Mythicals

by Dennis Meredith

  Mike grinned and chuckled. “Maybe you should poke harder,” as the man shrank away in shock.

  The others, however, maintained their distance, until the gang parted, and Bardolph emerged, wielding his rifle. He shouted a command, which James translated into English as, “You will all die as these did! You come to our land, you kill our people!”

  Bardolph raised his rifle, and his men followed, leveling their weapons at the group.

  “Tell him we killed no one,” said Jack, and James translated. “Tell him we brought him a gift.”

  A dozen rifles trained on them, Jack gestured to Mike, who fetched a blanket-wrapped object from the carrier and pitched it to the ground before the warlord. The ogre ripped away the blanket to reveal the shark-gnawed head of Flaktuckmetang, his staring eyes milky, his jaws gaping in death rictus.

  Jack kicked at the head. “This is the creature that killed your people. This was all that was left after a shark got him. We offer you revenge. We offer you justice.”

  The warlord stared at the water-soaked head for a long moment, then transferred his impassive gaze to Jack. Jack held his ground, not sure whether the next moment would bring permission to pass or a hail of bullets.

  Finally, the scarred, hulking man lowered his rifle, and saying nothing, waved his hand at his gang.

  The crowd in front of the carrier parted, and Jack and the others boarded the vehicle. The elf eased the carrier slowly forward past them, then once clear, gunned it back toward the highway.

  “I figured the werewolf’s head would come in handy,” said Jack, as they slumped, relieved in the carrier’s passenger compartment.

  After a day speeding across the barren, gray landscape, constantly vigilant for other gangs, they reached the rusted steel gates of the walled Pilgrim compound.

  From the guardhouses atop the concrete walls, machine guns swiveled around to bear on them, and the sound of their bolts being snapped echoed down.

  James and Louisa climbed out of the carrier and stood before the gate.

  James issued a challenge. “You know we hold the key to your future,” he declared. “Only we can disarm the destruct mechanism and allow you to escape to Thera. Open up, or you will die with Earth.”

  After a long moment came the clank of the gates being unlocked, and the whine of their electric motors as they swung ponderously open. James and Louisa walked through, followed by the carrier.

  Inside, they found themselves proceeding between two ranks of heavily armed Pilgrims. The colonel commanding the compound stepped forward, his expression one of barely contained fury.

  “You will release the controls!” he commanded. “You will return the wormhole to functionality.”

  “Of course,” said James matter-of-factly. “We are Pilgrims, too. We just could not agree with what the leadership planned . . . joining with those monsters to kill billions of innocent Therans. We will ensure that all Pilgrims . . . here and at the other compounds around the globe . . . can transit safely to our new home.”

  After a long moment, the captain curtly issued a command dispatching the four men to accompany the group to the wormhole, where James and Louisa began operating the controls to prepare it for transit.

  As they typed commands into the console, the main view screen came to life, showing the gently curved surface of Thera far below. James and Louisa plotted a course that would bring the wormhole down from orbital height to the planet surface—specifically, to the Califanan defense center.

  The wormhole began to descend, and the Theran landscape loomed closer, the defense center appearing on the view screen. It was a sprawling array of windowless, one-story buildings, surrounded by tanks and troop transports.

  Geniato and Meri embraced, relieved to be home. Jack put his arm around Sam—a bit diffidently, given that he had witnessed this petite, beautiful pixie decimate a cadre of burly, well-armed soldiers. But she nestled against him, warmly affectionate. She brought up his bandaged hand that had been wounded by his grip on the glass shard that had wounded the werewolf. She unwrapped the bandage and began to kiss it lightly, and Jack felt a strange tingling, as his torn flesh began to heal itself.

  Finally, the wormhole had settled near the ground, and James operated controls to magnetically warp one section into a flat surface that would allow safe passage.

