Eternity or Bust: Mission 16 (Black Ocean)

by J. S. Morin

  “What?” she snapped in the direction of her door, whence the pounding originated. Summoned unbidden from Esperville, she was still in the mode of a minor goddess surveying her domain, content and in control. The idea that someone could break the pleasant monotony without her say-so rankled her.

  “Ithaca’s in trouble,” Carl’s voice boomed through the door, muffled but clear in its desperation. “Nobody left. They’re all in the path of an Earth Navy Intelligence sweep.”

  Esper rubbed her eyes. In the bleary afterglow of a wondrous day in Esperville, the Mobius was drab and dreary. Its troubles seemed surreal, detached from her, possibly even someone else’s. “Their own fault,” she muttered. “Should have come to the wedding.”

  The wedding.

  That sparked memories. Recent festivities. Teary hugs. The bridges to her own life reconnected one by one. Tanny was on Ithaca now. So were Mriy and Kubu, Carl’s parents, and any number of acquaintances from Carl’s feeble attempt at becoming a big-name crime lord.

  Carl pounded anew. “This isn’t a joke. We need astral, and we need it deep.”

  “That’s what she said,” Esper murmured, hoping Carl hadn’t overheard and flushing with embarrassment. She raised her voice. “Just a minute.”

  “We haven’t got a minute!”

  That seemed implausible. The variability in astral travel made such precise declarations moot. However deep Esper could put them, they’d likely arrive with hours to spare or be days too late to make a difference. This wasn’t a holovid, where the nick of time was a razor-thin margin as wide as it needed to be—usually as wide as the edge of a seat.

  When Esper emerged, she brought Mort’s old Earthwood staff with her. “Clear out, everyone,” she warned, glaring around the room to chase onlookers back to their quarters. “You want deep? This is going to take some serious magic.”

  “Don’t mind me,” Mort said with a sulking tone, still refusing to appear before her but never letting her forget his presence. “I just invented this maneuver.”

  He hadn’t, and he damn well knew it. Wizards were once the motive force of space travel. The star-drive didn’t come for decades later and wasn’t the ubiquitous means of propulsion it was in modern times until a century later. Nowadays, wizards had grown timid, afraid of their own powers. Starship captains wanted safe, reliable machines capable of making routine travel predictable.

  “Low as you can go,” Carl said. “I don’t care what color it turns. Yomin’s pirated nav software is supposed to be able to deal with theoretical depths.”

  “The technological underpinnings don’t concern me,” Esper said. “The less I hear about physics right now, the better.”

  “Atta girl,” Mort said halfheartedly. “Defend magic. Poo on the science. Grow a beard and they’ll forget all about me.”

  Part of her wanted to twist inward to chase Mort off with a horde of pitchfork-wielding Esperlings, but she knew that once the real magic started, Mort was smart enough to shut up.

  With the common room cleared, Esper began to chant. She skipped the song and dance routine Mort used to impress the non-magic folks aboard. Skipping straight to the demonic tongue of the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts, she slashed at the universe with claws made of words and backed it into a corner. It had two choices: either obey her or face her wrath.

  Esper felt the ship move. Relative to realspace, they remained motionless, but in that mathematical axis perpendicular to reality, the Mobius plummeted. Down, down they went, and Esper felt the vertigo sensation of her stomach rising weightless despite the lack of a physical sensation to accompany the feeling.

  Though she’d closed her eyes, something told Esper to look out the overhead dome. The plummeting freefall hadn’t ceased, and the dread purple deepened around them as the borderlands of astral space swallowed them.

  This was enough. Stop. Whoa, universe.

  She barked the commands in the underworld language and felt the Mobius slowing but not by enough.

  Not by nearly enough.

  The purple deepened from amethyst to violet to indigo and onward into colors that defied the visual light spectrum. She saw colors that were psychic impressions, colors made of nothing but raw temporal energy, hues that existed as a probability field and nothing more.

  Then, without warning, all sensation of movement stopped. Stars appeared in the dome above. They were in realspace again.

  But not in the universe that they had just left.

