The Forever Gate Compendium Edition

by Isaac Hooke

  She frowned. "Can't you break its head off or something?"

  "With this?" He stalked over and offered her the stick. "You try! You're the one that called it a toothpick."

  She looked from the stick to his face. Covered in sweat like that, there was a certain rawness about him that she kind of liked. Not that she'd ever tell him.

  She gazed across the room at the iron golem. The red light was still blinking. The thing seemed somehow even more malevolent with those glass disks smashed. She had the strangest feeling that it was still watching her, even without eyes. It made her skin crawl.

  Tanner lowered his voice. "I've set up the motion detectors, remember." He was trying to sound reassuring. "We'll wake up if it moves, Ari. Okay? Ari?"

  She sighed, not answering.

  Tanner grabbed the cord that was her link to the terminal, and offered it to her. "Once more unto the breach?"

  She nodded slowly. But as she reached for the tether, something gave her pause. "What about you?" She glanced at the smashed remnants of his desk. His control pad had gone dark.

  Tanner followed her gaze. "Oh yeah."

  Ari set the tether aside. "I can't do this alone."

  He raised a finger as if to say just a second. He started checking the compartments of her desk. When he didn't find what he was looking for he waded over to his own desk and, keeping a watchful eye on the iron golem, he searched those drawers that weren't locked or sealed shut from the damage.

  He shook his head. "Damn."

  "What is it?" Ari said.

  He went over to the pile of crumpled metal beneath the window, and began searching the debris. "I'm looking for..." He opened a drawer that was still intact, then another. He shoved a piece of metal aside and found a previously hidden compartment. He opened it.

  "Aha!" He pulled out a strange metallic clamp, one that had small blue and green lights flashing along the surface. Hoodwink had carried one of those when she'd first met him in this world—he'd called it a wireless access port.

  Tanner returned. "You won't have to do it alone. But before we go, there's something I need to show you. Something that will shatter all you know about the world."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Brute traveled between the lattice points of the marble hall. The red and gold rug crunched underfoot, and Brute's weight left deep imprints. The marble ceiling scraped Brute's forehead. Most ceilings did. Brute was not small.

  Brute ducked inside a white archway carved with long-tentacled octopi, and entered a cubic chamber whose lofty ceiling allowed for Brute's full height.

  "Ah Brute, my favorite Direwalker!" Jeremy-krub turned from the reflective surface beside the dual-piled mattress. "How are you this fine afternoon? In the mood for some killing yet?"

  Option A—ignore. Option B—turn around and leave. Option C—tear off Jeremy-krub's limbs. Option D—

  "State your command, krub!" Brute lifted its four arms. Social pattern—threatening.

  "Easy, big boy." Jeremy-krub took a step back and raised his hands. Social pattern—placation. Facial expression—comfort, ease. Deception detected. Cues—dilated pupils, raised eyebrows, licking of the lips, microscopic beads of sweat. Interpretation—fear.

  "Easy," Jeremy-krub said. "The task I have for you is rather small for one of your prodigious size and abilities, I do daresay." He retrieved a small disk from the stand beside him, and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. Jeremy-krub held the disk away from his body. Far away. "Take it. Quickly!"

  Urgent tone. Slightly higher pitch.

  Brute snatched the disk. Surface—planar. Composition—iron and carbon. Weight—two point seven grams. Diameter—three point four centimeters. Thickness—one millimeter. Anomalous emissions detected—high frequency radio waves.

  A smile formed on the lips of Jeremy-krub. Social pattern—malicious. "You are to hunt down Ari Flanners, leader of the New Users. Touch this to her forehead and you will kill her instantly. When you have done this, return here with the disk, and with it we will track down the remainder of her associates. Start by posting watchers around all the places she might visit. The houses of family. Friends. Known New Users."

  Ari Flanners. Accessing remote records—formerly Yolinda Cooper. Daughter of Hoodwink Cooper. Accessing local memory—Ari Flanners, the krub-gol with the fire sword who had defied Brute outside Jeremy-krub's mansion. Emotion triggered—outrage.

