The Negator, page 28
I spun around, my hand going to my assault rifle.
Zorion simply stepped sideways through space, appearing directly in front of me.
Up close, he was even more unsettling. His eyes were the color of the deep ocean, and they held intelligence that was vast and seemed alien. When he looked at me, I felt like a bug being examined by an entomologist.
“Colonel Malik of the 2051st Regiment,” he said, as if reading from a file. “Fourteen successful deep incursions, fifteen now. Psychological profile indicates above-average intelligence for a human, with notable resistance to standard conditioning protocols.”
He gestured casually, and I felt invisible hands lift me off the ground, holding me suspended in the air like a child’s toy.
“But of course,” he continued, “you’re not really Malik, are you?”
The equipment pressed against my chest felt like it weighed a thousand kilograms as I hung there, helpless. My rifle was useless—even if I could reach it, what good would human weapons do against a being who could manipulate space?
“The amplifier case you’re carrying,” Zorion said, circling me slowly. “It’s emanating a field that interferes with my abilities. I haven’t encountered technology that could do that in several centuries.”
He reached out and touched the case with one finger. The moment he made contact, pain exploded through my skull. It wasn’t physical pain, but like having my thoughts torn apart and examined.
Then the pain stopped, and Zorion jerked his hand back as if he’d been burned.
“This is impossible,” he said. “The amplifier is adapting to my quantum signature, building defenses calibrated to my abilities.”
He was staring at the case with something approaching hunger.
“This changes everything,” he said. “Pre-Polarion technology that can adapt and evolve? This could be the key to transcending our current limitations.”
The invisible force holding me tightened, squeezing my ribs. I gasped, tasting blood.
“You will give me the amplifier,” Zorion said. “In return, I will kill you quickly instead of spending decades studying how your primitive nervous system processes pain.”
I tried to speak, but the pressure on my chest made it impossible to draw breath.
Zorion noticed and eased the force. “Do you have something to say, human?”
“Go… to… hell,” I gasped.
He laughed.
“How delightfully primitive,” he said. “But I’m afraid your bravado is wasted. You see, I can simply take what I want from your corpse.”
He gestured again, and the crushing force returned, stronger than before. I felt ribs crack and tasted blood.
That’s when the amplifier case began to glow. The black metal surface lit up. The glow spread to the power cell, and suddenly I could feel energy flowing through me.
The invisible force holding me shattered like glass.
I dropped to the floor, gasping, but I could feel the amplifier’s energy flowing through me. My broken ribs knitted themselves back together, and something else happened—I could see Zorion’s powers, could see the way he bent space and manipulated matter like visible threads of light.
Zorion backed away. “You’re interfacing with the pre-Polarion technology. How are you—?”
I didn’t give him time to finish. I lunged, the amplifier’s energy flowing through my muscles, making me faster and stronger than any human had a right to be. My fist connected with his perfect face.
Zorion staggered backward, touching his split lip in amazement.
“You actually hurt me,” he said.
I hit him again, this time in the solar plexus. The amplifier’s energy flowed through the strike, and Zorion doubled over, gasping.
“Not so tough without your cosmic powers, are you?” I said.
But even as I spoke, I could feel the amplifier’s energy beginning to fade. Whatever it was doing to protect me, it didn’t seem like it could last indefinitely.
Zorion must have sensed it too, because he straightened up, his injuries already healing.
“I am going to tear you apart slowly,” he said. “I am going to study every nerve ending while you scream.”
He raised his hand, power gathering around it like visible flame.
I turned and ran.
I hit the door to Storage Room C-7 and crashed through, slamming the manual lock behind me.
Something outside hit the door, causing the metal to bulge as if a giant fist had struck.
Inside the storage room, I found the maintenance panel. My hands shook as I pulled up the floor section, revealing the T-suit hidden beneath. The black globe on its back pulsed with anticipation.
The door began to glow.
I grabbed the T-suit and started pulling it on, my fingers fumbling with the fastenings. The amplifier case and power cell sat beside me.
“Chak-Tal,” I said. “If you can hear me, we need to go. Now.”
The door exploded inward, molten metal spraying across the room. Zorion stood in the smoking doorway.
Finally, the voice scraped through my head: About time. Feed me the power cell.
I grabbed the power cell, pressing it against the black globe. The moment they made contact, the globe began to pulse faster. I could hear Chak-Tal making satisfied sounds in the back of my mind.
Delicious. It’s been far too long since I’ve tasted real power.
Zorion stepped into the room, space bending around him like a heat haze.
“There is nowhere to run,” he said. “I can follow you anywhere in the galaxy.”
I sealed the T-suit’s helmet, as the systems came online. The circular antenna on top began to hum with energy. I picked up the case.
“Not anywhere,” I said. “Chak-Tal, get us out of here.”
But as the teleportation light began to surround me, Zorion raised both hands, power crackling between his fingers.
“I think not,” he said.
The glow faltered as his power interfered with the T-suit’s systems. For a moment, I thought he’d stopped it and that I was royally screwed.
Then the black globe pulsed one final time.
