I relaxed. Her wings flapping, she rose above the hole and put me down on an untouched part of the deck. Then she turned back, dropping again to rescue Josef, who was hanging from a spar.
“You okay?” asked Jakon. I nodded. Then I opened my hand, where the prism had been. There was nothing there.
“He tricked me,” I said. “He lied.”
Jakon grinned. “I don’t think so.” She pointed above me.
I looked up. Hue hung in the air above me. He was faint and gray, but there nonetheless. I felt relief wash over me. “Hue! You’re back! Are you okay?”
A faint blush of pink spread along the mudluff’s bubble surface.
“I think she may have been hurt,” said Jakon.
I wondered about the “she” part, but there was no time to get into something as potentially complicated as that. “The quickest route’s through here,” I said, pointing at the wall. J/O stepped up and aimed his blaster arm. I didn’t see what he did; the smoke had become so thick that I couldn’t see, or breathe very well either. “Hurry,” I said, coughing. Then I saw a flash of scarlet light through my closed eyelids, heard something like ffzzzhhsstt!! and suddenly there was fresh air in my face. Someone pushed me forward, and I stumbled out onto the Malefic’s forward deck.
“There’s the gate,” said Josef. “Look.” You could see it almost a hundred yards away to one side of the ship, glimmering against the strangeness of the Nowhere-at-All. “How do we get there?”
Jai said, “Jo, can you navigate the ether?”
“Can I fly over there?” She hesitated. “I don’t know. Probably not.”
“This is crazy,” growled Jakon. “We’re going to die on this stupid ship within sight of a gate.”
I looked again at the “hole” in the “sky.” It looked smaller, as if we’d drifted farther away. No. We weren’t drifting.
The gate was shrinking.
I looked up at Hue. “Hue! Could you get us out of here?”
He pulsed a sad gray. He had obviously been hurt by his time in the prism.
“Okay. Could you get us over to the portal?”
Again, a gloomy gray pulse. No. He couldn’t even do that.
“Well, then, could you get one of us over to the portal?”
A pause. Than a positive blue spread across Hue’s surface.
“Great,” said J/O. “So you get to live, and we get to die. That’s great. That’s just great, by which I mean, it really sucks, in case you were wondering.”
“You know,” I told him, “I was just starting to like you, after that sword fight. All of us are getting out. And the one I want Hue to carry over is Josef.”
“Me?” said Josef, his brow creasing.
“That’s right,” I told him. There was another explosion from below us, and another chunk of the ship dissolved into splinters.
“Quick,” I told them, looking around, “we need that rigging over there, and—yes! There’s a segment of mast down there. We need it over here.”
Jakon grabbed the rigging—it was the size of a couple of bedsheets, a netlike tangle of thumb-thick line—and Jai, with a little effort, levitated one end of the broken mast from under the pile of broken spars and timbers. Jo pulled up with the other, flapping her wings as she did so, and Josef and I pushed it up and over to the spot I had indicated.
I wrapped the rigging around the spar, tying it at the top and the bottom. It wouldn’t win any design awards, but it would serve. I hoped.
“Now,” I said. “Let’s hope that there isn’t much inertia in the Nowhere-at-All. Josef, how’s your javelin throwing?”
“Why?”
“Because,” I told him, “I want you to throw us at the gate.”
They all stared at me with that particular stare reserved for someone you’ve pinned your last hopes on, only to discover he’s utterly mad. “You’re crazy,” said Jakon. “The moon has taken your mind.”
“No,” I told her, told all of them. “It’s perfectly sensible. We hold on to the rigging, and Josef throws the mast toward the gate. It’s still pretty huge, although it’s shrinking fast. We hit it, I open it and Hue brings Josef through.”
They looked at each other. “It sounds very straightforward that way,” said Jo.
“It sounds like worms have eaten your brain,” said Jakon.
“Completely cracked,” agreed J/O. “Neural systems failure.”
