by T J Trapp
Not yet – we might need him to find the concentrator, Erin thought back. Let’s find the concentrator before the hornet’s nest awakens. Verra has escaped, and will soon bring help.
“What is your name?” Erin asked the elf, glaring at him.
He shrugged. “I am a clutchman, I do not have a name.”
“I expect you to cooperate with us.” Erin gave him a little burst of pain.
“I will fully cooperate,” he said quickly. “I have no more interest in experiencing pain than your drones did.”
“Take us to the concentrator building.”
“It’s on the other side of the city. You will never beat Verra on foot,” the clutchman said. “As soon as she reaches help, they will communicate across the city with Mother-to-clutch communications.”
What is that? wondered Alec.
Mind reading, Erin thought back.
“What is the best way for us to get there?” Alec asked the elf.
“Take the portal system. That’s what we would do. Portals link our city. The nearest portal is around the corner from here. We will have to take three different portals to reach our destination, but it will be much faster than walking.”
“Lead us,” said Erin, “but first we must honor our departed rider.” By now Thom had roused Cryl and Rhor had rejoined the other riders in the courtyard. Erin held a brief departing ceremony before Alec turned Nikka’s body into ashes. Thom spat into the dust and recited the ancient curse of the victor.
As they prepared to leave, Thom handed Erin her sword. “My Lady, I took the liberty of removing this from your sleeping chamber,” he said, “and we have retrieved our other weapons as well.”
“Good thinking,” Alec said, and handed out two more rings so that each rider wore one. With the clutchman on a leash, the group left the residence and moved down the main boulevard.
Alec asked about the strange amulets they had been wearing. “We have many tools to subdue you animals. That is a defuser – it doesn’t allow the concentration of dark energy to build up around it. We use it when we face dark energy wizards. Dark energy sometimes undoes the domestication process, so occasionally one of the drones assigned to use dark energy reverts; we wear the defuser amulets when we subdue them. Mother was concerned about you cross-breeds, so we were wearing them today.”
“What other tools do you have?”
“Our rings, of course,” the clutchman said. “Those are the Mothers’ most valuable tool.”
“Where did they come from?” Alec asked. Someone must have invented them.
“It is said that the rings originally started as an orb weapon – that the orbs developed the rings to try to resist the elf Mothers. If an orb has a ring, it is difficult for the Mother to twist the lines to control it. Eventually, our Mothers learned that they could use the rings to twist the lines at a distance. Without the ring, the Mother has to touch an orb to control it.”
The conversation ended as they came to the portal. They faced a small platform about five arns in diameter. On one side was a pedestal with a bulky looking controller on top.
“Can you operate this?” Alec asked.
The clutchman gave him a surprised look. “Of course not! Elves cannot feel the dark energy – that is why we have drones. Only drones can control the dark energy! We use drones to control it, even in our residences.”
“So how do we operate it? Can any drone run it?” asked Erin, looking up and down the empty street for a drone.
“No, only special drones trained with the dark energy medallions can operate these. If one of the drones is not here, then sometimes you can stand on the platform and wait until someone comes from the other side. The trip will swap us to the other end.”
They all stepped onto the platform.
Can you run this thing? Erin thought to Alec.
I don’t know. Maybe.
Alec looked around the platform and saw the hex pedestal. Focus. He felt the dark energy. He could feel the portal controller on the pedestal. It was like the previous one, back in the Grasslands. He pushed dark energy into the controller and the light around them faded, went black, and then returned. They were in a different place, with drones moving all around them.
I guess the answer is: I can operate it, he thought to Erin.
After being around Alec this long, Erin could occasionally understand sarcasm. She rolled her eyes and thought, If Zera had a clutchman that behaved like you, she would severely discipline him.
In spite of their situation, Alec smiled at her.
✽✽✽
“Where is the next portal?” asked Erin. The clutchman pointed at the middle one of three circles marked on the ground across the way. They casually walked through the crowd of drones to the next portal. The drones efficiently moved out of the path of the Mother and her clutch, allowing them to move unimpeded. No alarm had been raised and no one was concerned about their presence. A drone operated this portal, and he promptly ported them as soon as they stepped on the device.
They appeared in a location empty of drones and elves. The clutchman led them down a narrow street and through a maze of paths to reach the third portal. This device was empty, so Alec ported them. They emerged at the base of a hill. At the top of the hill was the concentrator building. The building was different than most of the others in New Haven – it was blocky and gray.
“This is the building you want,” the clutchman said. “Before you punish me for not being forthright, though, I must tell you that I have never been inside, and I don’t know of anyone who has been past the outer room.”
“How do we get in?” asked Alec.
“Many of our oldest buildings have stone locks, including this one. You put your hand on the stone and it opens if you are allowed in. Otherwise it will not open. Since it requires dark energy, no elf has ever opened the door. And of course, no drone would ever think about entering without direction from their Mother.”
“Let’s see what we can do. I may have to use dark energy to open it,” said Alec.
