“Hold on, Shizuka! Hold on!”
Shizuka felt a hand. Someone else’s hand was holding hers tightly. Lan.
Lan!
Shizuka squeezed Lan’s hand as hard as she could, holding on against all that was dragging her down.
“Shirley! Get that damned thing off of us!”
“Yes, Mother. Miss Satomi, please brace yourself.”
“Engaging battle mode.” Shirley’s figure dimmed as she integrated completely with the ship’s controls.
The runabout suddenly swerved from one side to the other, then slammed to a full stop. The fireball was caught completely off guard, and roared past them. Then, almost instantly, the runabout flipped, spun, and discharged a full-power disruptor burst back into the flames.
“Damned thing now off of us, Mother,” Shirley said as the runabout darted away.
Shirley’s maneuver was brilliant; it had bought them a few more precious seconds, and now their ship had a direct line to the stargate.
But the Big Donut was still flickering unsteadily.
“Aunty! Go to tectonic!” Lan yelled.
“Windee, cross-circuit to tectonic power,” Aunty Floresta said calmly.
Windee hesitated.
“Ensign Windee?”
“W-we haven’t checked my calculations!” In the rush to prepare, there had been no time to test the graviton emitters. And if Windee’s calculations were wrong, the energy imbalance would destroy the stargate and devastate most of the surrounding area.
“Ensign Windee,” Aunty Floresta said sharply. “Cross-circuit to tectonic power now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Windee replied. She closed her eyes and hit the switch. A brief, powerful surge of gravitons flooded the Earth’s crust.
Suddenly, every seismologist monitoring Southern California was stunned. All seismic activity in the area went completely and utterly still.
The power conduits surged as all the stored tectonic energy of Southern California smoothly poured into the stargate. The space-time filaments sang and glowed as Starrgate Donut majestically twisted open like a spiraling, cosmic French cruller.
And Shizuka was bathed in a wondrous, euphonious hum—that same merciful hum she’d heard when she had desperately needed the bathroom—except it now swelled into an almost heavenly crescendo: forte, fortissimo, fortississimo.
“The stargate is active and operational,” Shirley said.
“Thank you, Shirley. This is your stop. Time to go home.”
“Mother? But I can go with you—”
Lan shook her head. “I took away your childhood. I won’t take away the rest of your life.”
“Mother!”
“Furthermore, Starrgate needs you. Will you follow my orders, Lieutenant Tran? Please?” She said the word like a caress.
“Y-yes, Captain. I will do my best.”
Lan waved her hand over the console.
“I love you, Shirley.”
“I love you, Mom!”
Shirley saluted as her form faded away.
The space within the donut warped and swirled into glittering cadenzas of space and time.
“Shall we?” she heard Lan say.
“Yes, please,” Shizuka heard herself reply.
“Engage!”
There was a brilliant rainbow flash.
And then the ship was gone.
The fireball veered from the stargate and landed in the parking lot. Tremon Philippe watched the stargate slowly fold back into its familiar form. Then, from the donut sprinkles burst a quick, powerful series of green pulses that illuminated the San Gabriel Valley skies.
And finally, the lights of the valley returned. The earth gently quivered again.
Tremon looked east and west. He looked north and south—but there was nothing anywhere to find.
* * *
“Shizuka? Shizuka?”
Shizuka nodded. She was trembling, but not from pain. The former Queen of Hell coughed, then looked up. There was something different about Lan.
She was plum-colored.
It was cute.
“Where are we?”
“Not too far. Just a little beyond Altair.”
“Tremon?”
Lan shook her head. “Remember when your Tremon kept saying there is nowhere in existence to hide? I realized that was just the bluster of a little demon stuck on a tiny rock. Think about it—we received signals of your performance from space, even when all traces of your music were supposedly erased.
“I think I need to sit down.”
“You’re already sitting down.”
“Oh. So I am. Thank you … for telling me that, at least.”
“I’m sorry that we had to cut it so close, but we needed to wait until after Tremon had formally accepted your soul. That made your loss his responsibility. Any sooner, and he would have declared the contract in default and come for Katrina.”