Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (21 page)

"How big is it? Do you have measurements?" Gruth asked.

"The interior of the Waygate is one hundred forty-four feet in diameter," Kemmer told him. "The ring itself is about eight feet wide and five feet thick. We estimate that each section weighs an average of thirty tons. There are sixteen segments."

"How are they held together? Or to the base?" Enu-Io wondered. He walked around the base of the Waygate.

"That's one of a thousand things we don't know yet. We haven't been able to get a sample from the seams, if there's any mortar. You can't even slide a razor between the pieces."

"Self-tensioned?" Enu-Io asked.

"Nope." Kemmer swept his arm to encompass the whole huge ring. "The angles don't line up. We have no idea why it doesn't just fall apart."

Panna looked up at another piece, made of a glittering black… stone? It was hard to tell. She pulled on a pair of green vorlex gloves and ran her fingers over the joint where it met the next section. It was fitted so closely that Panna could not even feel the change of material. Not even a different texture. It all felt slick, almost wet, and… warm?

"What's the temperature?" she asked.

"Ambient," Kemmer told her, then laughed at her shocked expression. "I know the Waygate feels warm, and we have no idea why, but it doesn't register on a thermometer."

"It looks like the portal thing on Arborus," Gripper said.

Xen looked at Xia, then at the alien. "She's told me about your experiences, and that you believe you might have come to the CWA by means of a Waygate, or something similar."

"Yeah." Gripper stood at the base of the ring. He did not touch it. "It was the same shape, and all in piece, but that gate wasn't on a pyramid. This one has more pieces, too."

"How many more?" Xia asked.

"I'm not sure." He traced one of the shiny, eddying striations in the air with a huge, clawed finger. "This is the same, though. The ones that were put together all had this kind of finish… or whatever the light is."

"They? Then there were more than one?" Kemmer asked. His eyes lit up.

"A whole plaza. And they were a lot smaller than this. About at tall as I am, maybe."

"Built to a personal scale, perhaps," the Prian mused.

"Then what was this one used for?" Xen wondered aloud. "Without a loading ramp or something similar, it couldn't have been used to move cargo."

"Not necessarily," Panna said. The awe had not worn off or even faded, but she was full of ideas. "The Waygates were clearly built with much higher technology than we understand yet, but even we use NI fields. There's no reason to believe that they couldn't just fly or push anything they needed right up these stairs. The steps might just be for foot traffic."

"I don't think I'd call it technology," Gruth grumped. Like every Lyran that Panna had ever met, the man was an arrogant elitist when it came to machines.

"Just because you don't understand magic doesn't mean it isn't technology," Panna reminded him, exasperated. "Waygates can cover more distance in less time than the best superluminal drives. If we can just understand how these things work, places like Prianus don't have to suffer just because they're far away from the galactic core."

Panna realized she might have gone a little too far and glanced at Kemmer. The Prian looked back with eyebrows raised. She bit her lip. "Sorry."

"No need," Kemmer said. He smiled at Panna. "Prianus is not a pleasant planet. I'm hoping that this find will be enough to secure a tenured position at a Tynerion college."

Xen crossed his arms. "That's why you don't want me authoring anything about this."

Kemmer was unfazed by the Ixthian's irritation. "You've already got a Tynerion office and a beautiful assistant. You'll get plenty of grants off this, Professor Xen, but I need the credit. I don't want to be stuck on Prianus my whole life."

Panna blushed at the part about Xen's
beautiful assistant
and returned her attention to the Waygate. The film of light playing over the surface had taken on a different tone. The layer of pale, multi-hued light moved faster now, curling and swirling like water eddying around rocks.

"What about this?" she asked. "This light? Is it some sort of reflection?"

"We haven't been able to determine the source. Like the warmth you feel, it doesn't register on anything. No kind of photometrics or chemical composition," Kemmer said. "It seems to react to people, too."

"How's that?"

"Notice how quickly it's moving now? It slows and fades when no one is around. We've set up cameras to record the changes. This is the most active I've seen it, but there are more people down here than ever before."

"There are a lot of things we don't know about the Waygates," said Xia. Her eyes swirled with colors, not unlike the gate stones. "All things considered, I'm a little surprised you don't have any Arcadians on your team."

"Some Arcadians saw the base camp and came asking for work. I asked them some questions, but they had nothing to tell me. I assumed they were keeping secrets, so I sent them on. If your friend Maeve is telling the truth, maybe they just don't know much. Anyway, we don't need their help."

Xen clicked his tongue "The Arcadians know a lot more about them than we do. We should pay them a little respect, if only because we may need their help."

Kemmer shrugged. Gripper shifted his impressive weight back and forth, from one foot to the other. Bare feet, Panna noticed, and wondered if they were cold. If Gripper was uncomfortable about anything but the arguments, it did not show. He was a tough creature. Physically, at least.

"I'm still not hiring Arcadian diggers," Kemmer said, crossing his arms and narrowing his blue eyes at Xen. "They're not suited for this kind of work, anyway. As for Arcadian consultations, we've got Maeve for that now. She seems to know a thing or two about Waygates."

Gripper flinched at that. Panna wondered why.

Xen looked up at the much taller Kemmer and grinned. "That's all I ask. As I said, we do need an academic perspective on this find. We've got a lot of work to do. Let's get started."

Everyone in the chamber relaxed visibly as the tension in the air eased and the curiosity returned. Panna wanted to thank Xen for that, but remained quiet and did as she was told.

"When criminals are as driven as the detectives who hunt them, we are all in a lot of trouble."

- Amana Drex, Axis police officer (165 PA)

A red light blinked in the Raptor's cockpit. There was no positioning signal from any of the Pylos landing fields. The skypads were out of commission in the wake of some ubiquitous local catastrophe.

