Time Storm Shockwave (21 page)

The core of the
Meliorator stood at the center of the underground section, the size of a basketball stadium. It had an observation-control room from which they would operate the machine. There was a row of breakers, which all had to be pulled in unison. Several guards stood around watching for any sign of sabotage. The precise calculations had taken months. Once the machine started, there would be no way to stop it without creating a catastrophic chain of events; it was an all or nothing gamble with life.

Mark had considered
simply killing the admiral, but ever since he had told them of his plan, he had been accompanied by a contingency of naval guards by day and he stayed inside a heavily guarded fortress by night. Even Ashlyn, with all her stealth and training, was powerless to get to him. The machine had also been under constant guard with a high security fence and alarms. The yard around it looked like a prison, complete with a man in a watchtower armed with a machine gun.

Mark had also considered
supplying the admiral with false information, but that would have only ensured a cataclysmic event. There was just too much raw power involved, and it had to go somewhere. Besides, there were other scientists checking and double-checking each other’s results. In the end, he had found only one way to sabotage the device.

Six pillars, each eighteen feet tall and ten feet in diameter
, made of nano-manufactured loadstone, had been tightly wound with copper wire. Out of the top of each one, extended a long metal rod. Looking like gigantic Tesla coils, each was capable of releasing untold amounts of energy. All six pillars were joined by spokes to a hub in the center, which was raised several feet off the ground with an inverted bowl shaped magnetic channeling device. Directly below that, exactly six feet down, was the opening to the downward passage that would carry the massive microwave discharge.

Several coolant valves and gauges connected to each one of the massive, coiled columns. Once started, any malfunction might need to be corrected manually
. One person, wearing protective gear, was assigned to be in the actual room with the machine when it was turned on. Oddly enough, he had chosen Mark, and that had given him a way to sabotage the machine, hopefully without any catastrophic events.

Once the system was turned on, the center section would start to turn until the wormhole was established, then the entire area would
begin spinning like a carousel. The centrifugal force would push the event horizon outward toward the towers they had seen the first day that they were there. The towers were spaced evenly and were receivers for the tornado of energy that would soon be released, taking them all back in time. Once started, the machine would power itself. If all went according to plan, the towers would all light up and shoot out connecting beams of energy.

His
protective suit was made of a special flexible, nano-diamond fiber. His plan was simple; once the machine started, he would jump onto the spinning central section and place his body over the hole. It would be too late to stop him once his subterfuge had become apparent. He didn’t have a prayer of stopping the microwave surge; the powerful force would probably vaporize his body within seconds, but it was the nano-diamond fiber suit he was counting on to deflect the beam just barely enough to change the delicate balance and overload the machine.

It
would likely kill everyone in the control room, including the admiral. Mark would have tried using the suit alone if he could have gotten it off fast enough, but there was no point, the overload of the machine would kill him anyway.

They had less than ten minutes
before zero hour, and he was in position. Then the admiral sent an order for Mark to come and talk to him.
What could he possibly want now?

“Yes sir,
” Mark feigned respect. He prayed his profuse sweating wouldn’t be noticed as he exited the cold room.

The room had to be cold to help offset the heat that would be generated even though the machine itself had liquid nitrogen cooling tubes wrapping around it like octopus arms.

Admiral Preston stated succinctly, “I am replacing you as monitor.” He offered no explanation.

Mark felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He had no backup plan and could see no other means of preventing the disaster. He tried to remain calm so the admiral would not suspect anything.

“May I ask why, sir?”

“I have my reasons.”

Mark didn’t know what to do. Arguing would only put him under suspicion, and he would lose the chance forever, but he had to try.

“
Is there some reason—” he hesitated “—I mean, did I do something wrong?”

Dierdra
walked into the room. “Hello Mark, long time, no see”—she said with an evil glint in her eyes—“the admiral doesn’t trust you.”

It didn’t take long to figure out exactly where that sudden lack of trust had come from.
Then again, maybe he never believed me.
He had probably been using Mark all along, only pretending to trust him.

Dierdra
looked so much like the woman he loved, except her eyes. They were cold and devoid of humanity.
I can’t believe I ever thought she was Ashlyn.

He turned to the admiral. “I would not do anything to disrupt the plan sir because my wife and my friends
would be—” Mark stared directly into the admiral’s eyes “—let’s be real. They would be executed.”

