The Lilliput Legion Read online

  “Hell, you’re saner than anyone I know,” Delaney said. “And we’ve known each other too long to keep things from each other. Now tell me what you saw.”

  Andre licked her lips nervously. “A ghost, all right? I just saw a ghost.”

  Chapter 3

  “You should’ve let me stay dead,” said Lucas Priest, sighing and wearily running his hand through his dark brown hair. “I simply can’t seem to control it.”

  Dr. Robert Darkness turned a steely gaze on Priest. “You will control it. You will learn. You have become the living embodiment of my life’s work, Priest. I brought you back from death for this and I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow you to give up!”

  “It doesn’t look as if I have much choice, does it?” Lucas said, rubbing his aching head.

  He lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The simple act of smoking helped to keep his mind occupied. It was excruciatingly difficult trying to control his thoughts. It had never before occurred to him just how exhausting it could be. Random thoughts were taken for granted by most people, but unlike most people—in fact, unlike anyone else in the entire universe—Lucas Priest could no longer afford to take random thoughts for granted. A random thought could mean disaster for him now. And his thoughts were becoming increasingly harder to control. A person could concentrate only for so long and then something had to give. Lucas was tired. And he was afraid.

  He had always thought of Dr. Darkness as a brilliant scientist, eccentric, highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable, but it went beyond that. Dr. Darkness was a madman. Not a raving lunatic, but a madman just the same. It was often said that there was an exceedingly fine line between genius and insanity. When had Darkness slipped over the edge? Was it after his invention of the warp grenade, the most devastating weapon known to man? Perhaps his sanity had been derailed by the knowledge that his invention had been responsible for the loss of billions of lives, when the surplus nuclear energy of exploding warp grenades was mistakenly clocked into a parallel universe, setting off the war between the timelines. Or maybe he lost it after the disastrous experiment in which his atomic structure became permanently tachyonized, turning him into the man who was faster than light. There were so many cataclysmic upheavals in the life of Dr. Darkness, so much pressure brought to bear upon his fragile genius that it was a wonder he had not snapped completely.

  Dr. Darkness never spoke about his past. Lucas knew nothing about it whatsoever prior to the event that gave him both his fame and infamy. After years of laboring as an obscure research scientist in the Temporal Army Ordnance Division, Darkness had invented the terrifying warp grenade purely as an accidental by-product of his own independent work in temporal translocation.

  He had begun by working on voice and image communication by tachyon radio transmission. He eventually achieved a method of communication at six hundred times the speed of light, but that still wasn’t good enough. He wanted it to be instantaneous, even over distances measured in hundreds of light years. Working from the obscure Zen mathematics based upon Georg Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, Darkness found a way to make his tachyon beam move more quickly by sending it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, more commonly known as a “space warp.” The…result was instantaneous transmission, going from point A to point B without having to cover the distance in between. The warp-grenade was merely an incidental by-product of this discovery.

  It occurred to Darkness one day that his method of translocation through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge could be applied to nuclear devices, allowing unprecedented control of nuclear explosions and drastically limiting fallout, in some cases almost eliminating it entirely. Having explored this idea merely as an intellectual exercise in abstract theory, Darkness lost all interest in it. However, since the Temporal Army Ordnance Division took control of all the paperwork and computer data generated by its scientists, from complex equations down to incidental doodles done on temporal Army time and in temporal Army facilities, the end result of this “intellectual exercise in abstract theory” was the warp grenade, a combination nuclear device and time machine, small enough to be held in one hand and capable of adjustable, transtemporal detonation.

  The principles behind the function of the warp grenade led Darkness to the development of the warp disc, which had rendered Prof. Mensinger’s chronoplate obsolete. It had also led him to the development of the disruptor, or the “warp gun” as it was sometimes called by those few who knew of its existence. It was the first true disintegrator ray. Yet as frightening a weapon as the disruptor was, the warp grenade made it seem tame by comparison. It could be set to destroy a city, or a city block, or one house within that block, or a room within that house, or a space within that room no larger than a breadbox. The surplus energy of the explosion, whatever was not required to accomplish the designated task, was then clocked instantaneously through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, to explode harmlessly in the Orion Nebula—or so it was believed.

  The problem was that so much devastating energy clocked through Einstein-Rosen Bridges eventually shifted the chronophysical alignment of the universe. The result was that every time a warp grenade was detonated, instead of the surplus energy being teleported to the Orion Nebula, a parallel universe was nuked. Millions of lives were lost and though Darkness had never detonated a single warp grenade, he had to live with the knowledge of what his work had led to. That alone, thought Lucas, could easily destroy a man.

  Shortly after the temporal Army had conducted its first test detonation of a warp grenade, Dr. Darkness disappeared. No one knew where he had gone. He had wanted to get as far away from people as it was possible to get, so he took off for some remote pan of the galaxy, to carry on his work in an environment where he could keep complete control of it. From time to time, he would release some new discovery through one of several Earth-based conglomerates he controlled, thereby financing his further experiments in tachyon translation, a process no one else alive could even begin to understand. And, as it turned out, even Dr. Darkness hadn’t fully understood it.

