Chapter Fourteen: The Frozen South

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Part One

“Three days.”

“I’m sorry?” The Writer said as he set out his tablet and stylus.

“At this point, there are three days until the invasion begins in the story.” The Mage reached across and took an English muffin. He cut it open and spread a liberal amount of jam across it.

The Writer watched him, confused. “I don’t remember an invasion.”

The Mage nodded slowly, “You wouldn’t. A good majority of the people of the world don’t remember an invasion.”

“That’s… insane. You might not have had the internet or newspapers in ancient time, or even as soon as one thousand years ago, but we do have those things in place now. And this is the age of technology, everyone has a camera on their cellphone. You mean to tell me that a world-wide invasion resulted in exactly zero pictures?”

“You assume two things, here. One, that the invasion was visible to the human eye, which it wasn’t. And two, that it was visible to a camera lens, which, again, it was not.” The Mage took a bite from his English muffin, chewed thoughtfully, then set it down on his plate. “Remember, the first invasion that Rhianna sent forth occurred all through Truth and Consequences. No ATM or surveillance cameras caught those. Indeed, the death-moon that was discovered was only visible through the highly advanced military satellite optics designed to see in several different spectrums.”

The Writer shook his head and began to take notes next to the streaming waveform on the tablet that indicated the recorded conversation. “That seems pretty far-fetched.”

“Yes, well, I’m sharing a story about how there are extra-dimensional beings trying to invade earth, complete with hidden cities, beings of enormous power and a protagonist who is equal parts genius and charming. I think an invisible invasion is the least of these things.”

“Good point.”

“I’m sure you don’t like the idea of having to replace the Concord.”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

Adam Felix shrugged as he looked at me from where he sat nearby. “Because there’s a storm brewing near where we’re trying to go. If it goes to where I think it’s going, it’s going to be white-out conditions soon after we land.”

“I’m certain it won’t be that bad.”

Adam fixed me with a stern expression. I could see the expressions of the pilots ahead and they didn’t seem all that impressed by my complaints about using such a slow military aircraft to get to our destination.

If you’ve never flown in a military plane, let me assure you that the experience is a lot like, riding in a car without comfortable seats, windows, or the sleek exterior. It is one of the most utilitarian methods of moving from one place to another since the advent of walking. And, while I might be a little facetious here, I was there when they invented walking.

Walking’s far more comfortable.

“Have you ever been to Antarctica?” Adam asked me, trying, rather well, to change the subject.

“Yes. I have been. In fact I have a facility in Antarctica. One of my older workshops. I thought it might come in handy during the expedition to the south pole. Turns out it was a great deal of useless. And, well, it’s cold.”

“Have you ever been there in the winter?”

“No. Never had that pleasure.”

Adam let out a long breath and ruffled his hair. “Okay, well, let’s go over a few things now. It’s going to be very important for you to understand what I say. You must stay covered at all times. If you expose your skin, you’re liable to lose it within a few seconds. The cold and wind will turn exposed flesh into ice within a few moments. Stay indoors unless absolutely necessary. These winter months, it’s very important for you to understand the rules of the white-out. At the base, we’ll go over a few of these things again-“

I held up a hand. “Not to be completely rude, but I don’t think these particular rules apply to me.”

“Are you immune to extreme cold?” Adam blinked. “Right, right, you survived a nuclear explosion. I saw video of that. That was pretty damn amazing.”

Since leaving Shambhala and delivering its tower to the military, my powers slowly returned. At this point I think they were about back to full capacity. Given that, I had very little fear of the extreme cold of the Antarctic.

“Even so, if you get lost in a white-out, you’re going to be shit out of luck. You won’t be able to hear anything except the wind. You won’t even be able to see your hand held out in front of your face. And that’s only if one of the small storms hits. What we’ve been tracking is some sort of monster.”  Adam sighed to himself and looked out of the window. He looked the part of the classic action hero. Dark hair, dark, brooding eyes and the build that spoke of his time in the military before being transferred to Michelle Williams’ operation.

