Authors: James Axler
“A world neither of us belong in,” Nectar replied angrily. “The chronovores, those things out there, are attracted to the time dilation. The only way to halt their progress is to shut down the experiment, close the time window.”
“Then shut it down,” Doc insisted. “Cease these experiments.”
“And what then?” Nectar growled, his hands grasping the comp equipment, sending a final command to open the time window. “Leave both of me stranded here, leading a hand-to-mouth existence in this Hell on Earth? I...we are meant for better than that, Doc Tanner.”
Doc watched as Nectar wrenched free his umbilical cord. Behind him, a green button pulsed with illumination. “We’re live,” Nectar growled. “There’s no turning back now. One of us shall return home.”
“Don Nectar,” Doc growled, shaking his head. “Am I really so selfish? I do not think you know you at all.”
Before Nectar could respond, Doc leaped forward, grasping his swordstick and snapping the hidden blade from its sheath. In a moment, he had the blade free, turning on his heel and lunging at his shadow counterpart.
Nectar stepped back, pulling himself just fractionally out of reach of the sword’s tip. It was as if he had anticipated the move, could judge the sword’s path to the nth degree.
Doc issued an angry noise, sweeping the blade in a broad arc, drawing it through the air toward his agile foe. Nectar stepped back then forward, wobbling on his heels just barely out of the path of the swishing blade.
Behind them, Ryan and Krysty watched, weapons raised but mystified as to what to do. To them, Doc and his foe were talking in riddles.
As Nectar came back toward him, Doc saw him clasp his hands as though gripping something, right thumb to left knuckle. Then he pulled his right hand up...in an eerily familiar move. Doc recognized it as the same move that
he
had performed himself to pull the hidden sword from his walking cane. Something was forming between Nectar’s hands, a blade like Doc’s own, but this one was made of something insubstantial. It looked to Doc like a ripple in the air and everything behind it seemed to be seen as though through rushing water.
“Though unsuccessful, my experiments have generated certain interesting by-products,” Nectar stated as he brought the blade up toward Doc’s face.
Doc parried, his own sword clashing with the strange nonblade with a low tolling clang. “Do tell,” Doc said as he forced Nectar to retreat a step.
A sinister smile appeared on Nectar’s ghostly face. “My blade is made from solid time,” he told Doc. “You feel its passage with every stroke, cutting at the eras, hacking at your days.”
Doc’s gaze flicked to the shimmering blade and he saw things in its depths: grass and trees and the bombs that set the world on the path to wrongness. Something else was there, too—a face, beautiful and all too familiar. Doc gasped. “Emily,” he said.
“My Emily,” Nectar corrected. “The blade cuts so much from us. So much we might never retrieve.” He lunged again at Doc, slashing with the blade of time.
Ryan prepared to shoot the man in the radiation suit but Krysty stopped him. “Ryan, look.”
Behind them, the machines were toiling, a window forming in the air like an opening mouth.
With a grunt of effort, Doc brought his own blade to meet Nectar’s, barely holding it away from his face. “You have...discovered something here,” Doc said with effort. “You have...tapped into...something...that could be...great.”
“Yes,” Nectar hissed. “A way home. For one of us.”
“And leave the other here, while the chronovores you have unleashed destroy the world?” Doc asked, parrying another clash of the blades. “Is that your plan?”
“No,” Nectar snarled, kicking out with his right foot and knocking Doc to the floor. Doc lay there, gasping for breath, his hair clinging to his face with sweat. Nectar strode toward him, bringing the shimmering blade of solid time down toward his throat. “Only one of us can exist. You were right. The other is a disembodied shadow, detached from the whole. Reassembled, we shall travel back to Emily.”
Behind Nectar, between the twin pylonlike structures, the time window had taken form. Its edges were insubstantial, wavering in the air like a mirage. Between them it looked like a great tunnel reaching through space, its ripples running back toward a distant street as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Doc recognized the street. It was a street he had walked a thousand times before, the place where he had been walking with his family when the Eye had taken him, wrenching him through the time stream. It had been the last place he had ever been with his family.
Doc felt the blade of time pushing at his throat, pricking against his skin. He comprehended Nectar’s plan in its entirety now—the blade would knit himself and Nectar, the rogue facets of time, back together. Once fixed they could hopefully survive the chrono jump where Nectar alone had failed. He was a splinter of Doc come detached from him during the original time trawl. The time machinery had spit him out here, at this way station for Operation Chronos, but he was nothing more than false data blurted from the machine. But still, that false data could take Doc home, to see Emily again....
And leave his friends, his companions, here to die in a world consumed by predators who ate time itself. No, Doc could never do that. He could never doom a world, even one as ruined and broken as this one. Not at the expense of his friends.
