by Ben Stevens
Before another painfully long two minutes had passed, his efforts paid off. He saw Maya’s foot first, sticking out from underneath a large hunk of twisted black metal. His chest felt as if it were once again in the icy clutches of the bardo-spirit. For a cowardly moment, he was too scared to lift the debris, too afraid to look.
The sight of her foot twitching suddenly and the sound of her soft, girlish voice moaning returned life to his dead heart as sure as any defibrillator ever could. He rushed forward and carefully lifted the debris away, making sure not to hurt the prone goddess, and tossed it aside.
Maya lay there, eyes shut and looking more like a drunk that had passed out than someone who had peacefully fallen asleep, her arms and legs twisted and contorted in awkward positions, but otherwise appearing no worse for wear.
Jon dropped to one knee and cradled her head in his hand. “Maya!”
Her eyes fluttered open, like a child waking from a dream. When she saw his face, she smiled.
“You’re okay!” she said.
“Me?” Jon was incredulous. “I was worried sick about you!” They both laughed and embraced. He pulled back from their hug and took in the sight of her face. They smiled at each other and Jon leaned forward to hug her once more. Halfway there, some involuntary madness overcame him. His head dipped of its own accord, and he kissed her hard on the lips.
The goddess’s eyes widened in mild shock for a heartbeat, then she closed them and returned the kiss. Jon felt wetness on his cheeks and broke off their lip tug-of-war, concern on his face. She was crying, but she was still smiling. A small fleck of saliva lingered on her bottom lip, and she brought her demure hand up to her exquisite mouth, covering it, and laugh-cried. Her other hand reached up and caressed the side of Jon’s face.
“I’m fine, guys. Not hurt. But it’s cool, go on slobbering on each other.”
Stunned and embarrassed, Jon and Maya both spun around to find Carbine standing a few meters away, dusting himself off.
“Carbine! You’re okay!” Jon exclaimed, his face contorted with a multitude of emotions.
“We, uh…” Maya mumbled.
“Hey. It’s cool,” Carbine said with a wink. “Your secret’s safe with me. I knew you were concerned about me, even if it didn’t look like it.” Carbine’s grin betrayed his faux hurt.
“Gee, I, uh… I’m sorry, man,” Jon stammered, rubbing the back of his head and casting shifting glances at the sandy ground.
“I said it’s cool. Everyone else all right?”
Maya turned to look at Jon, clearly curious for the same reason as Carbine.
“Yes. Lucy and Ratt are back that way.” Jon pointed behind him to where sand dunes rolled away, littered with chunks of transport and small bushes. “I honestly don’t know what Ratt’s condition is.”
“Let’s go find out,” Maya said.
“Yeah. But hey,” Jon paused and frowned, deep in thought, “somebody want to tell me exactly what happened?”
On their walk back to Lucy and Ratt, Maya explained to Jon what had transpired in the transport, the way the bardo-spirit, the Wardens, had nearly erased Jon, and then the ship itself, from existence. How she had shaped a Strange to protect them from the spirits, how it must not have worked on Jon because the spirit had already penetrated him, and how the protective cocoons she’d shaped on everyone must have saved them from the destructive kinetic energy of the crash.
A few minutes later, they crested the small dune that obscured Ratt from their vision and called out to Lucy, who was nearby and still searching for the survivors.
Another minute later, they had Ratt’s shirt off. Lucy went straight to work and began to examine Ratt with a laser wand of some kind, pulled from the kid’s gear pouch. After a long minute’s silent work, she looked up at the goddess as she continued to run the laser back and forth over Ratt’s chest.
“He is alive, but in a coma. Brain and organ activity are normal,” Lucy reported. “He doesn’t actually appear to be physically hurt at all. A miracle, really. But, that said, I have no idea what’s wrong with him.”
“Let me see what I can do.” Maya knelt down in the sand. She scooted herself up close to the sleeping Ratt, while Lucy pulled back, giving her lady space to work.
A moment later, Jon and the others watched as the goddess did her thing, humming a soft melody and placing her small hands on Ratt’s chest, which rose and fell almost imperceptibly.