  # # #

  Enzio stalked the narrow corridors of the Rucker Syndicate prefab compound. There would be no sticking around to see the permanent structures erected—not for him, not for anyone else. The only difference was he knew Earth Navy was coming.

  Checking over his shoulder at every turn, Enzio was looking for someone. The particulars of that someone were flexible. It could have been practically anyone willing to fly a non-space-faring vessel across Ithaca on short notice in exchange for not getting turned to ash.

  As he threaded his way through the base on his search, Enzio bumped into perhaps the least likely candidate for a pilot. A six-and-a-half-foot-tall tabby cat drew herself up to her full height to loom over Enzio when he pulled up short upon noticing her. They’d nearly collided, though with azrin senses, Mriy must have smelled him coming.

  This was no accident.

  “I hear you’re not welcome,” Mriy said with a hiss and bared fangs. It briefly occurred to Mort that Enzio ought to be wary of the azrin warrior. Even a hardened wizard ought to have been, and Enzio had been anything but.

  Unfortunately for Mriy, Mort was in no mood for childish, predator-instinct bullying just then. She fell through the nearest wall with a feline yelp halfway between a meow and a roar. The hallway lights flickered. As Mort strode onward, the only clue that there had been a blustering, self-important azrin barring his path was the angry pounding from the wall of the locked supply room.

  “Bloody cat,” Mort grumbled to himself with a sardonic smile. “Who does she think I am?”

  Enzio opened doors, locked or not, no longer caring about mild magical damage to the local gizmos. For all that the place was prefab and temporary, Tanny hadn’t cut corners on the budget. The stupid place was too big for its own good—and Mort’s.

  At last he found who he was looking for. A scruffy, bearded fellow with data lenses that might as well have been permanently glued onto his face was poring over a computer screen when Enzio barged in.

  “You,” he barked, unwilling to strain his brain working out the man’s name. One techster was as good as another. “Hover-cruiser. Now.”

  “Huh?” the bearded techster grunted, looking up from his work with blinking eyes hypnotized by the siren’s lullaby of science. “What’s up, Enzio?”

  “I need a pilot,” Mort clarified, taking pity on the man’s addled intellect. His own experiences deep in scientific devices often left him confused and irritable as well. “That’s you. And it’s important, so we’re leaving now.” With Enzio’s hand, he patted the day bag slung casually over one shoulder. “Chop chop. Time’s a wastin.’”

  “I… uh… I can fly. Don’t get me wrong,” the techster said. “But wouldn’t you rather have—”

  “Nope,” Mort cut him off. “You. Now get a move on before I turn that console of yours into a plate of spaghetti. You can play with it later.”

  Reluctantly, and with a look of wide-eyed alarm at the peril his tech doodads faced, the techster rose and followed Enzio toward the parking zone. “Where we going?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  “Don’t I need to know which direction I’m heading, at least?”

  Leading the way, Mort counted on the poor techster not noticing his smirk. It didn’t much matter what way he picked. Halfway around the planet worked for any heading.

  # # #

  Carl sat in horror, watching from the pilot’s chair as the Black Ocean vanished first into the familiar astral gray, then beyond into the worrisome red and p
urple spectrum, finally panicking when colors he could no longer identify assaulted his eyeballs.

  This was too much. He’d asked the genie for a wish and been granted more than he’d bargained for. This wasn’t astral travel. This was something beyond, something a lowly spacer wasn’t meant to see.

  The stars resolved themselves once more, and Carl’s panting breath began to slow. He was sweating. Releasing a grip that had left imprints in the arms of his chair, he ran for the common room.

  “What happened?” he shouted, heedless of who he awoke. Anyone who’d slept through that chaos had to have been made of stone.

  “I… I don’t know,” Esper said meekly. “I’m sorry.” She hid Mort’s old staff behind her back as if it were at fault.

  The door to the laaku’s quarters opened, and Roddy burst out. “What the ever-loving fuck was that? Did we just fall back out of the astral or something?”

