Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  “So how does a space not have any of those things?”

  “If a Palta is laying an ambush.”

  “Helpful.”

  He shrugged and looked up and down the crossing hallway. There were only the vaguest impressions of shapes to either side.

  “Jesse, if she’d wanted to kill me, she would have done it, wouldn’t she?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And if she wanted to kill you, she would have come after you, yes?”

  “Probably.”

  “So let’s find her.”

  “And what do you think is going to happen, then?” Jesse asked.

  “I’m finally going to find out what’s going on.”

  “Optimist.”

  He made a decision and Cassie followed him down the hallway to the right.

  There was a laugh. A long, echoing howl that came from nowhere.

  “He’s here. Let me go.”

  It might have been Mab’s voice, but there was something manic to it that sent a cold shiver down Cassie’s spine. Or would have, if she’d had one.

  “I’m tired of your games, Mab,” Jesse called. “Come out and talk to me.”

  There was another peel of laughter and a faint, white shape appeared in front of them, just down the hall.

  “I want to play,” she said. “I’ve waited all this time; I’m not going to sit down and have one of your serious conversations.”

  “What do you want?” Cassie asked.

  “Is that you, human? I thought I’d left a half-finished sculpture lying in the hallway.”

  “That’s funny,” Cassie said. Mab laughed.

  “I can see why he likes you. It’s like having a pet monkey.”

  “I’m not here to play, Mab. You know what I have to do,” Jesse said.

  “You have to catch me,” she said. “No one leaves until this is done.”

  She jumped.

  Jesse looked at Cassie and shook his head.

  “I have to do this.”

  “Go,” she said. “Catch her.”

  He nodded.

  And vanished.

  Cassie wandered down the hallway, running her hand along the wall. She couldn’t see her shadow on the floor any more and if someone had jumped into the space in front of her, she’d probably have run into them.

  Her hand fell into an opening in the wall, and she waved, finding a doorway. She rounded the corner cautiously, feeling the other side of the wall. A light flickered on, blinding her, and at the same moment, she felt her heart contract, dropping like a rubber band into her waist and rebounding somewhere somewhat higher, but she wasn’t conscious to find out where.

  She blinked at a dim ceiling.

  She was pretty sure it was a ceiling, but it could have been a wall; she was only mostly sure she was laying on her back.

  She felt different.

  The previous transitions, especially the ones in the past few days, had been slow, ground-out events with stages that hurt differently. The very early ones had apparently been more abrupt, but without pain. This had been one sharp pain that even now cast echoes that her body remembered, though her mind didn’t. She lay for a moment, catching her breath, then began the process of identifying body parts.

  Two arms, two legs, neck, hair, by the sound against the floor, heartbeat, thirty-five beats per minute, lungs, approximately one liter differential volume, eight breaths per minute, resting, stomach, bladder, sulphur filter…

  Where was she?

  How long had she been unconscious?

  What had happened with Jesse?

  She sat up, body moving in familiar, skeletal ways. She stretched her neck, tilting her head to one side and then the other, and then stood. She remembered the bright light, the jolt as her body had started the transition, the feeling of falling that had quickly shut off as whatever mechanism the Strath used for balance - something located in her chest that functioned much like a swim bladder, she realized on reflection - had been consumed in the transition.

  She found now that the walls were lined with shelves and the shelves were filled with hard-shelled boxes. She tried the nearest one, finding the pieces of an electro-mechanical device. The design was elegant, and it assembled in her hands as if the pieces wanted to be together.

  It was a weapon. She recognized the design characteristics, but not the specific device. Simple enough to figure out, though, just looking at the heat dissipation and energy pathways. It fit neatly in her hand and she smiled. The familiarity of it was beyond satisfying.

  “You found my playroom,” Mab said. Cassie turned.

  “Jesse’s going to kill you,” she said, running her hands over the smooth surfaces of the weapon.

  “No, he’s not,” Mab said. “He thinks he can, but he can’t.”

  The woman’s voice was almost sad.

  “You did this to me,” Cassie said. “Why?”

  Mab brightened.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad, is it? Look at you.”

  Cassie inspected her hands. Long fingers.

  “I’m Palta.”

  “You are.”

  “How did you do it?”

  She shrugged, leaning from foot to foot.

  “Get some DNA, do some super-clever abracadabra stuff, shoot it into you.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  Cassie couldn’t argue with that. Mab held out her arm, offering her something.

  “You know how to use that?”

  Cassie recognized it as one of the electronics like Jesse wore on his arm. She started to say that she didn’t know how they worked, but the glimmer of super-thin electronics intrigued her. She took it, keeping an eye on Mab, and held it up. It translated like reading a book.

  “I get it,” she said, patching it against her arm. The electronics seized on her biology and activated. Mab told her their coordinates, then licked the corner of her mouth.

  “You’ll find that you can’t get out. You try it, it will squash you like a bug against a windshield. Got it?”

  “How do I know what’s in and what’s out?” Cassie asked. Mab grinned.

