Farside Base: Part Seven

     There was absolutely no reason for the Demon to be in the hanger, and even less for him to be accompanied by a heavyset blue Zafara and a much less muscular Desert Ixi. There was even less reason for the Ixi to gracefully leap into Kent’s open cockpit and remove him with such ease it seemed dreamlike... until I felt the prickle of magic on the edge of my senses, and knew what was going on. Well, sort of.

     “This is no time for a coup, if that’s what you’re thinking of,” the Commander shouted from her fighter. “You idiotic... ”

     “I’m sorry, Crystal,” the Demon said firmly, but very fast. “This Lutari is a traitor, and I cannot allow him to fly tonight. Clear skies.” The Ixi tossed Kent, who looked terrified, into the Zafara’s waiting paws, and all four of them exited the hanger... though not before Karl had a say in the matter.

     Leaning out of his cockpit, he shouted after them, “That talent’s not just for impressing me, Kent! Use it!”

     I had no time to wonder what he meant. “Move, the rest of you!” the Commander yelled, slamming her fighter’s top down. I followed suit, hurriedly starting the engines...

     “All systems go,” I murmured to myself as the control panel flickered to life.

     The Commander’s shout of “For those we love!” roared over the radio, and she raced out into the empty air outside, turning up towards space at once. The other pilots echoed it as they followed, and I realized it was a battle cry.

     As I repeated it, I knew I should be thinking of the damage that would occur if Sloth got past us, to fulfil his plans to ambush the sleeping night-side of Neopia from behind cover of the full moon, joining his forces already on the Space Station... In actuality, all I was thinking of was the look on Geena’s face as I turned away from her.

     Sloth wasn’t expecting us, that much was clear. It was very slightly amusing to see the huge ship slowly turn in answer to our cannon fire, looking like a fat and rather stupid Buzzer. Then it started firing... I was very grateful for the time I’d spent playing Neverending Boss Battle. Of course, the other pilots had only thought it a childish game, and it wasn’t long before we suffered our first loss. “Sorry, guys and ladies,” Farside Eleven said anxiously, “I can’t fight any more. I’ll be lucky if I can get through the atmosphere, let alone land this thing.” Half of his fighter’s tail had been blown off by a near-miss blast from Sloth’s ship.

     “Good luck!” the Commander barked, barely dodging another blast. “If any of you have a better idea for stopping Sloth, now’s the time for it! He’s picking us off...” A laser beam seemed to hit her head-on, and I bit my lip as a cloud of incandescent dust burst where she had been. Then she raced out of it, and I saw that the beam had actually hit the detached tail of Farside Eleven’s fighter. “...one by one,” she finished ruefully.

     “I got it, Chief!” Karl yelled, before shouting, “Ground Control, get me Kent. Now!”

     “I’m already here,” came Kent’s voice, breaking the scared silence from Farside Base. “Demon dragged me in here; what do you want?”

     “Your talent,” Karl said bluntly. “You’ve not been taught, but you’ve got magic, and you’ve read the spells.” He fired another ineffectual volley at Sloth’s ship. “Tech’s not doing us much good. We need magic, and for a gating spell, we need at least three mages. Unless you’d rather have the Demon’s goonette do it...”

     “She can’t do any magic past touch-range; I asked,” Kent snapped. “Useless bully! I assume I’m to be the fixed point in the gate?”

     “Who else?” Karl asked, as I dodged a volley of laser beams. “Explorer, we’re doing a large-scale gate around Sloth, target random space, far away. Kent’s fixed point, you’re on his left, me right. Commander, let us do our bit and don’t ask, it just might work. Start!”

     I knew what Karl had in mind: Creating a magical gate around Sloth’s ship, then basically using our combined willpower to isolate enough negative energy to temporarily warp space inside it. It would likely only last a moment, but that would be enough to slam the gate shut, safely transporting the ship elsewhere.

     However, I was dubious as to whether it would work. For one thing, I had never known Kent had any magical talent at all. For another, none of us had focusing devises. Karl’s wand was long lost, I had used magic so little at Farside that my staff was tucked under my mattress, and I had never seen anything of the sort in Kent’s possession. And then there was the little fact that the standard instructions for gating spells assumed such constants as Neopia-normal gravity, and were therefore meant to be cast in two dimensions.