  "What do you wish done with the body?" Brute said.

  "I don't care." Jeremy-krub curled back his lips. Social pattern—snarl. "Tear her body apart. Suck it dry. Feed it to your brethren. It doesn't matter. Once the disk touches her forehead, she's gone. The disk will kill her in all worlds. At the same time."

  Brute glanced at the disk and smiled.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The first thing Ari noticed was the snow.

  Or rather, the lack thereof. Beneath her feet, the cobble was joined together into one long, smooth path of snowless stone. The air was warm. Clouds streaked the heavens, and sandwiched between two of those wispy veins was the sun. A tall building of glass blotted out a portion of the sky, and it reflected the sun into her eyes.

  Around her, people in thin, embroidered silks passed among shops. The aroma of food tickled Ari's belly, and her stomach growled for the hundredth time today.

  "Where are we?" she said. "Is this the utopia Hoodwink talked about?"

  "No," Tanner said. "It's Earth. Before the end. A different simulation than the one you're used to. Drawn from the ship's archives. The A.I.s were able to reconstruct all this from the last transmissions received from Earth."

  Then she noticed it—there was a tension in these people. She could see it in the set of their shoulders, the grim faces, the quickness of their strides. The stalls that sold wares or hot food were nearly empty. The biggest line-ups were for the kiosks that sold canned foods and dried goods. Tempers flared in those line-ups, and people shouted at one another. She half-expected someone to take out a sword and start cutting people down.

  This was no utopia.

  Still, it was life—beside her, a tall tree grew beside one of the kiosks. A living and breathing tree, covered in leaves. Plants looked so different when they weren't dead.

  She went to the tree, and tried to caress one of those heart-shaped leaves. She was surprised when her hand passed right through it.

  "We're in observational mode only," Tanner said. "You'll understand why in a second."

  She shielded her eyes against the sun, and looked up. The air was full of floating objects. Wedge-shaped, they flew to and fro in orderly lines, following thin rails laid across the sky. In the distance, azure beams shot upward, carrying more of those wedge-shaped objects—some went up beyond the roof of the world, others came down.

  "What's going on there?" She pointed at the azure beams.

  "The flyers going up are full of people. The ones going down are empty. It's bringing them to a larger ship in orbit. Our ship. The one that was going to take a hundred thousand of us to a new world."

  Those flyers kept coming and going in ceaseless flow. Ari was awed by the immensity of it all. "It must have taken years to construct something big enough to hold so many people."

  "It did. Just be glad that our ancestors had advanced warning of the calamity. They detected the Enemy when it breached the Termination Shock at the fringes of our solar system. Hundreds of small objects. We thought they were extrasolar asteroids at first. Five years passed. The objects reached Jupiter. Not asteroids, but pods of some kind. Not long after that, new objects were detected entering the outskirts of the solar system. Objects far larger than the precursors. All the standard communication protocols were followed. Neither the precursors nor the more distant newcomers answered.

  "The precursors were headed on a collision course with Earth. We launched preemptive strikes, but there were just too many. The precursors penetrated the atmosphere and crashed into the oceans. Poisoned the seas. The shores were lined with the de
ad bodies of whales, dolphins, sharks, squids. And our technology could do nothing to reverse it. Though we tried, I'm sure. We thought we were so powerful. That technology would save us. Still, we should thank the Enemy I suppose, for warning us of their intentions. Because the real invasion force was still five years away."

  Ahead, people lined up beside a gate for entry into a fenced off area. Beyond the fence, a diamond-shaped object towered skyward. It was iridescent, and mirrored the sun so that Ari had to squint to observe it. Four long, metallic lattice masts held the giant diamond in place.

  Ari nodded toward it. "And what's that?"

  "A smaller escape ship, independently built by those who lost the lottery. There's hundreds like it around the world."

  "So everyone just gave up and left?"