“Josef,” said Jai. “Do you believe you can throw us that far?”
Josef reached down and hefted the length of mast. It was as long as, although thinner than, a telephone pole. He grunted with the effort, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so. Maybe.”
Jai closed his eyes. He took several deep breaths, as if he were meditating. Then he said, “Very well. It will be as Joey says.”
“Hue,” I said. “You have to stay here, on deck, and bring Josef over to us once we’re on our way. Can you do that?”
There was a green glow from one small bubbly corner.
“How do you know it even understands you?” asked Jo.
“Do you have a better idea?” I asked her. She shook her head.
We pushed the mast over the side of the ship, with the end pointing slightly up and toward the gate, which was pulsating like a holographic nebula in the bleakness a hundred yards to the side of us.
“Let’s do it,” I told Jo. We all, except Josef, clambered onto the mast, holding tightly to the rigging.
“Okay, Josef. Go for it.”
He closed his eyes. He grunted. Then he pushed.
Slowly we began to move away from the ship. We were falling, flying, coasting toward the gate, moving through the Nowhere-at-All.
“It’s working!” shouted Jakon.
Sir Isaac Newton was the first person (on my Earth, anyway) to explain the laws of motion. It’s pretty basic stuff: An object (let’s just say, for instance, a length of mast with five young interdimensional commandos hanging from it) if left to itself, will, according to the first law, maintain its condition unchanged; the second law points out that a change in motion means that something (like Josef) has acted on the object; the third states that for every action there is a reaction of exactly the same force in the opposite direction.
The first law, the way I saw it, meant that we should have just kept floating toward the rapidly shrinking gate until we got there. True, there was air, or ether or something that we could breathe, but simple atmospheric friction wouldn’t slow us enough to stop before we reached it. So my plan was foolproof, right?
Problem is, as I’ve said before, there are some places where scientific laws are only opinions, and pretty questionable opinions at that. Where magical potency can be stronger than scientific law. The Nowhere-at-All is one of those places.
And the members of HEX know it.
We were still about thirty feet away from the gate when we stopped. Just stopped, and hung there in space.
And then, from behind us, we heard a voice. A voice as sweet as poisoned candy. A voice that, not too long ago, I would have died to hear a single word of praise from. And from the looks on the others’ faces, I knew they had once felt the same way.
“No, Joey Harker,” the voice said. “No last-minute escape for you.”
As one, the five of us, as well as Josef, back on the Malefic, turned—
to face Lady Indigo.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SHE HUNG IN MIDAIR, between us and the Malefic but to one side, one arm still uplifted, still poised from casting whatever spell she’d cast to stop us. As she spoke, she lifted her other arm and began to float away from the Malefic and toward us. “I congratulate you, Joey Harker,” she said as she came. “You’ve done what no one thought possible. You’ve destroyed the Malefic and its mission. Lord Dogknife has already returned to HEX Prime. He has charged me with bringing you to him. I look forward to doing so, believe me. With his conquest of the Lorimare worlds aborted, he has only his thoughts of revenge on you to occupy his time.
”
She landed on the edge of the mast and started to trace in the air the luminous path of that same sigil she had used on me so long ago, back in one of the countless alternate Greenvilles. As she gestured, she began to speak the Word that would put all six of us in her thrall once again.
I knew I had to do something, or it would all be over. With their mission of conquest destroyed, there would be nothing to stop Lord Dogknife from using all the skill and knowledge he possessed to tear the secret of InterWorld from our minds. If Lady Indigo completed that spell, it was all over, for everyone. Worlds without end.
But I didn’t know how to stop her. A glance at my teammates showed me that they were already falling under her geas—their eyes were turning glassy, their muscles stiffening. And I could feel her will nibbling at the corners of my mind as well, seductively whispering how easy and right it would be to do whatever she told me . . .
