The objective “now” for Patrice and Derron was close to local midnight. I could have waited until day, but I didn’t know what shape they were in, and that far underground I doubted it would make any difference to the locals.
With both the darkness and the undertime barrier, I couldn’t see more than shadows, but I got rough images of two figures chained to opposite sides of a long wall with Toltekian sentries stationed or planted or whatever at each end.
Hit and run was my idea, to slide up from undertime behind one sentry and stun him, her, or it, then to do the same to the other, disable the weapon gadget in front of the one guard, cut the divers free, leave a mess of demolition cubes, and depart. The charges would make a thorough mess of the chamber and cover our tracks to some degree.
I slid from the undertime behind the Toltekian sentry closest to the gadget gun and thumbed the stunner. It hummed. Nothing happened. The sentry stood.
At that instant, both sentries “screamed,” and the whole dungeon began shaking. I dropped the stunner and threw a thunderbolt at the far sentry.
That energy bounced off and around him, skittered around the tentacles, and they were purple tentacles. The sentry shrank back, winced. In the intervening instants, the sentry I’d failed to stun had turned toward me, “screaming,” and grabbed at me with his tentacles.
For a fraction of an instant, the vibrations distracted me, but I mentally pushed them away and slid around the grabby Toltekian. I threw another thunderbolt, this time at the weapon. The pointed nozzle wilted, and the sentries froze at the flash.
A deep gong chimed in the background, kept chiming.
So far, I’d alerted the entire city and accomplished nothing. I was beginning to see red. Damned if a bunch of tree-snails were going to stand in front of Loki!
Light! That was the answer. They didn’t like light.
I began firing off thunderbolts in every which direction, pulling the laser cutter off my belt as I dashed/slid toward Patrice. She was out cold, slumped against the chains which linked her to the wall. Her arms were tight against the stone, and the links were shaped rock which seemed to be the same material as the walls. That explained plenty.
I cut through two sets of links and let her slump to the floor.
Mindlessly, I fired off another round of thunderbolts in the general directions of the sentries and slid to the other side of the chamber.
Like Patrice, Derron was unconscious. It was harder to cut the chains
from his arms because he was bigger than me, bigger than Baldur, and had his whole weight resting against them.
I used the cutter to blaze through one while I threw a bunch of lightnings behind me. I had the feeling that the Toltekians were closing, ready to enter the chamber, but I finished the second set of links and let Derron collapse on the rock floor. I could hold him, but not carry him.
I glanced up to see a procession of Toltekians coming through the oval door in a high-speed glide. My body felt like it wanted to shatter, but damned if I were going to let it.
I froze the tree-snails in place with all the power I could throw, and as the chamber flared with that light, I saw they were unlimbering some ugly hardware.
I flash-slid to the other side of the chamber and tossed Patrice over my shoulder, glad she was small, and slid/dashed back to Derron, feeling like I was moving in slow motion.
Using my free arm, I blasted the Toltekians again, concentrating on light. The thunderbolts may not have hurt them personally, but all the power I was tossing blinded them and made a mess out of their equipment.
Before I picked up Derron, I had enough presence of mind to yank out a handful of demolition cubes, one at a time, ripping the set tab on each one as I scattered them across the chamber. One was supposed to bring down an average-sized dwelling into dust, and the bunch I scattered had enough power to punch a good-sized hole in the citadel around us and the city above, if that’s what it happened to be.
With the last cube gone, I grabbed Derron around the waist and forced my way undertime. Forced, because it’s difficult to carry a cooperating and consenting adult undertime, let alone two unconscious ones. The unconscious mind resists
any
change, has a tendency to lock itself into the here and now, wherever that is.
But I managed, clearing the undertime of Toltek as fast as I could, which was the subjective equivalent of a slow crawl under large and heavy rocks. I wasn’t about to try a straight dive foretime to Query, not lugging all that baggage. I struggled forever to get just as far as Faffnir, and Faffnir was only a fraction of the time and distance home to Query.
I broke out on the knoll I’d found earlier, not that I’d been looking for it, but somehow we ended up there. Local time was late afternoon, with a breeze sweeping up from the sea, carrying a tang of ancient metal.
Legs quivering, I eased both Derron and Patrice down and laid them out so they’d be as comfortable as possible on the hard ground. Both
were breathing and, outside of a few reddish welts, had no obvious physical injuries.
I sat down on a low hump next to them. Didn’t have any choice. My legs refused to support me any more. I dug out my ration sticks and gobbled two bone-dry before I even thought about being thirsty. After a few units, my body stopped trembling, and I began to take stock.
Patrice and Derron, unmoving, slept like small children.
I surveyed my own gear. Both my wrist gauntlets were fused and inert plates. Everything from the directional readouts to the power cells and thunderbolts was gone. Probably overused them, I figured, in the continual throwing of power at the Toltekians.
One arm, my left, had a red line. I peeled back my sleeve slightly to trace it, but the scratch only ran up to a point below the elbow, much like a fine scrape that a briar thorn might have caused me when I was growing up and running through the woods.
I dismissed the scratch. Everything else was accounted for except for the stunner and the laser-cutter. I’d dropped both. That couldn’t be helped, but I hoped that they were safely buried under a pile of rock.
“Uunnnnhhh,” someone groaned.
I glanced at the two. Derron was not moving, but Patrice was shaking her head and trying to get up. She was still wearing a canteen—more thoughtful than I had been. I was surprised that they still had their equipment, but hadn’t thought about that before then.
