Invaders: Dreadnought Ocelot (Invaders Series Book 4) Page 20

  An outside door slid up and a blue-robed man who I took for a Polarion walked into the larger chamber holding the aquarium. He was a black-bearded individual, a big humanoid with a bald pate. He had a slate in his large hands as he walked toward the aquarium.

  I squirmed, moving my arms, trying to signal him.

  He noticed, raised bushy black eyebrows and marched up to the glass. He used a stylus to mark the slate, glanced at a panel attached to the aquarium and activated something on it.

  I heard a crackle in my ears, and the man spoke alien words.

  My heart sank, because this was supposed to be Sand’s kingdom. Why did the man—the Polarion—speak this alien gibberish to me?

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He cocked his head, frowning at me. He spoke into the panel again, and more gibberish sounded in the earphones embedded in my helmet-mask. This went on for twenty minutes, the style of his gibberish changing each time. I understood nothing he said.

  Finally, his shoulders deflated. He set the slate against the aquarium and walked to the side. He rolled a table-sized machine to the aquarium until it bumped against the glass.

  The black-bearded Polarion crouched at the machine, making adjustments until finally he stood and pressed a switch.

  I felt the vibration and wondered if he was about to shock me. The vibration increased, and the water around me stirred.

  “What are you doing to me?” I shouted.

  He did not look up.

  The vibration increased even more, and I felt pressure against my head.

  I closed my eyes, breathing heavily. Maybe I should just tear the mask from my face. I would force the joker to free me or let me drown. Yet, maybe he would restrain my arms next time and plop me back into the pool.

  The water stirred more, and the pressure against my head increased.

  I opened my eyes to glare at him but found that he had left. For the next hour, hour and a half maybe, I endured the pressure. My head started hurting, and a vile taste made me want to tear off the mask and drink water.

  Why was he torturing me? I didn’t know his language. Was that a criminal offense?

  He came back at the end of the time, studied me, checked his slate and smiled faintly. He turned off the machine.

  The vibrations quit on the instant.

  I sagged with relief, still floating, still trapped in the aquarium.

  The black-bearded Polarion approached the panel, speaking into it again.

  “How do you feel?” I heard from the headphones.

  I hesitated answering. What was the right thing to say?

  His slight smile disappeared as he watched me.

  “Uh, I’m fine,” I said.

  He immediately brightened, leaning near the panel again. “I’m sorry for having to use the translator unit. I’m told it’s an uncomfortable experience. I could not communicate with you, though, and dearly wish to do so.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “You didn’t understand any of the known languages. Thus, I had to translate directly from your cerebral cortex.”

  “You scanned my brain to learn English?”

  “Essentially correct,” he said.

  “Okay. Something is off. Did you kill Sand?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Did you destroy Sand?”

  “Sand, as in the particles on a beach?” he asked.

  “No. Sand, the robot defender of the Great Machine.”

  The big Polarion stared at me. “Either you are being clever, feigning ignorance, or there is something terribly amiss afoot.”

  “You don’t know who Sand is?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you know Argon?”

  “Who?”

  He was lying. I was certain. He had to be Nerelon Brontios or one of his assistants. This was some kind of elaborate trick.

  “Are you telling me that you’re not a Polarion?” I asked.

  “A god?” he asked. “By no means.”

  “No, not a god. Oh, is that what your thingamajig translates Polarion into?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, but I think the answer is yes.”

  “Am I on Earth?”

  “Essentially,” he said.

  “Am I inside the Earth or underground?” I asked.

  “Yes. That is correct.”

  “Okay. You’re not a Polarion, right?”

  “That is correct. I’m just a man.”

  “And your name is…?”

  “Unimportant at this moment,” he said. He studied his slate, nodding afterward, looking up at me again. “You have taken grave injuries and absorbed an abundance of Q-rays.”

  “What the heck are those?”

  “If you don’t know, my explaining won’t help you. You are in the bath so I can save your life. I am, of course, quite grateful for your aid against the Gigantopithecuses.”

  I shook my head. This wasn’t making any sense.

  “Oh,” he said. “One last thing. How did you get here?”

  “Ah, I used the portal,” I said.

  He nodded. “What happened to the others?”

  “What others?”

  He looked away, sighed and finally shrugged. “I don’t think we’re tracking yet. I will have to apply the machine a little longer.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” I said, trying not to sound desperate.

  “I know. But this is for the best.”

  With that, he turned on the machine, causing the water to vibrate and my head to start hurting again. If I didn’t know better, I would say he was torturing me but trying to get me to believe otherwise.

  At that point, my first hallucination started.

  -43-

  Did I say hallucination? I must have been mistaken. In fact, everything that had happened to me must have been wrong. My head hurt. My thinking about things changed. I was in an aquarium and yet…and yet…it felt as if I was walking outside it.

