The Final Nexus
by David Clarke
Preface
Author's Note: the first Nexus story was originally intended simply as a one-off, but the response I got to it indicated that there was plenty of demand for a sequel, and so I wrote one. And that one provoked just as much positive feedback as the first one, which is why you're now looking at the final part of what has become the Nexus trilogy. Hopefully at the end of this one I'll have tied up most of the loose ends and the story really will be over.
If there are any new readers here I really must advise you to go and read the first two stories before you start this one, because otherwise this will make no sense at all: the story follows straight on from the end of the second story, and many of the characters who appear in this story will already be known to those who have read the first two stories.
For the benefit of those who read the first two stories some time ago, you'll find below the abbreviated version of what has happened in the saga so far, as told by Jake.
Most of the characters from the earlier stories will make only brief appearances in this one; only two of the Mad Hintraten Stokers - Jake and Stefan - have a significant part to play. To help you envisage what they look like when the third story opens in August 2010:
Jake Stone is fourteen and a quarter, is around five feet six inches tall and weighs around 115 pounds. He is Jewish by birth, though not particularly religious; he wears glasses and has dark brown hair and hazel eyes.
His partner, Stefan Kohler, is a couple of inches taller, a bit heavier and has blond hair and blue eyes. He is three months older than Jake and was born in a world in which Germany won the Second World War.
You can find more detail about them, and about Jake's other friends, in the preface to The Second Nexus.
Finally the usual disclaimer applies: this story, like its predecessors, will depict a certain amount of sexual activity between teenage boys. In some areas it may be illegal to read this sort of material if you are below a certain age, in which case you should leave now. Similarly, if you have a problem with this on the grounds of your personal morality, consider yourself warned now, and if you decide to read it anyway, please don't bother writing to me to complain about it later!
The story so far, as told by Jake:
The Nexus (this has been lifted in its entirety from the preface to the second story).
I left my home in Oxfordshire at the end of June 2009 on what should have been a straightforward school trip to our twin town of Colmar in Eastern France. However, on the very first day we were there I wandered off from a visit to the castle of Haut-Koenigsbourg, got lost and spent the night in a hut I stumbled upon in the mist. And next morning I explored the tunnel beneath the hut, which led me to what I later discovered was a Nexus Room - a place where it was possible to travel between different versions of reality.
I didn't realise straight away that I had moved into another world. It was only after I met Stefan, who like me had become lost in the mist, that I discovered that his world and mine were completely different. In his world Germany had won the war, and in fact he was a cadet at an SS school. And I'm Jewish, and so not exactly flavour of the month with the Nazis...
But in fact in Stefan's world so much time had passed since the disappearance of the Jews from Germany that he had no strong feelings about it, instead finding me something of a curiosity. And we became friends and, later, a lot more than friends.
Together we started exploring the other doors in the Nexus Room. The first two doors we went through led to dead worlds, one where there was nothing at all except bare rock - we didn't hang around there - and another where there seemed to have been some sort of catastrophic accident involving biological weapons, since all the inhabitants seemed to be dead. But our third attempt found an inhabited world, a sort of feudal society that was like something from the Middle Ages.
This world had an unfortunate custom of sacrificing a child to their gods at the summer Quarter Day. At first we were earmarked to fill that role, and when I talked us out of it the powers that be decided instead to sacrifice Olivier, the boy who had warned me about it. I thought that was hardly fair, and so, together with Olivier and another local boy called Alain, we headed back for the mountains and returned to our temporary base in the second dead world.
After that we discovered the Hub, the control room for the Nexus Room. It had been abandoned, but a computer there gave us some of the history of what the Nexus Room was and who had built it. We learned that there was a second Hub, too - this turned out to be on the slopes of the Feldberg, the highest point of the Black Forest, across the Rhine in Germany - at least, in my own world it was in Germany, though Stefan and I had already discovered that national boundaries changed considerably from one world to another.
