The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  So he squeezed gently down on the trigger, taking up the slight amount of slack, waiting for the crisp snap as carefully machined inner parts sent the firing pin forward through the breechface, into the primer.

  A sharp c-r-a-c-k! tore the crisp morning air. The rifle had fired. But the buttplate had barely nudged Jathmar’s shoulder. He stared down the barrel past the front sight at the target, which was pristine. It was only fifty yards away. There was no wind. His sight alignment had been perfect, he knew it had been, but the bullet hadn’t struck the target. He hadn’t missed a shot that simple since childhood.

  He peered at the rifle in consternation. It had fired, which was comforting to his violated sense of normalcy, but the recoil had been so puny as to be almost non-existent and the bullet had failed to punch a target only fifty yards away. Even the sound of the rifle had been off. That sharp crack wasn’t anything like the deep-throated bellow the Ternathian Model 9511 was famous for producing when fired. That characteristic roar had earned the rifle its most common nickname: Thundergun. Only this Thundergun had barely wheezed.

  Jasak’s voice punched through his shock.

  “It fired!” Jasak was saying again and again. “It fired. But why? I don’t understand. It fired.”

  “Ye-e-s-s,” Jathmar said slowly, “but it didn’t fire properly.”

  Sogbourne frowned. “What do you mean by that? Explain.”

  Jathmar scratched the side of his head, trying to figure out where to begin. He was still scratching when Gadrial called out a request to join them at the firing line. A moment later, she and Shaylar were standing beside the shooting bench, staring down at the rifle in Jathmar’s puzzled hands.

  “Well,” Jathmar said, “for one thing, the sound was wrong. Much too quiet.”

  “Quiet?” Sogbourne gaped. “That hellish crack was quiet?”

  “You know,” Jasak frowned, “now you mention it, the noise was louder the last time we shot this gun.”

  “Yes,” Jathmar said, although his voice was distracted by the thoughts colliding uselessly in his head. “For another thing, the recoil was all wrong. It was much too soft.”

  “Recoil?” Sogbourne asked.

  “Yes, the recoil that occurs when the gun is fired. The release of all that gas pressure moving forward shoves the butt of the rifle, this part,” he carefully moved the rifle into a new position, muzzle-up, to show them which part of the rifle was the butt-plate, “back against my shoulder.”

  “Why?” Jasak asked, looking mystified.

  “Because of physics. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. When the gas propels the bullet forward at such a high speed, with all that tremendous gas pressure, the energy released propels the rifle backwards, in an equal and opposite direction. The bullet goes one way and the rifle goes the other way, so it punches your shoulder. The faster the bullet moves out of the gun barrel, the more energy there is to slam backwards. If you have a big, heavy gun, some of the weight will tend to compensate, but there’s still an opposite reaction. The gun will travel backwards while the bullet travels forwards, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  The Arcanans, he discovered, were staring at him as though he’d lost his mind.

  “Ah, Jathmar,” Gadrial said carefully, “that’s a very interesting theory. But it doesn’t work that way here.”

  Others were shaking their heads.

  “But that’s impossible,” Shaylar said. “There’s always a reaction.”

  “Oh, well we’re familiar with the idea of recoil,” Gadrial reassured her. “We just don’t let it get in the way.”

  “‘Get in the way’?” Jathmar repeated. “That’s one of the basic laws of physics. It underlies everything. It has to ‘get in the way,’ Gadrial!”

  Gadrial’s brow furrowed. “Not here. Half of what we do on a daily basis wouldn’t work if that was a physical law underlying everything. Heavens above, dragons couldn’t fly if we had to worry about silly things like recoil all the time!.”

  Jasak Olderhan exchanged a long and worried look with Commander of Twenty-Thousand Sogbourne.

  “I want to shoot this,” Gadrial said abruptly. “I shot it before. I want to shoot it again. Jathmar, I’ve forgotten how to operate it. Could you show me again, please?”

  “Well, certainly, if you really want to.” He loaded it for her, slipping half-a-dozen rounds into the tube-fed magazine, worked the action to chamber a round, then showed her again how to hold it, how to aim it, and how to fire it. She had trouble holding it steady and on target, because the weapon was much too heavy for her, but she did a creditable job of aligning everything, and then she squeezed the trigger…

  It clicked.

