by C H Duryea
“Charles,” Augie said, “you indicated that we all ‘picked up something’ in there. Would you care to elaborate?”
“Now that I’ve had a minute to think? I’m beginning to see a pattern. I told you before that the warding spell I created acted like a transformer—stepping up the frequency of the Dodec and powering the Inverkethi magic system. I think it did the same to us. Augie, you’re a builder. You make things. You manipulate materials. And look what you did during the fight. Me? I’m a coder—I used my programming skills to create the warding in the first place. A little like Narissa, once we were inside, I started to see in terms of binary code—and it seems I can work with that code the same way I manipulated the opening in the warding. You, Zeke. Well, you’ve been wearing those vambraces.”
“And I finally figured out how they work. And now they seem to be working on overdrive.”
“Right. And the relevance of the fact that both materials used to make them come from outside Inverkethi space remains to be seen.”
“And Vibeke,” Zeke said. “Did you guys see her?”
The others nodded, but they didn’t say anything right away.
“It seemed,” Narissa said carefully, “like she was teleporting.”
“Right,” Zeke said. “And how do you account for that?”
Narissa shrugged. “The NeuralNav. Her nervous system was rewiring itself to it. And not just the Nav—”
“The Frogger?”
“The Frogger.”
Zeke needed a second to let the ramifications sink in.
“Good gravy.”
“That shadow in the gate,” Harbinger asked. “What the hells was that?”
“It was Tozzk-like in shape,” Augie said. “But it was considerably larger.”
“Some kind of uber-Tozzk.”
“And a visual confirmation of the hyperstack phenomenon.”
“Having that confirmed,” Narissa went on, “doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“That huge hoop structure—”
“Looked like a big monocle,” Harbinger said.
“It’s meant to focus an unimaginable amount of energy,” Narissa finished.
“How unimaginable?” Zeke asked.
“Think the granddaddy of all quasars.”
“You’re right,” Zeke admitted. “I can’t imagine that.”
Harbinger whistled. “I can. Not good. So you think the monocle is designed to harness the six-pack more precisely?”
“It wouldn’t be particularly effective,” Zeke said. “Sure, you could brute-force it from this side of the event horizon—but it would be like a one-sided wormhole. You’d need—”
He stopped.
“In theory,” Harbinger continued for him, “you’d need some kind of quantum-entangled, corresponding meta-space beyond the event horizon.”
Zeke turned to Narissa. “Does your model predict such a meta-space?”
She nodded.
“That would explain why the Tozzk came after us, to begin with.”
“They need the Frogger,” Narissa said, “to access the meta-space.”
“Not anymore,” Augie said quietly.
Zeke suddenly felt the stone dropping out from under him.
“What do you mean?” Harbinger asked. “Not anymore?”
No one answered. They all looked at Zeke.
“You mean—” Harbinger stammered. “Aw, hells!”
“Vibeke,” Zeke said.
“Her neurology is a close enough match,” Narissa said.
Zeke exploded.
“Then why are we just sitting here at the bottom of this cliff?”
“How do you suggest we proceed?” Augie asked.
“We go back in time,” Zeke said. “Burn it all down. Make it so she never has to take this ride.”
“Can’t do that,” Narissa said. “You’d just create an analogue—or a massive causal time-quake.”
“Screw causality!” Zeke shouted. “And I’m not interested in any analogue.” He stabbed his finger at the cave entrance, now shrouded in darkness. “I want—that Vibeke.”
“Your Vibeke?” Narissa asked.
Zeke swallowed hard.
“Our Vibeke.”
Augie stood and placed a calm hand on Zeke’s shoulder.
“Remember that relationship advice I offered you a few days ago,” he asked. “Would you like it now?”
“Now that it’s too late to apply it? Sure, go ahead.”
“We’ve all known you a long time. We know how you tick. She doesn’t. Every time you ran into problems with her, it was because you led her to believe that she wasn’t as important as the Frogger—as your work.”
“My life’s work,” Zeke interjected.
