Читать книгу In the Empire of Shadow - Lawrence Watt-Evans - Страница 5

Chapter One

The spaceship shone vivid purple in the unfiltered light, brighter than any jewel, bright as a skateboarder’s gear. Its nose and tail fins were golden; the forward fins were patterned in gold, white, and purple. At first glance, it should have been as gaudy and absurd as a cartoon.

But out there in space, with the glow of Base One’s sun cutting sharp-edged divisions between light and shadow, with the utter black of deep space and the hard, unblinking blaze of a myriad stars behind it, it didn’t look silly at all. It looked impressive, more real than reality itself.

Pel Brown supposed that this was what all those comic-book artists and movie special-effects crews had been trying for, and, limited by the media they used, had been unable to achieve. It took the reality of airlessness, free-fall, and starlight to create such an intense image.

The bright colors were what did it; the bland greys and whites of NASA’s shuttle or most of the movie spaceships just didn’t have the same power.

Pel had never expected to see a real spaceship—not like this, anyway. After all, he was just a freelance marketing consultant from Germantown, Maryland, and until recently the only spaceships he’d ever known existed were the ones built by NASA or the old Soviet space program.

Three months ago he had had no idea that parallel universes were real, and not just science fiction. Three months ago he hadn’t met the velvet-clad thug who called himself Raven, or any of Raven’s motley companions. He hadn’t asked his lawyer to bail a bunch of stranded spacemen out of jail. He hadn’t stepped through a portal in his basement wall into Raven’s world, a universe where magic worked, and something called Shadow was the absolute ruler of the world. He hadn’t escaped from Shadow’s monsters only to wind up in a third universe, the one the spacemen came from, where the Galactic Empire ruled three thousand inhabited planets. He hadn’t spent weeks as a slave working in a mine on a planet called Zeta Leo III.

And three months ago he had had a wife and daughter, and now they were gone, and he had been told that they were both dead, murdered by space pirates.

Space pirates! God, that sounded like something out of the old pulp magazines, or a low-budget movie—only they’d been all too real, and altogether serious. They’d captured Pel, along with Raven and the others, and sold them into slavery.

And they hadn’t gone in for gaudy colors. The ship out there was not their style at all. The colors marked it as part of the Imperial fleet.

This particular combination of colors wasn’t quite the standard set; gold and white were unusual. The purple meant the ship was the property of the Galactic Empire, of course; Pel wondered what the gold represented. He guessed that it probably meant the ship carried some high official.

There were plenty of high officials at Base One already, in Pel’s opinion; he had been harassed by a few of them. A good many of the Galactic Empire’s big shots had been interested in seeing the people from another universe.

Pel watched, vaguely annoyed, as the ship slid smoothly into the huge air lock a quarter-mile farther down Base One’s surface.

That surface was an uneasy blend of raw meteoritic stone and riveted metal—the Imperial military had hollowed out the orbiting rock, and then built outward, as well. Pel’s window looked out from a bulge of asteroidal stone onto a broad vista of sheet steel, pocked and patched as a result of collisions with celestial debris, but untainted by any trace of rust.

Then the infinite depths of space and the long metal walls of the station dimmed to near-invisibility and his own face leapt out at him from the glass; someone had turned on the light in the room behind him.

He blinked, and continued to stare at the glass, at his own features superimposed on the universe, almost blocking it all from sight. His nose, recently broken by the overseers at the mine where he’d worked as slave labor, did not look quite right, and the bruises elsewhere had left dark traces that looked like shadows, but it was still the same face he had always had.

He was in the wrong universe, but he was still in his own body. Reality hadn’t gotten that strange.

“Mr. Brown?” an unfamiliar voice inquired.

* * * *

The clerk looked at the clipboard, then at Amy. “Miss Jewell?” he asked.

Amy dropped the magazine on the table, losing her place. The tentacular monster in the cover picture grinned lewdly up at her, ignoring the screaming girl in its coils.

Losing her place was no great inconvenience; the stories were all pretty bad anyway. Men’s adventure stories weren’t any better written here than back home on Earth, and in general were even more offensively sexist. Not to mention that the line between adventure and science fiction had been hopelessly blurred by the existence of interstellar travel and huge areas of unexplored galaxy—odd, to realize that stories of heroes fighting monsters from other planets didn’t qualify as science fiction here.

The stories still sucked, though. She was very tired of evil mutant masterminds and big blond heroes.

Reading this tripe was better than nothing, but not by much. It generally took her mind off feeling lousy, but nothing more than that. When her bruises healed completely and she got back home to her three acres in Goshen, Maryland, that would probably help a lot more.

