Hell's Gate-ARC

by David Weber

  She couldn't stop the glance she cast at Osmuna, sprawled so obscenely below their vantage point.

  "You're afraid it's a super weapon?"

  "I don't know what the hell it is," he admitted with a frankness which astonished her.

  "Then you really don't know what killed him?" she said, and Jasak's mouth went hard as marble.

  "We know exactly what killed him." His voice was as hard and flat as his expression. "Something was driven through his body, straight through the heart."

  "But you don't know what went through him?"

  "No."

  Gadrial peered at the innocuous metal cylinder again, then sighed.

  "I'm sorry, Sir Jasak, but I haven't the faintest idea what that thing might be." She met his gaze once more. "And you have no idea how much I wish I could help you with this."

  His response surprised her.

  "If anything crops up that you can help with, be sure I'll call on you. We're a long way from home. A long way from the nearest help. Before this business is done, we may need the Gifts of every Gifted person we have. Meanwhile, stay close to the Chief Sword and me, but stay behind us."

  She started to speak, but he held up one hand and surprised her again.

  "That isn't Andaran chivalry," he added, his eyes glinting briefly with what might almost have been an odd little flash of humor. "It's my duty to see that any civilian is as safe as possible during a military emergency. That goes double for a magister with a Gift strong enough for Magister Halathyn to handpick her to head his theoretical research department."

  His eyes dared her to protest that assessment, when both of them knew his standing orders contained no such official statement. Besides, Gadrial wasn't a civilian—not precisely, since she was officially on the payroll of the UTTTA and currently on sabbatical from her Academy position to serve as a research liaison to the Second Andaran Scouts.

  But she wasn't about to take that particular gryphon bait, much less run with it. She was no adolescent, and the agony she'd endured at the Mythal Academy had taught her which battles were worth fighting, so she conceded the point.

  "I appreciate your position, Hundred Olderhan."

  The relief in his eyes told her he'd expected her to protest. She was, after all, Ransaran, with notions most Andarans regarded as rife with anarchy and social chaos. Gadrial didn't know whether to be irritated or amused. Then his eyes darkened, and she was suddenly gazing at another person, a grim stranger with skulls reflected in his suddenly frightening gaze.

  "We're trying to find a wounded killer, Magister Kelbryan," he said softly, his near whisper far more chilling than another man's ranting. "This isn't going to be a simple hike through the woods. We're hunting the most dangerous quarry any human can hunt, and the only thing we have to track him by is the trail he left walking to this spot. I don't mean to give offense, but you're not an experienced tracker. You could damage a faint spoor without even realizing it."

  "No offense taken. I'm a good outdoorswoman, but I'm no soldier, and I won't pretend to possess skills I don't."

  "I appreciate your honesty. We're going to be moving fast. Very fast. You're not combat trained, Magister—"

  "Gadrial," she interrupted, and one of his eyebrows quirked. The light in his eyes changed, the balefires flickering and dimming as surprise misted through the flame.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "My name is Gadrial. If were going to face death together, I'd just as soon do it on a first-name basis. Death is a little personal, don't you think? Much too intimate to face with a stiff formality between us. If I were soldier, it would be one thing. But I'm not. Frankly, I'll feel better if you stop being so aristocratically formal and just talk to me."

  He blinked. Actually blinked, started to speak, and paused. He blew out his breath, and then a tiny smile crooked one corner of his mouth.

  "You have a point. Several points, all of them valid." The smile flickered larger for a moment. "In fact, you rather remind me of someone else. All right." He nodded. "Where was I?"

  "You were telling me I'm not combat trained," she said in a dry voice which surprised another tiny smile from him. Then he regained his equilibrium.

  "Yes. Well, the point I was going to make is that we'll be moving fast, trying to catch up. You may find it difficult to keep up the pace," he said, not formally, but certainly diplomatically, and she grinned.

  "Is that all that's worrying you? My dossier must not have mentioned that I run competitively. Distance running. I may not match your speed," she added with a droll glance at all those muscles in a body that was certainly easy on the eyes, "but I've got endurance, and that's what we'll need most, isn't it?"

  Jasak was beginning to think this delightful woman was just this side of perfection. But before he could decide how to respond, she continued.

  "There's something else you need to know about me. You know I have a very strong primary Gift, but I have two or three minor arcanas, as well. One of those may be useful before this business is done."

  "Oh?"

  Gadrial tilted her head, studying him for a moment before answering. His tone sounded hopeful, rather than challenging or dismissive. Sir Jasak Olderhan might be a blue-blooded Andaran noble to his bootsoles—he was, after all, destined to become the next Duke of Garth Showma, Earl of Yar Khom, Baron Tharkala, and at least another half-dozen equally improbable titles—but that didn't seem to have atrophied any of his brain cells.

  "I would be grateful for anything you can contribute, he said very quietly.

