“I have to find a way into this,” the peacekeeper said, his voice thick.
He had just finished saying this when a siren went off and the cool female voice said from a speaker in the ceiling: “Intruder on Level One…Intruder on Level Two…Intruder on all levels…multiple intruders…warning…warning…multiple intruders on all levels…”
Ethan knew they had come to kill him. Time was running out for everyone in this room and for every human who huddled in a shelter all across this world. They were on their way, and they would not wait for this form to fall and his true essence to break free.
The black cube sat in his palm. Fear, he thought. End of all life. One chance. One.
They were coming.
THIRTY-FOUR.
“IT’S IMPOSSIBLE!” BEALE’S EYES WERE WILD. “NOTHING CAN GET IN here!”
“Warning…warning…multiple intruders on all levels,” said the female voice, its cool computerized cheerfulness now completely out of place. “Echo Sierra. Repeat…Echo Sierra.”
“What does that mean?” Dave demanded.
“Worst case scenario. Everybody stays on lockdown while the Special Ops soldiers work…but there aren’t any here.” Beale left them in the artifacts room to confer with Derryman and Winslett, who both looked as if they were ready to climb the walls. Corporal Suarez had taken a position where he could watch the steel door, his rifle at the ready.
“He says nothing can get in here,” Jefferson said. His face had become a swamp of sweat. “That’s what he thought about the White Mansion too. Ethan, do you know where they are and how many?”
“Many signals,” Ethan answered, but he was giving most of his concentration to the black cube. The siren was still sounding, a high oscillating noise. Pain nagged at him, pulling him away from his task. “They’re not far from this room,” he added. “They’re fighting each other right now, which gives us some time.”
Dave thumbed the safety off his automatic rifle. He offered the pistol to Olivia, who gladly took it.
“I know this cube is a gift,” Ethan said. “It has to open up, somehow.”
“By the time you figure that out we’ll be dead.” Jefferson looked with some consternation at the pistol in Olivia’s hand. “Don’t I get a gun? How about letting me hold that one?”
“I’m fine as it is, thanks,” she told him.
“You can hold this.” Ethan held the cube out to Jefferson.
“I don’t want that damned thing. It scares the hell out of me.”
“Please hold it. I need a free hand.”
Reluctantly, Jefferson took the cube and held it before him in his right palm. “Echo Sierra…Echo Sierra,” the computerized voice repeated, but no Special Ops soldiers were coming to their rescue.
“How much time do you think we have?” Dave asked, watching the door and the walls.
“I have no…” Idea, Ethan was about to say. But an idea did pierce through, and that idea was: Time.
The greatest gift.
A thousand permutations went through his mind in a matter of seconds. A thousand odds were weighed, a thousand combinations and possibilities. He looked at the digital clock on the far wall, which had just changed over to 20:52.
“I’m going to try something,” he said. “Every civilization recognizes the concept of a positive and a null, which would be to you one and zero. In your language, binary code. Whatever happens,” he told Jefferson, “don’t drop it.”
“What’s going to happen?”
Ethan ignored him. The clock still showed 20:52.
He spoke the number calmly and clearly in binary code: “One, zero zero zero, zero zero zero, zero zero one, zero zero.”
The cube did not open.
Jefferson felt nothing, no movement nor heat from the object.
Two small squares suddenly illuminated on the top. Jefferson gave a little yelp but he didn’t drop it.
Within each square were two symbols that pulsed with white light. Jefferson thought they looked like Chinese markings. The other sides of the cube remained black.
“What is it?” Dave asked. “How’d you know to do that?”
“It’s a timepiece,” Ethan said. “I spoke the current time in binary code. It’s set itself to recognize the time system here and react to a human voice. And…I didn’t know for certain, but I assumed that the cube might respond to something other than touch.” He saw that Beale, Derryman and Winslett had noticed the glowing cube and they were coming in, with the President leading the way.
