Spires of Infinity (55 page)

The robotic guards steadily fired their weapons into the melee, blasting everything around them to pieces in bright flashes of light. They seemed unable to distinguish soldiers from mutants, and blasted at each with equal ferocity.

Staring at the carnage and the overwhelming tide of death that continued to pour over the wall, Gabriel prayed that sending Sam would cause the paradox to hit, or there was going to be nothing left of the Imperial Soldiers. Unable to believe what he was seeing, he gazed around, trying to make sense in the sheer destruction of life and unholy violence.

“Gabriel,” Kari was shaking his arm. “Snap out of it!”

Shaking his head, Gabriel focused on her and nodded. Taking a few seconds to

reload his pistols, he searched past all of the violence for the crackling lightning that made up the frame of the Gate.

Driving the blade of her spear into the ground, Kari bit down on both of her

thumbs, causing blood to well out of them. Deftly she drew a symbol on each of her palms and slammed them together. Black lightning began to crackle and snake between her fingers. Pulling her hands apart with obvious enormous effort, she looked at the lightning crackling between them. A ball of swirling fire began to form between her hands, mixing with the lightning. Pulling her hands further apart, she pushed them up over her head as the ball of swirling fire and lightning began growing until it was about the size of a Volkswagen. Gabriel’s hair stood on end from the electricity in the air, and sparks began to fly from his pistols and belt buckle. Heaving, as though throwing a huge weight, she tossed the roiling mass of fire and lightning forward. It screamed through the mutants, destroying everything it touched, clearing a path for them to the Gate, and burning a furrow in the stone paving.

Slumping against her spear for a second, Kari breathed hard, as though she’d

sprinted a mile. She did not rest for long. As the massive fireball exploded large against the side of the Control Tower, shooting lances of lightning in every direction, she straightened and yanked her spear free.

“I’d just like you to know,” Gabriel said. “That was the absolute coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”

“Come on,” Kari breathed, looking more than a little exhausted and frayed around the edges. “That space won’t stay cleared forever.”

With a slice of her spear that decapitated a nearly human looking figure, Kari stumbled to a run along the smoking furrow her fireball had melted into the paving, holding her tails up well clear of the ground, in a way that flashed her panties.

Following, Gabriel aimed and fired at anything that even looked like it might step into the cleared path. Right on his heels, Sam grasped his coat as if afraid of being lost in a crowd.

Growing hotter with every step, the heat of the burnt stone radiated through the soles of Gabriel’s boots as he dashed along the blackened furrow. It became

uncomfortable long before they reached the Gate, and painful not much after that.

Gritting his teeth against what would likely result in severe blistering at the least, he ran as though the devil’s hound was nipping at his heels

Reaching the end, Gabriel spun around just in time to blow a hole in a huge,

hulking mass that lumbered toward Sam. Looking down at the gaping wound in its chest, the huge creature came to a stop before falling over dead on the melted furrow where his flesh began to sizzle with a horrible odor.

Holstering one pistol, Gabriel pulled Sam close to him. He kissed her briefly, then nodded to the odd shimmering within the frame of the Gate.

“Good luck,” he said. “Remember what I told you about what you need to do.

Both of you. It’s very important. And remember, you’re going back into
my
past, so don’t tell me
anything
about what’s happening back here. Got it?”

Turning to face the Gate, Sam gave an annoyed nod. Visibly steeling herself, she hefted her pistol and stepped forward. Mister Mittens stood at attention on her shoulders as she took a deep breath and dashed through the shimmering light, disappearing as though plunging into the surface of a pool.

“Now what,” Kari shouted to be heard over the sounds of the battle.

“Now we wait for her to get back,” Gabriel shouted back as he redrew his pistol and began firing at anything that got too close to him.

He was really feeling the blood he’d lost now. It was making him dizzy and

lightheaded, and he felt as though he could eat an entire cow, but the thought of eating made his stomach churn uncomfortably. He began missing a few shots as his muscles trembled with adrenaline and hunger.

