The Road to Hell (7 page)

The thin wisps of smoke were gone. On the other side of the one-way mirror a dark mass of fog swirled around the room in the vague shape of a man. Every now and then the form of a teenager was clearly visible in the billowing cloud.

“
Tell me where he is. Tell me where I can find him.”

A deep voice broke from within the interrogation room crying, “Artemis… is… here…”

Kane flicked a switch and 50,000 volts of electricity surged through floor of the interrogation room. The captain stood silently to one side as the senator squirmed; such soft hands were not use to such violent means.

“
Tell me,” yelled Kane. “Tell me and I’ll make the pain go away.”

The senator watched in astonishment as arcs of electricity danced around the room. A blood-curdling scream resounded through the glass.

“
Tell me,” screamed Kane, yelling back at the cries of anguish.

Suddenly, the form of a young man appeared slumping against the table before rolling down onto the floor. Kane released the switch, turning off the voltage.

“
Is he dead?” asked the senator.

“
He’ll wish he was,” replied Kane. “No. He’s just unconscious. It takes more than that to kill these monsters.”

“
But he’s just a child,” said the senator staring at the young man lying on the floor, seeing this daemon in physical form for the first time. Blood pooled on the tiles, running from around the young man’s eyes, out from his mouth and down from his nose. To the ageing, grey-haired senator, he looked more like a boy than a man, a teenager if anything.

“
Don’t be fooled,” replied Kane. “He’s playing possum. It’s all part of his training. Enter that room and you’re a dead man.”

“
How did you catch him?” asked the senator, turning toward the captain.

“
We picked him up during a routine patrol,” replied the captain, standing to attention, “He evaded capture for more than an hour but, as we poured more and more troops into the area it became increasingly harder for him to escape, even with his special abilities. Eventually we cornered him. He made a break for it and fell through a skylight. When we got down to him, he was unconscious. From there, we brought him to this holding cell as per our standard quarantine procedures.”

“
This is brilliant,” said the senator.

“
Captain,” said Kane. “Your services are no longer required. You will leave us.”

Nothing further needed to be said. The captain backed away, bowing slightly as he turned and left Kane alone with the senator.

“
What is he?” asked the senator, watching a hand twitch in the other room. “I mean I know the name, I’ve read the briefings and seen the photos, but this, this is something else. All the scientific articles and abstract discussions mean nothing until you actually see one of them in operation.”

“
During the war there were experiments in genetic engineering,” began Kane. “Most of the subjects died. The variations were just too radical, tearing at the very fabric of existence. They were bonding volatile strands of anti-quarks within the atoms of a select DNA chain. Of those that survived, only a handful had traits that were useful to the military. Those that had an offensive capacity were labelled daemon, meaning devil or evil spirit. The rest were cleansed. The daemon were originally designated as assassins, assets that could infiltrate with stealth, move as a shadow and murder in the dark.”

“
But how do they do it? How do they move like a ghost? I don't mean in a scientific sense, that stuff goes over my head. But can you explain it in layman's terms? In terms I can understand?”

The senator watched as the feet of the young man fade in and out of sight while the rest of his body stayed limp and inert on the floor.

“
Time travel seems remarkable, but it's not. It's actually quite dull and ordinary. We travel through time every second of every day without ever really thinking about. We travel on from one second to the next, like a stick floating down a river. It sounds strange, but that, in essence, is time travel in its most basic form, and it's entirely natural.”

“
If time was a regular spatial dimension, we'd find ourselves slipping in just one direction at a constant pace all the time, like sliding on ice. All they are doing is changing direction every now and then. If we're slipping in a straight line, they're dancing back and forth.”

“
They are free to move in four dimensions, not three. They bend time around them. Oh, not in terms of months or years like you see in the movies, only in terms of seconds or minutes, in some cases even hours.”

“
They move around in time,” replied the senator, somewhat lost in thought. “It seems so fantastic, unreal.”

“
Oh, it’s real, alright.”

“
They seem to float, as if on a breeze,” the senator added, looking intently at the young man as his arms drifted in and out of view. He read all the senatorial reviews and seen pictures, but nothing compared to seeing one of the daemon live.

Kane took a sip of water before continuing.

“
As time warps around them, their bodies distort and so they appear as a blur, a mist, or a shadow. We see them in only one phase as they spreads themselves out over multiple regions of time. They can’t walk through walls but they can search local time to see if a door has been or will be opened and then use that to escape.”

“
I understand the words you're using, but the meaning is lost on me,” replied the senator, watching as the young man in the other room groaned softly, rolling his head to one side.

“
It is difficult to grasp, senator, but time is just another dimension. It seems somewhat unique to us, but it’s simply a dimension like any other. Forwards and backwards, up and down, left and right. We see our world in three dimensions when, in reality, it unfolds in four dimensions as time continually rolls on.”

Inside the interrogation room a bloody hand reached up and grabbed hold of the edge of the table as the young man struggled slowly to his feet.

