Through the Reality Warp

by Donald J. Pfeil

  “Yeah, that’d be fine,” Billiard said with a grimace as he touched his bruised face. “Trouble is, the Redhat patrol behind us won’t be resting. By tomorrow night they’ll be here. We’ve got to go on tonight.”

  The two moved out, exhaustion showing in their every step. In half an hour the river curved away from them, and a short climb brought them out onto a wide, almost treeless plain. The sky was still overcast, obscuring the stars, and occasional rain showers moved slowly past. These intermittent showers helped screen them from any possible airborne search missions, even ones equipped with starlight scopes and infrared snoopers.

  On and on they slogged, Billiard sometimes pulling his lieutenant, sometimes pushing her, catching her when she stumbled, cursing her when she lagged behind. There was no sound on the wide plain except their labored breathing.

  Hours passed, and neither could really remember where they were going or why it was so important that they cross the savannah. Neither spoke. Both merely stared at the ground, at their feet, moving like beasts of burden without complaint and accepting a world of unending torment. Then their world changed.

  In the east, the sky began to lighten. As it did, it exposed—less than a mile in front of them—a line of jungle. Jungle backed by steep granite cliffs. Billiard looked at the cliffs, hundreds of unclimbable feet high, and knew that the end had come for them.

  V

  Billiard lay on the shelf of rock in front of the cave. From it, if the weather ever cleared, he would have a commanding view of the plain he and Santha had crossed the night before, and of the narrow belt of jungle separating the plain from the cliffs and the steep, rocky approach to their hideout.

  Santha had barely made it to the foot of the escarpment before collapsing. After resting for a half-hour, Billiard had tied her to his back and begun the one-hundred-foot climb to a shelf he had spotted from the plain. The climb, a hand-over-hand crawl up seventy-five degree slopes and along occasional almost-vertical faces, had taxed him to the utmost. He had wondered constantly if his arms would hold out. They had. Now he waited on the shelf for the enemy with Santha unconscious in the cave behind him.

  Billiard knew they were near. He had spotted a patrol out on the plain moving toward him before a drizzling rain moved in, masking the plain from sight. Later, he had heard the drone of a heavy transport floater; then he knew that he had more than just a patrol to deal with. Most likely there was a full company at least down on the plain now, and they knew exactly where he was. Before long they would be coming up to get him.

  He lay on the rock, gathering strength for what was ahead, waiting with his weapons piled around him. Near his right arm were some field rations and a canteen of water, his last. He was wide awake and strangely peaceful. He and Santha had fought their way through some of the most impossible terrain on Thopt; he had taken on a Vwrung’n in hand-to-hand combat and had come out on top; and he and his gunner-lieutenant had made it halfway to the Goromi enclave. All for naught.

  They had almost made it, he thought bitterly—running and hiding and fighting and running some more—when a simple line of rocks, so small they didn’t even show on the orbital map, had stopped them. Given climbing equipment and a couple of days’ grace, they might have made it across that line of cliffs. But they did not have the equipment, and the enemy was not about to give them a rest period to regain their strength. But from this shelf of rock to which Billiard had brought the two of them, he was going to make the Redhats and Lorian troops pay dearly for their victory. Victory not only over Santha and himself, but a victory over Earth—a planet they had never heard of—and, ultimately, a victory that would ensure their own destruction as well as the destruction of two universes that would soon begin tearing each other apart.

  One of the ways Billiard planned to make them pay dearly was with another series of mines. After carrying Santha up the cliff to the cave, he had climbed back down again to retrieve the weapons he had left at the jungle’s edge. He rigged some of his explosives there, as well as still more surprises, at the foot of the cliff, in the form of concealed mines. Some were hooked to tripwires; some had detonators kept on “safe” only by rocks that might easily be moved by a careless foot; some were hooked in series to others, so that one explosion might set off another a hundred feet away. Billiard had planned carefully, ensuring that even if the Redhats and army eventually scaled his cliff, they were going to lose a lot of men doing so.

