Allies

Chapter One

The Menin child, wrapped in a towel after his bath, sat warm and safe and very bored. Using both hands, and his lap as a platform, he flicked through channels on the wall-sized display in front of him.

One world had funny grass, like little green snakes; the child occasionally heard a sound in the distance, a screaming and ululating sound, like savages at prayer.

Another world was dead and airless. His father told him that world had a lot of resources that were useful for maintaining the ship, which was the only reason this channel had been set up. The receiver on that end was encased in a transparent box, an airlock that wouldn't function unless the receiver was switched off again and all Menin in the box were wearing spacesuits.

But the boy wondered what would happen if those measures failed, if the airlock breached while the receiver was still on, still tuned in to the Menin ship. His father told a horror story; the whole ship depressurized, all of its air and life and heat sucked out and dispersed among the stars.

The barrier that separated worlds was thin. It could be passed through by any molecule moving beyond a certain threshold of speed. Including air. As the boy continued flipping through channels, he caught an occasional foreign smell or felt a soft breeze on his cheek, the result of a strong wind blowing through and being muffled by the barrier.

The boy mashed the button as fast as he could, watching worlds and rooms flashing by. He had been to all of them, seen all there was to see.

Mother, he said in his native tongue. I want to go somewhere new.

But she didn't hear him. She was busy with his sister. The girl was refusing to eat, wrenching her head from side to side to avoid the spoon and, at the same time, keeping her eyes fixed on the rattling toy gripped in one pudgy fist.

Eat, now, please! their mother howled, growing impatient.

In return, the girl offered a scream of her own, a wordless squeal of defiance.

The boy sighed, hitting the channel button one more time. He had reached the end of the feeds, and this next button press ought to bring him back where he had started.

But instead, he found himself looking at something else. It was an icy landscape, covered in snow. Dark, snow-laden trees offered a shade that looked deep enough to kill. A mountain rose in the distance, forbidding and alien. The boy swallowed, staring in awe. This was a new place. The feed must have just gone up. It looked cold, dangerous, horrifically hostile, and the boy wanted nothing more than to explore it.

With another scream, his sister threw her toy. It arced over the boy’s head, hit the barrier, and shot through into the alien world. It landed in a flurry of snow, burying itself but leaving a hollow behind. The boy jumped up, pulling his damp towel tight around himself, and ran forward. He was grateful for the chance to get in there. But he had to move fast, before his mother said otherwise. She would make him bundle up. Worse, she would make him wait for his father so they could go in together. The boy loved his father, but sometimes he wanted to do things on his own.

He hopped through the barrier, ignoring a call from his mother. His foot sank into ice and snow, numbing him to the bone. He had never felt such cold before, except in his nightmares. But he strode bravely forward, teeth chattering. The lock of wet hair that fell over his forehead froze solid; it swung like a pendulum, slapping against his skull.

The wind was like a living beast. It moved in a circle around him, as though he were its prey. It covered him like a blanket that ripped heat and all memory of heat away. It howled like a beast as well, like a monster that covered the world. Like a creature in mourning, it howled through the eons. The boy had a feeling it would never stop.

He bent forward, reaching toward the hollow where his sister's toy had fallen. It had punched into the snow at an angle, a diagram of trajectory frozen into this eternal blanket of white.

A gust of wind came suddenly. It was stronger than anything the boy had ever felt. It was stronger than his father, even. It caught him like a sail, picking him up off the ground and slinging him to the side. He heard trees cracking and crashing down around him. He heard a distant rumble, a howl beyond the moan of the wind as of some giant creature waking from its slumber. Looking up dizzily from his new spot in the snow, the boy saw that the mountain was moving. That was what it seemed like to him. It was shaking off its coat of snow, sending it all crashing downward in growing waves.

He turned, the toy clutched in frozen fingers. There was the wall, built by the Mindseat's crew. And there was his mother, reaching through the portal with one arm and screaming his name silently.

The boy stood and rushed forward, stumbling in the ice, pushed back and forth by a sliding snake of wind.

A shadow came out of the dark, tumbling toward him like the edge of a sword. It was a tree. The wind had broken it. And now, with an echoing crash that chilled the boy more thoroughly than any snow or wind ever could, it smashed through the wall and erased the portal.