  Just clicked. Not even a crack, let alone a roar.

  Jathmar stared in utter consternation.

  “That’s impossible!” he blurted. “Why didn’t it fire? It should have. It just did!” He did something he shouldn’t have done. It wasn’t safe. It certainly wasn’t smart. He took the gun from Gadrial, thumbed back the exposed hammer to cock it without working the action, tucked it against his shoulder, and squeezed.

  C-r-a-c-k!

  The buttplate jostled his shoulder. The target remained pristine, but the cartridge that had failed to fire for Gadrial had fired on the first try for him. He nearly dropped the rifle. In fact, he had to fumble for it as the gun started to slide out of his numb hands and a film of sweat broke out across his whole body. His hands actually shook as he lowered the rifle gingerly to the shooting bench.

  Jathmar stared at Gadrial.

  She stared back.

  “That’s impossible,” he said, voice flat with shock.

  “Why?” Jasak asked, brow furrowed.

  “It just is,” Jathmar insisted. “The primer should have worked for Gadrial, too.”

  “Does this kind of thing ever happen in Sharona?” Gadrial asked.

  Jathmar started to answer, then halted. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “there are misfires or hang fires. A misfire is a cartridge that doesn’t function at all. A hang-fire is one that for some reason doesn’t ignite properly. It goes off more slowly, usually due to the powder not burning at the proper rate, which is one reason we always point a gun’s muzzle downrange, away from anything we don’t want to shoot. A hang-fire can go off a second or two later.”

  “Maybe,” Jasak suggested, “we should experiment with more shooters?”

  Jathmar nodded, feeling dazed.

  Ten minutes later, he was so confused, he could barely think straight. It was flatly impossible, but they’d given it a thorough, rigorous testing. When Jasak Olderhan, Gadrial Kelbryan, or Twenty Thousand Sogbourne tried to fire a Sharonian gun, nothing happened. When Jathmar or Shaylar pulled the trigger, the gun fired—but with only a fraction of its original power. A bullet that should have nailed a target a thousand yards away wouldn’t travel fifty. They had to move the target back to the twenty-five yard line before Jathmar’s bullet would even reach it.

  Even Twenty Thousand Sogbourne was puzzled by the admittedly weird performance of Jathmar’s hunting rifle. “What’s going on, Magister Gadrial?” he demanded in exasperation.

  “I don’t know. Jathmar, tell me again how the guns work. What makes the bullet leave the gun?”

  Jathmar drew a deep breath and launched into another explanation of powders and primers and gas expansion. He told her what gunpowder was, how and why it burned, what priming compounds were and why and how they exploded when struck with a sharp blow. He didn’t do a very good job of it, in part because he was thoroughly rattled and in part because he wasn’t an expert in arms manufacture or the chemistry of weapons development. But he told her what he could.

  Gadrial listened intently.

  “In essence,” she said with a frown that only seemed abstracted, since Jathmar was perfectly well aware of how agile her mind was, “what you’re describing is the incarnation of motive energies, which are harnessed through a distillation proces
s that transfers their latent arcane energy from the etheric plane to the physical, and the action of this device, this ‘fire-making pin,’ is a physically expressed incantation that causes the latent motive energies distilled in these various compounds to combine in a sudden, complex spell of release. Ye gods, Jathmar, it’s mind boggling!”

  Jathmar’s mind was certainly boggled, since he hadn’t understood a single word of that crazy mishmash. Judging by their expressions, neither had Shaylar or even Jasak Olderhan and Twenty Thousand Sogbourne. Gadrial, however, was gazing at the rifle with a smile of childlike delight. She moved with sudden authority, taking Jathmar by surprise.

  There were five more rounds loaded in the magazine. Gadrial racked the action like a seasoned pro, creating a crisp, metallic shlack-shlack, the characteristic sound of a cycling scissor-action. Before Jathmar could even open his mouth to protest, Gadrial had lifted the gun to her shoulder, more-or-less sighted on the target, and yanked the trigger.

  C-R-A-A-A-A-C-K!

  Gadrial dropped the rifle.

