Castle War

Twenty-nine Country

The countryside was deserted, its fields silent, its eroded asphalt roads devoid of traffic.

They walked through overgrown hayfields and pastures, encountering the foundations of demolished farm houses and buildings, sections of rusted barbed-wire fence, and other remnants of what were once working farms. The fields had been allowed to go wild for so long that saplings had grown up in them, the surrounding patches of forest reclaiming lost territory.

They ate a lunch of wild raspberries. There was nothing to drink but creek water, which Gene didn’t trust. They did find a well site but the pump was long gone. The raspberries’ juice was enough to hold them, though, and they continued their cross-country journey, keeping away from roads and not staying too long in the open.

Occasionally they would hear the whine and roar of turbines and take cover. Rural areas were well patrolled. Gene wondered why.

He began to suspect the reason when they discovered a destroyed tank in an old cornfield. It had been hit in the turret with an armor-piercing shell. The top hatch had been blown off and the inside of the vehicle had burned out. Judging by the amount of rust and weathering, Gene put the event at four to five years ago.

They began to see evidence of recent battles — besides the hulk of the blasted truck, they found shell casings, ammo belts, and other military refuse. Nothing in great quantity: Gene got the feeling that this was debris missed in a general cleanup.

“Did you ever hear about what happened here?”

“No,” Alice said. “Never. But …”

“What is it?”

“A while back there was a Citizens’ Mobilization Training Festival.”

“What was that?”

“We were ordered to report for training.”

“Military training?”

“I guess you’d call it that. We marched around carrying wooden sticks.”

“Not rifles?”

“No, just sticks to practice with. They didn’t give us any guns.”

“Then what happened?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It lasted about a week, then there was a notice canceling the festival.”

“Was there anything on the screen then about ‘unsocial outside elements’? Anything at all?”

“Yes, a couple of mentions here and there, but no information.”

Gene mulled it over. Thinking aloud, he said, “There was a battle or a series of battles fought here not too long ago. The area is still being patrolled. That might mean that the front lines are not very far away. Maybe fifty miles to the east. Which puts it close to the portal.”

“Close to the what?”

“The thing that will take us to my world. A doorway. Never mind that for now. Let’s reconstruct a possible history. This nation, whatever it was before, some variant of the United States, was taken over by this mysterious molecular entity called InnerVoice. The rest of the world wasn’t taken over, or there were at least parts of it that remained free. These free nations or a group of them finally managed to invade the East Coast and work their way west as far as western Pennsylvania, meeting strong resistance all the way. Around here somewhere a decisive battle was fought, and the defenders threw back the invasion force. The front lines stabilized somewhere east of here, where they remain. Stalemate. The civilian population is kept in the dark, except for some hastily improvised mobilization effort. How does that sound to you?”

“I don’t know. It could be true.”

“It has to be true. No other interpretation fits the facts.”

“How are you feeling, Gene?”

“Huh? Oh, fine. Fine.”

It struck him then that he was feeling fine. No nausea, no anxiety. He wondered if the battle inside his body had been won. If so, how? What inner resources had he drawn on? Maybe it had been sheer fortitude and willpower, with a little adrenaline added to help.

Somehow he doubted it. He had been thoroughly cowed, beaten. InnerVoice and its mechanisms were almost insurmountable for the ordinary person.

But he was not an ordinary person — at least his experiences were not ordinary. After all, he lived in a magic castle in a world of magic. Was something supernatural working here? He couldn’t see how, because he was not a magician himself; rather, he was a bad one. He could cast a few simple spells but seventy percent of the time he botched them completely. And those spells would not help him here in any event. So, what was happening to him? He felt the faint stirrings of something going on inside, but he couldn’t put a finger on what it was.

They had come to the edge of a strip of woods. Ahead was a wide field and no cover until they reached the other side of a highway below, where trees started again.

Gene checked the highway, then the sky. He listened for half a minute. Nothing but birds, the wind through the trees, crickets in the field.

“We’re going to have to make a run for those woods. There’s no choice. We have to cross the highway at some point.”

“We’ll make it, Gene.”

He smiled at her. “I like you.”

“I like you, too.”

“Let’s go.”

Holding hands, they jogged through the high hay. They were halfway down the hill when a helicopter came out of nowhere, followed by two VTOL gunships.

