by Pam Uphoff
***
The Helaos had spotted them, there were commands being snapped but Ebsa couldn't make them out over the distressed cheeping of the Triceratops pups.
Ebsa bit his lip. "The gate is . . . damn it, a third of the way around their camp." He blinked at movement on the far side of the Helaos' camp. Triceratops, size extra large, lots of them.
Heads up, looking this direction. Ebsa eyed the pups. Stepped over and grabbed one by the tail. The cheeps redoubled. Rose in volume. Across the camp, the triceratops started moving.
"That's a really big herd." Ra'd grabbed the other pup. It shrieked.
"Ooo, you nasty Dinosaur kicker, you!" Ebsa had to laugh at Ra'd indignant glance.
"He tripped me!"
The chick shrieked again.
The entire triceratops herd charged. He heard the snap of gunfire. A few dinos swerved, tents started falling . . .
"Umm, guys?" Nighthawk sounded a bit worried. "However much fun it would be to watch them smush the whole Helaos camp, most of them appear to be coming in this direction!"
"Right." Ebsa gave Ugly Puppy a last pet, then put him down and headed for the door of the crawler, suspended in mid air a few inches off the ground. Nighthawk gave the stick a worried glance, and jumped inside. Ra'd was on Ebsa's heels, and shut the door behind him.
Ebsa stepped over Yffi's limp body in the middle of the floor and looked around. Up. "Nighthawk, can you open the bubble over the hatch so we can see what's happening?"
She brightened. "Good plan." She detoured to the kitchen and grabbed two knives. Then up the ladder. She stood there for a bit then eased back down. "We're surrounded by dinosaurs. I think we'd better just sit it out." She frowned at Yffi. "I can't believe he did that."
Ebsa sighed. "I ought to have seen what he was going to do sooner, and stopped him." He glanced at Ra'd.
:: Do not ever tell her I was caught with my pants down in the lav. ::
:: A little humor helps relationships. ::
:: This is Nighthawk, not Paer. ::
:: Has it ever occurred to you that she might enjoy seeing you as a fallible human. She's already impressed. Don't let that slide over into intimidated. ::
Snort. Ra'd leaned over Yffi. "I hope I didn't hit him too hard. He was totally manic."
Nighthawk handed over her bottle of wine. "Don't give him much. He deserves to hurt."
Ebsa left them to it, and started cleaning up salad, all over the floor, not to mention the dinosaur poop, put the chairs away, tossed the dinos' bedding in the wash.
He helped heave the sleeping Yffi into a bunk and took a turn up the ladder, pulling the knives apart and taking a look. They weren't exactly surrounded, but the fringes of the herd were close by on two sides, looking alert and restless. No distressed cheeps. I'm certain they adopted the orphans. If they were of a mind to trample them, they wouldn't have come when they heard chicks in distress. Right?
On the other side, the trampled remains of the Helaos' camp. If there were survivors, they must have departed. I. . . did that. Killed them as surely as I killed the men I shot.
He closed up the knives and slid down the ladder. "So, anyone hungry? I c . . ." he swallowed suddenly. "I could make . . . something."
Ra'd frowned at him. "Are you all right?"
Ebsa glanced his direction, and away. "I . . . never killed anyone before."
"Oh." Ra'd stepped over and gripped his shoulder. "Yeah. It . . . it's a thing we all wish we had never needed to do. Yes, even me. I won't vouch for Isakson, though." He punched something up on the fab. "Carbs. Helps with stress."
Nighthawk nodded. "Sorry, Eb. You're so cool and competent it always surprises me that you haven't done so many things. I . . . there were these bandits . . . when I was sixteen." She sighed. "Punch up some more carbs, Ra'd. I think we all need them."
Ra'd snorted. "You were saving Yffi, and me, for that matter. Remember that."
Ebsa sank his head in his hands. "No I wasn't. I didn't even fire the damned gun until some poor damned soldier took aim at Ugly."
Silence.
Broken by sudden laughter. From both of them.
