Wood Sprites

42: Plan B

“They say something has happened to the gate!” Nikola reported as he joined them at the window. They’d been watching a continuous storm of burning debris rain down through the night sky. “They think something hit it. They’ve lost contact with the crew that maintained it, and there’s a huge debris field where it should be and where it shouldn’t be. Though I’m not sure what that means.”

“It probably means that there is debris that they can’t account for.” Louise couldn’t tear herself away from the window. “The wrong orbital plane. The wrong trajectory.”

“Like from a colony ship?” Nikola asked.

Louise shook her head. “No. It couldn’t have been a ship that hit it. Earth’s gate can only jump spaceships to Alpha Centauri Bb; the ships can’t return back through it. Even if the colonists somehow built their own hyperphase gate to return to Earth, it would be astronomically improbable that the exit point would be the same exact position as the Earth’s gate.”

“But you said Providence’s Child was falling!” Crow Boy leaned against the glass, staring up at the night sky. “You said Jin Wong was returning to us!”

She had? When she tried to recall the exact words, though, they slipped through her memory like elusive minnows, darting this way and that. It was as if even as she tried to catch hold of the words, they changed as the future changed.

“Esme did say that she had to leave Earth to do something important. Maybe she was going to get Jin Wong.” For some odd reason, Jillian stared downwards toward the street instead of up at the sky.

Did it mean that Jin Wong was tumbling through space, falling to Earth, with Esme desperately trying to catch him? Try as she might, Louise couldn’t force that scenario onto the facts she knew. The colony ships couldn’t jump back to Earth. Even if they could, “debris” indicated that neither ship remained intact. Did the elusive nature of what Louise foretold mean that Esme had probably failed at her attempt to save Jin Wong?

“If the gate is gone,” Jillian said slowly as if trying to work out a difficult logic problem, “why hasn’t Pittsburgh returned?” She pointed at the quarantine zone just a block from the hotel’s parking lot. “Shouldn’t it be right there?”

They stared at the dark Elfhome forest in silence.

Jillian chanted a litany of, “This is bad. Badbadbad. Really bad. We’re totally screwed.”

“Don’t say ‘screwed.’” Louise murmured as she struggled to be calm and find a satellite that had caught the accident.

“There’s nothing we can do!” Jillian cried. “Nothing. There’s huge ginormous hunks of stuff falling out of the sky that we can’t change or stop or anything.”

Louise locked down on a scream until she could say calmly, “We will find a way to deal with this. First, we need to know what exactly we’re facing.”

Within a few minutes, she found a Russian spy satellite that had been launched while the Chinese started the construction of the hyperphase gate. Over thirty years of silent observation with nothing more to report than occasional spaceships jumping to another star system. The spy satellite showed a confusion of metal pieces drifting where the gate had been. Louise scanned backwards through the satellite’s memory, watching the accident in reverse. The debris coalesced down then vanished, replaced by the gate, wreathed in violent greens and reds.

“It’s never looked like that before.” Crow Boy leaned over her shoulder. “Is that Rim fire?”

“Maybe,” Louise said. There had been no explosion, just one moment the large round gate had been there, and the next debris, all seemingly too straight to ever have been part of the circular structure.

Jillian snorted with contempt, despite the fact she didn’t know any better than Louise. “Rim fire is simply an aurora effect caused by the collision of energetic charged particles in the field that holds Pittsburgh on Elfhome.”

But normally Rim fire only appeared on Elfhome. Why was it suddenly wreathing the gate? And was the debris even from the gate?

“The crew on the gate sent out a distress call.” Jillian reported on the results of her research. “They reported strong vibrations before Earth lost contact with them.”

Louise stepped back through time and gasped as the gate flickered in and out of existence. There. Gone. There again. Gone again. While the gate winked in and out, the Rim fire continued to mark the gate’s location. “I don’t think anything hit the gate. I think something went wrong with the field.”

Louise scanned the footage to check her theory. Nothing seemed to interact with the gate until the last moment, when the mystery debris appeared. Nor did the debris seem to come from the gate but just flickered into existence as the gate vanished. The Rim fire appeared first and then, detected only by zooming in tightly, the reported vibrations started. The aurora grew for several minutes before the gate started to blink in and out. The question was: In and out of where?

She locked on to the falling debris. It looked like a jigsaw puzzle thrown into the air and caught on film before raining onto the ground. Judging by the speed it flashed out of camera range, it had a vastly different orbit than the gate. It appeared only in a dozen frames of film.

Space limited the number of possible sources. It wasn’t like Earth where “machine” could run from anything airplane to mining equipment to submarine. She linked a recognition program to the “known space objects” database and fed it the dozen frames of film that showed the debris.