  Tanner sighed. "No. Some stayed to fight. As you'll soon see. The ship in orbit, our ship, well, it was always thought of as a backup plan. A backup fast-tracked by the threat of invasion. Humanity had been wanting to colonize the stars for years before then. The coalition government had picked out suitable planets, put together blueprints and whatnot. They'd even started building, but the costs were just too prohibitive. And they never had a real motivation to actually finish the thing. The Enemy finally gave them the kick in the backsides they needed. The governments cut a whole lot of corners finishing that ship, and it ended up being only half the planned size. But no one ever thought we'd actually have to use it. No one ever thought we'd actually have to leave."

  Ari regarded him in a new light. "You learned all that from the archives?"

  "That and more. Watch."

  She saw it then. In the sky, long streams of smoke arced down from the heavens, smoke that expanded and writhed, looking a little like molten slag from the blacksmith's shop. People paused what they were doing to look up and watch.

  Without warning, the air cracked with a sound that was ten times louder than a thunderclap, and Ari felt her chest vibrate. Glass windows shattered on the building beside her, and people screamed as the shards rained into the street. More smoke plumes ripped up the sky, followed by more earsplitting thunderclaps.

  A siren sounded.

  People dispersed in pandemonium.

  "What's happening?" Ari said, though she knew.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The walls of the buildings and stalls abruptly blinked, and were replaced with multiple images that showed destruction across the world. A person's head overlaid these images in the lower right. Ari heard a voice speak from the air, though it cut in and out. It began in mid-sentence: "At all costs. The Enemy seem to concentrate their attacks on urban centers. Residents are advised to flee to the countryside. Take plenty of purified water, and—"

  A mushroom cloud appeared in the distance.

  A commotion drew her attention back to the fenced area. A drawbridge sealed on the diamond-shaped ship, and flames erupted from its underside, igniting those men and women who hadn't boarded in time. They didn't even have time to scream. The lattice masts that held the ship in place broke away. The vessel slowly lifted from the ground and began the long ascent.

  On the horizon, the azure beams that stretched into the sky abruptly winked out, and all the wedge-shaped flyers those beams had contained plunged downward.

  Tendrils of black mist slithered from the long plumes of smoke that smeared the sky. Flyers not restrained by the rail system converged on the mists. Small explosions and flashes of light dotted the air. The attacks had little effect on the invading darkness, and flyers fell, entangled in the mist. Ari saw a mushroom cloud form around one particularly massive congregation of darkness near the horizon, but the black mists emerged from the cloud a moment later, apparently unscathed.

  She tried to hold Tanner's hand, but her fingers passed right through his.

  Some of those mists swarmed around the diamond-shaped ship that was attempting to flee all this. A translucent funnel formed at the top of the ship, and it climbed faster and faster, pushed ever upward by the stream of fire beneath. A visible shockwave erupted from its base, and the fire reddened. The funnel at its tip expanded, and the ship tore free of the black mists and vanished beyond the clouds.

  "So others got away," Ari said.

  "Maybe." Tanner didn't sound too convinced.

  A terrified family rushed straight toward Ari. She tried to move out of the way but the family passed right through her.

  A little girl tripped and fell. The mother went to her, hauled her up.

  "Why are you showing me this?" Ari said.

  "It's important that you know the truth," Tanner said. "And understand what we're fighting for. Or at least, what we gave up."

  A thin line of smoke tore across the sky, passed right through those black mists, and collided with the ground maybe three miles away. A grayish-brown wall of death instantly erupted into existence. The start of another mushroom cloud.

  "Tanner..." But already the blast enveloped Ari. The sound was similar to the thunderclaps she'd heard from those smoke plumes, a drawn-out, earsplitting, thunder. Her insides rattled. She struggled to remain in place. Her hair gusted around her. Her eyes burned from the brightness, though her lids were shut.

  "I thought we were just observing!" she said, though she couldn't hear her own words.

  When the wall of death had passed, around her everything was tinted red. The sky. The dirt. The remnants of the shops around her. The hollowed-out shell of the building. The broken stone statues that were all that was left of the woman and her daughter. The incinerated tree.

