Parallel (7 page)

“I should’ve died then.” Gerald’s voice stumbled. “And not to get sappy, but you gave me a reason to keep going. To get out of bed every morning with a purpose. I’m glad I could be here to see that purpose realized. Though, admittedly, it did not go quite as I’d imagined.”

“What are you talking ab—”

“You gave me something to live for, but deep down I always knew you’d be the death of me.” With a weak smile, Gerald winked. “Now remember what I said: get the girl and run.” And with that, Gerald leaped from his chair, screaming with adrenaline-fueled purpose.

“Hey!” Hari snatched for Gerald’s arm but missed. His hand found only air. The older man darted across the room, weaving between overturned bits of furniture and broken lab equipment with surprising agility.

The insect men jolted into action in a blur of arms, wings, and movement that defied the laws of physics. Gerald rammed a workstation, using the anchored bench to stop his forward momentum.

He spun to meet the advancing insects. They stalked him with tails twitching eagerly. Yellow mucus oozed from their stingers, dripping in long sickly strands that pooled on the floor. The three aliens formed a semi-circle, cornering the aged scientist with his back to a workbench void of anything that might make a useful weapon.

Hari wanted to scream, to draw the instectoids away, but his body refused to comply with his wish for martyrdom. He was not a hero. Frozen like a man before a firing squad, Hari wanted to rage against the impotence imprisoning his body, but he could not.

Gerald stood firm, defiant in the face of walking death. Bright blue light arced from the Key in his left hand, dancing on the white tile floor at his feet. No vapor trail signified the Door had opened. Only pretty lights.

The largest of the insect men filled the room with the sound of a rumbling truck driving along a gravel road. To Hari it sounded like the devil’s laughter.

The alien stepped into the half-circle. Gerald did not flinch. Did not waver. He kept his finger firmly pressed to the Key. The device hadn’t been designed to run for extended periods. Already the metal cover glowed red as the Key overheated.

Gerald betrayed none of the agony he must have felt holding that fiery ember in his hand. He looked up at the insect and studied him with a mute interest.

The insects exchanged unintelligible buzzes. Then one of the aliens turned. Hari caught the stare of its compound eye refracting light from overhead and casting a thousand tiny rainbows across the floor. Imprisoned by fear, Hari froze.

“Run, Hari!” Gerald’s scream cut through the ambient buzzing like shattered glass raining to the floor.

Gerald opened the palm of his left hand to reveal a silver lighter with dented edges—a device he’d used over the course of a lifetime to feed an addiction responsible for slowly killing him. The cancer, it seemed, would not get the last laugh.

With a practiced movement Gerald flicked the lighter open and turned, pausing for a fraction of a second that stretched into forever with his hand hovering before an open propane exhaust port.

Hari locked eyes with his mentor. His friend. With the man who’d shown him that life could be beautiful even in the face of tremendous suffering.

A small blue flame flickered from the end of the lighter. The propane ignited, releasing a jet of bluish fire.

Gerald, with a stoic calm that would forever be scarred into Hari’s memory, thrust his hand, still clutching the overheating Key, into the maw.

The explosion was instantaneous.

A blinding array of white-and-yellow light hit Hari milliseconds before the concussive wave hammered the air from his chest and slammed him to the ground. Thunder clapped in Hari’s head.

For the second time that day Hari lay on his back dazed, afraid, and now alone. Terribly alone.

Gritting his teeth, he propped himself on an elbow before sitting up. He stared at the place Gerald had stood only seconds before. Any proof of the man’s existence had been annihilated. A tear crept down Hari’s numb cheek. A crackling haze of smoke filled the room.

Hari, recalling his friend’s last words, staggered to his feet with the help of the overturned chair. Gerald’s death would not be in vain, he resolved.

One of the insectoids lay face down on the ground, fire dancing across his back. The alien did not writhe beneath the flames. Occasional convulsions of its flitting wings were its only movement. Whether the creature was dead, or merely resigned to its fate, Hari did not know or care.

