Now THAT I had steeled myself to develop whatever was necessary, I stayed on Muria, continuing to concentrate on discovering something that either concentrated energy, stored large amounts of energy, or transported that energy.
As far as I could discover, in sliding from undertime locale to undertime locale around the Murian systems, they had little need for storage of massive quantities of energy. Their closet-sized fusion generators and their light, thin, and all too durable superconducting cables took care of that aspect of energy.
In the end, the fact that I could sense energy flows from the undertime led me in the right direction—to a small series of structures located directly under the south magnetic pole of Muria. At the time, I didn’t know it was the south magnetic pole, but Wryan later assured me that it had to be.
The complex seemed inactive, but the spray of energy ghosting around it in the undertime indicated that at infrequent intervals massive amounts of energy had been expended.
The initial observation was easy. The eight buildings, arranged as points of an octagon, were all closed and without inhabitants. So was the central eight-sided structure, which enclosed an eight-sided platform. In the center of the platform was a shimmering circular plate half a rod across and perhaps the thickness of my thumb. Connected to the plate were sixteen of the thin superconducting cables—apparently two from each outlying building.
A quick series of dives verified that each outlying building contained an inactive fusion power plant.
The ghostly energy lines looped around the plate, then, about a handspan above the metal, disappeared.
I dropped backtime, perhaps a local decade or so, before any activity
appeared, and watched as three Murians employed what might have been a forklift to place a cube covered with the shimmering insulation used for their superconducting wires on the plate. A burst of energy from all fusion systems, and the box was gone.
That meant more backtiming, since there was no way to determine where the box had been destined. Instead I forced myself back to the construction of the facility, getting hell-fired close to my personal back-time limit, in order to follow the equipment back to its point of fabrication.
There were two plates. One went somewhere in an interstellar ship. The other went to the site where I had found it. That cinched it. The Murians had a matter transmitter. But they didn’t use it often at all. And its use required the output of eight fusion generators at peak load.
Still … I wondered about the possibilities. So I went back a touch farther and liberated a set of the plates … and did a few experiments of my own. They worked. I didn’t know much about physics, but when you can see the energy flows certain alternatives show a possibility. Like using the direct energy from a sun instead of one fusion generator—or eight generators.
It sounds easy. It wasn’t, and it took subjective weeks before I was convinced that what I had in mind would work. That’s the way it is with all brilliant discoveries. They become grunt efforts. Great ideas are easy. Getting them to work is the hard part.
After figuring out the pieces for my gadget, I had to get all the pieces home, all the time hoping that there was a home left for me to go back to. I suppose I could have checked in periodically with Wryan, but that would have taken twice as much subjective time as staying on Muria, and time was something we had little enough of in any case.
Carrying all of the equipment was a chore, requiring about three times the number of breaks and stops to get me back to our Bardwall retreat. At least the retreat, with its time-protected stone, would have survived the worst of any Frost Giant attacks.
Empty … and dusty—that was the way I found it. The single workroom off the minuscule kitchen showed no recent footprints.
“Wryan?” My voice echoed.
“Wryan?” Again, no answer.
“WRYAN!”
Wryan, Wryan, Wryan … .
My stomach was so tight that I was shaking all over.
Had she run into the Frost Giants—or Odin Thor? Was I too late? Again?
As the questions swirled around in my head, I reached out and managed to steady myself on the long workbench. Another look through
the archway told me that it was mid-morning in the Bardwalls, and there was no reason Wryan would be home in mid-morning. None at all.
That reasoning didn’t calm either my guts or my shaking.
Wryan, dear, where are you?
“Sammis … are you all right?” She had apparently broken out in our sleeping room. Her light steps scuffed toward the kitchen.
“Where have you been?” The words came out before I had a chance to even think about them. Or glimpse her face.
She stopped silently in the archway, and I could see the exhaustion and the strain, the lines in her face, the blackness under her eyes, the sandy hair wisps framing the high cheekbones.
“Oh, Verlyt …” Wryan … Wryan …
“Wherever I was needed.” Her voice was husky, in a way I had never heard, as if she had cried and cried. And then had to cry again.
There was so much to say, and no words for me to express those feelings.
Wryan took another step forward.
“I’m sorry …” It wasn’t the right thing to say, but I said it anyway. “I’m sorry.”
“The Woods are gone, and the Plain of Cannorra, and Camp Persnol …” She shook her head. “And, yes, one Frost Giant. One more Frost Giant. Two in all.”