Leaning heavily on her spear, Kari’s eyes scanned the melee with rising concern.

Gabriel realized that she was searching for her brothers and pointed them out to her. The twins were back to back, their blades like windmills of death, flashing red in the light of the sun as it began to peek around the edge of Altima above. Anything that approached them died. There was a waist high pile of bodies around them, and yet more and more mutants clambered over it to meet their ends. Gabriel felt vomit rising, but couldn’t spare the time to puke. He fired his pistols one after the other, reloading when his shells were spent. Finally there were nothing but clicks when he pulled the triggers and his ammunition was completely gone.

Holstering the pistols, Gabriel pulled out his shotgun and began blowing

basketball-sized holes in anything that even appeared to be moving in his direction. Allie had picked up a spear from the hands of a fallen soldier and was jabbing it at anything that got in her reach. Kari killed anything that came near her, but between kills she sagged against her spear breathing hard and looking haggard and drained.

Reloading the shotgun, Gabriel looked up at the sky. The sun was about a quarter of the way out from behind the planet. Had it really only been that long? When he’d stepped through the Gate the sun was just finishing its eclipse. It felt like
years
rather than mere hours.

“Come on,” Gabriel growled. “Why isn’t she back yet? Why isn’t anything

happening?”

“I calculated her Gate Jump back to this time before I received the software and hardware upgrades that the Northern Sage gave to me,” Allie explained, her voice perfectly audible in his ear over the din of battle. “I may have missed by an hour or two, give or take.”

“I don’t think we’re going to hold out more than a few minutes,” Gabriel said

heavily, “much less an hour or two!”

“Before my upgrade, time travel had a great portion of guesswork in it,” Allie shrugged uncomfortably. “I am sorry I could not send her back to the exact time she left.

I did my best.”

Grounding the butt of her spear, Kari practically collapsed against it, barely remaining on her feet. She wheezed loudly and her eyelids kept drooping almost closed as though she was fighting for consciousness.

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll last,” she breathed, voice harsh and strained as though she’d spent the last hour screaming at the top of her voice. “That fireball used up a lot of my strength.”

“Don’t give up, foxy lady,” Gabriel said.

“Foxy lady,” Kari blinked at him. “You mean me?”

Gabriel nodded as he reloaded his shotgun with the last of his shells.

“I think I’ll take that as a compliment,” Kari said as she forced herself back upright.

Minutes seemed to pass like hours as Gabriel fired the last of his shells. Tossing the shotgun aside he drew his knife and held it at ready in his right hand.

There was a bright flash of light and Sam abruptly stepped out of thin air next to Gabriel. Blood poured from her nose and she shook her head with a hand to her temples, swaying a bit before righting herself.

“That hurts a lot more the second time around,” she mumbled.

“You’re back,” Gabriel cried.

Sam shot him a glare, pulled back her arm, and decked him. The blow was

unexpected, and she was a lot stronger than she looked.

“That’s for making me come back instead of helping you to the end,” she said

fiercely, wiping blood from her nose. “Just so you know I’m angry with you, since you seem completely incapable of noticing it for yourself!”

Looking around, Sam seemed to realize that everything was the same as she’d left it. Scratching behind one of her ears, she adjusted her cleavage a bit with her other hand.

“It’s all still the same,” she said.

Massaging his jaw, Gabriel wondered if it was cracked. Sam had seemed eager

enough to go back to the future when he’d sent her. Why was she so angry
now
!

Nothing that went on in that crazy little head of hers
ever
seemed to make any sense.

“Are you sure this plan of yours is going to work,” Mister Mittens asked from his perch on Sam’s shoulders. “Nothing seems to have changed at all.”

“Allie,” Gabriel asked with concern.

Plunging her spear through the belly of an approaching mutant, Allie shrugged.

“Honey, we’re home,” Michael and Jonathan said as they carved their way

through to join their sister. “Did you miss us?”

The two of them were covered from head to toe with blood so thickly that their skin appeared to have taken on the color permanently.

