Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

But the man in black did have a point; a glance at Amy convinced Pel that she did, indeed, need a rest. She looked terrible. She hadn’t thrown up again since that morning, but her face was pale, and she appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Susan was keeping a solicitous eye on her; Pel was relieved that someone was.

The four Earthpeople and Prossie settled to the grass in a group; the other four Imperials settled a few feet away. Raven and Stoddard remained upright, roaming along the slope, studying the countryside.

And Valadrakul crouched on the slope, muttering, working his magic.

* * * *

Amy was ravenously hungry, but at the same time she doubted she could keep anything down if she ate it. She felt achy and exhausted; her feet throbbed. The stop for Valadrakul’s magic had been very welcome indeed.

She wondered what was wrong with her. There were so many things it could be.

Stress, hunger, weeks of bad food-that could be it. The others weren’t visibly suffering, but stress didn’t affect everyone the same way. Ted Deranian wasn’t exactly suffering, but he’d snapped completely. And Pel Brown had become sort of detached since his wife and daughter were killed; that might be his way of dealing with the strain.

Susan, of course, could cope with anything; Amy was convinced of that. She’d been through it all before, as a child in southeast Asia.

And the others-well, they were different. The Faerie folk were in their own world, they were used to dealing with Shadow’s monsters and all the rest of it. The Imperials were all soldiers, even Prossie; they’d been trained for hardships. And they’d only been out of their own reality for a day and a half, not a couple of months.

So maybe it was just stress affecting her. Stress, and the thin air, and the heavy gravity, and the heat, and the humidity, and the weird washed-out sunlight.

She liked that idea, the idea that it was just stress, much better than the other possibilities. If this space wasn’t quite right for Earthpeople to live in, then finding a way home wasn’t just a way to get back to normal, it was a matter of life and death.

But none of the other Earthpeople were showing any symptoms that she could see, so she hoped that that wasn’t it.

If it were, then she was the most sensitive. If the others did start showing symptoms, then she would be the first to die.

Right now, she felt as if she might die if she didn’t get a few days’ rest and some good food.

There were other possibilities, of course, and in a way those were even more frightening. What if she’d contracted some alien disease somewhere? What if she’d caught something from her rapist, Walter, back on Zeta Leo III? She’d been free of him for weeks-heavens, he’d been dead for weeks, hanged on her testimony-but how could she be sure she hadn’t picked up something from him? Who knows what loathsome alien diseases he might have had?

Oh, hell, who needed anything alien? If he had syphilis or herpes or something, that would be bad enough, though she didn’t think her symptoms fit either of those.

What if Walter had AIDS? Did AIDS exist in the Galactic Empire? In the space movies on the late show they never talked about things like that.

And what were the symptoms of the early stages of AIDS? Despite all the scare stories on TV she didn’t have any idea. Feeling tired and sick and nauseous didn’t seem very distinctive. And didn’t AIDS usually take years to appear?

That brought a terrible thought-could she have gotten AIDS from her ex-husband and have had it all along, for the past year and a half? Despite all their arguments and accusations, she had no idea whether Stan had ever really been unfaithful, whether he might have picked up the virus somewhere.

This was all silly, though, she told herself; it wasn’t AIDS. It was more likely to be mononucleosis, or that “yuppie flu,” or something. She could have caught anything on Zeta Leo III. Or on Base One.

And that was all the more reason to get home to Earth. Somehow, she doubted that modern medicine was easily come by here in Faerie.

Valadrakul was crouched a few yards down the slope from her. “How’s it going?” she called.

“Don’t bother him,” Prossie said, from where she sat just behind and to Amy’s left. “He’s working magic, or whatever you want to call it.”

Amy glanced at her, startled.

“He needs to concentrate,” the telepath explained.

“Are you reading his mind?”

Prossie grimaced. “No,” she said. “I can’t, here. Telepathy doesn’t work any better here than it does on Earth.”

“But I thought…weren’t you relaying instructions from Base One?”

Prossie nodded. “That’s right,” she said, “but only as a receiver; it’s my cousin Carrie who does the sending.”

“Oh, that’s right, you said that.” Amy waved a hand at herself and said, “I forgot.”

Prossie shrugged.

“So, is Carrie sending anything right now? Does she have any news about Lieutenant Dibbs?”

Startled, Prossie stared at Amy. “How could she have any news about him?”

“Well, if they sent a rescue party, or something.”

Prossie shook her head. “They’re not sending any rescue party,” she said. “If there were any chance they’d do that I’d probably have stayed there myself.”

Amy frowned. “Then what’s going to happen to those men?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Prossie said. “I hope that eventually they’ll have the sense to leave. Or maybe we can send Taillefer to help them, after he’s sent you Earthpeople home.”

“That sounds good,” Amy agreed.

“What I’m afraid of, though,” Prossie said, “is that Shadow’s going to send more monsters, and more, and more, until Dibbs and his men are all dead. That’s what Raven’s expecting, you know; that’s why he fled, but didn’t argue more about everybody coming.”

“I don’t understand,” Amy said uneasily.

Prossie picked up a pebble and tossed it down the slope. “It’s simple enough,” she said. “Shadow knows something’s happened back there at the clearing where we crashed, right? It sensed the space-warp, and it sent those creatures to investigate, and we killed them all. So it’ll be expecting a report, and it isn’t going to get one; what’ll it do then?”

Amy stared at her.

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” the telepath said. “It’ll send another force, a larger one. And if that doesn’t work, it’ll send a third, and a fourth. It’ll send trackers, too, in case whatever it’s after has left.”

“Then they’ll be coming after us,” Amy whispered, suddenly terrified.

Prossie shook her head. “No, they won’t,” she said. “Or at least Raven doesn’t think so. He thinks that they’ll find the ship and Lieutenant Dibbs and the rest there, and they’ll kill them all, and it’ll never occur to Shadow that there were more, that the rest of us got away.”

“Is that…” Amy began. Then the implication sank in. “But that’s…that’s horrible…”

Prossie grimaced. “Raven set them up,” she said. “A decoy, so we could get away.”

Amy glanced at Raven, standing further down the slope, showing no sign at all of a troubled conscience.

“He did ask for volunteers,” Prossie said unhappily. “He gave them a chance.”

“Do you know for sure that that was what he was doing?” Amy asked. “Did you read his mind?”

Prossie shook her head. “I told you,” she answered, “I can’t read minds here.”

“You’re just guessing?”

“You can call it that if you like.”

That was exactly what Amy liked; she didn’t want to think of Raven as being as callous and calculating as Prossie claimed. She swallowed, then changed the subject. “So what is your cousin Carrie saying? What’s happening back on Base One?”