Multiverse: Stories Across Realms

by Steve Rzasa

  “And I advise strongly against waiting around for nightfall, so we get nabbed by the guys who shot us or get eaten by the local fauna.”

  “I’m a fan of neither, so let’s go with Aaron’s proposal.” I waggled my fingers. “I could use the laser as a crutch.”

  Aaron twisted, shielding the weapon from me as if it were his only child. “No way.”

  “All right, fine, but somebody’d better cut me a stick as a substitute.”

  Ten minutes later, thanks to my Swedish-made Fallkniven blade, I limped at a steady slog with a branch tucked under my arm. It was only then I realized my backpack was gone. No straps, no bag, not even a scrap of fabric. “What’s our supply status?”

  “My medical kit, and the provisions I packed,” Trini said.

  “Aaron?”

  He shrugged, but only with one shoulder. The other stayed stiff. “Pack’s gone, like yours.”

  “When you say provisions, Trini, you mean—”

  “A bottle of water with a UV filter, a bag of raisins, and crackers.”

  Aaron shook his head. “I had beef jerky in mine.”

  “You’re going to miss that. How’s your shoulder?”

  “Fine.” The sheen of perspiration on Aaron’s face told me otherwise.

  Trini waved the scanner across his arm. Whatever the red indicators showed her, the results were enough to wrinkle her nose. “Aaron! It’s dislocated!”

  “Set it for me after we find shelter. We need to move as far as possible.”

  “That is what I’m doing.” I glanced over the edge. “Okay, the good news is, we can climb down.”

  Trini made a face. “The bad news is it’s thirty feet.”

  “You’re telling me. Let’s go.” I tried to focus on what Sandra and Griff would do with Chesapeake, and whether we should chance a transmission through the waves of static.

  Anything but the pain.

  Sandra tried Channel One. Then Two. Then Three.

  All swamped with static.

  “Sandy! Get down here, Sandy!”

  It didn’t help Griff hollering her name. “Gonna land first, Griff, if you don’t mind.”

  Chesapeake balked at every maneuver. Having a big hole open to the sky would make any aircraft difficult to fly. This ship? Especially touchy when damaged. The Ghiqasu put together a marvelous bird, but one that moved best when every surface was uninjured.

  Sandra found rock outcroppings behind a hill, facing away from the LZ. Good enough cover. She pulled in the wings and set Chesapeake down.

  The engines hadn’t even died down and she was halfway to the landing hatch.

  Precious Lord. The thing was ripped clean off. Her heart squeezed. They were gone. All three of them. Like they’d never existed. No blood, either.

  “Sandy.” Griff stomped down from the upper deck. He was shorter than her, wiry, with black hair that stayed perfectly slicked in place no matter the turbulence. His blue coveralls were smeared and smudged. They were patched with tougher material at the knees and a few former rips on the arms were sewn shut. “What happened?”

  “We took fire.” She knelt, ran a finger along the ragged edge where the ramp had been. “Particle weapon. Blew the hatch clean out, ripped off the ramp.”

  “Are they…?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t get an answer on comms. I’ll have to review the scan logs.” The sky was shot through with pink. Dusk. And the day is almost gone.

  “Gāi sĭ. I can get the auto-seal fixed, block it off.”

  “Good enough to get me airborne?”

  “Yeah, but not above low atmosphere. It’s going to take me the better part of the day to prep us for orbit.”

  “Then do the temp fix and get started on the rest. I’m not waiting around much longer. We’ll light up the whole planet with searchlights if we have to.”

  “Are we going back for them now? The guys who hit us are probably waiting to take a second shot. Look, I want to get them back—if they’re alive—but to risk the whole ship—”

  “My Daddy flew Phantoms in Vietnam. Did I ever tell you about his wingman getting shot down? Daddy saw the plane hit, saw the chute deploy. He circled through Vietcong anti-aircraft fire and SAM strikes until he almost ran out of fuel. Took too many holes in the fuselage. But he didn’t leave his wingman until the Hueys swept in and secured the area.”

  Griff nodded. “I’ll get on it.”

