Ozzie’s slaps were a distraction now. Even Helen’s teeth in her neck were a distraction. Mike was not dead. Helen had vanished in exactly the same way he had when she crossed over into this place. It was all the confirmation Kim needed. On a hunch, she opened a realmspace channel. “Sellars, you out there?”
“I was wondering when you’d remember my number.”
She didn’t have time for snark, either. “Now would be a good time to do something.”
“Close your eyes.”
Even with them closed the flash of an explosion nearly blinded her. The overpressure pushed the air out of her lungs and she went flying. Instead of crashing into a wall or the ground, a new kind of force dropped her gently onto her feet. The entire space had gone from near black to brilliant white, like the echoes of a camera flash. Ozzie was flat on his back in the far distance. She could only just make out his boots, and Helen was nowhere to be seen.
“You’re not the only one who can cook,” Mike said.
Blowing the whole space up in Ozzie’s face might actually beat him. “Can you do that again?”
“Not any time soon. I discharged this dimension’s zero-point energy at him all at once. It’ll take a while for that to come back.”
Finally, Mike being a know-it-all was an advantage. “Where are we?”
“An interstitial dimension. String theory gets another confirm-ation!”
He could also get obscure at inconvenient times. “And that means?”
“It’s how Helen and I can inhabit realspace bodies. Our consciousness channels through them. Your consciousness channels through them, but in different directions. I didn’t count on an interstitial dimension being big enough for anything with real mass to go through it. You should’ve told me more details about when you were here the first time.”
She’d been recovering from a psychotic break back then. “I didn’t think this place was real.”
“It is. We’re everywhere at once in here, with Cartesian coordinates at any rate. I think. I’m not much past the pull this string make world go bang stage right now.”
Ozzie moved again as the rest of the space faded to its more familiar static-charged blackness. “Enough with the theories. What else have you got for me?”
“You mentioned you were cold.”
Well, she wasn’t actually, but some sort of protection would be nice.
A cloud of particles swirled out of nowhere and surrounded her. Armor plates strapped themselves around her legs, arms, chest, and back. A round shield landed in her left hand, while a spear filled her right. The helmet that came down over her head had extensions that covered her cheeks and nose. It wasn’t the same armor she wore in the tournament realm. Less Joan of Arc, more Hoplite. A definite upgrade from bare skin.
Mike said, “It’s made of the stuff of this place, just like his armor. Ozzie’s a bastard but he’s clever. And now to complete the look.”
Kim flinched when the biggest owl she’d ever seen landed with a thump on her shoulder. It hadn’t made a sound, but had to be at least the size of an eagle.
Mike said, “It’s not as cool as a dragon, but I’ll be a lot more useful.”
No way. “That’s you?” She could feel his weight on her shoulder. He could touch her, and that meant… Kim immediately shucked a glove off and gently ran her finger along a wing. It was soft and warm. He had a light, sweet scent.
“That’s weird,” he said. “I can feel the wing moving, but I can’t feel your touch.”
He was flying around as a giant owl and the thing that caught his attention was that he couldn’t feel her touching him. It was typical, but she couldn’t stop a smile.
“Why an owl?”
“I honestly don’t know. When I manifested, this is what I ended up with. I can probably do other shapes, but we don’t have the time to figure that out. You need to put your gauntlet back on, we’ve got company.”
Ozzie closed the distance. She watched him and as she did her vision changed. She could now see walls and obstacles. “I can see this place now. Are you doing that?” she asked. Strategies Kim would never have known were possible immediately came to mind. Maybe she didn’t need to blow Ozzie up to beat him now.
“Yes. The enhanced vision is an area effect. I don’t have to touch you for it to work, but I don’t know the range. I’ll try not to go too far.”
“You’re not leaving me again, Sellars. I won’t let you.” Ever.
Ozzie ran toward a freestanding crack a few degrees to her left and several hundred yards in front of her.
Mike said, “Shield up and to the right.”
