They probably weren’t going to like this. They’d wanted someplace near human habitation, to avoid impassable wilderness and make foraging easier, but no one had wanted to come out smack in some primitive village. And they’d wanted ground level, where they could just step through, not a four-foot drop.
Well, it wasn’t his fault; they could shout at the scientists.
But they’d probably want to try again, which would mean someone would have to make another leap into the unknown, and Hamilton Puckett had a pretty good idea who’d be making that leap.
After all, he had experience now. And if he wanted to command the first assault, he needed to scout the terrain-that was the deal the brass had offered.
And it was a deal he intended to keep.
* * * *
“It’s getting bad,” Miletti said. “They’re escalating, turning it into a war.”
Major Johnston considered this for a moment, then turned to Prossie Thorpe. “Ms. Thorpe,” he said, “if you don’t want to answer I won’t press it, but you know more about this than any of the rest of us. In your opinion, is a war between Faerie and the Empire good or bad for us here on Earth?”
“I don’t know,” Thorpe said.
“How can any war be good?” Amy Jewell asked. She seemed uncomfortable, here in Miletti’s living room-and that was, Johnston thought, reasonable enough; after all, Miletti hadn’t invited her, and didn’t particularly want any of them here. It had been Johnston who had brought them along, in an effort to speed up the process of questioning Miletti and interpreting the data he provided.
If Miletti had been willing to come down to the Pentagon, or Crystal City…
But he wasn’t. He insisted he could provide more information if he stayed safely in his suburban home, with familiar surroundings and sixty-eight channels of cable TV, and Johnston had decided that there might be enough truth in that to make it a mistake to argue with him, or to order him anywhere.
“If it removes them both as threats,” Johnston answered Amy’s question. “I’d consider that a good war, for us.”
“I don’t think Pel was ever a threat to anybody,” Thorpe replied.
“He is now,” Miletti said, looking up from his television.
* * * *
“Secure the village,” they said. Just what the devil did they think that meant?
Captain Puckett only knew one way to make sure a village was secure, and he didn’t like it much. He was fairly certain that Marshal Albright knew what was involved, but Secretary Markham and Secretary Sheffield might not. Someone might get soft-hearted later, and if that happened Puckett supposed he’d take the blame for the massacre and probably spend the rest of his days on a pension somewhere like old man Blackburn, with parents warning their children away from him.
But if he didn’t do it, he’d catch hell right now.
He looked over his men once again. In their space suits they all looked alike, faceless gleaming automatons-but the swords they held looked weirdly out of place, throwbacks to some earlier century, as if they were knights in distorted armor rather than Imperial troopers.
He chalked a final warning on the board-REMEMBER! FOUR-FOOT DROP, HIGH GRAVITY! Naturally, the scientists hadn’t fixed that-they claimed they couldn’t. Puckett had his own opinion on that, but knew better than to say it aloud.
He put down the chalk and signalled the door crew. The big panel slid open, admitting the blinding glare of the space-warp, and Puckett waved his men forward.
He wondered if any of them were yelling as they charged across the open, airless expanse and into the light.
* * * *
Pel had never seen this part of his new world before-but that was hardly surprising, since he had never seen most of the place.
He estimated that he had covered at least two hundred miles so far, probably more, and the twist in the matrix was still far ahead of him, somewhere to the southwest. The terrain below was not as lush as the Starlinshire Downs, by any means-there were occasional open areas that looked like little more than bare sand, while trees were few and far between.
Far off to his right, almost on the horizon, he could make out a distant ocean, glittering in the afternoon sun. Behind and to his left were green hills. Ahead, he saw mostly flat scrubland.
There weren’t any roads or villages along this stretch; there had been, closer in toward Shadowmarsh, but he had passed them all.
What the hell was the Empire doing, opening a warp out here?
And using it, too; he’d sensed people coming through the warp for some time.
And there were people around the warp before the Empire’s people started arriving. Had the Empire found local allies? Maybe some part of the resistance movement that Raven and Valadrakul had belonged to still survived, and wanted to see Shadow’s matrix destroyed, rather than passed on.
Well, once he had his family back, Pel wouldn’t have any great objection to that. If the matrix exploded and wild magic wrecked what little civilization Faerie possessed, it wasn’t his problem.
He glimpsed something moving in the air ahead, and almost fell off the wind he was riding before he recognized it as just distant smoke.
It seemed like rather a lot of smoke, though.
He reached out through the matrix.
Shadow had had some way to see far-off places magically, through the eyes of the people or animals there, but Pel had never managed it, and he still couldn’t contrive to get a look at whatever was happening there-it didn’t help any that he was whipping through the air several hundred feet up at about fifty miles an hour.
Sometimes, when he used the matrix, he felt as if he were one of those poor fools with a big fancy computer loaded with expensive software that he only used for balancing his checkbook because he didn’t know how to access anything else. Shadow had only taught him to open interdimensional portals; she hadn’t intended to turn the matrix over to him permanently. He had picked up a few other things from the other wizards, and there were a few things that simply feeling the matrix made obvious, and then on top of that, every so often he would stumble across something else the matrix could do-such as fly-but he still had the tantalizing feeling that there were a thousand other wonderful things just out of reach.
And some way of seeing what was making that smoke was probably-almost certainly!-one of them.
He could sense the shape of the matrix. He could sense people, usually. But he couldn’t see anything, or hear anything.
The matrix was bent out of shape by the intruding space-warp, and Pel could tell that this warp was bigger than the old one in Sunderland-but why? That one had been big enough to fit a spaceship; what more would they need?
And there were people there. There were a lot of people there. Two different kinds…
That was strange; he hadn’t usually been able to tell people apart through the matrix before, and certainly not at so great a distance. Fetches felt different from natural people; so, much more subtly, did simulacra, and wizards. But other than that, people were people; he hadn’t noticed any difference between natives, Earthpeople, or Imperials.
So why did some of the people ahead feel different?
And they seemed brighter somehow, as if they held more of that trace of magic that people had, as if they were more nearly linked to the matrix.
The new space-warp had come through at the center of a magical power spot, he noticed; did that have anything to do with it? Had these people absorbed some of the world’s magic by living there?
More and more Imperials were arriving, or at least more and more people were coming through the warp, and he assumed they were Imperials. The others, the strange-feeling ones, were scattering in all directions, moving away from the warp.