Who was to say that the chronovores wouldn’t follow them—the joined being of himself and Nectar—through the time hole and into 1896, his world, his home? Who was to say that in dooming one world he wouldn’t have doomed it through eternity, present and past? There were too many variables, too many unknowns, too many risks. It was an uncertainty he simply couldn’t ignore.
This much he knew for certain: whatever Don Nectar was, whatever he had started life as, be it a blip in the data or something more significant, he was no longer Theophilus Algernon Tanner. He was Doc without a moral compass, left with nothing but the vaguest memory of what he had once desired. Don Nectar was Doc Tanner freed from all of the things that made him Doc, a tiny slice of Tanner cut so thin it no longer resembled Tanner at all.
I am facing the darkest aspect of my own soul,
Doc realized as the time blade cut deeper into his neck,
and I am losing. And that is quite simply something that I cannot suffer to endure.
* * *
O
UTSIDE
THE
REDOUBT
, the lightning storm had become a full-blown meltdown, sheets of electricity blasting across the ground like a marching army. Each time Doc and Nectar touched, the lightning had fired out with more intensity than ever before. The area known as
Yego Kraski Sada
had suffered terribly at the hands of the time manipulation, generating the ever-expanding bubble of broken time. But now, that self-contained disaster zone was becoming worse as time contorted beyond human comprehension.
* * *
N
ECTAR
GRABBED
Doc’s wrist as the sword streaked by, yanking him toward the widening portal that had appeared behind him, a portal that led into the time stream.
“Prepare yourselves for full emersion into the time flow,” Nectar growled, stepping back and pulling Doc with him.
Almost forgotten beneath the stairs where Krysty had been working Jak and Ricky’s bonds, Ryan had unslipped his Steyr Scout and brought its scope up to his eye. He was a remarkable shot, with unprecedented aim and speed. But right now he stood there, wondering what—or whom—to shoot. Doc had slipped into the fiery window that had appeared in the center of the machinery, a ceaseless and nonsensical tunnel that burrowed beyond the limits of space and into time’s hidden dimensions. Don Nectar had his hands around Doc’s throat, pulling him forward as chronal energies massed all around them, the sword he held becoming a surging flame that threatened to engulf them both.
The flux of chronal energy rippled through the room, tearing at the walls and blasting through Ryan’s body as he took the shot. Down the scope he could see, magnified and centered in the crosshairs, all of time laid out before him, a spiral of seconds turned minutes turned hours turned days, a lifetime of lifetimes. Doc and his corrupted opposite, the man known as Don Nectar, were caught in pitched struggle, Nectar’s hands reaching around Doc’s throat, the old man struggling to push him away amid the flames of time. Behind them, 1896 pulsed and bloomed, expanding to take one of them, time opening like the petals of a flower.
Squeezing the trigger, Ryan sent a single bullet through the open rent in time.
Chapter Thirty
Ryan felt the longblaster buck against his shoulder, watched as his bullet raced time itself to strike the grasping hands of Nectar as he tried to chill the source from which he had budded, a parasite come to murder its host. The bullet drilled through Nectar’s hands, cutting through the tendons in his left then out through his left palm and into the right palm, continuing onward in a spurt of blood. Wounded, Don let go of Doc’s neck for a moment, but it was enough. Krysty was standing ready, her feet anchored to the spot, reaching for Doc’s hand with the Gaia power still channeling through her with the fury of the sun.
“I’ve got you,” she breathed.
Doc leaped from the fracture in the time stream, his feet skipping across the decking of the floor as he found himself, once more, on solid ground. Standing there, as chronal energies danced all about them, Doc turned back to the rip in time, saw Emily, Rachel and Jolyon for a fraction of a second. Don Nectar was hurtling through the churning tunnel of time toward them, racing past the ages in a sprawl of limbs.
“Finish him, Ryan,” Doc urged, “before it’s too late.”
Ryan stroked the trigger again, sending another bullet down the fracture of time. But Nectar was moving too fast now; the bullet would never catch up to him. “Fireblast!” Ryan cursed. “He’s out of range.”
Doc didn’t hesitate. Plucking up the discarded swordstick, he angled it at the heart of the machinery and thrust it into the metal plating with all his might. A great cascade of energy blasted through the swordstick, channeling up its length like electricity through a lightning rod, pouring into the air in a shower of chronal fury.
Thrown back, Doc crashed into the wall beneath the stairs as the unleashed stream of time rushed up the sword.
Ryan felt himself being dragged into the collapsing portal as it began to suck the untamed energies from the air, sealing the far end of the tunnel in a rapid blur of force. His feet slipped out from under him and suddenly he was in the air, still holding his longblaster as he plummeted into the gaping wound in time.
