“Well, don’t.”
The assistant director appeared no more alarmed than if her administrative assistant had told her the internet was running slow today.
“You didn’t tell me they had an army,” I said the instant she was close within earshot.
“And you didn’t tell me you need a shower,” she replied, looking me up and down and wrinkling her nose at the gore and goo clinging to my uniform. “Ropoco isn’t your color.”
“Maybe not, but I’ll bet their hides make a great pair of boots.”
We had retreated 50 paces behind the skirmish line and stood behind the reinforced elevator shed, where over the wind and rumble of the approaching enemy there was no chance of being overheard. In addition to the twins, Dad, Cynthia, and me, Venus completed the group. Excepting Cynthia, we were all the Trashmen present. The leading edge of the approaching force was about 900 yards to the south and engaged the firing line with medium caliber automatic weapons. Whatever we intended to do, we had to do it fast.
“Where did that bitch get an army?” Venus said. Ribaldo cut her off with a chopping motion.
“There’s no time for that! We are not equipped for this fight with our heavy weapons destroyed. We must get everybody underground and deny them access. There are escape tunnels we can use, but it must be the Trashmen who act to delay the enemy. We—”
“No! Listen to me,” I said, cutting him off in mid-sentence. “We’ve gotta stop the enemy from coming through. There could be millions of them back there. Here’s what we’re gonna do—”
“I am in charge here, Steed,” Ribaldo said. “We are going below ground.”
“God damn you both, I am in charge,” Cynthia said, managing to drop her voice half an octave and insert a growling undertone. Ribaldo and I both obeyed. “Ridaldo, in most matters regarding SAD you are the Senior Agent in Charge, but Steed has led men in combat and none of the rest of us have. Steed, you are in tactical command, what are your orders?”
Incoming rounds impacted the opposite side of the elevator housing, lending urgency to the situation. Like all such combat decisions, the key lay not only in knowing what to do, but how to accomplish it during the chaos of battle. I knew we had to stop the influx of new enemy units. I just didn’t know how.
“What kind of vehicles do we have that would fit all five of us?” I asked Ribaldo.
“You mean six, mate.”
I hadn’t seen Merkus join us, but after seeing him deal with the Ropoco on my first day at the airfield, I wasn’t about to argue with him coming along. Ribaldo, however, had a different opinion.
“No, he cannot come with us. Merkus is indispensable here. Listen, Steed, before you argue, I have been inside the Continuum, I am the only human, to my knowledge, who has done so and returned. Only those who have discovered the Balance may do so without going mad.”
“That’s for you bloody fucking humans. I was a merc before I was your mechanic.”
But Ribaldo shook his head for emphasis. “No, you are staying here and no argument.”
There wasn’t time to argue, so I put Merkus in charge of defending the facility.
“Sometimes humans don’t like taking orders from my kind,” he said.
“They’ll deal with me if they don’t,” Cynthia said. As threats go, it carried more menace than anything Ribaldo or I could have said.
“All right then, what do we do Steed?”
Glancing around the building, two bullets skimmed off the wall less than a foot over my head. I ignored them. The ones that miss have never bothered me.
So far, the men stayed at their posts, either lying down or kneeling, and maintained fire discipline. A smoke column marked where somebody had taken out an APC with a Gustav, and a crack preceded a smoke trail and boom as a round blew up another enemy vehicle. Two down, a few dozen more to go and counting…
That’s the instant I knew what to do. Now they were close enough for me to see them in detail, many of the APCs had open tops, not turrets. But to pull it off I needed elevation—the roof of the elevator shaft. I outlined the plan in seconds and my tone allowed for no argument. It was nuts, but we were all probably going to die anyway, so what the hell?
The elevator housing rose 25 feet above the ground. I took Dad’s M16 up with me instead of an M14 because it had a scope and, kaval or not, I probably wouldn’t get more than one shot to make it work. By the time I scrambled up the iron ladder affixed to the outside wall, the closest APC was 200 yards out and moving fast. They’d sped up for the final race to wipe us out.
