The Zygan Emprise: Renegade Paladins and Abyssal Redemption (31 page)

As the Chidurian M-fanned a comm holo, “Spud”
took a deep breath as well. Exactly three seconds after exhaling,
“Spud” exploded! Bits of flesh and blood spattered over me. I
grabbed my Ergal and X-fanned as the Sentinels stood momentarily
frozen in shock. Agriarctos—or what was left of him—was now on his
own.

* * *

I M-fanned into a massive arched chamber that
stretched endlessly before me. The walls on each side were white,
and seemed to radiate a soft glow that lit the infinite tunnel
ahead. The light was soothing, and I basked in its comfort for a
few moments, then, aware of my mission, I activated my Ergal and
let it do its thing.

I was levved quickly forward for five long
minutes, accelerating faster and faster, the air whipping my face
as my speed rapidly topped one hundred miles per hour. I flashed
back to the afternoon John had taken me out on his motorcycle a few
months before he’d left. Sans our helmets, we’d done the usual back
roads in the rolling Appalachian hills until we hit a distant
valley with a straight stretch of highway and John had floored it.
I’d held onto him for dear life, and whooped with joy as we
practically flew over the asphalt. I remember watching the
speedometer going eighty, ninety, one hundred, and feeling the rush
of wind across my body. I knew then that when I got older I was
going to learn to fly. I just never imagined I would be doing it by
myself.

My Ergal finally stopped me—a little too fast
for my stomach—next to the white wall on my left. I looked at the
wall more closely. Its surface seemed slightly rough, like the
popcorn ceiling in George’s ancient dorm room. Strangely, the
roughness seemed to be growing, the wall turning into a sea of
white bubbles. I realized I was being micro’ed at a rapid clip.

As I became smaller and smaller, I was able
to see more and more detail in the wall. To my relief, the process
finally stopped when I got to the level of several microns, the
resolution of an electron microscope. And that’s when I saw them.
Lining each wall, to my shock, were thousands and thousands of
brightly glowing spheres.

The spheres looked to me like
basketball-sized versions of the spheres I had viewed in the giant
chamber the first time I had been dragged to Benedict’s
planet-ship. Could those spheres have been stolen neurocaches? If
so, where had they gone when I had returned to the chamber with
Matshi and Spud? To another brane, perhaps?

I was still clutching my Ergal in my hands,
and I abruptly felt it start to vibrate. The vibrations caused my
hands to tremble violently. At the same time, one of the balls
directly opposite me started to vibrate and glow with a greater
intensity. It soon resonated in rhythm with my Ergal, and, finally,
visibly startling me, it flew off of the wall and attached itself
to my Ergal.

“O-kay,” I said to myself, trying to stay
calm. This is creepy. The ball felt soft, warm, and soothing
against my arms and chest. I felt its vibrations slowly become
synchronized with my pounding heartbeat. Bum-pum, bum-pum, bum-pum.
Really
creepy.

My mission accomplished, I expected my Ergal
would swing me around, mega me, and shoot me back to the entrance.
However, as soon as my Ergal stopped vibrating, I—and my new
friend, the sphere—started moving forward again. After another few
minutes of swift travel, we were stopped near another wall of
spheres, this time on my right. The Ergal once again started to
vibrate, and I waited, expecting another chosen sphere to respond
and join our party.

Instead, all the spheres seemed to be growing
larger—or was I getting smaller again? The sphere I had cradled in
my arms became much larger than me. Fortunately, it was
feather-light, and it floated next to me, hovering and shadowing me
as I moved. The spheres in front of me had also grown, and I felt
myself being towed towards one in particular. That sphere was now
positioned directly in front of me and continued to grow until it
was almost four times my size,
^xxx
and micrometers from my face.

As I’d been able to do on Benedict’s planet,
I soon found my body diffusing through this new sphere’s membrane.
As I passed through, I developed an inexplicable feeling of dread.
Once inside, my feathery sensation of flying quickly disappeared. I
started to feel very heavy and clumsy, as if I was bound and
imprisoned once again. My breathing became more labored, hampered
by thick secretions in my nose and throat. My eyes now had
difficulty focusing, my vision was blurry and double. I felt
hunger, thirst, and a pressing urge to empty my bladder, yet, when
I tried to move, my limbs jerked wildly, seemingly completely out
of my control. Worst of all, I could no longer hear John’s voice,
or remember his comforting words.

