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IF YOU’VE SEEN ONE Stabilized Rip Station you’ve seen them all. There’s always a massive concrete bunker surrounded by a gigantic, razor wire-topped electric fence that would fry a kaiju. The usual heavy military presence was firmly in place, with helicopter gunships on patrol and armed robotic drones in the air day and night. This particular Rip was outside of what’s left of Springfield, Missouri, where the first Moj invasion on the North American continent began. It’s the only one on Earth known to also connect to Adrathea.
I’d gone from a pleasant summertime in a fairly dry climate to the muggy Midwestern version. The jeans and golf shirt I had on clung to me before we could shuttle over to the bunker in the electric golf cart, driven by a UNMS trooper. I mopped my forehead and glanced at Trey, who sat in his casual grey blazer and slacks as if on a cool spring morning. I don’t believe the Alvehn perspire.
To say we traveled light would be an understatement. Besides the clothes I wore, I had a leather courier bag that I’ve used for almost ten years to haul personal items from one world to another. Trey once made the observation that the bag seemed to have melded with my skin and become a fifth appendage. I had the Alvehn sword in its old, black sheath in my hand, the point propped on the floor of the cart, and wore the Alvehn-designed baldric that would eventually support the sword and keep my hands free. Trey had no bag, since most of what he would call personal effects were surgically implanted. He carried sword and baldric as I did.
Our driver took us deep inside the bunker, down one ramp, then another, and finally rolled through an opening into a cavernous space well below ground. In the center of the chamber was a platform flanked by the massive cylinders containing the Alvehn field generators that stabilized the Rip. Between those was the Rip itself. If you’ve ever suffered from an ocular migraine, you know what a Rip looks like. I find it uncomfortable to look straight at the things. The Springfield Rip floated a few centimeters above the platform, in front of which was a set of concrete steps that were painted with the standard yellow and black pattern to warn of the trip hazard. Around the Rip, and over and behind it, connected to the generators by fat, white cables, were the curved and gleaming silver brane grapples that held the Rip open and prevented either fluctuations or relocations. This Rip was, I knew from previous travels, doubly stabilized, since the Alvehn had a base on Adrathea, and an installation much like this one. The only other place it could take you was a Moj world, one the Alvehn had retaken after we made our alliance with them. No one lived there now. Actually, nothing lived there anymore. What the Moj can’t hold onto they destroy.
The air in a Rip Station always seems to be charged with static electricity. In a way, it reminds me of how loft feels when a winged chimera makes ready to fly, as if the entire building is ready to take off. Trey says this is just my imagination.
The second human tech we met as we walked through the Springfield SRS asked for my autograph. For some reason I never see that coming. It’s crazy, but harmless, so I gave it to him.
A pair of Alvehn approached us and bowed low to Trey. They might as well have been twins, and both wore the same dark orange coveralls as the largely human staff working the banks of controls around the Rip. The color really didn’t suit them. White hair was tied back severely. “My lord Olvanak,” said one as they straightened. “We are ready to facilitate passage.” He spoke English with a heavy accent that always reminds me of someone speaking English after first growing up French, and then learning Japanese.
“My friend and I are ready to make the transit,” Trey replied.
The Alvehn who had addressed Trey looked at me and acknowledged me with a nod. “Colonel David Render. It is an honor to meet you at last.” He placed his long-fingered right hand over the center of his chest and bowed his head. The other Alvehn followed suit. “I am Iloran Banzik. This is my colleague Willon Crolonz.”
“We’ve met,” I said with a nod toward his colleague. Willon looked distinctly uncomfortable. “You are well, I hope? I see you kept your position here.”
“I am well, and I maintain my place, thanks in no small part to your intervention,” he replied.
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “I don’t have any patience with scapegoating. Missing that time slip was clearly not your fault.” It was easier to forgive Willon than myself, and I had long since done so.
“I thank you, all the same.”
“Did you ever figure out what went wrong?” I asked. Part of me really didn’t want to know, but...
“Not precisely,” Willon replied. “Something on the other side of the Rip to Adrathea prevented us from detecting the time slip. And it would seem the phenomenon was not natural.”
“Not natural? Are you saying it was done on purpose?”
“That is one possible explanation,” said Iloran.
“I believe it is the explanation,” Willon said, flashing a glare at Iloran. “For it is the simplest explanation. There are no known natural phenomena that could block a time slip signature from our instruments.”
“Edren,” Trey said with his teeth clenched. “It is the sort of petty thing he would do.”
“Petty?”
Trey sighed patiently and said, “You know what I mean.”
“Okay, you’re right, I do,” I admitted, though the Alvehn perspective still irritated me.
“It may not matter, now,” said Willon, “but having seen this once, we can now guard against it. The knowledge of how to do so spreads through the multiverse as we speak.”
No one else would ever endure the grief I’d felt, or the guilt. “It matters,” I assured them. “Thanks for telling me.” And I gave them my best rendition of a stiff-shouldered Alvehn bow. To the evident surprise of the human technicians around us, they returned it. The Alvehn usually keep their courtesies for their own kind. Then Willon and Iloran stood aside, and nothing but a few garishly painted concrete steps lay between me and Adrathea.
“Shall we?” Trey said with a gesture toward the shimmer in the air that revealed the Rip. It was as opaque as it was difficult to look at.
“Yes.”
We climbed the steps and then took one more step, and changed realities.
Didn’t feel or see a thing in the passage, but I never do. My first few missions gave me a bit of a headache stepping through that much passive energy — and no, I don’t know why they call it that — but having done this so often over the past twelve years, I’m apparently well-adapted. And so, without further ado, Trey and I walked down the somewhat taller and steeper set of steps on the other side. The equipment around us and the banks of controls and readouts were the same as those we left behind, with a mixed crew of Adrathean humans and Alvehn, all dressed in the same style of coverall, but of a pale blue color. A much better color for the Alvehn, come to think of it. The chamber housing the Rip wasn’t quite as large and, instead of concrete, was made of fitted stone block — floor and walls — with a dark wooden ceiling supported by stout beams far overhead.
