---Chapter 16
The airship was not at a great distance across the prairie. With only a few rests, the crew was able to get Jackal back safely, up the side and into a bunk. He was panting by then and had a slightly feverish look to his face, but his eyes were deep and dark as always.
“Lemme get ya’ a bit of med’cine.” Raggsy offered, fetching a cup of rice wine from the barrel for him. Then the Ratperson trotted off to see what provisions he could dig up for a much-needed lunch. Patch went up to pace the deck restlessly, keeping a watch on the horizon. He was still not sure that they were entirely safe from bandits or other evil-doers (as he said, despite being a pirate himself) so he wanted to keep a lookout posted.
Lenny sat on a chair by the bunks, trying to think of what they should do next. Try to find Jax and Amber, or go on about their business as if the others did not exist? He dismissed this second option right away. Even if they were perfectly fitted to keep on with the mission, he would not feel comfortable continuing it, not knowing what had happened to his friends. He did not even know if they were safe. Jax’s panic could have taken them anywhere, into a nest of enemies or a barren waste. There was no way to tell.
Glancing sideways at Jackal, who sat comfortably propped up on the bed, drinking his 'medicine’. Lenny turned over the remark he had made earlier. He had never wanted to pry rudely into Jackal’s private business, but the man had made a few remarks before that puzzled him. Especially when they had first met and he had claimed to know them as extradimensionals just by their appearance.
“Jackal...” he said, trying to find a way to ease into the subject. “What do you know of other dimensions?”
The gunman gave him a knowing look. “Other than what I have learned traveling with you folks?”
Lenny nodded.
Jackal set the cup aside and sighed, “well, I guess this has been coming for some time. And I trust you now. Have for awhile, I reckon, but some things are just hard for a man to bring up on his own.”
Leaflow sat across the table, playing with a greasy deck of cards from his cloak and watching them intermittently. He looked up then, but his gaze was not curious.
“Leaflow already knows part of it.” Jackal nodded at him. “We see eye-to-eye on some things pretty quickly. But I do feel a little wrong about it, because I think now that she left a message for you.”
“She?” Lenny felt a chill of hope, rather than fear, run down his back. “Who was she?”
“A young thing, about your age I guess.” Jackal closed his eyes wearily as he continued, “looked a little like Amber, but with darker hair, softer eyes.”
“Sara. Sara Lancaster?” Lenny all but breathed the words.
“That was her name. She came to my town after...well, I had better start at the beginning instead of way over here in the middle.” Jackal gave a mirthless chuckle. “the first thing that you should know is that I wasn’t always a carter. Before then I was just a drifter, seeking adventure. One day it came right to my door in the form of a man who called himself Doctor Devi.”
“Devi?” Lenny choked on the word. Jackal was hitting his soft spots.
“That’s right. Suppose it must have been the same man as you knew. Anyway, he had just tried out his dimension-traveling machine and it had rattled him a little. Wanted someone else to try it out a few times for him, some young, foolish adventurer who could take a rattling. So I volunteered.”
Lenny stared at him, trying to imagine those hardened features wanting to go on interdimensional adventures. Jax and even Leaflow seemed like the sort of people who would attempt a crazy adventure like that and enjoy it. But Jackal?
“To cut a long story short, I went to a few worlds on it. Then a few more. Had some trouble, once, when it was accidentally left behind. But I recovered it and kept going. Never ran into any cities as large as yours or Jax’s, but saw some pretty strange stuff. By that time, I didn’t feel like returning the device. I was having too much fun.” Jackal shook his head with a sigh. “Then I ran into some trouble. Real trouble. And got myself in so deep that I couldn’t see the light. Eventually I broke and fled, back to my home dimension. By then Devi had left again, made another device and went home, I suppose. Where he went on to build EX-2, meet you and all that.”
“But what about Sara?” Lenny pressed, “you said she left a message for me.”
“Something I think is a message for you,” Jackal corrected, explaining, “I hid the dimension traveling device and settled down to a normal life. Years later that girl appeared in my town. She didn’t know what was up or down. I helped her through the tough part and she told me her story. Said she had left a dimension traveling device behind in her home world. I knew how that went, so I told her what I’ve just told you and gave her an inkling where the hiding place of my stolen device was. Before she left, she said this; 'if anyone comes looking for me...tell him that I just had to leave. But I’ll be waiting forever.’ Then she left. Don’t know where she went. Some other dimension, I guess.”
