~~~~~
“Tracked?” Aimee squeaked the question as a new fear entered her mind. If these people had floating computers, space ships and laser beams then what would worry them?
“Charalan!” The woman holding the floating computer cast a strained look their way. “We need you!”
The siren sounded like a high-pitched fire alarm of nuclear proportions and Aimee lifted her hands over her ears, but Charalan was speaking to her. She followed the movements of her lips. Yep, they were worried. Aimee didn’t even begin to think that some special forces from earth were coming to save her, but surely this whole thing couldn’t get worse. Yesterday the worst thing she could have imagined had been being humiliated by a Lamborghini-driving jock.
“Stay here,” Charalan ordered. “I will be right back.”
Aimee opened her mouth to respond, but the deck shook as she was jolted several feet across the floor. Barely managing to keep her balance, Aimee looked up at the transom and to her horror saw a hulking vessel that looked something like the Manhattan skyline. Any forays of the television remote to the Sci-fi channel never revealed a spacecraft that looked like New York City. As if that wasn’t odd enough, the vessel came with what she perceived as two large feet. It was from these feet that a beam was emitted, and the Horus trembled as that shaft made contact with the hull.
A fleeting thought went through her head that if this foreign craft was this large…what the heck was the size of the Horus? That roller coaster ride had only lasted a few seconds. How far had that horizontal elevator taken them?
Aimee wanted to scream at the absurdity of her plight. This simply could not be happening to her. But the Horus shook again and this time she was knocked to her knees. Strong hands grabbed her arms and hauled her up against a body that felt powerful and secure. She looked up into amber eyes that were so intense they exposed her vulnerability all the more.
“You can’t stay here,” his voice was soft and husky, but she could hear it over the cacophony of sound because he was so close.
“Do you know where the health ward is?” he prodded her.
“Health ward?” Aimee mouthed as her fingers curled around his arms.
“Zak!” Vodu called. His tanned face look strained, his lips thinned with determination. “We need you out there!”
Molten eyes looked away from her towards the elderly man. “I’m on my way!”
“Get her out of here. She—“
A blast hit the Horus and Aimee would have fallen were it not for Zak’s strong hold. He looked back at her and must have read the frantic look on her face. He did not break eye contact, but spoke to Vodu.
“I’ll drop her off in the health ward.”
“Good.” Vodu clutched the panel for balance. “Zak. Be careful out there.”
“Always.”
Aimee felt herself pulled from the deck, and though she did not know this young man in the strange black uniform, she felt safe in his presence. He exuded a take-charge charisma and everyone they passed tipped their head towards him as if in a silent bid for good luck or maybe just a military salute. The hand that was not secured around her arm flicked impatiently at the door to the horizontal elevator.
Inside, Zak surprised her when he touched a panel and the door collapsed into the floor, yielding to a huge transparent plate. Blazing along at horizontal hyper speed, Aimee was able to witness first-hand the destruction being imposed by the enemy craft. Sapphire beams blazed from the ship’s feet in myriad directions like a Disney laser show—only these were not innocent strobes, and they had one destination: The Horus.
“What is happening?” Aimee asked in a hoarse voice as the Horus shook again.
“I am not certain, but I think they are from Koron. Their ship has the markings of the structures on that planet.” Zak seemed think about it before answering. “I’ve only been there once, but I’m sure that this is them. They must be as surprised to see us as we are to see them.” Zak shook his head. “I guess their society dictates hostility as an initial reception.”
“Planet?” Aimee felt the blood drain from her face. “They are from another planet? Somebody better tell me where the hell I am!”
Zak let go of her and a fishhook mark developed between his eyebrows as he frowned and crossed his arms. “There is no time to explain in the depth that you want to hear and are obviously unwilling to listen to. You were taken from your planet by accident. You are on the Guardianship Horus. We just finished our Triad around the three spectral galaxies, and taking you on board was—” he seemed to hunt for a word, “an accident. We are not hostile like the Korons you see there, so don’t look so devastated. What is it they say in your language? Shape up or ship out! And in this instance 'out' would be very cold. We start the Triad over again soon. You will be back on your planet in no time.”
Thank God! Maybe she would be back in time to tell her classmates it had just been a family emergency. Heck, her parents were probably so busy talking over each other that they hadn’t even noticed she was missing yet.
