The Broken Universe (45 page)

He pushed open the emergency exit. Weeds had sprung up in the sidewalk and street. Nothing. No bastion.

Transportation was the first requirement. Prime found it right outside the warehouse in a white delivery van for a general contractor. He dumped the tools, wood, and material out onto the street and drove the van to a hardware store where he picked up wire cutters, a knife, and other things he might need. He had marked the location of the Texas National Guard headquarters and drove there next.

The door to the armory had been ripped from its hinges and the weapons looted at some time during the plague. The place was barren. He tried the commandant’s office and found a shelf unit of assault rifles, grenades, and pistols. He broke the glass to the unit and took what he needed.

The Pantex site proved trickier. The gates were locked tight and spike strips had been deployed in front of and behind the gate. There was no way to get near the fence; short, stubby poles blocked access off the road. Furthermore, there was a cement culvert that made driving near the fence, even if he got past the poles, impossible. He’d have to go through the gate.

John Prime donned thick leather gloves. He grabbed the first spike strip and tried to drag it off the road. It proved almost too heavy for him. Finally he managed to drag it into the grass. There were three more on this side of the gate. He was sweating heavily by the time he took his cutters to the chain and lock. It snipped with a grind of metal. He unlooped the chain and pulled it off.

Four spike strips were on the other side.

“Jesus. Were they expecting zombies?”

He encountered no more obstacles on his way to the concrete bunker that housed the SADM devices. On the tarmac near the entrance to the bunker were six skeletons, picked clean by the elements and the animals. They were soldiers, Prime saw as he edged closer, with GI tags that hung from their ribs. One of the soldiers had died of a gunshot wound—his skull had a jagged hole in the temple.

Had there been some last stand here? Had someone come to take the nukes and these soldiers died here defending the trove? Were the nukes gone?

“Shit!”

The door to the bunker was locked. That was a good sign that the special atomic demolition munitions—the backpack nukes—were still inside. But getting through the door was a problem.

He couldn’t grenade the damn door. The last thing he wanted to do was to have explosives near nuclear devices, regardless of the fail-safes.

The door opened outward, but the hinges were machined flush with the wall. There was a handle, however.

He weaved the van among the skeletons and ran a chain from the trailer hitch to the door.

Slowly he eased the van forward, putting tension on the chain. The door held. He applied more gas. The van leaned forward. The wheels suddenly spun and the van lost traction, fishtailing a bit to the left.

“Damn.”

Prime slowly backed up a meter or two. Then he slammed on the gas. The van lurched forward, hung there for a moment, and then jumped forward. Something smacked the back window of the van, shattering it. He slammed on the brakes. The door was intact. The chain was not.

He drove to the machine shop and found a pneumatic drill powered by a gasoline engine. With it he was able to dig the three hinges out, though he ate through a bit to do so. This time when he yanked the door by its handle, the locks’ tongues bent and the door tilted out of the frame to rattle on the tarmac.

Prime had to use the drill three more times, twice on a mantrap that required a person to stand one at a time in a particular spot before the doors would open or close, and then the vault door. He had to go back to the machine shop for more drill bits.

The vault door came off with a clank, slamming onto the tile floor. He reached in and hit the light switch. Lights flickered on, illuminating a room with twelve alcoves. The captain had explained that the SADM facility had its own bank of batteries in case of power failure. Apparently they still held a charge after two years.

Each alcove was separate from its neighbor by a meter and a thick wall of lead. Inside each alcove was an olive-drab cylinder. Straps hung from the front and each stood on a pedestal that would make it easy for a soldier to back up to it and strap it to his back. The cylinders were about seventy centimeters tall and half as much wide. From the manuals he’d been able to find in 7650, he knew they weighed nearly seventy kilograms.

“Jackpot.”

An hour later, John Prime was heading toward Ohio in an M35 cargo truck with six nukes in its bed.

CHAPTER
39

John squinted against bright lights. He tried to raise his hand to wipe away the tears, but something held his arm down. He needed to blow his nose; snot was collecting in his throat. He groaned and tried to sit up. He couldn’t move.

