[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

ma-nipulate Banks, his former warder, into initiating a dialogue when he
probably could just as easily have manipulated the man into releasing him.
It certainly wouldn't have been the first time Balam and those of his kind
tricked and lied to their human allies or pawns.
Repressing a shudder, Lakesh transferred the vid network to the exterior
cameras again. When it came to
Balam, the only thing he could be certain of was that he could be certain of
nothing.
file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/James%20Axler%20-%2...20Moon%20-%20The%20Dragon
%20Kings,%20Book%201.html (56 of 174)17-2-2006 3:18:22
James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon
He turned toward Bry. "What's the status of the interpolation on the last
group of parallax point co-
Page 45
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
ordinates?"
Bry gestured to the stream of numbers and geo-metric shapes scrolling and
flashing at dizzying speed across the monitor screen. "Encoding them into the
main database now. Once we have them all collated and decyrpted, they can be
fed into the Cerberus mat-trans directory and copied onto the interphaser's
hard drive."
He frowned slightly and added, "Providing our bench-marking team brings the
damn thing back and doesn't abandon it like they did the prototype."
"They didn't have much choice, as you recall," Lakesh argued.
Nearly two years before, Lakesh had embarked on the most audacious and
desperate plan in a double lifetime filled with scheming. He had constructed a
small device on the same scientific principle as the mat-trans inducers, an
interphaser designed to interact with naturally occurring quantum vortices.
Theoreti-cally, the interphaser opened dimensional rifts much like the
gateways, but instead of the rifts being path-ways through linear space,
Lakesh had envisioned them as a method to travel through the gaps in normal
space-time.
He had hoped to open a rift that intersected with the home dimension of the
Archon Directorate, if in-
deed the entities were pan-dimensional rather than ex-traterrestrial. The
interphaser had not functioned ac-cording to its design, and due to
interference caused by Lord Strongbow's similar device, the so-
called Singularity, its dilated temporal energy had sent Kane, Brigid, Domi
and Grant on a short, disembod-ied trip into the past.
Although the interphaser had been lost, its memory disk had been retrieved,
and using the data recorded on it, Lakesh had tried to duplicate the dilation
effect by turning the Cerberus mat-trans unit into a time machine.
Such efforts were not new. A major subdivision of the Totality Concept had
been devoted to manipulat-
ing the nature of time. Operation Chronos was built on the breakthroughs of
Project Cerberus, but it had not been as successful. During development of the
mat-trans gateways, the Cerberus researchers ob-
served a number of side effects. On occasion, tra-versing the quantum pathways
resulted in minor tem-
poral anomalies, such as arriving at a destination three seconds before the
jump initiator was actually en-
gaged.
Lakesh found that time could be measured or ac-curately perceived in the
quantum stream. Hypothet-
ically, constant jumpers might find themselves phys-ically rejuvenated, with
the toll of time erased if enough "backward time" was accumulated in their
metabolisms. Conversely, jumpers might find them-
file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/James%20Axler%20-%2...20Moon%20-%20The%20Dragon
%20Kings,%20Book%201.html (57 of 174)17-2-2006 3:18:22
James Axler - Outlanders - Devil in the Moon selves prematurely aged if the
quantum stream pushed them farther into the future with each journey.
From these temporal anomalies Operation Chronos had the starting point, using
the gateway technology, to de-velop time travel.
The Operation Chronos scientists employed a prac-tice they termed "trawling,"
focusing on subjects in the past and pulling them forward to the twentieth
century. Although not directly connected with the time-travel experiments,
Lakesh had heard rumors of their many attempts and failures.
Without access to the specs and data of Operation Chronos, Lakesh could not
duplicate what they had done, so he determined to circumvent it. He saw to the
creation of the Omega Path program and linked it with the mat-trans gateway.
The concept was sound to dispatch Kane and Bri-gid back through time to a
point only a month before the nukecaust so they could hopefully trigger an
al-ternate event horizon and thus avert the apocalypse.
Page 46
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
The Omega Path had worked, at least insofar as translating them into a past [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]