Inn Between Worlds: Volume 1

  Inn Between Worlds

  Volume 1

  -Edited by-

  Thomas A Farmer

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9987679-0-1

  ISBN-10: 0-9987679-0-5

  “Gideon Wallace and the Sapphire Woman” and “Inn Between Words” are ©2017 to Thomas A Farmer.

  “Chaos Candy” is ©2017 to Amie Gibbons

  “Flux” is ©2017 to Michael David Anderson

  Nothing may be copied or reproduced without the original author’s express written permission.

  Cover Art is ©2017 to Nelleke Schoemaker – Hollow Moon Art, used with permission.

  Published by: Black Knight Books, 2017

  The following are works of fiction. All persons and events depicted in the stories are wholly the product of the authors’ imagination and not intended to represent anyone or anything that has happened in the real world.

  Table of Contents

  Gideon Wallace and the Sapphire Woman – Thomas A Farmer

  Chaos Candy – Amie Gibbons

  Flux – Michael David Anderson

  About the Authors

  Gideon Wallace

  -and-

  The Sapphire Woman

  -by-

  Thomas A Farmer

  Like many things, this is for my wife, Stephanie, who also came up with the title.

  The planet was called Pelleus IV, and in another life, it had been going to be a barren hunk of ice in seven thousand years. Now, green fields stretched away to Gideon's left and crashing waves to his right. Away from the shore, the land dropped away precipitously, and a cool breeze blew in across deep, indigo chop. With it came the smells of salt and ocean that reminded him of the London home he left on the other side of existence.

  Gideon's current visit was superfluous. He finished the real work a hundred and ninety centuries ago, but the draw of the planet—the draw of being the first human being to set foot on its living soil—proved impossible to resist. Despite that, if Gideon was being completely honest with himself, this particular job had been one of his more boring and routine assignments. A few button presses and he was done.

  Still, he felt a touch of empathy with the planet he helped save from death. In another life, Pelleus IV would have drifted into the path of a massive comet that would have pulverized its crust. Victim of a freak accident, the planet would have burned to a cinder as bits of rock and metal would have been ripped away by the impact. Worse, because the comet struck the planet on the outward leg of its orbit, Pelleus IV would have been pushed out of the so-called “Goldilocks Zone.” In that reality, the fires gave way to ice within a hundred generations.

  Debris rings from the impact would have settled into a regular pattern a few thousand years from his current time. Gorgeous, though short lived, they posed a serious problem for the colonists aboard the Staraveth, who originally emerged from cryogenic stasis to find their paradise of a destination reduced to a cold hulk.

  Apparently, the disaster also opened a portal at the impact site. Five hundred years after the Staraveth arrived at the cold corpse of Pelleus IV, a man named Kennedy stumbled through the portal, found Gideon, and pleaded his case.

  Now, two thousand years after starting work on a job given to him by a man who would not be born for another seven millennia, Gideon felt justified in taking the weekend to admire his handiwork.

  Admittedly, his handiwork had been a very small part of the whole. He organized the project, but the actual heavy lifting had been carried out by a creature that insisted its name was Pavarotti.

  Introduced to Gideon by a mutual friend, Pavarotti turned out to be a seven-kilometer spacefaring leviathan with an odd fascination for opera. Regardless of its musical tastes, Pavarotti had been the key player in maneuvering several asteroids into positions that altered the course of the planetkiller that would have been going to hit Pelleus IV in just a few minutes.

  The plan worked, as originally evidenced by a visit from a much healthier, and much more confused, Kennedy who came to tell Gideon the news. Gideon smiled at that particular memory—apparently leaving a message carved in the stone of a cave addressing the man by name had produced something of a stir.

  The portal appeared on Pelleus IV's moon for that version of Kennedy, a fact which Gideon found somewhat surprising. To be fair, Gideon found it surprising that Pelleus IV had a moon at all. When he, Pavarotti, and the rest of the project crew first came to the planet two thousand years before, the skies had been empty of any lunar objects.

