The Merchant’s War

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?"

"I'm not sure yet." Huw licked his left index finger and held it up to feel the breeze. "Yes, it's still going. Hmm."

"What is it?"

"I'm not sure," Huw said slowly, "but I'll tell you what I think. It was behind the door, sealed in until Yul broke something. It's got hard vacuum on the other side. like a, a hole in space. Not a black hole, there's no gravitational weirdness, but like-imagine a wormhole leading into yet another world? Like the thing we do when we world-walk, only static rather than dynamic? And the universe it leads to is one where there's no planet Earth. You'd come out in interplanetary space."

"But why- "

Huw rolled his eyes. "Why would anyone want such a thing? How would I know? Maybe they used to keep a space station there, as some kind of giant pantry? You put one of those doors in your closet, build airtight rooms on the other side of it, and you'll never have to worry about where to keep your clothes again-it gives a whole new meaning to wardrobe space. But you keep an airtight door in front of the-call it a portal-just in case."

He gestured around the dome. "Something bad happened here, a long time ago. Centuries, probably. The guy with the perfect teeth was trying to hide in the closet, but didn't make it. Over time, something went wrong on the other side-the space station or whatever you call it drifted off site-leaving the portal pointing into interplanetary space. And then we came along and fucked with the protective door."

Elena's eyes widened. "But won't it suck all the air out?"

Huw shrugged. "Not our problem. Anyway, it'll lake thousands of years, at a minimum. There's plenty of time for us to come back and drop a concrete hatch over it." He brightened: "Or an airlock! Get some pressure suits and we can go take a look at it! A portal like that, if we can figure out how it works-" he stopped, almost incoherent with the sudden shock of enlightenment. "Holy Sky Father, Lightning Child, and Crone," he whispered.

"What is it, bro?" Yul looked concerned. "Are you feeling alright?"

"Eve got to get back to base and report to the duke right now." Huw took a deep breath. "This changes everything."

* * *

After two days aboard the Northern Continental, Miriam was forced to reevaluate her opinion of railroad travel- even in luxury class. Back when she was newly married she and Ben had taken a week to go on a road trip, driving down into North Carolina and then turning west and north. They'd spent endless hours crawling across Illinois, the landscape barely changing, marking the distance they'd covered by the way they had to tune the radio to another station every couple of hours, the only marker of time the shifting patterns of the clouds overhead.

This was, in a way, worse: and in another way, much better. Travel via the Northern Continental was like being sentenced to an enforced vacation in a skinny luxury hotel room on wheels. Unfortunately, New British hotels didn't sport many of the necessities a motel back home would provide, such as air-conditioning and TV, much less luxuries like a health suite and privacy. Everything was kept running by a small army of liveried stewards, bustling in and out-and Miriam hated it. "I feel like I can't relax," she complained to Burgeson at one point: "I've got no space to myself!" And no space to plug her notebook computer in. for that matter.