Authors: Pauline Baird Jones
* * * * *
The General had cleared the whole building, not just the portal room, prior to their arrival. An elevator-like device took them deep underground where the portal waited, so innocuous it had been mistaken for a doorway at first. Its accidental discovery caused many problems for the Key, though it was also a convenient way to travel to the other outposts in the galaxy.
Doc could smell the scents of the people who’d been there lingering in the air, and she also smelled the stone they’d used to build the room. Like everything else in the galaxy it was a bit different from what she was used to. The ventilation was subtle, but present. She felt the air circulating, felt it slide across her skin. The air was chilly, from being so deep underground and the stone walls. The floor was stone, too, the craftsmanship almost too nice for such a pedestrian space.
Hard for her to believe two years ago something had happened here that had sent her out of the galaxy and into the past. She brought black ops online, felt her peeps adjust, too. She glanced at Hel.
“Can you talk to them yet?”
“Talk to whom?”
“Your peeps. The nanites.”
He almost broke out in expression. “I have these nanites?”
“I saw them on your skin after you plugged in as the Key. And I think some of mine went into you during the wedding.” Black ops flickered as bride tried to do a comeback. Doc benched her. “If you can talk to them, then we’ll have secure communications during the op.” He gave the impression of being a bit boggled. “Just relax and let them talk to you.”
“I do this how?”
“Ask a question. Something easy. Like, are you there?”
A pause, then his eyes popped wide. “I have nanites.”
“Excellent.”
“How does this help us communicate?”
“The nanites communicate with each other. That means they can pass on messages as fast as we can think them.”
His eyes widened.
What’s a wedding?
Doc felt heat surge into her face. She hadn’t expected this downside to their secure communications. “I’ll explain that later.” Not to mention control her thinking better. “Let’s take a look at this bad boy.” She stepped forward, her gaze traveling across the consoles on each side. She felt their readiness to respond to her, but it was the portal she was interested in right now.
It looked harmless, a simple doorway in a wall, with flat screen TV-looking panels on either side. She’d seen these screens, seen the maps in her mind, but this was her first look at them in real time. She ran her hand up the jamb, careful not to get even a toe over the threshold. This was not the moment to have an accident. It was just as advertised. Looked like a door, but the inside was densely dark and looked the same no matter where she stood in the room. That was creepier than her.
The panels on either side were portal controls. Dominance shifted to the side you were interacting with. Maps on the left opened portals to the other outposts in this galaxy. Pick a planet, touch, and step through.
Maps on the right were a tad more complicated. She studied this side, felt the capabilities beneath the simple surface. Keltinar rotated in the center, a listing of the settings in Garradian down both sides. It was strange to know how to set it, but to not
know
. The science behind it was beyond her understanding, though she sensed it had something to do with what she and others sometimes called folding space. She felt the lack of precision between their concept and hers, but couldn’t bridge that gap right now.
She might be smart enough to get it, but the language barrier was huge, even with the nanites helping out. The words were there in her head, but the principles, the science behind the words was, well, alien.
Science assumed that atomic numbers were universal, but that assumed everyone used the same symbols, or at least similar representations of those symbols. The Garradians didn’t use the same symbols or the same computer language they did. The first Key had been able to “talk” to the outpost because of her nanites. What upped the difficulty factor, the Garradians had gone far beyond what they’d achieved in their scientific understanding. They’d dealt with concepts Earth scientists could only dream about or hadn’t yet thought of. In this room, with their knowledge swirling inside her head, it was like being in kindergarten. Well, she’d never attended kindergarten, but she’d bet it was like that.
With enough time, she thought she could understand it. Most of it anyway. How ironic.
Enough time
. She had time, lots of it, and was running out of time. Talk about a freaking paradox.
She didn’t have to touch the maps to reset the portal. It was safer to think it anyway. Touching was risky. She worked with her peeps, watched the map reform into a new pattern, a new setting. Since they planned to travel portal to portal the settings were easier to adjust.
