The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy) Page 12

  He couldn’t tell how large the hole was. There was no frame of reference. It could have been thousands of kilometers in diameter.

  There appeared to be another object floating in space on the other side. At the top of the object was a half-dome viewport just like his. It looked like some kind of...space station?

  He stepped forward to get a better look. And as he moved closer to the window, the other station appeared to get closer as well.

  Darius stopped, and the other station stopped moving. He stepped back, and it moved away.

  The transglass of this dome appeared to have some kind of optical magnification that adjusted to where he was standing. At least, he hoped that was what he was seeing.

  He walked all the way to the front, and now the other space station floated about 50 meters away. The shimmering rim in space had expanded with each step, and now it was out of view. The interior of the other station looked identical.

  He turned around to look at the rest of the control room, and just like that, he was back with Nadira and sitting in the tall chair.

  “So?” asked Nadira. “Any ideas on why your father came here, and died here?”

  “No. But this is a very interesting chair. You need to see what it does.”

  She walked over to the chair and looked at him uncertainly. “Interesting how?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But I can say that it appears to be important. And more or less safe. Come, sit down.”

  “I have to admit, I do want to understand what that is,” she said, glancing at the lightless void that took up most of the wall. “You promise this thing is all right?”

  “If anything happens, I will pull you right back out.”

  “Hmm...okay.” She smoothed her pants and placed herself in the chair.

  “I’m going to put my hand in yours, Nadira. To keep you oriented. If you want to come back, all you have to do is turn around 180 degrees, okay?”

  “Come back from what?”

  “Just watch.” Darius rotated the chair to face the void.

  “Mother of the gods,” she breathed.

  “Can you feel my hand?”

  “Yes. I don’t see it. But I can feel it.”

  “And what do you see around you?” he asked.

  “I appear to be in some kind of...space station? But...it’s abandoned. I don’t think anyone has been here in a very long time. The design of it is also nothing like what we’ve found here underneath the ruins.”

  “Yes, that’s what I saw. Now take one step forward.”

  “Woah! What just happened? —Wait, is that another space station?”

  “The dome appears to zoom in as you get closer to the far rim of it. And yes, I think that’s a space station.”

  “Oh my,” she said, “it zooms quite a lot.”

  “Nadira, do you recognize either station? Maybe you saw it when you drank the tea, or in a vid? Anything?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t. Should I?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Darius. “There’s just...no one else to ask. I wonder if my father knew anything about it.” A small pile of notepaper in a corner of the room caught his attention.

  “Nadira, I’m going to take a look at something. I’ll be just a few feet away. Remember, just turn yourself around when you’re ready to come back.”

  Upon closer inspection, the notepaper contained more scribbles of the alien writing, drawings of circles, and one handwritten note. It read:

  I am finally in the place that calls my name. I put together the symbols, and the words, and the deep grooves. I found the place where the pieces all fit together.

  There is far more here than what the dream of the teas showed me. If I had known what I would see, I do not know if I would have had the strength to answer the call. I do not know if I could have faced the strange darkness before me.

  And if I let the world see this darkness, I fear that it will swallow us all. For this is not a door just to another place. The gate has shown me things that come from more than just other worlds. I see things in the glass that make me wonder if I understand anything at all. It haunts my sleep.

  The power of this anomaly is far too great to put in the hands of mere humanity. It is so great that I fear to leave this place. I fear that my tongue may loose in my sleep, or in a hospital, or in a dementia of age. I am so sorry, Nadira. I thought I had found something that would help us. Instead, I have come to know something that cannot be known.

  There was a thump behind him, and he turned to see that Nadira had fallen out of the chair. She looked pale. “Darius...”

  “How well did you know my father?” he asked her.

  “Darius...I just saw myself. In the other station.” She panted and put a hand to her chest.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “She...I...was dressed differently. But she was there. And she saw me.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Darius, that’s not just a portal to another area of space. I think that’s a portal to...to something that’s not here. In our universe.”

  Darius struggled to process this. “Maybe it’s just a reflection of some kind. A giant mirror. Or it could be some kind of force field technology that we’ve never seen before, bouncing light back.”

  “Like I said, Darius, she was not dressed the same as me. She also didn’t move at the same time that I did.”

  Darius closed his eyes, took in a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. Then he looked at Nadira and said, “Okay, let’s say that you’re right, and that someone made a hole in space that goes to something like a parallel dimension, and they just plain forgot to tell anyone about it. If that were true, then why did you see you, but I didn’t see me?”

  Nadira got up from the floor and dusted herself off. “I don’t know. Maybe you don’t exist in whatever place that is. But I know what I saw, and I know the conclusion sounds crazy, but the alternative is that I am crazy. And I don’t think I am.”

  “We should take another look, Nadira. This kind of thing has to be double-checked.”

  “I am absolutely not going back in that chair. Neither are you. We’re getting out of here. I need to report this. Take your father’s body, and let’s go.”

  Darius didn’t move. “How well did you know him?”

  She gave him an inscrutable look. “Why do you ask?”

