In the Empire of Shadow

Chapter Three

Pel eyed the gathered group with some dismay.

All four of the Earthpeople had eventually gotten the idea and realized that the road home led through Shadow’s world; now they all stood in a little bunch to one side of the staging area. They wore hand-me-downs and cast-offs; their own clothes were lost or ruined, leaving them in borrowed slacks and surplus T-shirts and old boots. Susan Nguyen had managed to hang onto her big black handbag through all their adventures, but everything else they wore came from the charity of the Galactic Empire, and in consequence they looked mismatched and scruffy.

In the center of the assembly room stood Raven of Stormcrack Keep, dramatically clad in his customary black velvet, calling and waving for order. Three fingers of his left hand were bandaged together, and his movements still had a certain stiffness to them; his arms were raised, but did not move as smoothly and freely as they ought.

It was a mystery to Pel just where Raven had gotten his clothes; when he had been taken aboard Emperor Edward VII for the flight to Base One he had worn only a tattered green silk bathrobe. Perhaps the Empire had been generous with him in return for his enthusiastic opposition to Shadow-or perhaps his own garments had somehow been recovered and repaired.

Beside Raven on his right stood Stoddard-none of the Earthpeople knew any other name for him, or even whether Stoddard was a family name or his given name-in a borrowed purple uniform with the insignia removed, since his own leathers had been lost or ruined somewhere along the way.

On Raven’s left stood the wizard Valadrakul of Warricken, and a step behind him was Elani, also a wizard. Some of their original garments, like Susan’s purse, had been recovered, somewhat the worse for wear, so that Elani wore her dark red wool robe, now heavily stained and with a few tears in the fabric hastily sewn shut. Valadrakul’s calf-length embroidered vest incongruously covered most of a borrowed Imperial uniform. He had worn braids and long hair before his arrival in the Galactic Empire, and had lost one braid and some skin on Zeta Leo III; now his hair was cut short and trimmed in the bristly Imperial military style. Where Imperial soldiers were always clean-shaven, however, Valadrakul wore a full beard, which made for an odd combination.

These four, Pel knew, were all that remained of Raven’s cell of the organized resistance against Shadow’s rule in Stormcrack Keep’s demesne; all the other members of Raven’s little group were dead or lost, their remains scattered across two universes.

Of course, Raven claimed that there were other resistance groups, dozens of them, and that they formed a network that had even placed spies in the Galactic Empire and sent envoys to the Imperial Court. Pel had no way of knowing how much of that was true, but in any case, Raven’s party had been cut off, and no longer knew how to contact the others.

At least, so they said.

Facing Raven was a stocky, balding man in a purple uniform, his insignia proclaiming him a full colonel. He had given his name as Carson. Behind him was arrayed his squad, some fifteen men-all of them white, of course, and most of them blond. The Galactic Empire did not believe in mixing races; Pel had learned that much during his time here. The Delta Scorpius system, where Base One orbited, was entirely reserved for whites. Pel had been told that planets and bases existed where there were blacks and Orientals and other non-whites, either alone or in combination, but he had never seen any. The only non-white at Base One was Susan; even Raven, with his Mediterranean complexion, was dark enough to sometimes draw curious and uneasy looks.

So here were fifteen of the Empire’s finest, which meant Aryans, in full uniform, hair cut short, tall polished boots gleaming, helmets hung on their Sam Browne belts. The fancy belts apparently indicated that they were a special elite force of some sort; the crew of I.S.S. Ruthless hadn’t been so equipped.

If the uniforms had been black or gray, instead of purple, Pel thought they’d have looked like fine little Nazis.

And why a group that small was under the command of a colonel, rather than a lieutenant or even just a non-com, Pel didn’t know. Maybe Carson’s rank was intended to impress someone. It did not, however, impress Pel.

Standing off to the side was one more person in an Imperial uniform, this one with an ordinary belt, dull-finished half-boots, and the black and gold patch of a Special on her shoulder, a rather plain young woman Pel knew from his previous adventures. She had no helmet in sight, and no sidearm. Pel knew her as Registered Master Telepath Proserpine Thorpe-Prossie, to her friends.

