Moon Mask (81 page)

King made a show of chambering a bullet into his handgun. “It doesn’t have to be exact. Two weeks, two months,” he shrugged. “Even two years-”

“That is the other problem. We wrote a failsafe into the control program which prevents it from calculating a date of less than one hundred years.”

King’s heart sank. “Why?”

“To prevent the possibility of a time traveller meeting himself.”

“So what if he does?” King snarled.

“So what?” Tobias scoffed. “The same matter cannot occupy the same point in space-time,” he explained. “Theoretically, if such a thing ever happened . . .”

“What?” King demanded as Tobias trailed off.

“It could be catastrophic. Such a reaction could theoretically tear apart the entire space time continuum.” King’s expression was blank, uncomprehending. Tobias sighed, trying to think of the simplest way to put it. “It could destroy the world. No, not just the world, but
time
itself.”

Gibbs
lashed out with his legs, taking Raine’s feet out from under him. He went down hard, felt a rib crack. His head struck the safety banister and he saw stars. Then Gibbs’ fist smashed into his face and his vision exploded. Another blow came, and then another and another.

“Do it,”
King ordered Tobias.

“Didn’t you hear a word I said?”

“You were only too happy to screw around with the space time continuum a few minutes ago-”

“Under controlled conditions!”

“Controlled conditions?!” King laughed bitterly. “Take a look around! Does this look controlled to you?” Then he levelled his handgun at Tobias’ head. “Do it. Override the program-”

“I can’t!”

King slammed the butt of his gun into the other man’s face. He spat blood. “Don’t lie to me!”

“I’m not!”

King felt as though he was standing outside of his body, watching someone else control it, watching someone else use it in such a brutal manner. He was a man of peace, not of violence. Yet he knew that whatever wrong he did here, now, he could
un-do
it in the past.

He moved the barrel of the gun down and placed it squarely on Tobias’ knee cap, pulled the trigger-

“Okay!” he screamed. “Okay! I’ll do it! I’ll do it.” The scream became a sob.

King took a deep breath and removed the gun. The scientist was trembling and he felt bad for treating him in such a way. But then he remembered that everyone here was responsible for Sid’s death and his heart hardened once more.

Tobias turned back to his computer and began inputting commands into it. Moments before King had burst into the control room, he and his team had written a work-around program which would enable them to bring the accelerator online while there were people inside it. Now, he quickly began disengaging one of the other failsafe systems and recalculated the temporal destination. Streams of data waltzed across his screen, converging lines indicating the approximate tachyon requirement versus the point in time desired.

Eventually, he announced, “I’m ready.” He barked commands at the technicians. One of them began operating a joystick and, in response, King saw through the transparent partition one of the robotic arms began to move.

“Closing radiation screen,” the technician controlling the arm announced and in response a thick sheet of lead began to drop in front of the giant window to protect the control room’s inhabitants from the tachyon radiation. King’s eyes switched over to a computer monitor which played streaming video from inside the chamber. With shocking dexterity, the robotic arm opened a lead case, reached inside and extracted the Moon Mask.

Welded carefully together, after many thousands of years, the Moon Mask was now whole and complete. All the facades that had been added to it by ancient civilisations had been cut away and now, what King stared at was what had been carved by the hand of some sophisticated artist from a civilisation that had no name official name.

“I’m moving the mask into the accelerator tube now,” the technician announced and, sure enough, the robotic arm locked the mask into place in the centre of the cone.

“Temporal destination set,” Tobias announced. He glanced ruefully at King. “As near as possible, at any rate.” He paused. “Once we bring the particle accelerator online it will pick up the tachyons and hurl them at a speed many times faster than the speed of light. The effect will be transmitted via nano-filaments to the entire ship, creating a . . . bubble, for want of a better term, around us.” His eyes were harsh and serious. He glanced at King’s gun. “This is your last chance to-”

“Do it,” he cut him off without any hesitation.

I’m coming Sid,
he thought triumphantly.

USS George Washington,

Pacific Ocean

“Admiral!”

“I see it,” Harriman cut the young man off as he gazed in a mixture of awe, wonder and dread across the stormy ocean, beyond the burning oil slicks of downed planes, to where the
Eldridge
lay.

An eerie green mist slowly seemed to envelop her. At first he thought it was his eyes, tired and bleary, but another young sailor, a woman, called out; “There is some sort of massive energy spike emanating from the
Eldridge.
”

What the devil are they up to?
Harriman wondered. In all his years in the navy he had seen many things which had never been explained to him. He’d heard many crack-pot theories and he’d always argued in the defence of the navy. But now, all the conspiracy theorists, all the Area 51 nutters’ and the JFK fanatics’ arguments seemed somehow justified.

“Oh my god, they’re making a run at the
Eldridge
!”

Whoever had the keen eyes wasn’t wrong. Sure enough, Harriman felt nausea rise in his throat as his eyes zeroed in on the Chinese jet which had broken away from its pursuers. Evidently, the pilot had seen the green mist too and knew that this thing, whatever it was, was reaching its climax.

The jet shot straight towards the
Eldridge’s
tower.

USS Eldridge,

Pacific Ocean

Langley’s
hands flew across the keyboard of his laptop. A trailing wire hooked it up to the
Eldridge’s
computer and he saw the enormous power spike indicated on the screen a moment before a strange queasiness overcame him.

For a moment, it seemed as if the world around him wobbled, but then the sharp contours of the bridge re-sharpened.

