Eschaton Read online

  THE INFINITY ENGINES SERIES

  BOOK III

  Andrew Hastie

  Contents

  ESCHATON

  Foreword

  1. Coup d'état

  2. Everything Changes

  3. The Colonel

  4. Mother

  5. Mughal Empire

  6. Eddington

  7. Arrival

  8. Talisman

  9. Lenin

  10. Nautilus

  11. Solomon’s temple

  12. Sword

  13. Avatar

  14. Chapter House

  15. Reaving

  16. Parabolic Chamber

  17. Bedlam

  18. Fermi

  19. Derado

  20. Difference Engine

  21. Leverage

  22. Bentley

  23. Witch Trials

  24. Rescue

  25. Futures

  26. Founder

  27. E.R.D

  28. Draconian HQ

  29. Xeno

  30. Fermi

  31. Tibet

  32. The Letter

  33. Justice

  34. Execution

  35. Colonel

  36. Escape

  37. Wyrrm

  38. Titanic

  39. Timeship

  40. Brother Valient

  41. Maelstrom

  42. Shimmering Sea

  43. Bergson

  44. Citadel

  45. Reverse Exorcism

  46. Augurs

  47. Nihil

  48. Survivors

  49. Virus

  50. Dissonance

  51. Decompression

  52. Reunion

  53. Ravana

  54. Dark Energy

  55. Capture

  56. Armageddon Gallery

  57. Cerebrium

  58. Briefing

  59. Chief MacKenzie

  60. Dressing

  61. Headbolt

  62. Heisenberg

  63. Ahnenerbe

  64. El Presidente

  65. Time machine

  66. Snowball

  67. Cave art

  68. Ice age

  69. Shaman

  70. The Grand Seer

  71. Debriefing

  72. Curing the colonel

  73. Lady Anne

  74. Choices

  75. Copper Scroll

  76. Dalton-Jinn

  77. Fifth door

  78. Ninth Legion

  79. War rooms

  80. Dangerous Myths

  81. Interventions

  82. Viking

  83. Fundamental truths

  84. Conflagrato

  85. Inferno

  86. Under Fire

  87. East India Company

  88. Stories of Kings

  89. Anunnaki

  90. The Bridge

  91. Nemesis

  92. Breached

  93. Time Falls

  94. Confined Spaces

  95. Founder wakes up

  96. Plan

  97. Dark Water

  98. Observatory

  99. Father

  100. Aetherium

  101. Home-world

  102. Battle

  103. Leadership

  104. X9009

  105. XII

  106. Lenin

  107. The Wave

  108. Father

  109. Oglethorpe

  110. Never Enough

  111. Unabridged

  112. Solomon's tomb

  113. War

  114. The Witness

  115. Preparations

  116. King's Gambit

  117. Defeated

  118. Decisions

  119. Beginnings

  Chimæra

  1. Archangel

  2. Memories

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © Here be Dragons Limited 2018

  The right of Andrew Hastie to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  5.4

  September 2018

  To everyone that believed I could.

  Thank you

  Foreword

  For all those that may need a quick reminder…

  Josh and Caitlin were arrested while trying to change the course of history. They had planned to steal the skull of Daedalus and stop Dalton Eckhart from opening a breach into the maelstrom.

  This event signified the third Eschaton Crisis. A theoretical set of events that would lead to the end of times. As a result, the Order was put under martial law by the Protectorate and Dalton was made head of the Eschaton Division by his mother, Ravana.

  Before the founder was placed under house arrest, he told Josh to go in search of his father, and with Caitlin he follows the trail into the future, leaving her parents with an injured Daedalus and an Order in chaos.

  1

  Coup d'état

  Lord Dee stood silently in the centre of the Star Chamber while the other members of the council waved their ballot papers and called for calm. He was having trouble standing but refused the offer of a chair.

  Dalton Eckhart smiled, as did his witch of a mother, Ravana, both taking great pleasure in this public humiliation as their Protectorate officers surrounded him and snapped the iron manacles around the old man’s wrists.

  ‘Order!’ declared one of the clerks of the court, but no one took the slightest notice. Everyone was shouting, and the entire chamber was up on its feet, protesting at what Ravana had just done. Thousands of members were trying to make themselves heard.

