A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1) (4 page)

He rested his
head against the cool tiled wall of the shower.
This is getting worse, not better. I thought I’d be over her by now.
He
banged his head lightly against the wall. He’d been entranced with her almost
from the moment they’d met, and had asked her out within days of meeting her.
She’d flatly turned him down. He’d never had a chance with her, and he didn’t
know why. He had no idea what to do now.

He couldn’t
just blurt out his feelings, after working with her sixty hours a week for a
year. He’d never be able to look her in the eyes again if she turned him down a
second time, much less trust her with his life as his partner. There would
always be that distraction, that barrier between them.

He didn’t want
any barriers between them, and there were none, except the one in his mind that
allowed him to treat her as his partner and friend, and give her no hint that
he wanted more.

He’d kept it
buried, resigned to simply be with her while desperately loving everything
about her, from her agile mind to her dry humor to her adherence to protocol
(mostly so he could fantasize about getting her to break it). He’d been looking
for a chance, but he wondered if he’d ever find an opening to let her know how
he felt.

Excruciating if
she wasn’t interested.

Excruciating
because
she wasn’t interested.

He banged his
head against the wall again. He needed more cold water.

Monday
morning, Liv arrived at the base early. She headed straight to the spare R
& D lab she was borrowing for her experiment because it was so much closer
to the surface. The new PET scanner had come in on Saturday, and she’d spent
most of the weekend setting it up and testing it.

It worked as
advertised, reading brain activity within minutes of marker injection. But the
best part: it was portable. She was going to be the first person in Home World
to study Travel as it happened.

She was just
finishing the final computer synch when Jordan strolled in. When his cologne
hit her nose, she breathed deep—a mix of citrus and cedar and something
else. She loved that smell. Wrapped in his scent, her excitement finally calmed
to something like manageable levels.

She turned
toward him, still typing, as he took a chair. “What are you doing here so
early?”

“I had some
research of my own this morning. T28 has been in R-9792W for a week now.” T28
was one of the other two DEPOT exploration teams. “They found some fascinating
evidence for the evolution of a completely new progression of early settlement
the other day.”

“Fascinating.”
Liv smiled. It sounded dull as dirt to her, but history enthralled Jordan as
much as functional neuroanatomy enthralled her. She knew he would understand
the teasing note in her voice.

“No, it is. It
may be proof of an advanced civilization
before
the current civilization.”

“Actually, that
is interesting. Did they devolve, get wiped out, pick up and leave, what?”

Jordan shrugged.
“We don’t know yet. We’ll have to wait for R & D to do the research, which
will probably take
months
.”

His face was as
glum as a kid at Thanksgiving contemplating how long it was until Christmas.
Liv laughed.

Jordan smiled
as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. Knowing him, he probably did. He picked
up a splicer wire from the counter while Liv turned back to the PET scanner. He
played with it, bent it, knotted and unknotted it.

“Everything
okay?”

“Yup.”

She glanced at
him. He was still fiddling with the wire.

“You were
really quiet Friday. Usually you tear apart my movies for being scientifically
unsound. Something bothering you?”

“Nope.”

“I have some
good rebuttals.”

He shook his
head and frowned. “I don’t have any complaints.”

She had picked
at least three places where she knew he’d have to take issue with the history
the movie referred to, and he had been too distracted to notice. Obviously he
didn’t want to talk about it. She tried to bury her worry and respect his
privacy.

Trent walked
in, greeting them both with a grin.

“Why are you so
chipper?”

“I finally got
the fly thread I’ve been waiting for.”

“What is it
this time?” Liv asked. “A tsetse nymph? A green drake?”

“A dung
beetle?” Jordan asked with a grin.

Trent turned a
stone-faced stare on him. “Why would anyone fish with a dung beetle?”

Jordan
shrugged. “It’s something no one else has done. I know you like original
challenges.”

“No, it’s not a
dung beetle.”

Connor walked
in. “Good morning.”

“Morning,
Commander.” Being enlisted with Connor as his superior had ingrained the habit
of formality too deeply for Trent to overcome, and Liv had never heard him use
Connor’s first name.

“Morning, Con.”
Jordan, on the other hand, disdained formality.

Connor frowned
at Trent. “Why are you so glum?”

“I’m not. I got
my new fly thread in.”

