What the hell’s going on over there? Gilchrist said we may need to hold off.
Sandy looked away from the fascinating sight of a team of Air Force cooks helping Amarylis cook chicken soft tacos on her scale, reading Dennis’s message on the laptop. His ears folded back. What now? I don’t know. Last I saw her she was arguing with Brickman, again. How’s research coming?
Still working on it, not holding off. A couple dead ends but Tim’s got a new idea.
Ok, Sandy sent, and put the phone back in his pocket.
“I hope we’re all getting those tacos,” one of the tiger agents said.
Another one shook his head. “We have to go to the truck outside.”
Sandy lifted his brows, packing up his laptop into his shoulder bag again and tagging along behind them. There were actually three trucks with different menus, but the power of suggestion clearly favored the taco truck, its line running thirty deep. The ocelot headed for one of the other trucks, ordering a chicken tikka masala wrap.
So where did this leave them? Back with his original crazy idea of trying to make a gateway anyway and going “surprise, we’re ready” at the end—just what Dennis had grumbled about a couple of days ago, except now both Gilchrist and Brickman would feel undermined.
Even so, once they had finished the project, the two would have to let Amarylis use her teleportation spell. The political costs of saying yes, we know we can do it now, but no, we can’t let you do it would be astronomical.
Right?
He headed back inside with the half-eaten burrito, looking for the caracal. Hopefully, he’d figure out what to say to her before he found her.
It took no time to locate her, though—she stood about twenty feet off to Amarylis’s left. It wasn’t only Brickman she was in an argument with this time: the crowd around her and the lion included one of the tigers in black and a few other suits, maybe other SI execs or other government officials. Amarylis sprawled rather than sat, torso upright, just finishing the last of the giant soft tacos.
Staring at someone eat seemed impolite, but it was tough not to, given that the tacos were bigger than he was. Besides that, she clearly really liked the tacos, looking uncharacteristically blissful. She might just be starving, of course. Even so, it was oddly compelling.
She finished, licking her fingers clean. Sandy stopped, momentarily transfixed. That was…um. Unintentionally…um.
Just at that moment she saw him, enormous eyes meeting his. She stilled for a second, then smiled, licking her lips clean.
Sandy’s ears flushed. It had gotten about ten degrees warmer in the hangar, hadn’t it?
One of the agents, one of the suits, and Gilchrist all followed Amarylis’s glance; the agent and the suit quickly dismissed him, turning back to the group, but Gilchrist focused an uncomfortably measuring stare on him before rejoining the conversation/argument.
Okay. Focus. Get Gilchrist back on board, or at least get an idea of where her head is now.
He resisted the temptation to walk right up to them and join the discussion; he’d been identified as not one of them, and he couldn’t count on either Brickman or Gilchrist to back him up. So he sidled up toward Amarylis rather than the group, getting as close as he dared.
“Hello, Sandy.” She held out a hand for him—not the hand that she’d licked, although her fingers still carried a strong scent of corn flour and seasoned grilled chicken. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was somehow unsettling. It hid her natural scent. The realization that he knew her natural scent? Also somehow unsettling.
“Hi.” He climbed on. When she lifted him up, he said, softly, “What are they talking about?”
“Whether you and Dennis Pick are…” She furrowed her brow. “‘Off the reservation,’ whatever that means. But Field Director Brickman suspects you, him, and Aurora Gilchrist of conspiring to subvert national security.”
“Great.” He pulled out his phone and sent a terse message to Dennis. Brickman is on to us.
Pick’s response was even shorter. Fuck. We need a lot more time to have any chance of figuring out these points of reference.
“I don’t suppose your hearing’s good enough to pick up what they’re saying from here? I think we might need to put a new plan in motion real quick.”
“Such as?”
“Either figuring out your points of reference as fast as possible, or figuring out a way to get you home that doesn’t need them.”
“My teleportation spell can only work across such a tremendous distance with the proper vector calculations.” She looked at the group of VIPs. “They are…arguing…” She trailed off and stiffened, ears going back.
Sandy’s ears lowered, too. “Uh.”
“They are arguing,” she raised her voice, “over how ‘primitive’ or ‘feral’ I might be, although I am not sure if that is based on my appearance, my size, or merely the way I fail to offer either side what they desire.”