Coldhand circled the city once, switching between different frequencies, but picked up only the local police signals. He turned east and flew away from Pylos. He could not land in a police field and did not want to linger in a stolen Raptor.

Logan's fighter pierced the heavy, clinging gray clouds and then he was soaring over the mountains. The Kayton range was one of the largest on Prianus, rising ever higher each year as the tectonic plates that formed the mountains pushed together and thrust the peaks starward.

The mountain slopes were streaked in pale blue glaciers and deep, dark ravines. The same forces that built the mountains were tearing ever-widening cracks in Prianus' stone skin.

Wrinkled and fragile as an old man. It's like the whole planet is getting old.

Coldhand wove between the peaks, searching for a place to land. He flew over a broad, flat stretch of stone, an ice-carved depression more than wide enough to hold the Raptor. But someone else had found it first. A half-dozen domed tents circled up in the center of the moraine, just to the south of another dark crack in the mountain. Even if the campers below were discrete and would be willing to quietly share their campsite, it was too far away from Pylos for Coldhand's purposes.

He skimmed lower over the slopes until he found a wide lip of stone jutting out from the side of the mountain, only half visible through the surrounding trees. Coldhand cut the engines down to minimum and set the Raptor gently down on the outcropping. Between the surrounding forest, the clouds and fog, it was unlikely that anyone would find his ship. It would be a long hike down into Pylos, but once within range of mainstream access, he could rent or hire a vehicle.

Coldhand unbuckled his harness and slid back the Raptor's canopy. Rain and sleet sprayed down into the cockpit, carried on an icy wind. Thunder rumbled in the distance, but the worst of the storm was still far off.

Logan climbed out of the Raptor. His entire body was sore and bruised from Vorus' beating. It was not enough to hinder him, but it hurt with every movement – a dozen reminders how much he could still feel. Logan sealed and locked his ship, then set off down the mountain, toward Pylos.

It was an eight-hour hike through the Prian forest. The rain was lighter under the trees, at least. They creaked in the wind and birds called from the branches. A pair of soft brown doves watched Logan walk under their perch, blinking round black eyes. They huddled together, two fluffy balls of feathers shielding each other against the chill.

The ground was muddy under Coldhand's feet. His feet ached. The feeling was so strange… Why did it hurt? Logan had suffered much worse injuries without difficulty.

Vorus is a master. He knows how to inflict the most pain with minimal damage,
Coldhand reasoned.
This is his fault, not mine.
But it sounded hollow, even to him.

The rain turned to hail and then back into rain as Logan made his way down the mountain. Somewhere around noon, he found a road winding through the thinning trees. Logan checked his bearing and followed the road west. An hour passed before any of the vehicles pulled over to offer him a ride. It was a primer-gray truck driven by a pair of tattooed young men. A short exchange and brief display of Coldhand's Talon-9 convinced them to drive on.

Logan kept walking. Passing cars – most moving on wheels and spherical bearings instead of the more expensive null-inertia fields – kicked up sprays of muddy water. The trees and boulders were replaced by apartments and stores, all with the same dull, colorless spray-on finish. The anti-frosting microbes had long since died and left the gray city covered in a fragile skin of ice.

Why did I lose to Vorus?
Logan wondered. He was younger, faster, and far more ruthless than the old cop. He did not feel, did not tire. How could Coldhand lose? But winning would have meant hurting his teacher, the man who had saved young Logan Centra from a life as a street thug.

I don't care. I don't feel shame. If I felt anything, I would have felt it when I left Highwind, when I left the police. When I left Jess. When I stole my Talon and my Raptor. A good man couldn't live with the things I've done.

There were signs of the recent quakes all through Pylos. The streets and sidewalks were broken, some places so wide that the gaps had to be bridged with planks of wood. Some were filled with gravel or rubble from shattered buildings so that the cars could drive over them, but these were temporary measures, at best. They jolted over the cracks and creaked on worn-out shocks.

Coldhand was going to be in Pylos longer than Highwind. He waved down a striped cab, made sure the driver knew that he was carrying a weapon, and bought a ride to the nearest rental lot.

All of the closed vehicles were already sold out. They were valuable in the rainy seasons. Even the deposit on a small, fast streetcycle was almost more than Coldhand was willing to pay. They always were on Prianus. Chances were all too high that the drivers would never return their rentals.

Logan cinched his coat tightly closed around him and drove the rest of the way into Pylos. The city was considerably larger than Highwind. It filled and overflowed the valley, crawling up into the mountains like a spreading mold. The sky was full of birds, both wild and tamed. The larger winged shapes of Arcadians flew through the driving rain, more than Logan had ever seen in one city.

It made sense. A century ago, this was where the fairies first appeared, by the hundreds of thousands in the mountains above Pylos as they fled the destruction of their homeworlds. Many Arcadians had never left the city.

Coldhand pulled to a stop at a signal and leaned against the weight of the bike, steadying it. The muscles in his leg protested sharply and the knee threatened to buckle.

I've been trying to feel anything for so long. Shouldn't I be… pleased?

The light changed and Coldhand kicked the bike back into motion. He had to swerve around a street-train hauling a long line of trailers that sat low on their NI fields. A truck cut so close to the streetcycle that Logan banged his elbow and scraped the edge of his cybernetics on the driver's door. The illonium peeled a strip of paint from the truck and the impact jarred Logan's already bruised arm. The other driver yelled at him through the closed window, then raised his thumb and smallest finger.
Fly off.

Coldhand did not bother returning the gesture. He eased his weight opposite the dangerously tipping bike. The tires hydroplaned uselessly for a moment before they caught. Rebalanced, Logan drove on through Pylos. Rain splattered against the visor of his helmet. The cold water seeped in through his sleeve, torn where he had hit the truck.