She had no choice but to obey him, already having decided that her life was forfeit. She had no doubt that with his peculiar sense of soldier’s honor he would spare the children if she caused no trouble, and kill them without losing a wink of sleep if she did not.
He led her to the edge of the Hellgate. She’d seen it, or ones just like it, many times before. She stood there on the apron while he undressed her. Now naked, she was led to the ladder and told to go down into the depression, which was shaped like a deep saucer. He followed, and they walked to the small central hole, the “tunnel” back to the true Gate itself. There was another ladder, and then a smooth floor that gently sloped down. She had never been this far before; it was well known that automatic defenses disintegrated anyone trying it, but Champion seemed unconcerned. The long, extremely thick power cable had traced their route, and continued on down.
They reached the Gate itself, and she saw the large machine with its dials and gauges to one side. Only now an access panel had been opened on its side, and the fat cable went right into it.
Beyond was a short space and then the Hellgate itself, a swirling mass of multicolored Flux denser than she had ever imagined. She could feel its massive, pent-up power. She felt too, that she could draw upon it, and reached out to take it.
Champion grabbed her, turned her around, and squeezed her bare shoulders hard, nails biting into her flesh. It hurt, and for a moment she let go of the Flux. He took the opening and drew upon it himself. As Mervyn had said, the general had very limited power, but when that power was amplified by the Gate itself and directed with emotional fury at a single individual, it was powerful indeed. The shock of his turning her and digging into her flesh had distracted her, as he’d intended, and he used it to draw full on his own hatred and fury and drive it all right at her mind.
Her mind burned, and she was powerless to do anything. The commands and the spell could not be resisted.
You are a girl, it said, and girls are animals, like horses and chickens and pigs. You do not speak, but you hear and obey. Your sole purpose in life is to make men happy. There is nothing else. You are . . .
The power was suddenly broken, and she fought for what she could retain. Champion suddenly straightened up and looked very confused. “What the hell . . .’?” he muttered, and his hand went to his holster as he turned.
Facing him were two figures, a large, muscular, bearded man in a New Eden soldier’s uniform and a strikingly beautiful but extremely tall woman in the black uniform and boots of a stringer. The pistol came out and pointed itself at the strange pair. “Who the hell are you and what do you mean by this?”
The bearded man looked at the woman, who with her boots was almost the same height as he was. “He wants to know who we are.”
She smiled. “We are the spirits of Flux and Anchor,” she told him.
“You have five seconds to turn around and march back out!” the general barked, forgetting all about Sondra who slumped unconscious to the floor of the tunnel. “I mean it! I’ll shoot!”
“I’m sure you will, General,” the woman responded. “But this is my domain.”
“I warned you, bitch!” Champion snarled, and fired three shots point blank into her. She smiled back at him and put out her hand in front of her. The boiling Flux suddenly reached out a finger of living fire and wrapped itself around his mid-section. Champion screamed and struggled, and the more he struggled the deeper it burned into him.
“Why not just change him into one of the Fluxgirls? Poetic justice,” Jeff suggested.
Spirit shook her head. “No, there’s been too much of that. Besides, he’s already had it the other way.” She looked down at Champion, who had dropped to his knees, face contorted in pain. “No one can free you from that, General,” she told him. “It’ll bite into you, burning away bit by bit, until finally it meets in your mid-section somewhere. You won’t be alive by then, General, but it works very slowly if you don’t struggle.”
They stepped by him and Jeff gave him a kick away from the machine. He screamed. Spirit examined the machine and the cable connection in detail while Jeff looked over the still form of the woman just beyond. “Hey! Damned if it isn’t Sondra!” he cried.
Spirit continued her examination of the removed panel and its connections. “Is she still alive?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know if there’s anything left inside her head but mush.”
“That’s all right. We’ll take her with us. If she’s still alive we can tap into records and get her back. Ugh!” She pulled at something.
“Can you disable it?”
“Oh, sure, but all he has to do is slap on a new connector. It’s no good, anyway. He’s damned clever. They know a lot more than anybody was ever supposed to. But it was real confused at the time they did this, and I guess they had enough warning to smuggle out copies of all the corporate files and as much engineering as they could manage. He’s got a constant current running through directly to the Gate lock, removing and replacing one of the boards. Interrupt that current and the whole cluster goes up in a rush. They want to make very sure that anybody who got this far couldn’t afford to meddle, or even switch the defensive screen back on.” She got back up and joined him. “I’ve done a few little dirty tricks in there that’ll give them fits and maybe fry one of the Seven if we’re lucky, but it won’t stop them. You pick her up and step back beyond the machine for a few moments. Right now this timing is all second-hand, and the clock is running.”