  “What’s going on?” Amy asked as she emerged in pajamas from their room. “I had this feeling like I fell out of bed—but I hadn’t—and now everyone’s shouting.”

  “Esper, this is your ballgame,” Carl said. “Explain what the fuck just happened. Did we fail to get into astral space?”

  “I’m not 100 percent sure,” Esper said.

  Yomin’s door swung open, and she emerged with a handheld computer. “We’re getting some weird, weird signals.”

  Roddy picked up the remote and activated the holo-projector. The ship’s library came up, but there was nothing showing available on the omni.

  “That can’t be right,” Amy said as she squinted over the listings of available holos. “Even if we had a slow connection, it should be enough to get something. We’re halfway between Sol and Phabian. The omni should be bursting at the seams.” She headed toward the cockpit.

  “I’m still waiting for a good explanation,” Carl said, glaring at Esper. “Get Mort. He ought to know.”

  Esper hung her head. “He has a theory. You’re not going to like it. I know, because I don’t like it.”

  “What? You teleport us to another galaxy or something?” Roddy asked with a nervous snicker.

  “Universe, actually,” Esper replied.

  “Listen to this,” Yomin said. She fiddled with the controls on her computer. It played a series of sounds that were too uniform to be mere background noise, too chaotic to be melody, and repeated every few seconds.

  “OK,” Carl said slowly. “Anyone want to guess what zee-oowip-oowip-da-da-shuu-mah means?” He tapped his earring, similar to what the others all wore. If his wasn’t translating this gibberish, he couldn’t imagine theirs having any more luck.

  “Guys!” Amy called from the cockpit. “These aren’t our stars. Nav computer is caught in a reboot loop trying to make sense of it. Can’t even get a basic calibration.”

  “That’s it,” Carl said. “No more. Esper, I don’t care what you did. Undo it.”

  She nodded spasmodically. “Yeah. On it.”

  “Everyone, give her room,” Carl ordered, and to his mild surprise, the common room cleared. When the two of them were alone, he lowered his voice and leveled a finger Esper’s way. “Don’t you kill us all. I just got this life on track. I don’t need to find out what happens in the next one.”

  She nodded soberly.

  Carl headed up to the cockpit to sit with Amy.

  “Helluva way to wake up,” she said with a tenuous smile. “Married life sure is a lot like being single.”

  The words echoed.

  Tanny had said something similar days after their first marriage. They had just blasted their way out of a docking bay, fighting off pirates whose cargo they had just boosted. The thought that he was repeating old mistakes he thought he had learned from tasted like sour beer in his mouth.

  “Yeah. Well, maybe we need to reconsider that,” Carl said as much to himself as to Amy. A regular guy wasn’t supposed to end up in alternate universes because his ship’s wizard fucked up. A regular guy didn’t have to worry whether his parents were going to be picked up by an Earth Navy Intel sweep because they blew off his wedding. Carl had never considered himself a regular guy, but he was starting to see the appeal. Regular guys often lived long enough to see their kids grow up.

  The chanting from the common room hurt his ears. Amy was already covering hers. He mouthed a “sorry” to her as he covered up his own. She mouthed back “it’s OK.”

  The process reversed. The astral sky grew strange colors again. One color tasted like mint, another felt like petting a dog’s fur the wrong way. Eventually those gave way to psychedelic hues that at least bordered on describable before settling into deep purple and staying put.

  A wooden staff’s clomp accompanied Esper’s weary trudge to the cockpit. She leaned heavily on the magical artifact for support. “I think we’re deep enough to go fast and shallow enough that we’re in our own universe.”

  Amy checked the nav computer. It spun its digital wheels for a while, then spat out a location and a bearing for Ithaca.

  “Sleep it off,” Carl said to the wizard. “But don’t get too comfortable. Says we’ll be there in three hours.”

  # # #

  Esper stormed into her own mind. With the Mobius slicing across the galaxy like—well, she couldn’t think of anything as fast as they were going right now—she felt more confident. While she had been the one to bring the crew to the brink of disaster, she’d also pulled them back. It hardly counted as a crisis; more like tripping on the stairs and catching the handrail.

