In the Empire of Shadow

Chapter Two

We’ve no need of them,” Raven repeated.

“We don’t need them here, either,” General Hart replied, “and they might be useful to you. Our telepaths tell us they have the most amazing assortment of odd information tucked away in their heads; this Earth of theirs seems to make a fetish of spreading information every which way, whether it’s needed or not.”

“And what know they of my world?” Raven protested. “Not so much as a newborn babe at the nurse’s breast!”

Hart shrugged. “So? My men aren’t much better.”

“Soldiers?” Raven waved that away, the natural gesture stiff because of the bandaged fingers of his left hand. “A soldier’s a soldier, man-an they know their jobs, we’ll find use for them in Stormcrack and in Shadow’s lands. But the Earth-folk…”

“Are you bothered because two of them are women?”

Raven, pacing by the wall-map, glanced at the general. “Aye,” he said, “there’s that, and I admit it freely. ’Tis no place for a woman, in the midst of battle.”

“One of your own party’s a woman,” Hart pointed out.

“Elani? Nay, she’s a wizard; ’tis another matter entire.”

“Looks like a woman to me,” Hart said.

Two rooms away a telepath listened in on the conversation, and on the thoughts of the participants. Proserpine Thorpe had been reading the minds of those around her, sometimes whether she wanted to or not, since her earliest childhood; she was rarely surprised by the lies and deceptions of non-telepaths dealing with one another. Even so, the cynicism underlying this particular discussion was more than she would have expected.

General Hart really didn’t care about any plans to destroy Shadow, had no interest at all in the people the mysterious evil had harmed or killed; he just wanted to get rid of all the extra-universal troublemakers before some idiot politician or ambitious underling found some way to exploit them and make him look stupid or ineffective. He didn’t really completely believe in other universes, or that this Shadow thing posed a serious threat; this whole business had happened because nobody kept a close enough eye on that over shy;zealous geek Copley, who should never have made Major, and that pompous civilian fraud Bascombe, the so-called Under-Secretary for Interdimensional Affairs-a post in the Department of Science that existed only because Bascombe had invented it and pulled sufficient strings to get it for himself.

But Copley was out of the way now, thanks to a burst appendix, and Bascombe would be harmless enough by himself once these foreigners were disposed of. If Hart had a chance to send along a couple of his own unwanted subordinates as well, that would be just fine, even if it meant losing a couple of dozen men from his command. The Empire had plenty of soldiers, after all; sending a few on a ridiculous mission was no great loss.

And he seemed quite certain that whoever was sent would be lost.

For his part, Raven cared about almost nothing except destroying Shadow-not so much because of what it had done to thousands of innocents, though to give him credit he did feel a certain regret and anger at such needless cruelty, but because Shadow had harmed him, his family, and his honor. Had Shadow never touched Stormcrack Keep, Raven would still have opposed it, but only from a safe distance.

That was hardly a shock; after all, Raven was, as Prossie had known for weeks, a barbarian.

As it was, though, with his younger brother ruling Stormcrack Keep as Shadow’s puppet, Raven was willing to sacrifice anyone and anything, including Stormcrack itself, to defeat Shadow and avenge himself. He did not care in the least that Amy and Susan might be in danger if they ventured back into his native reality; he cared, rather, that they would be useless, and that their presence might be an inconvenience him, and increase the risks of the party as a whole.

However, he would, in the end, agree to anything General Hart proposed, because it was General Hart who controlled access to the gate between universes-at least for the moment. Once back in his own land Raven would be free to ignore any plans and promises made at Base One-and he intended to do just that. He thought General Hart’s plan for a small, fast-moving strike force that would penetrate Shadow’s fortress and assassinate Shadow to be utter nonsense. Shadow, he knew, was a magical being, and if confronted directly must be fought with magic-though its creatures could be slain with sword or spear, certainly, he doubted that Shadow itself would be bothered by anything so mundane.

