by David Weber
"They couldn't possibly blame him," Shaylar replied primly, eyes laughing wickedly. "He's a telepath. And everyone knows that not even the best Voice can transmit through a portal."
"That's what all of you keep telling the rest of us, anyway," Jathmar said. "I'm not too sure Grafin's troopers were buying it this time around, though."
Shaylar chuckled. Like her, Darcel Kinlafia was a Voice, a Talented long-distance communications specialist. Voices, who were born with the gifts of perfect recall and the ability to connect, mind-to-mind, with other Voices, were essential in many aspects of Sharonian society.
Governments, the Portal Authority, and private industries ranging from manufacturing to news broadcasters used Voices to transmit complex messages that were word-and image-perfect. The military used Voices, as well, for its long-range communications. But as useful as Voices were throughout Sharona's multiple-universe civilization, they were utterly indispensable to the work of surveying new universes.
Every survey crew fielded a bare minimum of two Voices. One remained at the portal giving access to a new universe, serving as a link between the field team conducting the survey and the established settlements in the universes behind them. The more portals a field team surveyed, the more Voices it needed to cover the portals in their particular transit chain. And when their team reached the distance limit of Shaylar's transmission ability, they would need to move Darcel forward and replace him with a new Voice in a game of telepathic leapfrog.
This portal, in particular, was part of the reason they were so stretched for manpower. During the past ten months, Chalgyn Consortium's teams had found no less than three new portals, including New Uromathia and this one, which they hadn't named yet. That had forced them to split up, trying to claim and explore them all, and that was before they crossed into this universe and started to realize what they might have stumbled across. Their discoveries were going to be a massive windfall, and not just for them and their employer. In all of its eighty previous years of exploration, the Portal Authority had located and charted only forty-nine portals. The Chalgyn teams had already increased that total by over six percent, and if Darcel was right about this portal, the consequences for their entire civilization (not to mention their own bank accounts) would be stupendous.
All of that was wonderful, but it also left them incredibly shorthanded. Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl had split their team twice, already, claiming the other two portals and exploring the universes beyond them. As a result, they were down to only two Voices and a bare minimum of other crewmen, not to mention supplies, but nobody was complaining.
Fortunately, the Portal Authority was in charge of all portal transit traffic, which meant the units of the PAAF?the Portal Authority Armed Forces, composed of multinational military units assigned to the Authority duty?built the portal forts and provided most of the personnel to man them, including at least one Portal Authority Voice. Or, that was the way it was supposed to work, at any rate. This portal was so new, and there were so many other portals along what had been designated the Karys Chain that needed forts, as well, that the military hadn't been able to bring in a new Voice, yet.
All of which left Darcel Kinlafia holding down the listening post for their team until a fort-based Voice could be moved in. Darcel would pass their field reports along from one Voice to the next, creating a chain of rapid communications. They could, if emergency required it, get a message all the way back to humanity's birth world, Sharona, in little little more than a week. If not for the water gaps between some of the portals, which had to be crossed by ship, since no one could permanently post a relay Voice in the middle of an ocean, they could have gotten a message home in a matter of hours.
Shaylar was grateful that she would never be the Voice stuck at the portal, just waiting for someone else's messages. She wasn't merely the Voice assigned to the survey team, she was married to?and inextricably linked with?its primary Mapper. That made her not only an integral part of the survey, but meant she was critical to the team's primary mission: mapping a new universe. Jathmar could "See" the terrain around him, but Shaylar was the team's actual cartographer. It was her job to translate Jathmar's mental "pictures" of distant terrain features into the maps which would guide later exploration and settlements. Even if they stumbled across another portal, they wouldn't?couldn't?leave Shaylar there to cover it. They would have to send word back to field another survey crew to explore the new universe, or else to take over the exploration of this one so that they could concentrate on the new one.