 

“I assure you, everything will be alright. We touch down, I make my way to the workshop and get the control program and the tower and then we’re out of there without any fuss. Hopefully.” I smiled at Adam. “You won’t even need to put on a jacket.”

We flew for nearly twenty hours. The pilots switched off several times, each taking two four-hour naps during the trip. I wandered around the massive plane that the United States Air Force had lent Williams for this operation. There were all sorts of emergency equipment specifically designed for several different types of environment. Desert kits, forest kits, tundra kits. And then I hit the jackpot.

If you haven’t tried a Meal Ready to Eat… you’re kind of missing out. If I was trapped on a desert island and I could only choose one type of instant food to eat, it would be MRE. While the idea of such things are off-putting, actually eating one is like having a small five-star restaurant in a box. Of course there’s not caviar or champagne, but the food itself is delicious.

At these meals I learned the names of the two pilots: Elena Cassinelli and William Gould. Both of whom had made a career in the Air Force. The two of them had known each other for a long while and had become good friends through the years. Though technically Adam Felix was in command of the entire operation while we were in and destined for Antarctica, the two of them had had command of a few operations in their time.

William had joined the military after 9-11 and Elena a few months after him. They were both disappointed that they could not be a part of the preparations for the incoming invasion. “But,” William, a tall and lanky slip of a man, said with a half-grin after downing his second MRE of dinner. “We get to be where all of the world-saving is happening.”

“It’s like Lord of the Rings,” Elena said, surprising all of us with her geek cred.  She glanced back from where she was piloting and laughed at our expressions, the sound coming easy and strong. “We’re Frodo and Samwise taking the ring to Mordor and the rest of the Fellowship is fighting Sauron and Sarumon, right? So the way I see it, we’re doing the most dangerous part of it.”

“Yeah, well, didn’t Frodo and Samwise have to get saved by giant birds?” Adam countered.

“Well, that’s why you’ve got us. We’re the biggest bird in the sky,” Williams said after a long belch.

And then someone found a deck of cards.

As the flight continued on and the buckles of the seats around us jangled, we placed endless hours of poker. Things got extremely rowdy when we played strip go-fish, but by that time it had gotten extremely cold and we only played one game of it. I won, of course. And by won I mean lost. One of the pilots hid one of my socks in the hold. It took me another hour to find it.

Finally, we encountered land. Below, the great ice shelf of the outer boundary of Antartica glowed with moonlit illumination. But for all talk of Adam’s storm, the skies ahead of us were clear enough to see the horizon.

“How are things going?” I said into the radio, sitting next to William as Elena slept nearby.

“The prep is going fine,” Michelle Williams replied. “Sorry Lorenzo couldn’t get the signal going for your tablet.”

“That’s not important right now. What is important is that you have the Tower locked up and safe,” I said, watching endless expanses of snow and white pass below.

“At Stonehenge in room 1408. All under control. We’ve also evacuated the hotel, just in case. We don’t know what the interaction of the Tower devices might do to human anatomy.” Michelle paused, then continued. “How much time do you think we have?”

“I don’t know, Michelle. There are too many variables-“ She paused again. “Delores says that it will be soon.”

“Delores might be a clinically depressed flake, but she’s more often right than wrong. And more than that, the world cannot afford it if you aren’t ready. Stress the importance of this to Dr. Olyphant and don’t let her or any of the researchers at my facilities slack.”

“Valentine, I’d feel a lot better about all of this if you were here.”

It was my turn to pause. The fate of the world was in our hands. But this wasn’t my first time to this particular party. “You’ll do fine. I will be back before-“

The plane shuddered violently and a cacophony of jangles and shaking equipment cut me off. I glanced to William who was checking readings and gauges. Elena was there, suddenly, shooing me out of the co-pilot seat. She pulled on the headphones that I’d been using and also began checking readings.

“Valentine, strap in.” Adam called from where he sat a few yards away from the cockpit. I joined him and began to fiddle with the complicated buckles that were designed against such turbulence.  This plane had been designed to operate at high altitudes and make deliveries in some of the most hellish conditions in the world while under fire.

