by Amber Stuart
No one talked to me much.
Then again, the morph didn’t appear to be talking to one another much, either.
As I looked around at faces, it struck me that most still looked pretty grim. Whatever their dedication to Razmun and his cause of freeing the morph, the idea of relocating to another dimension didn’t appear to be uncomplicated for them, either.
I tried to keep an eye on Nihkil while he worked with the others, but he often seemed to be swallowed in the crowd. Black-clad soldiers pressed in on him from all sides as they worked over the maps.
Mechanical lights filled the clearing around the gate itself, immune to the rain and driving wind, even though they flickered more like fire than your standard Earth light bulbs. The blue-white flames reflected eerily against the trees, illuminating sheets of rain and drops that collected on branches and in pools between thick roots.
I watched shadows shorten and lengthen as the cluster of ten or twelve morph bent over the maps around Nik. Occasionally, I would hear voices rise as a handful of them erupted into some heated argument, but I couldn’t really get a sense of what it was about.
They always spoke in Dengue, and anyway, I wasn't close enough to make out the words, even if I understood the language.
I really hadn't expected that we’d leave that very night, though.
Huddled around the fire, I dozed inside my rain skins, goggles propped on my head, hood hanging down my back, my boots drying slowly from the rocks surrounding the fire pit. I was grateful to be left alone, and grateful that no one felt the need to talk in a loud voice around me.
I was still huddled by that fire when a group of soldier-types returned to the cave to tell the rest of us they were getting ready to leave.
I ignored them while they spoke Dengue.
Eventually I couldn’t ignore them, though. One actually bent over and shook me, presumably thinking he needed to wake me up. Once my eyes opened, he told me in Pharize to suit up, that we’d be leaving within the hour.
I wasn’t the only one to grumble a bit upon receiving the news.
Unlike most of the morph, however, a few of the guards lingered beside me.
Enough of them to remind me that I was still their prisoner.
Tugging up my jacket’s hood, I wiped then fitted the thick goggles back over my eyes. After I bent to re-lace my boots, stomping my heels to knock them into place, I got up to join the line of morph who filed obediently out of the cave’s mouth and into the dark and pouring rain.
The handful of morph guarding me followed, but didn’t try to talk to me again.
As soon as I exited the shelter of the cave, I felt like all of that time drying my clothes got erased within seconds.
The wind had gotten colder, too. It seemed to cut into my skin wherever it lay exposed, causing me to suck in my breath at particularly hard gusts. The combination of the wind and rain did manage to wake me up for real, though... despite the heavy gear and how tired I'd been only seconds before. I hadn’t realized the extent to which the fire and cave walls had put me into a dozy, pleasant sort of sleepiness.
I also hadn’t realized the extent to which the cave walls sheltered us from the elements. Now it hit me that Nik had been working all that time in this near-freezing rain and wind, and likely without a single break.
I had to wonder about the big rush-rush to get out of here.
I figured it had to be at least partly from needing to go before the human authority discovered Razmun’s little gathering out here. Despite the fact that Razmun’s people appeared to have bought off some percentage of the local racial police, I knew that couldn’t be the whole story. Nik already told me that Vilandt had more prisoners per capita than any other colony in the Outer Rim, and that ninety percent of those prisoners were morph.
The main prison of Vilandt, called Muganu, was located miles away from Quisieri Settlement, but all of the morph knew about it, and knew what happened inside. Most had at least one relative who’d spent time inside those walls, and many had lost spouses, friends, neighbors and co-workers to Muganu more permanently, often without being told if they’d ever see their loved ones again, or even if they’d died.
According to Nik, some of the morph had been imprisoned there since the first morph uprisings, something like eighty years earlier. Once a morph disappeared into Mugano, no one knew if they’d ever be seen again, not until they got released... which, needless to say, didn’t always happen.
The morph soldier behind me shoved at the small of my back, presumably to hurry me along. I paused to give him an openly irritated look, but found myself lengthening my strides anyway. By then, I just wanted to find Nik. Despite what Razmun said, I couldn’t help worrying that he might try to separate us, after all.
As we approached the high stone archway, my eyes drifted up.
I studied the illuminated edges of the stone, then noticed the ring of basketball-sized rocks on the grass below. I knew the archway was supposedly how they stabilized the location of the gate, by tying it to that place via some kind of electronic pulse combined with an artificially-produced dimensional shift.
That combination somehow locked the gate to this particular location.
And yeah, okay, so I didn’t fully get it... but Nik said it was based on the same technology they used to propel their ships long distances in a relatively short period of time. Neither the humans nor the morph could create an actual gate artificially, at least not yet, but they could open less-sophisticated portals within the same time sequence and the same dimension.
Those simpler portals could close distances between two fixed points.
Or, apparently, lock other dimensional portals to a single physical location.
Thinking about Nik and how I’d first gotten here, I frowned up at the archway’s illuminated stone edges. When I looked down that time, I found myself facing Nik himself. He was watching me from only a few yards away, his eyes a light color, maybe green or blue.
