"Keep telling yourself that," said a voice.
Maybe so, but hopefully, the great wrongs had finally been made right. I reached for my pad, and opened up the first book, near the end, and skimmed through until I reached the third place I’d been.
I smiled. Second book, taking a bit longer to find the place, and the smile widened.
Everything had changed.
But there was still my first visit to check, and I opened book seven.
I fist pumped, grinning widely.
The door opened, and Aline appeared. Her face turned puzzled.
"What have you been doing?"
Shadow Magic
Twenty Two
"You're kidding me, right?"
Jane gave me her best not kidding look.
"Yep."
"You mean you are kidding?"
"No. I'm agreeing with your unstated assessment."
"Which one?"
"That can't possibly be an evil person one."
"So you do agree with me?"
"No. That is an evil person."
"And you want me to do an assassination right here in the street?"
"Cloak, strike, cloak. All done in seconds, no-one will even see it happening."
"Seriously, an assassination? Me?"
"I know what you did in those other three books on your own."
"Oh."
I should have known. Jane knew everything.
"What happens if I don’t?"
"A lot of crazy shit will happen."
"Isn't that normal for us?"
She chuckled.
"Make a choice Jon. You have a window of opportunity here, which closes very soon."
"No."
"You won't make a choice?"
"I won't just kill someone on your say so."
"Trust me, the main characters here will thank you."
"The author won't."
Jane cocked her head for a moment, and giggled.
"You’re probably right. Then again, maybe they all like the new versions?"
I looked at her. She was serious. Once again, I was finding it hard to believe we were inside a book, and not out in the real world. Our real world.
"Where are we again?"
"Shadow Magic, by Nazri Noor."
"More magic?"
"Why not? You read those books."
"But…"
"Oh come on Jon. Where's your get up and go?"
"It got up and left."
"Maybe if we feed it, it'll come back. Window closed. Follow me."
The person of interest had vanished, so I followed her. We ended up in this little café which served Chinese food. The rest of the team were already there, and between us, we filled the place.
"We already ordered," said Alison.
I sat in the only seat left, and looked around. We were all in our normal civvies. Apart from cut and subtle differences made up by being belt suit clothing instead of real cloth, we didn't look out of place for once.
Jane had vanished again. Presumably to organize some here money.
Before I could think any more, food arrived. A lot of it. The team set to with their chopsticks, but I looked around for the server.
"Can I have a fork please?"
Movement stopped. All eyes turned to see the reaction. The woman's expression didn’t change. Mind you, she was a bit terrifying to start with, and any change to her expression wasn’t going to make it worse. She turned, and returned to the kitchen. There was a loud thud. She returned with a small plate in her hand, upon which was a dim sim, totally impaled on a fork. She placed it in front of me with deliberate movements, and backed away.
Laughter came from a door to the rear, and all heads turned to see a man standing there. He was large, imposing, and seemed to have two pointy teeth in his mouth. He saw us looking, closed his mouth, and quickly left back the way he came.
Eating resumed, beginning with what was already on my fork. And I have to admit, it was some of the best food I’d eaten in a long time. Not counting Over Easy, of course.
Jane was back before we finished, and she seemed to hand over a significant roll of paper. The server's expression lightened a great deal, making me wonder how much the tip had been, and she again went into the kitchen, this time returning with a bowl of fortune cookies.
Everyone looked at me, so I took one randomly. They continued to look at me, so I broke it open, and took out the small piece of paper inside. I read it, and frowned.
"Well?" asked Amanda. "What did it say?"
"The door opens both ways."
Twenty Three
Still pondering the imponderable, since cryptic fortune cookie messages were not really my thing, I nearly missed the obvious.
Looking out of the windows, there was early evening light, not yet sundown.
As I stepped through the door though, it was completely dark outside. I was so surprised, I stopped dead.
Jane walked solidly into my back, and I went down heavily into the gutter. I sometimes forget there's a robot under her suit. Or more correctly, an android. The security and combat droids were a robot. Hers was as human looking as an android could get in our time, but still primarily solid.
The gutter, by the way, was relatively clean and dry. I stayed where I was, and waited for the inevitable.
"Are you staying down there?" asked Aline, Amanda, Aleesha, and Alison, all at once.
I could hear the grin in their voices. Given the number of times I’d fallen out of bed over the last couple of years for one reason or another, or found myself unexpectedly on the ground or the deck after having been fired upon with no warning, me being down again wasn’t anything unusual, but was still always worth a good laugh. I gave them the usual response.
"No, I think I'll stay here for a while."
BA hauled me up. Jane shook her head. I gave her the 'what?' look.
"Follow me," she said.
"It's dark," said George, finally getting around to stating the obvious.
"Did we just get moved in time coming out the door?" asked Amanda.