“Tell Williams that I’ll see her when I get back,” I called back to the cockpit.

“What?” William asked as he turned to look at me.

“What the fuck is that!?”

It took me a moment to understand what Elena was shouting about. I’d been too dazzled by the white expanse of Antarctica. I looked out of the cockpit windows to stare out at the sky. There was the night sky and then there wasn’t… It was a shape defined by the absence of light. Where it was, the stars were simply gone. To either side of the shape, stars flickered into and out of sight. Almost like… wings.

“Avoid it…”

“What?” William asked again.

“AVOID IT!”

The world spun as William jerked the plane to the side. The shape briefly came into view as we passed it, illuminated by the moon above and the snow below. I’d never seen it in this configuration before, but each time I encountered it, I knew it for what it was. It was a shadow creature. It was as if it had taken its blob form, massive and ominous, grown wings and took flight. But how did it know we’d be here? Had it been there merely patrolling?

“It’s not showing up on the radar,” Elena reported. “We have no idea where it is.”

“You’ve got to land us,” I called. “We’ve got to land right now. I can protect us on land, but I cannot do anything if that creature rips off a wing.”

“We’re nearly a hundred kilometers off. If we land now and the storm overtakes us we might not make it,” Adam countered.

“If we crash, I promise you, we will not make it.”

Elena and William glanced at each other. William nodded. “Alright,” Elena said. “I’ll take us down.”

But it was already too late.

Part Two

“It seems to me that Rhianna had her forces waiting for you at each Tower,” the Writer offered, gesturing lightly with his stylus. A half-eaten piece of toast lay on his plate along with the remnants of eggs and a half-sausage link. 

The Mage nodded his agreement, “Yes. But at the time I thought that I had arrived in time to encounter and thwart the creatures who had been sent to retrieve the control programs in each Tower. Remember, she was after these programs in order to invade each version of reality with her armies. They would enable her to open portals into each world simultaneously and, through them, duplicate her creatures an infinite amount of times.”

“See, that’s something I don’t quite understand. What do you mean by that?”

The Mage nodded slowly to himself. “Consider a prism. When light hits it, it splits into its component colors. Each portal would act like a prism or a hall of mirrors, duplicating each thing that passed through it amongst all of existence. And, instead of splitting them up into their component pieces, the process would be much like a paper copier, duplicating, in whole, the entire creature.”

“So… instead of millions to invade one world…”

“She’d have an infinite amount. Once some worlds were subjugated or determined to either be inhospitable or its inhabitance had already killed themselves off, she would direct those forces to world which put up a true fight.” The Mage nodded slowly. “So you can see why I didn’t really care why the creatures were there other than the fact that they were close to the control programs.”

The Writer nodded.

The plane jerked and then flipped onto its right side. The world outside became a dichotomy of white and black, split directly down the center by the horizon. The plane shuddered violently, then, slowly, the white grew larger, filling the cockpit window with brightness and the promise of death.

Ahead, Elena and Williams spoke quickly between each other as they reached up and across to initiate flips and switches across the control consoles.

“We lost engine four,” I heard Elena say. She was speaking at a normal volume which was difficult to hear, but the two of them could hear each other through their radio.

“How long can we compensate-“

“Doesn’t matter, we won’t be able to take off with just three. Not in this cold.”

The white disappeared as the two of them, as one, guided the plane upwards and level. Ahead, the outline of the creature appeared again, darkness against the night sky. Williams called back, “Can this thing die?”

“What? Yes, of course.” I called.

“Good,” Elena muttered as she reached forward and flipped a switch. “This is goddamn ridiculous. Defensive countermeasures.”

The air lit up with tiny explosions as small rockets erupted from various places on the plane. The shadow creature veered away sharply and I felt us descending quickly. Then I heard a low electric whine and the sound of machinery moving. The landing gear.

The plane shuddered again.

“Open the fuel valves,” William grunted as he pushed the throttle forward. I looked out of the window to the right and saw sparks and flames from the disabled engine.

