World Raiders: Part 1 - Invaders: World Raiders, #1

By Ju Honisch

Today -  1952 - in a far and distant future

 

The early 1950s in Germany are not the time or place where anyone would expect a dimensional breach. Neither is today. Anne's grandmother never talked about the terrible things that happened to her back in 1952. That's bad. Because now Anne knows nothing about the danger that is already lurking right behind her. From beyond time and space, disaster creeps into her 21st century life - with deadly consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ju Honisch
• Release date: May 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224149070

Ju Honisch

Ju Honisch started writing at the age of twelve much to her parents' chagrin who thought she should apply her time to more useful endeavours. Decades later, useful endeavours still do not seem to be entirely her forte. She has lived in Germany and Ireland and currently abides in Hesse with too many books, too many musical instruments but only one husband. She has an MA in literary studies and history which explains her love for stories with an historical background. For her first novel "Obsidian Secrets" (the German version: “Das Obsidianherz”) she received the German fantasy award (Deutscher Phantastik Preis) in 2009. The last book in the same series was awarded the SERAPH, the award for speculative literature given out by the Phantastische Akademie at the Leipzig Book Fair 2014. She writes in both English and German. www.juhonisch.de

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THINGS HAD TO CHANGE.

Lesmoyan felt the long waiting on his skin. It tugged at his soul, scratched at his mind, but he just sat very still on a fallen tree, its musty smell woven into all the smells of the dark forest: decay and forest flowers, mushrooms and mould, night air and that other element that defined this world.

Silence prevailed.

He did not move. He held his long fingers folded loosely on his outstretched, slender legs. His waist-length hair reflected the starlight in its own colour. Not a single strand of it moved out of place.

The night was of silvery darkness. The near-stars wandered across the sky, breaking the blackness into different shades of motley grey. It never grew completely dark. Negative star shadows turned branches and leaves into patterns.

Silence hung over Thisside.

Silence, but not peace. The night did not radiate peaceful harmony. Without making a sound, the energy of the world hummed and pulsed. It smelled of lightning saving its white-hot rage for later, gathering its power, as it were, for the big one, the hyper-flash, the one that would change things.

Lesmoyan had felt the tremor.

And found it beautiful.

He knew then: The inconceivable was happening, just as his calculations had shown him it would. It had not happened yet, but the opportunity was beckoning. His opportunity: The chance for an event that would shake the very foundations of existence.

Good. The foundations of his own existence had remained distinctly unshaken for far too long. It was time for the world to change.

CHAPTER 2

MR ANZENSHOFER WAS not a nice man. Anne did not like him at all. That in itself was not particularly extraordinary. Bosses often enough belonged to the type of person you preferred to see from a distance. Through binoculars held backwards. Very small on the horizon.

Of course, Mr Anzenshofer. I’ll take care of it right away, Anne assured him, making a half-hearted effort to smile as she placed his scrawled mess of numbers on paper right on the top of her well-structured order.

And when can I hope to get those sales figures? It’s about time now! he urged, in a diligent effort to pin another ounce of guilt on her, trusting that would clear him of any of his own mistakes. How could it be that the gentlemen with the better paid opinions always believed that women would not recognise such very transparent strategies? If he didn’t constantly obstruct her efforts with the extra tasks he demanded in between, he would have had the sales figures on his expensive desk long ago.

Would you like them before or after I do these statistics? Anne asked back, registering how her smile froze into ice cubes.

He might perhaps have noted the inherent accusation that it was he who was holding her up and not her being slow, but he disdained any further comprehension. That would have required some awareness – in his case, self-awareness. Self-awareness, however, would be quite undesirable for a man like him.

So Anne did not expect either comprehension or understanding.

He gave her a miffed look, to which he quickly added a superior component by lifting his chin and squinting arrogantly down his nose. With that accomplished, he turned and left her to admire the expensive back of his tailored suit.

Today! he ordered, without looking back. His voice was full of admonition and reproach.