Hers was the only familiar face in the Imperial contingent. Pel had hoped that the surviving members of the former crew of Ruthless would all be included-he had gotten to know them somewhat, and to respect them. Especially, Pel thought, in comparison with most of the Imperial military personnel he had encountered at Base One, many of whom seemed virtual parodies of dim-witted pomposity.

The military didn’t have to be like that, Pel knew; back on Earth, in the U.S., even the Marines generally weren’t as absurd as the bunch at Base One.

He looked for a familiar face in Carson’s squad, and didn’t find it. Captain Cahn was not there, nor Smith, Mervyn, Soorn, or Lieutenant Drummond.

Lampert was not there because he was still missing, last seen on Zeta Leo III. Cahn himself was probably still in a hospital somewhere, getting his bones reassembled-he had been thrown off a rooftop on Zeta Leo III.

And Cartwright, Peabody, and Lieutenant Godwin were dead, of course. Like Squire Donald a’ Benton, and little Grummetty, and Alella, all of them dead, somewhere in the Galactic Empire.

And like Pel’s wife Nancy, and their daughter Rachel.

So there were eight survivors from the other two universes here, and even counting Prossie as an ally, that left them a minority of the group. Carson’s fifteen men-fifteen strangers-were the majority.

Pel was of the opinion that that was likely to cause trouble. Raven was certain to consider himself the leader of the entire enterprise, and from the look of it, Colonel Carson did not care to yield the point.

Colonel Carson might also have some pretty serious reservations about allowing the Earthpeople to go home. Pel thought that he and Amy could probably have convinced Captain Cahn to let them go-after all, the Earthpeople had gotten Cahn and his crew out of the Rockville jail; shouldn’t he return the favor?

But Carson was a complete stranger, and his presence could be a real problem.

Still, once they were in Shadow’s universe, the Imperials would no longer have their whole empire backing them up, and their blasters would not work.

Did they know that? Had they picked that up from Cahn’s reports?

Pel remembered the battle that had sent the earlier group fleeing through the magical opening from Shadow’s universe into the Empire’s reality. Shadow had sent hordes of monsters against them, and the Imperials’ blasters might as well have been harmless toys for all the good they did. Valadrakul’s spells had worked, and Susan’s pistol…

Susan’s pistol.

Pel blinked, and looked at Susan.

Yes, she had her purse. The big black handbag hung from one shoulder. Despite everything, she still had it.

Carson and Raven were arguing about something, and everyone else was watching the dispute, or else busy with their own affairs. Pel leaned over and whispered to Susan, “You armed?”

She threw him a quick warning glance, then answered, not looking at him, “Yes.”

He took his cue from her, and did not look at her as he asked, “Loaded?”

She lowered her head slightly, in a barely-perceptible nod.

A moment later, as some minor official was herding the entire party of twenty-five into the ship that would carry them through the space-warp, Susan managed to step away from Ted and closer to Pel.

“.38 Police Special,” she whispered. “Six-shot revolver, but I only have four rounds left. Why?”

“Just wanted to know what’s available, in case we have any disagreements on the other side.” He threw a meaningful glance in Colonel Carson’s direction.

She nodded.

Just behind them, Amy asked, “What are you two talking about?”

Pel glanced at Ted, and at the Imperials, and said, “Tell you later.”

Amy, annoyed, decided not to press the issue on the spot.

“You’d better,” she said.

Pel smiled. He glanced about.

His gaze fell on Prossie Thorpe, and his smile vanished. If she read what he was thinking, the whole game might be up right there.

Or it might not; he wasn’t sure just what side Prossie would take.

To be safe, though, he decided it would be best not to think about any of that stuff. Not about the pistol, or using Elani’s magic to get back to Earth, or anything the Empire might not like. But of course, trying not to think about it was almost impossible.

If he thought about something else instead, maybe he could distract himself.

Well, here was something-just how were they going to go through the space-warp? He had seen the machinery the Imperials used to generate their opening between universes, and it was absolutely gigantic-Hoover Dam would make one of the support brackets, and the Washington Monument an insulator. The resulting field was a couple of hundred yards across-and a few hundred yards away from the machinery, out in the vacuum of open space. They would need some sort of transport to reach it.