He considered that for only a nanosecond before saying,
“Nevertheless, I’ve replaced you. I won’t hear anymore about it, or I will believe you to be a traitor, and summarily execute your wife and friends while you watch and then of course, you.”

What more could Mark do. He watched as the countdown finished. A sickening feeling ripped through him. T
hey flipped all the switches right on time. The center started to spin, exactly on schedule. The power surge traveled up the shaft and into the waiting machine. He watched as the event horizon of the wormhole began to appear, and then the whole machine began to spin, looking like an enormous centrifuge, but rather than test tubes, it had gigantic Tesla coils.

***

The Hadron Collider had just reached full power opening a small wormhole. The scientists measured the results without too much surprise. This was the second time they had run this test, and they were getting the exact results that they had been expecting. However,
they had no idea that across the sea, the admiral’s time machine also had opened its wormhole, and the inter-dimensional tunnels through space-time combined. The unexpected imbalance combined opposing forces and spun together into a gravitational singularity on the collider end.

Scientists
started yelling at each other too late. “Shut it down, shut it down!”

Outside the ground began to shake, and the snow-covered Earth above the seventeen-mile circular particle collider began to pull together as the hole opened up. It began sucking in the land abo
ve like a giant vacuum cleaner as if pulling downward on a rug until it was entirely gone.

***

“What happened?”
Ashlyn yelled over a deafening roar as Mark ran through the gate.

“I couldn’t stop it
. The admiral replaced me.”

Just then power surges,
which looked like controlled lightning, shot out from the machine in every direction. The distant towers lit up and interconnected. The entire domed area was encircled with streams of electricity surging through the air, and then suddenly disappeared, and everything went silent.

Stewart and Kathleen joined them quickly
. Panicked voices asked in unison, “What’s going on?”

“I couldn’t stop it!”

“So what happens now?” Ashlyn asked.

“I’m not sure—” Mark glanced back at the large machine “—I guess we find out if it works.”

Chapter 19

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly …time-y wimey …stuff. — Steven Moffat

~

Almost as soon as Mark had answered her, there was a deep rumbling and suddenly their darkened, night
-like world blazed with the light of noonday. The tarmac beneath their feet was replaced with snow on an uneven landscape. It was a valley, somewhere and
somewhen
. Shocked by the panorama before them, none of them spoke for several minutes.

The snow-covered earth stretch
ed for miles in every direction, obstructed only by the absurd contents of the dome. To the south, a large mountain range loomed. While distance was hard to gage, it was no more than ten or fifteen miles from where they were standing. Up on one of the lower hills, maybe a thousand feet, directly in front of them stood a castle. The size was impossible to determine, but to be able to see it that clearly it had to be very large.

Kathleen turned her head west, staring at the enormous white pyramid. It had been impossible to see in the darkness, under the water, but here in the open daylight
, and the wide expanse of the valley it was impossible to miss and preposterously out of place.

She turned to
the others and said, “Well, where ever we are, I don’t think the people who live here will be able to miss that, even if they ignore the Meliorator, buildings, and all of the other high-tech stuff we brought back with us.”

The others had been too stunned by the dramatic change to
consider that fact. In spite of the missing tarmac and snow-covered earth, everything else under the dome had arrived safely with them. Now they all stared, not even noticing the noise of yelling marines, and the scientists who had now emerged from the operations room.

Ashlyn finally broke the paralysis with a question directed at Mark, “If everything under the dome is here, what happened to anything that was here before?”

Visions of the house landing on the witch in the Wizard of Oz danced through Mark’s head as he considered her question. He was intimately aware of how the machine worked from the writings of the Atlantians, only their destination had been withheld from him. The dome had been huge, nearly two hundred square miles. Surely, there had been people there, maybe even entire towns.

He took a deep breath and stared over the wide expanse. “
Everything would have been demolecularized,” Mark said ominously.

“Even the people?”
asked Ashlyn, completely distraught at the thought.

He nodded, hating the fact that he had helped
the admiral to commit this heinous crime against humanity, in spite of his good intentions.

A pall fi
lled the air, and they stood there silently, slowly becoming aware of the noise and movements around them. The admiral began to mobilize the military for whatever his devious plan was.