I let go of the bench to reach out to her, but the room began to spin. So I put my hand back down and concentrated on keeping my balance. Before saying anything more, I went to work unstrapping the equipment from the complex harness that wore me, rather than the other way around. I couldn’t talk; so I might as well do something.
Clunkkkk.
Despite my best efforts, the main tube hit the work bench top harder than I had intended. That might have been because my hands were still shaking, and because the room kept trying to spin around me. The pair of plates in their insulation were all the rest that I could manage.
Clannkkk.
Rather than argue with my body, I sat down on the floor to finish disentangling myself from the rest of the components.
“Sammis!” Wryan didn’t seem to mind the components, but her arms had trouble encircling both electronics and me, especially in the cramped space between the equipment bench and the timewarped stone wall.
“Sorry it took so long …”
“Some of us knew it would …”
Her arms stayed around me, and I could tell she was shaking, crying without tears, perhaps because she had no tears left to shed.
“I think I have what we need.” What else could I say?
She held me, still without speaking, still shivering, although the workroom was warm enough for me to have begun to sweat. I scarcely smelled human, even to me, but Wryan didn’t seem to mind.
“Let’s get the rest of the equipment off you.” Her arms squeezed me, then dropped away.
With her help, stacking the rest of what I had brought back took only a few moments longer, even if I kept having to take deep breaths and concentrate on keeping the universe steady.
“You need something to eat.” Her voice was almost back to the no-nonsense tone of Dr. Wryan Relorn.
“Yes, Doctor.”
“I’d hit you for that, but you’d fall over.”
She was right, unfortunately, and I had to lean on her to get into the stool by the dusty counter. I just sat there while she tossed together something on a plate.
I ate it, more concerned with raising my blood sugar and with the exhaustion in Wryan’s face than the details of what I was eating.
“You have something, too.”
“Too tense to eat—”
“You’ve lost weight you can’t afford—”
“You should talk, Sammis Arloff Olon …”
“Just humor your returning explorer and eat.”
Finally, she sat down on the stool next to me. When she got around to it, she ate every bit as much as I did.
“So you couldn’t eat?” I could feel the tiredness in every bone, and suddenly my bladder was demanding relief, but the room had lost its disconcerting tendency to whirl around my head. “Don’t you feel better?”
“Yes.” She tilted her head at me in that elfin way.
I waited.
“Outside of the divers, there are probably less than a million people left alive.”
“In Westron?” That was hard to believe, even with the Frost Giants.
“Everywhere. There must be a thousand Giants. They’ve sucked the ambient energy out of everyplace where there might be people.”
“Hell …”
“We can keep ahead of them, and we’ve saved some of the children, those of us who can carry them undertime. But they won’t leave.”
“Verlyt!”
She tilted her head again, wordlessly asking for my reason. I touched her shoulder, squeezed it gently, feeling both smooth black cloth and muscle before letting go. As close as Wryan was, I could smell the spiciness of her, that brought up thoughts of holding her, and more. But she was waiting for my explanation, and some hope of a solution. I just hoped I had it.
“Maybe later,” she answered my unspoken question.
“Energy,” I answered. “The plates tunnel matter or energy from point to point.”
Her face screwed up.
“Drop one into a sun—timewarped—and the other near a Frost Giant. Should overload them. More energy than a particle beam or a small nuclear device.”
She still looked puzzled. “Do you want a thousand gateways to the sun scattered all over Query?”
“Oh … .” I thought for a moment. “The timewarping will only last a short time once it starts passing energy.”
“That’s still a lot of energy.” Wryan pursed her lips. “Why do you have to do it on Query?”
“That’s where—oh …” As usual, I was still thinking in linear terms. There really was no reason why I couldn’t backtime outsystem and plant the suntunnels. Given Wryan’s Laws of Time, that wouldn’t undo the deaths, although it might undo some of the environmental damage, but it wouldn’t require baking the planet, except for the few Giants who decided not to leave and whom we couldn’t track backtime.
“Are there any energy storage devices in that assortment you brought back?”
“No. Straight duplicating job, and the duplicates work.”
“Then, after you take a short nap, after you take a shower, we need to start duplicating. And hunting.”
So I took a shower, and a nap, and took care of a few other things, like hanging onto Wryan, who was hanging onto me, as if we had discovered each parting could be the last.
As I fell into the depths of sleep, I wondered how and why Wryan had arrived back so quickly at the retreat. But how seemed so much less important than the fact that she had.
