Last Merge Read online

  Handing off a bubble? The Great Stone Inn, perhaps, to be carrying less mass around? Or his dogs?

  "If you're not back in a week, I'll come see if you need rescuing."

  "See you in a week. On Embassy. I'll close this gate, and make my own when it's time to go."

  Q shook her head and followed the other witches.

  Xen stepped through to the X World and walked away from the gate . . . Sighed. "I should have known you'd follow me."

  Rael giggled and let her light warp go. "Of course. So let's go see what the Helaos are up to."

  He looked a bit unfocused for a moment, and the gate disappeared. Then he touched her shoulder and pushed her back a bit. She stumbled back over a rough surface in a shadowed room.

  "It's easier to deal with minor discrepancies in momentum if you're taking a step when you teleport." He flashed a grin. "Just in case you ever figure it out."

  "Humph." Her quick retort died as she got a good look at the room . . . Stepped back and swallowed. "Tell me those aren't . . . people . . . who merged with . . . walls?" She edged closer to the holes in the outer wall and looked out . . . and down.

  "Helaos. Waiting in vain for some people to merge with. There must have been a building here, with a close congruence, otherwise it probably wouldn't have stayed standing."

  Rael looked down at the floor, random high and low areas. "The floors weren't at the same height."

  "No, so they warped to merge."

  She gazed at the sort of human-shaped marks on the crumpled wallboard. Suggestions of clothing in the colors, their facial features smeared and twisted. Both adult-sized, thank the One.

  "The whole world is like this. Both Helios and the people of that world they ate. The people who didn't believe, who wouldn't evacuate. They're all still here. Merged with god knows what." Xen walked to the outside wall. "See the big dark cubic buildings? Those are the magnetics centers. We think they both cause and control the speed of the merge.

  "They have a lot in common with the powered gates. Rotating superconducting rings carrying huge electric charges and shearing magnetic fields. They run them in pairs, starting with two opening a small shadow zone between them. Then they extend the zone by turning on pairs of magnetics, one off each end of the zone."

  Rael nodded. "I've read your report. You sabotaged one that was starting to spin up, delaying the extension."

  "Yes, and I'll do a more thorough job of it, this time. I have bombs in bubbles. One hour on the timers. I've experimented at home. I should be able to shove the bomb into the wall of the containment and anchor it on the other side. It should be undetectable there. Unless something pops the bubble. The rings are dimensional phenomenon, after all.

  “Unfortunately I'll need to be within a mile of the bubble to pop it . . . and trust the bomb to still be operational after an hour in a very thin nitrogen atmosphere at cryogenic temperatures."

  "Umm . . . "

  "Yeah. So I'm going to sneak into that one tonight and see about placing the bomb." He cleared his throat. "I hope you don't spook easily, because I'd appreciate a heads up if a bunch of people suddenly show up armed to the teeth at the center down there."

  Rael looked over her shoulder at the images . . . Just images, not real bodies, even though they really are real dead bodies . . . "Sure. No problem."

  He flashed a grin. "Like something to eat? It's almost noon here."

  Rael resisted looking at the . . . images, and stepped over to a side wall. Slid down and sat where she could look out a hole in the wall at a cloudy sky. "Umm . . ." her stomach gave warning. "Thanks, but I'm on a diet."

  Xen sobered, and folded up to sit beside her, lifted an arm in an invitation to snuggle that she accepted immediately.

  "Sorry. It's . . . a reminder of my worst failure. Not that there was much I could have done differently. I talked to some of the Helaos. Not these two specifically.

  "One man, he was in agony, not wanting to kill someone by merging, but at the mercy of his government and in terror of his family's lives. He saw me doing the water and ashes merge . . . and ran off to try it. I hope he made it."

  He leaned his head back against the wall. "The next one just sneered, all arrogance. 'We are Helaos, the Damned. Thrown from the Universe, and thus the Universe is made our prey.' He was immortal and the lives of Damos were of no importance at all. He'd merged five times."