“Nice! I loved
the last two you tied me. Used one this weekend in fact. You should have come
with me, it was amazing.”

“How many fish
did you catch?” Liv asked from the computer.

“None. But it
was great. Beautiful sunshine, cold mountain stream. For the beer,” he said at
her puzzled look.

“Ah.”

“I don’t fish
with my flies, I just tie them,” Trent said with the air of one who’d explained
a thousand times.

Gin whisked
through the door in a flurry of caffeine-driven babble and a cloud of golden
curls.

“Hey Virgin,”
Trent said.

Gin sent him a
scowl full of daggers—her full name was Virginia Karelli, and she much
preferred being named after booze than the Holy Mother—then smiled
sweetly. “Hey Ninja.”

It was Trent’s
turn to scowl. As a Japanese-American, he hated the stereotype of all Asians
being kung fu masters, even though he was a black belt in jujutsu and karate
and used throwing stars he made himself. Liv often wondered why he lived up to
the stereotype if he didn’t want to perpetuate it.

Ben was late as
usual. “Sorry,” he said as he strolled in with a donut in one hand. “Late night.”

“We don’t
expect more from you, Flyboy,” Connor growled in mock anger.

“Then you’ll
never be disappointed, Frogman,” Ben retaliated with a grin.

Liv finished
setting up just as Dr. Brown walked in. She insisted on being here “just in
case.” She would also inject them with the marker the PET scanner would read.

Liv said, “Okay
all y’all, listen up.”

Everybody was
talking, except Connor, who was famed for being able to sleep anywhere and
leaned against the wall dozing. But they all turned to her the instant she
spoke, including Connor, who also woke up to the slightest noise.

“Y’all are
going to be hooked to the scanner one at a time, but you’ll Travel in pairs as
always. I don’t care where you go, as long as it’s somewhere thoroughly
explored. So who’s first?”

Jordan
volunteered. Connor offered to go with him. Dr. Brown injected Jordan with the
marker while Liv hefted the portable PET scanner—thanks to research
assistance from one of their more advanced allies, it was one-twentieth the
usual size. As she fixed it to Jordan’s head, she noted again how good he
smelled—light spicy cologne and soap.

When the last
electrode was glued in place, Liv said, “Okay, you’re set.”

Jordan smiled
at her, then turned to Connor. “Sand Castle, on mark.”

“P-23786L,” Liv
said to herself as Jordan counted down, and marked it in the computer database.
She turned to watch the PET screen as Jordan began to concentrate, and areas of
his brain lit up on the scan. It worked! Then the image blinked out as he
vanished. She wasn’t worried—the scanner recorded its findings
internally. She’d have to download the whole scan later, but she’d also be the
first one to see the part of the scan that happened in another world as a
Traveler prepared to return Home.

When Jordan’s
scan popped back onto the screen, she knew he’d returned to the surface. He was
able to Travel from underground, because if he was going to appear in the
middle of a solid object in another world, like bedrock, he’d just pop to the
nearest available empty space. But he couldn’t get underground over there to
Travel back into the base here, so he returned above ground—equivalent to
where he’d been standing in Sand Castle.

A minute later,
Connor and Jordan walked through the door. Liv removed the scanner, downloaded
his scan, and reset the machine for the next Traveler.

Her team went
quickly, one after the other. Finally, only Liv was left. Dr. Brown rigged the
electrodes.

Liv decided to
go to Blue Beach, E-746U, one of her favorite places since she’d gone there at
age thirteen. Its technology lagged a few hundred years behind Home World’s,
which meant it was clean and quiet, but the best feature was its thousands of
lakes, all with beaches of sapphire sand that tinted the water to a stunning
cobalt. Jordan volunteered to go with her.

When Liv opened
her eyes and followed the first rule of Travel, she thought she’d somehow gone
to the wrong world, even though she never had before. She turned her head and
saw Jordan standing next to her. If she’d screwed up, so had he. Therefore,
this was Blue Beach.

All this took
less than a second, and her reflexive gasp made her choke on the smoke she’d
inhaled.

Blue Beach was
burning.

