So . . . what else could I do?
I pulled on my blacks one cloudy fall morning, smiled brightly, and announced I was off to find a lightweight energy weapon.
“Find one?” asked Wryan with a critical look. Even when she was critical and tousled, I wanted to hold her. And a bit more.
Instead I just nodded. “A few angles left to explore.”
“Be very careful, Sammis.” She looked dubious.
If she’d had any idea exactly what I was going to try, she would have been even more dubious. Then again, maybe she knew.
I dropped back to Ydris with the ease of routine. Finding the place had been an accident. Then, again, my whole life resembled an accident.
On one of my too frequent theft-trips to Muria, I noticed another one of those thin energy lines, one that wavered and blasted and screamed for all of its tenuousness. Being inherently curious, I came back. It was clearly a track made by a timediver, yet it was opaque to me. So I followed it— all the way back to Ydris. Back a good long ways, probably halfway to the end of my backtime range.
Ydris—home of rod-tall amphibians with dexterous claws and enormous brains. Ydris, where both brains and claws were employed in supporting a duel-based culture.
Lace towers rose from artificial lakes and held the sunrise, speared the sun, and held its light well into the night. Light and energy—the Ydrisians squandered them like water.
I took a score of dives to scout out Ydris, from the empty and arid poles where ice winds whistled across sea ice sculpted into knife-shaped dunes to the tropical jungles where each instant held battles between beasts so savage that even the Ydrisians avoided their own equator— except for the outcasts.
The cities, built of pale jade nearly as hard as time-warped granite, circled and twisted along narrow peninsulas too regular to be natural. And in those cities, well, Thor would have drooled.
Just in passing, I had liberated the heavy energy pistol for Odin Thor. That stopped his complaints about the wisdom of time-diving. Initially. Before the problems.
Problems? One of the ConFeds, Beran, put the whole pistol in a duplicator. Fuel cell/power source/battery and all. After the blast and flash that momentarily blinded a score of ConFeds drilling nearby, turned Beran into molecules too fine to discover, and sent three others to the infirmary, we discovered, at the cost of one duplicator, that at-tempting to duplicate stored power produced rather messy results.
Cleaning up required building another duplicator from scratch, stealing another heavy energy pistol, and conducting a few educational lectures for dumb ConFeds.
Everything had more problems and angles than I ever anticipated.
So . . . I was diving back to Ydris, red-flashing into the past, knowing what I had in mind, but not exactly how to do it.
First, I tracked back to where I had found the first energy pistol. Easy enough. Then I traced that back to where it was manufactured—a small black stone building on the end of a peninsula. No real help from that—just a group of machines, each one stamping or forming or drawing little parts that were assembled by another machine. It would have been a good place from which to lift more pistols, but that wasn’t the idea.
I lifted one pistol, barely emerging from the undertime, then dropped further backtime, to the point where the factory was being built. In time, I zeroed in on a single Ydrisian who was assembling a much larger version of an energy weapon.
When he, it, she left the room, I deposited the smaller version.
That didn’t work. The technician, researcher, whatever, nodded, squawked, and made a few changes. I could scarcely feel a chill in the time currents. So I reclaimed the weapon and looked at geography.
A cooler continent in the southern hemisphere was also a technical centre. I never did figure out the local politics or what passed for them, but even from the outside and undertime, it was clear that the southern continent and the northern continent did not exactly get along.
So I went back foretime and retrieved some more energy guns, as well as a few other technical devices, and deposited them in various locales on the southern continent, hoping. . . .
The jolt to the undertime was like a cold wind, shivering the time-paths around Ydris like leaves in a storm, and confirming that I’d done something.
I had, all right.
When I returned to the time when I had picked up the pistol, all I could see from the undertime was a shimmering flow of energy and a sea of hot glass fused into strange shapes and emitting a hellish glare quite discernible from the undertime.
That was the bad news. The good news was that a few hundred local years earlier, the “new” Ydrisians had developed some much smaller and more highly directed energy weapons, one of which was worn on the foreleg, or whatever they used for manipulation.
It took awhile, but this time, I tracked down all the components, including the miniature power cells just before they were energised. And I brought them back.
Wryan was waiting.
“What did you . . .” she shook her head. “I felt it from here.”
“Don’t ask,” I mumbled. I laid out the band on the work bench. “This should be able to be made into a wrist band, a gauntlet. Fires directed energy beams. Here’s an uncharged power source. It holds about the equivalent of one of our fusion plant’s energy for—I don’t know exactly . . . and here’s the key to the charger. I can get the rest later.”
I slumped against the bench, feeling the blood drain from my face.
“Sammis . . .”
Wryan’s voice was coming from a distance, but I managed to sip from whatever she held in front of me. Then I could stand up—except my legs started to shake.
That wasn’t physical.
I had only wanted to spur the Ydrisians into building smaller weapons—not into destroying themselves. They weren’t admirable, and they fought all the time, but so did we.
I wondered if the Frost Giants looked at us that way.
“Sammis . . . ?”
Wryan’s arm was around me. Her warmth and strength helped, but I wondered, absently, if my eyes were beginning to show the almost hidden blackness I sometimes glimpsed in hers.