After a minute, Maya finished her song, scooted back, and stood, brushing grains of clinging sand from her knees.
“I suspect that he was touched by the Drop itself. I am sensing changes deep within his innate Strange. I could be wrong, but I think the Drop, perhaps the pocket-dimension itself, is somehow communicating with him. And, I think…” she added almost as an afterthought, “that he is talking back to it.”
Jon frowned, straining to understand the super-dimensional mechanics of Hell and Strange in general, but withheld his questions.
“I will tend to him as best I can, but he may simply need time to return to our world fully,” Maya explained.
Jon nodded, then announced to his friends that he would do the meditation of the pillar.
“We need to confirm that we are still even on Earth, and if so, find out how far off course we are.”
The pillar of golden light still stood on the horizon like a lighthouse. It offered small relief, though, for they still could not use it to gauge distance. They had no way of knowing whether the base of the beam was just over the small hills in the distance, say maybe a day or two away, or if it burst forth from a place halfway across the globe and entire oceans separated them from it. Still, it was a comfort to know that they had returned from the bardo to the Earth they knew.
“Maya,” Jon said, “maybe you should open a door back to Home for us. We have no idea how far away the Morning Star is. I know the Old Guard took all the other transports, but we could set out on wheels, perhaps.”
“But we have no way of knowing if that would be faster or slower than finishing the journey on foot,” Maya protested. “And we must…” She left the thought unspoken.
“I know, hurry,” Jon finished it for her, holding up his hands and flexing them open and closed. Everyone knew that Jon’s lifespan was a ticking clock, counting down to extinction.
“Maya, Ratt is out, we don’t know for how long, or even what’s wrong with him. And our gear…” Jon gestured around, letting the carnage speak for itself. “We simply aren’t in any shape to continue on foot. Xibalba could be on the other side of the globe for all we know. We have to go back and start over.”
He saw the pained look on her face breaking into spoken protest like a wave, cresting at its zenith, about to come crashing down and cut her off with more cold, hard facts.
“It’s only been a month, Maya. I have time.”
Maya looked at Jon for a long time, her eyes searching him for something. Finally, she broke the awkward silence.
“Very well. We go back, regroup, and start over. We still have time.”
The group nodded in agreement and waited for Maya to lead the way via her powerful Strange.
Maya began her shaping exactly as she had before, the last time she had created a Drop-like portal for them to escape from. Only this time, they weren’t falling to their deaths in a Ziggurat trash-tube, so it took Jon a second to recognize the melody.
Maya had her back to Jon and the others and was looking out across the desert scrub and the bruised flesh sky that spoke of impending twilight.
She made tiny gestures with her fingers and wrists as if she wore invisible finger-cymbals that made no sound. Her arms and hips swayed gently like one of the spindly limbs of the prolific ocotillo cactus that dotted the plain around them.
The air directly in front of Maya began to shimmer, wavering the very fabric of reality, as if a wall of perfectly clear water had been raised from the ground, and stood vertically, in defiance of the laws of physics.
Then,
like a note played off-key, Maya’s song was rudely interrupted by a yelp of pain. The goddess instantly ceased her gentle song and her hand shot to her temple as fast as her body dropped to its knees.
The portal, still only half-formed, like a sheet of ripples suspended in the air, oscillated violently before snapping in on itself, reducing in size until it was no bigger than a tea saucer.
A small portal began to fill the now reduced sheet, its aperture starting in the center and growing until it reached the edges, where it abruptly stopped.
Jon rushed forward, wrapping his arms around the pained goddess, demanding to know she was okay.
“I, I, uh… it hurts,” Maya said weakly, her left hand still glued to her temple. She looked up through the hood of Jon’s embrace and beheld her handiwork.
She had opened a portal to her private chambers in the upper levels of Home, which she had relinquished to To-Kan and Wyntr, yet still remained one of her teleportation anchors. The opening of the portal had been successful, but it was only a hand’s width in circumference.
“That’s, uh… not good. Right?” Carbine asked.
