Contest (The Stork Tower Book 6) Read online

  Leah reached out and brushed the back of her hand against the creature. It reacted quickly and whipped its pincers around to snap at her hand, but she’d been ready and had already moved it out of range. The skin on her hand tingled a little, but Leah felt no pain. She inched closer and this time brought her hand down with what she hoped was enough force to knock the creature off the tree. She almost succeeded, and all its claws came loose except the ones from the two segments near the head. Before it could regain its hold, Leah knocked it again and watched it fall free from the tree. She looked over at the other creatures and couldn’t discern whether they had noticed its disappearance at all. Where she’d hit the creature the last two times her hand was numb, but there had been no pain, and her movement wasn’t restricted at all.

  She was about to go get a branch to knock the creatures off the tree when they all paused, crouched close to the tree and then scuttled quickly back the way they’d been coming from. Leah, who’d been holding on with her toes and one hand, brought herself in toward the trunk and began looking around. She didn’t see anything, but as she pressed her ear to the tree, she heard a faint movement vibrating through the rough surface. Something large was headed toward her, and she had no way of defending herself except by trying to escape. She momentarily considered trying to get the piece of metal but preferred the option of possibly dying with the metal left in the tree to the possibility of losing the metal if she removed it and dropped it during a fight.

  She scurried back to the branch and looked up to see something at least as large as her scrambling down the tree toward her. It moved down the tree like a lizard except it had six legs and what looked like an exoskeleton. As it got closer, Leah realised it wasn’t an exoskeleton as much as a series of armoured plates which covered the body. Its armoured head was shaped more like a frog than anything else Leah could think of. It had a long spike jutting from between its two large black eyes.

  Leah reached the branch just as it came into view and when it saw her, it doubled its pace and rushed in her direction. She tried to remember where the dangerous patches of moss were, but she was more concerned about escaping as she hurried back along the branch. As Leah approached the place where she’d crossed between the trees she looked up, only to see that the Deathdrape had returned to its previous position. Without stopping she changed her angle slightly and leapt for a point on the other branch which was thinner and further away. She wasn’t able to land on the branch with her feet, but did catch hold with both hands and was able to pull herself up onto the limb.

  She glanced at the attacking armoured frog-mouthed unicorn lizard thing which was racing along the other branch toward her. She glanced at the Deathdrape and then moved quickly along the branch to put the sheet of filaments between herself and her attacker. Without glancing up the creature leapt across the gap toward Leah just as she dove headlong along the branch. The creature hit the hanging fibres which all caught hold of the armour. Its weight dragged the Deathdrap’s body downwards, and the filaments slowed the forward momentum of the creature. Unfortunately for Leah, one pincer hadn’t been caught in the drape, and this tightened around her ankle. The creature's weight pulled it back toward the entangling fibres, and it dragged Leah with it until she was entangled in the Deathdrape as well. Within minutes the Deathdrape had drifted to the forest floor and began to feed on the dead creature and on Leah.

  Leah had resurrected as soon as she died and having just suffered a painful death, wasn’t quite ready for the precision required to escape plunging to her death. In fact, it took three more resurrections before she was safely standing back on the branch. She knew where she was and had just crossed this tree that morning, so she moved faster than before but with almost as much care. Five minutes later and Leah was once more looking up at the piece of metallic debris. This time when she approached it, no small centipede-like creatures were feeding on the sap. She climbed over and carefully touched the sap but found that it didn’t affect her adversely at all. It took Leah almost twenty minutes of pushing and pulling to get the spar out of the tree. One reason for the length of time had been the difficulty of getting any type of grip on the metal, because Leah was perched on the tree trunk and could really only push and pull with one hand. The other reason was the metal had been driven almost half-a-metre into the tree trunk. When the piece came finally came loose it almost pulled Leah off the tree. Fortunately, she had been holding onto the edge of the hardened sap, and this gave her a perfectly shaped anchor point. Even though both feet came loose, she was able to hang for a moment before regaining her perch.

  Leah carefully crossed down to the branch with what turned out to be a one-and-a-half metre long spar from the destroyed shuttle. The cross section was shaped like a letter ’T’, and one end had a jagged, pointed end where it had been torn from the shuttle. The other end was also jagged, but it had been bent out of shape and resembled a hook. Leah tried holding it like a sword and although it was a little heavy, the more serious difficulty was finding a decent grip with which to swing it.

  Holding it a third of the way along, she first used it to break the top section of a gourd-like growth that formed under a blue epiphyte which she’d first noticed. The gourd was filled with a sweet water and players had reported no side effects from drinking it. Her thirst taken care of, Leah considered her options, but nothing came readily to mind until she decided to get the sap off the end before it hardened. She discovered that some of the sap had dried on the metal and had become impossible to remove.

  Leah scooped some of the still fresh viscous sap from the end that had come out of the tree and formed a handhold on the shaft of the spar. Leaving that to dry a little before forming the grip, she scuttled up the tree to the wound and collected a handful of sap which she brought back to the branch. Leah found that the semi-dried secretion could be moulded into different shapes before it hardened. In its solid form it was almost unbreakable.

