by White, Gwynn
“—where you’re going!” he heard the beast finish as he flew.
As a result of being thrust through the neutral space, he slowed in the air and was able to pull himself into a backward somersault. He touched down on a section of floor conveniently soft at that second. The cushioned landing caused him to fall to his side.
Abby scrunched his face to focus. Leta was in front of the Maro. She was standing with her hands on her hips, shoulders forward, leaning in on the giant nearly twice her height and more than four times her girth. Abby was too dazed to hear what she’d said. He did hear the bellow of the Maro.
“This is a trick. He has no uniform.”
Leta said something else, “…still under arrest.”
Abby willed an adrenalin boost then shuffled to his feet. The Maro had effortlessly tossed him ten meters. He leaned to run toward Leta, but fell forward with his first steps. He pushed his arms down to catch and propel himself and kept moving. The Maro began to glow bright crimson, and his massive ram’s rack hung forward.
“Keep your jurisdiction,” he said. His clawed hand swung over to grasp the hilt of his blade. “We own the planes.”
Abby was still too far away to intervene. He dropped his hand to his side to draw his own blade.
Before him, the Maro had begun to fall.
As the beast had reached for his weapon, Leta dropped her right shoulder and drew her blade while whirling left. In a blur of a pivot, she spun on her left foot while her right rose to meet the beast’s blind spot, the side of his head behind the curve of his horn. The kick wasn’t enough of a blow to jar the giant. However, in that split second, when his head shifted to the side and his hand rose away from his weapon toward her leg, Leta’s free blade flew flat against his side. A long electric arc discharged first in red then blue flame as 50,000 volts surged into the hulk. The red monster’s body tensed, convulsed, and he dropped to the floor.
Abby slowed. Leta planted a knee in the Maro’s back and pulled his limp arm into a cuff.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Abby said. “Fine.”
Leta clasped the second cuff then rapidly tapped her wrist. The cuffs lit up.
“You know this guy?”
“I believe, though brief, this was our first meeting.”
Leta stood and tapped on her wrist again. “He seemed to know you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If you ask me, he was gunning for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he waited for me to pass, then launched himself into you.”
Abby shrugged. “Who knows? Death by cop, maybe?”
“Yeah.” Leta nodded her head. “Except he was right. You’re not wearing a uniform. How’d he know you’re Bureau?”
Before Abby could answer, Leta turned her attention to two uniformed Homeland Security troopers jogging around the cylinder. “He’s all yours. Everything you need is on the rings.”
“Yes, Captain,” said the first, then both knelt, each grabbing one of the fallen Maro’s arms.
“The Arcadian gate is right over here,” Leta said. She started to turn away but paused. “Stay close.”
9
Yun hadn’t told Abby that the agent he was to meet at the Bubble was an Umbra—a Shadow, a Haunt—and there’d been no precog flash to paint him a picture. Sure, he was aware that the Bureau was a different corps than when he was active, after a century it had to be, and enlisting the Umbra made sense. They were, after all, like mortals, residents of the Homeland, and they made excellent agents. The same skills they’d honed living for generations as gypsies, hiding in the spectrum and among the mortals, and their enhanced psychic ability, all assets to the Bureau. That their race didn’t need drugs, devices, or surgical modification to shift across spectrums or for planar travel through the Bubble were further strengths for the Bureau to leverage. The Umbra were natural allies to the mortals and should’ve been treated so from the start.
Like many of the spectral races, the Umbra had been revealed when the technology of the Bubble was first discovered. Like other species, they were a product of evolution. Unfortunately, the same attributes that allowed them to survive symbiotically with mortals led to their persecution. For years, the Umbra had blended in or hidden. They appeared to be pale-skinned, black-haired mortals, only distinguishable for having eyes of solid black, which they could hide by compelling mortals to see normal eyes. Their limited psychic ability also allowed them to know what mortals were thinking, and they demonstrated this talent by answering questions before they were asked, or by anticipating actions before they occurred. When the Umbra hid among the mortals as gypsies, these talents were either marveled at or thought of as carnival tricks. When people discovered what the Umbra were, the perspectives changed.
What made things worse was the revelation that the Umbra could compel mortals to perform simple actions, such as opening doors for them or moving to help them without consciously knowing. Amplifying the prejudice was that their mere presence caused mortals to become overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. The trait, like the hiding of the eyes, was easily subdued by mature Umbra, but their young children couldn’t hide. Young Umbra, approached and surrounded on the street by hateful mortals, were referred to as black-eyed kids. They were scapegoated as the pariah of the Homeland, accused of being specters, ghosts, and poltergeists as they could manipulate objects from the edge of the spectrum, and were said to steal jewelry and keys.
A nation of gypsy tribes themselves, they were able to hide among mortal gypsies, subdue the myths, and use their abilities for profit. But as in all wars, the gypsies were among the first to be persecuted. Accused of sabotage and spying for the Reds, the Umbra were rounded up during the Spectral Wars, and placed in internment camps or worse.
