Empress of Eternity

by L. E. Modesitt

  “You know that if you leave the Bridge this way, you can’t return…except by traveling back to the canal?”

  “I know. I heard you tell the others that.”

  “And you know I can’t leave? Ever?” The tears ran down the sides of her face, and she stepped forward and embraced him. “You deserve better…” she murmured.

  “We don’t always get what we deserve,” he murmured back. “But perhaps we have…or what we wished for. I wanted you to be here forever, and I wanted the chance at great deeds.” He tightened his arms around her for a moment, then brushed her lips with his, before easing out of her arms.

  “Be as careful as you can, dearest,” she said softly.

  “That I will.” He smiled and looked at her, taking a long look, one he hoped would not be the last, then turned toward the door.

  “It takes longer here,” she said quietly. “Or seems to. I’m not quite certain which.”

  “I know.” He did not look at her, but kept his eyes fixed on the station wall.

  When the stone did slide open, the brilliance of all the colors of the rainbow flared around him as he stepped through the opening and down from the railing onto the outside balcony of the office of the Minister of Protective Services, a balcony that overlooked all of Caelaarn to the south.

  Maertyn did not look back but hurried to the glassine door between the covered balcony and Tauzn’s private office. Inside, the office was empty, as he had hoped. The door was locked, but it only took three sharp blows with the ice hammer to break the lock. That wasn’t surprising, since few would have expected a burglar or assassin to enter from an eleventh-floor balcony in the middle of a guarded complex.

  He wiped the grip of the hammer with the fabric at the bottom of his jacket and dropped the hammer on the yielding flooring of the balcony, then took one of the stunners from his pocket before he stepped into the office.

  So far as he could tell, his entry activated no alarms. At least no one burst through the door to the outer office, but that might have been because the brilliance of rainbow light still flared behind him, possibly distracting security personnel.

  From his recollections, the offices of all ministers had private facilities for changing and other necessities. He tried the door on the left. It was a closet. The one on the left held the facilities and a robing chamber with a mirror. That would do. He left that door ajar and turned back to the wide and empty desk.

  There he checked the comm system. He didn’t even try to access anything in it. All he wanted was an open line with a delay to one other system. That took him only a minute or so, and he couldn’t help but smile wryly as he thought about the idea that time didn’t exist, only event-points on a continuum, or something like that.

  Then he retreated to the small room, leaving the door barely ajar, and waited…and waited…

  He wasn’t certain how long he had waited when he heard voices.

  “…took forever this morning…”

  “That’s understandable, sir. There’s been no success in entering the canal station, and with the inquiries about the Gaerda dirigibles…and that rainbow…”

  “Ashauer’s at the bottom of this…”

  Although Maertyn had only heard Tauzn speak a handful of times, the minister’s deep, resonant, and reassuring voice was distinctive enough that he recognized it immediately.

  “…Maertyn’s just an expendable piece…”

  “…rather resourceful for being so expendable. How did he seal the station? No one’s ever done that.”

  Maertyn had waited to see if anyone else would enter, but it seemed as though no one else would. Raising the stunner, he eased the private facilities door open a trace wider, then fired at the back of Tauzn’s head, switching to the man on the left, Deputy Minister Aembit. The third man was someone Maertyn didn’t know, but he immediately yelled, “Assassins!”

  That was all he got out before the third stunner bolt hit him.

  Maertyn pushed the door open wide, took three quick steps and thumbed the stunner up to full narrow beam strength, and placed the tip at the back of Tauzn’s head, giving a double jolt. If the minister lived, and Maertyn didn’t care one way or the other, he wouldn’t have much mental processing power.

  Maertyn immediately did the same thing to Aembit, then hurried across the room, flinging the door to the balcony wide open, and then moving to a position where he’d be shielded by the door to the outer office opening. As he took his position, he adjusted the stunner to a wider beam.

