by Pam Uphoff
"Thank you ArcTecno Menikos. Hopefully the team should be up to par by tomorrow. Is that still the next scheduled extension?"
"Yes. The enlargements have been strong, so we think it may cross-over and go all the way this time."
Quicksilver paused, but there wasn't enough left of Iokaste to help. Did he mean the whole World would overlap and merge? They hadn't gotten nearly enough people away yet. Even on this continent. And the foreign governments had looked skeptical . . . Not good. Not good at all. Eight more days to evacuate completely, the President had said. Four more now, she rather thought. I've lost three days, at least. I wonder how many gates there are, now, with Mom and Harry and half the Old Gods trying to get people to shift their asses before they're killed?
"Is that wise? Or are the rumors of how few people have merged not true? I know I've never been so late before."
"That's not our decision to make." His voice disapproved of her question, but his fists clenched briefly and his eyes were worried as he turned away.
:: Crap. This is not good. ::
Q nodded. :: We need to slow them way down . . . Apparently reversing or stopping is not possible. ::
:: Or not something they ever considered. I'm going to prowl around a bit. ::
Q worked most of the day, and had requalified before she went to dinner. She collected her few belongings, although she had a 'feeling' that Iokaste had a lot more 'at home', and was chivvied onto the bus for a seven hour drive to the currently quiet eighth Magnetics Center. Was she married? Did she have children? Not even a vague feeling about it. Could she sabotage something tomorrow? Or was Xen in a better position?
::Xen?::
::Hey Q, they're really nervy all over here. .::
::Here too. There's a constant background worry that this will be the last time they can limit it. And apparently a strong possibility that it could go all the way. Can you get in there for a bit of sabotage tonight? I'm being taken too far away to get back to where we were.:: Quicksilver pictured the Maintenance Module Training Center, pulled back to show all the surrounding buildings. :: That building over there has the magnetics in it. I think damage there would mess things up considerably. I may be able to stop it wherever I'm headed as well.::
:: Yes, that's the most guarded building. I'll check it out tonight. I'm in the mood for large explosions. ::
::Good. Find a solid location before you go—in case of pyrotechnics.:: She set her mental alarms, settled back in her bus seat and caught four hours of sleep before she woke and checked on him.
::I'm almost in. They've got a pile of light traps to work through.::
She waited quietly, staring out the bus windows at the stark over-populated landscape. What advantage was there to a merge? Had they used so much of their reserves that even an advanced World like the one they were attacking now looked rich? What happened to people in a forced merge, if there weren't enough people for everyone to merge with someone?
She closed her eyes and searched through the scraps of Iokaste's memories. Yes, she'd been in that building, getting it ready for the next attack on some unsuspecting world.
::All right. Game time.::
She could see through his eyes the corridors, familiar to Iokaste, and cued him through turns and down stairs to the lowest level. To loosen fittings and start slow leaks, to turn off some backup safety measures. And then up to the third level, to a dead end corridor where the vertical wheel of the magnet spun on the far side of thick insulating layers. ::Now it needs to get warm, and you need to be ready to Travel instantly.::
She could feel him reach for gravity, this time. Probably the source he used the least, but inside at night the best. Or . . . ::It's spinning very fast, if you pull the kinetic energy . . . ::
:: Oh yeah. Remember the Earth's gate when I shut them down? In fact I suppose some sort of dimensional effect is in play here. But I think I'll try to be more subtle this time. ::
She watched in awe as he pulled energy and channeled it and the huge ring started vibrating. Alarms went off all over, emergency procedures shutting down the ring. Bringing up the little rings . . . Spreading the work to neighboring centers . . .
Xen traveled back to his recognition point. ::That should do for a good while, and I have a solid location right there, to do it all over again. ::
The bus turned into the barracks behind the Eighth Magnetics Center half an hour later, and the news that the extension was postponed at least a day was the first thing they were told.
Q climbed into her assigned bed and slept happily. She had plenty of time to sabotage this plant.
***
Klytaimestra was getting worried. Two days now she'd been working in the shadow zone, merging the seeds of crops in hopes that enough viable seed would result that there wouldn't be any starvation next year. These merges were insane. At twenty years of age she had no experience with it outside of school books, and she wasn't much liking what she was learning first hand.
She carefully poured wheat from two containers into a bowl. Everything but the seeds and herself were already merged, and essentially inert. She stirred the wheat, watching the seeds collapse into each other. She shuddered at the thought of doing the same. Of someone, a real live person, being killed so that she could live. She would lose her genes, her looks would change. Whatever age the person she merged with would average with her own age for a final result. She could look forward to a long, long life full of miscarriages and infertility, and more merges.
A quiet tap was followed by the entry of her father. She gulped at the pale grimness of his features. "What's wrong?"
"The damos have successfully evacuated so many people that even the soldiers can't find people to merge with. No women have been caught in the last three days." He had pulled a loaded cart into the lab as he spoke. "This is water from the new World. You know what a high percent of the body water makes up. And in here, roughly the right chemical mix."
"Ashes. Are we now reduced to dead bodies?"