  Leah began moulding the sap into different useful shapes, and altogether she made numerous trips to the tree wound to get sap, one of which involved taking the spar with her and reopening the tree wound. Working slowly because she needed to remain vigilant, it took Leah just over an hour to make four water bottles, a bowl, a spoon, twenty arrowheads, six daggers, a pair of shoes and two spiked gauntlets. She wanted to see how hard the sap finally hardened before doing anything else. She worried a little about it drying hard on her skin but found that when the sap was semi-dry, she was able to pull it off easily.

  When she’d finished making these things she turned to the third thing she’d seen, a black and purple flower shaped like a trident. The receptacle was almost twenty centimetres long and had a diameter of about five centimetres. The sepals continued the shape and were the same length but black with dark purple pinstripes. The petals themselves were shaped like daggers and splayed out like a trident. Each petal was dark purple although the very tips faded to a lighter toned reddish purple. The reports had specifically mentioned these flowers because they were found on tough vines that so far had not caused any harm to those who’d harvested and used them.

  The flower she saw was on the neighbouring tree, and it took her another quarter of an hour to make her way over to the flower. Leah was thrilled with the proliferation of vines and collected several hundred metres of them. By the time she’d pulled them free, trimmed them, and cut them into lengths she was almost out of time. She asked Gèng to let Dr Ellis know she’d be between ten and fifteen minutes late and then she moved the vines back to the tree which had had the spar embedded in it. Moving quickly, Leah wove a hammock from the vines. She collected more sap and used it to seal the ends, loops and knots. It took some time, but she eventually secured the hammock between two branches and swung herself hand over hand into the bed. Pulling the edges together over her body she used some additional vines to tie the edges together. Satisfied she’d done as much as she could, she logged out and hurried to the Academia portal to see Dr Ellis.

  9


  Chapter 9

  December 16, 2073 - Part 15

  ACADEMIA

  Dr Ellis appeared from an inner room as soon as Leah arrived. He smiled as he approached her and said, “It is good to see you up and about. Thank you for letting me know you’d been delayed, it gave me time to finish what I was doing without having to hurry.”

  For a moment it looked like he wanted to say more, then he realised the laboratory wasn’t a very secure place to talk. He rolled his eyes and said, “The modifications are finished, and I’ve been waiting for you to power it up and see if the machine works as we’d hoped. You must realise that if all the connections are correct, then we’ll almost certainly get the results we expect because the AI applies the theory it is programmed with. I sometimes get odd results when it takes into account some obscure theory that I’ve forgotten or have been unaware of. The real proof is when I make the same modifications on the machine I have in the real world.”

  They continued to talk as they walked to the control room. They began the warm-up procedure and then needed to make some adjustments to the components. With the additional neutrino accelerators, the energy used by the machine was significantly increased, and the extra power caused some minor fluctuations in the circuits. Some of the components had to be re-calibrated, and in two cases they had to add a smoothing circuit. Finally, when Leah’s time was almost up, they had time to form one aether dimension. If the machine was calibrated correctly, then they expected the constructed dimension to last approximately ten times as long as the previous attempts, and it should form and expand along one particular axis in a cone rather than expanding outwards in a sphere.

  When they were ready, Dr Ellis turned to Leah with a huge grin on his face and said, “I know this isn’t real and I know nothing can really go wrong, but every time I do an experiment I still get a rush. When I do this in the real world my heart almost bursts.”

  Leah grinned back, and Dr Ellis did a countdown before pressing the button to start the machine. Leah and Dr Ellis watched the screen which showed what was happening in the central vacuum chamber. As soon as the accelerators were all ready, the machine shot the particles at the dimensional vortex which was forming by the application of electrical, magnetic and gravitational fields combined with several quantum fields formed by a particular combination of quarks, hadrons and gluons. Previous experiments had produced molecular sized portals which had remained open only for a few milliseconds. Both of them were shocked when a portal with a diameter of almost one nanometre formed and remained open for almost one-tenth of a second. The sensor records were of little value because no theories described what the dimension might look like and all they had were brief records from Dr Ellis’ real machine.

  The size and duration of the formed dimension had exceeded expectations, and they spent the rest of Leah’s time discussing how they had been so far off target when the experiment had been a direct result of their theories and predictions. They hadn’t reached any conclusions when Leah’s time was up. Thomas said he would forward her all the data and he’d attempt a few more experiments with small changes to the particle alignments to see if that significantly changed the dimension formation. He hoped the additional data would help pinpoint what they had overlooked.

  Leah was excited and satisfied when she logged out of Academia and arrived in the Tower.

