by Pam Uphoff
"Good." Ngratei turned to the chief. "Make sure they are not shot down and bring them here immediately."
Jklep touched fist to chest and walked quietly out.
The warlord was studying the documents on a workbench when the techs entered.
He nodded at the portal machinery. "I want it opened to every place it has been over the last moon. Starting with whatever the controls are set for right now."
They soft footed about, reading dials and tapping away at their own computers.
"Sir, the current setting is for a very distant destination, if indeed the setting is not just a random reset." The tech frowned. "There are some interesting adaptations to the machinery. It is very versatile, but it requires even more energy than yours."
"Try it anyway."
"Yes, sir."
More consultations and computing. A check of the castle's power plant. It had taken some damage, but was functioning. Then the rings chilled and spun and opened into darkness. Wavered, started to collapse . . .
An elf staggered through, shoved by another.
Sparks and smoke as the portal collapsed. The techs cursed, cutting the power.
The Warlord kept his attention on the travelers. Bloody, panicked . . .
"They're dead! Everyone is dead!" The first elf fell to the floor clutching his bloody leg. "They were huge. They, we ran out of ammunition . . . "
The second elf was frozen. Staring at them in shock.
"And the children?" The Warlord purred.
"To hell with the children, Lord Ftang was going to kill them anyway." The first elf rocked in pain.
The second elf swallowed. "Shut up, for the goddess's sake, shut up." It came out in a shaky whisper.
The first elf finally looked up. And clearly recognized them. His eyes rolled up and he fainted.
The second sank down into a crouch of surrender. Hands flat on the stone floor, to show that he worked no magic. Not that he likely can, but he knows enough to not move as if he could.
The Warlord looked over at the techs.
They shook their heads. "It'll have to be rebuilt, and it will have to have more power. Reliable power. That voltage drop was . . . dangerous."
Ngratei stared at the rings. If I had leaped through as they opened . . . and now I cannot. He pushed the grief away. I knew I would never get them back. But I am not ready to stop looking. Not yet.
"Very well. I think we will take it all with us. We have the power it will need." He eyed the elves on the floor. "And you two . . . have a lot of questions to answer."
Chapter Seven
20 Jumada 1408
Coast Camp, World X 22845
"That's it!" Professor Coffee yelled. "The burst of static we . . . had before."
He lowered his voice as the static died away.
Ebsa looked around carefully. Nothing else had changed. The ute lurched forward again. Another ten minutes and they parked in the usual place.
"So . . . if the static was from here . . . " Ebsa looked around. "Not even any insects."
He led the way, with Yeahza and Vee falling in beside the archaeologists, and Paer in the rear.
Stopped at muffled pops, like gunfire in the distance . . . or underground. He listened carefully . . . nothing.
They exchanged shrugs and walked on. Half a kilometer's scramble over heaps of debris, to get around to the side with the gap.
The white powdered area was devoid of life, but beyond, there was a steady stream of ants, winding along paths clear of the insecticide. The ants leaving the mound were carrying reddish chunks. Meat.
"Guess they found something edible down there." Paer hunched her shoulders. "Those couldn't have been shots we heard. No one else is on this world."
Ebsa eyed the ants. "We really dare not go underground while they are there . . . But maybe we can get a peek at what's down there."
He shucked his pack and dug out three mini vidcams, and rummaged deeper . . . yes, mechanic's tape. "Back off and get ready to run."
He crossed the insecticide covered rubble, calling up his unnoticeable spell, the spell to blunt the sense of smell that had worked so well on guard dogs . . . Ebsa tore off a strip of tape, laid it across the first vidcam and stepped out beside an ant heading for the dome. Set it on top of its thorax, pressed the ends of the tape down. Stepped back into the insecticide.
Nobody here. No smell. No movement.
His ant and four others milled about in circles, then turned back to follow their fellows up the dome and down the hole he and Vee had spotted yesterday.
He did it twice more, but the ants seemed to be catching on, so he retreated across the poisoned zone.
