The Fires of Paratime

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Hycretis insisted on putting all three of us through a barrage of diagnostics and retaining us for a night's sleep in the Infirmary before he'd let Heimdall debrief us.

  After eating and cleaning up the next morning, the three of us walked over to Assignments.

  Nicodemus intercepted us at the archway into the As­signments Hall. "Counselor Heimdall would like to see you individually, starting with Guard Patrice. He suggests that Guards Loki and Derron avail themselves of the lounge."

  I shrugged. Derron looked off balance. Patrice smiled faintly. "Don't worry," was all she said. Why should I have worried?

  Derron and I wandered down the corridor to the vacant Senior Guards' lounge and sat down. For a time, neither one of us said anything, just sat there, me looking up at him, him looking down at me. But he wasn't looking, not exactly.

  As the silence grew, Derron cleared his throat. "Loki?" "Yes."

  "Remember one thing, no matter what happens. I'll never cross you."

  Odd, that's how I saw it. There was a seasoned Guard who'd been tracking down malefactors for centuries, who outweighed and overtopped me, asking me to remember that he'd never cross me. "I mean that," he insisted.

  "I'll remember," I promised, when it became obvious that he was sincere. But why was he worried? Just because I'd somehow thrown a thunderbolt without gauntlets? A thunderbolt was a thunderbolt, and both kinds killed.

  We sat for a few units longer in the low stools before Patrice tripped her way out the archway and down the corridor.

  "Derron, Heimdall wants to see you next."

  "See you around, Loki," he said as he got up.

  I stood and bowed slightly. "Good diving, Derron."

  He deserved that much.

  Patrice waited for Derron to enter the Assignments Hall.

  "You never told me what was on that rock, or why you screamed yesterday."

  "Nothing. There wasn't a thing on the rock."

  "Why did you scream? You're as cold as ice in the crunch."

  "So you wouldn't think before you acted."

  "I don't understand." But I did, and didn't want to admit it.

  "I know. You don't understand anything, and it may be the death of all of us, but I'll be damned if I'm going to answer your stupid questions for you. You have to find the answers. I hope you have time to discover them, be­cause part of you doesn't want to admit you can."

  "You're playing games!" I was getting angry. Patrice was just like the rest of them, hinting at this and that, but never just coming out and saying it.

  She half-turned away. "I'm reporting back to Scouting, but I'll give you a question. Didn't you check your gaunt­lets on Faffnir before I woke up? Check them again. Think about it."

  Hints or not, she made sense, and I didn't like that either.

  Brendan had carried all my equipment down to my bench for repairs because Hycretis wouldn't let us go. After Heimdall finished with me, I could go over the gauntlets again. Didn't take long, but Heimdall didn't come to find me. Nicodemus did.

  Heimdall was leaning back in his stool right where I'd left him the day before—had it only been a day earlier?

  "Derron and Patrice have filled me in on what happened to them, except for how you got them out of the dungeon. The Toltekians 'screamed' when you appeared and that knocked out Patrice and Derron, I gather."

  I told Heimdall what I'd done, from the point where I'd broken-out on the green beach at night till the time when I'd staggered onto the knoll on Faffnir with Patrice and Derron in tow.

  He nodded as I recited, muttering at one point some­thing about "sheer brute force." A matter of opinion, I thought. At least I hadn't used any more force than necessary, nor had I destroyed the planet.

  I stopped.

  "You all agree on the sonic control," Heimdall noted. "What sort of follow-up would you recommend?"

  "Do we need any? I'd have to revise my earlier judg­ment. I don't think the tech level is as high as I figured."

  Heimdall punched out a code on his screen, then leaned back so I could see the picture that formed.

  The holo shots zeroed in on one of the Toltekian cities. As I watched, a whole section collapsed in on itself, thun­dering silently down into a pile of rubble.

  "Sammis went out last night to get a series of follow-up shots. I thought you might have left a trail." He laughed, a short bark that wasn't expressing humor.

  "Sammis does agree with all three of you that further retaliation is totally unnecessary."