The other two insects, thrown across the room by the explosion, appeared unharmed by the fire as they stumbled to their gangly feet like a couple of drunks.

Ryol had been thrown from her chair in the blast. She lay motionless upon the ground, one leg strewn across an overturned recliner. Ignoring the stabbing protests of his knees, Hari scooped the unconscious alien into his arms. She still weighed no more than a cloud.

He wasted no time contemplating his newly acquired superhuman strength. He ran for the gaping black hole of charred wood that comprised his laboratory’s door as fast as his legs could take him.

The aliens buzzed behind him. He imagined their hot, moist breath against his neck. He ran faster.

His heart hurled itself against his ribcage as it pounded out a vicious beat. The buzzing grew louder, drowning out the sound of blood whooshing to his ears like a jet taking off.

Closer.

At the end of the hall Hari took a left, but still the buzzing followed, a static noise permeating everything, burrowing through his insides and causing his teeth to chatter along with the alien vibrations.

Hari clenched his jaw and ran, not daring to turn around.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Falia

A cloud of minds milled about Falia’s sedated body. Unprepared to speak with others in her weakened state, she ignored them.

“Where is my daughter?” Falia thrust the thought at Aurora, who had remained conspicuously silent.

I do not know.

“How is that possible?”

An Inhibition Field has been established around the world in question. It is beyond my ability to penetrate at this time.

Aurora spoke not like a machine the size of a planet, but with a softness of tone Falia would expect from a child Lenorean. Falia did not approve of the computer’s choice of voice. It elicited strong emotions as she remembered Ryol as a child.

Those memories, once a source of strength and happiness, were a cruel torture decaying the mind of a frightened mother imagining only the worst.

“Who could have constructed a device strong enough to withstand your efforts?”

That Aurora did not immediately respond could only be bad.

I am its creator.

Falia did not know how to interpret this. “Have you turned against Lenora?” she asked, fearing the answer.

Never.

The Madam Leader knew
never
was only a theory in a Universe of ever-spawning Dimensions. She couldn’t, however, bring herself to consider the possibility that Aurora had betrayed her in a different Dimension. There had to be an alternative explanation.

Falia would find it.

Run this line of inquiry.
Falia appropriated a portion of her attention to the hypothesis she’d created to explain this new development.

As you wish, Faliana.

Falia remained locked inside her mind. The sedatives coursing through her bloodstream would not release their grasp on her body. She did the next best thing and pushed her mind into that of the Healer beside her.

The Healer resisted at first, recoiled from the strength of Falia’s touch, before realizing the Madam Leader’s intention. The Healer relaxed and allowed the Madam Leader to borrow her body.

Falia blinked rapidly, prompting her mind to adjust to the influx of light and stimuli. She looked at her motionless body resting inside the recovery pod. Two Healers, plus herself, formed a triangle around the chamber.

Falia watched herself for a moment. To the casual observer the slow rise and fall of her chest coupled with the look of serenity she wore made it appear as if she slept in a state of bliss. They would be wrong.

First Healer Solma stood at the foot of her pod. His pulsing green eyes cast faint shadows across his smooth cheeks. Solma’s hands, palms facing down, hovered over Falia.

Warmth leapt through the gap between their two bodies despite the Healer not touching her.

“Madam Leader, how do you feel?” Solma asked, continuing to look at his own hands.

“I am fine. Your services are no longer necessary.” Falia pivoted in the body of the Healer whose mind she’d confiscated. Solma nodded but did not argue. “How is Mineal?”

“The damage penetrated deeply. She has not yet regained control of either her body or mind,” Solma said, drifting gracefully around the pod to stand beside Falia. “We are not confident in our ability to mend the wound.”

Guilt would have punctured Falia’s defenses if she’d been paying attention to the physical reactions of her body. Fortunately, she was not.