“That should do it.”
“This does not look like Kikk,” Hel observed.
“It’s not. We’ll travel to the past through another portal in the outpost system, and then come here via simple transport. It won’t let you time travel to the same portal, even with a time difference.” She’d picked the closest planetary portal to minimize any time/space distortion. Gristal was in Dusan space; a risk, but a necessary one, she and her peeps agreed. What they knew about the portals two years ago indicated it
should
be uninhabited, but there was always that law of unintended consequences she lived with.
“And our return?”
“The peeps have activated beacons in themselves, which means in us. When triggered, we can enter the portal and return to present time Gristal. We’ll return close to this time, but it’s not precise. Then we do a normal, non-time travel trip back here.”
“How much time variation?”
“As much as a week. As little as a couple of hours.”
“So we might have to wait a week in the past?”
“That’s why our packs have survival supplies in them.” She sighed. “I was hoping I’d never have to eat an energy bar again.”
“And if we have only a few of your hours?”
“Then we’ll have to work fast. We should go in weapons hot, but set to stun. I want us to be ready for anything. If someone is waiting for me, they might figure out I’d have to arrive via another one of the outpost portals and attack there.”
“You are sure we should use stun?”
He was a guy after her own heart: never leave an enemy behind you.
“We have questions that need answers.” She had several syringes of a special truth drug, developed just for the Major, which should encourage a useful exchange of information by whoever was targeting her.
“You ready?” He nodded. She took a breath and tapped her radio. “General Halliwell? Requesting permission to proceed.”
Before he could respond, the consoles around her lit up like a carnival sideshow. Doc stared at the HUDs popping up over each console, but she didn’t need to look at them. Data flowed into her through the peeps.
“Looks like Conan has figured out where I am. We got incoming. Brace for impact.”
Her radio crackled. “Get the hell out of here, Doc. We’ll try to hold the fort until you get back.”
The ground shook as Conan’s first salvo hit the shields he wouldn’t be expecting. Hel grabbed her arms and the edge of the portal or they’d have been knocked to their knees.
He pulled his ray gun at the same moment she pulled both of hers. His smile curled her toes in her military-issue boots. Pirates might look like that before they boarded a gold-packed merchant vessel way back when.
She nodded. “We have to go in together, or we’ll arrive on the other side as corpses. And we have to back in.” For whatever reason, the portals all faced the same way, so you had to exit the same direction you entered. Doc never liked to have her back to an open doorway.
He nodded crisply. One of the consoles blared a warning of more incoming missiles.
She bent her arms, weapons pointed up, elbows tucked in against her body, so they’d both fit through the opening.
“When we get there, go out right and I’ll go left. On a three count. One. Two. Three.”
Shoulder to shoulder they stepped backwards together into the opening.
Doc was glad she’d passed on a last meal; she’d heard portal travel made you queasy. She figured this would be worse, since they were going back in time. It sucked to be right. Didn’t suck to not be barfing up lunch as lights stretched green and gold on either side of her. She looked down—or it felt like she looked down. Not sure if she could since she didn’t know what state her body was in at the moment. She felt pulled in one direction, then another. Then the pulling angled, like she’d been pulled off true. Her stomach didn’t like any of it. She sensed other anomalies in their passage, but lacked the ability to put them into words.
She was traveling through time. Holy foxtrot sierra.
Doc tended to swear in military jargon when she went black ops. It felt more natural.
The lights began to shrink again and so did her body. She had a slowing sensation, though what had happened didn’t feel like movement. She was weapons ready when she reintegrated—or whatever the foxtrot hotel happened.
The Dusan squad leader wasn’t ready.
Hel dove right as requested. She dove left, passing under his body, hit the floor, rolled onto her back and fired at two bogeys from her two ray guns. Before they hit terra firma she’d twisted and rolled again, her line of fire tracking toward new targets.
There were a lot of targets in a small space.