Abby was aware of the prejudice then, and he was aware now. The racist ignorance was accepted as mandate, all for the greater good. He was an expert on the historic prejudice of man and the will of an empire. For untold millennia, men enslaved, persecuted, and killed other men because they were different, then they finally banded together when a new race was discovered among their own.
The Umbra would’ve never collaborated with the Omni or the Reds. The Omni may’ve been the major combatant of the Spectral Wars, but the Shadow peoples, as the Umbra called themselves, weren’t interplanar, and wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the gray-headed monsters, and the Reds—well the Reds were just plain evil. A nation of tribes and families, a whole culture, was dismantled, for the greater good, all at the hands of the Warlocks, the Homeland Security special operations team tasked with hunting other species in the Homeland and the planes.
Partnering one of the gypsy race with the Warlock responsible for rounding up her people was a bit twisted.
* * *
Before reaching the Arcadian gate, they passed a small sphere and a cube that appeared oddly suspended from one corner. With the exception of the gaseous Viridis and Pratinus Planes, the Carcerem Prison Plane, and those that had been sealed, the Arcadian Plane’s gate was the only lift bay in the dome surrounded by an enclosure, an added buffer between Arcadia and the other planes’ inhabitants. The exterior was composed from a darkened resin, a material adequate for such a sentry-type structure but clean enough to maintain the necessary appearance of refinement. Abby gauged the windowless structure was heavily reinforced and, judging from its twenty-meter width, that it held at least two rooms. This was the Arcadian gate. They certainly would want their own waiting area, private lavatory included. There were two access points Abby could see: the door directly to the front of the lift bay, as expected, and a second to the side.
Leta stopped short.
She sighed then said, “It’s going to be a while.” She demurely lowered herself to a bench. As demurely as one could in tight leather. She gestured for Abby to sit. So, he did.
“What’s the delay? The lift door is green.” He was referring to the light above the door.
“Yeah, the gate is free. You see that red glyph to the side of the door?”
“The lock?”
“That’s not a lock. When the glyph is red, that means the Arcadians are using the inside entrance to the gate. The VIP entrance.”
On cue, the second door to the side of the enclosure slid open, and a small vehicle, windows cloaked in black, sped silently out and away from the gate.
“Last time I was here, they had to march out into the hall like everyone else.”
“Yeah, well, they are Arcadian,” she said.
“We have authorization. Let’s just go.”
“Yeah. When we cross to the plane, we have authorization—when the elevator is free.”
“I see.”
Not far from where they sat, a long line of travelers, mostly families, stood waiting for a lift bay door to open. Everyone appeared to carry with them everything they owned. The families in queue were repetitive: each father held a precious package tight under his arm, sometimes a parcel, other times an instrument, always a package, and with his feet, the man would shuffle the luggage forward, while beside him, a mother, attired in a light dress and a light coat, also carried a package or a baby with one arm, and corralled their fidgeting children with the other. Family after family, fine clothes, tatters, Asian, Caucasian, and Umbra. The other families wouldn’t notice the Umbra, their eyes disguised by shimmer or mind. Surely none of the mortals could see Leta’s coal black eyes unless she wanted them to. He saw their eyes, though, and the queue of Umbra gathered with their belongings made his stomach churn. Not from the irony of so many poor near the gate of the elite; yes, classism disgusted him, but it had stopped bothering him long ago. What made his insides ache was a wrongdoing so long ago, when Umbra were once lined up at the planar gates and marched off to camps or worse.
“They’re all workers,” Leta said, “going to settle Paradise. They save up credits for two years for the trip.”
“Paradise, eh?”
“The new frontier. Supposed to be as nice as Arcadia, but for everybody else.”
“You ever been?”
“No.”
The lift bay opened and the families in the front of the queue shuffled in. The entire line slid forward. Abby’s eyes went tight. “You notice that nobody got out of that lift?”
“What do you mean?”
“You ever meet anybody that’s been to Paradise?”
“No,” she said. “The ads say you can stay and settle the new frontier. That’s probably what most people do. Who would want to come back?”
“Hmm. I guess you’re right.”
Abby leaned back into the bench and gazed up at the sky of phosphorescent plasma dancing neither in the neutral plane or any other. The Bubble wasn’t named after the massive geodesic sphere that bound the interplanar harmonic portal. The name originated from the inner core where he waited with the other planar travelers. The Bubble was a place suspended outside of the planes; a neutral space built by an Elder race. The ceiling of the dome above wasn’t a ceiling at all; rather, the transparent curved surface of that Bubble. On the other side was an ocean of fluctuating plasma, lost matter shifting from particles to wave and back again, a place in between where mortals couldn’t go and expect to return. What life was out there was eternally imprisoned, and if one stared into the abyss long enough, one of the Great Old Ones or their minions could lumber by.
Abby ran his palm slowly down his forearm. A missed harmonic and he could be eternally imprisoned.
The Yeti child who had collided with him when he entered the hall circled the upended cube then ran to the front of the bench to catch the ball his sibling threw. The child smiled at Abby then looked up to see what he was staring at. With a thud, the Yeti planted down next to him then squeezed up against his side.
