The Alignment Ingress Page 9

  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.

  Conrad stumbled on a short stalagmite and nearly impaled himself on another. Hank tripped over him and slid along the metallic and rock ramp, nearly falling over.

  The power cube began to pulse critical behind them, turning everything bright.

  Conrad glanced at Hank, who grinned and said, “We’re not gonna make it...”

  “Move your ass!” Conrad barked with a whistle through his remaining teeth.

  “Save your breath,” Hank said when they made it out the tunnel into the small rotunda behind the great arch with the two pillars and missing doors. “I can’t understand a damn thing you’re saying.”

  Conrad pointed to the inscription above the tunnel they had just emerged from. “Turn back to the Lord,” he said, enunciating the words with precision, and then ran into the narrow tunnel on the opposite wall.

  “Of course!” Hank said, sprinting behind him as the narrow, jagged walls seemed to close in.

  Conrad tore his shoulder on a protruding rock and realized he had actually left a chunk of his flesh behind. He was completely breaking down at some biological and even molecular level.

  Then the walls seemed to part to reveal an octogonal cavern with a floor of gold. On either side were two great sculpted cherubs, also made of pure gold. The two cherubs faced one another, their outstretched wings touching each other and forming a canopy over Conrad and Hank in the center.

  “They replicated the Ark!” Hank shouted, as flashes of light seemed to swirl through the gold around them. “This is the tech Solomon gave the Queen of Sheba! Lightning in a box!”

  Unfortunately, it was a box. As Conrad looked up and beyond the wings of the cherubs he could see the roof of the chamber. There was no opening, no outlet, no escape.

  All of a sudden the world went white as the power cube Hank had set exploded in the distance.

  For just a moment, Conrad thought he saw an entity standing in the cube flash. It was 15 meters tall. Not human, but definitely a living being.

  Conrad felt his body disintegrating into bits and swept into a twister of energy, rising up into a tunnel of light. At the end of the tunnel he saw the face of an angel, and when she pressed her soft lips to his own, he recognized Serena Serghetti. Then everything faded away in an explosion of blinding white.

  CHAPTER 17

  It was raining when Conrad awoke in the middle of the jungle, flat on his back and surrounded by eight metallic pillars. The raindrops on his face felt…cleansing. He sat up and saw Hank on the ground about ten meters away, groaning. His eyes opened and they looked, well, less green.

  Conrad put his finger to his mouth and felt a full row of teeth. “How do I look, Hank?”

  “Like hell.”

  Conrad breathed a sigh of relief. “Did what I think happened actually happen?”

  “Yeah,” said Hank, slowly sitting up. “I think we just got teleported a few hundred miles. This portal must be connected to the one under the crater.”

  At that moment there were loud voices coming from the jungle. Leaves parted and out came none other than Serena Serghetti and a party of officials from the Sudanese government.

  She was looking straight at him, and Conrad suddenly doubted it was for the first time that day. “Are these the men, Garamba?” she asked a tall, slight man.

  Garamba pointed at Hank and said, “Hollywood.”

  “Hollywood has littered all over your sacred site, Garamba.” She addressed the two of them. “UNESCO received reports of religious, archaeological and environmental desecration taking place here. Now I arrive to see you two looking like a couple of frat boys after a night you can’t remember. All that’s missing are the beer bottles and pizza boxes.”

  “Actually,” Conrad began to speak, but she cut him off.

  “You’re going to have to clean this all up,” she demanded. “You’re going to make it look like nothing ever happened.”

  Conrad was confused, but Hank seemed to get it in a heartbeat.

  “Like nothing ever happened. Of course, Sister Serghetti. And my apologies to Mr. Garamba and the people of Sudan for any mess my film crew made here. I will pay you for your troubles. But I would still appreciate an interview with you, sir.”

  Garamba looked delighted, then signaled to his countrymen. They turned back into the brush, picking up bits of real trash th
e crew left behind along the way.

  “The French were right,” Garamba was telling his minions, although Conrad heard one of them call him Uncle Emmanuel. “When you want things done, you call the nun.”

  Conrad wanted to call out, “But she’s a sister!” But he bit his tongue instead, and thanked God he had teeth to do it.

  Serena lingered for a moment. “Looks like they missed some waste,” she told him, but her soft face betrayed some feelings.

  Conrad pointed a finger at her. “You kissed me, Serena.”

  “I did not!” she said, her cheeks turning red.

  Conrad rose to his feet and looked into her warm, brown eyes. “You took advantage of an unconscious man in the middle of nowhere! Just like you did beneath the pyramids of Meroe.”

  “In your dreams, you wanker,” she told him, and turned and walked away into the jungle.

