One way or another, there would be no more war on Query. One way or another. Even if it took the witches of Eastron and their offspring and their talents.
LX
I WAS WRONG about the war, because I had forgotten about the Frost Giants. They hadn’t forgotten about us, and Odin Thor hadn’t forgotten about them.
EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeee . . .
The scream of the vest-pocket nuclear device vibrated even in the undertime, even from the geographic distance I had put between the trap and myself. The location was north of Inequital, almost a wasteland, that had yet to recover from the first Frost Giant attack. Then it had been industrial.
The trap? Simple enough. Odin Thor and Weldin had rigged a fusion power plant to run at full output and linked it to a modified arc furnace of some sort, figuring that the combination of heat and energy would be enough to tempt a Frost Giant into appearing. Then they rigged the nuclear device to a thermocouple trigger. The instant the temperature began to drop, the bomb blew.
Not terribly elegant, but effective.
. . . eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee . . .
My head ached from the vibration and energy flashes that weren’t supposed to have a physical impact in the undertime, and I was kays from the blast.
“. . . noooooo . . .” The non-voice was mine, trying to close eyes that would not, could not, close in the undertime.
. . . blue flashes, like jagged edges of a mirror, cut through my head . . . an image of a small blue and blocky figure, four-armed, surrounded with warm blueness . . .
. . . a dull red plain . . . standing beside another blue-block figure . . . reassuring heat . . . flashing back and forth . . .
. . . so much heat . . . pressure . . . like knives cutting from inside . . . . . . and more blue shards knifing their way through my head, already fading as they cut.
I time-staggered back to the divers’ village, stumbling out of the undertime and losing the contents of my guts right into the sink.
Cold water helped my appearance and that of the sink.
By the time Wryan appeared, I was back to normal, if pale.
“For someone who has created so much destruction, you certainly have a nervous stomach,” she observed, wrinkling her nose.
I went on cleaning up the mess, opening the window. The cold winter air was preferable to the odour.
“Staying around to experience death close up doesn’t do much for me.”
“I take it Odin Thor’s trap was successful?”
“Too successful, I suspect.” I dried my face, and folded the towel. The wind almost lifted it off the rack. I slid the window half-closed and took the chair across from Wryan. She was pale, though not as pale as I was. “You? You felt it, too?”
“No.” Her lips quirked. “You’re not exactly good for my digestion. I felt you feel that thing’s death.”
“Oh . . .”
I stood up, feeling the unease mount within me, the sense of an avalanche overhanging. Opening the cupboard, I took out some hard crackers, tossed one to Wryan, then caught the towel as a gust of wind from the window blew it past me. After closing the window the rest of the way, I began to chew on the cracker, slowly, until I was sure that my stomach would take it.
The mental unease continued.
“All hell is breaking loose. Better warn all the divers. Shut down the power plant—ours anyway.”
Wryan looked blank. I just dropped undertime and sprinted for the Bardwalls. I wanted something left to rebuild with, and the one power plant, the duplicator and the parts we had stashed there would be enough.
In the undertime, I could sense the distant rush of blue, but it wasn’t close . . . yet.
Wryan broke out as I was shutting down the system. The cold of the location and the time-protected walls should have been enough to insulate it from the Frost Giants. They couldn’t easily get inside, nor pull the energy through the walls, I didn’t think, but there was no reason to provide that temptation.
“Do you think . . . ?”
“I know. Now let’s tell whoever we can reach. I’ll take Odin Thor.”
Wryan’s eyebrows raised a notch, even as she completed the shutdown I had started. Outside the double doors, the winter whistled, throwing more snow against the rocks below and building the drifts.
The retreat was mostly complete, with glowstones on the floor and some furniture, and the workroom we had moved from the cave. But we had not used it much, partly because of the time difference. Living a quarter of the way around the planet from where you spent most of your waking hours could be more than a little disruptive. Besides, who wanted to advertise it?
The cold—and the lack of energy—might protect us . . . that and the fact that the Frost Giants didn’t seem to move much out of the now, except as a group or when pushed.
I could hope.
Wryan looked at me, although her face was dim in the low light from the storm outside, now that we had shut down the power.
We left, sliding across the now.
Odin Thor was sitting in his office, Weldin sitting across from him, and two other forcers, Carlis and someone I didn’t know, in the other chairs. Each had a glass—old Imperial crystal recovered from who knew where—in his hand.
“What . . .” gaped Odin Thor, as I dropped into the space between the chairs.
“Sorry to disrupt your premature celebration, Colonel, but it appears as though you have made the Frost Giants really mad. A force of them is headed this way through the undertime, and I frankly have no idea how to stop them. You might think about dispersing your troops and personnel. That way, some of them might survive.”
“It’s your doing, witch,” snapped Carlis.
I looked at the idiot. “I told him not to attack the Giants. And I told him then that we didn’t have any way to stop them as a force. You all agreed to this idiocy over my strong objections. Now, you’ll have to live with it.”
I glanced undertime, feeling that the blue rush was nearer, but unable to judge how much nearer.