“No, Rene,” Jon snapped without turning around. “That’s not good. Maya, what happened?”
“I don’t know. My head hurts,” she mumbled, her words slurred, and she swayed as if she were hypnotized. A thought lanced Jon’s mind, triggering a recent memory.
“Your head. You were rubbing it earlier, in the transport.”
“It’s, uh… it’s where I was hit. By the drop.” Maya finished the thought for him, apparently realizing where he was going with his line of thought.
“Whatever put Ratt down, it must’ve affected me somehow too.”
“At least as far as your ability to open doors,” Lucy added, appearing at Jon and Maya’s side and dropping to one knee. “Let me take a look at you, my lady.”
Jon moved aside and switched his concerned gaze from Maya to the grapefruit-sized portal that remained hovering in the air.
“Makes… sense…” Maya mumbled, her speech still struggling to remain coherent. “The Drop… being… the mother… of all… doors… to this… place.” The effort having exhausted her, the goddess crumpled into the arms of her oldest guardian and whimpered.
“There, there now. I have you,” Lucy soothed, looking up over the petite woman’s head to shoot Jon a look of concern.
“We rest here tonight,” Jon said, a turn of his head pointing out the setting sun. “Tomorrow, we figure out what to do next, and see what might be salvaged from all this.”
Lucy simply nodded in return.
As if having heard Jon’s proclamation, the diminutive portal sizzled and then winked out of existence.
Although the sun was fading away, the desert still glowed with the heat of the day, absorbed by the thermal mass of rock and sand, so Jon knew without a doubt that the shiver he felt run down his spine was one of foreboding only.
4
The light of the cold winter day was diffused into a soft, omnipresent glow by the low-lying fog that blanketed the ground and meandered through the gaps in the trees like so many tributaries of a broken river.
The fog brought an uncanny silence yet seemed to amplify every sound that punctuated the stillness of the forest. The crunching of boots on the frost-bitten dead grass created a drumbeat, accentuated now and again by the morbid crowing of carrion birds desperately searching for their next meal.
As the men progressed deeper into the wood, the soft glow of the sun’s rays, already concealed by the frost in the air, grew dimmer, further obscured by the tangle of leafless branches that thickened above.
“Your man sure picked a pain-in-the-ass place to meet. Any reason we couldn’t have just handled our business in the Shanty?” one of the two men asked the other.
“I would think that would be fairly obvious, Nguyen,” the second man said, his tone sharp with irritation.
Truth be told, Martin shared his companion’s feelings regarding the remoteness of the rendezvous point, but he hated needless grumbling, especially in a trained soldier. It just sounded like whining. One might think it, but one should never speak it aloud.
When Nguyen failed to respond to the sharp quip, Martin took pity on the kid and elaborated.
“The Provocateur said that extreme care must be taken to ensure that our machinations are not discovered. The Shanty has too many eyes and ears now. It’s not like the old days.”
“Well, wouldn’t it have been the same in the old days? I mean, the Resistance seems to have been there all along. They were way more organized than we thought, right? Otherwise, we’d be kicking it in the Zigg right now, instead of tromping through this forest with the ravens and freezing our butts off.”
Martin made a face of disgust, instantly regretting any remorse he’d had for being too hard on the kid.
“Shut up, Nguyen,” he said, more irritated than before. “It should be right up ahead. Stay frosty.”
“Why? You expect trouble? I thought you said we can trust this guy?” The young soldier prattled on, oblivious to his commanding officer’s growing frustration.
“I said shut your cock-holster,” Martin grumbled, then added, “Trust no one.”
Private Nguyen’s nagging questions caused Martin’s own reservations to rise to the light of day, with all the rudeness of a cadaver unearthed by an incautious grave-robber. Try as he might, he couldn’t force himself to focus on guarding against an ambush, his mind instead drifting back to the events that had led him here. But here he was, away from his beloved command post in the Republic Military, in this frigid, half-dead forest, far to the east of Home.