With that he disappeared in the direction of his own office. That door was like a drawbridge. He could metaphorically pull it up and leave trouble outside – to her.

Today? Dammit. It was half past four.

But the day had just begun, obviously. This was annoying, because Anne had arranged to go to the cinema with her little sister. You won’t make it on time, anyway, Ev had griped. You never do.

Anne had briskly assured Ev that she was wrong. She was almost finished. Despite the boss. Despite the company’s move to another building. Despite unpacking and putting away boxes. Despite organisational madness and removal drama. Nothing had stood in the way of going to the cinema today.

Until just now.

Anne lifted the receiver and pressed the automatic.

Yeah. What?

It’s me. Anne was silent for a moment, thinking about how best to sweeten her broken promise.

I was right, wasn’t I? said Ev, with the pre-programmed grumpiness of a disappointed teenager. Of course. Whenever I want something...

That wasn’t fair. Anne never neglected her little sister. No one could say that. Ever since their parents had died in a car accident three years ago, Anne had taken care of Ev, of Granny and of everything that needed to be done. Indeed, she, too would have preferred things to be otherwise, would have liked to continue studying literature instead of being bullied by Mr Anzenshofer!

Her silence had done more than explanations might have. Ev wasn’t stupid. With an IQ that none of her teachers could match, the girl was anything but unintelligent. Ev had already skipped two years at school. She had a photographic memory and thoroughly enjoyed cramming everything into her head she could get her hands on. That made her a rather nerdy walking encyclopaedia – a two-legged Wikipedia in the making. What it didn’t make her was easy to deal with.

It’s all right, grumbled Ev. You can’t get off early, and we’ll postpone the cinema. Granny’s not well today anyway. She’s terribly upset about something.

Oh God, not that too!

"Upset about what?

Not a clue.

Can you manage? asked Anne, anxiously.

It’s okay. The shrug was almost palpable through the receiver. Granny was all they had left, but since she had had her small stroke, even that wasn’t easy anymore.

Good, then... see you later. A lot later. I need to...

You’re putting in another night shift for that first-class sphincter. I get it.

The first-class sphincter pays for our lives, Anne would have liked to retort, but she refrained from answering.

It was just as well, because just then the voice of the owner of this epithet sounded from the door.

If you didn’t waste your time chatting on the phone all day, maybe you’d finish at some point.

Anne remained silent. If he expected an apology, he could wait until he turned green. With pink spots, in nothing but fluffy underpants and sock garters. That particular irreverent thought almost always helped Anne to keep her temper.

Bye, then, she mumbled and hung up. She didn’t even turn around, but preferred to pretend she hadn’t heard the comment.

When you had just turned sixteen, you could claim the prerogative of making your opinion known about the first-class sphincters of this world. When you were twenty-three and the provider for the family, you had to walk the thin line that existed between first-class sphincter tolerance and the outer limits of self-chastisement. For someone who had dropped out of college without a degree, it was not easy to find another job.

But at some point things would get better. Eventually. Somehow. Somewhere.

You have to plan for the future, her father had always said, and then he had gone and died on them without any plan at all. Anne didn’t get to plan. The days were always overflowing and crammed with tasks that basically didn’t fit into twenty-four hours.

A front door opened. The boss had another out-of-office appointment. So he didn’t actually need the figures she was working on today. But he would certainly ask for them first thing in the morning, and since he had the unforgivable habit of arriving at the office at the crack of dawn, it didn’t help: she had to finish the job today.

His being an early riser on top of everything else was a sign of the general cruelty of fate, Anne felt. It was a preordained point of friction. It wasn’t that she could enjoy sleeping in, but there was her little sister who needed speeding along to school. And she had to wait for the morning nurse who came to help her frail grandmother, and somewhere in between she had to get ready and have breakfast. Her life was one big somewhere-in-between.

She sat down to the numbers.

She hated numbers.

