“They sent it through a portal,” Caleb said. “When? Icarus’s last approach?”
“Ten years ago, give or take,” Miriam said, and looked sadly at Diana. “Another black project you knew nothing about. But the genius was not just when the satellite left this room, but what time we actually sent it to.”
Diana’s mouth hung open. “It was that old? You were able to…”
“Send it back thousands of years, crash it there so you would never question its age.”
“My God, the high priests of Egypt who had seen this…” Caleb shook his head. “It wasn’t from the gods, but from the future.”
Miriam smiled as Diana continued working through it. “You left us a fake warning from the past, knowing we’d see it as the threat became imminent. Why?”
Montross moved to her side. “I’m guessing it’s the old Bre’r Rabbit trick.”
Miriam gave him an amused look. “Ah yes. Shoot down the comet, please! To which you refuse because it’s what you believe I want…”
Caleb’s mouth hung open. “And I took the alternative.”
“What did you do?” Diana asked, still open-mouthed and gaping at all the destruction around her.
“He did something,” came a new voice — a voice that even startled Miriam in its purity and volume and suddenness. “That I had hoped to avoid.”
Stepping out of the nothingness behind Miriam came two figures.
Another custodian, dressed in rags and tattered green coat—
And… Caleb’s heart leapt.
“Phoebe!”
28
“I was too late,” said Nikola Tesla, looking around the chamber in desolation. “After all my years, these infinite loops of time and space folding in and back, and now that I needed to pick one…”
“You forgot how.” Miriam spoke, stepping from the luminescent haze of sparks and energy.
The bell continued to spin faster, driving off more energy and rattling the foundations of the structure.
“What the hell is that?” Phoebe wondered, but then saw what Caleb had just stepped out of, the chair, and she saw the Tablet. “And that again? Oh my God!”
She moved to Caleb, held him as he almost collapsed.
“What did I do?” He gripped Phoebe’s shoulders, then looked past her. “It’s him…Tesla?”
“Yeah, he’s one of them…”
They watched as Tesla and Miriam advanced toward each other.
“That,” said Montross at their backs, “I bet she didn’t see coming.”
“Too late,” Miriam said. “But I’m surprised you finally stepped off the sidelines.”
“You did. And had help…” He cocked his head. “One who is no longer. Lucky him.”
“You can join him, Tesla.”
“Not yet. Not until I undo what you’ve done.”
She shook her head. “No, you won’t.”
Caleb got the point though, and made for the chair. “I’ll get the Tablet…”
But suddenly it — and the chair itself folded in on itself in a space that drifted beyond Caleb’s reach. Where it had been, a vertical line expanded, widening into…
“She’s created a portal! Tesla, stop it…”
The Custodian reached out, and fluttering waves of nearly invisible energy shot from his fingertips and encircled the Emerald Tablet, holding it fast, pulling it back from the doorway that now revealed a close up of our sun (or a sun), a fiery mass of nuclear activity, churning with heat and power, until—
A grunt and Tesla fell as twin tentacles of plasma roared up and down from the bell behind Miriam, as if emerging from her back like sinewy appendages. They struck at Tesla’s neck and wrist. Golden dust burst from his mouth as he regained his leverage. His hand flared with light that burned away the tentacle-thing, then shot pure electricity back at Miriam.
She bounced back thirty feet, crashing into a support beam just before the whirling bell. Her suit tore away in burning shreds and her wig incinerated, revealing bald, featureless skin beneath.
Tesla wriggled free of his burning jacket, revealing patches beneath the dirty T-shirt that were glowing and writhing with golden ones and zeroes…
“What the hell?” Diana struggled to keep her sanity. “How…?”
But Montross pulled her back as the two beings rushed toward each other again.
First Tesla made a motion with his hand and the Tablet pulled free from its invisible cage, moving back from the doorway, the view of space and the blinding sun.
Caleb lunged for it again — but a wall of brute electrical force slammed down before he could reach it. Sizzled and shocked him, and sent him reeling back with pain. Tesla grunted as Miriam’s light-form crunched into his. She seemed more in tune with her abilities, more powerful and dominant and in control of the forces in the room, and with a sideways flick of her wrist, the portal exerted a black hole-like effect, sucking at everything nearby toward it — the Tablet, debris, even Caleb himself!
He flipped in the air, with his arms flailing wildly. Barely heard Phoebe crying out his name, but instead focused on the Tablet, there in front of him, hurtling end over end toward the waiting, hungry sun. It zipped through the doorway — which suddenly, after a shout from Tesla, snapped closed — just as Caleb could see the background — the sun roaring into view and the Tablet streaming down toward its massive fiery maw.
The gravitational pull severed, he fell in a rolling heap, then looked back.
So much for that one, Caleb thought, shaking his head in anguish. Phoebe was back at his side in a moment, lifting him up. They both turned and joined with Montross and Diana, feeling helpless as they watched the two Custodians battle.
“Can we help?”
“Help which one?” Diana asked, watching the fists fly, the bodies tumbling, now in the air like cosmic combatants, caught up in a firestorm of elemental fury.
“I don’t think what we do matters,” Caleb said, “but that bell, spinning…all that torsion and energy, it’s got to be released if it’s not stopped.”
They looked around the chamber. Montross pointed to all the sparking machines, the controls on fire.
“You kind of took away the option of shutting it down, I would say.”
“What do you mean all the energy is going to be released?” Phoebe asked.
“An explosion,” Caleb said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know how much nuclear force, how many kilotons we’re talking, but…”
Diana cursed. “We have to get the hell out of here.”
Tesla was thrust against the floor, then bounced up on waves of energized particles, his body trailing pieces, clothing and dust like a comet until he was barely a shimmering humanoid form. His facial features were gone, blurred out in tiny digital cells, glowing and shifting. But he was still powerful.
It was as if he had charged himself with his boyhood obsession, electricity; bent it to his will, shielded himself with it, then dove down, unleashing all that force into one devastating blow upon his opponent.
Miriam, staggering under the onslaught, her own skin rippling with binary coding flying off her joints and expelling from her eyes, lost control, spun and then bounced off the floor — and over the bell, plummeting over the side.
Tesla landed in a sparking thud, then reached out, flicked his wrist — and hauled her back up. “No fleeing,” he said.