  There were brief periods, certainly, where I felt as if the blue-robed—he called himself the Magistrate so I might as well use the same title. I felt as if he was attempting to trick me. He used a machine to break my mind. He fed me hallucinations—

  No, no, there were no hallucinations. What I had been going through were the hallucinations. I had not gone to different worlds, but parallel Earths in different dimensions in the multiverse. That did not sound right, at first. But the Magistrate kept explaining and upping the voltage of the hallucination machine.

  Oh no, I think I’m beginning to sound crazy. I tried to fight these strange thoughts and ideas that were so at odds with my portal travels. Surely, the Polarion attempting to break my mind was indeed Nerelon Brontios. He wanted to know what I had done. He must yearn for the Prometheus Stone and Celestial Cybernetic Circuit. I think he already had the Odin Eye. One time, he asked about Argon. So, I think the Polarion who had aided me in the past had managed to escape.

  But…that wasn’t reality. The machine vibrating the aquarium water helped break me of those strange illusions. The Magistrate finally released me and showed me around his underground realm, which was so like Sand’s underground realm beneath Utah and Nevada.

  If I sound disjointed…well, never mind. I wasn’t crazy. I’d needed help. That’s all. Let me put it like this.

  I spent two weeks with the Magistrate, as the big black-bearded man styled himself. He ruled his other-dimensional Earth, a nuclear wasteland above with a small colony of underground survivors. He and others defended against the dimensional-attacking Sliths, of which the Magistrate spoke little other than the one time he told me I’d attacked them, not these imaginary Gigantopithecuses I kept talking about.

  Some of what he did for me I am not at liberty to relate because I swore an oath to keep certain matters confidential. The Magistrate knew more about dimensional travel than anyone else I’d met to date. He spoke of it in grave terms, calling it a terrible folly. According to him, it brought grief a
nd despair to those who practiced it. Far better, he told me on more than one occasion, to live in one’s present reality.

  “The dimensions and parallel worlds are without number,” he said one evening as he strove to find my Earth for me so he could send me home. “Before leaving your own reality, you must take great care to mark your home. Otherwise, you will never reach it again. There are places and realms…” He shook his head.

  “Logan, you must return to your dimension if you can and never leave it again. You have already absorbed far too many Q-rays. I’ve cured you of some of the maladies that would have manifested shortly. But there’s a limit how many most of us can absorb and heal. Only the Sliths seem immune to Q-rays.”

  “And Sliths are, exactly…?” I asked.

  “A plague to human life,” he said. “More I will not say. Although…your Polarions…they are rash to have built so many portals.”

  “Then, you do know about them?”

  “Only from what you have said and from my time abroad in my youth. I saw some of their handiwork. I do not approve of them.”

  I was unsure if he was being honest with me, as I spent many hours with him as he searched the dimensional realms with his Locator.

  I had breached his Locator, he said, entering through the portal. He stood by the many controls near it, making adjustments and sending probes through and studying their findings on the wall screens on either side of the semicircular stone portal.

  “The mistake you made thinking this was your Earth is understandable,” he told me a day later. “I have a Great Machine that creates a barrier. This Sand you’ve talked about also has a barrier. It tells me the Polarions who helped make the Great Machine understand something of the perils they played with each time they journey to a different dimension.”

  I thought about the Shadow Dimension and realized the Magistrate knew what he was talking about.

  Except…for an instant, I felt as if I was floating and as if I could hear bubbles rising past my ears. Could I still be in the aquarium and this yet another in a series of hallucinations?

  The feeling passed as the water vibrated more. No, no, that wasn’t right.

  Oh, I don’t know. The Magistrate was surely telling the truth. In order to help him find my Earth—which I longed to reach—I told him about my supposed portal adventures and added much of what had occurred on the Asteroid Belt station.

  The Magistrate seemed especially interested in that part of the story.

  “This randomizer you carried in the null gravity belt,” he said once, turning to me after studying a portal screen. “It shows you have a malignant enemy.”

  “I don’t see how, as I picked up the belt on impulse.”

  The Magistrate stroked his beard, finally shaking his head. “I do not accept that. This Ailuros, a Polarion, like a god in some ways, would have fantastic powers of calculation. You believed her defeated on the station, but I think she loathed you and used the station computer as an ally. They or the computer watched you in the hangar bay, waiting to see if you would act as the computer or Ailuros predicted you would.”

  “You can’t know that.” And…hadn’t he said the Asteroid station was a delusion on my part? Why would the Magistrate want to know about a delusion? This wasn’t making any sense…unless he was trying to drive me mad.

  “Know is a funny word, Logan,” he told me. “Such is my suspicion in any case. Does my suspicion they tricked you make it so? No, but the event is likely, most probable even to have occurred the way I just described it.”

  This was confusing. So, maybe these things had happened to me after all. “What about the mutant priest who helped me on the doom world?” I asked.

  “Clearly, the priest thought you were someone else.”

  “Meaning what?”

  The Magistrate smiled grimly. “That is the point I was trying to make a few days ago about the endless dimensions. Sheer logic tells us that we cannot know all the players, all the strategies and ploys at work throughout the dimensions. I believe a power aided the mutant priest. It was cleverly done, too. Perhaps the power believed you were a different Logan.”

