More than that, they have been careful this time to set up strategies and tactics that are very much unlike them. In the past they only took slaves and things of value, like jewels and precious metals. Now their target seems to be every bit of tech they can acquire and especially any tech related to the gate network.
I fear they have joined forces with a more devious race and therein lies our problem. Somehow, they may have access from a point that we do not know and that is not in our known network of gateways. Who knows what technology they may have access to that they did not have before? This is a new war, with new variables, and we cannot rest until we have destroyed their access permanently."
By the time she finished this explanation, Liliath seemed to have herself back under control, but a small wisp of dark smoke dribbled out of one nostril, which she waved away.
Myla nodded. "We fear for you and the dimensions in the Alliance. At this time your Earth is in danger such as it has never experienced. If we are unable to locate and destroy the access of the Groga and whatever or whomever is aiding them, the entire network is compromised, and we may have no choice but to bring the governments of Earth into the Alliance to protect themselves. As The Gatekeeper, it will become your responsibility to see to this, if it becomes necessary."
Jenny sat there in shock. It had all seemed an adventure until Sam and the Groga had been thrown into the mix. All of those dimensions to learn about and explore, everything she was learning and her kind reception into the Alliance as a Guardian. But since Miriha's death, it had escalated into a nightmare from which she couldn't awake. She couldn't go back to her comfortable little life. She couldn't view the world from her safe space online. The beautiful little garden with its herbs and butterflies and koi pond was no longer any kind of refuge.
There was nowhere to run or hide and these people and all of the people of the dimensions were counting on her, a twenty-something ghost-writer, to save them from ultimate evil. How insane was that?
But instead of voicing her fear, she said, "What must I do?"
Ingot's warm smile was as good as a hug. "For now, you need to wait for the building to clear. Then we will prepare Tarafau to travel back to your gateway. We have already sent agents through to Earth to aid Burt and Bob. Bob has agreed to make his home headquarters for the agents there. The other Guardians have been notified and they will be in touch. It is vital that your training continues. It is also vital that you be protected. Therefore, we will continue as we have already decided."
At this point, another sound, less urgent, rang out. The transparent screen appeared again. "All Clear," it stated and then disappeared.
Almost immediately after that, two of the security squad marched into the Council room.
"There is no trace of her, Councilors," the stern-faced guard reported. "We did a thorough search of the building by scan and room by room. She is no longer on the premises."
"What happened? How did she escape?" Jenny demanded, only realizing after she spoke that it wasn't her place to question him.
Ingot looked at her meaningfully and turned to the guard expectantly.
"We don't know. We had visuals on her, both electronically and through the glass window to her cell. One moment she was there and the next she was not. We rushed inside and searched thoroughly then set the alarm and searched the building."
"I think you will find, when you review the recording, that she was still in the cell when you searched it," inserted Myla dryly. "We should have remembered that one of the abilities of the Fleistians is camouflage. Like the chameleons of Earth, they have an ability to blend into the background of their surroundings so well that they can seem to disappear. When you opened the door to search the cell, you allowed her to escape."
Both guards hung their heads, the shame apparent on their faces.
"You could not have known," Ingot said. "The fault lies with us. We should have remembered. Be at ease."
The guards nodded almost in unison.
Ingot said briskly, "We cannot un-ring the bell. We can only move forward. Assemble the guards in the situation room and we will be down shortly. We must put some new security measures into place."
This was an obvious dismissal. The guards turned on their heels as one and marched back out of the room.
"Now we will go see to Tarafau. Please come with us." Ingot led the way out of the Council room and onto the elevator. Crammed in there with the dragon, Jenny could now appreciate the size of the elevator, compared to the little boxes on earth. She could feel Liliath's breath on the back of her neck and had a flashback of reading The Hobbit as a kid. A phrase her mom had often said came to her mind, "Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
She shook her head, this was no proper time for such thoughts, but it did make her smile.
They got off on the infirmary level. The stark whiteness was relieved somewhat by the dimmed lighting. A healer approached them and reached out a hand to Myla. She turned to the group.
"Tarafau will be well. His concussion was milder than we first expected. It appears that his kind, partly due to their shape-changing abilities, have an automatic mechanism in their physiology that shuts them down when a certain amount of damage is done to the cranium and allows the body to begin repairs. He will still need to limit physical activity. No sparring or running or any activity that will jar his head. He does not like it, but has agreed to cooperate."
Jenny's anxiety eased, just a little. She could no longer imagine her life without Tarafau. She knew she would never be able to complete her tasks and do her job without him to guide her and to be her friend.
"Thank you, healer," Jenny said, grasping the healer's long fingered hands in her own. "There is no way to express my gratitude."
"We all have learned to love Tarafau over the years. This is not his first visit to my infirmary. Hard-headed old cat."
They entered Tarafau's room, where he was seated on the edge of the bed, a dressing wound around his head.
"What happens to the dressings when we return to Earth?" Jenny asked.
"They will continue to do their job," replied the healer. "We really don't understand the science completely. When he is bandaged in this form, the bandages continue to work, even though you can't see them on the cat. He will appear to be uninjured in that form. While you are in Sanglarka, have Arvid continue to treat him. I will forward him instructions."
