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Déjà Vu All Over Again
by Oracle
Prologue
Everything Old is New Again
“He who fights monsters should look to himself that he does not become a monster.”
— Friedrich Nietzche
“Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there — and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.”
— Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”
“We’ve found it, sir.”Colonel Marcus Cade looked up from the blueprint he was studying and smiled. It was cold smile, without emotion, the smile of a killer.
“Excellent. Show me,” he said.
The man who’d brought the news led him through the maze of corridors, over and around debris and past the remnants of a lost war.
A lot of M-7 aliens had died in this place. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
At length they arrived at the terminus of a long subterranean passage. A crew of sandhogs were busy with a large hydraulic jack that they’d used to force open the heavy metal door. There was enough of a gap now for a man to pass through into the chamber beyond.
“I have to see it,” said Marcus coolly, ever careful to conceal any emotion, anything that might be interpreted as weakness by an enemy or subordinate.
“This way, sir,” said the messenger, threading them through equipment and debris to the door.
Electric lights had already been strung into the room beyond. His crew was efficient, thought Marcus. He couldn’t fault them on that score.
He slipped through the gap between the door and its metal frame and entered the chamber.
In the center, bathed in the harsh light of quartz-halogen beams, was the culmination of twenty years of searching. The culmination of a dream. The secret to setting the universe back on its preordained course. The secret to unlimited power.
Damn that Summers bitch for costing him two decades of his life. But it didn’t matter any more. She was long dead, and now there was nothing and no one to stop him.
He had a gateway. All he needed now was the key.