by John Daulton
“Yeah, they didn’t seem to pay any attention to us down there on the planet either … until they did. Then Altin and Orli were gone. I never should have talked them into it.”
“The last time you told this story, Sir Altin was eager to go as well.”
“He was. I’m just whining. I hate not knowing what they are up to.”
Tracy came briskly in and took up her place at navigation. “Sorry, I’m late,” she said, and quickly set herself to assessing the situation, as Deeqa had.
“So are we going to fight them?” Squints asked.
Tracy turned back and looked as if she’d forgotten they’d gotten a new crewman. She looked back to Roberto after, though. It was a fair question.
“Not if they don’t screw with us,” he said.
“What if they take off like those other ones did?” the young Prosperion asked. “We gonna chase them down?”
“If we have to.”
Tracy grimaced, but Squints looked eager for the fight. “I need one of those light-beam rifles you guys carry,” he said. “And a sword. I’ll fight. Wouldn’t be my first.”
“I’ll holler if it comes to that,” Roberto said. “Now be quiet. We need to think. Tracy, what’s the depth on the dig now?”
“Eighteen point six miles. The heart chamber is breached.”
“Shit. I knew it. They probably pulled him out of there. God damn it. What if he’s dead?”
“It just opened,” Deeqa said, pulling up the readings. “It’s still hot around the edges where the diggers were going at it. They’d have to have worked pretty fast to get him out, and even more so to harvest all the Liquefying Stone.”
“Are we going to go save him?” Squints asked. “Whoever he is.”
“Shut up, kid.”
“If we’re going to save him, we need to go now,” Deeqa said. “You know Putin is sitting there right now ready to push his button, even if the general and the director aren’t.”
Roberto couldn’t help being glad that at least the ship Altin and Orli were on was off the surface now. He felt guilty for it, for, in a way, not caring about Yellow Fire like that, but, well, Yellow Fire—Blue Fire, for that matter—was an intangible. A bunch of glowing rocks that Altin and Orli said was alive and in love. Roberto loved love, but, he loved his human friends more. And he loved his crew. He wasn’t going to risk them for some damn Hostile world. He’d feel guilty about it forever, of that he was sure, just as he would never forget how it felt to blast the doomed spaceship Liberty into oblivion. But he wasn’t going to go down there for Yellow Fire. He couldn’t. Not with the other ship in sight. What if they did try to get away, shoot off after the other four or, God help them, even back through the goddamn rift?
“Tracy, see if you can detect the gravity wake on those four that left. Deeqa, you’re watching that one for the same, right?”
“I am.”
“You guys with me if we have to chase that fucker into that wormhole?”
Deeqa turned to him, her expression stoic and, by her tone, the question not rhetorical. “Are you being serious?”
“As a heart attack. Orli and Altin are on that thing.”
“How do you know they weren’t moved?”
“I don’t. But that’s where they went, that ship. Why would they move them?” He watched her study his face. He shrugged. “I’m going. Period. The rest is up to you.”
She shook her head, but then showed her teeth with her smile. “You’re a crazy goddamn Spaniard,” she said. “I’ll go.”
“Good. I need a crazy goddamn Somali for some shit like this.” He turned to Tracy. “You going to have a problem with that order if it comes?”
Tracy shrugged. “I’ve never been through one.”
Roberto grinned. He opened up the all-ships com. “Attention, everyone. I need a little gut check here, just in case we have to jump through that wormhole in a minute or two. I know you guys signed up for commercial enterprise, so, if you aren’t up for it, I need to know now. I’ll arrange for anyone who can’t muster for it to go home. But I need to know right now. I can’t have anyone hesitating if it happens, and we’re about out of time. Speak up now.”
No one answered.
Roberto tapped the console where the com pickup was. “Hello? Is this on? I need to know. I need to hear in or out.”
To the last of them, they were all in.
“You’re all nuts,” he said. “But I love you. If we don’t all die, everyone just made a million-credits bonus when we get back.”
“Hey, what about me?” Squints said. “Do I get that?”
Roberto looked over his shoulder as Deeqa began to laugh.
“Do you even know what it is, boy?” Roberto asked.
“No,” said Squints. “But I want it.”
Roberto laughed. “Fine, you too.”
Squints grinned broadly, clearly having no idea exactly what a credit was, but clever enough to know he was going to be pleased with a million of them, whatever they were.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Deeqa said.
“It might come to something worse,” Roberto said. “They’re moving now.”
“Heading toward us at eighty thousand miles per hour.”
“Bastard better not hit us again,” Roberto said. “Or shoot our ass.”
“I hope those new tank braces hold,” was Tracy’s comment.
Roberto groaned.
The alien ship stopped abruptly in its course. Directly over the Glistening Lady.
“Now we’re being scanned,” Tracy reported. “And who knows what else.”
“What’s that mean?” Squints asked, sounding perfectly at ease now.
Nobody answered him.
“Man, I’m not going to have time to do shit if they fire on us,” Roberto said.
“Your call,” Deeqa said. “You armed the nukes. Say the word.”
“I can’t open it up. Altin and Orli are on there.”
