by Skyler Grant
Quinn allowed the power to flow into him and flickers of other realities began to surround him. Some of his wives had terrifying versions of themselves, but Dela was almost always more respectable than she was now. An academic who had never sought out adventure, never gotten involved with crime.
Quinn had to make himself focus and turn that attention to the artifacts. The displays flickered, shifting and changing between the different universes he could perceive.
Dela hooked her arm in his and they began to walk along the hall.
"Are you going to go back to archeology when we are finally done with all this?" Quinn asked.
"With me a wanted felon in Imperium space and probably soon to be one in clan space? I'd love it, but I can't see how that would work. We can't go backwards."
Quinn knew that she spoke the truth, and he wasn't ready to accept that himself. Quinn liked being a pilot, he liked being on the edge, and a part of him loved always looking for the next score and figuring out how to make the odds work in his favor. To some degree he'd held onto that life. However, if they successfully executed their exit plan it would mean leaving that all behind.
"Well, you don't have to be all accurate," Quinn said.
Dela flashed Quinn a grin and leaned up to steal a kiss from his lips. "No need to lie, love. Just because things are changing, it doesn't mean they'll be bad."
There was a good quarter-mile of artifacts in this section. Four in particular were strange to Quinn's senses. One looked a lot like the magical obelisk that they'd once picked up in a museum on the Rim, a chunk of white stone engraved with faint runes. While there was no visible glow of magic, to his magical senses there still seemed to be some sort of hunger for magical energy. Another piece was a loop of spiraling metal that looked like it must have once been part of something larger, and realities around it seemed distorted. There was a tiny rod that looked to be made of crystal, although smoke drifted within it, and Order magic in particular seemed to respond to that one. There was also a small bundle of what almost seemed to be knotted yarn that Quinn sensed was dangerous.
Quinn pointed out his selections to Dela, who chose two more. Neither looked like much to Quinn, both smooth flat panels of crystal that showed hints of runework.
"Why those?" Quinn asked.
"Language. I don't care if we, in theory, hold the archives that can talk to us. I don't trust them and I think my selections might allow me to figure theirs out. None of them are large. Shame we can't just walk out with them."
Their little expedition wasn't just scouting the merchandise but the security as well. While the facility had far different defenses than such a place would have in Imperium space, it did have them. Each section of the museum had inset shield emitters that could partition part of it off, and the sheer number of armed patrons who would no doubt get involved meant a virtual army was waiting for a reason to do something.
Quinn thought he had a way around all of it, without having to wait.
2
"Trust me?" Quinn asked Dela.
"Is this one of those even more terrible ideas than the first terrible idea moments?" Dela asked.
It was, it really was. Quinn reached out for Dela's hand, holding it for a moment as he focused on the magic within him. Worlds flickered around him. It was his first time trying this without Jinx, but somehow he knew he could do it.
A shimmer in the air and they were elsewhere. The hall was the same, but the sounds of people in the distance faded. It was cold and dim, the hall lit only by a thin strip of emergency lightning.
"Well, this is unsettling," Dela said with a look around.
Quinn tried to respond but found words impossible as agony washed over him and he collapsed to his knees. This had drawn on his powers, on both of his sets of powers, the Chaos and the Order. It had both taken more out of him than he expected, and the pain was excruciating.
Dela was instantly down beside him and helping him back up. With her implants she was more than strong enough to support his weight.
"I know you're hurting, but whatever is going on you need to get past it. I get why you thought we're alone here, but we're not," Dela said.
That got Quinn's attention even through the pain. Reaching into a pouch at his belt he pressed his fingertips against one of the mana crystals. The energy didn't exactly push back the pain, but it at least helped to fill the yawning hole of power within him.
"I'm back with you," Quinn said with a weak smile. "Let's get what we came here for. I moved us to a universe without anyone present. I figured we'd just do our stealing here where there's nobody to miss it."
"I got it," Dela said, releasing her arm from him and moving to load up her pack with artifacts. "But this place isn't empty. I'm not picking up people, but there are a lot of weapon signatures closing on us."
That didn't sound good. Fortunately they didn't have much more to pack, and soon they were laden down with the artifacts they'd chosen.
Quinn put a hand on Dela's shoulder and reached for his magic to try shift them back to their own universe. Pain flared again along with a massive sense of fatigue.
"Okay, so, bad news," Quinn almost groaned.
"You pulled a magical muscle and we're not going anywhere, while whatever wiped out the people who should be here closes on us?" Dela said.
"You're getting pretty good at this."
"I'm getting used to it," Dela said with a huff. She drew her pistols and turned her attention to their surroundings. "How long until we can move?"
Quinn really had no idea, this being the first time he'd ever tried it.
"If this is anything like Jinx used to be using the runic sphere, I'm going to need at least half an hour," Quinn said, drawing his own guns.
"This way," Dela said, heading off down the hall.
Quinn trusted her to have some idea of what she was doing. With her implants she must have memorized every bit of this space in the other universe, and she was the only one who could detect whatever might now be hunting them. Quinn could hear movement in the distance, the sounds of metal joints articulating.