“
Imagine this building as viewed from space. Imagine if you could look down upon this floor with x-ray vision. From that height, the building would appear flat and it would look like I was moving in only two dimensions as I moved around the floor.”

“
On this floor, I cannot walk directly from the turbo-shaft to the windows. There's a concrete wall in my way. I have to go around and through security, but if I go up five floors to the cafeteria I can walk right out of the lift and over to the window. To you, watching from space, watching me move about in only two dimensions, it would appear as though I walked into an obstacle, walked back to the centre of the building and then simply walked through the obstacle to get to the window. You wouldn’t see me move between floors, shifting in a third dimension. To you, it would seem like I could walk through walls. Essentially, that’s what the daemon are doing with time.”

Kane picked up his glass of water and took another sip before continuing, watching as the young man in the other room staggered back against the wall.

“
They can’t move through time for periods of days, weeks, months or years for the same reason you can’t run faster than a horse or a car. It’s a physical limitation.”

“
What do they want?” asked the senator. He knew full well what Artemis wanted, but he wanted to hear it from Kane, to make sure Kane understood the gravity of the situation.

“
They want a revolution. They want anarchy, to destroy the Council.”

Kane reached down and pressed a button beside the microphone built into the control panel.

“
Where is Artemis?”

In hazy blur, the young man shot forward from over behind the table up to the glass, covering a distance of almost ten feet in a fraction of a second as he screamed out, “He’s here. He’s right here…”

__________

Olivia stood alone in the turbo-shaft lift watching as the floors flashed by. She’d stopped anyone else from getting in on the lobby floor and, given her commanding appearance, no one seemed prepared to challenge her. Grabbing the sides of her strapless dress, she lifted the smooth, silky fabric, allowing her breasts to sit a little lower, making her feel a little more comfortable and a lot less self-conscious.

A soft whisper broke from behind her, saying, “I love it when you do that.”

“
Now is not the time, Artemis.”

His hands materialise around her waist, gently caressing her thighs. His warm lips kissed softly on the back of her neck.

Artemis came into concretion, condensing into human form as Olivia slipped off one of her stiletto shoes and opened the flat sole. A small key card hidden inside the sole allowed her to access the lift computer. This, she knew, was what had tripped the sensors at the security checkpoint.

She slipped her shoe back on and waved the access card across the face of the touch screen computer. Binary code flashed rapidly across the display, a series of zeros and ones scrolled before her in seemingly infinite, random combinations. Olivia’s nimble fingers punched a series of virtual keys and the screen changed into hexadecimal and then into regular programming code, a harsh display of semi-literate English commands.

The lift slowed, stopping at the 318th floor as Olivia struggled to finish reprogramming the access codes. Artemis slipped a small bag off his shoulders and onto the floor of the elevator. Although he was physically ready for action, with his muscles pumped and his adrenalin running, he wasn’t sure if he should phase-shift or stay in solid form in such a small, confined space. There was a fine line between courage and stupidity, one they both realised they’d overstepped.

As the elevator doors opened, Artemis stepped away from Olivia, back into shadows in the far corner of the lift, trying to give both her and himself enough room to fight their way out if need be. Neither of them knew quite what to expect. They’d hoped to take complete control of the elevator but just didn’t have time to commandeer the lift before the central computer had locked onto a request from another floor.

Olivia cancelled the programatic update, waving her card over the sensor as a uniformed officer stepped into the lift with a prisoner in handcuffs. Daffodils rolled across the lift display screen as serene music filled the elevator.

Two soft lights lit up on the list of floors currently programmed into the lift, 550, the observation deck Olivia had originally selected and a request from someone in the council chambers on 557. With his back to Artemis, the officer smiled at Olivia, somewhat taken back by her beauty. He swiped his access card and punched the 420th floor. At first, the officer didn’t know quite where to look. His eyes drifted upward to the floor numbers flashing past within the lift and then slowly around the elevator doors. Without making it too obvious, his eyes finally rested on Olivia.

The prisoner looked nervous, as though he sensed something wasn't right. Artemis quietly drew out a fighting knife and held it out of sight, up against the back of his thigh.

“
Faulty security card, huh,” said the officer, taking a very good look at Olivia, taking full advantage of the situation now he realised she’d been fiddling with an access card. With his attention on her, Artemis was in his blind spot, conspicuously out of sight. The officer barely even noticed him, but then, he wasn’t supposed to, was he? Artemis thought. After all, that’s why Olivia was here in the first place. She was the diversion, the distraction, and she plied her craft well. Slowly, he slipped the knife back into the sheath beneath his trench coat.

The officer reached out and took the fake card from Olivia. Her heart leapt in her throat. If he tried to swipe the card she knew what would happen. The card would automatically hack into the core system, throwing up the binary screen, and the game would be up. The officer looked at the card, flexing it between both hands, straightening out a slight curve in it.

“
Don’t you worry about a thing, Miss. This happens all the time. They use these generic cards over and over again with so many different encryption patterns they start to fail when they get old.”