Hell's Gate m-1

by David Weber

  He glanced again at Jathmar, wondering if the wounded man's unconsciousness was a mercy or a bad sign.

  "We'll rig a field litter for him," he said. "And one for her, as well, if she needs it."

  "Get it ready, then," Gadrial said. "The sooner we move him, the faster we'll getting back. As long as his litter doesn't jostle him too much, he should be all right. I'll do what I can for him as well as your men."

  "I appreciate that. Immensely." He smiled, the expression tight with worry and fatigue, yet genuine. "I'll get right on it, then."

  It took only minutes to break out the collapsible field stretchers that were part of the baggage his platoons carried in the field. Jasak couldn't imagine what battle must have been like before the development of Gifts made it possible to move heavy loads with spells, rather than muscle power.

  All four of his baggage handlers had survived, along with their equipment. The most critically wounded were placed on proper field litters, canvas slings mounted between poles to which the handlers attached standard spell storage boxes. They didn't have enough of the standard litters for the less critically hurt, but Sword Harnak threw together field expedient substitutes, using uniform tunics for slings and hastily cut branches for poles. They looked like hell, but they ought to do the job, and Jasak watched the baggage handlers attaching the sarkolis crystal storage boxes.

  The storage devices were all pretty much the same size and shape. Only the markings varied, with a color coding that told the soldier at a glance whether it contained spells that powered infantry-dragons, spells that lifted baggage, or spells that illuminated a landing area to guide living dragons during night airlifts. As an added precaution, those which carried weapon-grade spells featured carefully contoured shapes which would fit only into the weapons they were intended to power, but that wasn't immediately apparent at first glance.

  Jasak supervised preparations closely, speaking to wounded men in a low, reassuring voice. Gripping shoulders where a bracing moment of support was required to stiffen a man's weary spine. Making sure every bit of captured equipment was secured for analysis back home. He still didn't understand how the long, hollow tubes they'd found beside the dead?or the smaller versions several had carried, as well?had managed to wreak such havoc, but he intended to find out.

  When it was time to shift the unconscious Jathmar onto one of the litters, Jasak abandoned the captured equipment to the handlers he'd detailed to haul it out and personally accompanied Lance Erdar Wilthy. Wilthy was the senior, most experienced of First Platoon's baggage handlers, and Jasak had assigned him specific responsibility for transporting Jathmar. The lance had been doing his job for years, but Jasak found himself hovering, unable to restrain himself from taking personal charge of the delicate operation of getting Jathmar onto the litter despite the fact that he knew Wilthy had far more experience than he.

  Shaylar sat beside her husband, one hand resting gently on his scorched brown hair, when Jasak and Wilthy approached. Her unguarded expression was full of anguish, and Jasak crouched down beside her.

  "Shaylar," he said gently. She looked up, and he pointed to the canvas sling Wilthy was unrolling on the ground beside Jathmar.

  "We're going to put Jathmar on this stretcher," he continued, pantomiming the act of picking something up and setting it down again. "We won't hurt him. I promise."

  Shaylar looked at him, and then at the litter. Since they would have to transport Jathmar face down, the litter had to be rigid, or the sling would bend his spine painfully in the wrong direction, not to mention the tension it would put on the burned skin of his back. Harnak's improvised stretchers would never have worked, Jasak thought, watching Wilthy slide crosswise slats into place, turning the canvas sling into a rigid platform.

  When it was ready, Jasak pantomimed their intentions to Shaylar again, and she nodded.

  "Easy, now," Jasak cautioned Wilthy. "I'll take his shoulders, Erdar. You take his feet. Gadrial, support his waist. We only need to lift him a couple of inches off the ground. On the count of three. One, two, three?"

  They lifted him two inches and slid him smoothly onto the canvas. Shaylar hovered, holding Jathmar's head, biting her lips when he stirred with a sound of pain. Gadrial whispered over him, and he subsided again, lying quietly on the litter.

  So far, so good, Jathmar thought.

  "All right, attach the accumulator and let's lift him, Erdar."

  "Yes, Sir," Wilthy said, and pulled out the box and attached it to receptacle on the litter.

  Shaylar had been looking down at Jathmar's face, but she looked up again, attracted by the lance's movement. For just a moment, she showed no reaction, but then her eyes flew wide and she came to her feet with a bloodcurdling scream.

