So Close to Home

by Galen Surlak-Ramsey

  Movement caught my eye, and I spun to the left, my weapon following. To my utter shock, I saw KN-C pressed against a far corner, his pupil wide and iris pulsating a bright yellow. I’d honestly never seen a droid so terrified in my life. I was sure he was about to bust a half dozen gaskets.

  “Sympathetic plea! I beg of you, don’t shoot!” the little backstabber wailed. “This was all KN-B’s idea, I swear!”

  The shock I’d experienced immediately gave way to burning hate. My finger twitched against the trigger, and it was all I could do not to blast him apart. “You lied to me!” I yelled. “You lied and all those Kibnali died because of it!”

  “I didn’t lie! I—” He cut himself off and dropped a few centimeters. “Yes. Much regret. I lied. But I had to!”

  I stepped forward. “Shut up! You didn’t have to do anything!”

  “I did! I did!” he cried. “They all threatened me with such immense suffering, and I’m weak. So very, very weak.”

  His admission surprised me, and it was probably the only thing that saved his life in that split second. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kill you,” I growled. Before he could answer, I shook my head and amended that statement. “No. Not one. Three. Give me three good reasons why I should let you live.”

  “Because I’m innocent!” KN-C begged.

  “Not in my eyes.”

  “And I did try and save you, too,” he added. “Remember? I said ‘this is the part where you run.’ I was trying to warn you without them knowing.”

  Jack appeared at my side. “Dakota,” he said. “Those Nodari are still headed this way.”

  “I know.”

  “Then stop listening to him,” he said. “Blast him. Leave him. I don’t care which you do, but we can’t stick around.”

  My eyes narrowed as my weapon’s sights crystalized on my target.

  “Wait!” he shrieked. “I can help you! The prime mover is inside the main storage!”

  My head cocked. “You mean Jakpep?”

  “Yes! That’s what he likes to call himself now!” he said. “He’s locked away here in the Chrono Displacement Labs’ vault, but I can teach you how to hack the locks. Then you can take him and fix anything you want. His ability to make portals wherever and whenever you—”

  I squeezed the trigger. A single plasma bolt flew from my gun and struck him a hair above his pupil. The shot blew through his fragile body, sending a shower of electronics and bright sparks in all directions. His body crashed to the floor, and flames sputtered out of the entry and exit holes.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A New Old Friend

  “Cripes, Dakota,” Jack said, laughing and shaking his head. “Why did you do that? I mean, I’m glad and all, but I didn’t think you would.”

  “He was lying about helping us,” I said, not moving a muscle and trying to rein in my anger. “All the others warned me never to take Jakpep—never to try and fix things with him. Curator. Master of Records. They all said it would lead to disaster, and it almost did. But not him…not him…”

  Jack eased in front of me. His face softened and wore a pained look. “You okay?”

  His words took me out of whatever hate-induced fog I was in, and I realized my eyes were leaking. A lot. Nose, too.

  “Yeah,” I said, clearing my eyes and sniffing a couple of times to get things under control. “I just—I just want to make things right, you know?”

  “I know,” he said. He then slapped my shoulder. “Let’s find this part so we can go home.”

  I nodded, and he took off for the storage room Daphne had said it would be in. I followed, sorta, but I didn’t go far. I slowed to a stop, and my eyes drifted back to the giant spire thing in the center of the room.

  “Daphne,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Affirmative,” she replied. “I’ve been listening the entire time.”

  “Yeah, I assumed,” I said. “Is this big spire thing the main vault?”

  “Nope.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It stores all the planet’s number fours,” she said. “Terrible, terrible thing, especially for people like you who can’t stand that particular digit. It’s so terrible, if I were you, I’d stay far, far away. In fact, I’d stay so far away, I’d forget it even existed.”

  “Sounds like good advice.”

  “You’re going to look, aren’t you?”

  I wiped my nose on the back of my arm and grinned. “What do you think?”