“‘Forever?’” Lenny stared off into space, remembering the very tones she would have said that word in. Then he snapped back to the present, shaking his head softly to himself. It might just take forever to catch up to her.
“Then, you know what Devi’s traveling device looks like. The one that can get to EX-2’s world.”
“That’s right.” Jackal opened his eyes for a moment to give him a look and a shrug. “But what will that change if we don’t know where it is? It was just a big heap of shining metal and do-dads. You get in a glass tube and set the controls, making sure to turn on the interdimensional fastening beams so the rig doesn’t get left behind. It glows with light...then you’re somewhere else.”
As they were talking, Raggsy had come back from the hold with a sack of foodstuffs in his paws. The very same sack, in fact, that always held his provisions. He had been chopping and mixing busily, but now broke in with a little cough. “Eh, heh, don’t mean to be intrudin’ or anything, but I had a bit of an idea about where Jax could be. See, if I had a panic button, it would take me directly back ta my hidey hole at home. So his might have done the same.”
Lenny jumped up, almost hitting his head on the ceiling, and clapped his hands together. “That’s a great idea! Your logic is always an asset, Raggsy. And even if it didn’t take him home, if we go to Jax’s dimension we can ask Grummage what the panic button does, since he made it.”
“Heh, thanks.” Raggsy shrugged. “Whatever an asset is, I’m glad to be one. I am older’n most you, so it’s not surprising I have a bit of common sense.”
“Not older than all of us,” Leaflow put in, stacking his cards into delicate houses, “though I wouldn’t deny the bit about common sense. Looking at Jax’s home world is the best chance of finding him quickly. We will lose time by it one way or the other. I only hope that it is not too much.”
While Raggsy continued to make their meal (thankfully free of ‘crunchers’) Lenny ran up on deck to explain their plan to Patch and hook the Di-jump back up in its place. It was easy to fasten it back where it went, but he soon realized that he would have to find Jax’s world on it again to return safely. He knew, basically, how to work the apparatus, though he had never used it before, but he was not so sure about locating worlds on his own.
Jax had always seemed to have a sort of memory-map of dimensions in his mind, which he consulted easily to get from one to the next. Only once had he failed them, when he took them to the caves of Triple Grag on accident. Lenny flipped slowly through the dimensions, which only displayed as varying amounts of Sission beam strength, then shook his head in despair. He would have to ask Leaflow to help him navigate.
Raggsy called them in for lunch then and served up fried sausages, eggs, rice and salad all with various simple sauces. While they ate, Lenny asked if Leaflow could calibrate the Di-jump for Jax’s world.
“I’m more used to spacecraft navigational computers than his Di-jump, but I think I can make it work,” Leaflow replied, “if not...well, you’ll see a little more of the universe than you expected to. I wonder what my two friends back on earth are doing now? One was a thief and the other a chronic convict, so they must be having an interesting time.”
“Have you ever traveled in time, as well as dimensions?” Lenny asked him, suddenly curious to know what the cloaked one had seen and done in his extensive travels. “Or is that even possible?”
“The first time I changed dimensions, when I met those two numbskulls, was an attempt at time travel.” Leaflow picked his cards back up and laid two of them on the table, side-by-side. “I ended up shifting to a parallel universe instead of going directly backwards in my own place’s history. There might, perhaps, be a way to follow the lines of your own history backwards, but I doubt it. I think that if, for instance, I attempted to visit myself as a child using a time machine, I would appear to go back in time and meet myself. But the person I met would not actually be me. It would be an analogue, one that would live his own life and not necessarily have to complete the circle and go back in time to meet himself as I did. And having met the other version of myself would not change my childhood memories. I would never have met an older one of me. But the other Leaflow would have. The one just starting his journey. You see?”
All the time he was speaking, the cloaked one had tapped one or the other of the cards laying on the table to illustrate what he was talking about. They were laid next to each other in the same positions and looked almost identical with the backs flipped up, but they held different numbers underneath.
Lenny nodded slowly, trying to take in everything that had just been said. It was difficult to imagine a field of possible parallels, all with different ones of himself in it living different lives depending on the choices they made. It made it seem like there was a lot more of everything to the world.
“So I suppose that a time machine would have to work on Sission beams, just like the Di-jump?” he asked.
“Not necessarily.” Leaflow shrugged. “It is a high possibility that there are dimensions out there that don’t even have such a thing as ‘Sission’ beams in them.”
“But...then they wouldn’t even show up on the Di-jump!”
“Exactly. So you would never know of them.”
Lenny gave him a long look. “But you might?”