The lights of the domed ceiling that wasn’t a ceiling came to life. From a far nova, a thin tentacle, galaxies in length, whipped out of view then recoiled in the direction of the Bubble. The plasma spun and flared and cycled through brilliant shades of aubergine, tangerine, fuchsia, and scarlet.
Abby’s arm tensed as the Yeti child held tighter to his side.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re safe in here.”
“I’m not scared,” the child said.
“I know,” Abby said. “That echo will fade. We’re not there.”
The comprehension would be hard for a child. What they saw was an echo. Not the same type of echo he experienced from shifting, but of another sort. They weren’t ‘there,’ at least in the sense that ‘there’ was nowhere, the abyss. Nothing from the abyss could return.
As he spoke, the tentacle did fade, and the storm of particles around the dome eased from the rapid cycles of dark color into light creamy shades of cerulean, tan, peach, and pink. The hall brightened. The child relaxed his hold.
Only the child and Abby seemed to notice the far-off echo. He glanced at Leta. Her head slightly twitched side to side. Her bold black orbs stared out at nothing. She was scanning an augment in her eye.
Again, he thought of Yun and that his old colleague might have told him his partner was an Umbra. Then again, that shouldn’t have mattered. The folders of the past were closed, to protect the… innocent.
Abby opened his coat, untucked and lifted his black shirt, then peeled the flesh layer away from his side to expose the crystal compartment. Everything was in order. The child hadn’t squeezed that hard. He smoothed the flesh layer back into place then brushed the surface.
The child lifted his head then rubbed his eye. “Telly told me that if I go through the gate, I might run into another me that doesn’t want me there.”
“Who’s Telly?”
“My brother.”
“I see. Well, Telly has obviously never been through a Bubble and has no idea what he’s talking about.”
“You mean there won’t be another me through the Bubble door?”
“That’s not how the Bubble works,” Abby said. “The Bubbles don’t open to alternate realities. They open to alternate planes.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Back in the Homeland, before the mortals found the first Bubble, way before, there were bees.”
“There are bees now. My aunt says we need them for the flowers to grow. That’s why the Farm Plane is full of them. That’s where we’re going.”
“She is right, without the bees, the plants wouldn’t grow. That’s why the Farm Plane has so many. Before the Bubble, though, the bees weren’t nanosynthetic. You know what that means?”
“There were real bees? I thought they were syns, like all of the fish from the water or the deep workers in the oceans and mines.”
“They are now. Before the Bubbles, there were real bees. Think about the flowers. They were around before, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, the way the bees did their job is the same as the way the nanosyns do theirs. They could see the color spectrum in a special way. They knew when to visit a flower because of the colors they saw, colors you and I could never see.” That was only half true, but the fashion was to hide one’s mods.
“Really?” the child asked.
“Sure, and that’s how the Bubble works.”
“Different colors?”
“Sort of, different parts of the spectrum. Every one of the planes is in the same place, the same way all of the colors were on the same flower even though not every creature could see them. The planes are that way, all there, but we couldn’t see them until some fancy scientist found the first Bubble. The Bubble is the bridge to the other parts of the spectrum, and when you go through those doors, you will stay the same and the world will change around you.”
“I stay the same?”
“Sure. The matter in the planes has already shifted in particle and wave to a set plane in the spectrum. You’ll stay the same.” Another half-truth. There were planes beyond the locked gates where he and the Yeti couldn’t travel. Abby didn’t s
hare that with the child.
“Will there be another me?”
“No, of course not. There is only one you. The thing is, there are more than colors in the spectrum. There are other parts to the physical universe, and that will be strange to you.”
“It will be okay?”
“Yes, it will be okay.”
10
Leta and Abby approached the gate when the glyph to the side switched from red to green, then waited to enter. A sensor from within made a small ping and the enclosure door opened to a foyer, a three-meter long corridor sealed on either side, and to the glass door of the gate. When they entered, the door to the dome slid closed behind them. A series of emerald beams, cast from an embedded console, rapidly fanned across their feet then back again, forming a sheet of translucent green light that rose up the length of their bodies to the tops of their heads. When the scan was complete, a soothing female voice emanated from the console. “Unable to read. Subject blocked. Please authorize.”
“523 Huxley Wilson.”
“Commander Squire, Ph.D., Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence, Special Agent Corps, Redacted, Redacted, Redacted. Clearance required for further discovery.”
Abby scrunched his face then caught Leta looking pensively toward him in his peripheral. He smiled mildly and shrugged.
Leta then arched her brow and followed the same protocol.
“Sparrow Gambit,” she said.
The console immediately chimed, “Captain Leta Serene, Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence, Special Agent Corps, Redacted, Redacted. Clearance required for further discovery.”
Leta returned the shrug with a smug smile of her own. Abby straightened and looked away.
“A bit annoyingly detailed,” Abby said. “Do they all do that now?”
“This is the only one I’ve come across. An Arcadian thing, I suppose.”
They entered the glass box that would carry them to the elite plane and, without sensation of momentum, they were whisked through a swirl of plasma toward the outer shell.