Jeremy considered the situation carefully. This was rather difficult, given the tremendous amount of banging on the sealed hatch behind him, but still he tried. Like a titanic lock-pin, the cylindrical bolt that held the gate mechanism closed had to be lifted into its casing, then the whole assembly pushed into its slot. Normally the gigantic gearworks towering over them took care of this, but with the mechanism disabled, there was no way that gate was opening — unless …
“Danae, can you lift it?”
The mage put an Analyze Object rune on the smooth surface of the lock-pin. “Forty thousand kilograms of solid cordite? No way.”
“Gravity cancel?” Jeremy suggested.
“Are you kidding? That thing’s more than six meters wide. I can’t scribe a rune that big.”
“Hm.” Forty thousand kilos of solid cordite. About ten cars, maybe, or one semi. Jeremy remembered a conversation in which a concussion had been compared to the way he’d felt after the last time he tried lifting that much weight. No way around it this time, however. “Tomarik. Ragger. I’m gonna need your help.” The Ronso and the Wookiee carefully peeled themselves away from the hatch they were helping to brace. When they were sure it would continue to hold in their absence, they approached the lock-pin. “One on each side,” Jeremy instructed. “Whatever you do, don’t put your feet under the edge of the pin. Lift only as much as you can; you’re just taking some of the load off me. Ready?” Both nodded. “Okay.”
Jeremy spread out his arms in front of him, feeling the psi-projection of the pin take form between his hands, scaling it down by a tenth … by a quarter … by a third. At half of its original size, it began to shiver. Jeremy stabilized it, tuned out the insistent banging on the hatch behind him, squeezed it down even more. When it was down to near a fifth of its original size, it shivered again, and this time it took much longer to stabilize. Tentatively, Jeremy exerted a bit more pressure on the psi-projection, trying to compress it just that little bit more. It refused, trying to expand in his grip. With an angry grunt, Jeremy acquiesced to twenty percent.
“You need some help with that?” Jeremy heard Danae whisper. His next breath came out in what, to anyone else, would have been a scoff, but to Danae communicated merely This is not something you can help me with.
He glanced at Tomarik and Raagrakyysh in turn. The latter two crouched by the sides of the lock-pin. Jeremy too crouched, curled his fingers beneath the imaginary cylinder (lift with your legs, not your back) and heaved upward.
Large objects — tank turrets, vault doors, and the like — are often depicted as making a soft bass boom when they begin to move. This is neither a cinematic affectation nor symbolism: it actually happens. Being bigger than most, the lock-pin made a deeper boom than most, an almost subsonic tremor strong enough to feel in the bones. The banging at the hatch paused, then the Guado on the other side realized what had made that sound and started banging again with renewed vigor. Raagrakyysh glanced at the group piled against the hatch, wondering if they’d be able to hold out long enough without his help. But the gigantic Galka had all of his considerable musclepower focused on the task of keeping the hatch from swinging into the room. Tehuatl met Raagrakyysh’s glance, gave him an encouraging smile — and cut his eyes toward the bottom of the pin, where a paper-thin gap between the lock-pin’s beveled edge and the shallow dimple it rested in was growing slowly wider. Forty thousand kilograms of solid cordite rose, ponderously and very, very slowly. Jeremy felt his energy draining rapidly into the scalar difference. Tomarik and Raagrakyysh slipped their fingers under the real pin and lifted. Their enormous strength made an immediate difference: the pin began to rise faster as Jeremy poured more energy into the motion than into the congruence.
Danae watched the pin slide upward into its casing, centimeter by centimeter, and fretted. She could literally see the way Jeremy was wearing himself out moving such an obscene volume of matter; next to the effort he was putting out, the Wookiee and the Ronso were doing practically nothing. Struck by sudden inspiration, she opened her spellplate and scribed two glyphs, Soul and Eye, on each side of Jeremy’s sigil. The same spell with her own sigil yielded a blank whiteness, but she had never tried it with someone else’s sigil. As she aligned the glyphs and put her eye to them, she saw his body encased in a nearly opaque white sphere, something she understood to be a visual rendering of his body-force; but a hair-thin purple line, his soul-force, stretched taut from pole to pole like an overtightened cello string, and it looked to be on the very verge of —
“Je — !”