Then again, they couldn't really leave Darcel, either. Not for long, anyway. He might not be as essential to the everyday operations of the field team as Shaylar and Jathmar were, but his secondary Talent was, in its own way, even more important to the Consortium's long term operations.
She knew exactly how lucky she was. Not just to escape the tedium of portal sitting, while others enjoyed all the fun of exploration, but to be out here at all. On the whole, Sharonian women enjoyed equal status with Sharonian men, although legal rights varied from one kingdom or republic to the next. After all, there was no question about female intelligence or inherent capabilities in a population where one in five people possessed at least some degree of Talent. That sort of discrimination had gone out with the dark ages, thousands upon thousands of years ago, during the first Ternathian Empire.
But mapping virgin universes was arduous, frequently dangerous work. The Portal Authority, whose governing members were drawn from each of Sharona's dozens of nations and city-states?not to mention the current Ternathian Empire?had decreed that women should not risk the dangers routinely braved by virgin-portal survey teams.
Shaylar was the Portal Authority's first exception to that ironclad rule, which had carried the weight of eighty years of precedent. She was very much aware that her performance was under scrutiny. She had the chance of a lifetime?the chance to blaze the way for other women who wanted to explore where no other human had ever set foot?but she was equally conscious of her responsibility to prove once and for all that it was time to set that long-standing rule permanently aside.
Shaylar had helped survey two other virgin universes before this expedition, not to mention putting in her time, along with Jathmar, pushing back the frontiers of other, already claimed universes. Each portal gave access to an entire planet, after all, and however physically similar all of those duplicate worlds might be, they still had to be explored and surveyed. And that wasn't the sort of chore which could be accomplished in the snap of your fingers. Besides, that sort of exploration was the final training period?the internship?the Authority required before it was prepared to turn a team loose on the far side of an unexplored portal.
It was just as rugged a life as everyone had warned her it would be. The frontier wasn't gentle, and it didn't make allowances for the "frailer sex." But despite the worries of the general public and the dire predictions of the naysayers?not to mention the very real harshness of conditions, and the ever-present dangers any pioneer faced in the wilderness?she was profoundly happy. Not to mention tremendously successful.
Having Jathmar at her side to share the experience only deepened the wonder of at all. Her eyes met his and the love that came rolling to her through their marriage bond was so strong and sweet tears prickled her eyelids. Jathmar leaned down the seven inches between their mismatched heights and placed a gentle kiss on her brow, a more tender expression of his feelings than a mere ardent lip-lock. Then he grinned and jerked his head towards the deep timber.
"Time's a-wasting," he said. "Let's see how much we can get mapped before lunch. And the sooner we talk to Ghartoun, the sooner we'll get started."
Their camp was nestled in a natural clearing where the stream looped its way through the timber. It had taken them three days to come this far, and they'd been here for nearly three more days, mapping the region. Shaylar knew she would miss the campsite when they moved on, but she was just as anxious as the others to see what lay ahead. Any survey wa
s always slow work, of course, but it had taken five full days just to map the portal itself. Not surprisingly, since it was by far the largest any of them had ever seen, far less mapped.
In fact, at over thirty miles wide, it was actually larger than the Calirath Gate. That made it the largest portal ever discovered, and their first task on stepping through it had been to map the actual portal and lay out the grid coordinates of what would become this universe's primary base camp, one day's journey from Company-Captain Halifu's fort. This one would be a substantial affair?a fully manned fort and forward supply depot that would house portal Authority administrators, medical teams, more soldiers, and enough equipment and supplies to serve as the staging area for other exploration teams, construction crews, miners, and the settlers who would inevitably follow.
One they'd found a suitable site for that base of operations and sent its coordinates back for the Chalgyn Consortium to begin organizing the follow-on construction crews, they'd set out along a line to the south. As they pushed forward, they'd built small brush enclosures at the end of each full day's travel, designed to keep out unfriendly local wildlife. They'd remained in place at each camp long enough to thoroughly map the surrounding region?which meant hiking far enough to telepathically Map a twenty-mile grid-square?then pushed forward another full day's journey and built another camp to start the process all over again.