A blast radiant enough to mimic lightning was followed by a tremor with the vibrato of thunder. That shudder was powerful enough to hurl Aimee against the clear wall. When her cheek smacked the panel she squealed, prepared for the pane to shatter and eject her into space. Powerful hands seized her shoulders and drew her from her imagined threat of oblivion. The fear of instant death faded. She became aware of a heart other than her own beating against her chest as she inhaled the fabric of the onyx uniform, thinking that the material looked remarkably like space itself. Celestial camouflage.
Another sharp quake of the Horus threatened to topple Aimee, but she was pinned against that bizarre uniform, trapped within inflexible arms. Panic brimmed as she started to struggle. She didn’t know this Zak at all, and here she was, splayed against him like peanut butter on toast. And yet, the embrace was something to lock onto in a world full of chaos. Everything around her was surreal, but the heart that beat against hers was something tangible. The warmth of another body and the comfort of the embrace, as unintended as it may be, represented the first sense of stability she had experienced since this whole nightmare started.
“Hang on,” Zak’s voice was as steady as his body. “You’ll be safe in the health ward. I have to go.”
“Where are you going?” She hated the desperation in that question.
“I have to go out there.” He nodded towards the firework display. “Don’t worry. Our fighters will get this under control.”
Another shudder shook the Horus and in the glow of a nearby explosion she saw the focus on Zak’s face. He was a young warrior prepared to go to battle to protect his own. In his golden eyes she saw the flares of lasers and the starburst of ensuing flames, and she also saw worlds she could never imagine. In those eyes she saw determination. At that moment he looked as she expected Hercules or Alexander the Great would have looked before embarking on a battle.
“You said I could go back to Ea—home soon, right?”
His nod was perfunctory. “We’ll be back there as soon as the next Triad is complete…that is, as long as the Korons don’t succeed here.”
Now released from his arms, Aimee felt dizzy and splayed her palms flat on the glass panel, taking in the chaos around her. The hulking silhouette of the Kronos ship was barely discernible, obscured by a host of small crafts that darted about like lasers themselves. Disc-shaped vehicles with green glowing tails burst into brilliant light in front of her eyes just before they whizzed by at unthinkable speed. She tried to trace them, but they transformed into hyper-blurs, barely differentiated from the rays firing upon the Horus. Every now and then one of the silver discs would zoom by close enough that she could distinguish a solitary figure at the helm. A figure dressed in black. A pilot? A warrior? She turned to look at Zak. He would soon be out there!
Aimee swallowed hard. “How long does a Triad take?”
/>
Zak waved his hand and halted the horizontal motion, disabling her equilibrium as she collided into him. He set her back from him and considered the question. “Not long. I think in your terms it’s only about six revolutions of your planet.”
Six years.
Aimee closed her eyes.
And she prayed.
A Dark Matter
By Brendan Carroll
Copyright 2010 Brendan Carroll
This was indeed a dark matter as were most assignments that the Chevalier du Morte received from the Grand Master of the Red Cross of Gold, Edgard d’Brouchart. As one of the surviving members of the semi-immortal Council of Twelve, Mark Andrew Ramsay had received uncounted requests from his Master aside from his usual duties as assassin and alchemist for the poor Knights of Solomon’s Temple, but this one was surprising indeed.
Mark turned the paper over, half expecting the other shoe to drop, but there was nothing written on the back. Just a simple question front and center of the expensive parchment stationery written in d’Brouchart’s almost illegible, archaic script:
What is the nature of this dark matter that has the scientific world in such a dither, du Morte?
The brooding Scot’s brow creased and then he smiled. The mention of the word ‘dark’ was probably the initiating factor in the Grand Master’s mind. He often called his Knight of Death a ‘dark bastard’ among other things. Certainly he had sent the Scot on enough foreboding missions over the years. Mark had found himself in Eastern Europe searching for revenants and vampires, in Germany seeking out Nazi holdouts, in Russia stalking serial killers and even in America spying on the activities of a number of spurious secret societies. Of course, his normal occupation as assassin for the Order took him even deeper into the darker shadow realms of the human psyche. Then there was his title: Chevalier du Morte, Knight of Death, which had nothing to do with his work as an assassin, but rather dealt with his Divine Mystery that involved the ability to literally cut his Brothers’ souls loose from their earthbound bodies should the need arise with a single blow of the Golden Sword of the Cherubim. This distasteful task had fallen to him a number of times over the centuries whenever one of them had fallen in battle or succumbed to some accident that left their material bodies unsuitable vessels for soul repositories on earth. These were his most distasteful missions, killing his own Brothers.