Elena reached forward and hit a button. Again, the shadow appeared in the front window. William stared at the darkness. “Hold it…” he intoned, “hold it…”

William heaved the stick to the right and the plane lurched. Metal squealed as the world inverted violently. For a brief moment, I was upside down and weightless. “Flares. Now.”

“Countermeasure away.”

An explosion rocked the entire plane as the released fuel ignited, the sound deafening within the hollow metal tube of the aircraft. The entire control board flashed red. I peered out of the window in time to see the shadow-fabric wisps of the dead shadow creature drift toward the ground, fluttering silently. I leaned back in my seat and let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

“We’re coming in too hot. We lost engine three.”

I turned and saw, among the wisps, a massive gouge ripped out of both engines on the right side. Elena and William began speaking very quickly between the two of them, discussing how best to get the plane on the ground even as they fought to keep it level. Finally, discussion died down and I felt the plane change direction. The horizon began to shift and the stars swirled as the pilots sent us into a very shallow spiral toward the ground.

As the way we’d come spun into view, we saw the dissolving wisps of the flying shadow creature, but beyond that, illuminated by the moon, massive storm clouds hovered. “There’s your storm,” I muttered.

“Looks like I’ll be needing that jacket,” Adam intoned as the four of us spiraled downward into the ocean of white.

The Mage fell silent. The Writer allowed the silence to stretch on for several moments as the Mage considered his next words. Their trays of breakfast foods had been cleared away, replaced by tea and coffee. The Writer took the time of silence to pour himself another cup. He added cream and sugar. Took a sip. A full five minutes passed before he interrupted The Mage’s thoughts.

“Tell me about the landing,” he said, gently. The landing didn’t really have all that much to do with the larger sense of the story. Well, in so much that a single event had anything to do with something as great and as large as the invasion of an entire planet. But still. There seemed to be something intrinsically important about how the Mage got to where he was going. About how he got to the point where he hovered above Washington DC as it crumbled around him, lava spewing forth from rents in the ground, inky tattoos flowing across his skin and eyes ablaze like some sort of tremendous god.

Beyond all of that spectacle, behind all of that heroism, there was a being who felt. There was a man, human or not, who felt the deaths of his companions as deeply as anyone else. Who felt the weight and responsibility of the world on him and, every day, over the past fifteen thousand years at the very least, woke up to rise to the challenge.

And alone.

And now he was finally telling his story… a story, among many.

“There was no landing,” he began slowly. “It was a crash.”

The impact was odd. A sort of sliding-grinding that, instead of making me feel relief, made me tense up even more than when we’d been, essentially, falling with style. We hit the ground and immediately began spinning across the wide open plain of snow and ice. The sound was like a rushing waterfall against metal. Glass shattered and our limbs flailed the rest of our bodies strapped securely into our seats.

The plane gave a tremendous lurch and the entirety of it, I would discover later, flipped, one of its wings having caught on a rock formation. Then, silence.

I felt the cold air rushing across my skin as my eyes adjusted to the situation. To my side, Adam moved slowly, hanging upside-down in his chair. Ahead, I could see Williams and Elena slumped in their seats. Then, I heard William scream.

Beside him, Elena remained strapped in her seat, motionless. The entirety of the console she’d been sitting behind had come loose during the impact and had crushed her torso into little more than pulp. William struggled to release himself from his harness to help her.

“Don’t move!” I called, but again, I was too late. William fell violently onto the upper ceiling of the cockpit. A wedge of metal met his skull as he descended and, with a sickening crack, it split open.

I unbuckled myself and rushed to the two of them and reached out a hand to each. I had to make a decision. I could save one of them, I knew, but not both of them. Not in my diminished state and not with how much time had passed – seconds were critical. Here I was faced with the decision of saving one of two people where the lives of the rest of the world hung in the balance.

No, I thought, I could save them both. I would save them both. It wasn’t a question of how or if.

As my fingers touched their skin, I closed my eyes and focused.

