37

 

Meloku’s legs had become a mass of flayed nerves. Her chest and throat burned. Still she ran ahead of Galien. He stumbled after her more by momentum than by choice. More than once, he’d fallen and she’d just pulled him along until he found his footing. Galien’s breath came in ragged gasps. He’d tried to ask questions when they’d set out, but she’d robbed him of the strength.

She was astonished he’d kept up as well as he had. Even without her demiorganics, she was among the healthiest, fittest people on this world, and her stomach was still a knot of pain. Her ration bars hadn’t lasted long without her demiorganics boosting her metabolism. She couldn’t block out the agony in her legs or the fire in her chest. She could hardly think.

They were almost there. In truth, they hadn’t had much farther to go. If they’d been dragging Fallard’s men, they would have had another day of walking. Now it was merely sunset, and Meloku recognized the landscape. The shape of the forest to the west and the gentle hills ahead were too distinct to be coincidence.

She topped the next hill and halted. Galien nearly crashed into her. The decrepit barn sat in the field ahead, half-collapsed. The sunlight was at too steep an angle to reveal anything but shadows inside.

The shuttle should have been parked next to it, but it was missing.

The field base’s security systems had surely spotted her. Mission procedure held that, should any of the natives get too close to the field base, the shuttle should be flown to a safer position. She doubted that was what had happened. The field base’s sensors would’ve seen who she was.

She resumed running, pulling Galien. The burning in her limbs had gotten worse. Just a few hundred more meters and then she could rest, she lied to herself.

She let go of Galien’s wrist right before she reached the barn doors. She heard scuffling and then a thud as he crashed into the wall. She was already through the doors and into the darkness.

The door leading downward was already open. Kacienta and Joao were framed in the artificial light, running to meet her. Joao ran past to check on the man she’d left outside.

Meloku almost pushed through Kacienta. Kacienta grabbed her shoulder. The strength of the grip confirmed one of Meloku’s fears: Kacienta had active demiorganics.

Kacienta asked, “What the fuck is–”

Meloku interrupted: “Were you in on this?”

Kacienta looked at her, uncomprehending. Meloku took a risk. She jammed her arm under Kacienta’s throat and shoved her into the barn wall. The planks shuddered. Any more force, and she’d give away the fact that her augmented muscles were offline. If, of course, Kacienta didn’t know already.

Meloku asked, “Are you working with Habidah?”

“No,” Kacienta choked. “Habidah stole the shuttle.”

Meloku let go. She turned toward the ramp leading downward. Kacienta rasped, “How did you know to get here? Did Ways and Means find out?”

“I lost contact with Ways and Means,” Meloku said, and started downward.

She wasn’t expecting the smell of smoke at the bottom. Dust tickled her nose. Three lights lining the walls had gone out. Those lights were rated for five hundred years of continuous use.

The walls ahead had buckled. So many lights had gone out that the corridor was half shadow. Debris from the broken lights remained scattered on the floor. The damage led in the direction of the communications chamber.

Kacienta had recovered herself. Her bootsteps followed Meloku. She asked, “Who did you bring along?”

“He’s a native,” Meloku said.

“Not again,” Kacienta said. “Not you, too.”

“Just take care of him,” Meloku snapped. The door to the communications chamber had been jarred open. She sidled through.

The farthest wall had been rent as though by an earthquake. The light from the corridor was barely enough to illuminate the room, but it showed her all she needed. The bare guts of the base’s gateway mechanism had been exposed. The aperture projectors, two rapier-sharp metal needles, jutted from the interior floor and ceiling. To a human eye, their tips seemed to touch, but they were actually infinitesimally far apart. They were surrounded by power conduits, transformers, and heat sinks. A mass of tubing coiled around the base of each emitter, held fast by thin gold-silver threads.

The moment she’d stepped inside, she knew exactly what had happened.

Beads of glass cracked and crunched under her boots. Without demiorganics, she wouldn’t be able to manipulate anything. She would need help.

Kacienta stepped into the chamber a few steps behind, as if afraid. Meloku felt like a parent coming home after the kids had wrecked the place.

Meloku asked, “Habidah took the shuttle to Ways and Means, didn’t she?”

“How’d you know?”

“It’s the only place on this plane worth going to.”

The gateway, she figured, must have been used to transport something from this plane, to another. Her enemy had more than enough power already here.

Meloku said, “You told me Habidah stole the shuttle. So who went through the gateway?”

Kacienta didn’t even ask how she’d guessed that. “It was her pet monk. But he came back. Is that why you brought the other native here? To do the same thing? Is this some kind of amalgamate trick?”

“What? No. He’s just a man. Tell Joao to get him food and water. Tranquilize him if he complains.”

