He Who Crosses Death Read online

  “Hey, I’m only in it for the money,” Nebb said. He slapped his forehead. “Wait a second, there’s no money to be had here. What am I doing?” He turned around in mock leave-taking, but then swung back toward Tane. “I know you’re going to pay me back a hundredfold when this is through and you take control of the galaxy. I’ll be a rich man. I wouldn’t mind a satrapy on some pleasure planet of some sort, if you can arrange it.”

  Tane couldn’t help but smile. “I’m not taking control of the galaxy...”

  “You say that now...” Nebb told him.

  Tane glanced at the stasis pod that held Sinive, and gazed at her peaceful face.

  We’re all doing this for you.

  He completed his dark timeline and placed it in reserve, so that he now had two Fingers of Ruin works ready.

  Then Tane held the pyramid out in front of him. Thanks to an embedded memory from the latest artifact, he knew to Siphon Dark and White into it, just so, in the right quantities necessary to unlock the stored Essencework.

  But what was stored in the relic was a work of neither White nor Dark, but a third Essence he had never encountered before. It felt neither fiery nor cold, but... strangely pleasant. It was almost like the pyramid contained raw hedonism bottled up, waiting to flow out onto his skin and suffuse his body with intoxicating bliss.

  The pyramid disintegrated in his palm and the pleasure slipped away from him.

  A blindingly bright gateway opened amongst the foliage in front of him, big enough to fit two dwellers abreast. Tane instinctively shielded his eyes against the intensity of that light, and was unable to make out anything within it. He felt a sense of well-being emanating from the opening, however. A sense of belonging.

  He tried reducing the aperture of his helmet camera, but still the area beyond the portal remained a greenish-white blob.

  “How long will it stay open?” Jed asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tane said.

  “Already it’s shrinking, I think,” Gia said.

  “It is,” Positron said. “By my estimates in an hour from now it will be half the size. In three more it will be gone entirely.”

  “It’s not closing fast enough,” Lyra said. “When we enter, the dwellers will no doubt pursue. We should have moved to a different location after destroying the tracker in your lungs.”

  “We should have, but we couldn’t have known the gateway would close so slowly,” Tane said.

  “The memories you gained from the artifact didn’t tell you?” Gia said.

  “Not even Tiberius knew what this gateway looked like,” Tane said. “He only knew how to activate it. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Let the Amaranth pursue. I think we’ll have a lot more to worry about than dwellers once we’re inside.”

  “It doesn’t seem so bad…” Nebb had stepped toward the glowing entrance, obviously attracted to it.

  “You feel it?” G’allanthamas said. “The sense of welcome. The invitation to what seems a world of pleasure.” Tane hadn’t been sure whether he was the only one feeling that way, and was both gladdened and disappointed to know he wasn’t. “Don’t let the feeling lull you into a sense of complacency. It is an illusion. The archaeoceti had a reputation for treating outsiders brutally, especially those who would attack them, and had the space navy to back up that reputation. In fact, theirs was among the most feared navies out of all the races my people encountered, at least until the TSN.”

  “But didn’t you say they made great sport?” Chase asked. “Why hunt something you were so afraid of?”

  “And there you’ve hit upon the key,” G’allanthamas responded. “Our fear was precisely the reason we hunted them. If there is no fear during the hunt, no chance the hunter could die, there is no sport.”

  “We’re stalling.” Tane took a step toward the gateway. “If we’re going to do this, then let’s do it. Who knows, while the gate might be slowly shrinking now, it could wink out at any moment as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Wait, I’ll go first.” Jed cut in front of Tane. The Volur stepped into the white light and vanished.

  Tane wrapped a glove around the handle of the stasis pod and dragged it toward the brightness. Positron accompanied him on his right, Lyra his left. She kept her Chrysalium staff firmly gripped in hand.

  Tane retrieved his beam hilt as he entered the gateway.

  5

  The brightness consumed everything. The ground gave away beneath Tane, and he experienced a sensation of falling.