But this particular assignment seemed almost jovial in comparison, like being asked to eat a smoked salmon or being asked to paint the barn door red. It seemed strange that the Master had not given the assignment to another of the Council Members. Perhaps the Historian or the Knight of the Golden Eagle? But it made no matter; he would do his best to answer the question. It should be simple enough.
A few days later, found the Chevalier du Morte sitting in his favorite chair in his library with two or three dozen scientific journals, textbooks and periodicals scattered about on the floor around him, a small decorative pillow from the settee was in his lap serving as a writing desk. He folded back the leather cover of a worn journal with lined leaves and smoothed out the yellowed page. The journal was just one of a number of notebooks he used to record his alchemical notes in his basement laboratory. In his hand, he held his favorite refillable fountain pen, a smooth gold antique of some considerable value dating from the 1930’s.
He had soaked in everything available on the subject of Dark Matter, the latest fad, fashion and topic of enormous debate in the fields of astrophysics, cosmology and nuclear physics. It seemed that everyone of any note in the scientific community had an opinion of the nature of Dark Matter, its purpose, its existence and its relevance to basic understanding of the Universe, its size, its construction and its future. Currently, the race to capture a ‘picture’ of it was underway with a possible Nobel Prize in the offing for the winner.
Mark now sat in a deep state of meditative contemplation with the library doors closed and bolted, the wolfhounds safely off in the meadow chasing rabbits and the household servants under strict orders not to disturb him. A half empty tumbler of Glendronach Scotch sat on the table at his right elbow in front of the half full bottle of the same. His eyes were open, but his mind wandered the heavens between the stars, beyond the planets and the farthest reaches of known space where the Hounds of the Barrier could be heard barking furiously in the distant caverns of time. After an indeterminate sojourn that could have been hours or mere seconds depending on the point of view, he blinked.
He carefully removed the cap on the pen and checked the ink level in the barrel before putting the tip to the paper.
His thoughts ran ahead of his writing and he found his brain waiting impatiently for his pen to catch up.
Dark Matter. Physicists are searching for it with every technically advanced piece of equipment in the world, spending enormous sums of money on research and basically beating their heads against the proverbial wall, trying to get a glimpse of it, trying to understand its nature. So far, they have managed to prove its existence and have even managed to map its location or density dispersal throughout the universe by the mathematical extrapolation of observable data. The scientists say that without Dark Matter, the Universe would fly apart. All very fascinating, but not much by way of description. They know what it is not. It carries no mass, no electrical charge and does not react with matter. In light of those three mysterious facts, the very thought of proving its existence has been very difficult and is, indeed, not proven at all by positive means, but rather by negative inference, i.e. by what could not exist without it, namely the Universe. Describing something that seems to defy Newton’s laws at every turn appears to be impossible. At least, it seems materially impossible, but perhaps not virtually impossible.
The real questions might rather be: How can something without mass, without weight, without some sort of nuclear charge, so profoundly affect the entire Universe, permeate it, surround it, even fill the space between the individual sub-atomic particles and affect it so completely? And how could this ephemeral substance possibly exert enough gravitational influence to keep the trillions of galaxies in the Universe swirling about at such high rates of speed without flying apart?
Mark stopped writing and shivered slightly as the thought of what the Universe might be if the Dark Matter were to carry a charge and become reactive with matter. If the dispersal rates were accurate, then the very air would be clogged with Dark Matter. Eyes, ears, noses, tactile senses… all useless. What a very different Universe that would be! People, if they existed at all, would be deaf, dumb and blind and about as cognizant of life as the one-celled animals living under the rocks in a stagnant pond.
Rising stiffly from the chair, he laid aside the journal and pen before stoking the fire in the hearth. The fire popped and crackled comfortably, sending up a curtain of embers into the flue. The smell of the fire and its warmth on his face dispelled the chill that had crept into his soul during his silent musings and he suddenly understood why Master d’Brouchart had sent the question to him. He picked up the glass, drained the Scotch and poured another glass from the bottle. The wind rattled the panes in the windows on either side of the fireplace as he sat down and picked up the journal once more.
He drummed his fingers on the paper and took another burning sip of the liquor before continuing to write.
The scientists are digging in the wrong place with the wrong tool.
The Scotch called to him once more and he put aside his pen and paper and picked up the glass. A half hour later, his chin touched his chest, his long, black hair fell around his face as his eyes closed and sleep took him where no scientific journal could.