A shape blocked the light.

“John Rayburn, can you hear me?”

“Luigiantia,” he mumbled. His brain felt foggy. He couldn’t think right, and he was pinned down. Panic rose in him.

“That’s right. I am Imperator Luigiantia—”

“—of the Order of the Vigilari,” John finished. The words came unbidden from his mouth. He’d been here before, days ago or hours ago. He couldn’t tell.

“Drugs?” he said, slurring his words.

“That’s right. We’ve drugged you, John Rayburn,” Luigiantia said. “So that you answer our questions without unwanted emotion.”

“Casey.”

“Where is your iaciorator, John Rayburn?”

“Everywhere.”

“What universe is it in?”

“Every one we settled.”

“No, the specific universe where the iaciorator is located,” she insisted.

John felt himself grow angry, but in an abstract way.

“I told you, every settled universe!”

“Which ones?”

“That’s a secret.”

“You need to tell me,” Luigiantia said. “Do you have two? Did you find two of them?”

“Didn’t find any,” John said. “It found me. I found me.”

“Did someone give you the iaciorator?”

“Yes! But it’s broken. Only goes one way.”

“What?”

“Broken. Can only go up. One-way trip.”

“If your iaciorator is broken, how can you travel anywhere?”

“Made my own,” John said.

“What did you say?” Luigiantia asked, incredulous.

“I made my own iokinatinator, whatever.”

“You made your own iaciorator? Without fail-safes? You can travel anywhere?”

“Haven’t tried anywhere,” John said. “Induction suggests I can. Can’t you?”

“There are limits. Practical and otherwise,” Luigiantia said, but quietly, as if she were speaking to herself.

“I had a limitation. I reverse engineered it.” John’s mind was slowly coming unfogged. He’d been drugged. He felt the freedom of it dissipating, and with it a dread that he had revealed too much. Had he told Luigiantia where the settled universes were? But she knew who he was. By a process of elimination—by the process of eliminating every John Rayburn—she could eliminate the Pinball Wizards.

“Leave us,” she said to someone beyond John’s vision. A door opened and shut.

“What does your iaciorator look like?”

“It’s—”

John forced himself to remain silent.

“It’s—”

“What does it look like?”

“Negotiate!” John shouted.

“I’ll drug you and get what I want! Answer the question.”

“No! You attacked us. You attacked us! You killed us! You killed Casey!”

“Vermin!”

“Murderers!”

“You want to be left in peace?”

“Yes!”

“You can’t be! You’ll kill us all, and you have no idea why!”

“We won’t!”

“You’ve never heard of the Vigilari, have you?”

“Never.”

“You’re from a fallow universe.”

John didn’t answer as he had no idea what that meant.

“One where there is no idea of transdimensional travel,” she added.

“None.”

“And you found some—machine—that allows you to move from one universe to another.”

“My doppelganger did.”

“Your dup.”

“My doppelganger.”

“What does the device look like?”

“A disk, ten centimeters in diameter, just a centimeter thick. With controls and a display.”

Luigiantia gasped.

“That small?”

“It fits under my clothes.”

“Where did your dup—your doppelganger—get it?”

“No more answers! We deal! You leave us alone!”

“That can never happen, John Rayburn. You’re too dangerous for the universe.”

“No!”

She reached for something, a needle.

“I need to know where that device is, John Rayburn. I need to know where you have been. Your traces have to be sterilized before it’s too late.”

“No!”

A door slammed open and there were words spoken quickly, breathlessly, in a language John didn’t recognize.

Luigiantia turned back toward him.

“Do your doppelgangers know which universe this is?”

“No.”

“Then why has there been an unauthorized incursion?”

She barked orders in her own language. He was unbelted from the bed and helped into a wheelchair.

“I don’t know how we could know where you are. We only knew vaguely of you from Corrundrum and the Alarians.”

“The Alarians? Of course.

“Take him to his room,” she ordered. “We’ll finish this, John Rayburn, and you’ll tell me what I need to know.”