  He was not going to complain. When their part of the project began, the portal from the asteroid impact had not yet formed. At that point, the portal waited a kilometer out to sea, seven meters below the surface. As surprises went, spending two full minutes under deep water at night—because of course the relative time shift dumped him out at three a.m.—was not one he wanted to repeat. In his corduroy coat, pockets laden with gear, simply judging the direction of gravity had been a challenge. Eventually, he risked the last of his air to form a stream of bubbles and followed them to the surface.

  Worse, however, his old hat lay at the bottom of the planet’s ocean, assuming it had not been consumed by some sea bass analogue on the way down

  Gideon smiled again. He supposed he had become a bit jaded if nearly drowning while hopping through time to alter the course of a ten-kilometer asteroid with the help of a living starship was on the “boring” end of things.

  A few more minutes passed during which Gideon continued to enjoy the simple, serene beauty of the planet. He had nowhere to be, but the rumbling of his stomach reminded him of the one shortcoming of his current location. If the Staraveth was not going to arrive for another seven thousand years, dinner was going to be a very long way off.

  He checked his watch. Disguised as a simple brass pocket watch, the device also functioned as a highly detailed scanner for his surroundings. At the moment, what he wanted was exactly what it looked like the watch provided: the time.

  Gideon told himself he would wait a few more minutes before leaving. Opening a portal now meant he would miss a spectacle two thousand years in the making. Still, with nothing to do until then, he withdrew his small portal controller from the thigh pocket of his topcoat. Taking a moment now to set the coordinates on the little tablet would save time later. Plus, Gideon learned early on never to leave his destination up to the moments right before opening a portal. Rushing in instances like that was a gamble, at best.

  He could have used the natural portals, relying on his own tech to do little more than stabilize them. But with one portal under the sea and the other on the moon that apparently existed now, creating his own was much more convenient. He was just glad Allotech refined their designs to the point where the process no longer drew the attention of the star gods. That was an ordeal Gideon would never consider boring.

  As he fiddled with the controller, the wind kicked up, taking away Gideon's hat—the one which replaced the hat now at the bottom of the sea. The felt tophat swirled away on the sudden gust, floating a dozen meters inland. He cursed, dropped the controller back into his pocket and turned to retrieve the wayward piece of clothing.

  Halfway to it, the wind swirled again, picking the lightweight hat up and throwing it another few meters. This time it stayed put, and Gideon retrieved it with minimal effort. With an exaggerated frown, he dusted it off and placed it firmly back onto his head.

  The hand that reached a second time for his pocket watch stopped halfway there as the sound of feet crunching on gravel some distance away took the entirety of his attention.

  Several thoughts went through Gideon's mind right then, but the
foremost of them was that no one, other than perhaps Pavarotti, knew he was here. Pavarotti would not make footstep sounds, so that ruled out the possibility of the living starship having come to pay an unexpected visit.

  Rather than retrieve his watch, he dropped his hand to the holster hanging from his belt. All in one go, Gideon accomplished three things. First, he pivoted on his heels to face the source of the sound. Second, his left hand extended to ward off any blows coming in from short range. Third and finally, he drew and leveled his revolver.

  A younger Gideon would have drawn a knife, but that younger Gideon did not have a proper respect for the ways in which someone could do him harm at a distance. His pistol might have looked like a LeMat revolver straight out of his parents' generation, but the shell was an aesthetic choice that disguised the gun's advanced inner workings. Instead of bullets, each one of the revolver’s nine cylinders held a different, and complete, weapon.

  His thumb cocked back the hammer to arm the default cylinder, a simple stunner. He leveled the pistol, then immediately relaxed. The man standing a few meters away was no stranger and certainly no assassin. Like Gideon's Nineteenth Century wardrobe, the other man's polished breastplate and Conquistador sword belied incredibly advanced technology. The rainbow plume of ostrich feathers protruding from his helmet, on the other hand, were nothing but decoration.