"Are you ready to go home?" Jenny asked him tentatively.
"Lead the way," agreed Tarafau grimly, flexing his fists. "We have work to do."
Chapter 23: A Shot in the Dark
The moment they stepped over the threshold of the gate into her study, Jenny knew something was wrong. She didn't know exactly why. Then she realized the skin surrounding her key was tingling. This had never happened before. She unconsciously picked up Tarafau, cradling him protectively.
Bob and Burt looked at her curiously, frozen in place, obviously concerned. "What's up?" said Bob, his voice sounding oddly in her ears as it always did after spending some time using mindspeech exclusively.
"I'm not sure," Jenny replied softly. "Something isn't right. My key is tingling."
Burt went around her, putting his hand on the door handle. "It's warm, but not hot. Don't follow me until I give the all clear."
Jenny nodded, and Burt turned the handle. The acrid smell of smoke and…was that gunpowder?...filled the room. Burt stepped through quietly and they all stood rock still where he had left them. In a moment he called out, "We're clear, but you aren't going to like it."
As Jenny stepped into the hallway the impact of just how real her danger was, hit her like a thrown brick. The area of the door to the gateways was blackened, as if someone had set off a small bomb. The floor was littered with ceiling tiles and the hall light was shattered. There was evidence of impacts, as if someone had tried to use a hammer to get through the wall.
As she moved into her living room, she
vaguely noticed her books strewn across the floor, the stuffing of her reading chair pulled out down to the frame of the chair. Her china from her hutch was in pieces all over the dining room floor. The doors to her kitchen cupboards had been torn from the cabinet and a mixed odor of spices and decaying food wafted up from the floor.
She ran to the office and her computer was gone and all of her paper files were strewn as if someone had been looking for something.
In her bedroom it was the same. Her belongings had been trashed.
"The shed!" she cried and, with Tidbit still in her arms, she ran as quickly as she could through the shards of broken china out through the French doors that barely hung cockeyed on their wrenched hinges.
Like the gateroom door, there were obvious signs of an attempt to force entry, but the door remained locked and undamaged. Jenny heaved a sigh of relief. "I don't know what's in there that they could possibly want, but evidently Aunt Lizzie did a good job of protecting it."
She turned to her team. "I need some agents to come in and clean this up while we're at Sanglarka. We don't have time for it now. I wonder how they did all of this without someone calling the cops. It must have made a lot of noise."
Then she realized why they had taken the computer. They thought her security footage was stored there. She pulled out her phone. When they had altered the tech inside it, they had also installed an app that gave her unlimited cloud storage off world. Apparently, according to her training, they had hidden a tiny satellite among the space debris in Earth's orbit. Jenny had been sending the footage from Aunt Lizzie's security system into that cloud.
She brought up the security app. She watched in horror as two burly men smashed in the French doors with large hammers. Hadn't the neighbors heard?
"How could they have done this without attracting attention?" she asked the two silent men gathered around her.
"Silence shield. They must have extended a silence shield over the property. It's pretty common tech among the less honest of the dimensions. Most merchants on gate worlds know to use counter-tech against it, but I don't imagine Lizzie ever thought to need it."
Jenny continued to watch as these men went from room to room, ravaging her belongings. They didn’t even appear to be looking for anything. However, they did search the walls carefully, probably looking for an opening into the gate room. Which was proved out after they had torn the bathroom apart, looking into the tank on the back of the toilet, throwing everything out of the medicine cabinet and the drawers and even unrolling the toilet paper roll.
As they moved toward the bedroom, they stopped in the hallway as if listening for something. One of them pulled out some kind of device and blasted exactly at the point where the invisible door existed that led to the gate room. There was a brilliant flash and when the picture returned, the wall was black, and they were attacking the spot with sledge hammers. Even as brawny as they were, they appeared to be making only the slightest dents in the wall.
They tried attacking on either side, supposedly to find a weak spot in the wall, to no avail. "The Alliance will be glad to know they get high marks for wall building," said Burt, almost gleefully.
When none of their efforts succeeded, they went on to trash her bedroom, but when they got to the computer room, one of the men, with a scruffy beard and a nose ring, reached toward the computer and ripped it out of the wall. This made absolutely no effect on the feed, as the security system was not tied into the computer. It only showed the footage on the monitor screen. "Bonus points," Burt breathed. "Magnificent."
They circled back to where the impervious door still hid behind the gate shield. One of them kicked the wall with a big booted foot, but only got pain for the effort. He hopped around on one foot, apparently swearing and shouting to the amusement of his companion until he hauled off and punched the fellow in the belly. The second man, clean shaven, even to his bald head, bent over in pain and then followed the bearded one out of the house.
Jenny regretted the lack of audio, as it might have given them a clue as to what their orders were and maybe where they were holed up or if there were more of them.
"But wait…there's more!" said Burt, who was practically dancing with excitement.
