"It's going all right, for now." Rudi glanced up at the sky. Partial cloud cover, at least five thousand feet up- no problem for the time being. "Thing is, I'm about to trust my neck to this machine. There's no backup and no air traffic control and no help if something goes wrong. So I want to make sure everything is perfect before I lake her up."
"Good." Riordan paused. "You've got a radio."
"Yeah. And binoculars." He gestured to the small pile sitting beside the fuel drum. "If you need it, I can take a camera. But right now, this is going to be pretty crude, visual flying only in good weather, staying below two thousand feet, and if I see anything I'll probably only be able to pinpoint it to within a mile or so. I max out at about fifty-five miles per hour, so that's not going to take me far from here, and I've got enough fuel for a couple of three-hour-long flights, but I'd prefer not to go up twice in one day. It's pretty physical."
"Three hours and a hundred and fifty miles ought to be enough." Riordan nodded to himself. "What I wanted to say-I'd like you to do a circuit of the immediate area. If there's any sign of troops on the ground within thirty miles, I'd like to know about it. We're expecting a move from the southeast, and I know it's well forested down there so I don't expect miracles, but if you do see anything, it's probably important. Also, I'd like you to take a look at Wergatfurt. We got an odd call half an hour ago, there's something going on down there. Can you do that?"
"Probably, yes." Rudi patted his pocket. "I'm using relief maps from the other side for navigation, it's close enough to mostly work, and the Wergat's pretty hard to miss. The only thing I will say is, if the weather starts closing in I need to get down on the ground fast. The Hjalmar palace is about an hour, hour and ten minutes away from here, as the trike flies-it'll cut into my ability to do a sweep around to the north. Are you sure you want that?"
Riordan rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully. "I think... if you don't see signs of soldiers southeast of here within thirty miles, then I definitely want to know what's going on down along the Wergat. If you see those soldiers, call me up and we'll discuss it." He nodded to himself. Then he pointed at Rudi's survival kit. "Why the gun? Can you shoot from a moving aircraft?"
"It's not for when the trike's flying: but if anything goes wrong while I'm forty miles out, over open forest..."
Riordan nodded. "Good luck." "Thank you, sir. I'll try not to need it."
In the end, what saved them was Huw's nose hair.
It was, Huw sometimes reflected, one of those fine ironies of life that despite being unable to grow a proper heard, he suffered inordinately from the fine hairs that clogged his nostrils. Nostril hair was neither sexy nor obviously problematic to people who didn't have to put up with it: it was just... icky. That was the word Elena had used when she caught him in the bathroom with an open jar of Vaseline and one finger up a nostril. Yet it played seven shades of hell with his sense of smell, and had driven his teenage self into an orgy of nose-picking that resulted in a series of nosebleeds before he'd figured out what to do about it. And now...
In the flashlight-lit wreckage of a building inside a shattered dome, standing before a wall with a tightly sealed doorway in it, his kid brother raised a fire ax and swung it down hard towards the left side of the door.
As the ax-struck the door, Huw, who was standing a good two meters behind and to the left of him, sneezed. The sneeze had been building up for some time, aggravated by the cold, damp air in this new world and the low priority Huw had attached to his manicure in the face of the mission of exploration. Nevertheless, the eruption took Huw by surprise, forcing him to screw his eyes shut and hunch his shoulders, turning his face towards the floor. The noise startled Yul, who began to turn to his right, towards Huw. The movement took him out of the direct line of the door. And it also surprised Elena, who was standing off to the right near the entrance to the building with her vicious little machine pistol at the ready. She ducked, and this took her out of the direct line of sight on the portal.
Which was why they survived.
As the ax blade bit into the edge of the door, there was a brilliant flash of violet-tinted light. Huw registered it as as flicker of red behind his closed eyelids and might have
ignored it-but the rising noise that followed it was impossible to write off.
"Ouch! What's that-" Yul began.
Huw, opening his eyes and straightening up, grabbed his brother's arm, and yanked. "Run!"
The hissing sound from the edge of the door grew louder; the center of the door bowed inward slightly, as if under the pressure of a giant fist from their side. Yul barely spared it a glance before he dropped the axe and took to his heels. Huw was a stride behind him. Two seconds brought them to the twilit entrance to the room. "Hit the ground!" yelled Huw, catching one glimpse of Elena's uncomprehending face as he threw himself forward and rolled sideways, away from the open doorway.
Behind them, the creaking door-far thinner than Huw had realized-creaked once more, and gave way. All hell broke loose.
The hissing and whistling gave way to a deep roaring, and the breeze in Huw's face began to strengthen. Huw glanced over his shoulder once, straining to look over the length of his body towards the inner chamber. A strange mist curdled out of the air, obscuring whatever process was at work there. The wind was still strengthening. "Take cover!" he called out. "There's hard vacuum on the other side of that-thing-watch out for flying debris!" It 'II blow itself out soon, he told himself. Won't it? A sudden frisson of fear raised the hair on the back of his neck: That skeleton was old, the door can't have held in a vacuum that long. So something's pumping the air on the other side out, something that's still working...
But that didn't make sense. Come on, Huw, think! The wind wasn't slackening. Dust and leaves blew past, vanishing towards the gulping maw behind the doorway. Huw pushed himself up on hands and knees and began to crawl sideways, away from the damaged front of the building. He waved to Yul and Elena, beckoning them after. The seconds stretched out endlessly. The wind was refusing to die. "Meet me behind the building!" He yelled, jabbing his hands to indicate the direction. Yul raised a thumb and began to crawl away, tracking round the building.
Once Huw was away from the frontage, he risked standing up. Out of the direct line of the door, the wind was a barely noticeable breeze. "Huh." He slapped the knees of his fatigues, then hurried round to meet Yul and Elena. It's still running, he realized. Can't be a pump; it'd lake a jet engine to shift that much mass flow. He glanced around. A nasty idea was inching its way into his mind: Utterly preposterous, but...
"Well, bro, what do you reckon?"
Yul was characteristically unfazed by his near-miss. Elena, however, was anything but pleased: "What were you playing at? Hitting that thing with an ax, we could all have been killed!"
"It looked like a door to me," Yul shrugged.
"Did you see the flash-"
"Flash?" Huw glanced at her. "There was a flash?"
"Yes, a bright flash of light as the big oaf here hit it!" Elena swatted Yul on the arm. "You could have been killed!" She chided him. Then she glared at Huw. "What were you playing at?"