He rested his head against the cool tiled wall of the shower. This is getting worse, not better. I thought I’d be over her by now. He banged his head lightly against the wall. He’d been entranced with her almost from the moment they’d met, and had asked her out within days of meeting her. She’d flatly turned him down. He’d never had a chance with her, and he didn’t know why. He had no idea what to do now.
He couldn’t just blurt out his feelings, after working with her sixty hours a week for a year. He’d never be able to look her in the eyes again if she turned him down a second time, much less trust her with his life as his partner. There would always be that distraction, that barrier between them.
He didn’t want any barriers between them, and there were none, except the one in his mind that allowed him to treat her as his partner and friend, and give her no hint that he wanted more.
He’d kept it buried, resigned to simply be with her while desperately loving everything about her, from her agile mind to her dry humor to her adherence to protocol (mostly so he could fantasize about getting her to break it). He’d been looking for a chance, but he wondered if he’d ever find an opening to let her know how he felt.
Excruciating if she wasn’t interested.
Excruciating because she wasn’t interested.
He banged his head against the wall again. He needed more cold water.
Chapter 3
Monday morning, Liv arrived at the base early. She headed straight to the spare R & D lab she was borrowing for her experiment because it was so much closer to the surface. The new PET scanner had come in on Saturday, and she’d spent most of the weekend setting it up and testing it.
It worked as advertised, reading brain activity within minutes of marker injection. But the best part: it was portable. She was going to be the first person in Home World to study Travel as it happened.
She was just finishing the final computer synch when Jordan strolled in. When his cologne hit her nose, she breathed deep—a mix of citrus and cedar and something else. She loved that smell. Wrapped in his scent, her excitement finally calmed to something like manageable levels.
She turned toward him, still typing, as he took a chair. “What are you doing here so early?”
“I had some research of my own this morning. T28 has been in R-9792W for a week now.” T28 was one of the other two DEPOT exploration teams. “They found some fascinating evidence for the evolution of a completely new progression of early settlement the other day.”
“Fascinating.” Liv smiled. It sounded dull as dirt to her, but history enthralled Jordan as much as functional neuroanatomy enthralled her. She knew he would understand the teasing note in her voice.
“No, it is. It may be proof of an advanced civilization before the current civilization.”
“Actually, that is interesting. Did they devolve, get wiped out, pick up and leave, what?”
Jordan shrugged. “We don’t know yet. We’ll have to wait for R & D to do the research, which will probably take months.”
His face was as glum as a kid at Thanksgiving contemplating how long it was until Christmas. Liv laughed.
Jordan smiled as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. Knowing him, he probably did. He picked up a splicer wire from the counter while Liv turned back to the PET scanner. He played with it, bent it, knotted and unknotted it.
“Everything okay?”
“Yup.”
She glanced at him. He was still fiddling with the wire.
“You were really quiet Friday. Usually you tear apart my movies for being scientifically unsound. Something bothering you?”
“Nope.”
“I have some good rebuttals.”
He shook his head and frowned. “I don’t have any complaints.”
She had picked at least three places where she knew he’d have to take issue with the history the movie referred to, and he had been too distracted to notice. Obviously he didn’t want to talk about it. She tried to bury her worry and respect his privacy.
Trent walked in, greeting them both with a grin.
“Why are you so chipper?”
“I finally got the fly thread I’ve been waiting for.”
“What is it this time?” Liv asked. “A tsetse nymph? A green drake?”
“A dung beetle?” Jordan asked with a grin.
Trent turned a stone-faced stare on him. “Why would anyone fish with a dung beetle?”
Jordan shrugged. “It’s something no one else has done. I know you like original challenges.”
“No, it’s not a dung beetle.”
Connor walked in. “Good morning.”
“Morning, Commander.” Being enlisted with Connor as his superior had ingrained the habit of formality too deeply for Trent to overcome, and Liv had never heard him use Connor’s first name.
“Morning, Con.” Jordan, on the other hand, disdained formality.
