The Rising(104)
And with that the cylindrical entrance to the accelerator opened, disappearing into the thick steel walls to reveal a brightly lit tunnel that seemed to stretch emptily forever.
“Embrace your true identity and take the place that is rightfully yours,” the ash man continued, stretching a hazy hand forward. “Come back to your world.”
“This is my world!” Alex screamed at him and, for the first time, Sam realized the shrill alarm wasn’t sounding down here. “This is my world!”
“It won’t be for very much longer.”
*
“Drop the weapon!” the big bald man wailed on, Raiff watching his eyes, sizing up the situation. “Where’s the boy? What have you done with him?”
The hall beyond him seemed dimmer to Raiff than it had when they’d first traversed it, as if power were being pulled away from down below. The overhead lighting faded, flickered, and Raiff realized a power drain wasn’t to blame, that something else was …
coming …
“The boy,” the giant standing before him resumed, “where is he?”
Raiff never had a chance to answer. A rumble seemed to pulse through the whole of the prison structure before the floor broke apart along an endless cascade of crisscrossing fault lines. Gaps opening in the cracking tile through which the cyborgs burst with their plasma rifles at the ready.
Raiff shoved Donati against the elevator’s far wall, covering him protectively as the battle erupted beyond. The plasma rifles made a pinging sound, something like a toy weapon might, white heat erupting from their barrel bores instead of a muzzle flash. All this in eerie contrast to the steady rat-tat-tat of the human force’s assault rifles, their fire deafening in the narrow confines of the hallway.
Raiff watched the soldiers of Langston Marsh’s Fifth Column being slaughtered in virtually effortless fashion by an army that provided the ultimate vindication of Marsh’s obsessive crusade. The sounds of screams and the incessant barrage of fire continued to hollow their hearing, and Raiff realized Donati was screaming in cadence with the constant cacophony of gunplay.
Marsh’s forces tried to make a stand while seeking some form of cover, only to have the plasma rounds fired by the cyborg army trace their trails wherever they darted. The rounds flared in the semidarkness like streams of light, darkening only when they hit their targets and obliterating whatever lay in their path.
Raiff had been in this world so long that he’d practically forgotten the fearsome impact of the weaponry from his world. As advanced beyond this world’s as virtually every other form of technology. Strangely, the plasma rounds ejected with only that soft pfffffft, just a hissing in the air as they sizzled through it en route to their targets.
The big bald man who was obviously the leader of this phalanx of Marsh’s Fifth Column managed to hang on to the last, amid the sprawl of spilled bodies around him. He was holding a pair of M4 assault rifles in hand, firing them while wailing himself and managing to take down a few of the cyborgs in his relentless spray. His eyes locked briefly with Raiff’s when he crossed even with the elevator cab, sweeping his assault rifles toward him, when a series of plasma rounds tore into the man and blew him apart, pieces scattered all directions.
The damn machines saved us, Raiff thought, but only for the moment.
“How good are you with that thing?” Donati asked, eyeing the stick into which the whip had receded.
“I guess we’re about to find out,” Raiff said, his whip flashing to life again.
*
“You must believe me, Alex,” the ash man continued, as a hot, static-riddled wave blew out from the entrance of the accelerator, like a wind-powered magnet drawing them toward it. “These aren’t your people, that isn’t even your name. Come with me now, so I may show you the way, the truth. Come with me to the other side, millions of light-years from here where your true destiny awaits.”
The ash man said something else, but Sam didn’t hear him. She looked at his spectral image superimposed against the particle accelerator tunnel behind him, began to consider the incredible amount of energy it would take to fold space over to create a pathway between these two worlds.
Positive energy.
That took her to the projection of the ash man, transmitted almost surely by some sort of electromagnetic energy. And yet Alex had cut that transmission in half, implying the projection must be some hybrid or held together in all likelihood by an excess of electrons.
Negative energy.
The ash man was talking again, Alex still listening, when Sam crept closer to him.
“What causes a spark?” she said softly, hoping he recalled the lesson of their last tutoring session.
Alex cocked his gaze toward her.
“What causes a spark?” Sam repeated.
His eyes widened, realizing what she was getting at, what happened when positive and negative charges collided.
“I’m offering you a chance,” the ash man was saying, “I’m offering you the future.”
“Here’s your future, asshole.”
And with that Alex was in motion. To Sam he looked just as he did on the football field, barreling forward to take down a ball carrier. Only this time it was the ash man he barreled into, slipping partially through his spectral image on contact even as the image was driven backward.
Straight for the entrance to the particle accelerator.