The men on the firing line ran for four open access doors as Merkus waved them inside, chased by bullets. Several fell and lay still, but I couldn’t let that hurry or distract me. Lying down, I spotted one of the open-topped APCs and acquired it in the scope, getting my first look at our new enemies.
Dona S. must have had a thing for amphibians because they were frogs. Big ones, shaped like African bullfrogs with wide shoulders and even wider heads, which explained the shape of their vehicles. I found the driver sitting on a bench seat behind a thick windshield. I could have taken the shot then, but the APC swayed enough to throw off a bullet enough for a clean miss of his head. Kaval could only do so much in predicting flight path alterations because of an obstacle, so I exhaled and trusted my mind to squeeze the trigger for me.
I had never understood my extraordinary ability to throw or shoot until discovering the Balance. Nor had I been aware enough of my own power to realize what I did as it was happening. Now, that had changed. The energy we dubbed kaval responded to my command to reach out and lock the driver’s hands in place just long enough for me to shoot. Without conscious thought, I fired.
Whether the bullet hit the driver or exploding glass blinded him, the APC slewed sideways and rolled three times, throwing out frog-soldiers and crushing several of them. It came to a rest upright, less than 50 yards from the tower. As Jürgen, Ribaldo, Venus, and my father ran toward it, I picked off any survivors I could see through the billowing dust. Then I scurried down the ladder and after my fellow Trashmen.
I’d been too preoccupied shooting to see Cynthia Witherbot sprinting behind them. Unless she had powers I didn’t know about, the last place my former wife needed to be was on a battlefield where, fair or not, I would feel obligated to keep her safe.
Green sludge coated the driver’s seat and what passed for an instrument panel. None of it made sense to me, but Ribaldo’s hands flew over the controls like an expert; that was his kaval-talent at work, the ability to understand any conveyance on land, sea, or in the air. Within seconds of my climbing into the passenger platform behind the cockpit, he had the APC running.
Amid the madness of battle, none of the enemy saw us capture one of their vehicles.
Chapter 28
The plan was as simple as it was insane; drive into the Continuum and find a way to stop the frogs from pouring into our reality. So far more than 50 APCs had come through, but who knew how many more were heading our way? And it stood to reason that if they could enter our reality, then we should be able to enter theirs.
Should being the operative word.
Speeding toward the great hole at the end of the runway was like heading the wrong direction down a one-way street. Ribaldo swerved through oncoming traffic with an expert touch. None of the frogs reacted or shot at us. I guessed that frogs could be cowards too, since none of them tried to stop what had to look like running away while under fire. Or maybe they considered it showing good judgment instead of cowardice, or they were too intent on staying alive to care about one squad going rogue. Regardless, it was only when we barely avoided a head-on collision that the crew of a turreted APC notice we were humans. But their turret couldn’t rotate fast enough to hit us.
Standing in the back, dirt particles swirled in the wind thick enough that I had to turn away. Through the blur of watering eyes, a smudge of bright red glowed against the darkness of the tear, dead ahead. Using the rifle’s scope as a monocular, I saw a tiny fig
ure outlined by the radiant glow of extreme danger, a shriveled man that I recognized as the Hmong gatandi named Blong Cha. Although 200 yards distant, and the APC bouncing me around like I was on a trampoline, I didn’t hesitate to squeeze off three shots, depending on marksmanship and kaval to hit my mark.
All three hit, I was sure of it, but they had no effect. Blong Cha raised his arms and then both his red aura and my warning sense vanished. Simultaneously, the APC veered side to side as Ribaldo’s control slipped. For the first since we’d met, his mask of stony confidence slipped into one of sweaty concentration.
I’d learned that the magical energy we called kaval was a finite thing, in some ways like static electricity. The strength of a gatandi’s powers depended on how much kaval was available to draw on in a given place and moment. In the past, my powers had only failed me three times, and I never knew why. Now I did. Neither Ribaldo nor I commanded kaval in that moment because Blong Cha had gathered all of it to himself.
