Moon Mask (83 page)

She shifted her gaze to King. He sat in the chair, shoulders slumped, his eyes staring distantly into nowhere. His attempt to save Sid had failed and she saw the defeat in him and regretted her part in it. No matter what she had done, she had honestly considered King and Sid friends and felt sickened by what had happened at Yonaguni. But Sid, in her self-righteousness, had left her no choice. It was a matter of shoot, or be shot.

A loud creaking sound echoed through the accelerator then, bringing her back to the matter at hand. She returned her attention to the laptop, but nevertheless offered an explanation to her audience, if only to gloat at the Americans inferior understanding of the technology they had created.

“The Moon Mask is constructed from a superconducting meteoric metal, yes? Xibalbanite, if you want to call it that,” she reminded them all. “It is the exact same metal as the ‘fake’ mask, except for one difference: the fake mask does not emit tachyons. Why does it not emit tachyons?” she glanced up from the screen. “The same reason that not all individual pieces of metal
capable
of conducting electricity do so- because, at some point, that metal needs to have been given an electrical charge.” She returned to the laptop, downloading her updated software into the
Eldridge’s
quantum computers, complete with a carefully calculated new temporal destination.

“At some point in the distant past, either before or after the Moon Mask was carved out of a lump of space debris, but
before
it was divided into five segments, it was subjected to tachyons, whereas the ‘fake’ mask was not. Over the corresponding millennia, the superconductivity of the metal has decayed, and the amount of tachyon particles spinning around inside it has decayed also.”

She had begun to consider this after reviewing the history of the Moon Mask with King. The intensity of the detrimental effects to the human body, and to local communities, had diminished over the years. The civilisation that had flourished at Xibalba was decimated when the mask had been brought to them in an unknown epoch. The Bouda tribe in Africa, however, many hundreds, even thousands of years later, had suffered only relatively minor afflictions before a genetic resistance had developed in them.

This was because, she had realised, the intensity of tachyons in each piece of the mask had diminished over the years. The rate of decay seemed to have increased as time pressed on, so that while in 1942 a
single
piece of the mask had just breeched the energy level needed to create a 0.002 second time jump, almost seventy years later, the combined tachyons from
all
the pieces had dropped to such a level that they could not hit the energy requirements necessary.

“So I ask again,” Raine cut in. “If there isn’t enough tachyon energy to do your Jules Verne mumbo-jumbo, then what the hell are you doing here?”

The ship shuddered suddenly and Nadia heard the tell-tale hiss of water. She moved to a window and peered into the depths of the accelerator. Down below, a small fountain of sea water had breached the hull.

She didn’t have long.

“Give me your pack,” she demanded of one of the Spetsnaz soldiers. He handed it to her and she opened it, pulling the fake mask from its cushioned interior. She glanced at Raine and King, ignoring Tobias. King’s dark eyes cruelly met hers, then drifted to the mask. His brow knit together in consternation.

“I thought you said the fake mask didn’t emit tachyons?” Raine queried.

Nadia’s face broke into a triumphant smile. She saw the flash of pleasure in Raine’s eyes as he looked at her attractive face. They had a connection, she knew. More than just physical; just as he had melted her, she had broken through his defences and found his heart.

But would he go that extra step, she wondered? He had been betrayed, for the second time, by his country. He had no life to return to, no future. Would he even entertain a future with her?

“Not yet,” she admitted, replying to his question.

It had been when she was submerged beneath the waves off Yonaguni Island that she had been struck by an epiphany. The entire underwater monument had been constructed from the same meteoric metal as both masks. As she shone her torch over it, she had seen the way it conducted the light, revealing intricate carvings on its exterior. All she had needed to do was introduce the substance to be conducted in the first place.

She moved to the airlock door in the centre of the glass partition. The Moon Mask on the other side was still held in the claw of one of the robotic arms. Without the lead shield she knew the radiation would be eking out, affecting all in the room except Raine and King. But limited exposure could be treated, just as she had been after Sarisariñama.