It was no accident that the Portal Authority had drawn upon the Ternathian Empire's method of expansion. Ternathia had been building empires for five thousand years, after all. That was an immense span of time in which to develop methods that worked, and the Portal Authority had borrowed heavily whenever and wherever appropriate, including the custom of building fortified camps along any line of exploratory advance through virgin territory. The fact that Ternathia provided over forty percent of the PA's multinational military contingent, and something like half of its total attached officers, might also have had a little something to do with it, Shaylar supposed.
With only twenty people on their currently understrength crew, she and her crewmates couldn't build the elaborate stockades which had comprised the Ternathian system of day-forts. But they could construct a perimeter of interwoven branches that served to keep out anything short of a herd of charging elephants. There were even tales from veteran crews of stampeding cattle and bison herds numbering in the tens of thousands, turning aside and flowing around the camp, rather than run directly into the jagged, sharp projecting branches of its brush wall. All in all, the system worked as well for the Portal Authority as it had for the Ternathians.
Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl was intimately familiar with that system, since he'd served with the Ternathian Army, as the honorific "chan" in his name proclaimed. He'd been an engineer, and after fulfilling his commitment to the Army, he'd returned to school. He taken advantage of a major scholarship offer to pursue graduate studies in engineering and actually taught engineering at the branch of the Ternathian Imperial University in New Estafel on New Sharona, the first major colony established outside Sharona's home universe.
After a decade in the classroom, however, he'd succumbed to the lure of the portals. That had been almost twenty years ago, and for the last seven, he'd been with the Chalgyn Consortium.
She and Jathmar both found Ghartoun's experience comforting. Jathmar was especially conscious of it, since he himself had never served in any military force. The Republic of Faltharia, colonized long after the last real shooting war had rampaged across Sharona, had only two neighbors, neither of whom were interested in expanding their territories through conquest. Not when there was free land for the taking in unexplored universes, just waiting to be colonized. Jathmar had learned his woodcraft during his childhood, living near and honing his Talent in the trackless Kylie Forest, the greatest of Faltharia's protected state forests, which preserved the wilderness Faltharia's earliest settlers had found when they arrived from Farnalia nearly three hundred years ago.
Jathmar was grateful that Farnalians?and their Faltharian descendents?understood the multiple values that large tracts of wilderness bestowed on a nation. And for giving him a place to hone the skills which had helped earn him a slot on a survey crew.
And if he lacked formal military training, he'd been through the Portal Authority's own rigorous training program. Coupled with a lifetime as a hunter, he felt more than capable of holding up his end of anything that came his team's way. Not that he spent very much of his time in camp.
His Mapping duties were the main reason it had taken them three days to move this far south. They could have made the same trip much more quickly?they were little more than a single day from their entry portal for someone hiking at his best emergency speed?but you simply couldn't Map that quickly. While Darcel Kinlafia loafed around at the portal with a fishing pole and a stewpot full of whatever he could bring down with his rifle, Jathmar and Shaylar were hard at work, earning every cent of their fat paychecks.
They frequently toiled well past darkness to lay down their expanding grid. Jathmar didn't need daylight to "see" terrain features, and Shaylar could work by the light of the oil lamps they carried in their packs, with reflectors to give her plenty of light to fill in the charts and field reports she was responsible for creating. With any luck, their chosen direction would carry them straight toward some kind of valuable real estate that they could claim for the Chalgyn Consortium.
The consortium's main income, of course, would come from portal-usage fees. Once a survey crew discovered a new portal, the company which employed them earned the right to charge fees for every person and every load of goods that traveled through it. The Portal Authority actually ran the portals and set the fees, which were very low on an individual basis. But the cumulative totals added up to a staggering annual income for busy portals.