"We aren't even getting many of those. These are pets, dogs and cats that we're trapping over there. They're dead, and cremated. Nothing but chemicals, now. Drink the water, bathe in it, the ashes? Wet them and smear them on. Drink them too, no matter how nasty. Please, Klya. I'm going to go get your mother and little brother, take them to the warehouse where we have more. I'm horribly afraid this may be your only hope."
She looked at the ashes. I won't have to kill anyone. I'm not a murderer. Not personally. "Thank you, Dad. I will. Now hurry and get mother and Paeon."
He dropped a kiss on her head and took his cart away.
Klya picked up an empty bowl and filled it with the new water and drank deeply. Better dead than merged.
Chapter Eleven
22 Skirophorian 4721
Helios Shadow Zone
The next day nothing was found wrong with the maintenance mag, and it was restarted.
Unfortunately the Eighth Magnetics Center developed problems in the control circuits and power supply that caused a further postponement.
Xen vibrated the ring again the third night, but was seen.
He abandoned the effort, and started working his way backwards, to check out these people's society.
It was a long trek, the shadow zone was close to a thousand miles across, and easily five times that length now. He slipped aboard a dump truck full of rubble headed away from the front, light warp closely held as he nodded off.
He woke when the truck stopped, and slipped away. The truck dumped its load against a tall building and other equipment spread it along the side of the building. Civilians were picking up pieces and carrying them inside.
He looked around and realized he was again at the boundary of the shadow zone. He walked out into normal light. No cravings, no attraction to trees or people.
There were very few people on the street. They gave the impression of scurrying to finish a few last errands. Xen created an illusion of their garb, and walked the streets more op
enly. He bought all three of the newspapers available with illusionary money and read them over breakfast. Am I using Q's language skills or did I pick someone's brains and add it to my repertoire? Dare I deliberately take more?
Where the other side had been evacuating as fast as possible, these 'Helaos' had meticulous maps of the expected schedule and extent of over laps, the locations of merge clinics and schedules depending on a lottery involving their social services numbers.
Also some bland statements about slight delays.
And now new instructions for wild merges.
Warnings about avoiding 'Target' plants and animals. Even wood was to be avoided, once one was in the shadow zone. Only the already merged should be moving building materials and so forth. Xen considered the likely fatal consequences of merging with lumber. No doubt it would be a quick way to go.
The third newspaper was apparently a low class rag, given to much sensationalism. They had plenty to be sensational about, and plenty of crude pictures of dogboys and little girls with cat ears and whiskers. They carried on about the Government Conspiracy to hide the real population count of the target, which had been chosen for its extreme mineral wealth.
Not a word in any of the papers about the target evacuating people away from the shadow zone, and that there might well be no one to merge with.
The evacuation was going to put these folks in a very dangerous situation. He asked his pretty waitress where to find a library, and received directions. The man in the next booth absent-mindedly dropped a large denomination bill as he passed Xen's table. Xen polished off the rest of his breakfast and paid his bill, with a hefty tip and walked to the library. It was just inside the shadow zone. Closed, with a sign that said it would be remaining closed until the merge was completed.
The lock clicked open with a pass of his hand, and he slipped in. The mess inside was interesting. They must have scavenged for blank paper supplies as they captured cities, reams of paper were stuck between volumes on the shelves. No, rather they were partly integrated with the covers, the pages, the shelves. The floors and walls were lumpy, as if they'd been layered with the rubble still scattered along the walls, and gradually absorbed it. Shelves were equally lumpy wood, half absorbed boards nailed to the sides and under the books. Apparently they were intending for the library to survive the merge. He went looking for details.
The merge had been planned for years in advance. All the possible Worlds they would cross, that they could attack, had been scouted for information that would make it easier. Apparently this World was drifting, crossing other Worlds insubstantially, moving too fast to stick and merge gradually over the centuries or millennia. Until they found a way to force a merge, gates large enough to hold . . . Xen switched to astronomy and read all about their Universe. Twelve light years across, containing four stars besides the Sun. Mythology. Once the stars filled the night sky . . . then man disobeyed God and was cast from the Grace . . .
"Bloody hell. What did that!"
It did make the idea of a cannibal universe a bit more practical. "Twelve light years across is only small by comparison. Does everything merge, all the planets and moons? I wonder what the effect is on the Sun. Or the other stars? In and out of this mini-verse."
Back to history. History merged into Archeology four thousand years ago. The planet was covered with the remains of a fantastically advanced society that had collapsed. There was no explanation for the situation, but resource depletion was mentioned as a possible cause for the fall of the Lamuri, the "People from the East." No doubt it sounded better than an industrial accident that ripped a twelve-light-year chunk of the universe loose from the rest of it. Or war, or for all he knew, an invasion by space aliens.