Jane didn’t answer, but I think we all knew the answer was a resounding yes. I had no idea how far we'd been moved though. Could have been a few hours, or could have been days and a few hours. I winked at Amanda, and said nothing. We followed Jane for several blocks.
Suddenly, the ground shook, and the light changed. As we came around a corner, we could see into a large square. The sightlines opened to us, and we could now see the town had become a nightmarish alabaster hellscape, created by many giant pillars of light. The dark had become something else. Not daylight, but we certainly weren't going to need night vision.
People were pouring out of buildings. Some of them were gathering and looking up, while others ran in whatever direction they could.
I looked up. The rest followed my gaze.
"Is that a person?" asked Alison.
I groaned. It was the same person Jane had wanted me to kill. She avoided eye contact though, so I didn’t get an I told you so. It wasn’t her style anyway. She had the look of concentrating on doing other things. Which for her, was quite probable, although usually it didn’t slow her avatar down.
Out in the square, a young man was yelling up at the person making all the ruckus. He had a large group around and nearby him, and they were all following every word being said. He sounded pissed off, but I couldn’t make out the actual words. Several of those near him appeared to be very protective towards him.
"This way," said Jane, and we followed her once again.
Along a wall, belt suits shifted into armbands, and a line of combat suits appeared. Unmoving, the belt suits had made them completely invisible. Now they were something totally alien for this day and age, but as I looked around to see who was looking, I found no-one was. Not even the person suspended up in the air.
"Saddle up," said Jane quietly, with an air of expectancy about her.
We found our own suits, had them open up, and steppe
d inside. Systems activated, we stepped back, and turned to face the activity.
"Lock and Load," said Jane, over team coms.
Off her back, she pulled two meson pulsers. She normally used streamers, but I guess she was expecting them to be too dangerous to civilians here. The meson pulsers were larger than pulse rifles, needed a lot more juice to keep them firing, but Jane's suit didn’t need her inside, so had a lot more power generation than the average suit. Not that ours were average. Top of the line was as low as I went when purchasing equipment.
The rest of us pulled a heavy pulse rifle. The hand grips linked them to our suits, and allowed us to fire them until the suit itself lost power. It'd only nearly happened to the team once, before they joined me, and they'd been using the suits for weeks without being able to charge them. And they were lesser models too.
BA pulled two. But BA was bad arse, and this was her in her element.
Things had deteriorated out in the square. The bad person up in the air was in control, and she was doing her thing, whatever that was.
"Is that magic being used?" asked Alison.
"Yes," replied Jane. "A lot of the people in front of us are magicians, of one sort or another. We need to protect them."
"From what?" asked Amanda.
"That."
Twenty Four
That, appeared to me to be a tear in reality.
It was big, black, and shouldn't have been possible. In some ways it was like looking into nothingness itself.
Except there wasn’t nothing. Shapes were beginning to come through.
"Skirmish line," said BA, taking combat command. "In front of the magicians. Protect them and any civilians around."
Amanda had the lead if we needed tactics. But this looked like pest control. But I did wonder if Jane had been coaching BA on what was coming.
BA led the way at the run, and we followed her through the crowd. Shocked exclamations and looks were everywhere about what was coming through, but we drew a lot of them as well as we passed people.
We formed up just in front of the group protecting the young man, and began firing.
What we were firing at was the second most ugly thing I’d ever seen in my life. The first was the Darkness, who were a hybrid spider and cockroach combination. They ate everything, and had the disposition of a piranha. These in comparison were pussycats, and very slow ones at that, but all the same, when they got close enough, they started ripping into anyone and everyone with tentacles.
We held our line, but the magicians kept darting past us to attack them, and some of them didn’t make it back without our help. More kept coming, and for everyone we shot down, or magic claimed, two more seemed to appear. We were about to be overrun.
"Jane, take control of my suit."
"Confirmed."
The suit kept firing without me, and I quickly opened the back and stepped back out. My belt suit went straight into full protection mode, except for my face.
"Sword."
My sword appeared on my back, and I drew it. I leapt past my still firing combat suit, and started hacking away with the sword. One cut was all I needed to drop one of these dark terrors, but they were coming so fast now, and even with better mobility and a lethal sword, I still wasn’t making any headway. All I was doing was stopping this part of their advance from getting past the combat suits.
Suddenly there was another sword flashing next to me. I hardly had time to notice, as my suit was starting to degrade slowly from the tentacle hits I was getting, but I could have sworn no-one was actually wielding the sword. When the young man came up beside me wielding a pipe, the sword started co-ordinating with him, so I assumed he was controlling it. Why he wasn’t holding it was another matter, and for the moment, two magic swords and a pipe started to gain an upper hand.
Laughter came from above, and the opening grew a great deal bigger. More of them appeared.
"BA," I called out, forgetting team coms was on, "cross the streams upwards."
There were no streams of course, but quick firing pulses could still look a bit like streams, and she knew what I meant.
