All the King's Horses and all the King's Men

All the King's Horses and all the King's Men

Something had gone drastically wrong with the world, Lain Shenske thought, if government agents were kidnapping cripples out of rehab hospitals. They hadn’t even let the fact that she loudly refused to go or was dressed in a hospital gown deter them. Pausing only to secure her hated wheelchair, they loaded her from the gurney into a Black Hawk helicopter. They handed her off at Langley Air Force Base, loading both her and her wheelchair into one of several C-17s carrying Army soldiers and tank-like Bradleys.

Yes, something definitely had gone wrong.

They landed an hour later at a tiny little airfield in the middle of farm country. The massive transport jet dwarfed everything in sight with nothing more hostile than corn in view. A sign identified the field as “Butler County Airport” and an American flag flew atop the flagpole. While the Bradleys rumbled out of the C-17’s belly, she and her wheelchair were juggled quickly into another Black Hawk with a new sunglass-wearing handler.

“Where the hell are we going?” she shouted as the blades spun up for takeoff.

“Pittsburgh.” The new handler was in combat fatigues with insignia identifying him as Army Intelligence.

Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh? Lain tried to find some logic in the madness and was defeated.

“Why?” She had meant “Why Pittsburgh” but he misunderstood and thought she had asked “Why me?”

“You’re the only fully trained xenobiologist currently available,” the officer answered.

That made sense. Xenobiology was still in its infancy. The title had been conferred on only a handful of people with astronaut training and doctorates in biology and astrophysics. Everyone of her caliber had either been killed in the explosion that had crippled her, was in orbit, or had just jumped through the newly activated hyperphase gate that the Chinese had in geostationary orbit over the China Sea.

But “xenobiologist” and “Pittsburgh” didn’t add together.

“Why Pittsburgh?” she asked.

Frightening enough, that professionally blank look vanished off his face, replaced with a confounded inability to explain the situation.

What in God’s name had happened to Pittsburgh?

“We’re coming up on it now,” the pilot radioed.

They hauled open the side door, blasting the cabin with spring-cool air. Below, several major highways tangled together. Clustered tight around the intersection was a sprawl of suburbia. Strip malls with massive parking lots lined the access roads with red lights every few hundred feet. Housing plans crowded the hills behind the stores, hundreds of cookie-cutter houses on aimlessly curving streets. The only green was postage-stamp yards and scrub trees growing in areas too hilly to build on.

“That’s the Pennsylvania Turnpike and I-79.” Her handler indicated the two major highways. “That’s Cranberry Township below us; Pittsburgh city limits should be twenty miles south of us.”

Should be. They followed I-79 south. Military trucks blocked the on-ramps. Eight lanes sat empty of traffic. Despite the ever-present pain in her body and the darkness of her soul, Lain found herself growing concerned for the people of Pittsburgh.

“There.” The officer pointed out the door toward a wooded area.

Lain opened her mouth to ask what she should be looking at and then she realized what she was seeing. The highway ended abruptly at the edge of a forest. A thick, uninterrupted green blanket of trees ran as far as the eye could see.

“Oh, dear God,” she murmured.

“It’s a twenty-five-mile radius,” the officer shouted over the green-scented wind roaring through the cabin. “A perfect circle. Gone—with this in its place.”

“What about the people?” she shouted.

“We estimate that there are close to three million people missing.”

Yes, something was drastically wrong with the world.

The helicopter landed on the highway near where it ended abruptly. Several branches of military were already assembled but, judging by the general milling about, were jointly confounded as to what to do next. Lain had hoped that with all the massed confusion, her arrival would have gone unnoticed until she was installed in the wheelchair and the wreckage of her body covered. A small crowd gathered, though, even as the blades were spinning down, as if her arrival was more interesting than a major US city vanishing.

“Oh, the joys of being famous,” she murmured. Her father had been an astronaut, host of a popular science television series and murdered when she was young. Her stepfather was impossibly rich, powerful and notoriously reclusive. Between the two, she’d grown up in the media spotlight but that was standing on two sound legs. Now the stark brilliance was too intense; it laid too much of her body and soul bare for public inspection.

Stripped of privacy, she wrapped herself in the thorns of power instead. “Who is the motherfucker in charge of this mess?”

That checked the crowd that had been gathering. Only one officer kept coming in the cautious half-crouch people used around helicopters. He was annoyingly tall, wide shouldered, and looked like he should still be in college, getting drunk and planning pledge hazing at a frat house. He was in army fatigues with a Pennsylvania Army National Guard badge on his sleeve.

“Ms. Shenske, I’m Lieutenant Perkins. I’m Major General Crocker’s aide-de-camp.” He put out his hand for a handshake. Considering the wave of army forces slowly following Lain in Bradleys, the National Guard was unlikely to be in charge for much longer.

