Guardians of the Portals

by Nya Rawlyns

  Two Bearcat four-stroke utility models skittered on either side of the domed road, shooting rooster tails in the fresh powder. They roared past Wolf's position before coming to a halt on the curve just past a drainage cover. Though he could see through the shields if the target was close, wave motion from the energy field seriously distorted his vision. He needed to get a look at the riders.

  Keeping to the tree line, he crept cautiously from one trunk to another until he caught a bead on the rear Bearcat. The driver pointed to someone across the road but downhill from his position. The other Cat sat just out of sight. He needed to get closer but the woods thinned to light brush and afforded no cover from whoever was on foot. They weren't using torches to scan the woods but seemed intent on searching the road surface on either side, near the culverts.

  Wolf's gut clenched when he recognized the M&P 15T rifle carried loosely as the man walked alongside the ditch. These were no kids out on a lark. What the hell were they looking for?

  The man on the ground quickly mounted behind the driver who flagged the team ahead to move forward. Wolf stood carefully and waited until the sound receded down the mountain. He jumped across the ditch and trotted in the torn up track left by the Cats. It felt good to move freely instead of the lunging, plunging motion that had his back and thighs in a screaming fit. He followed the rough track, searching the ground for answers. Then it occurred to him why they were stopping so frequently. They were looking for footprints.

  Caitlin. Being careful. Keeping to the edge of the woods. But where the going got tough, she had jumped onto the road and waded through the drifts. She must have heard the Cats and deduced that they came from the wrong direction. The tracks on the road indicated the teams had already made several runs up and down the road. At some point somebody had picked up her tracks and come back for another look. Now they were on the hunt.

  Who the hell were they?

  Wolf moved the Mossberg to his right shoulder, adjusted the strap and put on his gloves. He took off at a lope, praying she'd made it back to the cabin and locked it up tight. If not, then it was only a matter of time before they found her. There was no hiding the tracks in the snow.

  The invisible energy, the umbilical cord stretching from him to the woman, vibrated in his gut and chest, setting his innards on fire. She was in trouble. Her terror echoed on the wind as he broke into a flat-out race down the mountain, following her moans.

  Wolf!

  Chapter Six

  Trey struggled awake, limbless, suspended in space, his innards pressed tight against his spine, a formless mass. He wanted it gone, retching with the need to dispel the pressure. He gagged as the bile rose in a tide, sweeping to the back of his throat and lodging with acid sweetness. He fought the maniacal, searing pain as if it were a living thing eating its way out, ingesting and disgorging, tunneling to freedom.

  He flexed a shoulder, angling for a clear path but failed. The foul taste coated his mouth and dribbled toward his left ear though he could only guess the path. The vile stuff coated his face, masking all sensation.

  Stasis had taken over at some point, pummeling him into submission, blanking him to all stimuli. It hadn't helped. He was still stone-deaf and feared he might remain so forever. Hands, rough fingered, textured to knife-edge sharpness, prodded though he could only guess where as he had no feeling in his arms and legs. That was a mercy from his gods, but he knew he would pay for their kindness once his captors released him to the brutal wash of blood and nerves on full alert.

  He had no perception of elapsed time. It seemed a perpetual dusk, long-shadowed and rimed with golden hues that echoed across the stiff stalks, standing at attention in muted rows of tans and blond-tipped feathery heads. He sensed movement, then realized it was his body dropping with a crushing thud onto sharp gravel. Why was it that all these gods-damned worlds landscaped to jagged knife-edges, inhospitable and insufferable? He longed for the soft caress of newly fallen snow and the bitter bite of sleet against his chin. His world was clean, ever birthing new promises. Not like these worlds of never-ending heat and grit that rubbed raw, punishing with the sting of sweat and demanding retreat.