A neat cleft had split the floor down the middle. Meloku stepped over it, toward the rent in the wall. In spite of the destruction, the gateway mechanism was wholly intact. Not a sliver or wire out of place. It had been built to withstand earthquake-like stresses, but everything around it hadn’t. The compression waves had sheared through the earth, rock, and walls, ripping metal like paper. It was probably unsafe to be here. The chamber might collapse.

Kacienta said, “Joao and I still don’t have any idea what happened here. It’s got us thinking we’re up against some god, some extraplanar power–”

Meloku turned, gave her a withering look. It worked; Kacienta stopped babbling. Meloku asked, “How long ago did they leave?”

“Who?”

Meloku said, through strained patience, “Habidah and her monk.”

“Two hours,” Kacienta stammered. “We can’t contact our satellites, but last the ground sensors saw, they were headed to Ways and Means. They must have reached it by now. If Ways and Means let them, I mean.”

“I need to contact Ways and Means,” Meloku said. “Go after them if I can’t.”

“The shuttle’s gone. We can’t get into contact with it.”

“I’ll use the communications gateway,” Meloku said. “I’ll send myself through if I have to.”

“But that’s impossible…!”

Meloku snapped, “Obviously it’s not impossible. You saw it.”

After a moment, she calmed enough to say, “Nor was it ever intended to be impossible. No one besides the amalgamates and their agents is meant to know, but a micrometer communications gateway aperture can be widened this far. The method is intended to be used only in emergencies. It doesn’t require ‘gods’ or powers. Just an understanding of transplanar theory behind what the amalgamates have chosen to make public.”

Kacienta peered through the fissure. “But all the destruction–”

“Didn’t destroy the gateway mechanism. The mechanism stayed intact while the stresses destroyed everything around it. As it was designed to.”

Kacienta set her hand on the twisted wall, as if to lean on it. “We thought that we were seeing a miracle.”

“Whoever wanted you to think that it was some kind of mystical power was tricking you. There was nothing magical about what happened here. The only mystery is where the extra power came from, but there must be an explanation for that, too.”

The needle-like projectors tapered to invisibility. There seemed to be space for a gateway, at most, a few micrometers wide. All deception. Multiple layers of folded space had already cut right through them without displacing them. It was one of the contradictions possible only at so high an understanding of transplanar physics.

“I’m going to need your help to reactivate these. You and Joao both.”

“What can we do?”

“My demiorganics are nonfunctional.” Meloku paused to gauge Kacienta’s reaction. When she saw nothing, she said, “I need you and Joao to restart the gateway, and to program some very specific instructions.”

“For what?”

“I’m going to open a gateway directly aboard Ways and Means, and contact it through that.” A gateway opening in the middle of its hull would definitely get the amalgamate’s attention.

Kacienta stared a moment, her mouth slack, and then nodded.

She fetched Joao, who had gotten Galien tucked away into Feliks’ old quarters. While Meloku told them what they needed to do next, they alternated between telling her everything that had happened.

Joao said, “She lied to us. She must have set up her plan with Niccoluccio hours beforehand. She’s a psychopath, a walking disaster. I should have known this was coming.”

“You should have,” Meloku said.

Meloku got a breathless earful of Niccoluccio’s stories of the world beyond the gateway. There was certainly some powerful force behind all of this, that much was certain. But their talk about gods was a native mode of thinking. Someone was trying to pull a very thick wrapping over their eyes. It was impossible to tell whether Habidah knew more, or if she had been just as duped as Kacienta and Joao.

Meloku said, “I need one of you to find Ways and Means’ current position and velocity. If you can’t get in contact with your satellites, then just plot its orbit from the last time you saw it.”

Calculate an orbit. She might as well have told them to spoon her food. Without her demiorganics, Meloku couldn’t do much but direct.

While Joao tracked Ways and Means, Kacienta programmed the gateway mechanism as Meloku directed. Meloku was relieved to discover that most of her work had already been done for her. Whoever had last reconfigured the gateway hadn’t bothered to undo their alterations.

She returned her attention to the gateway mechanism. Opening a transplanar gateway was difficult enough. It was paradoxically much more difficult to gate between two points on the same plane. It might have been better to travel directly to the Core Worlds. But no, Ways and Means was in immediate danger. No matter what she thought of Kacienta and Joao’s ramblings of gods, she couldn’t underestimate her opposition. If Habidah and Niccoluccio got aboard Ways and Means, they might lose it. The Unity had never lost an amalgamate.

While Joao worked, he said, “We still can’t contact Ways and Means directly. Whatever’s in control of this base won’t let us. NAI isn’t answering our questions. I suppose it could have taken our demiorganics, like it did yours, but it didn’t.”

Meloku didn’t answer. At least her enemy had been more afraid of her than these two.

Joao asks, “I still have to use base systems. What makes you think NAI’s going to allow what we’re doing now?”

She was forced to admit, “Nothing. I have to try.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

She had to hope that her enemy had turned its attention away. If she couldn’t alert Ways and Means, she wouldn’t be able to do anything else, either.