They entered the outer chamber. The room was small and cold with no windows. A heavy door was set on one side of the room. A translucent stone panel was beside the door. Alec could feel dark energy oscillating even more strongly than before.
“I may have to break the door,” Alec said, examining it. “You try the panel first, Clutch-Man”
The clutchman put his palm on the stone panel. Nothing happened. Alec tried next and put his palm on the lock to see what he could feel. Nothing happened. Then he pushed a little dark energy into the panel. The palm lock seemed to get slightly warmer, but the door did not open. Erin walked up.
“I can feel you are close. Try again,” she said, placing her hand on the panel next to his. Alec pushed a little more dark energy into the panel and directed it to where Erin felt the rightness. As if responding to Erin’s presence, the heavy door opened with a click.
Erin turned to her riders. “We are going in. Guard him, and protect the door for us.” Erin and Alec stepped inside the next room and looked back. The door swung smoothly shut.
Alec looked around. The octagonal room had its own internal light. It was larger than it looked from the outside. Alec estimated the ceiling to be twenty feet high. Conical blocks were mounted about two-thirds of the way up and spaced uniformly around the outer wall. In the middle of the room was a transparent sphere about an arn in diameter. Small points of light moved inside the crystal, forming ever-changing patterns.
“I understand this layout,” Alec said, eyes darting around the equipment. “Those cones are transmitters. That ball in the center is a concentrator.”
He walked around to the other side of the sphere and stared at the flickering lights for a long time. “Look at this concentrator! It has a million little tricrystals arrayed inside the sphere. It’s using a four-dimensional alignment of tricrystals for the focus. The array uses the three standard dimensions and a complex pattern that changes with time to create a fourth dimension. I know how to
do that theoretically, but never thought I would actually see it done! It can have ten-thousand-times more power than a three-dimensional concentrator! To use time in the structure, the active tricrystal pattern has to constantly vary.”
Erin knew that Alec knew she didn’t understand anything he had said.
Alec looked discouraged and turned to Erin. “How am I going to figure out the pattern to decipher it?”
Erin had been looking around the room, more concerned about threats from guardian elves than flashing lights, and figuring out how they could best defend themselves. Trying to be helpful, she took another look around the odd-shaped room.
“There is a square in the corner by the far wall, like the one in the elves’ education center. Might it have the same purpose?” she said, pointing.
Alec walked over to the panel and looked at it. “I guess it can’t hurt to try it.” He put his hand on the stone.
The stone lit up and information seemed to flow directly from the stone to his mind. “Greetings,” the voice inside his mind said. “I have enabled the door to open only to a member of the House of Lian. I do not want the enforcer elves to gain access to this concentrator. If the door is forced open, the concentrator will destroy itself and my message will never be heard.”
Who are you and why is your voice inside my mind? thought Alec.
“I speak to you from the past. I have encoded this message to be received if, in the future, you need to know of this device. I am a dark energy drone; my Clutch Mother now is Lian, the daughter of Syna.
“Formerly, in her lifetime, I was a dark energy drone of the Clutch Mother Syna, a descendent of the True Dragon Queen and one of the founders of the New Haven, where this concentrator is located. I came to this place with my Mother Syna through the transporter many years ago, at the time of the Founding, when she was fleeing the wrath of the False Dragon Queen and her enforcers.
“To protect those of us here at the New Haven, early on we set up a cloaking device so that the outside worlds could not locate us. I was trained on the original concentrator and the cloaking device. After Mother Syna died, her daughter Lian inherited me and took me with her when she started her free colony in the land away from the New Haven, and I was re-trained.
“However, after Mother Lian left the New Haven, somehow the elves accidentally turned off the cloaking device. The enforcer elves have located the New Haven and this world is now engaged in a pitched battle with the enforcers. If the enforcers win, all the Mothers on this world will be skinned alive to discourage others from trying to do what we have done: find a new world and establish a New Haven to escape the False Dragon Queen.
“Unfortunately, for some reason, early in the battle with the enforcers New Haven’s main concentrator disintegrated. That blast not only destroyed the concentrator, it also destroyed the enforcers’ transporter site and killed all of New Haven’s dark energy drones. Since I am the only living dark energy drone, Mother Lian sent me from her free settlement to help the elves here in New Haven. I found this backup concentrator and started it in an over-power mode. Even though it is small and not really designed for this energy load, it should be adequate for the city power needs and for the cloaking device.
“At this time, the cloaking device is preventing the enforcers from finding us again. But, if it fails, we will be overwhelmed. The False Dragon Queen is vengeful. She has decreed that she will blame our descendants for a thousand years. It will be necessary for the cloaking device to continue to operate for that period of time.
“I am a mere drone and am not an accomplished operator of a concentrator. Sadly, there is no one alive with the skills needed to help me establish the perfect pattern. I believe, however, that the starting pattern I created is adequate, although it is not perfect. It should last for many generations, many centuries.
“In time, however, the pattern may start to oscillate; that could lead to a system failure. If that happens, and you have come to fix the pattern I installed, then you will need to stop the concentrator, establish a new good pattern, and then restart the concentrator.
