by Terry Mixon
The man considered her for a moment and then slowly nodded. “She convinced the high priest to bring us to war. I am Kerrick Vidar, leader of the People. Who are you?”
“Jessica Cook.”
“Then you lead the people of Earth.” It had been a statement rather than a question.
“That’s a lot more complicated than you can probably guess,” she said wryly. “Let’s just say that I’m the leader you’ll be dealing with. I have some questions for you, though I can guess many of the answers already. Why did you attack us?”
“You would have to ask the high priest,” the man said with a shrug. “He commanded that we attack, so we attacked.”
“Did he by chance wear a really tall hat?”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “He did. I had assumed that you had kept him and his associates separate from me and my men. That isn’t the case, is it?”
Jess shook her head. “All of your people that we captured are in the area where we’re holding you. He didn’t survive the fighting.”
Unexpectedly, that made Vidar smile. “Good. I never liked him anyway. Arrogant fool. I would be pleased to meet the warrior that killed him and made my life better in doing so.”
Well, she supposed this was as good a chance as any to test that statement. “I killed him.”
The large man blinked. “You did?”
“I did, and five or six of his companions, at the base you attacked. Someone else killed the last of them.” The idea of having killed someone still made her insides tremble, but those men hadn’t been the first, and they almost certainly wouldn’t be the last.
Vidar stared at her for a few seconds. “I confess that surprises me. We have female warriors, but I did not take you as such.”
“I’m not,” she conceded. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was wounded and almost died in that fight.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You seem quite hale now.”
“Perhaps you can explain that as we proceed. You came from a ship when you used the gate. The one Kathleen Bennett came to see you in. How did you get there?”
“She came down the sky bridge to our world. We used it to return to the ship and use its gate when she was unable to activate any of those on our world.”
“What is a sky bridge?” she asked, settling back in the uncomfortable chair.
“A cable that reaches into the heavens. A large compartment rises from the building on the ground and goes to a sphere in orbit around our world. Her ship was near it.”
Then it wasn’t there anymore. The nuke that had destroyed the ship had almost certainly taken out the top of what was probably a space elevator when it had detonated. She wondered grimly how much of the area below it had been crushed under the falling cable.
As an engineer, she longed to ask about the space elevator, but she restrained herself. The makeup of the cable—probably some form of carbon nanotubes—would have to wait.
“That ship held a large box that healed those put inside it,” she said. “I was healed in just a few days, and now I have the ability to speak your language. I can do other things like shoot a flechette pistol better, too. I have no idea what it did to me.”
The man’s eyes widened. “You have been elevated. The Masters once used devices like that to reward their most loyal servants, as well as to maintain their own good health. I have heard the legends.”
He frowned. “That would explain many things about Kathleen Bennett. She could fly one of the small ships used by the Masters, as well as understand the workings of the gates, though that was a problem she was unable to solve.
“I suspect that the Masters would have been most displeased to find either of you using the device, but they aren’t exactly here to complain. What is it that you want of me, Jessica Cook?”
“Peace,” she said. “Or perhaps even just a ceasefire. We have not offended your people, yet you attacked us. I would see our situation returned to what it was before this fight.”
“Were it up to me, I would agree in a moment,” he said. “With the high priest dead, as well as his most trusted assistants, the decision falls to those he left behind. I confess that I do not know who that is, though the high priest only had a handful of men training under him. If you would have peace, you must come to my home and plead your case before the priests that remain.”
She felt her eyes narrow. “I don’t have such a high opinion of your priests. What guarantee of safety would I and my party have?”
“None,” he said, opening his arms wide. “The priests could overturn my assurance of safe passage with a word. Yet if you would have peace, there is no other way forward.”
Harry wouldn’t be pleased to hear that. Then again, no one else could speak the man’s language. In any case, she had no choice but to try. These people had almost invaded the Earth, and she had to stop that from happening again.
Yes, with the spaceship Kathleen Bennett had used blown to plasma and their gates turned off, they couldn’t easily get here, but she only had his word on that. No, she’d be going to his planet and making certain that they were either trapped or friendly. There was no other sane decision.
“We’ve still got a lot of talking to do, but I have a proposal for you,” she said. “I’ll take your safe passage even with the caveats you’ve added, simply to get past your fighters so I can speak with your priests. If we can make peace, I’ll return your people we hold here.”
“And if we do not make peace?”
“Then you’ll be our guest for a significantly longer period,” she said bluntly. “I have no idea what Kathleen Bennett told you, but I have a number of problems on my plate, and if you prove to be one of the more complicated ones, I’ll set you aside for later.”
He chuckled at that. “I would offer you some advice, then. Bring warriors aplenty. The priests may hesitate to order an attack if you are well protected.
“Also, I would advise you to meet with them soon. As it is, they do not know that they now need to select a new high priest. That will leave them ill prepared to act with any speed.”
