Technomancer

by B. V. Larson

  “There is a stranger in our midst,” he said. “A new man, a rogue who may be my equal in power.”

  Everyone was staring at me by this time. They had no doubt who the outsider was. Some of them had already tried to kill me once.

  “This man is a both a blessing and a curse to us,” Gilling continued. “He’s powerful, yes. So powerful he faced one of the Community in her domain, fought with her and won.”

  There was a susurration of crowd noises at that. They murmured and stared. I slouched against a wall and kept my eyes on Gilling.

  “He has come to us to ask our help and to give us his strength. Recently, several of our members have been killed. Others have abandoned us. We know the source of these attacks—those creatures from the shadows known as the Gray Men. It is my belief they see us as competitors.”

  I straightened and took a step away from the wall I’d been leaning against. “In what way are you competitors?” I asked.

  Gilling turned toward me. “We can move at will to their existence. They can do the same. I’m sure there are others, but I don’t know who they are.”

  “How do they do it?” I asked. “Do you think they have an object like your ring?”

  Gilling flashed me a look of annoyance. I took that as confirmation that his object was indeed a ring. Apparently, he didn’t like that detail to be advertised.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think they use objects. They might not even be aware of their existence. They have advanced technology that performs these miracles of physics.”

  I thought to myself that they were certainly aware of them. I recalled the female of their species and how she had been carefully examining objects in Holly’s apartment. She’d obviously been looking for something. I decided not to argue with Gilling about it.

  “You mean they have some kind of machine that lets them invade our world?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is this machine?”

  “Inside the cubes,” he said.

  “The smaller stack or the larger one?”

  He blinked at me. “You know their place well,” he said. “The smaller one.”

  “How do we get there?”

  The group members were now talking openly among themselves. Apparently, the implications of our discussion were freaking them out. Gilling raised his arms for quiet.

  “That’s right, my brothers and sisters. Draith wants us to help him against the Gray Men who plague all of us. He wants us to step into their world and stop them.”

  I walked slowly through the crowd toward Gilling. I kept my hands in my pockets. The crowd parted for me, moving away from me as I approached.

  “From the sound of it, there’s only one way we can stop them,” I said.

  Gilling nodded. “That’s correct. We must step through and break into their small stack of cubes. We must destroy their machine to break their power.”

  I nodded. It occurred to me that I now better understood the Gray Men. They’d been one step ahead of us. They’d reasoned it through and come to the logical conclusion that they wanted to be the only force that could step through whatever barrier separated our worlds. Perhaps all this time, they’d been trying to kill Gilling. Maybe they didn’t know who he was, but they knew someone on our side had the power to travel to their world at will.

  The conversation and the planning continued. Some of the members loved the idea; others were fearful and opposed it. They wrangled on into the night. I was no longer listening. Instead, I was thinking of the balance of power between the two sides. Between the Gray Men and these cultists. In the final analysis, I had to give the Gray Men the advantage. They were obviously advanced and more organized. Still, I thought the Gray Men must have felt some fear every time they came to our world, but they kept doing it. They came and carried out their missions, or died trying. What if they were just as afraid of us as we were of them?

  Gilling ended the night by passing out weapons and spare objects. I saw the doll Caroline had used to attack me—a doll that produced a gush of heat. Gilling gave it to the homeless fellow, Old Red. I winced at that. I could have been wrong, but I thought he was as likely to burn some of our own members down as the nearest Gray Man.

  By midnight, the fever of war ran through the group. I was struck by their emotional nature. Was there more here at work than just natural anger toward invaders? I came to think that either someone in the group was heating their collective emotions with an object—or that the objects themselves tended to unbalance people who possessed them too long. One theory was as good as the other. Whichever was correct, they’d built themselves up into a frenzy bent on revenge by midnight.

  I watched with growing detachment as they formed into groups and made plans. Their powers were quite varied and diverse. One old woman had the power to make others float in the air—but not herself. A middle-aged man with a banker’s paunch was a healer of sorts, and was put on duty as the medic. We were a vigilante group in this dark struggle. Earth’s own militia.

  As Gilling had said, it could only end in triumph or tragedy. I was convinced that the effort was necessary. Whoever had the power to choose the time and place of any battle had all the power. In this case, if we broke their machine, they could no longer visit us. But if they killed Gilling or stole his object, we could no longer visit them. At that point, we would be unable to attack, we could only defend.

  Of one thing I was almost certain: whichever side lost this struggle would lose its power to cross the barrier between the worlds, and would therefore be at the mercy of its enemies.

  Gilling led us out front to where the driveway circled around a large fountain. I saw most of the cars had been parked on the lawn. Overlapping tire tracks there on the grass made it obvious they did this often. No wonder the sprinkler pipes were broken and leaking.

  He organized us into two groups and named them squads.

  “My group is the support squad,” he explained. “Draith will lead the combat squad, just as we practiced during our defensive drills. The combat squad will go in first, then the support squad will go in when it is safe to do so and set up our defenses.”

  These statements caused me to raise my eyebrows. I waved to him.

  “I have a few questions,” I said.

