“It will be dangerous,” said Gary.
“Everything on this world is dangerous,” returned Matt.
Karen nodded. “Let’s do it.”
She took them to the point at which they had abandoned the pert, a couple of miles from where they had eventually been forced to leave the Fool’s Tesseract. The wrecked remains of the pert were still there, but the scenery was vastly different. In every direction within view, the trees had been flattened, as though a giant hand had pushed them all over in the same direction.
And then burned them.
It was a scorched and blackened world, like some artist’s vision of hell.
“Goddamn,” said Karen softly, adding a long whistle at the end. “It really was like a nuke.”
Matt was stunned as well, so stunned he almost failed to react to the next flash of insight. Shoving Karen to one side he erected a powerful shield—and nearly lost it under the force of whatever projectile struck. Reacting purely on instinct, he sent a powerful, though unfocused, line of fire back at the source of the attack. It splashed across hardened metal armor and failed to penetrate.
They had been fired upon by a four-legged metal monstrosity; at least that’s how it appeared to the young wizard from Lothion. It stood taller than a horse, with a strange torso that seemed capable of rotating in any direction above the legs. Two arms were equipped with some sort of weapons.
“They’ve brought in the armored cavalry,” declared Gary.
Matthew had no time to wonder what that meant. The thing that had fired upon them looked nothing like a mounted horse soldier to him, but he couldn’t stop to ask for clarification. Its other arm had lined up on them, and it held a circular array of gun barrels that were just beginning to spin, emitting a high-pitched whine.
He ran sideways, but then dropped flat as another vision warned him of his impending death. The creature’s aim was perfect, and it could swing its weapon far faster than he could run. His magesight only barely perceived the blur of high-velocity bullets tearing through the air just above his head and neck.
It was only a second before it adjusted its aim downward, and Matt had no time to move. Instead he ripped a portion of the ground upward, reinforcing it with a strong shield. Bullets tore into the soft earth and struck the shield, but not with enough force to put him in danger of them penetrating.
The thing continued firing, drilling into his defense with a seemingly limitless number of bullets. He couldn’t move, so he used his power to draw up more earth, reinforcing his defense until the bullets stopped and the whine of the spinning gun barrels faded. The monster’s torso turned, bringing its other weapon around.
Whatever the other weapon was, he knew he wouldn’t survive it. Reaching into his pack, he drew out a long, slender rod he had prepared. Before it fired, he leapt sideways from behind his earthen berm and unleashed a powerful stroke of lightning.
The lightning didn’t destroy the metal monster, but it went still after the strike. The exterior was scorched and smoking, but the electronics inside had failed under the electrical assault. Matt stared at it for a long second before remembering his companions.
Rushing back, he found Karen nursing a bloody arm. It wasn’t serious—a ricochet had torn through the skin—but it was sobering for him. He realized she might just as easily have been killed. Gary, on the other hand, had taken a bullet straight through his torso, but fortunately it hadn’t hit anything important.
Matt took Karen’s arm in his hand and looked into her eyes. “Watch what I do. You’ll need to learn this too someday soon.” Drawing his finger across the wound, he sealed the skin, stopping the bleeding. It wasn’t done with much finesse, but it would do. He had forgotten to block the nerves, though, so she hissed with pain as the skin was drawn back together. “Hopefully with more skill,” he added.
He turned to the android and asked, “What was that thing?”
“A tortus,” answered Gary. “A standard part of modern armored cavalry divisions. They replaced tanks and some of the light armor vehicles after the demon war.”
“It certainly wasn’t slow like a tortoise,” said Matt. He didn’t bother asking about the ‘cavalry’ part, either; there would be time for that later. The rush of adrenaline and fear had made certain things clear to him.
Leaning over, he gave Karen a brief kiss. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I can’t take you with me.”
She wasn’t having that. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him. “No way in hell are you…” The words cut off suddenly when he voiced the command for her belt and she was shifted back to his own world.
A lonely feeling crept over him as he looked at the empty space she had occupied. He hoped she didn’t land in the ocean. Either way, she was going to be mad as a wet hen when she saw him again. He chuckled at the inadvertent pun. “Heh—wet hen.”
“Thank you,” said Gary. “I know that was hard for you, but it was making me sick worrying about her.”
He ignored the words, and asked a question instead, “You said they were all dead, right?”
Gary shifted mental gears quickly. “The uploaded humans, yes, and probably the organics as well, though I can’t be sure. If not, they soon will be. Why?”
“How long can you survive in the ocean?”
“Until my power runs out, a few months at least. These military androids are fully sealed. There’s even a flotation bladder for use in the event of…,” began the machine.
“I’m sending you back too,” said Matt abruptly. “Try to get back to Lothion if you can.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Gary. “Once the radioisotope generator in this unit fails, I will cease to be. You may as well let me continue with you.”
“Lothion,” insisted Matt. “Karen will need you. We will worry about your battery later.” Then he voiced the command to send Gary back to his world.