The Hub had been abandoned because the people who had built it, who were from a country called Kerpia, had inadvertently opened a portal - a Hub doorway - into a world where the dominant intelligent species had evolved from reptiles rather than mammals. These intelligent reptiles, whom the Kerpians called Greys, had invaded Kerpia through the portal, and as far as we could gather the entire operation had been abandoned so as to prevent the Greys from finding and using the portals in the Vosges Nexus Room - their own world had been accessed from the Feldberg Hub.
Exploring the Vosges Hub further we found ourselves making a wholly unintended journey to the Feldberg Hub using the Capsule, a sort of automatic underground train linking the two. At the Feldberg Hub we found the power off: there was nobody there, and the Capsule was clearly going to take a long time to recharge, and so we found our way to the surface and set off to find someone who might be able to help us.
What we didn't know was that the Greys were now in control of this part of Kerpia, and before we had a chance to speak to anyone local we were captured and, after undergoing a long procedure that implanted the local language directly into our brains, we were questioned. The Kerpian who had overseen the implantation process, whose name was Mr Narj, had advised us not to mention the Hubs or the Nexus Rooms at all when questioned, and instead suggested an alternative story, which was apparently accepted by the local Grey commander. However, he refused to release us, and instead we were sent to work in the furnace room of a local uranium mine. And here we met a number of other slave workers, boys from the local orphanage or who had previously been in juvenile detention for criminal behaviour.
We might have stayed there until we died, but I got lucky: a pair of juvenile Greys chose me to take part in a study they were running to chart the differences between Greys and humans, and I was taken out of the furnace room, implanted with the Grey language and sent to work with them. I discovered they intended to finish their experiment by dissecting me, and that gave me a major incentive to find a way to escape. And I did devise a plan, but it involved killing the two Greys, and I found that I was unable to do that.
They were surprised that I had not killed them when I had the chance - in Grey thinking, self-preservation is the most important thing, whatever the cost - but it changed the way they saw me and they decided not to kill me after all. They took me through the portal to their own world and I helped them with their tests, and while I was there I thought up a way for us to escape - not just me, but all the boys at the mine, including my three friends Stefan, Olivier and Alain. One of the boys at the Grey school, Ssyrl, was unpopular with the other students because he was viewed as a sexual deviant: he only liked taking the passive role in sex. So I suggested that he should be sent to the furnace room, where the work might toughen him up and make him more masculine - though actually I thought he would be more sympathetically accepted by the other boys there than he was among his own kind, because in Kerpia sexual relations between boys in their early teens are considered normal.
The two young Greys who were running the tests thought this was an excellent idea, and so they returned to the mine with me, taking Ssyrl with them in order to set him to work in the furnace room. While we were there I suggested that a younger boy, a ten-year-old called Tommi, should come back with us to help with the testing, to see if the result obtained were the same at an earlier age, and I further advised that he should be implanted with their language to make communication easier. And while Tommi was being implanted, Mr Narj found me a bomb that I was later able to plant by the portal into the Grey world, hoping to seal it off completely.
In due course Tommi and I finished our tests and were sent back to the mine, and there I was able to persuade Ssyrl to help us evade the Guardians (a sort of giant scorpion) that ran free about the area to prevent humans from moving about unescorted - they were programmed not to attack Greys or anyone with them.
With Ssyrl's help we got back to the entrance to the Hub, but at the last moment he betrayed us by running off to warn the local Grey guard-post where we were, leaving us at the mercy of a number of Guardians. We avoided them and fled back to the Vosges Hub, using the Capsule for part of the journey - it had partially recharged while we were in the furnace room - and then on foot, pursued by the Grey soldiers Ssyrl had told about us. After a terrifying gun-fight - there were eleven kids on our side, only two of whom knew one end of a gun from the other, and professional soldiers on theirs - it seemed we were all going to die, (and I still find it hard to believe that we came out of it with no more than a couple of flesh wounds), but at the last moment we found the emergency exit from the Hub control room, and this led us back to the Nexus Room - we'd thought all the tunnels between the two had been destroyed by the Kerpians' fail-safe devices.