  Jasak flinched in astonishment as she leapt past him, snatched the box off the litter, and hurled it violently away. Then she spun to face him?to face all of them, every surviving member of First Platoon. She was a single, tiny woman, smaller than Jasak's own twelve-year-old sister, but he could literally feel the savagery of her fury as her fingers curled into defensive claws. She was prepared to attack them all, he realized. To rip out the throat of any man who approached Jathmar with her bare teeth, and he recoiled from her desperate defiance, trying frantically to understand its cause.

  "Oh, dear God!" Gadrial cried. "She thinks we're going to cremate him alive! They all look alike to her?the accumulator boxes!"

  Comprehension exploded through Jathmar, and he swore with vicious self-loathing.

  "Get that box, Wilthy!" he snapped. "Fasten it to something else?anything else. Show her what it does."

  The white-faced trooper, his expression as shaken and horrified as Jasak's own, scrambled to retrieve the accumulator. He scrabbled it up out of the leaves where Shaylar had thrown it and fastened it to the nearest object he could find?a section of decaying log about three feet long and eighteen inches in diameter. The box was equipped with twenty small chambers, each with its own control button, and he pressed one of them, releasing the spell inside.

  The log lifted from its leafy bed. It floated silently into the air and hovered there, effortlessly.

  Shaylar watched, her eyes wide. Then she sagged to her knees, gasping as she panted for breath, and Gadrial knelt beside her.

  "It's all right, Shaylar," she said gently, reassuringly. "It's all right. We're not going to hurt him. It'll just pick him up. See, it lifts the log."

  She pointed, pantomiming moving the accumulator back to Jathmar's litter, then lifting Jathmar the same way. Shaylar trembled violently in the circle of Gadrial' left arm, and the magister glanced over her shoulder at Jasak.

  "For the love of God, lift the other wounded men. She's half crazed with terror!"

  "Get them airborne!" Jasak barked to the other handlers, who were watching with open mouths. "Damn it, get them airborne now!"

  Wilthy's subordinates obeyed quickly, lifting all of the critically wounded. Shaylar watched them, her body taut, her eyes wide. But the wildness was fading from them, and she began to relax again, ever so slowly.

  "It's all right," Gadrial told her again and again. "Let us help him, Shaylar. Let us help Jathmar. Please."

  Jasak watched as Shaylar's obvious terror began to ease. The furious fear for Jathmar which had given her strength seemed to flow out of her. Her mouth went unsteady, and her eyes overflowed. Then she crumpled, and Gadrial caught her, held her close, rocked her like a frightened child, stroking her hair and soothing her.

  A badly shaken Jasak turned back to Wilthy.

  "Lift Jathmar's stretcher, Erdar. But move carefully, whatever you do. She's not strong enough to take many more shocks like that one."

  "Yes, Sir. I'll be gentle as a butterfly, Sir."

  Gadrial urged Shaylar to her feet as Wilthy slowly and carefully, pausing between each movement to let Shaylar see every step of the process, lifted Jathmar's litter until it floated just above waist level.

  Shaylar watched, still panting, and Gadrial wi
ped the other woman's cheeks dry with the corner of her own shirt. Then the magister gave her a smile and squeezed her hand for just a moment, before moving it to rest on Jathmar's. Wilthy had tucked the injured man's arms down at his sides, which was an awkward placement, but better than leaving them hanging over the edges of the litter.

  Shaylar curled her slender fingers carefully, delicately, around her husband's. Then she drew a deep breath. Her chin came up, and she met Jasak's gaze once again.

  "All right, People." Jasak gave the order. "Move out."

  Chapter Eleven

  "What?" Company-Captain Balkar chan Tesh stared at Petty Captain Rokam Traygan in total disbelief. "You can't be serious!"

  "I wish to all the Uromathian hells I wasn't, Sir," Traygan said harshly. The Ricathian Voice's face was the color of old ashes, and his hands shook visibly. He looked away from chan Tesh and swallowed hard.