LV
EVERYTHING APPEARED TO be improving. Between Gerloc and Amenda and the new divers like Kerina and Hadron and the use of the duplicators, we had gathered enough originals from Sertis and were producing enough tools and food to stop the levy on the farmers and to supply them with a few goods.
Wryan even worked out a continuous duplication stream for etheline.
The big hang-up was getting new fusion generators on line, but we had four of them operating officially. That didn’t count Wryan’s and my private one up in the Bardwalls.
With the batteries from Ydris, we even dispensed with the water turbines for the start-up fields.
Then, on the hills that had been Inequital, Odin Thor turned a work crew loose and levelled an area for a headquarters complex. Wryan and—mostly me—prevailed upon him to let the divers build a tower/monument in the centre, one built with time-warped stone that would stand forever. I badgered Deric to design something that looked like my dream, and then took over as project manager, when I wasn’t scouting or doing miscellaneous-type engineering.
It sounds easy, but it wasn’t. I started to cart building stones from Bremarlyn and glowstones from Muria before it dawned on me after about two trips—we only needed one perfect stone of each type, plus a duplicator. Of course, it took time to assemble another fusion plant and duplicator, but Odin Thor lent me some discipline cases, not that they remained that way.
And, yes, the gauntlets. Wryan and I made several modifications to them, one of which involved time-warping. Unless a diver could warp time around the gauntlets after donning them, they didn’t work. The field didn’t have to last, but its creation was the first step in arming them. I insisted on the idea, and Wryan, swearing quietly under her breath, figured out how to do it. One circuit was all we needed, of course, since we cou
ld duplicate the rest. Strictly an arming circuit, but that particular feature ensured that they couldn’t be removed from a diver and used by anyone else. That also meant some of the divers couldn’t use them, but both Wryan and I were adamant about that safeguard.
There’s nothing like nearing success in survival to ensure something goes wrong.
“Sammis . . .”
I was studying a cooler from Sertis, trying to discover how we could incorporate something to attach to the cooler to convert the cycle frequency from our handy dandy Murian fusion system into the Sertian equivalent. Then we could just duplicate the coolers and hook them up directly to the community power system. Yes, we had coolers, but they were big, cumbersome and didn’t work all that well. They were murder to duplicate because it had to be done piece by piece, and replacing parts entailed standing on your head, sweating profusely, and swearing liberally—when you weren’t muttering under your breath.
Along the way, I was trying, and often losing, in my efforts to ensure our tools, equipment, and appliances were roughly compatible and interchangeable. Aside from me and Wryan, who was too busy to do much about it, no one else cared. Why I did, I wasn’t certain, but I seemed to get stuck caring about the details no one else bothered with, that and Odin Thor’s interminable quest for weapons.
“Sammis . . .” Wryan’s voice was cool.
I looked up.
“The Frost Giants are back.”
I sat up so suddenly my head crashed into the work bench. “Uuufff. . .” I shook my head. “How do you know?”
“They froze two cottages in the other village.”
“The other village? Why there?”
“Targeted the fusion plant, I think. They are energy seekers, as you may recall.”
I scrambled to my feet. “Have you alerted any of the others?”
“Most everyone.”
“Now what?”
“I was hoping you’d have an idea.”
The problem was that I didn’t. Except one that I didn’t like.
“You’re not going . . . ?” asked Wryan with a look at my face.
“Anyone else better suited?”
We both knew the answer to that one.
So I went and pulled on full gauntlets, diving suit, and went hunting for Frost Giants.
Finding the track from the village wasn’t hard; it was almost bluish and jagged in the undertime. Nor was dropping backtime to see what had happened earlier in the day difficult, not that I could break out, but I could watch a hazy view.
Even from undertime, I shivered as the blocky figure sucked heat and energy from the fusion plant and the surrounding cottages. Frost Giant—a misnomer in some ways. The figure I saw was oblong, with two legs, and what appeared to be four wide and stubby arms. It wore no apparent clothing, except a bluish energy shimmer, and while it had a “head” of sorts, that was more a protrusion than a head resting upon a neck. It was cold, so cold that I felt it was sucking energy from the undertime as well.
Then it was gone, leaving a bright blue and jagged time-trail that seemed both sideways and backtime simultaneously.
I followed, although the effort was like ricocheting through a rock canyon on a high-speed steamer that bounced off every wall. Each “bounce” gave me a headache.
When the bouncing stopped, I was still undertime in the Queryan solar system. That was easy to figure because I couldn’t break out from the undertime. The planet was Thoses, the one out beyond Query. Rumour had it that the First Empire had put a base there.
Someone had. Once. But the Frost Giants had frozen it solid, too.
From the undertime, all I could see was the energy drain and the collapse of empty domes and plastics into dust. Sure, it had happened a millennia or more before I was born, but watching it happen and being unable to do anything about it was unnerving.
As I shivered in the undertime, I worried. I worried a lot. The Frost Giants didn’t seem all that bright, but more like some sort of cosmic energy grazer. And the trail from Query to Thoses had been without stops, as if they passed from solar system to solar system and grazed on all the artificial and natural heat and energy they could reach within their time range.
