Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  *********

  On the portal room floor, Olivia followed Cassie out into an open space. Jumps were limited right now, very limited, but the place still made Olivia jumpy. She knew exactly where Juan had died. Everyone did. Where a miscalculated jump had cut him in half. They’d blamed him for being there, but he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Just breathe,” Cassie said, stopping. Olivia wondered what the Palta woman had seen on her face, then realized she’d been walking sideways.

  Cassie gave her a nod, then reached out and took her elbow. There was a jolt, and then the two of them were standing in a dim room. Cassie started moving, and overhead lights came on. It had the feel of fluorescent lights, but they were nicer. No hum, a color that wasn’t quite so garish. Bright, clinical, but not intrusive.

  Cassie left her, going to a plastic crate that sat on the floor and checking it. It was the size of a large piece of luggage, but it had a rugged external frame, like it was meant to survive falling out of a plane, and Olivia didn’t immediately see a way of opening it.

  “Where are we?” Olivia asked.

  “Midas’ house,” Cassie said casually, and Olivia stiffened. Cassie glanced over.

  “Don’t worry. He’s still gone. It’s just a convenient place to keep all of my stuff. Jesse doesn’t like coming here, and… well, no one who’s ever been here wants to come back. So I can keep whatever I want here.”

  “Is Troy here?” Olivia asked. Cassie finished with the crate and stood.

  “No,” she said slowly. “All right, this is the hard part. So, calculating a jump, it requires knowing where you are and where you’re going. Everything in the universe has a location and a velocity that we combine into a single piece of information that tells us where it is, within a couple planet diameters, and that will get me there, even if they don’t have a beacon, but…” She twisted her mouth to the side, and Olivia took a step back, sensing that she didn’t want to hear what was going to come next.

  “Right,” Cassie said. “I followed Troy through a… different idea?… I guess?… and I don’t actually know where I was. The only way to do this is to go through the same path I took last time.”

  “That doesn’t sound…” Olivia started, then sucked on her lower lip. “Why is that bad?”

  “It’s underwater the whole way,” Cassie said. “I think I can eliminate a few of the detours and just go straight there, but… we’re going to be underwater.”

  “How long?” Olivia asked. Cassie’s face twitched again. It was the wrong question.

  “I’m going to do my best to cycle us through quickly and… simply… but…” She shook her head. “There’s no preparing you for it. I’m just letting you know that, yes, I knew it was going to happen and, no, I don’t think it’s going to kill you.”

  “But it could?” Olivia asked, her voice rising unbidden.

  Cassie rolled her eyes.

  “Do you really think I would have come to get you, if I thought that there was a real chance of you dying on the way there? No. I can’t rule it out, because obviously I don’t control everything in the universe… I mean, if I accidentally jumped us into a giant sea jelly, it stands a very good chance of killing you, but, I mean, what are really the odds of that?”

  “That could happen?” Olivia asked, her voice still an octave above normal. “Those are things?”

  “Of course it could happen,” Cassie said. “Every point-to-point transfer comes with risk that you aren’t going to end up where you think you should be. What I do is… Okay, it really is infinitely safer than what the portal program does, but they both still have risks. I’d have to hit a creature that is neutrally buoyant and an awfully lot like water to boot, for the really major problems to happen, and… well, that doesn’t really talk about the pressure issues, because it wasn’t like Troy was really worried about pressure when he did it…”

  “What?” Olivia asked, a screech. “What are you talking about? Why are you even telling me this? Does Troy need me?”

  It was such a stupid question. She knew where Troy was. He was back at base, being a jerk to everyone. But so was Benji, and Benji, well, he’d never been a nice guy, but he’d always been funny and you knew it wasn’t anything personal, and now he was just a plain, boring jerk…

  Something was wrong, and Olivia believed Cassie knew what it was.

  She waved her hands out in front of her.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Just… don’t answer that. This is the right thing?”

