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  RETURN: THE FIVE WORLDS SAGA, BOOK 3

  Al Sarrantonio

  A Mystique Press Production

  Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2012 / Al Sarrantonio

  Copy-edited by: Christine Steendam

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  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Al Sarrantonio is the author of forty-five books. He is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Locus Award and the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award.

  His novels, spanning the horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery and western genres, include Moonbane, Skeletons, House Haunted, The Five Worlds Trilogy, The Mars Trilogy, West Texas, Orangefield, and Hallows Eve, the last two part of his Halloween cycle of stories.

  Hailed as “a master anthologist” by Booklist, he has edited numerous collections, including the highly acclaimed 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, and , and, most recently, Stories, with co-editor Neil Gaiman, and Halloween: New Poems.

  His short stories have appeared in magazines such as Heavy Metal, Twilight Zone, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Analog, and Amazing, as well as in anthologies such as The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Visions of Fantasy: Tales from the Masters, Great Ghost Stories, and The Best of Shadows. His best horror stories have been collected in Toybox, Hornets and Others, and Halloween and Other Seasons.

  He has had numerous book club sales, and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and appeared in comic book form. He currently lives in New York’s historic Hudson Valley region.

  Other Books by Al Sarrantonio

  Novels:

  The Worms

  Moonbane

  Skeletons

  October

  The Boy With Penny Eyes

  House Haunted

  Thomas Mullin Mysteries

  West Texas

  Kitt Peak

  The Masters of Mars Trilogy

  Haydn of Mars

  Sebastian of Mars

  Queen of Mars

  The Five Worlds Trilogy

  Exile

  Journey

  Return

  Collections:

  Toybox

  Hornets and Others

  Halloween & Other Seasons

  The Orangefield Series

  Horrorween

  Hallows Eve

  Halloweenland

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  We hope you enjoy this eBook and will seek out other books published by Crossroad Press. We strive to make our eBooks as free of errors as possible, but on occasion some make it into the final product. If you spot any errors, please contact us at [email protected] and notify us of what you found. We’ll make the necessary corrections and republish the book. We’ll also ensure you get the updated version of the eBook.

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  Thank you for your assistance and your support of the authors published by Crossroad Press.

  For

  The real Shatz Abel:

  Bill, you know who you are…

  RETURN

  Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy

  Chapter 1

  Trel Clan made an excellent child. He was obedient, clean of body, responsive to commands, unobtrusive, mild-mannered, forgettable. He ate when he was told, made his bunk with military precision as prescribed, went to bed at the appointed time. He never complained, which rendered him all but invisible. He didn’t fight, was never chosen on the playground, did his lessons with precision and punctuality, was never in need of correction. When called upon in Lessons, his answers were textbook pure, delivered without a hint of boredom. His face was placid and pliable. He did his chores as ordered, and never drew attention to himself.

  Within, Trel Clan was angry, violent, hateful, spiteful, harboring of grudges, murderous, acrid, vengeful. His thoughts were full of mutilation and violence. He was a cauldron of animosity, nearly white-hot with ire. When he ate, he wanted to crush his Martian food; when ordered about, he longed for nothing more than to grind the nearest toy into the offending figure of authority. While he delivered his lessons in perfect rote speech, inside he tore the words to letters and scattered them to the four ill winds of his heart. When he made his bunk with military precision, he wanted to rend the sheets in his hands, tear the blankets with his teeth.

  He was an excellent child.

  He was an adult.

  Trel Clan was twenty-eight years old, an actor, a grown Titanian and distant cousin of the late ruler of Titan, Queen Kamath Clan. He was small, an expert with makeup, fourth cousin to Jamal Clan, the present ruler of subjugated Titan. Before the Half-Day War, Trel Clan had been twentieth in line to the throne.

  Now, due to the domino game of death the war had played, Trel Clan was first in line.

  And, due to Jamal Clan’s late disfigurement and madness, Trel Clan was, at least in his own mind, de facto ruler of Titan.

  King of a world.

  A child.

  Murderous.

  Cunning.

  Alive.

  Waiting.

  On this particular afternoon, on this particular day, it was obvious in the play yard that something was happening.

  It was always obvious when something out of the ordinary was occurring. That was because ordinarily things were so … ordinary. The regimen on Mars for the children of Titan and Venus was so strict, so perfectly punctual, that any deviation from the norm was instantly picked up by even the dullest child. So finely attuned were these children to their diet of Lessons and Structured Play and More Lessons and Chores and Bed (punctuated at the proper times by Nutrition) that even the slightest alteration set their internal antennas abuzz.