Captain Cahn’s expedition to Earth had flown through the warp aboard I.S.S. Ruthless, and had immediately discovered, on the other side, that anti-gravity didn’t work in Earth’s universe.

Their blasters hadn’t worked on Earth, either.

And their blasters hadn’t worked in Shadow’s realm.

Pel suspected that meant that anti-gravity wouldn’t work in Shadow’s realm, either.

So how would the whole group get there?

Was the Empire going to throw away another ship, and count on Raven’s wizards to send everyone back? Had they come up with some other approach?

A glider might work. The space-warp generator operated in the hard vacuum of space, but an anti-gravity craft with wings could use its engines on the Imperial side and its wings on the Shadow side.

“All right, folks-everybody, your attention, please!”

Pel realized he was staring at the dull gray asteroidal stone of the floor; he looked up, startled. Colonel Carson was speaking.

“We’re all here, and I think we’re all ready. We’ve got our team equipment loaded already, and if you’ll all bring your personal belongings, I think it’s time to board the ship and get this show on the road!” He smiled-Pel supposed the smile was intended to be encouraging and friendly, but it came out rather stiff and stupid.

Pel had very little in the way of personal belongings; unlike Susan, he had been unable to retrieve anything after his stint working the mines of Zeta Leo III.

Not that he’d had much of anything, in any case. He hadn’t carried a purse; when he’d stepped through the magical portal in his basement, planning a five-minute visit to Stormcrack Keep and a quick return home, all he’d had was the clothes he wore and the contents of his pockets. A shirt, a belt, pants, socks, and shoes; his wallet, with credit cards and a few dollars in currency that wouldn’t pass anywhere in this universe; the key to his car; and that was about it.

And even those items were all lost.

Nancy had had her purse, but she was dead and her purse was gone.

Rachel was dead, too.

So all Pel had to carry were the pair of pants he had been given at the mine, and somebody’s cast-off Imperial uniforms.

With a sigh, he picked up the little bundle and marched in the direction Carson had indicated.

* * * *

The Empire, it seemed, had decided to throw away another ship.

This one, I.S.S. Christopher, was a small short-range personnel transport, smaller than Ruthless, perhaps seventy feet from nose to tail-certainly no more than that. It was purple and pink, but not particularly elaborate in its design or decoration-at least, not by Imperial standards. To Amy, with its fins and curves and two-tone paint job, it still looked like something out of a comic book or a campy movie.

She shivered slightly; the air of the flight deck felt thin and chilly. She knew that had to be an illusion, though; the door they had entered through had been wide open to the rest of Base One, so the air would have equalized. It was just the knowledge that the flight deck itself was an air lock that was bothering her, she was sure-that, and the general stress and uneasiness she had been living with since arriving at Base One. She glanced up at the immense outer door; that mass of steel girders and panels was all that stood between them and outer space, and in a few minutes it would be opened.

She quickly looked away, back at Christopher.

The entire party trooped inside and found seats in the main cabin, which was starkly utilitarian-gray steel ribs overhead, gray steel plates underfoot, and eight rows of four seats apiece, gray steel seats upholstered in worn maroon leatherette, arranged in pairs on either side of a central aisle, like some military imitation of an airliner. Three bare lightbulbs, in a line down the center of the curving ceiling, provided light.

Amy thought that Ruthless, from what little she had seen of it, had been far more luxurious. But then, Ruthless was a long-range craft, Captain Cahn had told her, and had been on a diplomatic mission.

Furthermore, they hadn’t known they were throwing it away. This time they presumably did, so naturally they’d picked a less valuable ship.

There were no seat belts-Amy had noticed long ago that the Galactic Empire wasn’t much on safety equipment. Personal belongings were stowed under the seats; anything large or awkward was taken to the back of the cabin, where one of Colonel Carson’s men heaved it through a door and onto a shelf in the storage area astern, where the soldiers’ packs and various other supplies were already stowed. The soldiers retained their helmets and sidearms, but not much else; the Earthpeople generally kept whatever they had.