"Shift target," she said, and I knew all of them were getting a new place to shoot. "Rapid fire," she continued when all the rifles were pointed at the person up there in the air.
The pulses converged on whoever it was up there, but the laughing intensified, as some sort of shield protected her.
My fighting companion and his rapidly moving sword continued to hold the oncoming nasties at bay, with help from the magicians behind us, but I could sense everyone here was starting to become exhausted. I was a long way from it yet, since BA's training sessions keep me fit, but my suit was down to just above fifty percent now. The damn thing kept shifting to protect my face from darting tentacles, and then letting me see again. Each time it did I went to PC vision, but the rapid change was annoying.
"Not working boss," said BA.
That shield was too strong for what we had.
"Forget it then," I told her. "You keep on the uglies, and I'll think of something else. If only I could get up there?"
The firing returned to going around us, and we kept slicing.
"I can get you up there," panted the young man.
"How?" I said without looking at him, slicing a tentacle headed at my face off.
He did something. I've no idea what it was, but it was like a dark door opened to another dark place. He stepped inside, and bid me follow him. The door closed behind us, leaving the magic sword still slashing away outside.
Inside, there were shapes. Nothing identifiable, but I could tell they were some form of life, although not what kind. They seemed restless.
Another door opened, and looking out, I could see the person hanging in the air, and we were now on that level.
"Go," he said, and I leapt out.
My sword was coming down, and only a short arm away, when something hit me so solidly in the gut, I was hurled away. The only way was down now, opportunity missed. I cartwheeled, wishing I was still in my combat suit, which had leg thrusters. I wasn’t.
"Catch!" I yelled, getting a volume screech from several of the girls.
I never had learned to stop yelling while team coms was on. About five meters off the ground, something caught me, and I was eased the rest of the way. The laughter above was getting annoying now.
"Plan B flopped. Go to plan C Jane."
"What is plan C boss?" asked George, using his unused hand to smash an ugly, before bringing his rifle around and shooting it.
"On it," said Jane. "Keep doing what you’re doing."
We kept doing what we were doing, me and the flying sword back to back again. Except it had no back, so technically it was at my back. The young man had retreated behind several people, who looked exhausted, but were still protecting him from more than uglies, as huge javelin type things were coming down trying to spear him.
An explosion came from above, and I looked up. Another one, and then another one, but the shield was holding. I looked along what was now a stream of missiles, probably IR's because they were all hitting in the same place, surprised the line of them incoming was parallel to the ground. But in the distance was a shape I thought was Excalibur.
The laughter had stopped now, and as I cut down another ugly, the stream of missiles stopped, presumably with an empty magazine, and there was an explosion so loud everyone was thrown to the ground.
I looked up, and there was not only no-one up there, there was no longer a tear either.
"Got the fucker!" exclaimed Jane, her combat suit and mine doing identical fist pumps.
"Clean up on isle one," muttered Aleesha, and we set to killing the rest of the uglies.
When the last one went down under my sword, I turned to Jane, who'd been using her avatar to co-ordinate fire, and was now walking up to us.
"What did you do?"
"Used IR's as a distraction, and sent down a capital ship missile from BigMother in orbit."
&nbs
p; "With us underneath it?" asked Alison. "Are you crazy?"
Jane indicated me.
"He's the crazy one. I had it calculated to ten decimal places."
All the same though. Sheesh!
"Who are you people?" asked the young man.
"Army unit with experimental equipment," said Jane quickly. "We were never here. Got it?"
He looked along the line of suits, and back to us.
"Got it."
"Follow me," said Jane, and she started running.
The others followed her. Presumably she had a dropship parked somewhere.
I turned back to the man.
"You know that place you took me too?"
"Yes. What of it?"
"The door opens both ways."
Snark's Quest
Twenty Five
"There's a station out there," said Amanda.
"There's always a station out there," said the rest of us together, before laughing.
The laughter broke off, as the station seemed to suffer an external explosion. The HUD and navmap lit up with red dots, as Jane identified them as hostile.
"It's being attacked Jon."
"Mosquitos!" I barked, while taking control of the ship away from Jane.
Our position was off to one side of the main action, so I pushed up the speed slider to full, aiming to put BigMother between the station and its attackers.
Mosquito missiles are small and fast point defence, designed to intercept and kill incoming missiles. The launchers could do one hundred at a time, or one at a time, and this ship had several dozen launchers. Each one was controlled by a medium AI cloned from Jane, and each missile was individually targeted and controlled all the way in. Jane launched three complete magazines. A bit overkill I thought, since there were only a dozen or so missiles heading for the station, but it saved time getting to future launches.
The missiles nearest the station all winked out, and far enough away to not cause any additional damage. By the time I had BigMother in position, they rest were gone as well.
Crossover: It's a Jon Hunter thing. Page 8
