by David Ryker
I drew my plasma pistol back up. I wasn’t taking any chances this time. But before I could get her between the crosshairs, an air-splitting explosion rocked the cavern.
I sprawled forward, the force nearly snapping my neck, and watched as the screen lit up with a diagram of my rig, the whole back section flashing red with the words ‘critical damage’ flashing at me.
I swore loudly and landed on my hands, the rifle and pistol spilling from my grasp and landing somewhere outside my field of vision.
A deep rumbling kicked up and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. “What the hell was that?”
“It seems we have been fired on,” Greg answered diligently.
Gunfire started echoing behind me and a dying cry echoed through the deep bass note that was vibrating the ground under my hands. I rolled over quickly and dragged myself to a stance, Greg’s legs heavy and damaged under me.
Next to the tree, Fish was standing over the last soldier, pistol still smoking, a rocket launcher next to the prostrate body. I’d left the last soldier alive to take on Fox instead, and he’d grabbed the biggest gun he could, with total disregard for the repercussions.
The explosion had rocked the room and the shockwave had been enough to excite the Iskcara. Cracks ran up the length of the trunk like spiderwebs, spewing white light and what looked like plasma. It lashed out from between the fragments like long white tendrils, licking and biting at the air.
The noise was deafening now, the cracks widening with every second. The blast had set off a reaction that would escalate until the whole thing exploded. They’d been harvesting the crystal carefully, but now it was starting to react, and when it went up, it’d take us, the cavern and the surrounding thousand miles with it. If we were worried about their armada getting away with the technology, we didn’t have to now. If they were still hanging around in orbit above us then they’d be caught in the blast wave and likely vaporized.
I stared up at the tree, spewing flames and plasma, pulling itself apart under the sheer force of the combustion.
“Greg,” I mumbled, barely able to find my voice in the dread that was choking me. “How long do we have?”
“I estimate that we have less two minutes before the reaction consumes the cavern.”
“You got any ideas how the fuck we’re going to get out of here?”
“I do not.”
“Well, if this is it — I guess we had a good run.”
“We have failed every mission we have attempted and almost died on multiple occasions.”
“Shut up, Greg.”
21
The air was swirling now, like a huge tornado, whipping up the dirt piled against the walls and dragging it into the air.
I started forward and Fish backpedaled toward me. Alice’s rig hummed to its knees behind me and her hatch popped open, spilling her onto the ground. She rolled from the cab and dashed toward us, shielding her face from the squall.
She pressed her finger to her ear and pulled level with me, staring up at Greg. “I’m just going to chalk that stray shot up to a misfire?”
“What? No,” I said. “I meant to do that.”
“Sure you did.”
“I did,” I said defensively. “I knew it would shoot up like that — remember on Telmareen — the guard outside the—”
“Oh, you mean while I was being beaten to a pulp in their interrogation room?”
“I—”
“Save it,” she said, throwing her hand up. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
She was right. We did. We had less than two minutes to figure out how we were going to escape from an inescapable situation, and if we weren’t fast enough then the whole planet was going to explode. I could feel the waves of energy flowing out of it. The throb of light, the living heartbeat of the tree, was spilling out as pure energy, flooding the room with palpable electricity that made my teeth tingle.
I rolled the last minute or two over in my head, something Fox had said sticking in my mind. “The device. She said the device.”
“What?”
I popped my hatch and leaned forward, looking at Alice face to face. She recoiled at the sight of me, Icarus’ blood still smeared on my face. She swallowed the bile and nodded for me to go on.
“Fox, when her cronies woke up, said that they needed to finish harvesting the Iskcara, set the charges, and then prep the device.”
Alice snapped her fingers at Fish and pointed to the tree. “Charges. The crates. Check for explosives.”
“They were going to blow this place,” I muttered, looking around. “Once they’d gotten out with the Iskcara. They couldn’t risk the Federation finding it and following the instructions.” I gestured to the walls, the runes there that described how the Iskcara could be used.
“But even when the cave collapsed they kept going?” Alice was yelling now over the windrush, covering her ears to stop the buffeting.
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. “No, they wouldn’t leave something like that up to chance. There’s no way they’d come down here with only one way out. They must have had a contingency plan. Coming this far down underground with this much Iskcara, a volcanic wasteland outside and the Federation hot on their heels? Nah, I don’t buy it.”
“So what, they were just going to wormhole their way out of…” She trailed off, watching Fish approaching, holding something that looked like an oversized toaster with a pair of handles on one end and a pointed nose on the other tipped with three forked points. “Is that what I think it is?” she said, moving forward toward it.
I jumped down and followed, running over. Greg came after me and hunched down to look.
Alice tapped the screen and it lit up, a series of interconnected boxes filled with a strange language appearing. “How the hell does this thing work?”
I had nothing, and neither did Fish. We looked at each other, and then at her, hoping someone would say something, but no one did.
I lifted my head to look at Greg, his camera dome staring back down at me. “Ideas?”
