Event Horizon Threshold

by Kaitlyn O’Connor

  “Mine tell me it will fill my stomach.”

  Roslyn smiled with an effort. “Good point.”

  It tasted sour all the way through, but she found after a few bites that it had dulled her taste buds and emptied her salivary glands and she was able to eat it. It tasted like a cross between lemon and strawberry—nice flavor, just too tart for her preferences.

  But it was filling. “Thank you, Aurek—or whoever got them.”

  “It was Dylan.”

  She smiled at Dylan. “Thank you, Dylan.”

  He made faces and chuckled.

  Roslyn felt her face heat up, but she laughed. “It was sour. I can’t help it. I still appreciated the effort.”

  His eyes gleamed as they settled on her. “I happy, you happy.” He frowned. “Glad.”

  It was amazing how adorable a beautiful dark haired giant could be when they had trouble with their English—not that there was anything wrong with I’m happy you’re happy.

  It was the sentiment that counted and she’d felt pretty good about the gleam in his eyes, too.

  They packed up their entire camp and left when they’d finished eating, abandoning the mechanical pack dog since their equipment and supplies had dwindled until there was no reason they couldn’t carry everything themselves and the ‘dog’ slowed them down.

  They managed to get through the entire day without running afoul of the aliens or their cyborgs—at least as far as Roslyn was aware. They didn’t take detours. They took a more or less direct route to an area they hadn’t explored before, but Aurek seemed focused on a specific area and disinterested in stopping to explore anything.

  The building they eventually entered reminded Roslyn of some of the ancient temples she’d seen on Earth. It was built up at least a full story, with steep steps leading up to a vast, open floor—a flat area surrounded by the strange looking columns she’d seen around the city. There were remnants of what had once been walls made of giant stones and some of the giant stones scattered about the ‘interior’—which was roofless.

  Aurek advanced directly to what appeared to be an altar—for giants. Bracing his hands on it, he shoved it aside, revealing a deep, dark hole and narrow, steep stairs leading down.

  Roslyn stared at it in shock, then glanced at Aurek. “What is it?”

  “A gateway.”

  It was amazing how that one tiny sentence could throw her totally out of kilter. Naturally, her mind leapt instantly to ‘going home’. Before that could fully settle and the rise of excitement reach the stratosphere, though, she realized he’d said ‘a’ and also said they couldn’t go home because it would lead the aliens to Earth.

  That totally threw her into confusion, not the least because of the implication that he’d just found it.

  Like they were laying around all over the place, just waiting to be found.

  “You knew about this place?”

  He met her gaze for a long moment. “No.”

  He grasped her arm to support her as she headed down, compelling her by the pressure to take the stairs.

  Not that she would’ve fought him or anything, but she really didn’t want to go down. “But … it’s a gateway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, how did you find it?”

  “I detected it.”

  “How could …?” She bit her lip.

  He met her gaze for a long moment and looked away.

  There was absolutely nothing inferred by that, no expression. She was damned if she knew why she immediately felt like a bitch for bringing it up.

  Not that she had … exactly.

  “Is that … uh … how you would have found the threshold that you closed when we got here?”

  “I had triangulated that.”

  Between what damned points? They had had no references when they got there.

  If he triangulated then he had a lot more information than any of them had been given and she didn’t know what to think about that.

  It was as dark as the pits of hell when they got to the bottom. Except for the rectangle of light coming from the opening above them, there wasn’t a pinprick.

  Aurek strode across the blackness as if it was daylight.

  Roslyn was afraid to move away from the patch of light because the black was so thick it felt substantial.

  She folded her arms, trying to pierce the darkness and see what Aurek was doing.

  Dylan and Tor had remained at the top of the stairs, watching, she had to suppose, for the aliens that had been ghosting them almost since they’d arrived.

  That abruptly clicked in her mind.

  “Oh my god! Aurek! If you could detect it, can’t they?”

  She’d hardly gotten the question out when someone started firing. She couldn’t tell if it was Dylan and Tor or if they were being shot at. Aurek charged out of the darkness, flew through the air and landed about halfway up the stairs.

  That was when Roslyn realized they’d set their supplies down on the floor above them.

  They were pinned down and even if they could get the gateway to open they’d have to leave their supplies.

  And as slim as they were getting, they still needed what there was.

  The tent and sleeping bags might be the rock bottom level of comfort, but without them there was no comfort at all—water bottles, the makings for fire, the few changes of clothing … the compression suits and air tanks!

  They sent Tor out to grab their supplies and toss them down.

  He got shot four times before he managed to grab even half and throw them down.

  He hobbled back for another load, though.

  Roslyn covered her mouth with her hands in horror, struggling to stay silent when she knew distracting the guys would just be that much more dangerous.

  Finally, Dylan dragged Tor in and went to retrieve the remainder.

  He was shot all to hell, too, by the time he’d made it down the stairs.

  Roslyn didn’t realize she was sobbing until Dylan gathered her close and patted her back to comfort her—comfort her! “Is ok. Nanos will fix. You see.”

