“I’m moving the mask into the accelerator tube now,” the technician announced and, sure enough, the robotic arm locked the mask into place in the centre of the cone.
“Temporal destination set,” Tobias announced. He glanced ruefully at King. “As near as possible, at any rate.” He paused. “Once we bring the particle accelerator online it will pick up the tachyons and hurl them at a speed many times faster than the speed of light. The effect will be transmitted via nano-filaments to the entire ship, creating a… bubble, for want of a better term, around us.” His eyes were harsh and serious. He glanced at King’s gun. “This is your last chance to—”
“Do it,” he cut him off without any hesitation.
I’m coming Sid, he thought triumphantly.
“Admiral!”
“I see it,” Harriman cut the young man off as he gazed in a mixture of awe, wonder and dread across the stormy ocean, beyond the burning oil slicks of downed planes, to where the Eldridge lay.
An eerie green mist slowly seemed to envelop her. At first he thought it was his eyes, tired and bleary, but another young sailor, a woman, called out; “There is some sort of massive energy spike emanating from the Eldridge.”
What the devil are they up to? Harriman wondered. In all his years in the navy he had seen many things which had never been explained to him. He’d heard many crack-pot theories and he’d always argued in the defence of the navy. But now, all the conspiracy theorists, all the Area 51 nutters’ and the JFK fanatics’ arguments seemed somehow justified.
“Oh my god, they’re making a run at the Eldridge!”
Whoever had the keen eyes wasn’t wrong. Sure enough, Harriman felt nausea rise in his throat as his eyes zeroed in on the Chinese jet which had broken away from its pursuers. Evidently, the pilot had seen the green mist too and knew that this thing, whatever it was, was reaching its climax.
The jet shot straight towards the Eldridge’s tower.
Langley’s hands flew across the keyboard of his laptop. A trailing wire hooked it up to the Eldridge’s computer and he saw the enormous power spike indicated on the screen a moment before a strange queasiness overcame him.
For a moment, it seemed as if the world around him wobbled, but then the sharp contours of the bridge re-sharpened.
He quickly searched through the computer’s inventory until he found what he needed.
The Eldridge’s self-destruct program.
“I should have done this a long time ago!” Gibbs snarled, his face twisted in anger.
Moments ago, a pulsing red light had shot down the length of the particle accelerator, then another and another until they were coming fast and steady as the technology catapulted invisible particles, tachyons, at awesome speed.
But Gibbs had forgotten about the danger to himself, both from the radiation and from any other potential side effects of the experiment. He remembered seeing photographs of men embedded inside solid bulkheads following the original attempt well over half a century ago. But right now, he didn’t care about any of that. Not the Project, not the ship, not even his life.
He finally had the bastard who had betrayed him and his men all those years ago, right where he wanted him.
Tobias watched the graph on his computer screen as the elaborate matrixes run by the quantum computer turned themselves into information he could comprehend.
Cut down to its basics, the three twisting, undulating lines on the screen indicated the tachyon energy level required to begin the time displacement process in blue, the level needed to achieve the target temporal destination in green, and the current energy level in red.
In 1942, with a single piece of the mask, the energy level had spiked, for an instant, over the blue line. The result had been a fraction of a second’s voyage into the future, the first known successful time travel experiment, no matter how macabre the results. Then, decades before nano-filaments had even been postulated, different sections of the ship, and different members of the crew, had, for that fraction of a second, existed out of phase with one another. When they returned to the same point in space-time some of them had done so literally, fusing one to the other. Today, the nano-filaments, superconductive microscopic fibres threaded throughout the ship, kept the entire vessel and everything in it wrapped together in its own ‘bubble’.
“This isn’t right,” Tobias mumbled.
“What?” King demanded. “What’s wrong?” He felt a wave of dizziness, one of the effects of the space-time continuum beginning to shift around them.
Tobias moved aside and indicated the screen. “The tachyon energy levels are taking far too long to reach the necessary intensity. In 1941, with only one piece of the mask, therefore logically less tachyons, they had broken the blue line by now.”
“What are you saying?” King felt anger rising. He was so close, yet so far.
“Doctor,” one of the technicians pointed out. “Energy levels are flat lining.”
“What do you mean they’re flat lining?” King demanded.
“They’re levelling out,” Tobias explained. He stared at the screen then back at King. “We don’t have enough energy to break the time barrier, let alone to travel back two weeks into the past.”
“But you’ve got the complete mask now,” King accused. “I don’t understand.”
“I do,” a new voice entered the discussion.
King spun around to the sound of the voice.
“Nadia!”
Another blow came and Raine felt his body go numb. He wondered if he had damaged his spine when he struck the safety banister, or suffered brain damage perhaps.
“You’re a traitor, Raine!” Gibbs spat. Illuminated in the hellish red glow of the pulsing particle accelerator, his puckered and pock-marked face covered with blood, he looked like the son of Lucifer, come to wreak havoc upon the earth.
Another blow, then another. “You’re a traitor to your country!” Another punch. “A traitor to your men!” Another blow. “And a traitor to yourself!”
Seconds had passed since the power spike had arced, since the eerie mists of time had quite literally begun to envelop the Eldridge, but for Alex Langley it felt like an eternity.
He broke into the encrypted computer program and uploaded a virus which smashed through the firewall and gave him access to the self-destruct program. He wondered how long he had, how long they all had, before the time travel process truly began.
The command prompt page opened with agonising slowness, but Langley’s fingers entered the command in seconds, his fist flew down to smash the ENTER button and blow out the ship’s hull, dragging her to the deepest, darkest place on earth.
But in his haste he had failed to notice the screaming of jet engines a fraction of a second before the bridge blew apart around him in a hailstorm of fire and spinning glass, metal and jagged debris. He screamed in agony as the fire engulfed him, as shards of rubble bit into his flesh, but even as the force of the impact blasted him like a doll across the bridge, he scrambled for the ENTER button, his index finger falling just shy.