Halo Gate: Starways

By Alexis Glynn Latner

The most forbidding enigma of the Star Age . . .

 

For opposite reasons, Val Savre and Lane Dzimon both want to see what lies beyond the alien artifact called the Halo Gate.

 

The stakes are very high: it kills intruders.Only by combining their scientific training, intelligence, and resolve

can they get through the gate alive.

 

They have no idea what they'll find there.

 

They only have each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Avendis Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781942686286

Book preview

PART 1

VERE

1

MIND FIELD

G ood evening, Dr. Savre, said the roving guard. It was a casual, easygoing greeting. The guard probably thought Val Savre never felt tempted to enter the light.

Val had top security keys that got him into this deep level of the moonbase, so the authorities obviously deemed him a safe risk to be here. He’d studied the alien mystery for decades and must be immune to the attraction of it. Right? Wrong. Val wanted to go through the light more than anything else in all the worlds. But there was no point in experiencing the light if he could not also understand it. And that implied being alive for however long it took to understand the workings of the halo gate.

The guard continued on his nightly rounds.

Val watched the bands of light inside the carved-out regolith that framed the gate. The bands were called wards, because they protected the gate against intrusion. Inanimate objects could pass through the light. That included robots—but robots that got through would deactivate and eventually disappear. The last one was still in sight if you knew what to look for. Lying on the floor on the other side of the halo gate like a beetle, it was almost invisible.

The wards were even worse for a living mind. Something exploded in the neural circuitry and ripped the mind apart. A human intruder might make it back out of the gate, but he would be fatally deranged. The brain would fail to regulate the body’s functions including breathing. Then came—deactivation.

The halo gate was a mind field.

Yet from a safe distance the lights were beautiful. Val had always thought so. He knew exactly how close to the light it was safe to stand.

He heard light, quick footsteps. Someone other than the heavy-booted guard was coming. Val stood still in the multicolored shadows. He knew how things disappeared in the eddying light of the gate.

Soon he recognized the intruder. She was a junior researcher named Lane Dzimon. The only real interaction they’d had was a card game that ended up being a tie—she was highly intelligent. She was also tall, attractive, and young enough to be his daughter. What was she doing here? Probably taking readings. Junior researchers got tasked with gate readings in the middle of the night and issued a time-limited key.

But no. She came directly toward the gate, not even pretending to take readings.

He stepped in front of her. Stop there.

She tried to bolt around him. She was fast but he was faster. He caught her and wrestled her into a straitjacket hold. Then he pushed her around the corner away from the alluring lights. On the way, she kicked his shins.

Damn you! He forced her to kneel between his knees, tilting his head so she couldn’t hit him with the back of her own head. Settle down. You don’t have a choice. He felt a wash of triumph. She hadn’t thought that the senior gate researcher would be down here in the middle of the night. Or that he’d be quick enough to catch her, agile enough to overpower her, strong enough to hold her. She knew it now. She stopped fighting him. Good girl.

She had sculpted features—a face that looked too strong to wobble over the edge of sanity, even here. The light here in this corridor was harsh and revealing. Her fair skin had a subtle blue undertone, not at all conspicuous at a moonbase where all skin colors mingled and some of them were artificial. Could she be fashionably imitating Verian looks? But a couple of other things quickly added up too. Jumping into the Vere light is a bad idea even for you, Verian, he said into her ear. He felt her start in surprise.

The guard had heard the struggle. He returned. Is there a problem?

Val shrugged. Another newbie gone off the edge, like the one last year who saw a summer lake and tried to jump in. The psych screening leaves something to be desired. She won’t get away from me, so fetch a medic, would you?

He could feel her heart pounding. She must be wondering what his game was. He whispered, The undertone of your skin. The intensity of your determination to get in. You taking a research assignment here even though you’re a biological scientist. You are crypto-Verian. The virus did particularly good work with you and your alien genes are almost invisible. The light draws you like a moth to a candle. But you’re smart enough to come prepared. Sure enough, he found a small heavy box in the pocket of her jacket. He put it in his own shirt pocket.

She started to struggle. No, he said with an edge. I’ve taken you down. I can keep you down.

Sounding frightened and furious, she hissed, Interfering bastard!

Listen. Even you won’t get through the wards unscathed without a canceling device that really works. He heard approaching footsteps. Softly, into her ear, he told her, This is not the place for a kluged tool that buys you five minutes of life over what any fool would get. See the man named Enghel in the free trade ring. Only he can sell you a device likely to get you in.

She stilled.

The guard rushed back, accompanied by the night medic on duty. Val got Lane Dzimon up on her feet. She stumbled. He thought it was deliberate, that she was playing the light-bedazzled newbie. Good and better. Finally, here was a Verian smart enough to get here as a legitimate researcher, young enough to be fearless, and ruthless enough not to waver.