Kim hid behind the shield just as Ozzie vanished through the crack. He reappeared not ten feet away with Helen coiled around his chest. She breathed a gout of fire against Kim’s shield. Kim brought her spear around underhanded and rammed it into Ozzie’s chest. His armor held, but the motion of the thrust combined with the flex of the shaft flung him into the air.
Mike said, “Follow it up with a blast.” Power rushed into her and she blasted it through the tip of the spear. Ozzie bounced like a can shot with a pistol.
Kim laughed. “I like it!”
“It’s what we do here, me and Helen. I can’t pretend to understand why, but in here, I’m a conduit. We both are. I’ll give you more power and better control of it. Ozzie’s thinking is too literal; he’s not taking any real advantage of Helen’s abilities. He learned how to make things in here and then never tried anything else.”
“Breathing fire seems like an ability to me.”
“It’s not, not really, not compared to what I’m doing. She’s not channeling power and she’s not helping him see. It probably never occurred to him to ask her. I’ll bet he spent the entire time in here practicing Kung-Fu moves after he died.”
Which implied Mike understood how Ozzie was here in the first place. “You’re sure he’s dead?”
“Yes, and that’s a problem. The rest of us still have anchors in realspace, but he doesn’t. Your cuts and bruises? They’re happening outside. I can’t explain that either, but I’m just about certain it means we can die, and he can’t.”
It couldn’t be that desperate. “I’ve hurt him a couple of times.”
“Yeah, I think that’s the strategy we should go for: knock him out and then run like hell. We can’t get out safely until he’s down. We’ll figure out how to stop him from realspace. Start a left hand sweep with your spear and then jump over that wall.”
The waist-high barrier flashed briefly. Mike channeled more power through her, making her faster than she normally was in the realms. The jump was higher than she anticipated and it made her mistime the swing. Correcting it got harder when she fell through and down turned into sideways. She had to hop to stay on her feet. Ozzie ducked in time to save his neck from the spear but she still managed to slice a chunk of shoulder armor clean off. She followed up with a spin-kick to the back of his head.
As he hit the floor, Helen landed on Kim’s back and grabbed through gaps in her armor. The claws hurt like hell.
Helen bellowed and the weight on Kim’s back vanished. Mike flew off with scales falling from his talons as Kim rolled away from Ozzie. Helen twisted in Mike’s grip and breathed fire at him, but he vanished and landed once more on Kim’s shoulder. She spun just in time to parry Ozzie’s spear thrust and then knocked him away with a power bolt.
He jumped up to his feet, this time not smoking.
Oh good, he’s adapting.
It was going to be a very long fight.
Chapter 59: Spencer
They were on the wrong side of the world, not just a different time zone but a different goddamned day. Didn’t matter. The patch cord let him hook his US phone, which was still connected to realmspace on the other side of the Great Firewall, to the private realm in the lab. It formed a bridge between the two. All he had to say was Kim and Mike are in trouble.
Warhawk’s Raiders, the same team that helped him rescue them from Watcht
ell, came running. If there was a real fight, latency would be an issue for everyone but him. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. It was dumb luck he could connect his US phone to the private realm at all. Whoever ran this compound hadn’t configured their network to require specific RSIM card types—it didn’t ban his phone.
He led them down Helen’s connection trace and ended up in a dungeon realm straight out of a Frankenstein revival. Their demolitions expert, an old ex-Marine named Paul, pointed to a hole in the opposite wall. “Something coming in from the outside made that.” He went up to examine it.
Spencer’s hacking crew set to work on the machine constructs in the room. Chun said, “They were building an n-fold, using whatever was strapped into that.” She pointed at a bed construct that had the melted remains of some sort of cage sagging around it.
“Hey, everyone,” Paul said from the edge of the hole, “come look at this.”
The space on the other side was unlike anything Spencer had ever seen. Dark static would sometimes make it look endless, and then other times clearly showed walls and passageways. In the distance two figures, one colored with gold and red light and the other with purple and silver, fought with blasts of lightning and sheets of flame.
