Which was why they survived.
As the ax blade bit into the edge of the door, there was a brilliant flash of violet-tinted light. Huw registered it as as flicker of red behind his closed eyelids and might have ignored it—but the rising noise that followed it was impossible to write off.
“Ouch! What’s that—” Yul began.
Huw, opening his eyes and straightening up, grabbed his brother’s arm, and yanked. “Run!”
The hissing sound from the edge of the door grew louder; the center of the door bowed inward slightly, as if under the pressure of a giant fist from their side. Yul barely spared it a glance before he dropped the axe and took to his heels. Huw was a stride behind him. Two seconds brought them to the twilit entrance to the room. “Hit the ground!” yelled Huw, catching one glimpse of Elena’s uncomprehending face as he threw himself forward and rolled sideways, away from the open doorway.
Behind them, the creaking door—far thinner than Huw had realized—creaked once more, and gave way. All hell broke loose.
The hissing and whistling gave way to a deep roaring, and the breeze in Huw’s face began to strengthen. Huw glanced over his shoulder once, straining to look over the length of his body towards the inner chamber. A strange mist curdled out of the air, obscuring whatever process was at work there. The wind was still strengthening. “Take cover!” he called out. “There’s hard vacuum on the other side of that—thing—watch out for flying debris!” It’ll blow itself out soon, he told himself. Won’t it? A sudden frisson of fear raised the hair on the back of his neck: That skeleton was old, the door can’t have held in a vacuum that long. So something’s pumping the air on the other side out, something that’s still working…
But that didn’t make sense. Come on, Huw, think! The wind wasn’t slackening. Dust and leaves blew past, vanishing towards the gulping maw behind the doorway. Huw pushed himself up on hands and knees and began to crawl sideways, away from the damaged front of the building. He waved to Yul and Elena, beckoning them after. The seconds stretched out endlessly. The wind was refusing to die. “Meet me behind the building!” He yelled, jabbing his hands to indicate the direction. Yul raised a thumb and began to crawl away, tracking round the building.
Once Huw was away from the frontage, he risked standing up. Out of the direct line of the door, the wind was a barely noticeable breeze. “Huh.” He slapped the knees of his fatigues, then hurried round to meet Yul and Elena. It’s still running, he realized. Can’t be a pump; it’d take a jet engine to shift that much mass flow. He glanced around. A nasty idea was inching its way into his mind: Utterly preposterous, but…
“Well, bro, what do you reckon?”
Yul was characteristically unfazed by his near-miss. Elena, however, was anything but pleased: “What were you playing at? Hitting that thing with an ax, we could all have been killed!”
“It looked like a door to me,” Yul shrugged.
“Did you see the flash—”
“Flash?” Huw glanced at her. “There was a flash?”
“Yes, a bright flash of light as the big oaf here hit it!” Elena swatted Yul on the arm. “You could have been killed!” She chided him. Then she glared at Huw. “What were you playing at?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Huw licked his left index finger and held it up to feel the breeze. “Yes, it’s still going. Hmm.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure,” Huw said slowly, “but I’ll tell you what I think. It was behind the door, sealed in until Yul broke something. It’s got hard vacuum on the other side. like a, a hole in space. Not a black hole, there’s no gravitational weirdness, but like—imagine a wormhole leading into yet another world? Like the thing we do when we world-walk, only static rather than dynamic? And the universe it leads to is one where there’s no planet Earth. You’d come out in interplanetary space.”
“But why—”
Huw rolled his eyes. “Why would anyone want such a thing? How would I know? Maybe they used to keep a space station there, as some kind of giant pantry? You put one of those doors in your closet, build airtight rooms on the other side of it, and you’ll never have to worry about where to keep your clothes again—it gives a whole new meaning to wardrobe space. But you keep an airtight door in front of the—call it a portal—just in case.”
He gestured around the dome. “Something bad happened here, a long time ago. Centuries, probably. The guy with the perfect teeth was trying to hide in the closet, but didn’t make it. Over time, something went wrong on the other side—the space station or whatever you call it drifted off site—leaving the portal pointing into interplanetary space. And then we came along and fucked with the protective door.”
Elena’s eyes widened. “But won’t it suck all the air out?”
Huw shrugged. “Not our problem. Anyway, it’ll take thousands of years, at a minimum. There’s plenty of time for us to come back and drop a concrete hatch over it.” He brightened: “Or an airlock! Get some pressure suits and we can go take a look at it! A portal like that, if we can figure out how it works—” he stopped, almost incoherent with the sudden shock of enlightenment. “Holy Sky Father, Lightning Child, and Crone,” he whispered.
“What is it, bro?” Yul looked concerned. “Are you feeling alright?”
“I’ve got to get back to base and report to the duke right now.” Huw took a deep breath. “This changes everything.”
After two days aboard the Northern Continental, Miriam was forced to reevaluate her opinion of railroad travel—even in luxury class. Back when she was newly married she and Ben had taken a week to go on a road trip, driving down into North Carolina and then turning west and north. They’d spent endless hours crawling across Illinois, the landscape barely changing, marking the distance they’d covered by the way they had to tune the radio to another station every couple of hours, the only marker of time the shifting patterns of the clouds overhead.
This was, in a way, worse: and in another way, much better. Travel via the Northern Continental was like being sentenced to an enforced vacation in a skinny luxury hotel room on wheels. Unfortunately, New British hotels didn’t sport many of the necessities a motel back home would provide, such as air-conditioning and TV, much less luxuries like a health suite and privacy. Everything was kept running by a small army of liveried stewards, bustling in and out—and Miriam hated it. “I feel like I can’t relax,” she complained to Burgeson at one point: “I’ve got no space to myself!” And no space to plug her notebook computer in, for that matter.
He shrugged. “Hot and cold running service is half of what first-class travel is all about,” he pointed out. “If the rich didn’t surround themselves with armies of impoverished unfortunates, how would they know they were well off?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point…” Back in Baron Henryk’s medieval birdcage she’d at least been able to shunt the servants out of her rooms. Over here, such behavior would draw entirely the wrong kind of attention. She waved a hand in wide circles, spinning an imaginary hamster wheel. “I feel like I’m acting in a play with no script, on a stage in front of an audience I can’t see. And if I step out of character—the character they want me to play—the reviewers will start snarking behind my back.”
“Welcome to my world.” He smiled lopsidedly. “It doesn’t get any better after a decade, let me assure you.”