  "So they aren't all bad . . . "

  "Just most of them, and all of their leaders." Xen nuzzled her hair. "And I suspect I'm going to kill a whole bunch of them. But not today."

  "I hope. So . . . do you just teleport in and, what?"

  "No . . . I can teleport to places I've never been, but it's not advisable. I'll teleport out, though, so escaping won't be a problem." He made a plucking gesture. "I'll leave a bunch of stuff with you . . . " He patted her arm. "And put some handles on these two . . . Food and dogs."

  "Xen . . ."

  "Just a precaution. And I'm quite certain I won't need Pyrite in there."

  "You've got your horse with you?"

  "Yeah. He says when I'm doing something dangerous, I have to have him along, just in case."

  Rael eyed him. Is he genuinely concerned about not getting out of there?

  "Have you got a rifle in any of these bubbles? Just in case."

  ***

  "They've got the mags running . . . probably just spinning slowly . . . slowly compared to their working speed, couple thousand RPM, maybe . . . so the ring doesn't develop a sag . . . they're big, umm, about double the diameter of your powered gate rings—just one, not like the counter-rotating gate rings—heavy enough that they can get out of round if they aren't spinning. They've got little rings, too, sort of a back up."

  Rael nodded, looked out the hole in the wall at the setting sun. "Our gates have . . . never mind. You're too damned easy to talk to, God of Spies."

  Xen snickered and leaned out the hole to look at the street. "Looks like the night shift's here. See you later."

  He looked down to spot an empty area, warped light and teleported.

  A quick study of the men heading into the Magnetics center, then into a bubble, nearly closed . . . fingertip walk out onto the sidewalk and stick the bubble onto a shoe.

  He closed the bubble, opened it enough to peek out at a swinging featureless wall. He stuck a finger out to detach the bubble as the shoe touched the floor, and skittered on finger tips over to the wall. Stuck the bubble down and took a long slow look at a featureless corridor.

  Good thing there's a bunch of people walking along, otherwise just this little hole might catch the eye . . . and the shift change won't last forever, so I'd better see about finding a wall of the ring containment.

  Okay, those look like the front doors. And there are two cross corridors . . . this one ends at the second corridor. The ring might be behind that wall? And here comes the afternoon shift, heading home. Let's try the corridor least travelled . . .

  Which isn’t actually very far away . . . less than half the building.

  He finger walked down the main hallway, trying to not feel like an invisible snail. Stopped at the first corridor and peeked both ways. Offices with glass windows on one side of the corridor—toward the front of the building—and on the other side a glass wall looking into a room full of controls and computers.

  The last of the day sift departed, so he skittered across the corridor and on down the main hallway to the T intersection at the end.

  A careful peek around that corner to his left showed bare metal stairs going up and further down the corridor, stairs going down, beneath the upper staircase. Xen maneuvered the bubble around to look down the corridor to the right . . . three men, a bank of monitors.

  Guards? I'm surprised they think they need them . . . and who are they monitoring? Their own people? I wonder . . . if they occasionally have problems from merging? Just scrambled brains, or the other personality persisting?

  He eyed the men. Talking. Hot drinks
. Tossing occasional glances at the monitors. Not expecting trouble. Not alert.

  I'll try the stairs.

  Flexed his hand. Getting stiff. Ridiculous way to travel. Once I'm around the corner, I'll warp light and get out of the bubble.

  Around the corner and off . . . feeling . . . odd, hair on the back of his neck up . . . in fact all of his hair . . . Static? More likely the magnetic field of the rings. He maneuvered awkwardly . . . spotted the cam at the top of the down staircase. If he was across the corridor, right up in that corner, it might not pickup any little blips as he exited the bubble . . .

  Through the open lattice of the metal stairs he could see the guards, one of them waving expansively as he talked.

  Xen finger walked across, toward the back wall, possibly the wall of the ring containment . . . Warped light hard and smooth and eased out of the bubble. It zipped away instead of the usual float.

  Didn't notice that, last time I was sabotaging a mag center . . . but then I don't think I released a bubble, then, either.

  Xen eyed the wall.

