The Black Gate (26 page)

With the last of the coordinates entered, he pressed the button that sent them to the computer.
 

The effect was instantaneous. Instead of the expected tug of gravity, Peter felt as if he were in a plane making a steep banking turn. He was momentarily overcome with nausea and nearly fell from the chair. The blackness of the gate shimmered for the briefest of moments, and chain lightning rippled over the surface of the ring.

A horrendous screech came from the bottom of the chamber as another behemoth, just emerging from the darkness of Hell, was shorn in two as the gate shifted its aperture in time and space. The squealing remains of the enormous creature slammed into the floor with an audible thud, where it thrashed and squirmed. A number of the other creatures that had emerged, sensing easy prey, attacked with pincers, claws, stingers, and clacking mandibles.

The ring began to glow brighter, and the black disk at its center was now less than half its original diameter.

Something — someone — vaulted over the edge of the command platform from below to land just in front of the command station where Peter sat.
 

It was Baumann. Like von Falkenstein, he was covered in blood, but also had the left half of his skull missing from the eye socket to the back of his head, exposing the pink, undulating tissue of the brain within.

Before Peter could utter a word, Baumann grabbed him by the lapels of his uniform and flung him from the chair. Peter slammed into the floor beside Kleist’s body, crying out as something in his chest broke with a wet snap.

“You didn’t think I would forget about you, did you, Peter?” Baumann called as he jumped over the console to land beside him.
 

Dazed, Peter looked over at Mina and von Falkenstein. He had her pinned to the ground and was raining hammer blows into her face. She was deflecting most of them, but enough were getting through to make a difference.
No help from that quarter
, Peter thought, his heart pounding in his pain-filled chest.
 

Baumann knelt down, a wide smirk on his disfigured face. “The
Herr Professor
got the better of me for a moment,” he confided, pointing to his damaged skull, which was rebuilding itself right before Peter’s eyes. “But after he finishes off that little wench, we’ll have a rematch. In the meantime,” he reached out with his hands, which were already glowing, “I’m going to drain your life away and then crush your shriveled remains like dry leaves.”

Peter’s fingers closed around a metallic handle. As Baumann leaned forward, putting his hands to either side of Peter’s head, Peter shoved the nozzle of the sprayer Kleist had used on Mina into Baumann’s mouth and squeezed the trigger.

With a sputtering roar of agony, Baumann shot to his feet and backed away, and Peter soaked his body with the ammonia based chemical. Baumann’s throat disintegrated as his skin bubbled and boiled, and he somersaulted backward over the guard rail around the command platform, disappearing into the chaos below.

Ignoring the pain of the bones grinding in his rib cage, Peter pulled himself to where von Falkenstein knelt atop Mina, who lay face down on the floor. With a knee in her back, von Falkenstein was leaning forward, both glowing hands on her bloodied head. She screamed and hammered the floor with her hands in impotent rage as he twisted and pulled, trying to decapitate her even as he drained her life away.

Gritting his teeth, Peter forced himself to his feet, drawing the combat knife from the scabbard on his belt.
 

Both hands on the handle of the knife, Peter fell forward, driving the blade through the base of von Falkenstein’s skull and through his brain.

With a startled gasp, von Falkenstein went rigid, then collapsed in a twitching heap atop Mina.
 

With a cry of fury she tossed off his body. Rolling over onto her knees, she pulled the knife free before stabbing the blade into his skull over and over again.

“Mina,” Peter said, reaching for her. “Mina!”

She whipped her head around to stare at him, her eyes pits of rage in her bloodied, ruined face that even now was starting to reshape itself.

“Help me…” He whispered as his vision suddenly went gray. Turning so that the broken ribs ground together again, the pain signaling his body to send forth another flood of adrenaline, he said, “Help me through the gate.”

She shook her head. “Peter, no!”

He reached up and cupped her cheek. “Please. Trust me.” He looked down at the bullet wound in his stomach, where dark blood continued to pour from his body. “We have to hurry.”

