Hell's Gate m-1

by David Weber

  Shaylar started to open her mouth in a quick response, then paused and closed it once more. Gadrial was right, she realized. When it came to the organized slaughter of combat, there were countless horrific ways to die. No one had a monopoly on ghastliness.

  "I'm not saying you don't have every right to regard what happened to your survey crew as an act of barbarism," Gadrial said more gently. "If nothing else, your people were civilians, and all you were doing was defending yourselves. But when you think about all the horrors Arcanan weapons could unleash against your people, you need to remember that our people are worrying about horrors just as great coming from your people. Both sides are terrified, and both sides think the people on the other side are barbarians. I pray to God every night that we're both wrong, that Master Skirvon and Master Dastiri are going to sit down with your people and somehow negotiate an end to all of this without one more single person being killed.

  "But if Skirvon and Dastiri don't pull that off, then Jasak's father is one of the men who are going to decide what happens next, how Arcana goes to war against Sharona. You already know what Jasak's going to tell him, but it's going to be almost as much up to us?to you, Jathmar, and me?to convince the Duke that prosecuting the war with every weapon at our disposal is the wrong thing to do. And if you're going to help convince him of that, you've got to be able to be brutally honest about just how much barbarism there really is on both sides."

  She stopped speaking, and there was no sound except the noise of wind and water for several seconds. Then Shaylar gave a tiny nod.

  "You're right," she said. "Or partly right, at least. I'm sure being caught in the explosion of an artillery shell is just as terrible as being killed by one of your lightning bolts. And, yes, my people have used flaming oil and set their enemies' ships on fire with what we call 'Ternathian Fire.' I suppose the only real difference is how we go about inflicting our mutual atrocities, isn't it?"

  "I'm afraid so," Gadrial agreed sadly.

  "Maybe it's only the fact that I am a civilian," Shaylar continued. "I'd never seen anyone actually killed in front of me before, never even thought about how horrible and terrifying and ugly that would be. And," she managed something that was almost a smile, "something about being on the receiving end of something like that does tend to give you a somewhat biased opinion of just how … humanitarian it is.

  "But I'll try to think about what you've said. Especially the bit about helping to convince Jasak's father Sharona isn't simply a pit of horrors waiting to consume Arcana."

  "From what I've heard of the Duke, he's not likely to think that, anyway," Gadrial said. "But there are going to be others, as well, and some of them very well may."

  "I understand." Shaylar nodded. Then she inhaled deeply and squared her shoulders.

  "But you were saying about the dragons?" she said.

  "I was saying that they call the infantry support weapons 'dragons' because of the way they replicate dragons' natural weapons," Gadrial said. "But they aren't anywhere near as deadly as an actual battle dragon. The artillery's field-dragons are many times more powerful than the infantry-dragons Jasak's men had with them that day, and much longer ranged. But even the heaviest field-dragon is much less powerful than the weapons built into battle dragons. All of the infantry and artillery weapons rely on charged spell accumulators, but battle dragons are spell accumulators. They charge themselves from the magic field after every shot."

  "I'm trying very hard to remember what we were just saying," Shaylar told her a bit wanly. "It's a bit difficult, though, when you tell me about something like that."

  "I never said it would be easy. Just that we've got to do it, anyway."

  "I know, I know." Shaylar shook her head. "But are you saying that you think it's something about the … magic the Mythalans used to graft those horrible capabilities into their battle dragons that causes them to hate me where transports like Skyfang don't?"

  Shaylar asked, deliberately trying to step back from the horrendous vision of dragons flying over Sharona belching death and devastation.

  "Probably," Gadrial said, leaning back in her deck chair as if she, too, was grateful to back away from the same vision. "Although, actually, I think it probably has less to do with the weapons themselves than with the changes in the dragons' … personalities, for want of a better word, that went with it. The original Ransaran dragon breeding lines had deliberately emphasized docility. The breeders didn't want something that size which would suddenly decide it ought to be eating its handlers. The Mythalans, typically, decided to 'improve' upon that when they set out to create dragons for combat. So they spliced in several of the characteristics of a Mythal River crocodile." She grimaced once more. "You might say that their personalities are just a little more aggressive than those of a pure transport, like Skyfang."

  "I see," Shaylar said slowly, and, in fact, she rather thought she did. She'd sensed a similarity between Skyfang and the huge whales who sought out her mother when they needed an interface with humanity. The dragon wasn't as intelligent as the great whales?or, at least, she certainly didn't think he was?yet there was that undeniably familiar "feel" to his personality. But if Skyfang was somehow similar to whales, then the battle dragons were more akin to the great sharks … or, perhaps, to barracudas.

  "That's very interesting," she said after several seconds. "It's a lot to take in, of course … even without your well-deserved little lecture." she smiled crookedly, then she yawned. It wasn't completely feigned, and her smile turned lopsided. "In fact, if you don't mind, I think I'm going to take advantage of the sun until lunchtime and sleep on it."

