Pendulum: An Aes Sidhe Novel

by A. Omukai

  Her hands and feet felt numb. She couldn’t feel the piece of pine wood in her hands, her first time that a ritual hadn’t used up the paraphernalia.

  So, was it done?

  It sure had felt as if everything went the way it was meant to. Deirdre raised her eyes up to the ceiling of the grotto, but the cloud chasers were gone. The monolith next to her didn’t feel warm anymore now, and another fresh breeze made her teeth chatter. No idea how long she had stood here in the cold, motionless, with her already poor circulation, but she was frozen to the bone and needed to warm up. Using her hands to pick up the suit next to her seemed like an impossible task, but she didn’t have to. A friendly hand did it for her.

  The gate. Was it still there? She turned her head towards the spot where Cailean had appeared, and there it was, a dark green, shimmering bow of energy, slowly losing opacity, as if phasing out of existence, which it probably was.

  No time to lose now.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she croaked.

  A silent laugh. Then they walked together.

  Two, three steps, and… through.

  33

  Shock Wave

  Adams was watching the curve of the graph on the display rise and fall, rise and fall. I was really the weird way in which the values—

  Moans and sighs from several directions jarred him out of his thoughts. Not even two metres away, the tiny figure of Fionnlagh dropped out of the air, hit the console behind him. Then the artificial gravity malfunctioned, and the small body bounced off the metal like a ball. Adams’ feet lost contact with the ground and slowly drifted towards the ceiling.

  Chaos everywhere. Several crew members lost consciousness at the same time. Another Faerie whose name Adams didn’t know was stuck between his seat and a console. Mcguinness, a Lurikeen AI specialist working on something at the opposite side of the bridge. Sergeant Finnini, a huge Fir Bolg security officer, on his way through the bridge. Naomhan Sheenani, a Ghillie Dhu engineer. Too many other crew members to register in these few seconds of shock shared their fates. They had dropped where they had stood, and the lack of gravity catapulted them in all directions.

  Adams rotated around his axis, gave the seat below him a kick and sped up upward, where he turned around in the air, corrected his posture, then kicked the ceiling, with his trajectory leading directly toward Fionnlagh. His training in Zero-G finally bore fruit, even though this was not a happy occasion. He sailed for two metres, reached the Faerie, stretched out his hands and caught the tiny body, which had been rotating around itself just above the console.

  Adams was not a doctor, but he had basic medical knowledge. Enough at least to see that the small Faerie didn’t have any open wounds that needed immediate attention. Whether his body was fine internally was another question, one he couldn’t answer himself. He looked around. Lights, electronics, most basic systems didn’t seem to be affected. Whatever had just happened, had kicked only a very specific kind of system out of order, most prominently the artificial gravity system. It also affected several crew members, all of which had one thing in common.

  “Brilann, what has just happened?” Thornhill’s voice sounded surprised, but not shocked.

  Adams saw him sitting in this captain’s seat, attached to it safely. The old druid, however, who had stood behind him, as usual, clung to the back of the captain’s seat to not drift away. He, too, had lost contact with the ground. Was artificial gravity down everywhere? The second deck would be fine. A different system, based on centrifugal force, provided about half of Earth’s gravity there. The first deck of the ship though depended on the system that had just stopped working.

  “It… “Brilann’s voice trailed off.

  Whatever had hit them, he suffered from some of its fallout, too, but the old man was not completely unconscious. He shook his head in apparent confusion.

  “Brilann, are you all right?”

  Thornhill’s jaw muscles worked. He grabbed the druid’s robe and pulled him over. The old man moaned, then held onto his uniform. Words came out of his mouth, but Adams couldn’t understand anything. From the looks of his facial expression, neither did the captain.

  Fionnlagh groaned in Adams’ hands, but didn’t regain his consciousness yet. The one thing all those crew members had in common, was that they were all Aes Sidhe. The human crew appeared unaffected, apart from Brilann, and most of the normal ship systems seemed to function fine, which meant that the ship’s AI was okay, too. Something had happened unexpectedly, some kind of EMP-like burst for magic, not electronic devices.

  Adams activated his system and pulled up a status report. From the looks of it, gravity, heat dissipation, shielding and a handful of other non-critical systems were offline. All these things had one commonality, they all worked based on magic.

  Looking around, none of the crew members seemed to suffer from external injuries, as far as he could tell. What about the ship’s communication systems? He opened the communication program, then remembered that the ship’s doctor was a Faerie, too. He didn’t remember her name, but he knew she was a rather hot-blooded member of the Summer Court, seemingly not getting along with Fionnlagh at all. Adams had seen them argue several times. He called anyway, and a young medical staff member accepted the connection.

  “This is Adams, the xenobiologist, currently on the bridge. We might need some help here.”

