Point Apocalypse (28 page)

He started his story from the swamp wh
ich the volunteer was about to enter. The swamps appeared to be the Forecomers' doing who used to travel between worlds. For these alien Gods, Pangea was some sort of manmade intermediary station that housed the portal machine we'd discovered.

He didn't actually call them Gods, of course, replacing the religious term with some euphemis
m like "reason" or "the almighty Force", or whatever.

"The Forecomers had achieved a certain technological threshold, just like humans are about to do now. They'd learned to control the device."

Neumann called it a portal machine. It opened doors to other worlds serving like a router while the rod towers on the Continent worked as beacons used to enter the coordinates of your destination. The entire installation worked much as a GPS module, only instead of receiving a satellite signal, the beacons sent and received frequencies from outer space. So one day either through a fault of their operator or for another reason, a wormway opened on an unknown new world letting in all sorts of toxic alien matter. The professor chose to call them "the intruders". The Forecomers realized they had to leg it. And leg it they did, just in time, because we didn't find any of their remains next to their portal machine. Neumann, too, had studied the Continent up and down during his years of research but had failed to find any alien burials or other evidence of their demise.

I was about to suggest that they could have cremated their dead but I bit my tongue. The old man was too engulfed in his story.
The installation must still have worked at the time of their exodus, otherwise it wouldn't have been possible. But for some reason, it hadn't been shut down afterward. This drew Neumann to suggest that it was controlled by a limited-intellect program which kept the machine operational in order to preserve the global beacon network from destruction.

The machine had allowed the professor to discover Pangea. After the electronic bomb test explosion on the Kola Peninsula, the
portal device had detected the resulting perturbations and sucked part of the peninsula onto Pangea, complete with the
Samotlor
tanker on its way from the Arctic gold mines. About a hundred Kola garrison personnel and various equipment had also found themselves jumped to Pangea. Raiders were still busy hunting for all the junk and taking it to New Pang to sell.

The professor described the state of the two worlds as a collision of two soap bubbles.

"Imagine a straw connecting an Earth bubble and a Pangea bubble. It created an enormous surface tension so perilous I call it Point Apocalypse. So what caused the connection to stabilize without destroying both worlds? The portal machine, of course."

The professor nicknamed it "his bubble theory". Now he wanted to find
out how he could open portals to other worlds - any worlds. Knowing how to do it would allow him to disconnect the Earth from Pangea, then create a new wormway if needed.

It all seemed to come together. If this world was indeed nothing more than an artificial
docking station, then it explained the fact that the environment was so limited: its creators had only bothered to include the elements they needed. The absence of mineral resources now explained itself: the Forecomers had had to be humanoid or at least catered for such, while the toxic swamp had to be the result of a near-human error.

The toxic intruders' world had to be
entirely different both in its structure and environment. Mirabella Neumann couldn't give a concise description of the swamp life forms, so deadly to humans. By now, the area had capsulated forming its own habitat and a breeding ground for new colonies of mutated viruses and bacteria. Some of them had adapted to life outside the swamp; others penetrated the ocean. That's why you had to treat all local food produce with care for fear of poisoning or even death.

It was
possible that the Forecomers had realized or even known what they were dealing with. So they'd sealed Pangea and left. But now, people had arrived instead. Neumann especially belonged to this species of science fanatics: the race that would stop at nothing until they got the answers to their curiosity. According to him, science had finally stumbled onto the right path and made the first baby step toward our extraterrestrial brothers capable of traveling through time and space. The similarity of our technologies had allowed for this first contact promising more progress ahead.

Neumann hadn't even noticed
the wasting of his and his daughter's life on research which until now had brought no tangible results worth mentioning. Okay, so he'd put forward his bubble hypothesis and worked on his Point Apocalypse theory suggesting, in part, that the Earth-Pangea wormway could be destroyed by exploding a nuclear charge inside the wormway itself. That seemed to be the only way to destroy the portal that consumed indecent amounts of energy threatening to collapse Earth.

But Neumann didn't want to be known as an armchair theorist.
A man of practice ready to embrace the unknown, he wanted to take his ideas to their logical end. Just as my father did.

I
felt sorry for the old man. Everyone seemed to be using Professor Neumann: my father as well as the government.

I arched
my body and heard a dull snap as my sinews and vertebrae spasmed. I opened my eyes and collapsed onto the bed. My heart drummed in my chest. Reality came back just as quickly as it had taken them to remove the memory chip. The clock showed 5.24.

"He's come to," the neurotech
threw the electrodes onto the defibrillator stand.

"Where are we taking him now?" his
assistant pulled my eyelids down one after the other and nodded.

"Blank told me to
take him to the general as soon as he could walk," the neurotech glanced at me. "Think you can do it, Master Specialist?"

It's been a while since anyone called me
by my rank. Ever since I'd left Pangea, to be precise. How long had it been, two years? Something like that.

Gingerly, I bent my elbows and sat up trying to
adapt to my body.

"
You'll live," the neurotech concluded. He lay his hand on my shoulder and leaned closer. "We've implanted you a fourth-generation memory chip, standard upgrade, three channel coms. Sorry we didn't have anything more state-of-the-art. In your left eye is a monitor lens with a built-in infrared camera. In your cardiac muscle you still have a burnt-out stabilizing stimulator. That's it."

His assistant handed him a measuring tube filled to the brim with
a cloudy liquid.