“So you’re the asshole’s left butt cheek—congratulations. It’s Colonel Shenske. Some schmucks yanked me out of the hospital without a stitch of clothing. I need pants, shirt, socks, shoes, a coat and a blanket. And I want it now. I’m not going to sit around with my ass bare to this wind because you have your head up your ass. Get it for me, or I don’t care who the fuck you are, I’ll have your ass blistered for this.”

Lieutenant Perkins snapped to attention and saluted. “I—I didn’t realize—yes, ma’am, I’ll have a set of clothes pulled together immediately.”

“And if you expect me to be here at this camp for the duration, you better realize that I can’t so much as piss by myself. You have at best one hour before this becomes a very real issue. I’ll warn you now, if I end up soiling myself because some motherfucker thought up the smart idea to jerk me out of a hospital, heads will roll.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now tell me—what the fuck is going on?”

“At zero three hundred hours, all contact with Pittsburgh was lost. Satellite imagery confirms that a perfect circle of forest has…” Lieutenant Perkins paused as he ran out of military-speak to explain. “Well—it’s here and Pittsburgh isn’t. Governor requested a declaration of National Emergency at zero four hundred hours. Unidentified life forms have led us to believe the forest is extraterrestrial in nature.”

Her heart skipped at “extraterrestrial” but she clamped down on the jolt of emotions with steel-cold logic. There had to be some reasonable normal explanation—although she couldn’t even begin to guess at it.

As Lieutenant Perkins brought her up to speed, a knot of soldiers had lifted her hated wheelchair up and off the helicopter. They set the cube of metal down just beyond the spinning blades of the Black Hawk and stood eyeing it in confusion.

“It’s not that complicated,” she shouted. “Just hit the frigging power button and step back!”

One of them figured out the red button was the power button and there was a sudden scramble backwards as the chair unfolded its eight spidery legs.

“Hold your fire!” Lain shouted as half the soldiers whipped up their weapons and took aim on her wheelchair. “Hold your fire! God-damn stupid idiots.”

“What the hell is that?” Perkins shouted.

“It’s an AI-assisted wheelchair.” She snapped her fingers. The chair skittered around, located her and scurried over to the helicopter. She didn’t care what her mother said, it was creepy as hell. The wheelchair was the bleeding edge of robotics, funded by her stepfather’s billions of dollars and gifted to her by her mother. The damn thing was full of glitches but was light-years ahead of anything that the VA would provide for Lain. She couldn’t blame the soldiers for staring at it, but since she was in a hospital gown, chances were good that she was going to flash anyone standing around when she shifted from the helicopter to the chair.

“This isn’t a peep show. Go do your fucking job and let me get decent.”

Lieutenant Perkins’ eyes went wide and he turned away, barking orders.

“Prepare to load.” She waited for the swing bar to extend and lock. The wheelchair took so long to process the command she thought its operating system had crashed again. She checked its screen and realized that it hadn’t heard her command over the background noise. “Prepare to load.”

The gown covered the scars where her womb used to be, leaving her knees and calves exposed. While her legs were useless, her accident had been recent enough that they still looked normal. She dreaded the day that all she had were withered sticks. The chair’s trainer had made the mistake of telling her that once her legs atrophied, swinging her body into the chair would get simpler. She’d given him a black eye. A new, more diplomatic trainer was supposed to start next week; unfortunately, that left her without a personal aide.

Perkins peeked to see if she was in the chair and caught her lifting her useless legs into place.

“Get me some clothes,” she snapped. “After I’m decent, I’ll look at these extraterrestrial life forms.”

The Black Hawk crew provided her with a flight suit to wear. She also secured a pair of binoculars, a two-way radio, and a sidearm complete with a spare magazine. (The pistol proved that her psych evaluation had not been checked prior to her kidnapping, as she’d been flagged as suicidal. Not surprising, as everything she ever dreamed had been blasted out of orbit along with most of the US space program.)

She needed two female privates to act as aides since “bathroom” on the front line was a portajohn. Her wheelchair was clever, but not designed with that limited space in mind. She hated having to let people do what she been able to do for herself since being a toddler. It made her feel weak and helpless and useless.

Once she was dressed, she chased the privates away and tracked down Lieutenant Perkins. “Where are these alien life forms that you found?”

“We put it in a cooler.” He started to walk.

“The specimen is dead then?” She followed, trying not to notice how her chair was startling the soldiers as it scurried behind Perkins.

Obviously it bothered the officer as he tried to walk sideways. “Yes, it was killed about half a mile from the demarcation line.” He pointed toward the houses clustered together beyond the highway’s right of way.

