Cara says, “Thanks for helping us escape. I’m glad no one is following us.” One facepalm later, I start a more aggressive sonar campaign. I wonder if the thaumic nature of this new place leads this kind of tempting fate to influence the future. I’m unwilling to bet either way.
As we run away, I’m juggling a fair number of responsibilities. I’ve got my travel drums on and I’m running a standard thaum-collection rhythm. Everyone near me is getting thaums at my normal huge multiplier. I’m also scouting for directions and enemies; because it’s dark, because Mu’s portal-eye doesn’t work as well in the dark, and because he’s occupied moving folks. Between leaving and dawn, we cross no monsters on the land that Mike seems to have claimed. His patrols are apparently pretty good.
As we run, the crowd gets better at moving through the portals. At the beginning of the night, we were taking 2 minutes to get through each portal, and then another minute to get setup for the next portal. By the time the light starts to break, we’ve doubled our speed. About one person per second through the portal, and then less than half a minute to move the next portal. Me and the BFG are the first two through, and Danae somehow managed to get the horses, so she’s riding one and leading the other two to bring up the rear.
Life gets a little easier when we find that one of the women, Sophia, is a luxomancer; she can control the amount of light in an area. It’s weird when we’re walking on well-lit ground, but everywhere above our knees is still dark. A few minutes of conversation determines that she’s not much of a fighter, but she’s awfully good at shadow-puppets. She heads through the portal with Danae in the back. It makes a big difference for our speed, and we get up to about a one minute cycle.
I don’t pick up signs of pursuit until an hour after dawn. They’re five miles back.
It’s a team of ten, which is kinda odd, given that there’s fifty of us, but it seems that they’ve got a lot of firepower with them. Mike himself seems to be with them, and I realize we don’t know what his power is. The gravity girl is with them too.
We’ve been running through half-mile portals every minute or so. Two minute miles with a team of fifty is nothing to sneeze at.
They’re moving faster than we are, and I have no idea how they’re following us. I’m shielding us from sound escaping in their direction. A little bit of detectivation and I notice the dog they’re using for tracking. They’re tracking by smell? How the heck is that fair? I can’t hide from smell.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Deciding to share with the whole crew, I let them know we’re being followed. Right now, we’re moving near thirty miles an hour, but they’re at closer to thirty-five. When Mu hears, he decides to up the pace now that it’s light out. We go from one minute per half-mile to one minute per mile as his vision allows longer portals when he can see. Suddenly, we’re outpacing them again.
About half an hour later, we’ve pulled away by an extra ten miles, and they notice. Or at least they seem to notice. They speed up again . Now they’re running about sixty five miles an hour to our sixty. After another hour, they’re back to five miles behind us.
Again, I share the news with the crew, and Mu decides to speed up again. As our mini-conference breaks up, our resident Gogmagog says one word: “Upwind.”
As Mu starts making two mile jumps, I think about the giant’s suggestion. We're now over a hundred miles an hour, and that takes us out of my sonar range to notice before they change anything. I keep out energy up with my thaumic rhythms. Along the way, we start running ten minute rest-periods on the horses. We let three people ride while the rest of them walk. Danae gets off and leads the horses. It takes about three hours to get through the whole crew, and then we do it again. We’re reaching towards dusk and we haven’t seen our pursuers for most of the day.
With agreement from everyone, we take a break, and then I go with Mu to see if we lost them. In short, we didn’t. They’re moving at only seventy-five miles an hour, and they’re over a hundred miles back, but they’re still coming.
Fifteen minutes later, we get back, and we decide to follow up on the scent suggestion. Hanging a hard turn to the, hmmm, North, I guess, we zoom away again. One more three-hour cycle through rest periods, and we're coming up on dusk, hoping we've escaped, or at least confused them.
The night is tense, and as night falls, we have to slow down a lot. A hundred-change miles an hour drops down to thirty. Worries about the folks behind us mean that Mu works with Sophia to improve our speed still further. Mu jumps two portals ahead, and then Sophia lights our area so he can see better, and we’re able to almost double our speed.
Still, the night is tense, as we're running away. Two hours before dawn, a long range sonar burst discovers that they weren't thrown off by our tricks, and we start preparing to convince them to leave us alone more violently. About fifteen minutes before dawn, they catch up.