She walked almost up to the swirling Flux itself, taking it in, becoming almost one with it. Jeff, a little worried, could only hold Sondra’s limp form and watch.
“Farewell, Soul Rider.”
Oh, no, Spirit. Not ever. You and I are one.
She took a deep breath. Activate. Merge shell with station commander “L” for Luck. Operational request.
There was nothing visible but the dark form of his mother against the hypnotic swirl of the pure Flux, but he sensed an immediate and incredibly powerful burst of Flux energy reaching to the point just before the great machine. So powerful was it that it felt burning hot, like pure fire.
Small jets of a different, more familiar form of Flux came from both walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the tunnel and seemed to intersect her body. Jeff could only stare and frown as he thought he heard strange voices stating things in eerie, machine-like tones.
“ANCHOR LUCK VERIFIED. COMMANDER ON STATION.”
And then it was gone. No, not quite, for although she turned and faced him he saw that all of that concentrated power seemed concentrated within her. He stood there, frozen in mixed awe and fear, wondering what strange creature his mother had now become.
And then she winked at him.
He blinked, and she laughed. “Come on!” she called. “Let’s go on through to good old Anchor Logh—Anchor Luck, ironically enough—and get to work!”
He started breathing again. “There’s going to be a nasty welcoming committee at the other end, you know.”
“Not where we’re going,” she responded, and stepped through. In another moment, he mentally traced the same pattern she’d just shown him and stepped through himself. All that he’d been taught told him that he’d come out in the basement of the temple at Anchor Logh.
But he didn’t. There were other patterns, and other destinations, that only Soul Riders knew.
It was dark before Suzl could fully tell them her story, and they were confined now to the living room.
Adam Tilghman had come home early a few days before and talked to them in a more somber mood than he’d ever taken on in the house before. He’d told Cassie and Suzl that very bad men were about to take control, and if he didn’t stop them, both he and they would be killed. Suzl told Matson and the twins how they had discussed what to do, and he had insisted that the two women take the younger children and go north. He had good excuses all worked out. and a few men loyal to him would accompany them and see that they were safe.
They’d argued against it. since they didn’t want to leave him, but they had finally realized that the children were in danger. Cassie was adamant about not leaving herself; she insisted that her place was with Adam no matter what. Suzl, with the help of the loyalists, would be able to handle the children. She had gone along with it that way only because she realized that she, Suzl, had the difficult job, and the most important one.
They had boarded the train, with a special escort and special crew, and gone north. Shortly after, the telegraph wires were to be cut in two places to prevent any fast inquiries, and they were to be met by other loyalists at the end of the line and taken to a place of safety.
New Eden’s women were generally weak and fearful, but in the matter of protecting their children they were fierce and willing to give their own lives for the children’s safety.
Tilghman, in his haste, had forgotten about the two-way nature of the Hellgate. Officers, when finding the lines out, had simply used it to personally go to the temple at Anchor Logh and raise the alarm from that direction. When they reached the end of the line all looked fine and even the proper code words were given, but once away from the camp her loyal escorts were disarmed and made prisoners and she found she could do nothing. The rest of the story was much like their own. She didn’t know what happened to the loyalist soldiers, but she’d been brought here with the children and imprisoned. When it was clear that the kids could not be adequately cared for under these conditions, though, they were given over to some local Fluxwives. Suzl had been allowed to see them for a short period once a day, both for her sake and to calm the kids, but otherwise it was just dreary waiting.
“Do you know what they plan on doing with us?” the twins asked her.
“Right now we’re all bein’ kept as holds over Adam if they find him,” she told them. “Later, if they win, they’re gonna give all the girls what don’t already have it the stuff that burns out your brain. Turn us all into pet animals or som’thin’.” She shivered.
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Matson consoled her. “They may have more than they bargain for if they win.”
Suzl looked at him, obviously confused and frightened. “Do ya think—” she began, then stopped.
“Before we can do anything more we need the operations officer.”
Suzl looked around. “Did you just hear somebody talkin’?”
Matson looked at the twins, and they shrugged and shook their heads.
“We’re going to have to read in—oh, my god! It’s Suzl!”
“There it was again!” Suzl exclaimed, and saw in the others’ faces that they still heard nothing at all.
“Who’s Suzl?” a man’s voice asked.