Now it became a fight to hold on while Ribaldo wrestled the strange vehicle to stay upright. A crash would have killed us all. After a long ten seconds, though, he finally got it back under control. Suddenly, the ground rumbled like an earthquake. Fifty yards short of the gash in our reality, which now resembled a sentient black maw crawling with dim figures like spectral maggots, a wall of dirt twenty feet tall rose out of the runway to block our path. Tires screeched on concrete as Ribaldo bled off speed, swerving side to side and jamming whatever pedal the frogs used for brakes. Everyone lost their footing and wound up in a heap between the two benches, with Venus and Cynthia on top of me. I didn’t need kaval for fight or flight syndrome to kick into high gear. Not one wise crack about having two women lying on me came to mind.
Untangling and pulling ourselves back to our feet took a few seconds. Meanwhile, the world turned dark around us, a darkness more than night. Ribaldo found the headlights and I instantly understood the danger; walls surrounded us, and a roof sealed the chamber.
“Steed?” Jürgen said.
“I don’t need magic to have a bad feeling about this.”
As if on cue, a grinding noise rumbled over the sound of the idling engine. None of us had a flashlight, so it took half a minute to verify what we all knew was happening: the roof and walls were closing in like a car-crushing machine.
“I’ve seen this movie,” Dad said.
“At least there’s no garbage.”
Ribaldo stood in the driver’s seat.
“If anyone has suggestions, now would be the time.”
The inexorable contraction of walls and ceiling moved fast, about a foot every ten seconds. I couldn’t see any cracks or seams but saw no reason to mention that if we didn’t wind up as jelly we’d suffocate. Nor did it seem to matter if the APC expelled carbon monoxide. Dead is dead.
“All right then,” Ribaldo finally said when the ceiling was only a few feet overhead, and the sides had closed within three feet. “Brace yourselves, I am going to crash our way out.”
The proximity of the front wall reflected the headlights so we could make out each other’s faces. Nobody showed fear, not even Cynthia. Collectively we adopted the old stiff upper lip attitude, which seemed as good of a way to die as any other. With barely a foot of clearance, we all braced for impact as Ribaldo gunned the engine.
Then the structure stopped moving and shook. Sunlight poured through cracks. Holes appeared, through which we heard gale force winds blowing outside. Then the holes closed, and the walls moved again for a few seconds, until they again ground to a halt, the ceiling now less than six inches from the APC’s highest point. Ribaldo put it back in idle and we all held our breath, waiting to see what came next.
Streaks of green-blue energy ripped through the walls like something from a Frankenstein remake. The vibrating increased and with a loud whump the cage turned to powder, coating me with a film of brown dirt that stuck to the Ropoco blood. I had to turn my shirt inside out to wipe my eyes.
Even with everything I’d been through, the scene that confronted us overwhelmed my already unwilling suspension of disbelief. The shimmering tornado I’d seen with Dad earlier, Director Keel, was back and engaged in a fight I didn’t understand with Blong Cha. Flames, lighting bolts, and a half-glimpsed chimera flashed back and forth between the combatants. I’d never known a time with no ambient kaval in my area, but if you concentrated hard enough, you could see the two powerful gatandis absorbed in faint sparks of energy. No wonder my abilities failed me.
The moment called for decisive action and Ribaldo took it. Shifting the APC into gear, he stepped on the accelerator and fought to hold the vehicle steady as we raced between the two wizards and straight into the maw of nothingness.
Human languages fail to relate the experience of being inside the Space-Time Continuum. Metal-lattice framing ringed the gash in our reality, stretching in all directions into unknowable distances. A narrow road of shimmering silver, without visible support, led straight into the heart of a frozen, three-dimensional panorama of jumbled images. The vastness transcended my ability to understand or describe. Without slowing down, Ribaldo took the road. Aside from the noise of the APC’s engine, absolute silence reined in…wherever we were.
“I know this place,” Dad said, but not to any of us. Wide-eyed, mouth open, he stared in wonder.
“Have you been here?” I said.
“No, never, but I recognize it all the same. I glimpsed it while discovering the Balance, son, and in micro-seconds my brain processed all of the data input and spit out a simple explanation. This is a frozen moment of the entire multiverse.”
