The tide of unmaking, p.31
The Tide of Unmaking, page 31
part #3 of Berinfell Prophesies Series
Migmar wrinkled his brow and made his voice more aggressive. “Shut up, fool you are! Tell you what you need, I will.” He looked up at Kat.
“Good enough,” she chuckled. “But better to leave the talking to us.” She pulled the headset off his head.
Migmar humphed and then looked back at the monitors. He chose one of the screens near the center that seemed to display a lot of motion, and clicked on it. The main image enlarged to show a news feed from a street battle in a city. Explosions. Troops taking cover. A tank rolled in the background.
“Looks like one of my old video games,” said Johnny. “Sweet.”
Kiri Lee leaned in. “I don’t think that’s a video game,” she said. “And it’s not the news either.”
Tommy looked closer, too. “Seems like a surveillance camera.” Soldiers held their position, firing down an empty street. “I think those are US Troops,” he said. “See the insignias?”
“But I don’t see enemies,” said Autumn. “Who are they firing at?”
“Click on that one over there,” Jimmy said, pointing.
Migmar moved the mouse up and expanded an image that seemed rather benign.
“It’s just a troop truck,” Tommy said. “Sitting there doing nothing.” The transport was surrounded by skyscrapers, and the men awaiting orders perhaps.
“Watch,” said Jimmy. He leaned in. “Look right now!”
The team watched as the troop truck crumpled inward, its front and back ends pitching up, as though a massive telephone pole drove down into the middle of the vehicle and pinned the center to the ground. Soldiers came reeling out of it, others spilled from of the back onto the asphalt. But there was no sign of what caused the destruction; it was as if the truck just imploded on its own.
“What in Ellos’ great name was that?” Bengfist bellowed.
A soldier in the front passenger’s seat raised his assault rifle and began shooting at the sky. Instead of the bullets disappearing out of view, they ricocheted off a hard surface just above the truck.
More soldiers took to firing at the same invisible object, their molten bullets spraying little more than flashes of light across the invisible surface. Just then two or three of the men were ground to a pulp right where they stood.
Kat turned away. “This is awful!”
As the soldiers continued to fire, a shape began to emerge. The invisibility paste was being blasted away. That’s when Tommy muttered the word they all knew accounted for the destruction.
“Warspider.”
Migmar brought up more images, each showing different engagements between US Troops and Asp’s invisible army. That is except for one shot that confused everyone. Migmar clicked on and enlarged what appeared to be a subway platform underground. A number of humans moved along the stage, sticking what looked like backpacks along the curved wall.
“What are they doing?” asked Jimmy.
“I…I don’t know,” said Tommy.
“Zoom in,” said Kiri Lee. “See that thing in the stairwell?” Migmar clicked on a plus sign in the lower right hand corner of the image. Sure enough it pressed in to the center of the shot. There, half hidden in shadow, stood a Gwar soldier with an assault rifle leveled at all the humans working the platform.
“Curse him!” cried Overlord Bengfist. “A traitor of our people!”
“Peace, Overlord,” said Kiri Lee, holding up her hand.
One human furthest from the Gwar and closest to the camera placed their backpack along the wall, and then started looking up and down the subway tracks.
“Uh, oh,” said Tommy, noticing how nervous the man looked. “I don’t think this is going to be good.”
Suddenly the man ran off camera and presumably leaped down onto the tracks. The Gwar warrior came bounding down the platform and then raised the rifle. Migmar tried to use the joystick to follow the man, but the camera was stationary. The Gwar aimed, and then squeezed a steady burst of lead from his weapon, bullets pounding down the tracks after the man. A second and third burst discharged from the firearm, and then the Gwar lowered the rifle with a smile on his face.
Bengfist stepped toward the table, warhammer poised. “I’ll kill you myself, traitor!”
“Bengfist, no! Stand down!” cried Tommy. “You’ll have your chance. But not now.”
“So Asp is using humans too,” Kat said. “I can actually read their thoughts somewhat.”