Olivier chose one of the remaining doors at random, and we ended up here in Elsass, in a world where the whole of Europe, including Britain and Russia, had been united by Napoleon and had remained peaceful ever since. And thirty years ago this world had been visited by an alien race called the Tammids, who had shown the human race the secret of faster than light travel, which had transformed everything. I haven't been here very long yet, but I'm pretty sure that, of all the worlds we saw, this is going to be by far the best to live in.
The Second Nexus
Once we got settled into the Home in Milhüsa I didn't really intend going through any more portals: I just wanted to settle down and get on with life. But shortly after our return Stefan and I were summoned by a group of scientists who were looking into the whole business of portals and who wanted to dig about in our minds to find out what we had read about them on the Kerpians' computer. And shortly before Christmas 2009 they succeeded in opening a portal into Kerpia. They asked us to help them establish contact with the Kerpians - we spoke the language, of course - and we were able to do that.
While we were in Kerpia Mr Narj, who turned out to be head of the whole portal project, told me that the king of Kerpia wanted to see us to thank us for destroying the Grey portal and defending Hub Two against them, and so our whole group went to the Kerpian capital to meet him. But on the way back home the portal that the Elsass scientists had built malfunctioned, throwing me and six of my friends off into an uncharted Grey world that was in the midst of a major war.
We met three Grey boys who had survived the bombing because they had been deep underground at the time, and we helped them to find food and shelter. But there seemed no way for us to get back to our own world, and so I decided to try to get over to the Vosges and to wait in the area where the Kerpians had built Hub Two in the hope that a natural portal might appear. We found an abandoned army base and commandeered a jeep, a couple of trucks and a tank and set off for the Rhine.
On the way we ran into hostile Grey soldiers and two of our party were injured, and we were in a bad way when we reached the Vosges. But a few days after we got there we found a natural portal that took us into another world.
This turned out to me a modern version of the Holy Roman Empire, and a monastery had been built in the area to care for travellers stumbling through portals - this place was a sort of natural Nexus Room, where five portals appeared naturally, some at regular intervals and some only very occasionally. The monks gave us shelter until another portal appeared. Still hoping to find a way home we went through that into a world where the Earth had been devastated by the impact of an asteroid in the early Nineteen-Forties. Here most of Alsace was under water and the temperature was much hotter than in my own world. We were unable to find any other way out of this world, but we had a pleasant five weeks lounging on the beach until the portal reappeared and we were able to return to the monastery.
We discovered when we got there that one of the local boys, Nicky, had stowed away in our truck. He was an orphan and wanted to try to find a better life than he had in Vogesia, which was the name of the hot country we'd stayed in.
The next portal to appear led us to a frozen world of snow and ice where there was no sign of life. It was too cold for us to stay in, and so we returned to the monastery again.
The next portal took us into a modern world. I was a bit worried about the possible reception the Greys would receive on a world like that, and so I suggested that they should wait for us by the portal, and that we would come and find them if we found out that they would be safe here. But when we got down into the local version of Sélestat we were arrested for having no papers.
The senior police officer for the region, whose name was Aarnist, was reluctant to believe that we had actually come from another world and so he called in a colleague, Irfan ved Meluan, to interview me. Irfan was a member of a separate race called Konjäauml;ssiem, who had the ability to read minds and, as we discovered later, to compel people mentally to obey them. He confirmed that we had come from another world. In an attempt to protect the Greys I gave Aarnist to understand that the portal was some distance from where it really was, but of course that meant that he was unable to find it. And as we had apparently no means of returning to our own world we became the property of the state - or, to put it another way, slaves.
Irfan said that he could use us as a training aid for boys of his race: because we didn't speak the local language his students would have to work that much harder to control us mentally. And so we were shipped off to their capital city.