“As far as we know.”
There was an edge in her tone that irked Roberto some, and he turned a terse look on her. “That’s right. As far as we know.”
Deeqa nodded, although so slightly it was nearly imperceptible.
The ship was in motion again. It snapped off its scanning beam and cruised right over them. Right over them and into the wormhole.
“Fuck.”
“Yep, fuck,” Deeqa agreed.
“Tracy, send word to the general we’re going after his girl without him. Squints, tell Tytamon we’re going through as well. Tell them to catch up as soon as they can.”
“Through what?”
“The goddamn hole in space.”
The Prosperion smiled as he did as he was told. Then the Glistening Lady gave chase.
Chapter 47
Pernie woke up lying on a cot in a small room. It was all very white inside. The light came from a strange ceiling that glowed all over so that she couldn’t tell where the source was really coming from. It was an ugly kind of white. Lifeless and unnatural. She hated it immediately.
She sat up and put her feet on the floor. It was cool and hard, but not cold and coarse like the flagstones of Calico Castle were. Not alive. She looked around and realized that there was something around her neck. She felt for it and confirmed what she already knew: a metal collar, narrow with three finger-sized boxes and one locking clasp. She didn’t have to see the lights to know they were there too.
She looked for a mirror anyway, but there was none. Only one small window in the door across from her. She got up and went to it. She could see out into the hall. It was lifeless and white out there too. She craned her neck left and right, looking down the hall in both directions. There was no one there.
She tried the handle, but, of course, it was locked. Pernie was in jail like a criminal again.
She spoke the words to the teleport that would take her outside, but before she could get the second syllable out, the muscles in her neck and face seized up with terrible
cramps, violent spasms that yanked her jaw back and jerked the corners of her mouth into a contorted, trembling grimace.
It lasted a pair of seconds at most, but it dazed her as if it had gone on for half an hour. It took her some time to blink through the haze. Casting magic had never done that before.
She tried again immediately, trying to speak the magic even faster. The same thing again. A terrible jolt, electrical, shocking her right out of her spell, pain from the collar on her neck twisting her muscles up in an awful way. It was as if the collar was watching her in the mana in the same way Djoveeve and Seawind had taught her to do: watching for the first signs of movement in the mana stream, and then, if you were quick enough, you could counter your opponent’s spell, kick them or stick them with your spear and knock them right off the magic they were trying to cast. Sometimes that alone could be the end to them.
But that was impossible. All the people on Earth were blanks. They could not see mana at all. Even stupid Orli Pewter had said so. She said nobody on Earth had ever heard of mana before. Roberto said it too. He said that people on Earth thought magic was all made-up stories and that even he hadn’t believed until Master Altin almost turned him into a toad. He said then he would have believed.
So how could they be watching the mana with the collar on her neck? Why would they all have lied? Of course Orli Pewter would lie, but not Roberto. He was nice for real.
But he was Orli Pewter’s friend. That’s why.
Pernie growled as she touched the collar. Master Altin didn’t even know how much danger he was in. They were all liars, and he was surrounded by them. She wondered if maybe they wanted to take all his gold that he got from Master Tytamon. What if that’s what this was all about? It was all for money. That was all anyone talked about on this world. They talked about it all the time. Sophia Hayworth and Don Hayworth and even Jeremy. The criminal in the alley wanted to take her to the casino for game chips. They all cared about money all the time.
That’s what Roberto had been talking about with the Queen!
Suddenly Pernie understood it all. All of it. It was all about money and credits and gold. And poor Master Altin thought Orli Pewter loved him.
Realizing it filled her with such rage as she’d never known. Not even when she’d killed the sargosagantis king had she been so furious. She glared out the window and cast the teleport spell again, speaking the first word as if it were a curse and trying to hold on to the mana no matter what.
The electricity struck her and felt as if it were strangling her. Even the python that had grabbed her in the tree on String and choked her in its coils, squeezing her to silence and darkness, had not hurt so bad.
She clawed at the contraption, gasping and trying to choke out the next word. The contractions of her face and neck squeezed tears from her eyes as she tried to force that second sound. Her whole face was in rebellion, the muscles in her neck betraying her. She fought with all her might to finish the spell, but her jaws were locked tight and her whole body began to shake. Still she forced herself to channel the mana, to try to get it out. Just the second word. She pushed, and the air rasped and gurgled in her throat. She saw spots in her vision, and when she woke up she was lying in a pool of her own saliva, much like the one on the table back at the precinct.
She hadn’t even known she’d passed out.
She got up and glared out the window. She beat on the door and screamed. Then she tried the spell again. She seethed and growled and grunted, and her neck squeezed and cramped and twisted up into knots. Her jaws locked up so tight it made the veins in her temples throb. The electricity burned hot against her skin.
When she woke up again, the major was sitting in a chair that someone had brought in. The door was open, and there were two men outside. Visible on either side of the doorway, Pernie could see the butts of their rifles and part of one uniformed arm and shoulder for each of them, enough to know she was under guard. Exactly like a criminal.