When they made their way to the end of the hall Quinn got his first look at their hunters—at what must have killed the locals. The robots were humanoid, although with massive cannons where arms should be and a single, blue glowing iris in place of a head.
A barrage of fire took out a nearby wall as Quinn and Dela each dove in different directions. Dela came to rest near a heavy-looking metal door with a security panel beside it. She squeezed off a shot at the robots before holstering one gun and tapping at the panel.
"I'm going to need to crack this," Dela said.
Even for Dela that was going to take some time. Quinn fired off several shots, the energy blasts sending one of the robots staggering back. Another quickly took its place. More were coming, becoming a swarm. He wasn't going to shoot his way out of this one.
The museum security. It was excruciating to use his abilities any more than he already had, but Quinn pushed through the pain, reaching out to see the spray of realities branching out from this one. Finding a safe path through the incoming fire.
With a highly improbable series of twists and turns he made his way through the oncoming fire unharmed, rolling towards one of the shield emitters on the floor. Without any time to waste he fired several shots at the locked maintenance panel. Sparks flew from the metal as it swung open, the lock reduced to glowing metal.
Hopefully this place hadn't gone down easily, and knowing the clans Quinn doubted it had. They'd have engaged their security and kept it going until the last, until the power ran out.
Quinn felt a rush flow up his arm as his fingertips found several mana crystals in his pocket again, absorbing two at once, then he tossed several more into the panel where they sparked violently.
It wasn't the proper way to power up equipment, and Quinn knew he was almost certainly damaging the shield components, but he didn't need them to last long. Just to do something. They did,
and a blue energy barrier sprang up, cutting two robots cleanly in half as they were in the process of charging. The rest of the swarm fired at the barrier. It rippled under the onslaught.
"I don't know how long that will hold," Quinn said to Dela.
"You're lucky Mara gave me her codebreaking routines then," Dela said, with a last tap at the panel. The security door swung open.
3
The corridor beyond the door was far narrower, meant only for employees of the museum and not for any guests browsing the exhibits.
Quinn and Dela made their way through and closed the door after them.
"That going to hold?" Quinn asked.
"I'm hoping it might not need to. I couldn't see past this door from the outside. It and the hall are sensor-shielded," Dela said, stretching. "I don't know how smart those hunter bots are, and hopefully out of sight is out of mind."
"Maybe," Quinn said. "We didn't have anything like those in our universe. I don't know what they can do."
"Think they were Imperium make?"
"I didn't see any Imperium sigils or colors. I don't think so. There are other threats in the universe and this place must have fallen to one of them." Quinn jerked his head towards the hall. "Let's investigate. Maybe there's an employee break room or something."
"So this hopping into new universes thing? I thought everyone had decided that was a pretty terrible idea and it shouldn't be done," Dela said.
They had, after Mahara had almost destroyed their universe when they'd brought her from another.
"I didn't even know if I could do it, not really. So far these new powers ... they're causing me a lot of pain and not helping us out much for all the suffering."
Dela offered him a half smile and kept a pistol drawn as she moved down the hall. "You wanted to try to making it all worth it, at least a little bit. I get it, these things Kalisa put into me ..."
"They hurt?"
"Sometimes. I'm sensitive. I'm so sensitive. I mean that in the best and the most horrible of ways. I could hear those robots from the other side of the facility, and I can see spectrums no other human can," Dela said.
"That has got to be ... weird," Quinn said.
"Sometimes it's just this feeling of power. I see all, I behold all. I feel like some sort of superior being walking around in a world of those incapable of perceiving less than a tenth of what I do. Then there are the times I'm doubled over and throwing up, or feeling like I am going mad because it's all just too much," Dela said.
"And Kalisa can't fix that?" Quinn asked. It sounded horrible.
"Kalisa says it isn't a problem with her implants. They're doing exactly what they were designed to do. Expanding me, making me greater. If my body rejects greatness, it isn't a design fault but user error."
"I didn't know that you were going through all that. I only knew there would be some complications," Quinn said. It made him feel guilty. Yes, the family was large and it wasn't a problem he could help with, but Dela was his wife. The fact that he now had so many wives didn't make him feel any less bad for missing that Dela was struggling like this.
"We've had a lot going on. We were working to take out Sand, and then all of a sudden she is Kat and that was a big problem in its own right," Dela said quietly.
"Still is, more than you know," Quinn said.
No break room yet. Most of the rooms off this corridor seemed to be storage, boxes piled high. A wealth of valuable artifacts that might have excited Quinn in times past.
"Whatever happened here occurred about twenty years ago, given what I'm seeing," Dela said.
"Those things really do show you a lot," Quinn said.
Dela glanced back with a grin. "Yeah, I was kind of mad at Kalisa at first. I thought going with her I'd get turned into a human flamethrower or something. But I kind of like this, being able to see more, understand more. It's a lot of what drove me to xenoarcheology in the first place. So, the Kat thing, need to talk?"
"I don't think I ever really understood the woman I married, and if I did, then I guess after she died I just erased all the bad parts from my memory."
