Chronicle of Nautilus

Chapter 20: The Break-in

A tall bald masculine man in black tights opened a door, he was wearing a backpack.

 He could not remember touching the entrance controls. He could not even remember how he got to this place nor what he did yesterday or a week ago. The name of this man was Simons and he was living in the present.

He stepped into a wide greyish corridor. A strange sense of achievement filled him. He knew, he had come here for a reason and each step forward was a step closer to his goal. He knew that this corridor was not to be underestimated, its emptiness was an illusion, there laid many traps ahead of him.

“Stop and identify yourself!” a loud woman’s voice echoed in the corridor.

Simons ignored it, took a few steps forward and stopped. The sixth sense he had was strong, it came from the memories he once had. A trap laid just a few steps ahead of him.

He put the backpack on the ground, took out a couple of small steel balls and threw them to the front. The sound of their hard surfaces hitting the ground filled the room. They rolled for a few meters and after a flash of light they were gone.  The light resonated from the places the balls had hit the invisible wall and rippled to all directions of its plane.

Had he not stopped a few steps before, only a pile of ash would be left from him. Simons did not need to inspect the wall. He knew what was needed to be done. He knew this place as if he had lived here for a long time, only he didn’t.

He took out a stick made from transparent material and put his backpack back on his shoulders. He carefully took a few steps closer to the barrier, extended the stick and touched the wall. The wall rippled again, the ripples extended into all directions as the last time, only now they went through the whole length of the stick as well. After the light filled the stick and the transparence of the gadget went away, slowly its color turned into deep black. Simons took a few steps back and threw the stick into the wall. As it hit the wall it left a black hole at the piercing point and turned to smoke. The hole expanded, gaining momentum quickly. The blackness was feeding on the barrier and soon the transparent barrier turned into a black wall and the black wall turned into nothingness. The path was clear.

Simons walked forward, holding his right hand behind his back just below the backpack.

“Who are you? State your business!” The woman’s voice shouted at him through the loudspeakers.

The intruder started running. He approximated that a hundred meters distance was between him and the door in front. He had already forgotten about the explosive entrance into the building, about the wall he just passed and about the woman’s voice he just heard, he did not feel disturbed, the past was irrelevant. What was important was to make it to his goal, whatever it might be, alive.

Two levitating drones approached him from both sides. He pulled out a gun he was already holding behind his back. The drones launched a few beams of light; Simons jumped up and gracefully dodged them in the air. After landing he did not stop running, he gunned down the drones without much effort. Simons was slightly surprised – the shooting skill did not seem natural, he felt as if he had underwent multiple target practices, but had he?

Two more drones approached him. He took them down before they could launch their projectiles. Now the difficult part lay ahead. He put the gun back to its place and grabbed an acid grenade from the other side of the backpack. He took of the safety, pushed the button and threw it as hard as he could; the strength of his throw was greater than he had anticipated. As the grenade flew closer and closer to the door, a blue thin horizontal light beams formed behind it. These beams, he knew, couldn’t be neutralized by the tools in his possession, they needed to be dodged. The grenade hit the metal door and the acid cracked its surface.