My powers, as mysterious and powerful as they are, stem from quantum memory. Each of my cells holds the quantum memory of its initial creation. When forces exert influence on them, they resist by returning to their original quantum state. Imagine if, each time you took a car out for a drive, the manufacturer had a replacement vehicle for you when you got home. Or, in really fancy restaurants, how your glass is always full, moments after you take a sip.

With effort, I could extend that power to others, temporarily, to heal them. But it all depended on time. It depended on how much time had passed. Now, remember when I had you count in tandem? Each of your cells similarly has a sort of quantum memory, but it only extends back a few moments. If I was going to save them both, I had to exert my maximum ability on the issue.

I recalled the last few moments.

William’s fall, the plane flipping, the crash, the long spiral to the ground, the explosion, the shadow creature, its first appearance, the shuddering plane… then…

Their laughing faces as I searched for my clothing in the hold.

I focused on that image, on that memory and I asked, no, demanded that their bodies remember that point in time.

Time travel is possible. Those of my kind have known about it for hundreds of thousands of years. It is relatively easy to bring, say, a penny back and forth through time. The problem is that with increased mass, the amount of energy required to do so increases exponentially. An apple is several orders of magnitude more energy consumptive than that penny. A dog, the same, a human, still more. The Towers had a direct channel to the energies of the universe but I only had what was around me. And within me.

I felt the cold seep in through my skin. I didn’t just sense the cold, as I had before, but I felt it, biting deep within my flesh. I felt the shuddering response of my muscles against the drop in temperature as my body automatically tried to get me moving, to keep me warm. But I held my focus on the two injured pilots. I needed to save them. If not, what would be the point? If I could not save them, how could I possibly save the world?

The logic was flawed, and I felt it as such, but at that moment, there was no logic. I just needed to save the two whom I had come to know to be friends in the past few hours.

It grew sharply cold and, beyond my eyelids, even darker until even the safety of my closed eyes became a dark void of nothingness. Cold enveloped me and I lost my grip on reality.

Part Three

The silence stretched on. The Mage stared off into the distance, lost in his thoughts. The Writer frowned slightly, waiting. But something the Mage said early on in the process of this interview nagged at him. He scrolled through his tablet and found a passage he’d highlighted.

“Why them?” the Writer asked, looking up.

The Mage blinked in surprised, turning to the Writer. “I’m sorry?”

“You saved the world and here you reached back and, presumably, healed both Elena and William. People who you just met. Why didn’t you save Aiden’s father?”

“I explained-” the Mage began, hesitant.

“You explained a single reason why you couldn’t,” the Writer cut him off. “But in everything you’ve shown time and time again that your powers and abilities extend beyond what I or any other human on the planet can coneive of. You who brought destruction down on an entire city, fought in a war before we as a species had discovered how to think properly.” The Writer threw down his stylus and it skittered across the table. “You’re not telling me the entire story.”

The Mage’s eyes smouldered with intensity yet the older man did not tense. Instead he reached across the table and retrieved the Writer’s stylus and held it up. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The very nature of this universe, of reality itself hinges on this principle. I cannot ascend a step without exerting a force. I cannot, say, twirl this pen without expending a resource. Even our very breath requires energy.” He set the stylus down next to the tablet, then turned back to his tea.

“The story continues. At its end, you will understand what I had to sacrifice to save those two, what I wasn’t willing to sacrifice to save Aiden’s father and what I will never forget I sacrificed to save this world.” The Mage nodded slightly. “When I awoke, several hours had passed.”

The Writer glared at the Mage, but the Mage didn’t continue. Finally, he took up the stylus and the story unfolded.

“May day, may day, this is Agent Adam Felix requesting evacuation I have three injured here.”

Then his voice drifted off into silence. Several moments later, I heard his voice again.

“…just me and three others. I need immediate evacuation.”

A heavily German accented voice replied. “Felix, you have a storm bearing down on your location. Even if we could send someone out right this very second, they couldn’t possibly get to you before that storm hit you.”

“That’s bullshit. I know for a fact you have operations going in the south pacific.”