CHAPTER 3

IT WAS AFTER NINE P.m. when the phone rang. It always seemed to Anne that the ring tone changed when she was working her lonely night shifts. In a deserted building, the ringing sounded almost lost, like a signal of loneliness: you’re all alone here, it seemed to say, even the security guy has already gone, you are completely on your own without help: just you and your phone.

The display told her that the call was from Ev.

What happened? she therefore just asked, instead of duly starting the entire rigmarole of a standardised greeting Grendelos Ltd, you are speaking to Anne Konners, how can I help?

Nothing serious, really. But Granny is crying. Ev sounded helpless, on the brink of tears herself. And she won’t tell me why.

Granny couldn’t articulate words very well anymore, but she could generally make herself understood well enough, even if she sometimes sounded a bit slurred.

Is she in pain? asked Anne.

No. She said I should just leave her alone. Ev sighed. But I can’t let her sit there crying!

Have you tried reading to her?

She doesn’t want to listen. She wants you to come home. Now. I told her you were really busy right now, with the company having moved to a new place. That’s when she started to get really, really upset.

Why on earth...

How should I know? You have been bullied before, just not at this particular... high-class place. She even knew the building, I think. Anyway, she’s completely frantic. I’ve really tried everything...

Have you tired Gone with the Wind?

Not even Gone with the Wind improved her mood. Unheard of, but Rhett Butler failed miserably.

If not even Gone with the Wind was helping anymore, then it was really bad. Anne and Ev knew the movie pretty well by now. Scarlett! Darling! Grandma could sink into the story again and again. It was morphine for the soul. Anne and Ev’s enthusiasm was rather less pronounced, but they kept quiet about it for courtesy’s sake. Granny had lost her husband and her son. Let her have Rhett Butler.

I’ll be home soon. If I stop now without finishing, I’ll have wasted the entire evening and still have to be told off tomorrow.

Ev snorted through the phone, Well, I think you’re too old to be told off. You should tell him that. That stupid assh...

One day I’ll tell him everything you and I have always wanted to tell him. Someday, somehow, somewhere. When gold nuggets came raining from the sky.

Yeah, yeah, Ev returned wryly. Sure. See you then. Hurry up. Bye.

She was almost finished. She checked the results again. Saved them. Printed one version. Made a copy. The copier had already switched itself off. Effing timer. Now she had to wait for it to start up again, because the worthy gentleman, whom her little sister liked to call the first-class sphincter, didn’t accept ink printouts for his own use since he once had got rained on while holding one and his statistics had tearfully fled the paper. He could simply have bought a laser printer, but no...

The copier was making noises like a plane taking off, and Anne was already putting on her cardigan. She reached into her drawer and was horrified to discover that she still had no key to the new building. Right. The locksmith had wanted to bring it over today. He hadn’t.

And the security guy had locked up earlier.

Oh sh...sugar. She ran out of the office, along the corridor, down the three steps to the front door. Locked. Of course it was!

It was a heavy door with small panes of glass in the upper third. It looked old, matching the rest of the renovated late nineteenth century villa, but it was merely modelled on the original and fitted with all sorts of security paraphernalia like a metal core and several safety locks.

Anne jiggled the handle. The door ignored her.

Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap!

The ground floor windows were adorned with beautiful wrought-iron bars. The first floor, maybe? Anne didn’t cherish the idea of jumping down from there. She didn’t want to break her legs - or neck for that matter. Apart from the fact that next morning an open window would cause a panic in the master of the house. Maybe he would even fire her for her negligence?

Before looking further for a solution, she made her copies and put them on the boss’s desk. Of course, she could just call Mr A. and ask him to get her out of here. He had taken the only other key. That would destroy his evening plans, whatever they were. And from then on she would be tartly reminded every evening that maybe she should just be smart enough not to get locked in.

So back to the phone. Speed dial.

Ev. I’ve got a problem.

Ev sighed in annoyance.

Me too. PROBLEM.

How’s Granny?

She’s not speaking at all anymore. She just got me to bring her jewellery box and is now clinging to it in determined silence. Surely she doesn’t think I’ll steal her earrings or something?

