Hexad: The Chamber (29 page)

But that wasn't what was giving cause for concern, it was the fact that the entire massive space was bathed in sickly blue light, shining off every surface, lighting the black to blue in ever-increasing pulses in sync with the strobing and buzzing of the dome of The Chamber. It was speeding up too, rotating along its axis slightly faster. The gravity inside would have been getting uncomfortable by now.

"Sorry about this Tellan, I honestly didn't want to do this, but I hope I did. Can we get to the actual machine room that controls how this thing jumps? Did I already ask you to find it? See what we have to do?"

"You did young man, and I must tell you that this is far from how I do things. I'm The Caretaker, not your lackey."

Wow, he really is pretty annoyed by this. But if it saves our skin then I'll live with it.

"Sorry, I ran out of ideas. Things were getting desperate."

"So you told me, will tell me. Gosh, I really do dislike this time travel business immensely, it's why you were supposed to clear up all this nonsense."

"I know, I know. Now, the machine room?"

"Hang on, and stay close, it's pretty cramped where we need to be. I don't want anyone fusing into the machinery."

Amanda looked lost, unable to keep up. "Hey, what's happen—"

They jumped.

Please Explain

Time Unknown

"Can someone tell me what the hell is going on here?" shouted Amanda, her voice almost drowned out by the incredible noise of machinery that towered above them like crazed mechanical beasts.

Dale took a second to take in his surroundings, acutely aware of just how close they had come to ending up ground to pulp in the monstrous cogs that reached far up into the room. The place made sense — it wasn't as large as the cavern housing The Chamber — but it was still a ridiculously huge space, crammed full of machinery large and small.

Punching through much of it, probably after coming through a lot of bedrock for stability, was the central pole that secured The Chamber and from which the numerous bands stabilizing it emanated. Dale had thought them there merely for the purpose of spinning The Chamber, but once they'd realized it was a huge time machine in the waiting then the image in his mind held a different kind of information: as well as functional in terms of maintaining the spin, they were also the dials that could be set to make the co-ordinates for The Chamber to make its jump.

The smell of oil permeated everything, coating the inside of Dale's nostrils like petroleum jelly. The pole was thick with grease and the mess of machinery around them glistened with black oil. The dull metal moved relentlessly as it had for more years than Dale cared to think about.

Now they had to change it, and fast, before the whole thing came crashing down, or wiped them out of existence aligning itself.

"Dale! Answer me."

"Sorry," shouted Dale, face feeling like it was splitting apart, his voice and the pounding machinery ringing like a church bell that had been relocated to inside his skull. "There's no time, we have to do this now." Dale turned to Tellan. "Do you know how to change it?"

Tellan shook his head. "No, that's not what you asked me to do. You asked me to find where it was located and to come open the hatch. Now, if you will excuse me, I do have other matters to attend to." The Caretaker doffed his hat to Amanda, gave Dale a rather curt nod, and disappeared.

"Damn. Looks like it's just you and me kiddo." Dale had hoped Tellan would have known what to do, but it seemed like he'd had different ideas. What could have been more important than this? Dale supposed he probably didn't want to know.

"Dale, please?"

"Amanda, I jumped, or I will jump, and I went to Tellan's home, that horrible place, and asked him to come help. Well, he did, now it's down to us. Look, you're better at this than me, can you please take a look at the controls and figure out how we change where The Chamber is going to jump to? Do you think it still will, now I, you know, put Cray in that machine?"

"I don't know, probably, although if it's fluid from me that makes Hexads function, and this is one helluva Hexad, then it might just skew it a little... Or a lot."

Amanda eyed the machinery cautiously, then sidestepped around Dale so she could see what he'd been frowning at with such incomprehension. She stared at him like he was mad. It looked like a retro games table from the early eighties, like a Pac-Man machine gone rogue, all shiny dark glass, switches and even a roller ball.