Krysty lunged, grabbed Ryan by his ankle and pulled him back. The full force of Gaia raked through her body, and when Ryan looked back he saw her hair arrayed around her head in jagged lines, like some stylized rendition of the sun. “Hold on, lover,” Krysty said, her eyes glowing a fierce green, sparking like fireworks.
Caught up there, with Krysty clinging to his ankle, there was nothing Ryan could do other than trust her. And despite all hell breaking apart around them, that was a trust that—as ever—came easy.
Before Ryan’s eyes, the gaping portal into the past flickered, energies cascading through its depths. It was sealing even as he watched, the far end—the one that touched Doc’s past—already scabbed over like a bloody wound. Amid it all, Don Nectar seemed to be disintegrating, slivers of his body unraveling as the radiation suit burned away. He had been a shadow of Doc Tanner, an echo taken substance, no more its own life than a heart murmur.
As Ryan watched, a great burst of energy exploded from Don Nectar’s form as it broke apart, firing out of the rip in time in a shadow-dark swirl. The darkness touched everyone in the room, tearing through Ryan and Krysty, striking Doc where he lay slumped by the steps, and Jak and Ricky, who were still bound by the wall.
Perhaps a hundred years hence, those echoes would emerge in the swamps of Louisiana, where five shades of long-forgotten companions would rise and take life for a moment, just pale ghosts of what they had once been. For each person had a Don Nectar within him or her, waiting to be plucked from his soul in some bloody, scarlet dream.
* * *
O
UTSIDE
THE
BUILDING
where Nyarla and her family hid, J.B. was running from a swarm of hungry time-eaters, launching a grenade at them from just ten feet away. The charge struck the nearby wall of a building and exploded, turning another cluster of the disembodied mouths into ashes. All around, his allies were engaged in similar guerrilla strikes. But as J.B. watched, the remaining cloud of chronovores winked out of existence. He halted, breathless, as cries of surprise echoed from all about the abandoned ville. They had been ready to give their lives, but now the chronovores were no more, sucked into the closing rent of the time portal.
Above the distant military base, the lightning ceased, the time window closed at last.
“What just happened?” Marla asked breathlessly, her blaster poised in trembling hands.
Mildred shook her head. “Wish I knew,” she admitted. “Just stay ready, okay?”
The other people on the snow-covered streets were waiting for what would happen next. But nothing did. Without any warning, the chronovores’ plague through time had ended.
* * *
I
N
THE
OPERATIONS
ROOM
of the Operation Chronos facility, the crackling aftermath of the closing portal vibrated the air like a low bass note.
“I think this whole place is going to blow,” Ryan stated as he looked furtively around the room.
Doc stood exhausted at the edge of the humming machinery and so did Krysty. Her Gaia power had finally abated, having lasted much longer than she had ever known before. As ever, its passing had left her weak as tissue paper, and she stood there hunched over and disoriented. Beneath the metal stairs, Jak and Ricky were just now waking up, their bonds half removed by Krysty and Ryan before the battle between Doc and Nectar had kicked off.
“You two okay?” Ryan asked, swiping the sharp edge of his panga across Jak’s remaining bonds.
“Okay,” Jak admitted. “Tired, like I awake for weeks.”
“Mebbe you have been,” Ryan said, handing his panga to Jak. The albino could free Ricky. Ryan wanted to check on Krysty.
Ricky was only just waking up, struggling to remember what he had seen. “That guy in the rad suit...?” he began.
“He is gone,” Doc told him, leaning unsteadily on his swordstick, its blade back in the hidden sheath. “As if he was never here at all.”
The old man was staring at the smoldering ruins of the time machinery, wondering if this had been his last chance to return home.
“We should get going,” Ryan told him. Krysty was in his arms with her arms around his shoulders. She looked limp, as if she had no strength left in her.
Doc nodded. “He was me, was he not? A little sliver of me, like a reflection in a mirror.”
“We’ll discuss it outside, Doc,” Ryan said, urging his exhausted companions back up the staircase.
Before long they had trekked through the military building and made their way to the doors that Ryan and his team had entered by. The lock remained broken, and when they stepped through the doors they were surprised to find that the building had sunk almost ten feet, leaving them to clamber out of the mess that remained. There was no more lightning in the sky above. The generators were burned out, their metal shells black with smoke where they had expelled their last iota of power.
“The whole place looks dead,” Doc said as he clambered up the slope.
“It’s melting through the snow,” Ryan said. “By this time tomorrow it’ll probably be gone entirely.”
“And there goes my gateway home.” Doc sighed.
Ryan looked at the old man, unable to express what he felt. They had all left their homes behind, one way or another, trading them for the endless roads of the Deathlands. The fact remained that they were alive, and that was a fact worth clinging on to.
“Time and tide wait for no man,” Doc said sadly.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope,” Ryan reminded him as they walked away from the sinking remains of the military facility.