  I repressed a sigh of relief.

  "There's one question that hasn't been answered, Loki."

  I stiffened.

  "The Toltekians 'screaming' stunned two of the best divers in the Guard. You were hardly affected. Why not?"

  I had been wondering about that myself. "I don't know. The first time, on the beach, it was hard, really hard, to get undertime. The second time I was mad, wasn't thinking about it, and it didn't seem to affect me as much. I don't know why. Hycretis gave me some hearing tests, but the tests showed my ears are as good as Derron's."

  I shrugged. What else could I do? "I don't know, Counselor. I just don't know."

  Heimdall accepted that, or seemed to.

  "Is that all?" I asked.

  "That's all."

  I got up from the lower stool and went out through the main archway. Started down the ramps to Maintenance, but I wasn't watching where I was going and barely avoided crashing into Sammis.

  He smiled, but I hadn't the faintest idea why. "Keep it up, Loki."

  And he was on his way.

  I was mulling over what Patrice had said about the gauntlets. Unfortunately, her hints made sense, too much sense. I'd checked my gauntlets on Faffnir before Patrice had awakened, and I was certain they were so much fused metal. I knew I could tell busted equipment from functional. And if they were fused, how could I have thrown a thunderbolt at that rock unless I didn't need gauntlets?

  Broken gauntlets were so much useless metal. But so what? A thunderbolt thrown at me would have been just as fatal. Dead is dead, natural or mechanical.

  I brushed past Narcissus and headed straight for my bench. The gauntlets were on my bench, fused.

  A chance remained. One might be operational, for all the melted exterior. I removed the power cells, cutting one out with a laser. I placed the left gauntlet in the diag­nostic center.

  "Non-functioning," the console scripted out, following the diagnosis with an extensive list of malfunctions. The right wrist gauntlet was diagnosed the same way. It made sense, for all my unasked questions. I just didn't like it.

  Derron was another question. Why would an experi­enced goon, two heads taller than me, one of the biggest, toughest-looking Guards, insist he'd never cross me? Any thunderbolt from a gauntlet was as deadly as mine, and maybe more certain. I didn't know how much, if any, control I had.

  Heimdall hated my guts, I sensed, but had been nothing but polite and courteous.

  That evening came quickly, but tiredness even sooner. No matter what I thought, diving, and especially rescue diving, took a toll. By the time I'd cleaned up the last of what I'd tackled from the repair bin, I was ready to head for the Aerie, a meal, and a long night's sleep.

  It couldn't have been more than fifty units after I'd walked out the South Portal of the Tower that I was wrap­ping myself in sleeping furs and feeling my eyelids close.

  Most nights I slept without dreaming, or if I did dream, I didn't remember. Once in a while I had a dream so vivid it was real, no dream at all. I could tell that kind was a dream only because the subjects were so unreal. The dream I had after the Toltek rescue was different, if it was a dream.

  Some sense of energy, of power, a tingling in the air around me, pulled me from sleep, but I felt so light, so filled with energy, I knew it had to be a dream. It couldn't be happening, not when I'd fallen asleep so exhausted.

  With the exception of the muted radiation from the glowstone floors, the Aerie was dark. I looked aro
und, half-sitting, trying to puzzle out what had brought me out of deep sleep. Nothing, no one—but an uneasy feeling grew, centered on a point in the middle of the room.

  I eased to my feet with a fluid motion so swift it had to be unreal. The walls, each glowstone, the permaglass over­looking the cliffs, all stood out in the darkness in relief, outlined with an energy reflected from—somewhere. I walked across the room, hovering above the glowstones, trying to pinpoint the sense of danger. I couldn't explain it, but the energy that outlined the room, the same energy that filled and refreshed me—that unseen force that coursed through my veins like fire—was the danger. As I waited, at the absolute center of the Aerie, a point of starlight burned, pulsing, pushing its way out from the undertime. The room filled with blinding light, heat, and power.