  This, thought the founder as he stood stoically observing the chaos around him, was precisely what the Determinists had wanted — the collapse of democracy within the Order. Ravana had spent years waiting to take control. At the point she indicted him, Grandmaster Derado and the rest of the Draconian guild had stormed out, refusing to take part in the mutiny, and left her so-called “Eschaton Martial Act” to be passed by the others.

  It was evident that she’d been working on the divisions between the guilds behind his back, insinuating herself with the weaker members of the High Council, creating, for the first time in its long history, disunity within the Order. That fact, more than the irons that were clamped around his wrists, was the thing that disturbed Dee the most.

  Ravana walked through the jeering crowd that was gathered around him. They moved aside, no one brave enough to challenge her directly until she was staring into his face.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ she said with a smirk. ‘Trapped in the past.’

  He looked deep into her eyes. ‘Better that than a world with no future.’

  ‘Take him away,’ she ordered.

  The founder bowed his head and allowed her masked officers to escort him out through the crowd of protestors; he could only hope Joshua Jones had escaped.

  2

  Everything Changes

  [Richmond, England. Date: 11.580]

  Sim was still calculating the best escape route in his head when he grabbed his almanac and slide rule from his desk and hastily stuffed them inside his robes. He knew it was a mistake to go via the central hall, but he had to see it with his own eyes. His friend Astor had already warned him they were shutting down
the difference engine, but he couldn’t believe it.

  Word of the founder’s arrest had spread quickly through the Copernican news channels, and even though it was a shock, it paled next to the rumour that Professor Eddington had ordered the shutdown of the Copernican’s computing system in protest.

  Breathing deeply to steady his nerves he walked towards the centre of the vast, complex machine that formed their headquarters. The corridors that wove between the clockwork mechanisms were full of analysts and statisticians running around like frightened children with no sense of direction. Some were carrying everything they owned: armfuls of journals, abacuses and strange collections of divination tools, while others wandered past with blank expressions following random people in the hope of finding someone who knew what to do, but no one did — the entire guild was in a state of panic.

  When Sim reached the central computing hall, he heard a distinct change in the machine’s pitch. The usual clack and clatter of the gears were winding down, and then, for the first time in its history, the hall of Copernicus fell silent.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened — it was as if time itself had frozen. Sim reached the gantry that overlooked the main atrium and saw for himself that the hands of the enormous clock that hung at the far end of the grand hall were still.

  The silence was violently broken by the sound of the Protectorate storming into the building.

  From high up in the gantries, Sim watched as the black-armoured guards flooded into the hall, arresting anyone who got in their way.

  ‘We’ve got to go!’ begged Astor, pulling Sim away from the balcony. ‘Norman says Dalton is rounding up every Copernican he can find.’

  Sim nodded to his friend and followed him back into their department.

  ‘Where are you going to go?’ Sim asked while Astor packed a rucksack with random things from his tiny cupboard of a desk.

  Astor shrugged. ‘Jefferson says the Protectorate want to control the continuum — that’s why Eddington shut it down. I’m heading for the library — going to find the most obscure book I can and hide out in the dark ages somewhere. They won’t go back there.’

  Sim wondered how many Copernicans were thinking precisely the same thing. The dark ages was a period most of them chose to avoid, being a statistical black-spot in their models and one that most actuaries excluded from their equations. It was the perfect hiding place unless of course, the entire guild had all decided to head for it.

  He had his own escape plan, one that had already factored in the likelihood of others doing the same. His analytical brain had processed many different possibilities and reached the only feasible conclusion — he had to go forward, towards the frontier.

  Although they always treated the past as if it were a vast and unexplored territory, it was still only accessible via known artefacts, whereas the frontier, the point where the future becomes the present, was chaos to most Copernicans and they abhorred it, even though they spent most of their careers trying to predict it.

  Sim had decided he would hide amongst the linears: that unfortunate part of humanity who had to take each day as it came — not knowing what might happen next. It was something he’d always wanted to try, ‘living on the edge’, as Lyra called it, but it wasn’t until he’d met Josh, that he knew it was something he had to do.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Astor, hefting his pack onto one shoulder.

  ‘Not sure,’ Sim lied, ‘but before I go, I need to find Professor Eddington.’

  Astor’s face paled at the name. ‘Haven’t you heard?’

