Home at Last

by Alex Sapegin

  After the memorable seedling planting, the heir to the throne was even more firmly established in his desire to hide in some quiet cave on the edge of the civilized world, for he had no desire to enter into a tangle of intrigues. It used to seem to Andy that no one would notice their departure, but if they did, he would only breathe a sigh of relief. After the events in the Wasteland, people started fearing him. They bowed to him, adored, and hated him. The only way out he could see for himself was to break all ties with the “big” world. Collecting the money didn’t take long. A small purse of gold and the portal mage-operators were immensely grateful to him, glad to send him and his company to his father’s valley.

  The valley met them with clean mountain air, bright sunshine and the chime of the waterfall near his native cave, with which Ania was simply delighted. It seemed like they could simply live and rejoice. It was nice to go out to the rocky ground in front of the cave, feel the sun, change into dragon form and flop into the lake. But it wasn’t meant to be—fate decided for itself what was better for him.

  Earth. Russia. Not far from N-ville...

  “We’re ready… Careful with the ‘window,’ go at him from behind. Prepare the impulse to open the portal… That’s it! We got him!”

  * * *

  Andy was confused at first and thought Ania had decided to play tricks on him. She sometimes played pranks, cast some spell with delayed activation of the control loop, and come what may. So, it seemed to him in the beginning, but when the colored cloudiness dissipated before his eyes, he realized he couldn’t smell Ania there. His nerves and feelings were struck by emptiness. No matter how he tried to grope for the connections with the world and the ocean of mana, they weren’t there. In place of the usual astral, there was a wall—an impenetrable barrier. Andy tried to penetrate the barrier, merge with it, but he was thrown back in such a way that the pitiful were-dragon’s body was physically lifted off the ground and bounced off the white wall of some room, ten feet in size.

  Andy, in a panic, rushed around the perimeter of a small prison. Thoughts skipped around in his head like fleas on a scabby dog; he constantly went from one to another—he checked his magical reserve which was filled to his eyeballs. He tried to find his second hypostasis. While in human form, his ethereal dragon body was in place, but it looked somehow faded and weakened, which wasn’t surprising.

  They’d pulled him out of a world full of vitality into an energy vacuum. No one knew how long he would have beaten his head against the wall and gone in circles, but a strange hiss made the dragon freeze in place. Andy immediately dived into settage[S39], calmed his nerves, then gently opened his eyes and looked around. True vision didn’t reveal any dangers. The hiss became quieter, and then a smell hit his nose. Gas, poison? Then he noticed the thin cracks along the floor, which stretched along the bottom of three out of four walls in the room. The fourth had no cracks, but it clearly suggested the outline of a door. The gas continued to come. The smell became stronger. It was not possible to hold his breath, and it was too late for that anyway...

  It’s a mystery what the alleged kidnappers were trying to achieve—to pacify him or immobilize him. But what they got is a backlash. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. The Earth scientists miscalculated. They thought they were dragging a person to Earth, but they dragged a beast. A deadly, intelligent beast with a different metabolism from bipeds. If a simple man had met them, nothing would have happened. He would have restrained himself, but someone decided to be safe.

  The transparent gas didn’t put him to sleep—it put Andy into a rage. An unmitigated fury and a thirst for murder took hold of him. The primal instincts of a predator driven into a corner took control. All the norms and moral prohibitions of civilization were washed away. Gazing at the contour of the door, Andy reached for his inner magical reservoir. Before his eyes with three-fold speed flashed various rune patterns. The fingers of hands acquired impressive claws...

  * * *

  “What’s taking so long? He just won’t go down,” said Reyna Glushko, a young graduate student from the Department of Biological Defense.

  “He’s a strong lizard. I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley,” her colleague James Smekalov said, wiping his hands. He never liked one certain feature of his physiognomy—eternally sweaty palms. Right now, they were sweating and itching like crazy underneath the gloves of his bio-defense suit. The fact that he was extremely nervous at the moment didn’t help. His instincts, waking up, started beating on the inside of skull, cursing him to no end for not bailing and somehow dodging the shift.

  “What’s he doing?” someone from the biologists’ group asked, looking at the screen. The foreign visitor in the transition cell stopped running, frowned, and made a strange gesture with his hands.

  “Sound the alarm!” one of the brainiacs in funny suits yelled. “Lock down the level!”

  “Holy Mother of…” James barely whispered.

  Glushko also found some choice language and swallowed in fear, watching the armored door of the intermediate vestibule go flying.

  They heard a loud cracking sound and a piece of iron weighing several hundred pounds rammed into three people and pinned them against the wall. Smekalov dropped to the floor and rolled towards the wall. The foreign guest appeared in the doorway. James involuntarily clenched into a fetal position. In the fluorescent light, it seemed to him that the alien had no eyes, but rather two unfathomable black pools that were looking at people, in the depths of which death was hidden.

