AEONA
THE HEART OF TIME
Compendium 2020 – Story 13
By Andrew Hawnt
Author's
note: This story follows on from story number 7, Aeona – The Wake of Time. You don't need to read it in order to enjoy this one, but it
may be fun to get up to speed first.
A
flash of light changed everything.
She
tried to scream, tried to fight against the force pulling her way
from the journey she was halfway through. Blazing agony erupted
through her body and mind as the unnatural energies tugged at her.
Aeona,
time traveller, adventurer, eccentric redhead, was being denied the
one thing she valued most. Her freedom.
As
she was dragged through eddying waves of liquid time amidst the
howling madness of the vortex known as the Chronodream, she screamed
not in fear but in rage.
Whoever
was responsible for this would pay dearly.
The
blur of images, timelines and infinite lives came to a shuddering
halt as her body was torn from the vortex and dumped heavily on a
cold surface. Despite the pain in her limbs and the chaos in her head
as her brain caught up with the effects of temporal displacement,
Aeona stood. Somewhere in her hazy consciousness, she was aware that
the surface she stood on wasn't flat. It was concave. She reached out
in a flail, her limbs not quite in this period yet, and touched a
rounded surface around her.
A
sphere. She shook the haze away from her senses a bit and tried to
fathom where she had wound up. The sphere was alive with crackles of
light that arced against her body and fizzed away against the
sphere's inner wall. Aeona pulled her brass-rimmed goggles from her
eyes and settled them over the brim of her chestnut coloured top hat.
Her eyes stung, but she focussed them on whatever she could see
beyond the sphere.
Her
vision was blurred through it, but she could make out four figures in
dark clothes at upright terminals, and one stood closer, without a
terminal. That one reached out to touch the exterior of the sphere as
though it was the hutch of a small, furry creature.
“You
ain't caging me, buster,” she said to the shape outside the sphere.
She concentrated, trying to generate a portal. Cog-shaped lights
danced before here and then winked out. “Buggery bollocks,” Aeona
grumbled. Her arrival here had confused the energies flowing through
her that allowed her to create her doorways. She sighed, dropped to
the base of the sphere and sat cross-legged with her arms folded like
an angry child, staring intently at the figure that had imprisoned
her.
She
poked her tongue out. Someone was going to get a kicking.
*
“We
have her, Caretaker. The Chronosphere is stable.”
Gria's
voice echoed in the expanse of the church. The glow from the
machinery surrounding the sphere was powerful and would have
illuminated the forgotten place of worship on its own, but the halo
of white that was growing more intense around the sphere itself was
like a young sun. Within it, they could see her. Sitting.
“What's
she doing?” Gria asked.
The
Caretaker straightened the brass monocle he wore and grinned at his
treasure. “Seething, most likely. She is working out how to get out
of there and make us pay for our crimes.”
The
four operators around the machine glanced amongst themselves, then
all eyes fell on Gria. The other three were too afraid to speak up in
the presence of the Caretaker, but he did favour the grey-skinned
young Tekarian scientist. No doubt it was something to do with the
way her slim frame filled her dark uniform. There was a twinkle in
his monocled eye when he was around her.
“You've
met her before?” she asked.
The
Caretaker caressed the sphere. “Several times in battle but never
face to face. In my days as a mercenary, I was hired as part of
various groups tasked with killing her. She's a pest, and not just
because she never shuts up.”
He
moved to Gria's terminal, glowing atop a fold-out pedestal before
her, and nodded for her to step aside. He swiftly manipulated the
symbols that danced across the screen “But this isn't an execution.
This... is an extraction.”
Siphon
online, came the voice of the terminal,
The
scream that rose from inside the sphere was every bit as loud as the
roar from the machinery that surrounded it.
*
She
felt like she was being turned inside out, over and over again. The
energies that attacked her permeated every fibre of her being,
scraping at her with incredible ferocity. Nausea rolled in her belly
while light that burned like solar flares raged against her body. The
force of this new attack lifted her off her feet. She hung in the
centre of the orb and was lashed from all sides by wave upon wave of
burning energy. Aeona could feel it moving through her, seeking out
the hidden tendrils of time and space that had been woven through her
over the course of centuries. The force found those tendrils and was
trying to scrape them off her. Whatever her captors were doing, they
knew what they were after.
Aeona
screamed against the pain to focus her mind. A stream of time energy
arced out of her chest and struck the surface of the sphere, shaking
it. She reached out and physically grabbed the stream, willing it
back into her body.
When
the arc had met the surface, the sphere had fluctuated. Excellent. It
was good, but it was struggling to deal with the mayhem of time
travel weirdness that had coursed through her for so long.