  Cassie looked at her with narrowed eyes, then nodded.

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s do it,” Olivia said. It shocked even her. She didn’t trust Cassie. Not as a person. Not to care at all about Olivia. But she did trust that the Palta woman loved Troy, and she believed Troy when he said… Well, maybe not. She didn’t really believe him when he said that Cassie was a woman who always did the right thing. But she was willing to give Cassie another shot at it. Willing to see, to learn that Troy was right.

  Cassie’s face softened.

  “You have a forgiving nature,” she said quietly, almost teasingly. “And you fight with it a lot, don’t you?”

  “I’ve been taken in a few times,” Olivia said bitterly, taking a step back. Cassie nodded.

  “Don’t trust Palta,” she said. “Not with things that are dear to your heart. But trust us with the important things. We’re curious, and we tend to overlook people in the pursuit of… knowledge? That isn’t the word, but it’s close enough. It’s something else, but…” Cassie looked away. “We hurt each other at least as often as we hurt everyone else. But when it’s important, we’ll literally move worlds to make things right.”

  “You mean figuratively,” Olivia corrected reflexively, looking down at her feet, then back up, and Cassie tipped her head slightly to the side.

  “No. I don’t.”

  Olivia swallowed.

  “And Troy… He’s important to you.”

  It wasn’t a question. Cassie didn’t answer it.

  “It will be uncomfortable, and it may even be scary,” Cassie said. “But it will end, and it’s important.”

  Olivia nodded, forcing her feet forward.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  *********

  The first two or three jumps were like falling down the inside of a waterfall. It was intense and disorienting and had a sense of weightlessness that wasn’t unpleasant, because she knew it was going to end.

  After that, it was much more like being broken on the rocks at the bottom of a waterfall, no air, nowhere to go, no idea where anything was, up, down, or otherwise, no way to fight, with an intensity of physical sensation, pressure and turmoil, that she could make no sense of. There was hot and cold, her eyes told her of dark and light through her eyelids, and intense squeezes on her chest pressed the air out of her, then sucked in water at the next lift. She couldn’t cough or do anything else to force it out as her lungful of water built. Just try to ignore it, to be as unaware of what she was going through as she could. Her head hurt with the pressure changes, and she regretted agreeing to it.

  Troy had done it.

  Cassie had done it.

  But they were both tougher than she was, and Olivia suspected that Cassie had largely forgotten what it was like to even be human.

  And then Cassie tugged her upward and her head broke into air. She would have screamed, if she’d had air in her lungs to do it; she couldn’t see.

  “Lay back,” Cassie said, putting an arm under her back and popping her onto her back in the water. It was very salty, from the way Olivia floated. There was one more popping sensation, and then the water was gone from her lungs, and she was breathing.

  “It hurts,” she said, trying not to move.

  “Where?” Cassie asked, clinical, and comforting for that. It was the noise of someone who had a plan to help.

  “My head,” Olivia whispered. There was a wet hand on her forehead, and then a sense of vibratio
n, not so much that her skin felt, but her mind itself.

  “It happened too fast for the dissolved gas in your blood to be a problem,” Cassie said. “But your brain is sensitive.”

  Olivia tried not to laugh. It would have been bitter.

  There was a gradual easing, and then the pain was gone completely.

  “Is that better?”

  Olivia nodded, breathing.

  “Can we not do that again?”

  “I’ll do better next time,” Cassie said. “But that’s our route home unless we’re here for long enough for me to find the beacons to calculate a direct route.”

  Olivia did laugh, now, hoping that her face was too wet to see the tears.

  “Anything else hurt?” Cassie asked.

  Olivia shook her head, just breathing.

  “Where are my shoes?” she asked.

  “I have them,” Cassie said. “Swimming with your shoes is hard, so I stripped them on the first jump.”

  “That’s not possible,” Olivia said before she could stop herself. She heard Cassie laugh.

  “Are you better here, or would you rather be standing?”

