Crossways (40 page)

Archie went next, then Cara with Nan. She handed Nan through, then pulled herself over the lip and found everyone sitting, delicately balanced on the roof plate of the giant geodesic dome. Looking down made her head spin and she quickly looked up to where the flyer was hovering a couple of hundred meters away. Gwala and Tengue completed the crew.

A roof plate to her right shattered and a bolt streaked upward, visible against the darkening sky.

Tengue waved Hilde in and she hovered above the roof, the downdraft almost dislodging Cara from her precarious hold.

“This is the difficult bit,” Ronan said as the craft's open hatch loomed about four meters away from their position.

He let go with both hands and bent his knees to jump, but Gwala beat him to it, the African's powerful legs and long reach giving him the extra impetus to grab on to the hatch with what looked like his fingertips. He hung there for a few heart-stopping moments, then hauled himself inside and lowered a line. Ronan and Ricky first, Cara and Nan second. As Cara passed into normal gravity her limbs felt like lead. She teetered on the edge of the hatch, trying to push Nan upward. Gwala leaned down and grabbed Nan's hands, then Cara's, and she tumbled into the flyer, gasping.

Another bolt shattered the roof plate where Cara had been sitting moments before. Nan rolled forward and covered the hatch with her bolt rifle still set on spray burn. Once the last man, Tengue, was safely on board, she sprayed the roof struts to heat them up.

“Whoo-hoo!” She sat back on the floor of the flyer, clutching on to a cargo net. “That was a wild ride, children. I thank you all very much.”

*N
AN AND RICKY ARE SAFE.*
CARA'S Message rattled through Ben's brain.

*Everyone all right?*
he asked.

*Yes. No casualties, except Archie's bots, but they died in a good cause.*

*A trap?*

*Yes. We had to get creative in zero gravity. Nan's still laughing, though I think it's relief. Did you know your Nan was a dab hand with a bolt rifle?*

*Nothing Nan does ever surprises me. Much relief all around. See you soon.*

*Soon.*

Ben eased
Solar Wind
out of the dock. It was a clean exit, completely different from lurching out with four limpets ready to blow. The Folds had been his salvation then. Keep that in mind.

“Jump drive powered up and online,” Kitty said.

He almost snapped at her. He knew the bloody jump drive was online. He could feel it coursing through his body. “Thanks, Kitty,” he said, trying to keep his voice even.

Jussaro looked at him sharply.
*Can I help?*

*No one can help. This is my fight.*

*You don't have to do it alone.*

*He's not alone,*
Gen said.

*Okay, I get that,*
Jussaro said.
*Let me swing along for the ride. A bit of mental ballast.*

*Just don't get in my way.*
Ben looked across and scowled.

*I won't.*

*Ready, Gen?*
Ben asked.

*Ready.*

The jump gate in front of them grew from a pinprick on the screen to a maw big enough to swallow a ship three times their size. Ben positioned
Solar Wind
ready for the leap into foldspace, the hairs on the back of his neck standing to attention—or maybe it just felt like that. They got the signal from the gate Telepath.

Ben continued to stare at the void.

“Go,” Gen said quietly.

He gave a short, sharp nod, but still hesitated.

*Go!*
she said again, but this time directly into his head.

He swallowed convulsively and took a deep breath. He'd been scared of water as a small child. This felt like the first time he'd stood on the bank, afraid to jump even though Dad was there in the pool to catch him. In the end the anticipation had been worse than the fear of jumping. He'd jumped so far and so fast that he'd barely touched the water and had landed on Dad's chest, knocking him over backward and submerging them both. Dad had quickly fished him out, but not before that moment of infinite mortality when the water had closed over his head.

Now Dad was somewhere in the Folds, no longer there to catch him.

Ben swallowed convulsively, took a deep breath, and nudged
Solar Wind
through the gate.

And that's when it all fell apart.

The flight deck is suddenly swirling with creatures of all shapes and sizes. They nudge and buffet him, their hot breath drying his eyeballs. Then they scatter, fleeing through solid bulkheads. In their place, one huge void dragon coils around him. It must be twenty meters long, snout to tail, and is etched black on black. The claws on its prehensile beard curl toward him and tickle his cheek while its dragon
breath cools his flesh. He crosses his forearms in front of his face and its attention is taken by the protective casing around his wrist. It nudges it; once, twice, three times. It's not just a creature. Its eye is infinity—his past and his future. His present is somewhere else entirely, but he doesn't know where.

*Ben, I need the line,*
Gen says from a very long way away.
*Ben, are you with me? I need the line.*

He can't answer her.

She reaches across and smacks the void dragon's snout. So she can see this one as well as he can. Kennedy was right. He's not going completely crazy. He stares into its lambent eye and is lost.

*Fuck it, Benjamin.*
Gen's voice comes from far away.
*I didn't think you'd really flake out on me. Taking control.*

He hears her, but the dragon has him transfixed.

They emerged into realspace with a gentle pop. No more dragon. Ben felt sweat cooling on his face. His heart rate must be off the scale. He forced himself to breathe. Without a word he unstrapped his harness, stood up, and walked away from the pilot's chair. Gen slid into it.

