Wood Sprites

“They say something has happened to the gate!” Nikola reported as he joined them at the window. They’d been watching a continuous storm of burning debris rain down through the night sky. “They think something hit it. They’ve lost contact with the crew that maintained it, and there’s a huge debris field where it should be and where it shouldn’t be. Though I’m not sure what that means.”

“It probably means that there is debris that they can’t account for.” Louise couldn’t tear herself away from the window. “The wrong orbital plane. The wrong trajectory.”

“Like from a colony ship?” Nikola asked.

Louise shook her head. “No. It couldn’t have been a ship that hit it. Earth’s gate can only jump spaceships to Alpha Centauri Bb; the ships can’t return back through it. Even if the colonists somehow built their own hyperphase gate to return to Earth, it would be astronomically improbable that the exit point would be the same exact position as the Earth’s gate.”

“But you said Providence’s Child was falling!” Crow Boy leaned against the glass, staring up at the night sky. “You said Jin Wong was returning to us!”

She had? When she tried to recall the exact words, though, they slipped through her memory like elusive minnows, darting this way and that. It was as if even as she tried to catch hold of the words, they changed as the future changed.

“Esme did say that she had to leave Earth to do something important. Maybe she was going to get Jin Wong.” For some odd reason, Jillian stared downwards toward the street instead of up at the sky.

Did it mean that Jin Wong was tumbling through space, falling to Earth, with Esme desperately trying to catch him? Try as she might, Louise couldn’t force that scenario onto the facts she knew. The colony ships couldn’t jump back to Earth. Even if they could, “debris” indicated that neither ship remained intact. Did the elusive nature of what Louise foretold mean that Esme had probably failed at her attempt to save Jin Wong?

“If the gate is gone,” Jillian said slowly as if trying to work out a difficult logic problem, “why hasn’t Pittsburgh returned?” She pointed at the quarantine zone just a block from the hotel’s parking lot. “Shouldn’t it be right there?”

They stared at the dark Elfhome forest in silence.

* * *

Jillian chanted a litany of, “This is bad. Badbadbad. Really bad. We’re totally screwed.”

“Don’t say ‘screwed.’” Louise murmured as she struggled to be calm and find a satellite that had caught the accident.

“There’s nothing we can do!” Jillian cried. “Nothing. There’s huge ginormous hunks of stuff falling out of the sky that we can’t change or stop or anything.”

Louise locked down on a scream until she could say calmly, “We will find a way to deal with this. First, we need to know what exactly we’re facing.”

Within a few minutes, she found a Russian spy satellite that had been launched while the Chinese started the construction of the hyperphase gate. Over thirty years of silent observation with nothing more to report than occasional spaceships jumping to another star system. The spy satellite showed a confusion of metal pieces drifting where the gate had been. Louise scanned backwards through the satellite’s memory, watching the accident in reverse. The debris coalesced down then vanished, replaced by the gate, wreathed in violent greens and reds.

“It’s never looked like that before.” Crow Boy leaned over her shoulder. “Is that Rim fire?”

“Maybe,” Louise said. There had been no explosion, just one moment the large round gate had been there, and the next debris, all seemingly too straight to ever have been part of the circular structure.

Jillian snorted with contempt, despite the fact she didn’t know any better than Louise. “Rim fire is simply an aurora effect caused by the collision of energetic charged particles in the field that holds Pittsburgh on Elfhome.”

But normally Rim fire only appeared on Elfhome. Why was it suddenly wreathing the gate? And was the debris even from the gate?

“The crew on the gate sent out a distress call.” Jillian reported on the results of her research. “They reported strong vibrations before Earth lost contact with them.”

Louise stepped back through time and gasped as the gate flickered in and out of existence. There. Gone. There again. Gone again. While the gate winked in and out, the Rim fire continued to mark the gate’s location. “I don’t think anything hit the gate. I think something went wrong with the field.”

Louise scanned the footage to check her theory. Nothing seemed to interact with the gate until the last moment, when the mystery debris appeared. Nor did the debris seem to come from the gate but just flickered into existence as the gate vanished. The Rim fire appeared first and then, detected only by zooming in tightly, the reported vibrations started. The aurora grew for several minutes before the gate started to blink in and out. The question was: In and out of where?