Killing it was the safest thing to do since even small rodents could bite through thick leather and carried everything from fleas to rabies. It was vastly annoying that she’d been dragged all this distance to look at a dead animal. “Did you at least put it in plastic before putting it on ice?”

Perkins looked confused. “Ice?”

“You have ice in the cooler?”

“Oh! Ice! No!” He stopped in front of a forty-foot, refrigerated shipping container. “We just put it in here.”

“Oh.” She thought he meant the type of cooler you took on picnics. “Oh!” He’d swung open the door and all her annoyance was blasted away. “Oh! A dinosaur! It has the feet and forelegs of a dromaeosauridae but it doesn’t have any feathers.” It was a beautiful jewel green with streaks of brilliant yellow that probably acted as camouflage within the forest. There were touches of jewel blue round its eyes and toes. There was a round bullet hole in its skull but no exit wound. “Dear God, why did you kill it?”

“It ate two Rottweilers, went through a picture window, and tried to batter down a bedroom door to get to the homeowner. He shot it with his deer rifle.”

“The world needs a living dinosaur more than it needs another redneck Pittsburgher.”

“Pittsburghers are suddenly in rare supply themselves.” Lieutenant Perkins didn’t seem to realize what he said. “We’ve picked out a dozen similar animals using satellites.”

“There are more? Still alive?” Life suddenly seemed a lot more interesting.

“Yes. There are two more of these at Monroeville Mall. There’s a herd of something loose in the North Hills. Elk or moose or something.”

“Mammals?” She threw a glance over her shoulder at the forest.

The trees were taller than coast redwoods, with the bulk and branch structure similar to sequoias, but appeared to be deciduous, which would make them hardwoods. Giant sequoias were the fastest growing trees in the world, but even they only grew between a foot to two feet a year. Physically it was impossible that the trees had grown overnight. It meant that improbable as it might seem, they would have had to arrive—branch, root and soil—from another world.

The forest was showing no signs of distress, so the environment of the planet the trees were from was exact to Earth’s. Nearly recognizable dinosaurs, mammals and deciduous forest indicated a nearly identical evolution path. It suggested that they were dealing with a parallel universe.

The military would be worried about the dinosaurs, but the real damage could come from anything. Rats had decimated the entire ecosystem of Easter Island, wiping out a complete forest and a dozen species of birds. Twelve wild rabbits released in Australia had multiplied to millions within decades and led to the extinction of countless native plants. Certain algae caused red tides. One nearly microscopic organism produced toxins that accumulated in shellfish and could cause a paralytic poisoning that lead to death.

She aimed her chair for the abrupt end of the highway. “I need to take samples and build a comprehensive profile of the ecosystem. We need to find out if the alien flora and fauna can thrive here. I suggest that until we know otherwise we treat it as a biological hazard and start decontamination procedures on anyone and anything coming out of the area.”

Based on what she was told, the boundary between the two ecosystems was over a hundred and fifty miles. They were upwind of New York City. All streams and rivers in the area fed into the Ohio River. By volume, the Ohio was the largest tributary of the Mississippi River and its drainage basin included fourteen states. Containment was impossible. They could be on the cusp of ecological disaster.

Perkins followed as if tethered to the back of her chair. “What are you going to need?”

Use of my legs back!

She bit down on the comment. Precious time had been taken up dealing with her crippled body. If she wasn’t stuck in her hated wheelchair, she would already be in a hazmat suit and gathering samples. As it was, she would need to waste even more time trying to protect the hydraulics on her wheelchair from contamination. She couldn’t risk taking a biohazard back to the hospital.

She gasped as she remembered the incoming Bradley troop carriers with their tank treads. If the military sent the vehicles into the forest to crawl through the rich moldering debris, organic matter would be embedded into the continuous tracks. If she didn’t arrange some way to sterilize the Bradleys before they were loaded back onto the C-17s, they would transfer foreign bacteria, spores, mold, seeds, and insects around the world.

She growled in frustration. Her chair would have to wait. Someone else would have to take the samples while she set up decontamination procedures.

The limousine arrived before the Bradleys. It glided like a black shark through the chaos that was the military camp at the end of the highway. She paused to watch it come. Despite the black tinted windows, she somehow knew that it carried someone she didn’t like. Someone that was going to make her life hell.

The limo did not fail to deliver on her expectations. The back door opened and an impossibly handsome man got out as if he owned the highway, the sky and the sun. It was her stepbrother, Yves, whom she unaffectionately nicknamed Crown Prince Kiss Butt. Yves was a testament to her stepfather’s power; he was strictly a civilian with no useful ability except as a spy for his father. Yet, here he was, passing through all the various military blockades to arrive like royalty.