  "I?" He swallowed again. "I threw up twice receiving the message, Sir," he admitted. "It was … ugly."

  chan Tesh stared at the petty-captain, then shook himself. He didn't know Traygan as well as he might have wished, hadn't even met the man before the Voice caught up with his column in Thermyn. But they'd traveled over a thousand miles together on horseback since then, from the rolling grasslands of what would have been central New Ternathia and across the continent's deserts and rocky western spine. The heavyset, powerfully muscled Voice hadn't struck chan Tesh as a weakling, yet he was obviously shaken?badly shaken?and chan Tesh was suddenly glad that he wasn't a Voice.

  "Tell me," he said quietly, almost gently, and Traygan turned back to face him.

  "Company-Captain Halifu didn't know exactly where we were," the Voice said, "and I've never worked with the Chalgyn Voice, Kinlafia. So instead of trying to contact us directly, he had Kinlafia pass the report straight up the chain with a request that Fort Mosanik relay to us. I got Kinlafia's entire transmission."

  He swallowed again and shook his head.

  "I never imagined anything like it, Sir," he said, his voice a bit hoarse around the edges. "It was?It was like Hell come to life. Fireballs, explosions, lightning bolts, for the gods' sake! And Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr and her husband caught right in the middle of it."

  chan Tesh felt his own face turn pale. He was Ternathian, himself, not Harkalian, but Nargra-Kolmayr was virtually a Sharona-wide icon. The first woman to win the battle for a place on a temporal survey crew; one of the most powerful Voices Sharona had ever produced; daughter of one of Sharona's most renowned cetacean ambassadors; half of one of Sharona's storybook, larger than life romantic sagas. The fact that she was beautiful enough to be cast to play herself in any of the (inevitable) dramatizations of her own life had simply been icing on the cake.

  "Was she hurt?" he asked urgently.

  "Yes," Traygan half-groaned. "She was linked with Kinlafia, and somehow she held the link to the end. Held it even while whoever the bastards were slaughtered her crew?even her husband!?all around her. And then?"

  His face twisted with what chan Tesh realized was the actual physical memory of the last moments of Nargra-Kolmayr's transmission.

  "She's dead?" chan Tesh almost whispered.

  "We don't know. We think she hit her head, so she might just be unconscious." Traygan sounded like a man whose emotions clung desperately to what his intellect knew was false hope, chan Tesh thought grimly.

  "All right, Rokam," he said. "Tell me exactly what you know. Take your time. Make sure you tell me everything."

  It was the news a transport pilot least wanted to hear.

  Squire Muthok Salmeer's quarters, such as they were, were almost adjacent to the hummer tower. The handler on watch had handed the message straight to Salmeer, and Salmeer had run all the way from his quarters to the CO's office to deliver the ghastly news.

  "Combat casualties? Combat with what?" Commander of Five Hundred Sarr Klian demanded incredulously as he scanned the message transcript the duty communications tech had pulled off the incoming hummer's crystal. It was, Salmeer recognized, what was known as a rhetorical question, and the pilot waited tensely for the five hundred to finish reading.

  By the time he was done, Klian was swearing blisters into Fort Rycharn's roughly finished wooden walls. He glared at the authorizing sigil at the foot of the message, then shook his head, looked up, and glared at Salmeer.

  "He met someone from another universe and attacked? Has Hundred Olderhan lost his blue-blooded mind?"

  "Sir," Salmeer said, leaning forward and jabbing a finger at the two words in the entire message which had meant the most to him, "I don't know who attacked who, but he says he's got heavy casualties, Sir. Whatever his reasons, whatever's going on out there, he needs a med team. We've got to scramble one now, Five Hundred. My dragon's got seven hundred miles to fly just to reach the portal."

  The pilot was almost dancing in impatience. Sarr Klian swore once more, explosively. Then, as Salmeer opened his mouth to protest the delay, Fort Rycharn's commander shook his head savagely.

  "Yes, yes, of course! Throw a medical team into the saddle and go," he said sharply.

  Salmeer paused just long enough to throw an abbreviated salute. The five hundred returned it with equal brevity, and Salmeer whipped around. He was already back up to a run by the time he hit the door, but even so, he heard Klian muttering behind him before the door closed.

  "He attacked them? What the fuck is Olderhan doing out there?"