The unknown forcer, a heavyset and older man, nodded, then asked, “How long before these attacks start?”
“Assuming they stay close to the now—the present time reference—I’d guess it might be a day, perhaps two, before the mass of Giants strikes Query.”
“That soon?”
“I don’t understand exactly how they travel the undertime, because it’s hard to track unless you’re right with them, but they move at an angle—that’s the only way I can describe it . . .”
Odin Thor stood up, his face slightly flushed. “You have the—“
At that point, I lost it.
I slid under the now, inside his big arms, and cracked him on the jaw, then was back across the room before he could react.
“I could have killed you right there.”
The room got very quiet, so quiet that the faint whine of the wind seemed like a shout.
Carlis looked at me with the look one gives a snake.
I almost smiled, but I was looking at Odin Thor. “You have blundered and blasted your way to power. And you almost saved Westron. But you couldn’t wait. We gave you weapons and tools. We brought back the technology to make food. In time, we could have stopped the Giants. But you couldn’t wait. I’ll do my damnedest to find a way, but not because of you. And if you ever threaten the safety of the divers or the people again, you won’t live long enough to realise what you did.”
I looked at the others. “The only thing you can do is to scatter and stay away from power plants, hot areas, and large groups of people. I know it’s winter, but this wasn’t our idea. You can thank Odin Thor for it.”
I dropped undertime and behind Odin Thor, touching the gauntlet bosses to deactivate his weapons, before moving aside and reappearing.
He glared as the gauntlets failed to trigger.
“You don’t listen, do you?” I forced a smile. “Now, gentlemen, the choice is yours. Partly. The divers will tell all the women and children, and I
think they’ll choose survival. I hope I can find it in time.”
I left, dropping back to the cottage to stoke up on food and equipment before beginning my solitary quest. Wryan was better at organising people. I just hoped I would be as good at searching.
LXI
SOMETIMES THE ANSWERS are right in front of you, if you can only see what they mean. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the pieces are all there, but it takes a new or different perspective to combine them to reach a solution.
Odin Thor had used one of the few remaining vest-pocket fusion devices to pot his Frost Giant. The Frost Giants, predictably, had retaliated, and what was left of Westron was generally uninhabited mountains, swamps, deserts, and whatever structures the divers had managed to warp undertime—like the unfinished tower.
Now the Giants were trying to track down individual divers, without too much success, because they were even noisier than Odin Thor in the undertime. Whether I liked it or not, we had to find something to stop them. And only massive jolts of energy, such as a fusion device or a massive particle beam, seemed to affect them.
The problem was simple enough.
We needed to destroy Frost Giants. Destroying Frost Giants took energy. The gauntlets worked fine, except they didn’t handle the massive amounts of energy required. We could no longer produce those old-style energy-intensive weapons, and only a few of the fusion devices remained, far fewer than the total number of Frost Giants. Far fewer.
Not many high-tech races we could observe and steal from produced mass destruction energy weapons, or, for that matter, much in the way of any weapons at all. Those that did, like Ydris, produced weapons that were more like mobile forts.
The logic of what had to be done was simple enough. We needed to use someone’s existing technology to apply enough energy selectively to individual Frost Giants. And whatever it was had to be light enough for a timediver to carry.
Simple and apparently impossible.
I went back to Muria. The gentle Murians weren’t destructive, but they did have some interesting technology, and not all of it was obvious.
So I watched from the undertime, subjective day by subjective day, and scoured the planet from one island continent to another, from lab-oratories to the very small proto-factories they used. Each day, at first, I staggered back to Query, back to our retreat in the cliffs of the Bardwalls. At least there, I could look at the starkness of the cliffs and the play of the light in the canyon below. With the timewarped nature of the walls and the cold location, it apparently wasn’t too attractive to the Frost Giants. Neither was the tower, still only half-completed, but who had time to build anymore?
Sometimes, Wryan wasn’t there. Mostly she was, as if she knew when I would return.
“Any luck?”
“It’s not a matter of luck, just perseverance,” I mumbled through a full mouth.
“You’ve lost more weight.” Her voice was gentle. “You can’t keep this up for too much longer.”
“Do I have a choice?” I swallowed some more of the underbaked bread, which had to have come from Sertis originally, via the duplicator. Without the duplicators, we already would have starved. All the fields were dust, along with the remaining Westron farmers.
Since Wryan didn’t answer, I jammed some more bread and a hunk of unidentified cheese into my mouth and continued chewing. Then I swallowed some Quin. Drinking beer after diving can destroy your balance and then some, but I wasn’t going anywhere for a while, and from Wryan’s comments, I needed as many calories as my system could take, followed by as much sleep as I could get away with.
“How is it going?”
“You know. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be out there day after day, killing yourself. You have to be careful. I don’t want you ending up like—“
“I know.” I cut off her words abruptly. Some comparisons, well meant as they may be, are too painful to hear. “What’s the esteemed colonel doing?”
“He’s located another vest-pocket device, and they’re baiting another trap.” Her thin face was as white as mine still felt.