  “I didn’t say I was going to give you a completely level playing field.”

  “What are we playing?” Cassie asked.

  “Same game as last time, only this time, you actually have a chance.”

  “Why would I come after you?”

  Mab grinned.

  “Same reason as ever. I knew Jesse wouldn’t hide forever, that he’d eventually go out wandering again. I wanted to get his attention.”

  “So you poisoned the Kenzi and the Adena Lampak caretakers and wiped out the Xhrahk-ni,” Cassie said. Mab grinned wider.

  “Oh, I had no idea where he’d go. I can’t count how many species I wiped out, making sure he’d find one of them eventually. There are dozens out there in the midst of a slow death. Turns out I’m good at it. Once I kill you and Jesse - yes, I will kill him, and we both know I can if I want to, given he doesn’t have the spine to kill me, first - I’m just going to go back to it. I mean, I won’t have anything better to do, right?”

  “And that’s supposed to make me try to kill you?” Cassie asked. Mab winked.

  “It is if you’re the soldier I think you are.”

  “I don’t generally trust people who are this excited about me killing them,” Cassie said. Mab shrugged.

  “Then you can let me kill you instead. I’m just trying to make a sport of it.”

  Mab vanished. Cassie looked at her arm, sliding her finger over the electronics and enjoying the tingle as the high-density circuitry responded, then jumped, the fragments of a plan forming in her mind.

  Perhaps an hour later, Cassie stood in the weapons room again, going through boxes at leisure. She’d chased Mab, Mab had chased her, she’d made a few shots, and so had Mab. Nothing to be concerned about. The bullets were lodged in a few places in her torso, radiating energy in an attempt to cause additional post-impact damage, but her body simply r
egenerated faster than the bullets could hurt her. The first one had fallen out on the floor about fifteen minutes earlier, and the second was just below her skin on her shoulder, maybe a minute away from completely healed.

  Being Palta rocked.

  She’d put up a shield on the room that meant that Mab had to walk through the door rather than being able to jump - she could do that, now - and if she did walk through the door, the rocket launcher Cassie had found a few minutes prior would go off, shooting Mab in the stomach.

  Not that Cassie thought that that would be fatal. She hadn’t yet figured out how to kill the other woman. Right now, she was just enjoying her new level of tactical capability.

  The first time she’d fought Mab, she’d been all reaction and instinct; the only difference between what she’d been doing and running on pure fear was that she’d have been ashamed to run on fear. She’d used every bit of training she’d had just to survive as long as she had. Now, she was expanding on all of her previous training, finding nuance and strategy beyond what she had ever considered. She’d pinned Mab twice, shooting the Palta in the chest and head before jumping away, like a particularly brutal game of capture the flag. Mab wasn’t toying with her; this was an earnest competition, and Cassie was winning on points.

  The problem with battles to the death, though, was that no one tallied the points in the end to figure out who won.

  Cassie had to figure out how to kill a Palta.

  And she needed to do it quickly. She wasn’t sure how long she had in this body, even with all of her new Palta insights.

  So she went through guns. It was a charming diversion, opening box after box and assembling the weapons inside of them. She could wage a war with this arsenal. She could win a war with this arsenal and her Palta brain. She opened an eliptical case, like an egg with the sides sliced off, and took out the marvelous contraption inside of it.

  Complete with stand.

  She envisioned the battle that would surround such a weapon; the tactical disadvantages she could have overcome with it.

  This was better than her normal sense of familiarity and confidence that came with cleaning and holstering her handgun. This was the idea of a general standing over a field map, a writer creating the thread of a war, and a sorcerer spinning magic, all in one. She could do such great, terrible things with any of these guns.

  A germ of an idea burst into bloom and she realized that, if she reworked the parts from that one over there and this one on the shelf where she’d left it and… she stuck her tongue out the corner of her mouth, scanning what had suddenly turned into a pile of raw materials. There! That!

  She started breaking things down, managing interfaces that weren’t quite designed for each other… oh, what she wouldn’t give for a workshop.

  Then she realized she’d seen one.

  One of the endless rooms she’d explored, where the lights surged on when she arrived, like a great beacon - I’m over here! - where Mab had once gotten the drop on her. That had been a workshop, it was just full of raw-er materials than she had recognized at that moment.

  She gathered up armloads of ordnance, finding magical new uses for things just by picking them up and looking at them once more, prioritizing which pieces were going to be most useful.

  How to kill a Palta?

  Well, the rocket launcher couldn’t hurt.

  She had too little knowledge.

  She was certain the things in that little room could have ended universes, if she had just known what they were. She was also certain that Mab had left it stripped, locking away the truly useful rooms in the giant complex. She felt it when she lined up jumps; the space on the other side was blacked out, like she would trade the space where she stood for something that was too-real, too-solid to trade, and instead, she would have just launched herself into it.

  She suspected Jesse was in one of those spaces, stuck, having sprung a trap that Mab had left for him, and that he hadn’t seen in time.

  Cassie had seen them in time. Hornets’ nests and beartraps that existed in between the two spaces, that would only spring when you brought them on top of each other.

