Crystal Core Read online

  Coalescence: Book Three

  Crystal Core

  P.S. Power

  Orange Cat Publishing

  Copyright 2018

  Chapter one

  The note Will looked at was wildly out of place for the austere room. The space was actually very barren. Empty of anything that spoke of being used by human beings. At least the kind he was used to seeing in any of fifty-odd worlds. Willum was totally surrounded by gray painted concrete, with only a single metal box, bolted to the ground, just off of being in the center of the room. There was also a single bulb to illuminate the whole thing, dangling by a gray chain from the ceiling in the middle of the space. Even in the smallish room, about twenty by twenty, there were shadows in the corners.

  Those managed to seem brooding and a bit sullen. Which could be, Willum had to admit, him, instead of the room at all. Not that it was interesting in any way. The thing screamed of being drab on purpose. Why anyone would do that, he didn’t know. The place could have just as easily been a nice bright yellow with orange highlights, without changing the function of the space at all.

  Nothing stood in the shadows, watching him, though that was the impression that whoever designed the place no doubt wanted anyone in his current situation to hold. It was, no doubt a bit of mental pressure, to keep people like him in line. Given that, for the most part, that would honestly have to be be their own people, it spoke to how things were done in the world Willum was standing in at the moment.

  They were oppressive and manipulative as a rule, he was willing to bet. Convoluted as well.

  The yellow paper was stuck directly on top of the sealed steel box. It had thin blue lines across it, which acted as a guide for the words that were printed there. The hand it was written in was blocky and a little sloppy, compared to what Will himself used, on the rare occasion that he had to write anything. Lacking any decorative swirls or flourishes at all. After reading it carefully, taking his time, since it was written in a strange script hand, he understood the basic idea. Whoever had put it there was threatening him.

  Which was really quite rude of them.

  Not by name, thankfully, since that would have been a sign that he was about to die for real, but it was still pretty pointed. After all, the room didn’t have a door on it. That meant only a small handful of people might have made it inside. People who had power of some kind. That and the will to be there in the first place.

  Smiling a bit, he went over the words on the palm sized page, for the fourth time.

  “Breaking the container open will cause the interior item to be destroyed. You will die in that event. Well… That’s nice of you, whoever you are. A puzzle. What you don’t know is that I’m actually rather good at those.” He spoke in Standard, even if it wasn’t his native language. It was just a bit more refined than Hometongue. They weren’t off in the country after all.

  The note had been in English, of course. A thing that he could work out, with a bit of trying. Willum was truly better at speaking it. Enough so that many native speakers couldn’t tell he wasn’t as well. Not just from his accent. Depending on the world he ran into other issues, but that particular one was simple enough for him to fix. Knowing the meanings of words, which varied from place to place was much harder for him to get. Accents did too, but they stayed constant, once you had them down. You could use a word for months before realizing that you had the meaning slightly off.

  Even native speakers did that, but going to alternate realities meant he was open to it nearly every single day. It was annoying.

  It meant that people didn’t get that he wasn’t from the world he was in instantly, at least.

  No, they normally had to talk to him for about five minutes to work out that he didn’t know basic things about the reality he was in at the moment. This particular world wasn’t really an exception that way, of course. The big difference in this single case was that he’d worked his way directly into the room he was in, from the void. That empty nothingness between worlds. Any of the other line walkers could have done the same thing, of course. It was their job to enter different spaces. From the void, prying open a gap wasn’t that hard to do. It just took having enough focus to make it happen.

  A thing they all had more than enough of. If they didn’t, then the great nothingness would have caused them to fade into non-being. Almost instantly. It took hundreds or even thousands of years to learn how to hold together under that particular kind of stress. Even with good guidance and proper training, most couldn’t master the task at all. It was why, in the end, there just weren’t going to be that many of them. People that could use their minds to pry open different realities.

  He’d come for what was in the box. The data that he’d been given had flat out told him to do that. Patricia Baker had found the location. She hadn’t told him where the data for that had come from, or what it was in the container. Really, he doubted she knew all of it either. That was part of the problem of his current job. Being a spy. Of sorts. So far, he’d mainly taken messages around for anyone that paid him to do it. Some of those messages had been taken aside for a time before being delivered, but what they’d said had been hidden from him.

  Which didn’t fit with what he felt he was supposed to be doing, inside.

  In his mind, warped and damaged as it probably was now, his job was to try and break open the plot to destroy all reality. All of them. The enemy desired to remove all existence if they could. The idea behind that seemed pretty weak to him, putting him on the other side.

  Basically, it just made sense to him to live, if he could. Most people seemed to like that, as far as he could tell.

  Writing a note, a thing that only required a pen and a scrap of paper, addressed directly to the information he needed to find for his mission, had brought him to the place he was inside of. A totally sealed room, that had very little air in it.