  For several minutes nothing happened, and Maertyn wished he’d known that. He could have used the time to alert Ashauer. Then the door burst open, and three black-shirts sprinted into the office. All were wearing body armor and helmets.

  That didn’t stop stunner beams aimed at the back of their necks, and all three toppled.

  Maertyn eased over to the door and kicked it shut, then twisted the privacy lock. He knew that would only slow them, but he needed a moment or two…or three.

  Dashing back to the desk, he triggered the comm code for Ashauer, although the open line had been feeding to the deputy assistant minister. Ashauer’s image came up, and Maertyn hit the override. “Ashauer…Maertyn here. I’m in Tauzn’s office. He’s been assassinated, and now everyone’s attacking the office. Thought you might like to know. Do what you can.”

  There was no immediate answer.

  Maertyn left the channel open, and retreated into the facilities room, leaving the door ajar.

  Outside he could see another brilliant rainbow arching toward the balcony, but this time it did not touch the balcony. He smiled.

  The rainbow continued to coruscate for several more minutes, and no one tried the door to the office.

  He waited…and the rainbow vanished. He kept waiting, then checked the time. Almost half an hour had passed.

  What was going on? Were they mobilizing a full assault team?

  From somewhere, he heard sirens.

  Then the door burst open, and more black-shirts poured in, fully armored, looking around.

  Outside the balcony a flitter hovered.

  Maertyn narrowed the stunner beam to a needle focus, and fired…without effect. The black-shirts looked around. Maertyn fired again.

  One of the black-shirts turned toward Maertyn, leveling a high-impact projectile automatic at him and triggering it.

  Maertyn felt himself falling, and he clutched at the doorway, seeing for a moment a fog that rolled away from the flitter and in through the open balcony door. One of the armored black-shirts staggered, but Maertyn lost sight of him as he toppled backward to land on the hard floor.

  “…least I got Tauzn…Maarlyna…”

  Above, the ceiling began to spin around him—before darkness crashed across him.

  62

  24 Siebmonat 3123, Vaniran Hegemony

  How long the heat and cold, the rush of time, and the sense of time passing not at all, while he could neither move nor sleep, lasted Duhyle had no idea. He only knew that it ended, and darkness enfolded him. When he did wake, he was encased in a medical unit in a small chamber, with only his head and upper neck free. There was even some sort of cap on his head. Every appendage of his body, not to mention his torso, was a mass of pain, except that the medical nerve blocks kept him from feeling that agony, only letting a trickle through so that he was aware of how severely he had been injured.

  Helkyria looked up from the small screen in her lap. She sat in a reclining medichair and her entire right leg, from mid-thigh to toes, was encased in a regeneration cocoon. “Welcome back into time and the universe.”

  “Am I going to stay here?” His voice was ragged and hoarse.

  “The medical types weren’t certain at first, but you’re far more resilient than they could have imagined, and there’s no doubt now.”

  “Symra said that your leg got torn up a little. A little? Was there anything left before they got you to regen?”

  “Enough for the regen to take.”
Her voice was pleasant.

  Duhyle could see the darkness around her eyes. “Barely, I suspect.”

  “You were in far worse shape, dear.”

  Duhyle wasn’t about to argue. “Where are we?”

  “In the medcenter in Vestalte. There’s not much left of Vaena. That was the last Hammer strike.”

  “Did we stop her soon enough? What happened after I threw the last grenade?”

  “You did. What did you have in it?”

  “Not in it. On it. That was what the keeper gave me. Mistletoe. Mistletoe from the distant past, from the keeper’s time. The insulation allowed it to penetrate Baeldura’s time or event-point shields, and the grenade then shattered the insulation, I’d guess, and channeled the explosion toward Baeldura.” He managed to stifle a cough. “I presume it was enough.”

  “It was.”

  “You…we…were incredibly lucky,” he said.