  Up on the shelf with him, Billiard had his laser pistols and the rapid-fire recoilless rifle, which he was surprised to find he was still carrying after the nightmare on the plain, but which he knew would be his chief weapon in the coming battle. Pocket lasers didn’t pack enough punch for the kind of battle he was going to be in, nor did they have much range.

  Billiard was hoping the enemy would rush him, even though he knew that that would be a foolish thing for them to do. An overhang of rock loomed above him that would make it difficult for them to get him with an air strike. Difficult—but not impossible! It was the only way they could get to him without taking immense casualties coming up the escarpment under his guns.

  Billiard groaned as he shifted position slightly to scan what he could see of the line of jungle through the drizzle. He rubbed the back of a swollen hand, anesthetized by nerve-eaters, across his dirty, scabbed, and now quite bearded face. He hoped the Lorians would try to rush his position at least once, but he knew it really didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference what they did. The enemy might just as well sit back and wait: With very little food and water left on the shelf, they could climb up the cliff within a few days without a shot being fired. They might even take the time to find and disarm all the mines Billiard had left for them. Chances were that they would not take a single casualty, beyond the ones they had probably already lost back at the forest mines. At that thought, a smile came to Billiard’s cracked lips.

  Now the drizzle that had been blocking Billiard’s view of the ground below the cliff began to lift. Gray and black mounds became boulders. Dark patches against the flat off-white fog became the vines and creepers and trees of the belt of jungle between cliffs and plain—the jungle that was hiding the Lorian forces. He began to hear sounds from that jungle: the clank of equipment, the rustle of moving troops. He knew his time had come. Placing his weapons in front of him on the shelf, he squinted down the cliff and the lower slope to the area where he had planted his mines.

  Long minutes passed, then the Redhat army patrol moved out of the jungle, a ragged column of men in light-blue field suits, dodging upward through rocks and gullies, moving in a snaking line from boulder to boulder, rock to rock, crevice to crevice, aware that death lurked above them. They had passed his mines at the edge of the forest by moving out at another point from the dense undergrowth! Billiard tried to count the assault force, but gave up when his estimate passed two hundred. They moved cautiously and slowly, but they were moving. Billiard had no illusions left about how long it would take them to get to his shelf. He was merely wondering how many of the hundreds below him would never ever get anywhere again—and whether the whole thing was worth it.

  Shaking his head to clear it, Billiard rose cautiously to his knees, careful not to be silhouetted against the gray rock behind him. He eased forward until he had a full view down the cliff, then pulled to the edge the small packages of detonator-equipped explosives he had saved. The time for battle was upon him, and he was wide awake and alert. Every nerve in his body tingled with an overload of adrenalin. He felt his heart pumping furiously and the muscles in his belly tightening. His nostrils spread wide as he took deep breaths, willing himself to relax. Only a few more seconds, he told himself, and they’ll be in the minefield at the foot of the cliff. Then the fun would start.

  The rocks’ wetness served to muffle much of the sound of the Lorians’ climbing. Then suddenly the semi-quiet erupted with thundering booms and bright red and yellow flashes against the gray sky as the mines went off. All at once the tension i
n Billiard’s body was gone and he leaped to his feet, throwing his remaining explosives down the cliff.

  Rock dust blended with the light drizzle to partially mask the scene below, but Billiard grabbed the recoilless rifle and began pouring fire down the slope. Slugs pinged off the rocks around him, and laser traces fogged the air in front of the shelf; but most of their fire was wild. The few shots that came close at all did so more by accident than anything else. Billiard ducked for a moment, stuffing a fresh magazine into the recoilless; then he jumped up again and began spraying the still-advancing soldiers below.

  Unable to fight both the mines and the fire he was pouring down on them, the Lorians began pulling back. Their fire now became sporadic. Billiard soon heard only the sound of wounded men moaning and screaming in agony and smelled the odor of blood and death. In a moment, he heard commands shouted below, ordering a regrouping. So, with a moment to rest, he stretched out prone on the shelf, dropped his head onto his arms, and tried to catch his breath. He discovered again, as he had, years before, as a guild Mercenary, that the exertion of killing was much more than the exertion of mere physical work.