An emotional response had no place in the decisions she now had to make. She severed ties with the emotions that made her Lenorean. She could not afford to indulge them. Falia composed herself like the Leader Lenora expected her to be in a time of crisis.

“Keep me apprised of her progress,” Falia said, releasing her mental grasp on the Healer. She retreated to the comfort of her own mind.

Time passed at unmeasurable intervals inside Falia’s mind. A year’s worth of thought blitzed across the tapestry of her consciousness in what would only be a handful of seconds in real time. Though the concept of real time was an artificial construct itself, with fluid applications across all Dimensions. One second in this Dimension might equal a century in another.

Ryol would have been protected by a Stasis Bubble before traveling between Dimensions, but the Inhibition Field keeping Falia from connecting with Ryol would also keep Ryol from connecting with Aurora. Without Aurora’s protection, she would be subjected to the flow of time native to that alien Dimension.

How much time had passed for Ryol? Had she lived the equivalent of a lifetime since having been cut off?

Falia wondered if she would look upon the face of her daughter again. If so, would she look into the eyes of a stranger? Without her connection to Ryol these questions were unknowable torments.

Falia was suddenly grateful for her inability to feel.

A dull hum, rising in pitch and fervor, resonated in the back of Falia’s mind as a line of thought came to a conclusion. Falia answered the alarm and found herself unsurprised by the result.

Your prediction proves seventy-three percent likely. A Dimensional Overlap has occurred.

Unsurprising, but no less intriguing. A possibility long theorized by Lenorean scholars, the Overlap had never been observed outside a simulator.

And the Graesians? Are they responsible for the stolen Inhibition Field?

Probable.

Falia pushed her thoughts out into the Universe, past the reaches of her own Dimension, to the Delegates of the Alliance assembled in the Neutral Zone.

Madam Leader, we’ve checked and verified that the Graesians remain within the Inhibition Field you yourself placed them under,
came the familiar rumbling tones of Delegate Oleid, Acting Leader in Falia’s absence.
They remain prisoner to their own Dimension.

“We have experienced a Dimensional Overlap, with the Graesians responsible for this act,” Falia said. “They themselves are probably unaware of the merger.”

How did they come by the Inhibition Field?

“I predict they stole it after overthrowing the Alliance in their Dimension.”

But why use the Field on this young planet? What value could it possibly hold?

“Eitr.” Falia twitched and her hand responded. A tingle crept up her arm as the sedatives relinquished part of their hold on her. “They will need Eitr to power their stolen Lenorean technology. With it, they cannot be stopped.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Ryol

Ryol’s body mutinied against her brain’s control, trapped inside her own black sea of thoughts, romping on untraceable strands and tangents. She gave in to the chaos, rode the winds of thought wherever they carried her. That breeze blew in circles, always returning her to the Graesian’s words, to her dead mother.

Being severed from the flow of information streaming across the Universe caused Ryol a dull ache she felt in her bones and joints. She hid in the wreckage of her own mind, not daring to peek from behind the curtain.

Ryol.

The voice called out from across the chasm that had cleaved Ryol’s mind into opposing halves of discontinuity.

“Aurora?” she whispered to herself.

I need you. Come back.

Something was amiss. The voice in her head sounded nothing like Aurora. Felt nothing like her. Panic had corrupted this voice. Fear. Emotions beneath Aurora.

She searched for the source of the voice, but could not find it from inside her locked mind.

WAKE UP!

Pain ripped Ryol from the void like a thousand sheared hangnails. Tendons tensed, muscles jerked. The world poured through unaccustomed pupils in waves of liquid fire dancing along her optic nerve. A firecracker of color burst in her occipital lobe.

Ryol gasped and slammed her eyelids shut, waiting for the pain to recede.

“Are you okay?” the voice said, this time coming from outside her mind.

Ryol shaded her eyes from the harsh light overhead with the back of her hand. When her vision cleared she stared into the face of an alien. The haze enshrouding her mind lifted slowly. Memories flooded into place.