She
closed her eyes tight, desperately trying to focus on anything but
the pain. If the strange forces that lay within her were stolen, they
could be used to rewrite the multiverse.
One
second. That's it.
She
focussed the mental triggers in her head on moving one second into
the future. She moved her hands up, fists tight, fighting against the
drag of the sphere. She brought them together and moved them apart as
if opening curtains and a cog shaped circle of searing cyan light
came into being. She pushed everything the onslaught would allow her
to muster into the effort. Thankfully as it was for such a short
length of time, the energy she needed would be minimal.
Unfortunately,
the effort wouldn't. An act that would ordinarily cause her almost no
distress now felt like taking an atomic bomb to the face.
“One
bloody second,” she said through gritted teeth. “Now!”
Her
body was swallowed by the portal she had created, vanishing and
appearing at the same time.
The
sphere exploded as the conflicting time energies overloaded it. Aeona
braced herself for the fall as the sphere's wall shattered around
her. She dropped with it in a rain of jagged shards and unleashed
temporal energy. As her sturdy boots found the floor, she cast a cog
vortex around her, dragging the rogue time energies back into the
endless swirling mass of the space between times. She snapped it shut
again, straightened the goggles secured around her top hat, blew
strands of her red hair away from her face and grinned.
“Right,
hands up if you're the bad guys.”
The
four scrawny aliens that were stood behind computer terminals on
metallic pedestals stared wide-eyed at her. One of them raised her
hand, confused.
“Put
your hand down, Gria,” the Caretaker snapped. He looked to Aeona,
astounded and furious at the same time. “Hello, Aeona Gardinier.”
Aeona
smirked. “Why do you people always greet me with my full name? Does
it make you feel taller or something?”
The
Caretaker smiled. “We can all be friends here, Aeona. I am the
Caretaker. These people are my associates. We wanted to... chat.”
“Well
I'm convinced,” Aeona chuckled as she surveyed the huge machine the
sphere had been part of. “This looks very... old school. Where are
we?”
The
Caretaker gestured to his team. They all drew sleek pistols from
their uniforms. Aeona ignored them.
“Earth.
South Yorkshire. 1842. It's a Wednesday,” the Caretaker sneered.
“Happy
hump day!” Aeona chirped. “So. Temporal engines. A chronosphere
generator. A stasis cell. You've done pretty well to make it all in
this time period. Let me guess, you brought those control stations
with you and some parts of this gear across from a couple of other
dimensions. Stuck it all together with some old fashioned Sheffield
steel and a hell of a lot of reclaimed iron. Looks natty. It fits my
aesthetic.”
“Subdue
her.”
Beams
lanced around her and struck the machine in a burst of sparks. She
recognised the smell of the burn as she ducked. Those beams wouldn't
kill her, but they would paralyse her for hours. That would be bad.
She broke into a run and sprinted for the church doors between the
rows of tattered pews. She knew they were following her. Aeona dived
at the doors with a heavy kick, splintering the lock and flinging
open her gateway to the outside world.
Once
outside, Aeona skidded to a halt.
“No,”
she whispered, then span back to see the Caretaker and his followers
were almost upon her. Their weapons were trained on her forehead. She
paid them no heed, instead looking right at the Caretaker. “Why
would you do this?”
She
turned back to the horror that surrounded the church on all sides.
People hung in the air as though they were icy corpses laid on
invisible mortuary slabs. Aeona darted back and forth, quickly taking
a tally. Thirty-one of them had been captured, the floating fractals
of light over their foreheads telling Aeona these innocents had been
put into temporal stasis. Their clothing, ages and visible states of
health said there had been no discrimination in who these maniacs
took.
“These
people... let them go right bloody now!”
The
Caretaker smiled at the crazy-eyed woman. He looked her up and down
mockingly, sneering at her jaunty top hat and the goggles around it,
her eccentric outfit of leather and wool and a heavy grey skirt that
stopped at the knee. Her black leggings with gold cogs printed on
them. The heavy boots. He settled on her pretty features, which were
set in a desperate expression.
“They
are alive. They are our bargaining chips and also our bounty, Aeona.
If you refuse to cooperate, as you clearly seem to be doing, then
they would die one at a time until you concede.”
Aeona's
face darkened. “You don't threaten innocents when I'm around, lad.
You mess with history like this and the future gets even more jumbled
up. The lives these people need to live have to play out naturally.
Same for everyone. If someone is messed with somewhere in the time
stream, the rest of the continuum starts cracking. Judging by your
equipment, weapons and overall demeanour, I'd say you lot already
know that and you don't really care. Do I get bonus points?”