Ev sounded indignant.

Oh, come on. She knows you wouldn’t do that. Listen. I’m locked in. Security has locked up and I don’t have a key. The stupid house has bars on the windows. If I don’t find another way out of here, I’ll have to spend the night here.

On the parquet floor. In the executive chair? Under the desk? Next to the oversized decorative plant? Why was she thinking Feed me! now?

Gross, was all Ev said, sounding less than thrilled. And you’ll leave me sitting here.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, I can’t help it. Now stop whinging. I need that like I need a third ear.

Maybe there’s a cellar exit? asked Ev. Suddenly horrified stammering broke through the line from the background.

What was that? asked Anne anxiously.

For a while there was no answer from Ev.

I don’t know, her sister then said. Granny’s got something against the cellar. The voice got quieter as Ev spoke away from the receiver. It’s all right, Granny. Anne won’t go into the cellar. Then the voice was back. You can probably hear it. I’ve got to take care of this. Make sure you don’t get stuck there.

She hung up.

Maybe the cellar really was an option after all?

CHAPTER 4

THE DARK ONE KNEW HOW to fly. He had always been able to, but he rarely used his skill. Mostly, he kept his wings tiny and invisible. Only when he really needed them did they sprout from his back, huge, wide: black and dark grey mottled skin spanning bony struts.

He didn’t like flying. It was quite an act of violence, even though to the casual observer it might seem powerful and elegant.

But the earth was far more his element than the skies. The firm ground of facts – that’s where he felt at home. From there he had become what he was now: that flimsy ‘now’ that was so important to some, more important than the ‘always’ and ‘ever’.

Kerder flapped his wings ever so gently, delighting in the whooshing, leathery sound that cut the air and kept birds of prey at bay.

Except for one. Silently it glided on the soft wings of the nocturnal predator: A night-warbler, owl-like, but almost man-sized, with a razor-sharp beak, whose poisonous edge ensured in seconds that a victim, snatched from the air, plummeted to the ground as if onto a dinner plate and then became a meal.

The night hunter flew faster than Kerder. It was also more agile, more skilful and more practised. It was so silent that he had not heard it approaching. A beak descended on him in a flash, aiming at his side.

Kerder sent a wordless curse into his world and descended abruptly by folding in his wings and letting himself fall. Still – he just barely escaped being bitten. He almost felt the bird’s horned beak-blade. A silky soft flap of feathers grazed him as soon as he began to trundle downwards.

Had he escaped?

The disadvantage of flying was that you couldn’t see what was happening above you, at least not if you had a human head on human shoulders and no eyes in your temples or a neck that could also be twisted backwards. And not even the night-warbler could fly on its back.

Kerder already knew why he didn’t like flying.

He felt the breeze above him and understood that the night-warbler was pursuing him. Kerder was very close, very close to the mighty poison beak, very close to the hand-long claws that night-warbler hunters liked to bring home as trophies, if they survived the encounter. Should night-warblers also collect trophies, their collection of dead hunters would certainly outshine that of severed claws.

Ground. Kerder needed ground beneath his feet to be able to win this fight somehow. The desert sands seemed to rush towards him, lit by near-stars, deceptively lonely and harmless.

Kerder had tied his sword to his body. It now interfered with his manoeuvring skills, making him clumsy and stiff, while it was largely invisible to others.

But he could not have travelled without the weapon. He would still need it. He just wished it were shorter and lighter. Fulminonium, however, was almost as heavy as iron. Also, Kerder was out of practice. For too long, the status quo had remained unchallenged. Things that had seemed right forever were things you no longer expected to suddenly change.

He had become inattentive. A serious mistake.

It was impossible to draw his sword while in flight. But even if he had succeeded, he could not have fought while airborne. He was not a bird of prey, although some of his characteristics had been loaned by predators of ages past.

He was a man. With a sword that was of no use to him, and a night-warbler at his heels.