  The wormhole’s ladder extended, and they all made their way down, with E’iouy going first, given that he needed medical attention. Indeed, A’eiio was waiting anxiously, her slim figure now rounder with her pregnancy. They embraced, their wings wafting back and forth in the pleasure of their touch.

  Jack, Sam, Geniato, Meri, and Mike all took their turns climbing down onto the Theran surface. The defense minister met them, making arrangements for a debriefing and a meeting with his country’s president.

  But Jack left them to greet A’eiio, and make sure she was well, and her unborn babies healthy. After a warm embrace, he saw them over to another waiting wormhole—the fairies’—and up its ladder. On the other side was the fairy terminal, where E’iouy could be transported to a medical facility to receive treatment for his injured wing.

  But when Jack turned back to the Pilgrim wormhole floating nearby, his brow knitted in unease. Something wasn’t right.

  “My mother and father . . .” he began worriedly, shaking his head. “They should have followed us through.”

  He started back toward the wormhole, when the ladder abruptly retracted, and with the stunning acceleration, the wormhole vaulted into the sky, speeding away so quickly that in only seconds, it shrank to a small orb, then to a dot, then to nothing.

  “MY GOD!” exclaimed Jack, as the others also shouted in alarm. “WHAT HAPPENED?”

  • • •

  “You thought I was dead,” said Roberson, standing beside the wormhole control console on the Earth side. He aimed his pistol at James and Louisa. “You thought the codes were gone. You thought you had won. All wrong.”

  He leaned heavily against the console, favoring the wounded leg he had bandaged with rags. He panted in bone-deep pain; the narcotics he had demanded from the Pilgrims hadn’t yet kicked in. His right arm and the right side of his face were both blistered from the fire that had engulfed the carrier, as he leaped out of it and into the clutches of the warlord’s men.

  Even as his uniform had smoldered, he had shot three, slashed the throats of two more, and taken a bullet to the leg before he had reached the motorcycle of one of the warlord’s men. He had leaped on, and hunkering down to avoid the hail of bullets, sped away across the mud flats.

  Compared to that escape, he’d had little problem scaling the wall of the Pilgrim compound, killing four guards, and making it into the wormhole control room.

  Now, he loomed over James and Louisa, having demanded that they pilot the wormhole away from its landing spot on Thera.

  He had ordered the colonel and the other Pilgrims out of the building. They readily complied, given that he had slapped an explosive charge onto the control panel and held the trigger in his hand. And it was a dead-man’s switch. If he released it, or lost consciousness, the building would be obliterated and the wormhole closed.

  In fact, the colonel was just as happy to comply, because the mercenary wanted the wormhole directed to a destination that was perfectly fine with the colonel—the Pilgrim colony in the Confederated States.

  “What do you think you will do?” asked James, his gaze intent on the controls, as the wormhole plummeted toward Thera.

  “What I was contracted to do. I’ll have the techs at the colony check the trigger codes . . . make sure they’ll actually activate the generators. Then, we will all take a trip into orbit. And Thera will suffer the consequences.”

  “Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?” The defense minister repeated the question over and over, as much to himself as to the others crowded into the Califanan defense center. A crowd of Theran scientists, Mythicals, and one lone human—Jack—stared desperately at the large v
iew screens, as elf, troll, and Theran technicians worked feverishly at the monitoring consoles to find the Pilgrim wormhole.

  “Can’t we find it?” asked Jack grimly. “We know how to detect a wormhole. We have the electromagnetic signature.”

  Scrutinizing his console, Ryan skrittered an answer, which Sam translated as, “He says the problem is that the sensors can’t differentiate among wormholes. There’s no fingerprint that identifies the Pilgrim wormhole. To the sensors, the fairy wormhole outside this building looks just like the Pilgrim wormhole.”

  From another console, Steve said, “We’re trying a process of elimination. We are notifying the Wardens to take the Mythicals apertures to orbital height. The Pilgrim one will be the only one left on the planet.”

  “Assuming the Pilgrim wormhole is on the planet,” said Jack.