  “What?”

  “Come now, my friend. You’re no fool. The dimensions also possess parallel worlds. Surely, there are other Logans, some of whom have surfed the many possibilities of the dimensional realms. Perhaps you took his place—another Logan—in this instant. You possibly changed the event the other Logan should have done. One thing is clear. You aided my world and me. For that, I am grateful.”

  “The way you put it makes it all sound confusing and chaotic.”

  “Ah. If that is how you feel, then you are learning. That proves my point about your intellect.”

  I said nothing more then, wanting to think through the implications of what he’d proposed. It was getting harder and harder for me to know what was real and what was false. Still, one of the interesting properties of this Earth was that Rax acted like an inert piece of crystal instead of his regular self. I told the Magistrate about that.

  “It’s perfectly clear what has happened,” he said. “In this dimension, Rax and his kind do not function, as they are not sentient.”

  “But…”

  “Do not concern yourself, Logan. Rax should be the same once you leave this dimension.”

  I hoped the Magistrate was right. I did not like to think that Rax had died. In many ways, he did not even feel right in my hands. I thought I’d thrown Rax into… No, I would not talk about that. I needed to keep that secret. I needed to keep playing along with this charade. It was all a charade, right?

  As the days passed, as the Magistrate continued to search the Continuum, as he called it, I exercised and planned. I had to get back. I had to save my Earth from the Gigantopithecuses. They did exist. I had to kill the bastard that had pirated the GGS Ocelot and caused the death of Debby. I couldn’t let Ailuros win, either. Had she really tricked me? Had the station computer at her command left me alone in the hangar bay, knowing I would pilfer the Polarion null-gravity belt?

  I did not want to cross dimensions again. I did not want to gather more Q-rays in me. They sounded like mercury in fish. Over its life, a fish saved whatever mercury it consumed, finally killing it once it had too much.

  I had used portals once or twice before. Now, if I could get back, I just wanted to stay on dear old Earth and protect it from all alien comers. My single dimension had enough problems for me to handle. I did not want to bring Sliths to my Earth. I did not want my homeworld to turn into a nuclear wasteland, a death zone, like here.

  I was just a lonely man, a human, who had found himself propelled into one crazy adventure after another. I wished Polarions had left our planet alone.

  That got me to thinking. Why did the Earth—my Earth—have so many rifts, so many openings to other places? Was that a product of Polarion tampering, or had some other force created them before the coming of the Polarions? I was coming to see that I could not take everyone and everything at face value. Too many people and aliens had lied to me about why or how things worked. From now on, I was going to use my eyes and believe what I saw. Did that also apply to the Magistrate? Was he just the simple ruler on a dead Earth, or was he something more in the Continuum of Possibilities?

  I was starting to think that I should bet on him being more than what he claimed, but I wasn’t going to tell him my thoughts. I wanted to get home. I wanted to know if Jenna and the others had made it.

  Finally, two weeks after passing through the Great-Machine-created barrier, the Magistrate summoned me, telling me to bring my belongings. It looked as if he had found my Earth and was going to send me home.

  -44-

  In my hallucination, I found myself deep underground in the Locator Chamber with the Magistrate. I could feel the Great Machine through the slight vibration on the polished floor. The smaller machines in the chamber all labored with power.

  The Magistrate wore a silver suit today instead of a robe as before. He h
ad a holstered weapon at his side. He looked more like a Polarion than ever. In that moment, I was sure he was a Polarion, maybe one of the more powerful ones.

  I wore a patched jacket and clothes. The waist pack was cinched tight around me, with a fake Rax and a few rations inside. I had the knife, too, but that was it.

  The Magistrate had explained before that he could not give me any of his dimension’s weapons. That might change the balance of technology on my Earth, and someone evil might use the items to pinpoint his Earth.

  “Each dimensional item and each person has its special signatures—if one knows where and how to look,” he said.

  I stood to the side, eyeing the main screen. On it appeared an Earth. Was it my Earth?

  “Do you detect a barrier?” I asked.

  “I do,” the Magistrate said, as he adjusted controls. “It is almost an exact match with my barrier. That is uncanny.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He glanced at me before shaking his head.

  “Have you told me all I need to know?” I asked him.

  “Growing suspicious of my motives again, are you?”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “It shows you’re thinking. I have been generating portal power for several days. The dimensional distance to your Earth…it is far.”

  “How do you measure that?”

  “Now, remember this, Logan. I do not know one hundred percent if that is your Earth. Finding it again after you’ve traveled and bounced all over the Continuum…it will be amazing luck if I’m able to send you all the way home.”

  “A needle in the haystack,” I said.

  “Eh, what’s that?”

  “Nothing,” I said, wondering if the Magistrate had really never heard that saying before.

  “I do not detect any Slith probes,” he said. “Pray they never find your realm. Pray you do not leave a blazing trail to your planet.”

  I eyed him sidelong. Was this a subtle warning? Was he going to trail me back? What if he was the grandfather of all Polarions and had a grudge against some of the others like Argon? I exhaled.