  The indigenes moved about easily, with no hesitation, the reverberation against his skull translating into numbers and dispersal about his position. The rumble, rocking in waves against his spine and hip, slowly dissipated as they moved the wheeled device away. At first he thought he imagined the cracking of bamboo-like stalks, the effect dopplering to his left before fading completely. He was hearing, at least on some level. Perhaps it would come back once the blood began to flow. He had no control over that, not now, with his metabolism and auditory sensors so badly compromised. He needed water.

  A small figure advanced into his line of sight—slight, the size of a child but sporting a full beard and long straggly brown hair dreadlocked with beads and shells. What should have been a symphony of flat-toned chimes instead winked off and on, as his right ear gradually awoke to the stimulus. The creature worked with intense efficiency though Trey could not follow his progress without turning his torso and driving his aching shoulder further into the rocky ground. At some point they'd removed his shirt but left him his cargo pants and boots. He took small comfort in that. When he bolted, he didn't want to fight through the unyielding wall of reeds without some protection.

  Unseen hands, several, child-sized, lifted and guided him to a sitting position. The auditory assault had scrambled his brains, and destroyed his sense of balance. He reeled as the pressure in his ears equilibrated but fought off the nausea. Another wizened creature knelt next to him, lifted his chin and nudged his parched lips apart. The trickle of warm fluid jolted him and he nuzzled and sucked at the lip of the container, mindless that it would come back up, not caring as only the gush of water sluicing down his throat mattered. Life-giving but unsatisfying. He yearned for ice to dull and numb, or steaming hot to comfort, but tepid would do, for now.

  Something appeared in his peripheral vision—by his guess, a male, more humanoid than the dwarfish creatures tending to his needs. The indigene looked to be almost his size, lean and long-limbed, the muscles on his arms thin and ropey. He—it—was bipedal, with a shorter torso than the mind was willing to process, giving him a spidery appearance, and an oddly menacing demeanor. The creature mouthed something, a series of clicks and glottal stops that rang harsh on his damaged auditory nerves. Trey couldn't help cringing away and clapping his hands over his ears. The man-creature nodded as if he understood, then backed away and waved to his diminutive minions to continue with whatever had been their assigned tasks.

  Trey waved off a foul-smelling bowl of something resembling jelly fish. His bearded keeper patted his lips and motioned for Trey to eat. The contents of the bowl moved, slithered, then settled. While his stomach conferenced with the nature of the fluids he'd ingested, his brain opted to sort through the meager information he had about his location.

  They'd traveled a distance, and that was an inane factoid of no use. He needed to know which direction and how far. If they had traveled closer to the jump point he'd detected on their GPS system, he might be in a position to make a break for it. If not, he still might be able to fashion a bolt hole but only if he regained sufficient strength. That would not happen unless he had food and more fluids.

  He'd never felt quite so helpless in his long life, not since his days with his father and brothers on their forced marches and endurance challenges. They had worn him down and stripped him of his still-developing powers, ridiculing and baiting him into senseless acts of bravado. He'd learned to doubt, then to hate—first himself, and only later, Gunnarr. Bryn had always been his savior, cushioning the blows, deflecting the wrath and derision onto himself and curling the child into his arms and giving him comfort. His brother was the first and last thing he'd ever truly loved. Until Caitlin. Now both were gone, Bryn by his hand, and Caitlin because he was too weak to fight. The things he cared about always vanished—his fault, always his fault�
��so he kept a clamp on his emotions. It was the only way he could function.

  But now he cared, about a great many things. Kieran, his friend, one of the few he'd ever had, and his father Jake, bonded to him in an uneasy truce and a shared agony over their mutual loss. Feelings and emotions he could not process. Alien thoughts and yearnings that tangled with memories of Bryn and the time before it all changed. If only he could set aside the confusion and channel his pain into hate and discord, he could break free of the weakness encasing his soul. He had long wished and prayed to Freyja to set him free to follow his own path, but now he recognized that that boy was long dead. In his place a warrior stood, with a quest and a final warrior's tribute to those he took a blood oath to protect. This time he would not fail.

