Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  For as little as that meant, under the current circumstances, the tension in the room dropped substantially, anyway, and Cassie put an arm out, lowering herself onto her cot carefully. The worst might have been over, though her extremities had been surprisingly painful, mid-transition, a couple of times, now.

  The pain wasn’t going to kill her, though.

  Lack of lungs was.

  She slept.

  When she woke, her body felt big and heavy. Slow.

  She opened her eyes and found herself looking through two distinct tunnels. She rolled slowly up into a sitting position on her cot and turned her head. Jesse was sitting nearby, looking at printouts.

  She tried to swallow, but her throat didn’t seem to be suited for it.

  “Jesse, what am I?” she asked, picking up an arm to look at it.

  “Strath,” he answered, without looking up. Her arms were thick, thicker than her thighs had ever been as a jumper; perhaps thicker than her waist, and her skin a pale gray.

  “What does that mean?”

  He looked at her now, eyes showing a flicker of amusement.

  “The derogatory term for them is ‘stoneskin mercenaries’, if that helps.”

  Her hands were shaped roughly like mittens. She closed the finger portion against her palm and felt the tissue there scrape.

  It didn’t hurt.

  As she moved, she realized that it seemed unlikely that anything would hurt.

  “Where are Troy and Slav?” Cassie asked.

  “Slav went to get more needles. They kept breaking. Troy went for lunch.”

  She stood, trying out her legs. It was like having two tree trunks to work with, but they were stable.

  “I’m not sure I understand how this body is a warrior’s body,” she said, feeling the lethargy of the stiff outer skin even more now.

  “Not in that form, certainly,” Jesse said.

  “What other forms do they have?”

  “That’s where the genius of the species is,” Jesse said, coming to stand where she could see him more easily. “They control their own forms mentally.”

  She looked at her hands.

  “How?”

  “You’re doing it, by nature,” he said. “You shape yourself the way you see yourself. They can get stuck in a form, if their self-identity gets to be too strong, so they have a culture of challenging themselves, in order to stay dynamic.”

  “I’m pretty sure I have fingers,” Cassie said, making a fist again. It was a good fist. A fist that would go through walls.

  “You aren’t skilled enough to make fingers, yet,” Jesse said. “I might be impressed that you have a thumb, I’m not sure.”

  She took a few practice swings, just feeling out the thick, fibrous muscle that went the length of her largely jointless body. This would do nicely. Take her back to Yan, now, she thought, and see what they thought of that.

  “Highly regenerative, highly adaptable, highly creative,” Jesse went on. “They’ve been known to survive your equivalent of a nuclear blast, even significant antimatter fire. There are rumors that some of them can turn themselves back and forth between matter and antimatter, but I think those are hysterical.”

  “Hysterical like funny, or like mentally unstable?” Cassie asked.

  “Both,” Jesse said with a grin. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like a rook,” she said.

  “Like a bird or a castle?” he asked.

  “Not the bird,” she answered. She wondered what her face looked like.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “What do I eat?”

  “Rocks, dirt, and fallen enemies, as far as I know,” Jesse said.

  “Seriously?”

  “I’ve never been to Stran. Who knows what they eat off the battlefield.”

  “Your intergalactic community doesn’t frown on eating the losers?” Cassie asked.

  “Oh, we frown,” Jesse said. “It’s just never been known to change anything about what the Strath do.”

  “They’re evil?” she asked. He shook his head, letting the pause linger for timing.

  “Stubborn.”

  “I get that,” she said. “We would make it illegal to hire them.”

  “If both sides do it, it’s allowed,” Jesse said. “If only one side does it…” He sighed. “It’s a universe, du Charme. No one does anything about it unless things get out of control. We’ve all got our own problems.”

  “You don’t have Geneva conventions?”

  “And how well have those worked for you?” Jesse asked. “Where all the good dogs wear muzzles?”

  “It makes us civilized,” Cassie said. He snorted, then shrugged.

  “I get that soldiers have to have a code. The Strath do, too. It just involves eating their enemies.”

  In school, they called it the policy of equivalency. It was one of the things she and her peers tended to struggle with most: everything was potentially justifiable, depending on the cultural context of the action.

  “Well, we’re going to have to come up with something else,” Cassie said.

  “I can get you some rocks, if you want.”

  “I didn’t say I was hungry.”

  She stretched, feeling out her range of motion. First impressions had indicated that it would be extremely limited, but if she gave herself enough time, she could bend double easily. It occurred to her that the types of motions she was making were based on the fixed skeletal system she was used to; she didn’t seem to have one of those limiting her, here. Experimentally, she rolled her hand closed again, then, closing her thumb over her finger, continued to roll her hand. The concept of forearm vanished as her hand started to make a snailshell out of her arm. She couldn’t make it past her elbow, but it was an interesting exercise, anyway.

  “And if that were useful, it would be highly impressive,” Jesse said.

  “Shut up, Palta,” Cassie answered. She sat back down. “I don’t like not having a part in what’s going on here.”

  “Test subject,” Jesse said.