I unstoppered the canteen and helped her take a swallow. For several units she sipped and pulled herself together.
I waited.
“Hell! It had to be you, blood and thunder. Break out and assault the sentries and carry everyone off. I suppose you fried the planet after you left.”
“Patrice!”
“Did you?”
“No. Just blew up part of the city, or whatever it was. That’s a guess. Took everything I had to drag you two here. Didn’t have the energy to stay around and see what happened.”
“Where’s here?”
“Faffnir.”
She cocked her head. “How come they didn’t get you with their shaker-upper?”
“They almost did …” I told her about my experience on the green sand beach at night.
“No reinforcements? And after
that,
you decided you could handle it?”
In retrospect and put that way, it did sound stupid.
“Why not?” I replied, not wanting to admit it.
Patrice was about to tell me, but Derron started groaning, and I was spared another lecture.
The three of us sat there while Derron recovered. After a few units, he started in with his questions. From the tenor of his comments, I gathered he’d been in some tight spots.
“Never seen anything like it … those trees, snails, didn’t react to stunners, warblers, darts, nothing,” Derron lamented. “Just how did you manage it?”
“Lucky, I guess.” I didn’t have real answers, except for one. “I used thunderbolts to blind them.”
Patrice looked at me, then climbed to her feet, studied the area around us for a long unit or so, then jumped, pointed at a nearby rock, and screamed, “Loki! Quick! Blast it!”
I fired and blasted the rock into powder.
She turned absolutely white, sat down in a heap like a pile of stone fragmenting into gravel.
Derron looked around as if he’d missed something. “I don’t get it.”
I was afraid I did.
“I must be seeing things … Better get back, before Heimdall thinks we’re trapped here,” said Patrice. Her color was returning.
After we finished the last of the water from Patrice’s canteen, we all dived.
Hycretis insisted on putting all three of us through a barrage of diagnostics and retaining us for a night’s sleep in the Infirmary before he’d let Heimdall debrief us. The head medical tech with the twinkle in his eyes also insisted on feeding us breakfast before he’d let us go. All that was relative, of course. Any one of us could have left, and no one could have stopped us, but he was so insistent we stayed.
After eating and cleaning up, we made our way to Assignments.
Nicodemus intercepted us at the archway into the Assignments Hall.
“Counselor Heimdall would like to see you individually, starting with Guard Patrice. He suggests that Guards Loki and Derron avail themselves of the lounge.”
I shrugged. Derron frowned.
Patrice smiled faintly. “Don’t worry.”
I hoped I didn’t have to, but Heimdall was sharp, and I still didn’t have everything figured out. Derron and I wandered down the corridor to the vacant Guards’ lounge and sat down. For a time, neither one of us said anything, just sat there, me looking at him, him looking at me. But he wasn’t, not exactly.
As the silence lengthened, Derron cleared his throat.
“Loki?”
“Yes.”
“Remember one thing, no matter what happens. I’ll never cross you.”
I swallowed. I hadn’t expected that. Finally, I stammered, “All right, but there’s nothing to worry about.”
There was a seasoned Guard who’d probably been tracking down malefactors for centuries and who outweighed me and overtopped me, asking me to remember that he’d never cross me.
“I mean that,” he insisted.
“I’ll remember,” I promised, when it became obvious that he was sincere. But why was he that worried? Just because I’d somehow thrown a thunderbolt without gauntlets? A thunderbolt was a thunderbolt, and both kinds killed.
We sat for a few units longer before Patrice tripped her way out of the archway and down the corridor.
“Derron, Heimdall wants to see you next.”
“See you around, Loki,” he said as he got up.
I stood and bowed slightly. “Good diving, Derron.”
He deserved that much.
Patrice waited for Derron to enter the Assignments Hall. “I didn’t tell Heimdall, because it would hurt the Guard, I think. But have you got it figured out, Loki? Do you finally understand?”
I understood all right. At least I understood the how, if not the why. If timedivers could use their minds to move their bodies across distances, why couldn’t we use our minds to move energy? After all, a body is merely stabilized energy. From the beginning I could dive while in motion, and that was handling a form of kinetic energy.
Personal thunderbolts? Theoretically practical, since there is some energy virtually anywhere, and a thunderbolt is only the manifestation of passage from one point to another. It does leave a lot of damage in the wake of its passage, but that was another question.
What Patrice and the others didn’t seem to see was that it made no difference. If I did a series of quick split entries in the atmosphere, it looked like I was flying. If I thought hard, I could throw thunderbolts. If I concentrated hard, I could avoid getting disrupted by restrainer fields and sonic shocks. So what?
My talents were only the logical extensions of already existing talents, and in some cases, the difference between what I could do and what equipment could do wasn’t detectable. What was the difference between a thunderbolt from my fingers and one from a gauntlet?
As the Laws of Time have decreed—dead is dead.
“I understand that you’re worried, and that there’s no reason for it.”
“Loki … you think too much like Baldur. If there’s a mechanical explanation, why, you figure everyone should see it—”
“There’s no difference between a thunderbolt and a thunderbolt,” I protested.
“Probably not,” she admitted. “But I’d rather that you didn’t forget. So … would you do me two favors?”
I nodded. The favor business was getting old quickly.
“First, when Heimdall’s through with you, check your gauntlets again, and remember that it’s you, not the equipment. Second, remember that technology is an acceptable way to be god for most Queryans. The real thing upsets people … a lot. Think about it.”