He was too weak to lunge out of the chair, too weak to try to run. His body was limp and useless. The orderly pushed him into a white hallway. Sunlight streaked the floor through high windows. It felt like he was in a hospital. It smelled like a hospital.

An incursion! The Wizards were looking for him.

They passed a window. A small rock garden with a fountain stood in a courtyard. This world seemed artificial, not real. He’d been to the Pleistocene world enough to know what an empty universe felt like. This wasn’t the Vigilari’s home universe. It was a staging universe. A firewall between them and the rest of the multiverse.

Why?

“What universe is this?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

There was a flash of light. The orderly gasped. Then a roll of thunder slammed across the world, a wave of density that plugged his ears and made him gag. He’d felt this before, only much closer.

The orderly pushed him quickly to the next window, one facing the other direction—outside.

A mushroom cloud rose on the horizon.

“Prime! You son of a bitch!” John said. Oh, what had they done?

CHAPTER
40

“It’s an empty world,” Henry Home said. “Not Pleistocene. No megafauna or megaflora. It’s like our world, only empty.”

“How could they be from an empty world?” Casey Low asked. “That makes no sense.”

“It’s a staging world,” Grace Home said. “Not their home world, but something in between.”

“For protection,” Casey said.

“A firewall,” Henry said.

“I feel better about nuking it,” Grace Home said. “No collateral damage.”

“So no sign of them?” Grace Top said.

“Well, we sent a probe through from our Columbus site, from our Findlay site, and from our Toledo site,” Henry Top explained. “Simple camera probes. Scanned the entire horizon. Neat stuff. Let me draw it on the chalkboard—”

“Henry,” Grace Home, Grace Top, and Grace Champ said at the same time.

“Right. Nothing at the quarry. Nothing at Columbus. But we got a sighting at Toledo,” Henry Gore said.

“About six kilometers to the southeast,” Henry Low added.

“Huge structure,” Henry Case said.

“Nothing else,” Henry Pinball said.

“That’s the spot then,” Prime said. “Six klicks away and downwind. That’ll get their attention. Next one will be right on top of that structure if they don’t give us John.”

Grace Home held his gaze. She nodded.

She said, “Set up another gate near the structure on this side. And another halfway there. And one more to be safe, on the other side. We’ll have nukes at each location. We’ll escalate if we have to.”

“Got it,” the Henrys said in unison.

*   *   *

John Prime and John Gore transferred over at the first Toledo site into Universe 0010—Site #1. They placed the SADM device next to a tree on a level spot of ground.

“How long?” John Gore asked.

“Ten minutes.”

Then Prime looked up and saw the rise of an aircraft in the distance coming their way.

“Better make that two minutes.”

“Then we’ve got to make the next transfer cycle!” The gate at Site #1 in 7650 was flashing every sixty seconds to bring them back. Prime checked his watch. They had twelve seconds until the next one.

“We’ll make the next cycle. Two minutes.”

“Okay.”

John Gore set the timer, and together they turned their switches.

“One, two, three!”

It took four hands to activate the SADM, all toggling switches within a second of each other. No single person could activate one. There had to be two madmen.
Not to worry,
Prime thought,
Pinball Wizards has a plethora of madmen.

The Site #1 gate cycled with a small whoosh of air, the result of whatever pressure differential than existed between the two universes. They ran to stand in the transfer zone, holding each other’s shoulders and counting to sixty.

“Get ready,” Prime said.

“It’s fast. It’s gonna get caught in the blast.”

Prime eyed the aircraft coming toward them. It wouldn’t reach them within sixty seconds. “Screw ’em,” he said.

He glanced at his watch.

“Here we go,” he said.

The universe jumped and they were in Universe 7650.

“Mark site one as radioactive in Universe 0010. Don’t transfer there from here,” he said to the Henry working their gate.

“Noted.”

“Tell the teams that they have some sort of detection system,” Prime said. “Don’t send a nuke through—or anything else—unless we plan to use it.”

“Right.”

“Let’s get to Site Number Two.”

Site #2 was three kilometers to the southwest toward the structure they had spotted in Universe 0010. Prime hoped it was far enough away from the first explosion.