the petty squabbles of the surface people. And that’s the way we like it.”

“Things always change,” Grant said, but he tried to make a joke of it, splashing the amber liquid over himself as he dunked his head under the surface.

* * *

T
HE
ROYAL
COURT
was quiet, its functionaries going about their business in near silence. Queen Rosalind sat alone, staring into her hand mirror, tracing the age lines that marred her face. Using the Happening had taken a lot out of her, and neither she nor Jack had told the strangers how much of the user’s energy the Happening drained in its functioning. There were things one didn’t share with strangers.

Like much of the Annunaki technology on which it was based, the device employed an organic dimension that meant it needed to bond and engage with the user before functionality was achieved. Roz had been kept physically young by the pools of regeneration, but using the machine was truly a young person’s game. In future, she reminded herself, she should leave its function to the genetically manipulated staff who were grown to use it.

“It’s a terrible thing, getting old,” she remarked to herself. But it was something the people of Authentiville need never fear, not with the Ageless Pools serving their needs.

It was at that moment that the figures appeared in the colossal chamber, flitting across the surface of her mirror as she brushed at her neon hair. She spun in her throne, turning to see who they were.

“Ronald—?” she began before gasping. The other figure was familiar to her, as well, and his appearance here brought with it a sense of dread.

“Well?” Wertham the Strange demanded, wielding the silver-colored rod in his hands. “Aren’t you going to welcome me back to the palace, Your Majesty?”

“Get out, Wertham,” Rosalind spat out, rising from her grand throne. “You shouldn’t be here. You should be...”

“What? Imprisoned?” Wertham challenged her. “Imprisoned for my expansive ideas? Is that how you remember it, even after all these centuries? Or perhaps it is the centuries that have made you misremember so much, casting me in the role of villain in your simple play.”

Around them, the people of the royal court were clearing the room, sentries marching to see what the fuss was. But before they could do anything, Wertham waved the silver rod he carried at them and, as one, they halted in place, their eyes losing focus.

Rosalind’s dark eyes fixed on the rod that Wertham was holding in his hands, and her heart sank as she realized what it was. “What is that?” she demanded. “You don’t think for a moment that you can...”

“Replace the king,” Wertham finished. “I’ve had seven hundred years to think on that fact, ever since your husband incarcerated me for suggesting we reach beyond the borders of this little idyll in the stars. And you know what? Yes, I think I can replace the king. But I won’t. No, I’ve promised that role to another.”

“Wertham, no,” Rosalind pleaded. “You’re unwell. Your mind...it’s...”

Wertham held up the proxy God Rod that he had created, tooled from the bar that held his bed together, worked with circuitry that had been smuggled into his prison over the period of a decade, stripped and repatched, so that now it worked in a manner only his fertile mind could possibly have conceived. “It begins this day,” he announced. “The Era of New Gods.”

Wild energies exploded from the false God Rod, burning a hole in the air, fizzing with their barely restrained fury. The sentries remained unmoving, their Gene-ager minds idling as they awaited new commands.

Rosalind gasped as she finally realized the enormity of what the device meant. With it, Wertham could control all of Authentiville, including every atom of salvaged alien tech that had been put to use there.

“Today, your whole world changes,” Wertham told her as he strode across the room toward the twin thrones.

Rosalind stood, blocking Wertham’s path, but he shoved her aside. She hissed like a cat as she was knocked against the side of her towering throne. Then Wertham slipped the silver rod into place in the mount between the thrones, guiding it inside the circles of gold where King Jack’s God Rod belonged. For a moment, Wertham’s rod glowed with sinister promise.

“Today, everyone’s world changes,” Wertham snarled as the base of the holder linked with his false God Rod, firing the palace’s power through its sleek lines. Now the throne was Wertham’s to control.

All around Authentiville the lights began to dim.

Chapter 19

Kane and Grant climbed from the pool.

“Got to admit, I feel refreshed,” Kane said as he reached for his clothes.

Grant agreed. “Yeah, nothing beats a dip in the nano-soup,” he said with a laugh.

As they spoke, both men noticed something almost subliminally, and Grant was the one who gave it voice first. “Did the lights just flicker?”

“I...think they did,” Kane agreed hesitantly.

A few paces across from them, King Jack was being helped back into his armored garb by two of the Gene-agers while a third proffered his freshly laundered cloak.

“Your Highness,” Kane began respectfully. “Do the lights often dim in this place?”

The king ran his left arm down the sleeve and into the golden glove of his armor. “They shouldn’t,” he said, bewildered. “Why do you...?”

Before the monarch could finish, the lights faded a second time. Only this time, it was more pronounced as the illumination slipped to darkness for fully three seconds.

“Now, that time I saw it,” Jack admitted as the lights came back on with no discernible hesitation. “This is most peculiar. I have never known the illuminants to fail like that.”