  “There’s a handwritten note among his papers,” he said carefully. “He mentions you in it.”

  Nadira put her hands on her hips. “You know that I knew your father. I was the one who made the tea for him, after all.”

  “Sure, but...why would he apologize to you?” asked Darius.

  “He apologized in the letter?”

  “Nadira, what did he owe you? If anything, didn’t you owe him?”

  Nadira looked down at the floor for a long time. Darius crossed his arms and waited.

  She walked slowly over to a console, leaned against it, and looked back at him. “Have you ever heard of the Battle of Vauxhall Anchorage?”

  “Nadira, I’m sorry, but I’ve never even heard of Vauxhall, and I don’t know what that would have to do with my father...”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Nadira. “Almost all records of it have been scrubbed. But at one point, a long time ago, Vauxhall was the last human freehold known to mankind. It was a popular trading hub and the remaining bastion of democracy in the whole empire. Everyone was taken care of. They had real elections there. Education was free to anyone who wanted it. Corporations could be held in check. Bad actors could be removed.”

  Nadira wandered towards the back of the room and inspected some of the ancient tools on the racks. “For centuries, the empire had left Vauxhall alone, because tolerating its freedoms was less costly than the optics of asserting total domination. Sar-Zin simply waited for Vauxhall to make its inevitable mistake: a public call for other anchorages, other planets, other moons, to reconsider its way of life.”r />
  Nadira returned to the chair at the front of the room and idly spun it around.

  “It didn’t take long for Sar-Zin to amass a fleet and send it to the anchorage. But he didn’t attack right away. He told Vauxhall that his navy would not fire a single shot if the anchorage just joined the empire in full. Vauxhall resisted. They said that they were an independent state, and that any violence against them would be a violation of interstellar law. But according to the empire, if you were human, you were an imperial.”

  “I don’t see where this is going, Nadira.”

  “You will. Now, Vauxhall didn’t accept the emperor’s definition of his territory. They swore to fight, even at the cost of their own lives. They sent their children and their mothers away. But the soldiers stayed to fight. They would rather have died free than live under Sar-Zin’s iron rule.”

  Nadira sighed and began braiding a lock of hair. Her eyes were far away. “But that was not Sar-Zin’s plan. It turned out that the fleet he had assembled was not the destroying kind. He wasn’t there to kill anyone. Instead, he was there to capture them. All of Vauxhall’s soldiers who survived the ground assault were taken. Then he sent his navy after the children and the mothers who had fled, and he took them too.

  Her eyes settled on Darius. “And they just...disappeared. None of them were ever seen again. The silencing effect this had on the public was more powerful than anything he could have done with a gravity cannon or compound railgun. And he knew it.”

  “If almost all of the records have been scrubbed,” said Darius, “then how do you know all of this?”

  She crossed her arms and stared him in the eye. “Because I was there. I snuck out from Vauxhall two days before the attack, to marry the love of my life, in secret.”

  Darius stared at her and tried to find his words. “Gods,” he croaked. “But...that would make you—”

  “Old, yes. As I was saying...I was to elope with my love, Hecate. But that was taken from me too. You see, she heard about the blockade, and she was worried for her mother and sisters. I couldn’t make her stay. She went back to see to their safety, and that was the last I ever saw of her.”

  “Gods, Nadira, I’m so sorry—”

  “I’m not telling you this story for your sympathy,” she said sharply. “If anything, I am trying to make a confession here. So keep listening before you decide.”

  She leaned against a console and dusted off her hands. “Once it became clear that I was the only survivor, there were two things I had to do. One, change my face. Two, destroy my enemy.”

  “You...you changed your face?” asked Darius. “I mean, I know that people get some pretty extensive cosmetic surgeries these days, but—”

  “I did more than that. I didn’t just change it. I took the face of another. I took an entire identity, an entire life.”

  “Whose?”

  “You’re looking at her, Darius. Nadira Markosian. At the time, she was not a senior member of the Ministry of Technology. She was an entry-level marketing specialist, not even employed by the government. She had no immediate family, a limited social life, and her parents had passed years earlier.”

  “But she had not passed herself...”

  She nodded. “You see where I’m going. When I said that I took her life, I meant it.”

  Darius looked over to his father, wrapped in the sheet. He didn’t know what to say.

  “I will be judged,” she continued. “I know that. I’ve always known that. You may judge me now. I wouldn’t blame you.” She walked towards the tall chair at the center of the ampitheater and began pacing around it in a slow circle. “In a way, I am judged already. The memory of my true face has gone from me. I could not keep any images of myself. It was too risky. There would be questions if anyone ever identified the person in the photo, or the video, or the holo.

  “There would be no mementos of me, of Hecate, my parents, my sister, my aunts, uncles, cousins, friends...no one. I could only carry the images in my mind, of myself and of them. And that fades.”

  She sat down on the raised platform of the theater. “Sometimes I think I see them in my dreams. Sometimes I think I see myself. The only place I can keep these people now is in my heart.”