She gave him a long look before speaking. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because I do not see how this war benefits anyone. Kathleen Bennett was a snake. I realized she had treachery in her heart, but the high priest was blinded by the opportunity she dangled in front of him.
“I want my people to prosper. Perhaps even to one day return to the world from which we came. Not this Earth, but the world that once nourished our muscles and made us strong. It would anger the priests to hear this, but I would be happy if the Masters never returned. Which I will deny having said if you tell them.”
She smiled a little. “Your secret is safe with me. I’ll gather warriors, and we shall leave tomorrow. Talk with your people and select two others to accompany you back to your planet. We leave in the morning.”
8
Brenda stared in awe at the huge city below the lander as it coasted through the dark skies over a dead Earth that she’d never imagined could exist. Even after having been told about it, she hadn’t believed it really existed. Not until this very moment.
The bright lights shooting away from the lander illuminated one massive building after another, all dark and frozen. They looked like high-tech versions of structures that might appear in New York or Los Angeles. Only this was supposedly very rural New Zealand. At least it had been on this alternate, impossible Earth.
“And it’s like this all over?” she asked. “Seriously?”
“Scout’s honor,” Harry said. “It looks like a majority of the land masses have grown into something like this, other than what was probably dedicated farmland. We haven’t had enough time to even scratch the surface, so to speak, but they probably also farmed the oceans. Just not enough free land to feed what had to be tens of billions of people.”
Krueger was looking out the other side of the lander. “Probably more than that. I’ve been to Tokyo, and this seems like it could pack even
more people into that kind of footprint. If it’s consistent all over, you’re looking at over a hundred billion, easy. Even with ocean farming, that had to be hard to manage.”
He turned back toward Harry. “Queen is going to freak. Is this an alternate Earth? Something from our future? Whatever it was, it sure looks like the loss of life was total. That’s a vacuum out there, right?”
Harry nodded. “We’ve found a few contemporary journals. Nothing that talks about what happened, but more what the people went through. It was like the flipping of a light switch. One moment it was a bright summer day, the next it was pitch-black night.
“The sun was gone. Even the moon was gone. Obviously, it was the Earth that had vanished, but most people probably never knew that, or the semantics didn’t matter.”
Brenda was horrified. “I hope it was quick.”
“Not as much as I’d have wanted in their places,” Harry said. “It took a few days for the temperature to hit what would otherwise be deep winter. A few more for arctic temperatures. By the end of the week, every place on the planet was indistinguishable from the North Pole.
“People huddled where they could and tried to survive. Perhaps some of them even made it a few weeks in underground bunkers, but when the very air itself froze, they died. Perhaps some deep in the Earth with canned air lasted a while longer. It didn’t matter. In the end, they all died.”
The lander flared when it came to a large mesa and settled onto a brightly lit landing area beside it. Suited figures told her that the landing area was probably a temporary area manned by people from Freedom Express.
Harry hefted his helmet. “Seal up. We’re going out.”
In addition to Krueger and herself, a representative from New Zealand named Molly Goodwin and Kevin McHugh were seated in the back of the lander, eyes still locked on the dead world just outside their windows.
“I recognize this,” Molly Goodwin said, her voice strangled. “This is the mesa with the base in New Zealand. I’d know that slab of rock and the shape of it anywhere.”
“It is,” Harry confirmed. “I think you’re going to find what’s here fascinating.”
Once he’d personally checked everyone’s vacuum suits, he dropped the air pressure and opened the ramp at the back of the lander. The pilot had positioned the rear of the lander so that it pointed at the mesa.
Someone had carefully laid out lights leading up a path toward the top of the large rock beside the mesa. It was buried under frozen atmosphere but looked like it was part of the original landscape.
Designated assistants stepped up beside each of them, helping to make sure no one slipped or fell on the ice. A shattered helmet would be a fatal event, after all.
“This is new,” Molly said. “Or rather, it’s old and doesn’t belong here. Neither does the city all around it, I suppose.”
“It’s different here,” Harry confirmed. “Though to be fair, we weren’t sure if that was because it was from the future or not when we found it. This world was a few centuries older than our own even before it arrived here.”
“Any idea how long ago that was?” she asked. “Just because the Asharim found it a thousand years ago doesn’t mean that was when it arrived.”
“Spot on,” he confirmed. “We had some of the bodies carbon dated. The people on this world died almost ten thousand years ago, subjectively. The intense cold and vacuum preserved them. Hell, back on our Earth, they found someone who’d died thousands of years ago on a glacier and thought he was a modern accident victim. Bodies on Mount Everest are still intact, even after having been there for over a century.”
“That’s horrible,” she said, surprised that she felt that way. As an FBI agent, she’d seen every manner of horror, but bodies lying where they had fallen for long years—millennia—after they’d died rattled her. Death should be an end. From the Earth they came, and so shall they return.
Only that didn’t seem to be the case on this frozen hell.