“They never told you about her? I—I thought she was long dead. Well, let’s get to it.”
“Two people, a guy and a girl, are talkin’ about me in my head!”
RESTORATION PROGRAM SUBJECT SUZLETTE ANN LAMARTAINE AO544M36287L14K1478.
The twins jumped. “What was that?” Even Matson heard it. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt a rising excitement in him anyway.
“Something’s going to happen,” he told them.
Suzl suddenly stood up, eyes wide, her expression vacant. She stayed that way for perhaps a minute, then her mouth dropped open, she swayed, and fell to the floor. Matson caught her and gently laid her down on the mattresses.
Suddenly her eyes opened, and she sat up with a quick motion, staring not at them but off into space somewhere. “Ho-ly shit!” she said at last, in a tone of voice only one other in the room had ever heard her use before.
She jumped up to a standing position. “Matson! Kids! Get over there and get hidden! Something’s coming that’s gonna bring them in here fast!”
From the depths far beneath the old temple it came, riding the electrical lines. As it passed, going much slower than the electricity, the lights and other electrically powered devices slowed, skewed, or dimmed.
Now it was free of the temple and riding the underground lines beneath Temple Square. It emerged at the new substations, dimming almost all the lights in a full city quadrant, then came along the overhead poles and over to the old house itself. Power to the house had been cut at the pole, but the wire was still there, and through that wire it ran into the house. The outlets in the living room sputtered, and suddenly the entire room was bathed in an eerie, unnatural glow.
Matson watched from the hallway, fascinated. The twins were concerned, but he held them back.
Now all of the glow seemed to coalesce around Suzl, and she seemed to absorb it into her. The glow faded, and while they heard some yelling outside Suzl stood for a moment, motionless, almost a living statute from Mervyn’s lost Pericles.
OPERATIONAL SHELL VERIFIED INSTALLED.
From the hushed stillness, Suzl was suddenly a blur of motion. The twins watched in awe, having grown up with this woman as one of their mothers and never before seeing her like this.
She reached up, grabbed the collar, and there were sparks where she touched it. She pulled it off and threw it against the wall. “Quickly! Let me get those damned things off you!”
Matson looked worriedly at the door, but bent down. The removal stung for a moment, but the sense of freedom it brought him more than compensated for that. She had barely gotten the twins’ collars off when the bolt slid back. “Matson!” Suzl called. “Back me up. I’ll handle this!”
A black-clad trooper entered. Suzl leaped and kicked with her left foot, hitting the man in the crotch. He screamed in pain, and fell back from the force of the small woman’s blow. A second man rushed in, and she scrambled under him and tripped him. He went sprawling towards Matson, but quickly regained his feet. Matson damned near broke his knuckles with the force of three quick punches, then as the man doubled over he brought linked arms down on the back of the trooper’s neck. The other one continued to writhe in pain near the door, and it was clear that Suzl had broken something far more terrible in the man than bones.
She didn’t have much arm strength, but did she have a kick!
Suzl was up and giggling. “God! That was fun!”
“If you’ve got an idea for us going anywhere, we’d better move it!” Matson said sharply.
“In a minute.” She fumbled through the unconscious trooper’s pockets, then came up with a pack of cigars. “Now we go!”
“Which way?”
“To the temple,” she told them. “Fast as we can.”
“But they’re gonna be swarming all over the place! We’ll never make it across the square!”
“Oh, yes we will. This was just to get it out of my system. I don’t worry about anyone in Anchor. It’s my element.”
The twins seemed undecided between horror and excitement at Suzl’s performance, but they were clearly shocked in any case, and Matson had to pull them out of the house.
As soon as Suzl reached the porch, all the power went out in Temple Square and the immediate vicinity. None of the others could see much, but Suzl seemed to have the same vision as if it were bright daylight. She actually stopped on the porch and handed Matson a cigar, putting another in her own mouth.
“Are you still our Momma?” the twins asked in a hushed whisper.
“You bet I am! There’s just more of me, that’s all. Can’t have enough of a good thing,” she responded lightly. “Look, don’t worry about this part. This is the easy part. Tomorrow it gets hairy.”
Matson was more used to strange changes and transformations than the twins. Like most people of Flux, he simply accepted them when they came and adjusted his situation accordingly. “It doesn’t sound like anybody’s out there,” he noted. “I’d have expected a near riot by now.”
“They’re all knocked cold,” she replied. “And they’ll stay juiced until I decide otherwise. Come on—let’s get over to the temple.”