  Then stood there, gulping hard and staring down at the gun as though it had transformed itself into a venomous snake. She finally looked up. Looked around, searching almost frantically for Jathmar.

  “It worked,” she whispered. Her lips had gone unaccountably dry.

  “I noticed,” he croaked. His voice emerged as a hoarse, frog-like sound—a hoarse, frog-like sound even feebler and far fainter to ears stunned by the thunderous blast of a Thundergun which had just functioned perfectly.

  “No,” she shook her head, eyes wide in growing fright, “you don’t understand. It worked. Not the rifle. I mean, that worked, too. It wasn’t the rifle I meant. Wasn’t the rifle I was talking about. Or testing.”

  “Gadrial,” Jasak said in a down-to-earth voice, “you’re not making sense.”

  She didn’t even seem to hear him, because she was too busy turning parchment white and battling the tremors that had begun to shake through her slender body.

  “It shouldn’t have worked!” she said on a note of rising alarm that was heading rapidly toward panic and the onset of hysteria. “I didn’t expect it to work!” she gasped. “It was just a crazy idea, a half-baked notion that flashed into my head, an idea so nutty, I didn’t even stop to think it through. If I had, I would never have tried to shoot that…that thing.” She shuddered, staring down at the rifle on the ground with genuine horror in her eyes. “It was just a crazy idea, but my God, it worked. Rahil’s mercy…” She wrapped both arms around herself. “It’s impossible,” she whispered, lifting her gaze to stare into Jathmar’s totally bewildered eyes. She was shivering so hard, Jasak peeled off his uniform’s coat and wrapped her up in it.

  “Jasak,” she gripped one of his hands in both of hers, “Jasak, what I just did—” she gulped. “I just took everything we thought we knew about reality and turned it inside out and upside down and raveled out half the garment we call physics.” She stared down at the rifle again and bit her lip. “Jasak, I’m scared.”

  Jathmar glanced from Gadrial to Shaylar, who was as baffled as he was.

  “But why?” Jasak asked. He, too, was bewildered. So was Sogbourne, by the look on his face, and more than a little worried, as well, since whatever Gadrial had just done had terrified a woman who was high on a very short list of candidates for the best theoretical magician in the whole of Arcana’s civilization. When Jathmar realized that, he felt an abrupt stab of sudden, unadulterated terror. What the hell had Gadrial just discovered?!

  “Gadrial,” Jasak said in a tone that was abruptly stern, “what have you done, just now? What have you discovered? And why has it scared you out of your seriously intelligent wits?”

  “What?” she asked as though dazed.

  He took her by the shoulders in a grip so firm, it was just shy of shaking her. That grip forced her to meet his gaze. “What have you just discovered?” he asked again. “And why has it scared a year off our lives?”

  She gulped. Shivered. Pulled Jasak’s coat more tightly about her shoulders. “The connection I made,” she whispered, “about Jathmar’s ability to shoot the rifle you couldn’t. It isn’t what their weapons can do, Jasak, that’s a danger to Arcana. That’s so minor, it’s hardly worth mentioning—”

  “Now see here,” Sogbourne snapped. “What the devil does that mean? Their terror weapons are minor? Weapons that blow apart human flesh? That can destroy an entire platoon in a matter of minutes? Have you lost your Ransaran mind?”

  “No. I haven’t.” Gadrial’s hoarse whisper sent chills down Jathmar’s spine. “But what their weapons do is the least of our worries. It’s what they believe that will destroy us. Unless we’re very, very careful.”

  * * *

  Thankhar Olderhan sat gazing into the heart of the message crystal badged with the logo of Halka & Associates while cold, dark despair flowed through him.

  He stared at it, longing for some spell to obliterate it, to change history so it had never been sent—would never be sent. But no magister had ever devised that spell, and no power in all the universes could protect him from what he had to do now.

  He set the crystal on his blotter and leaned back in his chair, massaging his temples with both hands, trying to grapple with all the implications. Trying to imagine all the things he still didn’t know about this entire Jambakol-spawned monstrosity…and about who was deliberately shaping it into an even greater monstrosity.