  This Structured Play period, antennas buzzed all over the play yard.

  “Did you hear that we’re not going back to Lessons, but on a trip?” one blond-haired Venusian child asked a young Titanian boy.

  Across the yard, instantly, another Titanian boy smirked and said to a Venusian girl, “You’re not going, but we are! Only Titanians are going on this trip!”

  And magnified back across the play yard, as by amplification: “Titanian children are better than Venusian children!”

  “That’s not true!”
<
br />   “It is!”

  A fistfight here and there; a single black eye; a sudden blare of the dreaded black siren atop its tall black pole—and then, from the siren’s suddenly silent cone, the voice of the Prefect:

  “Attention!”

  There was a hush across the play yard, instant and unbroken, save for the girl with the black eye, who would not control her whimpers and was led off.

  “Listen!”

  All ears, all eyes were on the black siren with the symbol of Mars, black sickle within a circle of black iron, mounted above it.

  “You have heard rumors,” the Prefect’s voice announced, in the sternest of tones. A boy began to mewl, not in pain from injury but in terror. He, too, was led away by a monitor attendant.

  Trel Clan’s ears and eyes were on the black siren also; inside he burned and fumed, but his face showed the placid attentiveness and immobility called for.

  “It is true,” the Prefect continued, “that there will be a trip this evening, for the children of Titan only. Silence!”

  The few smirks that had broken out as Titanian children turned to Venusian children in triumph were instantly quashed. On Trel Clan’s face there remained tranquility and placidity.

  “The trip will commence with dorm assembly at hour seventeen. Lessons will be doubled for the children of Titan tomorrow, with no Structured Play.”

  The siren went silent; beside Trel Clan a Venusian boy shorter and plainer than himself turned briefly to grin into Trel Clan’s face.

  “Ha!” he said.

  At hour seventeen the promised transport was waiting outside Trel Clan’s dorm; and, along with the thirty other of his party, he boarded, traversing the short distance from the dorm’s entrance to the bus’s hinged door without need of the building’s dust shield, which was unextended.

  It was a clear evening promising an exceptionally clear night. There hadn’t been a dust storm in weeks, and a roseate glow lay upon the horizon, which lipped the far crater of Wells, as Sol descended into rest. Already a sprinkling of stars was evident in the higher blackness; only the lights of the Teaching Compound and the nearby towns kept the overhead view from being dazzling, and even at the horizon the Three Comets, nearing their circling rendezvous with the Sun, were fat and bright tonight, their long brushes of tails trailing upward into the darker black.

  As anger boiled within Trel Clan, he kept his eyes on the sights outside the bus, pretending to listen to the Lessons that droned over the bus’s speakers.

  His face was blank. Inside he raged.

  Three hours later, the transport Trel Clan rode, along with the twenty-five others that preceded and followed it, came to a halt in the middle of …

  Nowhere.

  Alarm tightened Trel Clan’s stomach. Had they been brought out here for annihilation? Had his months of playacting been for nothing, because the Martian High Leader had decided for whatever reason—on a whim, perhaps—that the experiment with the Titanian children was not working, that their indoctrination was not possible: that they were too much of their planet, too proud and hard-edged, as their parents had been, and that it was easier just to end the program?

  For the first time since Trel Clan had faked his way into the midst of the children of Titan, he felt true fear. Fear that it would all end here in the desert.

  That all his plans would come to …

  Nothing.

  “Exit the bus!” the monitor attendant at the front of the transport shouted, its chrome head gleaming, and for the first time Trel Clan found that he had slipped out of his persona of blandness and therefore invisibility—he was the last one on the vehicle, and sat staring out the window.

  “Exit the bus!” the attendant repeated, in a fractionally louder tone, and Trel Clan hurried out of his seat and past the machine, which followed him with its round glass eyes.

  “Tardiness noted,” it said implacably.

  Instead of turning to apologize, Trel Clan drove himself onward, burying himself in the milling crowd of children that had formed off the road in a sparsely grassed crater field.

  “Line up!” a monitor ordered; the order was repeated by the others.

  With the others, Trel Clan obeyed; but that knot of fear in his stomach grew.

  They formed into ranks.

  The bus lights abruptly turned off.

  The knot in Trel Clan’s stomach hardened into pain, which would have showed but for the darkness.

  Above them, the night sky turned hard and bright, like a scatter of perfect diamonds on black velvet. To the horizons was blackness broken by points of glorious light. The tails of the Three Comets still brushed against the west, their heads long since sleeping for the night.