"Drink this. It'll make you feel a bit better,"
the neurotech took the tube and nearly brought it up to my lips but held his hand. "Apparently, the Feds fitted your aorta out with a chemical blocker. You'd think it's nothing much, and then... Had we known about it straight away, it wouldn't have taken us so long. The fucking thing activated so we were forced to give you CPR. I thought that was the end of you, Master Specialist. You were lucky we had a defibrillator at hand. The stimulator screwed up, naturally. We'll give you a new one when we have time."

He
brought the tube up to my lips. Mechanically, I opened my mouth and swallowed the liquid, all the time trying to remember the names and identities of these two. I couldn't possibly remember all the camp staff but they certainly knew me as General Varlamov's son.

Father
, I sent him a silent call,
are you waiting for me? We're back together again.

The stone walls dampened my
signal. The memory chip's operating range without the amplifier didn't exceed a few dozen feet.

My bare feet touched the cold floor.
I inspected my staple-patched chest. The scar was still stinging like hell but I knew it wouldn't be long before its edges knitted together. Then I'd pull out the staples myself: not for the first time, I might add. Still something felt wrong. I couldn't quite put my finger on it but the world around me seemed to have somehow changed. I sensed it but I couldn't explain it. It could be post-op grogginess... I needed to recuperate. I had my false identity removed; they'd unblocked my memory but those Federal experts had very nearly done for me with their heart blocker. It had to have been their analysts' idea. Either they knew the general would try to recapture me or they were afraid of me changing camp. So they covered their backs. It may look like nothing much, just as the neurotech had said, but the delayed-action chemical blocker couldn't be detected with a scanner. And it's pretty pointless to try and open the aorta to look for a clot when the patient is about to croak. That's why the lab staff used the defibrillator. It had worked a hundred percent: they had broken the growing clot down with electric pulses despite the obvious risk. Had the stimulator not burned out, my heart would have gone into overdrive, and then...

I raised my head and met with Captain Blank's gaze. He had s
everal soldiers next to him - regular guys, not the cyber type. Blank had already tuned to my frequency and kept his channel open and receiving.

Oh well.
I sent him a return impulse, rose from the bed and walked out of the "clean" room. Blank handed me an army jacket. I already knew where to go: the monitor lens showed my route in every detail.

So
! The tables had turned. The mind games were over. They had given my memory back but it didn't change very much. The only thing that remained was to speak to my father. I had to stop him at any cost. It had to be possible because without me, he'd never get anywhere. I was the only one who could start the portal machine.

Chapter One

The Dream Is One Step Away

S
till, I wasn't quite right. The hallway seemed to be the same but when you looked at the stone walls, they seemed to emit a weak glow. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. Now they were ordinary walls of dark uneven basalt.

But... w
ait up!

My feet froze to the floor. Blank gave me a rough shove in the back and I lost my train of thought.
Barely staying on my feet, I turned round and glared back at him. The guards raised their rifles and glanced in alarm at the captain waiting for his orders. He said nothing. His face relaxed and he waved us through.

I still would
have found the road even without the monitor lens. I remembered it too well. We were heading toward the stairs that led down to the closed level under the gasometer. There Mira had built her laboratory two years ago when we'd just arrived in the old city. The place was quite well-chosen, with a large room below and a wide shallow-sloping hallway leading to the exit upstairs, perfect for bringing in equipment. We'd had to widen the stairwell with a jack hammer but the former miners among the clones had made short work of that. Mira had also asked them to build a stone partition to divide the room into both working and living accommodation. Naturally, I'd been more than welcome in the latter.

The guard in front turned into a
nother passage and started down the stairs. The walls seemed to be gleaming again. I thought I saw some sort of grid shimmer appear on their surface. It flashed red and died away leaving a vivid imprint on my retina.

I glanced back at the captain. He kept walking as if nothing
had happened and gave me a quizzical look. That was weird. Did it mean that neither he nor the soldiers had seen anything?

We walked down the stairs
and along a wide hallway. The guard in front stopped by Mira's laboratory door. My palms broke out in a sweat as my heart pounded in my chest and I knew that Mira was behind the wall waiting. I detected her frequency, open and free, but my father seemed to be there with her. They were bouncing messages off each other and it seemed that the discussion was quite heated. At that moment I couldn't say which one of them I wanted to see more. All previous speculation was obliterated by my emotion.

Advance
, Blank ordered.

Slowly, I entered the
silent room. Practically nothing had changed there. A cot, a small table, two stacks of plastic containers in the corner. To the right, the stone partition and sliding glass doors. A light burned in the lab.

Of course, after two years I wasn't used to the memory chips any more. I'd forgotten the idea of the thought communication.
My eye caught sight of some shelves that hadn't been there before. Baby blankets were stacked on the top shelf, next to a folded bedspread. On top of it lay some homemade dolls made of plastic tubes, the kind that wounded soldiers used to fashion in hospitals during their convalescence.

I stepped to the door and
again glanced at the shelves. The lower one was occupied by two clean little plates edged with a cute drawing next to a baby bottle half-filled with white liquid. None of this belonged here. I walked toward the door, and the glass panel slid noiselessly aside. I entered the laboratory.

Mira sat by her work desk staring at the opposite wall.
A lamp was lit on the desk lined up with test glassware next to her electronic tablet journal where she normally entered her test observations. A refrigerator hummed in the corner. Behind it I noticed the ultracentrifuge she used to separate liquids and mixtures. Next to it, stood the general.