Half of the "ready to run" gang had their computers out, watching nausea-inducing pictures of rocks zipping by. One vidcam was knocked loose and fell down a hole, and after a spinning, jarring fall, landed looking at a faintly illuminated rock, and past it, darkness.
"That's funny, the rock looks almost like a shoe . . . " Yeahza trailed off.
Paer tiptoed across the poison, and from three meters away, sent light balls to stick on half a dozen ants' backs. She trotted back, grinning.
"Does that help?"
Ebsa pulled out his own comp and made sure it was recording everything as the scene lightened.
As the shoe-rock brightened, and the odd perspective showed the sole of a huge shoe, a leg , arm . . . and an ant with a light on top of it . . . snipping off a hand and carrying it away. In the background, a cavern. Tall rectangular frames reaching up into the dark. Ants swarming other . . . objects on the floor.
A big seething mob barely visible as the lights and cams moved around.
A brief glimpse of ants pushing on something invisible, a sphere . . . shapes inside . . .
"Someone has a shield up. Holy One!"
Ebsa dumped his backpack. Grabbed his spoons and the ropes. "Right. I go down, bloody damn fast, grab that guy. If there's trouble, into the bubble with us, you pull us out. Right?"
Paer nodded, face strained. "Take lots of poison."
Yeahza snorted and grabbed one of the bags. "You'll need someone to watch your back."
Ebsa opened the bubble, removed the cooler of food . . . stuffed two bottles of booster in his pack. The carbine . . . he kept that and handed Paer the 12mm. He bound the rope just below the bowl of one spoon, just before the bubble attached to the long handle.
"Hell, we don't know if we can even get down there. We're a lot bigger than the ants, or the roaches." Ebsa clipped a vidcam to his shirt, handed one to Yeaza. A battery lantern. What else do I need?
"Let's try this gap first. I would love to put off meeting any ants until we absolutely have to deal with them."
A grinning Yeahza headed for the gap. Ebsa followed, turning to check that the rope was uncoiling smoothly.
This is not one of my better ideas. There's no way the rope won't snag somewhere. But he squeezed into the gap, and down, around the corner and slid across the marble slab. Doused the light, for a moment.
"I see light down there, reflecting around a corner." Yeahza eased over the edge, turning and reaching out with a foot. Ten meters down. Not a bad climb.
And no other way out except a triangle of dim light from a hole in the rocky floor. Ebsa was surprised a roach could get through. He pried a bit at the stones around the opening, but they were immobile.
:: Any more vids of the shield down there? ::
Paer's mental voice was worried. :: The sphere seems to be getting smaller. ::
:: Right, we're at a hole we can only negotiate with the bubble. I'm going to see if I can figure out how to do this. ::
He looked over at Yeahza. "I need you to stay here."
The man grinned. "No you don't. I need to do this bubble thing. Because if it doesn't work, you will figure out how to get me back."
Ebsa eyed him. Looked down the hole. "Right. Listen up. Take a light. On the inside it'll be bronze. You back into it. Look at the edges with the spoon handle
s. Close them, open them. Immediately. With time dilation, every second you are in there is three hours out here. Rip it open fast. Then look out and see if you can get out. You can stick a hand out and shift it around to get a good look, see if there's enough room to emerge. Got it?"
"Right. Fast close and open. Look before you exit." He took the battery lamp Ebsa held out, clicked it back on
:: Paer, give me a whole lot of slack. ::
Yeahza backed into the bronze rectangle, tucked the light under his arm and pulled the spoons closed. Once sealed, the mass, the weight, was in another dimension. Only the spoons weighed anything, now.
Ebsa dropped the spoons through the hole, measuring out the rope as he quickly lowered the bubble. Thirty meters. The rope went slack, and he jiggled it, but it didn't seem inclined to drop any further.
He waited . . .
Why so deep? Was it the sun? Paer said there was an astronomer studying the sunspots . . . does it have flares? So a lot of things went underground? Or some other climate problem, most easily addressed by building down instead of up? There could be all sorts of relics down underground.
