The Light-Field

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Ringbalin cut in, looking to Jazmay who rolled her eyes.

  ‘He’s done the same to us!’ Zeven protested. ‘He’s shown no mercy —’

  ‘All the more reason that we should then, don’t you think?’ she reasoned with a questioning frown.

  ‘In this universe, it’s known as karma,’ Telmo spoke up to shed some light on the matter. ‘Which basically means, treat others as you would have them treat you, or it will come back to bite you in the arse!’

  ‘I’m in touch with that notion,’ Khalid commented, whereupon Zeven punched him in the face.

  ‘Zeven!’ Taren objected, as clearly her cousin didn’t comprehend.

  ‘What?’ Zeven snapped. ‘That’s exactly how I’d have him treat me, if I had murdered his father.’

  ‘You all did murder my father,’ Khalid pointed out, nursing his bleeding nose. ‘And I was extremely grateful —’

  ‘Shut up!’ Zeven ordered and Khalid very wisely obeyed.

  ‘Just lock him in a meditation chamber,’ Lucian decreed. ‘Our focus is needed elsewhere at present.’

  Zeven reluctantly followed the order, hauling Khalid out of his chair to drag him away. He could have just as easily have placed Khalid under lock and key psychokinetically, but clearly he preferred the physical satisfaction of doing it by hand.

  Taren’s attention turned back to En Noah, as he appeared on the brink of collapse. ‘You should rest. As much as I wish it were not so, you are mortal and mortals need to sleep.’

  ‘I hate being useless.’ He roused himself out of his slouched position. ‘Shoot me with your gun again —’

  ‘You’ve only just stopped shaking from the last pounding.’ Taren denied the request.

  ‘But there is no time for me to waste slumbering.’ Noah managed to get to his feet. ‘We need a combat strategy … yesterday,’ he concluded sombrely.

  ‘We have the specs for the weapon we devised, but it’s a hand combat weapon. We were not expecting such a large scale threat.’ Taren was frustrated; this was supposed to have been a simple mission, one that she thought she was well prepared for.

  ‘I am going to meditate,’ announced Telmo, as he strolled in the direction Zeven had taken Khalid.

  ‘Now, Telmo?’ Taren wondered at how calm he seemed; it was as if he were simply musing the next scene of a play he was writing. ‘We’re in the middle of a crisis.’

  ‘In the middle of a crisis is the perfect time to stop, reflect and find clarity.’ The technologist stayed his course and left them all speechless and in shock — it was like mass déjà vu!

  Taren found her voice first. ‘That sounds just like —’

  ‘Taliesin,’ Noah gasped, having not noted the resemblance before now; he’d never seen his old mentor appear youthful before.

  ‘Taliesin!’ Jahan was shocked away from his work a moment, for the time-hopping druid was a legend that he’d only ever seen in the recollections of others in Noah’s chronicles. ‘If the Time Lord has returned —’

  ‘Telmo is not a Time Lord,’ Zeven said, rejoining the conversation, having passed Telmo en route. ‘Taren, Jazmay and myself are the only Timekeepers on the crew.’

  ‘Really?’ En Noah was fascinated. ‘You can move through time?’

  ‘Yes,’ Taren replied, not wishing to raise his hopes. ‘But we can only go back to somewhere where our physical body has been.’ She explained why they had not simply transported themselves back to a few days ago to warn Rhun.

  ‘We could just go back to before we left our universe and ensure Khalid’s ship never crosses over into this one?’ Zeven suggested.

  ‘Then we also risk making the situation worse,’ Taren stated in all honesty. ‘You know it only gets harder each time you try to rework one focused point in time.’

  Jazmay nodded. ‘Next time Khalid’s ship might get here and we don’t, then what?’

  At this point everyone took a deep thoughtful breath and silence descended on the room.

  Zeven noticed Noah quietly edging toward him. ‘Could I speak with you a moment?’ the historian asked quietly, not wanting to disturb his company from their contemplation.

  ‘Sure.’ Zeven knew he didn’t have a hope of solving their quantum dilemmas, and so was happy to follow Noah into the adjoining conference room.

  By the time the door closed behind them, En Noah was wavering in his stance and struggling to keep his eyes open. ‘Shoot me.’

  Zeven was momentarily startled by the request, unaccustomed to carrying a weapon that made others feel better.