"I think you're pretty normal that way. We always try to scrub the dead clean of all their sins."
Still no break room, but they came to what had obviously been a security room with a number of screens. They were blank and Dela moved to look over the controls.
"They're probably out of power," Quinn said.
"We still have lights on emergency power. I can't believe a place like this wouldn't have the security systems rigged into the same feed," Dela said.
It was a good point. Quinn pulled a panel free and tried to make sense of the clan circuitry. There. It didn't automatically switch over to emergency systems but required a manual trigger. Poor design, since someone looking to pull a heist could have made good use of that. Quinn hit the switch and the screens came alive.
"This is different," Quinn said, returning to the subject of Kat. "Worse, maybe. I had visions of a lot of terrible things that might be to come and she was one of them. And Sand has such huge potential to go bad."
"Sand is the scariest person on our ship full of scary people. I'm no paragon of moral virtue, but I'll ask Kat to hang out. Maybe a friend will help," Dela said.
"I think we need to get her away from the fighting. I don't know how we do that, when the fights are picking us as much as we're picking them," Quinn said.
"And it's made worse when the fights know where to find us," Dela said. She nodded at a screen. "I've got movement here."
One of the screens showed combat.
The woman was clan, perhaps even an Unshackled. Quinn counted four runes on her, so that made her a fairly powerful one. She was supported by a mixture of beasts surrounding her, tigers and bears, almost all as large as she was, most adorned with glowing red marks of their own.
They were in quite a fight. The video looked to be from outside the building, near the main entrance. The group was holding its own, but robots were swarming quickly.
"Can we get to her?" Quinn asked.
"What did we just say about picking fights? What did we say before that about people in alternate universes?" Dela asked.
"I am a man full of terrible ideas, but she'll die if we don't do something."
"And you've just enough heroism to give your wives headaches. I can get us there," Dela said, gesturing at the door.
4
It took them a good five minutes to get there. The winding back corridors through the museum took them most of the way. Bursting out of another security door they found themselves facing the rear ranks of a line of robots facing the entry. Queued up for the attack.
Dela tossed a circular disk into the center of their massed forms and a second later an explosion sent parts scattering and robotic forms bouncing off the walls.
"You didn't tell me you had grenades. Why don't I have grenades?" Quinn asked.
"Security office just had the one," Dela said with a shrug, and crouched behind the still-opened armored door, using it for cover as she started shooting.
Quinn drew upon his magic once more, the pain agonizing as he vaulted through the massed robotic forms.
Slipping between the protective circle of creatures, a saber-toothed tiger bigger than Quinn very nearly bit his head off. Fortunately he'd seen that coming in the might-have-beens, avoiding it just as he had the robots, as he came face to face with the woman.
Blonde hair flowed loose and free down to her shoulders and she'd gone for a common Chaosian form of combat attire—almost nothing so her runes were left open to the air. It showed off a body well-tanned and athletic.
Quinn tried not to take too long to appreciate it. It was hard not to with Dela being present. In the presence of his wives Quinn was always turned on due to a quirk of Kara's physiology. It was distracting when Chaosian forms of dress came into play—his mind really couldn't help turning to the carnal.
This also wasn't the time for it.
Quinn held out
a handful of mana crystals.
"Need a charge?" Quinn asked.
"Quinn? What the hell are you ... you're dead. You can't be here—" the woman said and her voice caught. "Later, I do."
Red sparks leapt between them as she snatched the crystals out of his hand.
The runes the woman bore, which were barely lit, flared to full red brilliance as she absorbed the mana, and so did those of the beasts around them.
The animals seemed to be using Chaosian battle powers of their own. Energy blasts aimed at their flesh dissipated before they quite hit, and when muscle and bone clamped down on metal, the metal that shattered.
"I didn't expect this many. They must have called in reinforcements already because of you. When my companions sensed movement in the city I knew someone had to be here. I hoped for a ship," the woman said.
"This might seem odd given you seem to know me, but I've no idea who you are. Seems like I probably should," Quinn said.
"Not odd. You're a might-have-been. My husband, my Quinn, could see them, use them. I'm Ilsa. We need to go. We stay out in the open like this they'll just keep swarming."
Dela asked, "Did she just call you her husband? Did I leave you alone for like thirty seconds and you picked up another wife?" She fired several shots at the knees of robots which sent them collapsing to the ground.
"Another?" Ilsa asked, her eyes narrowing at Dela, "I see. This is what you consider attractive in another universe. Well, at least she seems minimally useful."
"Oh, if you are the jealous and bitchy sort, you have such a bad time ahead if you get to know us better," Dela said cheerfully. "Listen, we've done the savior thing. Quinn, if your magical muscles are quite up to it we should get out of here."
Ilsa was still staring at Dela and didn't seem in the least impressed. "I am Unshackled. I'm the one who makes others have bad days. You have a way off this world?"
"The same way we arrived," Quinn said, reaching out for his magic, the effort forcing him to grimace. "Which still isn't going to give us an out. I need more time."