Gathering him up in her arms, she carried him up the steps to the catwalk as if he weighed no more than a feather.
 

“Help me get my clothes off,” he whispered as they reached the departure cage. Hoth had told him that the harness seemed to have no effect on travelers, but those sent through wearing clothing often returned with the material interwoven in their skin and organs, which inevitably led to death. With a weak smile he added, “I wish it could have been under more…enjoyable circumstances.”

Her eyes wet with tears, Mina quickly stripped off his uniform.
 

Sitting with his feet dangling over the open trap door of the cage, Peter stared into the darkness that awaited. But the gate was no longer an empty black disk. A hint of scarlet, like a faint trace of blood, swirled from the edges to the center like water spiraling down a drain. He knew it must be an optical illusion, for nothing could escape the infinite gravitational pull of the artificially created black hole at the center of the gate.

But he didn’t have any more time to ponder this celestial impossibility. He looked at Mina, and their gazes locked for a long moment. “I’ll see you on the other side,” he said at last.

Then he let go her hands and leaned forward, falling into oblivion.

***

The bombardier in the lead Lancaster was sweating despite the freezing temperatures inside the plane. “Almost there,” he whispered as the Arnsberg viaduct smoothly scrolled right toward the center of the bombsight’s crosshairs. “Steady, pilot,” he warned as the plane was buffeted slightly by the winds aloft. “Steady…now! Bomb away!”

As he had four days before, the bombardier pressed the bomb release button, freeing the ten ton weapon slung under the belly of the straining four engine bomber. The plane ballooned upward, throwing off the view, but the bombardier managed to keep the bomb in his sight as it hurtled toward the target far below.

In tight sequence, the other eighteen planes of the strike formation released five more Grand Slams and thirteen smaller Tallboy bombs.

SACRIFICE

Moments after Peter disappeared into the gate, an earthquake shook the chamber. It was so violent that Mina was knocked from her feet. She desperately grabbed for the bars lining the door of the departure cage, barely saving herself from a second trip through the gate. Dust and small chunks of stones rained down from the rocky ceiling, and a huge arc of electricity shot from one of the capacitors. The ring itself was shaken and began to emit a high keening noise, as if it were in dreadful pain.

Hauling herself back up to the catwalk, she saw that the dark disk was rapidly pulling away from the vibrating metal of the ring, dwindling in size as the gap around its perimeter filled with artificial lightning.
 

She was thrown from her feet again, slamming headlong onto the catwalk as a series of quakes, accompanied by deafening booms, rocked the chamber. She suddenly realized that these were not part of some natural phenomenon, but must be the result of some new Allied weapon. Cursing their deplorable timing, she got to her hands and knees and scuttled back to the stairs. Above her, the cables suspending the catwalk to the ceiling began to give way, parting with metallic whip cracks as fissures opened in the rock and more debris rained down.

Below, the huge golden ring was visibly warping as the solid stone of the earth around it flexed like rubber under the titanic impacts from the Allied weapons. It was a true testament to Hoth’s engineering skills that the machine still functioned at all. But it would not last much longer: the Schwarzchild radius continued to rapidly contract, the black disk now only a dozen or so meters in diameter. If it became too small for Peter to emerge or the gate was damaged so much that it shut down, he would be doomed. As would she.

With the twang of parting cables and the screech of bending metal, the catwalk gave way beneath her. She would have fallen into the lightning that circled the shrinking black disk had the collapsing catwalk not slammed into part of the ring’s support structure. A multi-segmented arm with a pincer as long as her leg reached up from below the ring to snap after her as she got up and ran. The thing clamped onto part of the catwalk as Mina leaped the impossible distance over and down to the command platform. A deep warbling squeal erupted from the thing, whose body was somewhere in the battle zone of the lower chamber, as the catwalk hit the energy discharges, which arced through the catwalk to electrocute the monster that clung to it.