  Billiard raised his head from his arms for a moment and looked over the edge of the shelf. In the rocks at the foot of the cliff he saw movement. Squinting his eyes, he tried to make out what was happening through the mist and dust of battle. Two men were working their way up the slope!

  Obviously the attackers feared more mines, and they were sending a couple of volunteers to find a safe pathway up the cliff. One was scanning the ground in front of him for tripwires or out-of-place rocks, while the other was unreeling a length of light plastic cord as a guide for the men still waiting behind near the jungle. Billiard brought the recoilless rifle to his shoulder and waited patiently for the men to come close enough to give him a shot he couldn’t miss.

  The two moved slowly forward, trying to watch the ground and at the same time the shelf where Billiard was lying in wait. They sought what cover they could find, even though a Redhat officer cursed them and ordered them on from behind a large boulder at the foot of the slope.

  Billiard sighted the rifle carefully, then squeezed off a short burst. The two figures in pale blue folded, crumpling, then pitching onto their faces and rolling down the slope. Snowballing all the way to the bottom, they ended up sprawled twenty feet in front of the Lorian lines.

  At the urging of their officers, the enemy forces, still over two-hundred strong, suddenly burst forward in a charge up the slope. Running, firing, dodging rocks and Billiard’s return fire, they dropped onto their bellies among the rocks and boulders and began pouring a fusillade of fire at the shelf in an attempt to keep Billiard’s head down. Slugs whined around him, several near-misses by laser traces brought sweat to his forehead. He finally had to drop to one knee, then lay prone on the rock shelf.

  The attackers were moving quickly up the slope, some had even reached a shelf not far below him. But Billiard couldn’t do anything about them, because to stick his weapon—and his head—out over the lip of the shelf to where he could see and shoot would have been instant suicide. Rock chips stung his face now, and one leg of his flight suit began to smolder from a graze by a laser trace. He rolled from side to side, presenting what he hoped was a rapidly moving target to the men below, firing only when he could.

  Suddenly he heard a strange roar, and a screaming blast resounded as the rock shelf rose up, slapping him in the face. For a second he was dazed; then he felt the entire shelf buckling outward. Throwing himself backward toward the cave, he frantically attempted to escape the crumbling shelf. Another explosion rang out now. Rock chunks and flying dust blinded him momentarily, and he stumbled, falling to his knees. Shaking his head, trying to clear the ringing from it, he clearly heard the crack of recoilless fire and the humming hiss of heavy lasers. Unable to fire back, Billiard cursed and dived for the dark splotch that marked the cave mouth.

  There was another rending crash as Billiard crawled into the depths of the cave. It blended with the staccato bursts of fire from the Lorian troops below and with the rumble and crash of rocks sweeping downward as entire chunks of the cliff face broke away. The noise was unbelievable. Billiard had a second’s thought that perhaps he was already dead and in hell, then a sharp falling splinter of rock burrowed itself into his cheek and the pain cleared his mind.

  He realized suddenly that the roar he had heard was the noise of combat-boat engines and that the explosions had been kill-torps hitting the cliff side. Another kill-torp hit, and the blast threw him deeper into the cave. He landed hard on his side and rolled uncontrollably, ending up against Santha’s still-unconscious form. Pain flooded through his body as he lay there, afraid to move and in too much pain to breathe. He feared that if he stirred he would blank out from the pain—and he had to remain conscious: those combat boats outside were shooting at the Redhats, so they had to be his men.

  Billiard closed his eyes, then opened them again very slowly, trying to fight the irritation of the rock dust that constantly filled them. Then he began to move, slowly—first one finger, then a hand, then an arm. He forced himself to sit up and look toward the mouth of the cave.

  Swirling dust obscured any details of the battle going on outside, but there was enough visibility, enough light, to show that the entire shelf was gone. He forced himself to his feet, feeling faint. His vision went red, then black, but then began to clear. For long seconds he fought for complete consciousness; then he realized that the darkness was not in his mind, but was real. Something now blocked the mouth of the cave, cutting off the light. That something was the silvery hull of a combat boat with the emblem of Free Lori on its side.