She opened the airlock door and placed the fake mask on the floor before sealing it once more. Then she returned to the control terminal and activated one of the spare robotic arms. She automatically opened the inner airlock door and deftly manoeuvred the carefully calibrated arm to gently pick up the fake mask.

Raine, King and Tobias all watched as she worked the robotic arm, bringing the fake mask up close to the original. With the gentle caress of a lover, she carefully worked the control stick, the arm responded by moving the two masks together.

They touched.

Nadia smiled and released the controls. She turned back to her audience, focussing her attention mainly on Raine. “Right now,” she explained, “billions of subatomic tachyon particles are jumping from one mask to the other. Charging it, I guess you could say. And, as its superconductivity has not yet started the decay process, in a few minutes it will emit more than enough energy to power this machine.” She stepped closer to Raine, her black combat gear clinging to the contours of her body.

She knelt down before him and caught his eyes with hers. “Then, I will be a master of time, Nate,” she whispered. He frowned at her, and despite his resistance, she could see intrigue there also.

“We could go anywhere, do anything.” She reached out, her fingers almost touching the stumble on his face. Then she pulled away. Nervous. Afraid. For that one night, Nathan Raine had accepted her for who she was. To have him reject her now would break her heart.

She hated this weakness she was showing. “Think of it, Nate. We can go back-”

“What are you doing?” the lumbering Spetsnaz soldier guarding Raine demanded.

“Stand down,” she barked at him, shifting quickly back to Raine. “All the wrongs that have been done against you. All the betrayals. All the sacrifices you have had to make. They can all be undone now. The last great threshold of human existence has been breached
. Life, death . . . it has no meaning now.” She leaned close to him, shutting all else out of their world so that only they existed.

“We can make our own rules. Our own destiny. We can shape the course of history to suit our needs.” Their lips touched, sending an electrifying tingle down her spine. She pushed away slightly, needing to read his eyes, to ensure there was no deception there.

There was none.

Nathan Raine was hers.

“We can be gods,” she sighed, giving herself to him, her lips hungrily meeting his, her arms wrapping around his head. His hands wrapped around her back. She heard a grunt of protest from her soldiers but they knew better than to question her. She heard a groan of complaint from Tobias and a snarl of disgust from King, but none of that mattered.

She had the only man she felt had ever loved her for who she was, the only man she herself had ever loved. His hands, strong and protective, moved down the arch of her back, cupped her buttocks, the back of her thighs, up to her hips-

He breathed into her ear, sensual and exciting, his whispered words taking a fraction too long to register in her distracted mind.

“Not such a genius after all, huh?”

She gasped as she realised her mistake a second too late.

Raine wrenched her holstered pistol from her hip. The lumbering guard saw the move and lurched forward but Raine fired blindly, plucking a line of bullet holes across his chest.

Nadia reacted instinctively. “No!” she slapped him hard but Raine pushed up off his seat, sending her sprawling backwards. The other two soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons. Raine lunged behind the control booth as it shattered in a spray of sparks. Tobias coward under it, hands clamped to his ears.

King erupted back to life.

Instead of charging for cover, like a man possessed, he charged the nearest gunman and shouldered into his mid drift, ripping a handgun from the man’s holster. The second Spetsnaz saw the attack and swung his rifle to him. Raine jumped from cover and landed a head shot. The man fell.

King spun on the spot and fired at Nadia. She rolled out through the control room door, bullets sparking in her wake.

“Benny!” Raine called to him but he wasn’t listening. He ran to the control station. The sequence Tobias had entered in earlier was still on the screen and he slammed the ENTER control. It overrode Nadia’s updated program and, with a hum of static and a rumble of machinery, the accelerator lit up once more.

“Ben, what are you doing?” Raine demanded. He rushed to meet him, but the soldier King had floored was back on his feet and firing. Raine dived for cover, King charged towards the airlock!