Hel fired in multiples, too, their flashes creating a satisfactory crossfire that had to make them tough to see. A couple of them got off a few shots before they cleared the room.
Doc didn’t do a victory dance. She kept one gun trained on the door, the other on the downed bogeys. With a thumb, she kicked her ray gun from stun to kill and fired at the downed men as she moved through them.
This was not an enemy you wanted waking up and coming in at your back.
With an impressive lack of fuss, Hel adjusted as quickly, taking a position on the other side of the door. They were so integrated, all she had to do was think, and he got the message. They didn’t even have to use hand signals.
She palmed open the door, went through firing and they cleared that larger room, too. This room had consoles and HUDs that came on for them, even as she followed Hel to door number two. Data flowed into her head via the peeps as they stacked by this door. They had successfully traveled back in time, though she didn’t know exactly
when
they were yet.
There’d been no report of Dusan coming at the Kikk Outpost via the portal, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t tried. This was also a deeply buried portal room on this small outpost. Looked like the Dusan troops had been working their way down from the surface and had reached the portal seconds before their arrival. Several ships waited on the surface with more troops. The next door led to a lift or elevator. Doc kept a weather eye on it while she studied the various HUDS, trying to determine
when
they were.
Halliwell had briefed her as comprehensively as possible on troop deployment before, during and after the battle two years ago—no,
now
. She’d read about the battle, but seeing it this way, seeing the Dusan fleet arrayed against her people made her throat close up.
“Holy foxtrot sierra.” She found the planet where Hel had been, making the move on the Key that had so pissed off General Halliwell. Locating him was a quick way to figure out where they were in the timeline. She found the two phase cloaked ships closing on the two Dusan battle cruisers.
“We don’t have much time. The General will order the evac sometime in the next hour, I think.” It was horrible to see it, hard to fight the impulse to engage. These were her people, but this wasn’t her fight. This wasn’t her time. She might endanger the victory.
Some victory.
Hard to believe anyone survived alive.
She looked at the life sign readings. The Dusan up top must know their people were dead, since they communicated through transmitters inside their heads. She didn’t want them on her heels either, but she might not have time to deal with them before they had to go through that portal.
“Can we lock the portal behind us?” Hel asked, following her thought processes.
“I don’t think so. You’re not keyed to these locks.”
He grinned and shrugged. “Then we will need to watch our backs.”
At least the Dusan weren’t moving yet. They couldn’t without direction from the Supreme Leader, she realized and he’d been a bit distracted about this time.
“We should go now.”
“I agree.”
They didn’t need to talk out loud, but Doc did like the sound of his voice, the reminder she wasn’t alone.
“The Kikk portal will be under guard, but I don’t know if they’ll be friendly.” She switched her weapons back to stun. “They
will
be super trigger happy with the outpost under attack.”
They picked their way past bodies to the portal. If someone was waiting for
her
, or anyone coming through, they’d be focused on the center, about chest high.
“What do you wish me to do?”
She considered the problem, let him see both scenarios play through her head.
If one of them stood, it would pull the attention of anyone waiting, but it also upped the risk of getting shot. She didn’t want to get shot, sure didn’t want Hel to get shot. It was inconsistent with loving him. And it changed the working dynamic.
If the portal were guarded by regular jarheads, they’d be using live, projectile based ammo. No stun guns there. Hel wore body armor, so he had a good chance of surviving. While they were shooting at him, she’d be shooting at them.
If they were using stun weapons, he’d be out, but alive and in pain later.
If they both crouched and backed into the portal, it would be awkward, but it should take any guards a second or two to sight on them. All Doc ever needed was a second, two were a gift.
She looked at him, brows arched. Felt like it should be his choice. While she waited for him to process her scenarios, she did a mental assessment of trajectories, cross-fire options, risk assessments, bogey numbers and deployment possibilities. The bogies had the consoles for protection. A lot depended on how much they knew about the Chameleon, what they’d be expecting.