“Really?” asked the others, quite surprised.
“Yeah. It’s strange too. All of them there were saying they’d never even been to New York before. ‘What a way to see the Big Apple,’ one of them said.”
“So they’re tourists,” guessed Johnny. “That’s not unusual.”
“That’s just it,” said Kat. “They’re tired. And one of them was thinking about the nightmare they’ve been living through, especially passing through the wormhole.”
“Worm hole?” said Johnny. “Like, Star Trek worm hole?”
“One could assume so,” she said. “Probably means portal.”
“Slaves,” said Kiri Lee. “Asp’s taken humans as slaves. Possibly from all over the planet.”
“I certainly wouldn’t put it past him,” said Regis. “That was the Spider King’s plan long ago.”
“So what do you think those are?” Tommy pointed to the backpacks on the walls. Then he noticed the Gwar was gone and the humans were huddled on the platform, two of them crying in fear. A beat later and an explosion burst from the farthest backpack. Then, the camera went dead, the screen all static.
“In the great name of Ellos!” Mr. Charlie exclaimed. “No!”
Simultaneously another video feed further down the table showed a plume of dust shooting skyward in a street. The corner of a building began to cave in, and the next thing the team knew, an entire building was listing sideways on a slow-motion descent into a cataclysmic swatch of destruction. Those among the team who knew and even lived through the history of 9/11 watched in horror as the collapsing building brought back a flood of memories. The slogan had been well coined: they would never forget.
“There he is!” Taeva tapped on a screen on the far left side of the table. “Migmar, quick!”
Migmar grabbed the image and brought it to the center, expanding it over four or five screens. Caught by a skyscraper roof-cam, a figure sat atop a Warfly that hovered above a street battle.
It was Asp.
He was still half hidden by a dark cloak, but his otherworldly shape, angular joints and arachnid features gave him away.
“Bold,” Tommy said. “He is the leader of all of this, and yet he stays visible and out in the open.”
“Arrogance, more like,” Jimmy replied.
Asp seemed to be presiding over his invisible army’s advance down a street of overturned cars. Tanks fired in the distance. As Asp turned his head, Tommy could see a small headset microphone protruding from under his hood. A voice came over the loudspeakers.
“Advancing further inland,” Asp said.
A shudder went through all those gathered. It was as if Asp was right there in the room with them, bigger than life.
Migmar glanced over and saw Bengfist with his warhammer held high over his head. “Overlord, you are doing what?”
“Finishing this here and now!” cried the Overlord.
“Woah, woah, woah!” Regis reached over and tried to help Bengfist ease his weapon down. “It’s just a projection of Asp. He’s not really in front of us.”
The Gwar Overlord looked extremely confused. “I don’t understand. We should kill him while we have the chance!”
“First off,” Tommy said, “we need to persuade him to return to Allyra, remember? Killing him may be necessary, but we have to try diplomacy first. Secondly, you’d just be destroying the equipment that’s giving us observation powers from afar. Like Regis said, he’s not really in front of us.”
From behind, Autumn tapped Tommy on the shoulder. “What’s up?” he asked.
“Do you think the pulsing orange dot on the globe has anything to do with the image we’re currently looking at?”
Tommy turned around. “Hmm. Well, that’s New York City onscreen. No doubt about it. And that dot over New York State’s southeastern point looks right on the globe.”
“Here,” Kat walked over to another table of computer screens. “I’m going to click on another image. Autumn, see if the dot changes.” Kat used the mouse to click on an image of a strange piece of architecture surrounded by old, elegant buildings.
Suddenly the globe spun, then slowed, and a new dot pulsed. Autumn examined the globe.
“Why…that’s Paris!” Kiri Lee exclaimed, using the proper French pronunciation of the city, Pah-ree.
“What?” asked Tommy moving to look at Kat’s screen. “You sure?”
“Absolutely!” Kiri Lee looked between the globe and the screen to confirm what she saw. “That shot’s just above the Louvre! See the glass pyramid?”
