She had the only man she felt had ever loved her for who she was, the only man she herself had ever loved. His hands, strong and protective, moved down the arch of her back, cupped her buttocks, the back of her thighs, up to her hips—
He breathed into her ear, sensual and exciting, his whispered words taking a fraction too long to register in her distracted mind.
“Not such a genius after all, huh?”
She gasped as she realised her mistake a second too late.
Raine wrenched her holstered pistol from her hip. The lumbering guard saw the move and lurched forward but Raine fired blindly, plucking a line of bullet holes across his chest.
Nadia reacted instinctively. “No!” she slapped him hard but Raine pushed up off his seat, sending her sprawling backwards. The other two soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons. Raine lunged behind the control booth as it shattered in a spray of sparks. Tobias coward under it, hands clamped to his ears.
King erupted back to life.
Instead of charging for cover, like a man possessed, he charged the nearest gunman and shouldered into his mid drift, ripping a handgun from the man’s holster. The second Spetsnaz saw the attack and swung his rifle to him. Raine jumped from cover and landed a head shot. The man fell.
King spun on the spot and fired at Nadia. She rolled out through the control room door, bullets sparking in her wake.
“Benny!” Raine called to him but he wasn’t listening. He ran to the control station. The sequence Tobias had entered in earlier was still on the screen and he slammed the ENTER control. It overrode Nadia’s updated program and, with a hum of static and a rumble of machinery, the accelerator lit up once more.
“Ben, what are you doing?” Raine demanded. He rushed to meet him, but the soldier King had floored was back on his feet and firing. Raine dived for cover, King charged towards the airlock!
“Stop him!” Nadia screamed from her hiding place. The soldier aimed at King but he was too fast. The airlock door slammed shut behind him, the bullets danced off of the reinforced glass. He locked the door from the inside, then, without hesitation, he pressed the release button on the inner airlock and stepped inside.
Instantly, the invisible tachyons slammed into his head, exciting his Parietal Lobe and overloading his nervous system.
He dropped to his knees.
“Sid,” he choked out.
63:
Tapestry
Images, thoughts, sounds, smells, memories all bombarded Benjamin King. It was as though he stood outside of his body, looking down at his pathetic form kneeling on the deck in front of the two masks, held firmly in the grip of robotic arms.
It all made sense. For the first time in his life, since General Abuku had pulled the trigger and ended first his mother’s, then his sister’s life. It all made sense!
The sequence he had forced Doctor Tobias to input had been activated.
Though they were invisible, he fancied that he could see the tachyon particles jumping from the pieced-together Moon Mask to the whole and unbroken fake one. First there was one, then there were dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, an entire universe of them whipping around the superconducting metal that had fallen to earth from outer space.
Even though they travelled many times faster than the speed of light, he fancied he could see the tachyons emanating from the fake mask like the rays of a sun. One by one, the enormous particle accelerator built into the heart of a naval warship picked them up and whisked them down its length at tremendous speed, around the far end of the tunnel and then back again.
Even though theoretical quantum physics were far beyond the understanding of a humble archaeologist, he fancied that he understood the supercharged tachyon particles interactions with the fabric of the space-time continuum. He saw the fourth dimension of reality, as Langley had described it, as a block of sandstone. The Eldridge was the pressure washer, the tachyons the jet of water. They found a hole in the flat surface of time and punched through, one at a time to begin with, and then untold billions, all pouring into the defect, stretching it, widening it.
The wormhole burst into existence!
Although invisible to the naked eye, the hyperactive electrical synapses in King’s brain, excited by the tachyons, sent his Parietal Lobe into overdrive. The intensity was far greater than what he had experienced when he had placed the mask on his head in Germany. The Extra Sensory Perception that was stimulated, as before, now reached further than he had ever imagined, tendrils of his mind shooting into the invisible vortex before him, reaching out to the distant epochs of the past.
All of eternity lay before him now.
“Admiral,” the operator called to Harriman again.
He stared through a pair of binoculars across the water to see the burning wreckage of the Eldridge listing to port. Water was pouring into her hull, he knew. Her superstructure was little more than a burning tower of smashed and jagged metal sticking up from wild flames in the middle of her deck.
The three rescue helicopters he had sent were nearing her now, their huge flood lights illuminating her scorch hull. The sky was finally clear of Chinese fighters but the surviving U.S. birds remained in the sky as a precaution.
“Sir,” the operator said more urgently.
“Yes, what is it?” Harriman snapped.
“Energy levels on the Eldridge are spiking again, sir.”
Harriman looked at the young sailor. “Like before?”
The young man hesitated. “More than before, sir. Readings are off the scale!”
Harriman looked back at the ruins of the ship, at the helicopters preparing to land.
“Get those choppers back here,” he ordered. “Order all ships to fall back to the predetermined coordinates and await further instructions. And get those planes back, now!”
The sailor moved away to issue the admiral’s orders but was halted by his voice again. “And get me a secure line to the president.”
“Benny!” Raine yelled at his friend. More sparks spat at him as the remaining Spetsnaz fired on full auto, his weapon tearing through the central computer station. “What are you doing?”
He glanced through the glass partition. The lead shield had failed to lower and he could see King drop to his knees, pressing his hands to his temples in pain. The emergency lights cast a hellish sheen off the metallic surfaces.
He heard King’s voice, calling out a name. “Sid!”
“Sid’s gone, Ben!” he shouted back. He checked his magazine. He was running low on bullets. The gun fire ceased a moment as the Spetsnaz soldier reloaded. Raine took the opportunity to lean around the workstation and fire twice. He missed and the barrage of automatic fire resumed.
“Nate, we’ve got to get him out of there!” Nadia yelled at him from where she had taken cover.
“Tell your man to stop shooting at me and I’ll do that!” he shot back.
“I tried,” she shouted over the din. “He’s not obeying me!”
“Probably doesn’t want to take orders from a little hussy,” he grumbled.
A bullet shot close to his head and he slid down further.
“Ben, don’t do this!”