  Conrad just stood there, staring at nothing now, and heard Hank laughing.

  “You heard the woman, Conrad,” Hank said. “It’s all in your head. Nothing happened here.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Cape Verde

  February 19, 2013

  It was a beautiful, balmy evening when Conrad Yeats arrived at the tavern to meet Hank Johnson for drinks and to catch up. Not much had changed that Conrad could see, except the lights of the sunken Sea Academy out in the bay, now a dive-for-gold tourist trap. As for the bathroom in back with the sinister trapdoor for abductions, Conrad had collapsed the shaft with a small pipe bomb. Smoke was still pouring out, along with a few shouts, but the kitchen staff had contained the fire.

  Conrad found Hank at the same table overlooking the cove, sucking down his “Nelson’s Blood” made from a recipe that hadn’t changed since Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson’s body was embalmed in a rum keg on his return from Trafalgar for his burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  “Well, if it isn’t the respectable Doctor Conrad Yeats, back from washing his hands,” Hank said as Conrad sat down and ordered the house ale from the Portuguese barmaid. “How is your pal Abdil Zawas?”

  “Happy now I paid him off with the gold you gave his brother Ali back at the family villa on the Red Sea,” Conrad told him. “He knew where to find the vault in the villa, but he’s going to stay in Switzerland. He thinks the colonel is out there somewhere.”

  “I doubt it, but anything’s possible,” Hank said. “We may never know what happened to him or Smith and his mercs.”

  “Hell, Hank, I don’t even know what happened to us down there.”

  Hank shrugged. “We beat some bad guys,” he said and took another swig of his rum. “It’s kind of like a western where Clint Eastwood cleans out one town, but there’s another town just as bad down the dusty trail.”

  “I mean with the Queen of Sheba,” Conrad pressed. “When we strip the myth, who was she really?”

  “She was a good queen,” Hank said, obviously defending his girl. “She ruled as well as she could, and probably didn’t dwell more than she had to on the reality that her wealth came from a hellhole deep in a continent shaped like a skull.”

  “Hellhole,” Conrad repeated. “That’s an understatement. Wouldn’t surprise me if the concept of hell itself came from that pit.”

  “Well, her miners clearly cut too deep, hit the dark XM deposits and started mutating,” Hank said. “So did her priests, and then finally the queen herself.”

  Conrad nodded. “So that’s when she decides to see wise King Solomon in Jerusalem for some supernatural help. She’s heard all about the Ark of the Covenant in his Temple, which is sitting on the biggest portal in the known world. She shows up with her pile of gold, frankincense and the like.”

  “Yep,” said Hank. “And I’m thinking Solomon told her to build the jungle portal to disinfect her people, which she did, then sealed the place up and left. She would have forbidden her subjects to disclose the dark XM portal or anything else about the wisdom of Solomon. She probably returned to her palace at Meroe and never left after that. But some kind of stonecutter—one of her masons or Solomon’s—probably wanted to record a way back to the mines. So he cut a coded relief to make a map, which was what my illuminated illustration of the Queen of Sheba was based on.”

  Conrad looked up at the stars over the cove. Virgo was sure shining bright tonight. “Wow, I guess we both found what we were looking for.”

  “You mean my banking theory about Solomon, the gold-laundering alchemist?” Hank laughed. “I stand by my theory. Einstein called compound interest the greatest secret of the universe.”

  Conrad said, “I’ll grant you that.”

  “And I’ll grant you that the two portals we found in Africa could well be your legendary Pillars of Creation,” Hank offered. “The crater portal could be considered the natural—as in fallen nature—Pillar of Chaos. And the nearby portal made from Solomon’s tech, the one that ends up in the jungle, that could be considered the man-made or artificial Pillar of Order.”

  Conrad could see that. “You could almost call them the Pillars of Good and Evil, like the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden.”

  “Or its inspiration,” Hank said. “But now we’re heading off into Serena Serghetti land.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Conrad said darkly. “But if the truth behind the Queen of Sheba was supposed to be some big secret, why include it at all in the Bible?”

  “To remember.”

  “Remember?”

  “Yeah. It means nothing to the uninitiated. But to those who study the arcana, the metaphysics, it’s a tangible reminder of the wages of sin.”

  The barmaid had finally returned with Conrad’s pint, which sloshed pleasantly onto the table. “But who gets to know the truth?”

  “Those who are smart enough to go looking for it between the lines, in what’s not said.” Hank raised his glass of rum.

  “Cheers to that, mate,” Conrad said, clanking his glass against Hank’s. “It sure was a hell of a trip. How about another round?”

  THE END