Bridgehead (33 page)

Sara Jean stepped sideways, putting herself between the guns and her husband. Her eyes were panicky and on Selve, though one of her hands reached down to Henry's shoulder to reassure her of his presence.

Gustafson and Isaac Hoperin were within arm's reach of the Monitors, both of them too shocked by Astor's final statement to make split-second decisions in the present. Mike Gardner had just stepped forward with the orange suit held out. Market saw him poise to spring back behind an instrument cabinet. “Mike!” she screamed, for she saw also a pair of Monitors taking final aim at the motion. Gardner froze.

The Monitors were not wearing atmosphere suits. Mike knew that meant they had not come through Portal Four, but the fact carried no implications for him. Only Selve realized that if the Monitors came by way of Skius, then the present madness was not merely some aberration of Deith's.

It was madness all the same.

The Skiuli in pastel-patterned uniforms herded Selve and the humans together against the enclosure fencing. Deith watched, grinning like a crocodile, her pistol held slanted across her chest in her remaining hand. Two of the Monitors holstered their weapons and walked to the controls of the transport equipment. One of them was pursing and pushing out his lips, the equivalent of a worried grimace in a human.

Isaac Hoperin looked across at the body of Astor. Minutes before she had been his personal symbol of overbearing authority. He said, “Who are these people, Selve? Are they arresting you?”

In Skiuli, Selve said, “We've got to report home at once, Deith. The Vrage base is not only located at Portal Thirty-one, their coils have been knocked out of service. If we attack at once, they won't be able to warn Vrage itself.”

“We've reported to the Directorate,” Deith said. She laughed, a sound beyond the edge of tittering madness. Her right arm waved. The sleeve was neatly capped below the elbow instead of being pinned. “I should thank your friend for this,” the stocky Monitor went on. “It was the proof we needed that you were quite mad and far too dangerous to be entrusted with the safety of the race. Quite mad.”

She walked over to Astor's body and kicked it. Muscles spasmed. Astor's back arched and her throat drew a grating breath. “Thank you, Astor,” Deith said.

The Monitor with the shot-burned sleeve pawed for his gun on the floor for a moment. Then he threw up on the concrete.

“Deith, you don't know how to use this equipment,” Selve begged in Skiuli. “We'll go back together and explain to the Directorate about the Vrage coils. Deith, it isn't
us,
it's
Skius.
”

The female of the pair of Monitors at the controls glanced up before resuming her work. She and her partner spoke in low voices as they checked and keyed instruments. The two were awkward, but they were clearly familiar with their task. Their three fellows with guns trained on the captives seemed a great deal less certain of themselves.

“I knew you'd screw up,” Deith gloated. “I knew I'd have to take over.” Selve wondered if shock from her wound had driven the Monitor over the edge, or if Deith had always been madder than any of the Contact Team had dreamed. “You filed complete plans of this—tangle—at home. We built a mock-up, so Sehor and Kadel could practice on it every day for the past month. Practice for this.” She waved the stub of her arm toward the controls and the pair at work setting them up.

Isaac Hoperin stepped forward, his mouth slightly open and his eyes on a future far beyond Deith. He did not understand the language or any of the details of the situation. But while the humans with him feared and waited, the physicist's own mind had connected one fact to its unstated corollary. The fact was that Selve and Astor had a plan which would prevent the destruction of Earth as a side effect; the corollary was that the plan had been countermanded by someone utterly ruthless. Hoperin would
not
stand by and watch that happen, even though his death would not stop it.

Professor Gustafson caught the younger man in a bear hug even as Hoperin's foot lifted for his first step. The project director wrapped Hoperin up with a strength not far short of hysterical, crying, “
No,
Isaac, you mustn't make me have killed you!”

The shock of contact and his colleague's words jarred Hoperin back to the present. He gaped at the Monitors. Their gun hands were tight and their faces frightened. Embarrassment at being manhandled by a fellow faculty member subdued the physicist as the guns could not have. “It's all right, Louis,” he mumbled. “It's all right.”

