Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

“Yes, sir. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” she answered. Troy put his head up and twisted his mouth, putting the frying pan away and getting out bowls. She shrugged at him.

  “Meet me at the interview rooms,” General Thompson said and hung up. She nodded.

  “Yes, sir,” she murmured, hanging up her phone and tossing it onto the bed. Troy met her at the bathroom with a bowl of cereal. She took a two minute shower and dressed while she ate, hitting Troy’s front door five minutes later.

  “I’ll look for you for lunch,” he said. She waved as the door swung closed behind her.

  Jesse was manacled to the table, apparently asleep.

  “Sir,” she said when she entered the observation room, nodding to General Thompson, then jerking a head greeting to the lead interrogator.

  “We need to debrief you,” the man said.

  “You didn’t get my report?” she asked.

  “I have more questions,” he answered.

  “Later,” the general said.

  “I thought I was rather thorough,” Cassie said as she turned to face the window. Jesse snorted in his sleep and rolled across his arms.

  “You know those won’t hold him,” Cassie said to General Thompson.

  “I guessed as much, but we’ve had good luck with armed guards, in the past,” he said. She nodded. There had been an obedient-looking bullet stopper in the hallway.

  “Suspect he wouldn’t consider it worth the risk. He’ll just leave when we aren’t looking again.”

  The general grunted.

  “You’ve spent as much time with him as anyone,” he said. The interrogator sputtered, but the general ignored him. “We need to drive this to resolution. I’m getting pressure to put him down.”

  “You can’t do that,” Cassie said. “He hasn’t done anything.”

  “He evades custody at will,” General Thompson said. “And he represents a security risk, even without that. All of the other foreign terrestrials on this planet are adequately handled. We have no idea what the interaction between his knowledge of technology and our own could result in.”

  She almost laughed.

  “Sir, I suspect telling him that would be like a toddler telling his parents that they don’t know how to play with his toys,” she said.

  “Careful, Lieutenant du Charme,” he said. She pressed her lips together and tried to not say anything else stupid.

  “What are your orders?” she asked.

  “Neutralize him,” the general answered. “By any means necessary.”

  She started to protest, but the draw of breath as he pulled his arms behind him stopped her.

  “I won’t make you his executioner,” he said. “But I will order you to make that decision, if it comes to it.”

  She hesitated, thinking of Jesse juggling in a dusty street in front of a crowd of blue-and-green skinned amphibianites.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded once, sharply, then tipped his head back to indicate Jesse.

  “We don’t have much time, Lieutenant. I have to send my own report to Washington this afternoon. I need to see that you can at least make progress, or I’ll call it, myself.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She glanced at the interrogator, who, for the moment, didn’t look jealous any more. If she wasn’t imagining things, that might have been sympathy. She smiled and went next door, nodding to the guard. He wasn’t unattractive, just vacant. She badged herself into the interrogation room, and found Jesse watching her.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good as your word,” he said, showing her his wrists.

  “Hope you weren’t expecting anything different,” she answered.

  “Not at all,” he said, sliding down in his chair and crossing his arms. At least they’d left the chains long.

  “Jesse…”

  “It was fun, though, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was. Incredibly dangerous, to us, them, and the planet, but I’ll give you it was fun.”

  He grinned.

  “Humans. You take yourselves so seriously. Looking at the universe like spun glass, not to be played with.” He frowned dramatically. “Not a toy.”

  “It isn’t a toy,” she said. “There are lives at stake.”

  “So you hide yourselves away in your human-only zone, and you try not to touch anything,” he said. “There’s more out there than that, Cassie.”

  “We explore,” she said. “We see new things. We establish relationships.”

  “But only when you consider yourselves equals,” he said. “If they’re too advanced, you leave, fearing for your own autonomy, and if they’re too far behind you, you leave so that you don’t alter their natural advancement. How many planets have you abandoned because you were afraid?”

  She crossed her arms.

  “It doesn’t matter. No one ever died from an abundance of caution.”

  He laughed, a silent snort that shook his shoulders.

  “People die from amazing things all the time, even an abundance of caution,” he said. The blue eyes pierced her, and he grew serious. “But that’s not what you came here to talk about, is it? They want you to stop me.”

  “They do.”

  “Why?”

  “If we can’t control you, you’re a threat.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “That you’re a threat? Your gift with our nonverbal communication means that any reaction that I have to you is untrustworthy.”

  “Well, that’s flattering, but that’s not what I meant,” he said. “Do you believe that anything you can’t control is a threat?”

  She hesitated.

  “No. I don’t believe that. But I’m also a soldier. There’s a chain of command, and it keeps everyone safe.”

  “You do believe that, don’t you?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  He nodded.

  “So you need me to follow a chain of command.”

  “It would be a good start,” she said, not wanting to commit to an agreement until she’d thought it through.

  He stood. Went to the window and cupped his hands around his face, trying to look through it. She looked under the table to see the manacles swinging just above the ground.