  "They destroyed everything," Ari said.

  "It was us," Tanner said.

  "What?"

  Tanner glanced at her. There was pity in his eyes. "The mushroom clouds? That's us."

  "Why?"

  "I don't have all the answers, Ari. Wish I did. Maybe some governments decided that if we can't have our planet, then no one else could. But I like to think we did it because we were trying to destroy the Enemy. Even though it didn't work, as you can see."

  Those black mists remained in the red sky, and were spreading out. One flew just overhead. She caught a glimpse of triangular steel within the darkness.

  Unable to remain standing, Ari fell to the ground, stunned. "Why why why. Why?"

  But she knew, of course. Humanity's history was littered with resource wars, many taking place ages before this Enemy had ever come. Resources. That was the only explanation.

  Still, there was something she didn't quite understand. "We left Earth. Abandoned it to them. And still they hunted us to Jupiter's moon. Even in our own violent history, the conquerors always left survivors. This Enemy wants to wipe us out completely. Even though we're no threat to them. Why?"

  "No one knows, Ari. Their culture is entirely alien to our own. Who can say what traditions and emotions drive them? Who can say if they even have emotions. Plus we're not completely sure it was the Enemy who crashed our ship. The archives aren't clear. We're not even sure who exactly is in orbit right now over Ganymede, firing bolts of energy at us. Could be the Enemy. Could be another human ship. Our damaged equipment can't make heads or tails of it."

  She rested her head in her hands. She felt the weight of the lies that had been heaped upon humanity. Centuries of lies. Though she had to admit, if everyone had this knowledge, there would be few sane people left. Centuries of lies and unknowns. It was enough to drive an entire society to madness.

  "End the simulation," she said. "We have a Control Room to steal."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ari stood at the door to Briar's Grassylane District mansion. The irony of the district's name wasn't lost on her. This place hadn't seen grass in an age, and probably never would.

  She was wrapped in a heavy cloak, with a scarf tight around her face. The wind was particularly biting today, and even though she was a gol she found it difficult to ignore the cold. The snow whirled around her, falling from clouds where it had been too long pent-up. If the snow continued pissing down, at thi
s rate she'd be standing at the heart of an all-out blizzard in a few minutes.

  She was still shaken by what Tanner had shown her. Humanity had destroyed the world while trying to save it. Only a few ships escaped. Maybe only one.

  She was on it.

  She knocked on the door again. Louder this time. She heard the reverberations echo in the vast hall beyond. Surely at least the servants would have answered by now.

  "Open up Uncle!" she said. "I know you're in there!"

  It'd been years since she'd visited her Uncle. The last time, she'd had to leave in quite a hurry, before she throttled the overweight man. Her mother had been present, but the conversation had been stilted. Ari thought it was because Briar was there. She'd asked him to leave, but he'd refused. Things had quickly turned sour.

  Her mother. Cora. Ari wondered if she still lived here.

  She stepped back to gaze at the upper windows, and her boots crunched on the fresh snow that had accumulated on the porch. It was quite a fancy place, not so grand as Jeremy's of course, but more than decent for one of Briar's station. The small grounds were fenced all around and sealed at the front by an iron gate, easily scaled with her gol body. The main walkway was immaculately shoveled, and was lined by ice sculptures cut into the shapes of fanciful animals. The manor itself was made of mortared stone, with steeple-topped windows set here and there, curtained on the inside to keep out prying eyes. It was the kind of home a portal trader would own.

  But Briar had another, more important house, and that was the entire reason for her visit.

  "Briar! You lardy piece of—" She knocked one more time, and then decided it was time for an inspection.

  She circled the mansion, making for the backyard, where an ice rink covered the ground. The ice had known better days—it was plagued by lumps and depressions, and nicks from old skating sessions marred the surface.

  She squinted through the whirling snow. A particularly nasty blast of wind cleared the air, and she caught sight of a form huddled in at least three layers of clothing, trying to sneak across the rink in the storm. It had to be Briar.