“What’s that thing doing?” Winslett asked, a frantic note in his voice, before Beale could speak. “Is it a bomb?”
“No. It’s…an alien clock,” Ethan decided to say for the sake of simplicity and simple minds. “I woke it up.”
“A clock? What the hell good is that?” Derryman asked sharply.
“Warning…warning…multiple intruders on all levels,” said the female voice. “Echo Sierra…Echo Sierra.” It sounded now as if the computer had begun to plead for help.
“We’re going to be under attack very soon,” the peacekeeper said. “Cyphers are going to be coming through the walls. Before they do, I need to tell you about this.” He held his hand out for it and Jefferson gladly gave it up. “I know where it came from. I recognize the symbols. And it’s a little more than just a clock.”
“What, then?” Beale prompted.
“This is the greatest gift you’ve been given, sir. It’s your world’s second chance.”
“Explain that.”
“The civilization that brought this to you is very old. They were the first to use the dimensional lightpaths. They might have witnessed an asteroid strike to your planet, eons ago. They brought this as a gift to prevent the destruction of your world in the repeat of such a strike or some other catastrophe. We can use it now. I can read the symbols, I can activate the power in this.”
“Power? What power?” Beale eyed the cube warily. “What does it do?”
Ethan smiled faintly, in spite of the pain that was steadily breaking this body down. Oh, there was so much they did not know and could not yet understand…
“It’s a time machine,” he said.
No one spoke. It was a frozen moment, though from beyond the steel door there came the muffled noise of what might have been an explosion. Ethan could envision the Cyphers and Gorgons fighting out there, locked in deadly close-quarters combat.
“Such a thing doesn’t exist,” said Derryman. “It can’t exist.”
“This has its limitations,” Ethan went on. “It can reverse time but not leap it forward. That’s the point of the gift. To go back and have a second chance…a gift of time to destroy an asteroid, to avert a war, or prevent any other disaster.”
“You’re saying…with this thing we can erase what’s happened?” Beale asked. “Go back in time?”
“With limitations. As I understand this creation, it can be used only once. And…I think going back more than two years is…how would you say…pushing the envelope. Your minds are such that the reversal of that much time may cause memory holes. Some will be able to remember and some not.”
Something slammed against the steel door, but for the moment it held.
“Echo Sierra…Echo Sierra…” It was a lost voice calling out for a lost cause.
“There may be other repercussions,” the peacekeeper said. “Honestly, I just don’t know.”
Beale drew a long breath, held it and then exhaled. “Can you program it?”
“Yes.”
“For when?”
“To be as safe as possible…the latest date. The third day of your April month, two years ago. I can program the device to…” Ethan paused to study the symbols. “I think…to revert time back to within a few minutes before the Gorgons came through the portals.”
“That’s cutting it damned close, if it even works!” Winslett said.
“And what if it does work?” Jefferson asked. “So what if you can reel back time? You can’t s
top the Gorgons from coming through! They destroyed the armies of the world in a couple of days! What’s to keep everything from happening all over again?”
Ethan nodded, the silver eyes intense but under them the dark circles of exhaustion and physical injury. A smear of blood showed at the left corner of his mouth.
“I can,” he said.
“How?”
“In my true form…I can leave you with another gift. I can use my energy to create for you a permanent protective web around your planet. It can be tuned like the strings of an instrument to the harmonics of both Gorgon and Cypher warships. But if the Gorgons can’t get through,” he said, “the Cyphers will never come here. There will never be a fight for the border. Some will know it happened…some will have their memories of this erased.” He looked at Dave and Olivia and then back to the President. “It’ll make for a very interesting and challenging future.”
“My God,” Beale said. “If it works like you say, how will the world handle this?”
“I hope as what it’s supposed to be, a second chance.”
The President looked to Derryman and Winslett for help, but they were as lost as the lost voice and the lost cause. It was his decision to make, and what was the alternative?