  The dwarf waved the wooden bowl under his nose and spat a single unintelligible word. Trey took the bowl gingerly with his right hand and scooped a finger full of the gelatinous mass into his mouth. It was strangely tasteless, bland, sliding down with ridiculous ease with no aftertaste to mark its passage. He grappled with a larger bit, beginning to enjoy the texture, almost like a thick fluid, with a fulsomeness that eased his sore throat, numbing it. After fishing out the last bits, he handed the bowl back to the dwarf and nodded his thanks. The creature offered a refill of the liquid but Trey waved him off. He knew better than to overload his system, no matter how starved or thirsty he might be. His self-healing powers would assert themselves in good time. For now he needed answers.

  Trey rocked onto his knees and used his hands and toes to push off the rough ground. He wavered, inhaled with a gasp, allowing the vertigo to wash through him to dissipate on an exhale of breath. The reeds still towered over him by a good foot. Unless they came to a clearing, or higher ground, he was not going to determine his location, nor was he going to fashion a Portal from energy vortices, not with the dampening effect from so much vegetation. Portals always required a considerable expanse of cleared ground—at least that was the theory. If he could not figure out a way to leave the forest of stalks, he might have to put that theory to the test.

  The man-creature emerged from a narrow pathway to the right. He could make out weak tracks on the gravel surface. They'd come in and gone out the same way. Wherever they were, it dead-ended in an alcove of sorts. The hemisphere of stalks behind him looked pristine, undisturbed. He wondered what might be on the other side. If his captors, for whatever reason, did not venture past that point, there would be a good reason—one he might be able to exploit.

  At first, it didn't register that the tall indigene carried a familiar-looking object in his arms, cradling it tenderly. The mismatched length of his legs and arms in relation to the torso gave him an oddly graceful gait. The creature's greater height and reach could put him at a distinct disadvantage except for the fact that he out-massed it by several stone, though he knew better than to misjudge strength based on metrics from his own worlds.

  The creature handed over Trey's olive drab shirt and waited as he slipped it on, buttoning it awkwardly as his fingers still reacted sluggishly, though the pain and tingling had largely stopped. He watched his captor intently as the being sank to the ground to sit cross-legged, limbs and joints oddly akimbo. He motioned for Trey to join him. He would have preferred to stand but couldn't risk annoying the being and ending up hung on the spit again. He grimaced and landed with a grunt.

  Trey nearly jumped out of his skin when the creature spoke, loud and clear, "I am Newar."

  Though strangely accented, it sounded like standard English. What freaked him was that the creature had not opened his mouth, nor had the 'sound' registered in his ears.

  Sweet Freyja! A telepath.

  "Yesss," Newar hissed, then waited expectantly.

  He blanked his mind quickly. He'd had training in dealing with telepaths. Relatively rare on Earth, they were common enough in his dimension—one of the reasons why his people had been hunted and persecuted as witches and warlocks, eventually driving them from their ancestral homes to seek refuge in an alien ice-world.

  Trey was not so gifted that he could easily broadcast while simultaneously blocking ingress into his inner thoughts. He opted instead to speak normally, hoping the being had the ability to translate sounds into words.

  "Newar. I am Trey."

  "Yesss."

  "May I ask a question?" Newar nodded assent so he rushed on, "Where am I? Why have you taken me? What do you want?"

  "Gone."

  "I don't understand."

  "Pffft. Disappeared. How?"

  Apparently Zack had been correct, they were after the arms and his team had been set up. He needed to find out who. And he needed to know what they expected of him. Taking a hostage with no way to communicate with possible rescuers, or with the people who could provide suitable ransom, did not seem logical, even for an alien mindset. His experience with indigenes of the humanoid type gave him some confidence that genetically they were all hard-wired in similar ways.

  He'd need to take care and rein back his natural tendencies to plow ahead, reacting rather than thinking through a situation. He was no tactician as Eirik was so fond of pointing out. But haste in this instance would not help Kieran or Zack if he ended up dead or worse.

