Exodus: Tales of The Empire: Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier. (10 page)

“Rangers.  Let
me ask you a question, from one former warrior to another.  What does it feel
like to sell your soul to the darkness?”

Jack made his
move at that moment, twisting, bringing his right elbow back in a strike.  The
strike never landed, and the monomolecular blade cut through his neck.  The
last thing he saw was his headless body, spurting blood, as the man who had
killed him brought the blade around in return from the killing stroke.  His
vision blurred as his head hit the ground and rolled.  Vision turned to the
darkness the Ranger had asked him about, and he knew no more.

*     *     *

“We’ve got
everyone but the two still following you, Matthew.  You just hold tight.”

“That may not be
possible, Uncle Timothy,” whispered Matthew into the com.  “The bastards aren’t
more than fifty meters from me, heading my way.”

Matthew thought
it would be a good idea to close up with the two survivors so he could watch
them and keep track of them in order to vector his uncle to them.  And then
they had turned in his direction, seemingly at random.  Now he was trapped with
his back against the open water.  The only way out was a small bridge that
crossed the creek to the west.  The bridge had been built by a Swamper who
wanted to live on an island, but still wanted a low tech connection to the
land.

The bridge was
the problem.  Giant carnotropes had made that bridge their nest, holing up
under it.  The Swamper who had made his home there had been one of the first
victims of his construction, taken by one of the largest tropes anyone had
seen.  Gigantor still lived under the bridge, along with the females that were
his mates.  Crossing the bridge could be dangerous, even with the stinkweed
covering up his own scent.

The two kept
stumbling his way, making enough noise to spook every small animal for thirty
meters.  And they were still heading straight for him, obviously unaware that
there was water blocking their path.

Matthew knew he
had to move, and move fast, if he wanted to get out of the path before they
spotted him.  And the only way was the bridge, since the cove to the east also
cut him off.  Like most who had been raised in the Swamp the open water
terrified him.  He knew how to swim, but didn’t like his odds in the water.

Go
, he
thought as he moved west in a crouch, headed for the bridge.  But he had waited
too long.

“There he goes,”
shouted one of the men, the one he thought was the hireling mercenary.

A particle beam
buzzed the air, and he stopped for a moment to crouch by a tree and return
fire.  The next beam hit the tree, burning into the trunk and exploding it
outward into splinters propelled by superheated steam.  A splinter struck
Matthew in the neck, while a couple pierced his hand.  Stifling a cry he
stumbled away, heading for the bridge.

As soon as his
feet hit the bridge he looked back, to see the two men up and running his way. 
He turned back and ran across the bridge, aware of the eyes on him from the
water.  He looked to the side and saw the largest set of trope eyes he had ever
seen.

“Kelvin,” yelled
voice behind him.  “Stop where you are, or I’ll burn you down in your tracks.”

Matthew stopped
and turned, hands away from the rifle that hung from his neck by a strap.  He
had almost reached the end of the bridge, but there was twenty meters of open
ground before he could reach the cover of the trees, and he didn’t think the
two men would miss him over that space.

“We got him,”
said the older man, stepping out onto the bridge, his rifle pointed at Matthew.

“Now we just
have to figure out how to get him out of here,” said the younger.  “And
ourselves.”

“First things
first,” said the older man, the one he knew was named Deveroix.  “First we
secure him, then use him as a hostage to make the rest of his blood mad
relatives back off.”

“You’re
Deveroix?” asked Matthew.  “Numbra’s enforcer?”

Deveroix made
sure his rifle was pointed as he moved forward.  “That’s me alright.  And
Centari will be really happy when I bring you to her.  She’s got something
special planned for you, just so the others working for her don’t get any
ideas.”

“My family will
never allow you out of the Swamp,” said Matthew, trying to think of a way out
of this predicament and coming up with nothing.  At least the tropes weren’t
coming at him, so the stinkweed must still be working. 
The stinkweed must
still be working.  The stinkweed must still be working, and they aren’t wearing
any.
  Ow he just had to get them to come out onto the bridge, where they
would attract the attention of the predators.

“If they don’t
want to see you vaporized, they’ll do as we say,” said Deveroix, a tight grin
on his face.  “Now lift that rifle off your neck by the strap and toss it in
the water.  Slowly and carefully.”

Matthew did as
he was told, tossing the rifle by its strap into the water, making sure it
landed nowhere near any of the tropes.

“Now walk this
way.”

Matthew took a
step forward, then allowed himself to stumble forward and fall, hoping they
would see it as infirmity and not as something he had planned.  Even though it
had been planned.

“Dammit,” said
Deveroix.

“Let’s just
shoot him now and get it over with,” said the other man, and Matthew found
himself cringing at the thought of a particle beam striking through him.