“Agent Felix, think. How many hours would it take a craft, not designed for extreme cold, mind, to reach your location? At least several hours. By that time the storm will have already overtaken your position.”

“Is there anything?”

Silence.

“Answer me.”

“No. I am sorry.”

The cold made it difficult for me to move. No, it was a tightly wrapped blanket. Adam’s voice and the voice over the radio seemed muffled because there was fabric over the lower half of my face, ears and the rest of my head. “Adam,” I managed.

The cold was slowly leeching away, I felt my limbs come to life beneath the brightly colored blankets. There was a scuffling and Adam appeared in my field of vision. He knelt next to me, seeming at once relieved and worried. “Elijah, how are you doing?”

“The others?”

“They’re… Well they aren’t smashed up anymore. They are both whole but they haven’t woken up, yet. I’m not even sure if they’re going to. I’m mostly concerned about brain damage. Can you feel your toes, your fingers?” He was slowly pulling the blanket off of me as I struggled against them.

“Yes, I can. How long was I unconscious?”

“An hour and change.”

Not long enough. Not for two. “I’m assuming a plane won’t be able to get out here. So how much time do we have until the storm hits?”

“We’re already at the outskirts of it,” Adam replied, frowning. Now sitting up, I looked around. We were still in the front portion of the plane. The glass of the cockpit had held and, through it, I could see wind whipping large clumps of snow sideways. “At least, we were.”

“Thank you, Adam.” I looked over to the two bundled forms of William and Elena. “You’ve taken good care of us.”

“Like I said, I was trained to operate at the south pole base,” Adam replied with a grin.
I blinked. “How far are we from the south pole base?”

“It’s not actually at the south pole,” Adam explained, “But right now we’re nearly thirty kilometers away.”

“Can we get help from them?”

“No one’s there. It’s been evacuated for the winter.”

“Then we need to get there.”

“We can’t go out in this storm,” Adam said, shaking his head. “It’s suicide.”

“And If we stay here in this wreck of an airplane, how long will it take for you, William and Elena to die?” I watched as Adam turned the figures in his head. There weren’t many supplies, this had been meant as a simple drop-off and pick up operation for the Air Force. Most of their resources had been redirected to prepare against the oncoming invasion. So, while they had use of the massive ship, three wasn’t much for them to subsist on.

“A few weeks,” Adam said after a moment.

“A few weeks. And if you were to go to the base?”

“There’s an emergency protocol…” he shook his head. “It would last us through the winter.”

“So, do you want to die in a few weeks for certain or take a chance of it and make it to the base?” I asked.

“You could come back.”

“What?”

Adam shook his head again. “There’s no use in risking our lives. You need to get the control program and the Tower and stop the invasion. We can survive for a few weeks. You stop the invasion and then come back and get us.”

“Adam…” The logic of it seemed flawless, but.

“No, this seems like the best idea. Get the Tower to safety. Stop the invasion. Come back and get us. At the very worst, the storm will have passed and we can have another plane come and retrieve us.” Adam smiled, reassuring. “Go.”

There was something that he was holding back, but time was of the essence. He was right. I didn’t have time to stay and wait for the three of them to get to safety. Their safety paled in comparison to that of the billions of billions of lives at risk from Rhianna’s invasion if I didn’t secure the control program.

“Are you sure?”

“Go.”

I hesitated, “I’ll need directions.”

Adam smiled. We spent the next fifteen minutes going over our location – fortunately GPS hadn’t been damaged in the crash and we’d gotten our location before the storm hit – and Adam handed me a compass. “Really, you navigated by the stars and you’re having trouble with GPS?”

“There’s no… personality in it.”

Adam and I stood at the opening the crash had ripped into the side of the plane and watched as a wall of white appeared on the horizon. “You don’t have much time. When that storm hits you won’t even be able to see your hand in front of your face. Go.”

And so I did. I left Agent Adam Felix alone with two unconscious people to go save the world. There, though, in that desolation, the latter didn’t seem to matter quite as much as the former.