  “Funny.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, Slav wouldn’t be useful, either, if he hadn’t emphasized training in genetics and microbiology when he was training as a jumper.”

  “No. That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  She’d emphasized politics, martial tactics, and combat.

  Maybe that was part of why she’d never really liked him.

  Couldn’t be. He was just annoying.

  “Jesse, I’ve been wondering something, and every time I think to ask, something else comes up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “At the trial, the prosecution had a video of you giving me an order to stay at the hotel while you went to talk to the Xhrahk-ni els.”

  “They what?”

  “It’s true,” Slav said. Cassie turned her head, slow, like twisting rope, to find Slav leaning against the doorframe. “I’d had the device to play with for days before trial, but you weren’t around to show it to.”

  “How did they get it?” Cassie asked, turning back to see Jesse’s reaction.

  “You should have told me this when I got back,” he said.

  “Tried,” Slav said. “That whole, ‘I’m not discussing anything until Lieutenant du Charme gets here’ thing got in the way and then… I forgot.”

  “Where did they get it?” Cassie asked.

  “What was it?” Slav asked. “The technology was incredible, and they seized it after the trial.”

  “Jesse,” Cassie warned, seeing his mind spin off on its own. “Where did it come from?”

  He licked his lips and ran both hands through his hair.

  “Jesse.”

  He turned to face her, dropping his hands.

  “Mab.”

  “Who’s Mab?” Slav asked.

  “She’s been here?” Cassie asked.

  “I need to go,” Jesse said.

  “Not without me,” Cassie said.

&nbs
p; “Who’s Mab?”

  “The tracking algorithms are too complicated to run without the equipment, but here, virgin space…” Jesse was muttering.

  “I’m going with you,” Cassie said.

  “Like hell you are,” Slav said. “You’re in a tail-spin, du Charme.”

  “Shut up, Slav.”

  Jesse was still muttering, numbers and English mixing in with another language.

  “Who is Mab?”

  “She’s the villain, Slav. The villain.”

  “And what has she got to do with that video?”

  It seemed painfully obvious, now. The only two people who had been on Xhrahk-ni other than Cassie were Jesse and Mab. Of course Jesse wouldn’t give the US military a recording of a conversation on another planet. How had she missed that?

  “How did she find us?” Cassie asked.

  “Smart girl,” Jesse muttered. “Very smart girl.”

  “It’s a trap,” Slav said.

  “What?” Cassie asked.

  “Seemed like the thing to say. You’re going looking for the villain, I gather, and she’s smart. It’s always a trap, at this point.”

  “Maybe she got bored, waiting for us,” Cassie said. “We should have figured this out weeks ago.”

  “Yeah, let’s go with that. She set up an intergalactic ambush and then got bored waiting for you to walk into it.”

  “Shut up, Slav.”

  “You look like a golem,” he said. “If I put a piece of paper in your mouth, will you be my slave?”

  “No, I’ll make a pancake out of you on the floor,” she said. “Jesse, what do we need to do?”

  “I need to go,” he said finally.

  “Go where?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “How do you find out?”

  He shook his head, tracing patterns in the air in front of him.

  “If I walk through his work, will he lose his place?” Slav asked.

  “Probably not,” Cassie said, “but I wouldn’t do it, anyway.”

  “Kansas,” Jesse said. “I start in Kansas.”

  “We start in Kansas,” Cassie said.

  “No way,” Slav said. “You stay here.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Look, I’m not going to pretend like I can make him do anything, but you stay.”

  “I’d love to see you make me do anything,” Cassie said.

  “Strath do generally get what they want,” Jesse said off-handedly.

  Cassie made her best stony I-told-you-so face at Slav.

  “On the other hand, Mab is the reason you’re Strath right now,” he continued, sketching shapes on the air with frantic speed. “Possible she knows you’re Strath.”

  “So? I’m hard to kill.”

  “How many species does she have to drive to extinction for you to believe that she’s good at killing things?” Jesse asked.

  “What?” Slav asked.

  “Yes. And she’s been here,” Jesse said. “You poor, defenseless children are never going to know what hit you, when she decides to pull the trigger. It may already be all over.”

  “What are you going to do?” Cassie asked. He turned to her, sharply.

  “I’m going to find her. And I’m going to stop her.”

  Cassie leaned in to him confidentially, coming to the abrupt realization that she was nearly nine feet tall. She let that pass.

  “Let me come with you. Let me see it through.”

  He looked into her eyes, one at a time, for a moment, then nodded.

  “Yeah. You should be there, when this happens. Someone should.”

  “Wait, what?” Slav said. But Jesse took her arm and they were gone before she had an opportunity to gloat.

  Sherlock Holmes remakes had been en vogue three or four years previous, at the height of portal euphoria, and Cassie had spent a month of downtime working out and gorging on a series that reinterpreted the detective as a foreign terrestrial with a tiny blue sidekick who, apart from being blue, was a dead ringer for a squirrel on caffeine.

  Apart from being nine feet tall and made of stone, Cassie was the tiny blue sidekick.

