Through the Reality Warp

by Donald J. Pfeil

  Their radio operator, seated in the back, began checking out her signal net, speaking quietly into the microphone suspended in front of her lips, punching channel selectors on the computer link, establishing a command net for Billiard as well as a connection to the tactical net being run by Stevru.

  Billiard settled himself into the driver’s seat and slipped on the helmet and boom mike that would keep him in touch with the other units. Meanwhile, Santha belted herself behind the breech of the magnetic cannon. Billiard touched the controls lightly and the turtle began to move. They headed sharply upward over a spur of basalt, and finally stopped next to General Stevru’s turtle on the reverse slope, electric motors humming softly in neutral.

  Billiard heard the screeching whine of the magnetic fields building up in the cannon, then the click of UHV torps sliding into place.

  “You ready for this?” he heard Santha ask over the crackle of voices on the tactical net. It was a minute before he realized she had slipped off her headset and was talking to him directly instead of over the intercom.

  “No,” Billiard said sharply, slipping his own headset up at an angle so he could talk to her and still hear what was coming in over the radio.

  “A battle in space doesn’t bother me,” Santha said in a musing tone. “That’s what I’ve been trained for. But these ground maneuvers… I just don’t know.”

  Billiard loosened his safety harness slightly and leaned across the cabin, resting his hand lightly on Santha’s shoulder. “You’ll be all right,” he said.

  “I guess you’re right,” she said quietly. “I was just making noise. Something to cover the fact that I’m nervous as hell.”

  “You aren’t alone,” Billiard responded, feeling suddenly better than he had in hours.

  “Latham…” Santha asked, shocking Billiard because it was so seldom she used his first name, “what’s going to happen when this is all over? What’s going to happen… to us, I guess, is what I’m asking.”

  “I don’t know. There are a lot of changes I can make in the political structure of the empire, but changing the role of the God is a social problem and I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything about that for a while.”

  “And the God can’t be married!” There was bitterness in Santha Garth’s voice.

  “Traditionally, the God is allowed female servants, though,” Billiard said, chuckling.

  “I have no desire to be any man’s servant!” Santha returned with a flash of anger.

  “But I’m no longer a man, remember? I’m God of the Lorian Empire now.” Billiard was grinning, hoping that what he was saying would be taken as a joke. But his eyes showed worry over what might prove to be an explosive situation.

  He was about to say more, but sudden movement outside caught his eye.

  Next to them Captain Stevru’s turtle began to move, and Billiard threw their machine into gear, advancing the throttles on the electric drive motors. The turtle began to crawl down a straight stretch of mining road.

  Billiard looked up, through the clear plastic canopy over his head. The V’noon sun was low on the horizon, only minutes away from setting, but the dark bowl overhead was already dotted by distant sparkling. On most airless planets, the glare from whatever star they circled completely wiped out the feeble gleam of other stars. On V’noon, however, they were on the fringe of a mighty globular cluster, and overhead burned ten thousand mighty suns whose brilliance helped bring many things into focus in Billiard’s mind. He suddenly sensed—no, knew—what he would have to do. The feeling of anxiety that had been with him for so long lifted, and he felt that things were going to work out for him…

  He tried now to see ahead, but the sun had dipped below the horizon and he could make out only a dim blue light on the back of Stevru’s turtle, fifty feet beyond the roughly graded road.

  IV

  It seemed as if they had been traveling across the blasted land for hours, when Billiard saw a sudden change of speed in the turtle ahead of them. Then the blue light he had been watching was suddenly obscured for several seconds as one of the outcroppings of basalt came between them.

  “Radio reports?” Billiard called tensely.

