Tag: analog

After-report!

Gabe looked Ibrahim over. He was sporting bandages on his arms and neck, and his fingers were trembling from one too many buzzkills. “Looks like you were in the scrum yourself, Chief. When were you planning to get some sleep?”

“I dunno. When are you?” Ibrahim shot back as he lit a cigarette. “We got a lid on the situation now, but the pot’s still bubbling and the handle’s damned hot. I can keep track of what still needs doing; I’ll hand things off to my relief when I can’t. Kimiko’s better off soaking up what happened while she’s still got fresh eyes for it, anyway.”

“Fair enough, Chief.” Greg lit his own cigarette. “What did happen, anyway? I know we got swarmed, sure — but who released the wasps? We haven’t had this many gold-witches at once since the last days of the War. An incursion point didn’t show up when I wasn’t looking, did it?”

“I almost wish, Greg. That’d be easy-peasy to solve. A couple of H-bombs through the point to let the Others know we ain’t happy, and a firecracker on our end to seal the hole; if we could do that, it’d already be done. There’s been no breakthroughs, though. Besides, we’d know if one had popped up. It’s for sure we’d have done better triage!”

On the beam…

The crazed screaming of the gold-witch — no burbling now from that hideous creature! — increased behind him as he cleared the doorway, a bare half-second before the heavy door slammed down. Bernice was already yanking on the large switch mounted by the door, hard enough for it to creak as the circuit slammed closed. That part of Greg still capable of reasoning thought approved; the switch was built to take it at least once, and it was for damned sure that nobody would be using that room for anything, any time soon!

The rest of him instinctively concentrated on shying away from the reinforced window looking into the room. The blast shutters had snapped shut, and they should have been as immobile as tungsten steel over composite armor could make them; only they were now faintly clattering from the titanic forces now contained in the room. He could feel the first tendrils leaking through, lashing at local time-space in ways that could not be described, save as corruption in the nose and a roiling in the gut. Time itself stuttered, in slow, sickness-inducing waves, stretching the current moment like taffy in the sun.

The three seconds between the blast door’s closing and the first wild electrical surges felt like a grotesque, nigh-eternal Now — but it was, indeed, still ‘only’ three seconds. Greg could feel the intrusive, blindly questing fingers of corruption suddenly shudder and sublime as the gold-witch was electrocuted, its calls (faint, but damnably perceivable!) devolving into a shriek of mortal pain before being abruptly cut off. Greg thought he could feel the surge of regular reality pass through him as it rushed to fill the newly-made vacuum in space-time, and the sheer relief of it staggered him as he stood.