Ra'd was still snickering as he tapped away at the kitchen fab. "More carbs. Chocolate. We definitely need chocolate. But then we really need to get out of here."
Chapter Seventeen
5 Rajab 1405 yp
World EM 0925
The Triceratops herd moved far enough away for safety by sundown. Ebsa stepped out carefully, keeping an eye on the nearest. They eyed him as he picked up the stick and walked away.
He pulled out an unnoticeable spell and veered to examine the remains of the Helaos camp.
Dammit all, but start to finish, they attacked every time they saw us. Not to mention the kids they kidnapped. A faint whimpering sound . . . A soldier, his legs trapped under a squashed vehicle.
Crap. Ignore him, or . . . take prisoners? Lots of pins and stuff on the uniform, an officer, maybe?
He set the stick down and opened the door. "So, shall we take prisoners, or leave the wounded to scavengers?"
"Scavengers! They deserve it!" Yffi yelled.
Ra'd hopped out and eyed the officer. "No such thing as too much intel. Let's take him." He pulled out his bubble and maneuvered it over the man.
They collected thirteen more Helaos as they crossed the remains of the camp. The twilight was fading as they approached the gully where the gate to Embassy had been . . . last week? Ebsa had lost track of days, somewhere in there.
A tall figure melted out of nowhere. "That was an impressive bit of mayhem."
Comet Fall accent, a voice he'd heard once, years ago.
Nighthawk trotted over for a hug. "Hi Dad. I'm home."
"And high time. The Oner Ambassador is throwing fits." He tossed a quick grin Ebsa's direction. "Come and explain everything to him. Please."
Ebsa swallowed. Nodded at the stick in his hand. "Umm, Nighthawk? Can you unbubble the crawler? I'd much rather make an entrance in a large vehicle, rather than on foot."
She reached out and poked thin air. The crawler thumped down. Then she walked over and leaned on Ra'd.
Ebsa strolled away . . . heard peeping noises and stepped out to watch two triceratops pups make a frantic beeline for home and safety . . . and no doubt, tomatoes.
"Don't you dare bring those things back aboard!" Yffi yelled.
Wolfson started laughing. "Pet dinosaurs? No wonder you were all Paer ever talked about when she was on Embassy." He pulled a bit of metal out of nowhere and ran his fingers along it, lengthening it. Made some snatching motions, and offered a small metal rod. "Here. Double bubbled, so they really won't experience any time. Do not ever get in it yourself. Too much time goes by in just seconds. But you never know when you'll need a dinosaur."
Ebsa blinked, grinned. "Yeah." He split the rod, opened the bubble and scooped up the pups.
"Let's go. We really do need to close this gate. We had a raptor come through two days ago." Wolfson turned and walked back through the gate.
Ebsa cleared his throat noisily. "Ra'd, we really do have to report in expeditiously, and um." Sigh. "Since Nighthawk is getting so good with gates and so forth, I suspect we'll see her fairly often."
Ra'd finally stepped back. "Yes. We'll make it happen. Kiss Oak for me."
Nighthawk actually looked like she was on the verge of tears. She turned and trotted through the gate.
Ebsa climbed aboard and took the driver's seat. Waited until Ra'd was aboard, and drove back to Embassy. This time he kept going, turning and only stopping when the Directorate Guards at the Empire's embassy stepped out to block him.
Someone must have already told them that the lost agents were back. The man stomping out toward them was the Subdirector of Action and Exploration. Subdirector Ebko did not look pleased to see them.
"So . . . since when did 'move that crawler' become a euphemism for . . . "
Ebsa could hear his teeth gritting.
". . . On
e damned heroics . . . best left to trained Action Agents?"
Ebsa dropped his voice. "Sir, we have eighteen Helaos prisoners. I assumed we would prefer to question them ourselves . . . "
"Shut up . . . and . . . drive through that gate. Right. Now." He pointed at the gate back to One World.
"Yes sir."
Epilogue
15 Rajab 1405 yp
World EM 0925
Ten days of verbal reports, written reports, questions, rewrites and updates . . .