“Nobody knows that more than we do. But we also know it’s not the only thing that gets you out of the sack tube in the morning. She needs to know she matters. To you. I’d say this is a good opportunity to do just that. Show her the Zeke Travers that says the wrong thing but who’s willing to bend the multiverse like a pretzel for her.”
“Great,” Zeke said. “How on this or any other universe am I supposed to do that?”
“If I may?”
All four of them turned. Qaant Yke was still on the boulder, barely visible now in the growing dark. Zeke had forgotten the alien was even there. They waited for him to speak.
“I have yet to fully comprehend your human bonding protocols,” he said. “And exposing my interior goes against the evolutionary purpose of my exoskeleton. But if your intention is to demonstrate these bizarre imperatives to Dr. Helstrom, there is something I should point out.”
“What?” Zeke asked.
“When the Tozzk portal closed on Dr. Helstrom, it also closed on Prince Feldspar—and what he carried with him.”
“The Dodecahedron—” Harbinger started.
“Is no longer on Inverketh,” Qaant Yke finished. “The moment the portal closed, the valence counter-shifted. That pattern of energetic behavior you call ‘magic’ has ceased to operate on this planet.”
“Wow,” Harbinger said. “The dreck must really be hitting the oscillator back in Lankshale.”
“But that means—” Narissa said.
“The Friendly Card!” Zeke exclaimed. “It should come back online!”
“It should,” Harbinger said.
“How can we know?” Narissa asked.
They all craned their necks to peer at the ridge of the cliff, and the dragon eyrie they had crash landed on.
“Awesome,” Zeke said. “Now all we have to do is climb this thousand-foot face.”
“Not gonna happen,” Narissa said.
“Allow me,” Qaant Yke said. Then, without a word, he sprang onto the cliff face and began to ascend.
“Wow,” Zeke said as he watched. “I didn’t think anything that looked that much like a lobster could climb that fast.”
“Wait,” Harbinger said. “How’s he going to get aboard? We locked up, and the airlock is keyed to Vibeke’s biometrics.”
Zeke hadn’t thought of that.
It took Qaant Yke only a few minutes to reach the top. Once there, he disappeared from view as he climbed into the dragons’ nest. A few moments later, they heard the angry roars of the dragons and saw several flashes of fiery orange light.
“Told you,” Harbinger said. “They don’t like him.”
But another sound overtook the roars. The shriek of metal against stone. Then the nose cone of the Friendly Card became visible, pushing out over the edge of the cliff.
“What the—” Zeke said.
“I do believe the dragons are pushing the ship out of their nest,” Augie observed with remarkable detachment.
Narissa squinted. “Isn’t that Qaant Yke on top of the ship?”
“He’s baiting them!” Harbinger exclaimed. “If he’s on top of the ship, he knows the easiest way for them to get rid of him is to—”
The ship reached its tipping point.
“Oh no,�
�� Zeke said.
The ship fell.
It seemed to play out in slow motion, as Zeke watched the Friendly Card pitch end over end as it plummeted. A part of his mind began to calculate the not inconsiderable tonnage that was about to squash him.
But that didn’t happen.
About halfway to the ground, the ship stopped spinning and leveled out. Then in a brilliant flare, the Friendly Card’s navigation lights and maneuvering jets ignited as the autopilot kicked on. The ship slowed its descent, finally stopping and hovering at station-keeping, about four meters above the ledge. Qaant Yke, who’d managed to cling to the hull on the way down, now stood on the roof of the ship, lit from underneath by the lights, looking down as if nothing was at all unusual about the arrangement.
“When we get home!” Harbinger yelled, “remind me to show you a movie called Doctor Strangelove!”
“Get me up there,” Augie said. “I’ll run a bypass and open the cargo bay doors.”
Zeke stared at the alien. “Why?” he called up to him. “Every time you helped us before, it was either to survive or to eat. Why make yourself more accountable to your fates now?”
Qaant Yke stood silent for a moment.
