Alyria stood, tears pricking the corners of her eyes.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
All the sacrifices she’d made to get to this point, all the favours traded, the coin expended, the hard graft… it was all for nothing. Before her, the ruins of the gateway taunted, its rubble strewn over twenty square metres. With a wordless, throat-ripping howl, she sank to her knees.
Even the breeze through the dusty ravine seemed to mock her, whispering “too late, too late, too late” over and over until it became almost torturous.
Three long Earth years she’d travelled to get here, following rumours and sotto voce conversations in bars she thought she’d never get out of. The laser pistol at her hip had seen more use than she’d hoped – slavers, kidnappers, and perverts had all stared down the barrel, and more than once she’d barely escaped with her life.
And all for this. For nothing.
The portal had been decimated and there was no rebuilding it. Even if she could have rearranged the stones, some of which were far too heavy for even three people to lift, the very essence of it, the power that kept The Travelways open, wouldn’t return.
Remnants of ancient energy flickered here and there, but the purpose of the site had gone, dissipated in the wind.
For long moments she knelt, the loss total, until her attention was brought back to the present by something beeping, quietly, insistently, in her backpack. She scrambled for it, not daring to hope that another path back to her own dimension had been found. This was the last anyone had heard of, and the routes laid open by The Harbingers, through which she’d accidentally fallen, had been being systematically closed off for centuries of human time by them.
No one ever spoke their name, lest it summonsed them, and brought down their wrath on an entire world, so she’d only worked out through inference and snatches of gossip who, or rather what they were. Vast malignant intelligences, seeking to isolate this reality from others, they closed gateways wherever they were detected. They were what had led her, post wormhole, to crash her ship on that backwater shithole of a planet in the first place. If she’d known then what she knew now, she’d have turned around and gone straight back within seconds of arriving, but she’d been so overwhelmed by the idea of exploration that she’d paused too long. They’d arrived and destroyed it.
And now they’d reached this one too.
She pulled a jerry-rigged detector and comms unit out of her pack and swore again, this time though through exhaustion.
Another anomaly. Another chance, two systems away.
Slowly, she trudged back to the hoverbike, her facemask now raised against the dust, and aimed for the nearest spaceport. She’d trade the machine for passage on a ship and hope against hope that, this time, she’d make it before they did.
From the darkness of the canyon shadows, vengeful eyes watched her leave.