Matthew stood and looked around, alone, just as he had been when he had first come to this world. He started walking east, a direction that was perpendicular to the lay of the fallen trees. After traveling several miles, he would head north and eventually west, circling back to approach the place where Desacus’s egg was held from the other direction.
It was foolish and stupid, but he wasn’t leaving without it. He no longer had anyone to worry about but himself, and if things went badly, he wouldn’t have to listen to their complaints anyway.
His aythar was low, so he pulled out another iron sphere and began drawing the power out of it. It might be a long walk.
Chapter 51
Considering the number of miles he had to traverse and the lack of roads or other signs of civilization, at least as he knew them, Matt thought seriously about using his flying construct. Something told him it would be too dangerous, though. If he were targeted in the air, there was no way he would be able to evade a missile or protect himself in time.
He missed the dragon-bond. The weeks since Desacus’s death made him realize how much he had come to rely on it. The heightened senses, and more importantly at the moment, the strength, speed, and stamina—all would have been welcome to him.
He covered almost a quarter mile before the next attack came.
There was no warning, either by sight or sound. The enemy was targeting him from too far away for that. One moment all was peaceful, the next he experienced a compelling urge to jump to his left. The earth was thrown into the air as a hypervelocity projectile slammed into the place he had been standing. It struck with such force and energy that the soil flung up by its impact struck his shield with what would have been lethal force if it had hit him directly.
A second later the sound reached him, a loud heavy clack followed by a soft boom. His ears guided his eyes until he spotted a small puff of dust or smoke in the distance. That’s where it was fired from. Whether it was a tortus or some other armored weapon, he didn’t know. It was more than a mile distant, much too far for his stunted magesight to explore in this world.
He starte
d running.
Not in the direction of his enemy; that would have delayed him. It would have also taken him far too long to reach them. He kept to his predetermined path, running a straight course with no deviations. Zig-zagging would be pointless in the face of such an accurate and quick weapon. He could only trust his strange warning sense to save him if it fired again.
It did.
This time he stopped dead still, just in time for another projectile to crack through the air right in front of his face. It came at a lower angle this time and passed some twenty yards before exploding against a tree to his right.
The tree’s trunk disintegrated in an explosion of splinters and wooden shards, while the upper portion seemed to take a second before it started falling over, as if it were just as surprised as he was by the destruction of its support.
Matt began running again.
He continued on his chosen route, switching to an energy-conserving jog instead of a sprint. He had a long way to go, and he couldn’t possibly do it running flat out the entire way. Besides, it didn’t matter how fast he ran, the enemy’s weapons would find him; and they were too fast and too accurate to avoid on the strength of his running ability.
More attacks came, each time from enemy emplacements that were too far for him to spot visually, though sometimes his ears could judge their approximate direction after the attack was finished. Each time, he felt a flash of insight, and he followed it instantly. Sometimes he stopped, others he went left or right, and each time it was just barely enough to dodge a deadly assault. He dropped his shield to conserve his aythar; it wasn’t doing him much good keeping it up the entire time. Instead he blocked his hearing with a small sonic shield around his ears. They were bound to start using explosive warheads again, and he had been nearly deafened too many times already.
A few of the attacks came at such an angle that merely dodging wasn’t enough—debris and shrapnel could be just as lethal as a direct hit. In those instances, he erected a shield just before it was necessary; again his prescient talent let him know when he would need it.
Eventually, they gave up trying to hit him with their hypervelocity projectiles, but after a brief respite he found himself pinned down once more by high-powered machine gun fire. It was just like what had come from the tortus he had fought earlier, almost too strong to shield against and unrelenting. Once they started, they didn’t stop for several minutes.
He couldn’t dodge that, for the weapons tracked his movement precisely, so he was forced to hunker down with a hastily erected earthen bulwark supported by a shield each time.
Luckily, it seemed that an individual weapon couldn’t fire forever without pausing. After a minute or two, the attack would end, and he would start jogging once more. He guessed the weapons might overheat from continued use, but he couldn’t be sure.
After a couple of miles of this, he began to angle his direction back northward. Soon after, he ran directly into one of the tortus’s that had been firing on him earlier. He didn’t see or sense it until it was almost too late. His magesight was far too limited in this world. Running through a small copse of trees on a slight rise, he emerged only twenty yards from it.
Like all the machines, it never hesitated. The torso turned immediately and the spinning barrels blurred into motion as it fired on him.
Rather than use earth, since he had no time, he created a softer shield, one that was spongy and elastic, with a hard, solid layer beneath it. He had done something similar in the past to cushion a fall, and he had a memory of his ancestor Tyrion doing something like it in battle.
It worked.
The outer layer robbed the bullets of some of their energy, allowing the harder shield beneath to stop them without putting him in danger of experiencing feedback. Losing consciousness now would be a death sentence.
Pointing his specialized rune channel rod at the thing, he fried its electronics and resumed jogging.
