The Pandora Chronicles - Book 1 (A Scifi Adventure Thriller) (26 page)

“Kinda busy, here,” Nick replied as he dodged a slash from Astrid aimed at his neck.

Excalibur spun in a crouch and fired a quick three-round-burst on Nick’s position. She meant to shoot Astrid, but her bullets were redirected by the orb’s electromagnetic field and were sent scattering all over the place. Nick and Astrid ducked under the console.

“What the hell?” Nick yelled. “A little warning next time.”

“Calculating: Twelve seconds.”

The Navy SEALs advanced, killing the mercenaries even if they surrendered. They couldn’t afford the luxury of taking prisoners, not ones who had witnessed events meant only for secret government facilities.

Astrid and Nick’s sword fight had devolved into a raw, bloody fistfight as they hit and kicked at each other, stabbing and slashing with their weapons, while at the same time dodging the occasional stray bullet.

“Calculating: Eleven seconds.”

Astrid went in for a lunge, propelling his body weight forwards. Nick side-stepped, drove his fist into the man’s ribs, and intercepted a horizontal strike. He twisted, throwing Astrid off balance, and in one swift motion, disarmed him and smashed the pommel of Finnegan’s cutlass into the Spaniard’s jaw. Astrid swaggered, threw a sluggish punch, and was flipped over Nick’s shoulder. The momentum carried him towards Excalibur’s direction, face down and unconscious.

She looked at Nick with a quizzical frown.

“Page forty-seven,” he replied with a cocky smirk.

“Calculating: Ten seconds.”

Director Briggs instructed his men to arrest Astrid and turned to Nick. “Solomon, can you shut it down?”

Nick was already at the console. “It may be too late.”

“Then, we get out of here.”

“It’s no use,” Nick replied. “If this thing blows up it’ll be like ten nukes going off at once.” He placed both hands on the console and concentrated. He had to rectify his mistake and somehow shut down the machine without blowing up the entire island.

“There must be a way,” Excalibur insisted, as she made her way next to him. “Nick?”

He stood there leaning over the console with his eyes closed, unresponsive to her words.

“Nick? Nick!”

But Nick Solomon’s mind was now solely focused on only one task, and his body shut down all of his other senses. His entire consciousness was now diving into the machine, hoping to avoid a nuclear catastrophe.

Excalibur stopped Briggs when he went to shake him awake.

“Trust him,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as her superior. A nervous breath escaped her lips. “Just trust him.”

Chapter 37

Select DNA recognized. Authorization granted.

Neural Synchronization in three, two, one—Neural Synchronization complete.

Welcome: Solomon, Nicholas—generation four Select.

Nick felt the connection take place. It was the strangest feeling in the world, as if he had been living in a shell his entire life, and only now he was finally whole. He felt the machine as an extension of himself, like an appendage he never noticed or used before.
 

When it moved and executed actions, Nick felt them as natural as breathing.

Status Update: Self-Destruct Protocol in place.

Abort
, he ordered.

Cause?

Destruction of humans,
he replied.

Cause invalid.

The void inside his mind was suddenly flooded with images as the machine stimulated his visual cortex and transmitted information directly into his brain. Nick struggled to make sense of what he was seeing, before he stopped trying to apply reason, and just accepted what he saw at face value, without any interpretation.

Nick saw Them landing—terrifying monsters whose gaze drove people insane—and implanting their DNA strand onto creatures that would eventually evolve into humans. He saw the progress of evolution, the countless species that died until we came to be.
 

But he saw all this from the point of view of the machine and was, thus, unbiased and emotionless. Like a casual observer, unable to take sides, he saw the bloodshed by mankind as they fought over the orb. He saw the havoc that Select members created throughout the ages—generals at war, politicians, priests, writers, concubines, lawyers, and businessmen.
 

And he was no different, a messiah of destruction.

Mankind’s
destruction.

That was the sole reason why the orb existed. It was only a pawn in an epic game of chess going on since the dawn of the planet Earth, with checkmate being total and utter armageddon. Nick now understood why the orb had initiated the Self-Destruct Protocol, rather than simply shut down, when he tampered with it earlier. The machine realized he was a Select, not one if its alien masters, and followed its original programming: destruction.

Nick struggled to divorce himself from the machine’s influence. He could feel it pulling at his Select nature, and slowly encroach on all that made him human—his compassion, his drive, his lust for life. He racked his brain to try and find a way to trick the machine into stopping the countdown, but all he could think about were those images of violence and death.

That’s it,
he thought.
 

He focused on the connection between himself and the orb.
Abortion criteria: prolonged existence of the artifact will ensure usage by humans.

Nick felt the machine working to make sense of his answer.
Causality?

Meeting of original parameters,
Nick replied.
 

Tapping into his own memories, Nick conjured up images of skyscrapers and illuminated cities. He showed the machine landscapes of people communicating, all blissfully unaware of just how vulnerable they are, and how precious little they appreciate their lives—the same lives engineered by the machine’s creators all those eons ago.
 

Nick showed how mankind became dependent on its inventions, how it became drunk on its own power and success, and how it played right into the aliens’ hands, in lusting for greater highest at all costs. He pushed his reasoning onto the machine, trying to telepathically convince it that, given enough time, mankind will become dependent on the technology provided by the aliens.
 

And once that happened, They would return to our planet, to reap the seeds sown eons ago, and plunge the Earth into total destruction, rather than the partial annihilation brought on by the orb’s explosion.