Connor frowned at Trent. “Why are you so glum?”
“I’m not. I got my new fly thread in.”
“Nice! I loved the last two you tied me. Used one this weekend in fact. You should have come with me, it was amazing.”
“How many fish did you catch?” Liv asked from the computer.
“None. But it was great. Beautiful sunshine, cold mountain stream. For the beer,” he said at her puzzled look.
“Ah.”
“I don’t fish with my flies, I just tie them,” Trent said with the air of one who’d explained a thousand times.
Gin whisked through the door in a flurry of caffeine-driven babble and a cloud of golden curls.
“Hey Virgin,” Trent said.
Gin sent him a scowl full of daggers—her full name was Virginia Karelli, and she much preferred being named after booze than the Holy Mother—then smiled sweetly. “Hey Ninja.”
It was Trent’s turn to scowl. As a Japanese-American, he hated the stereotype of all Asians being kung fu masters, even though he was a black belt in jujutsu and karate and used throwing stars he made himself. Liv often wondered why he lived up to the stereotype if he didn’t want to perpetuate it.
Ben was late as usual. “Sorry,” he said as he strolled in with a donut in one hand. “Late night.”
“We don’t expect more from you, Flyboy,” Connor growled in mock anger.
“Then you’ll never be disappointed, Frogman,” Ben retaliated with a grin.
Liv finished setting up just as Dr. Brown walked in. She insisted on being here “just in case.” She would also inject them with the marker the PET scanner would read.
Liv said, “Okay all y’all, listen up.”
Everybody was talking, except Connor, who was famed for being able to sleep anywhere and leaned against the wall dozing. But they all turned to her the instant she spoke, including Connor, who also woke up to the slightest noise.
“Y’all are going to be hooked to the scanner one at a time, but you’ll Travel in pairs as always. I don’t care where you go, as long as it’s somewhere thoroughly explored. So who’s first?”
Jordan volunteered. Connor offered to go with him. Dr. Brown injected Jordan with the marker while Liv hefted the portable PET scanner—thanks to research assistance from one of their more advanced allies, it was one-twentieth the usual size. As she fixed it to Jordan’s head, she noted again how good he smelled—light spicy cologne and soap.
When the last electrode was glued in place, Liv said, “Okay, you’re set.”
Jordan smiled at her, then turned to Connor. “Sand Castle, on mark.”
“P-23786L,” Liv said to herself as Jordan counted down, and marked it in the computer database. She turned to watch the PET screen as Jordan began to concentrate, and areas of his brain lit up on the scan. It worked! Then the image blinked out as he vanished. She wasn’t worried—the scanner recorded its findings internally. She’d have to download the whole scan later, but she’d also be the first one to see the part of the scan that happened in another world as a Traveler prepared to return Home
.
When Jordan’s scan popped back onto the screen, she knew he’d returned to the surface. He was able to Travel from underground, because if he was going to appear in the middle of a solid object in another world, like bedrock, he’d just pop to the nearest available empty space. But he couldn’t get underground over there to Travel back into the base here, so he returned above ground—equivalent to where he’d been standing in Sand Castle.
A minute later, Connor and Jordan walked through the door. Liv removed the scanner, downloaded his scan, and reset the machine for the next Traveler.
Her team went quickly, one after the other. Finally, only Liv was left. Dr. Brown rigged the electrodes.
Liv decided to go to Blue Beach, E-746U, one of her favorite places since she’d gone there at age thirteen. Its technology lagged a few hundred years behind Home World’s, which meant it was clean and quiet, but the best feature was its thousands of lakes, all with beaches of sapphire sand that tinted the water to a stunning cobalt. Jordan volunteered to go with her.
When Liv opened her eyes and followed the first rule of Travel, she thought she’d somehow gone to the wrong world, even though she never had before. She turned her head and saw Jordan standing next to her. If she’d screwed up, so had he. Therefore, this was Blue Beach.