The hole brightened suddenly.
:: I'm out. I see moving lights, probably your ants. Square cages . . . no, they're cases, some even still have glass in the frames . . . It's a museum. ::
:: Excellent. I'm coming down. :: Ebsa pulled up a meter of rope, and put a rock on it. Enough to stop the spoons from hitting the ground too hard, below. He had no idea what would happen to the bubble if they broke. He pulled the spoons up, coiling the rope carefully, and pulled them apart. End of one in the hole, back in, pulled the other across and immediately open, and stepped out beside the grinning Yeahza.
"It's a History Museum. I found some readable labels."
Ebsa stared out at the distant lights. "And it's a really big cavern."
A few shafts of light from holes up above, the little sparks of Paer's lights, but most of it was still very dark . . . And we could get lost really easily.
He squeezed down some power and pushed the spectrum higher. Sent the blue light soaring and stuck it on the wall. Hopefully they'd be able to see it from across the cavern. "I'll leave the spoons here."
:: Ebsa! :: Paer sounded alarmed.
:: We can run faster than you could reel us in, and there are too many things it would get hung up on. As it is, you may need to climb down to where we dropped to haul us up without snagging the line. ::
"Let's go. Point your vidcam at everything as we go. The archaeologists can analyze the pics later. From a safe place."
They strode, quick, but looking around. More for ants or roaches than at the dust covered exhibits.
He slowed once to be sure of getting a scan of a wall mural. A picture of the sun in the background, a graph with a cyclically spiky line across it . . . Looks like sunspot cycle charts. . . except for those really, really high spikes . . . I think that explains why there's a huge cavern under their city.
But a pole sprouting square leaves from its top stopped him altogether.
He stepped carefully through the open side of the case, old memories nagging at him.
"What is it?" Yeahza whispered.
"It reminds me of pictures of old dimensional beacons." He bent and wiped dust from a small prism shape in front of the post.
The Location Beacon of the Original Eden Colony
December 1, 2116ce
"Aww fuck. Earth got here before us."
Ebsa shook his head. "No. Well, yes. But this is from the first diaspora . . . A year and three months after the New Prophets escaped to the One World, and six months before Comet Fall was colonized in the Exile. We need to take it. See if you can lift it; get it back to the spoons. I'll find the survivor."
:: Damaging an irreplaceable artifact, in situ! :: Coffee, sounding furious.
:: Hopefully we can come back and study the whole cavern in detail. :: Ebsa leaked plenty of skepticism into his mental voice. :: But I want to save this specific artifact, in case something even worse than insects takes up residence, or the whole thing collapses in an earthquake. ::
He got reluctant agreement in return, as he picked his way through the rubble. He squeezed down more power, stuck the light on his forehead, and tried to hurry.
The first body was stripped to the bone . . . and a lot of those were missing. He made sure his vidcam got a good shot of it, poked around a bit. "I don't see any ID. Moving on . . . "
Half a dozen ants were hauling another body away, whole. Ebsa reached out mentally . . . whoever it was, was quite dead.
Ebsa moved on. He avoided several more concentrations of ants, spotted the mob around the spherical shield. Shoving it, rolling it, finding no purchase for their pincers.
He must be curled up in a ball. But why not try to walk out with the shield at skin level?
Ebsa tossed a bug bomb. A high arc, so it burst on impact and scattered dust. The ants ran frantically about, then retreated. Ebsa circled them, knelt down before the sphere. The shield felt shaky, weak.
It collapsed, the small figures inside sprawling out of a tight knot.
Children. A boy and a girl.
Ebsa blinked at their elegant sweeping pointed ears.
:: Elves! ::
:: Didn't think they were that small! ::
Ebsa shut out the babble of mental speculation.
The boy tried to stand, fearful, exhausted, glassy-eyed, but still looking for a direction to run . . . Overextended.
A meter and a half tall, dark hair and eyes, skin tones hard to judge in this light. Neither very pale nor very dark was the best he could do. The dead ones were large enough that I didn't think of their sizes. I wonder how old he is.
