In the Empire of Shadow. Lawrence Watt-Evans

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      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 СКАЧАТЬ