  He popped a panel beside the broken hatch, and was soon head and shoulders inside. Sandra didn’t bother asking how it looked. When Griff got talking to himself in Mandarin, it was best to walk away.

  All she could do was try the comms again, and pray for the safety of her people.

  I scrounged enough dry wood and plant life for a modest fire. No need to worry about a spark, thankfully; Aaron set the Sidewinder on low pulse, high intensity, and got a blaze going with a single flash.

  A tree limb as wide as Chesapeake’s landing ramp sheltered us from the downpour. Leaves across the forest had shriveled up, like umbrellas furled. Water slammed into the ground so hard dirt leapt up, spattering on leaves, ferns, rocks, and the thick, yellow-green moss that sheathed every root I could see. I sank against the trunk. Pain lanced through my leg, a nice reminder it was still intact.

  Trini sat beside me. Her face was streaked with grime and sweat. Blood caked the cut on her forehead. “How does it feel?”

  “Terrible. Six hours of hiking will do that.”

  Aaron stepped into the circle of light projected by the fire. “No sign of anybody out there. They don’t seem to be looking for us.”

  “Now that you’ve taken care of our flank, let Trini set your shoulder.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Sit down!” Trini standing in front of Aaron with her hands on her hips reminded me of Mother. She’d scolded my brother and I with the same imperious gaze when we took Father’s car my senior year. Trini had to crane her neck to meet Aaron’s eyes.

  He did his one-armed shrug and perched on the nearest root. Trini got her hands around his arm, bracing her feet against the base of the trunk. “Breathe deep.”

  Aaron just nodded.

  She moved so fast, it was over before I could blink. Only the sharp pop and Aaron’s muffled shout told me it was done. He went deathly pale.

  “I said breathe.” Trini rubbed her hands on his back. “Easy.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You boys are a mess.”

  I poked at the fire with a stick. “Let’s make the most of it. What do we know about the LZ?”

  “Scanner transferred everything to me before we went down,” Aaron said. “Eight Rycole, one Ghiqasu, just like the job said. But there’s a few more.”

  “That’d be great if either of us still have our tablets.”

  “Like I said, you’re both a mess.” Trini held up hers with a flourish. “I got the same data, remember?”

  “Well played. Show me the scans.”

  They were grainy, though the ship’s computer must have enhanced the images I saw before the attack. Six more aliens accompanied the Rycole. These were tall as humans, thin with ropy muscles, narrow faces and heads stretched too far back. Big ears, too—huge, like the fennec foxes of North Africa.

  “What’re those?” Aaron asked.

  “Yakadrii. A wandering species. Scavengers, mostly, who abandoned their home planet. They had a series of devastating wars about the same time Napoleon was firing cannon into the faces of Royalists at Tuileries Palace. They’re not members of the Consociation, nor are they enemies, but they can be collective pains in everyone’s backsides. Robbery, smuggling, kidnapping.”

  “I can take them all down, without them seeing us.”

  “Yes, but they can hear us from a good distance. Very sensitive auditory nerves, these ones. Their eyes, though, have protective membranes. You can’t stun them.”

  “I wasn’t talking about stunning.”

  Trini slapped his arm. The injured one. Aaron grim
aced. “You can’t kill them!” she said. “We can’t do that!”

  “Morally she has a point, Aaron, and legally, if we take lethal action against a sentient species within Consociation boundaries—” I snapped my fingers. “There go our transit visas. Poof. No trips through the Big Ring. We’d be stuck at Earth and her attendant planets without a way to pay Chesapeake’s lease, unless you feel like hauling platinum group metals from the asteroids.”

  Aaron, to his credit, didn’t argue. “What about their ride?”

  There was a small vehicle, a ground transportation sled I’d never seen before, nestled beside the downed Rycole vessel. Hard to tell from the IR but it appeared to be partially loaded with containers. “Nothing in the rules about property damage.”

  Aaron patted the laser rifle. He leaned back against the tree, cap tipped down over his face.

  “So what is our plan?” Trini asked.

  “We need to get the Yakadrii in one place. Only then can we restrain them all.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “With a distraction.”

  Aaron chuckled. I wished he wouldn’t every time I suggest such a thing.