Raven’s own plan was to gather whatever magic he could and fling it against Shadow until something got through.

To Raven, as the telepath had seen before, “magic” included not just the magic of his own universe, but any force that he did not comprehend, including Imperial science and Earthly technology.

If he took this proposed Imperial raiding party in, and brought back a few survivors who would attest to the need for other weapons against Shadow, then perhaps the Empire would provide those other weapons. Perhaps, if their “science” could do nothing, they would at least provide the men and swords to dispose of Shadow’s creatures.

So he was agreeing to Hart’s plan, even while he knew it was absurd, in order to draw the Empire into more direct conflict with Shadow.

Prossie knew that according to the rules the Empire set for telepaths, which required the immediate reporting of any sort of treason, or deception of government officials, or other anti-Imperial thought that a telepath might accidentally uncover, she should tell General Hart-but the general already assumed that the whole thing was a suicide mission. He misjudged Raven’s motives for agreeing, thought the man was acting out of some silly romantic notions of courage, honor, and chivalry, but Hart knew that the proposed attack was insane and impossible.

He was deliberately trying to get Raven and the others killed, to get them out of the way. He liked the idea of keeping Shadow there as the Empire’s enemy; it made the military more important if there was a serious foe out there somewhere, rather than just occasional rebels and outlaws to be suppressed.

So he intended to send Raven and his companions, and the Earthpeople, and a few of his own less-desirable underlings off to get killed.

And he intended to send Prossie along. Like most Imperials, he didn’t mind at all if telepaths got killed. Almost everyone hated telepaths; that was a fact that Prossie had lived with all her life. Hart was no exception.

It was only reasonable to want to send a telepath, for communication and espionage reasons, and Hart thought that Prossie, after her previous visit to Earth, might be tainted with dangerous notions.

General Hart wanted her dead.

And as far as Prossie was concerned, that meant that he didn’t deserve to be warned of Raven’s plans.

Besides, even if Hart knew the lordling’s true motives, his own plans wouldn’t change.

Likewise, even if Raven knew Hart’s own intentions, he wouldn’t change his own mind; cooperation was the only way to get home to his own world.

Maybe some of the others should be warned, Prossie thought, but not these two. Aside from the uselessness of such a warning, nobody really wanted to have telepaths telling them what to do, telling them what they had misread or misunderstood or forgotten.

And for that matter, Prossie was not supposed to be listening in in the first place. She had heard her own name mentioned earlier, and had, almost inadvertently, begun eavesdropping. That was a violation of the rules; the Empire had strict penalties for telepaths who spied on innocent citizens, and even worse for those who spied on government officials. If she warned General Hart, or if she warned Raven and he let it slip to an Imperial officer, she could wind up at the whipping post, or on the operating table for a lobotomy, or even hanged.

General Hart was far more likely to order a flogging than to thank her.

Let them go on with it, then.

As for the others-well, that remained to be seen.

Prossie liked the Earthpeople, or at least three of them-Pel and Amy and Susan had such interesting, complicated minds, and so little real hatred or hostility in them. Ted’s poor tangled thoughts she avoided now, but the others she enjoyed, even when Amy was feeling sick and sorry for herself. Raven’s liegeman Stoddard was a good person, the wizards Elani and Valadrakul were no worse than average-Elani had a noble streak under her motherly warmth that was intriguing. Prossie didn’t want to see any of them killed, and she certainly didn’t want to get killed herself.

But although Prossie wished the Earthpeople no ill, getting off Base One and into Shadow’s realm was probably the best thing that could happen to them.

She would not say a word to General Hart.

* * * *

Roughly an hour after the briefing, if that was the name for it, had broken up, while he rambled along one of the endless metal-lined corridors that laced Base One, Pel encountered Susan Nguyen and fell in beside her.

He would not admit, even to himself, that he had been deliberately tracking her down. It was just good luck, he told himself, that he had happened upon her.