“Go and sit next to Gen,” he said to Max, his voice shaking.

He couldn't look Max in the eye. He flopped down into Max's still-warm seat, next to Jussaro. Damn, he hadn't given a thought to whether Jussaro had managed to get rid of his implant.

*It's real,*
Jussaro said directly to Ben and Ben only.
*I saw what you saw, a wyrm or a dragon or an alien. I don't know what it was, but it was real and it was trying to make contact. It knows you. It's not your mind playing tricks.*

*Gen saw it, but it didn't scare her.*

*It wasn't as big to Gen, not as threatening. The rest aren't looking. They don't believe. You're not imagining things. You have to find a way to deal with this thing because it won't leave you alone until you acknowledge it.*

Ben got his breathing under control.
*How the hell do I do that?*

*I can't help you there. All I can say is that you're not going nuts.*

*Thanks, Jussaro. Believe it or not, that is a help. But you've still got your implant.*

*Yeah, your void dragon sidetracked me and I expected to have more time, but we're doing another jump, aren't we? A short one?*

*A shorter distance covered doesn't always mean a shorter jump.*

“Get ready everyone,” Gen said, meaning,
Get ready, Ben.
“Jumping to foldspace in three, two, one.”

Ben feels the jump drive kick in and immediately the void dragon is back. It coils itself around him again, making a mockery of the cabin dimensions. Half its body is through the bulkhead. One coil pierces Max's chest, but he doesn't react. He obviously can't see or feel anything. Its tail snakes across the flight deck and out through the far bulkhead. Ben is heavy with fear. Paralyzed.

Even though his mind tells him the void dragon can't possibly be real, his gut tells him that it is. He's ridden it, out there, in the vast deeps of the Folds, the nothing place between realities.

He tries to imagine it gone, but it remains. Belief is not that easy to deny. The void dragon is real in this reality, and it wants something from him.

Its head snakes around. He feels the whisper of breeze, ice cold on his mouth and nose. He holds his breath, afraid to breathe the air that the dragon has breathed out. The claws on the strands of the dragon's beard twist and reach out to touch his forehead. He feels a pinprick on the tiny scar left by the implantation needle.

No. No. No.

His insides turn to liquid. Between one blink and the next he understands how he parted from his last implant. It wasn't lost. It wasn't an accident.

*You took it!*
He tries to communicate that thought.

The void dragon echoes it back to him with a hint of assent. Or maybe it's intent. It doesn't seem to have words, but it has ideas.

*Well, you're not having this one.*
He puts a thought into his mind that's a mixture of no and stop.

The void dragon responds with,
*?*

Ben wonders how to communicate the fact that his implant is supposed to be there, that he wants it to be there, that removing it will be a bad thing. Does the void dragon even have a concept of good and bad, of right and wrong?

Across the cabin he sees Jussaro bent double in his seat, held in place by a lap strap. There's a look of fierce concentration on his face.

Oh, gods! He's misled Jussaro. The thought sits like a stone in his gut. It wasn't the effect of belief or the fluidity of foldspace that separated him from his first implant, it was the void dragon itself.

Ben reaches out, trembling, and tugs at the strands of the void dragon's beard.

*Over there.*
He puts Jussaro at the front of his mind, turns the great saurian head and points.
*Take that implant.*
(And leave me alone.)

He hears a gasp as the beast turns its attention on Jussaro, which is less of a movement and more of a rotation of its coils until its head is in the right place.

“What's it doing?” Jussaro's voice trembles.

“It's doing what you're trying to do.”

“I can't . . . I don't . . .”

Jussaro gives a wordless cry. A glittering net of delicate tendrils floats beside him. He cranes his neck and looks at it, reaches for it with his fingers. Some of the strands begin to unravel.

The void dragon breathes in and the implant is gone.

Jussaro collapses over his own knees, sobbing quietly. For a few moments, Ben's own misery is deluged by Jussaro's.

“Ben, get your ass back in this chair,” Gen yelled. “We're in Chenon's atmosphere and likely flaring across Corrigar's tracking screens like an incoming meteor.”

Ben blinked images of the dragon away and pushed down the terrors as if shaking off a nightmare. “Someone see to Jussaro. He might need a sedative.”

Kitty jumped up from systems, but Max beat her to it and flopped back into the bucket seat Ben had just vacated.

Gen slid over to copilot, and Ben once more had the
Solar Wind
under his control. This was okay. Flying in realspace was what he needed right now.

*All right?*
Gen asked.

*Yeah, I'll manage.*

She looked at him sideways.

*Don't worry, I can handle it from here.*

He brought
Solar Wind
screaming through the upper atmosphere, swept around and let her speed bleed away. “Kitty, what have we got on the screen?”

“Airliner.” She snapped out the coordinates and heading.

“That will do.” Ben matched speed and shadowed the liner across the southern continent to confuse any tracking signals, peeling off for Russolta just before Corrigar and skimming low over ancient woodland until the Benjamin family farm was on the horizon.