“When they rebound,” said Selve in English, “set the apparatus for, ah, the Mesozoic, Portal Thirty-one, and engage it at once. In case I'm not here to do that. Don't make any trouble now, please don't, it'll be all right.” He could not help but stare at Astor whenever his eyes fell from Deith's. Selve could not help the tears, either.

“We're ready,” said one of the Monitors at the controls.

“Go ahead, then!” Deith snarled in a return to her normal style of interaction with her colleagues. It was in triumph, however, that she added to the prisoners, “Perfect timing, two minutes before we rebound.”

The main switch slapped into its live position. The pair of Monitors sidled away from their handiwork, glancing first at the controls and then toward their one-handed colleague.

“Did you think you were going to reset the Portal after we were gone, Selve?” Deith asked through a smirk.

Selve sidestepped once, then again. He struck a brace as he waited for the blast that would kill him. He was standing far enough from the other prisoners that none of them would be caught by the shot as well. He knew that the Monitors—that Deith—could not afford to leave him to undo their own settings. What Selve hoped and prayed, for the sake of Skius and of Earth, was that Deith did not realize the locals could save the situation.

Even if Selve had already gone the way of Astor.

“The Directorate isn't going to change plans now on the word of madmen,” Deith continued in grim echo of Selve's own thoughts as he watched the hand and watched the gun. “The assault force will attack as soon as we return to tell the Directorate that Portal Eleven is open and tuned.” The nervous buzz of the coils rose through a set of blackboard-scraping harmonics. The Monitors were all keeping carefully clear of the docking area.

“Deith, you're sending them all to die,” the Contact Member said. “We can win the war if you'll just direct the force to Portal Thirty-one. Even without warning the troops, they'll be able to slaughter the Vrages instead of being butchered themselves.” His voice rose of necessity to be heard over the vibration. There was no doubt that strain was forcing it into a squeak as well.

“You've forgotten your duty,” the Monitor sneered. “We haven't forgotten ours.”

The drive coils tripped in a blue flash as stunning as the pistol bolt Selve knew would follow in the silence.

Deith turned and fired into the center of the left-hand pillar. The Lucite shell dimpled away from the bolt in concentric circles. The superheated plastic ignited in a ghostly red flash, a sphere two feet in diameter. Only at that point had the wave front broken up enough to mix with the oxygen needed for fire.

The coils themselves died less obtrusively than the cover sheet did. The circuits carried ultrahigh voltages, but their current was too low for spectacular arcs. There was a violet lambency, almost a fluid drifting from the sagging ruin. Copper burned green in the direct path of the shot. Some of the insulating lacquer smoldered for a moment or two afterward.

Deith licked her lips in satisfaction. The glowing muzzle of her weapon waggled for a moment toward the other pillar.

Mike Gardner had invested over a hundred hours of coil winding in each of the pillars. The destruction of the first had been a shock greater than Astor's murder. The student had never seen someone killed before, so the murder was an act without any real-world referent. When the gun pointed toward the other half of his laborious construction, he lunged into Lexie Market. The physicist had set and braced herself, knowing that Mike's instincts would drive him toward the weapon.

Market put her arms firmly around him. “Hold still,” she said. The blond physicist had always been good at anticipating irrational behavior … except when it affected her directly. “Got to work on that,” she muttered. She stepped aside when Mike relaxed, keeping her right arm around his waist.

The one-handed Monitor did not bother to fire into the second pillar. The first set of coils had been pierced through the phenolic mandrel on which it was wound. The odor of carbolic acid was bitter and overpowering, even among the other effluvia of destruction. That deterred Deith from a needless follow-up shot.

“We'll see you back home in the half hour or so it'll take you to rebound, Selve,” Deith said. She smirked. It was notable to Selve that the other Monitors did not speak aloud, except in terse reply to Deith. How had the Directorate ever listened to this mad thing, who terrified even her closest colleagues? Were the best minds on Skius so desperately afraid?

They were right to be afraid. It was their decision which was so tragically wrong.