“I don’t understand,” Crow Boy said. “The gate in orbit generated the field that kept Pittsburgh on Elfhome. If the gate is gone, what happened to the city?”

“We don’t know!” the twins and Nikola cried.

The recognition program found a match. The largest piece of debris was an odd glittering mass that looked like an iceberg growing out of a medusa of silvery tubing. The iceberg was spinning as it rocketed away. In frame number nine, it showed its smooth underbelly. There were three small ports and the start of a Chinese letter in red. The recognition software filled in missing pieces and the ghostly outline of the colony ship Minghe Hao took shape. Part of the ship’s hull had been peeled back by some unknown collision, laying bare the water-treatment plant. The ship’s vast store of water formed the glimmering iceberg blooming out of the shattered remains. The constellation of smaller debris was identified as pieces of the ship’s orbital maneuvering system. Burn marks indicated that the rocket engines had been fired prior to the ship’s destruction. It would explain the speed and angle of the wreckage. But Minghe Hao had jumped out of Earth’s orbit six years ago.

Crow Boy made a small hurt sound. “I had family on the Minghe Hao.”

“Maybe Esme saved them.” Louise offered what little comfort she could. “The colony ships are massive. We’re looking at only a small section of the Minghe Hao.”

It was enough, though, to wreak havoc on Earth. The television was showing complete panic as the pieces rained down. No one else had yet identified the debris. The news was still calling it “the gate.” The Minghe Hao’s missing engines had aimed the ship at American’s heartland prior to being sheared off. Remains of the water-treatment system struck the town of Bellbrook, Ohio, with such force that the reporters were stating “possible nuclear weapon” to describe the destruction.

“The gate is gone!” Jillian tossed her tablet aside and began to pace around the room in long, man-length strides. She was fleeing into the character of Captain Hilts as fast as she could. “Even if the gate wasn’t what fell, it’s not in Earth-space anymore. It’s probably wherever the rest of the Minghe Hao is, and that can’t be a good thing. The Minghe Hao hit something!”

Jillian was desperately trying to be strong. Now that Louise knew the signs, it was all so clear. Her twin was trying to press her lips into Hilts’ thin, confident sneer, but they kept trembling. She threw herself onto the couch, trying for the soldier’s seemingly carefree slouch. “We’re not talking rush hour on the George Washington Bridge here. There’s not a lot of shit to hit in space.”

All completely true.

Statistically, whatever accident shattered the Minghe Hao most likely had also claimed the gate. The structure had been built in space, spiderweb-delicate and carefully balanced. It hadn’t been designed to take a hard blow and recover. The gate had small positioning-correction thrusters but it wouldn’t be able to save itself if it had been smashed out of its orbit.

If something had gone horribly wrong over Elfhome — and all evidence pointed that way — the gate had been lost. Without it, the magic that linked the two worlds was broken. The great ironwood forest would forever be on Earth and Pittsburgh was lost.

It was frighteningly huge, and Louise didn’t know what they could do. All her hopes had been pinned on the idea that they would find the tengu children, free them, fly over the quarantine zone next Shutdown in hovercarts, and in short order be with Alexander and Windwolf. She had found a great deal of comfort thinking that powerful, unflappable Prince Yardstick would be protecting them. All they had to do was to get to his side and all would be over.

Now she had no idea what they should do.

But Louise did know that they couldn’t do nothing. They were standing out in the middle of a freeway. They had to move or be mowed down by everything hurtling at them with murderous speed.

Or more correctly, Louise had to do something.

At the mansion, right after their parents had died, Jillian had been too broken to pretend anything. She’d pasted all her broken bits back together, but the cracks were all still there. The promise of escape to Elfhome was the only glue that was keeping Jillian in one piece.

With that promise gone, the cracks were coming undone.

Jillian covered her mouth to hide the betraying tremble of lips and stood back up. The hurt lost look was filling her eyes as her control crumbled more. “Where — where’s my ball?”

Crow Boy staggered back to the window like someone had hit him with a sledgehammer. Super ninja or not, he was still just a fourteen-year-old boy, stranded on a world full of enemies. “What are we going to do?”

“We fall back to Plan B,” Louise stated as calmly as she could.

“We have a Plan B?” Crow Boy asked.

“We don’t, but the elves will have one. They probably knew that the gate could be damaged in an accident at any time — or the Chinese might be forced to actually abandon the colony program — or Queen Soulful Ember might figure out what they were doing and somehow blast the gate out of orbit. Feng was told years ago what to do in case of emergency. They have plans. Long-thought-out plans.”

“Okay.” Jillian breathed like she was willing to grab hold of any lifeline thrown to her.