They dove into the hay at the first sound, and for a moment Gene thought they hadn’t been spotted. But the three craft began circling, and he knew his escape attempt was over.

He wished mightily for a gun, for any means of resistance, even for a handy cliff for them both to leap over. Anything was better than going back to InnerVoice. Anything.

But there was nothing he could do. He seethed with anger, wild desperate thoughts springing to mind. He imagined bolts of death leaving his fingers, striking down his tormentors. If only he had magic, like Linda and Sheila! Why? Why had he been left out?

He offered them no resistance. When they were handcuffing him he couldn’t even look at Alice. He felt as though he’d betrayed her.

They put him in the helicopter, her in one of the VTOL craft. The noise of the rotor blades chopped at him, reverberating inside his head. It hurt. The helicopter took off and swung west. The faster VTOLs shot ahead and lost themselves in the sun. He stared out the window at the green earth below, mourning the silent meadows, the desolate farmlands.

The helicopter landed at what looked like a large rear-area field headquarters, an assortment of tents and temporary buildings not unlike Quonset huts but probably made of fiberglass. There were VTOLs in a field nearby and tanks hull-down in camouflage arranged around the perimeter.

They brought him to one of the fiberglass shacks, pushed him down a short corridor and into an office. He was made to sit.

An officer came in, a tall thin man with a bald head and wide shoulders. His uniform was crisp and new. The insignia he wore weren’t recognizable but he had the odor about him of the rank of colonel or better. He came in and sat at the desk.

“I’m Group Leader Y-9,” he said amiably. “You’re Gene Ferraro, correct?”

“I can’t deny it. How do you know my name?”

“Intelligence has been watching you since you were taken. You were obviously a setup. You were sent here to be captured, though what the strange papers and paraphernalia were about we haven’t quite figured out yet. But we treated you like we treat most agents that you people drop. We usually interrogate them after we give them InnerVoice, but we wanted to see what you would do.”

Group Leader Y-9 got up and began to pace. “We suspected you were immune from the start. You put on quite an act, I’ll have to admit. But you were immune to InnerVoice. This is something we’ve been waiting for.” He turned and smiled. “And we’re prepared for it.”

“Prepared for what?”

“For the day when the Outforces developed a nanotechnology to deal with InnerVoice on a molecular level — when they found a magic bullet to kill it inside an individual who has been infected with it. You obviously have that magic bullet working inside you.”

Gene shook his head. “I have no such technology. And I’m not from the Outforces, though I’m in complete sympathy with them.”

Y-9 laughed. “Where did you come from, then? Or did you appear out of thin air?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

Y-9 regarded him curiously for a moment, then sat down.

“But we still don’t know what you’re up to. Care to tell us?”

“I’m trying to get back to Castle Perilous.”

The Group Leader contemplated the ceiling. “We can’t use InnerVoice on you. Drugs probably wouldn’t work. We’ll have to conduct the interrogation the old-fashioned way.”

“It wouldn’t matter what you did to me. I couldn’t tell you anything.”

“Well, we won’t do a thing to you. We’ll do it to her.”

Gene’s stomach twisted into a knot.

“We can’t understand why you would compromise your mission for a temporary infatuation, but it seems as though you’ve done it.”

“Leave her out of this.”

Y-9 grinned. “You can arrange that by telling us what your mission is, how far advanced the defensive nanotechnology is, other things we want to know.”

“I can’t. Believe me, I can’t tell you anything. I don’t belong in this world. I come from something totally outside it.”

Y-9 narrowed his eyes and looked down his nose at Gene. “Very interesting. You’re asking me to believe that you’re mentally unbalanced.”

“I’m not asking you anything except for you to leave Alice out of it.”

“Who?”

“The woman.”

“I see. Well, we can’t do that, I’m afraid. Only you can. The decision is up to you.”

Gene could think of nothing to say or do.

“We’ll let you think about it for a while. But you ought to keep this in mind. We know you people know about our research in biological transmission of InnerVoice. Well, you might as well be the first on your side to know that we’ve solved the main problems. Through gene-splicing we have come up with a bacterium large enough to carry the complete complement of InnerVoice nanomachines within its protoplasm. The ailment it causes is quite communicable and produces most of the symptoms of the common cold. All the world will soon have InnerVoice.”