  A’eiio and E’iouy entered the hall, E’iouy’s injured wing wrapped in a clear bandage. A’eiio gently clasped Jack’s shoulder.

  “Your parents. Would they have done this?”

  “No, I think something happened on the Earth side,” he replied. “I don’t know what.”

  “There!” exclaimed the troll, and he punched a button to bring up, on one of the wall view screens, a satellite image of a Theran forest showing the familiar layout of the Pilgrim compound in the Confederated States. The shimmering image of a wormhole was visible in a clearing near a large barn.

  “Zoom in,” commanded the defense minister. “We need to know what’s going on.”

  The image magnified, to reveal several figures surrounding the wormhole, setting what looked like spacesuits beside the ladder, in preparation for loading.

  “Why would they need those?” asked the minister.

  “Obvious,” said E’iouy. “They are planning spacewalks. The only reason they would do that is if they were going to trigger the remaining EMP generators.”

  “But that’s not possible,” said Jack. “They don’t—” he stopped, staring intently at the screen.

  On the satellite view, several figures emerged from the large barn, one limping.

  “Roberson! The mercenary!” exclaimed Jack. “He survived the warlord attack!”

  “And he must have saved the trigger codes. They’re going to activate the generators!”

  The defense minister sat heavily into a chair. “It would mean disaster,” he said. “We were not able to destroy enough of them. The Theran mercenaries and their allies prevented it. They could trigger a generator and redeploy over another region . . . over and over. They could destroy our civilization.”

  “We have missiles,” declared one of the generals. “We have the wormhole outside. We could have the missiles on station instantly. We could launch within an hour . . . close the Pilgrim wormhole!”

  “No!” declared Jack. “My parents are on the other side. And as much as the Pilgrims have done against us, we cannot simply kill them.”

  “Well, then, do you have an alternative?” shot back the defense minister. Without waiting for a reply, he turned to the general and ordered him to ask the fairy Warden to use their wormhole to transport missiles to orbit.

  Jack shook his head in impotent frustration. “Even if you did attempt to come within range of the wormhole, remember they know how to detect them, as well. They’ll immediately pilot the wormhole out of range, and Thera will be lost.”

  “Then what?” asked the minister.

  Jack sat at a console, rubbing his face, thinking. He needed a way to get near enough to the wormhole without triggering an attempt to escape. It had to be an approach that seemed benign to the Pilgrims.

  And he needed a way to disrupt the precisely controlled magnetic fields that maintained the wormhole stability. The disruption need not be violent. Even a minor magnetic instability could destabilize and close the wormhole. Even though it would mean the loss of his own parents.

  As an engineer, he tried to focus on closing the wormhole as an engineering problem. Since magnetic fields maintained the wormholes, his analysis drew on his understanding of electromagnetic equations . . . electromagnetic induction. That seemed promising—creating an electrical field using electromagnetic induction.

  The room had grown heavy with tension, quiet except for low, urgent chatter among the elves, trolls, and Therans at the consoles.

  Abruptly, Jack sat up straight, then leaped from the chair. “I think I know how to close the wormhole!” he exclaimed, turning to A’eiio and E’iouy, and leading them over to confer with Wendy.

  “I need all the fairies, and all the angels you can possibly muster,” he said. “I need you to gather them on the other side of the fairy wormhole . . . to prepare for transport to the Pilgrim colony.”

  At first the fairies and the angel shook their head in puzzlement. But as Jack outlined his plan of attack, and as its logic dawned on them, they began to smile and nod. They left immediately to contact their Wardens.

  Jack next approached the general. He sketched a set of engineering specifications on a tablet computer, showing it to the general before transmitting it to him.

  “Produce as many of these devices as you can make,” he declared.

  “But this is ridiculous!” exclaimed the general, staring with consternation at his own tablet. “How can these possibly be used as weapons?”

  “Payloads,” said Jack. “Payloads carried by fairies and angels.”

  “What can they possibly do? They can’t possibly close a wormhole!”