  Diary - 16 December, 2073 - Night

  I wonder if every relationship is like the reaction I had to the EPIC in cyber-space. Gèng seemed to think it appeared creepy because I associated it with Meredith, the download and the vault. Is Thad nice because he helped in Dunyanin? Is Jimmy OK because he helped me out of a jam when I was younger? If you don’t know everything about someone, then it stands to reason you are biased. If I’d met Meredith at some function and we just chatted would I think she was OK? Worse, would I like her? Would we have become friends? Would I overlook her arrogance and pettiness and see them as minor defects if I didn’t know about the slavery? Or, the murders? I like Jimmy, we’re friends, maybe even close friends but I overlook his greed and his violence because I understand where he comes from. If I understood where Meredith and Nathan came from, would I cut them some slack? I don’t think so. At least Jimmy acknowledges his faults, and I can tell him when he goes too far. Meredith believes she’s right all the time and thinks it is OK to hurt others. Or, is it worse to know you are wrong and still do it?

  Thinking about it, I was probably too hard on Thad. I know I would blame myself if I’d mistreated someone, even if I couldn’t do anything about it. Why is it I can see when Thad’s overreacting but not when I am? Is it even possible to think about yourself, objectively? Is all my self-examination bound to be subjective? Is that wrong in any way? Why can’t something be subjective and still accurate? Surely the very fact that I live within the situation can’t remove all validity from my conclusions.

  Is that true in the world? Can I evaluate the structure of the universe from inside it and still be right? Is whatever sense I have of being right, conditional? Does someone who has only known poverty and who understands injustice from within the system really be justified in stealing from the rich when it’s their perspective which highlights the inequality. Is the rich person, who has only ever understood that they have because they work hard for it, right in condemning the thief and asking for justice? How much do I need to put myself in someone else’s shoes to see truth?

  10

  Chapter 10

  December 17, 2073 - Early Morning - Part 1

  STORK TOWER

  Leah sat on her favourite sofa with her legs curled beneath her. She had so many things happening that she was running out of time every day. Her ability to multitask was becoming crucial to her, but even so, she knew her time playing Dunyanin was going to suffer a bit until she’d found her mother. Leah not only took control of two of Gèng’s cores but she increased her perception to ten times normal and started organising her day and reviewing all the information she’d been sent by Peter, Leon, Sharon and others. At the same time, she dictated her report on Survival to be added to the forums, and especially highlighted some suggestions she wanted John to discuss with Lin.

  When she’d finished the Survival report, she worked on summarising her time with Dr Ellis and wrote a brief summary with some suggestions and an analysis of several theories she thought they might not have adequately taken into account. She simultaneously contacted Wisp and Kate to organise times to enter Pneumatica and Cosmos Online later that morning and then responded to the various queries different people had sent. Leah arranged a time to meet with the environmentalists and the historical society about the Swanbank Power Station, she responded to Red and Tungsten about a share agreement for anything they found at the location she was sending them to, and then she read a report from the Emerald Trustees on the progress they had made to date.

  She was preparing material for Dr Whitfield when Gèng approached and said, “When you are free, Olivia and John need to see you about the police investigation. Tesfaye has a suggestion for contacting Alan Hopper he wants to run past you now that the Friday newsletter option is gone. He’s requesting a face-to-face. Kevin wants you to exit soon and have your dressings changed. Finally, you have received an invitation to a meeting in Ascendent with a ‘Mr White’. His brief invitation was embedded in a legitimate bulk advertising email offering a month’s free play in any of the world’s operated by the Barnsworth Group. Three times were given, and you are invited to attend whichever is most convenient, no reply either necessary or possible.”

  “Please let John and Olivia know I’m free now. I can see Tesfaye after I speak with them if he is available. Can you ask Kevin if he wants my dressings changed before or after the one-hour NREM3 sleep I have planned? I’m going to suggest I have another day without muscle stimulation, but that will leave me only one more free day available for the next month. Can you see if he has a suggestion? Also, please send me the invitation, and I’ll look at
it. I imagine it is from one of Thomas’ friends.”

  “John and Olivia are on their way and will meet you in the Gazebo.”

  Leah thanked Gèng and then slowly made her way out of the Tower. As she walked, she continued to work on her paper for Dr Whitfield and looked through the Dunyanin handbook and various forums to see if she could see anything which would help her decide which shroud to use or how to maximise the return from claiming the coin quests.

  Gèng was escorting Olivia and John from the arrival pavilion when Leah arrived. Leah greeted them both and listened to Olivia’s praise of Leah’s world until they were seated. Leah looked at John and said, “I suppose this has to do with that man who was killed.”

  “Yes. The police are focussing their investigation on you, and they have approached Olivia to arrange an interview with you. The interview can be conducted either in person, at the Brisbane City Police Station, or virtually at the same location.”

  Leah turned to Olivia, “What do you advise?”

  “I suggest you keep it virtual at the moment and don’t willingly travel anywhere you don’t have to. If you attend in person, I wouldn’t be surprised if they issue an arrest warrant while you are there. From the evidence John has discussed with me, I think it’s almost certain they will issue an arrest warrant within the next few days. If they do it virtually, we will be able to apply for bail without you leaving here. At this point, however, I think the chances of them agreeing to bail are slim to none.”