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Maligoth

Chapter Thirty-seven

General Rathburn left the tent. Three grim-looking officers in black fatigues replaced him. Sight of the reptilian humanoids and the brilliant colors of their finely scaled bodies ruffled their composure momentarily. They made a visible effort to control their upset, then took seats facing the plastic wall that separated the two groups. They introduced themselves to Sasha and asked permission to interrogate the Saur. "We understand that you will serve as translator," one of the three concluded.

Melanie rose to her feet and reached for Wallace's hand. "We don't have to sit through this."

She took him to a small tent nearby and sat on the edge of a cot. "Home sweet home." She smiled wearily.

Wallace sat at her side feeling increasingly despondent and stressed by the escalating scale of events. "People are going to get killed," he said.

"An entire world is dying, Wallace. We go with Sasha and the Saur as observers and hope like hell they can escape and destroy the portals on the way out. Can you do it?"

He didn't want to do it, but under no circumstance would he think to abandon Sasha. "Yeah, I can do it."

"General Rathburn doesn't think you can hold yourself together much longer. He has reservations about me, and he says he's not doing too well himself."

"I think I'm okay."

"We owe you, Wallace. We would have been helpless without Sasha and Qualin."

Wallace managed a smile. "And you were General Rathburn's only means of dealing with me?"

"Sneaky, weren't they?"

"Nobody's getting any sleep," Wallace said. He studied the shaking of his hands.

"Did you make love to her?"

Wallace studied her stony expression. "Who wants to know?"

"Just curious. Sasha derives a sense of security from you. You're her only anchor to her old self. Some of us were afraid that you're old relationship didn't survive the changes."

"Are you’re hoping it did, or didn't?"

"Professionally, I'm hoping it did. Personally, I have mixed feelings that are not relevant."

"Well, I did, with both of them, I guess, and I think Qualin's a bit kinky."

Melanie squirmed with discomfort. "Has in occurred to you that Sasha and Qualin have a major decision to make when this is over? Will they go with the Saur, or return with us?"

"I've thought about nothing else."

"What about you, Wallace? Will you come back with us or go with her?"

That was something he hadn't thought about. It irked him that she brought it up now, but when he glanced at her again, the tears in her eyes brought him up short.

"I don't want to lose you," she said. "One way or another, I'm going to."

Melanie curled up on her cot and buried her face in a pillow. He joined her after a time, feeling like an ally and an old friend and knowing they weren't too far away from being more than that. The small kerosene heater in the tent failed to keep out the gray morning's chill entirely, and they shared body warmth as well as companionship through the long afternoon.

Wallace expected to be called back to attend Sasha and tried to remain awake and alert, but two dark figures with rifles slung over their shoulders awoke him to darkness. "Agents Cass and McFerguson? We're ready to leave."

Wallace and Melanie untangled themselves from one another and struggled to their feet in the unexpected cold. One of their escorts tossed them black nylon jackets.

Wallace followed them out to a tan Humvee idling alongside the tent. Melanie climbed in back with him and shut the door. A fleet of helicopters flew over, and the camp was alight with headlights and milling with the strange combat troops dressed in black fatigues.

"Who the hell are all of these people?" Wallace murmured in growing apprehension.

"Classified information," the driver said. "Hell, my name is classified. If I didn't have direct orders to keep my mouth shut, I'd sure as hell like to know if this operation is on the level. It is a bit hard to swallow."

"It's on the level," Melanie told the man. "I don't know how they expect everybody to function in this madness cold-turkey."

"Oh, we have our means," he said with a secretive smile.

The driver pulled onto a thoroughly rutted lane of mud. The Humvee drove down a county road for a mile, then turned again onto a dirt road.

In the center of a harvested cornfield, a dozen black helicopters squatted in the dusk light. By the time the Humvee drew close to one, several had taken off and others had landed in a blaze of spotlights and flickering stroboscopic running lights.