It surprised her that the forest drew Yves like a magnet. He was a creature of the city; his idea of “country” was his father’s mansion on the Palisades outside of New York City. On weekends he could barely be stirred from the indoor pool, shimmering with reflected light.

She locked down the urge to use his distraction to run and hide. She wasn’t a grieving ten-year-old anymore. If he turned his sharp tongue on her, she would give it back a hundredfold.

He stood staring at the forest for several minutes. Finally he tore his gaze away from the trees to look down at the edge of the highway. The end of Earth’s ecosystem was marked with a sharp line, mere millimeters in size, where everything was reduced to fine particles. He looked upward where an aurora-like effect danced in the dusk sky.

He turned finally to lock his gaze on her.

Her stepfather had an exotic pedigree. He claimed to be part indigenous Scandinavian Sami and part French. Yves was more of the same with almond-shaped eyes of stunning green and hair that was a rich honey walnut and a face that whispered possible blood ties to the Great Khans of the Mongol Empire. Life had been entirely too kind to him; he still looked twenty.

She certainly was no longer ten. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“We’re the largest defense contractor in United States.” Yves walked past her, focused on the forest. “I’m here as a consultant.”

Consultant? Maybe if he’d brought a pet scientist on a leash with him, but he seemed utterly alone. Yves was smart, spoke multiple languages, and had a stunning grasp of history, but advanced physics wasn’t in his playbook. What was he really doing here?

She had already heard rumors floating through the camp that the government was grinding to a halt as various factions started to argue over who had control over the area. Homeland Security, FEMA, and the National Guard were all claiming to be top dog. She hated to ask Yves for help; he was the second-to-last person on the planet that she wanted to be indebted to. The entire planet, though, was at risk. Yves had more connections than she did. He had an entire army of employees and a political network spanning multiple countries. If he were busy playing god with them, he wouldn’t have time to spare to bother her. It would be a win-win for her.

“Yves, all communities downriver on the Ohio and Mississippi plus probably the Tennessee River need to be warned of possible biological contaminants.”

He flicked his hand in negation. “There is no need.”

“If this ecosystem can thrive on Earth…”

“It cannot,” he stated firmly. “Earth lacks what it needs to thrive. There is no danger.”

“I have a dinosaur on ice that says otherwise.”

“It would die within a week on Earth. Yes, on its own world, it would destroy all in its path, but here it would be betrayed by the very genetics that made it so fierce. It would die a slow and painful death as all its cells cry out for the thing that Earth cannot provide. It is like slowly suffocating.”

“And you know this how?” Lain asked. “Or are you just making random guesses and full-out lies?”

“History repeats itself. This is not the first time something like this has happened. Only the evidence has always neatly erased itself, so science has never acknowledged what folk tales hold to be true.”

“Fairy tales?”

“Atlantis. El Dorado. Garden of Eden. Avalon. Baltia.” Because he knew she didn’t recognize the reference he added, “an island that Pliny the Elder described supposedly entirely made of amber. The seven caves of Chicomoztoc of the Aztecs. Alfheim, land of the elves in Norse myths. Hawaiki. Gorias, Finias, Murias and Falias. Irkalla. The Kingdom of Saguenay. Over and over again, all across the world, in every culture there are stories of other worlds. Lost places. Because we’ve never found evidence of them on Earth, scientists have always dismissed thousands of years of oral history.” He waved his hand at the forest. “Once upon a time there was city called Pittsburgh.”

Lain didn’t recognize any of the names after Avalon and hated that she needed to take his word that so many existed. “Nothing like this has ever been recorded in the last hundred years.”

“A hundred years: a blink of an eye.” He took a small glass ball from his suit’s breast pocket. “Humans started to use stone tools nearly three million years ago. What is a hundred years compared to that?”

He stepped down off the highway and onto the forest floor. Lifting the ball to his mouth, he said a word she didn’t recognize. It flickered faintly. Sweeping it back and forth, he walked into the forest.

“It still proves nothing about this flora and fauna being unable to thrive in Earth’s ecosystem!” Lain shouted after him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

When he didn’t answer, she guided her wheelchair carefully down off the thick lip of the highway to follow him. The legs sank deep into the forest debris but her chair was able to pick its way forward.

Yves stopped a dozen feet into the forest, screened from the road by tall ferns. The glass ball gleamed brightly in his hand. He spoke a second unfamiliar word and the light extinguished. Tucking away the ball, he took what seemed to be a piece of glass out of a pouch and laid it on the ground. With a grease pencil, he drew odd hieroglyphs onto the glass.

“What are you doing?” She nudged the wheelchair closer.

“Nothing.”

She laughed bitterly at the obvious lie. “I’m not ten years old anymore.”