  “That’s exactly what the Pilgrims will think.”

  • • •

  His face and arm bandaged, Roberson leaned over the console, scrutinizing the display showing the Theran globe. An array of red dots arrayed around the planet marked the positions of the remaining EMP generators.

  “You’re sure you can program a fire-and-reposition sequence?” he asked the technician.

  “Absolutely,” replied the young mercenary. “We experimented on a spare generator we found in the werewolf base . . . and used the information from the captive soldiers on their system. That gave us enough knowledge to automate the whole process.”

  “By automate you mean . . . ?” asked Christopher, who had joined them with the Clark brothers.

  “We’ve enhanced the activation codes Captain Roberson brought us,” said the technician. “Once a generator is triggered to unleash its pulse, it will automatically shift orbit to target another region . . . pulse again . . . then shift again.”

  “And all the regions of the planet are covered,” said Roberson.

  “Each generator has its own assigned targets. The impact on the planet will be as if none of the generators was destroyed.”

  “So, now we launch the wormhole to rendezvous with the generators to reprogram them,” said Roberson.

  “We have an intrusion!” exclaimed another technician, pointing to one of the security camera screens. It showed an array of glimmers in the sky of sunlight reflected off shimmering wings.

  Roberson and the others rushed outside to see a fairy fluttering smoothly into a landing near the barn, his silver hair wafted by the breeze from his wings. He stood quietly, as he was surrounded by rifle-wielding soldiers. Given that he was naked, he clearly carried no weapons, so Christopher waved off the soldiers and approached him.

  E’iouy opened his arms in a gesture of surrender.

  “I see your wing is damaged,” said Roberson. “You are the one who attacked me and my men.”

  “I am,” said E’iouy. “But we were only trying to save the beast’s captive. And our purpose was only to stop you from injuring the young girl we were protecting. We injured none of your men. And you got your trigger codes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “As you know, all Mythicals are trapped here . . . when you closed our apertures.”

  “And why should we care?” asked Nathan Clark. “Why should we not let you perish along with the Therans?”

  “We have technology you do not,” said E’iouy. “In return
for keeping us safe, we will offer our expertise.”

  “You will offer only revenge . . . ,” spat Roberson, “. . . revenge for marooning you here. We should just kill you. Another enemy neutralized.”

  Christopher waved his hand in dismissal. “Captain Roberson, I understand that as a soldier you see that as a valid tactic. But it is not a valid strategy. What harm can these creatures possibly do?”

  “Yes, what harm?” asked A’eiio. “And, we also can give you a human you have sought . . . Jack March. You have his parents.”

  “We do,” said Christopher. “They are traitors. They will die.”

  “He is willing to trade his life for theirs.”

  Christopher and the Clark brothers moved away to confer, quietly arguing among themselves, glancing periodically back at the fairy.

  When they returned, Christopher nodded his assent.

  “And where are his parents?” asked E’iouy.

  “Nearby,” answered Christopher. “Over in the colony. In a room . . . guarded.”

  “They are not on the Earth side?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” said E’iouy. He touched his finger to an earpiece, announcing into it, “They are here.”

  “INTRUSION!” shouted the tech monitoring the security cameras. “MASSIVE!”

  Roberson and the others leaped to the screens, to see a sky alive with flying creatures.

  “Mobilize everyone!” exclaimed Christopher, and they rushed outside, as if not believing what appeared on the screens.

  They were immersed in the whir of fairy wings and the whoosh of angel wings. Above them, swooping, wheeling, and banking overhead, filling the sky, flew hundreds of fairies, hundreds of angels.

  • • •

  “What is happening?” demanded Christopher. “What are these creatures doing?”

  E’iouy did not answer, instead launching himself to soar upward, joining the throng.

  “Is this an attack?” he demanded of Roberson.

  “If it were an attack, there would be other species,” replied the mercenary. “True, these creatures can do battle, but not effectively.”