  “Come now, Gideon. You wouldn't shoot your old partner, would you?”

  Gideon gently lowered the hammer on his pistol, pointing it at the sky just in case, and grinned. “Certainly not in the face, Senhor Santiago. Perhaps in the thigh for sneaking up on me.”

  “Then I would be forced to see a machinist and acquire an entirely new leg. That would hardly be fair.”

  “You could stand for an upgrade.”

  “I couldn't stand without an upgrade if you shot me, that's for sure!”

  Gideon laughed. “A fair point.”

  “Plus,” the erstwhile Conquistador continued, “I would send you the bill.”

  “That, my friend, would be cruel.”

  “Then I advise you to restrain your desire to poke holes in my limbs.”

  “Point taken. What brings you here, Ruben? Better, how did you find me?”

  “When was easy. This evening was the original date for the asteroid impact. Where, well...” Ruben laughed and indicated the seascape with a dramatic flourish of his hand. Silk embroidery, or something that looked very much like it, fluttered at his wrist as it caught the sunlight. He smiled. “It took a bit of searching, but when you're the only other human on the planet, the search is a little easier.”

  “Stealth tech,” Gideon replied. “I must invest in stealth tech.”

  “You'll never hide in an orange coat and a tophat.”

  “I'm not taking stealth advice from a Portuguese who considers polishing his armor a fun leisure activity.”

  Ruben's grin widened into a flash of teeth and twinned moustachio curls, and he took a bow. “Ruben Santiago does not need to hide!”

  “That's quite a boisterous way to explain that you don't know how.”

  “One needn't learn stealth if one isn't a frail Englishman, Gideon.”

  “You wound my pride, Portuguese.”

  “I cannot help it, my friend. The larger targets are easier to hit.”

  Gideon mimed a wound in his chest, grabbing at the jacket over his heart. “Another deadly blow. And, I might add, a distraction.”

  Ruben raised an eyebrow. “From?”

  “You haven't yet told me why you came in the first place.”

  “I can't pay you a visit to help commemorate your success?”

  Gideon chuckled. “If you did, it would be the first time.”

  Now it was Ruben's turn to laugh again. “Not true. Did I not attend the celebration at Sunkiss?”

  Gideon held up his hands in defeat. “Alright,” he said, “once.”

  “At least. I'll make a list and bring it to you later.”

  “You do that.”

  Ruben finally approached the rest of the way and clapped Gideon on the shoulder. That close, it was clear how much larger the Kelt—Gideon only called him Portuguese to needle the man—actually was. Gideon had been on the lower end of things physically on his own Earth and Ruben Santiago came from a world where the Roman Empire never rose and the children of the Keltoi ruled.

  Gideon supposed there were worse heights to reach than the Kelt's lace-wrapped throat.

  Heavily spiced tobacco smoke lingered on his clothes and breath as Ruben spoke. “Truthfully, Gideon, I didn't come with good news, at least I think it's not good.”

  Craning his neck upward, Gideon asked, “you think?”

  Ruben shrugged and stepped back to a more comfortable distance. “There's a woman asking after you, my friend. I don't think she means you harm directly, but there's something off about her.”

  “Off?” Gideon chuckled. “Ruben, you've got to stop being so vague.”

  “Remember when we met the original CEO of Allotech?”

  “Corinthus?”

  Ruben nodded and Gideon shivered. Corinthus might have looked human, but something in his eyes said otherwise. The green glow had been bad enough, but Gideon knew enough about technology, even then, to know effects like that would be easy enough to replicate. No, something inhuman lurked behind his eyes, revealed in the moments before the portal cascade tore his planet apart.

  “Don't tell me he's back.”

  “He's not.”

  Gideon let out a breath he had not been aware he was holding and tension left his shoulders. “You were saying?”

  Ruben shrugged. “She felt like he did, only,” the Kelt waved a hand at the ocean, “not. Corinthus felt evil, do you remember?”