Another bright blue jagged trail, this one foretime, toward Mithrada.
I dropped away and headed back to the divers’ village.
The problem was simple, and nearly impossible. Unless we could either find a Frost Giant in real time, or in another time outside the Queryan system, we couldn’t even try to attack it. I needed to talk to Wryan, to design some sort of tracking plan or strategy.
Execution I could handle, but not long-range planning. Not well.
LVI
“OUT OF MY way, Sammis.” Even when he was trying to keep it down, Odin Thor’s voice boomed. He twisted the bosses on the gauntlets to activate the microcircuitry.
When I looked at Odin Thor, I wished I’d never found Ydris. The gauntlets were too powerful for his ego. Bad enough for me, and I’d survived his damned ConFed Marines with no illusions of justice.
“They won’t work very well in here, Odin Thor.” I used both his last names to irritate him. Dangerous, but he lost most rudiments of logic when he was angry. “Or too accurately.”
“Don’t you ever say anything straight out, runt?” All of Colonel-General Augurt Odin Thor looked ready to assault me. Which would have been fine, except that was the moment Wryan walked into the travel hall, or what there was of it we had built.
“Dr. Relorn . . .” Odin Thor was all charm again, bowing low, almost from the waist. “I was about to depart to see if I could localise the latest manifestations of the Frost Giants. The ones that young Sammis here tracked across the cluster.”
“You are so determined, Colonel. Do you think that it is necessary? Especially when we have no effective way of neutralising individual Giants?”
“Madam, we know who the enemy is. That enemy has just destroyed another timediver’s innocent family.”
“What will you do once you find all the Frost Giants, Odin Thor?” I interjected.
“Keep track of them until we can destroy them. They’ll be a threat until we do.”
I wanted to know how Odin Thor could keep track of anything when he couldn’t find his way across a room under the now. Instead, I asked, “Do you remember what happened the last time?”
Wryan shook her head, but I ignored her. This one wasn’t going by logic.
“That was years ago!” snapped Odin Thor.
“Not to the Frost Giants. Barely an instant for them.”
Wryan looked even more distressed, and I knew why.
“So we’re going to cower in our half-built city and our half-built tower and hope they leave us alone? Hope they don’t freeze another poor family with their curiosity? Can I tell my people that the great Doctor Relorn and her intrepid scout, who can avoid the Giants, wish to run and hide and leave them to face the terrible freezings? That you two have no wish even to track the Giants to warn them?”
“What are you going to do, great Odin Thor? Track them all over the galaxy until they get tired and turn on us again?”
Wryan was making motions behind Odin Thor’s back for me to shut up, but it wouldn’t make much difference. He was going to do what he was going to do, and we’d end up picking up the pieces again.
“Don’t you understand?” By now he was bellowing.
Deric had dashed in from supervising the time-warping of the wall stones in the adjoining hall. Another young-looking diver who carried a youngster in a sack upon her back stood frowning in the archway.
“Understand what?” asked Wryan calmly.
“That the Giants are our enemy. That they will threaten us as long as they roam free through the galaxy.”
By now, half a dozen divers had popped in, and, unfortunately, out. Word would be through the community within the afternoon, if not within instants.
I could see the handwriting on the wall, and it was written in blood. Mine and Wryan�
�s especially.
Sighing loudly, I got their attention. Once again, it was my mess, a mess that I should have seen coming sooner.
The travel hall was silent, too silent.
“Why don’t we discuss it at a full meeting of all the timedivers tonight? It affects everyone, and everyone should have a say in it.”
“Great idea, Sammis!” boomed Odin Thor. His voice was not quite mocking. “What time?”
“After dinner . . . whenever you want . . .”
“I’ll let you know.” And the colonel-general was off, on foot. He couldn’t afford the embarrassment of planet-sliding, since he still had little enough directional sense. He was smiling every step of the way.
Wryan looked over at me sadly. “You know what will happen.”
“Got any better ideas, Doctor?”
“Do you?”
“Just one.”
She did not ask, but continued to look at me sadly.
“Finding something that destroys Frost Giants before they destroy us.”
“Ignorance rules again.”
“Always has. Probably always will.”
“How long will it take you to find something?” Wryan seldom wasted time on formalities or useless commentary.
“That’s simple enough. Until I do or until there’s nothing left unfrozen on Query.”
“And now?”
I took her hand and held it, cool as it was. “You and I go over the possibilities.” I leered a little bit.
That got a faint smile. “Not those possibilities . . .” She took her hand back.
“If you say so, but we really need a good physicist to talk with, assuming there’s one alive somewhere. Who would know?”
“Jerlyk or Mellorie—they were with the university.”
We touched hands and slid undertime, under the clinging black surface of the now, slipping sideways and out toward the half-built settlement on the hilltop below Mount Persnol. Thor was probably trying to calculate the directionality of his planet slide. Sooner or later, he’d come booming in with an energy swathe half a world wide. Not that more than a handful of our timedivers could sense the energy flows. But his dives, like him, were so violent that I winced whenever he broke out near me.
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