A glint ran through the glowing eyes. “Perhaps.”
He would not say more on the subject. When lunch was over they got into position and the Di-jump was calibrated for Jax’s home planet. They gave one last look around the thickly grassed horizon of Jackal’s world and made the jump.
---
Amber dropped beside Jax and put a hand to his throat. She still felt in it the light fluttering of a pulse and could hear him gasping for breath. The knife was stuck in the wound, preventing it from bleeding heavily. Wasting no time, she pulled the blade out and shoved the green 'Galaxy Gas’ shirt up, exposing Jax’s narrow chest. The wound in it was thin and short but deadly deep. Dark blood was pumping from it now that the knife was gone. Hands trembling a little, Amber pulled out the bottle of Soleeryn’s potion and uncorked it.
It had taken little more than a teaspoon to completely heal the knife wound in Leaflow’s wrist. And that had been both quick and complete. But this was a worse wound, both deeper and in a more fatal location. Knowing it would be better to use too much rather than too little at this point, Amber poured about half a cup of the precious liquid into the wound, hoping that it would seep in deep enough to save him.
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“It’s no good.” Hotcho was hovering nearby. “If you bring him back to life, I’ll only have to kill him again.”
Glancing up, the girl saw that he had an orb of purple energy glowing in the palm of one hand. He held it out and played with it absently, his eyes seeming to stare off into space rather than see what he was doing. But a threat was definitely implied.
“You might as well step back. I don’t really want to kill you. The master would prefer it, but I’ve never hit a girl before. It’s only Jax that I must do away with.”
The wound had stopped bleeding and was sealing back together. Jax’s breathing was starting to sound less hoarse and frightful. Amber leaned over him, just hoping that he would wake up and be able to draw his Hyperblast cannon in time if she shielded him. Her own gun was out of bullets and she did not know where the hand-cannon was stored, exactly.
“Move back, girl!” Hotcho’s voice rose a few octaves as he snapped the command.
Frustrated beyond calm thinking, Amber suddenly looked up and whipped the glass bottle of potion towards him, while keeping a hold on it. The cork was off and half of the remaining contents sprayed out, striking Hotcho full in the face. Amber had expected him to flinch, at most, but his reaction almost scared her. He stood for a moment looking down at the spots on his clothes and arms, then his face twisted and he began to scream.
“What have you done?” he shouted, covering his face with his hands. Still moaning and shrieking as if in pain, he stumbled around blindly, orb of energy gone from his hands.
Amber jumped to her feet, frightened and worried that it might be the beginning of some new, horrible attack. But the tall hoverboarder just kept stumbling around in circles, then wondered off and hit into a tree, moaning the whole time. The potion, so healthful for uncorrupted people and so useful for curing the corruption, seemed to be a painful or even deadly acid to a Power Core.
“Amber...what...what happened?” Jax looked around weakly, blinking as if the world was still blurry to him after his close brush with death.
Hotcho‘s moaning had turned to a low growling. Despite the distance separating them, Amber could hear his words with a chilling distinctness, “Kill them. I’ll destroy them both! Both of them!”
An aura of purple light was starting to form around him.
“The Hyperblast cannon,” Amber dropped to her knees again, realizing with a sickened twinge what she most do. “Give it to me.”
Jax fumbled it from his coat, pressing it into her hand. “But what...? I thought that I was dead. Where’s Hotcho?”
The girl did not answer him, slowly and carefully aiming the hand-cannon at the figure leaning against a tree about a hundred feet away. She did not know how a Hyperblast cannon worked, or how accurate it was, but she was fairly good with a black-powder pistol. Leaning it across her bent right arm, she aimed for Hotcho and pulled the trigger.
There was no blast or recoil. Just a sound like cloth being torn ziiiip! and a flash of pale light. The flash traveled between her and the hoverboarder in less than a second, striking him in the center. His threats were abruptly cut off and he crumpled to the ground in a heap. The light around him disappeared. The world fluttered, then steadied back into its original colors.
“Amber.” Alert now, Jax looked at her with wide, pain-filled eyes. “You’ve just killed Hotcho!”
His eyes filled with tears. He put his head in the crook of his elbow and began to sob.
Amber dropped the hand-cannon to the ground, her voice a pained whisper, “I’m sorry. He was going to hurt us.”
She did not really know, afterwards, how she got Jax up and moving towards his home. The whole journey passed in a gray blur as they stumbled back along the long, bright city streets. And the whole way, he was telling her between sobs about the fellow they had called Hotcho.