He quickly searched through the computer’s inventory until he found what he needed.

The
Eldridge’s
self-destruct program.

“I
should have done this a long time ago!” Gibbs snarled, his face twisted in anger.

Moments ago, a pulsing red light had shot down the length of the particle accelerator, then another and another until they were coming fast and steady as the technology catapulted invisible particles, tachyons, at awesome speed.

But Gibbs had forgotten about the danger to himself, both from the radiation and from any other potential side effects of the experiment. He remembered seeing photographs of men embedded inside solid bulkheads following the original attempt well over half a century ago. But right now, he didn’t care about any of that. Not the Project, not the ship, not even his life.

He finally had the bastard who had betrayed him and his men all those years ago, right where he wanted him.

Tobias
watched the graph on his computer screen as the elaborate matrixes run by the quantum computer turned themselves into information he could comprehend.

Cut down to its basics, the three twisting, undulating lines on the screen indicated the tachyon energy level required to begin the time displacement process in blue, the level needed to achieve the target temporal destination in green, and the current energy level in red.

In 1942, with a single piece of the mask, the energy level had spiked, for an instant, over the blue line. The result had been a fraction of a second’s voyage into the future, the first known successful time travel experiment, no matter how macabre the results. Then, decades before nano-filaments had even been postulated, different sections of the ship, and different members of the crew, had, for that fraction of a second, existed out of phase with one another. When they returned to the same point in space-time some of them had done so literally, fusing one to the other. Today, the nano-filaments, superconductive microscopic fibres threaded throughout the ship, kept the entire vessel and everything in it wrapped together in its own ‘bubble’.

“This isn’t right,” Tobias mumbled.

“What?” King demanded. “What’s wrong?” He felt a wave of dizziness, one of the effects of the space-time continuum beginning to shift around them.

Tobias moved aside and indicated the screen. “The tachyon energy levels are taking far too long to reach the necessary intensity. In 1941, with only one piece of the mask, therefore logically less tachyons, they had broken the blue line by now.”

“What are you saying?” King felt anger rising. He was so close, yet so far.

“Doctor,” one of the technicians pointed out. “Energy levels are flat lining.”

“What do you mean they’re flat lining?” King demanded.

“They’re levelling out,” Tobias explained. He stared at the screen then back at King. “We don’t have enough energy to break the time barrier, let alone to travel back two weeks into the past.”

“But you’ve got the
complete
mask now,” King accused. “I don’t understand.”

“I do,” a new voice entered the discussion.

King spun around to the sound of the voice.

“Nadia!”

Another
blow came and Raine felt his body go numb. He wondered if he had damaged his spine when he struck the safety banister, or suffered brain damage perhaps.

“You’re a traitor, Raine!” Gibbs spat. Illuminated in the hellish red glow of the pulsing particle accelerator, his puckered and pock-marked face covered with blood, he looked like the son of Lucifer, come to wreak havoc upon the earth.

Another blow, then another. “You’re a traitor to your country!” Another punch. “A traitor to your men!” Another blow. “And a traitor to yourself!”

Seconds
had passed since the power spike had arced, since the eerie mists of time had quite literally begun to envelop the
Eldridge
, but for Alex Langley it felt like an eternity.

He broke into the encrypted computer program and uploaded a virus which smashed through the firewall and gave him access to the self-destruct program. He wondered how long he had, how long they all had, before the time travel process truly began.

The command prompt page opened with agonising slowness, but Langley’s fingers entered the command in seconds, his fist flew down to smash the ENTER button and blow out the ship’s hull, dragging her to the deepest, darkest place on earth.

But in his haste he had failed to notice the screaming of jet engines a fraction of a second before the bridge blew apart around him in a hailstorm of fire and spinning glass, metal and jagged debris. He screamed in agony as the fire engulfed him, as shards of rubble bit into his flesh, but even as the force of the impact blasted him like a doll across the bridge, he scrambled for the ENTER button, his index finger falling just shy.

And then, a giant ball of searing, roiling flame pluming towards him on a cushion of jet fuel, Alexander Langley screamed as his world went black.

“No,”
Raine snarled, seconds before the Chinese kamikaze struck the ship. “I’m not a traitor to myself, Gibbs. You are!”

With that, he forced his good arm into action and grasped Gibbs’ fist inches before impact. The move lanced new fire through his impaled shoulder but he fought through it and pushed back, slamming Gibbs into the safety banister behind.

The jet struck!

The explosion rocked the ship as the awesome impact shattered the hull, igniting fuel lines. The enormous plume of fire washed below decks, racing in a flash of light through the corridors, incinerating any hapless sailor in its path.

Then, like some serpent released from the gates of hell, the wall of flame whooshed down the corridor towards the access door to the accelerator, churned down the tunnel and spewed forth from the remnants of the hatch Raine had blown apart. It slammed into the catwalk, the force crushing metal, the heat melting it. The intense heat slammed into Raine and Gibbs like a sledgehammer. Raine felt his hair singing, his skin blistering. Gibbs screamed as, on his feet, the force picked him up and swept him along the catwalk. He reached out and grasped a superheated railing, his flesh adhering to it, then slumped to the deck.

The
intensity of the blast also slammed into the control room. King had been about to hurl himself at Nadia, regardless of the rifles pointed at him, but the explosion knocked them all from their feet. The lights flashed, flickered then died. Computers exploded, glass shattered. There was screaming. There was thunderous noise. There was pain and blistering heat.