“Stop him!” Nadia screamed from her hiding place. The soldier aimed at King but he was too fast. The airlock door slammed shut behind him, the bullets danced off of the reinforced glass. He locked the door from the inside, then, without hesitation, he pressed the release button on the inner airlock and stepped inside.

Instantly, the invisible tachyons slammed into his head, exciting his Parietal Lobe and overloading his nervous system.

He dropped to his knees.

“Sid,” he choked out.

63:

Tapestry

USS Eldridge,

Pacific Ocean

Images,
thoughts, sounds, smells, memories all bombarded Benjamin King. It was as though he stood outside of his body, looking down at his pathetic form kneeling on the deck in front of the two masks, held firmly in the grip of robotic arms.

It all made sense. For the first time in his life, since General Abuku had pulled the trigger and ended first his mother’s, then his sister’s life. It all made sense!

The sequence he had forced Doctor Tobias to input had been activated.

Though they were invisible, he fancied that he could see the tachyon particles jumping from the pieced-together Moon Mask to the whole and unbroken fake one. First there was one, then there were dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, an entire universe of them whipping around the superconducting metal that had fallen to earth from outer space.

Even though they travelled many times faster than the speed of light, he fancied he could see the tachyons emanating from the fake mask like the rays of a sun. One by one, the enormous particle accelerator built into the heart of a naval warship picked them up and whisked them down its length at tremendous speed, around the far end of the tunnel and then back again.

Even though theoretical quantum physics were far beyond the understanding of a humble archaeologist, he fancied that he understood the supercharged tachyon particles interactions with the fabric of the space-time continuum. He saw the fourth dimension of reality, as Langley had described it, as a block of sandstone. The Eldridge was the pressure washer, the tachyons the jet of water. They found a hole in the flat surface of time and punched through, one at a time to begin with, and then untold billions, all pouring into the defect, stretching it, widening it.

The wormhole burst into existence!

Although invisible to the naked eye, the hyperactive electrical synapses in King’s brain, excited by the tachyons, sent his Parietal Lobe into overdrive. The intensity was far greater than what he had experienced when he had placed the mask on his head in Germany. The Extra Sensory Perception that was stimulated, as before, now reached further than he had ever imagined, tendrils of his mind shooting into the invisible vortex before him, reaching out to the distant epochs of the past.

All of eternity lay before him now.

USS George Washington,

Pacific Ocean

“Admiral,”
the operator called to Harriman again.

He stared through a pair of binoculars across the water to see the burning wreckage of the
Eldridge
listing to port. Water was pouring into her hull, he knew. Her superstructure was little more than a burning tower of smashed and jagged metal sticking up from wild flames in the middle of her deck.

The three rescue helicopters he had sent were nearing her now, their huge flood lights illuminating her scorch hull. The sky was finally clear of Chinese fighters but the surviving U.S. birds remained in the sky as a precaution.

“Sir,” the operator said more urgently.

“Yes, what is it?” Harriman snapped.

“Energy levels on the
Eldridge
are spiking again, sir.”

Harriman looked at the young sailor. “Like before?”

The young man hesitated. “More than before, sir. Readings are off the scale!”

Harriman looked back at the ruins of the ship, at the helicopters preparing to land.

“Get those choppers back here,” he ordered. “Order all ships to fall back to the predetermined coordinates and await further instructions. And get those planes back, now!”

The sailor moved away to issue the admiral’s orders but was halted by his voice again. “And get me a secure line to the president.”

USS Eldridge,

Pacific Ocean

“Benny!”
Raine yelled at his friend. More sparks spat at him as the remaining Spetsnaz fired on full auto, his weapon tearing through the central computer station. “What are you doing?”

He glanced through the glass partition. The lead shield had failed to lower and he could see King drop to his knees, pressing his hands to his temples in pain. The emergency lights cast a hellish sheen off the metallic surfaces.