Two more of Colonel Carson’s men split off from the main group and trooped forward, into the cockpit; Carson himself stayed until everyone else was sorted out and seated, and then he, too, vanished through the forward door.

There were half a dozen portholes, small ones with opaque covers dogged down over them; Amy found herself seated beside one, and immediately set about uncovering it.

Susan, seated beside her, watched with interest.

As Amy had suspected, the ship was already off the deck and moving slowly toward the air lock door. Anti-gravity was quick and silent, and the Empire, once it finally started something, didn’t waste time.

The space-warp machine was out on the surface of Base One, halfway around the asteroid. They would be out in empty space for a few minutes. Amy had traveled through space before, on Emerald Princess and Emperor Edward VII, but those were big, comfortable ships, and appeared far safer than Christopher. She felt a twinge of uneasiness.

They stopped moving; there was no change in sensation, any more than there had been when they lifted off, but Amy could see that the flight deck wall was no longer sliding past. For a long moment they hung suspended as air was pumped out of the chamber, the ship no longer moving forward, but swaying gently in the air currents. The process began with a distant boom that was audible even through the thick steel of the ship, and then a dull roaring that gradually faded as the air thinned.

At last silence fell; the ship was floating in vacuum, with nothing to carry vibration. Then, finally, the outer door swung open before them-Amy had to press her face against the after edge of the porthole to see it clearly, but she managed it. There was no sound, of course; the immense steel barrier moved in utter silence, swinging slowly aside and revealing the white blaze of stars beyond.

The ship began moving forward again-as always with anti-gravity, there was no sensation of motion, but Amy could see the air lock walls sliding by again.

Then they turned about. Amy’s inner ear still registered nothing, but she saw the universe wheel vertiginously past the porthole. The open door of the air lock was replaced by an infinity of stars and blackness; then the gray steel of Base One’s artificial walls appeared along one side, followed by a rough, dark stretch of the original asteroid, then by more steel.

She had hoped to have a good look at the space-warp generator, but she realized quickly she was on the wrong side of the ship to see it clearly. Still, by repeating her edge-of-the-port maneuver, she was able to see it ahead.

It was ablaze with light. The gargantuan ring of equipment was glowing violet-white, so bright Amy found she couldn’t look at it directly even when she found the right angle. Everything else vanished into the blackness of space in contrast.

The airless void gave the whole scene an impossible sharpness, a clarity that perversely made it seem dreamlike and unreal. The waking world as Amy knew it was never so stark and clean-edged.

Then the ship surged forward-still with no sensation of acceleration-and that intense light surrounded the vessel, spilling in through the port so intensely that Amy turned away, momentarily blinded. Others exclaimed in pain and surprise at the unexpected brilliance as she groped for the porthole cover and slammed it shut.

Her eyesight was almost back to normal when, abruptly, there was a feeling of motion.

The ship was falling. Amy could feel it. Her stomach surged uncomfortably; she clutched at her seat, wondering why the hell the Empire didn’t use seat belts and shoulder harnesses.

Everyone else felt it, as well; Elani screamed, Prossie Thorpe shrieked something that might have been, “Here we go again!,” and several of Carson’s men swore.

To add to the confusion, the cabin lights went out, plunging them into utter darkness.

They struck something, hard; the ship rocked wildly, and Amy heard crunching and snapping. They fell again, and then, again, struck something and broke through it.

Then, with a sudden hard bump, they were down. Amy’s head rocked back and forth, but she kept her seat and was undamaged. Judging by the sounds she heard in the stygian gloom not everyone was equally fortunate.

She waited for a few seconds, to be sure the ship was not going to move again; she realized that it lay at a slight angle, the artificial gravity that made it always seem level gone. It wasn’t much of an angle; she didn’t hear anything rolling or sliding down the slope after the first second or two.

At first it felt as if they had bounced, as if the ship were now rising, but then Amy realized that was just higher gravity. Base One had artificial gravity set at one Imperial gee-which was less than Earth’s gravity. Earth, she had been told, had a gravitational field approximating 1.15 gees, by Imperial measurements.