“You forgot his matches!” Matson grumbled.
She laughed, and pointed a finger at the end of his cigar. A spark leaped and it was lit. “Cute trick,” she said admiringly to herself, and lit her own. She coughed once. “Damn. I’m out of practice!” And they were off across the street and by the small rail yard, its floodlights now out, towards the looming hulk of the temple.
“How the hell are you doing all this?” Matson asked her as they walked briskly towards their goal. “I thought your old self was erased!”
“It was. But nothing is permanent if you have Flux power here,” she told him. “Nothing but death. First they read my memories back in, so I have the whole record. That also negated Coydt’s spell.”
“I notice you kept your Fluxgirl body.”
“Honey, if you had this body would you go back to being a fat, dumpy broad with stringy hair?”
The twins were recovering from their shock in the excitement of freedom, and joined in. “So you’ve got Flux power. But, Matson, you said it don’t work in this place.”
They were going up the vast, high stone steps now. Suzl slowing only to make allowances for the others’ vision. Their eyes had somewhat adjusted now, but it was a dark and cloudy night.
“It works when I want it to work,” Suzl told them. “Like when this square was turned to Flux once.”
She was at the door now, and waited for them to reach the same place. “The Guardian did that,” Matson pointed out, feeling a little out of shape. He was breathing hard from just that climb.
“Matson, darling, haven’t you figured it out yet? I am the Guardian!”
The technician was a blubbering, quivering mass of terror. Onregon Sligh looked at him in complete disgust.
“Get hold of yourself, man! What the hell is wrong with you?”
Finally, the technician collected himself enough to speak. He was terrified out of his wits, but he was at least as terrified of Onregon Sligh.
“I—I monitored a surge in the line. I went down to check on it, and I s-saw—him.”
“Who?”
“G-General Champion! God! It was horrible! He’d been cut completely in two, his guts and blood are all over the place. . . .”
Sligh frowned. He didn’t like losing Champion at this stage of things. Still, there were others. “You’ve seen dead men before.”
“Not like that. Burned through, he was! And the look frozen on his face—I’ll never be able to get that face out of my mind!”
Sligh turned away and summoned some of Champion’s aides. They told him what Champion was doing down there. He took out his big cigar and spat on the ground. “Stupid hung-up psychopathic son of a bitch! He just loved torturing the girls so much that he couldn’t resist it even now. Well, it’s clear what happened. She was a wizard, and he took her down where there was maximum power. She was stronger than he was, and absolutely terrified, and that terror pulled so much force out of the Gate it killed him. Serves him right, risking his life and command in a crisis.” He sighed. “Well, you were his aides. Take some men, get down there, and clean up the mess. I don’t want it fouling the cable. When you’re done I’ll send some of my boys down to check and see if any damage was done.”
He walked back over to the communications shack. He’d have to call up von Heilman and Narjawal and tell them that their precious general had cut his throat and that they would be expected to shoulder the load now. He didn’t care which one of them took over here. They were good military men, but otherwise both were just as batty as their fallen commander.
General Borodin jumped off the platform to the first car before the train had come to a complete stop and ran over and saluted Adam Tilghman. The Judge returned it, then shook hands warmly. Borodin had been thought by Champion and Sligh to be on their side, and, in fact, he had been—for a limited coup. He had never felt right about it, though, smelling something odd, and when news came of the Hellgate plot it all fell into place for him. Tilghman knew that Borodin had been ready to stab him in the back before, and Borodin knew he knew it, but neither let it influence their actions now. Any ideological differences could be settled later—if there was a later.
“I had to sacrifice men for ordnance,” the general said apologetically. “How many have you got?”
“Almost two thousand,” Tilghman replied. “We’ve picked up a very large number from nervous junior officers and sergeants who have little stomach for revolution if it means civil war. I’m hoping that more of them won’t fight when we move.”
Borodin nodded. “We’d better. With only two trains on this damned single track I was lucky to pack in another three hundred, and half of those are ordnance experts. Still, we’ve alerted a lot of commands along the way, and we might get substantial reinforcements overland if we can hold that long. I wouldn’t count on them, though. There’s one hell of a storm front between there and here. We almost didn’t make it through!”
There were rumblings in the west, and the occasional glow of far-off lightning flashes to emphasize his point. Tilghman was delighted with the ordnance, particularly the heavy ray projection equipment and the rocket launchers, but he was under no illusions as to their chances. Even though the enemy force was currently spread out in all directions, once either their scouts located him or he struck they would all move to close in. If they couldn’t punch through quickly and in total secrecy until the actual point of engagement, there was no chance at all of reaching the transmitter. It sounded simple, but even with an all-night trek it would be midmorning before they could be in any kind of position for a solid attack.