The
Caretaker grinned. “Get back inside the church, Aeona. Now isn't
the time for a daring escape or a fashionable comeback. Now is the
time to do as we ask, or thirty-one people will very soon run out of
life.”
“Considering
you're called the Caretaker,” Aeona said bluntly, “you've been
pretty careless. These people will surely be seen by others, who will
bring others. Boom – instant divergent timeline.
Before you know it, big chunks of other time periods start vanishing
like matching socks.”
Aeona
and the Caretaker stared each other down for a moment.
The
Caretaker raised his own weapon and fired at the nearest comatose man
hanging in the air before them. Aeona yelled, but there was nothing
she could do. The bolt from the Caretaker's pistol hit the fractal
over the man's head, and he screamed, violently thrashing in the air
as the field holding him in place became a blaze of fire. His scream
echoed away as his entire body was reduced to ashes, dropping like
grey rain.
“Thirty
left, Aeona.”
“Bastard,”
Aeona sneered. “Every life lost is another tear in the eye of time.
You'll pay for that.”
“Get
inside, Aeona. Let us get on with our work. You're the final
component.”
“Component?”
“You
are the heart of time as far as we're concerned. You've been to times
and places that we can't even dream of. Your DNA is coded with time's
heartbeat. So much travel through the vortex has turned you into a
nexus of all that time can offer. Give us your body and these people
will be returned to their places of origin, never to be bothered
again.”
“And
the man you killed?”
The
Caretaker wafted a hand before him. “He didn't matter.”
Aeona's
eyes blazed. “Everyone matters. Everyone.”
*
She
closed her eyes and listened to the hum of the machine around her.
The shattered sphere had been replaced by hastily constructed tubes,
pipes and strange black devices that would soon be ravaging her body
again. She was held in place by shackles connected to the engine
itself. Her hat and goggles were somewhere else. Her waistcoat, filled
with secret gadgets, sweets and tools, was draped over a chair, far
out of reach. Aeona could see from the construction of the thing and
the way these temporal dissidents were operating it that there was an
energy loop pulsing through it that, once activated, would be
impossible to break. There was also a transmitter linked to its core.
What would he need that for?
But
she couldn't let those people die.
Even
though the Caretaker clearly had no intention of freeing them. Aeona
had met more than her fair share of tyrants across the ages she had
visited, and this one was little different. Eyes on the prize rather
than the journey getting to it.
Aeona
was counting on that.
“Begin
the broadcast,” said the Caretaker.
“Aye,”
Gria nodded and activated a camera drone that rose up out of her
terminal and bathed her boss in green light. “The feed is live,
Caretaker. We are broadcasting across temporal and dimensional
frequencies.”
Of
course, Aeona nodded to herself. He wants everyone to watch
his conquest. He wants to stake his claim to my death.
“I
am the Caretaker,” came the smooth, practised words. “I have done
what many have strived for and yet none have achieved. I have
captured Aeona Gardinier, the being known to many as the Heart of
Time.”
He
gestured to the imprisoned woman behind him. “I want you to see. I
want this message to be shared amongst the multiverse. I want you all
to see who did what you could not. Aeona is alive with the energy of
the Chronodream. She isn't just a traveller in time and space. She is
time and space itself. She has moved through the madness of the
between spaces so much for dozens of lifetimes that her very DNA is
one with the vortex. In a moment I will strip that energy from her
body and move it into my own. You are witnessing history, my friends.
Today is the day Aeona Gardinier will die. And you? You will be given
an opportunity. Follow me or be eliminated. Details for contacting me
are encoded in this stream. Declare your allegiance.”
He
stepped closer to Gria's terminal and the drone followed. Gria
stepped aside.
“Now
watch as I kill your worst enemy.”
He
brought the engine to life. Mechanical rhythms rapidly built within
its depths, the feedback loop raising along with it, ebbing and
flowing like the heartbeat of dreams. The shock of its grinding,
scraping energies burned through Aeona like no pain she had endured
across her centuries of life. The process was agony, and she screamed
as oceans of perverted time washed through her.
Her
vision was replaced by the swirling insanity of the Chronodream. The
space between moments. The infinite junction between times,
dimensions, realities, minds, dreams, nightmares and all that is, was
an will be. She felt the engine pulling at the influence of the
Chronodream in her every cell. It sought to pull the secrets free.
Beyond
the engine, eyes across several universes watched the heart of time
take her final breaths.