Dale watched as Amanda touched the reflective glass and small images appeared on the screen, looking like icons for various apps. That was where the similarities ended though, it was nothing like the modern tablets and computers they were used to using, this was something else entirely. Amanda cautiously fiddled with the machine, the touch screen extremely sensitive and super-fast. As she tapped a few icons she smiled and Dale felt relief wash over him.

"You can figure it out? Can you send The Chamber, the damn Hexad or whatever it is, somewhere far away, and stop all this?"

"Sure, it's simple," said Amanda, fishing in her bag, pulling out a Hexad.

"What are you doing?"

"This is all just diagnostic stuff, more for the running of The Chamber than for time travel. But there is an interface, look." Amanda pointed at a simple depression at the top right of the angled glass, a hole the size of the base of a Hexad. Dale peered into it, seeing a series of gold connectors and a small criss-cross bump of metal right in the center — it matched the strange shape in the Hexad's base he'd always wondered about.

"Genius!" Dale kissed Amanda on the forehead and she smiled back at him, the hope in her eyes the same that Dale knew was showing in his.

"Let's do this," said Amanda, and placed her Hexad into the ring. It held fast with a metallic click, faint because of the surrounding machinery, but they heard it as they were practically on top of the Hexad they were peering at it so closely. It sunk slightly in the ring, then turned once, popped back up, and the diagnostics changed on the screen. Amanda glanced at them, then paid them no more mind.

She paused for a moment, thinking, then adjusted the concentric rings around the Hexad before letting go, shoulders relaxing once she seemed content with her settings.

A 6 flashed on the blue dome, and with a nod to each other Amanda placed her hand on the dome. Dale placed his on hers, and pressed down as he went, "Whooooooooooooooooooosh."

They jumped.

Seriously?

70 Years Past

"Okay, we have exactly five minutes to get out of here before we, well, before we can't."

"Um, okaaaaay. Why do I have a bad feeling about this Amanda? A very bad feeling."

"I might have panicked a little," said Amanda nervously, pulling the Hexad out of the ring. 5 blinked on the top.

Dale couldn't tell if they'd actually jumped anywhere, the machinery was still working, the room was the same, but the touch-screen interface was practically screaming at him, flashing a red warning symbol it was impossible to ignore: the universal red-bordered triangle with an exclamation mark in the center.

As they'd been touching the Hexad, and the Hexad was thus connected to everything else, then the whole lot had jumped with them, a feat so far removed from Dale's experience with jumping to date he wondered what else had come with them too.

The housing clearly had, so maybe his impression it was a man-made housing, maybe a hollowed out mountain that contained The Chamber, may just have been wrong. The whole lot had jumped with them, as well as the room that contained The Chamber.

"Bloody hell."

"Yeah, I know. Right? Come on, we don't have much time. Leave all your Hexads, and I mean all of them. This is it Dale, time to end this." Amanda dumped her bag, just threw it away like it was trash, not containing the most valuable commodity there had ever been in the entire history of countless universes, so Dale rather reluctantly did the same. All that was left was the Hexad in Amanda's hand, the 5 pulsing regularly.

"Let's move, now." Amanda grabbed Dale's hand and they ran for all they were worth, weaving through the cramped space, heading away from the controls, hoping, praying, that there was a simple exit to the room, and that they could get to it quickly.

"What date did you set?" panted Dale, weaving between the machinery, trying to keep hold of Amanda.

"August," said Amanda, glancing at him then looking away.

"Year?" Dale had a bad feeling.

"Nineteen forty five."

"Month?"

"August. Like I just said."

"And, ugh, the day?"
She wouldn't, would she?

"The sixth, all right?"

"You are not going to also tell me we are—"

"A door, there's a door. Quick, come on."

"Why don't we just jump, from in here?" asked Dale, dreading Amanda's answer to where they actually were.

