I headed back to Lyste and made three more flash-throughs at random, plus a series of high-altitude recon shots, before retreating to the quiet grass of Azure.
Some conclusions leaped out at me from the holo frames.
The population density was high. On all of the run-throughs, there
were crowded streets, and several sharks spotted me. At least one shark on each run had managed to unlimber the ubiquitous dart gun.
On the other hand, I received no interference from aircraft, which seemed strange, since the ground technology was sophisticated enough, fossil-fueled or not, to have suggested their presence.
I checked over the recon shots again and again, looking for some more clues. I just didn’t want to go back to the Tower for technical assistance, not from Heimdall, since I wanted to jam the whole thing down Heimdall’s throat one way or another.
Reluctantly, I decided I needed more holo shots of Lyste. I dived back to get them. On the last pass, I found myself within body lengths of an atmospheric fighter that definitely had been looking for me. He tried to lift a wing to whack me, but even his reflexes weren’t fast enough, and I was gone.
With that, I took another rest stop on Azure, the staging planet that was beginning to feel like a second home. I slumped down next to my ration pack. Sooner or later I was going to be an instant too slow if I kept up exposing myself.
I glanced over the last set of high-altitude panoramas, letting my thoughts wander over the regularity, the gentle contours of the mountains, the direct lines of the rivers, the low and small cities, the rail-like transport, and the comparative lack of aircraft.
Finally, it jumped out of the pictures and pasted me between the eyes. Lyste was an old, old planet, probably gutted of easily mined minerals, fossilized hydrocarbons, and even natural radioactives. Yet it wasn’t in some post-civilization crash, and it was populated by an almost insanely aggressive species more likely than we were to shoot on sight.
I studied the holos more closely, and, in the next to last one, found what I was searching for—the regular blackness of another fortress. I reloaded the holopak and dropped under the now.
Between the holo and the pull of the fort, locating it in the undertime wasn’t at all hard. Still, at the edge of breakout, I hesitated. It seemed stupid, but it felt like someone was waiting, but how could that be when no elapsed time was occurring? Besides, I wasn’t that close, and nothing was obvious through the time-tension barrier. So I went ahead.
I got the first holo frame, and a second—just as an enormous surge of energy flashed toward me. I tried to push it away and dive undertime simultaneously. I threw up my arm just before I penetrated the under-time—but not quickly enough. When my forearm shattered, I thought I screamed.
The dive foretime to Quest was a red-blurred agony, and when I popped out in the Travel Hall, the glowstones came up to meet me.
Next thing I knew, I was propped up in the Infirmary with a regenerator over my arm and a mass of tubes hooked into me.
“Loki?” asked a voice.
Focusing was difficult, even though it was the second time I’d ended up like that.
“Loragerd?” I croaked. My throat felt like I’d been swallowing sand.
I couldn’t hear the response, if there were one, couldn’t see the formless faces, and fell, twisting through the nightmare country into a dark pit filled with shiny black shark people who swirled and gobbled and chomped, mostly on me, but on each other when they got tired of tasting me.
Later, and I had no idea how much later, I woke up to find a young Guard sitting across the room.
“Good morning, or is it good afternoon?” I asked.
He seemed surprised.
“Morning … sir …” he stammered.
“Loki,” I corrected him.
“Yes, sir.”
“So what happened?” I asked, as if nothing in the world had gone wrong. Even though immortals recovered quickly, I was feeling a lot better than the time after Hell. I glanced at the arm that I’d felt explode, but it only rested in a dressing. I could wriggle my fingers, even. I frowned. Regenerators didn’t work that fast.
“Tribune Freyda should answer that, sir.”
He left, presumably to run down the honored Tribune.
I wriggled my fingers again. They burned, and the whole arm felt bruised, but it was all there. There was a beaker of Sustain on the table, and I swallowed the whole thing, ignoring the kick to my guts when it hit. I just wished there had been another beaker.
Freyda arrived shortly.
“All right, superhero, you’ve left us on blasts and bolts …”
“Did you leave me much choice?” I interrupted.
I was still sore about the whole situation, but whether I was sore at me or sore at the Guard—that I wasn’t quite sure.
“From your instruments, we figured you went back a million years, but the energy drain on the equipment shows two million. Locator pinned the spot, but no one can get anywhere close, and Eranas gave strict orders that no breakouts were to be tried until you were in shape to report.” She glared at me.
“You realize that no one could have pulled you out if you hadn’t staggered back under your own power?” Her eyes narrowed as they flicked to the loosely dressed arm.
“I suspected it, but there wasn’t much choice.”
“You also couldn’t have survived the energy blast that your equipment took, but there was only the damage to your arm.” She looked at the arm again. “Hycretis still …” She broke off.
“I heal quickly,” I said.
“No one heals that quickly.”
I shrugged, then changed the subject. “Did the last holo frames come through?”
“There were three. That’s another thing. Where’s the rest of your equipment?”
I held up my good arm, my right one, to stop the questions. “I had to use a staging base. I imagine the stuffs all there. Do you have the holos?”
Freyda handed them over. I took them with my right hand; the left still felt shaky, although the Sustain had helped. The top shot was the last one. It showed raw energy and my forearm exploding in blood under the pressure. But the wave of energy, laser beam or particle beam, stopped cold at the forearm. Too bad I hadn’t reacted sooner. When I thought about it, energy was energy, and if I could handle thunderbolts, why not lasers? Except—learning under fire you sometimes make mistakes.
I laid that frame aside.