  “I think Tolby is going to be very upset with you if you do. Even more so if you get eaten.”

  “He loves me,” I said. “He won’t stay mad for long.”

  And he would, I told myself. He would. That said, I did honestly feel a little guilty about abusing the friendship right then and there, but damn, what if it was the vault? What if Jakpep was actually inside the thing? Besides, taking a look wouldn’t hurt with Jack going after the dorsal subatomic charm flipper doodad. I mean, it wouldn’t take two of us to pop open one measly little storage bin.

  I ran over to the only working console. Although it had no obvious signs of outward interface, that didn’t bother me since most Progenitor computers seemed to lack them. Using my implants, I made the mental connection with ease and smiled broadly when I heard the pop inside my head.

  “All right, baby, show me the Jakpep,” I said, bouncing on the balls of my feet. My energy levels dropped considerably when the screen displayed a single line of text before I felt the disconnect in my mind:

  Unauthorized Access.

  “No, no, I’m very much authorized,” I argued. I tried connecting again. And although I was successful in plugging back in—briefly—I was greeted with the same message.

  “Come on,” I griped. My hands gripped the sides of the monitor, and I kicked the bottom of the spire for good measure.

  “I don’t mean to second-guess your overall strategy, but we are working against the clock,” Daphne said. “Perhaps you would enjoy a sense of wonderment for the rest of your life by not finding out what’s inside.”

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. “No. What I’d like is a hacking routine to get in here. KN-C said I had one. Can you figure out what he was talking about?”

  In an instant, my arm tingled, and my eyes darted back toward the screen. The unauthorized access message flickered before giving way to a series of concentric rings, each one having a few little spikey things coming off it.

  I cocked my head, unsure what to make of this new development. Operating more out of instinct and curiosity, I reached out with my left hand, fingers splayed so they could touch multiple parts of the outer circle, and gave it a spin.

  To my delight, it rotated with my hand, and as it did, the ring beneath it spun a little more slowly to the opposite direction. I played with the screen for a few more seconds before I quickly realized that it was possible to have all the spikey things on one ring connect with the spikey things on the rings above and below as long as everything was rotated in the proper manner.

  “Oh please, please, please, tell me this is my hacking minigame,” I said with a renewed sense of hope. A dozen spins later, I had my answer.

  And it was good.

  Glory be to the lucky elephant, and may Taz be forever praised across the heavens. The screen flickered, went completely white, and then faded into a typical menu selection I’d seen a thousand times before when playing with the archive cube from the museum and other Progenitor computers.

  Jack, panting, appeared at my side. In his hand he held a contraption that looked like the bizarre offspring of a coffeemaker and a cactus. “We can leave now,” he said.

  “Almost,” I said, paging through the current screen I was on.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Inventory of this place, or rather, looking for a way to open the vault.”

  “Leave it,” he said. “There’s no way that portal device is in there.”

  “I have to know,” I said.
<
br />   “Do you have to die, too?”

  I tore my gaze away from the screen long enough to throw him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “I know we’re short on time, and I know that the portal device has been…problematic, but it’s also saved our bacon,” I said. “Please, trust me. I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

  He said something else, a few somethings actually, but I didn’t catch it. I was too focused on what was in front of me. The experiments that they had been conducting here were dizzying, or at least I imagined they would be if I could understand any of them. Hell, their titles alone threatened to put my brain in a tailspin: Depolarization of Ventral Synthetic Chrono Compressors and Their Effects on Temporal Membrane Alignment. Optimization of Nanowave Entanglers for Spacetime Collapse Engines. Quantum Dark Matter Fluctuations and How They Affect Co-dependence. So on and so forth.

  The worst part of all of it was, however, the inventory list was pretty much filled with the same gobbledygook. I worried that a lot of them were extravagant names for simple tools. For example, deep down I had the feeling that the “small range manual torque device” would end up being a basic wrench, and if I couldn’t differentiate the truly awesome from the utterly mundane in short order, I’d use up whatever precious time we had to spare and end up dying on this rock—without my Viking funeral I might add.