An auburn-haired woman, middle-aged, I’d
guess, leaned into my line of sight, her expression filled with
concern. She seemed, somehow, to be talking directly to me. “What’s
wrong, Stacy?” the woman said tenderly. “Honey, are you okay?”

Stacy? Who is Stacy? The woman reached over
and adjusted my pillow, re-positioned my arms, and then patted me
on my bottom to see if my diaper was wet. Diaper?! What the hell?
Where am I? What’s going on? I tried to cry for help, but I was
unable to form any intelligible sounds and my voice only came out
in grunts and groans. I was terrified, and, once again, tried
desperately to escape this nightmare into which I had stumbled—or
been led to—to no avail. I was trapped, incapacitated. A prisoner
in a strange and disabled body, unable to flee. Panicked, I heard
myself scream.

* * *

I don’t remember anything about my return to
the infinite tunnel. I recall only the joy of feeling free,
weightless, and comfortable, bathed and calmed once again by light.
I opened my eyes and saw that my Ergal was still in my hand. The
first sphere I had collected was getting smaller and smaller. It
had stopped shadowing me and had reattached itself to my Ergal,
disappearing completely as I kept mega’ing and could no longer see
at the molecular level. As I continued to grow, the wall in front
of me lost its texture and once more became a smooth surface of
glowing radiance.

I waited uneasily for my Ergal to take me
still further into the endless room, worried that I’d be pushed
into yet another terrifying experience. But, the Ergal instead
whooshed me briskly back to the starting point of my bizarre
journey. I arrived at the RAM entry breathless and grateful for my
short, spiky haircut that was ideally suited for surviving the
wind.

At the entrance, as
Agriarctos and I had planned, I, with fingers crossed,
simultaneously X-fanned and activated a temporal leap. This is a
very dangerous and, if unauthorized, illegal move. Temporal leaps
are different from time loops. Time loops bring the traveler back
on or after the point he or she left. The time the traveler
experiences in the past or future is just lengthened relative to
those who remain in the present. For example, it was a week in Hell
for me, and only an anxious hour outside waiting for Spud. Temporal
leaps take you back in time
without
looping, so the traveler can return to any time, including a
time
before
he or she
time-traveled. There’s a potential for some pretty peculiar
paradoxes with temporal leaps. And, if you’re caught, some pretty
long temporal loops in Hell.
^xxxi

Temporal leaping, I M-fanned in the reception
lobby under the cupola minutes before Agriarctos and I were due to
arrive. As several of the Sentinels whipped out their stun guns, I
strode directly to their Chidurian leader, whom my Ergal had by now
identified as Gameshi.

“Gameshi,” I said immediately in Zygan, “Rush
from Central. You’re about to be invaded by two impostors, one of
them pretending to be me, and the other my partner. They’re going
to try to break into the RAM.”

To my dismay, the Chidurian seemed
suspicious. He ordered one of his Sentinels to keep his stun gun
aimed at me, and then told the rest of the team to adopt defense
formation five. Anxious, I stood at the periphery of the lobby with
my captor, watching as the guards formed a circle awaiting the
impostors’ M-fan. I crossed my fingers once again.

It took a couple of minutes, but my
prediction did come true. Agriarctos, muted as Spud, and the
“earlier me” M-fanned into the circle of Sentinels. I shouted
loudly in Ursan, “RHRak’nk!”
^xxxii
The cry distracted the Sentinels for a crucial moment as they
turned to look at me. Agriarctos and the earlier me sprung into
action, Ergaling stun guns and spraying the closest Sentinels with
stun rays. I shot out a kick that threw my guard’s stun-gun flying
across the room, and levved out of the way to avoid his lunge. It
was soon down to three against five, and we fought like…Zygan
Sentinels. I disabled my own sentry with a blow to his head, and as
I whirled around to assist
my
team, I saw the Chidurian
raise his stun gun to get a clear shot directly at me.