Of course, there was presumably still a stranded spaceship in her back yard. The Empire’s first attempt to contact Earth, to arrange an alliance against Shadow, had ended when I.S.S. Ruthless plummeted out of the sky and crash-landed there.

They’d planned on appearing twenty miles from the White House, one the crewmen told Amy later—they didn’t want to just drop right into the middle of the capital.

Twenty miles or so northwest of the White House had put them right over Amy’s yard, and the moment the ship popped out of the space-warp that let it into Earth’s universe the crew had made the unexpected discovery that anti-gravity, the basis for much of the Empire’s machinery, didn’t work in Earth’s universe, and there was therefore nothing holding the ship up.

It had crashed, and it was probably still there, and it was never going to fly again. The laws of physics were apparently very different in each of the three known realities.

They were different enough that something called “magic” worked in the world Shadow and Raven came from, something that had let Amy and the crew of Ruthless step through a basement wall into that world.

And when they’d fled into the Galactic Empire, the monsters that followed them had died for lack of that “magic,” just as Ruthless had fallen for lack of anti-gravity. The three universes were different, all right.

Some things didn’t change, though—people could still be rotten, in any universe. Like her ex-husband Stan. Like that son of a bitch Walter, who had bought her from the pirates and kept her as a slave until the Empire rescued her and brought her to Base One.

At least the Empire made an attempt at being civilized.

Even if, she thought with a final glance at that god-awful collection of violent, sexist, racist, imperialist adventure stories, they weren’t all that good at it.

She forgot the magazine and looked up at the clerk.

“Ah…Miss Jewell? Or is it Mrs.?”

“It’s Ms.,” Amy said, perversely. Her stomach was slightly upset, as it often was lately—the food here was at least as bad as the fiction—and she was in no mood to cooperate with the Empire in its petty oppressions.

“Mrs.?” the clerk asked again.

“Ms. It’s a word we use back on Earth.”

“Oh. Yes, of course.” The clerk noted something, then looked up again and said, “Could you come with me, Miss Jewell?”

“Why? And where?”

The clerk did not answer; instead he said, in a surprisingly definite voice, “I was told to bring you at once.”

Amy sighed, and decided not to argue any more.

* * * *

“Mr. Deranian?”

Ted ignored them, and the two men cast knowing glances at one another.

“You take the right arm,” one of them said. “Be careful, though—the doctor said that besides the head wound, his ribs aren’t completely healed yet.”

The other nodded.

Side by side they advanced, and grabbed Ted by the arms.

“Come on, Mr. Deranian,” one of them said. “Dream’s not over yet.”

* * * *

“Miss N’goyen?”

“Nguyen,” Susan said, without moving from her cot. She was lying facedown; the burns on her back no longer hurt all the time, but lying on them was still not a good idea. Her time as a slave on Zeta Leo III had been very rough on her.

But then, having been a refugee as a child, she’d survived rough times before. She’d thought that she was finally through with all that when she’d made it through law school, passed the bar, and joined the firm of Dutton, Powell, Hough.

Obviously, she’d been wrong.

When Amy Jewell had called on her to provide legal assistance in dealing with the spaceship that had crashed in her back yard, Susan had not expected it to lead her to this.

The messenger tried again, and almost managed to pronounce the name.

“What is it?” Susan asked.

“Could you come with me, please?”

Susan raised her head and looked at the messenger. “Do I have a choice?”

“Not really.”

She sighed, sat up, swung her feet to the floor, and stood.

“Lead the way,” she said.

* * * *

Pel took the seat on the far left, and Amy settled beside him. Pel noticed that she was no longer wearing heavy make-up to hide the bruise on her face; the discolorations had faded to a faint, sickly yellow tinge. Pel knew that his own injuries, too, were no longer obvious.

Ted was led in, unresisting, and seated on the far right; the fresh bandage on his head was smaller than the one Pel had last seen there, and the visible cuts and bruises had healed. There were scars, of course.

Susan, arriving last, took her place between Amy and Ted. A long-sleeved tunic hid the bandages that still covered much of her back and her forearms.

That was all of them, Pel thought, all four of them—the only living Earthpeople in the entire universe, according to the Galactic Empire.

At least, in this entire universe. So far as Pel knew, there were five billion others back on Earth, all blithely unaware that any universe but their own existed. And he secretly harbored hopes, despite his own better judgment, that his wife and daughter might still be alive somewhere. Their deaths had been reported to him, had been confirmed repeatedly, but he hadn’t seen either of them die, hadn’t seen their bodies.

