The cube did not open.
Jefferson felt nothing, no movement nor heat from the object.
Two small squares suddenly illuminated on the top. Jefferson gave a little yelp but he didn’t drop it.
Within each square were two symbols that pulsed with white light. Jefferson thought they looked like Chinese markings. The other sides of the cube remained black.
“What is it?” Dave asked. “How’d you know to do that?”
“It’s a timepiece,” Ethan said. “I spoke the current time in binary code. It’s set itself to recognize the time system here and react to a human voice. And…I didn’t know for certain, but I assumed that the cube might respond to something other than touch.” He saw that Beale, Derryman and Winslett had noticed the glowing cube and they were coming in, with the President leading the way.
“What’s that thing doing?” Winslett asked, a frantic note in his voice, before Beale could speak. “Is it a bomb?”
“No. It’s…an alien clock,” Ethan decided to say for the sake of simplicity and simple minds. “I woke it up.”
“A clock? What the hell good is that?” Derryman asked sharply.
“Warning…warning…multiple intruders on all levels,” said the female voice. “Echo Sierra…Echo Sierra.” It sounded now as if the computer had begun to plead for help.
“We’re going to be under attack very soon,” the peacekeeper said. “Cyphers are going to be coming through the walls. Before they do, I need to tell you about this.” He held his hand out for it and Jefferson gladly gave it up. “I know where it came from. I recognize the symbols. And it’s a little more than just a clock.”
“What, then?” Beale prompted.
“This is the greatest gift you’ve been given, sir. It’s your world’s second chance.”
“Explain that.”
“The civilization that brought this to you is very old. They were the first to use the dimensional lightpaths. They might have witnessed an asteroid strike to your planet, eons ago. They brought this as a gift to prevent the destruction of your world in the repeat of such a strike or some other catastrophe. We can use it now. I can read the symbols, I can activate the power in this.”
“Power? What power?” Beale eyed the cube warily. “What does it do?”
Ethan smiled faintly, in spite of the pain that was steadily breaking this body down. Oh, there was so much they did not know and could not yet understand…
“It’s a time machine,” he said.
No one spoke. It was a frozen moment, though from beyond the steel door there came the muffled noise of what might have been an explosion. Ethan could envision the Cyphers and Gorgons fighting out there, locked in deadly close-quarters combat.
“Such a thing doesn’t exist,” said Derryman. “It can’t exist.”
“This has its limitations,” Ethan went on. “It can reverse time but not leap it forward. That’s the point of the gift. To go back and have a second chance…a gift of time to destroy an asteroid, to avert a war, or prevent any other disaster.”
“You’re saying…with this thing we can erase what’s happened?” Beale asked. “Go back in time?”
“With limitations. As I understand this creation, it can be used only once. And…I think going back more than two years is…how would you say…pushing the envelope. Your minds are such that the reversal of that much time may cause memory holes. Some will be able to remember and some not.”
Something slammed against the steel door, but for the moment it held.
“Echo Sierra…Echo Sierra…” It was a lost voice calling out for a lost cause.
“There may be other repercussions,” the peacekeeper said. “Honestly, I just don’t know.”
Beale drew a long breath, held it and then exhaled. “Can you program it?”
“Yes.”
“For when?”
“To be as safe as possible…the latest date. The third day of your April month, two years ago. I can program the device to…” Ethan paused to study the symbols. “I think…to revert time back to within a few minutes before the Gorgons came through the portals.”
“That’s cutting it damned close, if it even works!” Winslett said.
“And what if it does work?” Jefferson asked. “So what if you can reel back time? You can’t stop the Gorgons from coming through! They destroyed the armies of the world in a couple of days! What’s to keep everything from happening all over again?”
Ethan nodded, the silver eyes intense but under them the dark circles of exhaustion and physical injury. A smear of blood showed at the left corner of his mouth.
“I can,” he said.
“How?”
“In my true form…I can leave you with another gift. I can use my energy to create for you a permanent protective web around your planet. It can be tuned like the strings of an instrument to the harmonics of both Gorgon and Cypher warships. But if the Gorgons can’t get through,” he said, “the Cyphers will never come here. There will never be a fight for the border. Some will know it happened…some will have their memories of this erased.” He looked at Dave and Olivia and then back to the President. “It’ll make for a very interesting and challenging future.”
“My God,” Beale said. “If it works like you say, how will the world handle this?”
“I hope as what it’s supposed to be, a second chance.”
The President looked to Derryman and Winslett for help, but they were as lost as the lost voice and the lost cause. It was his decision to make, and what was the alternative?
He was about to say Do it when the first Cypher soldier blurred through the wall into the chamber outside the artifacts room. The creature was behind Corporal Suarez, who swiveled around and immediately opened fire.
The second Cypher soldier that followed blew Suarez apart with a double bolt of death from its energy weapon.
“Do it,” Beale ordered.
What Ethan needed was his own gift of time. The two Cypher soldiers were striding toward the artifacts room. Three more of them were ghosting from the wall. Dave fired through the glass, breaking it to pieces, and Olivia opened up with the pistol.
“Take it!” Ethan told Jefferson, holding the cube out. The creature that had killed Suarez was turning, bringing its blaster to bear on them. Jefferson scooped the cube from Ethan’s hand. The peacekeeper’s arm thrust forward and from the palm five spears of lightning shot out, one for each Cypher. The soldiers were hit, lifted off their feet and burned into black scarecrows when they slammed against the wall, where they flowed to the floor like streams of grease.
More were ghosting in. Dave and Olivia were still shooting through the broken glass but the Cyphers vibrated so fast the bullets passed through their bodies. Two of the soldiers fired as they materialized and four red orbs of flame with white-hot centers flew at the artifacts room. Ethan was able to deflect all four, sending them sizzling through the wall, but he realized even he in this weakened body was going to soon be overpowered. Five more soldiers were sliding into the chamber. Thirteen Cyphers were there within twenty feet, and all of them aimed their blasters in unison at the seven targets.
With human sweat on his face and human blood on his mouth, the peacekeeper swept his hand in a rapid motion across the row of soldiers.
How many thousands of burning bullets left him? So many that, to him, he saw only a solid wall of them, flying outward with awesome velocity. They tore into and through the Cyphers, ripped them into flaming black pieces and splattered the walls and ceiling with clots of glistening red-and-yellow-streaked intestines. The last soldier to be obliterated was able to fire its weapon, but since half of the creature was already gone by the time the black-gloved finger twitched on the fleshy trigger, the double spheres shot up through the reinforced metal ceiling into the original rock of the silver mine. A rain of small stones fell amid a storm of dust. Two soldiers that had been coming through a wall now gleaming with Cypher guts slid away, as if deciding in their robotic logic that retreat was advance in a different direction.