  “Is there anyone back there who can negotiate?” Jesse called.

  “They can hear you,” Cassie said, twisting in her seat to watch him. He knocked on the glass.

  “Hello?”

  “Negotiate what?” she asked.

  “Terms,” he said.

  “Have you been watching movies?” she asked. “I have no idea what you’re taking about.”

  He turned, leaning against the glass.

  “I am the foremost diplomatic delegate from Jalnia. I would be within my rights to demand an audience with the president, but I won’t do that. I just want to speak with your local commanding officer.” He turned and put his hands back on the glass. “One that, if my guess is right, is standing right over there.”

  “Terms to what?” she asked.

  “I came here as a refugee, never put up a fight through a long, tedious series of imprisonments and interviews, and now you people find you can’t make me dance and you’re thinking about killing me. Petty, superstitious idiots that you are.”

  “I never said that,” Cassie said.

  “I think that’s the first time you’ve ever been disingenuous with me,” Jesse said. “I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

  The door beeped and General Thompson came in with the clipboard-man carrying a chair behind him.

  “Sit,” the general said to Jesse, motioning to the chair across the table. “Please.”

  Jesse glanced at Cassie as the general took a seat, then dropped the corners of his mouth, some mix of impressed and smug. Cassie rolled her eyes. Jesse sat.

  “Now, my people don’t let me in rooms like this very often, because I’m a straight shooter,” the general said, crossing his arms on the table. “I need some verifiable agreement from you
that you will start being where we expect you to be, doing what we expect you to do. Otherwise, yes, we will have you killed. We don’t grant rights to foreign terrestrials, even refugees, until we are sure that they don’t mean us any threat.”

  Jesse put his hands up.

  “See, that’s where we’re going to have a problem. I’m quite attached to my own existence, and I can’t just let you take it because of your race-wide inferiority complex.”

  General Thompson blinked.

  “So what do you say we do about it?” he asked.

  “I propose a compromise solution,” Jesse said.

  “This is the military,” Cassie muttered. “We don’t do that here.”

  “I’m listening,” General Thompson said.

  “You want me to behave here. Fair enough. You want me to submit to oversight. I’ve never done it before, and I can’t promise I’ll be good at it, but I can try. But you have to give me space in which I function the way I want.”

  “And how do you suggest we make that work?” the general asked.

  “Assign me to her,” Jesse said, nodding at Cassie without looking at her. “When we’re here, I’ll stay where I’m told, do what she says.”

  “When you’re here?”

  “Yes. The other side of the agreement is that you leave me unlimited access to your portal. I go where I want, I do what I want. She comes with, to ensure that your interests aren’t compromised, but beyond that she’s an observer. I don’t take any orders, and I don’t take responsibility for her safety. And she doesn’t report back to you about what happened.”

  “Doesn’t report…” the general started.

  “No,” Jesse said. “She doesn’t report back to you unless she has a specific reason to believe that I am intentionally endangering your race. Hell, I’ll even give you unintentionally endangering you primates. I have no interest in disrupting your happy little lives. I just can’t stay here and do nothing. That, sir, will kill me.”

  There was a moment of stony coldness during which Cassie’s eyes froze on General Thompson.

  “You know our regulations concerning the portal,” he finally said.

  “I do. You think that the technology is sterling, unique in the universe, and dangerous to the point of potentially causing genocides. You have a drippy, violent history, and you’re trying to bind yourselves from unleashing that on a galactic scale. Oddly enough, I respect that. Your brands of commercialism and cultural imperialism wouldn’t be that out of place in most worlds, but the restraint is admirable. The problem is that you worship at that altar, ignoring all of the intellectual hunger such a device could eradicate. You compare it to your atomic bomb, guarding the knowledge around it so jealously, but fail to see that as much as it is like an atomic bomb, it is more like a library card.” Jesse paused, and Cassie realized that some of the expressions he had made hadn’t been strictly human. They’d been close, but that had been real honesty. Jesse looked at her for a moment, then back at General Thompson. “I don’t expect to change your mind concerning how your race utilizes it. I don’t even want to. I just want you to know that I respect the power that it represents, but I evaluate its risks differently. I won’t go to colonize or control. I won’t even go to distribute my own knowledge. I expect you to let me go because I am one man, and I am not human. I don’t represent you. And Lieutenant du Charme would represent you, but not to those planets I would visit. She would make no reports of them, not even insofar as their location. I will live by the spirit of your laws, which I would claim is enough, because I am not one of you.”

  “She isn’t qualified,” General Thompson said.

  Jesse leaned back in his chair.

  “So you’re saying if I were willing to take on a different one of your cadets, we would have a deal?” he asked.

  “I’m not saying that at all,” the general answered. “I’m just telling you that even if I did what you’re asking and set you loose on the universe, it wouldn’t be with her.”

  Jesse looked at Cassie, and she blinked. It was hardly a surprise. She’d aged out of the agency because she couldn’t meet the physical targets any more, and she’d never qualified for advanced guard. Almost no women did. Jesse pursed his lips and shook his head.