  Sim shook his head. ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve taken him. He refused to hand over the keys to the map room. He’s been hauled off by Dalton’s Eschaton Division.’

  That changes everything, thought Sim. Now he would have to follow Eddington’s orders.

  ‘Astor, I need you to do me a favour.’

  Astor looked scared. ‘What?’

  Sim scribbled a series of numbers onto a scrap of paper. ‘Find every book you can on the Eschaton and meet me at these coordinates.’

  3

  The Colonel

  [Nautilus. Maelstrom]

  Rufius’ breathing was erratic and his pulse rapid; if she didn’t know any better, she would have thought he’d taken a serious dose of amphetamines. Juliana Makepiece checked the clock and added another entry in her journal. Rereading her notes of the last few hours she could see he was deteriorating. His condition had declined dramatically since they’d pulled him out of the Cambridge mission.

  ‘Thomas, we have to put him outside,’ she said, turning to her husband. ‘Get him out of linear time.’

  ‘And do what exactly?’ he replied, looking out into the swirling maelstrom through the large circular window.

  ‘For starters, we could find someone who knows what they’re doing. I’m not a medic.’

  Thomas walked over to join her. He looked tired; neither of them had slept much in the last two days, and the stress was starting to show. ‘But he was the last man to see Cat before she disappeared.’

  ‘I know darling, but if he stays in here any longer he’s going to die,’ she warned.

  She looked over at the photographs of the timesuit scattered across the table.

  ‘Whatever technology that guy was using — I don’t think it’s a linear infection. Every drug I’ve tried so far simply reverts to an inert state. This pathogen isn’t following any known pattern.’

  ‘So who would know?’

  She crossed her arms and frowned. ‘Not Bedlam. This is way out of Crooke’s field. We could go back and ask Dangerfield before he died, but I think our best bet is Alixia and the Xeno department.’

  Thomas sucked air in through his teeth. ‘Alixia De Freis? She’s going to take some convincing.’

  ‘But in the meantime, we need to keep him in stasis.’

  ‘Where do you suggest?’

  She looked up into the broiling clouds of chaos. ‘How about that battleship cemetery we found near Cassiopeia? That looked like it’d been pretty stable for a century or so.’

  ‘You mean the Cassandra nebula?’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s why you’re the navigator.’

  ‘The one which just so happens to be where we stored the last of our chocolate supply?’

  She held up her hands in surrender. ‘Well, you’ve got to give a girl credit for trying.’

  He put his arm around her. ‘I do. I just hope our daughter has at least half your brains.’

  ‘She certainly didn’t get my taste in boys!’

  Thomas smiled. ‘I thought he was quite a decent chap.’

  She punched him in the arm. ‘Don’t lie. I know what you were thinking.’

  ‘His eyes were a bit shifty.’

  4

  Mother

  [Protectorate HQ. Date: 11.890]

  Dalton looked up from the latest report and smiled as his mother walked into her office.

  ‘Mother, how goes the war?’ he asked, getting up out of her chair and coming forward to greet her

  She winced at his snide remark, turning away as he kissed her cheek. Any maternal instinct had long since withered, and a thinly disguised animosity had taken its place.

  ‘We have a lot to discuss,’ snapped Ravana, taking off her long Protectorate cloak and hanging it carefully on the neat row of pegs. ‘Who authorised the raid on the Copernicans?’

  Dalton’s smile vanished. ‘I did.’

  ‘Stupid boy!’ She slapped him across the face. ‘Are you trying to undermine everything I’ve worked for?’

  He stood, unmoved by the attack, the red mark flaring up on his skin, staring defiantly at her. ‘No, Mother, I was trying to ensure that we controlled the continuum,’ he explained through tight lips.

  Her cheeks flushed as she tried to control her rage. ‘You arrested Eddington! The one man who may actually be able to resolve the Eschaton Cascade!’

  ‘He openly defied us by shutting do
wn their difference engine! Surely it’s better that he’s in our custody.’

  ‘Is he? Do you honestly believe for one second that he will cooperate with us now?’

  Dalton smirked. ‘There are ways to ensure his compliance, mother. But I don’t see why you still concern yourself with that ridiculous theory — it was just a means to an end — you don’t actually believe the sky is going to fall on our heads?’