  “Mr Adams, confirmed. This might take a bit. We are receiving similar requests from all over the ship.”

  The other side disconnected the call before he could answer. Adams wouldn’t have had anything noteworthy to say, anyway.

  So this problem wasn’t limited to the bridge, everyone on board felt the effects, at least all non-human members, and all systems that functioned on basis of, or partially with, magic. The druid stirred, and so did the Faerie in his hands. The tiny Otherworld creature wasn’t quite awake yet, but would be soon. Whatever had happened here, maybe it hadn’t put them in actual danger. Without knowing what had caused the problem, though, he couldn’t say anything for sure.

  Adams still hung about one metre above the ground when the gravity returned. He fell down like a stone where he had floated. Thankfully, it hadn’t been too high. From the sounds originating from various places on the bridge, not everybody had been this lucky. Some members of the crew had taken quite a dive. The small Faerie growled and his eyelids fluttered.

  “Magic,” the druid said. Adams still couldn’t understand the rest. This one word, however, told him that his assumption had been right. Whatever had disrupted them, it had to do with magic.

  “The fuck just happened!”

  Adams looked down on the Faerie who sat upright on the palm of his hand, cursing like a sailor.

  The xenobiologist grinned.

  “You sound like someone I know. I don’t know what’s up, was hoping you could tell me. All your fellow Aes Sidhe passed out, artificial gravity stopped, and several other systems, too.”

  “My head feels like a reactor containment field.”

  The druid had opened his eyes as well, but he kept staring into the distance, breathing heavily.

  “Brilann, are you hurt? Do you need medical attention?”

  The captain’s voice carried well, but the druid’s answer was too weak. Adams still couldn’t hear it, but the old man shook his head.

  Four med techs entered the bridge, droned and bots accompanied them. Two of them beelined for the Lurikeen, who still wasn’t conscious, while the other two parted ways. One of them marched over to the Fir Bolg, while the drones swarmed out and started diagnostic scans. The other came over to him. The young man nodded at Adams, then turned to Fionnlagh.

  “Your biometric control program sent an alarm. How are you feeling?”

  The Faerie snarled.

  “I’m good. Why don’t you tell your nosy boss I won’t let her lay her fingers on me?” He hesitated for a moment. “How’s she, anyway?”

  The med tech seemed to ignore him,
as he pointed a scanner unit at him and waved a bot over. The small machine rolled closer without a noise.

  The Faerie took off from Adams’ hand and fluttered upward towards the ceiling.

  “Sorry, boy. I got work to do.”

  With these words, he disappeared.

  The young medtech frowned, then walked to his colleagues.

  “There was a large outbreak on the planet,” Brilann said.

  His face looked as pale as his wide-open eyes.

  “My… my gravitational spell got uprooted. I have to get to my quarters soon, or it will become unstable.”

  Captain Thornhill nodded, his lips a thin line in his calm face.

  “Radiation shielding is offline. The outer walls will protect us for now, but as soon as the sun flares up… “

  “Yes, shields have top priority, I’ll go down to the engineering section as soon as I’m done stabilizing the… “gravity spell. There’s something else though.”

  Thornhill raised his eyebrows, while his fingers raced over a virtual keyboard.

  “Deirdre MacBreen, her last message was very unsettling. I need to know what happened to the women.”

  Adams nodded. He wanted to know more, too. Had the shock wave originated from Gliese 667 Cc? If so, they had been directly at the epicentre of the phenomenon that had knocked every magical creature and every spell out over this distance. Could they have survived it?

  34

  Return to Gliese 667

  The Tuatha De Danann glided through the triple system without causing a sound. Below her hung a brown planet with large, white clouds separating space from the surface. Gliese 667 Cc spun slowly around on its axis, basking in the light of three suns. Two more planets were close and neared apsis, the closest position to each other for a long time.

  Repairs had been completed a while ago, and Adams had moved back into his old laboratory, now an empty room. It had taken a while to move all the equipment from his temporary places back where it belonged.

  Almost a year had passed since the shock wave, and Brilann had insisted in timing their approach just so they’d reach a high orbit around the planet now. The apsis had been a welcome bonus for some of his colleagues.

  Adams himself hadn’t had another chance to apply his expertise on planet C. The small landing boat they had repaired had taken him to both F and D. Planet F had been usable around the terminator and was now open for colonisation, if they ever got home to report it. C had stayed untouched since that incident. That would change today.

  “Incoming call.”

  Adams whirled around and stared at Fionnlagh. A glance around the bridge told him he was not the only one. The Faerie was the center of attention.

  “On the screen,” the captain answered.

  Fionnlagh swung around again, a hand’s breadth above the comm console, and operated the controls.