He pulled out his little multipurpose electronic device. It wasn't a cell phone, he had assured her the first time she had asked him about it. He called it his "swiss army knife.” Apparently, it had many functions, one of which was to extract information from a person's mind and also to erase inconvenient memories. She shuddered to think what it would have done in someone else's hands.
He poked a few icons in rapid succession and his face lit up. "Gotcha!" And he actually did do a little jig on the spot.
"Gotcha?" Jenny inquired hopefully.
"It was a shot in the dark, but thanks to listening to my gut, we will now know exactly where they are from now on, thanks to my little bug friends. You see, when they went through the French doors, one of my little bug friends, actually tiny nanobots, dropped like a little spider on a web onto their backs and burrowed beneath the skin. They just feel like a little itch going in and, when the victim scratches at the itch, the bugs just burrow deeper.
It looks and feels like a mosquito bite. They can't be detected by any current tech and there is no additional sensation once they dig into the fatty tissue or muscle. These little hummers will tell us exactly where Curly and Moe are anywhere on the planet. Score a big one for dastardly alien tech! And the really cool thing is that they are dirt cheap and easy to manufacture. I keep a large supply of them in my MDP."
Jenny let out the breath she didn't realize she had been holding. "Do you think they will lead us to Engoza?"
"If not her, at least whoever is next in charge. I doubt she will risk being seen on Earth for a while."
"Can I have a look at that?" Bob said, looking longingly at the little device in Burt's hand. "How do I get one of those?"
"Actually, they'll probably issue you one at the end of your Agent training," grinned Burt, but for now it stays in my pocket," and he suited words to action.
Jenny looked at Tidbit, who she had let down and had been sitting quietly at her ankles. "Are you OK?"
"I'm fine," he sent back. "I think I want to check the koi pond. She may have left a clue."
Burt turned to Jenny. "I know this all looks pretty bleak from where you stand, but we'll get a lock on this. Was there anything valuable on your computer that wasn't backed up?"
Jenny considered. It had been her work computer, but other than email, she hadn't done much on her computer since all of this had started. Thankfully, she made a habit of trashing her read emails and dumping the trash folder nightly, so there was nothing there that might give them a clue as to what she might have been doing all of this time. Any emails she wanted to save, she saved to a highly encrypted cloud server, but she hadn't saved any of Aunt Lizzie's notes.
She shook her head. "I think I'm good there. And the laptop's no loss. It isn't like I can't afford to get a new one. I just hate having to reinstall all of that software."
Burt nodded sympathetically. "OK, well, I'd like to suggest we get on the road to Sanglarka, then. The house will be restored as much as possible while you're gone. Just think of it as an excuse to redecorate. A shame about the books, though," he said with a sigh.
Bob and Tidbit were examining the edge of the pond.
"Nothing here but some cat blood," Bob said, as they walked up. "You might want to call Ted and find an excuse to give him a couple weeks off with pay until the clean-up crew is finished, though. Don't want him putting two and two together and coming up with 16."
Jenny nodded and texted Ted.
"So, let's go," said Burt.
"Wait a quick minute," Bob said. "I need to check on my house. Remember, they know I'm involved now."
Burt agreed, and they all trooped over to Bob's place, waving at Miss Longtree as they crossed the street. She waved back cheerfully and went on with pruning her prize-winning r
oses.
There was no sign of forced entry. Burt scanned for signs of Curly and Moe and they went in, after the scan revealed nothing. Bob and Burt did a quick tour of the house, then they headed out to the workshop. The lock was a fingerprint lock and an iris scan and once again Burt's scan found nothing. They went in and, to Bob's evident relief, nothing had been touched.
"I have Ignatius boarding with my son," Bob said. "And since it doesn't look like anything's been touched, while I'm here, I want to add a few things to my MDP. You never know when the right tool will come in handy."
After quickly gathering a number of tools and gadgets, many of which Jenny could only guess at their purpose, he paused. "Fidget goes too," he said, "and my main laptop and external drives."
After packing these into his MDP, he smiled and said, "Okies, kiddies, let's go."
Chapter 24: Seeking Sneaky Sam
As they emerged from the gateway in Sanglarka, Jenny was grateful to see Lova, Arvid and all of her fellow Guardians waiting to greet them warmly. These people were fast becoming as family to her. Lova pulled her in for a wordless hug. Beside her, Tarafau, with his head bandaged, gave a ragged sigh, as though he were very tired.
"Come, to the lodge," Lova invited them, taking in all four of them with a sympathetic gaze. "We'll get you fed up and then all of you will take to your rooms to rest. I have been given strict instructions, so there will be no arguments." She looked pointedly at Tarafau.
He didn't argue, however. Jenny had never seen him look so weary.
The long dining room table had been extended and the lodge smelled of good food. There were many choices passed around, but Jenny took one of the large, fluffy home-baked rolls and a ladle of some kind of stew. It tasted like heaven to her weary soul.
There wasn't much chatter around the table as there otherwise might have been. Jenny was sure that her party must have looked like they'd been dragged through a rat hole. Most of them had circles under their eyes and Jenny realized that she hadn't slept in over 24 hours. The bandages on her and Tarafau were a mute testament to what they'd been through.
The House on Infinity Loop Page 20