“Good God, that wasn’t painful at all, was it?” Nina huffed as she caught her breath. The four of them sat up, trying to deal with the agony of minor electrocution.
“Wow! No way, doll! Look at that!” Gretchen said in awe. Her eyes were trying to get used to the dark, but she could see what it was. The stupefying vision astonished all four of them.
“Unbelievable! Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Nina asked, as her eyes took in the giant cavernous belly of the spaceship they were in. “It’s a fucking UFO! Look at all the records in discs and servers! Not books after all, and yet… ”
“Are we in the Library of Forbidden Books?” Sam asked, pinching his eyes and holding his still tender bullet wound with his hand. All around he saw the intricate engineering of a spacecraft held together by alien technology and metals he had never seen before. “Am I right in guessing that the ancient library sank under Venice….before Venice even existed?”
“Yes, you are, Mr. Cleave.”
He knew that voice and perked up to see better.
“Agatha?” Nina asked.
“Who’s Agatha?” Gretchen asked.
“Long story,” Nina told her friend. “I thought you were dead!”
“I was, in essence. But I am almost human now,” Agatha said bitterly.
If she is here, her brother could be here too, Sam thought. Jesus, he’d kill me if he saw me.
“Hello, Sam!” Purdue spoke behind him and Sam almost had a heart attack.
Sam turned and attempted a smile, “Hey, Purdue.”
Dave Purdue had a waterproof bag in his hand and his eyes immediately found Nina.
“Nina, how are you?” he smiled.
Nina’s eyes jumped between Sam and Purdue a few times as she tried to decide how to react, but ultimately she jumped up and gave Purdue a platonic hug. She was not going to deny that she was glad to see that he was alive after being delivered to the council by Sam when they returned from the Atlantis excursion. In actual fact, Sam too was relieved to see that Purdue had not been executed. He merely wanted him out of the running for Nina, but the guilt had been killing him while he thought he had the millionaire killed just for moving in on the girl he wanted.
“This is all very sweet,” Richard said dryly.
“Oh, come now, Pasty,” Sam nudged him, “you can get a hug too.”
“I see you have already retrieved the correct codes for Dr. Meiner to engineer the last part of the strain.” Richard remarked, pointing at Purdue’s bag.
“And you are?” Purdue asked.
“Oh, apologies. Where are my manners? I am Dr. Richard Philips, a scientist and historian from the United States, visiting on a lecturing sabbatical,” the pale, thin man chuckled awkwardly. “I know who you are though, Mr. Purdue. I have read much about your interesting explorations and adventures.”
“How do you know about Alfred Meiner then?” Purdue asked.
“Oh, it’s a long old story. My grandfather met Meiner as a young man after the Second World War and the old scientist became his mentor, I suppose,” Richard grinned coyly, his eyes firmly on Purdue’s satchel in the darkness of the meager flashlights.
“I hate to break up this party, but there are things to do here,” Sam announced, looking at Nina.
“They are done,” Purdue attested coldly to Sam.
“Really?… Renatus,” Sam asked with menace that sent a jolt though Nina.
“What the fuck?” she frowned, and pulled away from Dave Purdue. Gretchen had no idea what was going on.
“Not for long, I hear,” Richard mentioned casually.
“Wait, wait!” Nina shouted. “What is going on?”
“You did not know that Purdue is the new leader of the Black Sun?” Sam asked Nina, thoroughly enjoying her repulsion at the news, wedging her love even further from Purdue.
“Is that true?” she shrieked at Purdue, her hands shivering on her chest.
“Nina,” Purdue said, as gently as he could, “they were going to kill me, thanks to your boyfriend Sam Cleave’s assistance in having me apprehended.”
One for Cleave. One for Purdue. Nina could not believe her ears. She joined Gretchen and buried her face in her friend’s neck. “Please, God, don’t tell me you are also in on some insidious shit, Gretch.”
“Nope. I’m as confused as a bag of moths, doll.”
“Nina, they made me Renatus to keep me from destroying the Longinus. It was a ploy to punish me, I swear!” Purdue tried to explain to a confounded Nina. “Jaap Roodt, one of the members of the council who tortured and brainwashed my poor sister and almost killed her — he made me Renatus!”
“Brainwashed?” Agatha gasped. She grabbed Purdue’s satchel and tossed it to Richard Philips. “Well, maybe just a little.”
Purdue’s jaw dropped. He knew she had been turned, but he never expected her to be in league with the tall, wan stranger who he had only seen in pictures with Alfred Meiner. She had a pistol in her hand that she pulled from her zipper pocket. Before he could utter his disgust at Agatha, the craft’s artificial intelligence awoke and the white brightness blinded them all. Richard grabbed Nina and pulled her through the wormhole before she could resist.
“Nina!” Sam shouted in desperate panic. Purdue dove for the watery gate, but it closed before he could reach it. Gretchen was pulled with Nina, and Purdue’s carefully collected data was lost to Richard Philips and Alfred Meiner.
“Oh, my goodness,” Agatha said, brandishing her pistol at Sam and Purdue.
“I see there are no bounds to your treachery, David Purdue,” the voice echoed again, perfectly aware of what had happened before it was disengaged.
Sam jumped and swirled defensively, “What’s that?”
“The librarian,” Purdue said nonchalantly. Sam frowned at him, receiving only a shrug and a helpless nod from Purdue.
“I believe you have removed more information from my data banks. This is going to be a catastrophe for your breed, but as always, humankind will find ways to make itself extinct,” the voice remarked.
“You should not believe that just yet, my friend,” Purdue smiled. “I take it you are here to destroy the library, Sam?”
“It’s the only way to stop you and your persistent band of SS sycophants, Renatus,” Sam gritted his teeth.
“Well done, then, but I beat you to it,” Purdue grinned proudly. “Jaap Roodt is going to be the worst Renatus in history, when Alfred Meiner finds out that the data that pasty idiot took him is completely corrupted. In fact, they are going to slap together just enough genetic coding to bake a cake.”
Sam could not help it.
“Jaap Roodt is dead as a doornail, old boy.”
He burst out laughing along with Purdue in the middle of the super-advanced spacecraft’s records room where their twisted fortune reverberated. When they ceased their laughing, they realized that their kinship was preordained and really quite resilient.
“What do we do about the library? Seems a waste to obliterate so much knowledge,” Sam said.
“Look what the Tree of Knowledge did, Sam. We now have the opportunity to rewrite that faux biblical fuckup, eh?” Purdue persuaded in his usual charming way.
“Suicide for the good of humankind?” Sam lamented. “I miss Nina already.”
“Me too, old buck,” Purdue agreed. “Let’s go visit her.”
“That is impossible,” the librarian asserted.
“No, it is improbable, Officer Greenly,” Purdue said.
Agatha was astounded. “Who the hell is Officer Greenly, David?”
“The Allied soldier doomed to stay behind and mind the records — the librarian,” Purdue revealed. “But if he could find it in his wisdom to let me and Sam travel through that wormhole, we’d be happy to sacrifice a little something for his freedom.”