Conrad couldn’t believe what he saw down below. He glanced over at Hank, who saw it too. Hank’s lips were moving, but if he said anything, Conrad didn’t hear him. He didn’t need to. Hank’s expression in the ghastly light was all he needed to see. Words could not have been more articulate.
Several stories below was some kind of cosmic lava pool. It reminded Conrad of the crater at Mount Nyiragongo, except it glowed an unnatural fluorescent purplish-red and crackled with shocks of energy.
Conrad asked in a hushed tone, “Is that the classified stuff you weren’t supposed to talk about?”
“Dark XM… Chaotic matter… Pick your name,” Hank said. “It’s only been theory until now. I saw it in Afghanistan, but I had no idea what it was at the time.”
Now and again a tesla-like bolt would streak out of the throbbing mass, and in the toxic light they saw what appeared to be demonic shapes at the side of the pool.
Devil figures.
“What the hell?” Conrad asked.
Hank replied, “You got that right.”
“What are those things?”
“Mercs from Strategic Explorations,” Hank told him. “They’re kitted out in the latest in extremo-ware. I’m guessing the tall one is Smith and the short one is Chen. If you get a chance to kill them, do it. Apparently, you get a drive-on right through the pearly gates to the top level of heaven.”
Conrad could see how the asbestos clean suits, oxygen hooks and guns at the waists and hanging off the shoulders conspired to make the mercs look more mythological than human.
Now, through the strobing light, Conrad watched in horror as the tall one Hank said was Antoine Smith gestured to two of his guards, who pushed a helpless African woman, hands tied and legs flailing, into the pulsating pool.
“Did you see that?” Conrad almost shouted in Hank’s ear. “Who was that woman? Where did they nab her?”
Hank shook his head. “Some villager from somewhere.”
Conrad said, “It almost looked like a sacrifice.”
“Yeah, to science,” Hank said. “They’re testing the effects of dark XM on humans, and we’ve already seen what that looks like.”
Conrad looked down at the bubbling cauldron. For a ghastly moment, the woman’s shape flashed green in the sludge, and then a wispy vapor rose upward like a spectre.
Conrad trained his M16. “Those bastards die.”
“Not yet,” Hank cautioned. “If you miss, they get us. They get us, they get out of here with dark XM. Ergo, end of world. So let’s pick our shots carefully.”
At that moment, the short guy — Chen — took out his phone and began tapping intently on it. His face glowed in blue and green.
“He’s making a call?” Conrad said. “Can he even do that down here? What do you think, pizza delivery or instructions from Dr. Evil?”
“No, he’s opening the Ingress app,” Hank said, pulling out his Nexus.
“More games?”
“This ain’t no game, Conrad. Take cover. When he resonates that thing, it could go bad.”
“How bad?”
“I don’t understand how or why it works, but I do understand what’s about to happen,” Hank explained. “We’re in an Anomaly.”
“A what?”
“A transdimensional vortex where exotic matter meets chaotic matter. In nature they’re kept apart. Think of it as dry ice hitting water. Look.”
Conrad watched as a glowing shield enveloped Chen and Smith at the edge of the black lake.
“You’re seeing something that’s usually visible only to scientific instruments like the Ingress scanner,” Hank told him, like this freak show was some great honor.
Chen deployed a resonator. The dark XM lava pool erupted. Dark matter rose into the air, grasping to take living form. Order and disorder tore at each other. For a brief instant, large tentacles of chaotic matter lashed out everywhere, while lightning blasted from the resonator.
Small clusters of XM drifted from the portal and burst in the air, leaving glowing flecks of plasma on the rotunda and wall. A flying drop sizzled past Hank, who watched as the spattered substance disappeared, leaving a smudge of gold.
So the dark XM creates the gold. We found the philosopher’s stone.
“Get ready for a fight, Conrad. They’re about to find out that we’re here.”
CHAPTER 16
Before Conrad could hear Hank’s last word, a shockwave rocked the caverns. Conrad ducked for cover as the great XM pool erupted, its limbs of dark energy writhing. Exotic goo whipped out from the chaos, splattering him across the face. He expected it to burn like acid, but it didn’t. It simply tingled. Then he felt something like a pebble in his mouth and spit it out into his hand.
It was a tooth.
It had fallen out. He felt another spasm in his gums, and now a second tooth fell out, dropping loosely to the ground.
What’s happening to me?
“Hank!” Conrad shouted.
Hank was busy firing on Smith’s extremo-ware goons, who had now spotted them. He trained his sights on Chen, who was trying to deploy another resonator. The bullet was lost in the eruption of energy.
Hank!
Conrad pulled out his phone and peered into the camera. He started as he looked at himself on the screen. His right eye was no longer blue. The iris had dispersed into a galaxy-like spiral of red specks.
Something was horribly wrong, he knew with a stab of shock. And yet he could still see himself in the mirror through both eyes.
The phone shattered from a gunshot to his left. Conrad turned to see several figures running through a gateway. He hadn’t noticed it before. Even in the lambent, strobing light, he recognized Colonel Zawas and his handful of surviving troops.
Conrad fired off a round from his M16, taking one down. Two others fired back at him, raking the wall of stone over his head. The other Egyptians turned their attention to the SE mercs below.
It had just turned into a three-way furball. Total bedlam.
Antoine Smith methodically fired bursts of lethality throughout the stygian cavern. Chen deployed another resonator, adding to the cosmic chaos. Tentacles of energy whipped, lightning flashed and metal rained throughout the chamber. Hank deployed his shield, but it was too late. Conrad saw Hank’s body get splattered with glowing bits of chaos like a fluorescent leopard. When he turned to shout at Conrad, Conrad’s horror grew. Hank’s eyes glowed red, his face was an unnatural gray, and liquid metal dripped down his face.
Conrad said, “You look like a damn monster.”
“You should see yourself, Conrad. Welcome to hell! Get ready to run!”
If Conrad hadn’t believed in transdimensional matter before this, he did now. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to deploy a power cube. I don’t think we’re going to make it. I think we’re going to die. But it might counter the dark XM.”
“You said a power cube almost blew up CERN!” Conrad shouted. “You said it’s unstable as hell.”
Hank nodded. “That’s what I’m hoping.”
All of a sudden a glowing object materialized and flickered before them. A floating cube, relentlessly pulsing in and out of their dimension. It looked like a videogame object, but it was very real.
This can’t be the end. It wasn’t the end. Not for the Queen of Sheba. There had to be a way.
And suddenly he knew.
“I know where to go!” Conrad shouted. “Follow me!”
In the poisonous strobing light, Conrad could barely see his way out, and he couldn’t see either Zawas’ men or the mercs below. Multiple resonators crashed, tentacles and shocks radiated out. The air was electric. Everything tingled.
Conrad charged toward the entrance of the tunnel, maybe 50 meters away up the dirt ramp. Bullets whistled through the air. Hank ran after him, covering his back and firing at the area where the Zawas troops had been and then blind-spraying at the mercs, now obscured by the chaos of tentacles, lightning and metallic mist.