Chapter 84


    The Hours After the Battle


    Lugrin, Lake Lemac. France.


    The strange case seemed to be over.


    The battle had come to an end and with it came the tasks and problems that followed.


    Searching for the possible fatalities, collecting samples, and the endless meetings and explanations trying to find a reason for the final event.


    The teams recovered as best they could the remains of all the victims of the plane and finally they saw the desolate scene of all those who had perished. The portable hangar had to be reconfigured to put all the victims in the same place.


    The battle seemed somewhat minor, as one looked at the place with all those bodies laid out on capsule stretchers and covered with a sheet as a shroud. All those people had been removed from their time against their will and had been collateral damage in that event. People who had vanished for their loved ones and in turn those people who had lamented and mourned their loss had already been dead for more than two centuries. However, for those victims there, only a few days had passed since their death.


    The work in that hangar continued in silence almost as if the whole place had been transformed into a gigantic mausoleum.


    The SID team tried to help in the early hours of Thursday, but was relieved to rest later that afternoon.


    More special agents from nearby locations and more First Response Teams had arrived at the lake.


    Mai, upon waking up that afternoon, had had a very unfriendly meeting with Council envoys and she had decided to have Nevermore''s medical division take care of those rescued from the plane, so that they could be taken to Siren Island.


    Luckily, during the attack of those creatures, the medical tents with the rescued were in Locum. A place six kilometers away from where the confrontation had occurred and therefore that sector had not suffered any damage.


    Although in the first moments they had tried to stabilize the rescued, it was a surprise that, as the hours passed, one by one they fell into a deep coma from which they could not be awakened. Only one was the exception.


    Many needed medical treatment as they had been exposed to the strange film that had covered the plane, but such treatment would have to be carried out with care. For that reason, Mai was resolute in her decision that all those rescued should be taken to the island for proper treatment and not be treated like lab rats, since they were technically travelers from the past.


    It almost gave her the impression that the Council, or at least a part of them, would have preferred that there had been no survivors. That did not seem to be the case with Travis and Clark who had been some of those who had voted to inform previously, but the majority voted to carry out the operation as Janus had indicated.


    And now the main responsible had disappeared.


    It was hours that turned into days, due to the amount of work that Nevermore, the Council, as well as the government forces of all involved, had had to carry out.


    The press had picked up on what had happened at the lake. But the main event had been hidden.


    Wide-ranging joint simulation exercises was the official explanation that had been issued, although secondary theories and explanations had already begun to circulate in many media circles.


    Nevermore''s communications and logistical apparatus had been placed in dire straits due to the amount of information that was leaking out. The infamous Department of Censorship and Disinformation had been forced to employ all its staff in the entire European area to carry out an operation the likes of which had not been seen in a long time.


    Under other circumstances the official information would have come to light. But because of what happened after the confrontation, it was decided in a matter of hours that it was better that the truth should not come to public light.


    This happened while Mai was still unconscious and therefore it was Tony, the vice-director, who was in charge of receiving the new arrivals by telepresence in the different parts.


    Osmia, representing the Aeon, had appeared in Lugrin before the SID members in a synthetic body.


    Two new envoys from the Council of much greater power came down from the Orbital Ring to try to help. Finally Alesteir Crowley, one of the most powerful people when it came to magical knowledge. Aleister had moved his consciousness from Mars into a cloned body and had arrived at Nevermore Base No. 2 in Languedoc, followed by a large escort of aeons.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    The new arrivals had come to help sort out the missing parts of that mess of data, along with the SID members. But, at the same time, with the warning that it was to remain absolutely silent. The consequences of that becoming public knowledge were too great.


    On the one hand, the issue of time travel. That could cause fear on a large scale. Who knew what ideas it might bring up.


    On the other hand, after the experiment came to an end, the Council had the data saved by the minds of those scientists, that was something that had to be handled with care. And even more taking into account Janus'' final trick.


    As Mai and many others suspected, the Council had indeed been contacted by Janus before all that happened.


    But that data collected by the clones and sent to the original bodies was incomplete. It was not at all the way Janus had predicted. And with the core material that had caused that time travel destroyed, they were missing one of the most important parts of a better investigation.


    Janus had played the Council.


    Janus had offered them predictive data, long before the airplane event as a form of proof when he had asked for their help. Those data and predictions came true with complete accuracy. Political situations and conflicts unrelated to the Dark Events, but which were of weight in diplomatic and business terms. Everything had turned out with an accuracy that caused fear, that had a level of accuracy much higher than the prediction system that the Council had. Because of this, they had decided to cooperate with what was about to take place. The future of civilization depended on it.


    An operation within an operation.