  The gleaming metal box in the center, a nice silver that reflected the light well, called for his attention though. So did the note. It was probably a ruse, meant to get him not to try at all, but just in case there was something important in the thing, Willum couldn’t take that chance.

  “The problem… A metal box, of unknown weight. A solid thing with no door visible at all. Bolted to the floor with thick metal pieces. Enough to keep a normal man or woman from breaking it free easily, even if they had tools.” Tilting his head, he nodded to himself. “Which means that the opening will be on the bottom. If I start prying on it, the thing might be destroyed. An explosion, acid, even a contained fire, if there’s enough air inside. Nanos could be released as well. There is no way to tell from the outside. Unless it’s magical in nature. In that case…” He put his right hand out, and closed his eyes, concentrating on becoming as still as possible inside.

  Empty and nearly slick, if nothingness could have a feeling. After a moment, even that was put away, until he was in a state that slowed even his breathing and heartbeat. Down to very little activity at all. Much less and he’d eventually die from it.

  Then, only when he was prepared, his awareness was placed over the box. Moving inside of it. Feeling first for any kind of magical trigger. Then, when that proved not to be there at all, he tried to sense what was. It felt like a book, of all things. With a small device directly next to it, that was carefully balanced. Precariously and perfectly. What it did, if the glass was knocked over, he couldn’t tell.

  It was simply a thing that he’d never encountered before. That wasn’t too strange for him, since it happened about once a week. He traveled to different places, which had him used to seeing things that simply weren’t normal.

  What was clear, interestingly enough, was that he was correct in his first guess about the thing. The seams and lock were on the bottom. There would be
no way to get at it, without tilting the box over. Which would then destroy the book. If it wasn’t just a list of jokes to amuse whoever had put it there. If so, they were brilliant beyond all consideration. After all, those gags would have to be the secret to stopping the enemy, in order to get him there like he was.

  If the words were funny at the same time, that would be pretty impressive, he had to admit.

  For most people, the set up would have either stopped them from trying, or if they figured they were clever, would have led to the destruction of the paper and leather inside of it.

  Will just stood back for a second or two, thinking.

  The container itself was a perfect square, and looked to be three feet on a side. There were six bolts, each running through a flat piece on the bottom that seemed to be about an inch thick. That wouldn’t be a problem. He was more than strong enough to rip it up, or even to eventually snap the tops off the things, freeing it. Will might even be able to unscrew them, using only his hands.

  Which would cause the glass inside to fall over. That could be gotten around, in the void. Anything placed there and not protected, just stopped being. Nothing, was a powerful force, in a lot of circumstances. Most people that he’d met couldn’t understand that idea at all. Really, other than line walkers, he’d never encountered a person that really got that part of reality.

  Rather than make a big deal of the operation, Willum patted the front of his shirt. It was a plain black canvas at the moment, made heavy and so dark that it seemed to drink the light. Inside the small pocket over his heart, were his tools. All of them magical, naturally, since he’d made them himself. It had been all his current training had really taught him to do. If he wanted real tools of metal then he’d need to find a blacksmith and buy them, like anyone else.

  Working with magic was kind of a family thing, as it had turned out. At least in his extended relations. Wizards and builders were a common thing among his people. His Aunt, the Wizard Taman, had been training him, which meant that he could do magic now. Better than most.

  Most others who worked in such things, that was. If he hadn’t managed that, there would have been some pretty intense scoldings, he was nearly certain. There had been, even when he’d done a decent job, so he had no doubt that going any slower than he had wouldn’t have gone over well with the woman. She was, simply, brilliant with magic and expected him to be as well.

  Picking through the small tiles, which were etched on the tops, since having a traditional glowing sigil, while a sign of a master builder having done the work, might just call attention to him in places that having some glass-like bits of tan might not. The one he wanted was just an angled line, with a small crossing bit near one end of the scraped in line. His cutter.

  This one had five feet of effect, once activated. First, the rest of the things went back into his pocket, since leaving one behind would be insanely telling. There might be tens of millions of worlds that were similar to his own, as far as the magic that was used, but only one Messenger who traveled around using that kind of thing.

  From the style of the dim glass bulb above him, this was one of the technological worlds. It was impossible to tell how advanced they were, being so little to go on. Which was a thing to be aware of. The light bulb clearly used electricity which gave him a hint, but even that wasn’t enough to tell him all he needed. Just to make the metal box meant they had something fairly impressive going on tech wise.

  He held the small tile, which was about an inch on each side, except the thickness. That was about a quarter of that. Enough to hold on to, but meant to be simple to carry, not particularly easy or comfortable to use. If he’d been doing wood working, then the magic would have been built with that in mind. A cutter was so dangerous that being in control of it was important for a craftsman.