“How do they work?” Grant asked, securing his boots before reaching for his duster. The long coat was made of a Kevlar/Nomex weave, making it both flame retardant and able to deflect bullets. At that moment, Grant felt suddenly in need of the shield it provided.

“They’re a semiliving ecosystem that runs behind the walls of most of our buildings,” King Jack explained as he stomped across to the nearest wall. Beside him, the three Gene-agers kept pace, still holding his cape and God Rod, as well as one entire sleeve of his armor.

Jack stood at the wall, concern on his features as he ran the fingers of his ungloved hand along it. It was clear that he was searching for something, and in an instant he had found what he was looking for—a hidden panel. Three feet square, the wall panel opened on a hinge, revealing what appeared to be a growth of lichen beneath. The lichen glowed, providing the illumination. The Cerberus explorers had seen something similar some months back when they had found themselves exploring the Ontic Library, a grand storehouse of Annunaki knowledge located under the Pacific Ocean.

“Doesn’t need feeding,” the king explained, checking over the mossy growth. “Takes all it requires from the air. Place like this, with the pool—it’s ideal. Plenty of moisture in the air. Even if the lights fail elsewhere in the kingdom, this, of all places, should be immune to a problem.”

Kane was running over what Jack told him. “If this stuff is—what-chu-call-it?—semi-alive, then what would cause it to shut down like that?”

Still probing the moss with his bare hand, Jack shook his head. “Now that, son, is a very good question.”

Jack took the God Rod from the servant before running it swiftly over the lit wall. As he did so, the Gene-ager sagged, as did the others still holding segments of King Jack’s armor.

“What happened?” Kane asked.

All around, the Gene-agers were shutting down, each of them bowing head to chest the way that King Jack had demonstrated earlier.

“Are you doing that?” Grant asked warily.

“Not me,” the king admitted. He sounded worried.

As he spoke, the open wall panel flickered and went dark. All around the room, other walls switched to darkness along with the ceiling panels. Worried voices came now from the pool behind them, asking what was going on. The only glow remaining was from the golden rod of energy in the king’s hand.

“This is bad,” King Jack muttered as he ran the glowing God Rod before the open wall.

“Your doing?” Kane asked.

“No,” Jack stated. “And what’s more, it can’t be anyone else’s. Not without access to the God Rod. And there’s only one of those.”

* * *

D
OMI
VISIBLY
FLINCHED
as the lights dimmed in the water arboretum of the palace. There was still light in the vast room—a line of skylights set in the roof let through the multicolored glow of the warp—but it felt suddenly gloomy and dangerous.

“What’s going on?” Brigid asked, getting to her feet.

Domi shook her head. “I’ve not been here long, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “The lights don’t even dim with nightfall.”

Does a place like this even have nightfall? Brigid wondered. An experienced fighter, she had adopted a combat stance, keeping her center of gravity low, wary of an attack. Her emerald eyes scanned the darkness within the arboretum, the awe-inspiring fountains standing in thick shadow at points around the chamber.

Domi was on her feet, too, sniffing at the air, her ruby eyes shifting right and left as she searched for the source of the sudden loss of light. “Something’s happening,” she said. “Something bad. Just like the queen said.”

“There’s bad and there’s bad,” Brigid replied as she led the way through the room at a trot.

Domi kept pace with her and in a moment the two women were back at the tall, open doorway through which they had entered this wing of the palace. Through the door they saw that the whole palace had been thrown into darkness. The walls and ornate light fixtures had lost their glow, leaving the interior of the palace in thick shadow.

“It’s you, right?” Domi whispered, adopting a position just behind Brigid.

“What?” Brigid whispered back.

“Wherever you go, trouble follows,” Domi teased.

Even in the diffuse light coming from the skylights, Brigid could see the glint of Domi’s teeth as the feral girl smiled. Brigid smiled back.

“We better check things out,” Brigid said. “Find out where the queen is in this...power blackout. I have a feeling we may not like the answer.”

Domi agreed, nodding her head resignedly. The two Cerberus teammates had infiltrated too many places and seen too many things to believe that this was simple happenstance.

* * *

S
EEING
HER
CHANCE
, Queen Rosalind began to run, scampering away from the twin thrones as the lights of the palace flickered and died. The only light in the throne room now came from the imitation God Rod, a sparking upright line between the thrones as energy coruscated across its metal surface.

With alarming speed, Wertham reached out and grabbed her, snagging her flowing blue tresses and bringing her down to her knees with a whiplike gesture. Her capes spread around her as she crashed to the hard floor.

Queen Rosalind shrieked as Wertham dragged her up the few steps and back to the towering thrones. She could hardly keep up with him as he tugged her hair, kept slipping on the polished floor and dropping down to her knees. But he would not slow down.

“Let go of me, Wertham,” the queen yelled. “What you’re doing is insanity!” The queen’s words echoed across the throne room.