He squatted there a moment, wincing and shielding his head from a blast of flying needles and bits of wood. He remained perfectly still for only about five seconds, maybe ten. Just until the fallen tree had settled. But when he tried to stand, it was an effort to bend the towel out of the position it had frozen into. It made a crinkling sound and a snap as a piece of it broke off and fell into the snow. Already, the boy's feet were burning and tingling with cold. And now he would have given anything to have his mother here, forcing him into warm clothes. To have his father beside him, squinting toward the horizon and making his plans. Thinking his grown-up thoughts, so mysterious and powerful.

The boy limped forward with difficulty, leaving a thin trail of blood from where he had sliced his foot on a knife-edge of ice. He didn't feel the wound at all.

The wall was gone, and so was the device that allowed the portal to function. They had been broken just as completely as the boy's hope of making it home.

All that remained of the familiar and the safe was his mother's arm. It had been severed as the portal collapsed, and now lay frozen in its gesture of beckoning. The blood was already starting to crystallize.

Chapter Two

The Mindseat was busy. The servants who would ordinarily take care of such matters were also busy. The world the Menin occupied was about to grow by a million-fold, or more. Sudden access to an increasing number of worlds, places they hadn't seen in years and never thought they would see again, would alter the flow of society in many ways, some predictable and some totally unexpected.

The halls were no longer patrolled constantly, watched over by servants in armor who made sure all was well; they were off doing the same duties on an alien planet, stretching their legs and seeing new things.

It fell to the other fighting males in the hall, who were either sleeping off the latest challenge or the latest round of passionate love with their concubines. They all heard the screaming and came out into the hall, naked and groggy, to the unexpected sight of a bleeding female. One of her arms was gone; with the other, she clutched a crying girl-child to her side.

They ran forward. Someone found a trauma kit and used it to staunch the bleeding. Someone else had his concubine take the child and care for it. Someone else went running off. They knew who this injured female belonged to and went to try and find him.

For a time, they all worked together to solve a problem that had nothing to do with pride, glory, the ownership of females. It was another example of the changing ways of society. The Menin ship was no longer self-contained, a pressurized and stagnant environment. Outside forces now acted on it, forcing the flow of life to alter like a boulder thrown into the middle of a river.

They heard the female's story. They went into the rooms of her male, which usually would be considered a great breach of protocol, and worked to confirm the details. The boy was gone. And though there was plenty of blood, they could not find the arm, itself.

One of the males handled the remote, flipping through channels. On each channel, one of the others would step through and begin searching. By the time the remote-handler got back around to them, they would come stepping back inside the Menin ship and shrug. They could not find the arm anywhere. And so the female's story was true; she had lost it during the destruction of a portal, a feed they could no longer access, a world that was deathly cold. And the boy was trapped there.

As they stood around pondering, the father of the boy arrived like a cyclone. He flew through the door holding his daughter, split flying from his mouth as he screamed. The other males retreated quickly, shrinking back from his fury. They thought he was angry with them, that he would soon resort to violence. But his eyes were fixed on the portal, that wondrous invention that had somehow torn his family apart. He fell to his knees before it and hid his crying eyes behind one large, scarred hand.

The rest of them walked into the hall. They stood around in shock for a time. Soon a servant arrived, lugging a bulky medical apparatus. One of the males took it from him and gave him a fresh command.

Get Amnay.

Chapter Three

Five girls lost in the dark. Five girls ripped apart, separated and flung and scattered far across a hostile land. Five girls trying desperately to find one another. To find home.

It was the plot of Tina's latest novel. Slych had been kind enough to retrieve her computer from the ship. She could have gotten it herself... but she didn't want to return to that place. Not yet. In order to write something based on personal experience, she liked to give herself the proper time to distance herself from it. It was the only way for her to be perfectly honest in her writing, fearless enough to put everything into it. Her darkest thoughts and feelings.

Not that she had any of these now. As far as she could tell, all was right in the world of Man and Menin. The only question that remained was that of Sybil. Kozue still wouldn't say where the translator had gone, and the Mindseat was too busy with other matters to chase her down. They were a foul bunch of old men, but not the type to hold grudges. So long as Sybil lay low, it seemed everything would be fine.

And hopefully it would stay that way. Tina needed the peace if anything was going to come of this novel. There was no real need for her to write it. No agent asking for something new, no publisher applying a gentle but steadily growing pressure, no fan base blasting her with