Eternity's Wheel by Neil Gaiman Read Free Book Online Page B

entire dimension, this entire timestream, will all be gone.”
    She seemed to accept that, though she folded her arms and huddled in on herself, as though she didn’t like what she was about to say. “Okay. But, still—let’s say you do gather us all up, and we go stop this FrostNight thing. Let’s say we save the world, or all the worlds. Why not just let us go home, then?”
    I took in a breath, held it for a moment, let it out slowly. “Because InterWorld guards against HEX and Binary. That’s what we do. We track their movement, and we thwart them. We make sure they don’t get more of us, don’t get more weapons. Don’t hurt innocent people or take over entire worlds and use the inhabitants for cannon fodder. We’re the thorn in their sides, and that’s all we can manage. We may not be much, but we’re the first line of defense. We’re the only line of defense. We’ve gotta keep being that, no matter what. It’s all we’ve got, even if in the end, this is all that’s left.”
    To be honest, I hadn’t really been sure what I was going to say when I opened my mouth. The words had just come to me, based on a bunch of different things, mostly stuff I’dheard the Old Man say. He wasn’t a man of many words, but the ones he did use tended to be pretty effective.
    Josephine was looking at me with her eyes narrowed, like she still wasn’t sure what my game was. “I still think you’re crazy,” she said, “but now it’s for different reasons.”
    â€œYeah,” I said, and turned to walk into the base. After a moment, I heard her follow me.
    â€œFirst order of business is to get to the control room,” I told her as we picked our way through the debris in the hallways. “There might still be some auxiliary power cores laying around. I have no idea when this happened, so I don’t know if they’ll still be good.”
    â€œWhat if they’re not?”
    â€œThen we hope they can be recharged.”
    â€œRecharged? How?”
    â€œThat depends on how old they are,” I explained, shoving down my rising impatience. I had nothing to do but explain things as we made our way to the control room, and she really didn’t know any of this. I imagine I was much the same when Jay had first picked me up. “They can be charged a few different ways, if the transducers are still working. Thermal energy, chemical, electromagnetic, etc. The ship mostly runs on kinetic energy, as I understand it.” I glanced back to see if she was following all this, then elaborated. “Meaning, once it gets started, it’ll work up its own momentum and charge itself.”
    â€œI see,” she said, climbing her way over a pile of rubble. “So how do you get it started?”
    â€œWell, some kind of pulse. A shock, or—”
    â€œLike a static shock?”
    â€œIt’d have to be more powerful than that, but that’s the right idea.”
    â€œSo if the trans . . . ducers aren’t working?”
    â€œWe fix them somehow.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œI don’t know how,” I admitted. “So let’s hope they’re working.”
    â€œOkay,” she said, sounding dubious. I could practically hear her second-guessing her decision to come with me, as I obviously didn’t know what I was doing.
    She was pretty much right.
    It didn’t take long for us to make our way to the control room. I was anxious every step of the way; I kept expecting to run into bad guys, or worse—what was left of the good guys. There was nothing, though, no bodies of any kind or evidence of anything living. On the one hand, I was glad. On the other, I wanted to know what had happened here. I wanted to know how to stop it.
    We did find some used-up power cores, and some of them still had juice. Not enough to get the ship up and running but enough to give us a boost for