Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

“Walked. Looked at art. Watched games. Went to restaurants.” She snorted. “Got mugged.”

  “You what?”

  She nodded, scooping spaghetti into her mouth.

  “Seriously. They held us up for money.”

  “What happened?”

  “Jesse didn’t go along,” she said. Troy waited, but she found the language of the contract in harmony with her own desire to not spoil the trip by turning it familiar. She couldn’t do it justice, describing it, and for once in her life, that made her not want to try. She shrugged.

  “It was… complicated. The universe is bigger than we think it is.”

  “We know exactly how big the universe is,” Troy grunted, hunching over his food. “You sound like him.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “I liked it better when you came back and couldn’t wait to tell me everything.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Because he says so?”

  “Because I can’t,” she said. “There’s too much. I couldn’t explain it.”

  “That just doesn’t sound like you,” he murmured, looking around for a moment. “You were in danger?”

  “Some,” she said, “but we underestimate him. I don’t think it was ever that real, you know?”

  “I think that’s what he wants you to think.”

  She tipped her head to the side.

  “Can we not fight? We’re back. You’re going to be bidding for his time, same as everyone else. I don’t want to have you carrying around some grudge because you don’t think I take danger seriously enough.”

  He sighed.

  “Okay.”

  “So what happened while I was gone?”

  He started filling her in on the various base politics that were going on, things she was interested in and that had an affect on her career, but her mind kept wandering back to the colors, the people, the buildings on the Gana planet. She looked up to find Troy watching her.

  “You’re still there, aren’t you?”

  “Sorry.”

  He shook his head, friendly.

  “You have to tell me. What did you see?”

  She closed her eyes and took a breath, just letting the images flow through her mind.

  “The sky was gold…”

  They talked all night. The restaurant closed around them and they went to a bar and sat there until last call, then sat at Troy’s table until the sky began to pink outside.

  Cassie yawned.

  “You should get some sleep,” Troy said, standing and clearing the coffee mugs.

  “You aren’t going to?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “I need to leave for work in thirty minutes. We have DNA samples coming back from a new planet today. Should have cleared customs last night, around the time we left Pasta House.”

  Cassie shook her head and rubbed her eyes hard, willing vitality back into her brain.

  “I’m sorry I kept you up,” she said. He laughed from the kitchen.

  “You want a glass of milk?”

  “Please.”

  Milk was one of the things she didn’t trust, off-planet. No knowing what it was. The concept of ‘mammal’ didn’t exactly translate. Troy sat down across from her again, putting his hands over hers.

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” he said.

  “You know you can’t use it,” Cassie said, feeling bad for even saying it.

  “I read the contract,” he answered. “It’s like reading a book someone wrote fifty years ago. It’s inspiring, but… I have to pretend the facts are all made up.” He played his thumbs over hers for a second, then stood up. “Wish I could see it.”

  “Troy, how is work going? Really?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The last couple of months, you’ve said more about wanting to jump than I think you did, even during school.”

  He went to finish cleaning up in the kitchen, face pensive.

  “It isn’t the lab,” he said. “Not like you think. I love my job. I think I’ve got the best job on earth. The problem is that that means I get the first crack at almost everything that comes back from the other side of a jump.” He loaded dishes into the dishwasher and turned to face her, leaning against the counter. “I’ve got ringside seats to how cool it is to be an agent. It makes you think, you know?”

  “You’d be one of the best,” Cassie said.

  “Except that bright light of the wrong kind triggers a migraine every time,” he said. “I know why I’m not supposed to jump. I get it.”

  “It just sucks,” Cassie said. He shrugged.

  “It’s not that bad. I just didn’t really know what I’d be missing. I didn’t get it until I’d been in the lab a long time.”

  Cassie nodded, and he gave her a half-hearted smile.

  “You should get some sleep. No one is expecting you today. No one even knows what your sleep schedule has been like for the last month. If you didn’t turn up for a week, I don’t think anyone would say anything.”

  She nodded, feeling the fog roll in over her brain again.

  “I think I’m getting old,” she said, standing and finishing her milk. He laughed.

  “Happens to the best of us.” He came to take her glass and kissed her forehead. “Sleep well. I’ll give you a call at lunchtime, if you’re up.”

  “That’s like, what, four hours?”

  “Six. Sleep well.”

  Being back was strange.

  Beyond strange.

  She sat at her keyboard, looking at her computer screen, and had no idea what she was supposed to do. She started picking back through her email, alternating between reading it forwards and reading it backwards, because she kept finding things that she knew how to solve that someone else had solved days later. Sometime midmorning on her first day back, she got a note from interrogation that she had orders from the general to report in. She frowned at it and ignored it for half an hour, then caved and made her way to the interrogation hall. The faceless man with the clipboard met her at the door and gave her a tight smile.