The last thing I saw was Zorion’s perfect face contorting with rage as he realized what was happening.
“I will remember you,” he said. “Whatever you are, wherever you go, I will find you.”
Then the teleportation light consumed everything, and I was falling through dimensional space, through time itself, carrying the amplifier back to my own era—I hoped.
-65-
The return trip through dimensional space was far worse than going.
The T-suit screamed as temporal energies tried to tear it apart. The amplifier case burned against my chest like a brand, and I could feel Chak-Tal fighting to keep us coherent.
Too much mass, his voice raked through my skull. The amplifier is creating dimensional drag. We’re going to—
For a moment, it felt as if I existed in multiple timelines simultaneously. I was Kane Hunter on the Theron. I was Colonel Malik dying in the tunnels. I was a child in Nevada watching a wooden knife being stolen. I was an old man I didn’t recognize, standing over graves. All these versions of me overlapped until the amplifier pulsed and yanked me back into a single timeline.
We materialized in the Theron’s cargo bay with a thunderclap that blew out three lights. I crashed to the deck, the T-suit sparking and smoking. Through the helmet’s display, I saw dozens of warning messages scrolling past: system failures, dimensional phase variance, and temporal displacement syndrome, whatever that had meant.
“Kane!” It was Alina’s voice, but it sounded too fast, then too slow, like reality couldn’t decide what speed to play at.
I tried to pull off the helmet, but my hands were shaking too badly. That wasn’t right. They were phasing in and out. At times, I could see through them to the deck.
“Don’t move,” Alina said. “You’re not fully materialized.”
Through the vibrating vision, I saw her running toward me with some kind of scanner. Gorrax raced into the cargo hold with a medical kit that looked tiny in his massive paws.
“How long?” I gasped. My voice echoed as if multiple versions of me were speaking out of sync. “How long was I gone?”
“Twenty-eight minutes,” Alina said, running the scanner over me. “But the scanner says your cellular degradation indicates you’ve aged several days.”
The amplifier case was still strapped to my chest, and now it was the only thing that felt solid and real. Everything else kept trying to phase, but the case seemed to anchor me.
“The suit seems to be fried,” Alina said. “Whatever you did, the scanner says it burned out most of the circuits.”
I finally managed to get the helmet off. The air tasted clean after breathing recycled tunnel atmosphere for what had felt like days. My reflection in the helmet’s visor showed my face. There were lines around my eyes that hadn’t been there before, a scar on my jaw that had belonged to Malik, not me.
“What happened?” Gorrax rumbled. “Where did you go?”
“The past,” I said. “About twenty-one hundred years back. I fought through Chirr tunnels as a Vomag soldier to get this.” I held up the amplifier case.
They stared at me as if I were some kind of alien.
“You traveled through time?” Alina said, sounding dubious. “That’s supposed to be theoretically impossible. The energy requirements alone—”
“The T-suit doesn’t just teleport,” I said, interrupting. “It threads through dimensions, including time. Chak-Tal, the pilot in the black globe, took me back to get this amplifier. He said I needed it to make the Negator work properly against the Burnt Polarion.”
“Who is Malik?” Gorrax asked.
I blinked. “What?”
“You mentioned fighting as someone named Malik.”
The memories were still there, pressing against the inside my skull.
“It’s complicated,” I said. “The time travel process overlaid me onto someone from that era. I was him, but still me.” I could see their confusion. “Look, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I got what we needed—and I met the Burnt Polarion back there.”
“What?” Alina nearly dropped her scanner.
“He was the young version. He called himself Zorion. He was running the tunnel campaigns on Fenris III, experimenting on human soldiers. And here’s the kicker—he saw me and talked to me.”
“Could that create a paradox?” Gorrax asked.
“Or maybe something worse,” Alina said. “If the Burnt Polarion in our time remembers the encounter, he’ll know about the amplifier. He might know what we’re planning.”
The phase-shifting was getting worse. My hand passed through the helmet when I tried to pick it up.
“We need to stabilize your quantum signature,” Alina said. “The medical bay might—”
“No time,” I said. “The Collector gave us the coordinates to the Dreadstar, right? We need to move now, before—”
Pain exploded through my skull as a memory that wasn’t mine forced its way in. I was standing in a tunnel, holding a device, inputting codes…
“Kane!” Alina grabbed my shoulders, her hands passing through before finding purchase. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m calling it a memory bleed,” I gasped. “Malik’s memories are trying to overwrite mine. I think the amplifier is keeping me anchored, but—”
Another wave hit. This time I was Zorion, standing in his laboratory, examining data about pre-Polarion artifacts. I could feel his thoughts, cold and analytical, discussing human test subjects like lab rats.
“Let’s get him to medical on the double,” Alina said.
Gorrax picked up the amplifier case and me. I guess I was solid enough for him to carry me. As he carried me, I saw flashes of other timelines: versions where I’d failed, where the Burnt Polarion had already won, where Earth was nothing but cosmic dust.