Her spell was almost complete. The Word, the Sound of it, reverberated in the air, pulsing in time with the glowing Sign. I felt my hands rising, beginning to shape a gesture of obeisance to her, to Lord Dogknife, to HEX. . . .
I had to distract her somehow. I looked around for something to throw at her, to break her concentration. I shoved my left hand into my pocket, knowing that it would be futile—and my fist closed around the pouch of powder.
I barely stopped to think. Instead, I just acted—I pulled the pouch from my pocket and I threw it at her.
I didn’t know what would happen—if anything. It was a gesture of desperation, pure and simple. As I said, the most I hoped to accomplish was to momentarily break her concentration.
But it did far more than that.
When the pouch struck her it evaporated, releasing strange crimson powder as it did so.
The red powder swirled around Lady Indigo, enveloping her in a miniature whirlwind. She looked astonished—and then afraid. She moved her arms in a warding gesture, opened her mouth to speak a negating spell, but no sound came out. The powder swirled faster and faster, and I could feel the potency of her geas lessening. I glanced at the others, and saw they were coming out of it as well.
Whict meant we had one chance—and only one—for escape.
The gate had been about a hundred feet long in the engine room. It was about fifty feet long when we set out. Now it was starting to evaporate into nothingness.
“Jo!” I called. “Start flapping! And, Jai—can you levitate us toward the portal?”
“I’m not entirely certain,” he admitted.
“Be certain,” I said. “Give it your best shot.”
As for me, I concentrated on the gate. I’m a Walker, after all. I probed, and I pushed. I reached out with my mind. And, with everything at my disposal, I held that gate open.
And slowly, oh so horribly, horribly slowly, like a train moving through a small Southern town on a hot summer day, the mast began to move toward the gate.
“It’s working!” shouted J/O.
I threw a quick glance at Lady Indigo, reassuring myself that she wouldn’t continue to be a problem. It didn’t look like she would. There were flashes of light within the crimson whirlwind now, and each one seemed to illuminate the lady from within, as if her flesh had become momentarily translucent, exposing the bones. She was writhing now as if in agony, her mouth open in a scream—a scream that no one could hear.
But the gate was closing, and it was all I could do to keep it open. “J/O! Jakon!” I called. “Help me! We have to keep the gate open!”
I felt their minds—their strength—push with mine, as the gate continued to shrink and fade.
We weren’t going to make it in time. We weren’t—
The Malefic blew up.
It was a huge, black, greasy cloud of an explosion, mushrooming in all directions. I think that if it had happened in the Static, or on a world where science worked better, the shock wave would have killed us. As it was, I felt a great hammering blast of superheated air that sent the mast, with us clinging to it, surging toward the portal—and through it!
Easy as a key turning in a lock, we slipped through the portal into the welcoming madness of the In-Between.
The mast and the rigging evaporated into things that scuttled, spiderlike, into wild, cartoony snarls of grapefruit scent. I glanced back through the narrowing slit of the portal. The Lady Indigo—or what was left of her—was nowhere to be seen. Then the portal blinked out. To this day I don’t know what happened to her.
“What about Josef? And Hue?” asked Jo.
There was a fizzing noise, and a burst of emerald sparks, and Josef dropped from the sky in front of us, surrounded by a thin bubble shape, which shrank as we looked at it. It came toward me and settled in the craziness, bobbing like a balloon in a spring breeze.
“I’m here,” said Josef. “Let’s go home.”
Home? I had a pang, as I thought of my mom, my dad, my brother and sister. Places and people I’d probably never see again. I reached up my hand and touched the stone Mom had given me, on my last night there. You’re doing the right thing, she said in my memory.
Thanks, Mom, I thought, and the pang eased, even if it would never entirely go away.
Then I thought of my home. My new home.
{IW}:=Ω/∞
would take us back there, wherever it was hiding.
I Walked, and the rest of my team followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WE WERE ALL THERE in the Old Man’s outer office: Jai, Josef, Jo, Jakon, J/O and me. We’d been waiting there for almost an hour. The summons had arrived just before breakfast, and we’d come straight down. And then we’d waited.