  He had been obsessed with the idea of perfecting a process whereby the human body could be translated into tachyons, which would then depart at six hundred times the speed of light along the direction of a tachyon beam through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.

  On paper, he believed that he had solved the problems, but what was mathematically real and what was really real were often two very different things. His main concerns had to do with the reassembly process, ensuring that the organs and the tissues were reassembled in the appropriate order at the appropriate time and place. Because there would be no “receiver,” Darkness had incorporated a timing mechanism into the tachyon conversion, so that the tachyonized body could be reassembled at the instant of arrival based on the time/space co-ordinates of the transition. And when he was certain that he had the process finally perfected, he became his own first human test subject. His ego would never have allowed anyone else to be the first to experience direct translation into tachyons.

  Unfortunately, Dr. Darkness had neglected one small element of the equation. His “taching” process was ultimately restrained by a little known principle of physics called the law of baryon conservation. Lucas was never quite able to follow the scientific explanation, but it had something to do with the idea that objects with mass could not be translated into particles with “zero rest mass.” Or, as Darkness had sarcastically put it, “you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd.” When Lucas questioned that enigmatic analogy, Darkness lost his patience and told him to look up the works of 20th century philosopher named Roger Miller.

  In non-abstract terms, what the principle meant to Darkness in the real world was a glitch in the translation process that resulted in his body being permanently tachyonized. He became “the man who was faster than light.” He could travel from his secret laboratory headquarters somewhere in the far reaches of the universe to Earth or anywhere else in the blink of an eye—much quicker, actually—but once he had arrived,
he was incapable of normal movement, appearing much like a holographic projection or a ghost seen underwater, frozen in time, trapped by the immutable laws of the universe.

  Unlike a holographic projection, he was not insubstantial, although being faster than light, he could be if he wanted to. However, like a holographic projection, he could not move so much as one step. At least, not normally. He needed to project himself from one place to another. “Taching,” as he called it. His atomic structure had become unstable. His tachyonization had rendered him immune to ageing or disease. No bacteria could latch onto him because they simply were not fast enough. In a sense, Darkness had become immortal, yet due to the increasingly unstable nature of his atomic structure, he knew a time would one day come when his body would literally discorporate, departing at multiples of light speed in all directions of the universe.

  It seemed incredible to Lucas that anyone could maintain even a semblance of sanity under such conditions; yet on the surface, Darkness was completely lucid, brilliant, and controlled ... albeit in a thoroughly skewed manner. He was a driven man, obsessed, not knowing how much time he had before he flew apart in all directions. It could be centuries or it could be only seconds and he did not want to leave his work undone. And that was where Lucas had come in.

  During their mission to destroy Nikolai Drakov’s pirate submarine, The Nautilus, Darkness had “terminaled” Lucas with a tachyon symbiotracer that bonded to certain protein molecules in the cells of his nervous system. The device, which operated on the particle level, represented a technology which Darkness had pioneered and which only he fully understood. The purpose of the symbiotracer was to allow Darkness to “home in” on Lucas no matter where he was in space and time. However, unknown to Lucas, the symbiotracer had built into it a prototype of the particle-level chronocircuitry that Darkness was experimenting with—essentially, a particle-level warp disc, organic and completely thought controlled.

  The device had become a permanent part of Lucas Priest’s atomic structure. He could no more get rid of it than he could get a body transplant. When the symbiotracer had first been given to him in the medium of a graft patch from a medikit he had believed that minor surgery would be able to remove it. He had never suspected that the device would fuse with his very atoms. He was even more dismayed when he realized that the symbiotracer function was only part of what Darkness had designed the chronocircuitry to do. But by the time he knew that, he had already died.

  At least, he had been meant to die. And in some parallel timeframe that wound its way about him like a double helix strand of DNA, Lucas thought he must have realized that fate and had, in fact, died. He did not remember dying, of course, because that event had been in his future, relative to the moment in which Darkness had snatched him away, and that future had been changed. His death was now an irrevocable fact of Finn and Andre’s past, yet it was only an alternate future for himself, a potential future he had bypassed. It happened… and it didn’t happen.

  It was the sort of Zen koan puzzle that was taught in advanced temporal physics classes, a hypothetical set of temporal conditions that Zen physics professors referred to as “problem modules,” situations that were mindboggling, defying any application of conventional science or logic, capable of inducing nervous breakdowns in even the most gifted students who attempted to relate them to conventional reality or solve them with conventional reasoning. Only this was not a classroom problem module. This was real.

  Ever since he had learned what happened, Lucas had been trying desperately to figure it all out, to assess the implications, both for himself and for the timeline. It was driving him to the brink of a nervous collapse. And he knew that now, of all times, he had to keep his cool, his mental discipline focused, and yet it was impossible. Thanks to Dr. Darkness filling in the blanks for him, he knew what the original scenario had been, before Dr. Darkness had effected his unique temporal adjustment. It was, of course, a scenario that Lucas had never personally experienced–not from where he stood right now. He remembered only part of it. But from the vantage point of another time frame, he had experienced it. And it had killed him.