Ebsa staggered back into warehouse sixty-three and collapsed in the nearest chair. "Please, send me back into the field. It's much less exhausting than these endless questions."
Acty laughed. "Well, the rest of us have just been given two weeks leave. They said they'd finally get our permanent gate from the fort to the algae world, but then the army stepped in and said they'd use it to observe the Helaos. We're probably going to have to start over on a different world."
"So are they going to clear out all the Helaos?" I have a nasty suspicion I'm not going to be taking a vacation.
Ra'd snorted as he walked out of his room. "They decided it was better to watch them and see what happens. They're hoping to find out if the Helaos can relocate worlds without a beacon. So the Military Intel units are going to be out of the fort as soon as they can set up their own, closer to the Helaos."
"Hopefully all their interactions will be completely out of the study area. So we can go back to collect the data still being recorded by the cams. I, umm suggested that since the Helaos army got trampled into their study area, we might want to relocate to a pristine dinosaur world." Acty sighed. "They carried on about losing two years of baseline data. So . . . we'll see how soon anyone actually goes back."
"I'm surprised they want to." Ebsa looked around the shabby warehouse. Say goodbye, Ebsa. Team Forty-eight is going to move on without you.
"Even Yffi, although he was a bit jumpy when I talked to him yesterday. Most of the scientists want to go back. I think they enjoyed the excitement, since it never came down to an all out attack."
Ebsa hunched his shoulders. "Maybe you should try to limit the number of scientists actually Across at any given time. With a permanent gate they can come and go at a low cost."
"Oh, good idea." Acty looked over his shoulder. "I'm turning in the Junkyard, and requisitioning two armored All Terrain Vehicles, so we're a bit more mobile. So fewer scientists on site at a time would help with that as well."
Ebsa glanced at the crawler. Between corridors and gates, most of the glued on herbage was gone, just a few leaves left in the dents. "Good thing they'd already decided it wasn't good for anything but parts." Poor loyal machine! Never let us down.
Acty nodded. "Our budget has been increased to cover some squishies for the team. We've . . . been found competent in the field. Thanks to you two."
Ra'd waved it away. "You just needed a bit of experience."
"And you two to show us how to do it right."
"Any idea if this is a permanent assignment for any of us?" Ebsa tried to keep the wistful tones out of his voice.
Acty shrugged. "We'll find out in two weeks. Umm, I've been told you're going to be staying here, for an indefinite period."
Ebsa groaned. "Oh no. Not more questions!"
"It's what you two get for being heroes." Pie grinned. "But, Ebsa, even if they don't let us keep you, I think you've probably escaped from assignment as an office clerk. Ra'd . . . umm . . . "
"I'm doomed to be assigned to Action Teams. But with luck I can get one that handles Ebsa's kind of action."
"Hey! None of that was my fault . . . was it?"
Excerpt from an upcoming release
The Last Merge
Pam Uphoff
Part One—Before the Storm
Embassy World
Disco Headquarters
Xen hid a smile as he watched his sister try to explain what was plain to her to so many people who, however intelligent, were, for the most part, not cross-dimensional experts.
"And this thinner spray of worlds are Earths that had devastating nuclear wars. The One World is one of them." Thin gray lines, thousands of them, forming a stringy fog over a wide wedge of her model.
"What are these oddball colored lines going across?" The President of the Empire of the One was studying the translucent 3-D illusion intently.
"I call them strays. Worlds so different than the worlds they split from that they've gone zinging off in unexpected directions, very far from the clusters of the more common differences that split their worlds." Q sighed. "It's . . . I really wish you lot would develop some machinery that could measure these things. In any case, the red lines, if you follow them back, departed from the main dinosaur line about sixty five million years ago, but internally have only experienced a few hundreds of thousands of years, sometimes much less. They're both rare and scattered. The blue are primitive worlds. A departure from ours at about fifty-thousand years ago, with perhaps ten to twenty-thousand years experienced internally. Also rare, but with a much tighter grouping as they cross the area of interest.