  Without thinking, I gestured, pushed the light back where it came from, banished it into the undertime. I couldn't have explained how, but I did. I wanted it gone, and it was. Real time wavered for a few instants, rippled by the vanishing energy, before stabilizing, and the remain­ing energy lingered in the Aerie, the outlines which had put everything in relief fading slowly. The heat dissipated more slowly. I felt sleepy, filled with warmth, and I curled up on top of my sleeping furs.

  When the sun struck me full in the face at dawn, I was curled on top of the furs. The Aerie was warm and the dream clear in my mind. As I uncurled, I felt better than I had in seasons, relaxed and refreshed. After won­dering if the dream had anything to do with it, I washed up, dressed, and downed some biscuits and firejuice, ready for a quick slide to the Tower and the work that was waiting.

  The Tower was quiet, the ramps vacant, when I arrived, earlier than normal, and bounded down the incline to Maintenance.

  I had zipped through several routine jobs by the time Brendan rushed in.

  "Loki, have you heard the latest?" He stopped and whistled. "Where did you get that tan?"

  "Tan?" The time on Faffnir hadn't been long enough to darken my already tanned face that much more. Was I more tanned?

  I decided to brush off the question. "What's the latest?"

  "Sun-tunnel blew on some of Frey's Locator personnel."

  Hycretis has them closeted in the old wards of the In­firmary. Hush-hush, that sort of thing, but Lynia had duty last night, and I wouldn't let her in until she told me."

  Lynia must be his contract, but Brendan hadn't men­tioned her before. He was too young, by custom at least, to enter a full contract.

  "Told you what?" I was thinking about Lynia, barely out of training.

  He laughed. "Loki, were you listening?"

  I grinned back at him. "Sort of. Lynia had to work late ... "

  "No, she had duty, and Hycretis and Gerrond had to work most of the night patching people up. Some of the divers were badly burned. Must have been one hot tunnel."

  "What were Frey's people doing with a sun-tunnel? How many were there?"

  "Lynia said five had to stay in the Infirmary. One of them was screaming 'impossible' over and over. Nobody would say why."

  "Strange," I commented. "Very strange, but it won't clear our backlog."

  Strange wasn't the word. Sun-tunnels could be danger­ous, but normally only took a diver or two, not a whole team. I felt a vague fear rising in the back of my mind, like a wave. It couldn't have had anything to do with my dream. Besides, who'd want to poke a sun-tunnel into the Aerie?

  Coincidence, that was all. Then too, maybe I'd just had the dream because my subconscious had somehow tuned in on the disaster.

  "About that tan?" Brendan asked again.

  "Spent the day before yesterday on Faffnir."

  "Oh."

  And that was the end of the questions.

  In any case, Brendan, Narcissus, and I had more than enough to do. It was time to get on with reorganizing Maintenance and reducing the backlog that had been dumped on us.

  XIV

  Seasons, years, can pass before a Guard knows it, even an impatient one with a purpose. Much had to be done, and there were few enough Guards to accomplish the mere monitoring of our corner of the galaxy as it was.

  Through it all, I kept puzzling out the old equipment and machines in the Maintenance Hall, determined to un­cover the principles behind each old design. Not so direct was the self-imposed goal of increasing my own personal abilities. At first, the harder job was working with Sammis and Wryan. As the seasons passed, however, the daily sessions became less than daily, and then less than that.

  Finally, Sammis called a halt. "You know more than either of us, or both together, probably more than any Guard ever has, and far too much for your own good. Too much ability, too much knowledge, and not enough wisdom. Take a break. Let a little time flow around you."

  By then, I'd decided that the answer didn't just lie in physical abilities. Some of the stunts I attempted after that were doubtless stupid, like catching thunderbolts and trying to tap solar flares through the undertime. Not that I spent a whole lot of time on experimental stuff.

  I picked up a new trainee along the way, a woman, named Elene, who rated somewhere between Narcissus and Brendan in ability. Another redhead, but with a calmer disposition.

  Took some pride in the fact that we had everything in the Tower working. Heimdall couldn't find a thing to com­plain about, but he complained anyway.