“By the way,” Jonathan said. “I don’t see how we can hold out for much longer.”

“Just FYI and all,” Michael added, nodding to the dwindling number of imperial soldiers on the field. Those that had been considered too wounded to fight had joined in.

“We never really stood a chance,” Kari nodded grimly. “We lost the second that the shield went down.”

Jonathan fished something out of his shirt and held up a crystal identical to the one around Gabriel’s neck, smeared with blood. “We can escape. We did as much as we could. There’s no shame in running.”

“I agree,” Michael said, pulling out a crystal of his own.

Kari looked from one to the other before pulling out a third crystal. “There

doesn’t seem to be much choice. I’m sorry you two, but we’re going to have to part ways here.”

Gabriel looked down at his own crystal. With that he could escape too, but could he take Sam with him? The Northern Sage had told him he could travel through time and space just like the Doctor did, but did that mean he could take a companion too? He didn’t want to test it with Sam’s life in the balance.

A quick look at the battlefield showed him how hopeless things were. Without

Kari to help him hold back the tide he wasn’t going to last very long. Escape seemed like the only real option. But he would hate himself for the rest of his days if anything happened to Sam because he didn’t know the limitations of his new toy. Better to die by her side fighting, than to wish he had for the rest of his life.

Something happened, though for the life of him, Gabriel couldn’t say what it was.

He couldn’t see or hear anything different, but he could feel it. He focused on the feeling, trying to figure out what had changed.

He was not the only one to notice. Kari and her brothers began looking around with wondering expressions, and then the mutants and remaining soldiers slowly began to stop and look around.

“What’s happening,” Sam asked, backing away, fright plain on her face. “What is that?”

“The paradox,” Gabriel asked.

The crystal around his neck, and the crystals around the necks of Kari and the twins, began to blaze like the sun, seeming to hum inaudibly.

The ground shook violently, and the sky seemed to explode with movement. It

was like watching day turn to night and back again on time lapse. Cries of fear began to circulate through the courtyard as humans and mutants alike began to panic. The mutants seemed intent on running away back over the wall, and they started killing each other in an effort to be the first.

“Gabriel,” Sam shrieked, holding out her arms to him.

Looking back at her, Gabriel could hardly believe his eyes. Her arms seemed to flicker between solid and ghostly transparent.

“What’s happening to me,” she shrieked. Her voice sounded far away.

Looking around quickly, Gabriel saw that both armies in the courtyard, and even the courtyard itself, were beginning to fade in and out of existence like Sam was. Not only that, but the tower behind him as well. When the tower and courtyard faded, he could see a vast, untamed jungle in their place, but then the Spires of Infinity faded back into view and it was lost.

“The new timeline is overwriting the old,” Allie explained. “It appears that the odds of those created by events after the activation of the Spires ceasing to exist were higher than I expected.”

“
Ceasing to exist
,” Sam shrieked, looking down at her body as the flickers of her fading away became more frequent. She shot a pleading look to Gabriel. “
Help me
!”

Gabriel didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what he
could
do. He was horrified at what was happening. Something he had done was causing the woman he loved to be erased from existence. He would be the only one that remembered that she’d ever lived at all.

“
No
,” Gabriel cried as he threw himself toward her.

The air suddenly seemed solid. It was like trying to press his way through

invisible jelly. Fighting against whatever was holding them apart, Gabriel forced himself forward. He was not going to lose her. He was not going to let her die. If he did one good thing in his life, it was going to be to save her.

Fighting and growling through gritted teeth, Gabriel forced his way through the invisible bonds that seemed to be holding him back, step by step. Sam’s flickering became even more frequent. She seemed almost not to be there at all. He had to hurry.

He had to reach her!

At last Gabriel was in arm’s reach. He stretched out to grasp her hand, but just as he did, she faded away completely.

Shock flooded through him as he looked at his hand. She was gone. He’d been

too slow. He hadn’t been able to save her. She’d been completely erased from existence.