  Their radio operator began to speak in a rapid but soft voice. Before she had finished her message, however, a flash of light broke the darkness just ahead. No immediate sound followed, but a fraction of a second later the turtle jumped as the explosion was transmitted through the rock beneath its treads. Then came another explosion of light, and another. The landscape was suddenly a maze of lightning, silhouettes, rushing trails of UHV torps cutting electric-blue lines in flattened arcs in the blackness—all outlining a fire zone that suddenly became an unrhythmic hell of blackness and light. The rocking ground carried concussion after concussion to Billiard’s turtle, and the sand and twisted rocks around it seemed to erupt in flames. Now there was light where there had been only darkness, and Billiard clearly could see, silhouetted against the horizon, the dome of the Redhat fortress.

  Over his headphones he heard a series of coordinates, but no orders from Captain Stevru to move. The coordinates must have made sense to Santha, however: she was feeding the data into the computer sight on the magnetic cannon.

  Without warning, the flow of coordinates over the radio stopped. The zone of fire broadened almost immediately. Billiard’s hair stood on end from the electrical discharges as his cannon began spitting torps at unseen targets. Then another flash of light, bigger than all they had witnessed before, blanked out the turtle’s sensors momentarily as something exploded in front of it.

  “Laser battery,” Santha told him over the intercom. “We’ve made a hole in their perimeter.”

  As Billiard watched, the fire zone changed shape, widening at its source and forming a wedge shape of streaking light as the combined fire of the turtles—Stevru’s and Billiard’s and the several others that had accompanied them—converged on a narrow circle of blasted rock.

  Stevru began to move finally, and Billiard threw power to the treads, following him down the slight slope toward the fort. The other turtles fell in behind them and on their flanks, with men in spacesuits following as infantry. The entire force, spread out over a quarter-mile, began to slant inward toward that narrow burning space. Billiard could see the discharging wreckage of a main laser battery ahead, and could not help wondering how much radiation was leaking from the atomic eternaslug that had provided power for the laser.

  By knocking out that laser, they had opened the way into the fort and, perhaps more important, the laser was continuously discharging and lighting up the whole area. Turtles and portable lasers manned by Redhats were emplaced around the fort, but with the light to help them and their slight rise to shoot down from, Billiard’s men were in command of the situation, firing directly into the defenders’ positions.

  Maneuvering his turtle to give Santha the best possible shots, he watched turtles die, watched others as they continued to fight despite being hit. A Redhat turtle was bringing its cannon to bear on Billiard’s machine, and he called quickly to Santha. One round, and the enemy unit was a pile of smoking wreckage.

  A sudden wash of searing white flame now burst to their right. Billiard saw Santha’s face tense while the sensors recovered. Then she was absorbed in the search for the source of fire. He bent forward, looked at the edge of the screen before him, and saw the unmistakable outline of one of his crashed combat boats. He was straining his eyes to see if anyone was getting out of the boat, when the ground suddenly rose up and slapped at his turtle. He heard a staccato hammer of slugs hitting the armor next to his left ear, and instinctively ducked while driving the turtle forward toward the gap in the defensive ring. He could feel continuous concussions from shells landing close. A glare of drive nodes shone overhead, and suddenly the night behind him exploded in a flash of bright-orange flame.

  Far to his right, flashes of greenish fire intruded on the closer explosions of white and orange light. Billiard rose slightly in his
seat, looking out through the sloping plastic-and-armored hood of the turtle. The entire area between him and the fort now seemed to be burning, though there was no air to support normal combustion. To the right a long ridgeline was brightly silhouetted by flashes of fire.

  At that moment, a signal flare suddenly ignited on their right, and all around them turtles began to move forward. Billiard moved with them, steering right, his vehicle listing sharply to the left as they crossed a slope of melted rock. The invaders moved past the still-discharging laser. Santha shouted something that Billiard could not make out over the noise on the intercom; but the actions of his gunner, slamming down the faceplate of her suit, told him all he needed to know. He swung down his own, turned to make sure the radio operator had done the same, then slapped the quick-release for the pressure door.