Just good luck-but he did have a question or two he very much wanted her to answer.

After mumbled greetings and a few paces of polite silence, he cleared his throat. She glanced up.

“Susan, are you really going to go with Raven’s party into Shadow’s universe?” he asked. “You saw what sort of monsters Shadow controls-you really think this stupid attack squad is going to get anywhere? It seems to me that it’s practically suicide!”

He waited for an answer and was on the verge of concluding that he wasn’t going to get one when Susan suddenly said, “You’ve noticed that the Empire’s technology is different from ours, haven’t you, Mr. Brown? They’ve got anti-gravity and telepathy, but we haven’t seen any sign of computers or electronics, or even radios or telephones. All the same, do you think they might know how to make bugs of some kind, Mr. Brown?”

“Bugs?” Pel blinked.

He hadn’t thought about that. He chewed his lower lip for a moment, glancing along the drab gray walls.

“I suppose they might,” he admitted, “but it doesn’t…”

“Just keep walking,” Susan suggested.

Pel obeyed; together, the two of them strode down the corridor.

“A telepath could hear us, anyway,” Pel muttered.

“But a telepath would have to be listening,” Susan pointed out, “and they really have very few telepaths.”

“For all we know, they have spy-rays or something,” Pel pointed out.

Susan just nodded.

A moment later, as they turned a corner, she said, “You know, all of them are going back to their own universe, not just Raven. Elani’s going.”

Pel glanced at Susan, then turned his gaze resolutely ahead. “I know that,” he said.

He was puzzled by the reference. He was sure Susan had some good reason for mentioning Elani, and not any of Raven’s other companions. Susan and Elani weren’t particularly close; in fact, Pel couldn’t remember ever seeing the two of them together for more than a few seconds at a stretch, or speaking to each other at all beyond common courtesies.

Elani was one of the two wizards in Raven’s band, and the only surviving female; did either of those facts signify anything important?

“You know, I’d rather go back home to Earth, instead of Shadow,” Susan remarked. “It’s a shame we can’t go back the way we came.”

Pel started to reply, but just then Susan turned, adding, “And here’s my door. It’s been a pleasure seeing you, Mr. Brown.”

She stepped into her room, and left Pel standing in the passageway, staring stupidly at the blank closed door.

Back the way they came?

They had arrived at Base One by spaceship. They could hardly use an ordinary spaceship to get back to Earth; spaceships couldn’t travel between universes. In all the Galactic Empire, so far as they knew, there was only one space-warp generator, and it was a huge thing here at Base One, not something that could be mounted on a spaceship.

Before that spaceship they had been on another one, Pel remembered, and another before that-but before that, they had arrived on a worthless desert planet called Psi Cassiopeia II through a magical portal from Shadow’s realm.

Pel blinked.

They had come through a magical portal.

A magical portal that Elani had created.

And they had gotten to Shadow’s realm by stepping through another, similar portal from Pel’s own basement.

Pel suddenly felt very stupid.

They didn’t need the Empire’s gigantic space-warp machine to send them to Earth. All they needed was Elani.

Of course, the laws of nature differed drastically from one universe to the next, so none of Elani’s magic worked here in the Galactic Empire, any more than his long-lost digital watch had, any more than anti-gravity worked on Earth. Elani couldn’t send them back home from Base One.

But if they went with her into Shadow’s realm, she could certainly send them home from there.

Now why, Pel wondered, hadn’t he thought of that himself, and much sooner?

He shook his head. He’d been too busy with other thoughts to look at the situation logically, he decided. He twisted his mouth into a wry smile as he started back toward his own assigned room.

It appeared he’d be volunteering to join Raven’s strike team after all.

In the next corridor, Prossie Thorpe smiled to herself. The telepath hadn’t had to so much as drop a hint; Susan Nguyen had figured it out for herself, and she would let the others know. The mission would go on as planned-but not necessarily as General Hart expected.