Finally, Aurelius spliced the last one in with his cutting torch.
“There,” he said to himself, lifting his protective visor to admire his work, “that should do it.”
He began working his way back out of the cramped corridor, wondering how Lashyla and Esephalia had amused themselves in his absence. He'd left them alone for more than half an hour. From what he'd seen before he'd left them, they seemed to share a mutual animosity which kept them both unusually quiet.
As he drew near, he began to hear the two women’s voices raised in argument. He frowned and stopped to listen.
“. . . at least elves don’t keep their men for pets. I think Aurelius deserves better than that, don’t you?”
“They’re not our pets! We treat our men very well.”
“As equals?”
Lashyla let out a pretty laugh. “Don’t be silly! Men are not and never could be our equals.”
“I disagree.”
“It doesn’t matter whether or not you agree. He’s mine, you stupid elf, so stay out of it!”
“He’s no one’s, you stupid princess.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s going back. He has to. If he doesn’t return to his time, there will be grave consequences, and sooner than you know. Not only will
his
life be forfeit, but thousands, maybe millions of others will be too.”
“What
are
you talking about?”
Aurelius heard Esephalia sigh. “It would take too long to explain. Just trust me.”
“No, what do you mean he has to go back? Back where?”
“What do you think all of this has been about? Malgore, Gabrian, the relic that your mother thought was just another pretty bauble? Aurelius is not from this world. He was accidentally sent thousands of years through time to get here, and now he
must
go back to the time from which he came.”
“I won’t let you take him from me. . . .” There was a warning note in Lashyla’s voice.
Esephalia either missed it or didn't care. “You don’t have a choice.”
Then Aurelius heard Lashyla let loose a sudden scream, and now the sounds which were echoing into the access corridor were those of a struggle. He decided to pick that moment to intervene and squeezed out into the hallway beyond the access corridor. There he found Lashyla and Esephalia rolling around on the deck with hands locked around each other’s throats.
“I’ll kill you, you pointy-eared witch!” Lashyla screamed through gritted teeth.
Esephalia began whispering something unintelligible, and Aurelius feared that Lashyla was about to be reduced to a pile of smoking ash.
He cleared his throat meaningfully. When they didn’t even notice him, he pulled Lashyla off of the elvish woman and dragged her kicking and screaming to the other side of the corridor. “Hey, quit it!” he said, as she began kicking him. Suddenly she quieted and he cautiously released her. She turned to him with a sheepish smile.
“Hello, Aurelius,” Lashyla said.
Esephalia jumped up and dusted herself off, and with a parting scowl for Lashyla, she stalked back to the cockpit.
“What was that all about?” Aurelius demanded.
“Oh, just a little difference of opinion, that’s all,” she said, flashing a coquettish smile.
Aurelius frowned. He knew exactly what the fight had been about, but he decided not to press the point. The time to make Lashyla wake up from her happily-ever-after dream world of him and her would come soon enough. He felt a tug at heart at the thought of leaving her behind, followed by a much stronger chemical response which threatened to crush him like a load of bricks, but he knew well enough by now that the latter response was caused by Lashyla’s proximity and the steady stream of pheromones he was inhaling. He hoped it would fade once he put some distance between them.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go join them in the cockpit. We should be getting close by now.”
“Close to what?” she asked, her gaze finding his with sharp curiosity.
He hesitated. “Close to what we’re looking for.”
Lashyla crossed her arms over her chest. “You mean what
you’re
looking for.”
Aurelius frowned and started toward the cockpit, but Lashyla caught him by his arm and pulled him close. He felt helpless to resist.
“Don’t go,” she whispered in his ear. “Or else take me with you.”
“I can’t.”
She reached out and turned his head toward hers, then spent a long moment searching his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered back. “You can’t come with me, and I can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
Aurelius hesitated once more, feeling a slowly growing warmth in his veins, spreading and clouding his thoughts with a feeling of peace and ease so strong, so comfortable, that he just wanted to take Lashyla in his arms and never let her go.
She reached up and stroked his cheek. “Stay with me. . . .”
All of a sudden he realized what was happening, and he recoiled angrily. “Stop that!” he said, shaking his head violently and backing away from her.
“Stop what?” she asked, her eyes flashing with hurt.
“Whatever you were doing.”
Lashyla looked close to tears. “Aurelius, I wasn’t doing anything.” She shook her head. “Not this time.”
“Then you admit it!”
“Admit what?”
“That you’ve been controlling my emotions somehow.”
“Influencing, not controlling, but Aurelius—” She took a long step toward him, and he backed away more hurriedly.
“Stay away from me,” he said, shaking his finger at her. He turned and walked away, hurrying to the cockpit, and for a wonder, she did exactly as he’d asked, and just watched him go.