And Shadow’s conquered world was 1.3, which, she was sure, was what they were now experiencing. That heavy feeling, as if they were in an ascending elevator, was not going to go away.

Once she was convinced they weren’t going anywhere, she groped her way up the wall and found the porthole. Carefully, she lifted the porthole cover slightly; light spilled in. This was not the incredible eye-scorching glare of the space-warp, however; the light that now shone around the rim seemed quite manageable. In fact, it looked like ordinary daylight-perhaps a bit thin and watery, but daylight.

Amy swung the cover aside and looked out at Shadow’s world.

She couldn’t see much. The trunk of a huge tree, standing no more than two yards away, blocked most of her view. Turning slightly, she could see that broken branches and foliage were scattered across the ship’s fin, a few feet aft of the port. The fin itself was bent and battered, its pink paint scratched and scraped, revealing black primer and shining steel. Yellow sunlight slanted down, glittering coolly on the pink paint and green spring leaves-the sun here in Shadow’s realm, in what she and some of the others had taken to calling Faerie, was paler than Earth’s, its light not the warmer hue Amy would have expected back home.

Although she had no reason to think she could tell the difference, the light seemed to her like morning light, rather than afternoon.

“What the hell happened?” an unfamiliar male voice demanded of no one in particular.

Amy turned away from the port and peered into the gray gloom of the main cabin.

“We landed,” she said. “Hit a few trees on the way down.”

“Trees?” a timid voice asked.

“Big plants,” a more confident voice replied. “Some of them get to be a hundred feet tall, or more. They’re what wood comes from.”

“We know what trees are, idiot!” a new voice snapped.

“Not all of us, we don’t,” another retorted. “Or at any rate I’ve never seen any!”

“Well, you’ll see plenty of them here,” Amy called, while wondering how anyone could have grown to adulthood without seeing a tree.

Then she remembered what she had seen of the Galactic Empire-the backwater world Psi Cassiopeia II, which was mostly lifeless desert and entirely treeless; the rebel colony on Zeta Leo III, where she had been held captive on an immense corn farm where the only trees were a handful of six-foot shrubs near the house, obviously just recently planted; and the hollowed-out asteroid called Base One. She might have seen a tree or two somewhere besides that farm, but there certainly hadn’t been very many. She had to remember that these people weren’t from Earth; most of them weren’t even from the equivalent homeworld of the Empire, Terra.

Maybe trees had never evolved anywhere in the Galactic Empire’s universe except Terra. Even so, she would have expected the Imperials to have exported them to all their colonies.

Well, she had expected a lot of things that didn’t seem to have happened.

“Your pardon, milady,” Raven said from very near behind her, startling Amy. “Might I trouble you to allow me a look?”

“Of course,” Amy said, getting out of her seat and allowing Raven to lean over and peer out the port. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to see much.”

“Indeed,” Raven agreed wryly, as he took in the sight of the immense tree-trunk. “’Tis scarcely the broad panorama that one might have hoped for.”

“Any idea where we are?”

Raven shook his head. “Marry, milady, though ’tis a grand oak, ’tis hardly one I recognize-for that, how to tell one from the next, an you see but the bole, with no mark upon it save those put there by our craft’s descent? The Empire’s telepaths were consulted in the devising of yon opening ’tween worlds, and our goal was to arrive far enow from Shadow’s demesne for safety, yet close enough to approach it in time, and perchance that’s done, but that scarce names a single spot. Grand oaks such as this might be found in any number of suitable places.”

Emboldened by Raven’s presence, several of the others were now gathering around the port, trying to see out; poor Susan, in the seat beside Amy’s, was being crowded quite rudely, and was twisted almost into fetal position trying to avoid pressure on her burns.

A rush of anger swept through Amy at the sight of that. It was bad enough that the lot of them had been sent off on this stupid journey before their injuries were fully healed, but all those big, strong, healthy men crowding around poor wounded Susan…

“There are other ports you people could open,” Amy pointed out sharply.

Before anyone could reply, the door to the cockpit swung open and Colonel Carson appeared.

“Lord Raven,” he called, “we could use you up front.”