  Twenty minutes later, Fort Rycharn's sole permanently assigned transport dragon was lumbering out to the flightline, loaded with an emergency medical transport platform, several canvas bags of medical supplies, two surgeons, four herbalists, and Sword Naf Morikan, Charlie Company's journeyman Gifted healer, whose R amp;R had just been cut brutally short.

  "Sir Jasak attacked?" Morikan demanded as he fumbled his way into the saddle on the already-moving dragon. "Attacked what, in the gods' names? There's nothing out there!"

  Salmeer bit his tongue to keep himself from pointing out that there obviously was something out there, since Sir Jasak Olderhan had gotten into a blood-and-guts fight with whatever it was. The pilot found it impossible to believe it really had been representatives of another trans-universal civilization. That was simply too preposterous for him to wrap his mind around without a lot more evidence. But he didn't have any better explanation for what it might have been than anyone else at Fort Rycharn did, and he reminded himself that Morikan was Olderhan's company healer. He knew every one of the men of Fifty Garlath's platoon personally. Of course the noncom was worried half out of his mind.

  "I have no idea, Sword," he said instead. "Be sure your safety straps are buckled tight."

  "Yes, Sir," Morikan replied. "Ready when you are, Squire," he added after a moment, and Salmeer gave Windclaw the signal.

  The dragon launched quickly, as if he'd caught his pilot's urgency, and he probably had. Windclaw was a fine old beast, a century old last month, and as smart as a transport ever got. Of course, that wasn't much compared to a battle dragon, but Windclaw was no mental midget, and his experience made him doubly valuable in the field, particularly in an emergency. A canny old beast like Windclaw knew every trick in the book for coaxing extra speed during an emergency flight.

  Salmeer wished bitterly that they'd had even one more dragon available to send with Windclaw, but this universe was at the ass-end of nowhere, almost ninety thousand miles from Old Arcana. Worse, it was over twenty-six thousand miles back to the nearest sliderhead at the Green Haven portal, and almost ten thousand of those miles were over-water. A transport dragon like Windclaw could cover prodigious distances?up to a thousand miles, or possibly a bit more in a single day's flight?but then he had to rest. That meant landing on something, and the water gaps between Fort Rycharn and Green Haven were all wider than a dragon could manage in a single leg.

  That made getting anything all the way to the fort an unmitigated pain in the ass. But Salmeer was used to that, just as he was used to the fact that
Transport Command promotion was slow to the point of nonexistence. Muthok Salmeer himself had almost thirty years in, but he was never going to be a combat pilot, and he still hadn't been promoted as high as a fifty. Taken for granted, overworked, underappreciated, and underpaid: that was a Transport Command pilot's lot in life, and most of them took the same sort of perverse pride in it that Salmeer did.

  None of which made his current problem any more palatable.

  The Arcanan military?and the UTTTA civilian infrastructure, for that matter?were notoriously casual about extending the slide rails out into the boondocks. It was hard to fault their sense of priorities, Salmeer supposed in his more charitable moments. After all, even Green Haven boasted a total population of considerably less than eight hundred thousand. That wasn't a lot of people, spread over the surface of an entire virgin planet the size of Arcana itself, and it wasn't as if other portals, much closer to Arcana, couldn't supply anything the home world really needed. Exploration and expansion were worthwhile in their own right, of course, and there were always homesteaders, eager to stake claims to places of their own. But simple economic realities meant the inner portals were far more heavily developed and populated and invariably received a far greater proportion of the Transit Authority's maintenance resources as a result.

  And it's the poor bloody transport pilots who make it all possible, Salmeer thought bitterly. Not that anyone ever notices.

  He supposed it was inevitable, but every bureaucrat, whether uniformed or civilian, seemed to assume there would always be a transport dragon around when he needed one. The sheer range a dragon made possible was addictive, despite the fact that even a big, powerful, fully mature beast like Windclaw could carry only a fraction of the load a slider car could manage. Most of the freight that needed moving on the frontiers was relatively light, after all. But the demands placed upon the Air Force's Transport Command were still brutal. The Command was always short of suitable dragons, and Cloudsail, Windclaw's partner in the two-dragon teams which were supposed to be deployed, had torn three of the sails in his right wing colliding with a treetop. They'd had to ship him back to the main portal for treatment, and, of course, there'd been no replacement in the pipeline.