“It is difficult to say without analysis, though the operation of this device appears intentionally complex. This is likely so that only a select few individuals can operate it, preventing its use by any unintended—”
“I get it,” I said, reaching out and moving my finger over the boxes. They spun and rotated, slowing to a stop after a second or two. I touched one and it exploded, another layer of boxes appearing beneath it, each filled with more alien. “Do you recognize any of this, Greg?”
“This language does not appear to be on any of my searchable archives.”
I turned and looked around, squinting through the swirling sand. “Is it the same as what’s on the walls?”
Greg followed my gaze and scanned the room. “I am detecting some matching elements, but decoding will take some time.”
“We don’t have time!” I kept tapping through random boxes until, five layers down, the boxes exploded into a star-map. “Where the hell is this?”
“Analysis will take—”
Alice spun the map, growled, and then pulled back out of the layer we were in. It looked like the layers were corresponding to different parts of the universe. The bottom-most layer was comprised of the smallest parts — solar systems. Above that were chunks of galaxies, the galaxies themselves, the local cluster, the interstellar neighborhoods, the superclusters, the universe itself. But from what angle and in what way was it arranged? And there was hardly a big ‘you are here’ arrow to orient ourselves. It would take a lifetime and a brain bigger than a human’s to comprehend how it all worked. Or one of a Tenshi at least.
A chunk peeled itself off the tree above us and fell to the ground, spewing white fire into a deadly swirl overhead.
Fish’s gills flickered and we all recoiled as it impacted, rocking the room. My hand was shaking, and time was running out.
I reached across, near frantic, and tapped the screen, thumbing through screens and layers w
ithout any sense of direction. I hit the last set of boxes and a solar system appeared — a pair of binary stars, six planets, two of them ringed. I didn’t recognize it, but we needed to figure out how the thing worked.
The tree had started swaying, pulling itself in circles, the cracks now like hairline fractures set in a spiderweb across the whole thing. The structural integrity was waning and we needed a way out, and fast.
The corpses started to roll now, the wind dragging them around. Icarus, the furthest from the eye of the storm, tumbled past like some macabre tumbleweed, leaving a trail of blood as he went.
I looked over my shoulder to where Fox had been, but there was no sign of her. Carried on the current?
I dragged my attention back to the screen and tapped one of the planets in the middle of the system. It filled the screen and started rotating slowly, its atmosphere displaying around it like a halo.
We didn’t have time for any of this.
I hit the screen inside the atmosphere, and the nose of the device fizzed and began to glow. Lines of energy arced from the tree to the prongs at the muzzle like two high-voltage objects conducting across space, and then a blue glow made my eyes sting. I shielded my face from it, Alice too. Fish’s second set of lids folded down, dulling the haze, and he held firm, the sinews in his hands tensing around the device as a laser-focused line shot out of the muzzle.
It sliced through the cloud of dust and sand, hitting the wall and spreading across it like a sapphire sheen of oil, until it formed a circle and stopped, the shores of the pool shimmering and rolling like waves.
It was a portal, the aura around it blasting through the storm like a corridor of clarity. The light had started sputtering and the strobing flashes looked like lightning lancing through a growing storm.
We all stared out at the wormhole, wondering, deciding, tearing ourselves in two over what to do next. I rolled it over in my mind. When Fox had said to prep the device, she hadn’t seemed surprised. They’d had the contingency to use it from the start. Maybe they’d always planned to cave the entrance in. They’d transported some out already — in those crates we saw, and loaded it into the Tilt-wings. They’d been grounded, but not destroyed — and that was why we were still sitting here. If Mac had blown them up then the Iskcara shards would have gone bang too. That much was dumb luck.
But they’d always had another way out, and this was it. Maybe to worm back to their ship, or maybe to some distant stronghold. But all I knew was that we were under-equipped to be leaping into some random portal to who knows where.
There was just about a hundred percent chance of landing on a totally uninhabitable planet with a toxic atmosphere or gravity that would crush us against the surface.
I couldn’t make anything out beyond the rippling veil. I only knew that it led somewhere, but there was no way to know where. Something was different, though — I’d seen a portal before — hell, we’d gone through one. But this was smaller and looked more stable somehow. Maybe instability came with size? There was no way to know, and it didn’t matter anyway. We had to go through, or we were going to die.
“How do we know where to go?” Alice was exasperated, her fingers hovering and quivering over the display. The planet was pulsating, readings displayed alongside it.
“We just need somewhere we can breathe. It doesn’t matter where, so long as we don’t die the second we hit the atmosphere,” I muttered, pulling back into the next screen up, and then again.
I scrolled through the boxes, each a solar system, another option, another chance at life, or death.
Overhead the tree detached itself from the ceiling and cleaved itself in two, a shuddering crack like breaking bones echoing through the room.
Greg’s huge hand loomed overhead and moved toward the screen, his giant finger shadowing the whole thing. “By cross-referencing the size of these boxes, which seem to correspond to the actual size of these galactic objects, in line with our current position and their position and proximity, I believe I may be able to estimate our current location and identify a suitable destination based on the data in the Federation archives. I’m analyzing and—”
“Analyze faster!”