The purple line broke. Jeremy gasped. His arms were still wrapped around an imaginary barrel, torso upright, legs nearly straight, but his knees abruptly buckled. The lock-pin drooped. Tomarik and Raagrakyysh let out anguished howls as their fingers clutched at the lock-pin, their claws trying to dig into its hard undersurface.
“Tehua … ” Jeremy squeaked. His teeth gritted, he shifted his grip on the barrel in his arms and heaved upward. All it accomplished was to brake the lock-pin’s descent. A sharp inhalation — then Jeremy screamed “TEHUA!!” so loud that his voice broke. Danae flinched. “I NEED YOU!!”
The Galka heaved his tremendous bulk away from the hatch, picked his way past Korcha, Zell, Baito and Bo, and pounded in Jeremy’s direction. Without even slowing, Tehuatl ran past him and skidded under the lock-pin.
“NO!” Danae shrieked. Her spellplate was up almost by reflex; she had almost Inverted a Gravity glyph, the pin casing be damned, before she even looked at what she was scribing — but she let it all evaporate when she saw the lock-pin hadn’t budged an inch, up or down.
Jeremy gasped for breath. Tehuatl braced his back and tail hard against the undersurface of the lock-pin, powerful legs bent beneath himself — and he used those massive legs to piston upward, forcing the pin to rise again. A moment later Tomarik and Raagrakyysh joined him under the pin, adding the full strength of their bodies, not just their arms. Jeremy’s dim body-force, perilously near to transparency, flickered. The pin clanged hollowly into its casing — but the job was not yet done.
Jeremy let out a sound that, to Danae’s ears, sounded just like a sob, and nearly pulled one out of her throat. He was leaning forward, concentrating on helping the tremendously strong Galka to keep the lock-pin aloft, being pulled along with the mind-shape in his arms as Tomarik and Raagrakyysh strained to push the casing toward its slot. Tehuatl shuffled one foot a few centimeters to the side. Danae crashed right through her Aura Sight rune, its remnants curling like so much mist in the wind of her rush to the lock-pin casing. A moment later, a pair of huge, armored gray hands were planted on the casing beside hers — Rand’s. And Ox’s on the other side. Beyond Ox, Raijin and Sabin; beyond Rand, Wakka, Bo, and Rei. With all of them pushing, it was a matter of only moments before the edge of the lock-pin caught on the lip of the slot.
“It’s in!” Tehuatl shouted. He, Raagrakyysh and Tomarik ducked out from beneath the pin to help push, its undersurface scraping against the bottom of its slot.
Zell, having watched the entire byplay, guessed (correctly) what would happen next. He launched off the hatch door and was at Jeremy’s side in two long strides, just in time to catch him before he tumbled to the floor. Danae shot him a grateful look. Zell lowered Jeremy to the floor and hurried back to help brace the hatch, which was starting to swing open. Annoyed, Zell wound up and smashed a jab onto the edge of the hatch, ramming it back home. A satisfying yelp of frustration filtered through.
With ten strong males heaving the lock-pin casing into place, Danae decided her efforts were of negligible value. She ducked out from between Rand and Ox, focusing her attention on Jeremy. She made herself another Aura Sight lens and shook her head: a faintly pulsing purple dot above his head was all that remained of Jeremy’s soul-force line. The part of his body-force that showed above the floor did so only just visibly, flickering and fizzing like a screen with heavy interference. His normally warm, ruddy skin was chill, clammy and gray; his breath came in fast shallow gulps, and his pulse — when she took one of his wrists in both hands — felt weak. But his eyes were open and clear and lucid, gazing an apology into hers. Her own eyes flicked, incongruously, from one green eye to a stubby white tusk and back, and he gave her a wan smile — the best he could manage at the moment.
“Hungry?” she murmured.
He nodded.
Danae rose and went to get two ration bars from Baito. She peeled one on her way back and fed it to Jeremy. The other bar Jeremy peeled and ate himself, then balled up the wrappers and swallowed those, too. His body-force looked much less frighteningly dim once he was done.
About then the lock-pin casing crashed into its slot, followed by a series of clacks and clangs as the mechanism holding the massive gate closed cycled out. Tehuatl stepped over to the seam, a ridiculously tiny figure overshadowed by the vast bulk of the gate, and slapped a palm onto each side. With much bulging of thick muscles and grunting, he strained so hard to pull the gate apart that his olive features were soon covered in a sheen of sweat, but this was even beyond the Galka.