  The foreigner carefully examined the surviving scientists. His nostrils twitched a couple of times from the spicy smell of blood flowing from under the door where he’d flattened three people. The smell seemed to penetrate the spacesuits of the living scientists. James felt a tight lump in his throat. His sixth sense screamed at him to keep lying there and not twitching, but apparently, his sense of self-preservation was atrophied due to a long time spent wearing boots and caps[S40]. One of the guys moved. What he wanted to do was a mystery, but the movement served as a signal for the newcomer. He dashed from his spot, waved his hands, and people, as if from a shock wave, scattered against the walls.

  No one else moved. James was lucky—he was already lying against the wall, although how can you talk about luck when your friends and colleagues turn into broken dolls before your eyes. One of the security guys, avoiding the strange blow and finding himself in the way of the monster in human form, squealed when clawed hands clasped and squeezed his head. The big man screamed for a whole minute and twisted his legs. James looked at the weapons lying on the floor and was afraid to move. Suddenly, the shriek ceased; the dead body fell dully on the blood-drenched surface. Terror still splashed in the military man’s frozen eyes.

  “Lord save me! Have mercy on me!” the scientist whispered with pale lips. The foreigner again looked around. His gaze lingered on James, who had gone pale under the glass face mask of his bio-defense suit, smiled, exposing his rows of sharp teeth, and his hands lit up for a moment with a neon light. The stranger growled gutturally and made a pushing movement with his hands. The metal door creaked and bent, then burst with such force that a bunch of sharp “petals” formed on the other side. Several screeching tracer bullets flew into the wide aperture formed. The monster roared and slammed his hands against the wall. The corridor beyond the torn door exploded with myriad tile fragments. Sharp bits of stone flew in all directions, striking down the armed detachment. It was a safe bet the unfortunate men were dead. The demon of destruction the scientists had dragged to the Earth by the thoughtlessness of their higher-ups stepped beyond the threshold, then stopped.

  Smekalov previously thought that after his first few days on the new job, he could no longer be surprised at anything. But the electric discharges around the demon testified to the contrary. The monster spread his hands to the sides and then clapped his hands...

  * * *

  “Comrade Colonel William Reston, what are your orders?”

&n
bsp; Colonel Reston turned around and looked at the Major with bloodshot eyes. In the operator’s room, it became even quieter, although the silence that reigned after the carnage was already deafening. The entirety of the fourth group was looking at the screen that broadcast what was happening in the transition chamber of the spatial apparatus. The second part of the “extraction” operation had gone horribly wrong. The Colonel and his crooks didn’t yet know that the first part ended not quite cleanly either. It seemed that everything was thought through to the smallest detail; every point was taken into account when developing the plan, and the most fantastic scenarios for the course of events were worked out, but nobody was counting on THAT. A dozen corpses in three minutes and a transition chamber and air-lock chamber that were blown to bits. The corridor of sector “A” was completely destroyed, and there was no end in sight to this. Kerimov’s son. If THAT could be called a son, some people even had trouble calling the “son” a person. He’d destroyed everything in his path.

  “Proceed with the ‘red’ biological threat plan. That’s an order!” the Colonel croaked and turned to the screen. The people in the room froze in shock and looked at the 3-D diagram of the premises of the third sector and, accordingly, at the third apparatus, highlighted on one of the monitors. The “red” threat plan meant a complete blockade of the dangerous area, up to the destruction of the sector if necessary. Reston reached out and pressed the intercom button. “Colonel Reston says a ‘red’-level threat is declared in the third sector. Begin emergency evacuation of personnel from the sectors adjacent to the infected one.”

  “Osadchuk...” The Colonel never got to finish his sentence. Kerimov’s son spread his arms wide and clapped his hands. The main screen blinked and went out. All the lamps in the ceiling flared with a loud crash. According to the safety rules, the fixtures should have been executed according to an explosion-proof design, but at installation half of the dome lights simply weren’t installed, and later on they somehow never got around to it. Typical behavior in Russian culture—cutting corners where it counts most. When tragedy strikes, what can you say? Was saving a little time worth losing some lives? Yet this peculiarity of the Russian character persisted. So, people were showered with shards of glass. A heartrending cry came from the room in which there was a guard. Yesterday, one of the CCTV monitors went down, and it was temporarily replaced by a nineteen-inch with [S41]a kinetic tube—it blew right into the guard’s face. A strong smell of burnt plastic hit their noses. An instant of short circuits had disabled all the computers and servers. Everyone got the impression that a small atomic bomb had gone off in the underground scientific center, or some other explosion that could generate a powerful electromagnetic impulse.

  The third sector and some of the second sector were plunged into darkness. The rock formations and special measures that were taken in the eighties to protect the center from weapons of mass destruction protected most of the equipment and generators. The scientific center remained operational, although people in the third sector didn’t know anything about it. The apparatus kicked in that triggered emergency battery lighting.

  “Comrade Colonel.” Osadchuk’s face in the red light acquired a grotesque look.

  Reston put aside the out-of-order walkie-talkie and turned to his subordinate. “You know what to do,” said the Colonel.

  “Yes, sir!”