He stood below the mouth of dark cavern in the side of a sheer rock face some ten to twelve feet above his head. A hot breeze blew his hair in his face and sweat trickled down his face and his back under the weight of his chain mail. Looking about in astonishment, he saw a pale destrier, saddled and covered with the trappings of battle arm
aments tied to the blasted stump of a gnarled tree a few yards away. The horse rolled his eyes and snorted, raising first one and then the other front hoof nervously, sensing some danger nearby. Mark raised his eyes to the cave and was startled to see the head, shoulders and front feet of a tremendous black beast protruding from the opening. The legs were crossed and the clawed feet hung over the ledge almost casually.
The Knight stumbled back a few feet and gasped for breath as his heart rate kicked into high gear. He clutched the hilt of his golden sword in his gloved right hand. Such an instrument would be useless against such a beast of power. The horse was too far away to reach before the thing could fall on him and rip him to shreds.
The dragon snorted and snuffled the air above his head before lowering its neck and head down far enough to peruse him closely. Its eyes were deep emerald green and its head was covered with elegantly sculpted horns and iridescent scales. A wondrous beauty to behold, mesmerizing and deadly.
“Ah, methinks you have returned with some question burned into your head so sweet. Of your hale and hearty beast, I could make a lovely feast and together we might eat.” The dragon turned its gaze on the warhorse tied nearby causing it to whinny in fright.
Though the voice was loud, it was not harsh, but rather shockingly pleasant to Mark’s ear. His legs shook in his boots and his stomach fluttered, but he knew that showing fear at this point would most likely prove fatal.
“Hale and hearty?” He laughed and lowered the point of his sword to the ground, placing both hands on the hilt to steady himself. “He is naught but stringy tough and I daresay not enough for such a Lord as thee.”
“Well said, well said, my beautiful one,” the dragon seemed pleased with Mark’s summation. “There are tastier things under the sun. Then tell me true, what can I do for the likes of you? Might I sing, for that lovely ring? Take you far from here for a sturdy keg of beer? Ask your question and then we’ll barter for the answer, for I take you to be naught but a mighty Necromancer of whom I may ask a favor and information is what you savor.”
Mark wondered how the beast knew that he had a question, but realized that he had little to barter with. The horse was out of the question. The sword? Never! But the ring? He looked down at the rings he wore on a chain around his neck whilst in full battle armor. A smooth gold ring bearing a white stone with a blood red cross patee inlaid in the center, the ring of the Templar and a smaller silver ring engraved with the letters ‘IAAT’, the sign of the alchemist. He could make new rings, but if she… he wondered if the beast was female and why he assumed so… demanded more, he might have a problem.
“That sounds amenable,” he said carefully.
“Then speak.” The beast drew its head back and up, taking on the appearance of a stone sculpture in gleaming black.
“I am curious about Dark Matter.”
“Dark Matter,” the dragon repeated and it seemed her facial expression changed. "This Dark Matter I presume is not the dark side of the moon, nor is it what lies behind the eyelids in an evil mind, nor could it be what we do not see when deep within the earth we be."
"That is very astute, my terrible friend," said Mark. "You have named what it is not and this is no more than men have done. I'm afraid that I must be moving on for light is burning and I must be about my Master's business."
"Ahhhhh," the dragon snorted again and suddenly slid out of the cave into the space between the Knight and the horse.
Mark drew in a sharp breath and thought that the end had surely come as he raised the twisted golden blade instinctively between them.
"Put away that puny blade," the dragon said, blinking at him slowly. There was definite amusement in her great eyes. "Though by the angels it is made, for I shall not fight with thee, if thou might have discourse with me. Away we'll soar into the blue until eternal black envelops you and there will be the answer clear. You have nothing more to fear."
With that, the enormous claws closed around his waist and he was lifted, breathlessly, but gently into the air, her enormous wings beating up a whirlwind of dust below them. Daring a glance down, he saw his horse and the barren, rocky landscape receding at an alarming rate. He held tight to his sword with one hand and pressed on his helmet with the other as they rose through the clouds into the coldness of space. When nothing remained to fill his lungs, he ceased to breathe and his head felt light and though he knew it was impossible for speech in the relative vacuum of space, he could hear the dragon speaking in his head. The language she spoke was of a primitive time long before man had come of age, yet he could understand it. As she spoke he felt something envelope him and he could no longer see, no longer feel, no longer smell, taste or even think. Only darkness pressed around him and all the Universe was his.