How his real name was Axelsistiak. He was from an old family, as the length of his name indicated, and one that had a history of being on the city or even intergalactic council. They were rich and proud, but all he had wanted to do was be a hoverboardist. How Jax had first met him a handful of years ago in that very skatepark. They had, at first, been jealous of each other and spent the day trying to outdo each other in tricks. But a respect had grown up between them, turning into true friendship when they exchanged family stories.
He told how Axelsistiak and him had formed their own gang, or ‘brood’, of young hoverboarders with both of them together as the leaders. The tricks they would get up to. How often Hotcho had been punished or scorned by his own family for being himself. All of Axelsistiak’s good characteristics, his off-hand generosity, stolidness and good leadership in difficult situations. The few times he had really lost his temper, leading to him doing the craziest, most quirky of things.
The time Jax and Hotcho had jumped off of the roof of the hotel on a hoverboard and made it safely to the ground, riding double, after having done a full flip in the air.
Finally they reached Grummage’s house and Amber steered them both in. Jax had worn himself silent and dumb by then, walking without seeing what was around him. Grummage was working at his dimly-lit table on the new Di-jump, but hopped up when he saw them come in and rushed to ask what was the matter. Amber explained in a few words, feeling almost like she had been talking all the way home herself. Jax could only stand, staring off into space, not saying anything.
Grummage told Jax that he could go rest on his bed and Jax went willingly. Amber collapsed on a chair at the table, where Lenny and Raggsy found her when they came to ask Grummage where the 'Panic’ button would have taken Jax.
“Amber!” Raggsy jumped forward to pat her on the head with one thin paw. “I missed you.”
“Oh, Raggsy.” she turned and buried her face in the shoulder of his old coat. “I had to shoot Hotcho.”
“Poor little girl. You ain’t seen much of life, yet.”
Lenny was talking to Grummage, getting the truth of what had happened. He looked grave when he heard it. If EX-2 was already re-taking worlds, it might not be very many days before his own world had another Power Core. It all depended on if EX-2 was doing them all at once, or if he was taking them one at a time.
---
Everyone was reassembled in the airship, which floated in an empty lot on the edge of Crusem city. They had brought the new Di-jump with them and had exchanged stories so that they were all caught up. Amber had even told them, reluctantly, about how she had spoken to Dansei on the airship before and what his plans were for when EX-2 took him.
“He doesn’t even have a knife, now,” Jackal pointed out, “just that little bit of explosives. I hope he gets something done, but somehow I doubt it will be enough to stop the computer altogether.”
“Never fear, we’ll press on,” Patch returned, “we only have one more port before we get there! I hope we find some good loot on the next world. Haven’t had any in this or the last one.”
Amber also poured all but the last few drops of healing potion into Jackal’s leg wound, making it heal back together within a few moments. It was hard to tell exactly how much of the elixir was enough and how much too much, as all of it was absorbed. She simply tried to use her common sense in dosage.
With the secondary Di-jump, there was no need to wait for the first to cool down. Lenny wired it in place, giving the first back to Jax to keep until they needed it. Jax was slowly coming out of his shell of silence, returning gradually to his normal good-humor. But he would not, as yet, let anyone look him straight in the eye. He was afraid they would see the sorrow and uncertainty that were there.
Once everything was in order once again, they made the jump to a corrupted planet for the last time. They appeared just above a wide, broken street between dark, collapsed buildings. Purple vines and black creepers grew over some of the piled-up bricks, eating into the old masonry. The few standing buildings nearby had deep smears of the same colors rotted into their sides, making their immanent collapse appear inevitable. Further off, other skyscrapers stood darkly against a noxious periwinkle horizon. Faint yellow bands ran through this sky, the only sunset it was going to have.
At least it was not an open wound of space like Jackal’s planet had supported. Raggsy’s dimension was not yet as far conquered by EX-2, being a much later acquisition.
“Gee, I’m kinda’ lookin’ forward to never seein’ this place again,” Raggsy muttered, “it feels like home, but it just ain’t, anymore.”
The airship was still out of fuel, but Lenny had quickly recharged his power reserve in Grummage’s house before they left. He felt much more fit to face the world as he looked out across it, though the ruinous city still frightened him. It was so much more raw and unfriendly than his own dimension, though closer in technology than most they had been to. A smell of damp and decay came up from the pavement beneath them and there was what looked like scraps of gray fur blowing on the sidewalk not far off.
“What was it that you told us came out at night here?” he asked, with the impression that it had not been something pleasant.