  Billiard began to stagger forward, to assure himself that it was not an illusion. Then there were two men at his side, helping him toward the open lock. He tried to speak, to hold back, to tell them there was someone else in the cave with him, but it did no good. The men hustled him into the lock of the combat boat, which shook as it balanced precariously on what little remained of the ledge. He was laid on an emergency pad at the back of the cabin.

  The men left him there, moving out of his line of sight, and Billiard began to fear they had returned to their stations in the front of the cabin. He tried to rise from the pad; but before he could get more than one elbow under him, the men were back—this time carrying Santha’s inert body. He saw one of the men slap an autodoc diagnostic patch on Santha’s arm; then sudden acceleration hit, and Billiard’s supporting elbow collapsed.

  He lay flat on the emergency pad, feeling every bruise and cut on his body like the pincers of some demon intent on eternal torture. Then, as the G forces mounted and the combat boat streaked out of Thopt’s atmosphere, he realized he didn’t have to fight any longer. The battle was over. With that, he let the darkness he’d been fighting for so long sweep over his mind and body. He still had a universe to save, but that could wait until tomorrow…

  FOUR

  I

  The time for raids was over.

  For a year the revolutionaries’ combat boats had been picking away at the edges of the Lorian Empire, occasionally diving in for a quick attack on one of the central planets, capturing Lorian Navy vessels whenever possible, destroying those they came upon but could not capture. With the exception of the last fight, which the revolutionary fleet had engaged in to rescue Billiard and Santha, the insurgents had been careful to avoid a pitched battle with the Lorian fleet. His younger officers had been pushing Billiard for more action, for a drive toward victory, but Billiard had resisted, insisting that they had to wait until their fleet was fully ready. Meanwhile for a year Billiard had fretted about what might be happening back in his own universe as Lorian scientists under Redhat control developed and perfected their energy-drain device. Finally, Billiard decided, the time had come for a thrust right into the heart of the Lorian world.

  The God of Lori, knowing that something had to be done if he was not to lose power to the revolutionaries or to his ow
n people, sick of the unending war of attrition, assembled the Lorian Battle Fleet in one mighty unit. Taking personal command, he led it into space now to seek out and destroy once and for all the revolutionary forces which for two years had been harassing his outposts, disrupting his commerce, killing his soldiers, and giving the once-peaceful Goromi ideas about attempting another invasion.

  Reports of the gathering of the Lorian Battle Fleet had led to something of a showdown between Billiard and Admiral Koppett. Once messages from the various planetary undergrounds and from his own space units confirmed that the God of Lori was going to gamble everything on his fleet’s ability to destroy Billiard’s combat forces in one final battle, the Earthman knew it was time to decide the course of the revolution. The God had numbers on his side, but the fighting force Billiard had built was second to none in equipment and fighting ability. He recommended to Admiral Koppett that they meet the Lorian fleet in open battle.

  To Billiard’s great surprise, the admiral refused permission.

  Billiard’s entire strategy, in terms of the revolution and in terms of his ultimate goal as an agent of Earth, was resolved in that meeting with the admiral. In the space of a few minutes, several possible plans of action were narrowed to one. In that moment, the ultimate control of the revolution passed from the admiral to Billiard, even though the older man would not become aware of that fact for some time.

  II

  Billiard was uncomfortable in the vastness of the battle cruiser after spending a year that seemed more like a decade—and would have seemed a century, had it not been for the action he saw—leading combat raids in his own smaller boat with Santha at his side. He experienced a few moments of self-doubt as he climbed into the command shell near the center of the fleet-operations deck—a fifty-by-twenty-foot balcony ten feet above the cruiser’s main control deck. Not the least of his doubts had come from what was to prove to be his final meeting but one with Admiral Koppett, two days before the departure of the revolutionary fleet for its appointment with destiny.