Other than being physically exhausting, his journey had almost turned into a sort of obstacle course. Somewhere in the back of his head, he was silently terrified, but he kept that voice far from the front of his mind, where the decisions were being made. By restricting his use of shields to just when he needed them, he was getting better at conserving his aythar in this magic-barren world, and when he did get low, he would take out one of the iron spheres and start replenishing himself.
After an hour, it started to get mundane. Even his fear had dried up, or perhaps it had simply given up from the sheer futility of trying to keep him pumped up with adrenaline. He knew this stage was dangerous, he had heard his father talk about it before. Moments when he had become too numb to feel afraid, those were the times he had often suffered his worst defeats or made the biggest mistakes.
But Matthew had no choice, or not any choice that he would take. He had to continue. So he did, while trying not to let his growing confidence cloud his judgment.
Then it happened—an overwhelming sense of impending doom. There was nowhere to jump, no direction to seek safety. Everywhere around him was death, and there were no choices for escape.
It was quiet, and to his normal senses there was no apparent danger, but he knew he was about to die, unless he did something. This warning had come with enough time to choose, but he knew that he had less than a minute. Probably a missile, he thought.
He needed the Fool’s Tesseract. Either that, or he would have to return to his own world and admit defeat.
He pulled out the ring-gate, and after activating it, he reached inside with his non-dominant left hand. Again, he got the sense that if he deactivated the Fool’s Tesseract, he would lose his hand, probably to some sort of fire. Withdrawing it, he used the spell he often used in his workshop to protect his hands from intense heat. Putting it back, in he received a different flash of insight. His hand would survive, but he would lose it later.
Whatever was on the other side was something he didn’t know how to protect himself from completely. The choice was white and black; lose his hand or give up on recovering Desacus’s egg. He hesitated only an instant. Voicing the commands in quick succession he turned off the Fool’s Tesseract and then collapsed the staff into a shorter rod he could draw back through the ring-gate.
His hand experienced a strange warmth but no pain. That alone was unusual, for normally with his heat-protection spell up he couldn’t feel any temperature at all.
With the staff in hand, he discarded the ring-gate. It was useless now since its counterpart was still where he had recovered the staff from. He wouldn’t be able to use that trick again. Wasting no time, he extended the staff once more and reactivated the Fool’s Tesseract. Protective darkness enfolded him as the translation panes cut him off from the outside world.
While he waited, he summoned a tiny light to illuminate the interior and examined his left hand. It looked normal, and it didn’t hurt. Flexing it, he could find no flaw or other injury. He almost doubted there was anything wrong, but that strange warmth and the certainty of his vision made him sure that that was only a fool’s hope. Something was wrong with it, and he would pay the price for his choice later.
He had used a larger setting for the interior dimension this time, to avoid the same devastating effects that had resulted before. The Fool’s Tesseract had only been active for a minute, so he was hoping the blast would be small, something on par with the one that had destroyed his workshop at home.
Matthew gave the command to invert, and then a second later he deactivated it, trusting his precognition to warn him if either action was going to be a fatal mistake.
The area around where he had been standing was torn and charred. Some of the grass was still on fire, and there were several small craters around him. Missiles, for sure, he thought. He kept moving.
An hour passed without further attacks, and he wondered if that was because they had decided to stop wasting ammunition or whether the disappearance of the Fool’s Tesseract from its spot at ground zero had the enemy scratchin
g their heads. If they have heads, that is.
Either way, it was a welcome respite.
After traveling to the west for a time, he finally decided he was probably in the right general location to head south. If he wasn’t too far off on his distances, he should be approaching the Whittington facility from the other side now. After traveling with Gary for so long, he genuinely missed the android’s unerring sense of location and direction.
His hand had begun to itch, but he tried to ignore it. There wasn’t much he could do about it.
The land he was traveling through now was lightly wooded, but the ground was level and the underbrush was light to non-existent, so it made for easy walking. He had given up jogging. Without the dragon-bond, it was just too tiring to keep up such a pace.
Besides, I don’t want to be out of breath when I get to the party, he thought. The long delay between attacks had given his sense of humor a chance to recover. Dad would be proud. He probably made jokes the entire time he was fighting the dark gods.
Or maybe he had just made the stories more humorous when he told them to his kids years later. There was no way for Matthew to know for certain. For himself, he couldn’t see how he would color his own adventure in laughter later.
Assuming I survive it.
He stopped for a short break, drinking some water from his pack and eating a hard piece of bread that seemed to stick in his throat. His stomach rebelled. The constant danger and stress had left it in no mood to digest food, but he ignored its complaints and choked the bread down anyway.
His aythar was good. He had managed to absorb enough from the iron spheres to top off his reserves, but his body was another matter. The aftermath of battle stress was making his arms and legs begin to shake, and his fatigue had reached a new level he hadn’t known existed. Being a frequent night owl, he had thought he knew everything there was to know about being tired, but the constant strain of the past few hours had left him exhausted.