  "By all means, get as much rest as you can," Gadrial advised her with an equally crooked smile. "We won't be getting much of it over the next half-dozen universes or so."

  "In that case … "

  Shaylar settled back in her deck chair and tucked the light blanket around her legs. Then she gave Gadrial a smile, closed her eyes, and dreamed nightmares of Sharonian nights filled with the ghastly pyres of dragon breath.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  "So, Davir. What kind of effect do you expect these negotiations to have?" Darl Elivath asked.

  It was late as he and Davir Perth sat sipping tea. They were in the Sharonian Universal News Network's green room, in the wing of the Great Palace set-aside for the press, waiting for official word that the Conclave's Committee on Unification had finally managed to report out draft language for the proposed amendment to the initial Act of Unification.

  "On the Conclave and the Unification? Or on whether or not we go to war with these people?" Perthis asked.

  "Both, I suppose," Elivath said. "It took the threat of a war to get the Conclave assembled in the first place, after all."

  "Well," SUNN's Chief Voice scratched his chin thoughtfully. "I suppose the fact that they want to talk at all has to be a good sign. At least it's not what you expect out of the kind of murderous barbarians we've all assumed we were facing. And the possibility that it was all a mistake?that they thought our people were soldiers who'd attacked one of their people?genuinely hadn't occurred to me."

  Perthis was a bit surprised by how unwillingly he made that admission, and he wondered why he was so unwilling. Was it that he'd invested so much in hating the "Arcanans" for what they'd done that he simply didn't want to give up his hate? Or was it what he'd Seen from Shaylar's final Voice transmission? He remembered once again Seeing Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl stand up with his hands empty … and go down again, choking on his life's blood.

  Perthis was a man who'd spent his entire adult career in the news business. He knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that what he'd Seen from Shaylar was the truth. It was, quite literally, impossible for a Voice to lie about something like that in such a deep linkage to another Voice. But the professional newsman in him also recognized how even the truth could be misread, misinterpreted. Was that what had happened here?

  It was entirely possible that it was, he admitted. And if it wa
s, the fact that relatively few people on Sharona?Davir Perthis, included?had ever seen a violent death with their own eyes had undoubtedly contributed to it. The sheer, horrifying emotional impact of seeing that sort of carnage with your physical eyes would have been bad enough for someone who'd never seen it before. Going the extra step and Seeing it with the total clarity (and emotional overtones) which could only come from a powerful Voice trapped in the middle of it only made it infinitely worse.

  "What about what they say happened to Shaylar?"

  Elivath's question broke in on the Chief Voice's thoughts, and Perthis looked back up at him with a sour expression.

  "They haven't really said all that much, when you come right down to it," he pointed out. "Aside from the fact that she wasn't killed outright?which we already knew?all we have is their claims that they tried to get her to one of their Healers before she died. Or that they could have done anything for her if they'd managed to reach one in time. We didn't get that from a Voice, either, you know. And either way, she's still dead, and they still killed her."

  "So you think they're lying?"

  "I didn't say that." Perthis realized he sounded a little defensive, and waved one hand. "All right, I admit I thought it. I'm having a hard time getting past my original image of them, I guess. But the fact is, Darl, that we don't have any sort of confirmation of a single thing they've said, and I'm just … uncomfortable with the fact."

  "But if they did try to save her, and if it turns out they can prove it, don't you think it would make a difference with public opinion?"

  "If they genuinely tried to save her life after making an honest mistake, then probably yes," Perthis said. "But that's a lot of ifs, Darl. They've still got a lot of talking to do, as far as I'm concerned, to explain how what were supposed to be a bunch of trained soldiers mistook someone standing up and holding out empty hands as an act of aggression. Mind you, I'm not saying mistakes like that can't happen. Gods know they've happened in our own past. I'm just saying that after actually Seeing the events from our crew's side, it's going to be hard to convince a lot of our people, including me, that that's what happened here."

  He started to say something else, then stopped himself. He didn't know exactly how much Elivath actually knew about the rumors regarding the Voice messages to Emperor Zindel and the Conclave. The original message from Regiment-Captain Velvelig, informing the Emperor and the Conclave that the Arcanans had asked for negotiations, had been released directly to the Voice network and the general public. The follow-on messages had not been, and neither had any of the Conclave's?or Zindel's?responses to Velvelig.

  Ostensibly, that was to avoid further exacerbating public opinion by generating unreasonable expectations, on the one hand, or generating additional fury when the bobbles and stumbles which were undoubtedly inevitable in opening negotiations with a totally alien civilization occurred, on the other hand. Perthis supposed that the official reasoning made sense, but he'd picked up on a few very quiet rumors that it was because those follow-on messages from whoever was actually talking to these people included reports that the Arcanans weren't being completely truthful. He had no idea what they were supposed to be lying about, but the thought that they were lying at all was hardly reassuring.

  "Well, let's assume it turns out they really did their best to save her life," Elivath said. "And that they really do want to settle this as peacefully as they can, given everything that's already happened. If all that's true, what kind of effect do you think it's going to have on the Conclave and the unification?"