A lot more morph soldiers surrounded him than me.
They appeared to be doing something to his chest.
His shirt had been hiked up by two of them, so that it bunched up around his shoulders in front under the rain skin he wore. I glimpsed his white skin over ribs and corded muscle, contrasting sharply with the darkness of his coat and dark hair, and felt a reaction somewhere south of my belly, in spite of myself.
A third morph bent in front of him, holding a strange, hooked instrument. Whatever it was, he was using it to pry at something that looked glued, or stuck somehow, to the middle of Nik's chest.
"We have to unlock him to make the jump," a voice explained.
I jumped, turning to face Razmun.
I hadn't seen him approach on my other side.
He smiled, glancing me up and down, as if pleased that he'd managed to surprise me. Or maybe he thought he'd embarrassed me, while I stood gawking at a shirtless Nik. I couldn't tell for certain, since he wore the same shaded goggles I did, beaded with rain. He motioned me forward, so that we approached Nik and the four soldiers surrounding him together.
“All morph must be unlocked prior to a shift,” Razmun added, his lips still smiling faintly as we stopped in front of Nik. “...Not only the one controlling the shift."
I looked at Nik, feeling my stomach go cold for some reason.
"He's been locked all of this time," I muttered. My mouth curled into a deeper frown. “Huh.”
"Of course he's been locked." Razmun gave me a bemused look, but his voice bordered on irritated. "Do you really think I could have trusted him unlocked? What kind of fool do you take me for, Dakota?"
Pausing to glance at Nik, he grunted.
“He’s already been warned that he’ll have a tranquilizer gun on him for the duration of our prep... haven’t you, Jamri?” When Nik didn’t look at him, Razmun swiveled his attention back towards me. “He’ll be locked again upon our arrival at the staging site... at least, when he’s
not being restrained in other ways. He’s already informed me that he’d like some time alone with you, Dakota. For that and other reasons, I suppose we’ll have to work out a way to allow him to be unlocked at least part of the time.”
His smile stole perceptibly wider, but also a touch harder under the goggles.
“But do not be stupid enough to mistake me for a fool, Dakota Mayumi,” he warned. “I don’t give much for your long-term chances with Jamri, if you are that stupid. Not only will I probably end up having to kill you, just to keep you from endangering my people... but Jamri himself won’t tolerate it. My sister was one of the few who could keep up with him when we were kids... and she was considered a near-savant.”
I folded my arms, clenching my jaw a little, in spite of myself.
Nihkil, on the other hand, didn’t so much as spare Razmun a glance.
Instead, he continued to watch me.
I got the impression he was assessing me in some way, maybe gauging how I was handling all of this. Maybe he was trying to determine if he could count on me, if an opening presented itself. Maybe he also figured that any openings we got now were it... that it had to happen now, in the next however-long we had before we were permanently trapped in this mess... or not at all.
Or maybe, Nik had already decided to make his own opening.
Maybe he was trying to decide if I was ready for whatever it was he intended to do.
Whatever the case, all I could do was study Nik’s face in return, and try to understand what I saw. As far as being ready myself, apart from the rain skins still weighing me down, I felt about as high-strung and alert as could be expected.
Maybe more so, given that it was the equivalent of three in the morning and I was running on zero caffeine and almost no sleep, on an alien planet in the middle of a rainstorm while simultaneously gearing up for inter-dimensional travel and being kidnapped for use as leverage against my alien quasi-boyfriend.
Really, under the circumstances, I was doing A-Okay.
When I glanced at Nik that time, he gave me a faint smile.
For reasons I couldn't fully understand, I found myself returning it.
Just then, the morph crouching in front of Nik finished removing that black disc from the middle of Nik's chest. Once he held the thing in his hand, the other morph stepped back, leaving open the way for the other five morph to shove Nik forward.
He didn't fight them, just like I never saw him fight the Pharei soldiers on Palarine.
Instead, he kept his eyes on me as he allowed himself to be led towards the yawning opening of the high, stone gate.
30
GATE SHIFTING
I HAD NO idea what to expect.
My vague memories of that first time, when I'd followed Nik towards that bright light on what I’d assumed to be a regular golf course, didn’t help.
For one thing, everything happened so fast, I could scarcely remember it at all.
When I tried, I glimpsed pieces of that weirdly nostalgic transcendental feeling I’d had when the light first got brighter... almost a feeling of familiarity, like going home.
I remembered my mind whiting out. But I didn’t remember ever feeling like I’d been knocked unconscious, or like I’d fallen asleep.
I remembered the world disappearing in all that white, from the white stones at my feet to the dark trees and even the star-filled sky.
Then... nothing.
At least, nothing before I found myself on that other world, where it was daylight.
Once I landed, I remembered pretty much everything... Nik, the gate’s arch, those white stones, that near-purple sky and me gasping like a fish to try and get enough oxygen into my lungs. I’d been in shock. I mean, I must have been, right?