“The Bloodsworn.” Raggsy’s voice lowered as he spoke the name. “Far worse than Battlehounds, if you’ll b’leive it.”
“Those Bloodsworn are some sort of pale wraith, aren’t they?” Jax said, “or bloody-toothed Ratpeople?”
“Both, and neither.” The Ratperson shook his head, tail twitching from one side to the other nervously. “They’re like...well, t’ings that have been left too long in a swampy cellar and grown horrible from it. They didn’t start appearing until after the Change, so maybe they’re the Power Core’s work. I don’no. I just know that it was always best to be in your hidey-hole before they came out.”
“Well, that’s not an option now,” Lenny returned grimly, “we have to find the Power Core as quickly as possible. Time’s going to be ticking on all of our planets now, mine next. Unless we want to deal with reoccurring Power Cores, we have to deal with this one and finish EX-2 for good.”
“But we still don’t know how to get to EX-2 once the Cores are gone,” Amber said.
“Actually, we do.” Lenny looked around, drawing everyone in closer with his gaze. “Or at least, I do. Jackal knew about Dr. Devi’s dimension traveling machines and described one to me. At first it didn’t click, but after a bit of thinking I released that I had seen one before. In the doctor’s lab, when – the last time I was there. The machine was sitting in the middle of the room, powered by the Core. Devi said that he had been making add-on parts for EX-2, so that means he had a way to send them to the computer. The machine should still be calibrated for EX-2's world. All we need to do is find a way to power it up and it should be easy to get there.”
“If it’s big enough to hold all of us.” Jackal gave him a sharp look. “Last time I saw one, it was only large enough for three people to fit in, with a squeeze.”
“We’ll deal with that when we come to it.” Lenny dismissed the problem with a wave of his hand. “I can probably reconfigure it to work with different connections. For now, we should turn back to the job at hand. Including the question: who’s coming into the city and who should stay behind? The majority should stay behind to guard the ship.”
As usual, this took some discussion to settle, though they had become experienced enough where it was not actually an argument any more. But it still took time and the sun was setting.
In the end, Raggsy went, because he knew the territory, Patch went because he was a good fighter and wanted more treasure, and Lenny went because he had night-vision on his optics. All the others stayed behind to guard the airship and keep themselves safe from whatever might attack during the night. The original Di-jump, the one with a 'Panic’ button, was given to Lenny in case of dire need. The hourglass Raggsy carried, as usual, and the compass was passed to Patch.
“I wish we had a way to communicate between groups,” Lenny said, tucking the Di-jump carefully in a pocket. “Even a simple cell phone would do.”
“Don’t look at me,” Jax exclaimed when a few of the crew members did just that. “I don’t have any walky-talky thingies in my Telestorage.”
Leaflow got a thoughtful look in his green eyes. “I could make a mental connection with one of you, if you like.”
Lenny gave him a sharply distrustful look and he added, “it would not be for reading your mind, if that is what you are afraid of. It would simply be a link that you could activate at any time by a thought. Then you could tell me whatever message was necessary, I would relay it to our friends and send a reply.”
“Telepathy?” Despite all that he had seen, Lenny was still unconvinced. “That would be handy, I suppose...but is it practical?”
“Evidently, as I offered. But it is your own choice.”
He really did not want to have some sort of mystical 'mental connection’ with the cloaked one, no matter if it was practical or not. But communication between the groups would be useful in so many ways that it might jeopardize the mission unnecessarily to refuse. Whether they needed reinforcements or the airship crew had to have the hourglass turned over to keep them from being overrun, messages should be able to go back and forth.
“Alright Leaflow. How is one of these telepathic links made?” Lenny agreed eventually, his tone almost challenging.
“Like this.” The cloaked one looked at him for a moment, seemed to look through him with those brilliant eyes to his very core. It was not long before Leaflow looked away. “It’s done.”
“Already?” Lenny said in surprise.
“Do you not believe me?” A voice echoed in his head, and when he looked around he realized that no one else had heard it.
“Alright, let’s go.” the young man set his jaw, trying not to think of the implications of a mental link.
As the sky turned to deep plum and the yellow began to fade away, the three travelers dropped to the ground. The rope ladder was reeled up behind them, making a gap of a few yards between the ground and the bottom of the airship’s hull.
Patch checked the compass and gave them a direction in whispered words.
“Hard aport and still a middlin’ ways off. Needle looks like the brasswork when it hasn’t been scrubbed for a few weeks.”
So they set off, climbing over a heap of rubble and sliding between buildings into the darkening city.