  ‘I want you to shoot me,’ Noah repeated for clarity.

  ‘Not a problem.’ Zeven understood his reasons. ‘But why ask me in private?’

  ‘Please.’ Noah was going to pass out if he didn’t have his request met. ‘I know your soul-mind … you throw caution to the wind as I rarely do. I need you to draw on some of that wild abandon right now and shoot me until I either pass out or heal.’ Noah was deadly serious. ‘My mind won’t stop and my body is ready to collapse. Without my immortality I am useless to you anyway.’

  ‘But … all your knowledge,’ Zeven begged to differ.

  ‘Knowledge that lay in any incarnation of me,’ he pointed out. ‘Has Brian Alexander’s knowledge ceased to be because he is no longer with us? No, you have it.’

  ‘If you think Ringbalin can replace you, he can’t!’ Zeven scoffed. ‘He doesn’t remember anything about this universe, not even the last time that he was here! Psychically speaking, Balin is a healer, mostly.’

  ‘Goddess give me strength,’ Noah appealed to the heavens, frustrated, as he hobbled over to Zeven. ‘Please, the weapon is too damn big for me to shoot myself,’ he appealed one last time. As Zeven was still hesitant, Noah grabbed the pistol from the pilot’s holster and stumbled back to aim it at him.

  ‘Come on, En Noah.’ Zeven was almost amused. ‘You’re not going to fire on me.’

  ‘I need this to happen.’ Noah held his aim.

  ‘That gun is set on stun,’ Zeven pointed out the flaw in his plan, ‘so shooting me isn’t going to get you anywhere but stuck.’

  Upon being enlightened, Noah checked the side of his weapon and set it to kill. ‘That was helpful, thank you.’ He took aim once more.

  ‘Look, we’re good friends, where I come from,’ Zeven explained. ‘I don’t want to do anything that will put your life in danger.’

  ‘That’s what we Chosen do!’ Noah exclaimed. ‘We put our lives at risk for the greater good! We were good friends where I come from too, but that never stopped you putting my life in jeopardy … please shoot the damn weapon!’

  The shots were fairly silent; it was En Noah and Zeven yelling at each other that drew Taren and Lucian into the adjoining conference room.

  When the door opened, Zeven was staring at En Noah’s quivering, seemingly unconscious body on the floor, weapon raised. When Zeven noted he had company, he was horrified. ‘I told him we should stop.’ The pilot’s weapon clattered to the floor as he made his way to En Noah’s side.

  Taren joined him to check the historian’s vital signs. ‘He’s not breathing.’ She positioned her patient to attempt to resuscitate him. ‘We need Ringbalin.’ She looked to Lucian to find Ringbalin had come to check out what was happening and appeared shocked by what he found.

  ‘You killed me?’ he queried Zeven, as he approached to examine his own incarnation.

  ‘You threatened to kill me if I didn’t!’ Zeven examined the body and raised up one of Noah’s still quivering hands, noting the scratches had all healed. ‘It was working.’ He brought the miraculous healing to Taren’s attention.

  ‘It might have worked … had we taken it a little slower,’ Taren emphasised, her lecture directed at En Noah in this instance and not Zeven. ‘It takes eons of incarnating and evolving to braid twelve-strand DNA. You can’t expect your body to cope with doing it in seconds!’

  ‘Can I have some room?’ Ringbalin knelt beside t
he body, and everyone backed up as requested.

  If the situation of trying to resurrect himself from the brink of death was in any way off-putting, Ringbalin didn’t mention it. He held his hands cupped together above his patient’s heart, until a ball of energy swelled between his fingers. He directed the life force downward into Noah; if there was life left in him, the patient would normally convulse and awaken with a gasp. In this instance, however, the energy rebounded back into Ringbalin and it was he who convulsed and with a gasp, blacked out.

  Noah’s body finally fell still.

  ‘What just happened?’ Zeven couldn’t believe his eyes; Balin had never been injured trying to heal anyone before.

  ‘Not Balin.’ Taren moved to check on him. ‘I can’t lose them both in one day!’ She wanted to burst into tears when she couldn’t feel a pulse, and he wasn’t breathing either. ‘Stay with me.’ She sniffled back her welling tears as she re-positioned him for resuscitation.