He knew, intellectually, that they were both dead, but accepting it emotionally was another matter.

Nancy and Rachel weren’t here, though, even if by some miracle they weren’t both dead. The four of them, Pel and Amy and Ted and Susan, were the only Earthpeople here at Base One. Pel found something peculiarly amusing in the thought that half of them were lawyers, here because they had been representing the other half.

The Galactic Empire didn’t seem to care about lawyers, though. Ted wasn’t representing him here, and Susan wasn’t representing Amy; they were all here on their own. Pel looked around, wondering why they had been gathered.

This was a new room to them all. It was small and bare, with walls of whitewashed stone—that meant it was within the asteroid itself, rather than in the later additions, where everything was steel. The tiled floor might once have been white, too, but was now a dull gray. The four steel chairs were not particularly comfortable. The purple-painted lectern bore the lion-and-unicorn seal of the Imperial Military—but then, so did any number of objects scattered about Base One.

It looked like a small briefing room. That was, at least, an improvement on the debriefing and interrogation chambers where Pel seemed to have spent most of his waking hours for the past ten days.

The door opened, and a man in the familiar purple uniform of an Imperial officer marched past them, papers in hand, and took his place at the lectern. Pel was beginning to learn the insignia; he placed this character as a major in the political service.

That was mildly unusual; up until now they had mostly been bothered by people in Imperial Intelligence.

“Welcome to Base One,” the major announced, in jovial, booming tones that were almost painful in so small a room. “I’m Major Southern.”

Pel winced, not just at the tone, but at the words. He and the others had been here at Base One for over a week—Pel, without a regular cycle of sunrise and sunset, had lost track of exactly how long it had been, but he knew it was over a week. They didn’t need any more welcoming speeches.

Ted grinned foolishly. “Major Southern,” he said. “I like that. Glad I thought of it. Southern, warm, friendly—a summery sort of name.”

At that, Amy winced.

“Now, you’re all intelligent people,” the major proclaimed, in somewhat more moderate tones. “You all know what the situation is.”

Pel glanced at Ted, who grinned back and winked broadly at him.

“We’re fighting a powerful, mysterious enemy,” Major Southern continued. “A force that has conquered an entire universe, and that now threatens two others.”

Ted nodded, smiling happily. Susan sat in polite and motionless silence. Amy’s lips tightened. Pel could almost hear her thoughts—he could imagine her muttering, “I haven’t seen it threatening Earth.”

“This force called Shadow uses methods we don’t understand, methods that are impossible in our own universe; the people of Shadow’s world call it magic, and that’s as good a name as any. It’s used that magic to send its agents, its spies, and its monsters into our universe. It has attempted to subvert the Galactic Empire, which has brought peace and security to all mankind—at least, in this reality.”

Amy’s lips twitched, and Pel could easily guess the cynical thoughts running through her mind.

All mankind, except where it hadn’t gotten yet, which was far more than the Empire cared to admit—all of the little group had seen more than they wanted of the odd corners where the Empire had no dominion. And the Empire might bring security to mankind, perhaps, but not necessarily women. It also helped if the men were white.

Just how different was the Empire from Shadow, really? Both were imperialist; Shadow just seemed to be a little farther along in its conquests.

Of course, as one point in its favor, the Galactic Empire was run by humans; nobody knew just what Shadow was.

“You know that we have representatives of Shadow’s universe here at Base One,” the major said. “Lord Raven of Stormcrack Keep has taken temporary refuge here, and he and his party have fought against Shadow all their lives.”

“So they say,” Amy muttered, and this time it was not just Pel’s imagination.

He thought this might be carrying cynicism a little far; Raven and his man Stoddard and the two wizards had certainly seemed sincere enough.

The major either didn’t hear her, or chose to ignore her. “They’ve sworn to continue that fight,” he said, “and to join their efforts to ours, rather than to continue operating independently. In just a few days, we’ll be sending Lord Raven and the others through a space-warp, back into their home universe—and with them we’ll be sending a squadron of our best men, and a trained telepath. This combined force will be the first step in taking the battle onto Shadow’s home ground, the first step in overthrowing this unnatural tyranny and freeing the oppressed people of Shadow’s realm.”

And probably bringing them under Imperial domination instead, Pel thought.

“I’m here today to invite the four of you to join that combined force,” Major Southern said. “As natives of a universe different from both ours and Shadow’s, you have a different viewpoint, you have knowledge and techniques that might be just what’s needed to defeat this…this inter-universal horror.”