  "Thank you. I'll be glad to help however I can. And among other things, I possess a minor Gift for healing. I'm no miracle worker, mind. Not even remotely in the same class as a school-trained magistron, or even an army surgeon with a fair dollop of Gift. But I can heal relatively minor wounds all day long, if necessary. And if a man's injured critically, I might be able to save his life. At the very least, I could probably stabilize him until a real healer can take over and do a proper job of tissue renewal."

  "Magister Kelbryan—Gadrial," he said softly, "you have no idea how glad I am to hear that."

  The glorious sunlight faded to a pale blur, and the sounds of birdcalls, wind in the treetops, and the bubbling wash of water below their feet all vanished from her awareness when the depth of worry behind those quiet words hit home. He was expecting trouble. Big trouble. Injuries worse than his platoon medics could handle. His surgeon was with Fifty Therman Ulthar, a universe away and seven hundred miles from the swamp portal. No one had expected to run into anything like this, and she glanced down at her hands, which could heal minor things. Sprains and contusions, broken toes or fingers. Those lay within her capabilities, and she hoped with sudden desperation that she wouldn't be called upon to handle more than that.

  For the first time since their departure from the swamp portal, Gadrial Kelbryan was truly afraid.

  Chapter Five

  Jathmar felt wondrously alive as he sent his mind questing across the surrounding folds and dips of land.

  Mapping was as close to flying as he ever expected to come. Oh, he'd gone ballooning, of course. That was part of every licensed survey crewman's mandatory training. But ballooning was a slow-motion, ponderous activity, and the balloon was merely pushed hither and thither by whatever capricious winds happened to be blowing. He'd heard rumors about balloons fitted with one of the newfangled "internal combustion" engines some of the more wild-eyed lunatics were tinkering with back on Sharona. He didn't expect much to come of it, though. And even if it did, the earsplitting racket and stink wasn't going to be very conducive to enjoying the experience.

  But Mapping, now. Mapping felt more like what Jathmar imagined birds must feel, soaring silently across the sky as forests and fields flashed beneath one's wings. Jathmar had always envied birds, even drab and commonplace little sparrows.

  But, then again, sparrows can't Map.

  Jathmar grinned at the thought, but Mapping was a Talent only humanity possessed, and only a
tiny fraction of the ten billion or so human souls in existence could lay claim to that specific Talent. Of course, that was still a pretty damned large absolute numbers. Nearly a fifth of the population had been blessed with some kind of psionic Talent. Given the best current estimate, that worked out to around two billion Talented people, of whom only two percent had inherited the ability to Map. That meant there were—theoretically, at least—something like forty million Mappers, but there were several subtypes within the Talent, and they were clearly concentrated in specific bloodlines. Not to mention the fact that at least half of those technically Talented with the ability had Talents too weak to bother training for professional use. Both of Jathmar's parents had been Mappers, however, and so had three of his grandparents, which explained why his own Talent was so strong.

  Unlike Shaylar, Jathmar's mother and grandmother hadn't been able to join survey crews. But they'd found ways to make use of their Talents on the home front, working for the Park Service: mapping virgin woodland without impinging on it, doing geological survey work, planning new highway routes, doing the occasional Search and Rescue work for lost hikers. Even taking on odd jobs like inspecting dams and culverts for structural soundness.

  Mapping was a Talent which was always in high demand in the commercial sectors. Considerably higher demand than his wife's usually was, actually. Voices were always valuable, but they were also among the most numerous of all the psionic Talents, the true telepaths of Sharonian society, with nearly as much variety in potential employment as there were individual variations between Voices. Shaylar was a very special case, however. Very few Voices could match her sheer strength and range, which would have been more than enough to make her extremely valuable to someone like the Chalgyn Consortium. But when the sheer strength of her Talent was combined with the precision with which she was able to use it and her marriage bond with Jathmar, it produced a team which could have written its own ticket with just about any survey concern.

  Jathmar's professional assessment of his own Talent was tempered by a realistic view of his shortcomings, as well as his strengths. He knew he was a good Mapper—very good—and that Shaylar was a first-class Voice. But it was the combination of their Talents, they way they interlocked and complemented one another, which made them such a truly formidable team, especially in virgin wilderness.

  The reasons for that were simple enough. Jathmar could See not only the topography of the ridgeline that lay two miles due south of him, and the abrupt turn this creek took a mile northeast, frothing through a white-water staircase of rapids, but he could also See what lay under the ground. Only a small percentage of Mappers had that degree of Talent, and that was what made Jathmar so valuable to a survey crew.

  And Shaylar's ability to share that Sight with him was one of the reasons Halidar Kinshe, her government sponsor, had fought so hard to put them into the field together as team.

  Now, as he stretched his awareness to its furthest limits, Jathmar caught a glimpse of something vast and dense beneath the soil. It was large enough to cause a wavering, almost like heat-shimmer, in the faint but discernible—to a Mapper—magnetic field.