  The sound of a weapon firing in the main control centre stopped everyone’s heart a moment.

  ‘Now what?’ Taren didn’t dare to look.

  ‘Stay focused on Balin. I’ll go.’ Lucian left the room.

  In the pit, Lucian found Jazmay with her killing gun in hand and Jahan’s brains blown all over the control desk.

  ‘What the hell has gotten into everyone?’ Lucian could hardly believe he had a gun aimed at Jazmay, but his first instinct was to suspect another Orion implant. ‘Please don’t tell me you’ve just murdered the last of the Chosen Ones? We’ve got two dead bodies already!’

  ‘Relax, Captain.’ The Phemorian’s calm demeanour put him at ease. ‘Jahan asked me to kill him. He hasn’t physically died and until he did, he could not assume his immortal state or the greater powers that go along with that.’

  ‘I see.’ The captain lowered his weapon. ‘I seem to remember something to that effect.

  ‘All the Chosen have to die a psychical death before their immortal gene kicks in.’ She winked at Lucian and then glanced over at Jahan’s bleeding corpse. ‘At least I hope we got that right.’ She considered it seemed to be taking him a while to recover. ‘Here we go …’ Jazmay noted the droplets of blood on the desk drawing themselves together in a backward procession toward the wound in Jahan’s head. ‘He’s getting it together.’

  When Lucian saw Jahan’s body begin to wriggle and then sit upright, he had to wonder if this mini-death had any bearing on what was transpiring in the conference room and he immediately headed back in there.

  Ringbalin and En Noah were floundering about on the floor and moaning — Taren and Zeven were breathing a huge sigh of relief.

  ‘I have a headache,’ Ringbalin grumbled as Taren assisted him to sit up. ‘What happened?’

  ‘When you tried to help Noah, the healing force rebounded back at you,’ she explained.

  ‘Weird.’ Balin nursed his ailing head.

  ‘Self-defence,’ Noah deduced, as he raised himself to a seated position. ‘I wasn’t dead, but simply going through a spiritual metamorphosis in order to return to my immortal state. I’d already had an abundance of healing,’ he motioned to Zeven’s weapon, ‘so my body —’

  ‘— rejected the additional photons,’ Taren and Balin concluded at once.

  ‘That’s quite a talent you have,’ Noah told his younger counterpart. ‘It will prove very useful where we’re going.’

  ‘We are going somewhere?’ Taren was quietly relieved by how empowered and confident En Noah sounded suddenly.

  ‘Whilst liberated from my body, I bumped into Taliesin, among others, and we had a rather long chat about our present woes,’ he explained.

  ‘I remember that,’ Ringbalin was stunned to note.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Noah grinned, ‘you’re me.’

  ‘I remember a lot of things …’ Ringbalin’s baffled gaze shifted to Taren and then Lucian. ‘We have all lived lives together before, many more than I could have imagined.’

  ‘But you weren’t dead that long.’ Zeven was perplexed.

  ‘Time outside the physical realm is non-existent,’ Noah replied. ‘How do you think you manage to move through time … if not by passing through a barrier and into a realm where time and distance do not exist, and then repassing through this barrier to arrive at the desired location?’

  ‘The Zero Point Field,’ Taren concluded in her own scientific terms, and Noah nodded.

  ‘It turns out you are right about reworking one point in time too much. It becomes matted and very unpredictable,’ Noah told her. ‘So we need to go further back in history if we wish to rectify this disaster.’

  ‘But immediately prior to this disaster, we did not have physical bodies residing on Kila,’ Taren clarified, even though she’d outlined this problem earlier.

  ‘Back further,’ Noah hinted. ‘And not on Kila.’

  The notion of time travel in another universe was attractive to Lucian, but this was not one of his talents — was he about to get left behind on this mission? As Zeven had pointed out earlier, there were only three timekeepers on their crew and he was not one of them.

  ‘You’re back,’ Telmo exclaimed from the doorway, upon seeing Noah and Ringbalin conscious. ‘Excellent! Are we ready to put our plan into action then?’ He slapped his hands together, appearing most eager.

  ‘I haven’t had the chance to explain it yet,’ Noah said to account for all the baffled faces.

  ‘So you haven’t told them where we are headed?’ Telmo was upbeat and clearly enthusiastic.