“Fuck off,” Pel said, unable to resist any longer. Did this beribboned idiot think they didn’t know what the Empire wanted? They knew, and they weren’t interested. They had all made that clear enough. “Just send us home,” he said.

“It’s not our fight,” Amy added.

Ted giggled.

Susan’s lips were a tight line; she said nothing.

“I’d been told that some of you felt that way,” Major Southern said, frowning. “You’re civilians, and subjects of another nation—one we don’t recognize, of course, but still, we realize you aren’t soldiers we can order into battle. Further, you probably wouldn’t be of much use if we sent you out there involuntarily. We don’t seem to be getting anywhere by appealing to your patriotism and common decency—you’ve all turned us down. Revenge doesn’t seem to have been enough, either.”

“We don’t know it was Shadow that sold us into slavery,” Amy said. “We only have your word for that.”

“Why would we lie?” The major spread his hands in a gesture of bewilderment.

“You might have staged the whole thing to get us on your side,” Amy suggested. “If it was Shadow that captured us, why would it sell us? If it’s after us, why weren’t we killed?”

“We don’t know,” Southern admitted, “and that’s something we’d like to find out, but we can’t.” He hesitated, but Amy had said her piece; no one interrupted further, and he returned to his speech.

“You won’t go voluntarily, as I said,” he told them, “so we’re offering you a choice. Lord Raven and the rest will be sent into Shadow’s universe three days from now, whether any of you four are with them or not. Those of you who don’t go—well, we can’t keep you here forever, living on the largesse of the Empire. You’re free to join the Imperial military; we can always use bright people like yourselves. If you’re not interested, though, I’m afraid you can’t stay at Base One, which is, after all, a military installation. Instead, we’ll send you to any nearby planet you choose; we’ll land you where you ask, and from then on, of course, you’re on your own.”

“Send us home, damn it!” Pel shouted.

The major pretended to ignore him and continued, “Of course, we can’t create an inter-universal space-warp just for the convenience of a handful of uncooperative civilians, but I suppose we can arrange grants of citizenship and provide the necessary papers to keep you out of jail. For brave volunteers, once the crisis is past and Shadow defeated, no reasonable reward would be refused, and opening a space-warp would be considered; but for civilians who’ve turned down a chance to serve the Empire? Not likely.”

The four Earthpeople stared at him—or at any rate, three of them did.

Ted Deranian shrugged and said, “I’ll go with Raven if you like; it’s all the same to me. Might make a better story that way, if I don’t wake up before I get that far.”

Amy let out a low moan of disgust at Ted’s insistence on his delusion. Pel glanced at her, but said nothing; he understood her reaction.

Ever since the party had stepped through the magical portal from Earth to Shadow’s world, Ted had been convinced the entire thing was a dream. Beatings, torture, wounds, and the passage of days and even weeks had failed to dislodge this conviction. Almost two months had now passed since the May evening when they had passed through Pel’s basement wall, but Ted persisted.

The man’s exact mood varied; sometimes he seemed to be struggling to maintain his belief, sometimes he sank into near-catatonia. Right now he was treating it all as a joke that had gone on a little too long, a story that was slow in reaching the point.

It got on everyone’s nerves, and Pel and Amy both feared that Ted had slipped irretrievably into insanity weeks ago. Pel suspected the head wound he had acquired resisting the pirates aboard Emerald Princess, or the beatings he had received on Zeta Leo III, might have caused brain damage, as well.

“What about the rest of you, then?” Major Southern asked, smiling.

“You’re a sadistic bastard, you know that?” Pel answered calmly.

“Now, now, Mr. Brown,” the major said, feigning shock. “That’s no way to talk!”

No one replied. He looked them over, then stepped out from behind the lectern.

“I’ve said my piece,” he told them. “From here on, it’s all up to you.”

“Sure it is,” Amy said. “We get our choice of two universes—but neither one of them’s ours.”

The major smiled and patted Amy on the shoulder. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ll let you think about it.” He looked around the room, gave everyone a cheerful grin that was only slightly patronizing, and strolled out.

Amy glared after him, and muttered, “Where’d they find that stupid prick?”

Pel shrugged. “Same place as all the others, I suppose,” he said. “Wherever that is.”

Susan suddenly spoke, for the first time since entering the room.

“I’m going with Raven,” she said. “And I’d advise you both to consider joining us. I don’t have any power over you, Mr. Brown, but as your attorney, Amy, I strongly recommend you take my advice.”

The other three all turned to stare at her.

“Susan, are you…what are you talking about?” Amy demanded.

“Amy, just think it over.”

She turned and marched out.

Baffled, Pel and Amy and Ted watched her go.