A faint blush of pink spread along the mudluff’s bubble surface.
“I think she may have been hurt,” said Jakon.
I wondered about the “she” part, but there was no time to get into something as potentially complicated as that. “The quickest route’s through here,” I said, pointing at the wall. J/O stepped up and aimed his blaster arm. I didn’t see what he did; the smoke had become so thick that I couldn’t see, or breath very well either. “Hurry,” I said, coughing. Then I saw a flash of scarlet light through my closed eyelids, heard something like ffzzzhhsstt!! and suddenly there was fresh air in my face. Someone pushed me forward, and I stumbled out onto the Malefic’s forward deck.
“There’s the gate,” said Josef. “Look.” You could see it almost a hundred yards away to one side of the ship, glimmering against the strangeness of the Nowhere-at-All. “How do we get there?”
Jai said, “Jo, can you navigate the ether?”
“Can I fly over there?” She hesitated. “I don’t know. Probably not.”
“This is crazy,” growled Jakon. “We’re going to die on this stupid ship within sight of a gate.”
I looked again at the “hole” in the “sky.” It looked smaller, as if we’d drifted farther away. No. We weren’t drifting.
The gate was shrinking.
I looked up at Hue. “Hue! Could you get us out of here?”
He pulsed a sad gray. He had obviously been hurt by his time in the prism.
“Okay. Could you get us over to the portal?”
Again, a gloomy gray pulse. No. He couldn’t even do that.
“Well, then, could you get one of us over to the portal?”
A pause. Than a positive blue spread across Hue’s surface.
“Great,” said J/O. “So you get to live, and we get to die. That’s great. That’s just great, by which I mean, it really sucks, in case you were wondering.”
“You know,” I told him, “I was just starting to like you, after that sword fight. All of us are getting out. And the one I want Hue to carry over is Josef.”
“Me?” said Josef, his brow creasing.
“That’s right,” I told him. There was another explosion from below us, and another chunk of the ship dissolved into splinters.
“Quick,” I told them, looking around, “we need that rigging over there, and—yes! There’s a segment of mast down there. We need it over here.”
Jakon grabbed the rigging—it was the size of a couple of bedsheets, a netlike tangle of thumb-thick line—and Jai, with a little effort, levitated one end of the broken mast from under the pile of broken spars and timbers. Jo pulled up with the other, flapping her wings as she did so, and Josef and I pushed it up and over to the spot I had indicated.
I wrapped the rigging around the spar, tying it at the top and the bottom. It wouldn’t win any design awards, but it would serve. I hoped.
“Now,” I said. “Let’s hope that there isn’t much inertia in the Nowhere-at-All. Josef, how’s your javelin throwing?”
“Why?”
“Because,” I told him, “I want you to throw us at the gate.”
They all stared at me with that particular stare reserved for someone you’ve pinned your last hopes on, only to discover he’s utterly mad. “You’re crazy,” said Jakon. “The moon has taken your mind.”
“No,” I told her, told all of them. “It’s perfectly sensible. We hold on to the rigging, and Josef throws the mast toward the gate. It’s still pretty huge, although it’s shrinking fast. We hit it, I open it and Hue brings Josef through.”
They looked at each other. “It sounds very straightforward that way,” said Jo.
“It sounds like worms have eaten your brain,” said Jakon.
“Completely cracked,” agreed J/O. “Neural systems failure.”
“Josef,” said Jai. “Do you believe you can throw us that far?”
Josef reached down and hefted the length of mast. It was as long as, although thinner than, a telephone pole. He grunted with the effort, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so. Maybe.”
Jai closed his eyes. He took several deep breaths, as if he were meditating. Then he said, “Very well. It will be as Joey says.”
“Hue,” I said. “You have to stay here, on deck, and bring Josef over to us once we’re on our way. Can you do that?”
There was a green glow from one small bubbly corner.
“How do you know it even understands you?” asked Jo.
“Do you have a better idea?” I asked her. She shook her head.
We pushed the mast over the side of the ship, with the end pointing slightly up and toward the gate, which was pulsating like a holographic nebula in the bleakness a hundred yards to the side of us.
“Let’s do it,” I told Jo. We all, except Josef, clambered onto the mast, holding tightly to the rigging.
“Okay, Josef. Go for it.”
He closed his eyes. He grunted. Then he pushed.
Slowly we began to move away from the ship. We were falling, flying, coasting toward the gate, moving through the Nowhere-at-All.
“It’s working!” shouted Jakon.
Sir Isaac Newton was the first person (on my Earth, anyway) to explain the laws of motion. It’s pretty basic stuff: An object (let’s just say, for instance, a length of mast with five young interdimensional commandos hanging from it) if left to itself, will, according to the first law, maintain its condition unchanged; the second law points out that a change in motion means that something (like Josef) has acted on the object; the third states that for every action there is a reaction of exactly the same force in the opposite direction.
The first law, the way I saw it, meant that we should have just kept floating toward the rapidly shrinking gate until we got there. True, there was air, or ether or something that we could breathe, but simple atmospheric friction wouldn’t slow us enough to stop before we reached it. So my plan was foolproof, right?
Problem is, as I’ve said before, there are some places where scientific laws are only opinions, and pretty questionable opinions at that. Where magical potency can be stronger than scientific law. The Nowhere-at-All is one of those places.
And the members of HEX know it.
We were still about thirty feet away from the gate when we stopped. Just stopped, and hung there in space.
And then, from behind us, we heard a voice. A voice as sweet as poisoned candy. A voice that, not too long ago, I would have died to hear a single word of praise from. And from the looks on the others’ faces, I knew they had once felt the same way.
“No, Joey Harker,” the voice said. “No last-minute escape for you.”
As one, the five of us, as well as Josef, back on the Malefic, turned—to face Lady Indigo.
CHAPTER TWENTY
She hung in midair, between us and the Malefic but to one side, one arm still uplifted, still poised from casting whatever spell she’d cast to stop us. As she spoke, she lifted her other arm and began to float away from the Malefic and toward us. “I congratulate you, Joey Harker,” she said as she came. “You’ve done what no one thought possible. You’ve destroyed the Malefic and its mission. Lord Dogknife has already returned to HEX Prime. He has charged me with bringing you to him. I look forward to doing so, believe me. With his conquest of the Lorimare worlds aborted, he has only his thoughts of revenge on you to occupy his time.”
She landed on the edge of the mast and started to trace in the air the luminous path of that same sigil she had used on me so long ago, back in one of the countless alternate Greenvilles. As she gestured, she began to speak the Word that would put all six of us in her thrall once again.