  ‘No,’ Taren got to her feet. ‘Where are we headed?’

  ‘Clearly, in order to combat our enemy,’ Telmo outlined their reasoning, ‘we need to find another point in this universe’s time continuum when we were all incarnate in roughly the same geographical location and era, and which Yahweh Shyamal and his Orion buddies have frequented.’

  ‘And is there such a transverse?’ Lucian queried, eager and anxious at once.

  ‘Yes, there is.’ Telmo raised both brows to emphasise his amazement. ‘Over three thousand Earth years ago.’

  ‘Three thousand years!’ Zeven, Taren and Lucian gasped in unison.

  ‘However,’ Telmo held up a finger to reassure them all, ‘I have to tell you, it was a most extraordinary period, one of my personal favourites in all of Earth’s history!’

  ‘Hey, boss.’ Jazmay leant over Telmo’s shoulder to interrupt the proceedings. ‘The chariot is back.’

  ‘Rhun has returned?’ Taren was stunned.

  Jazmay frowned at the query. ‘Hard to say? Best you come see.’

  In the control room, Jahan was appearing far more spritely than he had done ten minutes ago.

  ‘You gave me quite a scare.’ Lucian was slightly perturbed.

  ‘Sorry, captain, but I was running out of puff. I promise I won’t lose my head again though.’ Jahan grinned and Lucian responded in kind.

  On the database soft screen before them, Jahan brought up the footage of the chariot returning.

  The passenger who had materialised along with the time-hopping transport was so heavily clad in fur, armour and leather it was hard to see him, and his hair and facial hair were so long and matted that you couldn’t see his face.

  ‘Good Goddess,’ uttered Noah upon sighting the visitor. ‘The armour he’s wearing is Chinese!’ Noah looked to Telmo.

  Telmo had both brows raised in expectation. ‘Early Zhou Dynasty by the look of it.’ Taliesin, being a Time Lord, had collected ancient armour among other things and was something of an expert.

  ‘That’s quite a coincidence.’ Noah appeared a little spooked.

  ‘Why a coincidence?’ Taren’s curiosity overcame her. ‘What are you two up to?’

  ‘The armour our friend is wearing stems from the same Earth era and civilisation that marks the transverse in time we were considering.’

  ‘Whoa.’ Taren looked back to the warrior with some trepidation. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It’s th
e only past transverse besides Atlantis, and I’m fairly sure none of us wish to endure that disaster again.’

  Anyone present who held a memory of the last days of Atlantis shook their heads to agree.

  Zeven took a good look at the fellow on-screen, who ran off through the secret passage and out of sight. ‘I’ll go fetch him.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ Jazmay vanished along with Zeven.

  ‘I don’t even know what Chinese means, is.’ Taren shrugged. ‘And you expect me to teleport back to a life there?’

  ‘You don’t consciously remember the life in question because Tory Alexander never consciously lived it — it was a past-life incarnation for both of you,’ Telmo explained. ‘But as it was a very pertinent life and era for most of us here, I believe the memory will resurface with the appropriate prompting and once you remember, you can go.’

  ‘Was I incarnate at the time in question?’ Lucian had been quietly following the conversation, but this point was obviously of great interest to him.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Telmo granted, with a smile of encouragement.

  ‘And can I be taught to remember?’ the captain asked.

  ‘Indeed,’ Telmo concurred, as Lucian’s grin grew.

  ‘But you cannot teleport?’ Taren didn’t want to put a dampener on his hopes, but it was a very important point.

  ‘Of course he can,’ Telmo insisted, surely. ‘He was Maelgwn Gwynedd, was he not?’

  ‘So they tell me,’ Lucian replied modestly.

  ‘That’s not very confident, captain.’ Telmo was frank. ‘The key to mastering any ability is first believing that you can, knowing that the power lies within you! So, is it really that people tell you that you are the Dragon, or is the truth more that, somewhere deep inside yourself, you know that you are the Dragon incarnate?’

  Lucian was dumbstruck; this moment felt like an all too familiar scene between student and teacher — between Maelgwn Gwynedd and Taliesin Pen Beirdd. ‘I’ve felt stirrings of the Dragon ever since I got here,’ he replied more honestly. ‘I know our connection runs much deeper and clearer than I had imagined.’