DUPLICATING THE SUNTUNNELS was the easy part, especially since Wryan and Jerlyk and a few of the other divers had, while I was hunting, moved one fusion plant and the duplicator into a small rebuilt and time-warped stone barn in the middle of Hardle, north Westron. The Frost Giants had ignored or avoided it.
Then I had to see if the theory actually worked in the real world. I decided that a few sunpoints in the colder areas of Query wouldn’t hurt, not if they were areas already destroyed by the Giants.
Finding a Frost Giant would scarcely be difficult, not with close to a thousand of them grazing Query.
Wryan watched as I linked the two heavy discs to my equipment belt—one on each side. My breath was white steam in the cold of the barn.
Jerlyk looked at the glistening metal. “Are you sure this will work?”
“No. Do you have any better ideas?”
Jerlyk shook his head.
“Then I’d better see if it does. They can’t destroy much more.”
Wryan’s lips brushed my cheek. “Try to take care.”
I shrugged. Of course I would. Whether it would be enough was another question.
First, I dropped along the black arrow that led to the sun, forcing myself against the waves of time pressure that spewed from that nuclear depth. My experiments with time-warping made the drop-off of one disc possible. I just willed it out of the undertime. Clearly I couldn’t have survived if I had tried to physically place it there. Solar surfaces and innards are not forgiving, even to timedivers.
Then, I just let the time pressure throw me back to Query, looking through the blue flashes from the Giants, seeking one that was isolated.
That didn’t take long, either subjectively or objectively.
A strong and jagged blue trail led me to a plateau north of Southpoint.
Not being particularly heroic, nor caring to relive another being’s , death again, I didn’t even break the surface of the now. Instead, I willed the disc out of the now and over the Giant—and mentally sprinted toward the retreat, dropping onto the glowstones.
…
craccckkk
…
Even though my break-out cut off the jagged blue flashes, I sat there shivering for several moments before looking for something to eat. I wasn’t really hungry, but I wanted some time to pass before I re-entered the undertime.
I munched on more hard crackers and watched the wind whip snow from the Bardwall spires. After finishing two crackers, I dropped back under the now and headed back to Hardle.
My breath still came out white in the barn’s air.
“Success?” asked Jerlyk.
“Probably. You go check.” I wandered over to the wall map of Westron Wryan had taped to the stones. Duplicated, it had wrinkles and creases, even a red stain across the lower right corner. Red crosses surrounded with circles marked the destruction she had been able to verify. Where she had discovered the original map, who knew?
I pointed to the approximate location where I had dropped the sun-tunnel. “Should be right here.”
Jerlyk looked from me to Wryan and back again. Wryan said nothing, just returned his glance.
“They can’t touch you in the undertime. If you feel anything cold or blue, it didn’t work.” I added.
Jerlyk checked his gauntlets, straightened his belt and disappeared.
“The same problem?” asked Wryan. Her breath smoked in the cold, just like mine. She was wearing a heavy black fur-lined parka.
“Almost got clear this time. Went to the Bardwalls. Waited. Then I came here.” I felt cold in the thin insulated jacket. So I put my hands up under the jacket, and walked toward the duplicator. “Take another set.”
“You think it worked?”
“The only question is how long the links lasted. You calculated a maximum of—”
“That’s enough to vitrify stone, Sammis.”
“
If
your calculations were right, we ought to use them as much as possible on Query in deserted areas.”
Wryan shrugged. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Two reasons.”
“Two?”
I nodded. “First, who can track and attack the Giants? Me? You? Jerlyk? Maybe Mellorie. And Odin Thor and a guide.”
“You forgot Kerina.”
“Is she that strong?”
Wryan nodded.
“Anyway,” I noted, “the second reason is a warning. We need to post the system, so to speak, to make sure that Frost Giants understand it’s death to poach here.”
“Are they intelligent enough—”
“I’d say so.” Alien, but not without brains.
By now, I was wondering about Jerlyk. Of course, he dropped into sight as soon as I really began to worry.
He was bobbing his head enthusiastically. “It worked.”
I didn’t believe him so I followed up myself, probing backtime just enough to check. But he was right.
Wryan was also right. There was a section of ground a hundred rods across fused into solid rock glass.
So we went hunting, the three of us, without even telling Odin Thor.
By the end of the day, we had placed nearly a hundred suntunnels.
By the end of the ten-day, after notifying all the divers, we placed over a thousand.
We also lost four divers, including Arlean, who broke out and didn’t make it back under the now before the tunnel triggered.
That left one problem—perhaps an even bigger one.