All this took less than a second, and her reflexive gasp made her choke on the smoke she’d inhaled.
Blue Beach was burning.
Black smoke billowed up from piles of trees that had been ripped out by the roots. The sky was a horrible shade of black-gray, lit from beneath to old-bruise yellow by the nearby flames. Gray ash covered the normally pristine blue sand, and the nearby lake that should have been clear azure was sickly gray and filmy. The air smelled like a campfire gone wild, and heat baked at them from all sides. They couldn’t see any villages, but Liv knew that the black cloud to the north must be Ganja.
She turned to Jordan and saw her horror reflected in his eyes. They had friends here.
“We have to get help,” Liv coughed.
“Let’s go.”
Chapter 4
Liv followed Jordan in a nightmare run back to the R & D lab. She arrived still choking—apparently the Travel Authority had decided the soot she’d inhaled was hers and it could come along.
The rest of the team came to attention at once.
“Blue Beach is on fire—it looks like a war zone,” Jordan said.
Liv took a deep breath and coughed again. She tasted black soot and blood in her throat. Dr. Brown hurried over and placed her stethoscope against Liv’s chest. Liv pushed it away.
“I’m fine. Help me get out of this.” She fumbled at the straps of the PET scanner.
“Careful! That’s expensive, sensitive equipment,” Dr. Brown admonished.
“Then help! People could be dying!” Liv tried to yell, but her voice was raspy.
Dr. Brown frowned, but reached for a buckle. Over her shoulder, Liv noticed Connor was already on the phone.
“Yes, it’s urgent. Tell him it’s Commander Bryant. Yes, now.” Connor didn’t raise his voice, but it was obvious that whoever was on the other end had jumped to obey. Connor had that effect on people.
“General Mace, Commander Bryant. Yes, we’ve just finished. Liv went to Blue Beach. It’s on fire…. Yes sir…. Yes, I thought so…. Yes, if possible, sir…. Thank you sir. Out.”
Connor turned to face the room. “We leave in five minutes.”
Liv would have sighed with relief, but she was afraid she’d start coughing again. “Thanks,” she said as Dr. Brown finally hiked the PET scanner off her head. She trotted after the rest of her team.
She found if she breathed shallowly, she could ignore the burning in her chest.
At the armory, Liv grabbed the usual air-quality and pathogen scanners, but picked up some sampling and testing equipment too. Then she grabbed a couple of extra magazines and explosives. She wanted to be prepared for anything.
In the hallway outside of the armory, Connor turned to the rest of the team. “Blue Beach on mark. One, two, three, mark.”
Liv exhaled, blinked—a blink that happened in her mind instead of her eyelids—and opened her eyes on the scene she had left a few minutes before. She tried not to reflexively inhale but couldn’t help it. Once again, she choked on smoke. She drew her sidearm the instant she arrived, holding it at her side while she scanned their surroundings for danger. The rest of the team did the same.
Connor appeared milliseconds later and took in everything with a single glance. “Form up, fall in.”
He got them out of the worst of the smoke and jogged toward the huge black cloud to the north. She and Jordan ended up as rear guard, and Liv kept her eyes mostly to the side and behind, trying to protect them from whatever had done this. Once they left the beach, the smoke cleared enough for her to breathe freely.
A few minutes later, they strode down Ganja’s main street. Liv took in the devastation and felt sick to her stomach. The buildings had been primarily wooden, and some still fed the flames, having been deemed lost causes and left to burn out. Most were smoking black piles of rubble.
People wandered the streets like zombies, as black as the wreckage they sifted through. Some had formed bucket brigades or hauled barrels of water on carts, but even these seemed to sleepwalk through their tasks.
Connor weaved to keep them out of the worst of the smoke. Liv tried to keep from wondering what had happened to Raja and Corc, friends she’d known since she was sixteen. They lived in one of the farmsteads nearby, so heartless as it sounded even in her head, she hoped the damage had been confined to Ganja.
“Can we help them?” Jordan asked, pain in his voice.