  The tribesmen still trapped in the pass were run down and trampled by the lancers as they thundered through. Then the cavalry formed a line upon the plain and charged the fleeing enemy. There was no escape. The Ghazis died in the rice fields, run through by the lances and struck down by the cavalry sabres. Bodies fell everywhere as the lancers descended on the fleeing Ghazis and butchered them.

  “Christ,” said Hugo, turning away from the carnage down below. “I’m sorry, General, but that’s more than I can stand to watch. I’ve seen enough of death.”

  Churchill was riveted by the spectacle. “They shall not forget this,” he said. “It’s probably the first time any of them have seen what cavalry can do, given room to deploy their strength. Henceforth, the very words, ‘Bengal lancers’ shall strike terror into their hearts.”

  As he spoke, a lone Ghazi sniper, who had remained undiscovered, hidden behind the rocks of his crumbled sangar, rose to a kneeling position and brought his jezail rifle to bear upon the surgeon. Hugo, whom he mistakenly took to be the commander of the British forces. As he raised his rifle, Lucas spotted him.

  He yelled, “Hugo. Look out!” instinctively, after so much time spent under enemy fire, Hugo reacted by throwing himself down flat upon the ground. In an instant, Lucas saw that Hugo’s combat-quick response had placed Churchill directly in the line of fire. In an instant of white hot, adrenaline charged clarity, he saw it all and made a running dive for Churchill—

  —and landed on a hand woven carpet of Chinese silk.

  For a moment, he lay stunned, unable to move. All he could see were the colors of the carpet, brilliant red, metallic gold and indigo a richly complex pattern, figured with dragons and stylized lions. Slowly, he pushed himself up and looked around.

  He was in a large, circular room with a domed, observatory ceiling. The most dominant object in the room was a huge radio telescope. All around him were banks of computers and other electronic instruments he could not identify, with rows upon rows of blinking lights and dials and digital and video displays. Laboratory equipment vied for space with exquisite Victorian antiques and bronze sculptures and impressionistic oil paintings. Books were everywhere, crammed to overflowing in tall bookcases, stacked upon tables and piled high upon the floor. As Lucas slowly stood, he turned and saw a huge, curved bay window behind him. The landscape outside was rocky and desolate. And red-orange. The vermilion sands stretched out for as far as the eye could see, nothing but an unbroken vista of rock-strewn, reddish-orange desert. And there were three moons in the sky.

  “What the hell?” said Lucas.

  “It does rather look like hell, doesn’t it?” said a deep, vaguely continental voice from behind him.

  Lucas turned to see a tall and slender man, with dark, unruly hair that came down to his collar in the back and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was gaunt, with dark, penetrating eyes and a sharp, prominent nose. He was dressed in a button-down white shirt, a silk tie with a regimental stripe, a dark brown waistcoat with a gold watch chain and a brown, tweed Norfolk jacket with dark wool trousers and expensive, handmade Italian shoes. He carried a hickory walking stick and wore a brown fedora. One moment, he seemed solid and the next, he was semitransparent. He seemed to flicker like a faulty hologram.

  “Darkness!” Lucas said. “What the hell is going on? Where am I? What happened to the others? Where’s Churchill? Is he all right?”

  Dr. Darkness raised his eyebrows. “Which of that plethora of questions would you like me to answer first?”

  “How about where am I?”

  “You are a guest in my home,” said Darkness.

  “Your ... home?” said Lucas, feeling totally bewildered.

  Darkness put the walking stick down on a table and then moved across the room toward a sideboard where he kept several bottles of whiskey, a gasogene and a decanter.

&n
bsp; Lucas stared at him with astonishment. He had never before seen Dr. Darkness walk. However, what he was doing wasn’t exactly walking. Darkness seemed to be moving in a series of extremely rapid, stop-motion frame, as if he were illuminated by a strobe light. As he made his way across the room, he left behind a series of blurred, ghostly afterimages of himself that faded out like contrails.

  “I was once able to walk normally while I was here in my unprojected state,” he explained when he noticed Lucas staring. “However, it appears that the stability of my atomic structure is gradually degenerating. I’m having some anxiety over it, since there doesn’t seem to be anything that I can do about it.”

  He poured himself a glass of single malt Scotch and then started to pour one for Lucas. He was at least twenty feet across the room when he held the glass out to Lucas, but in the next split second, he was standing right in front of him, close enough for him to take the glass. Lucas blinked. He never could get used to the way the man could project himself through time and space. It was… unsettling to say the least.

  Lucas accepted the whiskey and took a hearty swallow from the glass. It felt good going down. “Why am I here? What happened, Doc?” he said.

  “Nothing much,” Darkness replied. “I’ve only saved your life.”

  Lucas stared at him. He felt confused. “But what about … God, what about Churchill?”

  “Rest assured that Winston Churchill is perfectly all right,” Darkness said.

  “But… how? He was right in the line of fire!” Lucas said. “I jumped to shove him out of the way and … and the Ghazi fired and ..” His voice trailed off. He had a horrible feeling that something was very, very wrong. “Doe, tell me what happened back there!”

  “I simply tached you out of harm’s way,” said Darkness. “Otherwise that bullet would have struck you and you would have found it decidedly unpleasant. “