  He took me aside while the others busied themselves. They rolled up two black SUVs and opened the backs of them. Each had several large plastic bags. They opened the bags and began dumping them into the empty fountain. A dusty plume quickly arose to fill the yard.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “A mixture of grass seed and rice,” he explained. “It will serve as the organic fuel to open a large rip. These materials are harder to work with than blood, but they are long-lasting and easier to obtain in quantity.”

  I shook my head. This was indeed a strange business. I was left wondering if the witches of Salem had been up to something all those centuries in the past. This was beginning to look like a spell and a ritual to me. The only difference was our greater understanding of the process.

  “How can we get away with this? Are you paying the police off? Or the neighbors?”

  Gilling laughed lightly. “No. See that woman over there?”

  I followed his finger toward a drooping, unkempt palm tree. I peered, and saw the outline of a thin woman under the low-hanging fronds. “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Her name is Abigail,” he said. “She is one of my best. She covers our tracks. She makes this place quiet, dark, and—uninteresting.”

  “Yes, I’ve met her before. She controls minds? Like Meng?”

  Gilling’s hand fluttered. “Not exactly. Abigail changes the air, I think. It becomes more dense and harder to see and hear through. Look up at the stars.”

  I did as he asked, and frowned. They were normally dim near the city due to light pollution, but the stars here were blurred almost to the point of invisibility.

  “That is very odd,” I said. “It reminds me of the way the other
side of a rip looks. All smeared and wavering.”

  “Yes. I think it is a similar effect. She increases the density of the air, I believe. She makes it thicker.”

  “Why is she under that palm?”

  “To concentrate. She needs to focus to maintain the effect.”

  “Now,” I said, “tell me who is on my combat squad and why.”

  He pointed out each of my team members. There were six of them. They included Old Red with his new dolly that threw blasts of heat around and Rheinman with his hammer, who obviously still hated me. In addition were three men who carried hunting rifles and grim expressions. Gilling explained to me they possessed objects of minor power, but two had been in the military and one was an ex-cop.

  The last member of my team I knew at a glance. She was young and wild-looking. She had a knife in her hand that I’d been introduced to when I’d first met these cultists. She had slashed the back of my leg with it.

  “That’s Fiona,” he said. “Her object is the knife. She can slash with it at a distance of ten paces—more if she is angry.”

  “That’s how she got me the night I walked past her,” I said, nodding.

  Gilling disagreed. “I don’t think so. Her knife touched you without help. If you had not been protected, she would have cut your throat while sitting on the floor a good distance away.”

  I stared at the wild-eyed girl. She couldn’t be more than fourteen. Her hair floated around her head like a wispy cloud. Her arms were thin and pale, but I knew they were deadly. No wonder the cultists hadn’t cowered when I had waved my gun at them that night.

  “Once I set the fire, Abigail will be the first to step through,” Gilling told me. “She will thicken the air and make us hard to sense. I will move in more support people, my entire team. Your combat team will come next.”

  “How far will we be from the cubes?” I asked.

  “A few miles.”

  I stared at him. “You plan to walk across the desert to the cubes? With fifteen people?”

  Gilling crossed his arms. “You have a better plan?”

  I didn’t like marching in the open for so long. I thought of several possible options. “Can’t you open the rip closer to our destination?”

  “Not when stepping out to another place. In our own existence, I can connect two points as I did when invading your hotel room from here. But to go to the lands of the Gray Men, I can only tear through the membrane between a spot here and a corresponding spot on the other side.”

  “Let’s pack up, then,” I said. “We can drive close to the enemy cubes and come out closer to our goal.”

  Gilling’s fingers ran over his face thoughtfully. “We operate from the mansion usually—we are familiar with it. I’m not sure where to go. It’s not like we have a map, you know.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll scout. Just Abigail for cover and maybe Fiona for backup.”

  “You make me curious. Out of all of them, why Fiona?”

  “Because she won’t hesitate to strike when things go wrong. And add Old Red to the group. I want to see if he can handle that heat-blast effectively.”

  In the end, he agreed to my plan for a scouting mission. Ten minutes after that, the three of us stepped through into the world of the Gray Men through a rip we’d opened for that purpose. This rip seemed higher and stronger than those I’d seen before. Perhaps it was the large amount of fuel Gilling had put down in the bed of the fountain. It was a bonfire in comparison to previous rips. I hoped that wouldn’t make us stand out more to the enemy.

  I felt the thrill that must run through every warrior when he first steps out of his village to raid his neighbor on the far side the forest. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. My heart pounded in my ears and I kept swallowing. Would they be waiting for us? What kind of automated defenses did they have planted out there in the seemingly featureless sands? I feared we might be fooling ourselves, pitting our own amateur wits against an organized military force. But it was too late to turn back.

  I had second thoughts as the rip loomed up under Gilling’s nurturing hands. I thought about calling the army or the marines. Surely, a pack of trained government agents could do a better job than I, with or without objects. But I knew just convincing them I wasn’t a lunatic would take weeks, if it could be done at all. And I didn’t have weeks. The Gray Men would not stop coming. They were hunting us down one by one.