“Don’t be an
idiot,” said Deveroix.  “We need him alive to get out of here.  Now come on.”

Their footsteps
sounded on the planks of the bridge.  Matthew heard the movement of the tropes
under the bridge, swimming out, while those already in the water beyond the
bridge shifted.  He looked up to see the men walking toward him, weapons
gripped tight in their hands.

A female came
jumping out of the swamp, clearing the side of the bridge and striking the
other man at chest level, carrying him to the other side of the span and into
the water.  Deveroix looked around, panic on his face.  He raised his rifle and
fired a beam into the water, where the carnotrope that had grabbed his man had
disappeared.  It was really a useless gesture.  Even if he killed that
carnotrope, it wouldn’t matter.  His henchman was already dead and gone.

“I’ll make sure
you don’t survive,” screamed the man, turning and raising his rifle again,
aiming at Matthew.

And neither
will you
, thought Matthew, facing the death he knew he couldn’t escape.

A long tongue
rocketed from the water, wrapping around the body of Deveroix, knocking the
rifle from his grasp.  With a strangled cry he was jerked from the bridge and
into the water, reeled in like a fish on a line into the mouth of Gigantor.

“It’s over,”
said Matthew as his uncle ran up to him on the other side of the bridge. 
“We’ve got them all.”

“It’s not over
until we cut the head off the snake,” said his uncle, shaking his head.

“But, she’s
untouchable.”

“No one is
untouchable,” said Timothy.

*     *     *

“Where is
everyone,” called out Centari Numbra as she walked into the warehouse. 
“Dammit.  I told you all I wanted someone here all hours.”

No one answered
her call, and the crime boss swore there would be hell to pay when she found
out who dropped the ball.  Then a crate caught her eye, and she moved closer,
her nostrils taking in the intoxicating scent of topor. 
About time
, she
thought.  She had orders to fulfill, and since the Kelvin kid had reneged on
his promise, she hadn’t been able to fill those orders.  Her reputation was
suffering in the meantime.  This might allow her to at least fill the topor
part of the ledger.

The crate had a
simple latch on the top, and she had it open in a second.  Lifting the top, she
feasted her eyes on the sight of the perfect buds, while her head felt the buzz
of the flower’s perfume.  Then she noticed the leaves and branches through her
haze.

“Fuck.  What is
this shit?”  The branches and leaves were useless, and the value of the crate
was now in doubt, since it wasn’t filled with the precious buds.  “Fuck,” she
yelled at the top of her lungs, reaching into the crate and pulling one of the
branches out, determined to see just how much of the bud she had, and how much
garbage.

She pushed her
hand in again, and something moved against it.  She tried to jerk her hand out,
but something latched onto it, and a moment later what felt like liquid agony
entered her forearm.  She jerked the arm out to find a red streaked lizard
attached to it, its fangs buried deep in her flesh.  As she tried to knock the
lizard away, another one crawled into sight and opened its mouth.  The stream
of caustic liquid it shot hit her straight in the eyes, blinding her in a wave
of agony.

Centari Numbra
fell to the floor, screaming at the top of her lungs.  She continued screaming
for minutes, the volume decreasing until she was uttering whimpers that
eventually faded away, and with it her life.

Sometimes humans
look in the strangest of places, such as beyond our own Universe.  And
sometimes they run into things that they couldn’t imagine.  Things that look
back from another dimension with a hunger filled gaze.

"Dr.
Yu?" asked the man at the space dock, his eyes wide in surprise.

Lucille
Yu nodded and smiled, used to the reaction she was receiving.  As the daughter
of the famous Chun Yu, the brightest physicist of his era, a man just about
everyone in the physics world knew by sight, they expected his daughter to look
like someone from New Hanou.  In other words short, dark haired, with black
eyes in brown skin.  Instead the man found himself looking up at a statuesque
blue eyed blond with fair skin.  The only physical feature that could be
attributed to her father were the slight epithilic folds on her eyes.  That,
and her first class brain.

"My
mother was from Norje," she replied to the unasked question. 

The
man, who had the look of Brazilia about him, nodded.  It was common knowledge
that the people of Norje had genes that were dominant to most others, an
artifact of the project that had been instituted on the planet a half millennia
before.  Now that process would be considered illegal in the Empire, but
several billion people carried dominant genes for height, blond hair and blue
eyes nonetheless.

"Your
bags are being put on the shuttle," said the man, who then held his hand
out with an embarrassed flush.  "Dr. Rafael Rodrigue," said the man. 
"I am chief of the door opening team on portal one."