  She nodded. “We were, but we were lucky because the Aesyr rushed things. We couldn’t have taken that ship against a fully trained crew. They would have sealed every compartment at the first sign of boarders. I was counting on that.”

  “How…did you know?”

  “I didn’t, not for certain, but things pointed that way. Baeldura, or her captain, didn’t bring the ship all that close to the canal station, and the turns and maneuvers were sloppy. All their attacks on the station were rushed, and they were variations on strategies tried elsewhere. Baeldura and the Aesyr keep pressing for quick decisions. They were running out of time. They knew that if we could hold them off, their support would crumble. They had to win quickly, or not at all.”

  “They were willing to destroy the entire universe…”

  “One entire universe,” Helkyria corrected. “It does happen to be ours. That does make a difference. To us, anyway.”

  Duhyle wanted to nod. He couldn’t. Not the way his head was restrained. He could only turn it slightly, just enough to see Helkyria. “Is it all over?”

  “Mostly. When your…mistletoe…grenade exploded, there was some backlash to the other remote Hammer facilities. There’s nothing much left of Asgard and more than a few other locations in Midgard. They’ll have to be rebuilt. Thora was in Asgard, we think.”

  “What about Valakyr…Symra?” Duhyle knew he wouldn’t like the answer.

  “Valakyr’s troopers took the Bridge. She didn’t make it. Symra stepped in front of you.”

  “She didn’t have to…”

  “Yes, she did. She should have been in front of you the whole way.”

  Duhyle disagreed, but he wasn’t about to say so. Finally, he asked, “Do you know what the canal—the Bridge—is?”

  “The keeper called it a bifocused bridge—not a bifrost bridge,” she said with a smile. “It was built to block an ancient version of the Hammer—except the hammer was being wielded from Earth’s moon. The backlash of stresses pulled the moon closer to Earth and fragmented it—and a few billion human beings along with it—”

  “How could they have built it without disrupting the entire planet?”

  “It was actually built outside the local event-points, as the keeper would have termed it, outside of time, or what we’d call non-time, and anchored across from the time—or the event-point—of its building to the far future. It wasn’t actually meant ever to appear on Earth when it did—that was another unanticipated backlash of the conflict, but the builders had to bring it into ‘reality’—even if shielded—in order to stop the lunar bombardment of the world and to heal the rents in the dark energy web.”

  “…and the cost of saving the universe was the destruction of their own civilization?”

  “Essentially.”

  “So our little effort was nothing compared to that?” Duhyle didn’t conceal the sarcasm in his voice.

  Helkyria shook her head. “No. The way Thora and Baeldura had repeater Hammer stations across Earth, it would have been far worse. They might have even created such seismic upheavals as to wipe out all life entirely…except on the microscopic level.”

  “I know I’ve asked this before…and you’ve explained…but how could they?”

  “Because they believed that their truth was the only truth, and that beside it, nothing else mattered. Hasn’t that always been so with true believers?”

  “So we stopped yet another group of true believers who believed that their ‘truth’ was so precious that the failure of us unenlightened types to perceive that merited the destruction of all Earth and the universe?”

  “According to the keeper, we did more than that. The strain of the first conflict and ours reverberated or resonated through the event-points, or as we term it, through time. Those reverberations created images that receptive minds, dreaming minds, pick up on all event-points, even in those we’d call the distant past. Those minds only catch the images and sometimes the terms…and they become part of myths, of poetry at times, even cultural images.” Helkyria laughed softly, ironically. “That’s why so many myths are so illogical, and yet grip people, because there’s a ring of verity behind them, but the people who catch the images don’t know the context and fill it in with their own interpretations. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know…” She shook her head.

  “And the canal, the Bridge is…what? The artifice of eternity?” he asked. “Or is that a phrase like the myths, one that resonates from the deep past to the future?”

  Helkyria smiled. “Let’s just say it resonates, and the resonance worked for us.”

  Duhyle almost snorted before asking, “And what of the keeper, the ruler of eternity? What resonates there?”