“You'll be arrested there,” Deith was saying. “Treachery affecting the state. Unless they choose to dismiss the charges because of the victory celebrations.”

“Twenty seconds,” called a Monitor who until then had been only a guard with a trembling gunhand.

“I know that!” Deith shouted.

“Deith, you can't let them jump into disaster on Vrage,” said the single remaining Contact Member, although he bowed his head in full subservience. Selve was not one to let hierarchy affect the survival of worlds. “Trust Astor's judgment at least on that.”

“The assault force will be well on its way to destroying Vrage utterly, before you even rebound to explain your team's actions,” Deith taunted.

Selve had thought Astor's name might goad the Monitor to fury if it did not shock her into reason. Selve's own death might have resulted from that fury. Death was blind. Selve saw Astor's body when his eyes were open. He saw hundreds of thousands of other Skiuli dead uselessly on Vrage when his eyes were closed, his imagination free.

But Deith was as untouched by the memory, the flash of her hand and arm vaporized, as she was by the logic of what Selve said. Her smile was beatific as she and her fellows vanished. That smile soured air that reeked already with the burned residues of plastics, metal, and flesh.

*   *   *

With the Monitors and their weapons gone, Mike Gardner lunged for the pillar, though its total ruin had been obvious from twenty feet away. The thermoplastic covering was frosted and wrinkled a yard above and below a hole the size of a dinner plate.

Mike jerked the warped panel open. The metal's high thermal conductivity had spread and dissipated much of the bolt's effect, though not enough to avoid total destruction of the apparatus: the pit through the multiple layers of copper was conical, tapering down as it plunged deeper. For the first time, the implications of such energy release on a human target became real to Gardner. He turned and stared at Astor's corpse. Lexie Market guided him away with a hand on the student's wrist and another on his suddenly pallid cheek.

The equipment for which he had risked his honor was only part of a nightmare to Louis Gustafson now. He knelt at Astor's side, hoping that the obvious was not real.

Dr. Hoperin looked at Selve and opened his mouth to speak. The Traveler had sunk into a crouch when the Monitors disappeared. He covered his face with his hands.

Hoperin swallowed and joined Professor Gustafson. Henry Layberg did not bother. The Monitor who thrust a gun in his face had moved him from Astor without argument. He knew there was nothing he or anyone on Earth could do for the victim. A day earlier, Dr. Layberg might have been more interested in the structure of an unusual corpse than he was in the fact that the corpse had been someone he knew. For whatever reason, he no longer felt that way. He put his arm around his wife's shoulders and looked at Selve. The living Traveler might need help as the dead one did not.

“Selve,” said Sara Jean Layberg, “aren't they going to—invade through here?” Nothing that had occurred or been spoken just now made any sense to her. She knew enough to be afraid. She knew also to keep the quaver out of her voice as she forced those around her to deal with the real problem and not its side effects.

“No one would have been appearing here anyway,” said the Traveler as he rose wearily to his feet again. “The drive coils at Portal Four command a volume beyond the capacity of this unit to accept when energized. What this will do is redirect the transport to the current focal point of this Portal. To Vrage.”

Professor Gustafson's face was averted from the corpse by which he knelt. He was rubbing the flats of his hands against one another, although he had not actually touched the body. “There is no focal point,” he said. “The coils here have been destroyed.” He spoke without frustration. The old engineer had lived and taught too long to become exasperated when someone missed an obvious factor.

“Louis,” said Selve in the same tired voice as before, “the hardware isn't the Portal, it opens the Portal. The planetary magnetic field does the real work. By destroying the apparatus, Deith has seen to it that the focus can't be changed until it dissipates naturally.” The Traveler had been speaking audibly but toward an angle of the room with no one in it. Now he rotated his head to face Professor Gustafson. To do less would be cowardly. “By the time the Portal has closed, a Vrage counterstrike will almost certainly have rebounded along the transport column. To here.”

“Do the little coils upstairs still work?” Sara Jean Layberg asked unexpectedly. “The ones that—the other day, took Danny and me to the city?”