I wondered if we’d already lost. If young Zorion remembered me—if he’d spent twenty-one hundred years preparing for this moment—were we walking into a trap that had been set before Bill ever arrived on Earth in the Theron?
-66-
I woke up in the medical bay feeling like myself for the first time in what seemed like weeks. The phase shifting was gone, so my hands were solid.
I sat up.
“Welcome back,” Alina said from her chair beside the bed. She’d been working on a tablet. “You’ve been out for fourteen hours.”
“I feel normal enough,” I said. “Well, mostly normal.”
My body was mine again, although to my surprise, I had some of Malik’s memories. They seemed to be mainly about tunnel warfare, small unit tactics, or stretching rations. I wondered if they would fade with time.
“That case you brought back must be pretty special,” Alina said, setting down the tablet. “For one thing, it appears to have helped stabilize you.”
I looked at the black case sitting on the medical counter, cables running from it to various diagnostic machines.
“What have you learned about it?” I asked.
Alina shook her head. “Not much. We’re afraid to open it, although we couldn’t find a switch to do that. Perhaps it has a special thumb lock or something.”
“It’s called an Entropy Lens or an amplifier,” I said. “I don’t know if I have to open it and fit something over the Negator, or if having it gives me enough ‘weight’ to negate Zorion.”
“Come again?” Alina said.
“Chak-Tal said—”
“Who?” Alina said, interrupting.
It took me a second to realize they knew nothing about all that. “He’s the thing in the black globe,” I said. “His name is Chak-Tal and he’s a Void Corps pilot.”
Alina stared at me.
“He talks directly into my mind when I’m wearing the suit.”
“No, that’s not weird at all,” she said.
“You think it is?”
She stared at me again.
I gave her a grin. “Okay, it’s weird, and so is he, but he makes the T-suit work, and he helped me, so he’s an ally in all this.”
She nodded.
“He told me the real reason you couldn’t negate the High Polarion woman. You didn’t have enough… I forget the right word. I would guess it’s gravitas or something like that. We lack the bearing or weight of a High Polarion.”
“The Negator isn’t good enough by itself?” Alina said.
“I’m guessing not. So maybe the amplifier gives me the gravitas I need to use the Negator to negate the Burnt Polarion, to make it stick in other words.”
“That sounds crazy,” Alina said.
I nodded. “I know. This is all pretty crazy; so beyond my wheelhouse it isn’t even funny. Think of it this way. A Null Equation that can unravel existence is crazy too. So to stop it, we need something in that category.”
“That’s actually rational,” she said, “logical.”
I swung my legs off the bed, testing my balance as I stood up. Everything felt right.
“So what’s our status?” I asked.
“That’s what I was working on before you woke up.” Alina tapped her tablet. “While you were unconscious, I cracked the Collector’s navigation cipher.”
“And?” I said.
“According to this, the Dreadstar isn’t hidden in foldspace.”
“What?” I said.
“According to this, it’s in a remote section of space.”
“Where’s that?” I said.
“In a system with no official designation, just a catalog number: RX-7734.”
“How far is that from us here?”
“By my calculations,” she said, “a little over three days through foldspace.”
“We need to talk to the others,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, we were all on the bridge. Gorrax stood near the tactical station, his massive frame making the space feel smaller. Bill was at the engineering console, running diagnostics on the Manifold Drive. I’d taken my position in the pilot’s chair but hadn’t engaged the neural interface yet.
I related the situation as I saw it, adding the parts Alina had told me.
“So we trust a little weasel who has been working with our enemies?” Gorrax rumbled through his translator. He meant the Collector.
“We’re trusting to the fact that he doesn’t want to see the end of reality,” Alina said. “The Collector has obviously been playing his own game, but logic suggests he needs someone to stop the Burnt Polarion just like everyone else does.”
“His data could be trap,” Gorrax said. “He could be luring us into ambush for the Burnt Polarion.”
“He could be,” I said. “But what’s our alternative? We can’t search every star system in the galaxy and then foldspace for the Dreadstar. We know the Burnt Polarion is waking up. Every day we delay, he must be closer to full consciousness. And when that happens…”
“The Null Equation is activated,” Bill said, “and the unraveling of existence finally takes place.”
We all sat with that cheery thought for a moment.
“This is it,” I said. “We have the Negator, we have the amplifier, and we have coordinates to our target. I know the T-suit is a bust. So that’s going to make things harder than anticipated. But if we don’t take the shot now, we might not get another chance. So then what have we been doing all this time?”
Gorrax’s upper lips rose like a snarling dog. “If we die, at least we die fighting. That is better than waiting for the universe to end.”
The warfighter had given his vote. I might as well ask the others.
“Bill?” I said.
“You are the captain. I follow where you go.”
“Alina?” I said.
She nodded. “You’re right. What else can we do?”
“It’s unanimous,” I said. “So let’s get started before we lose our courage.”
I pressed my hands against the neural interface plates, expecting the usual resistance, the strain of my suboptimal genetics trying to mesh with Polarion technology. Instead, the connection was smooth, almost effortless. The Theron’s systems unfolded in my mind like a familiar room.