Melanie and Wallace left the jeep to be accosted by a trio wearing a red cross on their arms and collars. One of the men was holding what looked to be a weapon, an ungainly pistol dangling a glass bottle containing a clear liquid. Melanie seemed to know what they wanted. She undid her pants and pulled her clothing down far enough to expose her white hip. The gun was placed against her skin. Wallace heard it spat. Wallace followed Melanie's example. He felt a tingle, then a sudden alertness that made the night seem brighter. "I guess we're not going in cold turkey after all," Melanie commented with a smile. "We're going in higher than a kite."

"But what was it?" Wallace called after her.

"It's just a mood stabilizer and mild stimulant," a female medic said, "some new military thing for combat."

Others were waiting to hustle him into the back seat of a helicopter. He balked at being rushed into this entirely new experience, but then caught sight of Sasha and climbed in alongside her.

"Where are the Saur?" he asked of her.

"They’ve gone on to the other side to complete preparations for the assault," Sasha said quietly, her voice even more heavily laden with the Saur accent than before.

A uniformed attendant strapped him into his seat, slapped him on the shoulder, then jumped to the ground and slammed the door. The helicopter was surprisingly quiet inside as it roared skyward. It dipped its nose and stormed out over the dark countryside. Wallace felt unnaturally calm and alert, sharply focused in the here and now and ready to deal with anything that happened.

There were lights in the sky ahead, a thousand white stars slowly passing to and fro along the ground. As their chopper approached, the lights became a pattern of moving helicopters.

There were lights on the ground as well, spaced perhaps a quarter of a mile apart, extending in a shallow arc all the way to the horizon. There were crowds on the ground, and a veritable highway of traffic. Wallace saw nothing of the promised portals. He tried to imagine what it was going to look like when they appeared.

White splashes of chalk had been dropped in a sweeping line that ran across meadows burned clean of underbrush. The helicopters and ground forces were concentrated at the points where the chalk marks intersected. Wallace assumed that the portals would appear at those locations, but he had no way of knowing what was about to happen.

Brilliant, pin-points of light appeared even as his curiosity tormented him, lights far too brilliant for the unshielded eye. The helicopter swerved as the pilot turned his head away. The lights flared along the shallow arc and spread into flat vertical sheets of illumination tinged in blue along the edges. Each portal stood twice the height of a telephone pole, and four times as wide, spaced several hundred yards apart.

The chopper quickly dipped to the ground. It set down a comfortable distance from a much smaller portal, a rectangular window no larger than the ones Wallace had seen in the basement of the burned farmhouse. The doors to the helicopter were thrown open. As he climbed out, someone handed him an orange canvas vest. "ID as a noncombatant! Put it on!"

Wallace heard gunfire in the distance, a few random shots at first until they were answered by the darting bolts of light wielded by the Carn on the other side of the portals. Roars of anger filtered through the windy evening air as the first casualties were taken. The barrage of conventional gunfire escalated to a continuous thunder that only slowly abated as the ground forces entered the portals and vanished from the darkening countryside.

General Rathburn approached at a run from a nearby collection of ground traffic. "No more than twenty minutes and counting!" he told Melanie. "Regardless of whether or not we accomplish our mission parameters, return here with Sasha and Wallace within twenty minutes!"

Melanie responded with the same grim discipline shown by the uniformed troops about them.  She grabbed Wallace's arm and turned him about, gesturing for Sasha to take the lead. She followed with Wallace in tow through the window of light.

They entered an enormous room with a low ceiling. Wallace could see over banks of equipment he suspected by their spacing to be fed by the massive generators he had seen topside. Three Saur came running from nearby, chattering excitedly to Qualin. In this world, it was Sasha who was the less valuable of the two personalities. Sasha was the alien intruder who would serve as little more than an interpreter for the human observers who accompanied her.

The group of Saur exchanged rapid-fire information, then headed back to their instrument and control consoles. A peculiar roaring sound filled the air, the sound of battle being conducted topside. Now and then, a dull explosion jolted the ground at their feet.

Qualin and her group turned to face a nearby plate of gun-colored metal positioned vertically upon a low dais. An enormous glass dome covered the dais. As Wallace watched, the plate became a window into a void filled with brilliant starlight. The outside of the dome fogged momentarily.