  "I don't know that I expect it to have any effect," Perthis replied. Elivath raised one skeptical eyebrow, and the Chief Voice shrugged. "By now," he pointed out, "the debate's taken on the life of its own. Besides, even if we manage to put the brakes on this current confrontation, we still know the bastards are out there, don't we? All of our conventional political equations are going to have to take them into account from now on."

  "Do you really think so?"

  Elivath grimaced and set down his tea cup. He sat turning it on its saucer for a moment, lips slightly pursed, while he gazed out of the green room's window at the Great Palace's well-lit grounds under the great, midnight-blue dome of the starstruck heavens. Then he returned his gaze to Perthis.

  "I was talking to one of the Authority's theoreticians," the Voice correspondent said. "From the way he was talking, this may be the only point of contact we'll see with these people. So if we get control of it, or just seal it off, wouldn't that be more or less the end of it?"

  "Only point of contact?"

  Perthis leaned back in his own chair. To be totally honest, he'd never thought of Elivath as the sharpest pencil in SUNN's box. He respected the strength of Elivath's Talent, and his integrity, but he'd also always thought of Elivath as one of his correspondents who required rather more careful direction than many.

  He knew Elivath knew he regarded him that way?that was one of the problems when Voices with powerful Talents worked with one another?but he also knew that both he and Elivath had qualities the other respected, as well. Still, he'd never really considered Elivath an investigative reporter. The correspondent was extraordinarily good at explaining even complicated concepts to his audience, once he'd mastered those concepts himself, but he usually needed them explained to him in the first place by the investigators who'd gone out and turned them up initially. Part of Perthis' job was to see to it that the proper experts were found to explain things to him, and he was unaccustomed to having Elivath go out and do the finding for himself, especially in technical matters. But if the correspondent had, indeed, turned up some new technical information, Perthis wanted to know about it.

  "Why should this be the only point of contact?" the Chief Voice continued after a moment. "Aside from the fact that we've never had one before, which might predispose us to expect it to be the only one, that is."

  "I'm not the best technical man we've got," Elivath pointed out mildly?and, Perthis thought, with considerable understatement. "We both know that. But according to this fellow, the latest models for how the multiverse works suggest that our particular universe is part of what I guess you might call a 'cable' of universes. Sort of like those stranded cables they used to hang the bridge across the Ylani Strait, I guess."

  He waved one hand, frowning, as if he weren't completely satisfied with his own analogy. Not too surprisingly, Perthis reflected. No one, as far as he was aware, had ever come up with an analogy for the multiverse's structure that he really liked.

  "Anyway, this fellow I was talking to says that all of the empirical and theoretical work that's been done suggests that all of the universes in the multiverse had the same common starting point. What caused them to … separate from one another were events that had multiple possible outcomes. Each possible outcome happened somewhere, and that started the separate, divergent universes."

  He paused, one eyebrow raised, and Perthis nodded to indicate that he was still following. That part of the theory had been explained to everyone, over and over again. There might be an Arpathian septman somewhere so far up in the hills that they still hadn't invented fire who hadn't heard it, but everyone else was fully aware of it.

  "Well," Elivath continued, "this guy I was talking to says that up until recently we always figured that whenever a new universe was created, it went off in its own unique direction. That each new universe radiated at what I guess you could think of as right angles to the universe it split off from because of the particular event that created it. But he says that that theory's been challenged lately, and that the brains' best current guess is that the universes that are most similar lie … parallel to one another, for want of a better word, instead. They're all 'headed the same direction,' so to speak, not racing away from each other."

  "I got the same briefing when this whole thing blew up in our faces," Perthis agreed, nodding again. "In fact, they said something about the Calirath Glimpses proving the existence of parallel universes."


  "Yeah." Elivath made a face. "I remember. It made my head hurt, actually."

  "Only if you tried to follow the theory instead of the consequences," Perthis pointed out with a wry grin. "Just remember that the boffins think that what a Glimpse is is really a sort of precognitive peek across into those parallel universes, whereas a straight precog is stuck looking along the event line in his own universe. A Glimpse isn't true precognition, but more of a … statistical process. They do have some unique capability in their Talent which lets them follow possible human actions and outcomes, but the unpredictability of human nature means they can't be sure what any particular human in any particular universe is going to do. What they can do, apparently, is see the possible actions and outcomes of a whole bunch of people simultaneously. The same people, living in parallel universes. And what their Glimpses are is the most common outcomes of all those actions."

  "Like I say, it made my head hurt. It still does."

  "Mine, too, if I'm going to be honest." Perthis grinned. "But, the main point, is that that's the reason the Caliraths can See the consequences of human actions when no one else can. And if the universes in question weren't really, really close to one another?really 'parallel,' and really similar to one another,I mean?then a Glimpse based on what's going to happen in any other universe?or universes, for that matter?wouldn't help when it comes to figuring out what's going to happen in this one."