He was about to say Do it when the first Cypher soldier blurred through the wall into the chamber outside the artifacts room. The creature was behind Corporal Suarez, who swiveled around and immediately opened fire.
The second Cypher soldier that followed blew Suarez apart with a double bolt of death from its energy weapon.
“Do it,” Beale ordered.
What Ethan needed was his own gift of time. The two Cypher soldiers were striding toward the artifacts room. Three more of them were ghosting from the wall. Dave fired through the glass, breaking it to pieces, and Olivia opened up with the pistol.
“Take it!” Ethan told Jefferson, holding the cube out. The creature that had killed Suarez was turning, bringing its blaster to bear on them. Jefferson scooped the cube from Ethan’s hand. The peacekeeper’s arm thrust forward and from the palm five spears of lightning shot out, one for each Cypher. The soldiers were hit, lifted off their feet and burned into black scarecrows when they slammed against the wall, where they flowed to the floor like streams of grease.
More were ghosting in. Dave and Olivia were still shooting through the broken glass but the Cyphers vibrated so fast the bullets passed through their bodies. Two of the soldiers fired as they materialized and four red orbs of flame with white-hot centers flew at the artifacts room. Ethan was able to deflect all four, sending them sizzling through the wall, but he realized even he in this weakened body was going to soon be overpowered. Five more soldiers were sliding into the chamber. Thirteen Cyphers were there within twenty feet, and all of them aimed their blasters in unison at the seven targets.
With human sweat on his face and human blood on his mouth, the peacekeeper swept his hand in a rapid motion across the row of soldiers.
How many thousands of burning bullets left him? So many that, to him, he saw only a solid wall of them, flying outward with awesome velocity. They tore into and through the Cyphers, ripped them into flaming black pieces and splattered the walls and ceiling with clots of glistening red-and-yellow-streaked intestines. The last soldier to be obliterated was able to fire its weapon, but since half of the creature was already gone by the time the black-gloved finger twitched on the fleshy trigger, the double spheres shot up through the reinforced metal ceiling into the original rock of the silver mine. A rain of small stones fell amid a storm of dust. Two soldiers that had been coming through a wall now gleaming with Cypher guts slid away, as if deciding in their robotic logic that retreat was advance in a different direction.
“They’ll be back,” said Ethan, who coughed blood into a hand that was his gunsight. He staggered, and the President caught him. “I need time to program it,” he said, the voice raspy and weak. “We’re not safe here. Get into that room.” He nodded in the direction of the steel door that led to the surgery.
“Let’s go,” Beale said. Then, to Jefferson, “Hold onto that thing.”
They left the shattered artifact room and moved through the pall of rock dust, with Beale in the lead and Dave guarding the rear. Ethan was helped along by Olivia. He was aware of entities pressing in, of things not fully formed lurking in the haze, but whether they were Cypher or Gorgon, he didn’t know. Whichever it was, a terrible danger was very close.
They were about fifteen feet from the door when Dave heard what might have been a soft whistling like the displacement of air; or maybe it was a whirring sound, like a little machine in motion.
It was coming from his left.
He turned in that direction, his rifle barrel coming up because he knew already.
Vope had materialized only a few feet away. Vope was perfect again, as perfect as the Gorgons could create the masquerade of a human being.
Dave fired into the thing’s face and blew its right cheek off. Before he could take a second shot he saw the mouth hitch into what might have been a smile of triumph, just as the mottled spike drove itself into the right side of his chest. It wrenched free, and Dave fell to his knees.
There was no time for shock. With a cry of outrage and pain, Olivia emptied her last three bullets into the creature’s head. Vope staggered back, counterfeit human blood flowing down the face. The spiked arm and the arm with the ebony snake-head writhed in the air, the snake’s metal fangs darting out to seize and crush Olivia’s skull.
Ethan did not let that happen.
His rage emerged as a massive silver whip of energy that tore Vope to shreds in the blink of an eye. The face, now devoid of emotion, disintegrated. What little remained of the body was thrown backwards into the haze, and that small part ignited into white flame and exploded into nothingness.
