The Last Qumranian

Chapter 4

4

Present Day – Inside the Qumranian Lab – Altered Timeline

The world reeled around him, and Lukas barely registered the blasting cold of the web field before it dissipated and left him standing once more beside the steel table. His arm thrummed with the power of the quantum orb’s circuitry coiled around his fingers, then they released him, and his hand slumped out of the orb’s external membrane and down against his side. He had no idea how he’d ended up here; he’d just been giving his team a congratulatory speech, and then… Lukas blinked when an image burst unwelcome across his vision—two calm, shining brown eyes, studying him with an intensity he’d never felt from any other living thing. Peace, infinite wisdom, ceaseless and undying love. The wonder in those eyes filled Lukas with a weakness he seldom experienced, and then they were gone in a flash of red light.

Something toppled to the floor by his feet, and in a daze, he briefly glanced down to see the red energy phaser rolling across the Main Lab’s pristine tiles. How did that get there? His knees buckled, and in an attempt to remain standing, Lukas took a trembling step away from the table.

“In the eyes…”

It took him a moment to recognize it as his own voice, and the next thing he knew, he’d fallen to his knees. He blinked again, and Deborah’s wide eyes, her brow creased with concern and fear, now hovered inches from his own. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out, drowned by the ringing Lukas suddenly heard in his ears. His palms smacked against the tile floor beside the red energy phaser, and he willed himself not to fall flat on his face right there.

“Lukas, can you hear me?” Her voice was muffled, but he heard it now and he raised his head.

“What happened?” Ben knelt beside his sister, reaching out to lift Lukas’s arm up and over his shoulders before helping him to stand.

Lukas swallowed, his throat dry and oddly sandy, but he could only shake his head. “I don’t…” The words croaked out of him, and he couldn’t piece together the fleeting images of what felt like so much lost time before they drifted away into vague memory.

“That last jump was not approved,” Ben mumbled as he and Deborah supported Lukas over to a chair against the lab’s far wall.

“That wasn’t Lukas,” Deborah hissed, looking at the other scientists, all of whom stared at Lukas with what could only be horror. Just moments before, it had been admiration and pride. “Something else did this. Something—”

A deep, muted boom echoed from somewhere beyond Sector One, unmistakable in its impact. The white paneled ceiling above them shuddered, and Lukas looked up to see a sheet of dust sifting through the cracks in the panels. The memory of his dreams returned to him, and his stomach sank into a dark pit, thick with emptiness. His cousins almost had him sitting down in the chair, but he summoned the strength back into his legs and stood.

“I’m fine,” he muttered, and when they wouldn’t let him up, he jerked his arms up off their shoulders. “I said I’m fine.”

They released him, eyeing him with wary concern, and he put a hand against the wall for a moment to steady himself. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Something’s different.”

Another boom, this time closer and louder, rocked the foundations of the Qumranian compound and set the test trays rattling on their shelves. Deborah stumbled beside him but didn’t cry out. Ben whirled around and stared at the trembling ceiling, as if he’d find the answer there. The next wave of explosions sounded even closer now, followed by the distinctive rapid fire of automatic weaponry. The soft, humming whir of Qumranian energy phasers echoed the pounding retort of machinegun fire, a few shouts of alarm interspersed among the sound of what could only be an attack. Lukas glanced first at Ben, then at Deborah, who both stared at him in mute horror, neither of them able to voice what had always seemed so impossible. And deep below the surface of his consciousness, he could not ignore the burning certainty that whatever headed down the corridors toward the Sector One Main Laboratory was here now, in their home, where they were working to change both worlds, because of something he had done and could not remember.

“What’s going on?” a woman shouted.

This seemed to tear Deborah out of her own inability to act, and she whirled away from Ben and Lukas to head toward the lab’s steel double doors.

“Deb, you don’t know what’s out there,” Ben shouted, but it could very well have been lost in the nearly deafening chaos of the fighting outside.

Before she could even reach the entrance to peer through the reinforced windows, both doors burst open on their hinges, one of them nearly ripped free and left to hang there like a dislocated shoulder. The screams and gunfire in the hallway intensified, followed by two ominous figures who stalked into the lab and looked around as if they owned the place and had come to reclaim it.