Gene shook his head. “But you think the other side has defensive measures.”

Y-9 leaned back in his chair. “That’s where we’ve got you. We’ve developed countermeasures, nanomachines that will defend the computers. We think they’ll work.”

Gene burned inside. He wanted to get up and choke the man.

Y-9 suddenly began coughing. He wheezed and choked, sounding as though he were having trouble breathing. His face turned gray as he gasped for breath.

Gene sat there, watching, nonplussed. By the time the Group Leader managed to catch his breath his face was purple. Recovered, he sat back, taking deep breaths. He coughed once more and straightened his collar.

His smile was sheepish and he seemed a little embarrassed. “Must be coming down with a cold myself.” He stood. “Well, as I said we’ll let you think about it. Let the guards know when you want to see me. Otherwise, the interrogation will begin tomorrow morning.”

The man left, and the guards came in and took Gene away.

His cell was an unused windowless office with a cot. Two guards were posted outside the door.

He lay in contemplation, giving particular thought to what had happened in Y-9’s office. Gene had wanted the man dead. And the man had begun to choke to death.

Curious. Was there some connection between Gene’s wish and its fulfillment?

He tried to imagine a reason for there being such. If this thing stirring in him was supernatural, maybe it was the power of precognition. He had seen what was going to happen.

He had ESP? But why? How? It didn’t make sense.

Maybe, just maybe, it was psychokinesis, the ability to influence matter, to manipulate things from a distance. Perhaps he had willed the Group Leader to start choking to death.

No. He knew it was something else.

It was magic!

He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what Linda had often tried to explain to him, the lines of force. They were supposed to crisscross, intersect, weave into nodes or focus points, and from those points one drew power. Could he sense them?

He tried. He thought of the weave of fabric, enmeshed strands of fiber. No. Farther apart, looser. Like intersecting pipelines carrying energy, they crosshatched the earth in an endless grid of power. You just had to know, first, that this network was there, and, second, how to tap its power.

How did you tap its power? He thought of a transformer on a high-tension line, stepping down the voltage into usable range, controlling the energy, transforming it into something that could serve useful purposes.

Like what, for instance?

He stood up to try a little experiment. He thought that it would be a fine idea if the shabby plastic cot would lift up in the air. Just rise up, of its own accord, and settle back down.

He had no spells, no incantations. He couldn’t work that way. It was simply a matter of focusing power, of directing energy.

Nothing happened.

Okay, use an incantation. Something to concentrate his mind on the task. Maybe that’s what incantations were for. Say something, say anything.

“Do it,” he said.

The cot didn’t do anything.

“Do it. Do it.”

He pointed a finger at it.

“Do it. Do it. Do it now.”

The cot moved, and it surprised him. Don’t blow it, he told himself. It’s real, use the power.

“Do it, do it, do it now,” he intoned.

One end of the cot rose.

“Do it, cot.”

The other end rose and the cot lifted into the air. It floated almost to the ceiling before stopping. He held out both hands and urged the thing back down. It came back down and settled to the floor.

Was that it? Was that his limit? Just being able to move inconsequential objects around? Or was he more powerful than that?

He was feeling very powerful, very powerful indeed. He knew now what had defeated InnerVoice. Not willpower, but magic power.

He sat back down. What would happen if, say, he wished the guards outside the door to lose consciousness? He asked himself how that would be accomplished. The best way would be to imagine the blood draining away from their heads. That would put them out cold. Or maybe it would be better to picture them just keeling over, don’t worry about the mechanics of it. No need to —

Something thumped against the door.

He got up and went to it, listening. He heard nothing outside.

How to get out? Imagine the door unlocking, the metal tab pulling out of the slot in the jamb.

He tried the door, and it opened. One of the guards had been slumped against it and he spilled into the room. Gene looked at him. His eyelids were fluttering. The man would be coming around shortly. Gene didn’t know how it would be accomplished, but he imagined the guard falling asleep and staying asleep for a long time.

He did the same to the other guard. Neither moved.

He reached for one of their guns, but had second thoughts. He’d never shoot his way out. Besides, he really didn’t think he’d need the gun.

He went out a back window.