  The darkness reminded Trel Clan of night on Titan. “Keep the line straight!”

  Trel Clan’s alarm grew; he was ready to run, if need be, ready to scamper like a rabbit over the far dunes if a Martian Marine appeared with a raser rifle.

  “Turn around, as one!” the monitors ordered.

  Legs trembling now, Trel Clan turned with his compatriots, showing their backs to the mute, darkened line of buses.

  Trel Clan listened for the sound of a raser rifle made ready.

  “Look up!” Trel Clan, the others, were ordered.

  The children of Titan looked up. Trel Clan, fury within, calm obeisance without, looked up.

  “The bright light, thirty degrees up from the horizon! Look at it!”

  As one, they looked.

  Trel Clan made himself ready for anything—ready to run, to fight with his hands—

  There came a sighing sound from behind them; Trel Clan, a few others, stole a peek at the lead transport, from which a figure was descending.

  “Turn around!”

  Trel Clan’s eyes found the bright light in the sky, under the dark web of night.

  There was no sound of a raser rifle being made ready.

  The Prefect himself, moving his thin, tall, frail body slowly, made his way from the bus to the clearing in front of the ranks of Titan’s children; an attendant, bearing a tube upon a folded tripod (a weapon?), followed, stopping when the Prefect stopped to sigh and take a few short breaths.

  Finally the Prefect made it to his assigned spot; and the attendant opened the tripod of the device he bore, set it down and pushed a button, which rotated its tube until it pointed toward the bright light thirty degrees above the horizon.

  The Prefect, pausing to take two shallow breaths, looked into the rear of the tube, which was revealed to be a common telescope.

  The knot in Trel Clan’s stomach loosened.

  They had been brought out here for a common astronomy Lesson!

  The Prefect straightened up, took a shallow breath, and said, “Yes, that is it.”

  He turned to face the students.

  “Children of Titan!” he said, his voice was a hollow rasp.

  He paused and looked to the attendant, which made a delicately quick move with one hand, reaching briefly toward the Prefect’s throat.

  When the Prefect spoke again, it was with the amplified voice of strength and command:

  “Children of Titan!” the Prefect repeated; the volume of his voice rumbled to the buses behind them. “You have been brought here to the desert tonight for a very special Lesson!”

  He paused and then turned slightly to point with a thin finger at the bright white light all the children continued to stare at.

  “That,” the Prefect continued, “is the planet Saturn, parent planet to your homeworld!”

  There was the faintest stirring among the ranks; for the merest moment, Trel Clan felt himself swell with pride, and—oddest sensation of all—felt himself proud to be among these other citizens of Titan. Proud to be their de facto ruler.

  “Silence!” the Prefect and his attendant both said at the same time.

  The rustling ceased.

  “I want you to continue looking at Saturn, knowing, though you cannot see it with the naked eye, that Titan is n
earby!”

  The Prefect paused, whether for effect or to catch his breath it was not evident.

  Fingering the device at his throat, the Prefect leaned over to say something unheard to the attendant, which answered immediately, also unheard.

  “Students! You will recall in Lessons how you learned of the workings of Titan’s Heating Core, which provides its moderating temperatures and also its stable gravity. This was a great technical achievement and allowed the colonization of Titan, as well as its terraforming.

  “Continue to watch!”

  The Prefect now fingered the device at his throat again, said something brief to the attendant, received an answer, and nodded. “Good, it is time,” he whispered in his own, rasping voice before reactivating the device at his throat. He then bent stiffly to peer into the telescope again.

  “Students! Behold!”

  There was a bright flash at the point in the sky where Saturn was located; it briefly expanded into a thinning bubble the width of a marble held at arm’s length; this bubble then dissipated and soon was gone, as if it had never been there.

  Saturn continued to shine, a bright object.

  Without a word, the Prefect took his eye away from the telescope and allowed the attendant to collapse its tripod and bear it away toward the bus. The frail Prefect, a slight smile on his features, now turned to the ranks of Titanian children and locked his hands behind his back. As if giving a Screen Lecture, he paced slowly back and forth in front of the students, looking at the ground, the slight smile still set on his lips.

  “The Heating Core, so essential to Titan’s development, was also significant in its destruction. The Machine Master, at the High Leader’s command discovered that if the Heating Core was tampered with in a certain way, it would result in the meltdown of that core, followed by the detonation of the core with a blast significant enough to destroy Titan.”