Ebsa pulled out a bottle of booster, twisted off the cap and extended it.
"I think you need this." He kept his voice soft.
The girl was smaller, clinging to the boy. Silent. Terrified eyes fixed on Ebsa.
The boy reached out and took the bottle. Sipped. Then gulped.
Ebsa heard rustling in the background. "We need to leave."
The boy followed his glance, and said something. His voice was sharp, and high pitched, nearly painful, and Ebsa suspected some of it was entirely out of his range of hearing.
Ebsa rocked back to his feet and looked around. Plenty of movement around the powdered area. He grabbed another bomb and tossed it high up, in the direction they needed to go. It hit the frame of a case and burst. The ants retreated from the dust. And further as the powder settled. He threw a third one as hard and far as he could.
He eyed the kids. The boy had exhausted himself, keeping up the shield. The girl looked . . . five maybe? Maybe older, if elves were smaller. Whatever their ages, he was going to have to carry them both. Which is really going to inhibit my bug bomb throwing.
He slung the gun and reached for them. High squeaks and withdrawal.
Ebsa paused, looked around. I don't want to scare them, but we need to get out of here.
He squeezed down another ball of light and sent it upwards.
A mass of ants prowled the dusty perimeter. Ten or twenty deep. Behind them, a steady stream, streams, of ants were headed their way.
Panicked squeaks and both kids threw themselves at Ebsa.
He hoisted them up and started running. :: Yeahza, ready to go? ::
:: I'm halfway back to the spoons. ::
:: Good, keep going, the ants are homing in on me, we'll want to jump in and go. :: He stuck to the powdered areas, but dead ahead he'd be out of the powder, and while there weren't that many ants right there he was going to have to resort to brute force. Starting with his bulldozer blade shield, angled to just shove them aside.
He staggered a bit as he hit the first one. One Damned things must weigh twenty kilos! He kept going as fast as he could, aiming for the blue light on the cavern wall.
The girl eeped, and he threw up a shield behind them.
Light ahead, and settling dust. Yeahza looked around,
the beacon over his shoulder.
:: Paer? ::
:: I'm halfway down the chimney. It's so rough I'm afraid the rope might fray and break. ::
:: Right, well, Yeahza's shoving his trophy into the bubble now and I'll be there in a few steps. We'll seal it up and you can pull us up at your leisure. Open the spoons . . . if you don't need us to shoot, carry us out to the surface and open it there. ::
Yeahza voice :: I'm going in. ::
Ebsa staggered up to the bubble. Both kids still clinging. :: And I'm stepping in. ::
He turned and stepped in backwards, and let go of the kids to grab the spoons and bring them together. Both kids clung.
"So, Yeahza, I don't suppose you speak Elvish?"
Light flooded in before he'd finished the sentence. Bright sunlight and heat.
Everyone was looking away from them at something moving on the other side of a wall.
". . . think we should hide in the cavern?" Coffee sounded nervy.
A white-haired hump of a back, three meters off the ground. A head lifted. Pointy muzzle with whiskers, rounded ears.
Ebsa winced. "Figures rats would survive even this disaster."
Chapter Eight
20 Jumada 1408
Coastal Ruins, World X 22845
"Yeah. Pity they've gotten as large as elephants."
Ebsa looked around, only one rat in sight, thank the One. "I though rats were gray, or brownish."
Paer nodded. "Looks like a lab rat, doesn't it? More likely a natural mutation, possibly adaptive because it lives under ground?"
She was sneaking glances at the children, eyes wide . . .
The rat's head dropped back out of sight and its back moved forward.
Ebsa knelt down and started shoving everything back into the bubble. Snatched the crowbar. One help me if I need it!
"Let's head for the ute. Fast. We don't want to be trapped between the ants and a rat that size."
The kids crowded even more closely as more strangers gawped at them. Ebsa hung the crowbar over his arm and scooped them up and headed for the street. "Vee lead off. Yeahza and Paer, rear guard, stay close."