“Where is Pear-ree?” asked Bengfist to Migmar, to which the Gnome simply shrugged his shoulders.
“It looks to be a great city,” Jast said. “Like Thynhold Cairn…without the mountain.”
“Why would Asp have a camera feed of the Louvre?” asked Mr. Charlie.
“There are caves,” said Kiri Lee. “At least those are the rumors. Miles of caves beneath the museum underground.”
“A perfect place to amass an army,” concluded Tommy.
“Precisely,” said Kiri Lee. “That’s what I would do if I was going to attack Paris.”
Feeling more curious than ever, Tommy stood up and moved to another table, clicking on all the screens. One at a time, each of them lit up displaying a new camera image. Likewise, the globe spun smoothly, displaying a dozen pulsing orange lights. Half the team examined the globe, while the others were taken with the images.
“There’s Tokyo,” Kiri Lee pointed. Three different feeds of the city corresponded with a pulsing dot on the globe. Kiri Lee leaned in closely. “Wait. What’s that?” She was tapping the respective screens. “Tommy, zoom in.”
“Uh, I just clicked,” Tommy protested. “Migmar?”
“Migmar coming,” said the Gnome, leaping from his chair and running over to jump in the one Tommy steadied for him.
Migmar moved the mouse, grabbed the group of three camera shots and expanded them. One of the images, taken from atop a tall building, showed what looked to be a giant lens flare behind the cityscape in the distance. It was a common solar aberration that some photographers liked to use in their art.
“Migmar, can you use the joystick to turn a camera?” Kiri Lee asked.
Migmar reached for the device with his left hand, right hand on the mouse. He selected an image with the mouse and then tried the joystick. Nothing happened. At least at first. About five seconds later the camera moved to the left as Migmar had instructed it.
“There’s a delay,” Tommy said. “Makes sense.” Though Tommy had forgotten to research exactly where they were at present, he presumed they were far away from Japan.
“Quick then,” Kiri Lee pointed to one of the cameras without the sun flare showing. “See if you can rotate this camera in the same direction as the other here.”
Migmar selected the camera shot and inputted movements to the joystick. Five seconds later the camera responded. But it wasn’t enough.
“Keep going,” Kiri Lee said. “All the way around.”
Migmar moved the joystick more. But the camera eventually stopped, unable to get the view Kiri Lee wanted.
“Try the other one,” she snapped.
“Easy, girl,” said Johnny. “What are you looking for anyways?”
“A hunch,” she said. “A bad one.”
The camera continued around. But the image was distorted. The buildings disappeared until the city was gone, replaced with a solid wall of glimmering, prismatic light.
“Something’s wrong with the camera,” Jimmy said.
But Migmar shook his head. “No, wrong with the camera, there is nothing.” The wall of light inched toward the camera.
“It can’t be,” said Autumn.
“But it is,” whispered Kat. “Just as I had feared. The Tide of Unmaking. Exactly as the scouts described it.”
No one breathed. The screen turned to violent static.
“It’s here on Earth too,” Autumn whispered. “And now Tokyo is…is gone.”
“I fear it is so,” Taeva said, her eyes flitting relentlessly. “There is a logic to it. Our two worlds are connected with the portals now. What happens on one affects the other. We’re bound by a common fate.”
“The Prophecy told us,” Tommy said dejectedly. “We spoke of it before, but to see it…”
“Everything will be destroyed,” Kat said. “Unless we get Asp to return to Allyra with his forces.”
“So let’s get him!” cried Bengfist.
“We will,” said Tommy, nodding back to the other set of screens that tracked Asp. “We know he’s in the air somewhere over New York City, but we’ve got to figure out exactly where he is. Unless we can find a portal that goes right to him, we may have a long trip from here to there.”
“Where is here anyway?” asked Jimmy. “And how did Asp get there from here?”
“Good questions,” said Tommy. “I think we can figure it out.” He and Migmar moved back to the first workstation with all the images of Asp’s attack on Manhattan. Tommy remembered something in the text on the bottom of the video shot that showed Asp, the video shot that was connected to Asp’s headset. “Right there,” he pointed.