  His legs buckled as he felt the forest floor return beneath him. And then the brightness faded, leaving the jungle intact around him. Except, it wasn’t the same jungle. Oh sure, he was probably in the same place he had been before he had walked through the portal, but all the foliage around him glowed a gentle, greenish-blue.

  Above, the firmament had become jade rather than purple, and emerald lightning occasionally sparked across the cloudless sky.

  He spotted Jed ahead of him. The Volur appeared translucent, as if he were a ghost, so that Tane could see through his body and into the foliage beyond. Jed was surrounded by a white aura.

  Lyra and Positron were on his left and right, and just as insubstantial. Lyra had the white aura, while Positron did not.

  Tane continued to grip the handle of the stasis pod behind him. He peered through the glass near the top section of the pod. Sinive remained safe inside, her lifeless face peaceful as ever. The pod, and her body, were also translucent.

  “Engineer, your body,” Jed said over the comm. His voice distorted. It was different than the bi-octave effect of the Umbra, and seemed to sizzle more than anything else, as if the words crackled with energy.

  Tane gazed down at himself. He was just as insubstantial as the rest of them, but unlike the others, his aura was composed of a layered rainbow of colors that spanned the gamut from white to black. The green band seemed particularly bright.

  He also had what could best be described as translucent green sparks traveling away from his body, sourced from his fingertips, and the toes of his boots. Those sparks headed away into the jungle ahead, and seemed strongest in intensity close to his spacesuit, appearing emerald in color, but quickly faded the farther away they were from him, until they vanished entirely a meter in front.

  “Interesting,” Lyra said. “I still have access to the Essence, by the way.”

  “As do I,” Tane said, feeling the Dark and White waiting just beyond the periphery of perception. “Both of them.” His voice distorted, crackling with energy.

  “I suspect all of us who can Siphon will,” Jed said. “Always a good sign.”

  Tane felt the pod shove against him from behind. Looking back, he saw Gia emerging from the bright smear of the portal he had only just walked through. She was surrounded by a weak white aura, and had bumped into the stasis pod.

  “Clear away from the portal so the others can follow,” Tane said.

  “You’re like a living power generator or something,” Gia commented upon seeing him. “Talk about green energy.”

  “You get used to him appearing weird in these places,” Nebb said, emerging. Like Positron, he had no aura whatsoever.

  “Well, physics at least works partially the same here,” Gia said. “Considering that we’re able to communicate over the comm band.”

  Chase emerged, followed by G’allanthamas. The Mancer had a white aura about half as strong as that of Jed and Lyra, while G’allanthamas had a black one that matched the White of both Volurs in intensity. It looked like a translucent, dark mist enveloping his environmental suit to form a skin-tight layer.

  “Rainbow!” G’allanthamas said when he saw Tane, no doubt commenting on the strange aura.

  With Chase and G’allanthamas through, Tane had Jed and Positron secure the jungle perimeter around them. The area was clear.

  “According to my data, the air is still breathable here,” Jed said.

  “Good to know,” Tane said.

  “I’d recommend keeping yo
ur helmets on,” Lyra said. “We should be doubly concerned about infections, here. This place could be swarming with the equivalent of microcrillia.”

  “Very good point,” Tane said.

  “While that may be true,” Chase said. “Have you noticed? The insects are gone.”

  “He’s right,” Jed said.

  “What’s that mean?” Tane said.

  “Only that this universe is similar to the Umbra,” Jed said. “In that wildlife, including insects, isn’t duplicated here, while everything else is.”

  Tane paused to consider his options.

  “We could wait here and ambush the dwellers when they come through,” Jed suggested.

  “I was thinking that, but we still have no idea how many there are,” Tane said. “We’d have the advantage of surprise at first, true, but I suspect they’d quickly overwhelm us with their numbers. No, our best bet is to continue onward, and follow the path marked out by these green sparks coming from my body.”

  “You’re getting better at this,” Jed said.

  “At what?” Tane asked.