That was the driving force behind fielding survey crews. Any crew that found a new portal guaranteed a potentially massive income for its company. Mineral wealth and other natural resource rights simply added to the lucrative venture, and the team which found them shared in the money derived from them.
Now Jathmar offered his wife an arm, and Shaylar giggled as she laid her hand regally on his elbow. The gesture was curiously refined, in that subtle and mysterious way Harkalian women seemed to master in their cradles. For just an instant, the grubby, dirt stained dungarees and scuffed hiking boots wavered as his mind's eye showed him a vision of his wife in High Harkalian formal dress. She looked stunning in its multitude of embroidered layers, each one dyed a different, luminous color, setting her skin aglow with the colors of sun-struck emeralds and gold-flecked lapis and the rich, burgundy tones of Fratha wine.
Blue lapis remained to this day the most precious gemstone in any Harkalian culture, for reasons Jathmar still wasn't sure he entirely grasped. Harkalian mythology tended toward the complex, with layers of meaning Shaylar was still explaining after nearly ten years of wedded bliss. Of course, most of Shaylar's lessons ended prematurely, since virtually all of Harkalian mythology revolved around the pleasures of intimacy shared between willing participants… .
Shaylar caught the drift of his emotions and smiled gently, with a seductive promise that hit Jathmar like a blow to the gut. That smile made him grateful all over again for the victory they'd won, securing Shaylar's place in this survey crew. He couldn't have done field work without her. Wouldn't have, rather, for the simple reason that being separated from her for extended periods of time would have felt entirely too much like premature death.
"I love you, too," Shaylar murmured, drawing his head down for another kiss that was altogether too brief. He sighed regretfully and promised himself an early end to the evening, thankful that they'd pitched their tent just a little further from the others, for privacy's sake. Shaylar picked up that emotion through their marriage bond, too, and her eyes smoldered as they met his. Then she schooled her features, patted his arm in a decorous, wifely fashion, and headed him toward the center of camp, where Ghartoun chan Hagrahy
l's voice rang out clearly above the chatter of birds defending their chosen territories.
"Ghartoun sounds just like them, doesn't he?" Shaylar chuckled, nodding toward the deep timber and its glorious explosion of birdsong. "Defending what we've marked on our charts and figuring ways to outfox our competition when the rival survey teams arrive."
"I'd lay money that nobody else has ever suggested that Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl shares anything in common with birds," Jathmar laughed. The stocky Ternathian looked more like a Tadewian bison than anything avian. The former soldier's black hair was cut short, military fashion, despite thirty years on the civilian economy, and his blue eyes were as crisp as the morning air.
He wasn't a brilliant man, but he knew his job, and a lively intelligence lived behind those intense blue eyes. At six-feet-one-inch, he was taller than Jathmar, and far more heavily built, brawny with muscle. At five-two, Shaylar looked like a child beside him. Her chin barely reached his chest, and she weighed a hundred and five pounds, soaking wet, but appearances were deceiving. She was an experienced outdoorswoman, capable of holding her own on any march they'd ever had to make?and that ghastly three weeks-slog through wetlands and riverine floods had taxed all of them to the limits of their endurance.
"You're ready?" chan Hagrahyl asked, glancing up from sharpening his camp ax at their approach. He tested the edge with a cautious thumb, then grunted in satisfaction. He'd dulled it thoroughly yesterday, cutting branches for the camp's brush fence.
"Do you have a preference for which direction we start this morning?" Jathmar asked.
"Not really. Just bear in mind that Falsan headed southwest about thirty minutes ago, following our creek downstream. He's after something he can bag for supper. I told Cookie that if he served up another slop-pot of trail-rats, I'd scalp him alive."
Jathmar laughed. He was delighted that their team leader was such an ardent believer in saving their dried and canned emergency rations for genuine emergencies. He enjoyed eating fresh meat from the game they brought down, along with whatever edible plants were in season where they'd camped. Still …