With Jeremy out of commission, Danae decided it was her turn to be useful. She patted the struggling Galka gently on the shoulder blade. He stepped aside for her, watching as she opened her spell plate and scribed three large Gravity glyphs on it. Carefully, she slid the plane of white light into the seam and pressed the runes to one surface; then she retrieved her hand, re-scribed the same triplet of glyphs, and carefully pressed them to the opposite surface. The gates shuddered and groaned as the directed Gravity spells took effect, but did little else. Danae sighed tiredly and gazed up the length of the gates. It would help if she could put another set of Gravity spells higher up, to balance the forces down here …
She heard a chirring from the hatch and turned in time to see and hear it slam shut once more. Zell trotted toward her, an intent look on his slim features. Before she could ask him what he was about, he signaled his junctioned Guardians to cast a Float spell on her; she rose off the floor and wavered for a moment as she regained her balance.
Zell smiled at Danae and tossed off an informal salute with the same two fingers he’d signaled with, and returned to the hatch. “Thanks,” she called to his retreating back; she appreciated being saved the trouble and energy of calibrating a Float spell of her own to her weight. Zell gave her another smile over his shoulder.
Rising up along the gates was slow going, but Danae had the first spell ready when she reached a height she thought appropriate. Placing the runes took only a few moments. By the time Danae had maneuvered herself back down near the floor, the gates were already beginning to pull apart. Tehuatl moved in, ready to help.
A hairline crack appeared between the gate doors. Ox and Sabin moved to flank Tehuatl. Sabin’s strong fingers, slimmer than Ox’s, found purchase first. Finding traction on the floor less than ideal, he jammed a toe into the crack. Ox got his fingers into the slot next; with him and Sabin pulling, and Tehuatl prying, and Danae’s magic exerting a constant force, the mortised gate groaned open. Gaps appeared between the tenons, filled with sunlight that lanced in brilliant shafts into the chamber.
Tehuatl braced himself between the gates, using the full power of his legs and height to separate them further. A long warm zigzag of golden sunlight poured in over him. He, Ox and Sabin were outside in an instant, followed closely by the rest of the group. Rand swept Danae up as he went by, Tomarik hard on his heels with Jeremy slung over his shoulder.
“Wait,” Danae protested, trying to clamber off Rand’s broad shoulder. But Michael was already a step ahead of her, acetylene torch in hand. Ox waved everyone back to have room to swing his maul, with which he smashed a deep dent in each side of the gate. While Tehuatl and Raagrakyysh used these indentations to push the colossal gates closed again, Michael held out the torch. Danae stared in astonishment as three luminescent rings, the color of a fresh bruise, burst from beneath his boots with three dull booms and rippled outward, just as Michael began to speak in a deafening whisper: “Antorbok.” A glowing rune materialized on the ground in front of him, throwing a column of lurid violet light toward the sky. “Pargon.” A second rune appeared beside the first. “Magormor. Pargon. Pargon. Mantorok. Pargon.” Five more runes completed a perfect heptagon around Michael; upon the seventh word, thick bolts of violet-edged black lightning lanced from each rune into the acetylene torch in his hand; shadowy violet-limned bubbles swirled in a brief frenzy around it, settled on it, washed it in a shimmering film of violet energy. Quickly Michael lit the glowing torch, now dripping eye-twisting motes of energy, turned it to maximum flow, and trained it on the seam between the gates. Under the enchanted torch’s flame, material that would have required an arc welder and filler wire melted like butter. It took him but seconds to weld the seam from the bottom to the upper limit of his reach. “That should hold for maybe an hour,” he said. He shut off the torch and stuck it, still dripping shadowy sparks, in his belt.
He had barely stepped away when he heard the first bang against the gates.
As they hurried away, Danae maneuvered Jeremy off Tomarik’s shoulder and onto Rand’s, opposite her. She had to lean over Rand’s head and keep an arm around him to keep him from toppling off, but it gave her a chance to hiss into his ear, “Forty friggin’ thousand kilos of solid friggin’ cordite? Have I told you you’re crazy?”
Jeremy chuckled weakly. “Just a couple more times … before we hit the … five billion mark,” he assured her.
“All right. Just making sure you know.”