  Genius.

  Without knowing how common the expertise was to create such things, she couldn’t evaluate Mab’s creativity, but her execution was brutal. Given that Cassie had failed to run into him once in her hour-and-a-half cavort with Mab, she knew Jesse wasn’t running around, chasing or being chased, but she also knew that he was still alive. Mab would kill him last. For whatever reason, the Palta woman wanted to hurt him badly, and that would involve hanging Cassie in front of him, dead.

  The workshop virtually glowed with potential, but Cassie was no closer to being able to kill Mab. She needed to sit down, to think it through. All she could do now was hurt Mab more and more, which brought her no satisfaction at all, outside of the glee she took in creating the tools and the plans she would use. She was no sadist. One clean shot, dead, was the ideal. There were things she wanted to know, maybe even things she needed to know, but none of those were worth the bits of her soul she would sacrifice, inflicting mortal pain without death.

  She sat down in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, and put her forehead on her palms. She had any of a dozen methods to pick from to snare Mab and get a clean shot, and at this point the number of tools for that shot was spawning into the hundreds, if she included all of the things she could build in five or ten minutes with the raw materials she had sitting in the room with her.

  Fatal.

  What would kill a Palta?

  The third bullet finally finished burrowing out of her skin and fell, disarmed, down the back of her shirt and plunked onto the floor.

  Cassie blinked, forcing her brain into higher and higher gears. Slav would have figured this out in seconds, with a Palta’s capacity. The thought rankled her. She was just missing knowledge, and the learning structures that came with acquiring that knowledge. She was having to teach herself biology from almost nothing, cellular mitosis and pre-teen genetics. Dominant, dominant, recessive.

  Palta had all eight DNA bases.

  Did it matter?

  Regenerative energy.

  Like grounding an electrical source. Shorting a capacitor.

  You needed something that would hold up to the power, not crack open and leave the reserve untapped.

  She picked the bullet up off of the floor and rolled it between her fingers.

  It would have to be placed at the right spots, to get enough time to drain her…

  Cassie nodded.

  It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do. Mab had pointed her at the spots to hit. Cassie just had to design the weapons that could put the right munition in the right spot and leave it there. The math would have been inconceivable to her as a human, but as a Palta, it clicked into place quite easily. A few quick experiments on energy, and she’d have it.

  She took a few deep breaths, surprised at how engrossing the mental process was - she’d lost track of everything but the inside of her own mind for a minute - then stood.

  It wasn’t a game anymore.

  She was going to end it.

  There was some electrical tape in the little workshop, virgin strips that she could use the one on her arm to program. She set up dozens of them, one after another, and distributed them according to the travel pattern that seemed most likely for Mab, given where Cassie had already run into her. They had limited distance and limited life, given how little power they could hold on their own - surely there were add-ons that would increase power and transmission range, but she didn’t recognize them, if they were there.

  She was on a hair trigger; if one of her alarms went off, the electrical tape on her arm would jump her to the room where it happened. She had to be ready, to be holding what she needed to take with her, and to be ready to use it.

  She needed to pee.

  There had been a long night on one of the planets where she’d been assigned, as they’d been evacuating political civilian
s from an engagement gone wrong. A political dinner or party of some kind, where someone had said the wrong thing and everything had gone sideways more quickly than Cassie could have imagined.

  She’d sat at the on-planet base with a handgun pointed down the front pathway for three hours, waiting on the rescue team to come back with the ambassador, watching the local foreign terrestrials go running by or make feints at the building. She and the other jumper, a woman named Savanna who had only held credentials for about a year and a half, were the only ones left, but the foreign terrestrials hadn’t known that.

  That’s what she’d kept telling herself that night. Any minute, the other side could decide that a war was brewing and take the opportunity to make the first shot, but, second by second, it didn’t happen.

  That was the feeling, now.

  The drawn-tightness, waiting for something to happen. Once she could react, she’d feel better, but for now, she couldn’t move.

  Which, of course, meant she needed to pee.

  There was a laugh, far down the hallway, and Cassie heard Mab yell.

  “Very cute, Cassie. What happens now?”

  She jumped.

  Mab was in the doorway, saucy grin on her lips, and Cassie didn’t hesitate.

  She shot.

  Three guns, three bullets, three targets.

  Mab looked stunned.

  Cassie dropped the guns as she shot them, rushing forward to catch Mab’s arm and twist it out and to the side before the woman could jump away. Cassie applied another of the electrical tapes to Mab’s arm, and all of the electronics there went solid. Cassie peeled them off and tossed them aside.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, dragging Mab into the room and propping her up in a corner. “If I could have come up with a way to do it fast, I would have.”

  Mab nodded, the hole above her eye already closed and now just a rapidly-disappearing pink spot.

  “Palta don’t die quickly.”

  Cassie sat.

  “I have some things to say, first, anyway,” Mab said, turning her head away for a moment. The woman looked around the room for a long minute, the nodded and sighed. “Welcome to the house of Midas.”