Eltar was shaking his head slowly, whether at me or Farren I couldn’t tell.
“Just to say that the barracks were ours and that we’d have power once we could get the standby steam generators working.”
“Must be an old Imperial staging base,” mused Eltar.
“Not used for military, either,” I added.
“Trying to change the subject, Sammis? Hunh?”
“From what?”
“That lady you were giving the eye.”
I sighed. Farren was obnoxious. “She acted just like a ConFed colonel, except she has her professional smile down better. And she acts like this is her base, not ours.”
“Probably was . . .”
At that point, I didn’t really care. Looking at the colonel-doctor or whatever she was had been nice, but I didn’t see much future in it. Besides, I was tired. My stomach hurt, and my head was close to spinning away on its own. “Let’s find some bunks and then look for the mess.”
“Good idea.”
The doctor had been right. The barracks were ours. Completely. There wasn’t a soul in the building. So we took three of the better bunks, ones with lockers built in underneath them.
The cold water was cold, and the hot water was lukewarm, indicating that something worked. I used liberal amounts of both to remove as much road dust, grime, and soot as possible. Even good steamers emitted some soot, and the ones that we had been using were in less than perfect condition.
By the time we had washed up, the rest of the road scouts had found their way into the barracks, followed by Janth and his locks for the armoury.
“Let’s have those weapons, now . . .”
I was more than glad to get rid of the projectile rifle, just wishing that he would hurry up and finish so that we could get something to eat. I felt as white as the ancient canvas mattress cover on my bunk.
“Field mess is being set up in the dining hall below. That’s the big empty room at the back . . .” Janth went on, but I tuned it out, just waiting until we were dismissed to go eat.
After all, lack of food had landed me in the ConFeds, so to speak, and the ConFed organisation’s single greatest benefit to me had been the halfway square meals that allowed me to rebuild and maintain my strength.
“Sammis . . . just waiting to eat. Again . . .”
I tried to keep from smiling at the comments about my appetite, but I probably looked wolflike thinking about food. That was the way I felt.
“Dismissed.”
I was second in line heading down the wide stone stairs toward the dining hall. Eltar liked to eat as much as I did. He was first. That was fine with me. Being first called too much attention to you, just like being gentry, or being an officer. Or a witch.
“Line up on the right! On the right!” Carlis’s voice was unmistakable.
There was only one place to line up—on the right. So we did, with Eltar leading us on.
“Lukewarm field slop . . .”
“Boiled rat guts . . .”
“. . . tasty rodent brains . . .”
The cooks were used to the comments, and the one who glared at us looked no different than usual as our boots echoed on the stone flooring.
Four long dusty tables had been dragged away from a stack on one side of the hall that must have held two dozen of the massive wooden trestles. The rest loomed there in the shadows cast by the field torches used in place of broadcast power globes or hard-wired lights.
The flickering light made the old building seem ancient, but its age wasn’t my predominant concern as I shovelled a double helping onto the field tray.
. . . grrrrr . . . Both the light-headedness and my stomach were letting me know of my low energy state.
“You can eat that?” Farren sounded amused.
“He’s a damper, Farren.”
“. . . cannibal type, you know, swamp rat eating swamp rat . . .”
I ignored Rarden’s low-voiced comments and took two more slices of hard bread and one of the shrivelled chysts that Eltar had spurned. Food was food, and, besides, the stuff we were getting was quite edible, if not exactly a. gourmet’s delight. My father had been the gourmet, not me. My mother had regarded food only as a necessity, not an end in itself.
I took the tray and sat down on one of the long benches across from Eltar. My light-headedness began to disappear with the first bite, as did the tightness in my stomach, and I forced myself to eat slowly, methodically chewing each bite.
“That good, hunnnh?”
Again, I ignored Rarden.
“That good, swamp rat?”
“Rarden!” Even I looked up at Carlis’s bellow. The subforcer was standing almost at the end of the trestle table.
Rarden blanched. “Yes, sir!”
“Show some brains. That swamp rat is twice as tough and four times as poisonous as you. He has a hide thicker than a rhinopod. But he isn’t going to let you insult him forever, and there wouldn’t be enough of you left to stuff into a mess kit. So do us both a favour and shut your trap.”
Carlis’s tone showed he didn’t think much of either one of us—except as raw troop fodder. Still, it got Rarden off my back—temporarily.
I returned near-full attention to the field rations and broke the second slab of stale bread in two, taking one bite of the rehydrated and undefined meat and one bite of the heavy bread, one bite of the meat and one bite of the bread, alternating until I finished it all. I saved the chyst until last.
Everyone was gone — except Carlis — when I stood to take the field tray back.
“Swamp rat . . .”
“Yes, sir?”
“Still so very polite. Swamp rat . . . just stay polite and listen to orders, and everything will be just fine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re so polite, swamp rat. You never do anything wrong that you can help. Why don’t I trust you?” Carlis was sitting by himself at the very end of the trestle.
“Sir?”