  What the hell is it made out of? Not very dense, nearly three feet thick. Then a gap . . . and a metal wall . . . no it’s curved. That’ll be the pressure vessel, with a near vacuum inside. Damn, it’s huge, takes up most of the rest of the building, basement to second floor.

  So this outer wall is . . . blast containment? Or is it to keep foreign material away once the shadow zone encompasses the building? How do they deal with that problem . . . or does that explain the size of the containment? If they took ring material in a very fine powder over to the world they finally end up merging with . . . and placed it where the pressure vessel would over-lap . . . the oversized pressure vessel might cover the range of error in placement of whatever equipment is in there to . . . maybe spray ring power at the ring?

  Well, let’s just see about stopping them from using this thing in the first place.

  I can feel the magnetic field . . . so, how about one bomb shoved through this wall right here? It can sit in between this heavy wall and the pressure vessel, and the explosion will knock holes in the pressure vessel, warm up the rings . . .

  That should work. Then if they show signs of planning to merge with either the Primitive World or the One World, I’ll have one bomb in position.

  He plucked one bubbled bomb off his arm, keeping a solid grip on it. Shoved it most of the way into the wall . . . attached it to the material of the wall deep inside and shoved it all the way in. Mentally shoved it deeper. Halfway. Just a little more . . .

  The bubble popped.

  The wall bulged out a few inches, a glowing hot bump three feet across.

  Xen threw himself away and to the side.

  Crap, a hundred kilos of metal and chemicals trying to coexist with the stone or whatever of the wall! Good thing solids are mostly empty space . . . probably there weren't any atomic nuclei close enough to fuse . . . Otherwise I've just irradiated the hell out of myself . . . shit.

  And those are fire alarms. It’s cooling down fast, but it’s got a ways to go. And I need to get out of the way of the guards running this way . . .

  Xen jumped and grabbed a tread of the upper stairs and swung his body up out of the way, got the ball of one foot on another tread.

  The guard grabbed the support post and swung around to head down . . . Put on the brakes, scrambled to stay on his feet and turned around to gawp at the bulging wall. Not really glowing hot, but . . .

  His calls to the other guards and their yelled replies and exclamations when they spotted the wall exceeded Xen's rusty knowledge of their language. Dismay and cursing, a call for a techno—technician or scientist—was clear enough.

  Xen shifted his grip and reached to his right. Got a grip on the upper stairs, and a foot down on the rail of the lower and eased out . . . More running feet . . . and no way he could slide by them. He muscled over the upper stair rail and trotted up to check out the upper floor. No one in sight, lots of metal tanks, pipes. Insulated, the air cold and slightly misty.

  Pity I didn’t grab the written language when I grabbed the speech.

  No time for exploring. I think I need to leave. He felt the location . . . couldn't quite . . . I'm going to have to get further away from the magnetic field.

  He trotted back to the stairs, where everyone was getting out of the way of some new people, firefighters, perhaps . . . Except the techno exclaiming in horror and waving his arms . . . trying to stop them . . . being pushed aside.

  Xen decided to believe him and bolted down the stairs, turned into the main hallway and ran, weaving through spectators. Shields up!

  The splash of water, the hiss of steam.

  The crack of the weakened wall as the sudden cooling fractured the material. A muffled whomp and a brief gust of air toward the back hallway. A shrill hissing. Had they holed the pressure vessel? Or did I do that? The pressure vessel’s nearly half the volume of the building!

  Xen dodged running men, shouting orders. The people in the hall turned and ran, half for the control rooms, half for the front doors. Xen bounced off one, kept to his feet and sprinted for the front doors as the super cooled spinning ring shattered . . . and was almost contained within its damaged walls. The near vacuum of the ring room sucked air from the building in a hard gust. The Helaos rushing the front doors shoved at them in vain.

  Several explosions, the sounds oddly dim in the thinner air.

  A blast of arctic air shoved everyone against the outer doors, blowing them open. Xen staggered through and away, gasping for breath . . . Gas? Or maybe something unfortunate just happened to a whole bunch of liquid nitrogen? Helium?