  The hall shook. Somewhere something had exploded. The Colonel, not paying attention to external stimuli, froze like a statue with a sullen expression on his face and only a lone twitch under his left eye. That, at least, told the scientists they were still looking at a living person.

  When the doors were manually opened, and the scientists jumped out into the short transition hall, through the window of which one could be seen the vaults of a giant cave, the sounds of automatic gunfire reached their ears. Suddenly, a fiery cloud swelled on one of the cave walls, where the third apparatus room was located...

  “Quickly, quickly! Move it! Oh no, we’re too late...”

  The powerful latches completely blocked all the possible retreat paths. With quiet claps, the diaphragms on the ventilation shafts closed. The intelligent computers of the central “brain” of the center found the situation critical and took appropriate measures.

  * * *

  Andy was able to curb the internal beast in ten minutes when the effect of the unknown gas came to naught. He could only remember glimpses of corridors destroyed down to the last brick and people killed, most of whom were armed...

  He squeezed his jaw tightly and blew air between his teeth. Targ and Twins almighty—people were armed with machine guns. Targ, Targ, TARG! I’M NOT ON ILANTA! Andy wanted to get out through the breach in the wall, but to break through he would have to spend a good half his magical reserve, but then something stopped him. The glowing inscription above the door in the opposite end of the room with some equipment and blocks resembling his father’s apparatus caught his eye. Hm, familiar letters. The dim light was not a hindrance to true vision.

  Andy came cautiously to the door and sank to the floor.

  “Emergency exit,” his lips moved.

  The inscription was in Russian. Targ and bald dwarfs—he had arrived. They had somehow found him and dragged him back to Earth. His chest was cold. Andy looked around. Yes, these blocks reminded him of those he had seen on the active platform so long ago. A screeching sound came from behind the metal door. Scooping up energy from the remnants of his internal reserve, just in case, he formed a “battering ram” interweave and a couple of tricky spells (he didn’t have the strength or the mana for anything more, and to touch the energy from the second hypostasis would have been the height of stupidity) and carefully turned the door handles. Silence. Nothing happened. He pushed the door open with his palm.

  It’s been said many times that curiosity killed the cat, but some people stick their noses where they do not belong. Time slowed down. Before the world traveler, in the dim haze of the emergency lighting, stood a tall guy in tattered army camouflage and with a short little machine gun in his hands. The guy’s face was burned; blood was dripping from the deep cut on his left shoulder. His half-mad eyes met the dark pools on the were-dragon’s face. Andy recoiled to the right.

  “Ahhhhh!”

  A fiery “flower” blossomed at the end of the machine gun barrel. Puk-puk-puk! Rabid wasps struck Andy in the chest, throwing him a couple of yards back. The last wasp stung him in the heart. The interweave he’d prepared flew from his hands at the enemy. The gun-bearer, with his lips in an “O” shape, flew to the opposite wall, eyes bulging. His head went through the rough plaster, and he went limp on the floor.

  Andy heard footsteps, but he lacked the strength to move. His consciousness became viscous; his last reserves of magic were used for healing his wounds. Sensing that there was no time to waste, he dove into settage—he had to... What he “had to” do, he didn’t have time to think. Darkness overtook him from a strong blow to the head.

  Russia. N-ville. Secret scientific research center. A month later…

  Major General Sanin, with his hands clasped behind his back, lazily swayed from heel to toe. His new leather shoes creaked quietly. Through the wide window of the viewing gallery, there was an excellent view of the giant cave illuminated by numerous flashes of welding machines. Sanin strolled along the window apertures. The especially bright flashes made the general’s face take on an otherworldly, grotesque look. The dark shadows falling on the opposite wall writhed in some wild dance. Colonel Lantsov, laying his finger on a page in a thick folder, thoughtlessly looked at the dance of the shadows.

  “Dancing shadows,” the general said unexpectedly, touching the rough surface of the wall.

  “What?” The Colonel snapped out of it.

  “I said, our fuss reminds me of dancing shadows,” Sanin repeated, pointing to the twitching shadow. “No matter how you spin it, no matter how you squirm, you can’t escape the master’s will. I feel like a puppet being jerked at
the end of strings by an experienced puppeteer.”

  “Leonid, feeling philosophical again, aren’t you?” Lantsov asked, putting the folder on the table.

  “With a life like this, Igor, you’ll become a philosopher willingly or not.” The General paused, turned on his heels and looked straight at his subordinate and friend. “I’m thinking, Igor, I seriously think we should wash our hands of this and get lost in the shadows.”

  “Go on, I’m interested in your train of thought. It has something to do with...” The Colonel tapped his finger on the closed folder of papers.

  “It’s connected, yes,” Sanin answered shortly, glancing at the stationery.

  “Well well. Which lines aren’t letting you sleep?” Lantsov continued to ask. “The scientific community is simply going berserk from the horizons opening before it. I can’t imagine how it is they haven’t yet disassembled the boy completely, and you’re sinking into melancholy.”