Aurelius sat down in the flight chair with an angry sigh. Esephalia cast him a curious look, but said nothing.
“And the princess?” Gabrian asked after a moment.
Aurelius frowned and busied himself with the controls, boosting their acceleration to maximum now that they wouldn't feel it. There came an answering roar from the engines which rumbled underfoot. Now, at the current rate of acceleration, it would be less than an hour before they reached the point where the relic should be.
“Where is she?” Gabrian pressed.
“Who knows,” Aurelius said.
Gabrian dropped the subject there and silence reigned while they flew on toward an invisible point in space, marked on Aurelius's starmap as a blinking green diamond.
“Gabrian,” Aurelius said, breaking the silence suddenly.
The old man turned to him in askance.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, Malgore called you,
brother
. Was he really your . . .”
Gabrian looked away. “Yes.”
“Esephalia told me he killed your father.”
“Malgore was evil. He always was. I was a fool not to see it sooner.”
Aurelius took a moment of silence to process that. “And for your lack of foresight you were exiled, sentenced to guard the relic for the rest of your life.”
Gabrian turned to look at him. “It was a lenient sentence. My faith in my
brother—
” Gabrian paused, the word
brother
seeming to have left a bad taste in his mouth. “—cost tens of thousands of lives, including my father’s, and it brought the Watchers into being.” Gabrian sighed. “Let’s talk no more of this.” And with that, he looked away, back out into space.
Aurelius frowned out at the stars, glaring back at them as though they bore him some ill will. Now his thoughts turned, almost of their own accord, in another direction. If Lashyla could just tone herself down a notch and stop trying to smother him, he might actually have a chance to fall for her. Then again, how would he ever know if he did? All the usual feelings and desires which accompanied falling in love were already there, artificially created by Lashyla's overactive pheromones. If only he could think clearly about her for just a moment. . . .
Maybe he
could
take her with him? Would that be so bad? Isolated from her culture of origin, she might just exchange her matriarchal views for more reasonable, egalitarian ones. . . . Aurelius shook his head. No, she was already a fully-grown woman. It would take a lot to change her. . . .
A fully-grown woman with little more than one year of life.
Perhaps changing her would be easier than he thought. He could take her with him, and if it didn't work out, he'd just . . .
Send her back? She'd be an invalid in his time, where life was dominated by technology that she wouldn't know how to use. She'd be completely dependent upon him and he'd never be able to leave her—not in good conscience anyway. No, he had to leave her behind.
That conclusion was followed by a sharp pain in his chest. He winced and rubbed the spot. The thought of leaving her behind was intolerable, but how much of that feeling was influenced by Lashyla's lingering influence?
Given enough time away from her he'd be able to sort out which feelings were genuinely his, and which ones weren't. Of course, by then it would be too late. . . .
Aurelius's navigational computer beeped, breaking him out of his thoughts. They were almost to the point he'd marked out on his star map; it was time to start decelerating. He studied his scanners while reversing thrust, looking for the asteroid belt where the relic had been. After a number of minutes, Aurelius said, “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“What?” Esephalia asked, leaning forward to peer into the empty blackness of space. “I don’t see anything.”
“That’s just it. There was a whole field of asteroids here when I left. We should be flying through them right now.”
“Asteroids?” she asked.
“Giant rocks, floating in space—in the ether.”
“Hmmm . . .” Gabrian stroked his beard thoughtfully. “It has been a long time since you left. Perhaps the rocks are gone now.”
“Yeah, probably are actually, but then . . .” Aurelius had a bad feeling about what that meant for the location of the relic, but he kept it to himself. In just a few minutes they reached the exact place where his flight logs had abruptly ended when he'd been catapulted through the time portal.
Space was empty.
Aurelius cruised around the spot, shaking his head. “I’m not picking up anything on scanners. There are no asteroids, no relic, no mortal remains . . .
nothing.
”
“How can that be?” Gabrian asked.
“Look, if the asteroids aren’t here, the relic shouldn’t be either. Maybe the whole belt orbited into the Sun a thousand years ago.”
Gabrian closed his eyes and muttered something.
“You’re mumbling again old man.”
“Shhh . . .” Esephalia said.
“It’s here,” Gabrian whispered. “I can sense it. It’s very close.”
Aurelius frowned and checked his scanners again, this time refining their settings to make sure they’d pick up even the smallest object. He began to get some interference from space dust, but not a lot else. “I’m telling you, my wrinkly friend, it’s not here . . .”
And then they slammed straight into it. It bounced off the canopy with a
crack!
simulated by the SISE system, and went spinning off into space.
* * *
“Damn it!” Aurelius said, quickly setting course to follow the sparkling sphere as it spun away from them. Using visual tracking, he matched speeds and kept the relic just barely in sight using the autopilot’s target-following system.
