Jayne Castle - Bridal Jitters

The vast zoo room began to darken. The green gloom seemed to thicken and grow dense. Sam followed Virginia's gaze. They both looked out the narrow window. It was like looking into the depths of an alien sea.

"Dear heaven." Virginia said in amazement.

He knew what was going through her mind. There was no such thing as night and day in the ruins. The glow of the quartz was always steady. True, there had been more than the usual number of shadows in the zoo chamber, but there had been light, and it had remained at a constant level.

Until now.

Only the chamber in which they crouched remained luminous.

Jagged shards of green lightning flashed outside the narrow opening, shattering the heavy darkness that enveloped the zoo. The alien shrieks grew louder.

More lightning sizzled. As Sam watched, an acid-hued bolt of energy illuminated some thing that floated in midair outside the window. He caught a glimpse of a green phantom so gossamer thin and transparent that he could see straight through it to the opposite wall. As he watched, another specter joined the first.

"UDEMs," Virginia whispered. "When Chaz untangled the trap he must have disturbed some."

"Whatever the hell those two things are, they aren't standard-issue energy ghosts." Sam probed cautiously, feeling for the telltale trace of psi energy emitted by normal unstable dissonance energy manifestations. What he picked up with his para senses felt wrong. He cut off the probe immediately. He did not want to draw the attention of the strange specters.

"If they're not UDEMs, what are they?" she asked very softly.

"They're energy ghosts of some kind but not like any I've ever dealt with. Look at the way they move."

"As if—" Virginia hesitated. "As if they're headed somewhere."

"Yeah. Right toward Chaz and Drake."

"But that's impossible."

"Uh-huh."

She was right, of course. UDEMs were not sentient beings. They certainly weren't the ghosts of long-dead aliens, although more than one or two hucksters and con men had tried to convince the gullible of that over the years.

Technically speaking, UDEMS were nothing more than balls of residual psi energy left behind by whatever had once powered Harmonic technology. The only reason they were called ghosts was because they tended to drift through the ancient corridors like ghosts.

Green lightning zigzagged through the misty darkness outside the window. More ghosts drifted past the opening, streaming toward the entrance of the zoo chamber.

"Damn," Sam said. "What the devil is going on out there?"

"I don't know, but I can tell you that this is Chaz's fault," Virginia said grimly. "He set them off. I knew there was something strange about those traps."

The hideous wails continued to rise and fall in the unnatural night.

"Sounds like a reunion of lost souls," Virginia whispered. "I can't even hear Chaz and Drake now. Wonder what's happened to them?"

"Maybe we don't want to know."

"Maybe you're right."

Virginia huddled close, but Sam noticed that she was careful not to impede his gun hand. Not that the mag-rez would be effective against whatever was out there, he thought. If one of the things changed course and drifted through the window, their only hope would be his psi-talent.

More lightning sparked violently. Again and again it shattered the night. But there was no accompanying roll of thunder, Sam noticed. For some reason that only made the energy flashes seem all the more bizarre.

"It's like there's a storm going on out there," Virginia muttered.

"Maybe that's exactly what it is," Sam said, thinking about it. "An energy storm triggered by the untangling of the first trap."

"But to what purpose?"

"Who knows? We're talking about the Harmonics here. No one has a clue about why they did anything. If the place was a zoo or a prison, it's possible those in charge installed some unusual security measures. Maybe we're witnessing some kind of system meant to round up the escapees.

"Sam. ' Virginia touched his arm, her eyes fixed on the window."Look."

"I see it."

One of the phantoms had halted in front of the opening. Sam told himself that it was just a mindless UDEM, but it was all too easy to imagine that it was peering into this room as if it sensed prey.

He readied himself, not wanting to use psi energy unless there was no alternative, because he could not be sure that his talent would work against this stuff.

The ghost hovered. The brightest portion of it was at least three feet in length, but its aura flared out in a much wider band of acid green.

It drifted through the window.

"Damn."

Beside him, Virginia sucked in a deep breath, but she said nothing.

Decision time, Sam thought. He could either try to prod it back out the window or he could attempt to clobber it. He opted for the gentle nudge.

He sent out a pulse of psi-talent, gently summoning energy from the quartz walls, ceiling, and floor. A small ball of glowing green fire took shape in the center of the room. He propelled it gently toward the intruder.

The strange UDEM that had drifted through the window paused as though confused. Then, to Sam's enormous relief, it retreated from the smaller ghost.

It wafted back out through the window and disappeared in the wake of the school of phantoms roaming through the streets of the zoo.

Virginia exhaled on a long, soft sigh. "Nice. Very nice."

He could almost taste his own relief. For the first time, he realized that his shirt was stuck to his back. "Don't ever say I don't know how to show a lady a fun time on Halloween."

"A lot of hunters would have tried to blast it to smithereens," she said very seriously. "For some reason, I don't think that tactic would have worked."

"No," he said, "I don't think it would have."

The storm crackled and blazed. An endless parade of desolate-sounding specters and phantoms flitted past the window.

The tempest seemed to rage for hours, but when at last it began to abate, Sam looked at his watch. He was startled to see that only twenty-three minutes had passed.

"I think it's ending," Virginia said.

Gradually, the unholy wails receded. The flashes of lightning grew pale, then ceased altogether. As if some invisible hand had flipped a switch, the familiar green glow seeped back into the atmosphere. The strange darkness retreated into the pooling shadows from which it had come.

"Must have seemed like an eternity to Chaz and Drake," Virginia whispered.

"It may have turned out to be just that."

"Are you saying you don't think they survived it?"

"I don't know what was going on out there, but whatever it was, they were caught out in the open." Sam smiled slightly. "Thanks to you, we were safe in this room."

He got cautiously to his feet and went to the window. When he looked out he saw that everything looked very much as it had just before the tempest had been triggered.

Virginia stood slowly behind the chest. "Now what?"

"Now we get the heck out of here before someone else sets off another storm." He moved swiftly back toward her. "Ready?"

"If you're waiting for me, you're backing up."

They found Chaz and Drake lying on the floor near the main gate into the zoo. It was obvious that the two desperate men had tried to flee back through it, but something had caused the illusion trap there to reset itself. The energy storm had caught up with the pair before Chaz could untangle the trap a second time.

Virginia hesitated and then went down beside one of the men and checked for a pulse. She looked up in surprise. "He's unconscious, but alive."

"Same here." Sam rifled through the pockets of the man dressed in leather and khaki until he found a guild license and an amber-powered grid locator. "This is all we need. The locator shows three exits in this sector. We won't have to go back through the waterfall, after all."