  “Commanding,” Jed replied. “And your strategic thoughts are sound. Even so, before we move on, allow me to leave a little present for our Amaranth friends.”

  Jed knelt next to the bright opening and held his open palm to the jungle floor.

  “Essence Trap?” Tane asked.

  “Yes,” Jed answered, standing. “Normally the trigger for the explosion is an opening door, such as one leading inside a room or vault. But in this case, I’ve set the trigger to be the flora surrounding the jungle floor. When the dwellers step through…” He opened his fist, indicating an explosion.

  Jed placed several more such hidden traps in the area like mines.

  “What if we have to return this way, and quickly?” Gia asked.

  “I’ve set them to ignore each of you,” Jed said. “They’ll trigger only for our pursuers. Well, or anything else that happens to come this way.”

  When he was satisfied with the traps he had placed, Jed led the way forward. From his position on point, the Volur couldn’t see the green sparks leading away from Tane, so Tane had to relay any directional changes that were needed to ensure the Volur remained on course and following those emissions.

  Tane followed just behind Jed, while after him was Positron, conveying Sinive’s stasis pod by the handle.

  Tane glanced at the rear-view video feed provided by his helmet, and watched the others trudge through the jungle behind him. He kept a wary eye on the receding gateway beyond, expecting Amaranth to emerge at any moment, and was glad when the jungle undergrowth finally swallowed the last of its brightness.

  They proceeded onward through that bright realm of glowing trees. Where every branch and leaf hinted at the promise of both pleasure and pain. Where the greenish lightning that occasionally flashed overhead made no thunder. A realm that offered, somewhere, the means to revive Sinive.

  It was the only reason he was here. Otherwise, he would have cloistered himself away on some planet, away from humans and dwellers and the rest of the universe.

  When this was done, he planned to do that very thing—elope with Sinive somewhere faraway. The others could come, too, if they desired. He wasn’t here to save or destroy the galaxy. He just wanted to live in peace.

  The canopy was thick, the leaves of the tall trees blotting out the sun and casting the land in a twilight that was brighter than it should have been thanks to the greenish-blue glow of everything around him. A gentle breeze occasionally sent the whispers of rustling leaves through the upper branches. If Tane weren’t wearing a climate-controlled, pressurized spacesuit, he supposed the air would have smelled like decaying plant matter, and that his forehead would have been steeped in sweat.

  The lack of sunlight made the forest floor easier to traverse, as only mosses and other small foliage could endure without the light, stealing whatever nutrients they could from the soil and the roots of the trees themselves. Lianas thick as cables hung down from the heights, sometimes all the way to the ground, so that the party occasionally had to slip through the vegetation. Meanwhile, the spongy moss was so soft in places that it sometimes ate their spacesuits up to the thighs.

  After about five minutes of trudging through the moss and following the green sparks that emerged from his body, Tane heard a distant explosion. It seemed to come from behind them, but it was difficult to tell, given the echo effect of all those trees and the undergrowth.

  He glanced at Lyra.

  “The Amaranth have come,” Lyra said.

  The group increased their pace.

  It was another five minutes after that when the glowing leaves began to rustle in earnest as the wind picked up. The lianas that hung from the upper canopy swayed as the gusts pierced the dense branches.

  The wind became even fiercer, and the canopy ripped away entirely overhead in places as leaves were torn away in clumps. The unveiled sky beyond had become completely black, and that eerie green lightning flashed incessantly between clouds, still completely silent.

  The heavens opened up. Rain mixed with thumbnail-sized hail pelted down. Tane heard the rat-a-tat of pellets striking his helmet, and the plants and spacesuits around him.

  “Take shelter!” Jed said. “That hail will break your faceplates!”