“I don’t trust you, swamp rat. I never will. And don’t forget it.”
“I won’t, sir.”
“I know you won’t, swamp rat.” Carlis shook his head, and looked back at his own partly eaten rations. “I know you won’t.”
Since I appeared to be dismissed, I left to go back to the corner of the barracks I had staked out for some sleep. The next morning would be the typically early ConFed dawn.
XXIII
LIFE AT THE new base was an improvement over the temporary encampment at Herfidian, especially once Weldin had managed to get the steam generators going. He claimed that they hadn’t really been used in over a century.
I pretty much kept my mouth shut and tried to learn all that I could. While I didn’t know much about the systems, at least I could understand the manuals. By reading them and watching what was going on, I learned some practical engineering of sorts.
In walking around the old base—we were never told its name, and maybe that had been lost along with all the other destruction—I realised something else. Less than a handful of Secos had held the base against the riots and raids. Aside from the Secos there were the technicians and some scientists, and the most powerful, it seemed, was the woman who had greeted us—Dr. Relorn.
No one told me that, but it was clear enough. She had the only personal guard and steamer.
While I had my own ways of finding out what was going on, I didn’t start sliding under the now and snooping until we’d been at the base for several days and I was both rested and well fed. By then a second group of ConFeds had arrived, and the cooks were actually preparing food a cut above field rations. Not much, since it was still another season until the harvest, assuming enough farmers had planted for there to be a harvest.
After dinner that night, I lingered and cadged thirds, watching Carlis shake his head sadly, and ate everything methodically. Then I walked back outside, heading away from the gate and along one of the old worn stone roads lined with foundations.
By the t
ime I was half a kay from the barracks, twilight was fading into early evening. I knelt down by one of the stone steps leading upward to nothing and slipped under the now, sliding toward the technicians’ buildings.
As I headed toward the “reserved” section of the base, a faint spray of lines appeared before me. “Before” isn’t the right word, since you really see with your mind and not your eyes in the undertime, and the lines were more like a faint series of afterimages. But all of them radiated from a single point near the centre of a large single-story building.
The timbered building was newer than the two stone structures that flanked it. Age is easy enough to tell from the undertime. Older things seem solid. Newly built structures lack depth, and living things waver—just a bit for trees to quicksilver for birds and other fast-moving, fast-living creatures.
Following the lines backward, I found myself hovering undertime before a single operating console and an empty platform surrounded by other inactive equipment. At the console sat the doctor.
For reasons I could not explain, I slipped from the undertime behind her and watched, with her, silently, as the screen displayed its images.
A man wearing a bulky atmospheric or water diving suit clambered onto the platform, closed the suit’s faceplate and vanished. The screen blanked, then displayed a woman, wearing a less extensive version of a self-contained breathing system, who also vanished.
The console shed the only light in the shadowed laboratory, a room the size of a small equipment bunker that smelled of ozone and electronics.
“So you were in charge of the project?” I asked into the stillness.
She turned slowly in the swivel chair, as if she had known all along that I had been there. “So far as I know, I still am.”
“You knew I was watching.”
She nodded, but remained in the swivel, apparently relaxed, even though a stranger had appeared from nowhere.
“You can dive yourself. Otherwise you would have been more surprised.”
For a moment, neither one of us moved.
All the heavy equipment dated from before the time the monarchy had limited the use of metals to bare essentials. That it had not been removed indicated either how important the project had been, how well-connected the doctor had been—or both.
Dr. Relorn continued to look at me, evenly, as though she were cataloguing my every feature.
I looked back—seeing a slender, sandy-haired woman with a narrow, elfin face and eyes that penetrated even through the gloom of the room. Her physical condition had to be good, just from her posture and aura.
“So why aren’t you on the screen tapes?”
“I don’t dive.”
The words were matter-of-fact, but I could hear an edge to her voice.
“Why not?” I was surprised that I had the nerve to ask her.
“Do you know what you are?” Her reply came back to me almost as I finished challenging her.
“Me? I’m just a ConFed trooper, trying to get by.”
“That’s just not true, and you know it. You’re gentry, and an heir of Eastron, if not—”
“No!” The last thing I needed was some idiot doctor blabbing about witches of Eastron. “Look, Doctor. I don’t know where you’ve spent the last year or so, but every freeman and woman in Westron would be just as happy to cut the throat of any stray gentry youth they happened to run across—assuming there are any left outside of your fortress retreat here.”
She didn’t look convinced, but the anger was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and she looked younger, more relaxed. That her hair was as light as mine, if not lighter, was clear even in the dim light around us.
A muted roll of evening thunder punctuated the momentary silence.
“Why do they call you the swamp rat?”
I wondered how she had discovered that, but she was changing the subject all too successfully. “You never answered my question. Why didn’t you try diving under the now?”
“Diving under the now?” Her eyebrows furrowed for a moment.
I could smell my own sweat, that and the odour of metal and oil and machinery. I shrugged. “That’s what I call it.”
“Why are you with the ConFeds?”