A cluster of explosions, like the finale to a fireworks show, shook the earth around her and the rear half of the cavern collapsed. Tens of thousands of tons of rock fell upon humans and monsters alike, crushing them to pulp. Water burst from the ruptured ceiling as the Ruhr River sought to fill the void, inundating the remaining survivors.

Using up precious moments, she quickly searched for Peter’s journals. She found one and picked it up. It had a neat round hole where Kleist’s bullet had passed through it. Putting it in one of the pockets of her coveralls, she brushed away the nearby rubble, but was unable to find the other journal.

“Looking for this?”

She turned to find Baumann, his blood-slick nude body leaning casually against the warped guard rail, Peter’s other journal clutched in one hand.
 

***

Peter’s scream filled the forsaken universe into which he had been thrust as he passed through the gate. It was a scream of agony, of endless pain, as his body exploded cell by cell over a span of countless millennia. And as his body was slowly torn apart down to its constituent atoms, so, too, was his mind deconstructed, his soul ripped apart as he relived his life moment by moment from the time his heart began to beat in his mother’s womb. All his failures and frustrations, all his weaknesses were laid bare. If he could have shed tears he would have wept for all eternity, the rivers of shame emptying into an infinite sea of self-pity.

Around him glowered the dark and dying suns of this other universe, a place so far removed and so ancient that human eyes would never behold it in the night skies of Earth. His own galaxy, perhaps his entire universe, was yet newborn by comparison, full of life, full of hope.

Hope had long since fled this dark and bitter place, having died out countless aeons before some great spark had ignited to create his own universe. The brightest stars here were little more than flickering coals scattered through the ether, releasing the last of their energy before they at long last collapsed into hateful obscurity. The galaxies had long since disappeared, countless intersections and collisions among them shattering the gravitational bonds that had originally given them form, the greater mass of the universe having plunged to extinction in a series of titanic black holes. All that remained were individual stars scattered across eternity, each facing a lonely death.

But life here continued to flourish. It was not life as Peter would ever have understood it as a mere denizen of Earth, as ignorant of the far reaches of the cosmos as a newborn babe. He didn’t truly understand it even now, nor would he, even had his senses not been distorted by pain and anguish. But he recognized life for what it was, sensed that the dark universe around him was teeming with it, and that the life in this universe was suffused with hate and impotent rage. It was trapped here, doomed to die a final extinction once the flickering stars fused the last of their fuel and went cold. The things here, be they individuals or a collective sentience, were desperate to survive, but had evolved beyond the ability to manipulate technology, at least as Peter might have understood. They were, in this place and in their own fashion, infinitely powerful, yet they could never have replicated something so primitive as von Falkenstein’s gate.

But they could manipulate anything that entered their realm. Humans had come here before, of course, when the Atlanteans had created their gate. That had been only a heartbeat ago in the scale of time for these ethereal beings. And Peter sensed that humans had not been the only ones to come here. As his curiosity began to outstrip his agony on his endless voyage through this strange space, he could sense clusters of these beings, little more than ghostly images of dark energy, gathered at random points through their universe. Other civilizations in his universe, and perhaps others, had opened portals to this place, much to their peril and regret. The things here were gathered around these pinpricks in space time, waiting for the hapless creatures on the far side to make the same blunder made by the Atlanteans and Baumann.
 

A few such tragedies were in evidence, where colossal numbers of these hateful creatures surged through the tunnel joining this with some other universe. They changed as they passed through, transforming into monsters of the id, into creatures of nightmare patterned after the dark dreams of those who had been unfortunate enough to travel here.
 

Peter drifted toward one such point, the return portal to his own world, and his velocity rapidly accelerated as he approached. A soul-deep rage had by now eclipsed both his sense of curiosity and pain. He lashed out at the ghostly creatures as he sailed into their midst, but he could no more hurt them than he could hurt the sky.
 

But that, he realized, was about to change. On Earth’s side of the gate they would be vulnerable in a way they no longer understood. They had lived for so long that they could no longer conceive of death. But for those that managed to cross into Peter’s universe, a new paradigm would prevail: mortality. They could be hurt. They could be killed.