  “It’s almost a perfect track,” Jesse muttered, letting a pinch of dirt drift away on lethargic air.

  And:

  “How did no one notice?”

  And:

  “There’s no attempt at disguise at all.”

  And:

  “It figures she would like tofu.”

  Cassie kept her questions to herself, not expecting answers as he jumped from place to place. They weren’t only in Kansas. Cassie recognized the Chicago skyline, and the bizarre flatness of DC, but she couldn’t identify the other four places they ended up before he jumped them again.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said finally, standing. They were just out of sight of the front gate of the base in Kansas again. It was dead hour, sometime around three in the morning, but Cassie still felt very conspicuous standing in plain sight, she being a nine foot tall alien and Jesse being wanted on base.

  She wondered how much trouble Troy was in, at this point.

  “What did you find?” Cassie asked.

  “I know where she’s coming from,” he said.

  “You what?”

  “There are a bunch of different places, and eventually I need to check all of them out, but there’s a single point that she tends to come from.” He nodded, serious. “That’s where she’ll be.”

  “Jesse…”

  “You don’t have to come,” he said. “This is my fight, and she’s ready for me. I might not win.”

  “I’m not letting you go alone,” Cassie said. “You’re a scientist, not a soldier.”

  He gave her a quick smile.

  “I’ll admit, it will be fun to have a Strath bodyguard.”

  She laughed, looking toward the base again.

  “It’s been fun, du Charme,” he said. “Listen, Cassie. When this is over… I have to do this. You know that, right?”

  “What are you dancing around, Jesse?”

  “I promised you I’d fix this,” he said, motioning to her body.

  “No, you didn’t,” she said. “You promised you’d try. And you are. But this is more important.” She frowned at him. At least, she thought she did. He hesitated.

  “Jesse,” she said. “Let’s go finish this.”

  He finally nodded and pulled her arm away from her body, wrapping the bulky mass that should have been her fingers around his hand and covering it with his other hand.

  “Calista du Charme, it has been one of the chief pleasures of my life to wander with you.”

  “Hell, Jesse. You’re not getting rid of me this easily.”

  He smiled and she squeezed his hand.

  And then they were gone.

  The hallway was dim, maybe two fork-trucks wide, and only just tall enough for Callie to stand without hitting her head. They stood at a dead end and faced a long, empty hall that faded to darkness dozens of yards away. There were a few open doorways along the way that spilled white-blue light onto the gray, featureless floor.

  “Now there’s an archetype for you,” Cassie said.

  “Please tell me you aren’t surprised that Mab has a sense of drama,” Jesse answered, tapping on his forearm.

  “It’s just the wrong one,” Cassie said. “Hallways are about decisions. This is about good verses evil.”

  “Look at you, all literary,” Jesse commented absently, on full alert as he took his first couple of steps down the hallway.

  “Sometimes there really isn’t anything better to do, off planet.”

  “That makes me feel so much better. You only read as a last resort.”

  She grinned.

  “Where are we?”

  “In a hallway.”

  “And where is that hallway?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  “Good. And where is Mab?”

  “Could be anywhere in the universe,” he said.

  “Excellent.”<
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  “Probably shouldn’t talk, just in case she’s in one of these rooms or something.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  Jesse ducked around the first doorway and Cassie watched from the hallway, wishing her peripheral vision was better. She had to turn her head to see to either side, and couldn’t rule out Mab jumping behind them, dead end or not.

  “Is it just me, or is that an empty room?” Cassie asked.

  Jesse stood in the middle of the room, tapping on his arm and looking around carefully.

  “Best I can tell,” he agreed. She shook her head. The space was creepy. It was decent for an ambush; not perfect, because the walls looked solid enough, and there was some cover to be had in the rooms, but it would be hard to win a shootout for either side. The element of surprise was about the only advantage either one of them would get, and it seemed certain Mab was going to be the one who got it.

  Cassie wondered at what the tactics looked like for a firefight, when both sides could be anywhere they wanted to be. She’d seen it once, on Xhrahk-ni, but she’d been so preoccupied with survival that she’d never really revisited the decisions Mab had been making. With a great stone body to keep her safer, she could get some space for offensive measures, if she got the opportunity and had the right plan.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said, returning to the hallway. The other doors lead to similarly empty rooms. They were getting into murkier and murkier territory as they walked, and Cassie missed her Pixie’s eyes and ears. The Strath might have been indomitable, but they weren’t headliners for perceptiveness.

  The doors were far behind them, now. They came to an intersection and paused. Jesse continued to tap at his arm.

  “I’m not getting anything. She’s been here a long time, and she’s dug in hard.”

  “Is it possible she’s never been here?” Cassie asked. Jesse glanced at her with exasperation.

  “I’m trying to use everything from historical record to echolocation to figure out what’s here, and I’m getting nothing. Nothing has no history, no heat signature, and no echo.”

  “You’ve got the history of everything, in there?” she asked, motioning at his arm.

  “No, I have microanalysis capability of air composition.”

  “And that’s a history?”

  He blinked at her. She sighed and attempted to roll her eyes.