Frames one and two showed what I had been looking for—and afraid of finding. The installation, though more eroded, apparently also deserted, was a match to the ancient fortress on the deserted planet, down to the regular hills and the flat plain in front of towering black walls.
The evidence was enough for me. The same culture built both.
The sharks on Lyste were also avoiding the black fortress, which indicated to me that the automatic defenses were not terribly discriminating about who or what they zapped. The more I learned about the sharks and the cluster they inhabited, the less I liked them.
Freyda sat through my studies in silence, finally clearing her throat. “Unless you have objections, I would recommend an immediate sterilization of that planet.”
“Whose murder or suicide?” I asked brightly.
She looked at me with the cold expression that demanded an answer because she was Tribune.
“Besides me, who can get there? Does anyone want to try it farther foretime? And there’s also another point—a rather important one. So far, I’ve found traces on other planets. My gut feeling is that these people already almost destroyed themselves once across the entire cluster—or someone else tried to, for the same reasons we’re considering. Without
looking where else they might be, frying one planet won’t help much.”
Freyda digested my objections. “We’ll discuss it, and you can think about it while you recover. Hycretis says ten days or less.”
“It’ll be more like twenty or twenty-five,” I countered. I wasn’t going anywhere until I was not only fully healed but thinking. Those people were
mean.
Freyda frowned. Her eyes looked at my nearly healed arm. I ignored her look. She wasn’t the one who would be trying to counter people with micro-unit reflexes.
Meanwhile, everyone discussed the sharks. Heimdall thought genetic poisoning might be a good idea. Freyda still wanted to sun-tunnel the planet or nova the sun. Odin Thor wanted to send the whole Temporal Guard back with thunderbolts.
“Do the Guard some good! Shake up these softies! Give ‘em some real field experience, that’s what I say!” insisted the old warrior.
He conveniently forgot that he and I were the only ones with the time-diving range to get there or that he’d have to be led.
I just listened, and thought. And I wondered how many planets were inhabited by sharks, even that far back. Despite the problems I’d had getting information, we still didn’t have enough.
Before I came to any conclusions, I wanted to see if I could track undertime from the second fort—the one on Lyste. I hoped there weren’t more, but I really doubted that there were only two in the cluster.
Neither Loragerd nor Verdis came to see me, even when I was puttering around Maintenance, doing routine repairs while thinking about shark people. I had to keep telling myself that I needed some quiet duty and more sleep before I should dive into that cluster.
Brendan had done well in my absence, and outside of one or two ticklish jobs he’d left for me, Maintenance was current. Baldur hadn’t been indispensable, and, it appeared, neither was I. That must have pleased Heimdall no end.
Practically, however, the time came when I couldn’t put off the resumption of my shark assignment.
“Fit as a thunderstorm, fire and flash, ready to go …” was Hycretis’s assessment. I wished he hadn’t used those terms, but I grinned and gathered my equipment and headed for the Travel Hall.
Nothing had changed at my staging camp on Azure, since I broke out only a few units after my last exit. I didn’t have to leave the interval between, but leaving blocks of time can be very useful, especially in emergencies. If you use up all your time, sometimes it can kill you.
My next stop was Lyste. I didn’t break out, didn’t have to, just centered on the undertime feel of the black fort that had potted me. From
the undertime I could feel the continuity of the fortress and the flat plain in front of it, which meant that both had been there for one
long
period.
Hanging there, letting my thoughts drift out, I caught it—except it wasn’t “it.” I could pick up at least a dozen threads out- and backtime. Good and bad. Good because Lyste once had been a regional center for the shark predecessors who built the forts—assuming the builders were sharks or their predecessors. And bad because there could be a dozen other planets or systems inhabited by nasty sharks.
Rather belatedly, another thought crossed my mind. No one said immortals have to be smart, but I wondered why it took me so long to get to the point. Although the sharks were nasty in the now, they still couldn’t do anything in the undertime, and I could certainly look at the inside of the fort from the undertime, perhaps flash through even.
After the initial inspiration, some of my enthusiasm faded. There were such things as internal defenses … but they couldn’t put high-powered lasers inside—not if they wanted a fort left.
So I wandered through the dim outlines of the chambers in the undertime, trying to find the right spot for a flash-through, if I needed one. In the center, nearly a half-kilo underground, I sensed what I sought, what seemed to be a control center.
Scared enough that my flash-through was fast, I returned to Azure hoping the holo had gotten a shot or two. There was one frame—un—derexposed. On the grassy knoll, I studied the image from all angles.
Most of the chamber wall I had faced was bare and black, but the center section was blurred, like a holo of the Tower of Immortals. Even with the blur, the console, the chair, and the panels were clear enough, and I added another piece to the puzzle.
Item: The control board of the ancient fort was abandoned, and out-of-time-focus.
I made three more, equally quick flash-throughs, fast enough to avoid any internal defenses. That also told me that, if I hurried, I was faster than the machinery—but I worried about running into a live shark.
From the shots I compiled a sketchy outline. None of the gadgets looked familiar, except in the general sense that almost all extensive equipment built by humanoids seems to have a general similarity.
With that, I began tracing, as I could, the other backtime links. The first three turned out negative. Number one was a sterile planet with a flat dusty surface and the faint outline of what probably had been another
fort. The hills were fused but regular. Number two wasn’t around any longer—just fine dust in a ring around a G-type sun.
Number three was worse. I couldn’t even get close, but from the undertime pressure I suspected the equivalent of a black hole where the sun had been—and G-type suns aren’t supposed to do that.