All the VIPs stopped talking, staring up at her with their ears back.
She rose to her paws, taking a single step that closed the distance between where she had been sitting and where they stood. “Perhaps they could clear that up for me.”
Gilchrist was the first to recover, swallowing hard. “I don’t think you’re primitive or feral, Amarylis.”
One of the suits, a graying cheetah with an expensive-looking watch, looked like he might want to argue, but kept silent. He looked familiar, in the way of someone Sandy might have seen in news photos. A politician. An important one.
The tiger in black standing by Brickman cleared his throat. “Although you talked about rescue parties in a way that sounded…vaguely threatening.”
Amarylis stared daggers at him. “If you prefer, I shall make specific and detailed threats.”
He shrank back.
“And that attitude, right there.” Brickman pointed at her, while turning to Gilchrist. “That’s why we are following the fucking procedures I set out. The only concrete information we have is that she came through the gate your company accidentally set up and destroyed your lab in the process. Everything else we think we know is what she told us.”
Amarylis made a low, decidedly ominous warning growl.
One of the other suits looked between Brickman and Amarylis nervously. “Is this a topic we should be talking about right here?”
The lion stepped away from the group, throwing his arms in the air. “Yeah, Dave, I think it probably is a topic we should be talking about right here. As much as I hate to say it, the kid’s got a point.” He put his hands on his hips and looked up at the vixen’taur. “Keeping Amarylis out of the loop only kicks the can down the road.”
“Better than stomping the can flat,” one of the other suits muttered, staring at Amarylis’s closest forepaw.
“Do you think I might be an enemy agent, Field Director Brickman? An advance scout sent here to survey how difficult your world will be for my people to conquer, perhaps, so by delaying my return you give yourself more time to prepare for the coming invasion of giant magical alien warriors.”
Brickman stared up at her expressionlessly for a few silent seconds. “Do I think it’s likely? No. Do Can I absolutely rule it out? Also no. If our situations were reversed, could you?”
She sighed, looking up at the hangar roof, then back down at Brickman, Gilchrist, and the other VIPs. “I understand your fear—it is not of me. It is of the future for your world I signify. Yes, I could be lying to you. But if I am telling you the truth, it is far more frightening. You are far from the most technologically advanced world, you appear to have no practical understanding of magic, and you are physically very small. Keeping me prisoner—whether you wish to admit it not, that is what you are contemplating—seems as if it is the best leverage you have.”
She closed a hand around Sandy gently, moving him to her shoulder. “But,” she continued, “I understand how big the leap of faith I am asking you to make is because we had to make it, too. Each of the other worlds on the gate network had to make it. They have to make it over and over again—when newcomers travel to their world, when they travel to new worlds, and when new worlds such as yours discover the gates.
“There is nothing I can say to prove that I am telling the truth, that I will keep my word to you as best as I can. If I am telling the truth, though, your choice to take that leap of faith by helping me is a step toward establishing friendly relations with Sivrali, a civilization already on the gate network whose people have an extremely advanced understanding of magic and are physically very big. The choice not to help me is a step away from that.”
One of the other suits looked at the cheetah. “What do you think?”
He looked up at Amarylis, and seemed to steel himself. “That I’m going to tell the President that it’s better to step toward than away.”
She visibly relaxed, nodding down to him.
Brickman, though, looked positively livid. “With all due respect, sir, it is not ‘stepping away’ to keep control of the situation. We can not afford to let a multinational like Strategic Industries own this gate.”
“Director Brickman, you’re—”
“What does ‘multinational’ mean?” Amarylis cut in.
The VIPs looked at her, startled. The cheetah responded, “The world—our world, I mean—has many governments, many nations. We’re one of the largest and the most powerful. The company that ran the experiment that brought you here has…” He waved a hand. “…interests and businesses in multiple nations besides ours.”
“You plan to control the gate to benefit your nation, while Strategic Industries might not have that allegiance.”
“Exactly,” Brickman said.
Gilchrist shook her head. “We’d run it for everyone.”
“Oh, save it,” Brickman snapped. “You’d run it for your business.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“It should be run for everyone, which means it must be run by everyone.”