I remembered that strangely weightless feeling, like I couldn’t get purchase in the gravity on Trinith... but again, that probably came more from the physical realities of the planet itself, not anything to do with the gate-shift. The gravity on Trinith had simply been less than the gravity on Earth. Given that I’d never once been anywhere with less gravity than Earth, I’d had some trouble restoring my equilibrium, especially with those Malek soldiers implanting me and then wanting to rape me.
So yeah, that experience wasn’t particularly helpful.
Back then, I hadn't known even remotely what I’d just walked into.
Nothing would have convinced me that what ended up happening could have happened, not at the time, not even if I’d had a real chance to ponder the weirdness of that night. I'd thought I was walking towards a light. I'd lost Nik in that light, and I hadn’t been willing to lose him.
Really, it was as simple as that.
But yeah, okay, given everything I’d seen in that hour or so after Nik showed up to save me from my sociopathic “date”...much less Nik’s own warning not to follow him into that light... I’d still been pretty dumb.
As it turns out, hindsight regarding side-stepping inter-dimensional portals turns out to be as useless as hindsight in pretty much every other area of life.
Even so, as I watched Nik approach the gate on Vilandt, I couldn’t suppress a feeling of déjà vu. My throat went as dry as a bone as that stone arch loomed closer.
The guards didn’t let Nik get too close, however.
Nor did Razmun let me follow too closely behind Nik.
I figured both things were meant to prevent Nik from grabbing me and running for the gate on his own.
I still had no idea how the gate actually worked, even after all of those tutorials I’d devoured en route to Vilandt... but I got the basic rules surrounding the mechanics of what we’d be doing with Razmun. I’d read how that kind of thing worked, and how a single morph controlled the wave at any given time.
Despite that single point of control, a trained gate-shifter could bring a large number of people on a shift with him or her... at least, if those people crossed the line of the shift within a given time increment, like I had on Earth.
Large groups of individuals hadn’t been brought through the gates very often, but a number of cases were documented and all followed the same, basic pattern.
Generally, humans simply avoided allowing large groups of morph to traverse the gates together for security reasons. For one thing, they might be trapped on the other side, if something happened to the main gate-shifter who’d brought them through.
For another, they didn’t want to give the morph any opportunity to organize away from human eyes and ears... much less conduct a mass breakout, particularly one large enough to fight off whoever got sent after them. Truthfully, I suspected they would have paired humans with morph explorers, even changed the lock-mate system to accommodate that... if the vast majority of humans didn’t die during any kind of shift, paired or otherwise.
I had to hope I would be able to pull the trick off more than once.
Nik seemed to think so, based on how I’d performed in the last shift. But really, there was no way to know. The nearly three hundred morph I could see milling around the clearing shouldn’t have any problems, as long as they moved quickly and steadily through the gate’s opening, preventing the shift from ending prematurely... but I was a different story.
I was an anomaly, as Nik phrased it.
I thought through the rest of what Nik and the aboge told me about how gate-shifts worked.
Like the fact that only one, round-trip shift could occur on a given gate at a given time.
Meaning, once a gate-shift started, no one else could pass through that same gate to go somewhere else, not until the round trip on that shift had been completed, or the time window for the second leg expired.
If you tried to go through the gate with a new shift, you’d simply end up in the same location as whoever had conducted the gate-shift before you. Further, such double-jumping was risky, because sometimes it “completed the loop” of the shift, meaning, it prevented whoever left initially from returning to their starting point
.
In other words, if too much time passed after that first shift... if the round trip ticket was allowed to expire, so to speak... then the gate-shifters could find themselves stranded.
Well, unless they happened to land in a dimension with a stable gate already in place and they knew the shift coordinates well enough to find their way back by initiating a whole new round-trip gate shift. Otherwise, they were shit out of luck, as my dad would have said... at least, in terms of finding their way home.
Of course, they might still be able to stabilize a gate in their new locale, in time, but that wasn’t a given, either. It also didn’t guarantee they’d find their way home. They might not be trapped where they’d landed initially, but they could be stuck wandering for the rest of their lives, looking for something familiar... or until they started getting sick from the gates, which for most morph happened within a few dozen gate-shifts.
The other thing Nik told me was that the same navigator who controlled the first leg of a given shift had to control the second leg, as well.
In other words, whatever morph opened the loop of a given gate-shift had to close it.
So yeah, one person controlled where the jump went, and that same person controlled when and if it round-tripped. In a group-shift, everyone had to rely on that person. Once they'd arrived at the new point, he or she was the only one who could bring them home.
It was another reason the morph tended to gate-shift alone.
On this particular shift, Razmun would be our navigator, which meant he decided whether or not the loop closed.
He’d already made it crystal clear that he didn’t intend to close that loop, of course.
Even so, the reality of handing over control of something like that to Razmun didn’t really hit me until we were about to pass through the stone arch.
The exact timeframe of the loop closures varied from gate to gate, but the main thing was, Nik and I couldn't jump ourselves anywhere else, not until that timeframe expired.