"Because we can't. We have to know if The Chamber is destroyed, and we can't do that unless we watch. But I don't want to watch from here, do you?" Amanda reached the door first and turned a simple handle, opening up to a world more insane than anything Dale had experienced in what had become a rather terrifying life so far.

~~~

"You did, didn't you? You jumped us to bloody Hiroshima the day they drop Little Boy. Are you insane?"

"No, we have to make sure, we have to be certain that The Chamber is obliterated."

Dale looked around him. It was eerie, everything was still as it would have been. No buildings were burning, nothing had been bombed by more conventional means. He knew the history and knew that Hiroshima had never been targeted right up until the atomic bomb was deployed — the powers-that-be wanted to be able to evaluate its effects properly.

He knew that at the center of the explosion the heat had destroyed everything in a fairly small circumference, but the explosion itself had a much wider reach, not to mention the radiation that killed the survivors slowly and painfully.

"Are we right at the epicenter of this?" asked Dale, as they ran as fast and as far away as they could. Dale ignored the chaos that was happening all around them, caused by the sudden appearance of a huge edifice that was miles long, impossibly high, and had jumped right where many buildings were.

The further they got, the more Dale could see, and it was clear that many buildings were now fused through The Chamber and its support structure — from the outside nothing more than a series of gigantic boxes of different sizes, the rooms necessary for the maintenance of The Chamber itself. But The Chamber was devoid of the space it had occupied, it was exposed to the air and all the more impressive for seeing it out in the open. Parts of it were fused too, but the ceaseless momentum of the machinery was still turning the poles, ripping away the buildings it was fused to, turning them with it.

They kept running, both constantly turning back to see what was happening as they moved further away — however far they got through the maze of buildings they were still too close to really take in the magnitude of The Chamber and what made it spin.

"Not quite, no, but look, it's starting."

The machinery was groaning as it strained to support the pole that spun the Chamber, and in less than a second something malfunctioned and The Chamber, spinning fast and off-kilter, began veering to the side. The buildings it had fused to, not to mention whatever was going on in the machine room itself, meant there would have been countless malfunctions and the gravity was warping, the spin out of control.

Dale heard an almighty crack from behind as they lost sight of the pole. It must have snapped as The Chamber rolled, smashing into the floor like the bomb had already gone off. Buildings collapsed in all directions as The Chamber rolled away, the spin giving it huge momentum, its size destroying anything in its path like they were nothing more than buildings in miniature.

All Dale could think of was Godzilla movies and how the beast paled into significance against The Chamber.

Dale's head was buzzing. He didn't know if it was from the pain, the sound of The Chamber, or maybe it was the sound of an atomic bomb hurtling towards earth that would kill countless people but would help end the Second World War. It got louder and louder. Something wasn't right, he could feel it in his bones. Dale looked at his watch, they still had five or so minutes before the explosion, and as he looked up at Amanda he knew she was feeling the same thing he was.

"This isn't right, is it? It's like I can feel the future changing just by us being here."

Dale shook his head. They were clearly both in-tune enough with such a momentous invasion on reality that they were both getting the same bad vibe. "No, it's very, very wrong. We just killed I don't know how many people by jumping here, all those buildings crushed."

"I know, but there's going to be a bomb dropped here, so it won't make any difference."

"But does it? What about for us? We just killed people. I know they would be dead anyway, but it's still murder, isn't it?"

Amanda was struggling as much as Dale: where did you draw the line? He could see it in her eyes. Time travel was making a mockery of the morals they had believed in their whole lives. Was it murder if people would be dead anyway? Or murder if what you did resulted in people having never existed in the first place? What about the bomb? Shouldn't they be using time travel to stop such catastrophic events from ever happening? It was something he'd thought of a lot, but seeing the result of interfering with the way things happened meant it was simply too dangerous to meddle.

"Do you think we've done something bad?" asked Amanda, interrupting his dark thoughts.

"I think so. What if they don't drop the bomb now, because they've seen this? The Chamber may be broken but it's still here. And what about the war? We might have changed the entire course of human history. We need to put things back how they were."