     It was quickly clear that that would not work. Dodging laser beams and trying to concentrate on the opening words of the gating spell, I worked my way toward what would be one of the points of the triangle Kent was the apex of. It was a good thing I had that spatial imagination required for large-scale magic... I half-saw, half-felt the lines of energy radiating between the three of us, unseen by anyone else. But when I finally got to my destination, I could see that this wasn’t going to hack it.

     Far away, at the other point, was Karl, and lines of shimmering energy connected us, as they connected Kent to both of us. However... “We didn’t reckon for being in space!” I snapped. The energy lines clearly didn’t adequately contain the monstrous ship. If we activated the gate now, it would be as likely to slip out on our side again, wasting all our time and effort.

     “Throw some more lines out, then!” Karl shouted, and was as good as his word. More energy lines looped between the three of us, this time running under and over the ship, wrapping it in a web of energy. I joined them in pumping more power into the web...

     “Ok, we’re ready!” Karl yelled. “All fighters, get away from the ship, repeat, away from the ship!”

     “Doing it, Five,” the Commander said. “Squadron, you heard him!”

     “They’re clear,” Kent said, as the ship, or whoever was in control of it, lazily fired at what must look like retreating fighters. “Let’s roll!”

     I had never actually completed a gating spell before, and I wasn’t expecting what happened next. We pumped more energy into the web, focusing on keeping the two types apart, because what we really needed to open the gate was negative energy. According to physics, a pulse of negative energy is always countered by a longer and more powerful pulse of positive energy. We couldn’t change that... but there can be a gap between the pulses, and we were working to enlarge the gap... to several seconds, perhaps.

     The magic was strong enough to encroach on all senses now: It smelled like Poison Snowballs and old books, sounded like sloshing liquid, ripping paper, and something dripping, looked like a cascade of blue that ranged from the darkest black of space to the white of the whitest stars, and tasted of grapes, chocolate, and in some odd way, purple... that was it! The melding of senses was supposed to be the cue to open the gate.

     We let that stored negative energy run into the gate, and instantly had to hold back the tide of positive. Still, through the gate, I could see strange stars... all that remained to be done was for Karl and I to gently pull the gate open on that side and closed on ours, then let it snap shut. Yes, now was the second. Connected through the magic, we twisted the gate like a mesh bag, let the positive energy go... and the gate flipped!

     Well, it didn’t actually flip. For it to physically flip over one of its sides would have meant it had to detach from at least one spell-caster, and that was something that I wasn’t sure could actually happen. What the gate actually did was invert itself, leaving Sloth’s ship where it was, but also dumping something else, from the other side of the gate, into the battle. Or rather... someone else.

     The Space Faerie hovered in front of my windshield, and she was more beautiful, more impressive, and far more frightening than I had ever seen her in pictures. She looked exactly like in all the pictures... except that in the pictures, the stars didn’t shine dimly through her, her bronze skin, red eyes, and blue hair didn’t seem to glow like a star themselves, and, except in a few unclear pictures, her lower body didn’t just fade into the star-spangled vacuum of space. And of course, she didn’t look so angry.

     “What,” her voice came over the radio, “do you think you are playing at? That’s strong magic, and the way you were fooling around...”

     “Desperate times, desperate measures, ma’am,” Karmapa yelled irreverently. “Behind you!”

     The Space Faerie spun, and her next word was an angry shout. “Sloth!” she shouted. “Again! On this side of Krelu...” The word was never finished.

     Whoever was in control of the huge ship had just figured out that Sloth’s archenemy was in shooting range. A cannon glowed, and a laser beam, aimed directly at the Space Faerie, shot out... hitting something else altogether. I don’t know how many of the other pilots saw it actually happen. I don’t even think the Space Faerie, still full of anger, saw it properly. I did... I saw, in the moment after the cannon began to glow and before it actually fired, one fighter fly in front of it... and, etched in my mind as I screamed “Commander!” saw the large “1” on its wing in the moment before the explosion.

     “Queen Fyora in a bag of crisps!” Farside Eight yelled, having clearly seen it too. “The Commander...”

     “What’s going on?” Farside Four wanted to know. “Is the Commander...”

     “Gone.” The Space Faerie had been angry before, but now she glowed so bright that I could barely see the stars through her. “You want help getting that thing out of here? I’m ready.”

     “Gone?!?” the Demon yelled from Farside Base. “No... no... no...” Kent whispered from the background. Someone down there was shrieking in short, hysterical bursts, and I had a nasty feeling it was Geena.