  Trini frowned. “You’re going to talk to them, aren’t you.”

  “I am. But first I’m going to try punching through this static on the radio.”

  And hope Sandra was listening.

  Her hands ached. She hadn’t slept all night.

  But Sandra wasn’t going to put down the acetylene torch until the last temporary panel was welded into place.

  Griff worked beside her, taciturn. The self-repair system hadn’t responded. They’d been left with no choice but to rig up hull parts from Chesapeake’s storage for a fix.

  The radio clipped to her belt crackled to life. Sandra had left it on, hoping for a break in the constant jamming. The static cleared out. “Captain? If you can hear me, please respond.”

  More silence. “Todd, this is Sandra. I know you’re transmitting but I can’t hear anything.”

  Beeps. A series of beeps, repeating.

  “Morse code?” Griff asked.

  Sandra held a finger to her lips. The pattern repeated. Then it cut out, midway through the third repetition. Static reigned.

  Griff wiped his brow. “Give it another hour or so, we’ll have the breach sealed up. I’ve got some stabilizers I can yank from the port wing strut to reinforce.”

  Sandra nodded, mulling what she’d just heard.

  “LZ, I get,” Griff said. “But what’s Track Two?”

  I limped into the clearing carved by the crashed Rycole ship. Sunrise gave the sky a nice red hue, a welcome change from the blues and blacks of the early morning. The leaves overhead extended, fanning out to triple their size, shading their roots and catching the rays.

  My body couldn’t make up its mind whether I should collapse and sleep, or keep up this insane idea. The adrenaline prodded me along.

  “Morning, kids!” I waved cheerily.

  First part went exactly as I hoped. All six Yakadrii surrounded me. They were covered with short fur, ranging in color from maize to burgundy. Their outfits were cobbled together from a variety of cloaks, jackets, coveralls—wait, were those Muck boots? Such is the galactic economy fifteen years after Earth joined the Consociation. Each carried a weapon I assumed was built to unleash charged particles at flesh, but they held them like humans wielded regular guns. Some things truly were universal.

  A quick glance told me the prisoners were alive and relatively well. Eight young Rycole were huddled together by a fallen tree, stuck with their backs to the Y of the limbs. The ninth alien, a Ghiqasu, was tied to the largest limb. This fellow was six feet tall, with four arms and a huge, armored snout layered up a long forehead. He had the pale coloring of the Biqasohon race, and likely had the scent of every being in the clearing so well-defined he could have found us blindfolded. If anyone could smell my anxiety, it would be him.

  One of the Yakadrii had piercing grey eyes and mottled maroon patterns in his mustard fur, up and down his neck and arms. He was the only one sleeveless. This was the leader. “What are you doing here, human?” His words were English, but spoken with an odd mix of grunts behind the syllables.

  “Might ask you all the same question. I was hired to bring in a missing party.” I smiled. “Seems you found them first. What say we split the bounty?”

  The Yakadrii showed off a row of needle sharp fangs interspersed with blocky teeth not unlike a man’s. His face was more akin to a koala’s—an angry koala’s. Those ears twitched and pivoted every which way. “We are not here for reward. We are here for purity.”

  “Purity.” Well, nothing good was going to come of this. Avian lizards flapped overhead. Could Sandra get Chesapeake back in time?

  “These are urk-tark. All of them. We will take what they have, then shut off their bodies. Then we burn their corpses. Paint our ship with their ashes, so Yakadrii know we have made the galaxy purer.”

  “Ah, so you guys are the Daer Sect. The lunatics.”

  The Yakadrii tipped his head back, his gesture for miscomprehension. “You don’t belong here. You are of Earth.”

  “Yes, I am. Here’s what that means. No matter where I go in the Panstellar Consociation, Earth will always be home. The United States will always be where I’m from. It has not been so for my family. Like Yakadrii, my ancestors journeyed a great distance. A hundred of our years ago, my grandfather’s father left the only lands his people had known for generations. Why? He had to survive. He had to voyage into the unknown to save his family from extinction.”