“Why is the snow still here?”
Stewart asked.

The other’s looked at him blankly until they could make sense of the question.

“I think it’s because it’s so close to the ground—” Mark answered thoughtfully “—the tarmac of the dome was a kind of barrier, and as you see it isn’t here. Anything that was at ground level should still exist.”

“I would hate to think what anyone who was down in their basement is thinking now—” Ashlyn stated ruefully and swallowed hard “—hey, why is the operations room still
there? It was under ground level.”

Mark shook his head, “I suppose the
Atlantians accounted for that.”

“Is there a way for us to go
back”—Stewart wore a grave expression—“or …are we stuck here for good?”

Mark didn’t answer immediately. “I’m honestly not sure how we
could. There may be a way, but—” he shook his head “—I’m not sure the admiral will let me anywhere near the machine now. Whatever Dierdra told him, I don’t think he will trust me again.”

“Maybe I can help with that—” Ashlyn spoke quietly “—she pretended to be me so …maybe I can pretend to be her and undo the damage.”

Mark spoke flatly, “No, I’m not letting you go near him.”

“You are ordering me not to.” Her voice held a distinctly irritated tone.

He cleared his throat, “Let me rephrase that. I don’t think that’s a good idea. He is very dangerous. Please don’t even consider that.”

“You’re smarter than you
look”—Kathleen said—“the most effective way to get a woman to do what you don’t want her to do is order her not to do it.”

Ashlyn smiled and stifled a laugh. She turned away quickly so that he wouldn’t see it.

“Alright, if you don’t want her to try then what can we do? We can’t just let the admiral do—” Stewart scowled “—whatever it is he’s planning.”

“I think that first we need to find out when
—” Mark emphasized “—and where we are. We need to know exactly what the admiral is trying to do before we make any plans.”

“Are you suggesting we don’t try to get back?” Kathleen asked.

“Well—” Mark studied the view before him “—the world we left wasn’t exactly a nice place to be. Maybe what he is planning to do isn’t so bad.”

Ashlyn furrowed her brow. “And the people we
demolecularized, how about them?” she said accusingly.

He stepped closer to her and put his hands gently on her shoulders. “I’m not suggesting we let anyone die to save ourselves.
I’m simply saying we need more information before we act.”

Tears
glistened in her eyes. “I know—” she said quietly “—I’m just so …I don’t know how to deal with all of the emotions I’m feeling.”

He pulled her closely to him and she buried her face against his neck. Though she made no sound, her shoulders convulsed slightly
, and it was easy to see that she was silently crying.

Stewart pulled Kathleen aside to give them some space. “Have any ideas on how to tell where we are? You’re a historian right?”
he asked her.

“
Central American history—” she threw up her hands “—I don’t even know where to start.”

Ashlyn had over heard them and pulled herself together. “I think that is Neuschwanstein
castle”—she stated matter-of-factly—“that would put us sometime after 1886 in Bavaria.”

They others looked stunned. “How did you come up with that?” Stewart asked. He hadn’t been privy to Ashlyn’s explanation of how she had been taught, or that she was a virtual encyclopedia in all areas except science.

“Well, I think those are the Alps”—she pointed to the snow covered mountain range—“and it looks like that castle.”

“Have you been there?” Kathleen asked.

“No, but I’ve seen pictures”—she shot Mark an uncomfortable expression—“and I know that it was completed in 1886. We might have to get closer to be certain.”

Mark got the message; clearly, she didn’t want to explain her computer enhanced brain to the others. “I think she is right about
it”—he quickly interjected—“I think the Disneyland castle was modeled after it.”

Truthfully, he had no idea
, but it did look kind of like the one in the theme park. He was simply trying to take the unwanted scrutiny off her.

“Now that you mention it—” Stewart stared up at the structure “—it does kind of look like it.”

“Mark is right, Disney did use the Neuschwanstein castle as a guide for the Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland,” Ashlyn confirmed.

Mark
gave her a covert smile, letting her know that he appreciated the conformation of his guess.

Kathleen nodded her agreement after staring at it for a while. “So we are in Germany. Well, maybe, it depends on the year. It was a part of the German Empire, and then it
was made independent after World War I in 1918. Then it became part of modern Germany in March 1933, when the Nazis took it over—” she paused to think about it “—after World War II it was a part of West Germany.”