  It wasn’t ok, damn it! He was hurting. She could see he was in pain, and poor Tor, too. Tor nodded. “Long as head not shot off, ok.”

  Dylan glared at him.

  Tor shrugged.

  Roslyn sniffed. “Is there anything I can do? To help, I mean?”

  “Put your suit on,” Aurek commanded from his position near the top of the stairs, “now.”

  She looked up at him, struggling with the order.

  “For gateway,” Dylan said.

  “But … we don’t know where it’ll take us.”

  “Way from here,” Tor muttered. “Good enough.”

  Not necessarily, Roslyn thought, but they were trapped. If Aurek ran out of ammunition they could just walk up to the opening and pick them off like fish in a barrel. She used the light on her camera to find the suits, everybody’s and handed Tor and Dylan theirs and then put Aurek’s on the bottom stair and started struggling into hers.

  She looked up at Aurek, who’d been shooting sporadically—maybe to save ammunition and maybe because he couldn’t get clear targets.

  Or maybe just to make them keep their distance?

  “Do you want me to bring yours up? I can shoot while you put it on.”

  He sent her a speculative look. “This weapon?”

  “Well, uh, I haven’t used that, no. I have shot a gun before, though. You know, point and pull the trigger?”

  He summoned her.

  She moved up the stairs and passed the suit to him.

  He shook his finger in her face. “Do not touch this thing … ever!”

  Roslyn gave him a mulish look. “Ok, that’s enough macho man! I can hold a gun and shoot!”

  “And if they shoot back and blow your head off? They are cyborgs, Roslyn. They will not miss.”

  She felt a little nauseated at that thought.

  Ok, so she hadn’t thought it through. She’d never shot a
t anything more dangerous than a can of beans.

  He pulled her close, tipping her chin up to make her look at him. “If you die, I have nothing.”

  Roslyn blinked at him, feeling the urge to cry. “What do I have if you die?”

  “Dylan and Tor … and, the gods willing, our offspring.”

  Roslyn felt like her jaw dropped to the step below. A wave of dizziness washed over her.

  “Dylan!” Aurek growled. “Take her to stand by the gateway and power it up.”

  Dylan limped up the steps, grabbed her and tossed her over his shoulder.

  Then bounded down the steps again.

  Roslyn felt every step.

  By the time he set her on her feet the blood had rushed to her head and she nearly passed out.

  He forced her to sit and left her sitting in the pitch black, too blind to know if she was even close to anything.

  She began patting the floor around her when it occurred to her that she could be sitting beside a fifty food drop and wouldn’t know it.

  “You lose something?” Tor asked, practically in her face.

  She jumped, slapping him instead of grabbing his arm. “Sorry! I can’t see anything.”

  She started feeling him, trying to decide where his head was. He grasped her hand and guided it … right to his crotch. She gasped when he wiggled it and she figured out what it was and popped his thigh. He laughed. “No can see alright.”

  As irritated as she was, she was upset when he left again.

  The gateway felt like it was going to suck her in when Dylan began to power it up. “Dylan? Tor?”

  One of them helped her to her feet and put her helmet on and checked the air valve control.

  Then left her standing.

  She saw light begin to shimmer in the gateway, though—the lights of a million, million stars.

  Aurek ran toward her, snatched her off her feet, and dove across the threshold behind Tor, Dylan and the last of their supplies.

  It was pitch black when they landed.

  Roslyn was terrified for a handful of moments that she’d gone blind, but she discovered when she turned her head that she could make out deeper shadows within the shadows and, slowly, her eyes adjusted to a faint glow from the night stars.

  They were in a jungle.

  Aurek, Dylan, and Tor were very busy … doing something at the threshold where they’d landed. Whatever it was, they were in a dead heat to get it done in a hurry. Grabbing the containers once they’d slammed them and locked them, Tor and Dylan led the way. Aurek grabbed Roslyn and slung her across his shoulder and took off at a jogging pace that nearly cracked her ribs.

  She wasn’t able to complain, however. All she could do was try to brace herself to keep the pain down to a bearable level.

  Thankfully, they didn’t keep running. When they’d distanced themselves from the portal, they dove behind a fallen tree, unslung their rifles, and aimed them at a point Roslyn couldn’t see.

  Bugs began to swarm and buzz around them.

  Roslyn felt her muscles slowly tightening and beginning to cramp.

  Abruptly, all hell broke loose. The portal opened. The monster cyborgs stepped through and an explosion lit up the entire jungle around them, sending dirt and leaves and fire and pieces of cyborgs up fifty feet into the sky.

  “Stay put!” Aurek growled, bounding over the tree they’d taken cover behind and racing toward the disaster they’d created with Dylan and Tor right behind him.

  They moved from one to another, finishing them with their rifles and then headed back to collect Roslyn.

  It was almost like watching an action movie about war unfolding and being in the middle of the shoot.

  Except it was too horribly real.

  They weren’t in a movie.

  And she didn’t have any idea where they were.

  And the guys had just blown up the gateway back to the planet that might have been their only chance to get home—or be found.