  All around them men were pouring toward the break in the outer defense ring. By cutting across some still slightly glowing rock Billiard, Santha, and Stevru managed to be among the first to break into the fort proper. They soon found themselves in a large garage area, the other end of which was the door to a massive cargo lock. Without stopping to worry about whether there might or might not be a defensive position set up on the other side of the lock, Billiard led a group of fifty men into the chamber, closing the door and hitting the cycling switch as soon as they were all inside.

  Impatient with the pumps, Santha hit the lock’s emergency dump lever, and they were all but knocked off their feet as air rushed into the room. Now Billiard braced himself for a hail of fire as he triggered the inner lock door open, but nothing happened. They had caught the defenders by surprise. No one was waiting for them.

  Billiard briefly checked the load on the recoilless pistol he was carrying, then started quickly forward out of the lock as the raiders, following his moves, plunged for the corridors that led into the interior of the fortress.

  As he ran up the sloping ramps with Santha and Stevru right behind him, he heard a growing uproar somewhere ahead. Unable to make out what the yelling was about, he stopped for a moment to remove his helmet, and Santha and Stevru did the same. Without the ear-muffling helmets, they were able to hear the sound of shooting ahead. Billiard knew that no troops had gotten in ahead of their group, so whatever clamor was going on had to be in his favor.

  The great fortress was in chaos, alarm bells ringing, voices yelling from com-units, feet pounding through corridors. Obviously, the Redhats had not expected Billiard’s men to be able to break through the outer defenses; and they were not prepared to fight inside. It soon became evident that the fortress was not staffed solely by Redhats. Regular Lorian army and navy personnel were here as well. They, as well as the Redhats, were listening now to harsh orders coming over the com-units—the personal orders of Vice-Admiral Meril. Orders to kill the invaders, orders which were causing confusion as the men in the fortress saw who the invaders actually were.

  Some—Redhat forces mostly—pressed an attack against Billiard and his men, but quickly found their army and navy comrades attacking them from the rear as these refused to rise in revolt against officers and men who were of the now-legitimate government of Lori. What was more, they had seen Latham Billiard, who, they knew, was now God of the Lorian Empire.

  But, throughout most of the fortress, many of the army and navy personnel had not had time to arm. Only the Redhats, who wore sidearms as part of their uniform, were in any way prepared. Some others—civilian employees loyal to the Redhats, and a few regular army and navy men determined to follow the orders of Vice-Admiral Meril—found themselves with improvised weapons, or merely with clubs and fists, in place of lasers and bubblers and recoilless rifles. Battle was joined in crewrooms, laboratories, storage areas, corridors—battles which for the most part were over swiftly as the well-armed attacking forces blasted through the ill-armed defenders.

  Billiard found himself part of a little pocket of men trying to force their way through some well-armed Red-hats, Santha on one side of him, her bubbler emitting a stream of pale-yellow sparks that instantly homogenized whatever they touched, and Stevru on the other, wielding a heavy-duty laser like a combat knife with a fifty-foot blade, slicing Redhats like so much lunch meat.

  “We’ve got to get to the main lab,” Billiard yelled. “Give me cover, and I’ll try to get a shock grenade into them.”

  Stevru stuck the discharge node of his laser up over the barricade of furniture and dead bodies they were crouched behind, fanning the pale-pink beam down the corridor. Meanwhile, Santha picked up Billiard’s recoilless, pointed at the ceiling, and began banking shots into a second barricade of wreckage: the barricade protecting the defenders.

  With the Redhats pinned down, Billiard was able to crawl forward through the wreckage, worming his way between torn chairs and tables, inching over dead bodies—a pool of sticky, half-congealed blood smearing the front of his uniform—until he was less than twenty feet from the second barricade. Twisting around until he was lying on his back, his head toward the other barricade, Billiard pulled the safety pin out of the shock grenade, took a deep breath, then heaved it back over his shoulder in an arc which he hoped would take it over the wreckage and into the Redhat position.