Within
it, the eddying forces that raged through her had grown around her in
a corona of swimming light, and within that light she could feel the
ages. Moment upon moment upon moment that made up linear time laid
out as it truly was, an ever-present now. All of time and space
stretched out in her mind, and at the edges, she could see the
machine eating her life force. Soon it would consume all of her.
Aeona
let it flow. She let is get closer to killing her. Closer to
stripping her bare of the energies that had changed her so much. She
let herself be drawn closer to the edge of death. Closer to the veil.
Closer and closer, until she was able to commune with the multiverse
itself.
Let
me move to then and now, she called out to time itself.
Somewhere
in the infinite, time nodded.
Take
them home. Please.
Time
breathed.
Aeona
vanished for a split second. Then appeared again, but this time she
appeared twice.
Using
her intensified connection to the vortex of the Chronodream, she had
moved herself both forwards and backwards in time at once, aiming
herself at the same moment. For one impossible second, two versions
of Aeona existed at the same point in time.
The
engine didn't know which to kill. The feedback loop turned on itself.
Aeona,
trapped in the heart of the cataclysm, felt euphoria wash over her.
The engine exploded, a sphere of chaos erupting from her as time
realigned itself. Machinery rained down in a blaze of fire, smoke,
sparks and fumes. The chaos swallowed the Caretaker, his eyes locking
onto Aeona's as his body was scattered through infinite realities. He
didn't scream. He didn't fight it. Aeona could see that he accepted
this, that somehow he had always known this would be the way of
things. He vanished. His followers were similarly swept away.
Walls
exploded outwards, the steeple collapsing into rubble around her.
Stained glass shattered and masonry fell as the church was destroyed
in its entirety, but that didn't matter.
Aeona
knew those innocent people were long gone.
Time
was sentimental.
*
“Well,
I couldn't just leave you behind here, could I?”
Aeona
wiped the sweat off her forehead with her sleeve for about the
thousandth time. Two weeks had gone by in a blur after the attempt on
her life by the Caretaker. Two weeks in which she had gathered the
debris of that horrific engine and repurposed it with tools from the
surrounding area. Money, gold and diamonds she had retrieved from
stashes throughout the surrounding decades had seen to it that she
wouldn't be disturbed by curious parties or the authorities of the
time. She had seen to it that this would be left out of the history
books.
Two
weeks of hard labour had also seen to it that she would no longer
need to traverse time and space with nothing but her wits and a top
hat.
Aeona
grinned, a wrench resting on one shoulder.
Her
creation was ugly as sin, looking for all the world like a cross
between a steam train, a submarine and an industrial boat, but to her
it was beautiful. It was lined with pipes and cables and hunks of
machinery. The cabins atop it were furnished with repurposed pews and
whatever she could find in the ruins of the church. Its bridge was
alive with tech that should not have been in that time period at all,
the salvaged terminals of the Caretaker's staff now given a new lease
of life.
She
dropped the wrench into her toolbox, surveyed her work with a grin
and carried the box up the ladder on the side of the monstrosity she
had created. Its windows were of a substance she had found a galaxy
away, and she rubbed grease off the main door's window as she
entered. She set the tools down and hurried over to the iron chair
she had fashioned by the control array, its surface furnished in deep
red cushions.
Aeona
touched the terminals, and her new vehicle, her new home, came to
life, powered by her, the heart of time herself. On roaring engines, it rose up from the ruins. A cog-shaped portal came into being before
it, the wonders of the vortex visible through the huge doorway.
On
board, Aeona pulled her goggles down from the brim of her top hat and
placed them over her eyes.
“Chop
chop, Winnifred,” she said with glee to her ship. “Let's not be
late for whatever's next.”
With
a groaning howl, the ship now known as Winnifred hurtled through the
cog portal.
The
portal vanished.
Somewhere
else, somewhere incredible, a woman was laughing at the helm of her
new toy, ready for the next destination.
The End
Aeona will return
©
Andrew Hawnt 2020
About
Compendium 2020:
Compendium
2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt and consists of 52 weekly
stories encompassing science fiction, fantasy and horror. They are a
mix of short stories and flash fiction, 100% original and written
throughout 2020. Why is he doing this? To keep the words flowing. To
keep the ideas coming. To dance in worlds that are his and his alone.
To prove that he can.
About
Andrew Hawnt:
You
can find Andrew on Facebook at facebook.com/andrewhawntauthor and on
Twitter and Instagram as @andrewhawnt. Formerly a musician and DJ,
Andrew is known for his books, comic book writing, music journalism
and more, including fiction in Doctor Who Adventures, the Judge Dredd
Megazine and others. Look out for his film work soon.
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