“And yet you still haven’t learned to keep your nose out of my business.” Yves held up his hand, finger upraised in warning that he wanted her silent. He was the type of person that wouldn’t let the fact that she was in a wheelchair stop him from using whatever force he felt necessary to get his way.

She was tempted to ignore his request; she’d learned how to fight in the military. Even in the wheelchair, she could defend herself. She had a weird disquieting feeling, though, that he would seriously hurt her if they got into a fight. They were screened from the road. No one had paid any attention to them leaving the encampment. Another helicopter landed with a loud thumping of blades that drowned out all other noise.

Lain silently reached down and checked that the pistol was still tucked in beside her useless legs.

Yves took her silence as obedience. He dropped his hand and focused back on the glass. He drew several more symbols on the glass then said a foreign word. The symbols gleamed faintly and then a pale dome appeared over the glass and gleaming lines traced an odd pattern underneath.

What the hell?

The pattern looked like some type of map. There were a multitude of lines running like water, and a handful of bright motes. The contours hadn’t matched up to the three rivers that lay inside the zone. The lines indicated two “streams” in the immediate area, one of which they were standing directly on. She could see no water.

“What is that?” Lain wished she had a camera to capture the image before it vanished.

Yves studied it for a minute longer and then spoke another word and the glowing faded. “Nothing.”

He took out a cloth and wiped clean the glass.

Nothing? The hell if it was nothing. Yves was looking for something quite specific and apparently found it. He was surprised by the forest but not ignorant of it. He knew it existed. He just didn’t expect to find it here.

“Have they identified the power source behind the transfer?” Yves asked.

“No,” she said and then the oddness of the question struck her. What was the trigger event? The aurora-like effect that followed the arching path of destruction hinted that the power had come from the atmosphere. She hadn’t heard of any large solar flares—but those rarely made even the science news feed. Since her accident delivered its crippling blow to both her and NASA, all the news feeds focused on the Chinese hyperphase gate.

Which had activated last night for the first time.

If the gate worked as promised, it would jump a colony ship to a new world.

She gasped as possibilities hit home. Last night the gate was turned on and created a field through which something could travel to another world. Like Pittsburgh. The neat disc of forest was the same shape as the gate, magnified by a factor of nearly one hundred. NASA had been forbidden in its infancy by Congress to work with the Chinese space program, so she knew very little about the gate. Its design was top secret and the actual science unproven. Her stepfather had been heavily involved in the construction via his international businesses. If Pittsburgh’s disappearance were caused by men—her stepfather to be exact—it would explain Yves’ behavior. She always knew her stepfather was a stunningly powerful man but making an entire city vanish seemed beyond even him. Unless—of course—it was by accident.

Her family just got a thousand times more mysterious—and possibly more dangerous.

She sat in shock as Yves strode back to the encampment. What did she know of the gate’s startup? It was supposed to go live for the first time yesterday at noon Beijing time but had been delayed until nearly seventeen hundred. She worked through the time zones. Yes. That would be the right time Eastern Standard Time when Pittsburgh disappeared. The Chinese stated that after a series of tests, powering up and powering down the gate to make sure it was operating smoothly, they’d jump the first colony ship through. It was less clear when they planned those. Were they already testing the gate or hadn’t they powered it down yet?

Would Pittsburgh return if they powered the gate down?

There was an odd booming noise, growing louder.

“What now?” Lain spun her wheelchair around, wondering if some idiot was blowing up some other rare specimen.

A huge dark figure loomed inside of the forest. As she watched, it moved into the sunlight and she gasped. It was a tree—walking.

The ground shook with each step.

Lain knew she should be afraid, but all she felt was sudden and complete nirvana. It didn’t matter that she could no longer go to an alien world—it had come to her.

The tree’s branches were long and slender like a willow, trailing down to brush the ground as the tree walked. It would pry up a massive root foot, shift slowly forward and plant it again in an earth-rattling stomp. The trunk had many rough nodules with the appearance of a bark-covered face but she could see no true visible eyes.

She studied it through binoculars, whimpering as it drew nearer. “No, no, no, turn around.” She fumbled with the radio. “Perkins! Lieutenant Perkins! This is Colonel Shenske. You need to stop that tree.”

“Which tree? There are thousands of them.”

“Are you blind? The one that is walking! It’s bearing down on your twelve o’clock. You’re going to have to stop it.”

“Stop it?”

“It’s loaded with seed pods.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus.” He’d spotted the tree. “I-I-I don’t understand. Say again: seed pods?”

“If this vegetation can thrive on Earth, then every one of those seeds could grow into a similar tree. It could be like kudzu.”

“Kudzu?” Lieutenant Perkins said.