In the chaos that followed the Incident, the whore-queen of the rebellion and her ilk had seized control of the majority of the Zigg’s firepower. The confusion in the ranks of the military’s officers had been substantial. People woke up in strange places, naked, and with no memory of how they came to be there. Lily Sapphire, esoterrorist numero uno, had spun an elaborate fiction about Warbak. She claimed he had been transforming the New Breed into killing machines, robots called Spartans, and that all the last-gen citizens of Home were being captured by alien devices hidden in the great monuments. But Martin knew this was a lie. What he believed had happened instead made a lot more sense, even though its implications unsettled him deeply.
This Lily and her Unpure army of riff-raff had shaped a powerful Strange, essentially crippling the Republic in one fell swoop. Before anyone knew what was going on, Chairman Warbak and Colonel Taylor had both been murdered. Even Matiaba, the Chairman’s most trusted advisor and practical second-in-command of the Republic, had gone missing. Many of the New Breed officers, most notably in the Hopper, Heavy, and Easy-Rider detachments, had also been killed in the coup.
When Martin and the other Old Guard realized this fact, they were sobered in the extreme. If this Lily harlot was powerful enough in Strange not only to cut the heads off of the military beast with ease but also stun and disorient the entire population of the Zigg, then an instant counter-attack would be futile and most certainly spell death for them, and for any hope of survival and dominance the human race had left.
But a counter-attack will happen, Martin thought to himself now as he had then. We bide our time, plan, and take back what is rightfully ours.
In a turn of events that had broken his heart as much as it had surprised him, Martin had watched helplessly as more than half of the surviving officers and enlisted men swore their allegiance to the new regime, having swallowed the ludicrous lie about Warbak and his betrayal. As if he would sell us out to the Harvesters! Inconceivable!
In those first few hot and frantic days, Martin hadn’t known who to trust. Men he had called his friends fell one by one to the so-called goddess and her rebel ideology. Obviously faked and doctored video clips were being shown on the Zigg’s holo-vids, detailing the transformation and capture of Home’s old and new populations. That the events took place, Martin had no doubt, only he knew in his
heart that it was the esoterrorists’ doing, not Warbak’s.
Waiting for someone else to assemble any sort of organized front to resist the governmental takeover proved to be as impossible as it was essential. Martin had come closer then to despairing than he ever had before. For a brief moment there, it had seemed his only options were submission to the enemy or suicide.
Then it occurred to him that he should be the one who led the loyalists.
In that moment, on the fifth day after the Incident, Martin had presented himself at one of the impromptu “Town Hall” meetings set up by the traitorous Miller and his slut, Lily Sapphire. Equal parts euphoric from impassioned drive and terrified that the esoterrorists would gun him down on the spot, Martin had stood up and addressed the gathered peoples of Home.
Sure, many in the crowd, Shanty folk mostly, had booed him and called him names like fascist and brainwashed; however, a not insignificant portion of former military men had nodded their heads in grave agreement with his concerns.
After his speech, he had been approached by several groups of men, each one like unto a solar system—usually a ranking officer acting as a sun, surrounded by a small cadre of men who orbited him. One by one, Martin had met them, and a plan began to form in his mind to unite these isolated clusters of men into a galaxy.
Everyone he had spoken to shared the same reservations he had regarding the preservation of the Republic, and of the human race. At first, the strong majority of the malcontents did not receive Martin’s plan as well as he’d hoped. Many wanted to take action right then, to strike while the enemy was still disorganized. But Martin knew this was folly. Visions of the resulting bloodbath and epic destruction to the Zigg, to Republic property and equipment, had flashed into his mind at each suggestion of acting hastily. Martin understood their urgency, their worry, but he also knew that a chaotic shootout in the Zigg would be a catastrophe. The presence of the sorceress and her inner circle made such an idea even worse than it otherwise would have been. No, they would have to regroup somewhere else, somewhere far away, and wait for a better chance to strike. Either an opportunity would present itself, or he would make one. An opportunity that would allow them to remove the esoterrorist bitch from the equation and even the playing field. An opportunity to retake Home without destroying it, or his men.