Brickman stared up at Amarylis. “What, let me guess. You have a big ol’ happy communist one world government.”
She narrowed her eyes down at him. “We have what you might call nations, brey vikla, but they coordinate with one another. Surely, yours can as well.”
“Brey vikla?” Gilchrist repeated questioningly, mostly getting the pronunciation right.
“A suitable honorific.”
Brickman gave her a suspicious glance, and looked back to the cheetah. “If the company intends to honor their agreements here, why have the scientists gone rogue?”
“That was the question at hand.” The cheetah looked at Gilchrist. “Bottom line: have they?”
The caracal’s tail lashed. “I wouldn’t say ‘rogue.’ They’re used to working independently.”
“Not on this project,” the cheetah said. “You two have to figure out how to play nice. Meanwhile, I have to make calls about preparing for possible search parties.” He walked off, two of the other VIPs in tow.
“Shut Pick down,” Brickman snapped to Gilchrist, “or I’ll have an arrest warrant out for him within the hour.” He pointed up at Sandy. “That goes for you, too. And turn in your ID when you leave the hangar.” He left, agents trailing behind him.
Gilchrist looked up at Sandy and Amarylis, shrugged apologetically, and held up a hand as if to say “working on it.” She headed off in a different direction, pulling out her phone.
Amarylis looked off into the distance, ears slowly folding back.
“What does brey vikla translate as?”
She leaned down close to the ocelot to whisper. “The closest translation is ‘nasty little grease spot.’”
His eyes widened, and he stifled a giggle.
Smiling wryly, she straightened up, then sighed. “I do not know what to do now.”
Sandy chewed on his lip. “Was the problem with the gate we accidentally created just the negative flow?”
“No. It was also unstable. It collapsed as I fell through it.”
“But if we could recreate it without that flow, you’d have a chance of getting back through it?”
“From what you said, it would be too small. The flow was what temporarily widened it.”
“So you’d need to make it positive flow instead of negative. Could you?”
“I…” She shook her head. “I do not know how, unless I could…”
“Could…?”
“There are maintenance spells that might have such an effect, but they operate on our gate. I do not know if I could adapt one for your ‘connector.’ Finding the reference points is much simpler.”
“I’m not sure we have the time to figure them out. Making another connector that sucks you back in reverse could be much faster.”
He quickly typed to Pick again. Do you have the equipment to fully replicate the experiment from the other lab? Fast?
She studied him. “You should not put yourself at risk for me.”
“Nobody else is going to,” he muttered.
Dennis’s response came through. We can hack something together that might not explode by tomorrow. Maybe.
Too late. Gilchrist’s going to tell you to shut things down tonight.
“Sandy,” Amarylis said, voice worried.
That’s it, then, isn’t it? We can’t get Amarylis here in secret.
He looked back up at the giantess. “You said teleporting on a planet is easy, right? No worries about relativistic effects.”
“I…” She nodded. “If I have points of reference there, yes.”
“Do you actually need numbers, coordinates, or is it, like, if you’ve been to a place, know where it is, have line of sight? Or if you had a map?”
She tilted her head. “Any of those.”
“Okay. I need…hmm.” He looked around. The workspace had several big flat-screen televisions on stands, probably pulled from conference rooms, which meant the might accept wireless screencasting from his phone. “Can you grab that television there?” He pointed at one relatively close by that no one was paying attention to.
Amarylis blinked, then nodded, padding forward a step and picking it up carefully.
“Okay.” A label taped to the front of the TV declared its network name. “Perfect.” He brought up the maps app on the phone and performed the authentication dance with the television. A half-minute later, the TV switched to the map display. “Here we are.” He pointed. “And over here is the campus we brought you in on, around that building close to the road on the left.”
“Yes, I see it.”
“Great. If you follow the campus, the green space, to the right, there are more buildings and another narrower road where the campus ends.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Can you teleport both of us to the open space there?”
“I…should be able to. Are you truly suggesting…?”
Have you ever seen a heist movie? he sent Pick.
“I’m coming up with a plan.” He shut down the maps app, putting the craziness of said plan out of his mind. “Tell me about those maintenance spells.”
Sure…? Pick sent.
Let’s go steal a giantess.