Tilghman walked back to the small, fast carriage he was using. Cassie had used a small portable stove and offered him hot coffee and a two-day-old sandwich. “Them san’wiches don’t look like much, but they’re better’n nothin’,” she told him, forcing him to eat and drink something.
Not for the first time did he wish for the “old” Cassie back, the veteran warrior queen who’d conquered half of World. Still, he understood that that woman had hated war, and had hated being forced to wage it. Even this one had guts, though. She could have been safe but chose to be here, knowing she might die or watch him die—or both. She’d kept him going out here, forcing him to rest, to eat, to catch a little sleep. “I ain’t much good for fightin’ an’ wars,” she’d told him, “but you take care of the war and I’ll take care of you.”
Soon they were breaking camp. The trains had been unloaded, everything was hitched up, and he and Borodin and the brigade commanders had agreed on routes, strategy, and tactics. There was nothing left to do but to fight.
He had driven himself like a wild man, without rest or comfort, for many days, and he’d driven all those on his side the same way. The word was spread through Flux and Anchor, by wizard, by messenger, by stringer, that it could not be stopped. The Gates of Hell were opening, and the final battle and final test for humanity was at hand. They would be a massive force in each cluster, but a disorganized one. The stringers tried to help with that as much as possible, as each assumed an area command and switched roles. For more than twenty-six centuries the men and women of the Guild had studied and trained for just this sort of conflict, but this was the first time they, as a group, were called upon to put theory into practice. Still, they formed a ready-made senior officer corps as trained as any could be for an unprecendented situation. For the first time, Mervyn began to believe that, while World might well lose, it was not as unprepared as it seemed.
He had stuck to Flux, not wanting to be caught in Anchor as had Krupe and the others, and now he circled in the form of a great bird around the Northeast Gate. It was the least defended, since Fluxlands tended by chance to be closer to the cluster rims there, and entry from the temples had been somehow jammed. He circled, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and then landed and changed back into his human form almost at the lip of the dish-like depression.
All seemed deathly still, and he climbed down the ancient ladder to the dish floor and walked over to the tunnel entrance. Suddenly a head poked out, so abruptly that it startled him. The man in the tunnel grinned, then quickly hauled himself up to the surface of the dish.
“Hello, Mervyn,” said Zelligman Ivan. “Well, it’s just as I planned it. I waited until I heard you were in the region, then made more of a ruckus here than I had to in hopes it would bring you to me.”
“Zelligman—there’s still time to stop this.”
“Had a last-minute glitch in the remote receiver,” the Chairman of the Seven continued, ignoring the old wizard’s plea. “It wouldn’t do to have a mechanical failure undo all these carefully laid plans.”
“Zelligman—how are you going to do it? You have no receiving antenna.”
“Very astute. It’s because you can’t really ever be sure about broadcasting through Flux, old boy. So the signal will be beamed down, full strength, and concentrated on the tunnel in the south. There’s a carrier signal of some sort connecting all the Gates, you know. Our signal will piggyback onto that carrier, and they’ll all open—not within a minute, but within a second or less.”
“So the tower is only so that the real transmitter is high enough to beam directly down into the tunnel.”
Ivan nodded. “I know what you’re thinking, and, yes. Knock off a bit of the top and it’s no go. But they’ll never get that close, you know. And even if they did, and stopped it, they couldn’t disconnect what we’ve put in. It’s inevitable, Mervyn. If not now, then next week, next month, or next year. It might as well be tomorrow.”
“There might still be ways.”
“And if there are, I’m sure you can think of them, but it’s rather obvious that you and I are going to sit up there and be the welcoming committee. It should be instructive to one of us.”
Mervyn looked at him. “You mean to take me on, then?”
“You’re done, old man. Your cause is lost, your power is half what it was. Why fight me at all?”
“My cause is lost when it is lost, Zelligman, not before. My power may have diminished, but I need no machine to amplify it, so great is my hate and disgust of you and your works, when pitted against your cold and soulless rationality. You are dead inside, Zelligman. And if your cause is inevitable I can still hurt you, for I can cheat you out of ever knowing for certain.”
Zelligman Ivan smiled. “This was ordained from our births, Mervyn. This is the moment for which we were born.” He rose into the air and there was a sudden, blinding sheet of fire. The match was on.