We were greeted with the same level of formality, though by humans this time, and a young woman was assigned to drive us in an electric cart down a stone-walled passage to the equipment room. The first thing we did there was put on Alvehn second-skin body armor. Over that featherweight but impenetrable garment I placed clothing currently in use by the Adratheans when traveling by horseback: sturdy black trousers and a heavy-duty long-sleeved white cotton shirt, tall boots of black leather, and a long brown greatcoat cut for riding, and for drawing a sword over the shoulder. The styles had changed very little since my last visit, but that’s typical of an arrested world like Adrathea. After the common fashion of the world, which happens to be my personal preference, I rigged my baldric to wear the sword on my back.
Trey dressed as I did, brown instead of black and pale blue instead of white. He wore his sword the same way. We might have been just two guys on the road, until you took his slim build and almost white hair into account. And his eyes. No normal human has eyes that shade of violet.
Saddle bags were prepared with other supplies. Food, water, local currency, that sort of thing, and with the bags we piled sleeping gear sufficient for the season, which happened to be early summer. We could have traveled more quickly by solar rail, but the rail system was far more easily monitored than the open road. Edren would discover our return all too soon as it was; we saw no reason to help him out. Individual medium-distance travel is still dominated by the horse. I think the distortions we call flying monkeys did Adrathea a favor, in that regard. I took a moment to reacquaint myself with the denominations of the coinage. In about an hour we were ready to travel. Trey’s kit contained a small fabricator that could self-assemble into a larger version. If an unanticipated need cropped up, just feed in raw materials, depending on what was needed, and we were set.
We paid a visit to the armory. Trey added to his collection of knives, fond as he was of having spares, but left the guns alone. I took a rifle down from the wall more out of curiosity than need. The Adratheans use a spring-piston air gun technology for their weapons, and the clunky dart muskets I remembered had apparently been replaced with a longer, leaner weapon. I examined it for a moment, then asked, “How many darts will this hold?”
“Seven,” Trey replied. “They’ve made use of some of what we taught them to greatly improve the power and efficiency of these weapons.”
“Enough to skip reloading after every shot. Sounds like an arms race in the making.”
“Hardly in the making,” he said with a derisive grunt. “Ongoing. Guardsmen have switched from mail to a sort of plate armor, since those things can punch through ordinary mail at close range. The Sky Guard imports finstel mail armor from the Isles of Wulde, though many prefer the plate armor option.”
I noted that the rifle could still be equipped with a bayonet, and examined the cocking mechanism, which was smaller and more sophisticated than I remembered. It still resembled the old dart muskets, in the way it was used.
“These came into regular use about fifty Adrathean years ago.”
“Who uses them?” I asked.
“They were the weapon of choice for the Sky Guard by the time the, um, troubles came. Reserved for them and for the palace guard.”
I put the weapon back on the rack, thinking it might well be a sensible choice for fighting from the back of an airborne gryphon. In times past they’d carried lances to fend off attacks from above when a gryphon grappled with a foe. These rifles were long enough, when you added a long, slim steel blade at the end, to fit that need. “They’re still putting chemicals in the darts?”
“Oh, yes,” said Trey. “Quite a range of compounds, from distracting irritants to a neurotoxin that can drop a man in his tracks. They call it ‘Two Steps.’”
“Two steps?”
“It’s supposed to be how far you get before the poison kills you. Frankly, I think that’s an exaggeration. I’ve never seen anyone get that far after being shot.” Trey sighed as if weary, shaking his head. “As far as we can tell, the Pancreators introduced instabilities into most universes to prevent the sort of arms race that put your world in such danger. On an arrested world, there can be no weapons of mass destruction. Why the Pancreators skipped yours remains a mystery. We believe one goal was to keep warfare painfully personal. Other species evolve away from war under that pressure. Humans are remarkably resistant to the lesson.”
“That’s sometimes an advantage,” I pointed out.
Trey merely nodded in response. He knew all too well I was right.
You’re no doubt wondering about the combination of air-powered guns and swords. The flying monkeys, UNMS slang for the instabilities Trey mentioned, make explosive compounds, and weapons based on them, a dicey proposition. Adrathean chemists are well acquainted with gunpowder and other such compounds, but anyone who fools around with such materials in Morva is considered guilty of a capital crime. Too much energy discharged over a short time in a relatively small area causes space-time to warp in a universe like that of Adrathea. As Trey had said, we have no idea why it didn’t work for my Earth, but it’s just as well — our weapons were all that kept us from being devoured by the Moj.
The distortions caused by these instabilities almost look solid, with edges that resemble wings flapping. Small wonder they are thought on many worlds to be alive. The way they sort of swarm the energy source that triggers them adds to the illusion. The sight reminded someone of an old movie, and for some reason that name stuck to the phenomenon. Whatever you care to call the effect, it puts the brakes on the evolution of weapons, among other things. Sophisticated air rifle technology evolved in place of firearms, and the venerable sword has held its own in the area of personal defense.
I stopped doubting the effect those instabilities can have on a society the day I saw a guy open up on the Moj with an automatic rifle, on an arrested world. The flying monkeys left him looking like a botched autopsy.
Properly equipped, we made our way upstairs and to the main entrance. No one escorted us, but we knew the way. The Alvehn hadn’t changed the place much in several hundred years. There were guards at the door armed with swords and rifles. We greeted them casually, and stepped out into the bright sunshine of a world I’d never wanted to see again.