  He knew Commander of Two Thousand Mayrkos Harshu. Not well, but he’d met the man, spoken with him—even been briefed by him once. What he didn’t know was how the man he’d thought he knew could have lent himself to something like this, whatever the “military necessity” which might have justified it. Gods! How could someone as intelligent as Harshu fail to understand what this would do to the Army—to the entire Union—when it inevitably got out?!

  And deservedly so.

  Yet even that paled beside what he knew he had to do now. Not in its inter-universal implications, perhaps. But on the personal scale, the scale where the things which made a man of honor who and what he was mattered, it was infinitely worse than any macro political considerations could ever be, and he wished with all his heart that he wasn’t a man of honor, because then he could have avoided it.

  He lowered his hands to the blotter, laying them on either side of the crystal, and sat for another thirty silent seconds. Then he drew a deep breath and rose with the expression of a man about to face a firing squad.

  * * *

  Shaylar looked up from the Andaran history book displayed on the crystal in her lap as the soft, musical chime sounded. She glanced across at Jathmar, who was immersed in quite a different book. His Andaran was still weaker than her own, but he’d been wading through the crystal—A Basic Introduction to Theoretical Magic, by Halathyn vos Dulainah—ever since the firearms demonstration. Gadrial had provided it at his request, and he was determined to somehow reconcile the differences between the Arcanan and the Sharonian concepts of science.

  Somehow, she doubted he’d have much luck in that endeavor. Not that there was the remotest possibility of dissuading him from the attempt.

  The chime sounded again, and she smiled faintly as Jathmar read on, oblivious to everything outside his crystal. Obviously, it was up to her.

  She set her own book aside, climbed out of the comfortable, floating chair, and crossed the sitting room. She opened the door, and her eyebrows rose as the servant in the hallway bobbed a curtsy.

  “Yes?” Shaylar asked as pleasantly as she could.

  The acute hatred which had poured off of some of the Olderhan servants had eased considerably over the last week, for which she was grateful. The most hate-filled had simply disappeared, although she didn’t know if Sathmin Olderhan had found them other positions on another of the Olderhans’ many properties or simply fired them. Most of the remaining staff continued to regard her and Jathmar as profoundly unnatural beings from an alien and threatening universe populated b
y the gods only knew what monstrous threats, however. As Jasak Olderhan’s shardonai they were entitled to service and respect—even to protection, since those servants were also part of the extended Garth Showma household—but nothing seemed capable of banishing that penumbra of fear.

  “His Grace’s complements, Madam Nargra-Kolmayr, and he requests that you and your husband join him in the Blue Salon.”

  “Did His Grace say why he’d like us to join him?” Shaylar asked in some surprise, and the maid shook her head.

  “He just told me to ask you to join him, Milady.”

  “I see.” Shaylar gazed at the other woman for a moment, then shrugged.

  “Please tell His Grace we’ll be there as soon as possible.”

  * * *

  The Sharonians stepped through the door to the enormous room called the Blue Salon holding one another’s hands and paused, just inside the threshold, in astonishment. They’d expected a private meeting with Thankhar Olderhan, but the Duke of Garth Showma wasn’t alone.

  Jasak stood by the windows, gazing out into an evening which had turned gray and cold, burnished with a swirl of snowflakes and polished with wind moan. Gadrial stood beside him, her expression worried, and Sathmin Olderhan sat in one of the elegant, impossibly comfortable armchairs. Shaylar and Jathmar hadn’t expected the others, but at least they knew who all of them were. They had no idea who the man standing beside the duke might be, however.

  He was a nondescript, brown-haired fellow in civilian clothes, yet Shaylar had the strangest impression that he ought to be in a uniform of some sort. Of course, that seemed to be true of an awful lot of the Andarans she’d met since that hideous day at Toppled Timber.

  “Thank you for coming,” the duke said, crossing the room to personally usher her and Jathmar to a small floating couch which faced his wife’s armchair.

  He waited until they were seated, then stepped back and clasped his hands behind him. There was something…frightening about the way he stood facing them, like a soldier bracing against an enemy charge. That was Shaylar’s first impression. Then she was sure she’d imagined it…until she glanced at Jasak and saw him watching his father with exactly the same sort of wariness she felt.