"However, what I want to show is that I've backtracked the Helios' micro-universe across the various membranes." A black line sprung up, wiggling through the cloudy specks of thousands, perhaps millions of other membranes—parallel universes.
"Why isn't the line straight." One of the physicists glared at the model.
"I think that having been ripped away from its home membrane, it—all five stars and however many planets and asteroids—it is no longer orbiting the galactic center. But it passes through other membranes every few years and gravitational attraction jerks it around, closer to the equivalent bodies, even though it doesn't merge."
Xen frowned. "Wouldn't that be a little rough on the other brane? Surely they'd get jerked too?"
"Yep." She stuck her finger in the model. "Note that it wandered across the Hygeia branch. I suspect that has a lot to do with the planetary scale devastation so many of our branch's branes have experienced."
Xen leaned and tracked the black line to its end, deep in the nuclear war branch. "And now?"
"Now." Q reached and flipped a small tab of metal over, turning off the imbued illusions. She flipped a second tab over to the "on" side. A close up, now, with the membranes as small gray crumples trailing the faint threads of their past positions.
The black line showed slight course changes where it passed through one crumpled membrane and clipped another.
Q tapped the first crumple. "It's been a year since it merged with—and ripped the Earth out of—that membrane. It appears to have been slightly diverted from a straight path. It has just passed XC 12634. A world so devastated by nuclear war that no humans and damn few animals survived."
"It bent again, we could measure it." The Oner expert, Esna Withione was leaning forward, glaring as if Q was responsible for the looming disaster.
"Good. Good that you could measure it."
"If it keeps going straight now . . . " Dr. Esna scowled and poked. "Is that the One World?"
"No, that's EP 11566. It's going to be close. Possibly close enough to change its course, but not close enough to merge. The course change will be entirely the wrong direction, for us. We had every indication that it was going to miss the One World, but the last encounter has pulled it back on course. This will make it even worse.
"I have placed hundreds of gates between Helios and this settled world up here, in hopes that it will influence the course of Helios. But that is an Inhabited World so while I'll use it to add to any divergence, I'll release it if the pull looks like it could encourage a merge. I am also in the process of placing my storm of gates up to this world up here, another X World, in hopes of further countering any deflection toward the One World." Q drew a dozen parallel lines to the world she hoped would anchor the Helios miniverse.
"Then the next three encounters. You can see that there's a Dino World, and a Primitive World crossing paths—not overlapp
ing—as they cruise through going different directions. And then the One World."
The growing cone of the Helios miniverse's possible paths included the One's crumpled membrane, off center, but not comfortably off.
"If the next world bends its path . . . " Urfa looked pale, lines of stress marred his usually calm expression.
"It might still miss. There are two more worlds I can try to steer it toward." Q met his gaze. "I need you to monitor the situation, well, I know you will, but I need you to tell me if it's working."
"Of course, we have no way to tell if it's what you're doing or the natural result of a close pass."
"Of course. But if it pulls it even a little, I can repeat with the Dino World, and again with the Primitive World. Those are both possible merges. We will not stop trying."
"Q?" Xen stared at her, horrified. "You're going to try to merge it with an inhabited world?"
"Yes. As an absolute last resort. Because we can evacuate a few million people a lot more easily than a few billion." She looked away from him.
Oh. Bloody. Hell . . . And she looks like she's going to cry, but she's right. No matter how many people we'd miss trying to evacuate a Primitive World, it'll be orders of magnitude less than the number who refuse to budge from their homes on the One World. But what right do we have, to choose which world to sacrifice?
"Right." He swallowed, and sat back, a bit relieved at the appalled expressions on the Oners' faces. "So . . . how are the suburb worlds doing?"
The President finally relaxed, sitting back as his eyes crinkled with humor. "Oh. One. You have changed so many dynamics, I don't know where to start. But we have infrastructure in place and being expanded, on twelve Empty Worlds. So the twelve largest metropolitan areas could be evacuated in days. Which would barely be five percent of the population."
"We'll put up a whole lot of gates, at need. To those worlds, and your other colonies."