He waited for the orb’s advanced artificial intelligence to analyze the data he provided, and waited for the verdict. Then after a very long minute…

Causality accepted. Awaiting new commands.

Nick felt himself sighing in relief, despite being back in that mental void, just him and a piece of alien hardware.
Terminate Self-Destruct protocol.

The machine complied immediately and the pressure surrounding Nick suddenly lifted. He could stop there, having saved thousands of lives, but he knew that if the NSA got their hands on such a device, they would use it, and play right into the aliens’ hands. He had to render the orb into nothing more than a large paperweight, and there was only one way to do that.
 

Access Master Control Matrix,
he ordered.

Access granted.

Light filled every inch around him. Nick felt complete control over the orb, and was suddenly fully aware of just how powerful it was. There were so many possibilities: he could cure diseases, restore the ozone layer, stop earthquakes, provide free sustainable energy.

But ultimately, all roads led to destruction, and death.

Initiate Complete Shutdown.

Proceeding.

Outside, the consoles began frying their own hard drives and processors, rendering them utterly useless. The walls dried up and began flaking off, as a shower of minerals and metals cascaded all over the place. The electromagnetic field around the artifact died out, and the orb dropped pathetically on the lower pedestal before rolling down and coming to a rest against Nick’s arm.

Nick felt his mind being affected by the shutdown as well. The neural link he had with the machine began erasing his memory of what he saw when connected to the orb: the aliens and their mission. He felt an intruder inside his brain and realized it was his own Select powers working against him.
 

Reality seeped in again, assaulting his senses and Nick was aware of how still he had been the entire time he was communicating with the orb. He opened his eyes and felt something cold against his arm.
 

The orb rested there lifelessly, and he picked it up. He still felt that connection, like a phantom limb, and was sure he could reactivate it in time.

A sense of soreness and exhaustion covered him from head to toe, and he staggered. His head was pounding, as if someone had taken a drill to his skull. Try as he might, he just couldn’t remember how he had stopped the orb from blowing up—only that he did.
 

Nick lifted the artifact and looked at Excalibur, who had been standing beside him, concerned and worried, the entire time.

“I did it,” he said, before bursting into a fit of laughter, and hoisting up the orb for all to see. “I did it!”

Chapter 38

Briggs gave a single nod.

Soldiers immediately moved in on Nick like a swarm. One of them drove the butt of his rifle into Nick’s head, staggering him. At the same time, another SEAL grabbed the orb and wrenched it out of his arms. Nick barely had enough time to register what happened to him, when he felt a sharp pain at the back of one knee and fell down. Four assault rifle barrels hovered inches from his head as one of the soldiers yelled, “Stand down!”

“Secure the package,” Briggs commanded.

“What the hell, Briggs?” Nick yelled, as one of the soldiers drove him face first into the ground and pressed a knee against his back.
 

Director Briggs nodded again, and the soldier retreated, allowing Nick to stand up. Excalibur gave him something that resembled an apologetic look and followed as they all retreated outside of the cavern. Two soldiers dragged Astrid out, and Nick followed them. He was still holding Finnegan’s sword. The way he saw it, that weapon was a family heirloom and rightfully belonged to him.

“So, that’s it?”
 

Nick watched as Briggs searched Astrid, until he found the
Belladonna
’s logbook inside the Spaniard’s suit pocket and pulled it out. Another soldier searched the truck in which the mercenaries had arrived in, as well as the few quad bikes. He found the red ledger in the truck’s glove compartment and delivered it to Briggs.
 

Meanwhile, a separate team placed the orb inside a special container and magnetically sealed it. It was then promptly loaded into an armored car, which drove off seconds later.

“What are you gonna do with that artifact?” Nick asked.

Briggs handed the red ledger to a soldier who placed it in a briefcase and handcuffed it to himself.
 

“What artifact?” Briggs asked, with a look that dared Nick to challenge that statement. “I see no artifacts here. And if you’re as smart as you say you are, you won’t either.”

The two men glared at each other. “Nice of you to finally show your true colors,” Nick said.

“This was our deal from the start, Solomon.”

“That thing is dangerous,” Nick yelled. “There’s a reason it was locked up.”

“We can handle it,” Briggs replied smugly. “We got the best tech and people on the planet.”
 

“The first people who used it thought they could handle it as well,” Nick countered, pointing in the direction where the truck had driven off.
 

“We can handle it,” Briggs repeated.

Nick realized he was getting nowhere with the director. “I’m not opening it for you,” he said.

That got Briggs’s attention. “What did you say?”

Nick shrugged. “You heard me. Only a Select can reactivate the orb. And I’m not doing it.” He grinned. “Which means all you got is a fancy paperweight.”

Briggs let out a bark of laughter. “Really, Professor, I thought you’d be a little smarter than that.” His jet-black eyes were empty, but his look
 
still sent shivers down Nick’s spine. “If we want to get something out of you, we will get it. It’s that simple. Stop overestimating your importance to us, Solomon. Do you really think that we hadn’t taken this little game of yours into consideration?”

Nick cocked his head. “The hell are you talking about?”

“We have other means of opening the device, Solomon,” Briggs replied. “The rest is none of your business.”

“You have another Select?”

Panic now began to rise in Nick’s voice—did the NSA really have another Select in their clutches?
 

That’s impossible
, he thought. Why go through all the trouble of giving him this mission when they had someone with the exact same powers already in their roster?