Black smoke
billowed up from piles of trees that had been ripped out by the roots. The sky
was a horrible shade of black-gray, lit from beneath to old-bruise yellow by
the nearby flames. Gray ash covered the normally pristine blue sand, and the
nearby lake that should have been clear azure was sickly gray and filmy. The
air smelled like a campfire gone wild, and heat baked at them from all sides.
They couldn’t see any villages, but Liv knew that the black cloud to the north
must be Ganja.

She turned to
Jordan and saw her horror reflected in his eyes. They had friends here.

“We have to get
help,” Liv coughed.

“Let’s go.”

Liv followed
Jordan in a nightmare run back to the R & D lab. She arrived still
choking—apparently the Travel Authority had decided the soot she’d
inhaled was hers and it could come along.

The rest of the
team came to attention at once.

“Blue Beach is
on fire—it looks like a war zone,” Jordan said.

Liv took a deep
breath and coughed again. She tasted black soot and blood in her throat. Dr.
Brown hurried over and placed her stethoscope against Liv’s chest. Liv pushed
it away.

“I’m fine. Help
me get out of this.” She fumbled at the straps of the PET scanner.

“Careful!
That’s expensive, sensitive equipment,” Dr. Brown admonished.

“Then help! People
could be dying!” Liv tried to yell, but her voice was raspy.

Dr. Brown
frowned, but reached for a buckle. Over her shoulder, Liv noticed Connor was
already on the phone.

“Yes, it’s
urgent. Tell him it’s Commander Bryant. Yes, now.” Connor didn’t raise his
voice, but it was obvious that whoever was on the other end had jumped to obey.
Connor had that effect on people.

“General Mace,
Commander Bryant. Yes, we’ve just finished. Liv went to Blue Beach. It’s on
fire…. Yes sir…. Yes, I thought so…. Yes, if possible, sir…. Thank you sir.
Out.”

Connor turned
to face the room. “We leave in five minutes.”

Liv would have
sighed with relief, but she was afraid she’d start coughing again. “Thanks,”
she said as Dr. Brown finally hiked the PET scanner off her head. She trotted
after the rest of her team.

She found if
she breathed shallowly, she could ignore the burning in her chest.

At the armory,
Liv grabbed the usual air-quality and pathogen scanners, but picked up some
sampling and testing equipment too. Then she grabbed a couple of extra
magazines and explosives. She wanted to be prepared for anything.

In the hallway
outside of the armory, Connor turned to the rest of the team. “Blue Beach on
mark. One, two, three, mark.”

Liv exhaled,
blinked—a blink that happened in her mind instead of her
eyelids—and opened her eyes on the scene she had left a few minutes
before. She tried not to reflexively inhale but couldn’t help it. Once again,
she choked on smoke. She drew her sidearm the instant she arrived, holding it
at her side while she scanned their surroundings for danger. The rest of the
team did the same.

Connor appeared
milliseconds later and took in everything with a single glance. “Form up, fall
in.”

He got them out
of the worst of the smoke and jogged toward the huge black cloud to the north. She
and Jordan ended up as rear guard, and Liv kept her eyes mostly to the side and
behind, trying to protect them from whatever had done this. Once they left the
beach, the smoke cleared enough for her to breathe freely.

A few minutes
later, they strode down Ganja’s main street. Liv took in the devastation and
felt sick to her stomach. The buildings had been primarily wooden, and some
still fed the flames, having been deemed lost causes and left to burn out. Most
were smoking black piles of rubble.

People wandered
the streets like zombies, as black as the wreckage they sifted through. Some
had formed bucket brigades or hauled barrels of water on carts, but even these
seemed to sleepwalk through their tasks.

Connor weaved
to keep them out of the worst of the smoke. Liv tried to keep from wondering
what had happened to Raja and Corc, friends she’d known since she was sixteen.
They lived in one of the farmsteads nearby, so heartless as it sounded even in
her head, she hoped the damage had been confined to Ganja.

“Can we help
them?” Jordan asked, pain in his voice.

Connor glanced
at Jordan. “That’s what we’re trying to do, Jordan.”

Jordan gave
Connor an impatient glare. “Not help them get revenge, Con. They’re in shock
and they’ve just lost everything. The last thing they need is more violence. I
meant
help
them.”

Connor sighed. “I
know. We’ll see what we can do.”

Jordan nodded
his thanks.

Connor stepped
up to the nearest cart, which was hitched to an exhausted donkey, and asked the
man on the driver’s bench, “Who’s in charge?”