  She didn’t hurt anymore, but she was still afraid, the sense of fight or flight only just beginning to dim. The idea of standing, bearing her own weight, was catastrophic.

  “Take your time,” Cassie said.

  “Where is he?” Olivia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cassie said. “This is the spot where he left the water, and I never could find his trail again.”

  “Why would he go through that?” Olivia asked. “How?”

  “It has to do with his state,” Cassie said. “It’s complex, but water lets him travel across the universe almost seamlessly.”

  Olivia just breathed.

  She didn’t know what to do with it, so she breathed.

  There wasn’t anything else to do.

  “How are we going to find him, if you can’t track him?” she finally asked as her heart rate started to come down and she became more aware of what she was feeling. Sun on her face, too intense but not scorching, warm water, like a bath, that had a give and take to it like waves out before the breakers at a beach. There was the chaos of noise of those same waves breaking, not far from them. Just enough that they didn’t have to raise their voices to talk to each other.

  They were in deep water.

  Sharks.

  Olivia had a life-long fear of sharks.

  Her body jolted upright in the water and she was scanning the murk before she could remind herself that there wouldn’t be sharks here.

  There would be something else.

  “Easy,” Cassie said, but Olivia was out of control. She thrashed toward the sound of breaking waves, and Cassie swam alongside her, an easy, confident presence that eventually coaxed Olivia into a more studied swim.

  The breaking waves were almost as tall as she was, but she didn’t realize it until it was too late. They tossed her, headfirst, toward the sand and shoal, and she covered her head, holding her breath as she lost all concept of up or down once again. There was a hand on her ankle and a firm pull, and she went with it, tucking and pulling herself toward Cassie. A wave broke on her head as she got up out of the water and she didn’t get more than a gasp of air before the salty spray started to flood her mouth and the wave pushed her under again.

  Cassie had her by the elbow, this time, and got her back up to the surface faster, where Olivia struggled to swim through the white, foamy water before the next wave came. Already it was pulling her back toward the vast ocean.

  “Come on,” Cassie yelled. “You’ve been in waves before.” Olivia struggled against the hard current. “Relax,” Cassie yelled. “Wait for the wave and swim in with it.”

  Olivia hadn’t ever really liked the beach. All sand and sun and sharks, there was nothing about it that called to her. She looked cute in a bikini, if you overlooked how fair she was, but that was all it had going for it.

  But she could feel the rhythm that Cassie was talking about. She let herself relax, just treading water as the wave gathered, then she turned her face down into the water, swimming three or four strokes with it as it tried to toss her. She brought her head up again after it was gone.

  She could see huge rock cliffs at the edge of a narrow beach. That was where she was going.

  The water was too murky with swirling sand to see if there was anything sharp below her, but she tried to keep her feet up, anyway.

  “Hard swim,” Cassie called as the next wave came in, and Olivia pushed herself. She’d been on the swim team in high school. She didn’t hate water. She just didn’t like the ocean.

  Her body remembered, and old muscle overtook the sense of panic, and spurt by spurt she made it in toward the beach, until Cassie stood up. With the waves all the way out, she was only waist-deep in the water, though the next wave would be over her head.

  Olivia stood cautiously and waited for a wave to push her in further, trying harder now to keep her feet off the ground until the waves washed out and made her do it.

  “Are there corals here?” she asked. “Rocks?”

  “Don’t know,” Cassie said. Olivia gave her a dour look that the Palta woman probably missed through the wet tangles of hair all over Olivia’s face.

  They finally got to shallow enough water that they could just walk in.

  The ground was sandy, here. Sharp, at intervals, but small sharps, not the kind that were going to slice her feet open. Olivia got all the way to the beach, where the water just washed up across her feet each wave, and she stood with her hands on her knees, feeling washed out and dehydrated and exhausted.

  Cassie stood with her, patiently enough, not paying Olivia all that much attention.

  The foreign terrestrials, on the other hand, stared.