“There is a likely probability that—”
“Spit it out!”
“This one.” He pointed to a box in the corner of the screen.
I tapped it quickly and Greg surveyed the options.
“Quickly. Which one!?”
“I’m extrapolating—”
“Greg!”
“Here.” He pointed again and I tapped, exploding a solar system across the screen, orbiting around a yellow star.
“Which one?” I was yelling now.
“Here.”
I hit the planet he was indicating, already moving forward, away from the tree. We all were, anticipating the jump. The room was filling with fire, the dust now tinged and veined with flame and energy, the noise like constant thunder, the only respite the narrow tunnel from the device to the hole. The diamond blue tendril lanced out of the muzzle of the device, keeping the portal open while the cavern around it began to disintegrate.
“Are you sure?” I was screaming now, barely audible over the storm. The two halves of the tree above swung like willow boughs beneath the coils of a tornado.
“There is no way to be sure.”
I turned three sixty, squinting into the blinding geyser of light spewing into the air. It shot up like a fountain, hitting the ceiling and splashing outward, pouring down the ceiling, burning and blasting the runes off the walls as it did.
“It doesn’t matter — we’re out of time,” I said between breathless pants, stumbling forward through the sand. Alice was on my right, Fish in the middle. He dropped it to the ground and threw his hand up to protect his head from a blast of sand, the portal shaking but holding.
Greg circled us on the high side, blocking the worst of the tempest as we made for the hole, barely on our feet as the cavern swayed like a pitching ship.
Behind us the wall split, a burning crack tearing its way up from the ground. Magma spilled into the room like a glowing sea, hissing and howling as it folded toward us.
The wormhole loomed, beating blue and white, the tree crying its final dying wail at our backs.
My bones vibrated, my eyes aching. My teeth hummed and my mind squeezed against my skull.
The portal loomed, like a marble, the inside swirling and turning like a whirling pool. It pulsed and pulled us toward it, a magnetism that was inescapable.
We kept running, being dragged in and pushed away at the same time until it reached out and took us in its vise-like grip.
Our feet churned in the earth and twisted, our toes dragging as we crossed through. We all heaved in a ragged breath at the same time, filling our lungs instinctively.
It was cold, like being shoved into a frigid bath.
The wind leaped out of us and then turned, raking and clawing at our skin. The floor was gone from under our feet. Down was up and up was down. There was no sense of gravity or time or space, we were just spinning inside some cosmic washing machine, screaming and silent, alive and dead.
Thunder crashed and lightning ripped across the gray curtain in front of us. I felt the cold wash of rain, the pull of gravity returning. My stomach was knotted, my teeth aching in the suddenly cold air.
My eyes adjusted and focused and I oriented myself in the fall, guiding my path with my hands turned like rudders.
I put my back down and watched between my feet as the shrinking blue ring above was engulfed by fog and rain. The portal had spit us out in the air, high in the clouds somewhere. The air tasted strange and it felt cold in my lungs but it wasn’t choking me — yet.
The receding portal stuttered and then ejected a huge tongue of white flame. The tree back on Aerra had blown. In the split second between the explosion destroying the device and the portal snapping shut, the blast had poured in.
The force of the outburst was palpable, the fire sho
oting across the sky and illuminating the turbulent and shadowy cloudscape.
And then it was gone. It died in the air and dissipated, beaten into submission by the howling rain.
For a split second, I saw the others around me, Alice on one side, Fish on the other, Greg above, all tumbling through this alien sky. But toward what?
I turned around, squinting through the windrush, but there was nothing but thick fog ahead. Clouds like soup, thick and sludgy and hiding what inevitably lay below.
The ground.
And it was coming up fast.
22
“Greg!” I yelled, spreading my arms and legs, flattening myself out.
The wind caught me and slowed me down, tugging at my clothes and snatching at my ears.
A dip of the shoulder turned me over until my back was down again. I squinted into the sky, looking for Greg’s huge form in the flashes of lightning that split the sky every few seconds.
I could breathe, which meant that we had to be lower than ten thousand meters — and that meant that we had probably around two minutes until splat. But I felt like that was being generous. If we were already in the clouds, then we were probably a lot lower.
Greg was a few hundred meters away, off to the right and above. I swam to him, twisting and floating closer. I was putting distance between Alice and Fish and myself, but none of us would survive the fall. Our only chance was if I could get to Greg and grab them. His built-in chute and thrusters were our only hope.
He saw me coming, but my ears were filled with static, the storm hammering our comms. His thrusters blazed in the distance and his shape loomed, huge and imposing, toward me.
We approached each other and he oriented himself, head down toward the earth. He opened the flaps on his heels and pulled himself into a dive, trailing lines of shattered water behind him.
I guided myself in, barely able to see in the darkness and rain, reaching out with numb fingers.