He got a blank
stare in answer, so he moved to the next man who was fumbling with the hose
protruding from the top of the water barrel. “Who’s in charge?”

The man
continued to struggle, ignoring Connor, and Jordan stepped up to help. They
finally got the hose unkinked. “What happened?”

“Demons,” the
man quavered, and shuddered as he turned away.

Jordan glanced
at Liv and frowned. Apparently, she hadn’t hid her surprise very well. Even
with Elachai, and the stories she’d heard, she didn’t really believe demons
existed.

“Who’s in
charge?” Connor asked a third time, and a woman who had come to fill her wooden
bucket spoke.

“Major Hucklin.
He’d be in the Hall.”

“Thank you.”

At Connor’s
signal, Liv fell in again next to Gin and Jordan, and followed Connor’s fast
walk to the building the woman had indicated.

“Commander?”
Trent said.

Connor turned
with his eyebrow raised in question.

“These
buildings were torn apart by explosives. I think this is frag grenade damage.”

Connor
inspected the nearby building. “I’d agree it
looks
like frag grenade damage. But lots of explosives could leave
that pattern.” He turned to Liv. “Do you have equipment to test this residue?”

She mentally
kicked herself. “No. The portable mass spec is too big to fit all this other
stuff I brought.”

Connor nodded
and motioned them to move on.

The Hall still
stood. Aside from a smoking roof, it had escaped the damage that had rained
down on the rest of the town, probably because it was the only building
constructed of stone. Connor strode through blackened doors that barely clung
to their hinges, Liv and the others close behind.

Liv slowed for
a minute to let her eyes adjust to the dim light. Major Hucklin sat at the head
of a table full of people on the other side of the Hall. He was a portly man
with a florid face and thinning gray hair, and his size proved that he had
greatly enjoyed the perks of his office before this catastrophe. He was the
elected ruler of the nearby towns: ‘major’ in this world meant ‘mayor’ in Home
World.

Connor began,
“Major Hucklin.”

“Oh, it be
you,” Hucklin said with a distinct sneer in his voice. “You
would
wait
until the danger’s passed before you’d be making an arrival.”

“Are you sure
the danger’s passed?” Trent asked.

Major Hucklin
turned his sneer on Trent. “We’d be trying to clean up for more than a day now,
and no more demons are being sighted.”

“Demons.” Gin
looked skeptical.

“Told you,”
Trent muttered.

“What did they
look like?” Jordan asked.

Major Hucklin
shuddered. “They be huge monsters with faces that be like a pig’s and a dog’s,
and huge wings that be covered in leather.”

“How many were
there?” Connor asked.

“Several dozen
at least. The horde—”

“Despair.”

Hucklin stared
at Trent as if he’d sprouted an extra head. Liv turned to Trent too, and raised
her eyebrows at Jordan when she caught his eye. Trent had a long history of
fascination with demons and other myths of Travel, and probably had more
knowledge than the rest of them put together, even with the research Jordan had
undoubtedly done over the weekend.

Connor cleared
his throat. “What?”

“A despair,”
Trent said again. “It’s what you call a group of demons. Like a gaggle of geese
or a murder of crows. A despair of demons.”

Connor rolled
his eyes. “Thank you, Petty Officer Nagano.” He turned back to Hucklin. “Major,
please continue.”

“That’s uncommonly
appropriate,” the Major said, still staring at Trent. He shook himself and
turned back to Connor. “Well, the
despair
hit the nearby countryside, and then vanished before we even mounted a defense.
They exploded things, took several townsfolk, raided our stores, and burned the
rest to the ground.”

“Is there
anything we can do to help?” Jordan asked before Connor could say anything
else.

“Not unless you
can be finding the demons and returning the missing folk.”

Jordan’s eyes
flashed, but he only clenched his jaw. He didn’t make promises he couldn’t
keep, and Liv knew there was no way to track down the missing people. They
could be anywhere in the multiverse.

“It’s highly
unlikely that they’re still alive.” Trent’s black eyes were unreadable.

“Then no,”
Major Hucklin said, “there be nothing you can do. Our own countryside be
sending aid shortly. We’d be rebuilding.”

“It’s possible
the demons could return,” Jordan said. “Do you have means of protection?”