Sasha stepped back to join them. "We can only open a portal at random," Sasha said, her voice heavily accented by the Saur language. "We expected to access parallel worlds closer to our own probabilities than these. What we are getting seems to be a cross-section of the most common probabilities."

"But there's nothing there at all!" Melanie protested.

"Exactly," Sasha said. She paused as if translating the information Qualin provided into human terms. "Earth must physically in coexist only an infinitesimal number of probabilities."

The rapid succession of scenes stopped suddenly. The view became one of snow-covered hills beneath a star-dusted sky. Qualin spoke with a technician and sighed in exasperation. "Temperature is within three degrees of absolute zero," Sasha said. "The snow is frozen nitrogen."

Melanie studied her watch in growing dismay. "We don't have much time!"

Sasha's jaw clench with tension. "We will destroy the portals as promised should we fail to access a habitable environment. You will return to your own world with Wallace. Qualin and I must remain here."

"We need you to come back with us," Melanie said, and Wallace’s guts turned to stone and ice at the same time.

Sasha only glanced helplessly at the woman with her dark eyes simmering in quiet anguish.

An explosion behind them filled the air with smoke and debris. The transparent canopy over the dais exploded into a cloud of crystalline debris. Wallace's ears popped. The air turned to ice, and for a moment, he thought that all within reach of the portal would be drawn to their deaths by an abrupt wind of hurricane force.

Then the image of a world with its atmosphere turned to ice was gone. Only the bare metal plate remained and rapidly covered itself with frost.

Wallace looked around in time to see a Saur technician struck in the back by a glaring beam of light. The body exploded, filling the chilled air with a mist of blood. Bits of bone stung Wallace, embedding themselves in his clothes and skin with the force of tiny bullets.

Melanie latched onto his arm. "Run, Wallace! Hurry!"

Wallace fled toward the surviving portal through which they had entered. Sasha led the way, gesturing for the Saur technicians about her to follow.

There was nothing but inexplicable darkness to be seen on the other side of the portal, but Wallace plunged through heedlessly. They had no other option. Several yards into the darkness, he stumbled to a halt in confusion, choking in suddenly tepid, foul-smelling air. He dropped to his knees in shock.

Melanie and Sasha collapsed at his side. A number of Saur crowded from behind, screaming. When Wallace looked around, three enormous Carn stood against the glare of the burning laboratory.

And then the portal vanished, stranding them all in abrupt silence and all but complete darkness.

Slowly, Wallace's eyes adjusted to a dimmer light. Clouds tinged a sickly green and brown swirled in a dark sky. A vile jungle of moist and dark vegetation stirred with an eerie life of its own. Animate tendrils crawled beneath his hands, and in the distance, dark gray tentacles reached into the leaden ceiling of clouds. They trembled at the end of their reach, then curled into a spiral as they withdrew back into the foliage.

Hairless rats scurried about on all sides, eyeless, with heads consisting of jaws filled with white teeth. Some plants seemed to offer refuge to the creatures, closing protectively about them as they leaped into their foliage. Other plants tore them into bloody fragments and devoured them with the ravenous hunger of an animate predator.

Wallace gagged in revulsion.

"This is impossible!" Sasha cried. She turned and cried out to the Saur, and even the Carn. "This can't be!"

The Saur were frantic with confusion. The Carn tensed like grotesque statues and brought their deadly energy weapons up to bare on their unearthly surroundings.

Qualin talked to the Saur for a time. Sasha took a moment to collect her thoughts, then said, "This cannot be."

"Equipment failure?" Melanie said grimly.

"Not possible. Maligoth has done this to us."

Melanie looked quickly to Wallace. "Or Ghaedor?" she said. "Have the Stik intervened for some reason?"

Wallace had no way of knowing one way or the other.

"If there's no good reason for this," Melanie said, "or if this is Maligoth's doing, we're dead meat. I don't think there's any way back."

Wallace did not want to breathe the foul, cloying air. Breath by slow breath, he had no choice. He shied away from the sharp tip of a root tendril poking at his skin, but only stepped closer to the growling Carn doing so. Trembling, the Saur folded up in a defeated heap on the ground.

"Ghaedor," Wallace said quietly.

"Help."

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