  “Who can say? She doesn’t rule so much as keep eternity…for us…at least for her reign, perhaps longer.”

  “Ruler…keeper…did you get anything of value from her?”

  “Besides saving the universe?” Helkyria smiled, and her hair glowed warm gold. “Let’s say that I have a few equations and a few ideas for us to work on.”

  “Oh?”

  “They should allow us better ways to rebuild Asgard and Vaena…well enough that we can appreciate what lies, if you will, beyond the rainbow.”

  Duhyle did smile at that, even as he wondered why.

  63

  16 Tenmonth 1351, Unity of Caelaarn

  Fire burned along his left arm, and his lower legs were ice, and hot pokers stabbed into his body in too many places…Maertyn tried to turn, but found he could not move. Then he dropped back into a hot darkness…only to half-wake sometime later mouthing a name…

  It was a beloved name, so beloved…and so much a part of him, but he could not remember it before another wave of darkness took him…and so it went, endlessly, dozing, fire, pain, darkness and light, and names and words coming from his mouth, none of which he recognized…until an even deeper and cooler darkness claimed him.

  Then…he was awake

  Slowly he opened his eyes, but he was alone in a small chamber—a hospital room, or a reasonable substitute for one. Equipment hummed, and some of it was centered on him, if only for the reason that he was the only one in the room. He was restrained in a bed, with regen pads clamped everywhere, it seemed, but only below the neck.

  He was alive…but he was still tired…and his entire body ached…particularly places in his thighs and abdomen.

  He tried not to think about what might come next.

  An angular woman in the pale greens of healing walked into the chamber. “You’re awake at last, Lord Maertyn. You’re much better today.”

  “Could…I have…”

  His mouth was so dry he could not continue, and she stepped over to the bed and offered a tube from a beaker. The liquid helped.

  Finally, he completed the sentence. “Could I have been worse…still survived, Doctor?” Maertyn assumed she was a doctor because of the competence and the lack of badges and credentials affixed to her greens.

  “Some have,” she replied with a smile. “Not many. You have a visitor. He can only stay a few minutes, but he
insists that it’s important. Since the Executive Administrator of the Unity sent him, we had to agree to a few minutes. But if your vitals get disrupted, we’ll be back to escort him out. Immediately.”

  Maertyn almost smiled at that, but he worried. Exactly who was the EA these days, and how long had he been recovering? Before he could ask, the doctor had stepped out.

  The figure who stepped into the room and closed the door was not unfamiliar.

  “Ashauer…I can’t say as…I’m exactly surprised to see you.”

  “How could I not pay my respects to the hero of the Unity?” asked the older lord politely.

  That certainly wasn’t what Maertyn expected. He swallowed, then tried to gather his thoughts. Finally, he said, “My memory is a little hazy. Perhaps you had better refresh it.”

  Ashauer smiled warmly. “After all you’ve done and been through, that’s scarcely surprising. I can’t tell you everything, because your efforts to protect Tauzn from the assassins within his own bodyguards damaged several of the security scanners. The records we did recover implicated Aembit, not to mention Smaert…”

  Maertyn had never heard of Smaert, but just nodded.

  “…Caellins, the head of the Gaerda, turned a stunner on his brain before he could be taken into custody. It’s amazing what you uncovered, Maertyn.”

  “I just did what was necessary…”

  “EA D’Onfrio has already made a public statement that your actions prove that Caelaarn still has heroes…”

  Maertyn was beginning to get a very uneasy feeling.

  “There are some matters unresolved. No one can enter the research station…and your wife is missing…”

  Maarlyna…was she as lost to him as if she had died? Or he had? His eyes burned, and he shook his head, then swallowed.

  “Another casualty of the renegade black-shirts?” asked Ashauer gently. “I do know how much you loved her.”

  Maertyn just nodded.

  “I hesitate to ask…but the station?”