The off-focus glimmer of the time-warped walls went even more off-focus as I swallowed, hard. Almost, almost, I felt as though I were falling through the armaglass into a two-kay-long drop to the Dyel below.
Wryan nodded, slowly. “Everyone is so bitter about the destruction that they can’t wait.”
Pushing aside the Quin, a bottle duplicated from the late Duke of Eastron’s hidden private stock, I forced another mouthful of bread and cheese into my stomach. The room settled back into semi-solidity.
I joined Wryan in the headshaking, not having anything else to add.
My legs were rubbery when I tried to stand up, and the out-of-time glimmer of the retreat’s walls flashed at me.
Wryan slipped under my arm and helped guide me into our bedroom, where I ended up sprawled face down on the old-fashioned bed. The last thing I remembered was her hands kneading the tightness out of my back.
When I woke, she was gone. But a faint spiciness remained around the pillow next to mine. The sun was well into the sky, almost straight over the canyon, lighting the tumbling waters of the Dyel so far below.
Rolling onto my back, still tangled in the quilt, I closed my eyes without drifting back to sleep.
Odin Thor . . . vest-pocket devices . . . Frost Giants . . . Wryan . . .
With a sigh, I struggled upright and swung my feet onto the glow-stones, another theft from the Murians, but one I was certain they would not have minded. The slight warmth in winter and slight chill in summer, and the everpresent luminescence made the retreat just a touch more special.
“Oooooo . . .” The exclamation was mine. Despite Wryan’s ministrations of the night before, my shoulders still ached.
About then, the guilt hit. I’d been avoiding Odin Thor, while trying to track down a weapon, a way to drive off the Frost Giants. Wryan had to have been shielding me—again.
A hot shower helped, as did some more bread and cheese, along with a ripe chyst. Both guilt and aches subsided.
As I sat in the stool overlooking the canyon, the problem remained—how to concentrate enough energy in one spot when we couldn’t even generate it. It was too bad we couldn’t just toss them into a nearby sun—since there were plenty of those and they certainly had enough energy.
I ate a second chyst and then stood, heading for the sleeping room. There I began to dress, slowly.
Energy . . . Frost Giants . . . compactness . . . energy . . .
As the words drifted through my thoughts, I finished my pre-dive preparations.
This time. This time I was going to find what we needed.
LXII
EVEN FROM HER protected position, the woman shivered, though shivering was not physically possible, as if she could sense the absolute chill that lay only instants from her.
From where she viewed, through the dark lens of time, she could see both the flattening swirls of ambient energy flows being sucked into nothingness and less clearly, the new-formed snow cascading downward and the soft explosions of vegetation being frozen nearly instantaneously.
She concentrated and removed herself to another locale, only to find a circular grey-brown wasteland, covered with fog as the heat from the surrounding area poured back over the frozen surfaces. A wall of thunderclouds towered against the low mountains.
Again, she concentrated, this time on a plateau that had been tree-covered with a walled encampment centred upon it.
A series of pelting rains and gusty winds swept across another grey brown wasteland. In places, new gullies appeared in the waist-deep sludge of fragmented cellular matter that had been largely living days earlier, cut by the force of water and gravity. The stone walls stood stark where they had for centuries, now alone in rearing above the gentle undulations of the plateau surface. Stone and sludge. Just stone and sludge and rain.
Once more, the woman concentrated . . . and disappeared . . .
LXIII
NOW THAT I had steeled myself to develop whatever was necessary, I stayed on Muria, continuing to concentrate on discovering something that either concentrated energy, stored large amounts of energy, or transported that energy.
As far as I could discover, in sliding from undertime locale to undertime locale around the Murian systems, they had little need for storage of massive quantities of energy. Their closet-sized fusion generators and their light, thin, and all too durable superconducting cables took care of that aspect of energy.
In the end, the fact that I could sense energy flows from the undertime led me in the right direction—to a small series of structures located directly under the south magnetic pole of Muria. At the time, I didn’t know it was the south magnetic pole, but Wryan later assured me that it had to be.
The complex seemed inactive, but the spray of energy ghosting around it in the undertime indicated that at infrequent intervals massive amounts of energy had been expended.
The initial observation was easy. The eight buildings, arranged as points of an octagon, were all closed and without inhabitants. So was the central eight-sided structure, which enclosed an eight-sided platform. In the centre of the platform was a shimmering circular plate half a rod across and perhaps the thickness of my thumb. Connected to the plate were sixteen of the thin superconducting cables—apparently two from each outlying building.
A quick series of dives verified that each outlying building contained an inactive fusion power plant.
The ghostly energy lines looped around the plate, then, about a hand-span above the metal, disappeared.
I dropped backtime, perhaps a local decade or so, before any activity appeared, and watched as three Murians employed what might have been a forklift to place a cube covered with the shimmering insulation used for their superconducting wires on the plate. A burst of energy from all fusion systems, and the box was gone.
That meant more backtiming, since there was no way to determine where the box had been destined. Instead I forced myself back to the construction of the facility, getting hell-fired close to my personal back-time limit, in order to follow the equipment back to its point of fabrication.
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