  Trey decided playing dumb would do him little good. They knew the crates had been on the outcrop, and had probably seen them disappear through the Portal. He wouldn't know if they thought it by magic or technology unless he probed for more information.

  "The crates?" Newar nodded enthusiastically. "Ah, yes, they are gone. I'm sorry. The customer..." Trey paused at Newar's bewildered expression. "The people who bought the merchandise? They took the crates."

  Newar stared impassively, waiting. Either he didn't understand the language sufficiently well to comprehend the message or the look on his face translated to 'you're in deep shit'.

  "I don't have the guns."

  "Get guns."

  This was going to get circular, fast, and time was wasting. He eyed the bundle of cloth next to the man's hyper-extended knee.

  "That's mine."

  "Yesss."

  Trey held out his hand, willing it to stay steady. Newar shrugged and handed him the backpack.

  "Thank you." He gripped the padded shoulder straps and settled the bag on his lap. This had been Kieran's. He had to assume Newar had pawed through the contents, taking out whatever suited his fancy. If he were lucky, he might still have something in there that would be useful.

  Newar pointed to the bag and growled, the mental note of irritation clear. "No guns."

  "No, no guns."

  He looked around, curious that even after an extended passage of time the light had neither dimmed nor grown brighter. Daylight in this dimension had to have an unusual diurnal variation compared with Earth. The hell to which he had relegated Kieran and Zack was not much different, with the exception that moonrise dominated the cycle, in irregular, unpredictable ways.

  The dwarves had gone missing, leaving him alone with Newar. Eirik would be beside himself if he knew they'd found a dimension with a differentiation of races, if indeed they were even related. He unzipped the front pocket and felt around for anything of interest. Nothing. The two side pockets were also empty, but the large inner compartment contained the mother-load—Kieran's stash of recreational medications and a syringe that felt full as he blindly fingered the device, taking great care not to dislodge the plastic cap. The last thing he needed was to prick himself and go off into la-la-land.

  He felt the familiar tingle as he fondled the syringe. The drugs had little effect on his metabolism, leaving him with a pleasant buzz and the ability to forget, for a while, how useless and empty his life had become. He'd guarded Kieran during their forays down that path, waiting it out while the man dueled with his own demons, lost to all but his suffering. As long as he dictated the when and how, he managed to keep Caitlin's brother from diving into total dependence. Eirik would call that a slippery slope, but it was the best he could do until he wo
rked out how he could bring Greyfalcon down without destroying everyone in the process.

  Trey extracted a handful of bottles and set them on the ground. He had Newar's full attention. Did the creature think he was going to abracadabra a weapon from the depths of the backpack?

  "Show."

  Apparently that's exactly what he expected. Trey cradled the syringe in his left palm and pulled it out and extended his hand, palm up with the syringe balanced on his open hand. Newar looked confused, then angry. The creature shrieked a vocalization that had his ears ringing.

  "Not gun."

  "No, not gun. This is special. A new weapon."

  "Ssspecial?"

  "Yes. Here. Let me show you." He motioned for Newar to come closer. The creature complied, scootching forward until their knees touched. Trey controlled the cringe as best he could. Contact with Newar's bony knee sent odd perturbations up and down his leg, the energies beyond uncomfortable, edging toward creepy. He would need to do this fast.

  He carefully pulled the cap off the needle and wriggled his fingers for Newar to extend his hand. As the creature hesitantly complied, Trey angled the needle toward the skinny thigh and rammed the needle deep into the muscle, depressing the plunger, then yanking back. He quickly replaced the cap and shoved the syringe into a pocket on the side of his cargo pants. It was the only weapon he had and he wasn't going to waste it.

  Newar looked bewildered. There was no way to predict how the oxymorphone would react at the injection site, nor how quickly it would travel through the being's system. But judging from Newar's glazed expression and the total absence of brain wave intrusion, he felt confident the tranquilizer was already taking effect. All he needed was for the being to stay out of his head while he worked out some plan of action.