“Don’t you understand yet?” I forced myself to be calm. She could probably fry me if she chose. That or put me on the run again. I sighed.
She smiled, and I found myself smiling in return. Her warmth was contagious, and the smile was genuine. Don’t ask me how I knew. I knew.
“Why don’t you sit down and explain?”
Looking around, I didn’t really see anywhere to sit.
“My quarters are down the hall. It’s convenient.” She gestured vaguely behind her and to my left. “Was convenient,” she added absently.
“Might not be convenient to me. If I’m not back in the barracks by last call, it’s going to be difficult to explain.”
“That’s a while, isn’t it?” Her voice was businesslike, as the smile faded.
“Enough for a short explanation, I guess.”
After touching the console and blanking the screen, she stood in the near darkness, turned, and walked toward the door. The doctor walked the distance without a light. So did I.
Click.
A single lamp lit a low table and not much else. It flickered briefly, the way all the electric appliances did every now and again, the result of the imperfect system cobbled together with the backup generators. On each side of the table was a comfortable armchair.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“Water, please.”
“Just water?”
“Just water.” I sat down in the left-hand chair and waited. I could smell the faintest of fragrances in the air, just the hint of trilia.
“Here you are.”
I took the narrow crystal goblet from her. “No servants?”
“No servants.”
“Now, Dr. Relorn, you owe me an answer, and I owe you an explanation.” I took a sip from the goblet, an antique similar to my father’s Dyleraan, that probably dated back to the establishment of Westron.
“An answer.” She leaned forward on the edge of the chair, somehow perched there, yet relaxed. “The question was why I did not attempt to dive, as you put it, ‘under the now,’ when I am the one running the project.” She sat back slightly, as if waiting even as she spoke. “The simple answer is that mental travel—“
“Call it diving,” I interrupted. I took another sip of the cold spring water that tasted as fresh as the water I had once scooped from the streams along the Long Wall Trail.
“—mental travel, or diving, is blind. You don’t know where you’re going, and I never liked travelling blind.”
“But it’s not. Besides, anywhere on Query—“
“We weren’t looking on Query—“
My mouth dropped open for two reasons. First, I realised that other witches or divers might not really be able to see their destination. And second, Dr. Relorn was telling me that I could have travelled to other planets.
“—and the diving ability can take you forward or backward in time, but not in our solar system.”
“But didn’t you know you could travel from point to point on Query?”
“What for? You know the strength of the witch legends. Besides, what’s the point of getting hurt in travelling a few thousand rods? If there’s danger, the reward ought to be worth something. That’s why we worked on it as an alternative to mechanical means of stellar travel—“
“Stellar? To other stars?”
“What do you think I’ve been talking about, Trooper Sammis?”
I shook my head slowly. The stars? I’d never thought about the stars. How much energy would that take?
“But the physical energy?” I couldn’t help asking.
She nodded. “That’s another reason. Mental travel takes less energy away from Query and even less outside our solar system. It takes more energy to travel from Westron to Eastron than t
o travel back centuries in the Serianese systems—even wearing one of those pressure suits you saw.”
“Pressure suit?” Everything she said raised more questions.
“Other planets don’t necessarily have breathable atmospheres.”
I knew that. I just hadn’t put the pieces together. After sipping, or gulping, from the goblet, I remembered she still hadn’t answered my original question.
“But why didn’t you dive?”
“I tried several short. . . dives . . . but I . . .” She shook her head. “I told you. I don’t like doing things blind.”
I could sense the fear. Her fear, and I knew. So I stood up and grasped her hands, trying not to think too much myself. Her fingertips were warm and ice-cold at the same time. “Now. Just let your mind relax. We’re going to . . . Bremarlyn.” I tried not to think about how supple and warm her hands were in mine.
“Bremarlyn . . . ?”
“No questions.”
Diving under the now with the doctor was hard, especially at first, like dragging an anvil with my fingertips, afraid that I would drop her any instant. Once under the now, her fear washed over me like a black tide, almost blinding me and blotting my directional senses.
Fear—that was her blinder. I tried to push a sense of reassurance at her, a feeling of warmth. Her fear receded from me, but I could still detect it cloaking her, blinding her to our position in the undertime.
For all that, she burned in the undertime, swirling with those sparks I had noted earlier.
Even in forcing myself to ignore both her blackness and her brightness, I carried us to Bremarlyn, to an orchard I had known well. From the undertime, the area where I wanted to emerge appeared empty. In the starlight, the blackened walls of the old house gaped. Around us, the chyst tree leaves whispered in the summer night’s breeze.
“Look,” I said softly, remembering that I held the doctor’s hands, before releasing them abruptly. “You did it. You know I couldn’t have carried you. You did it.”
“Are you always this direct?” Her voice was husky, yet amused.
“No . . . I’ve never dared. But . . .” I shrugged. With the scent of suddenly ripening chyst around me, I didn’t feel like explaining. The last time I had stood in the orchard had been to see the fires which had been the beginning of the end for the old way of life on Query.
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