  That magnetic field lay across his Sight of the world like a precisely cast fishnet of crosshatched lines. But the line just ahead of him was bent slightly out of true. That caught his immediate, full attention, for he'd come to know exactly what spawned that dark, massive magnetic anomaly. There was a major iron deposit in this region, big enough to warrant immediate investigation. If the deposit were large enough—and if the clues they'd gathered so far added up to what he suspected, it would be enormous—it would shortly be a magnet (Jathmar grinned at his own word choice) for development by the Chalgyn Consortium's Division of Mining and Mineral Extraction.

  If DOMME developed the deposit into a profitable mining venture, every ton of ore extracted, smelted, and turned into tools would put finder's royalties into this survey crew's bank accounts. And if he really had stumbled across the same iron deposit as Sharona's fabulously valuable Darjiline Mines, the Consortium certainly would develop it.

  It was one of the conundrums of trans-temporal exploration that in a society with access to multiple, duplicate worlds, with all the vast treasure troves of mineral resources, rich untouched farmland, and incalculable numbers of wild birds and animals that implied, there were actually a limited number of key resources and all too many companies in competition to grab them. With no fewer than fifteen major corporations and consortiums—not to mention nearly a hundred smaller independent outfits which operated survey crews on a shoestring budget—contending for the riches on the far side of any new portal, prizes like the Darjiline Mines were actually scarce.

  Which was the whole reason survey crews worked so hard to figure out where they were when they crossed the eerie boundary of a new portal. News that the Portal Authority had sent troops to construct a new portal fort would race outward through the web of development companies literally at the speed of thought, despite all that a company's Voices could do to encrypt their transmitted reports.

  No telepath was ever permitted to invade another's mind without permission. Prison sentences went with that kind of abuse, not to mention massive fines and the ever-present threat of closing down any company which knowingly used or tolerated such practices. But industrial espionage tiptoed around that particular law with increasingly sophisticated ways of deducing the truth. Once the Portal Authority had taken the step of sending out a troop detachment to build the fort, rival teams would start sweeping into the area, looking for the fastest way to reach the most valuable tracts of land before anyone else.

  Shipyards went up first, in many cases, built with surprising speed, since the only practical way of reaching many of those valuable tracts would be to sail there. The company that owned the forests and iron mines necessary to build those ships would make a ton of money selling them to rival outfits. Once they'd grabbed the best land for themselves first, of course.

  It was usually a free-for-all along any portal border, which was why the Portal Authority insisted on building its forts. Portal Authority troops weren't there to fight a war, since there was nobody in any of the worlds they'd ever explored. They were there to prevent claim jumping and timber piracy and all the other uncivilized behaviors which went with the territory when multiple groups jockeyed for position along a vast, steadily expanding frontier. And, of course, to collect the Authority's portal transit fees.

  It was, on the whole, a delightful and exhilarating time to be alive. He grinned and pulled out his field notebook and pencil, making careful notations that included compass headings, then set out again, eager to finish the routine work so they could get to the iron deposit.

  Jathmar's Talent was strained to its utmost, feathered-out edge, feeling out the contours of the iron deposit he couldn't quite See from its distortions of the magnetic field, when it struck.

  The psychic blow was so savage that he literally lost stride, stumbled, and went to one knee.

  Shaylar!

  He exploded back to his feet and whirled, blindly seeking the source of his wife's abrupt anguish, and his hand blurred toward his hip. Steel hissed with an angry-snake sound in the suddenly menacing silence as the H&W cleared leather. But there was nothing to shoot. He was miles from camp. Whatever was happening, he couldn't possibly get there in time to do anything about it. Fright chittered along his nerves while the rest of him stood frozen for long, soul-shaking moments.

  Shaylar's terror and shock rolled across him in battering waves, but Jathmar wasn't a telepath. He didn't know what was happening. Couldn't glean the tiniest detail from the jagged emotions tearing through him. Every nerve in his body quivered with the need to run towards camp, but he bit down on the panic and remained where he was, forcing himself to breathe deeply.

  You can't help anyone if you go crashing through the trees in a headlong charge.

  The steel in that mental voice, put there by years of intense training and hardscrabble fiel
d experience, steadied him. It was hard to do—the hardest thing he'd ever done—but he managed to disassociate himself from the tidal wave of Shaylar's emotions. He stood silent for several more moments, just listening to the forest, but he couldn't detect anything out of the ordinary. The birds still chirruped and called through the trees. Squirrels and chipmunks still frolicked like happy children on a scavenger hunt. Wind rustled in the glorious crimson-golden foliage high overhead, and rattled through the thickets of blackberry brambles. The stream still bubbled its way across the rocks, splashing from one boulder to the next on its long journey to the sea.

  In all that ordinary sound, Jathmar could detect not one single, solitary thing that might have threatened Shaylar. And, by extension, the entire camp, since Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl would never have permitted Shaylar to wander away from the base camp's protection. Nor was she foolish enough to do so. All of which meant one simple thing; if he wanted to find out what was wrong, he would have to return. Immediately.