“The language of my forehatchers lacks the appropriate expression,” he said. “I knew not how to articulate an important shift in my outlook. Until you, Hezekiah Travers, gave me the precise linguistic typography for that which I must now do.”
“Which is?”
“Screw destiny.”
Twenty-Five
“What’s the status of the super light drive?” Zeke asked. As the Friendly Card limped out of orbit, Inverketh shrank into the distance on the rear view screen. Ahead, the main viewport looked out on a broad scatterplot of stars.
“Powering up from a cold start,” Narissa answered from the copilot’s seat. “We should be charged and ready for FTL in a few hours. Which is good—we’re lucky to be remotely spaceworthy. Every system on this boat needs a thorough diagnostic.”
“And you’re sure we have a bead on the hyperstack?”
“Trust me. I know exactly where that hell hole in space is.” She pounded a flickering display on her console. “And as soon as the navigation tank re-spools, I’ll plot our course.”
“If Vee were here, she’d already have us halfway there.”
“If Vee were here, this little excursion would be unnecessary.”
Zeke flipped a series of toggles to tweak the stabilizers.
“We’ll need these couple of hours for more than systems diags. We need to figure out how we’re going to pull this off.”
“About that,” Augie said, coming onto the flight deck. Harbinger followed. “Even with these new talents we seem to have acquired, we barely survived a scrape with a half-dozen Tozzk fighters. We need to realistically assess the likelihood of our not only taking on an entire Tozzk base, and not only finding, but successfully extracting Vibeke, all while keeping each of our skins in one piece.”
“You’re uncomfortable with those odds?” Narissa asked.
“On the contrary, my sweet,” Augie said. “I’m entirely comfortable with the conclusion that we don’t stand a chance.”
Zeke spun in his chair. “Do we have any choice, Augie? We can’t leave her there. We won’t.”
“I’m not making any such suggestion.”
Narissa narrowed her eyes. “What are you two thinking?”
“Upgrades,” Harbinger said. “To the Card—and to ourselves.”
“And where,” Zeke asked, “do you propose we accomplish that?”
“Easy, boss. We’ve already been there.”
And so, a few hours later, the Friendly Card pierced the dimensional membrane and approached a rather familiar-looking nebula. What they weren’t prepared for was the impressive amount of space traffic around it.
“Looks like the station got popular since we left,” Harbinger said.
Narissa manipulated a small set of knobs, her eyes scanning a scroll of numbers on a screen.
“Calibrating for translation uncertainty,” she said. “Reading tachyon flux values. Relative temporal drift—five hundred years, give or take.”
“I’m still not completely comfortable with this,” Zeke said. “We making a huge assumption that the uncertainty variance won’t backfire on us when we return to Inverketh.”
“Leave that to Doctor Brand and me,” Harbinger said.
Zeke turned to Narissa.
“What do you have in mind?”
“A potential work-around,” she answered. “As long as we’re out of here within a week, we should be able to beat the variance.”
“All we need to know now,” Augie commented, “is what constitutes a week in this neck of the woods.”
A blur of movement ahead of the ship materialized into a tight formation of small drones, each prickling with antennae and other communications equipment. Also, each was armed with a large plasma cannon at the ready, their targeting already calibrated on them.
A light flashed on the console.
“We’re being hailed,” Narissa said.
Zeke toggled the comm switch.
“Alien vessel,” a mechanical but familiarly accented voice barked. “You will transmit your identity on this frequency.” The comm screen blinked with a series of numbers. Zeke calibrated the channel.
“Friendly Card,” Zeke called. “Requesting permission to dock.”
The drone cloud went silent, the little red lights on each blinking nervously.
Harbinger toggled his screen. “I’m patching into their comm network,” he said, sliding out his keyboard. “Let’s see if we can see what’s what.”
After a moment, the voice returned. “You will follow us to landing bay Alpha Zed Alpha.” The drones broke formation and reconfigured into smaller escort groups and fell into place around the ship.
Zeke goosed the maneuvering jets to follow, and Harbinger pushed his keyboard back into its slot.