  This one had to be held between two fingers and was a bit awkward, really. It glowed as the line came into being, pointed away from him. No matter how he picked it up, that would always happen. If anyone else ever tried it, the pale-yellow line would have attempted to go directly into them. Which, even if cutters separated things with a lot of power, wasn’t a death sentence. Not if they turned it off instantly, instead of moving the thing around. After all, the area the magical line commanded to move away from was incredibly small. Just enough to draw a single line that would instruct anything made of solid matter to move away from it. It shifted just enough to allow the matter that made an object up to be in two pieces, instead of one.

  “Which gives me a lot of options here. I think… The bottom.”

  Most people would have probably attempted to cut the top of the box off. Then reach in and deal with the device. If that had been a known thing, Willum might well have tried that himself. It wasn’t, so leaving it in place, and being careful, was more likely to work for him. He hoped.

  Nearly laying on the floor, the pale glowing line of the cutter was drawn through the metal, just above the bolts on the bottom. There was a nice amount of metal still left, even with the door being on that side. The locking mechanism was trimmed off, so no one was getting in that way easily now. Not even with a key or whatever was used to tell the thing that the person with it had a right to open it.

  The whole thing, being careful, took him about twenty seconds. The cutter could have been instantly dashed through it, using his best speed and would have still worked. That might have gotten sloppy though, and breached the glass container inside.

  Then, standing, the small tan tile was placed into his breast pocket, with its little friends. At least he hoped they were getting along. After all, they were related, having all been made by him. It would be pretty miserable to be forced to live and work with a bunch of beings you didn’t like. Not that it was a real threat in this case. He hadn’t invested them with intelligence. Nothing he’d made was like that. They were, despite him making up personalities for them for fun, just things. Tools that did a single task and nothing more.

  Others had done it. Made intelligent devices. Creations that were nearly human. Mainly his Aunt Taman and Cousin Dareg.

  To him that felt risky. Like he might have been dooming the new beings to a life they wouldn’t want. Especially if he were doing small things, like cutters and explosive weapons. He even had a new device, a true novel build, that did nothing but pull and push things toward or away from the wielder on mental command. It was meant to help in the capture of powerful villains.

  It would work on a lot of different things as well. Pulling someone out of the ocean for instance. Or stopping the drift of a ship, even an energy vessel, in space. The size of the things, that standard inch square, was a bit off though. Going larger with the stones they were on might help a lot of people feel more at ease using them to move large objects. Still, the inconvenience was worth it for him. On his person he had ten tools that might just make the difference in getting any given mission done.

  Now that he was actually getting to go on some. One at least.

  The rest of the maneuver wasn’t that difficult for him. Leaning over, he grabbed the metal, which was smooth, from the top. He lifted upward, slowly, since he had time, and he wasn’t going to get tired, picking up a few hundred, or even thousand, pounds. The changes that had been made to him allowed for that kind of thing. Really, he was so strong that it never came up for him any longer. Everything he needed to lift or move, that a human shaped being could, was within his abilities. He’d met people who were stronger, but it functionally didn’t seem to make a big difference past a certain point.

  It was heavy, no doubt, being several inches of steel with only a small space inside. The whole operation had a drifty feeling to it, since he didn’t want to shift the glass inside over by accident. It took nearly five, slow moving, minutes to step back into the node point that he was holding open. A rift, actually, since it was going to fade as soon as he let go of it.

  Only his own will and focus was preventing the thing from closing at the moment.

  After tw
isting himself into the void, he let the thing go. It was a relief, though moments before he would have told anyone asking that it was without effort to hold the way out open like he had been.

  Willum had the large box with him there. Inside of the void. It took a bit of doing, protecting it from dissolving like he was at the moment. It required wrapping the concept of his being around it. Holding the object inside of what he was, bringing the whole thing back in constantly, to keep both it and himself from simply vanishing into nothingness.

  The trick, after that, was in taking away bits of the large metal container. Carefully, without losing the prize in the center. To be more exacting, he needed to free up slices of the idea that made the box up. It simply wasn’t that, where he was at the moment. Then, he wasn’t himself, either. He didn’t look like anything, and couldn’t be said to have a real shape. Neither did the box. It was both simple and difficult at the same time to wear away parts of the thing. Exposing them to the power of the void. Letting it stop being. There was a relief, a lack of pressure inside of him, as soon as all the metal was gone.

  Like a heavy load had been set down.

  That left the glass, and what was inside of it to be removed from existence. While holding the leather, paper and ink close to him. As a part of himself. Dropping that would make the whole job worthless after all. Willum really wanted to succeed, since it was the first real job it felt like anyone had given him. Everything else had been practice, or just him taking things from place to place. There was value in both, but it was so hard to see that it felt nearly like he was just being given tasks with no meaning.

  It wasn’t true. That was what he’d been told, at least. Supposedly he was being useful and getting a lot of good information. Being a spy meant not knowing everything all the time, for safety. It was the job of others to fight the war. For all he really felt like he should have been doing it with his own hands.