Meanwhile...
Perched on the edge of a control console in the almost cathedral-like command centre of The Endless Sunrise, Pratisha Westerly waited for her travelling companion to say it. He always did.
Of course, the enigmatic being known as The Traveller was never wrong when he came out with his customary catch-phrase, and Pratisha didn't anticipate a disappointment this time; she'd known that from the moment he activated the main view-screen, revealing seething crimson clouds, in place of the more usual inky blackness, studded with stars...
"Hyperspace", announced The Traveller, "or at least that's what the locals call it - the very limit what's been explored, but not the very limit of everything..."
"Which you've explored", the slender, dark-haired woman remarked, her accent educated Southern England by way of Mumbai.
"Far from it", came the reply. "I'm as close to that as you are to exploring every last nuance of magic, my dear."
Pratisha shook her head slowly as The Traveller, a youthful soul with straight black hair down to just around the lower tips of his shoulder-blades, dressed in his usual embroidered waistcoat, white shirt and black trousers, flitted from control panel to control panel, enhancing the image to what was for her an imperceptible degree...
"Now, what's this...?", murmured The Traveller, staring intently at the bottom-left corner of the screen, almost pressing his nose up against the surface.
Pratisha slipped her hand inside the hip-length slit in the right side of her ankle-length black suede skirt, and without looking located and extracted her ornately-crafted wand from where it was tucked away, inside the top of her thigh-high black patent leather boot. Carved from a branch of the Westerly family heart-tree, it was the means by which she focussed and directed the energies The Traveller had mentioned, and she had had plenty of opportunities to test her powers since she came across the strange man from the stars, and accepted his offer to travel with him...
"Well, there's something you don't see every day..."
"Four minutes", declared Pratisha, her eyes drawn away from polished and rounded engravings in the lacquered wood, and up to the ceiling. "Not quite a record."
"Hmm?", mumbled The Traveller, glancing over his shoulder, then he went back to studying the view-screen. He tapped the area of interest with his index finger, and a region the size of his finger-tip expanded dizzyingly to fill the entire screen.
"There", he said, and Pratisha could imagine the ends of his mouth creeping around to the back of his head as he grinned in delight at another incredible discovery. On the screen, dark shapes were just about visible through the turbulent blood-red clouds. "Pratisha, could you give me the spatial gradient readings...?"
"The what-which-where?", she replied exasperated.
"Under your left buttock", The Traveller said without looking. "That panel with all the clear round 'buttons' on it - there should be at least one circle of them lit up. Could you tell me the number of circles, the colours from the inside out - please...?"
Pratisha sighed, and slid off the console, sheathing her wand inside her boot again - at least he had said "please" this time, appreciating her awkwardness, bordering on revulsion, around technology. "Two rings", she reported back. "A small one that's yellow, another outside it that's green."
"Curious", remarked the explorer. "These devices are drawing in matter. Energy, too, but they seem to be using that for power rather than channelling it elsewhere..."
Pratisha's eyes rolled upwards again - the tiers and balconies above the command level, and the ceiling above even those were becoming quite familiar. "We're going to take a look, aren't we?"
"This is unprecedented", announced The Traveller as the glimpsed shapes, the visible sections and concealed parts alike, were outlined in white, revealing a cluster of rings, ovals and triangles - they reminded Pratisha of a jumble of window-frames - all linked together by some kind of intricate scaffolding. "This reality employs devices like these to access and exit from this 'hyperspace', a short-cut through the shallows of the InterRealm..."
"...the space between worlds", observed Pratisha. She'd heard stuff like this before - so often that it was starting to make some kind of sense...
"...exactly - and someone appears to have gathered together a number of prototype 'gates' to form this structure", The Traveller continued thoughtfully, stepping back to admire the construct as a normal person would admire a fine painting. "The gravitic shear in this sub-domain is really nasty - stray off the well-travelled path, and you'd quickly get completely, maybe permanently lost - so this... array could have sat here for thousands, even million of years, and no-one would ever know."
"They tried to hide it...?", suggested Pratisha - too late she realised what she had done. This was how trouble got started, when something attracted The Traveller's attention, and sparked his seemingly boundless curiosity.
"Possibly...", murmured the explorer, and the interior of The Endless Sunrise started to hum with energy and activity as the vessel responded to The Traveller's thoughts, and started to move through the blood-stained mists towards the conjoined devices.
"I better find something to hold on to, then", sighed Pratisha. All too often, these things didn't exactly go smoothly, or end well.
Ever since he got busted for possession, Lee Croxley hated the NYPD. Since that day, two summers back, he'd found a new focus in life - instead of getting high, he'd sworn to get back at the cops, and he made it his life's purpose to expose their every short-coming, their every screw-up...
And so, EyeOnThePigsty.com was born.
It didn't take long for his blog to start attracting hateful comments from all those people who'd become blinkered fans of the New York Police since 9/11 - they called him a "traitor", an "al-Qaeda fan", an "America hater", but he never answered back, even when the comments really hurt. They didn't understand; he loved his country, his grandpa had been a fireman - he had nothing at all against them - and he even had a cousin in the Marines in Afghanistan - but the damn cops had been riding the emotional coat-tails of all those dead people for too long. That only made things worse.
