The Big Meow

The gate blazed up bright as a spotlight, throwing long sharp shadows away from Rhiow and her team and from Ith and Helen. The interwoven hyperstrings of the gate’s pseudosurface throbbed with the power pouring through them, brighter with every passing second. It was an alarming sight. If any gate Rhiow was managing had started to behave this way, she would either have locked it to some location and activated it or would have taken it offline instantly, terrified that it would burn out while being held in the nonpatent state. But this one’s been reinforced against that, she thought. And even if it did burn out, we could build another. Assuming there’s a planet left to attach it to –

Then something made Rhiow shiver. “Ith,” she said, looking over toward where Ith and Helen had been standing near the edge of the terrace, where the mountain slope dropped away southward. “Ready?”

Helen was standing with the condor feather wands in each hand, looking south with a listening expression. As for Ith, without warning he was now about ten times his everyday size, a towering fanged apparition from which any sensible tyrannosaurus would have fled; and his stripes were burning paler, fading to match the hot underlying gold. It was one of the ways Ith appeared when roaming the plains of the Old Downside with the saurians he had redeemed and brought out of the darkness with him. But the other, more ancient form he wore at need, Rhiow suspected he was holding in abeyance. Trust him, he’ll know the moment —

She turned her attention back to the gate. It kept throbbing brighter and brighter, and Rhiow looked over at the control characters written underneath the spot where it hovered in the spell-circle.

“It’ll hold,” Aufwi said.

Urruah was stalking around the inside of the circle, carefully stepping in the empty access and maintenance patches and keeping an eye on the gate’s power draw. “Yes it will,” he said, “but we’re going to need a new one when this is done…”

“Which will be a good thing,” Hwaith said heading over to the management circle inside the diagram that held his own link to the power draw controls. “Especially considering how much trouble this thing’s been giving me lately. Wouldn’t you love the chance to do initial emplacement on a gate? And see the installation done right for a change?”

“Please,” Urruah said, “don’t get me started. That one gate over at Penn, even at the best of times – “

He started in on his favorite rant about the worst-built gate of the Penn complex, and Rhiow threw Hwaith a grateful glance as the gate throbbed brighter and brighter, coming up to the peak of its energy feed. ‘Ruah gets nervous in the runup to any intervention, she said silently. This is how he copes, but when things break loose –

It’s how I cope too, Hwaith said silently. What do you think I’m doing now? But he’ll be fine, Rhi –

This was almost certainly true, but it was somehow a great relief to have someone else saying it to her. Rhiow headed over to where Sif was babysitting the claudication package, which sat like a tiny fiery pearl in front of her at the center of the domed-in circle. “It’s stable?”

“No problems so far,” Siffha’h said, not taking her eyes off it.

Rhiow went on past her to the spot where Arhu was sitting by himself, eyes closed as if ignoring everything around him… but she knew nothing was further from the truth. “Arhu…?”

He didn’t look up or around: he didn’t need to. “It’s coming,” he said very quietly. “Get ready.”

Once more Rhiow turned her attention to the sky. No stars were showing, initially because of the dust still hanging in the air. But then it became plain that there were not going to be any stars tonight; and Rhiow started going cold from the inside out.

The initial effect hardly looked apocalyptic enough, at first. It began getting dark. Well, it was doing that already, Rhiow thought. But the unnatural quality of the descending darkness, something relentless and strangely cruel, became plainer moment by moment as the gate came up to its maximum power output and held there. Outside the circle of the gate’s radiance, the ugly new nightfall seemed to be fading down not merely the light of the sky and the sunset, but the outlines and colors in things – not the way normal night did, but in a way that suggested that light and color and even solidity were being sucked out of everything. For the time being, the ferocious light of the gate resisted the sucking. But even its normally multicolored light was turning pale and unhealthy-looking, a livid sheen setting in.

This is what we saw last night, Rhiow said. Here it comes –