  “Two minutes, Dakota, before the Nodari arrive,” Daphne said.

  “And we’re done,” Jack said, pulling on my arm. “It’s a long run back to the transport tubes.”

  I shrugged him off as I found the submenu that dealt with the contents inside the vault. Only one thing was listed:

  Prime Mover (Prototype)

  “Oh. My. God,” I said. My heart pounded relentlessly in my chest, and no matter how fast I breathed, I never seemed to get enough air. “He was telling the truth. He was actually telling the truth.”

  “He was? But how? You nuked it.”

  I shook my head and laughed as I hammered the controls to open the storage area. “I have no idea,” I said. “This must be where it was before we got it at the museum. Like, this is the young Jakpep or something.”

  A loud hiss and pop drew my attention, and off to the side, a single door popped open before sliding to the side. Billowing clouds poured out, like someone had dropped a chunk of dry ice into a hot tub. A metallic tray eased out next, and sitting on a cradle atop it was my portal device. Or, I guess what would be my portal device, come a few million years.

  No, check that. I didn’t have to wait that long at all. With an impish grin, I snatched the device from its stand. “Oh yeah, come here, you beautiful thing,” I said. Goosebumps raised across my body, and thoughts of what this meant for all of us ran rampant through my mind. “We can go home,” I said, staring at the device, happy tears running down my cheek. “We can actually go home.”

  “Not exactly,” Daphne said, ruining the mood.

  “Why not? It can open a portal anywhere—anywhen—I want.”

  “Your brain will not survive the calculation,” she said. “So, unless you have a spare—no, check that, forgot to carry the one again—unless you have a spare eighty-eight on hand, you won’t be able to time hop us back to the future. We’ll still need a webway. Besides, Jakpep can’t make a portal big enough for our ship, which I’m assuming you’ll want.”

  “Doesn’t that just—”

  The door leading out opened with a hiss. Jack and I spun around and were greeted with a trio of Nodari scouts, each toting a large blaster in hand. The two of us bolted to either side, guns blazing. I peppered the walls, floors, and even the ceiling with hideous scorch marks that would’ve made any janitor irate. Jack, on the other hand, drilled the lead scout twice in the chest and once in the leg, causing it to drop. The other two jumped sideways and returned fire.

  Tolby’s voice suddenly joined the line. “Dakota! What’s going on?”

  “I’m getting shot at by those damn scouts!” I yelled.

  “You can’t fight them! Get out of there!”

  “I know, Tolby! We’re cut off!”

  “Gah! Why didn’t you listen to Daphne and just go?”

  I peeked around the hunk of machinery I’d ended up behind and sent a few plasma bolts downrange. I didn’t scratch a single Nodari, but at least I was close enough this time they ended up ducking back. “We’re holding them off,” I said. “I think.”

  “I’m coming,” he said. “Don’t play hero. Get somewhere safe and hunker down.”

  Jack, who was using the doorframe to a storage room as cover, snapped off a half dozen shots before being forced back himself. When the barrage sent his way stopped, he dared a glance and cursed. “Dakota, we’re in trouble.”

  “Par for the course,” I said with a bleak grin.

  “No, I mean there’s more coming,” he said. “A lot more. We’ve got like ten seconds, tops, before this place turns into a Nodari mosh pit.”

  My mouth dried. There was no way we were blasting out of this. Then again, we didn’t have to. I slung my weapon and mentally connected to the portal device. Again, the power of the lucky elephant combined with the ever-awesomeness of Taz made it so I hooked into the device without a single hiccup. It was like putting on an old, familiar glove.

  “Tolby,” I said, entering my time-hopping state of Zen. “Stay at the ship.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me, Tolby. We’ll be fine. I don’t need you getting hurt.” As I finished, alien symbols appeared in my vision as my mind bathed in the Progenitor formulas needed to create the portals I so desperately desired.

  “Dakota!” Jack yelled.