When they finally reached the top of the large stone slab, she saw other people working at clearing what was obviously a large door in the side of the mesa. One large enough to get a lander into.
“There’s a base here,” she whispered. “Just like on our Earth.”
“There is,” Harry said, gesturing toward a smaller door, one obviously made for people. “We can get in here. The larger door isn’t functional yet. It’s quite literally frozen in its tracks.”
The smaller door hadn’t been intended as an airlock, but someone had placed one just inside it. It was large enough to pass them all through into a landing bay filled with Asharim ships and people working in cold-weather gear, but without helmets.
Following Harry’s lead, she loosened her helmet and pulled it off. Her breath fogged the air, and she guessed it was maybe the low teens. A look around showed her the portable heaters they were using to warm the large chamber.
That also showed her that the overhead lights were on. The base had power.
“It’s operational?” she asked.
“Sort of,” Harry answered as he led the way to one of the main corridors. “It had power, but it was shut down. We only just got it on yesterday, and the life support was never meant to deal with temperatures like this.”
“I can’t believe it,” Molly said, looking around with wide eyes. “I took a tour of the whole base. There were no ships here. Everything was rotted. What does this mean?”
“We’re one level above the gate room, and I want to get Kevin to check something there for me before I answer that. I’m almost certain that I know what the answer is going to be, but I want to hear him confirm it.”
Having seen the base in New Zealand, Brenda had to agree with the other woman. This base was in a much better state of preservation. Perhaps it hadn’t been breached like the one on her Earth, and thus the elements hadn’t had a chance to cause such deterioration.
When they went down the stairs and the group started toward the gate room, Brenda turned the other direction and looked into the engineering space. The machinery there was in excellent shape, and the slots that had contained the massive cubes that had originally provided power were present, glowing cubes a meter along each edge.
Her curiosity satisfied, she hurried to catch up with the others inside the gate room. It was also in excellent repair, with no sign of the make do power supply and control that someone had rigged in the original base.
Harry was waiting for her. “As you noticed, Brenda, this base is in great shape. One problem: the gates won’t connect to any of the gates we know the address for. In fact, we haven’t been able to make any of them connect at all, with the exception of the other gates in this very room. I’m betting something is very different inside them, and that’s what I need Kevin to find.”
Without waiting for direct instruction, her young subordinate got out his tools and quickly went to work gaining access to the control nodes on the middle gate. As adept as he was at the work, it only took a few minutes to have data flowing on his slate.
What he saw made him frown. “I can see your attempts in the log. Everything looks valid to me. I’m scrolling back. Wow. The last valid connection was almost twelve thousand years ago, subjectively speaking. It looks like these gates never lost their connection to the main power.”
“Any idea why the connections aren’t working?” Harry asked.
“Nope. Do you want me to try to connect to the last destination this gate was successful in connecting with? I’ll kill it right away if it works.”
Harry nodded. “If I’m right, it won’t work.”
Kevin gave him an odd look and tapped the screen of his slate. “Connection unsuccessful. I suppose I could try others, but why do you think it isn’t working?”
“I think this Earth is from another reality. I’ll wager there’s something that makes the gate network unique, and the gates here are part of another network, if you will. That’s why they can’t connect with the valid addresses we know but work
internally between these three.”
Brenda blinked at his guess. “And now that it’s in our reality, it can no longer see its original network? How did it get here? The Asharim couldn’t have done this. None of the species they had met would have the power or knowhow to do it either. Getting to another universe is science fiction, even for them.”
“Yet I think someone did it,” Harry said. “Not only that, they did it to an entire planet. One they likely struck at with no warning and did so from space. Other than the large Asharim station in orbit, there are no signs of orbital habitats, even though some of the records we found indicate that this Earth had a thriving presence there, as well as across the rest of the solar system.”
“Could they have done it to themselves?” Krueger asked. “Perhaps this was some experiment gone terribly wrong.”
Harry shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible, but the amount of energy this had to have taken would be immense. We’ve done a cursory look at the power plants these people were capable of, and while amazing, they would be ridiculously inadequate for the task of bridging realities.”
“This must’ve made the Asharim go crazy,” Brenda said. “I’m not sure how they would even know to look out here for this planet once they located our system, but they can’t have expected this. It must’ve frightened them badly.”
“How does this world compare with the Asharim technology?” Krueger asked. “Did they have this kind of wormhole technology? Or were these people somewhere between us and the Asharim?”
Harry made a waggling gesture with his hand to indicate a mixed answer. “They didn’t have gates, but they had many things that were almost as good as the Asharim, and even some creations that were more advanced than anything the Asharim could manage.
“Specifically, as Brenda knows, we found a cybernetic cat frozen in one of the buildings. Even after ten thousand years, its power supply was good, and it activated when placed in a shirtsleeve environment. Unless you knew it, you’d think it was a real cat.”