  “This way, please,” he said.

  “Have you guys got Jesse back here again?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” he answered. She waited, but didn’t really expect him to tell her anything else. Facts were currency back here, and they didn’t share out of a sense of community.

  “You going to tell me what this is about?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” he answered, turning and giving her another tight little smile, then opened a door to one of the rooms - interrogation side. She raised an eyebrow at him, but his face didn’t change. She looked in the room - empty - and looked back at the clip board man. He didn’t move. That wasn’t fear. That was bureaucracy at its best. He had his little fiefdom, as long as he held the clip board, and he expected his rules to be followed, but not in an invested way. If she had run, he would have just executed a process to track her down and bring her back that he had executed a dozen times before. He probably knew the guy who wrote it. She thought, just for an instant, about punching him in the throat, then went and sat down, looking up at the ceiling as the door swung closed.

  She waited.

  Protocol dictated that she be allowed to wait for at least thirty minutes before anyone came in to speak with her, but that grated at her, because she had better things to do. Surfing the internet was more productive than this.

  More than once, she considered just leaving. She outranked all but a couple of them, but technically the order to come here had been from the general.

  On the other hand, she had reported.

  If no one bothered to come talk to her, that wasn’t her problem.

  A lifetime of rigid rules-following intervened, and she waited.

  An hour and a half later, as her butt got numb on the metal chair, an interviewer that she only barely recognized by face came in and sat down across from her.

  “My apologies on the delay,” he said. “I’m afraid we have
an awful lot going on, today.”

  “Yeah, it looked like a zoo out there,” she answered, shifting to try to get blood past her tailbone. He gave her the same pressed smile.

  “Lieutenant, there’s no need for this to be antagonistic,” he said.

  “Half an hour is standard,” she said. “An hour is for subjects you think you’re going to break. Anything more than an hour and a quarter is to try to prove power dominance over a subject that you know is going to be a struggle.”

  She wondered how long they’d made Jesse sit, all told. Her interrogator gave her a tiny head shake.

  “I told you, ma’am. It’s been a very busy day.”

  “I don’t really care,” she said. “I outrank you and the work that I could have been doing demonstrably and severely exceeds the value of anything you may have been doing, instead. I can review dozens of hours of interrogation and start drawing connections and identifying themes in the time you let me sit. I have satisfied the general’s order, but staying was not part of it. I will only tolerate it as long as I choose to, and then I will leave. Do you understand?”

  “Of course, ma’am,” he said. “I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Because the general ordered you to be here,” he said. “You just told me that.”

  She glared. You had to be a special kind of jerk in school to be selected for interrogation. The kind that liked to be in control and didn’t feel the slightest tinge of guilt lying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, smiling with what might have been real amusement. “I just thought it would be perfectly clear. You are here for your interview.”

  “It’s clearly spelled out in the contract Jesse negotiated,” she said. “I’m not required to report on anything that happens off-planet.”

  “We’ve all read the contract,” the interviewer said. “It’s going back to the academy as an example of excellent execution of contract law. We have no legal recourse to force you to tell us anything.”

  She waited.

  He waited.

  “So?” she asked.

  “So, we are treating you like any other non-military individual who has had un-guided exposure to foreign-terrestrials.”

  “You’re going to interrogate me because you can’t force me to turn in a report,” she said. He nodded.

  “We’re giving you the loop-hole you need to give us the information we need to better prepare ourselves for future contact with foreign-terrestrials. You have unprecedented access to the mind and habits of a foreign-terrestrial in his native habitat, and while we frown,” he frowned, “on the risks that that entails, it would be foolish for either of us to walk away from the strategic advantages it provides.”

  “I have no intention of telling you anything,” she said, growing more insulted.

  “Lieutenant du Charme, this doesn’t have to be antagonistic,” he said.

  “You let me sit for an hour and a half on my first day back to work, with an undisclosed plan to interrogate me over activities that were, by every legal measure, private, and you think I’m just going to be friendly about it?” she stood, nearly tipping her chair. “You find someone who has the authority to give me an order, and I’ll sit and refuse to talk. Otherwise, I’m going back to work.”

  The interviewer sighed, glowing with victory, and pulled out a sheet of paper, unfolding it with feigned regret, and laid it on the table in front of her.

  It was the general’s letterhead.

  ‘Cassie,’ it read. ‘Sit. Stay.’

  Her hands began to shake. She grabbed the table, and the interviewer leaned back in anticipation of her flipping the table. The detached part of her brain wondered just how often that happened, around here. They were certainly infuriating.

  She sat.

  Folded her hands in her lap.

  Looked up at the interrogator and forced a pleasant expression onto her face.

  “What do you want to ask me?”

  Four hours later, she was livid.

  She called Troy from her desk.