  Gideon did not, but that was hardly surprising. He could read people, their motivations and goals, easily enough. Years of business taught him that skill, but to grasp the somewhat more nebulous concepts of “good” and “evil” by feel was a talent he lacked.

  Nonetheless, he nodded. Digressing down that road would not do them any good. It was hard enough to keep Ruben on a single story at a time without adding something to distract him.

  The Kelt went on. “She did not feel evil. But, Gideon? That same electric hum followed her around.”

  “Corinthus is dead,” Gideon replied. “You don't think she was an ally of his?”

  Ruben shook his head. “Doubtful. Again, she didn’t feel evil like he did. Proud, sure, but Corinthus felt cruel. You remember, yes?”

  That impression, Gideon did remember. Even before realizing he was not human, Gideon’s business acumen picked out Corinthus’s willingness to use people like tools. “Did she say what she wanted?”

  Again, he shook his head. “No, only that she was interested in meeting you and had been asking around the Inn for a day or so before I arrived.”

  “Days by whose clock?” Gideon asked, giving voice to a question that would not have made any sense in any other context.

  “At the Inn itself.”

  Gideon hummed. Time inside the Inn flowed at a constant rate, which meant very little for the multiverse outside it. Still, it provided the most reliable clock in all existence. More to the point, if this woman had been there for over a day, it would be rude to keep her waiting any longer. “I suppose my vacation here has taken long enough. Did you bring a controller?”

  “I did,” Ruben replied, then grinned. “How else would I have gotten here?”

  “I would not put it past you to arrive in the middle of the ocean just to prove a point.”

  Ruben's smile widened again and he laughed. “Perhaps, but not today. At any rate, I'm not headed back there for a while. I took a job myself just this morning. Well, another job.”

  “Something exciting, I hope?”

  Now Ruben's face made the transition from “smile” to “excited grin.” He took a step back so that he could gesture more fully with his arms. “Seven put out a call for soldiers yesterday.
In fact, I was already on my way out when this woman found me and asked after you.

  “'I'll find him,' I told her. She seemed most relieved to hear that. 'He'll be back eventually,' I said, but she was pretty insistent that she speak to you soon. 'Time is of the essence,' she said to me.”

  “And she couldn’t come find me here?” Gideon asked.

  Ruben shrugged. “You’ll have to ask her yourself, Gideon. She didn’t tell me much.”

  “Did ‘she’ have a name?”

  Again, a noncommittal shrug. “That was one of the things she did not tell me. I am unsure how time could be 'of the essence' when we were talking to one another in the Inn, but that was how she phrased it.”

  Gideon chuckled, trying to butt into the story before Ruben could drift further from what Gideon would consider useful information. “Well,” he said, then cleared his throat for emphasis. “Thank you for bringing me the news. As I said, I can cut this vacation short. I have the time, after all.”

  Ruben laughed. “Don't we all. Now, if you will excuse me, I must meet Sid before we deploy.”

  “Wait, Sid Belmonte? He took the job with you?”

  Ruben beamed. “He was the one who brought me the listing, in fact. Apparently Seven reached out to him personally, and...”

  “Ruben.”

  “...asked him to put together a team. Seven heard how we worked together against Corinthus and...”

  “Ruben!”

  “Yes?”

  Gideon laughed. “Tell Sid I said hello, alright?”

  The Kelt nodded, still grinning. “Of course, Gideon.”

  Ruben turned to leave, withdrawing his own portal control device from a pocket hidden inside his breastplate. A holographic interface sprang into life above the watch-sized lump of brass. Ruben’s fingers manipulated ethereal menus and a point of white light appeared a meter and a half in front of his face.

  The brilliant sparkle extended itself into a line that stopped a few centimeters above the ground. It hovered like that for a moment before swirling and twisting, impossibly thin and yet substantial enough that Gideon swore he could have measured its width with calipers. How something without a third or even second dimension could twist was lost on Gideon's brain, but his eyes insisted the line twisted and curled around itself before spreading out and forming a rectangle just a little bigger than a door.