  A slender face appeared on the screen. Serious green eyes stared into the camera on the other side of the connection, a strand of white hair amidst a flood of red. Adams gasped.

  “Lieutenant MacBreen and Sergeant Ailbhe back on Gliese 667 Cc, ready to return on board.”

  Adams didn’t have words. His throat was tight.

  “Glad to see your face, lieutenant. Stay where you are, we’ll send a transporter to your location and pick you up.”

  The captain’s voice didn’t betray any emotion. If he felt anything, Adams couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Roger.”

  Thornhill nodded to Fionnlagh, and the communication cut out.

  Not even a breath was audible on the bridge of the Tuatha De Danann.

  Adams looked at Brilann. The oak seer’s fingers gripped the back of the captain’s set, his white knuckles caught Adams’ eye.

  ***

  “What? How long have we been gone?” Deirdre needed to hear it again.

  “It’s November seven.”

  Deirdre and Ailbhe exchanged a glance. First Sergeant Carmag nodded.

  “What did you think about how long you spent over there?”

  “A few minutes,” Deirdre said. They had stepped out of the gate, sat down and gotten their act together, then returned right away. Deirdre had wanted to see the results of her ritual.

  “Time doesn’t flow so much slower everywhere. You must have landed somewhere close to Tir Tairngire.”

  Deirdre shrugged. She had never been in the Otherworld for more than a second, just opened a gate, then returned immediately.

  “I was in Tir Tairngire once. Time doesn’t matter over there, so I didn’t pay attention,” Ailbhe said. Reading her facial expression was absolutely impossible. She didn’t show her emotions, and her bark-like skin wasn’t a good mirror, anyway.

  “I have order to bring you back on board, where you’ll be brought to the med station immediately. I even brought you new suits to change into.”

  The boat that picked them up was a slower version of the transporter they had come with. It looked like a new construction.

  “Have you been in the system for eleven months?”

  The Faerie nodded. “Nowhere we could go. The Tuatha De Danann depends on you for long distances. Don’t worry, nobody will blame you for it.”

  Deirdre’s eyes wandered over the silvery surface of her home of these last days.

  “The Wisp is in better condition than I’d have expected. I thought I’d be half-eaten after all these months.”

  “I know nothing about that. There’s another expedition here planned, but as far as I know, that’s on ice until after your report.”

  Deirdre nodded. She’d have to stop them from doing that. She could stop the disaster on this planet once and didn’t feel like doing it again.

  ***

  Brilann stood right behind the seat of the captain, his eyes on Deirdre’s spirit body. His eyes were expressionless, but concentration drew wrinkles on his face.

  Cailean sat next to the oak seer, the Cat Sidhe on his other side.

  Adams stood with his back against his seat, his arms folded. While his eyes pointed nowhere in particular, and seemed to wander about, Deirdre felt them laying on her.

  The Winter Court Faerie floated over his console, as usual, his gaze fixated on a small display, his fingers in rapid motion, watching various scanners simultaneously.

  Another Faerie was on the bridge, her wings, hair and eyes in a flaming orange-red. Aislinn, the doctor of the ship, had insisted on being here during the ritual. She hadn’t let Deirdre escape her supervision since she had seen the blue symbiont inside her lungs. Deirdre had assured her repeatedly that she felt great again, and she had spent two weeks in quarantine, but the Faerie stayed obstinate. So much so that she didn’t even pay attention to Fionnlagh, a rare occurrence.

  Deirdre saw all this from above. Eight cloud chasers rotated lazily over her and provided her with a bird’s-eye view.

  She refocused her attention on the destination — Earth. The energies flew through her stem into her cap, and the piece of pinewood in her hands vibrated as if in anticipation.

  A last look around. There was no more reason to wait. Evoking Gwyar was effortless, and the dark blue colour of the ocean filled her mind completely. No need for mantras anymore. The energy flew into the pinewood and assumed the shape of the spell without her even having to focus on it anymore.

  There it was, the gate.

  Deirdre took a deep breath.

  The End

  About the Author

  A. Omukai was born in June 1975. He is finding it odd to write about himself in third person, but will continue to do so, because someone somewhere once decided that that’s the way to do it.

  Originally of European descent, he fled to Japan many moons ago. His first finished, but thankfully never published manuscript was a terrible pulp story of about 20.000 words about a demon hunter. His love for books and the hole in his heart whenever he finished one, drove him to sit down and do it himself. These days, he’s a language teacher at a high school by day, and
creator of worlds by night. He still loves to read, rediscovered his love for writing after years spent playing too many computer games instead of putting words down. He still looks longingly at this or that game from time to time, but these days, playing god in a text document is more fun for him.

  You can connect with me on:

  https://www.aomukai.com