“Miss Grayborn,” said the major. “I hope that we can dispense with any more attempts at magic now. If you hadn’t figured it out yet, that necklace you wear prevents you from doing so. Please spare us both the trouble and keep your magic in your head.”
Pernie’s little blonde brows dropped low over her eyes, like crouching predators. She watched him and made no attempt to conceal the hate.
He lifted a small black object, flattish and roughly oval shaped. He held it casually between his fingers, with his thumb resting on a silver button at the object’s center. “I can activate the necklace even if you don’t try magic, so if you decide to … get out of hand, I’ll have to shock you until you will behave. And, I want to tell you, Miss Grayborn, I don’t want to shock you at all. In fact, I want to help you.”
Pernie didn’t believe it for one second. She knew that he was the real criminal in the room.
“Miss Grayborn, we are down to two options at this point. We can send you home, or we can continue to provide you with an education here on Earth as accorded by our agreement with the TGS and Her Majesty of Kurr. It is my desire to—”
“Let me go,” she said. “And take this off me.” She pulled on the collar but knew better than to try casting a spell. She didn’t think she could beat the major and the men with guns. The men who had shot her in the broken building downtown had gotten her incredibly quickly. Their guns didn’t have to channel mana at all. They could cast faster than elves, and there was no mana to watch to see it shaping up. And even if they didn’t shoot her with bullets, she had no resistance to their tranquilizer darts.
“It is my desire,” the major went on, “to give you exactly what you have expressed interest in before. You want to train as a pilot, and you want to learn the tricks and secrets of our military. Our weapons, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t care about your military. I want this collar off me.”
He ignored her protests and pressed on. “We know you are interested in these things because we have your net logs. We know exactly where you have been going and what you are looking at while you are there. We also have several recordings of you and your friend Jeremy discussing your plans at school. I have to tell you, Miss Grayborn, you are a very intriguing girl. Far more so than anyone expected when they granted you your status in the student exchange.”
She frowned. How could they know that?
He saw it in her eyes, and smiled. “Miss Grayborn, you don’t think that the NTA would allow a teleporter loose on Earth, or any magician, for that matter, without observing everything they do, do you? Watching you was part of the contract. It’s just that nobody expected, well … you.”
“Master Grimswoller taught us at magic school you aren’t supposed to watch anyone when they don’t know. He said it’s bad and against seers’ laws, and Her Majesty will cut out your heart when she finds out. That’s the penalty.” She realized they probably weren’t using seers, but she did know about the “saddle lights” in the sky. She hadn’t read about them, but she’d heard enough to know that they were probably like gryphon riders made out of technology. She knew about drones and cameras and video. They must have stupid cameras even in the school. Why hadn’t Jeremy told her?
“Her Majesty’s people signed the documents. It’s all by treaty and contracts with the TGS. But look, I don’t want to bore you with all that. I’m trying to tell you that you have an opportunity. We want to—”
“I don’t care what you want. The Queen might let you spy on me, but Master Altin won’t. Not when he finds out. Or Seawind. Seawind will come and slice you up into meat, and Knot will eat your eyeballs.”
He smiled and sat back, shaking his head. “That won’t happen either.” He looked down into the tablet in his lap, scrolled through a few pages. He looked up. “Seawind is your elf friend. So, no, he won’t be coming at all. We have no agreement with them, and the new councilman from the TGS assures us that no elves will be processed through any TGS depots. So, there will be no pieces of me anywhere. And as for
your friend Mr. Meade, well, I’m afraid he’s gone.”
Pernie started to say something, but stopped. What was that supposed to mean?
He saw her pause, and sighed, the smile on his face turning into a patient thing. “That’s right, Miss Grayborn. Mr. Meade is gone. Permanently, by all best estimates. It happened yesterday.”
“You’re lying,” she said, even though she didn’t know what he was lying about exactly.
“Mr. Meade and his wife vanished into a wormhole that appeared above a planet in the Cep 128a1 system, along with the captain and crew of a spaceship registered to one Captain Roberto Levi, whom, according to your file, you also know.”
Pernie wanted to call him a liar again, but she didn’t know what most of it meant anyway.
“A wormhole,” he repeated, sensing her ignorance. “It’s a hole in space. A rift. Some say it’s a rip in the fabric of space-time. Others say it opens onto another dimension. Some say it opens to nowhere at all, although that seems unlikely, given that data uploaded to the NTA from Captain Levi’s ship show alien spaceships coming through.”
“Then he’ll come back, and then you will see.”
“That is possible. But may be unlikely. If it is a space-time rift, he may not come back for a thousand years. Maybe ten thousand. Hell, he might have already come back ten thousand years ago.”
Pernie’s whole expression was one of absolute bewilderment. The man was talking nonsense.
At least, she thought he surely must be.
She wanted to talk to Jeremy very badly. He would tell her if this NTA man was a lying criminal or not.
But what if he wasn’t?
“Look,” said the major then. He flipped his tablet around. “Here is the video from the satellite above the red planet where it happened. If you look up here in the left-hand corner, you can just see the Glistening Lady going through. And if you look at the date here, at the bottom, you’ll see that it was, in fact, yesterday.” He paused and looked at her.