  A messenger interrupted me on a morning no different from any other spring morning in Quest. He was one of the newer trainees. Giron, I recalled, was his name. Giron arrived as I was puzzling over the design of an incomprehensible, for the moment, Gurlenian "artifact" brought in by Zealor.

  "Tribune Kranos requests the honor of your presence."

  "I'll bet."

  "Sir?"

  "Tell the honored Tribune I will be there shortly, as soon as I get the grease off my hands."

  What did Kranos want? He normally avoided me like the plague. I sighed, flipped the artifact partly out-of-time-phase to make sure no one else fiddled with it. Nar­cissus was getting too damned curious for his own good. He didn't have the talents, either diving or mechanical, to get himself out of the jams created by his own nosiness.

  A few days earlier, he'd tried to discover the purpose of the back-row machine that assembled shield units, and if I had been any slower he would have had one planted in his shoulder. It worked on a mass-focus assembly sys­tem, made obsolete by the up-time Terran stuff which was a third the size and used less power, but it was an interest­ing concept, nonetheless. I'd made the mistake of not re­turning the time-shield, and Narcissus was trying to ener­gize the equipment with his shoulder halfway into the focusing point.

  I wiped off my hands, straightened my jumpsuit and marched up the ramps to Kranos's chambers.

  Blunt as always, he had his proposition stated before I sat down on the upholstered stool across from his work-table.

  "Loki, I'd like you to take a short leave of absence from Maintenance and see if you can give the Admin people a hand in designing a better personnel system. You've done wonders in Maintenance."

  "Why?" That was a question I always asked too often. "I know as much about administration as this stool does."

  Kranos's stern face was always smooth, and with his thick and unruly hair, it made you think he was an animated statue on loan from the Archives gallery. We didn't have much sculpture, perhaps because a people with such long life-spans didn't need as much to remind them of the past. Besides, if it were really old, no one outside the Guard really cared anyway.

  The legends remained, and no one wanted to know how many warts Odinthor had. That's why the old Tribune was such an embarrassment. He kept hanging around and tarnishing his legend.

  Kranos didn't blink an eye at my question. "You have a different outlook."

  In the whole time I'd been in the Guard, I'd never heard of such a switch. Suggestions were offered freely in any case. "Why do you want me out of Maintenance?"

  "I don't. I want you in Personnel. If you want, I'll even seal the Maintenanc
e Hall while you're gone."

  I believed him. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I did. The question was why he wanted me in Personnel, and it looked like the only way I was going to find out why was to agree. "When?"

  "As soon as you want."

  "Fine. How about tomorrow?"

  The sooner I went through whatever the Tribunes had in mind the better.

  Kranos's expression didn't change, but I got the distinct impression that he was relieved.

  The next morning I was sitting on Gilmesh's padded stool, looking at Personnel tracers. None of it made any sense. I had to start asking questions. At first, even the answers didn't make sense. Finally, I commandeered Verdis, set her stool across the work table from me, and got the system explained from scratch.

  Verdis had entered training a year or two before I did, and like many of the key support people, wasn't much of a diver, but as I had begun to discover, without her or Ferrin or Loragerd or a bunch of semi-divers, the Guard organization would have been hard pressed to function.

  Verdis was a redhead, with shoulder-length hair verging on a shade of mahogany, black eyes, and a shortish nose. She expressed her feelings with her whole body. Now she was expressing impatience. "We have to input the exact time periods of each assignment after return. That's why divers are taught to check and verify the wrist gauntlet read-outs immediately on return."

  "Doesn't that mean that a diver who doesn't report some of his assignments could build up so many bolt-holes he could never be tracked?" I couldn't resist asking.

  "It also means," she replied a bit coldly, or so it seemed to me, "that if an emergency occurred, it might be difficult to rescue them."

  I thought of an objection to that, but shelved it.

  The system was simple. Had to be, concerned as it was with the records of around one thousand active divers and two thousand support people. In addition, Personnel main­tained the records of another five thousand inactive divers—those lost in diving or who had left the Guard. All of the records were stored in both the small Personnel computer and in the main Archives Data Banks, and were updated daily.