A man and a woman, their facial features almost identical copies of each other, most notably, their almond shaped eyes and high cheekbones, stopped after a few steps through the doorway. A fearsome assemblage of armor decorated them both from head to toe—deep-purple, black, and blood-red leather stitched to thousands of metal plates across their chest pieces. The man’s helmet boasted intricate, square detailing beneath the burst of black and red feathers along the crest, the half-face armor crafted to resemble the sharp, wicked hook of some bird or raptor’s beak. His female counterpart’s armor seemed a mirror image in color and geometric design, varying only when necessary to fit her feminine form. Curved, sharpened spikes curled up from the massive pauldrons, lending the warriors an image of a stature far larger than Lukas thought either of them could truly claim. Every inch of their arms and legs had been wrapped in the same flexible sheets of linked metal, leaving them both completely protected and highly maneuverable. As he studied them, Lukas realized how difficult it would be to pierce armor like this, and he could not say whether Qumranian energy phasers would have had any effect, even if he hadn’t left the one weapon in this lab on the floor by the table.

All this he noted in a mere instant before a contingent of less-armored but no less formidable troops swarmed into the lab behind their commanders. Lukas tried to get a good look at the red star tattoo that each of them bore on the backs of their hands, but his focus was disrupted by another scream from his female team member, followed by the pleas of the rest of his team as they begged for mercy from the intruders aiming automatic rifles at their heads.

Without a given command, the soldiers unloaded their weapons into the best of the Qumranian scientists—on their knees with hands raised, scrambling uselessly away in an attempt to find cover, calling out and reaching for each other. Lukas dove away from his cousins and the open fire, rolling under one of the smaller control consoles and inching his way toward the opposite end of the lab.

The man dressed as fiercely as the woman beside him raised his fist in a sharp, swift motion and the firing ceased, though the soldiers had wiped out more than half of Lukas’s team. The remaining few whimpered and covered their heads, but not Ben. Lukas watched in surprise as Ben lurched toward the invaders. His cousin wasn’t an Enforcer class soldier, but he had completed the combat training required of every Qumranian. Before Ben could swing his fists wildly at the man in ornate armor, the woman stepped in front of her counterpart and intercepted Ben’s wrist with one simple upward motion of her hand. Her fingers clamped down around his flesh, then she jerked sharply downward. Even from where he lay under the console, Lukas heard the bones in his cousin’s arm snap, followed by Ben’s shriek of agony.

“Take this one. I assume by his pathetic attack that his skills lie elsewhere,” the woman ordered, her voice low and syrupy. “And that woman.” She nodded briefly to where Deborah cowered just beside the open lab doors. “Then find the third main scientist on this team. We need them all.” One of her soldiers beside her trained his weapon on a frazzled female scientist who’d managed to crawl across the floor toward Deborah. The fierce female commander, her grip still tight on Ben’s limp wrist, in one fluid motion grabbed her own soldier by the throat. The underling choked and dropped his weapon. “If you kill any more of these scientists we were told to bring in alive, you will be joining them shortly thereafter.” The soldier could not respond, but gave a barely audible gasp when his commander released her grip. “Do it.”

The insurgents set about securing the lab and rounding up the other scientists. Ben cradled his broken arm, his face frozen in a rictus of pain and shock. Lukas watched the black-spiked boots of the male commander stepping toward the steel table where the quantum orb rested untouched in its cradle. He could not see the man’s face, but he heard the low hum of greed and excitement coming from the man’s throat. The ruthless female leader walked out of Lukas’s view from beneath the console to join her co-commander, and Lukas wanted nothing more than to leap out and protect the product of so much labor, attention, focus, and prayer. But he knew it would do none of them any good.

“This is for you, my Lord,” the armored man said, his voice oozing like spilt oil over sand.

“And for us,” the woman added.

The man’s armored boots turned swiftly, and Lukas heard him call to the troops, “Take this machine and the prisoners out of the compound and back to the city. Unharmed. Or your lives are forfeit.”

Amid the scuffle of invading soldiers herding petrified scientists toward the Main Laboratory’s doors and his cousins’ terrified cries as they reached for each other, Lukas took the opportunity to make his move. He crawled on his belly to the other side of the lab where the instrument panel rested against the far wall. It took only a little force to pull free. Between the scientists’ shouted protests, the brusque grunts of the foreign soldiers, and the rapid gunfire and steady screams splitting through the echo of explosions, no one heard the instrument panel fall away before Lukas climbed into the ventilation shaft and made his escape.