“Oh good God, man, have you never been outside of Pennsylvania? It’s the second worst thing the South ever did to itself. It’s a massively invasive perennial vine native to Southeast Asia that was imported as groundcover to prevent soil erosion. It grows unchecked, killing off native plants and trees and covering any building in its path.”

“How do you recommend that we stop the tree?”

“At a distance. Roughly half of the plants that have rapid movement are carnivorous.”

“So we should shoot it?” He sounded doubtful at the effectiveness. The man obviously knew the result of shooting bullets at trees generally only resulted in ricochets and splinters.

“Do you have any Javelin or Dragon anti-tank missiles?”

He obviously was mentally scanning equipment lists as he slowly answered, “Yes.”

“Then get them and shoot it!”

Lain eyed the tree that was closing distance with surprising speed. It was the first living alien life form she had ever encountered and she had just ordered its destruction. If she didn’t start moving, she could be hit by friendly fire. First rule of xenobiology was to keep yourself alive. She thought she would never have the chance to apply the rule.

She toggled the wheelchair’s control. The chair shuddered. One leg pawed at the ground and then stilled. “Oh, no.” She glanced toward the tree. “You’ve got to work; there’s no time for a reboot.”

The tree seemed to be following the second bright line on Yves’ map. It hit the edge of the highway. The soldiers fell back, yelling in frightened dismay. One of them shot at it with a rifle and triggered a sudden barrage of gunfire. She ducked down and a moment later a bullet ricocheted over her head. An officer shouted to cease fire as the tree surged forward onto the paving. There was a sudden change in pitch in the yelling as the willowy branches lashed forward and snared two soldiers. The shouting went from excitement and fear to horror and pain. It was a sound that Lain had hoped that she’d never hear again. The sound of people dying.

She punched the control pad of her wheelchair. “Come on!” She had to do something, though she wasn’t sure what. She was a useless cripple trapped in an unreliable piece of equipment.

Everything went black and she felt like she was falling and suddenly everything snapped back to clarity. The silence was so complete that she thought she’d been struck deaf.

Oh, God, did I just have a stroke? Did I lose more of myself? She lifted her hands, wiggled her fingers and tilted her head back and forth.

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” she said aloud.

No, not a stroke. Nor was she deaf. The wind gusted, making the leaves overhead whisper. The forest was impossibly quiet. No booming footsteps of the willow tree. No screams of pain and terror. No gunshots.

Did the reserves kill the tree already?

The highway wasn’t where she remembered it being. She scanned the forest, trying to orient herself.

The base camp was gone.

The highway and all signs of civilization were gone.

Forest continued, uninterrupted.

The Chinese must have turned off the gate. Good news: Pittsburgh was back on Earth. Bad news: she was stuck on whatever planet that the gate was tuned to.

She sat stunned for a moment, and then forced herself to take a deep breath and push out shock. “Well, you always wanted to visit an alien planet. Congratulations. You’ve succeeded. Now what?”

If the Chinese continued the tests as planned, they should turn on the gate shortly.

If she was right about what was happening.

Logic suggested that she should sit tight and hope that the Chinese turned the gate back on soon. This parallel world, minus man’s pollution, was cooler. A few hours after sunset, she would be at risk for hypothermia. All the nearby fallen branches and trees were covered with moss; building a fire with the damp wood was going to take her survival skills. She had no matches but she did have a pistol. If she could find enough dry tinder, she might be able to use the muzzle flare to light it.

Something moved in the forest close by.

Her heart leapt painfully in her chest at the sound, as if it knew something horrible was hunting her.

A deep breathy roar came from downwind. If the beast could smell, it would pick up her scent. She pulled her pistol and checked the magazine. It was a .45 caliber with ten rounds in the magazine. She flipped the safety off. She noticed her hands weren’t shaking. Was it because she wasn’t afraid to die? This was the death she wanted; on an alien planet, dealing with extraterrestrial life.

If the Chinese never turned the gate back on, there was no way she could survive for long. Not crippled.

“If this is your idea of a joke,” she whispered to the God she rarely acknowledged. “I don’t think it’s very funny.”

Something large came crashing through the forest bracken. She steeled herself, knowing that she only had ten rounds, plus another ten in the spare magazine. Twenty bullets until she was rescued. If she was rescued. She couldn’t afford to waste even one.

The younger brother of Perkins’ dinosaur broke through the screen of ferns. It rushed at her, jaws open. She aimed at its dark eye.

Why am I fighting so hard? I’m just going to die.

Obey the first rule! Stay alive!

She squeezed the trigger. The dinosaur roared with pain as the bullet plowed through its eye. She flung herself forward, out of the chair, as the beast lunged at her. Its hot breath blasted across her back, reeking of spoiled meat.

There was a clang of metal and the whine of servos as the dinosaur bit down on her wheelchair. She rolled through dead, molding leaves, trying to put distance between her and the beast. The dinosaur shook its head just like a crocodile would to tear chunks of meat from a large prey.