“Alpha Zed Alpha,” he said, “is their VIP dock.” He fell silent and seemed to still be trying to process some new piece of information.
“Care to elaborate?” Augie asked.
“Remember when we were here before,” he answered, “we had to blast off before our mechanics were finished with the modifications we had ordered?”
“What about it?” Zeke said.
“Well, it appears that—even after we reimbursed them in absentia for the damage we left in our wake—the credit and a half left on our account compounded rather aggressively over the subsequent five centuries, and now that principal underwrites the entire local economy.”
No one spoke. Zeke adjusted course as they crossed a crowded traffic lane that the drones had cleared to make way for them. They followed the drones’ blinking navigation lights into the increasing haze as they passed into the nebula.
“Are you telling us,” Zeke asked at last, “that we own this place?”
“This place,” Harbinger said, “along with a couple of planets in the neighboring star system.”
“Well,” Narissa said. “Don’t that beat all?”
Soon, the station began to emerge from the greenish fog. The intervening centuries had grown it into a massive city in space that dwarfed the XARPA platform back home by orders of magnitude. Massive appendages radiated out from a center that wasn’t even visible yet, bristling with modules of every size and description, and enveloped in space traffic and EVA activity that reminded Zeke of a hive.
The drones guided the ship ceremoniously to a huge, elegant landing bay at the end of one of the station appendages. An honor guard of serious-faced and stately garbed aliens waited, alongside a small army of cyborg engineers and multi-handed mechanics.
Zeke landed and powered down the jets. They went back to the hold, where Qaant Yke was busy, forming more of his hard-shell figures.
“To refuse accountability to fate,” the alien explained, “will require great reserves of strength. The power I accumulate a
s the maker—the master—of these soldiers will grant me that strength.”
“Hate to tell you, partner,” Harbinger noted, “but those soldiers of yours don’t look big enough to take on me changing my mind, let alone challenging the forces of destiny.”
Qaant Yke looked up, said nothing, and returned to his work.
Zeke spun the wheel lock and hit the bay door switch. The ramp dropped and they descended, stopping face to face with their hosts.
“Are you the commanders here?” Zeke asked.
The aliens exchanged a series of puzzled glances.
“We’re your accountants,” the leader said.
And after a series of awkward meetings and translation mishaps, most of the matters involving the ownership of the station were, if not completely settled, at least sufficiently clarified to allow Zeke and the others to make use of their new-found status.
The Friendly Card was moved to the best-equipped dry dock on the station for essential repairs. But once Augie fully comprehended the scale of resources at their disposal, as well as the skill of the engineers he suddenly found in his employ, he quickly established plans for a significantly more robust retrofit. At first, he wanted to yank the Frogger from the Card and reinstall it in a newer, more powerful vessel. But the Frogger’s affinity for Vibeke’s neural blueprint was too intimately and intricately entangled with the ship’s cognitive and navigational matrices, so they decided not to risk it. He set up a workshop in an empty warehouse space and stocked it with a variety of raw materials. And since it seemed that the magic they had picked up on Inverketh also worked here, he practiced his new matter-melding skill during his off hours. He would build new and unusual objects from all combinations of elements, evaluate them for their utility, then methodically disassemble them and start again.
As their week unfolded, Harbinger busied himself with much-needed upgrades to the ship’s mainframe, including replacing the AI that had been removed in preparation for the NeuralNav test flight. His newfound ability to see and manipulate the binary code of his surroundings made his tasks that much easier. During his off hours, he frequented the armillary, which had also expanded considerably in the last five centuries. There, he sought out and procured weapons, technology, and all varieties of nifty gizmos that could be had in this part of this universe. What he curated he brought back, and he turned the hold into an arsenal. He spent hours practicing with each new weapon, especially the bladed ones. He also found a few opportunities to play cards with the locals, racking up a huge gambling debt, and getting into a massive brawl involving significant property damage. The next day, he squared the debt and funded the repairs anonymously.