  My eyes flickered to the side. Two Nodari scouts barreled toward me. The first dropped when Jack blew apart its head. The second stumbled when follow-up shots knocked its weapon from its hands and drilled into its hip. But the thing kept coming, losing only a stride.

  It reared back two of its arms to take my head off with one well-placed strike. In another life, I would’ve been absolutely petrified—back when I was a slave to time’s whims.

  Not anymore.

  With a half meter separating the Nodari and me, I calmly dropped a portal at my feet and popped out in the storage room by Jack.

  “Cripes, I forgot how disorienting that can be,” I said, laughing and stumbling into the wall.

  Jack fired off a few more shots before darting inside and hammering the controls so the door slid shut and locked. “I’m not sure if I’m elated or terrified you’ve got that again,” he said with a nervous laugh.

  Something hit the door with a thunderous clap, knocking Jack off of it and caving in several centimeters. The second blow furthered the dent. And after the third, the door had a sizeable split.

  “Dakota get us out of here!” he said, firing madly through the crack.

  I nodded, though I was already way ahead of him. I’d been in the process of mentally retracing the entire route we took to get here in order to make as accurate of a blind portal jump as I could. “A few more seconds,” I said. Warm fuzzies surrounded me, and I could’ve sworn I heard the faint sounds of a music box playing in the background. The thought that this was the telltale sign of me about to scramble my brain did come to mind. But when the door exploded in a shower of shrapnel and sparks, it didn’t matter.

  I threw open a wormhole, and before I could say a word, Jack barreled us through.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Picking Up

  A cold, unyielding floor rushed up to greet me, but instead of pancaking on that, my body used Jack’s as a giant cushion. So that was nice. The wind flew from my lungs as I crashed into him, and I’m pretty sure I heard a couple of his ribs crack as well.

  “Holy snort, that hurt,” I said, rolling off him and onto all fours. Regardless of our less-than-stellar landing, I’d never been so glad to see the cockpit of a strange, alien ship. “Hot damn, it worked.”

  “Dakota!” Daphne exclaimed. “I’m so pleased to see you’re alive.”
/>
  “So am I,” I said with welcome relief. “I told you guys Mister Oinker would come through. What do you have to say now, Jack?”

  “Never…doubted him…for a second,” Jack said, his voice strained.

  He had such an unsettling tremor, I had to force myself to turn and look at him. I guess in the back of my mind, I was afraid he’d been impaled by something or caught a stray shot from a Nodari as we escaped and was now missing half a lung.

  Thankfully, neither were the case. He lay flat on his back, eyes semi-shut, and one arm thrown across his midsection.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m breathing,” he said. “I think.”

  I ignored the ache spreading across my shoulders and side and offered him a hand up. “Come on, you big baby,” I said with a playful tease. “Let me help you up.”

  His eyes opened fully, and the corners of his mouth drew back. “I bet a kiss would go a long way.”

  My head went to the side, and I exhaled (though I might have been playing it up a little). “Still?”

  “Still what?” he said with a wry grin. “You did land on me. Seems fair.”

  Tolby and Jainon burst into the cockpit. My big bud’s eyes were wide with fright, but when he saw the portal device on the floor nearby, those eyes narrowed with anger. “You brought that thing back into our lives?”

  “I prefer to think of it as rescued,” I said.

  “Dakota, you know what kind of trouble it brings! How could you?”

  “Because we might need it,” I said. “And as much as you hate it, it’s the reason we’re still alive.”

  “It’s also the reason we’ve almost died multiple times,” he said with a growl. “I say we toss it out the hatch right now. It’s not worth the trouble.”

  “No!” I said, scooping it up and clutching it to my chest. “We might need it to get Empress and Yseri. We certainly can’t leave it here where the Nodari could find it.”

  Tolby growled once more, though this time it was longer and deeper. “I don’t like any of this,” he finally said. “But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps leaving it for the Nodari would end in disaster. Did you at least get what we need from the lab?”