  A second and a half later, the floor heaved under him, and wreckage mingled with bloody bits of flesh and burning pieces of uniforms rained down on him. A cloud of acrid smoke rolled up the corridor over him, bringing tears to his eyes and making him cough. When the smoke cleared, his men rushed past him toward the barricade, clearing out the few surviving defenders in the area and not taking any prisoners, simply because none of the fanatical Redhats made any gesture of surrender.

  “Are you okay?” Santha asked as she stopped and knelt at Billiard’s side, setting his recoilless on the floor next to him.

  “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Just a bit out of breath.”

  He reached up and grabbed her shoulder, using it as a lever to pull himself off the floor. Stevru bent over and picked up his pistol, handing it to him. Then the three of them took off at a run up the corridor, intent on catching up with their men.

  Two hundred feet along the curving passageway they came upon a knot of men waiting for them.

  “I’m not certain what this room is supposed to be,” a young lieutenant with combat-boat wings said, “but it’s got a command-net broadcaster inside. You should be able to talk to the entire fort from in here.”

  “Good. Here’s what I want you to do,” Billiard said, panting a bit as he tried to catch his breath. “Get in there and announce who you are; then tell them that, by order of their God, you have placed this fort under Revolutionary Law and that all personnel assigned here are to cease fighting immediately and turn their weapons over to whatever of our men are in their area. Finally, tell them to stand by for further orders once the situation has stabilized.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” the young officer interrupted, “but I think it would be a lot more effective if you were to give the orders yourself.”

  “Probably,” Billiard said, smiling, “but I have something else to do—and right now I don’t want any of the Redhats, especially Vice-Admiral Meril, to know that I’m here.”

  With that, he signaled to Santha, Stevru, and the squad of soldiers. Then he started up the corridor again.

  They raced forward along the winding passageway, the young lieutenant’s words to the personnel of the fortress, ordering them to surrender, ringing in their ears. The fortress seemed to be rapidly quieting. The small number of remaining Redhats were being wiped out, few of them surrendering, as was to be expected.

  Billiard and his men plunged through a hatchway into a large but crowded laboratory near the center of the fortress. It was crowded with machinery, computer banks, obviously jury-rigged power sources, and a nebulous something that Billiard knew must be the field containing the captive universe. My God! he thought, there is my universe, there in that seven- or eight-foot spheroid are my people… He halted, bewildered a moment by a nostalgia, a yearning,
a pain.

  Near the universe, which was cupped securely by the five giant padded hands that encircled it, stood a shiny steel-like object difficult to describe. Several cylindrical arms projected from it toward the captive universe, one larger than the others. Did these arms somehow open holes—“white holes”—in the spheroid before them? And were the cylinders even now, absorbing energy? An energy that would devastate much of the prisoner-universe? A number of bright white spots equal to the number of cylinders shone on the captive’s surface.

  Two technicians stood at computer control banks that were guarded by a trio of armed Redhats. At the sudden noise, the Redhats turned, their weapons coming to position—but not soon enough. They were felled instantly by a fusillade of shots from Billiard’s recoilless and Santha’s bubbler.

  As the echoes of the final shot died, Billiard heard a voice, Vice-Admiral Meril’s, giving orders. Charging across the laboratory—followed by Santha and Stevru—and around a line of computer-component cabinets, he found the admiral yelling into a microphone attached to a command-com set.

  “All Redhats, report to the main lab immediately! Repeat: All Redhats disengage and report to the main lab immediately.”

  From the corner of his eye Meril saw Billiard come around the cabinets. He spun quickly, a heavy recoilless pistol in his hand, his finger squeezing the trigger before he had it lined up on any target.

  Meril was a master shot, for several years pistol champion of the Lorian Army. But in addition to being a master at target shooting, Meril was also a canny combat shooter, and his quick triggering of the pistol had the desired effect. Though the shot went into the ceiling, showering down plasticene chips, for just the briefest second Billiard hesitated. That was all the time Meril needed to get off a second, more accurately aimed, shot—one directed dead at Billiard’s chest.

  Stevru, plunging ahead of his commander, took the shot in the center of his forehead.