Elora looked at her watch and sent Monq a text. Three hours, seventeen minutes.
Ram pulled up to his elbows. “What’s wrong?”
She turned back to look at him.
“I clocked three hours, seventeen minutes that the gas was effective on me. I was just sitting here wondering what would happen if that wasn’t enough time to… take care of things. And I was thinking about sending Monq another text asking if there is enough Equalizing gas in the system to deliver a second round.”
Ram reached out and ran his fingertips down her spine, which gave her a pleasant shiver from head to toe.
“You’re worryin’ the thin’ more than you should. I’m gettin’ there is wisdom in precaution to a point. But the chance of Jefferson Unit comin’ under attack? Dwellin’ on it is just silly. ‘Tis why we live here, you know.”
She turned and grinned at him. “Oh. Is that why we’re here? I thought it was for the free and plentiful babysitting.”
“’Aye. ‘Tis a nice perk and one we shall miss when we leave.”
CHAPTER 5
Stagsnare Dimension
Archer had looked at the equation from every angle. A thousand times. He couldn’t solve for the unknown because he was missing a critical factor. His superiors wanted results immediately. Nothing new about that. When had they ever said, “We want results. Take your time.”? The face that the puzzle was missing essential pieces was irrelevant so far as they were concerned.
He sighed, turned over, and looked at the bright LED display on the alarm clock, the only light in the darkness. Sleeplessness had been more rule than exception for a long time. He spent his nights tossing, turning and cursing at himself. At the moment he was engaged in his usual nocturnal pastime, staring at the clock that mocked him. Time. It was his biggest problem. Because he’d run out of it.
The Council had decided that a second expedition would be launched to find the escaped Laiwynn royal. It had been less than three months since the last had claimed the lives of twelve young healthy Ralengclan males, each of whom would have been an asset to the gene pool. They were officially classified as MIA rather than KIA, but if anyone thought there was a chance that they’d survived, they weren’t optimists. They were fools.
Of course there were a few detractors who were cynical enough to realize that MIA meant not having to pay the families death benefits. Bastards.
Politics followed its normal course of bureaucratic ineptitude and rewarded the idiot in charge of the senseless debacle, Lt. Rothesay, with a promotion to Council membership.
Although Archer had no proof, he had theorized that a "placeholder" was required for each life signature in a particular dimension. He wished he could claim authorship of the idea, but the truth was that there was an obscure reference to something of the sort in a fragment recovered from Monq’s journals.
If the princess had survived the trip to another dimension – and there was no proof of that - she would theoretically have gone to a dimension where two conditions were met: a life signature matching Monq's and a "placeholder" for her. In other words, someone who matched her unique life pattern, but was deceased.
The Council had been in far too big a hurry to explore that possibility. When the first team failed to return on the appointed date, or any thereafter, Council members had decided to grant Archer three months to better prepare for the next trip.
Archer had tried to impress upon them that, if his theory was correct and he sent someone to a dimension where the matching life signature was occupied, they would simply cease to exist - as in vanish or disappear. The idea of that had chilled him before. After having been instrumental in wiping out the lives of the entire expedition, his conscience was bruised and constantly throbbing. No doubt the root cause of his insomnia.
Truthfully, the additional time had done little to change anything. He continued to cling to the original premise of his working theory, but the reprieve of three months had rendered nothing in the way of new evidence. Just guessing, guessing and more guessing.
Archer wasn’t into guessing. Scientists pride themselves on dealing in facts. Nothing was more uncomfortable than playing parlor games with cosmic operations and yet that was exactly what he found himself doing.
Without the benefit of reliable data and replicable results, there was nowhere to turn except to gut feeling. His mother’s intuition had been fodder for inside family joking that bordered on ridicule, but that intuition was also typically unerring in a way that had been disturbing to a budding young scientist. There was an effect without an explainable cause.
The chasm between physics and metaphysics was not easily bridged because adherents of each were passionate about their dissimilar beliefs, not to mention that both sides were convinced that they were “right”.
Still, he found himself hoping, to gods he didn’t believe in, that he had inherited a little bit of his mother’s intuitive gift. Another crop of young lives depended on it.
Of course, someone was in line to feed the universal constant of sacrifice, but at least that sacrifice would be on the part of nameless, faceless young men who had no connection to him and their nameless, faceless mothers, wives, siblings, friends and maybe children. He wouldn’t again make the mistake of engaging any of the probable victims in conversation as he’d done with Rystrome. He would send them on their way without so much as making eye contact. Better for everybody that way.
While he lay in the dark alone, wide awake and staring at the red LED light on the clock, thinking about the course of events that he would put in motion the next day, he tried – hard - to not focus on the likely outcome of the mission.
He blamed himself for the entire thing. Himself and his big mouth. If he hadn’t revealed that he’d deciphered the code Monq had used to map the Laiwynn’s destination, he could have claimed – honestly – that the search was infinitely hopeless, a grain of sand in the Sahara. But he had reason to believe it was narrowed down to less than twenty possible destinations.
When he began to make out gray stripes on the ceiling, it meant first light was streaming past shutter slats. It was a relief of sorts. He could set all hope of sleep aside and move on. So he threw off the covers, grateful for an excuse to get up and fill the silence with noise and other distractions.
He showered, shaved, pulled on clothes and made his way to work. That meant opening his apartment door and walking fifteen feet to his main computer. He’d taken over the basement complex that had formerly belonged to Thelonius M. Monq. It included a well-stocked study-library, a large lab and a bachelor apartment that was comfortable and stylish in a medieval minimalist way. He’d been given a generous allowance to make changes, but found that the setup suited him as it was. So the allowance had been funneled into a scholarship program for Lt. Rystrome’s children. That was why Rystrome had volunteered – to get the money to educate his children. Archer shook his head and then shook off thinking about that.
He glanced at his watch. One hour until commencement of the death parade. That wasn’t the official name of the project, of course, but it’s what he called it in his own head. Before his assignment was complete there were going to be a lot of corpses. It was inevitable. And it was a waste. All the lives that would be cut short, all the squandered potential, just for a dubious seek-and-destroy with one inconsequential Laiwynn girl as the target. One who most likely died in her escape attempt. What a gigantic waste of resources! He didn’t agree with it, but was powerless to stop it.