    Acceding to Janus'' requests the Council had sent Azusa to Mai, before she went to the place where the plane disaster would occur. Azusa knew that situation because of her teleological perspective of the events. In the same way, the Council had agreed that the agent and professor Oxy should participate in the investigation. Just as they had allowed the kidnapping of Professor Reubens.


    At the same time the attack on Pyrene was something that was not supposed to have happened, but the Council was apparently settling it personally with Mari, the director of Pyrene, offering her separate explanations and compensation for the damages.


    While Janus had indeed deceived the Council to some extent, he had also taken precautions.


    Anticipating what would happen after the experiment, Janus had ordered that, although the operation at the lake would be for research purposes, all army personnel would be provided with weapons. It was a way of anticipating the battle that would follow.


    That didn''t seem to make sense in a way. Why not make it simpler?


    Osmia was the one who provided those clues, thanks to what happened in the Panopticon.


    Everything had a reason in those simulations for which the aeons had been summoned. In them Janus had shown billions of ways in which civilization had come to an end. From the known and predictable, to the most outlandish.


    Extrapolating the data with reality, there were too many coincidences with the scenarios. Only in one of the scenarios had the world come to the point where they all met. Everything must have happened that way.


    It was very easy to see that this could simply be a gambling game, in which Janus had found a way to justify the crimes he had committed. But there were too many things over which he had no control to ignore. The predictions made to the Council were proof of that. It was impossible to predict it with such accuracy, not even with quantum calculus simulating parallel universes. It was as if Maxwell''s demon had manifested itself to the Council to make those predictions of where things would happen. And on the other hand, Osmia herself had corroborated that those data were not falsified and really had been predicted before they occurred.


    But for everyone to be there, also there was a price too.


    The price of the dead on the plane, the price of the other murders committed by Janus and for which Osmia had provided proof. Janus had been intervening by his own hand in many events that no one knew about. Political assassinations, manipulation, extortion.


    At the same time Osmia counted on Janus'' reasons for carrying out those crimes, even though she did not approve of them. Those deaths and crimes were justified in Janus'' scenario for everyone to get to that moment.


    As an example. The death of a businessman and ambassador in the year 92 of the new era had allowed to close a contract that did not end in a major conflict. If that had not happened, a couple of years later, that same person would have led the entire African continent to become the focus of the end of civilization when a laboratory virus was released.


    The death of an engineer in the Orbital Ring, with interests in the construction sector, had resulted in the arrival of a new manager, who carried out improvements that would not trigger a section of the ring to detach and be attracted by Earth''s gravity causing an ecological disaster on the planet.


    The bribery of an entire guild on the Moon had caused a crisis to be averted that would trigger a new uprising, which would result in a terrorist attack on Earth ten years later. Attack that would trigger the first interplanetary war.


    Those were just a few of the billions of scenarios that had been avoided. Not to mention the environmental factors that had been narrowly avoided.


    And at the same time the Dark Events.


    The death of a few so that the rest could continue to exist.


    It was somewhat of a shock, to find that Janus had been one of those responsible for sending out several anonymous Dark Event alerts that Nevermore agents had worked on in the past.


    Once Osmia and the Council envoys, Travis and Clark, explained the situation it was Aleister''s turn through telepresence. But Aleister said it was better to talk about his points later. There had been a problem on Mars in transferring his consciousness, but he hadn''t wanted to be more explicit about what kind of problem it was.


    The team agreed to travel to Languedoc as soon as they could, but after that came as a shock to everyone.


    It was the information that Thor communicated to Mai. They certainly did not expect that. Mai and the others listened in complete amazement to what had happened inside that chamber where Gehirn''s hologram had held Thor captive.


    But, even more, they were even more surprised when he revealed the contents of the box he had brought from Germany.


    Inside that box, which could hold a body in suspended animation, was a creature they all knew too well.


    It was a small dog that had disappeared from the Languedoc base only a few days ago, but that dog had remained in suspended animation for more than a century until that day. Gehirn had kept it that way, ever since he had been commissioned to put it in suspended animation to get it to the future from whence it had departed.


    They didn''t understand exactly what had happened, until Thor handed Oxy a small device.


    The answers to part of the puzzle were there.


    But those answers did not bring happiness. Gehirn had never told the content of the message, so Thor himself was surprised to hear the story and the missing parts not only from Gehirn, but from someone he had been with just a couple of days before.


    Before that hologram telling that story, Oxy burst into tears and despair when she understood the enigma.


    That was too cruel, it seemed like a bad joke.


    But that had already happened. It was in the past.


    Thursday passed and so Friday.


    Saturday afternoon arrived, where the SID members returned to the Languedoc base to finally meet with Aleister.