  “No, she’s the one.”

  “I’m a big fan of hers, too,” the general said. “I get it. But we have rules, and it would go against all of them to put her into that situation without being qualified. It’s for her own safety.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, she’s the one who figured out where I was disappearing to in the first place, yes?” Jesse asked.

  General Thompson cleared his throat.

  “I would never argue that she isn’t a top-notch analyst,” he said, sensing that Jesse was setting a trap, but not seeing it.

  “And she caught me again at my next jump,” Jesse said.

  “She risked her life,” the general said. Cassie really hadn’t looked at it like that, then or now. She realized now, looking at Jesse, that something in his eye had told her he was waiting for her.

  “Isn’t that what soldiers do?” Jesse asked.

  “It isn’t what analysts do,” the general answered.

  “It would appear that she hasn’t transitioned well, then, wouldn’t it?” Jesse asked. Cassie glowered at him.

  “It doesn’t make her any more qualified,” the general said.

  “You’ve heard my terms,” Jesse said. “I’ll let you consider them in your own time. I will be here when you’ve made your decision. My final word of caution to you, though, would be not to start a war with me. My people tend to win them.”

  “And my people tend not to respond well to threats,” General Thompson said.

  “Straight-shooter to straight-shooter,” Jesse said. “No disrespect meant. You decide it is going to be necessary to kill me, I’m going to have to make my own survival decisions about what is and is not necessary.”

  General Thompson sat for a moment, even eyes watching Jesse, then nodded and offered his hand.

  “It’s been a pleasure to speak with you in person.”

  “And you,” Jesse said, standing to shake hands. Cassie followed General Thompson back out of the room.

  “You know it can’t happen,” the general told her, pausing.

  “If I may, sir, I’d like to go back to work now.”

  “As you were, then,” he answered. She saluted and turned.

  She didn’t want him to see how much she wanted to be able to hope that she would be assigned to chaperone Jesse on completely unsanctioned jumps. There had never even been a sinking feeling. She had simply known. The rules were the rules, and she’d done well, making it to twenty-six in the agency. Men made it to thirty-one or thirty-two, generally, and the women who spent their teens training for it made it to twenty-four or twenty-five. Biology, they said. You can postpone it, but you can’t prevent it. She’d watched the Olympics on television that summer, months ago, now, and had been struck by how young the gymnasts were. She’d always known they were young, but having aged out because her body was no longer considered strong enough, their tiny little pre-pubescent bodies were a stark reminder.

  She made her way to her desk and finished the report for her own files of her days with Jesse, then started through a data set that she had requested from an agent a few weeks prior. She had just gotten her brain settled into a rhythm when Troy scooted himself down the aisle in his chair.

  “So what did he say?” he asked.

  “What did who say?” she replied, trying to get to the bottom of the page before she looked up.

  “The general,” he said. “What did he say?”

  She sighed and looked at Troy.

  “They need Jesse to be docile, and if they can’t get a lever on him, they’re going to kill him.”

  Troy scratched his chin and nodded.

  “You had to kind of see that coming.”

  “I did.”

  “So? Think they can do it?�
�

  “The general said it was my problem, but then Jesse…” She got to the end of the screen of data and finally looked at Troy. “Jesse said he would only be good if he was allowed to use the portal at will, and I went with him.”

  “Why?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Why does he want you to go with?”

  She paused.

  “Oh. Right. No. He assumed he wouldn’t be allowed to go unless one of us went with, and he insisted it be me.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Troy said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “So what are they going to do?”

  “Don’t know. I came down here to get some work done.”

  “It means that much to you, doesn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She’d known. Like he had known. There were strict standards, and the moment you didn’t meet them, you were out. There were other interesting jobs to do, and you could still be working on things related to the portal, but the brass ring was doing jumps. Going places no one had been before. Some of the agents who aged out came back with private companies, willing to follow shipments back and forth across the portal just to keep jumping, but neither Cassie nor Troy had been able to do it. The blindness they forced onto the civilians who jumped was infuriating. They didn’t know where they were going and they weren’t allowed to speak with the natives. All of it was arranged through agents. No contact, reduced risk. But to jump.

  She could feel the throb of it, something she had missed, physically, for months. Something Troy had never even known. Sometimes she would dream about it and wake up, opening her eyes to what she was sure was going to be a new world, and find herself in the dark of her own bedroom.

  Troy sat with her for another minute, then pushed himself away, rolling back down the aisle and around the corner toward his own desk. He had work to do.

  And so did she.

  She went home alone that night. Left early so that Troy would see her and know he didn’t have to wait for her. She drove across the base in the dimming autumn light, the sun flashing in her eyes between buildings. What trees there were sported gold and red leaves. It had been a good year for them, and the forests across the country would be in their peak of fall’s blazing colors. She’d been in Montana, one year, on training during the fall, and had always wanted to go back.