Eventually we discovered that their country, Arvel, was in a place that had no geographical equivalent in our world: here there was an extra continent in mid-Atlantic, in the centre of which was the Arvelan capital, Laztaale.
I was lucky in that I was assigned to Harlan, a boy who treated me decently even though I was a slave. But some of my friends were a lot less fortunate, and when I discovered that some of what was done to slaves here was horrendous, involving torture and sometimes even death, I became determined to get my friends away from this place. So I spoke to Harlan about the Greys, suggesting that it might be interesting for him to try his powers on a non-human mind. I had to work quite hard to talk him into mounting an expedition in the school summer holidays to locate the Greys - I thought that by now they would have returned to Vogesia to wait for us to come back, and that meant that I was also able to dangle a holiday on a warm beach in front of Harlan as added incentive to make the trip. It helped that his father was the Chancellor of the neighbouring country of Sanölja, as that gave him quite a lot of clout, and eventually he decided to set up the expedition.
I'd succeeded in persuading Harlan to bring all of my friends on the expedition, but he also brought along three other Konjäauml;ssiem: his cousin Terry, accompanied by a slave called Caradoc; an older boy called Dervoran, with his slave Dannis; and a junior called Killian, with his slave Marlo. Killian had arrived at the school the previous year as a loud-mouthed but basically harmless kid, and Harlan had been provoked into messing about with Killian's mind and transforming him into a weak, submissive boy who liked being dominated by his slaves. The only reason he was on the expedition at all was because nobody else was available.
When we finally got back to the area where the portal had been I was amazed to discover that the three Grey boys were still there: apparently the portal had disappeared the day after we arrived and had still not reappeared. Harlan and Terry started work with Torth, the oldest of the Greys, and although they were unable to penetrate Torth's mind Harlan thought that if they worked at it they would eventually succeed.
But the next morning the portal reappeared and Torth said that he was going through it: he'd been waiting for several weeks and wasn't going to miss the opportunity to leave this world. Harlan didn't want to risk leaving his home world now that he knew he couldn't control the Greys and so he tried to make Torth stay by threatening to start killing my friends unless he complied. Torth took no notice because Greys are normally only interested in themselves, and so Harlan asked Dervoran to kill one of my friends. At that point his slave Dannis, who had been looking for an opportunity to avenge a friend whom Dervoran had killed previously, stabbed and killed him. Things then escalated: Harlan pulled a gun, shot Dannis and then pointed the gun at Stefan and threatened to shoot if Torth didn't agree to stay. Instead Torth took his own rifle and threatened to shoot Harlan. For a while there was a stand-off, and then Killian distracted Harlan, allowing Torth to shoot and kill him.
At that point Aarnist's police arrived, and we fled through the portal, taking Killian, Marlo and Caradoc with us. In fact we passed through two portals, ending up in what the monks had called the Green World. Eventually I realised that this was the empty world that the Kerpians had found, and Stefan and I worked out that there was a chance that they would have a mining operation going on not far from where we were.
But I'd made a serious mistake: I'd forgotten that we were travelling in Grey vehicles and that the Kerpians had only recently been fighting against Greys. When the militia unit guarding the mine saw us they saw only a Grey convoy headed by a truck being driven by a Grey, and so they opened fire on us. By the time they realised that we were harmless Marlo and one of the Grey boys were dead.
Once we had buried our dead we were able to return to Kerpia through the portal between the mine and their home country. We returned to Hintraten and found Mr Narj, who was able to send Torth and Sarleth, the two surviving Grey boys, though a temporary portal into the Grey world I had visited the previous year. He sent the rest of us to Strasbourg, where a permanent portal had been established between Kerpia and Elsass, and that took us back to our home world. But I'd been badly affected by the deaths that had happened while I was in charge of the party, and by that of Harlan, and so I decided I wouldn't ever use a portal again.
Sometimes, however, good intentions get overtaken by events ...
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