And waited.
Finally, there was a buzz from the inner office. The Old Man’s assistant went inside, then came back out. She walked over to me.
“He wants to talk to you first,” she said. “You others wait out here.”
I grinned at my friends as I went in. If I didn’t feel ten feet tall it was probably because I felt fifteen feet tall. Make that twenty feet tall. I mean, I may not have been part of InterWorld for long, but I—we—had done something pretty amazing. Six of us had taken out a HEX invasion fleet. We’d destroyed the Malefic. A dozen worlds, at least, would retain their freedom, thanks to us.
I’m not one to brag, but that’s the kind of thing that gets medals.
I wondered what I’d say if he pinned a medal on me. Would I simply say “Thank you” or would I say something about it being an honor and how I had only done what anyone would have done? Would I babble embarrassingly like those actors who win Oscars . . . or would I say nothing at all?
I couldn’t wait to find out.
And what about promotion? Let’s face it—I’d make a great team leader. I raised my head slightly, sticking out my chin. True officer material.
Nothing had changed in the Old Man’s office. There was the big desk that filled most of the room, still papers, folders, disks, everywhere in piles and heaps. And sitting at the desk was the Old Man, making notes. He didn’t seem to notice me when I walked in, so I stood there.
I stood there for a couple of minutes. Finally he closed the file in front of him and looked up.
“Ah. Joey Harker.”
“Yes, sir.” I tried to sound humble. It wasn’t easy.
“I’ve read your debrief, Joey. There was one thing I was not clear on. Exactly what was the stimulus that returned your memory?”
“My memory?” His question caught me by surprise. “It was the soap bubble, sir. It reminded me of Hue, and with Hue it seemed like everything else just came back.”
He nodded and made a note on the report.
“We’ll need to take that into account for future amnesiac conditioning,” he said. “There’s a lot we don’t know about mudluffs. For now, you will be permitted to keep the creature with you in the base. This permission may be rescinded at any time.”
His LED eye glinted. He made another note.
I stood there. He carried on writing.
I wondered if he had forgotten I was there.
This wasn’t going exactly the way I’d pictured it.
“Sir?”
He looked up.
“I was wondering . . . well, I thought, maybe we would get some kind of . . . I mean, well, we blew up the Malefic, and . . .”
I trailed off. Definitely not going the way I’d pictured it.
He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic R&R, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple.
Then he called, “Send the rest of them in.”
Everyone walked into his office, shuffling around to make room.
He looked us over. I found myself very aware that he was sitting down, while we were standing. It felt the other way around. It felt like he was looming over us.
Josef, Jo and Jakon all looked pleased with themselves. J/O had a grin spread like peanut butter over his face. The only one who didn’t look absolutely thrilled was Jai.
“Well,” said the Old Man. “Joey seems to be of the opinion that you six ought to get some kind of medal, or at least some kind of formal recognition for the stellar work that you did. Does anyone here share his opinion?”
“Yes, sir,” said J/O. “Did he tell you how I beat Scarabus in the sword fight? We rocked.”
The others murmured agreement or just nodded.
The Old Man nodded. Then he looked at Jai. “Well?” he said.
“I think we did accomplish a remarkable thing, sir.”
The Old Man’s eye glittered.
“Oh you do, do you?” he asked.
Then he took a deep breath, and he began.
He told us what he thought of a team who couldn’t even accomplish a simple training mission without a disaster. He told us that everything we had accomplished had been due to plain dumb luck. That we’d broken every rule in the book and a few they had never thought to put into any book of rules or book of just plain common sense. He said that if there were any justice in any of the myriad worlds we would all have been rendered down and put in bottles. That we had been overconfident, foolish, ignorant. That we’d taken idiot chances. He said that we should never have gotten into the trouble we’d gotten into. That, having gotten into it, we should have come home immediately. . . .