For every negative comment, there were five supporting Lee's crusade, and every once in a while, a lead to a nice juicy cover-up. Lee had built up quite a team of trusted "field agents", who'd text him tips on a semi-regular basis - and on one particular night, AnarchyMan2001 called in with a particularly tasty piece of news:
Cop vs building Broadway + East 10th. Chasing a biker - messy! 2 clocked off early, pals already setting up shop. Get here fast. am2k1
Lee grabbed his camera-phone - he'd stopped using digital cameras after the cops "accidentally" smashed the last two - and that old MP3 player with the voice recorder function, then raced off into the Manhattan night. Downtown, a cop had messed up badly, and he absolutely had to be there to document it. Maybe this was the night he cost one of them - preferably as high-up as possible - his job...
Broadway and East 10th Street had already gathered something of a crowd by the time Lee got there - people out partying, a reporter or two, and plenty of cops; easily one for each person hanging around the tarpaulin-shrouded wreck of the police car. There were Crime Scene Investigators there too - Lee recognised the "token black guy" and the skinny one with the glasses and stubble - and as Lee bent over to catch his breath, he saw a rather official-looking car pull up, the cops lifting the crime scene tape to allow it to pass. Two guys in seemingly identical grey suits got out, another two figures lost in darkness remaining in the back, and Lee snapped off a couple of shots before any of the cops, or their guests noticed him.
"Oh boy, someone's in trouble", he murmured into his voice recorder. "Now for the big experiment."
Quickly, Lee took a black-painted tennis-ball from his backpack, and tucked the MP3 player into the foam-padded slot he'd fashioned for it. He fed a length of string through holes on either side of the slot, both ensuring the recorder would stay safe in its cocoon and that he'd be able to retrieve the device, then he ducked down, and rolled the ball through the legs of the crowd, and past the oblivious wall of cops. Nobody noticed as the ball silently vanished into the shadows of the alley where the CSIs had retreated...
This was always going to be the tough part - waiting for the right moment to reel in the string, and find out what the ingenious device had recorded. He just hoped he'd put in enough lead to make the ball roll to a stop with the slot, and the microphone of the voice-recorder, pointing upwards...
The two men in grey followed the forensic investigators into the darkness. After a minute or so, there was a flash that Lee imagined was a camera flash, then the two suits emerged again, went to their car, opened the back doors...
...and out stepped two complete strangers in NYPD CSI vests, who then went about their business as though nothing was out of the ordinary.
Lee hastily retrieved his tennis-ball spy - it was intact, but he would only know how well it had worked until he listened to what it had recorded. To be on the safe side, he waited until he got the device home, and once he'd copied all its files onto his computer there, and burned them onto several CDs, he played back the covertly-acquired audio file...
"Oh boy, someone's in trouble. Now for the big experiment..."
After the brief introduction, there was a period of muffled rumbling - the tennis-ball rolling over the concrete sidewalk - then hissing. "Damn", muttered Lee. "Too good to be -"
"So what happened here?" It was the skinny CSI, who always tried to sound cool and "street-level". The recording wasn't perfect, but was good enough to make out every word, and that was all Lee had wanted.
"A high-speed pursuit that went badly wrong", said the black guy - at least he could sound smart without trying...
"You're not supposed to go racin' around chasin' perps", said Skinny. "There're rules against that."
"Strange hearing you speaking up for the rules", continued Black Guy. "Wish you'd been there to talk sense into Officer Capelli."
"Capelli? Dean Capelli?", exclaimed a shocked Skinny. "Aw, man..."
A name - just what Lee had been hoping for...
"Thirteen years on the force, and he goes racing off after some crazy on a motorcycle", explained Black Guy as Skinny muttered in disbelief in the background. "According to Despatch, he called in that he was in pursuit of some guy wearing a crash helmet shaped like a dragon's head. The pursuit went for several minutes, then Capelli lost sight of the bike's tail-lights - and ran into the side of a building at about seventy miles an hour."
"And you think the bike went down this alley?"
"I don't think the perp just drove through the wall", replied Black Guy. There was a pause, then: "Excuse me, gentlemen, but this is a crime scene - I'll have to ask you to..."
A new voice, a cold flat voice interrupted. "You are no longer required."
"Hey pal, two cops're dead, and you don't look like Internal Affairs", Skinny snapped back...
"You are no longer required", repeated the soulless voice. "This scenario has been cancelled - your replacements are ready for deployment."
"This is no time for jokes", warned Black Guy. "Let's see some I.D. - both of you. We're not - hey, what's that...?"
There was a brief, harsh buzzing sound - like a vacuum cleaner trying to suck up a plastic bag - then a second or two of silence. No Black Guy, no Skinny...
"Scenario corrected", said the strangely lifeless voice. "Preparing replacement synthetic installations..."
There was the sound of two pairs of feet moving away, a pause, then approaching footsteps for more than two people - Lee suspected four, and with good reason. "Your functions have been assigned", said the cold, empty voice. "You will commence independent function immediately..."
Lee cursed as the rest of the crazy-sounding instructions were drowned out by the muffled rumbling of his retrieval of the recording device, but he had already heard far more than he had ever expected. Something seriously weird had happened in that alley - and as soon as he got the chance, Lee was going back to see what he could find...
...to be continued - coming soon...
Posted at 21:23 on 19.07.2008
~ o O o ~
Previously...
A Spread Of Jacks And Queens - Prologue - 19.07.2008
A Darkening Tide - Chapter 15 - 15.06.2008
A Darkening Tide - Chapter 14 - 13.06.2008
A Darkening Tide - Chapter 13 - 11.06.2008
A Darkening Tide - Chapter 12 - 09.06.2008