  Maybe I should go back to college, engineering or something, before I try sabotaging any more high tech installations.

  He stopped to feel the location, the tower lookout room, the teleportation spell, power . . . and stepped out into the dark room and tripped over a soft thing that yelped indignantly.

  "Sorry, Pig." He released the light warp and shields. Blinked and focused on Rael, lowering her rifle, Barracuda jumping up from beside her. "Well, that was fun. But I think we should go home now."

  ***

  He dropped Rael at her ute, Hustled back to Embassy and got private with a bottle of wine and a speed bubble. Just in case there was radiation, or something other than a lack of oxygen in the gas I breathed back there.

  Chapter Seven

  Eldon the Honest Gold Miner—for as long as he can stand it

  Summer Solstice 1402 px

  Eldon liked the long trips down the east side of the Rip to the northern end of Long Lake. He'd grown up in Gemstone, with this stony wilderness just a few miles away. Of course they'd had a whole world to use and explore on the other side of their Gate. But a more boring World would be hard to find. The desert, on the other hand, had been perfect for his boyhood misbehaviors.

  And hide from well earned punishment. We're all set up with a house and mining claims. Not a bit of trouble in the last nine months . . . I hope to hell we can keep it up.

  With a good sized load of gold, he had all four horses hitched to the wagon today. Banana and Muffin leading, and Star and Blazer as his wheel pair. They'd been this way enough times that they hardly needed steering. Which was just as well; he rode the brake down the slope toward the bridge across the lake. The stupid dog sat beside him.

  Not stupid. He's a Hell Hound cross of some sort, and probably not even full grown.

  The bandits showed up at an awkward time, pelting down the hill at him, as they made a rather sharp turn on the steepest segment. They were whooping and yelling, and had crossbows cocked and in hand.

  The idiot dog growled and then faded into the rocks.

  "Halt or die!" The leader had a really great mustache.

  "What? Do I look stupid?" Eldon yelled back. He raised a physical shield around the horses and scowled at the idiots. Around the corner, Banana snorted and stopped. Eldon cussed and set the brake. Climbed down to examine the fair
ly minor fall of rocks that completely blocked the road. Eldon certainly wouldn't want to come up on it at any speed. "Son of a Witch."

  The dozen men were pulling up alongside the wagon, grinning.

  "Think its funny do you?" Eldon flicked a finger at the mustache, which promptly burst into flame. Half a dozen bolts bounced off his personal shield, and Eldon grabbed the nearest man and dragged him from his saddle. He removed sword and knife from the man's possession and shoved him at the rock pile.

  "Start shifting rock. Don't give me any lip!"

  Before the frantic leader had gotten his mustache put out in the road dust, Eldon had disarmed two more, bubbled three, and was studiously ignoring the rest of them.

  "Who the hell are you?" The man touched his tender face.

  "I'm a bigger, badder man that you'll ever be. And you'd best be glad it's me and not any of my partners that you tried to rob. They've got tempers. But, despite my position on the pinnacle of evil, I'm currently trying to be an honest miner. So, you lot are going to take note of these odd colored horses of mine, and you aren't ever going to try to rob me again. Right?"

  A sharp bark from the dog. Eldon sidestepped the swipe from behind and above and dragged the man out of the wagon. "Get out there and move rocks." He planted a boot in the man's rear for emphasis.

  "You aren't Auchel Ibrahm."

  "Old Gods, no. I thought they hung him. Twice."

  "Three . . . Umm, well, yeah . . . not that I knew anything about it, being at the time an honest man, who's umm, just recently gotten desperate and, umm, so incompetently . . . I mean, we was warning you about the rock fall, to not drive your poor horses into it. Why, they could break legs, coming up on something like that sudden-like."

  "Yep. Sure could." Eldon eyed the dust cloud to the south, and then the slightly diminished rock pile. "And if you and your helpful fellows were to clear those rocks in a hurry, why, I might let you go soon enough that you won't find out who's raising that cloud of dust."