Mark gave Ashlyn a questioning look, and she gave him a covert nod.
Apparently, Kathleen was going to be a valuable resource, at least if Ashlyn wanted to keep her knowledge base a secret.

Stewart eyed her strangely, “This isn’t Central America.”

“Well—” Kathleen rolled her eyes “—I like history, that doesn’t mean I’m an expert about this.”

“So, I guess the question is how do we find out the year—”
he shrugged “—and more importantly how do we find out what the admiral has planned?”

“We could try asking
him”—Kathleen suggested—“I know he doesn’t trust you Mark, but maybe he would tell me. I was working for him so …”

“I don’t think that’s a good
idea”—Stewart argued—“he’s a very evil man.”

She
looked as if she wanted to debate that, but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t had a clone assassin after her. No one said anything for a while.

Ashlyn
said, “I think that is a very good idea. At least, there is a chance.”

Stewart looked away and
clinched his jaw, but he didn’t argue, so Kathleen left the group to talk to the admiral. She came back within the hour.

“I’m sorry, he won’t tell me anything except that you were
right about him not trusting you—” she seemed quite agitated “—in fact, he said if any of us, including me try to leave the dome he will have us executed.”

“Yeah—” Ashlyn said sarcastically “—he’s such a nice man.”

A thought struck Mark, “Why don’t we just hike up to the castle and ask them what year it is?”

“Are you kidding
?—” Kathleen asked “—whoever is up there has got to be freaking out. I mean, a pyramid just showed up on their lawn. Besides, does anyone speak the language?”

“Ashlyn does,”
he answered without thinking.

She shot him a look
.

“We aren’t even sure what language they
speak”—Kathleen interjected—“that’s great if you speak German, but what if they speak Bairisch or something?”

Mark and Ashlyn
glanced at each other and then he said, “We will cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“Aren’t we forgetting something here
—” Stewart asked “—the admiral said he would kill us if we left the dome.”

“
Look”—Mark said after a minute—“we are at most five miles from the southern edge. He can’t have the entire dome guarded. Maybe we can grab a cart; they don’t seem to be watching closely. Besides, do any of you see the dome? It doesn’t even seem to be on. So we just tell him we didn’t know where the edge was if he catches us.”

“You really think he will buy that if we are half-way up the mountain?” Stewart argued.

“If no one has a better idea—” Ashlyn looked at each of them “—then I don’t see that we have another choice.”

That settled the argument. They waited until early the next morning, and after grabbing a few provisions, headed out, trying to remain unseen.
As it turned out, that was quite easy because everyone seemed to be quite busy or travelling in the opposite direction, and they were able to grab a golf-cart unnoticed, though it was clearly not made for the snow and irregular terrain, it did speed things up. The temperature had been cool, in spite of the snow. They had gathered what they could find to stay warm, but doubted it would be sufficient once they were on the slope of the mountain.

They had travelled nearly to the edge of where they assumed the mystery boundary was when they saw a strange shimmering in the air.

“What is that?” Ashlyn asked.

Mark stopped the cart and stared at the strange sight. “That must be the dome. I guess it’s just transparent.”

“Will we be able to get through it?—” Kathleen questioned “—After all, it was strong enough to hold back six-thousand feet of ocean.”

“I guess we will find out.” Mark answered as he jumped off the cart and headed for the boundary. He reached out to touch it.

“Wait!—” Ashlyn sounded panicked “—What if it’s dangerous, like a high voltage fence? You can’t just touch it.”

He stopped and looked around until he found a small tree branch, apparently, the tree had been
demolecularized, but the branch left intact on the ground. He slowly pushed it through the barrier. Though it formed a ring around the stick as if he was poking it into a barrel of water, there didn’t seem to be any resistance. He pulled it back in and examined it for any damage. There was none, so he very tentatively reached out and pushed his fingers through.

It felt a bit strange, kind of like thick wet cornstarch, when he pulled his hand back there was no damage to it either. He climbed back on the cart
, and they slowly moved through the boundary. Shocked by the sudden, unexpected temperature change they realized they had severely misjudged the situation. They had assumed no protective dome. That was clearly false. Hastily, they assessed their situation and turned around.