A moment later the brightly glowing speck that was the relic was close enough that they could clearly pick it out against the stars. Now with the relic safely before them, Aurelius frowned, wondering how to get it inside the ship. “Well, you were right, Gabrian. . . .” he said; though privately he wondered about that, thinking it was strange that all the asteroids and any trace of Malgore’s and Reven’s remains had vanished, while the relic itself had stayed exactly where it had been left.
“How do we get it inside?” Esephalia asked.
Aurelius abandoned the flight chair in a rush. “Stay here, I have an idea.”
He hurried aft to the cargo bay, grimacing upon reaching the broken inner doors of the cargo hold where Gral had forced them open, and walked straight up to the far side of the bay. He waved his hand over a small door recessed into the wall. The door opened with a
swish
to reveal a small, bubble-shaped viewport with a chair and targeting control system mounted inside. It was something he’d had installed only recently: a grav gun and cargo airlock, for all those times when he was being chased by the authorities and had to dump his cargo to not get caught. This little feature would have supposedly enabled him to recollect his cargo, though he hadn’t yet had a chance to put it into practice.
“Time to see what you can do,” Aurelius said as he sat down behind the controls.
* * *
Lashyla waited in the darkness of the little room she’d stumbled into, carefully biding her time until she saw the vista from the square viewport along one wall of the room gradually lighten from the blackness of space to a bright blue sky. When that happened, she knew they’d found what they were looking for and now they were going back. She crept anxiously up to the viewport to watch as the land began peeking distantly through the clouds. It made her dizzy just to think about how high they were, so she stepped back from the viewport.
It was only a matter of minutes before she could see green hills rolling along the horizon, and not long after that, tall pine trees rose to block out that rolling green line.
They were coming in for a landing. Lashyla knew that now was the time for her to make her move. She snuck out of the little room, and from there she crept down the corridor until she reached the airlock by which they’d entered the ship. Waving her hand over the glowing panel as she’d seen Aurelius do, the door slid open with a ragged
thunk, thunk, thunk. . . .
She smiled and watched from the open door as the ship descended the last few feet to a grassy green field. Some unseen wind was buffeting the grassy field all around the craft. They landed soundlessly and the roar of the engines diminished to a quiet hiss. Lashyla cast a quick look over her shoulder, but there was no one.
Good,
she thought.
It was time for her to disappear.
* * *
Aurelius frowned. “Someone just opened the airlock.”
“By
someone
, you mean Lashyla?” Gabrian asked.
“Yeah, I guess. . . . Who else would it be?”
Esephalia stood up from the copilot’s seat. “Well, she’s no longer our concern.”
“You think she left?” Aurelius asked. “Without even saying goodbye?”
“Esephalia's right,” Gabrian said. “It does not matter, and we have no time to look for her.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it. A minute ago she was trying to convince me to take her with me, and now she just leaves?”
“Aurelius!” Gabrian raised his voice to a thundering shout and the elder jumped with fright. “I’m going to trigger the portal outside. You must be ready to fly through as soon as that happens, or else we risk letting someone else from another time—maybe even Malgore—back into Mrythdom.”
Aurelius nodded absently. “I’ll be ready.”
He watched them leave. Once they were out of sight, he turned away. He felt suddenly bereft, and smiled bitterly at the irony. When Lashyla had been with him he hadn’t wanted her; he’d been unable to make up his mind, but now that she was gone, he couldn’t stand the thought of her absence. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, willing himself to think of something else. This was the way it had to be. She’d finally realized that at the end and had decided to spare them both the agony of goodbye.
When Aurelius opened his eyes once more he saw Gabrian and Esephalia walking out into the middle of the grassy green field. Gabrian stooped down and placed the relic in the grass, then walked on until he was a safe distance away. Now Aurelius watched as the old man raised Malgore’s staff and gestured toward the relic. At first nothing appeared to happen, though the relic was hidden in the tall grass so it was hard to tell. Then, the grass began to smoke, and a moment later it caught on fire. A thundering
bang
came, followed by a flash of light and a shockwave which flattened the grass and rocked the
Halcyon Courier
on its landing struts. The cockpit canopy had automatically darkened, shielding Aurelius’s eyes from the blast, so he immediately saw the swirling black portal appear above the relic.
Aurelius triggered his thrusters and lifted off, having the presence of mind to shut the open airlock door as he did so. He nudged the throttle forward, marveling at how slow and deliberate his movements appeared to be as he approached the portal. The last few feet seemed like miles, so Aurelius nudged the throttle up higher. The blackness swelled to fill the entire canopy, and then it reached out for him greedily, and enveloped his ship. There was a noticeable break point between one thought and the next where time seemed to freeze entirely. . . .