“Your pardon, milady,” Raven said, managing an approximation of a bow despite having his head and shoulders wedged into the narrow space between the back of Amy’s seat and a curving steel rib. He withdrew, made his way past the press of bodies, and strode up the aisle to the cockpit.

Without waiting for an invitation, Stoddard rose and followed his master.

* * * *

Pel took his time unclogging the porthole. After all, the ship wasn’t going anywhere-not unless the Empire had some utterly uncharacteristic surprise up its collective sleeve, some way to get the thing moving in a universe where anti-gravity didn’t work.

And he didn’t really care all that much about Shadow’s universe, except as a step back to Earth.

Ted Deranian was sitting beside him, watching as Pel uncovered the port. Ted was smiling foolishly. Looking at him, it was hard for Pel to believe the man had ever gotten through law school; he looked more like a village idiot than like an attorney.

Still, there was something he had said that tickled at the back of Pel’s mind. It didn’t really make sense unless you accepted Ted’s theory that both Shadow’s universe and the Empire’s universe were all an elaborate dream, but Pel wanted to believe it.

It had been said back at Base One, when Ted had found Pel sitting alone, on the verge of tears as he thought about Nancy and Rachel.

“Don’t worry, Pel,” Ted had told him. “They woke up, that’s all-they’re back on Earth. When you get back there they’ll be waiting for you.”

Then he had caught himself and asked, “But why am I talking to you? You’re not really here.”

He had wandered off, leaving Pel furious at his insensitivity, but the idea that Nancy and Rachel were alive back on Earth had stayed, no matter how hard Pel tried to suppress it.

Maybe they were.

He knew that this wasn’t all just a dream, all these strange things they had been through; he knew that Ted had it wrong, and the Empire and Shadow were real. They weren’t a dream in the usual sense.

But on the other hand, this was an alien universe; Nancy and Rachel did not belong here. The Empire’s universe was equally alien. Had they really, fully crossed over into these alternate realities?

What if they were all really doing some sort of astral travel? Wouldn’t Nancy and Rachel snap back into their own world when their astral selves were destroyed?

Or even if the physical bodies made the transition, was time the same here?

Pel had read plenty of science fiction and fantasy as a kid; he had seen hundreds of movies over the years. Wasn’t there always something somehow unstable about someone who had been removed from his or her proper place? What if that wasn’t just a literary convention, but a deep subconscious understanding of some fundamental fact about reality?

Mightn’t there be some way to change the past, to make Nancy and Rachel have never left Earth?

He and the others were in another dimension, a parallel world, an alternate reality; they were, as Amy put it, in Faerie. The very existence of such a place went against all common sense and previous experience; it threw Pel and Amy and Susan and Ted into the realm of legend, of myth, of fantasy. How could they know any more what the rules were? Back home, dead was dead, and nobody came back-but here? Who knew? Death might be different.

Hadn’t someone written a story about a land like that? “Death Is Different,” that was it-by Lisa Goldstein, perhaps? About a small country somewhere where death wasn’t permanent, where the dead could be seen strolling about.

What if that author had somehow known a truth about this place where Shadow ruled? After all, the worlds of Empire and Shadow so resembled the settings for any number of stories that Pel found it hard to believe it a coincidence; it made more sense to credit it to some sort of psychic leakage between universes, images from one realm finding their way into the subconscious minds of writers in another.

And if that were so, what about all those stories where people rose from the dead, where the protagonist awoke at the end home safe in his own bed, everything restored to what it was before? Were those based on truth?

What if death was different?

On one level he knew that was nonsense. He knew this was all hard fact; Nancy and Rachel were dead. Cartwright and Godwin and Peabody, Grummetty and Alella and Squire Donald, they were all equally real, and all equally dead, and all really dead. He had seen Grummetty’s corpse himself. He had seen Cartwright bleeding as the monsters overwhelmed him. They were all dead, and would stay dead until Judgment Day.

But somewhere, in the back of his mind, where he wanted so much to believe Nancy and Rachel were alive that he could believe anything at all, he still hoped.

He swung open the porthole cover and stared out at the green and gold and deep gray of the forests of Faerie.