“Help him…help him,” Ethan pleaded. Derryman and Winslett reached down and dragged Dave through the steel door. Beale slammed it shut and threw two locks.
Olivia had burst into tears, her knuckles white on the empty pistol. Ethan knelt down beside Dave, who reached out for him and grasped the front of his t-shirt.
“Damn,” Dave whispered, more in frustration than in pain. He was a ruin. He was his own Visible Man, open to the world. His hand trembled, and his face had gone deathly pale. He had lost his rifle and the baseball cap. His sweat-damp hair was sticking up in wild cowlicks.
Ethan searched his eyes and saw the dying of the light.
“Rest,” the peacekeeper said.
“I…I…” Dave couldn’t speak, he couldn’t get anything out. Yet he had so much to say. A coldness was creeping up. So much to say, to both Ethan and Olivia. To Jefferson, as well. He wanted to put his arms around Olivia one last time and tell her how much he loved and respected her, but he knew it was not to be. He hoped she knew; he thought she did. She knelt beside him too and took his other hand, and she held it tightly. It was getting hard for him to think, hard to realize exactly where he was and what had happened. It had been so fast. He thought as he started to drift away…one thing he had learned…life was not fair and there were hard blows you had to take on the chin, like it or not. A test, he thought. Was that really what it was all about? If so…he hoped he’d scored at least a passing grade. His sunken eyes found the glowing cube in Jefferson’s hand. He pulled Ethan close, his mouth against the ear of a human boy.
“I believe in you,” he whispered.
And he left the world with the small sigh of a man who had worked hard all his life, seen much trial and tribulation, but had known joy and love too, in what used to be. He left the world holding tight to a being from another planet or another dimension or another reality, and as the life departed and the hand fell away, the peacekeeper stood up with Beale’s help. Ethan was himself dazed and unsteady but not defeated, and he touched his silver eyes where they were wet. Then he knew fully what it was to be a human, and he was in awe of them.
Olivia got to her feet. She
stared down at Dave for a moment, and when she looked into Ethan’s eyes again she was stone-faced and resolute. “Do what you need to do,” she told him. “Do what you can.”
They stood in an area where surgeons prepared themselves to explore the bodies of beings from other worlds. There was a long green ceramic sink where the surgeons scrubbed their hands before they put on the rubber gloves and took up their scalpels. A pair of doors led into the operating room, and a large plate-glass window afforded a view to the two stainless steel operating tables, the concave mirror lights and the other necessary equipment. Ethan noted two cameras set up to capture all the details.
“Hold it out,” Ethan said to Jefferson.
There came the muffled noise of another explosion, a massive one, from somewhere else on the level. The floor shook beneath their feet. The Gorgons and Cyphers were still at their forever war, and they would fight each other into eternity on balls of rock, ice, and fire that sat astride the border.
“Hurry,” the President urged.
But it could not be hurried, because even though the peacekeeper knew the symbols, the task still had to be done with care. The creature who had brought this gift had intended to absorb the earthly languages, which would be child’s play for that advanced civilization. Then detailed instruction would be given to whoever was chosen to receive it, and hopefully that person was wise enough to grasp the power in this timepiece.
But that hadn’t happened, and Ethan figured the bearer of this had wound up being dissected on one of those operating room tables.
Ethan recognized that the upper symbols on the two squares stood for the representation of Furthermost Distance, which would be the year. The lower symbols stood for one and zero, again the binary code. Ethan entered the year by pressing the squares a total of eleven times. They turned from glowing white to red. That designation of the Year—the furthermost distance in time away from the present moment—was accepted.
The squares became white again. The upper symbols changed to the representation of Middle Distance, which would be the day. April 3rd was the 93rd day of the Earth year, thus Ethan entered the binary code of 1011101. The squares turned red, accepting the day.