Rex reached in to the Ortrix
The other was there and Rex felt like he knew them more intimately than ever before.
“You’re beautiful”, he said.
"We were a race of amazing creatures", the other agreed.
Rex looked his companion in the eye.
“Can I bring you back? Stop it ever happening?”
"That's not why we brought you here."
He sensed the other watching him.
“This is you, isn’t it?” he asked, holding the Ortrix up.
{{% voiceinthedark %}}“In a manner of speaking,”{{% /voiceinthedark %}} replied the other in a way that sounded melancholy, even though it lacked tone.
“All the Torim below created this? Became this before they died?” asked Rex.
{{% voiceinthedark %}}“Instead of dying,”{{% /voiceinthedark %}} the other corrected, {{% voiceinthedark %}}“and not just the Torim below.”{{% /voiceinthedark %}}
{{% voiceinthedark %}}“Although the other Torim lived, what little power they possessed was a power they all shared”{{% /voiceinthedark %}}
“And now it’s all in the Ortrix?”
The Ortrix.
For an object that contained the essence of an entire race, it was underwhelmingly nondescript. It even lacked the ostentatious metalwork it would eventually pick up on its travels.
Rex felt the weight of it in his hand. Not just its mass - again it felt not-enough - but the weight of it’s future.
He could sense its journey from here, had seen it in reverse, and knew where it ended up.
If he concentrated, he could hear every soul that had created it.
But the Torim below survived.
Not as physical beings. Not when their bodies were forcibly taken. Reduced to so much ash and dust.
Not as minds. The Torim below had found a power that linked them deeper than that simple structure.
Not as a single being, but as an entity of thought and presence and power.
And in the caverns of Torim, an Ortrix.
“I recognise this world.”
“We came past here a little while ago, I think - but we were moving so fast I wasn’t paying attention.”
Rex was solid again and standing next to an enormous featureless skyscraper.
“The Ortrix will be here again some time in the future.”
He put his hand on the stonework of the building.
“These stones are enormous!”
Stepping back, he wandered away from the buildings to get a better look at it’s entirety.
“That’s no skyscraper,” he gasped, “that’s a stone hut!”
The Other travelled with him.
{{% voiceinthedark %}}What will you do with it when you have followed the Ortrix to it’s source?{{% /voiceinthedark %}}
Rex pondered.
“I suppose I’ll see if it can be destroyed, or use it in some way to take Jones’ power away from him again. If I can’t do that, maybe I can stop it being made in the first place.”
{{% voiceinthedark %}}A sound plan,{{% /voiceinthedark %}} his companion replied, {{% voiceinthedark %}}although perhaps more difficult than you expect.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}
“No doubt. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since I died, it’s that nothing worthwhile is easy.”
The pair sped on into the past.
{{% voiceinthedark %}}They are one and the same.{{% /voiceinthedark %}} \
{{% voiceinthedark %}}The power of the Torimbalo was used in the device you observe.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}
The thread Rex had followed hadn’t tapered out, so much as disappeared into itself through the time belt. Squeezing his consciousness through it, like yarn through a needle, he could see the thread emerge from the other end.
He followed it through to another time, pausing to get his bearing while the other slipped through after. As he tried to establish when he was, he noticed the thread looped back on itself and through the time belt again.
“This is going to take a while isn’t it?”
{{% voiceinthedark %}}You are searching for the Torimbalo.{{% /voiceinthedark %}}
“Well I still don’t know what that is,” corrected Rex, “I’m looking for the Ortrix right now.”
Rex continued his clumsy dance through time and space, following the temporally luminous thread of the Ortrix. The Other followed alongside.
On a nondescript planetoid, in a system that no longer existed, the thread unravelled.
Finding where it ended, Rex turned to his companion bewildered.
“This isn’t the Ortrix. This is the time belt!”
Rex crashed through the past.
Following the thread of time, he ricocheted around divergent moments trying to find one that would not alert Jones to his changes.
He found the threads increasingly intertwined about the presence of the Ortrix.
{{% voiceinthedark %}}Where are you headed Rex? {{% /voiceinthedark %}}
The voice of the other startled Rex enough that he misjudged a quantum event and plunged through the fusion-heat of a star seventy thousand years in the past.
“Shoot, man! Don’t do that,” he complained.
The fool!
The Ortrix was gone, slipped further out of his grasp. That idiot Mondex had botched the operation from the outset.
Jones sneered. He should have known not to trust someone who had failed so many times before. But desperate times take desperate means. It had taken six months, and half his fortune to track down the device he’d given Mondex and the imbecile had lost it, killed some time in the past.
When Rex had returned from the casino planet without the Ortrix it took every ounce of composure Jones could muster not to scream at him, or push him out a window. Then to insult him further the oaf couldn’t remember what he’d done with it!
He would have suspected treachery except he knew Havoc was an idiot without a treacherous bone in his body.
So he’d sent Mondex back to collect his prize before Rex could lose it and the moron had failed him. Likely gotten himself killed by a hover-bus. Now he was down a time travel belt, and one all-powerful superweapon.
To make matters worse, he had known of another time-travel belt - secreted away in The bumbling Professor’s lab. To assure his success, he’d blown up the lab and duplicate belt with it, just to ensure no one could stop him. He’d also spent another small fortune on that blasted memory device he’d used on The Professor. Six months wasted. He’d gladly give his fortune over again for the Ortrix, but to come full circle and be no closer to his goal irked him to no small measure.
Some days it just wasn’t worth plotting doom.
It stood to reason that Jones would be unhappy with him. He had shot him, a lot.
Then again, Jones had vapourised him from space, so they should be square. Not to mention Jones had betrayed him in the first place back on Manasar, and killed The Professor as well. By his count he owed Jones one.
What worried him now more than Jones finding him and releasing all that terrible power on him, was what he had been doing with his power before they’d touched. Jones clearly had a plan when they had gone to recover the Ortrix, and he wondered if dying had slowed him down at all. Maybe with all this power he’d have a new plan. Jones always did love a plan.
“What can I do?” he asked the ever-present Presence.