Sandy risked a peek at what he could see of the vixen giantess’s face. Still mostly lips and teeth. He couldn’t miss the controlled anger in her tone, though. “I don’t—” He blinked rapidly. “I think—I think an experiment went wrong.”
“An experiment.” She drew back, far enough for him to start to let out a breath. The way she bared her teeth in a snarl, though, nearly made him faint. “What experiment did you perform?”
“It wasn’t me! I mean the company! An experiment trying to make a wormhole, a little wormhole, microscopic—”
“What are those?” She cut him off by pointing at the fire trucks.
“They’re here to put out the fires.”
“They are not doing that.” She narrowed her eyes at him.
“They’re probably too frightened to come close.”
“And the other smaller vehicles approaching?”
“P-police cars.”
“Where are your magicians? Are you one?”
“We don’t have magicians!”
“Scientists, then. Whoever can fix what you’ve done and send me back!”
“I don’t—I don’t—”
“Quickly!” she snapped, curling her fingers around him to make a loose fist again.
“They were in that building!” he shrieked, pointing.
Her ears folded down as she turned to look at the ruins of Building 4. By now, the fire had grown large enough that he could feel the heat; acrid smoke billowed up in a dark grey plume. “Surely not every one.” She sounded stricken, looking around, then pointed. “What about them?”
He looked. While many workers had cleared out, a sizable crowd remained in the far parking lot. Moreover, it looked like the police had blockaded the main entrance. “Uh. Some of them might—”
“Or the vehicles you called police cars.” She watched them—just two, so far—pull to a stop, closer than the fire trucks. Three officers, two tigers and a lynx, scrambled out, all with pistols drawn.
“Police are, uh, law officers.”
“I know the word. They can help, can they not?”
A fourth officer got out, a lioness, brandishing a megaphone rather than a gun. “Are you all right, sir? Has it hurt you?”
It took Sandy several seconds to realize she was addressing him, and referring to the vixen centaur—vixen’taur?—as an it. “I-I’m fine. She’s not hurting me.”
The vixen’taur took a deep breath and looked down at the police. “You must let me speak to a scientist.”
The lioness nearly dropped her megaphone. “You—you speak our language!”
“I cast a translation spell.” She shook her head. “You have no idea what you have done here today, do you? What you have opened. The mess you have caused…and dragged me into.” She stomped a forepaw against the parking lot in irritation.
“What we did?” The lioness had taken a few fast steps back, but she sounded affronted.
“Yes, you.” She leaned over, gesturing agitatedly—fortunately, not with the hand that still held the ocelot. “You opened a makeshift, unstable portal with a negative flow. I am lucky to still be in one piece. Korrin only knows what you’ve done to the gate.” She groaned. “I’ll have so much work when I get back. If I get back. Now help me find a scientist!”
As the vixen kept talking, the lioness lowered her megaphone, staring up dumbly. After a few seconds, she lifted it and spoke again. “I, uh. Okay. We can negotiate after you let the hostage go.”
The giantess looked down at her incredulously, starting to walk toward her. “The hostage? You think—”
“Stop! Do not move again!”
The giantess crossed her arms. “Or what?” Sandy, still held in one of her hands, found himself pressed against the side of her chest. He whined, trying not to squirm in the sea of warm fur. This had suddenly become not just terrifying but awkward.
“Look.” The fur muffled the policewoman’s voice, but Sandy could still hear a frightened shake in it. “You don’t have to get threatening. We’re—”
“I am not the one being threatening!” The giantess’s shout left Sandy’s ears ringing, but he could still make out the sound of a single pistol shot. Oh, hell.
The policewoman screamed, “Hold your fire!” simultaneously with the vixen’taur letting out a startled cry and stamping her paws. After a moment, the hand holding him moved, and she looked down at her legs. So did Sandy. No visible harm, to either her or the police, although they were backing away fast, ears flat. The lioness looked frightened and furious. The lynx had the expression of someone realizing he might have just made a fatal mistake.
The vixen pointed her free hand, arm stretched out fully. “Go.” She kept her tone flat, with just a hint of a growl. “Return with scientists. If you are not hostile toward me, I shall not be toward you.” She added a pointedly implicit or else by stomping one paw down hard enough to make the police cruisers shake.
The lioness looked like she was going to respond, but swallowed, motioning the officers back into the cars. They screeched away.
After a moment, the giantess sighed heavily. “Your police are not helpful.” She lifted Sandy back to her face. “What is your name?”
“I…I…”
“I do not intend to hurt you.” Her tone showed clear impatience.
He swallowed, knowing he must still look terrified. “Sandy Nelson.”
“Tell me what you know about what brought me here, Sandy Nelson. You were among all the littles running from my appearance, were you not? So you were here for this ‘experiment’ with…what was the word?”