  I stepped closer to the brute. “He left because of people like you—and trust my words, there are people just like you, no matter what sentient species you call kin. The brutal, the corrupt, the ones who trod on everyone else because they possess the power. My point, gentlemen, is I came out here, a great distance from my home, to help as many others as I could, and I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and let you do the very things my great-grandfather escaped.”

  A rumble grew on the horizon. The Yakadrii watched the skies, shifting their positions.

  Something sizzled. The stench of melting plastic made me gag. Those sounds and smells came from their transport, a vehicle resembling a pickup truck with the wheels removed and an open cab. The long, angled bed was three-quarters filled with containers, each labeled with Rycole script not unlike the Administrator’s signature. The craft slumped under intense heat, cherry red.

  I covered my ears.

  Chesapeake roared over the clearing, engines at full throttle, and swung into a hover. Orange flashes of rippling light exploded from the Yakadrii weapons, scorching the underside of her hull—until the kidnappers dropped their guns, howling in anguish.

  Their overly sensitive hearing couldn’t handle Track Two of my awful kemence practice from its earliest days blasted at enough decibels to cause them physical pain—a level, incidentally, which hurt my ears, just not as badly.

  Aaron and Trini raced up. Trini kicked one of the weapons clear into the smoking remains of the melted vehicle’s side. She made me seriously reconsider my pledge to never enter the Moon’s intramural soccer league. Aaron sliced the other weapons apart with a laser shot that left a burnt trench in the ground.

  My radio buzzed. Clear as a bell, minus any static, Sandra said, “You’re okay.”

  “Aside from almost breaking my leg off, I’m dandy. Good to see you got my message.”

  “That was risky.”

  “All part of the job, darling. All part of the job.”

  The Rycole were quite happy to get their young researchers back. We were quite happy to leave the Yakadrii tied up to the same tree on Incore. The Ghiqasu Retrieval & Justice team arriving a few days after us was even happier to get their plethora of hands on the repeat offenders.

  Not as happy as I was when we popped out of the Big Ring gate headed to Earth.

  On November 20, we passed heaps of alien traffic, with Chesapeake’s bow ai
med for the graceful wheel of Terra Orbital One station. Sandra parked us in an approach vector with a great view of my favorite blue sphere. “Maryland coast is coming up in a few minutes, Captain.”

  “Thanks, Sandra.” I played a soft melody Father always said was his favorite.

  Aaron propped a foot on one of Sandra’s consoles and pointed out the cockpit windows. “Rocky Mountains.”

  “Get your foot off there,” Trini said. “It’s filthy.”

  “Decontaminated, per your orders, Ma’am.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s polite.” Griff rubbed his hands with a stained rag. “Hey, Captain, I think I can manage the ramp replacement without hitting our bottom line too hard. You got a day or so to help?”

  “Of course, Griff. We’ll all pitch in. Then we take some time off.” I smiled at the old familiar world turning slowly in the window.

  Nothing like the feeling of getting the job done. Except coming home.

  THE GIFTWING (2016)

  CAPTAIN DEREK SATTERLEE IS AN inventor and soldier who I added to The Lightningfall, the sequel to The Bloodheart. Even before I wrote the book, I wanted to know more about this character. I settled on this origin tale of how he achieved human flight through mechanical means, in an era in which magic-powered flight is as common as sails were in our history.

  A dragon is dying.

  He slumps along the rocky coast, his form magnificent as any vessel I’ve sailed. The beast must be eighty feet from spike-encrusted snout to whip-sharp tail. He is tipped on his side, white belly exposed to the sea spray. Azure scales glint as steel in the reflection of the setting sun. The sky is set afire.

  He is not the only casualty. I have witnessed the carnage all along Northamber’s shores—the once proud castles reduced to rubble; the stalwart cloudships broken to splinters, their bits strewn on the waves; and the bodies, hundreds of them, man and goblin and valkiro alike, bloating and rotted, bearing scraps of clothing and armor.

  The fortress Navio Mons is gone. The darkness long pressing upon us is gone. It should be a time to rejoice.

  Instead, I kneel before the dragon and mourn.

  “Man-worm.” His voice rumbles as a cannon’s discharge. There’s no weakness to it, even as his breaths rattle through fangs longer than my hand. “You bear witness to my death.”