Kerder heard the beak snap. It barely missed.

He whirled to one side. His wing grazed the soft feathers of the giant bird. He resisted the temptation to stop time. A single breath was all he had to do it in, for time was inexorable and the Wisdom was slow to regenerate. It took days before he could access it again.

But he might not have any more days if the bird ate him for dinner. What a thoroughly embarrassing way to depart from this world: Rhonorai Kerder, the guano pile in the desert.

Some would rejoice. The Knights of Righteousness would be celebrating on their riddle-castles.

His hands fumbled at the leather straps that bound his sword to him. His feet almost touched the ground. A wing hit him.

CHAPTER 5

THERE WERE STILL SOME renovation works going on in the cellar. Only the ground floor where Anne worked was perfect and finished. She knew why: Because Mr A. worked there and the workmen probably didn’t feel like listening to his acrid comments all the time.

So the ground floor looked neat and complete, but down here in the cellar, things were not as they should be. As far as chaos could reign silently, that’s what it did.

The worst oversight was the lighting. Nothing but a bare, fizzing bulb hung from the ceiling on a makeshift cable. It illuminated the room only imperfectly. It almost seemed to make it darker rather than brighter. Shadows lingered in every corner and crept across your vision. Anne saw much more than she wanted to and at the same time could define little of it.

Nonsense, she muttered to herself. She didn’t like this cellar, and the clutter wasn’t what bothered her. Rather, it was the gloom, the whitewashed brick walls, the low ceiling. Well, and last but not least, of course, the rubbish lying around everywhere.

Something crunched beneath her step. She raised her foot and looked at the floor. She didn’t know what it was. It was too big for a piece of jewellery. Probably brass. Or maybe not metal after all? Plastic? Stone? She touched the thing, tried to lift it, but it wouldn’t come off the ground. It seemed strangely warm. Was there perhaps a heating pipe running underneath it? No. Certainly not. In this old cellar, heating pipes were fixed to the ceiling, not embedded in the floor.

The thing was a disc about twenty centimetres in diameter. Not a flat disc, but rather a tangle of individual wires and struts, intertwined and interwoven like Viking jewellery. The shape seemed strangely familiar to Anne. She wondered if she had perhaps seen it years ago when they had been in Norway with her parents. There had been a lot of knotwork jewellery like this.

But this was not a piece of jewellery. At least according to modern standards, the thing was far too big. Fantasy heroes on old book covers from the seventies wore things like this strapped to their chests with leather belts, while female handmaidens in chainmail bikinis were wrapped around their left leg, staring devotedly up to the heroes’ loincloths.

Some of her tension was released at the thought and Anne began to giggle softly. She suddenly appreciated the strangeness of her situation. Here she was, standing in the cellar of a house that was over a hundred years old. She disliked the rubbish around her, but she was stuck. Maybe it was time to forget about the dirt and look for a basement exit. Weren’t old houses supposed to have something like that? An exit to a garden, so that the gardener didn’t have to walk across the good carpets?

She heard a noise, quite close. Anne flinched. Could it be that she was not alone in the house?

She looked about frantically, but there was no one to be seen. She had probably misheard. Had it perhaps been a small animal?

Small animals were at least as disturbing as large ones. The thought that down here she might find rats – or rats might find her – did not please her in the least, no matter how small they were. She shivered at the idea of the rodents touching her or perhaps even singling her out as a tasty morsel, staring at her appraisingly from tiny, greedy eyes.

Nonsense! she muttered for the second time now. She was decidedly too tall to be a rat-roast, even if at five foot two she was anything but tall. Nor was there much to nibble. She had always been slim, and the last three years had almost made her skinny.

You must eat more, child! Granny always told her, firmly convinced that men only married well-rounded women and that Anne’s being single was not due to her family responsibilities and lack of free time, but solely to the fact that she didn’t eat enough. At the same time and maybe to the same end, Granny always urged Ev not to eat so much: Ev, who was already a bit chubby and at least half a head taller than her skinny little ‘big’ sister.