     “Get your acts together!” Karl shouted. “Kent, the Space Faerie’s fixed point two, we’re trying it again.” No answer. “Kent? Kent! We need you!” No answer, and both the Space Faerie and I had to dodge as the ship took another few shots at us. “Kent,” Karl yelled, “I need you!”

     “I can’t.” Kent’s voice was quiet and tearful. “I can’t. The magic’s gone. I’m sorry.”

     “What do you mean?!?” Karl shouted, but then the Space Faerie interrupted. “It’s fine,” she said. “The three of us can do it, and it will work. I hope you both still have your magic!”

     I hoped so too. I did know that grief could temporarily remove magical skills, and I had never felt this much yawning emptiness before. Luckily, I was starting to feel as if my mind had gone numb, and so my magic stuck. So had Karl’s, and with the Space Faerie as fixed point and main power source, we quickly got another gate woven around the ship. Things seemed to be going well... too well, in fact.

     We had just opened the gate and were twisting it around the ship when it fired its parting shot... literally. I didn’t actually see that loss, since the bulk of the ship was between me and Karl. However, I instantly knew what had happened, as the gate wobbled and spun. Freed at one corner, it went whirling away from the ship, threatening to entrap the remaining Farside pilots as it rapidly lost power and wobbled between disappearing and closing. And then...

     “Hold on, ladies!” I blinked as someone on the ground caught hold of the lose point of the gate. Kent must have gotten his power back... and what power it was! The gate, barely in the control of either me or the Space Faerie any more, wrapped itself around the ship with a vengeance. It treated us to a fraction of a second’s view of some far-off starscape before it slammed shut in a burst of light... then the erstwhile battlefield was populated only by the Space Faerie and the remains of Farside Patrol.

     It looked like Farside Patrol might be about to get a little smaller. I hadn’t had time to let everything that had happened sink in, when three alarms went off in my cockpit at once. From what seemed like far away, I looked down and noticed that all the lights for my fighter’s right wing were going red again. A glance at the wing in question showed that a good portion of it seemed to have been torn off... and then I remembered how forcefully the gate had slammed. My wing must have been caught in it... and as the alarms were telling me, the damage to the already-weakened wing was causing one engine’s failure, a fuel leak, and a slow circuit burnout through the wing’s electronics. I needed to land before it got any worse.

     “Permission to land, Commander?” I asked, already preparing to enter Kreludor’s thin atmosphere. It was only when Kent said gruffly, “I think you’re the boss, Explorer,” that I remembered that Commander C was steam or less than steam, a scattering of random atoms in space. Of course, that rubbed in that Karl was the same now, and... suffice it to say that, as my cockpit filled with smoke, my fighter jerked out of control, and I spiralled down through the upper atmosphere, I was thinking about a snowy day in Kiko Lake, where Karmapa was trying to educate my sweet tooth...

      ******

     “You never learned to like pecan fudge, did you?” Karmapa said, his exposed brain pulsing gently as he devoured some himself.

     I dropped my pawfull of rock sticks. “You did not say that,” I informed the Mutant Kacheek standing next to me.

     “And you didn’t drop your sweets, either,” he pointed out. “I’m sorry for using your memory, but how else could I get through to you?”

     “Why did you want to?” I asked, looking at the desultory few tourists wandering the snowy shores of the half-frozen lake. This memory dated from Karmapa’s first winter with us, I knew that. Freefall had given us what seemed like an immense amount of Neopoints and told us to amuse ourselves at the lake while she decorated the house for the Day of Giving. With very little to do, we had ended up gorging on sweets, and had been scolded for having no appetite for supper.

     “Because I’ve been a worse brat than I ever was back then,” Karmapa said simply. “Or should I say now?”

     “I don’t know,” I replied. “Will we... stay here? Now, I mean...” Everything was so real... even the slight magical hum of the heat-shield I’d cast around us... I reached out to touch the wall of Kiko Lake Treats, and it felt as real as ever. I fumbled in my purse, pulled out a bag of Tigersquash rock slices, and popped one in my mouth. Yes, that was real, and delicious... I flashed back to my last “real” memory, of slamming my helmet shut against the smoke, only to find fumes in my reserve air supply. That seemed much less real than this.