Two centuries ago, some bright fellow had had an idea about multiple dimensions. None-the-less, the first merge had been an accident, the result of the unfortunate and entirely accidental geometric relationship of multiple super-cooled power storage stations that came on line as they were passing, unseen and unfelt, through another brane. Fatalities in the billions. A hundred and thirty-five years ago. The survivors had been rich. Their planet had merged with untapped wealth. They'd known where to look for mineral deposits, hydrocarbons. Many of the survivors had been old, but got younger when they merged with a young person. Their Forum building, full of powerful and ruthless old men, had occupied the site of a boy's school, and most of the senators had emerged from the merge revitalized.
In the end, doing it again had been irresistible. Powerful old people merging with teenagers, regaining their young adulthood. A World of unexploited riches to renew their depleted, long-civilized World.
So. They were killing billions, deliberately.
The analyses of the merges were very interesting. People and things that overlapped shed 'dark matter' for a couple of weeks? Gravity anomalies all over the place, flying very hazardous.
The arguments they'd used when presenting this merge—the fifth—to the populace were interesting. They had gates, they'd scouted ahead and picked the World they'd attacked because it had the largest population of the worlds they'd passed through once they were ready. The public figures raised his eyebrows. Did Ben's world actually have a population of twelve billion? And this World was down to several hundred million, packed into this region for controlled merges. They had to hit Worlds with high population, else there wouldn't be enough young, healthy, captives locally to merge with. Without the corridors expediting evacuation, and the gates taking people completely out of harm's way, he supposed the cannibals would have merged more people already, had soldiers raiding even across to other continents to bring back young captives. To merge and 'improve' every single Helaos.
In theory, when the merge 'went all the way' the rest of the attacked World's people would die. How convenient. Except for the evacuation. There weren't enough targeted people available for controlled merges, any more. The cannibals were in big trouble.
Had they admitted there was a problem, yet? Or was the enemy government lying to its own people? Why was it going ahead with the merge? Was it even possible to stop, to disengage?
::Q? What's happening?::
::A complete check of the Maintenance mag has shown no damage done. It's back working at a bit above the minimum necessary to step the rift up again. Dad says they are just about done with the evac, and will have everyone possible gone by the next step up. He said I should sabotage the plant as it spins up. If it works, they'll know how to fight it next time. So you need to get out of here.::
Xen nodded. ::I'm in a secure spot. You can Travel to me and we'll both get out of here as your sabotage does whatever it does. Okay?::
::Okay.:: He could feel her reaching out to him, to feel him and his location. ::No problem.::
::We'll need to be fast.::
::Yeah, don't fuss, big brother.::
He settled back with his reading.
Their little loose cannonball of a miniverse was slowing with every forced merger. Punching through other branes and ripping the equivalent space out of the local membrane. But it was slowing. This was the fifth merge. Their scientists had divided opinions as to whether this merge the one that would catch them, and hold them or whether there would be one more.
Q was going to love this.
***
The convoy was searching for fuel in Phoenix when the sunlight dimmed momentarily, then brightened to normal.
But the overlapping walls didn't go away, they collapsed, and the original walls as well and they merged on the ground, and with the ground. Road tar crawled to meet other roads from the other world. They were left standing in a chaotic jumble.
"I don't know how they merged the Track or the trucks, but I'm really glad it wasn't left to random attraction." Gwen shuddered. "We're going to have trouble getting out of town."
Ben nodded. "I wonder if something went wrong? This doesn't look like the shadow zone."
"No. It doesn't. Maybe someone in LA will know?"
In
the end they siphoned the gas from two trucks and crowded into the rest and headed for southern California.
***
Xen was deep in meditation and didn't notice Q's arrival. He had made a gate and was watching it throb. She took one look and pulled him away from in front of it.
"I don't know what it's doing but it doesn't look healthy."
It spit out a fireball and Xen and Q squelched it instantly. "Nope, not a good time to travel." The gate shrunk down and winked out.
"Well, one of nine mags, one of the two that were just spinning up to speed has been taken out."
Xen looked over at her. She looked very much like herself, all the faint indications of the Iokaste person gone. He took her hand and looked small. "Your genes match your map exactly."
"Yeah. It kept making my head hurt, so I got rid of the last traces of her. Well, I kept the language. You look good too."
"Yeah. I guess I'm a good chemical match for incinerated rats and barbeque smoke." He winced, noticing she was pregnant.
"Inevitable. I took a slug of wine when it got hairy, just in case I got caught and lobotomized. I was stunned, lobotomized, merged, and apparently had sex somewhere along the line. I dunno. Even before I got rid of Iokaste, I had a big memory gap."
"Poor kid, these guys are really messed up." He'd gone out twice, finding stores and buying food. He started to offer her some, but recoiled from the mess that greeted his gaze.
"Yeah, well, that spell to change strange genes to mine has been working the baby over, turning her into a clone of me. I have no idea the genetics of the father. I wanted to let the kid be an individual, so I interfered and used some gene patterns I knew from friends and family. I will no doubt get a lecture from Mom about that being in rather bad taste."
"I hesitate to ask."
"Oh, no big deal. I duplicated Flare's purple gene, and Harry's black hair gene. I love that iridescent black some Purps have. And, well, Grandmother Never's nose. I didn't invent anything." Q looked out the windows and changed the subject. "Are we out of the Shadow Zone? It's too bright."