FREQ: 915MHz
BROAD: 42.430N / 74.350W
RECEP: 52.176300N / 117.23470W
“That’s latitude and longitude,” Johnny said, remembering it from Boy Scouts.
“And ten bucks says that abbreviation means reception,” Tommy added. “Where the signal is being received.” He looked down at the listing of coordinates from all the video cameras and saw what looked to be a search field. “Migmar, type those numbers in that box there,” Tommy pointed.
Migmar entered the “RECEP” latitude and longitude integers and hit enter.
“Woah, it’s spinning again,” said Autumn standing back by the globe. It rolled to a stop with a blinking orange light in the Canadian northwest.
“We’re in Canada again,” said Mr. Charlie, suddenly remembering the jaunt he and Regis had taken.
And Nelly.
Mr. Charlie and Regis locked eyes. How could either of them forget? They’d lost her that night...she’d sacrificed herself so they could escape...with the map of Vesper Crag. Too much like Miss Finney’s death. “But that was on the east side,” Mr. Charlie added.
“What was?” asked Kat.
“Our passage to the Spider King’s first stronghold on Earth. Northern Quebec if my memory of the French province serves me correctly, and it usually does.”
“It was under Asp’s command,” added Regis, “long before any of us really knew his name.”
Jimmy laughed nervously, “We sure do now.”
“So judging by the portal downstairs, and the pools of glowing slime up here,” Tommy peered over the table as he talked, “I’m guessing Asp has figured out a way to tether his Dark Arts with human technology.”
“Eh, come on Tommy, he’d need to be a software engineer for that kind of thing,” said Johnny, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Or he’d need to kidnap software engineers,” said Autumn.
“Exactly.” Tommy clicked on an image of New York and sent the globe spinning from Tokyo back to New York. “And I’m guessing that pulsing dot is exactly where the portal downstairs would spit us out if we walked through.”
Out of nowhere Kat burst out with, “It can’t be!”
“What?” Tommy asked, spinning around with the others to see her hovering in front of a monitor on the far table.
“There,” Kat pointed, clicking on the image to expand it. “Right there.” Everyone walked over, eyes fixed on an image of a formidable estate surrounded by a white picket fence and bathed in morning light.
“What are we looking at?” said Bengfist. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s an Earth home,” said Regis. “In North America.” Regis turned around to find the corresponding dot on the translucent globe. “Right there. North Carolina.”
Tommy took an exasperated breath; what did this have to do with Asp? “I still don’t get it, Kat. What’s so special?”
Kat stepped up and put her finger on the metadata of the image. Tommy looked closer.
Time: 04:21:15
Address: 3296 Bellevue Ridge Cr., Greenville, NC 27609
Name: Green, Austin and Hazel
Six of the Seven froze. Their eyes went from the home to the address back to the home.
Tommy muttered, “Jett’s home.”
Autumn approached the monitor and placed a hand on the image. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would Asp be watching Jett’s home?” She turned back to Tommy. “Are the rest of our homes up here?”
Migmar stepped in front of Kat and got on the keyboard. He started scrolling down the list of thumbnail images and addresses on the central lower screen, expanding the metadata. Tommy watched closely. Cities all over the world appeared, and monitors on the other tables came to life, displaying cityscapes and mountain refuges. But as far-reaching and diverse as the images were, no other single-family homes were displayed.
“Only Jett’s,” Tommy said finally.
“What does that mean?” Kiri Lee asked, turning to look at Tommy’s face.
“It means that Jett’s family is in grave danger,” he said. “For all we know, our Earth families’ homes aren’t listed because they’ve already been—”
“Don’t say it,” said Kat.
Tommy nodded. “We have to assume Asp not only wants to conquer Earth, but make sure he personally eliminates our heritage here, too.” He glanced up at the image again; pristine lawn, perfectly manicured gardens. “We’ve got to warn them.”