  When she found Mort, he was at the Esperville bowling alley, ordering a beer from the snack bar. Just as he was lifting the pint glass to his lips, the beverage vanished. An instant later, so did the snack bar, the cashier, and then the bowling alley entirely. The few captive souls who weren’t figments of Mort or Esper’s imagination beat a hasty retreat.

  “Explain that to me,” Esper said. “And I want more than just: ‘some other universe—maybe.’”

  Mort sighed. “Almost certainly some other universe.”

  “Then why did it listen?” Esper demanded, towering over Mort, who stood exactly as tall as she felt he needed to and no taller. That moment, in Esperville, he was barely larger than Roddy. “We argue with the universe for our power. Why would another universe give me the power to get us back? Our own barely had it in its head to go along.”

  With a hangdog look, Mort shrugged and kicked the dirt that had just a moment ago been polished wood. “Dunno. Maybe it had an extragalactic invader and decided to boot you out the quickest way it could.”

  “I thought you said it was another universe and not another galaxy?”

  “Semantics? At a time like this?”

  “Semantics, always.”

  What had gotten into Mort? He was the one who’d hammer into her that semantic argument was the foundation of all wizardly power. What you couldn’t wheedle or threaten to achieve, you had to trick the universe into giving you. Logic puzzles, conundrums, and paradoxes were the stock-in-trade of any wizard, even if neither she nor Mort treated it as a specialty.

  “Fine,” Mort said, if possible, deflating further. “Extrauniversal. Shitty word but so be it. Or maybe we don’t argue with a single universe. Maybe they’re all one big infinity-headed monster. Or maybe the universes gossip. Maybe, that new universe saw us and panicked, asked our regular universe for advice, and it told the new guy to play along and send us back. Maybe our home universe wanted us back and demanded our return. You want the truth, though? I’ve never been to another universe. So fuck off with the interrogation. You got us back. Congratulations. Go find some random stranger to have a romp with to celebrate.”

  Esper swallowed back her ire. Mort may or may not have been telling her the truth. It was growing increasingly difficult to tell. Every tidbit she learned about him, he learned ten about her. She could feel him browsing her memories while she wasn’t actively inside Esperville. Less so of late, but that could have been because he’d finally cataloged he
r entire life. That crack about her celebratory rituals dated back to her school days. It might have also been an oblique reference to Emily, but double meaning was a wizard’s tool if ever there was one.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately,” Esper said. “But this isn’t the last time we’ll discuss it.”

  “It’s not what’s gotten into me,” Mort shot back bitterly. “It’s what’s gotten into you.”

  Yet another couched double entendre. Esper had entirely too many passengers in her head. So long as they played nice, it was almost like having pets. But the back-mind driving and constant badgering were wearing increasingly thin.

  Next time Esper saw Keesha Bell, she was getting some Mort advice, whether the irascible old coot liked it or not.

  Strike that. Especially because he wouldn’t like it.

  # # #

  The jungles of Ithaca swept past the hover-cruiser in a blur. The tips of the tree-sized blades of grass were close enough that Enzio could have reached over the edge to brush them with his fingertips. He didn’t, because that would have been sheer idiocy—a good way for a fellow to lose a hand. Those damned trees were solid.

  … or grass.

  … or whatever the hell this planet was made of.

  Mort wouldn’t miss this place. Enzio had been a means to an end, but he’d always needed an end game. The former occupant had made his deal with the devil in combat boots, and it was Mort’s job to renege. That he hadn’t found a good opportunity before getting dragged to this forsaken moon was his own fault. Time to make some omelets out of those cracked eggs.

  “We’re getting close to Ramsey territory,” the pilot warned, raising his voice over the rush of wind. His name, as it turned out, had been Potter. Mort jotted that information in chalk on the walls of his brain since in a few hours it was unlikely to matter. “Want me to let you off when we hit the sentry line?”

  “I haven’t the slightest desire of that,” Mort countered. “We’re heading for the Odysseus. Accept no substitutes.”

  “They’ll shoot us down,” Potter said.