This might be the one he could work with.

In the small, spare clinic, Val described how he’d caught her trying to go into the halo gate. Then the frowning psychiatrist questioned her. She picked up on what Val had said about a delusion. Sounding rational and mortified, she described suddenly wanting to jump into warm luminous water that seemed irresistible in this cold, isolated space place.

The psychiatrist gave her an anti-psychotic injection. Luckily it was the mild kind without side effects. She’d have to report for one like it every morning she stayed here. She meekly agreed to do so. Then, apparently in earnest, she thanked Val for stopping her.

If she’d gotten into the gate without an effective canceling device, she might have destabilized the wards and radiation-blitzed the bottom levels of the research station. That made Val’s interests opposite hers. Almost. Because of his highest-level security clearance, he could never contact Enghel, much less buy one of the man’s black-market ward-cancelers. Enghel was a disunionist who openly plied his trade in the free trade ring only because it was interstellar neutral territory. If Val ever interacted with Enghel, the secret intelligence agency of the Faxen Union would find out. And that would be the end of his freedom.

A smart, driven, crypto-Verian, though, one with nothing to lose that mattered to her, might manage it. And bring the device here.

If he played this card right, his life would change drastically. The plan for the next day, however, stayed much the same. A staff meeting was scheduled early in the morning.

Two of the station staff were allies of his. The calm and competent chief electrical engineer, Arond Bay, was glad not to have had a destabilization crisis on his hands last night. The chief scientist in residence was a salty-tongued but competent gray-haired woman named Meredet. She explained how she’d scheduled Lane Dzimon to take the routine night readings and issued a time-limited key, and swore that the girl had seemed as stable as the day was long. From the base director, a political appointee who was neither the best nor the worst of his kind, Val got a commendation for apprehending the lunatic junior researcher.

Temporarily lunatic, Val corrected. Came back to her senses in short order. He arched an eyebrow at the chief scientist. You were more right about her than not.

How he took her down was an enjoyable memory, precisely because she was not a lunatic. More like an opponent, again, as in that card game they’d played. And this time he’d won.

The meeting moved on to more routine matters. In a parallel track of his mind he wondered how long it would take Lane Dzimon to reach the free trade ring, find Enghel and convince him that she had good reason to buy his device. By all accounts, he was no fool. Then she would empty her bank account to pay him—his work did not come cheap—and get back here. If she was as driven as he guessed, it might be less than the hours left in the moonbase day. What would she do with the last slack hour or so of her evening, then?

Maybe eat a good supper, on credit.

He was right. In the cafeteria, he found her sitting at a small table with several plates that added up to a large meal.

After he loaded his own plate from the dispenser, he approached the same table, pulling a stray chair over to sit down. She looked displeased to see him. He cleared a corner of the table to put down his plate. Actually I want to go with you.

She was surprised enough to set her tea bulb down sharply. You’ll die.

With execrable timing, the shop foreman entered the cafeteria. Val had cultivated him because the specialized tools he could lend often came in very handy. The foreman was the gregarious kind who would invite himself to join Val in the cafeteria. But seeing Val sitting with an attractive young woman, confidentially leaning toward her—the foreman veered away. Val relaxed infinitesimally. Not necessarily. Not in a Verian’s presence, I think. The gate is so psychoactive that I think it will key to your mind rather than destroying mine.

She looked at him with narrowed eyes, unconvinced.

He shrugged. My children are adults. I’m separated from their mother. At my age I won’t ever be this fit again. Much less have a Verian to try it with. Can you imagine what it’s been like for me to study the gates my whole life, and not be able to get in?

She thought about that.

He thought about the similarity of the phrases halo ward and casualty ward. He’d tidied his personal effects today and checked his legal papers, making sure they were in order in case he ended up . . . deactivated. But that would be if Enghel’s device is in your possession. Without that, I’ll not go in for love or money.

She said slowly, He gave me some advice to go with it. He said take an ally if I can find one. But only if I can find someone tough and resolute.

He said that?

Actually he said monomaniacal.

Val laughed out loud. That would be me. Ask my colleagues at the university downbelow.

This moon’s planet, the half-terraformed world Tellas, shone in the wide, thick-paned skylight above the cafeteria. The university was in a cloudy coastal city in the world’s temperate zone.

I did ask them. They’re my colleagues too. She looked him in the eye. All right.

They had just enough time for Val to describe his plan. A minute before midnight, he used his high-level security key to let them both into the lowest level of the station. He checked the motion detection system. As expected, no one else was down here. The guards were all at shift change. Lesser keys than Val’s would not gain entry right now. In the absence of the guard, the motion detection system was set to high sensitivity. He turned it off at the control box, using a versatile little tool he had on unofficial loan from the shop foreman. Nothing in writing identified him as having such a tool in his possession.

His eyes met Lane’s. Her eyes blazed,