  When we were on pure sand again on the far side, I immediately checked out our position. My pistol was in my hand, even though I knew it didn’t have much range. Luckily, we seemed to have made it across unobserved. I gazed toward the cube city and the smaller, closer stack of cubes to the east. It was the smaller stack that interested me more. It was little more than a geometric shadow in the night. How far was it? It was hard to tell in the open desert, but it had to be several miles. A second moon peeped over a distant rocky set of mountains behind the cube city.

  Abigail had her eyes closed and her palms aimed up toward the sky. I knew she was using her air-thickening trick to hide us. Fiona prowled around ahead of me, her knife twitching in her hand. She was more than a little mental, Gilling had told me quietly while the rest gathered. When he’d found her, she’d killed her own parents by accident, slashing at the air. He’d taken her in and taught her to control her object. I thought it was a clear testament to the power of these objects upon the human mind that she had refused to give it up even after the knife had brought her so much grief.

  As Abigail’s shield began to take hold, Old Red finally stepped out of the rip. He was a cagey one; I had to give him that. He had held back inside the safe zone to see if we all died first. He stepped up to my side, his head swiveling this way and that. His hunter’s cap remained firmly planted on his head.

  “Don’t pull anything out of your hat,” I told him. “I might need every bullet.”

  Old Red gave a raspy chuckle. “Don’t worry, bud.”

  “Someone’s coming,” Fiona said.

  My head whipped around. Behind us, a single light shone. The light was bluish in color and very bright. It was moving toward us—moving fast.

  “They saw us,” Old Red said. “Let’s go home.”

  I hesitated, staring at the approaching light. It was like the brilliant eye of a cyclops. Some army we were. The first time a Gray Man even poked a nose in our direction, my “combat team” wanted to run for it. The worst of it was I wanted to run too.

  “We can take them,” Fiona said.

  “How did they see us? Abigail? Is your little trick working?”

  She didn’t look at me, but pointed upward. I did and saw the wavering stars. It was the same effect I’d seen back home.

  “I bet they saw the rip when it first flared up,” Old Red said. “Gilling made it a big one.”

  “They’re slowing down,” Fiona said. “They can’t see us now. If we wait, they’ll probably drive right by.”

  I thought about it. “Can we close up this rip if we go to the far side and tell Gilling to turn it off?”

  “Doesn’t work that way,” Old Red said. “Takes time to die. You’ve seen them, haven’t you?”

  I had indeed seen more than my fair share. I decided to wait around. We were supposed to be scouts, after all. “Let’s see what they do. We can always step back out to safety. We have an army on the far side to back us up.”

  The others were nervous, but willing to go with my plan. We waited. The enemy vehicle did not make a straight path toward us. Instead, it drifted westward as it drew near.

  “See?” Old Red crowed. “They can’t see us. They’re going to sail right by.”

  I could tell he wanted very much for that to happen. But it didn’t. When they got close, they suddenly slowed and began to circle. They drove in a full loop around us. I glanced back and saw Old Red was about one foot from backing into the rip. I couldn’t really blame him. He was an old homeless guy who stole coins with his trick hat. He hadn’t signed on for a f
ight to the death with aliens in a strange desert. He’d probably joined Gilling’s group for the free food.

  “Can you thicken the air up enough to stop them?” I asked Abigail.

  She shook her head, concentrating on her task. She was doing a good job. The Gray Men clearly didn’t know where we were. But they knew they’d seen something out here. It occurred to me that we couldn’t retreat easily now. Abigail’s barrier would vanish if we ran, and then they would see the big rip. They would come through right into the mansion, and not in the wine cellar this time. The cultists would be in even more danger after that. This was exactly the kind of thing the enemy seemed to be looking for.

  “Just hold on, everyone,” I said. “They haven’t spotted us yet.”

  I shouldn’t have said those words. The vehicle turned away, then swung around and plowed right into the region of space we were in. The blinding headlight swiveled and bathed us in light.

  I could have ordered everyone to step back right then, to retreat. Maybe I should have done it. But I wanted to let these gray bastards know they were in a fight first. I was tired of running like a rat. When leading the living, it’s probably best to think of them rather than the dead, but I couldn’t help it. I thought of Holly, and I wanted revenge.

  “Fire!” I ordered. “Knock out that light!”

  Everyone opened up. I felt a gush of heat go by me and the van-shaped vehicle rocked with the impact. Here and there the smooth metal vehicle puffed flame and white sparks.

  I squeezed off rounds one at time. Fiona worked her knife in the air like a Japanese chef, and Old Red loosed more blasts. The light did go out, and I was never sure afterward which of us nailed it. If I had to guess, I would give the honor to Old Red. Whatever the case, we were cast into gloom again. Several shapes piled out of the vehicle. They were Gray Men, I was sure of that. They didn’t talk or shout. I’d never heard one utter a word up until now, and this occasion wasn’t any different.

  They were carrying those big beam weapons of theirs, but they didn’t have a chance to freeze us. Old Red let go first and his next puff caught three of them. They were staggering, burning. Like inhuman torches, they clawed at the sky and fell into the sands, thrashing.