Lucille
shook the hand, thinking how nice the man looked.  Then wondering how he might
be in bed. 
Not the best thing to think about when meeting my boss for the first
time,
 she thought, feeling a flus coming over her face
.

"Your
chariot awaits, Senorita," said the man, who was of a height with herself,
unusual for his homeworld.

Lucille
smiled and followed the man across the arrival lobby, taking a glance back through
transparent alloy window at the ship that had brought her to this far outpost
of the Empire.  They had spared no expense on bringing out new staff, using a
Hyper VI liner with a destroyer escort to carry them the two hundred light
years from Sector II base.

The
shuttle surprised her, being nothing more than a standard Imperial Marine
assault ship. 
It is a military project, after all
, she thought, walking
through the hatch and going to the seat that had a green icon suspended above
it. 
Or at least the military has a big stake in the project.

The
shuttle pulled free of the military dock with no sense of motion, the grabber
units pulling smoothly at the fabric of space and feeding all the inertia into
the compensators.  Lucille smiled as she noticed some of the other passengers
acting as if they didn't know that the ship had left the dock.

The
holo in front of her seat came on, displaying a construct of indeterminate size
floating above an ice planet.  At first there was no sense of scale, until the
viewpoint shifted back and the space dock, all fifty million tons of structure,
appeared.

"That's
the black hole generator," said Dr. Rodrigue, pointing at the object. 
"Sixteen two hundred pentawatt lasers."

"And
how often do you use it?" asked Lucille, estimating the entire construct
at three hundred million tons.  She knew the theory, and had in fact seen
larger hole generators in some of the core systems.  The light pressure of the
lasers compressed space itself, creating billion ton mass black holes, which
had several industrial uses. 
But they're too hard to transport
, she
thought, recalling that the largest freighters had a capacity of twenty-five
million tons. 
So they built one here.

"We
normally don't use it all that much.  Once the two portal generators were
constructed it was basically shut down, since we had all we needed.  It's just
completed its latest run."

"Why
did it need a latest run?" asked Lucille, realizing that something wasn't
right here.

"One
of the portals collapsed, and we lost all twelve of the generating holes,"
said Rodrigue, his face scrunching up in emotional pain.

"You
lost more than the holes, didn't you?" asked Lucille, her eyes wide as she
imagined the worst, which the other scientist soon confirmed.

"We
lost over three hundred people, sucked into whatever universe swallowed our
holes," said Rodrigue, rubbing his hand over his forehead.

"Has
that ever happened before?"

"Oh,
we've lost exploration crews we sent through to universes that seemed amenable
to our form of life.  First impressions are not always correct.  But nothing
like this."

"So
you're just rebuilding the portal, bringing in more people, and carrying on
from there?" asked Lucille, wondering just how mad these people were.

"This
program is important," said Rodrigue, his eyes tightening as he gazed into
hers.  "You know how we came to this space, don't you?"

Of course.  Aliens were going to destroy our race, so we ran as fast as
our then primitive tech could carry us.
  She simply
nodded her head.

"Then
you know that we still have an enemy out there, somewhere.  And we may need to
run again.  It would be nice if we could run into a hole and pull the hole in
after us."

Lucille
wanted to say something.  Something about how they were now too powerful to
fear such an enemy.  Something about how the
Donut
project was scheduled
to come online in the next decade, using a huge black hole to generate
wormholes that would make the Empire unbeatable.  Instead, she kept her mouth
shut, knowing there was no such thing as unbeatable.  People who thought they
were unbeatable soon found out differently.

Lucille
decided to stop thinking about it, for the moment.  She sat quietly in her seat
and watched the holo, which had now zoomed onto the surface of the planet, out
here far beyond the habitable zone of this star.  There were three hundred and
fifty fusion plants on that surface, supplying the energy needed by the
project.  Entire valleys were surfaced with heat exchangers, using the
interstellar cold of the planet to take care of the thermal radiation. 
And
two hundred thousand personnel to run the project, the robots, and all the
infrastructure.  Two hundred thousand people, including families, all at risk
whenever they open one of those rips between universes.

The
docking bay they entered  was very spacious, but not enough so to handle a
timely evacuation of everyone on the worldlet.  There were scores of such bays
here, still not enough. Artificial gravity was normal, and the primary base
contained several large caverns turned into wildlife preserves, with lush
foliage and small birds and mammals placed there for the enjoyment of the
inhabitants.  There were always some of those inhabitants around, mostly human,
but a smattering of nonhuman citizens of the Empire as well.  Lucille found herself
stepping around a huge hexacentauroid Phlistaran on the way to her quarters,
and there many small humanoid Malticorans in evidence, probably servants.