  “Where is he?” she asked before he had a chance to greet her.

  “Who?”

  “Jesse.”

  “You’re his CO. You’re the one who’s supposed to be keeping track of him.”

  “You bid on him. You know who got him,” she said.

  “He’s in metallurgy,” Troy said. “But you really should keep better track of your subordinates.”

  She hung up and stormed down to the metallurgy department. Staffed mostly by cadets interested in an engineering track, she had no idea what they expected to do with Jesse’s intellect, but she presently didn’t care.

  Jesse was staring at a projection of a metal-crystalline structure with his hands on his hips.

  “I think you’re actually going to get the worst of both worlds, actually,” he was saying.

  “No, but the small-scale work has been very encouraging…”

  “Let me see your theory for the small scale,” Jesse accused, then noticed Cassie. “What’s wrong?”

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Where?” he asked, not bothering to glance at the young officer he’d been working with as he walked toward the door. He really wasn’t going to fight her on this.

  “Anywhere,” she said. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “You mean…”

  She shrugged.

  “You have the clearance and I have the badge,” she said. “Pick a spot. Let’s go.”

  “Anywhere in the universe,” he said.

  “Not here,” she glowered.

  “What happened?”

  “I just spent more than five hours in interrogation, being treated like a stranger to the US military. Like a suspect. Like a subject. They thought they’d get answers out of me that way, and I don’t intend to be there for the next attempt.”

  “No bag?” he asked, walking ahead of her down the hallway. No questions about what she told them, no outrage on her behalf, just pragmatism. It made it feel good to be angry.

  “Screw it,” she answered.

  There was a soft laugh from behind her, but she didn’t bother to turn and look. They walked across the sky bridges and into the portal building, cadets and guards scattering in front of her as she badged through.

  And then they were on the portal floor.

  “I should have asked this earlier,” Jesse said, grabbing her elbow.

  “Hmm?”

  “How good are your controllers?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I assume that jumping a bucket of air to another planet is frowned on as a waste of power?”

  “Sure.”

  “How good are they?”

  She looked at her watch.

  “Power consumption goes down from one to six. I think that the shift working afternoons are the best.”

  “How long have most of them been doing it?”

  “The good ones, probably ten years,” she said.

  “So not expert, but…” he nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him, but he tugged her out onto the floor, following a wandering path toward a small section of open floor. No one paid much attention to them. Too many other details to manage to worry about an analyst and her charge working on the portal floor. They got to the space and Jesse started working on the back of his arm.

  “Wait,” she said. He shook his head, grinning.

  “Too late to change your mind,” he said.

  “I didn’t,” she said, pulling out her phone. She dialed Troy.

  “What’s going on, Cass?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. We’re going.”

  “Going where?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just… I’m sorry.”

  And then her stomach jolted and her phone wasn’t a phone any more.

  Jesse held her hand tight as she stumbled on the uneven, rocky ground. Volcanic ground. She got her feet settled
and he let go of her.

  “No leash this time?” she asked. He looked around.

  “You don’t seem likely to get lost here, to me. What do you think?”

  The sky was a churling red, underlit more than giving evidence of sun.

  “Where are we?”

  He shook his head.

  “Long time ago, I memorized a list of all of the oxygen-carbon-cycle livable planets. There are other kinds of livable planets, but you and I wouldn’t make it there. Some of them are uncomfortably warm and some of them are uncomfortably cold, but water exists in liquid state somewhere on the planet.”

  “Did that answer my question and I missed it?”

  “I picked one at random,” he said. “I’m crossing them off, one at a time.”

  “How many are there?”

  “One-point-two million.”

  “You memorized a list…”

  “Would you like to hear two million digits of pi in base eight?”

  “Shut up.”

  He smiled at her.

  “Let’s go see what’s here.”

  She looked around as she got opportunities to take her eyes off her own feet.

  “It’s the volcanic pre-history of the planet,” she said. “We reject these by observation. No sunlight so no solar energy cycle, and, you know, volcanoes everywhere.”

  “I’m so glad you’ve got it all figured out,” he answered, skipping over the uneven pumice like a well-known playground.

  “You think there’s life here?”

  “I know there is,” he said.

  “You memorize that list, too?”

  “No,” he said, containing himself to walk next to her for a moment. “But, over there, is a road.”

  Cassie pretended for a while that she thought the road might have been a different lava flow, but the signposts of some kind of civilization were unmistakable. Especially when they got to the signpost.

  “Which way?” Jesse asked.

  “You can’t read it?”

  “Need more than six words to learn a language, Cass.”

  The post was on a granite pillar that looked like it had been buried in a number of times since it had been constructed, and the symbols or letters were engraved in a dark black stone that felt like it might have been a cousin to obsidian. But there were arrows.