     “I’m afraid we can’t,” Karmapa said. “You can’t live in memory full-time. We’ve just got this little stolen memory, and I realize that a lot of what happened there was my fault. I’ve been a pretentious, vain, overdressed twit, and... and I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t have gone down if I hadn’t shot at you on that trip. I know the battle would have gone better if there was more time to prepare, which there would have been if I hadn’t hidden those plans. Neither of us would have been involved in this mess at all if I hadn’t decided we were going to Farside to begin with. And you know what’s worst?” The little mutant looked up at me, still my baby brother. “I convinced myself that I was doing it all in the service of truth, with the T in caps. With the effect it had...” He laughed. “You know how Freefall hates letters that are all in caps? Well, I think that’s what kind of effect my capital T had on everyone else. I should have gone into astrology, not journalism.”

     “And I should have dreamed of being a dancer,” I said, “or a historian, or a doctor, but not a space cadet. The fault was on both of us.”

     “Yeah...” Karmapa kicked at the snow at his feet. “I was trying to protect you by messing up your fighter, you know. I knew the battle was going to be messy, and I didn’t want you in it... I thought that if your fighter was crippled, you couldn’t insist on going. As it turned out, I only caused you more harm.”

     “Karmapa,” I said, and it felt good to call him that, “it wasn’t really harm. After all, if that hadn’t happened, I’d be out there alone now, not here with you. I’d rather be with you.”

     “Yeah,” Karmapa said, stuffing more fudge in his mouth, “but good times don’t last forever. Remember what it was like when we got home?”

     I laughed. “Freefall had done the house and the tree up something lovely, and she’d made us a great supper...”

     “If only we’d had the room to enjoy it,” Karmapa pointed out.

     “But it was lovely, all the same,” I said. “Remember? Broccoli, and leeks, and veggie sausages, and good bread, and chocolate biscuits for dessert...”

     “And the only thing you could stomach was a cup of Purplum Mocha,” Karmapa said. “Yes, I remember. I didn’t even have room for that.”

     “Maybe,” I said softly, “maybe we could go back now and have room for that supper?”

     “It won’t work, Explorer,” my brother said just as softly. “It’s only a memory, all of it. But... you’re right about one thing. It’s time to go home.”

     “Home?” I asked.

     “Sure,” he said. “Good meal, cosy bed, all that...”

      ******

     “Wake up!” The voice was insistent and loud. Too loud. Loud and piercing...

     “Gowayfreefa...” I had meant to say “Go away, Freefall,” but it didn’t come out right. I tried to curl up and go back to sleep, reaching out for the blanket which must have fallen off of me... and groaned as I felt pain running through my whole body. If this was a dream, I wanted to wake up!

     “What in Neopia...” Well, that came out right, at least. I was looking up at a very worried-looking blue Lupe in violet flight suit and helmet... “Fraggle?” I whispered, memory seeping reluctantly back.

     “Would it hurt to call me Your Highness?” Farside Seven asked, annoyance vying with relief in his voice. “Can you sit up?”

     In answer, I did sit up, although I had to groan as I did so. My body felt like one large bruise, and the thin, freezing air burned in my lungs. However, I could see that I was lucky: not far away, two fighters were burning merrily. “What...” I couldn’t think of an intelligent way of asking what had happened since I blacked out.

     “I followed you down,” Fraggle explained gently. “Against all orders, of course... I expect to be sent back to Neopia shortly for such disobedience. However, I could not allow a damsel in distress to go unaided... and I must say, that was amazing flying I did. To catch up with you, snag your wing on mine, stop the spin, and crash in such a fashion that we could escape before the wreck caught fire... yes, I did pull you out. And please don’t thank me. Feminism is very hard on a chivalrous creature such as myself. To be thanked by a lady one has just rescued is very humiliating.”

     I snorted, thinking of what Freefall would have had to say about that. It was rather a mistake, as I started coughing badly, and couldn’t stop for quite a few minutes. When I was finally able, eyes streaming, to stop, Fraggle looked more worried than he had before. “You need to get back to Farside,” he said. “The air’s far too thin for you, after the damage those fumes must have caused...”

     “Don’t you dare!” I snapped, for he had taken me in his forepaws and was about to pick me up, clearly intending to carry me back to Farside Base. “I can walk fine on my own, thank you!” In fact, I was rather dubious as to whether I could, but I was still in Farside Patrol uniform, so I felt I shouldn’t bow to my comrade’s chivalrous chauvinism... however justified it might be. Besides, if Geena saw me being carried back... no, she didn’t need to get any more upset than she was. “I’m fine,” I repeated, forcing myself painfully to all fours, then onto only my back paws. Feeling slightly better to be upright, I took two steps toward the mountain looming in the distance... and fell gratefully into a warm lake of blackness under my paws...

To be continued...