A .45 didn’t have the stopping power for a body shot. Getting a head shot from a prone position was going to be nearly impossible. She struggled to sit up, cursing her ruined body.

The dinosaur flung aside her wheelchair. It sniffed loudly, casting about for her.

She levered herself up, took aim on its head, and waited for it to turn.

There was crashing in the forest nearby. A second breathy roar of an adult dinosaur.

They’re pack hunters, she thought. Maybe a mated pair, or two juveniles, since this one is smaller than the male inside the cooler.

The wounded male turned to face her. It spotted her with its one good eye. She shot. The first bullet cut a groove along its heavy bone eye ridge. The second missed. Then she had no choice. She rapid-fired into its body as it loomed over her. The pistol thundered in her hand, slamming her onto her back.

The beast stood over her, its mouth wide to show off massive sharp teeth. And then slowly, gracefully, it toppled over dead.

She had one moment of elation and then the second dinosaur crashed into the clearing. She aimed and fired. The hammer fell onto the empty chamber with a loud click. She was out. She fumbled to roll to the side so she could pull the spare magazine from its pouch. The larger but less decorative female charged, rumbling dangerously. She wasn’t going to make it. She wasn’t going to…

A shrieking bolt of light pierced through the female’s chest. The beast crumbled, landing inches from Lain’s feet. The last of its breath washed over her.

What the hell? Lain rammed the magazine home. She lay in the deep rich moist loam of the forest, panting. Her wheelchair sat twenty feet away, canted on its side, looking extremely battered.

She caught movement out the corner of her eye. She rolled quickly, bringing up her pistol.

A humanoid stood a dozen feet away, bow in hand, string pulled taut, arrow ready. It took her a second to realize that it was nonhuman.

“Shit,” Lain whispered. First contact. A lifetime of dreaming of it—all the possible ways it might take place—and her mind went blank. “Shit.”

They stared at each other.

He was at least six and a half feet tall, wide shouldered and lean. Pointed ears said he wasn’t human but he had to be at least a distant genetic cousin. His black hair and almond-shaped eyes hinted that he was closer to the Asian branch. If she had to guess an age, she would put him at seventeen. Tribal tattoos done in blue ink covered his arms in a complex design reminiscent of Celtic knots. He wore knee-high boots, leather pants and a vest of overlapping scales that seemed more organic than handcrafted. He seemed to be wearing nothing fashioned out of metal; all his weapons were wood, leather and stone.

Primitive as his weapons might be, he could still kill her. It was a basic truth that xenobiologists had always acknowledged—first contact could easily be deadly to both sides.

They stared at each other, weapons aimed.

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Lain cautiously lowered her pistol. “And hopefully you don’t want to hurt me, but I am not going to make my last act in this world killing off an intelligent being.”

The male lowered his bow.

Lain breathed out in relief. Mutual destruction averted, at least for the time being. She risked glancing at her wheelchair still lying on its side. She snapped her fingers. Its legs flailed for a moment and stopped. It needed to be righted before it could function properly—if it wasn’t totally broken.

She started to crawl toward it, keeping her pistol in position so she could quickly bring it up. “Yes, I might be thrashing around on the ground like a beached whale, but I’m still dangerous. I’m a cripple but I have powerful machines that make me greater than this broken shell. With machines I have flown up to the stars, walked on the moon.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Was supposed to swim the seas of Europa—that’s a moon to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, although your people might think it’s just a star.”

She reached her chair and struggled to right it. “Of course it would help if my powerful machine was working.”

The male crouched down, cocking his head in what seemed to be puzzlement. She reminded herself that it was dangerous to assign human emotion to the gesture. It seemed, though, that he was curious about her. She knew that she was damn curious about him. Her training, though, stressed that her first priority was to stabilize her environment. Dead scientists learned nothing but the truth of their own mortality.

She finally managed to right her wheelchair. “Load.” It whined as it tried to comply. After a second, it shuddered and its operating system crashed. “I am starting to suspect that there is a god and he has wicked sense of humor. He’s probably doing all this just to teach me a lesson. I’m just not sure at all what I’m supposed to be learning.”

She manually set the chair’s armature to load position. “I think part of it is that I’m supposed to remember that it is my mind that matters most, not my body. True, this would all be marginally easier with two sound legs, but not much. Without a gun, I would have been in a bad way with those dinosaurs, crippled or not.”