“If you are here for that purpose I will continue to describe in greater detail how to generate a new pattern.” Alec continued to listen in rapt attention to an increasingly detailed technical discussion about the concentrator. He understood what the device did and how it worked. At the end of the description, he backed away from the panel and sat down. He was exhausted.
✽✽✽
Erin sat beside him. “You were at the panel a long time. Did you learn anything?”
“I was?” To Alec, it seemed as if only seconds had elapsed.
“It is already dark outside,” she pointed out.
“Well, yes, I did learn something. I learned a lot. It was like I was listening to a voice recording inside my head, from a drone of Lian, the elf you are descended from. The first part was a history lesson. He told how the elves here were fighting with other elves for some reason that wasn’t explained, and then came here to New Haven to escape. Something about a ‘Dragon Queen.’ More specifically, a ‘False Dragon Queen.’ The other elves were looking for these elves so they set up a cloaking device to help them hide; the outsiders may still be looking for them. The cloaking device is the only thing that keeps them from finding us all and wiping out the elves as well as the rest of us.” Alec sighed.
“I guess that answers an important question,” he said, stroking his beard.
“What question is that?”
“At first I was thinking that we would shut the concentrator down and not turn it back on. These elves don’t deserve for us to restart it just so that they can run their fancy facilities, but if we don’t restart it we may be at risk – Theland would be at risk – and we might have even worse elves poking around trying to kill everyone. I know what needs to be done to restart the concentrator, but first I need to rest for a few minutes before I try it.”
“We’ve been in here a long time,” Erin assured him. “I can sense elves out there but they seem to be content to wait us out. No one has tried to attack our riders. Take a nap and then you can try again. We don’t have provisions for an overnight stay, but we still have some refreshments from our tour this morning.”
Alec slept far longer than he imagined he could. He awoke to Erin watching him with tired eyes.
“Did you get any sleep?”
“I dozed lightly, but I did not want to give the elves an opportunity to exploit. Are you ready to try the device?”
“Sure!” Just an alien control system on a strange world and the potential to blow up everything around me if I do it wrong.
Alec took a deep breath and put his hands on the sphere. Focus. He started to push dark energy into the sphere. The sphere resisted his effort. He pushed harder and slowly the sphere accepted his energy. As the energy built up, he felt the sphere respond to him – much more easily than he was expecting – but the pattern of energy within the sphere was very complex and continually changing. He pulled the energy out and could feel the concentrator stop focusing dark energy. The sphere shut down.
“Okay. The concentrator is shut down. Now the hard part will be to re-start it with a stable pattern.”
Alec pushed dark energy into the sphere and it came back to life. There were so many patterns swirling in the system that his mind couldn’t grasp any of them. His head started to throb with the effort required.
Erin, come help me, he thought. She grabbed his arm and felt with him. Most of the patterns are wrong, he thought. Help me feel the wrong ones. There’s too many – if I can get down to just a few, then I can work with them.
Together they could feel the wrongness of some patterns, although neither understood how they knew. They worked with the patterns for a long time, eliminating the obviously wrong ones, until only a few remained.
“I can merge these now to make a workable pattern,” Alec said. Erin continued to hold his hand as the remaining patterns flowed together.
“I sense
a slight wrongness in one part,” Erin said.
“If we had lots of time, I could fix the wrongness, but this pattern will operate the concentrator – and it’s the best we can do right now. Time to restore the power.” Alec focused dark energy on a different portion of the sphere and the sphere lit and started humming on its own. The dark energy concentrator started operating and dark energy was broadcast to the city. There were no oscillations in the dark energy from the concentrator.
Alec felt the dark energy field. “Success!”
After a few hiccups of light, the cloaking projector resumed operation. “That cloaking device is supposed to make it difficult for the False Dragon Queen, whoever she is, to find this place and transport here from her world, wherever that is. “
“You are indeed a Great wizard,” Erin said, smiling at him.
“I couldn’t have done it without you. Very nice job,” Alec said, as he relaxed his mental control and let the concentrator resume operation on its own. They stepped away from the concentrator and sat down for a few minutes watching the internal patterns glow and evolve, little points of light flashing and moving.
“I wonder if the elf Mothers noticed that they were without power for a little while?” Alec mused. “It would have been terrible if their bath water got cold.”
33 – Backtracking
“Time to go home?” Erin asked.
“Let’s see if we can get out of here.” Alec put his hand on the door panel and nothing happened. “Come over here, Daughter of Lian.” Erin placed her hand on the door panel and felt it actuate. The door slid open.
The riders in the outer room instinctively reached for their swords when the heavy door opened. When they saw it was Erin, they relaxed. “No attempt by the elves to do anything,” Thom reported. “We had a quiet night, and we all got some rest.” Almost unnoticed, the inner door silently closed behind them.
“We are ready to leave, if we can get out of here,” Alec said. He pointed at the clutchman. “What do we want to do with him?”