L Modesitt - Empress of Eternity

"…Maertyn?s just an expendable piece…"

"…rather resourceful for being so expendable. How did he seal the station? No one?s ever done that."

Maertyn had waited to see if anyone else would enter, but it seemed as though no one else would. Raising the stunner, he eased the private facilities door open a trace wider, then fired at the back of Tauzn?s head, switching to the man on the left, Deputy Minister Aembit. The third man was someone Maertyn didn?t know, but he immediately yelled, "Assassins!"

That was all he got out before the third stunner bolt hit him.

Maertyn pushed the door open wide, took three quick steps and thumbed the stunner up to full narrow beam strength, and placed the tip at the back of Tauzn?s head, giving a double jolt. If the minister lived, and Maertyn didn?t care one way or the other, he wouldn?t have much mental processing power.

Maertyn immediately did the same thing to Aembit, then hurried across the room, flinging the door to the balcony wide open, and then moving to a position where he?d be shielded by the door to the outer office opening. As he took his position, he adjusted the stunner to a wider beam.

For several minutes nothing happened, and Maertyn wished he?d known that. He could have used the time to alert Ashauer. Then the door burst open, and three black-shirts sprinted into the office. All were wearing body armor and helmets.

That didn?t stop stunner beams aimed at the back of their necks, and all three toppled.

Maertyn eased over to the door and kicked it shut, then twisted the privacy lock. He knew that would only slow them, but he needed a moment or two…or three.

Dashing back to the desk, he triggered the comm code for Ashauer, although the open line had been feeding to the deputy assistant minister. Ashauer?s image came up, and Maertyn hit the override. "Ashauer…Maertyn here. I?m in Tauzn?s office. He?s been assassinated, and now everyone?s attacking the office. Thought you might like to know. Do what you can."

There was no immediate answer.

Maertyn left the channel open, and retreated into the facilities room, leaving the door ajar.

Outside he could see another brilliant rainbow arching toward the balcony, but this time it did not touch the balcony. He smiled.

The rainbow continued to coruscate for several more minutes, and no one tried the door to the office.

He waited…and the rainbow vanished. He kept waiting, then checked the time. Almost half an hour had passed.

What was going on? Were they mobilizing a full assault team?

From somewhere, he heard sirens.

Then the door burst open, and more black-shirts poured in, fully armored, looking around.

Outside the balcony a flitter hovered.

Maertyn narrowed the stunner beam to a needle focus, and fired…without effect. The black-shirts looked around. Maertyn fired again.

One of the black-shirts turned toward Maertyn, leveling a high-impact projectile automatic at him and triggering it.

Maertyn felt himself falling, and he clutched at the doorway, seeing for a moment a fog that rolled away from the flitter and in through the open balcony door. One of the armored black-shirts staggered, but Maertyn lost sight of him as he toppled backward to land on the hard floor.

"…least I got Tauzn…Maarlyna…"

Above, the ceiling began to spin around him-before darkness crashed across him.

How long the heat and cold, the rush of time, and the sense of time passing not at all, while he could neither move nor sleep, lasted Duhyle had no idea. He only knew that it ended, and darkness enfolded him. When he did wake, he was encased in a medical unit in a small chamber, with only his head and upper neck free. There was even some sort of cap on his head. Every appendage of his body, not to mention his torso, was a mass of pain, except that the medical nerve blocks kept him from feeling that agony, only letting a trickle through so that he was aware of how severely he had been injured.

Helkyria looked up from the small screen in her lap. She sat in a reclining medichair and her entire right leg, from mid-thigh to toes, was encased in a regeneration cocoon. "Welcome back into time and the universe."

"Am I going to stay here?" His voice was ragged and hoarse.

"The medical types weren?t certain at first, but you?re far more resilient than they could have imagined, and there?s no doubt now."

"Symra said that your leg got torn up a little. A little? Was there anything left before they got you to regen?"

"Enough for the regen to take." Her voice was pleasant.

Duhyle could see the darkness around her eyes. "Barely, I suspect."

"You were in far worse shape, dear."

Duhyle wasn?t about to argue. "Where are we?"

"In the medcenter in Vestalte. There?s not much left of Vaena. That was the last Hammer strike."

"Did we stop her soon enough? What happened after I threw the last grenade?"

"You did. What did you have in it?"

"Not in it. On it. That was what the keeper gave me. Mistletoe. Mistletoe from the distant past, from the keeper?s time. The insulation allowed it to penetrate Baeldura?s time or event-point shields, and the grenade then shattered the insulation, I?d guess, and channeled the explosion toward Baeldura." He managed to stifle a cough. "I presume it was enough."

"It was."

"You…we…were incredibly lucky," he said.

She nodded. "We were, but we were lucky because the Aesyr rushed things. We couldn?t have taken that ship against a fully trained crew. They would have sealed every compartment at the first sign of boarders. I was counting on that."

"How…did you know?"

"I didn?t, not for certain, but things pointed that way. Baeldura, or her captain, didn?t bring the ship all that close to the canal station, and the turns and maneuvers were sloppy. All their attacks on the station were rushed, and they were variations on strategies tried elsewhere. Baeldura and the Aesyr keep pressing for quick decisions. They were running out of time. They knew that if we could hold them off, their support would crumble. They had to win quickly, or not at all."

"They were willing to destroy the entire universe…"

"One entire universe," Helkyria corrected. "It does happen to be ours. That does make a difference. To us, anyway."

Duhyle wanted to nod. He couldn?t. Not the way his head was restrained. He could only turn it slightly, just enough to see Helkyria. "Is it all over?"

"Mostly. When your…mistletoe…grenade exploded, there was some backlash to the other remote Hammer facilities. There?s nothing much left of Asgard and more than a few other locations in Midgard. They?ll have to be rebuilt. Thora was in Asgard, we think."

"What about Valakyr…Symra?" Duhyle knew he wouldn?t like the answer.

"Valakyr?s troopers took the Bridge. She didn?t make it. Symra stepped in front of you."

"She didn?t have to…"

"Yes, she did. She should have been in front of you the whole way."

Duhyle disagreed, but he wasn?t about to say so. Finally, he asked, "Do you know what the canal-the Bridge-is?"

"The keeper called it a bifocused bridge-not a bifrost bridge," she said with a smile. "It was built to block an ancient version of the Hammer-except the hammer was being wielded from Earth?s moon. The backlash of stresses pulled the moon closer to Earth and fragmented it-and a few billion human beings along with it-"

"How could they have built it without disrupting the entire planet?"

"It was actually built outside the local event-points, as the keeper would have termed it, outside of time, or what we?d call non-time, and anchored across from the time-or the event-point-of its building to the far future. It wasn?t actually meant ever to appear on Earth when it did-that was another unanticipated backlash of the conflict, but the builders had to bring it into "reality?-even if shielded-in order to stop the lunar bombardment of the world and to heal the rents in the dark energy web."