“Yves is finding out right now that Shutdown isn’t going to happen.” Louise ignored the fact that Jillian whimpered and Crow Boy gasped as if she’d hit him. “He’ll switch to Plan B, and that involves getting to Elfhome another way.”

“No, no, no!” Jillian cried, her voice breaking. She covered her face with her hands, hiding her weakness as logic tore away hope. “If they had another way, they wouldn’t be trying to kidnap Alexander.”

“They want Alexander because there isn’t another way to Onihida,” Louise lied quickly to cut that fear off but then realized that she was right. “The tengu were isolated because the pathways from Onihida to Earth had been blocked.”

“By the dragons,” Crow Boy explained, “to try and isolate Onihida, but it didn’t work. They missed one path, but after the war, the elves pulled down all the pathways, even the ones between Earth and Elfhome.”

“See! See! Ming’s army is on Onihida! The island we blew up was the only way for his army to get to Earth. He would still need to get his soldiers from the China Sea to Monroeville first.”

“You blew up Pejamu Island?” Crow Boy cried in surprise.

“Parts of it.” Louise waved him away from distracting her argument. “The elves only blocked the pathways that they knew—”

“The caves!” Jillian cried.

“Yes,” Crow Boy said. “The pathway was in a cave.”

“No!” Jillian waved her arms frantically. “Remember all the maps of caves that Esme had? I bet Plan B is to go to Elfhome via caves.”

They’d ruled that out. Louise didn’t want to crush Jillian, though, not when she was so fragile.

“It would be difficult,” Crow Boy stated. “But they could do it.”

The twins turned to look at him with surprise. “What?”

“They found several cave systems in Westernlands that lead to Elfhome, only all the pathways were much too small to be useful. They took the worst and tried to expand the passages. It turns out that any construction destroys the pathway; the connection between the worlds is cut completely.” They stared at him in silence until he added, “The ones they attempted to expand had been too small for even a child to use. The ones that remain, you can squeeze a person through.”

“Child” made Louise think of the tengu children. Yves had been calmly sorting through the mansion’s treasures, keeping what would be useful for the takeover of Elfhome. He’d keep the children alive if he could still get them to Elfhome.

“Where are these pathways?” Jillian asked.

Crow Boy deflated, shaking his head. “I don’t know. We only know of their failures. They otherwise kept the natural pathways secret from us.”

Louise could almost see the cracks in Jillian’s composure widening. “Yves would want to stay as close to Pittsburgh as possible. That’s where all their resources are centered.” Louise did a quick search. There were fewer than a dozen caves listed for Pennsylvania, most of them more than a hundred miles from the quarantine zone. Only one was close. “Laurel Caverns. Was that one of the caves that Esme had a map to?”

“Yes, it was.” Nikola tilted his head, searching out data. “Desmarais bought it from Randolph Humbert in 1861, when it was known as Dulaney’s Cave, and he changed the name. Desmarais opened it as a show cave in 1961.”

“If they didn’t sell the cave after exploring it carefully, then there’s a pathway,” Crow Boy said. “It most likely is only big enough for a person to crawl through. They could send scouts through and some camping gear, but nothing larger.”

Between predators like wyverns and wargs, man-eating plants and rivers full of sharks, Elfhome’s wilderness wasn’t someplace you could live with just a tent and sleeping bag. “They wanted to take over the Eastern Hemisphere of Elfhome. A pup tent in the middle of the Western Hemisphere would seem to be wasted effort. At least, until the first Startup. Afterwards, though, they could have used it as a secret back door to Pittsburgh. They could have a fortress built over the cave on the other side.”

“A back door only stays secret if you don’t advertise it.” When the twins stared at him in surprise again, Crow Boy elaborated. “The oni do not play well with others, even other oni. I have not heard of there being a pathway near Pittsburgh, so it is possible that they have kept it for emergencies only. Plan B.”

That was good news at least: a way to Elfhome that wasn’t heavily guarded.

In a matter of minutes they had everything to be known about Laurel Caverns spread across the dozen monitors and their two tablets.

Nikola tilted his head back and forth. “Their website says that they host fieldtrips, caving tours, Girl Scout events, gemstone panning, and something called Kavernputt.” He tilted his head a couple more times in confusion. “Oh, it’s miniature golf in a cave, entirely handicap-accessible.”

For a secret back door, it sounded overrun with humans. Maybe Crow Boy was wrong. Maybe Ming had kept the caverns just because they made him money.

“Putt-putt?” Jillian obviously was trying to link miniature golf with plans of global conquest. “There’s something very twisted about a bad guy hiding out at a putt-putt course.”

“Oh!” Nikola cried. “Their website just posted that they will be closed to the public. It says they’re going to be renovating the gift shops and lighting systems.”

Louise breathed out in relief. “Yves just fell back to Plan B.”