Shouting, “Find out about Stacy!” I tossed my
Ergal to my earlier self just as Gameshi fired. The laser burned my
skin for a nanosecond and then—

* * *

Screaming, I leapt towards the Chidurian,
trying to stop him from shooting. But, it was too late. The stun
gun fired a laser ray that completely disintegrated me—or really
that person who looked so much like me across the room. I had
caught the Ergal she had thrown to me, and slipped it into my
pocket as I landed on top of the trigger-happy warrior, knocking
him to the marble floor. Purple blood started seeping from the back
of his head, but that didn’t stop him from using several of his
arms and legs to heave me off of him. I did a double back-flip and
landed on the shoulders of the last free Sentinel, knocking him
out, and turned to help Agriarctos, who was finishing off another
fighter.

The Chidurian was back on his feet again,
rivers of violet blood flowing down his face. He lunged towards me,
and, just before he reached me, he was stunned in mid-air by
Spud/Agriarctos and crashed, grunting, to the ground.

“Did you get it?” Agriarctos asked me
urgently.

I nodded, looking sadly off at the place
where my avatar had recently stood, and responded, “X-fan!”

We did.

* * *

With all the Sentinels either unconscious or
stunned, we were hoping that we could make it out of Nejinsen
without setting off alarms. We M-fanned into the Maternity Ward,
and Ergaling into scrubs, we strode confidently behind a row of
chattering, expectant Ytrans, whose eyes were glued to the meiosis
chambers where their offspring-to-be were splitting and
incubating.

We reached the lifts without incident, and
stepped into a crowded elevator for the trip down to the lobby.
Wary of a potential welcoming party, I was relieved when the door
opened and we saw only routine activity in the Medical Center’s
entrance hall. I realized then that I had been holding my breath
longer than I ever thought I could.

As soon as we had exited Nejinsen, we mega’ed
our ship, and set off as quickly as possible in stealth mode for
Benedict’s planet-vessel. Every minute’s delay increased the
chances that someone would stumble on the stunned Zygfed Sentinels,
who would, no doubt, raise a very angry alarm about our RAM
invasion as soon as they were unstunned. Briskly dodging guard
buoys, I piloted the Nautilus with one hand on our weapons control,
ready just in case.

As we approached the last tendrils of Zyga’s
atmosphere, the terminal buoy started flashing a pulsing red light.
Going into hyperdrive while still in planet orbit was a risky move,
but it was one of the best ways to avoid the laser blast that I
knew would follow from the buoy in the next second or two. I
warped, and the ray missed.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I sat back in
my jump seat and focused my eyes on the starstreams on our
viewscreen. After my adrenaline shakes passed, I turned to
Agriarctos, who had waited until we’d cleared Andromedan airspace
before returning to his normal Ursan form.

“So, where are they?” I asked Agriarctos, who
was thankfully no longer Spud.

The Ursan shrugged, but, perhaps picking up
on my anxiety about my friends, he swung his seat around towards
the Nautilus’ nav and scan holos and pulled up displays of M81.
Despite Benedict’s assurances that, if we succeeded in our assigned
mission, he would keep up his end of the deal, I didn’t exactly
believe he’d come through with his promises to keep Spud and the
rest of our team safe.

Agriarctos fiddled with the holo screens for
what seemed like an eternity. Finally, he responded, “They’re still
there. M81. Octet 6.”

“At a portal?” I wondered.

Agriarctos didn’t answer, but kept his snout
buried in his viewscreen.

After a few minutes of silence, I spoke up
again. “Who’s Stacy?”

Agriarctos looked at me and shrugged. “I
don’t know. Who?”

“It’s something she yelled to me just before
she died, ‘Find out about Stacy!’”

“Who yelled?”

“Me. I did. Or rather,
she
did. The me
that went into the RAM.”

Agriarctos appeared genuinely puzzled. “No
idea. Are you sure the name was ‘Stacy’?”

I nodded. “Yeah …” Sighing, I added, “That’s
okay.” In all the commotion, I probably didn’t hear her right. She
could have said “space heat” for all I know, maybe something to do
with the Zygan Sentinels. I shook my head. If only I’d had time to
ask her. And to say thanks.

I just could not erase her final minutes from
my mind. As a catascope, I’d witnessed deaths before, but seeing
yourself
die, disappearing into nothing, had been both
terrifying and devastating. What had she—I--been thinking, feeling?
Did it hurt? She’d been so
there
… and now she was gone … and
I
was here. I’d just met her, but I knew her better than
anyone else in the Universe, and, in some peculiar way, I missed
her.