Someone faintly called his name. “Spencer!”
Even at a distance he knew that voice. “Fee? Where are you?”
“In a different realm on the other side of this fight. You have to come over. Zoe needs help.”
“How’d Zoe get out here?”
“It doesn’t matter, Spencer. We need you if you want to save Mike and Kim.”
Paul shrugged and said, “It’s not like this realm goes anywhere else.” He stood up, cut loose with a howl, and jumped through. His voice was distant, faint, but still clear. “What are you waiting for? Into the garbage chute, flyboys!”
Spencer rushed through first and then stumbled as his feet hit a catwalk far above the floor of a cave. Thousands and thousands of glowing blue figures stood in neat rows below them, singing a single note that filled the realm. He got out of the way as everyone else came through.
Fee was there, waiting on him. “We need to get everyone into the control room.”
She explained it all on the way, but that didn’t mean it made any sense. Ozzie’s psyche or soul or consciousness was supported by the combined efforts of all the unduplicate AIs down below. The whole thing flowed, somehow, through Zoe.
The door to the control room opened and there she was, trapped in a column of golden light smack dab in the middle of the floor. Zoe in trouble again. What a surprise.
“I told Mike getting rid of all your trackers was a big a mistake.”
“Snark much, Spence? How about a little help?”
The team sat down in front of the consoles. “It’s all networked together,” Chun said. “One person can control it.”
“One person does control it,” Fee said. “It’s Ozzie. Can you break in?”
“Not from here, not exactly.” A wire-frame map appeared. “We need a haptic overspike of six point five Ralls on this control nexus.” A room two floors down was highlighted.
Demolition was one of their specialties. “Paul, you’re up. Time to go break things.”
“Hot damn. Come on boys, you’re with me.” Paul and three other Raiders ran down a corridor.
Spencer asked, “If this is all keeping Ozzie alive, what happens if we pop Zoe out?”
Chun tapped a few more keys. “We’ll find out after Paul does his work.”
Waiting sucked, but he had to let Paul do his job. A bang finally echoed down the hall.
“We’re in,” Chun said. They all started working furiously at the construct consoles.
Paul tromped into the room. “What else needs exploding around here?”
If only it was that easy. Spencer didn’t look up from the screens. “One thing at a time.”
Chun said, “Okay. Spencer, Fee, we’re ready. When the lights go out, yank her away from there.”
They stood on either side of the cylinder. Chun counted down. “Three, two, one.”
The column of light vanished and they yanked Zoe out so hard all three of them fell to the floor.
“Well,” Spencer asked as he got up, “did it work?”
Everyone talked at once, working at their consoles. “No,” Chun pointed at a monitor. On it, Kim leapt into the air firing balls of lightning through her spear at Ozzie. “He’s still out there.”
Jen, working a different console, said, “He doesn’t need Zoe anymore. I found an alternate command tree. Spencer, do you know anyone named Helen?”
Chapter 60: Tonya
This was worse than an ER rotation. Tonya bandaged a cut on Mike, treated a burn on Kim, and then turned around to find another injury on Mike. Kim’s shoulder dislocated all by itself at one point. Realmspace never did that; it was designed not to do that. Tonya reset it anyway, but only because Kim couldn’t feel anything like this.
“Hang in there, girl.” Tonya stroked her cheek. “You gotta come back to us.”
It didn’t help that she had to keep prepping for Chang’s arrival. The building was big and enough like a hospital to get normal people lost. But Chang wasn’t normal people, and neither was her luck. She had to do as much as she could to make her own. The room didn’t have any actual weapons, but there was enough gear she was familiar with to make an effort at it. An oxygen tank here, a little bit of Velcro there, soon you were looking at…well, it might end up being a weapon.
Tonya searched the other rooms. Her first break was a crate of cold packs. They were bigger than anything she’d seen back home, maybe a couple of pounds each. Most importantly they were the same design Tonya had used in a chemistry experiment during a slow night on a critical care rotation back home. Tonya had still been in school, so the nurses didn’t trust her not to kill patients yet. They got a lot better at keeping her busy after the experiment.