She climbed into the chair and rebooted the operating system. “And I think God was also reminding me that regardless of where I would have gone, I would have needed machines to operate. When I went to the moon, I needed a space suit. In the seas of Europa, I would have needed a diving suit. And if they ever got that insane trip to Venus finalized—you should have seen that gear. All machines to move this fragile container I have about, because what’s important is what’s up here.” She tapped her head. “It’s my mind that makes me special. And there’s nothing wrong with it. And machines let me use my mind, be it on the moon, or Europa, or wherever this place is.”

“This is Elfhome,” the male said.

She slapped her hand over her mouth. He spoke English? She had just ranted on and on. God, what had she said? First contact and she had thrown a hissy fit. Wait—how did he speak English if this was first contact? Maybe she just misheard him.

“Have you really been to the moon?” he asked.

She nodded, hand still over her mouth. He was definitely speaking English with a lilting British accent. He wasn’t simply parroting her faint New York accent back at her. Oh God, he had understood everything she had said! What exactly had she said? She had ranted on without thinking. Had she mentioned being on the moon? Yes, she had. She nodded, and then, realizing that he might not know the gesture, added. “Yes, I have. I was—I am an astronaut. That’s a scientist that travels to other worlds to study them.”

“What’s it like? The moon?”

“Very beautiful, in a lifeless kind of way. Rock and dust and cold and nothing more.”

He tilted his head to scan the trees above them, as if looking for the moon. “Do you suppose our moon is like yours? Lifeless?”

She floundered in the flood of implications. This twin of Earth had a brother of their moon. A nearly infinite set of identical events that would have needed to happen to form both. And most stunning of all, that he would know that the two planets were so similar. “Statistically speaking, yes.”

“Do you find our world more to your liking?”

There was a loaded question. It meant he had a full grasp of the concept of world and that she wasn’t a native of his. “Yes.”

“My father says it’s not much different than Earth.”

She considered the implication of the statement. The male not only knew of the existence of another planet, he knew its name and spoke one of its languages. There was only one way she could imagine he knew so much. “Your father has been to Earth.”

“Not for several hundred years. I have to say—judging by the city that you sent to visit us—your world has changed greatly since he was there last.”

For a moment she forgot how to breathe, and only remembered as she realized she was going lightheaded. Deep breaths. Radically shifting worldview required deep breaths.

“How…how…how old is your father?” It was the first of the “how” questions she could force out.

The male considered the question for a minute. “The exact count of his age? I do not know it. He has needed four digits to count his age for hundreds of years. I believe, though, that he is still under two thousand years old. Maybe.”

“And a year has three hundred and sixty-five days.”

He thought for a while longer. “That seems to be a correct number. I confess, one such as I has little need to count the days. I do not watch for winter’s thaw to sow crops or such things as that.”

Been to Earth. Lived for hundreds of years. Pointed ears. Lived on Elfhome. “You’re elves.”

“That is what our people are called. You are a human?” It was more question than statement.

“Yes. I am a human. I’m Lain Shenske.”

“What does your name mean?”

“It—it doesn’t mean anything. Shenske is my family name, given by father’s bloodline.” She didn’t want to explain being Jewish. “Lain is my given name, but neither one actually means anything.”

“I am Kaanini-kauta-taeli. It means Lightning Strikes Wind; a brilliance that is there and then gone. My mother was angry when the priestess gave it to me: I will most likely die young.”

“That’s terrible. Why would anyone even give a child a name like that?”

“Because she saw my future.”

She stared at him in horror.

“I do not mind. It has freed me to seize life, live it as I wish now, with no thought of the long future. If you constantly compare this moment with some perfection that you imagined, you are fated to be forever disappointed. Adventure is the unforeseen, not the expected.”

Blithe words for someone of sound body who had not had their dreams crushed. But was she not here, on an alien world, far greater than any she expected to explore? Europa would have been a long struggle to drill down through ice to open water and then pray for life. Exploring Elfhome might not be possible without her failure, because with the United States shelving its plans for Jupiter, the world had funneled its energy into the Chinese colony program.

She hated to admit her mother’s platitudes of “sometimes bad things have to happen for the good things to follow” had any bearing on her present situation. Lain had snarled in her mother’s face for that and every suggestion to use the wheelchair or to push herself in physical therapy. Lain hadn’t seen the point; her life seemed over. She couldn’t have predicted this impossible event all riding on the flip of a switch.

She cursed. A flip of a switch! Sooner or later the Chinese were going to flip the power switch again. If it wasn’t for her odd conversation with Yves, she wouldn’t have guessed that Pittsburgh’s disappearance was linked to the hyperphase gate in orbit. The Chinese would continue testing the gate until it was time for the colony ship to jump to Alpha Centauri. At that point, there would be no reason to keep the gate on. Pittsburgh would return to Earth and the connection to Elfhome would be lost.

If she wanted to stay on Elfhome, she needed to get to a piece of land that wasn’t shuffling between the worlds.