Nadia smiled at him cunningly. “I know,” she replied, patting him condescendingly on the cheek before returning her attention to her laptop.
“Then what the hell are you doing here?” Raine demanded. Nadia glanced up from inputting commands into her laptop and looked at her former lover. Despite his dishevelled appearance, there was no denying his rugged handsomeness. She toyed with the idea of asking him to join her. After all, he couldn’t go back to America now. But she knew that he would never accept the offer.
She shifted her gaze to King. He sat in the chair, shoulders slumped, his eyes staring distantly into nowhere. His attempt to save Sid had failed and she saw the defeat in him and regretted her part in it. No matter what she had done, she had honestly considered King and Sid friends and felt sickened by what had happened at Yonaguni. But Sid, in her self-righteousness, had left her no choice. It was a matter of shoot, or be shot.
A loud creaking sound echoed through the accelerator then, bringing her back to the matter at hand. She returned her attention to the laptop, but nevertheless offered an explanation to her audience, if only to gloat at the Americans inferior understanding of the technology they had created.
“The Moon Mask is constructed from a superconducting meteoric metal, yes? Xibalbanite, if you want to call it that,” she reminded them all. “It is the exact same metal as the ‘fake’ mask, except for one difference: the fake mask does not emit tachyons. Why does it not emit tachyons?” she glanced up from the screen. “The same reason that not all individual pieces of metal capable of conducting electricity do so — because, at some point, that metal needs to have been given an electrical charge.” She returned to the laptop, downloading her updated software into the Eldridge’s quantum computers, complete with a carefully calculated new temporal destination.
“At some point in the distant past, either before or after the Moon Mask was carved out of a lump of space debris, but before it was divided into five segments, it was subjected to tachyons, whereas the ‘fake’ mask was not. Over the corresponding millennia, the superconductivity of the metal has decayed, and the amount of tachyon particles spinning around inside it has decayed also.”
She had begun to consider this after reviewing the history of the Moon Mask with King. The intensity of the detrimental effects to the human body, and to local communities, had diminished over the years. The civilisation that had flourished at Xibalba was decimated when the mask had been brought to them in an unknown epoch. The Bouda tribe in Africa, however, many hundreds, even thousands of years later, had suffered only relatively minor afflictions before a genetic resistance had developed in them.
This was because, she had realised, the intensity of tachyons in each piece of the mask had diminished over the years. The rate of decay seemed to have increased as time pressed on, so that while in 1942 a single piece of the mask had just breeched the energy level needed to create a 0.002 second time jump, almost seventy years later, the combined tachyons from all the pieces had dropped to such a level that they could not hit the energy requirements necessary.
“So I ask again,” Raine cut in. “If there isn’t enough tachyon energy to do your Jules Verne mumbo-jumbo, then what the hell are you doing here?”
The ship shuddered suddenly and Nadia heard the tell-tale hiss of water. She moved to a window and peered into the depths of the accelerator. Down below, a small fountain of sea water had breached the hull.
She didn’t have long.
“Give me your pack,” she demanded of one of the Spetsnaz soldiers. He handed it to her and she opened it, pulling the fake mask from its cushioned interior. She glanced at Raine and King, ignoring Tobias. King’s dark eyes cruelly met hers, then drifted to the mask. His brow knit together in consternation.
“I thought you said the fake mask didn’t emit tachyons?” Raine queried.
Nadia’s face broke into a triumphant smile. She saw the flash of pleasure in Raine’s eyes as he looked at her attractive face. They had a connection, she knew. More than just physical; just as he had melted her, she had broken through his defences and found his heart.
But would he go that extra step, she wondered? He had been betrayed, for the second time, by his country. He had no life to return to, no future. Would he even entertain a future with her?
“Not yet,” she admitted, replying to his question.
It had been when she was submerged beneath the waves off Yonaguni Island that she had been struck by an epiphany. The entire underwater monument had been constructed from the same meteoric metal as both masks. As she shone her torch over it, she had seen the way it conducted the light, revealing intricate carvings on its exterior. All she had needed to do was introduce the substance to be conducted in the first place.
She moved to the airlock door in the centre of the glass partition. The Moon Mask on the other side was still held in the claw of one of the robotic arms. Without the lead shield she knew the radiation would be eking out, affecting all in the room except Raine and King. But limited exposure could be treated, just as she had been after Sarisariñama.
She opened the airlock door and placed the fake mask on the floor before sealing it once more. Then she returned to the control terminal and activated one of the spare robotic arms. She automatically opened the inner airlock door and deftly manoeuvred the carefully calibrated arm to gently pick up the fake mask.
Raine, King and Tobias all watched as she worked the robotic arm, bringing the fake mask up close to the original. With the gentle caress of a lover, she carefully worked the control stick, the arm responded by moving the two masks together.
They touched.
Nadia smiled and released the controls. She turned back to her audience, focussing her attention mainly on Raine. “Right now,” she explained, “billions of subatomic tachyon particles are jumping from one mask to the other. Charging it, I guess you could say. And, as its superconductivity has not yet started the decay process, in a few minutes it will emit more than enough energy to power this machine.” She stepped closer to Raine, her black combat gear clinging to the contours of her body.
She knelt down before him and caught his eyes with hers. “Then, I will be a master of time, Nate,” she whispered. He frowned at her, and despite his resistance, she could see intrigue there also.
“We could go anywhere, do anything.” She reached out, her fingers almost touching the stumble on his face. Then she pulled away. Nervous. Afraid. For that one night, Nathan Raine had accepted her for who she was. To have him reject her now would break her heart.
She hated this weakness she was showing. “Think of it, Nate. We can go back—”
“What are you doing?” the lumbering Spetsnaz soldier guarding Raine demanded.
“Stand down,” she barked at him, shifting quickly back to Raine. “All the wrongs that have been done against you. All the betrayals. All the sacrifices you have had to make. They can all be undone now. The last great threshold of human existence has been breached. Life, death… it has no meaning now.” She leaned close to him, shutting all else out of their world so that only they existed.
“We can make our own rules. Our own destiny. We can shape the course of history to suit our needs.” Their lips touched, sending an electrifying tingle down her spine. She pushed away slightly, needing to read his eyes, to ensure there was no deception there.
There was none.
Nathan Raine was hers.
“We can be gods,” she sighed, giving herself to him, her lips hungrily meeting his, her arms wrapping around his head. His hands wrapped around her back. She heard a grunt of protest from her soldiers but they knew better than to question her. She heard a groan of complaint from Tobias and a snarl of disgust from King, but none of that mattered.