Tonya didn’t mind. After her IED turned a dumpster inside out, she needed the hours to pay for a new one.
She cut the cold packs open and then dumped the powder into a plastic jar. The ammonia made her eyes water. The far room on Kim’s side was a small chem lab. Sure enough, it had a big jug labeled Alum on a shelf in the back.
Spencer was still upstairs in the control room doing who knew what. Sometimes it felt like she was all alone, and other times Tonya just knew Chang was right behind her. Unmixed, her ingredients were perfectly safe, but jumping at shadows with her arms full of them still wasn’t any fun.
Plastic containers were scattered all over, so finding the right size was easy. When she finished Tonya had a neat little hospital bottle hand grenade at her disposal, powerful enough to ruin Chan’s day. Hers too, if she wasn’t careful.
She spent precious minutes salving another burn that had appeared on Kim, this time on her calf. Mike had gotten a few of those as well; whatever they were fighting in there must have been using fire. It didn’t make any more sense than the bite she’d bandaged around Kim’s neck earlier. The teeth were too big and too strange for it to be a dog.
The final piece she needed was an ignition source. Her crude version of Tannerite was safe even after it was mixed, because it needed a very fast impact to detonate it. The actual stuff was sold commercially as an exploding rifle target; unfortunately Tonya didn’t have a rifle handy. That meant another trip to the chem lab.
She found the goods after a brief search: a bottle of potassium perchlorate old enough to have crystals in the bottom. No shaking it, though. Unlike the stuff in her grenade, it could go off if she dropped it.
Tonya held the bottle up against the hospital grenade for size when the heavy metal door at the back of the room clunked open. Someone walked out of the freezer, the one she’d checked not five minutes before. But it wasn’t Chan.
It was Walter.
Her voice wouldn’t work. His goggles had fogged up right after he left the freezer, so he hadn’t seen her, and now she couldn’
t make a sound. This was not Walter. Walter was dead. Tonya had been there when he died. She’d put her hand on his cold, dead face the day of the funeral.
He wore a heavy coat and cap, ragged and brown, frosted over like he’d been in there a lot longer than he should’ve been. Ever. Because nobody was in there the last time she checked, and it certainly couldn’t be her long-dead mentor.
He pulled off the goggles and then startled at her, which startled her. The bottle slipped out of her clammy hands.
Her primer explosive.
Walter was on the other side of the room, and then he was next to her. “Gotcha!” he said as he gently caught the bottle. Still looking down at it, he said, “Miss Brinks, you do know how to surprise a person.”
Miss Brinks? “Who are you?”
“Not who you think I am. I needed this body so you wouldn’t knock me unconscious when I appeared. You weren’t carrying high explosives the last time, though.”
His lips didn’t move when he spoke. When he smiled, it wasn’t Walter’s smile. The teeth were all wrong, too straight, and Walter never cocked his head that way. This was someone who looked just like him, but wasn’t him, because Walter was dead.
Focus on what you can control. No matter where his words came from, they bothered her. “What do you mean last time?”
“That is a very good turn of phrase, Miss Brinks. You’ll need to come with me.”
He grabbed her other hand, and she dropped the improvised grenade. Without the primer it was just a bunch of powder, which was good—
There were lines of potential time, potential space, probabilities, quantum harmonic oscillations made real. It took longer to name them than to understand what they were. All her attempts to visualize the things described in her physics books and articles were nothing compared to this raw exposure. Quantum uncertainty made comprehensible in a visual, visceral way.
His voice braided with the many different things he could say as the sound collapsed. “You’re better at understanding this than I was expecting. Good.”
Understanding did not make it simple. All choices stood before her, every choice in her life and everyone else’s. Basic choices next to the most sophisticated speculation. Basic was more important, because Tonya couldn’t get her lungs to work. They were jammed solid, between breaths, at the end of breaths, at the beginning of them.
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