“We can’t help
with protection,” Connor said before Hucklin could answer. “We can’t bring
anything big here, and we can’t leave anything behind.”

This was
another mystery of Travel that Liv aimed to someday understand. An object
brought with a Traveler would return to its Home World in exactly two minutes
unless the Traveler kept physical contact with the object or somehow restrained
it, like in a pocket or belt loop. She assumed it was some sort of protection
for the First Law of Physics: mass can be neither created nor destroyed. While
Travelers could bend the rule by entering a world and bringing things along,
apparently the Law struggled to assert itself and right the excess mass by
throwing the intruding objects back to their Home World when the Traveler let
go.

“We could
assign a team, just for a few days even,” Jordan argued, but Connor broke in,

“There’d be no
way to secure their safety, and no way of knowing when the demons would return,
if at all.”

Hucklin
replied, “There be no need. A branch of the militia be on their way.”

“We’re very
sorry for the damage, Major,” Jordan responded.

Hucklin waved
this away with his hand. “It wouldn’t be your fault. It just be difficult to
look at my beautiful village in ruins, and think of my poor voting constituency
taken away to serve as demon-meal. It be unlikely they’ll re-elect me if I
can’t protect them.”

Connor frowned.
“Do you have explosives?”

Hucklin managed
to look both surprised and affronted. “If we had explosives, we could be
defending this city from the attack!”

“Did you see
what kind of explosives the demons used?” Connor pressed.

“Do I be
looking like a self-terminator to you? If I didn’t be hidden with my loyal
advisory board, I’d be dead!”

“Right.” Connor
started to turn away.

Liv asked, “Did
anyone see any strange humans around? Specifically a man.”

Hucklin turned
to her. “What sort of man?”

“Black hair
with blue streaks, pale skin, dark eyes—” She didn’t know the common
measure for height in this world so she gestured to Jordan. “—about
Jordan’s height. Do you know if anyone saw him?”

“Not to my
knowledge, but I will ask my people. Why?”

Ben said, “He’s
a person of interest.”

Hucklin nodded.
“If we find him, someone be contacting you.”

“If there’s
nothing we can do,” Connor said, “I think we’d better report back.”

“One more
question,” Liv said, asking Connor for permission with a glance. He said
nothing, so she continued. “Do you know if there was damage to the north of
Ganja?”

“Not to my
knowledge. Why?”

“I have friends
there. Raja and Corc?”

“Yes. I’d be
knowing them. We’d be having no calls for aid from that direction.”

Liv breathed a
sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

Hucklin nodded
and turned back to his advisors, who had sat silently through the conversation.

Liv smiled her
thanks to Connor, who bobbed his head in acknowledgement before raising his
hand in a
move out
gesture. Liv fell
in next to Jordan and followed the rest of the team out of the village. Jordan
walked with his eyes on the ground in front of him, and Liv tried to come up
with something to make him feel better. She had nothing. She felt pretty
useless herself.

They reached
the beach and Connor opened his mouth, presumably to count them back to Home
World.

Demons appeared
out of thin air forty feet to Liv’s left, whirling into concrete solidity in
less than a second.

She whirled, her
sidearm already free of its holster, and noted her teammates echoing her
movement on either side. They ranged out to cover the demons.

“I still wasn’t
sure they existed,” Liv said.

Ben gave a
jagged laugh. “Me either, but that looks like proof.”

“Ack,” Gin
gagged on the rotten stench rolling off the creatures.

The three
demons stood fully eight feet tall, with leathery purplish-brown skin and huge
folded bat-wings that gave them another three feet of height. Their wrinkled
faces were a mixture of boar and dog—beady black pig eyes set in
basset-hound pouches, pointed pig ears, thick snouts with wiry bristles that
looked half pig and half mastiff, and huge boar tusks jutting out of their
lower jaw. The smell of them was rotting intestine and sulfur, and Liv
swallowed against her stomach’s heave as a puff of wind washed her in the
stench.

The demons
stood for an instant, peering around nearsightedly, then leapt toward the group
of humans, covering the distance between them with speed shocking for their
size. They slashed with hands spread, each finger tipped with a razor-sharp
claw.

“Fire!” Connor
shouted. Liv was more than happy to obey. She saw the bullets hit their
targets, but although blood splashed and holes opened in the demons’ hides,
they had no appreciable effect.