Without slowing his pace, Wertham glared at her, revealing his teeth in a fearsome grin. “Isn’t that what you said about me at the trial, Roz? Didn’t you call me insane then?”

Wertham slung the queen back onto her throne as though discarding trash. He paced along the steps of the dais, eyes growing wider as he examined the empty throne of the king. It had changed since he had last seen it: the filigree was more delicate while the thrones themselves were more sturdy, larger and more imposing. Ceremony again.

“Wertham...” Roz pleaded again, but Wertham shot her a cruel look and she sank into silence, but only for a moment.

Ronald glided closer, bringing himself to a halt at the foot of the tiny flight of steps that led to the thrones.

Queen Rosalind lay sprawled in her seat, clutching at her scalp where Wertham had pulled her hair. She warily eyed the false God Rod that Wertham had put into the space vacated by King Jack’s own device. The rod was glowing brightly, fluctuating with powerful energy. But to Rosalind’s eyes, the energy spewing from the rod looked wrong. It was a darker color than King Jack’s, full of purples, indigos and sickly yellows, like the changing colors of a bruise.

“What have you done?” Roz choked, barely able to say the words.

“My
God Rod,” Wertham said, settling into the king’s throne. He looked uncomfortable, squirming there like a child. “I made it with all the little forgotten pieces that were left behind. Ronald helped me acquire them.”

Roz shot a look at Ronald as he glided over in his hover chair. “Ronald? Is this true?”

“Nothing will change very much,” Ronald told her. “Not for you. You’ll still be queen, but the kingdom you oversee will be bigger—much, much bigger.”

“What are you talking about?” the queen demanded, pulling herself up in her throne.

“Wertham had the idea,” Ronald explained. He maneuvered his chair up the steps until he was in line with the thrones, sitting beside the queen. “We’ve spent our lives hidden in this rift, peeking out only to scavenge before we go running back to our little bolt-hole in the ether. That’s Jack’s fault, Your Highness.”

“He’s still your king,” Rosalind reminded him.

“Not for much longer,” Wertham said in a singsong voice as his hand played across the hilt of the silver God Rod. He closed his eyes, feeling the energies in flux and guiding them with his mind. He could see the hidden shapes, and he still remembered the four extra senses he had discovered that had granted him a fuller appreciation of the world.

“What are you planning to do?” Rosalind demanded.

“Two kingdoms, working in tandem,” Ronald said as Wertham sank into a trance, communing with his God Rod. “One here, functioning as it always has, generating new uses for the old technology...”

“And one down there,” Wertham interjected, pointing to the room’s polished floor, “on the surface of the planet.” Open, his eyes glowed with a sickly green luminescence, the force of the palace energies now running through him.

Rosalind gasped when she saw Wertham’s eyes. “And what?” she spat out. “You’d rule them, you lunatic?”

“Not me,” Wertham confirmed. “Not both, anyway. Ronald here will be taking Authentiville to new and greater heights. He’s been doing the king’s development work for the past three centuries anyway. And yet, Jack never repaired his ruined limbs.”

“He couldn’t,” Roz began. “He tried but the neural pathways proved...”

Wertham hushed her with a look. “And me—I’ll be down there among the old race, putting things together the way your precious, short-sighted husband should have done a thousand years ago when he had the chance. Instead of falling asleep at the tiller and squandering all our marvelous advances.” Before Rosalind could say a word, Wertham held up a hand and corrected his statement. “All
my
marvelous advances,” he growled.

Rosalind looked shocked. “You mean—to kill the surface people?”

Wertham shrugged. “We’ll sort the wheat from the chaff,” he said calmly, “and bring the old and short-lived human race up to scratch. They’ll wear my face and live only to chant my name. Perhaps I’ll train them to sing my name so loud that even you will hear it, out here in the cosmic rift.”

Roz looked from one man to the other, unable to believe what she was hearing. It was a coup. “And which of you will be the king?” she asked, her voice taking on a taunting tone. “The madman or the cripple?”

Ronald lashed out, striking the queen across the face so hard that she sank down in her seat, horrified at what Ronald—trusted aide and advisor to the throne—had just done.

Wertham took her goading more calmly. “A kingdom for each of us,” he said.

Roz wiped at her mouth, tasting blood there. “The people will never accept it. They love Jack.”

“Jack will be dead inside of an hour,” Wertham assured her. “The Gene-agers will see to that.”

“No, you can’t!” the queen shrieked.

Wertham looked at her, his eyes afire with that terrible green flame. “I control them now,” he trilled. “They perform my will. I designed this system, remember? Ultimately, it answers to me.”

“You can’t,” Rosalind repeated, sobbing.

Wertham ignored her. “And as for the people of Authentiville,” he said, “they will accept it because we shall have a continuity of ruler.
You,
my dear Queen Rosalind, shall be at Ronald’s side once we put things in motion.”