Connor glanced at Jordan. “That’s what we’re trying to do, Jordan.”
Jordan gave Connor an impatient glare. “Not help them get revenge, Con. They’re in shock and they’ve just lost everything. The last thing they need is more violence. I meant help them.”
Connor sighed. “I know. We’ll see what we can do.”
Jordan nodded his thanks.
Connor stepped up to the nearest cart, which was hitched to an exhausted donkey, and asked the man on the driver’s bench, “Who’s in charge?”
He got a blank stare in answer, so he moved to the next man who was fumbling with the hose protruding from the top of the water barrel. “Who’s in charge?”
The man continued to struggle, ignoring Connor, and Jordan stepped up to help. They finally got the hose unkinked. “What happened?”
“Demons,” the man quavered, and shuddered as he turned away.
Jordan glanced at Liv and frowned. Apparently, she hadn’t hid her surprise very well. Even with Elachai, and the stories she’d heard, she didn’t really believe demons existed.
“Who’s in charge?” Connor asked a third time, and a woman who had come to fill her wooden bucket spoke.
“Major Hucklin. He’d be in the Hall.”
“Thank you.”
At Connor’s signal, Liv fell in again next to Gin and Jordan, and followed Connor’s fast walk to the building the woman had indicated.
“Commander?” Trent said.
Connor turned with his eyebrow raised in question.
“These buildings were torn apart by explosives. I think this is frag grenade damage.”
Connor inspected the nearby building. “I’d agree it looks like frag grenade damage. But lots of explosives could leave that pattern.” He turned to Liv. “Do you have equipment to test this residue?”
She mentally kicked herself. “No. The portable mass spec is too big to fit all this other stuff I brought.”
Connor nodded and motioned them to move on.
The Hall still stood. Aside from a smoking roof, it had escaped the damage that had rained down on the rest of the town, probably because it was the only building constructed of stone. Connor strode through blackened doors that barely clung to their hinges, Liv and the others close behind.
Liv slowe
d for a minute to let her eyes adjust to the dim light. Major Hucklin sat at the head of a table full of people on the other side of the Hall. He was a portly man with a florid face and thinning gray hair, and his size proved that he had greatly enjoyed the perks of his office before this catastrophe. He was the elected ruler of the nearby towns: ‘major’ in this world meant ‘mayor’ in Home World.
Connor began, “Major Hucklin.”
“Oh, it be you,” Hucklin said with a distinct sneer in his voice. “You would wait until the danger’s passed before you’d be making an arrival.”
“Are you sure the danger’s passed?” Trent asked.
Major Hucklin turned his sneer on Trent. “We’d be trying to clean up for more than a day now, and no more demons are being sighted.”
“Demons.” Gin looked skeptical.
“Told you,” Trent muttered.
“What did they look like?” Jordan asked.
Major Hucklin shuddered. “They be huge monsters with faces that be like a pig’s and a dog’s, and huge wings that be covered in leather.”
“How many were there?” Connor asked.
“Several dozen at least. The horde—”
“Despair.”
Hucklin stared at Trent as if he’d sprouted an extra head. Liv turned to Trent too, and raised her eyebrows at Jordan when she caught his eye. Trent had a long history of fascination with demons and other myths of Travel, and probably had more knowledge than the rest of them put together, even with the research Jordan had undoubtedly done over the weekend.
Connor cleared his throat. “What?”
“A despair,” Trent said again. “It’s what you call a group of demons. Like a gaggle of geese or a murder of crows. A despair of demons.”
Connor rolled his eyes. “Thank you, Petty Officer Nagano.” He turned back to Hucklin. “Major, please continue.”
“That’s uncommonly appropriate,” the Major said, still staring at Trent. He shook himself and turned back to Connor. “Well, the despair hit the nearby countryside, and then vanished before we even mounted a defense. They exploded things, took several townsfolk, raided our stores, and burned the rest to the ground.”
A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1) Page 4