  She swallowed with an effort when the guys reached her. “Did you get them all?” she asked shakily.

  “All that came through,” Aurek said grimly.

  Chapter Ten

  Roslyn was about ready to drop when Aurek finally called a halt and the guys set up their campsite—for the first time with no fire.

  She wondered what difference it would make. It seemed to her that none of the guys had trouble seeing in the dark and if they were cyborgs and the others that were after them were then they wouldn’t be hidden even without the fire.

  Which tended to discourage animals.

  That was the only deviation from what had become their routine, though. One stayed awake to keep watch while the others slept.

  And Aurek pulled her close to sleep.

  Decide the doubts rambling around her mind like buzzards circling a carcass, she didn’t make any attempt to resist.

  Not that it would have changed anything beyond his perception … maybe.

  But she didn’t want him to feel like she didn’t want him to cuddle her. She knew it was more of an illusion than reality that she was completely safe as long as she was in his arms, but she needed that illusion.

  In any case, she found it hard to believe in moments like this that he was a cyborg as he claimed, clearly thought he was.

  But was it unbelievable? Or was it just that she didn’t want to believe it?

  The things he’d done that she’d seen …. She knew he was capable—they all were—of things no human being could do.

  At the pit—she hadn’t actually registered that Aurek had lifted her clear of the ground, over his head, and tossed her to Dylan as if she was a … softball or a Frisbee.

  And Dylan had caught her.

  It wasn’t just the ability of lifting and tossing her weight. It was the way they’d done it—effortlessly.

  To protect her.

  He’d been angry with her, she realized, when she’d demanded to be allowed to help.

  “If I lose you, I have nothing.”

  A lump formed in her throat when she remembered that.

  Nobody had ever told her anything that beautiful, that heart wrenching.

  He wasn’t incapable of feeling emotions if he thought that, felt it, was he?

  But then she wanted to believe, didn’t she? So how could she trust her own perceptions when she’d seen him as a man from the beginning? And everything she’d thought and felt had been about a man.

  How real was it if he wasn’t a real man?

  She fell asleep wrestling with it and woke up unhappy because he’d abandoned her.

  She got a far better look at the jungle when she climbed out of the tent. They’d pitched the tent in a fairly clear area—or maybe cleared it themselves, but it was crowded enough with greenery that it seemed primeval.

  It looked a lot like a south American jungle, though, and for a little while she felt buoyed by the hope that it actually was. Somehow, they’d leapt through another gateway and ended up back home!

  The sun that presently peaked over the horizon wasn’t the one she’d grown up with, though.

  There were two of them, as a matter of fact.

  A binary system.

  Common, from what she’d heard, more common that systems with a single star.

  It flickered through her mind that it couldn’t be stable enough to support life, but it obviously supported it very well if the jungle was any indication.

  The guys, she saw, had discarded their suits.

  Considering the bugs battering at her and trying to get to her the night before, Roslyn was reluctant to take hers off, but she would need the protection if they went through another gateway.

  Or back through the one they’d come through.

  “Are we going to just wait here a few days and go back through the gateway to the other place?” she asked Aurek when they settled to eat more of the mouth puckering fruit Dylan had found for them.

  “No.”

  She looked at him, her lips tight w
ith irritation. It was really annoying how often he did that! Just no. No elaboration, no explanation, just no.

  He studied her expression for a long moment. “There is no way to activate the gateway from this side and the others might still follow us through. We killed only half of the cyborgs they had with them.

  “We need to find the gateway on this side.”

  Rosyln gaped at him. “How do you know there will be one?”

  “The ancestors that led us here left the gateways for their children to find their way home when it was time.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I am.”

  She shook her head at him. “How do you know this?”

  He shrugged. “It is in my programming.”

  “So you knew all of this from the beginning?”

  “No.”

  One of these days …!

  “You should be glad I’m not as big as you,” she growled at his back as he began gathering things to leave.

  He sent her a startled look. “Why?”

  “Because I would kick your ass all over this damned jungle,” she snarled.

  Dylan uttered a laugh he tried unsuccessfully to hide as a cough.

  Tor grinned, but wiped it off when Aurek glared at the two of them.

  He looked vaguely amused and insulted when he faced her again. “I cannot tell you what I cannot access.”

  “You could tell me that, damn it! Instead of leaving me to wonder what you aren’t telling me that you do know!”

  “She is very … bad temper,” Dylan observed.

  Tor nodded. “Making baby.”

  “I am not ‘making baby’ and there’s nothing wrong with my temper,” Roslyn said irritably. She rolled her eyes. “Men! They screw you one time and they’re convinced they’ve made a baby!”

  Aurek sent her a speculative look. “Takes more than one time?”

  She felt her face heat. “To hit the mark! It only takes once, but it’s … like hitting a moving target.”

  Oh she was in trouble now!

  She pretended she didn’t notice when the guys exchanged a long, speaking look.

  Maybe they’d have time to forget it before nightfall?

  When they’d secured everything, Aurek struck off as if he had a map in his hand or a guide in front of him—like he knew exactly where he was going and how to get there.