  “Nadira, I’m so—”

  “Do not forgive me yet!” she cried. Her eyes were shining, her face flushed. “Do not forgive me yet.” She took a moment to still herself. She pulled a tissue from a back pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “I did not stop with Nadira Markosian. The rest of the blood may not be on my hands. But I imagine it there sometimes, when I look down at them. Because my youth doesn’t come from a surgeon’s scalpel. Oh no. It comes from the emperor’s own wicked alchemy.”

  “Wicked?” asked Darius. “I thought his extended life came from some rare and expensive plants on the other side of the galaxy.”

  “In part, they do. But there is one ingredient they never tell you about: a live human subject.”

  ✽✽✽

  A man like Sar-Zin who lives for centuries will inevitably accumulate legends and myths. Ordinarily, Darius would have been highly skeptical of Nadira’s a bold claim. But here in this room, standing a few feet away from a chair that seemed to be connected to an alternate universe, it seemed that his understanding of normality needed another look.

  “I know,” said Nadira. “You’ve probably heard a lot of things about Sar-Zin over the years. But you don’t have the advantage that I do—the time to investigate the most protected secrets of the empire. Less than ten percent of his subjects gain access to the canisters of purple gel that sustain life and vitality beyond its normal span. I worked hard to gain the emperor’s favor. He even sent me a letter with the first canister I received.”

  “I’ve seen some of those canisters with my own eyes,” said Darius. “Empty, of course. Even then, they were coveted and pricey, because of the association.”

  Nadira nodded. “It took me more than a hundred years to piece all the clues together. But I know now that everyone he took from Vauxhall Anchorage was sacrificed for his malignant existence. Between the assault on Vauxhall and the day I began to suspect the truth, I had used a dozen canisters already. I looked in the mirror that morning, and I wondered if the essence of someone I once knew was now flowing in my veins. I had kept them all in my heart, and now I wondered if they were passing through it.

  “And I kept using the gel.” Nadira buried her face in her hands. He did not comfort her. He knew that she didn’t want comfort, or empathy. And as these revelations continued, he found himself growing colder inside.

  So he let her weep. He stared at the chair, and he wondered who he would see if he sat down in it right now. If he was not on the other side, then who would the other Nadira be confessing to right now? Perhaps that one would keep her secrets.

  She steadied herself. She looked up and gazed off into a distance. “I told myself that I had to keep using it if I wanted to get close enough to Sar-Zin to bring him down. I had to keep using it if I was to gather enough evidence to expose him. I told myself, ‘Maybe one human life provides a thousand canisters, instead of ten, or five, or one.’ As if it matters.” She shook her head. “As if it matters...”

  Darius looked down at the floor and listened to her ragged breath. “So this is why you were willing to stand and fight that squad of soldiers. You had even more reason than my brother and I. But...you still haven’t explained what this has to do with my father.”

  “By the time I met him, I was already knee-deep in the resistance, Darius.”

  “What are you saying? Are you saying that...that you brought him in?”

  “I developed him as an asset, yes. I didn’t tell him the truth about the gel. Very few people in the whole empire know, as far as I can tell. I was simply hoping to leverage his relic hunting skills to uncover some valuables. To help fund our whole operation.” She looked over at Saeed’s body.

  “I underestimated him,” she added bitterly.

  His voice tighte
ned. “So when he drank the tea, was that part of it too?”

  “No! I had no idea what it was capable of. I was ignorant and careless, but I wasn’t scheming. Not against him, anyway.”

  Darius wasn’t sure if he could believe that. He wasn’t sure what to believe about a lot of things at that moment. “We’ve spent too much time here,” he said.

  “You’re right. If anyone’s sent a search team after that squad, they’re probably here by now.”

  “In which case,” said Darius, “they’ll cut us to ribbons, I will mourn my family and my sins no longer, and you’ll be released from your own guilts. There are worse ways to end it, I guess. Let’s go.” He got up to leave.

  “Darius...”

  He turned to face her. “I don’t hate you, Nadira, if that’s what you’re thinking. You put your ass on the line to help me and my brother. You did it when you packed us into that van, and you did it again with those soldiers. And you saved Rali from withdrawal and nerve damage along the way. I can’t hate you. There is good in you, despite what you think of yourself. There is something in you that is worth fighting for, even if you don’t feel it right now. And if that’s true for you...then maybe it’s true for me as well.”

  He sighed. “So come,” he added gently. “Let’s head back to the surface. There’s no avoiding the future.”

  ✽✽✽

  They moved in silence through the glittering obsidian tunnels. There were no more words for the impossible vastness of the dome below the ruins. But theirs was not the silence of hatred. They were too exhausted for that.

  “There is one other thing,” she said as the elevator rose up through the dome.

  “What’s that?”

  “When I looked through that transglass just now, it was not Markosian’s face I saw. It was my own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That woman wore the face that I had almost forgotten. The one I was born with. She is me, Darius. She can be no one else. Yet somehow, she has walked a different path.”

  Darius shook his head. “What a strange universe this universe has become. We’ll have to untie that knot later. I don’t know where to begin with it.”