As the adrenaline rush faded, pain soaked through her legs, seeping up her abdomen like water through a sponge. She no longer had the technology to disguise her exhaustion. Nor sort out her brain chemistry. Despair crashed down on her in big, heady waves. She tried to force it out, or, when that didn’t work, ignore it. Anxiety shouldn’t matter. Exhaustion and depression shouldn’t matter. It was all foolish chemicals.

She asked, “Joao, if Habidah could have saved the Unity, do you think she would have?”

Joao seemed lost in the haze of data. “Excuse me?”

“Her character profile said that she was never as attached to her home plane, or any other, as she was to the planes she studied. If she had to choose between attacking one or the other, which do you think it would be?”

“I suppose she chose to attack the Unity. I mean, she must have.”

“Would you?”

Joao gave her a sharp glance. “Of course not.”

“What did you and Kacienta think when you discovered what the amalgamates were doing here?”

Kacienta said, “Well, we weren’t pleased, but–”

“But you cared about what happened to this plane. That’s more than most people in the Unity.”

Joao said, “If you’re implying that we would betray the Unity, you can fuck right back off the way you came.”

Meloku said, “Whatever force is controlling the monk targeted you all for a reason. You were more susceptible to turning.”

Kacienta said, “We didn’t.”

“I believe you.” Meloku waited a moment before adding, “Since you’re helping me.”

Kacienta pursed her lips. Joao glanced at her, but couldn’t bring himself to look at Meloku. He closed his eyes to focus on his demiorganics. They both looked miserable, but they knew they were being watched.

She was finally starting to feel like herself again. It made her just as miserable as they were. But she’d found out what she’d needed to, why her enemy had targeted her old teammates. And she’d made it clear to them that they were being watched.

After a certain point, there were no more directions she could give. Kacienta and Joao had to handle this on their own. Anxiety clawed up her throat. She cupped her hands and breathed into them.

Companion wouldn’t have been able to allay her fears. Its cold foresight would have just informed her of another half dozen ways it could all go wrong. Still, just hearing its voice again would have been a comfort, like going home again. Like closing her eyes was right now.

Kacienta reported, “The microaperature gateway is open.”

Meloku’s eyes snapped open. She bolted upright. The sleep vanished from her system. The adrenaline was back, and, for now, that was all that mattered.

“Signal Ways and Means,” she said.

It took so damned long to hear the answers rather than receive them directly. Kacienta said, “Static.”

“There are thousands of radio signals coming through,” Joao said. “I can’t sort through them. It’s a babble. All kinds of chaos.”

“Spectroscopy,” Meloku snapped.

After another excruciating pause, Kacienta said, “Nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, et cetera, on the other side.” The gateway had opened in a breathable atmosphere. “Traces of all kinds of other compounds.”

“Name some.”

“Mono, di, and tricresyl phosphates, nitrous oxides, ozone.”

All industrial contaminants Meloku would expect to find almost-but-not-quite scrubbed from a planarship’s air. She’d found the right place. Ways and Means was on the other side. It should have detected the gateway opening in an instant.

If it hadn’t responded to that, something was terribly wrong.

She looked to Joao. “In all those thousands of radio signals, is there anything at all that sounds familiar?”

Joao bit his lip. His eyes flicked back and forth as data poured through him. Meloku would have given her legs to see what he was reading.

Finally, he said, “Habidah is there. I recognize her demiorganics’ fingerprint.”

Meloku said, “Reopen the gateway closer to her. Load the other instructions I gave you. You and Joao will want to clear out.”

Joao said, “You can’t possibly think you’ll survive. You saw the wreckage left the last time someone widened the gateway.”

“Compared to what I went through to get here, that will be easy.”

Joao shook his head, but he and Kacienta did as they were told. After they stepped out, Meloku stood and faced the gateway.

She could perceive no change in either the needles or the infinitesimal space between them. She stretched her fingers, an activity Companion had taught her to clear her mind. To survive this, she needed to be limber, like she was making ready to survive a crash.

But she couldn’t help herself. Rage poured through her head, boiling, fulminating, seeking any release it could find. It dampened the pain in her legs.

She knew she ought not to feel clear-headed. That was an illusion, a trick of brain chemistry. Her judgment was probably more impaired than it had ever been in her life. Everything inside her was a mess.

But she liked this mess. All the fury and fear compressed her pain, crystallized it into an urge to attack. If, when, she found something on the other side of the gateway, she didn’t know what she was going to do, but it was going to be something. That was more than Kacienta or Joao would have.

Maybe she’d always been a mess, and needed Companion and the amalgamates to temper her. They’d known that, too. And they’d still chosen her.

Light flickered between the needles.

Meloku preemptively raised her hand to shield her eyes from the lightning storm to come. When she stepped through, the last thing she needed was to stumble blindly while her vision adjusted. She would be stumbling enough already. But better that than stopping.