  Tane dove underneath the thick lianas that crowded the base of a particularly large tree, joining Positron, who yet conveyed Sinive. Tane wrapped a protective hand around her stasis pod, taking comfort that she was near. The trunk and those thick overhanging lianas offered good protection from the storm, but beyond the hanging plants, he could soon see nothing in the forest around him, as the rain and hail fell in a sheer wall that drowned out even the glow from the undergrowth and nearby trees. It battered the plants around him, the initial rat-a-tat becoming an incessant roar. He had never seen so much rain in his life. His home planet, Galtede Serpentis was a dry, inhospitable place, filled with deserts. When storms came, they were literally walls of sand, with black lightning generated in the charged depths, not waterfalls of rain.

  Yes, he was as far away from his home as he could come.

  Below him, water flowed by in thick, eddying currents alongside the tree. The liquid glowed green like everything else, adding to the surreal nature of the storm. The spongy ground underneath became softer as the seconds passed, and he found himself sinking slightly. When the eddying water enveloped his thighs, he wasn’t sure if it was because he had sunk, or that the water was rising.

  “Climb the trees!” Lyra said over the comm. His helmet employed noise canceling so that he could here her voice above the hail. “We’ll all be swept away otherwise!”

  Tane had no climbing skills, but thankfully the profusion of lianas made scaling the tree easy. That, and the strength enhancement provided by his spacesuit. He dialed up the servomotor settings and gripped the far side of Sinive’s stasis pod, while Positron took the other: the power cells that provided levitation weren’t strong enough to lift the stasis pod more than a meter off the ground, so Tane and the robot had to carry it up the tree.

  With his free hand, he grabbed a hanging liana and lifted his feet off the ground, and then planted them firmly on the bark in front of him. Then he pulled himself up.

  He couldn’t move any farther, not while he gripped the stasis pod in his other hand, so he lowered himself once more and stepped back into the rising water.

  “Attach the handle to your belt!” Positron said.

  “I was just about to,” Tane told the robot.

  He opened up the carbon fiber cable reel at his utility belt and unwound a small amount, securing it to the handle of the levitating pod beside him. When that was done, he placed both hands around the liana, planted his feet on the trunk, and lifted himself. He felt the pull of the pod at his belt, wrenching his hips to the side. He upped the servomotors of the hip region to compensate, but his waist was still dragged slightly to the right by the weight. It didn’t matter, becau
se he could climb.

  He did so, hand over hand, walking his boots up the trunk, pulling the stasis pod up and away from the rising water. Positron mirrored him on the opposite side of the stasis pod, with the handle on the far side attached to the robot’s own belt with a similar cable.

  Tane glanced at his overhead map and saw that the others were making good progress climbing up trees nearby, also using the lianas as ropes.

  The upper canopy was a long ways above yet, but Tane planned to stop soon anyway: he didn’t want to expose himself to the raw forces of the storm by getting too high. Yes, he’d stop after a moment and just hang there, letting his servomotors take the weight. Below, the forest floor was becoming a veritable river.

  The hail seemed to let up then, leaving only the rain, which was still so thick that he couldn’t see more than a few meters past the lianas girding the trunk.

  “We dwellers hate water, you know,” G’allanthamas said over the comm.

  “But you’re used to liquid environments!” Tane said.

  “Liquid hydrocarbon environments,” G’allanthamas corrected. “Not water! It’s so thick and unwieldy. If I fall into the river forming below, I’ll sink like a rock.”

  And then Tane heard an immensely loud crack, as if some enormous Essence ax had sliced through the air. It was accompanied by a simultaneous green flash, and he realized one of the lightning bolts had struck somewhere very close nearby. An alert flashed on his HUD, telling him that the helmet had automatically reduced the volume of the sound. If it hadn’t, his ears would no doubt be ringing at this moment.

  Another earth-shattering crack and blindingly bright flash combination filled the air, and the tree he climbed began to careen to the left. Apparently, the lightning bolt had struck the base of the very trunk he was climbing. He quickly scrambled to the right, toward the far side of the tree, drawing the stasis pod and Sinive with him—he didn’t want to be crushed when the heavy bole struck the ground. Positron matched his movements on the other side of the pod, and scrambled in his direction.