As Cynthia, Jürgen, and Ribaldo had explained to me, countless trillions of timelines occupied the same space. Unlike the river analogy used to explain the passage of time, in reality it was more like the frames of a movie. If you could enter the space between those moments, each one an infinitesimally small segment of time, then, as the theory went, you could travel between timelines, or variations as Cynthia dubbed them. If that was true, instead of a flowing river time was a long series of interconnected “frames,” which would explain the static nature of what we saw.
Or maybe we’d all dropped acid.
The road allowed for two-way traffic, but just barely. APCs passed us going the other way, all filled with helmeted frogs carrying rifles. It was anybody’s guess how far we had to drive, or if it was even a matter of distance. The English language wasn’t built for more than three dimensions.
Somewhere along the way we got stuck behind a road crew. They were a porcine race with big tusks and bigger underbites, stubby legs, and wide shoulders. Ribaldo yelled at them to move in a series of grunts and roars that were more likely to be understood than English, but the last one gave us the finger, so he floored it to drive around them. Unfortunately, the driver of an APC coming the other way panicked and screeched to a stop sideways, blocking the road. It would take several minutes to straighten it by backing and pulling forward a few inches at a time, so Ribaldo kept going at full speed.
We held on as our APC T-boned it, knocking frogs out of the back. Some spun into the nothingness on either side and floated away, grabbing their throats as if choking. Apparently only the road had oxygen and gravity. Other frogs were either crushed into paste or unshipped their guns to fire after us. Ribaldo backed up as bullets started coming at us from all angles and rammed the stricken APC again. It caught fire, teetered on the brink, and tumbled away.
Frogs in the APCs behind the one we’d destroyed also opened fire and we fired back. Like 18th century ships trading broadsides, we gunned down enemy soldiers in the first three APCs as we sped past. Once again shooting without kaval to augment my skills, I dropped at least five of them. Then we were gone, and the next ones we approached had no knowledge of our gun battle.
Satisfied, I turned to check on the others and saw Venus lying on the floor with blood drenching her stomach. Beside her, Cynthia’s head lolled as blood matted her right temple.
&n
bsp; Jürgen knelt beside Venus and ripped open her shirt to expose a bullet hole two inches left of her navel. Working with the expertise of a combat medic, he cleaned the wound and wrapped it in quick clotting gauze. Still conscious, Venus smiled through the pain.
“The one time I can’t heal myself, I get killed,” she said.
“You aren’t dying from this scratch, my love,” Jürgen said. I’d seen enough gut-shot people to know better but said nothing. Her only hope was for us to find a place with kaval before she lost consciousness.
Cynthia’s was a grazing shot that knocked her out and bled like a water hose but wasn’t dangerous so long as I stopped the bleeding. Using the rest of the roll of gauze, I wrapped her head. She woke up just as I finished and took in the scene at a glance.
“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. Pointing at the medical bag, she asked if we had any aspirin.
“Thins the blood too much,” I said.
Reaching up, she used her thumb to clean a spot on my cheek, brought my head down, and kissed it.
“If you tell anybody I did that, I’ll deny it and fire you.”
“You can’t fire me. Who’ll patch you up the next time you get shot?”
“Somebody younger and hotter.”
“Younger maybe. Hotter? Not possible.”
Time and distance had no meaning. We drove on the road until we no longer drove on the road, passing untold billions of frozen images that passed in blurred shapes and colors. Sometimes I could make them out: a double-decker London bus had the wings, tail, and neck of a dragon; a goat wearing glasses wrote equations on a blackboard; an upside-down ocean dripped into a chartreuse sky.
Then, with a bump, we emerged into bright yellow sunshine on a narrow road surrounded by olive trees and APCs filled with frogs. The olives were a dark maroon.
Chapter 29
A country road passed through the olive grove through a tear similar to the one at the airfield, with vehicles lined up out of sight waiting to enter. The sky was a comforting robin’s egg blue, except with two suns, the grass was a vibrant green, and the several dozen people watching us from a nearby hill appeared suitably human, if members of the Red Nail weren’t an altogether different species of hominids. Their black suits and sunglasses made identification easy, even without the gnomish figure of Dona Salvatorelli pointing out something to Dawn Delvin.
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