Her
quarters were just as spacious as advertised, with sitting room, dining room
and a large bed chamber.  Space was not a problem with installations, either
ships, stations or planetary bases.  It was more important to keep people happy
and healthy so that they could do their jobs effectively.

"Remember
what we talked about," said Rodrigue as he turned to leave.  "What we
do here is important."

"How
many have you opened?" she asked before he could get out the door.

"How
many?  A couple of hundred.  Maybe a few more.  We open them about twice a
week, and they remain open a week on the average.  Or they had, when we had two
portals."

"So
two hundred, more or less.  And how many have panned out?  How many opened into
a universe we could actually use?"

"None,"
said the other scientist with a shrug.  "But that doesn't mean we won't
find one, someday."

"Among
infinite possibilities?"

"That's
right.  Among infinite possibilities.  There has to be something out there that
we can use."  The scientist smiled, then walked through the door, which
closed immediately behind him.

Lucille
threw herself onto the couch and called up the room holo, linking into the base
computer system and sending through her password.  She spent the next couple of
hours learning all she could about the Other Universe Project.  At the end of
those hours she felt even more hopeless than before, and wished that she had
gotten that position on the Donut Project instead.

*     *     *

"Are
we ready, people?" asked Dr. Rodrigue, looking out over the control room.

The
crew sounded off, a hundred men and women at their stations.  Lucille looked
over the readouts from her own team, the one controlling the actual opening
process.  After the energy feed crew finished their checkoff, hers went through
theirs, while she checked their readouts one after the other.  She checked them
a second time through her link into the portal local computer, then again
through the main computer, her trained mind performing the equations through
the system ten thousand times faster than her organic mind alone could
accomplish.  She found a couple of minor discrepancies, and shuttled the
findings to those controllers responsible.

"Opening
mechanism ready," she shouted, at the same time sending her release code
into the system.

The
last crew, the exploration and recording unit, started their checkoff, while
Lucille looked around the large room.  She could recognize the old timers that
had been added to this portal crew by the looks of fear on their faces.  The
newcomers, who had never opened a portal, looked nervous, but their faces
lacked the expressions of stark terror on those of the veterans. 
And why
are they so afraid?
thought Lucille, going over what she had learned in her
own research on the project.  There were some disturbing indications that not
everything proceeded according to plan.  Not all the time. 
Maybe it's something
you have to experience
, she thought, wondering how she would be after this
opening.

"Prepare
to open," called out Rodrigue.

Lucille
looked at her board, making sure the electromagnetic field was set to the
programmed resonance.  One of the black holes was a little off, which would
result in a null opening.  She shifted it to the proper wavelength and signaled
the portal director that all was well.

On
the holo the twelve arms holding the micro black holes in their vibrating
electromagnetic cups started to move.  Each arm massed two hundred and fifty
million tons of superhard alloys and supermetals.  Thick superconductor cables,
massing several million additional tons, crawled over the arms.  The cupped
black holes began to move back toward the walls of the forty kilometer wide
chamber on the telescoping arms, going slowly from several meters apart to ten
meters.  The space the center of that ring started to ripple, much like that of
a hyperdrive opening a hole to the dimensions of hyperspace.  But this was
different, the space being accessed not one of the dimensions naturally
intersecting the Universe that humanity knew.  At fifteen meters separation the
space started to rip open, the hole accessing the other universe set by the
wavelength of the electromagnetic resonance.  Each incremental wavelength
opened onto a particular Universe, the number being almost unlimited.

There
was a bright flash of light at twenty meters separation, and then there was
something in the space that was not ours.  The arms opened up wider, to a
hundred meters, and Lucille found herself looking into total blackness.  Not
the blackness of space as she knew it.  There was nothing light producing in
that space, though the feel of depth was such that she felt she was looking into
billions of light years.

"Looks
like we have another null Universe," said one of the crew, a note of
relief in her voice.

"Send
in a probe," ordered Rodrigue, and a thirty meter long robot with heavy
grabber units fore and aft came speeding out of the wall perpendicular to the
hole.  It flew into the portal, its telemetry appearing in the holo, until it
had totally entered the other universe.  Then it just disappeared from all
sensors.

"It's
a null," said Rodrigue.  "Exploration teams stand down."

Lucille
looked into a side screen where a dozen personnel were suited up in modified
battle armor such as used by Exploration Command.  She could see the relief on
them through their body language as the order came through.  They would not be
risking their lives by working as guinea pigs in the ultimate of foreign
environments.  There were biologicals within the probe, but obviously they
would not be reporting back to the control station.

"Five
minutes, people," said Rodrigue, getting up from his seat and walking toward
the holo tank.  "Record everything you can, even if it amounts to
nothing.  Then we'll close this one up and get a fresh start tomorrow."