  Olivia was trying not to acknowledge them. Going to Gana had been different. No one had noticed them, and she’d been able to watch the world going by the way she did back home. Even that, though, had taught her that she was not cut out for this life. The adventures and the risk. Troy and Cassie lived for it, but Olivia simply didn’t understand. She’d been excited to do it, because no one got to, but when it came to the actual moment-to-moment being somewhere new, she just… She didn’t get anything out of it, and it cost her an awful lot.

  “You ready?” Cassie asked when Olivia finally straightened and tried to pull the hair out of her face. It was a tangled mess. There was a reason Cassie always wore her hair up.

  The foreign terrestrials gaped at her. Little surprise, there. She was the Montauk monster. Pale and foreign, herself, and half-dead.

  They were hairy, but lean, skin accustomed to a lot of sun and exposure to it, their limbs… Olivia wasn’t equipped to understand their limbs. They were tangled, but not like an elephant’s trunk that could wrap. More like… spider legs, perhaps. They had wide-set eyes that were white but for a vertical pupil, and they all stared.

  Olivia looked up and down the beach.

  And up.

  “You think I’m going to climb that, don’t you?” Olivia asked.

  “I can’t see the top of it,” Cassie said. “I’d jump us up there, but there’s no guarantee there’d be any ‘up there’ to be on.”

  Olivia looked at the rock face, trying to put buildings next to it in her mind. Four stories, at least. Forty feet, nearly straight up. Yes, they were craggy, fissured rocks. She’d have happily climbed six or eight feet of that surface, just to show that she could, but going up that high with nothing to keep her from falling?

  “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “You can,” Cassie said. “I believe that. And it may turn out at some point that you have to, but for now, I’m going up on my own and I’ll pull you up after me.”

  Olivia had a staggering sensation in her stomach.

  “You’re leaving me down here by myself?”

  Cassie looked around quickly.

  “They aren’t predators,” she said. “You ca
n see that, right?”

  “The fact that they don’t eat meat never stopped any herd of animals on the planet from trampling something they thought was a threat,” Olivia said.

  “Penguins,” Cassie said with genuine humor.

  “Flock,” Olivia answered with a dark look. “And not vegetarian.”

  Cassie smiled.

  “If they get any funny ideas, I’ll just jump you up with me,” she said and Olivia felt her eyes go wide.

  “No you won’t,” she said.

  “You want me to take you back home?” Cassie asked, teasing.

  Olivia was pinned.

  Completely pinned.

  “I spoke with some of them, the last time I was here,” Cassie said. “They weren’t aggressive with me. Just, be still, don’t look like a threat, and if they try to hurt you…” The Palta woman frowned, and Olivia gave her an exasperated look.

  “What?”

  “Can you just stop looking so much like prey?” Cassie asked. Olivia almost snapped that, no, she couldn’t, but her small store of dignity rescued her at the last moment.

  “Just go,” she said. “Waiting isn’t doing us any good.”

  “I’m waiting for that,” Cassie said, nodding toward the plastic crate as it came drifting into shore.

  “Gee,” Olivia said, stepping to the side as Cassie went to get the crate and dragged it toward the cliff face. Olivia sighed. “I can hold that, if you want me to.”

  Cassie looked back.

  “Oh.” She frowned. “Sorry. I’m so used to either porting my own gear or not having any that I completely forgot. I’ll just jump it up when I get to the top.”

  And with that, she was off. Olivia took a few steps back, watching as Cassie climbed. With a spirit of curiosity, some of the foreign terrestrials started up after her, their motions smooth and powerful, like watching starfish crawl over rocks at the bottom of a tide pool. They kept up with Cassie easily, chattering to each other in a language that Olivia’s interpreter was struggling to translate for how fast it went.

  Maybe a dozen of them split to go up on either side of her, climbing in clusters that didn’t seem to be bothered at all by going over top of each other. One of them approached Olivia.