Anyway, at the moment Anne could at least hope that any rats would only look at her in disappointment and then refocus their attentions on more worthwhile targets.

She wasn’t quite convinced, though.

She stepped over a few packs of mouldy waste paper, almost tripped, and caught her heel on a piece of torn wallpaper that had been dumped down here. Standing on one leg, she tried to pull the dirt off her shoe.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement and turned quickly to her left. A mural seemed to be painted on the brick wall, life-sized and sepia-coloured like an old photograph. A picture of a man sitting on a fallen tree trunk. Long, very light hair streamed from his head. A picture. Of a man. Of a – picture of a man.

She stared at the image, could have sworn it hadn’t been there a moment ago. In the poor light she had only noticed a brick wall, but the picture, as delicate and darkly shadowed as it seemed, was there. She had probably just missed it because she had been too focused on rats and rubbish.

Still, she couldn’t help feeling that there had been no image at all.

Nonsense! she muttered a third time, and the man sitting on the fallen tree raised his head and looked at her.

So far away.

So damned close.

Startled, she took a few steps back, caught her feet in old wallpaper and fell backwards onto the bin bags.

CHAPTER 6

KERDER TRIED TO SOFTEN his dive into a glide by spreading his wings just before he hit the ground. The wind pulled his wings back and he could not suppress a cry of pain when he was suddenly torn backwards, as if someone was plucking his wings from his shoulders like they would from a fly.

At first he thought the night-warbler had caught him and knocked him over, but it was only gravity and the laws that governed riding the air. You fell or you flew. You couldn’t do both at once.

He crashed backwards into the sand, onto his outstretched leather wings. Something cracked. A bone. Hot pain shot through him.

He had no time to dwell on that, though. The night-warbler landed in front of him silently, ending up entirely in the wrong spot. It clawed blankly into the sand right at the place Kerder had originally aimed for. The bird had miscalculated as much as Kerder had.

Kerder fiddled with the leather straps that held his sword to his body. The hilt was at shoulder height, which made it impossible to draw the sword quickly in one go. His fingers flew, but his movements were not coordinated enough to undo the knots speedily. Fighting spirit and danger made one’s arms strong but one’s fingers clumsy.

Ponderous and gauche, the night predator had come up on the sand, toppled over, and slid forward on its belly, carried by its own momentum. Its quiet elegance had given way to an awkward weightiness, but – considering it was armed with beak, claws and venom – it was no less terrifying.

Kerder denied himself every syllable. Not a single sound passed his lips. He stood, not quite knowing how he had got to his feet. The aforementioned fighting spirit and danger seemed to guide his movements without much conscious thought, gathering his senses, sharpening his reactions. Already he held his dagger in his right hand, severing the remaining straps with a cut. The sword slid down.

He grasped the hilt with his right, the scabbard with his left, which still held the dagger, and pulled. The scabbard was leather-lined, and no melodious clang heralded the coming fight. Kerder flung both sheath and knife into the sand. Now he held the hilt of the sword with both hands and balanced another two steps backwards like a dancer. The night-warbler was already coming up again. It turned, pushing itself off the ground with its clawed bird feet.

The animal would not do battle on the ground. Too bad.

Jumping backwards, Kerder almost stumbled over his own wings. They were long and large, as they had to carry his considerable weight through the air. Reducing their size now so that they would not encumber him in the coming fight was out of the question. It would cost him several seconds of full concentration and leisure. He didn’t have several seconds, or even one.

The bird glided towards him at an angle from above. Kerder whirled the sword around his head so fast that the breeze made a whistling sound. The heavy weapon, once set in motion, danced above him almost of its own accord. Feathers tumbled to the ground – but no blood.

The need to suddenly dodge had briefly cost the bird its air superiority. Again it landed on the sand and screamed its fury towards the sky, a screech somewhere between an over-eager cockerel and a hunting eagle.

Kerder was a strong man, not overly tall, but