“Wormholes. I, uh, um.” He waved around weakly. “This is, uh, kind of a research center? They do a lot of things. Um, used to.” Don’t start talking about office politics, you idiot. “One big project was quantum tunneling, traversable wormholes, where two points in normal three-dimensional space could be connected through four-dimensional space. Um, uh, does that make sense?”
“Go on.”
“So, uh, they were theoretical, and the experiments hadn’t been working, and if they did work, the wormholes should be really tiny, like barely enough to let electromagnetic particles through. But they were running another test with some new parameters, and…” He trailed off.
“And it succeeded well enough to momentarily disrupt a network of gates you had no way to know already existed.” She sighed. “Which is the way most new civilizations seem to discover it, I shall grant, but most have the wisdom to send exploratory scouts ahead. Somehow, you have accidentally sucked me back through your portal, destroying it in the process.” She eyed him. “What was your role in this, Sandy Nelson?”
“Nothing!” His ears went flat. “I wasn’t part of the research team, I swear. They used some code that I wrote, but…uh…” He trailed off as her eyes narrowed. “That’s, uh. I’m a programmer. If you don’t know what that is, it’s…difficult to explain without explaining what computers are. Um. Computers are machines that…uh.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Let me back up.”
“Computers are machines that transform data by applying a set of functions to them, and as a programmer your task is to write those functions. My people developed magic rather than technology, but do not make the mistake of assuming we are ignorant about the way of other worlds. A more pressing concern for me now, though, is whether your unhelpful police can return with weapons capable of hurting me.”
He swallowed, looking up at her. “Uh. Well.” Was it wise to be truthful? When the police came back, they’d probably have rocket launchers, not pistols. Maybe that was a good thing.
“Sandy Nelson.” Her voice grew tight, and her gaze focused on him so sharply it prickled. “It is clear nothing like me has been seen in your world before, and I am painfully aware that I have destroyed your experiment and your building, and likely killed some of your compatriots. I know you have only my word that none of this was my intention. But I am now stuck in a strange world I literally do not fit in, and I am in dire need of help. Be truthful with me.”
His ears flattened. Neither her expression nor her tone did anything to calm his nerves, but if she was telling the truth, she wasn’t wrong about being in a desperate situation. “Yes, they can.”
“Do you trust them to bring scientists, or will they continue treating me as a threat?”
“Possibly the former, definitely the latter. Uh…I can try to talk to someone and explain what actually happened.”
She hesitated a moment, studying him with those huge, beautiful eyes, then nodded. “Go ahead.”
“Okay.” He pulled out his phone, and opened the internal company chat. The on-premise servers might be offline—or crushed—but this was a cloud service, so it should be fine.
And it was, if “filled with frantic messages” qualified as fine. Numerous people talking about fires at first, then explosions, then “WTF there’s a giant alien,” alternating with “stop talking bullshit” from folks offsite, alternating with photos of the vixen’taur, alternating with unhinged theories about where “it” came from. And an increasing amount of the conversation was about just who it was holding in its hand and what would happen to them. Most bets were on Sandy being a dead cat walking.
Terrific. What should he say? Well, start with what she, uh…hmm.
He looked around at the giantess’s fingers for a moment, marveling at the unreality of the situation, then came back to his question, looking up at her face. “What’s your name?”
“Amarylis.”
“A-mah-ri-less,” he repeated carefully. “It’s overwhelming to meet you.”
She tilted her head, then laughed. “I am sure it is. It may surprise you that I would say the same, Sandy Nelson.”
“A little, but I guess it shouldn’t. And, it’s just Sandy. Nelson is my last name.”
“I see. Sandy.”
He swallowed, smiling awkwardly, and looked back at the phone. Okay. He started to type.
I am with the “monster”, safe. Her name is Amarylis, and we need to get someone top-level from the wormhole project out here right now to help figure out how she got here and how to get her back.
The chat went silent for about five seconds. Then several people are typing… appeared, while reaction emoji blossomed rapidly under his comment.
He ignored the peanut gallery comments, a mixture of disbelief and patently insane advice. Hopefully, someone important would—yes: a direct message from Dennis Pick, one of BRC’s founders, and now a Bridgetown Distinguished Fellow. He had been CTO before the merger, but his title was now “Director of Special Projects,” whatever that meant. He’d helped write the original version of an operating system whose descendants ran about three-quarters of the world’s computers.
Holy shit, it was a direct message from Dennis Pick.
Are you saying we brought her here?
“Are you communicating with a scientist using that?”
“Yes. Kind of.”
She grunted skeptically.
She says we accidentally connected to some system of “gates”.
It took nearly half a minute for another response. “I’m, uh, waiting,” he muttered to Amarylis. Finally:
OMW
“Okay. He says he’s coming. Uh, I don’t know where he is, though.” It looked like the police had blockaded the entrance. And more police cars had parked by the crowd. There were a lot of police cars here now. The ones Amarylis had dismissed had just retreated to the pack. “I hope he was on-site when you, uh…” He waved his hand.
“There are several people approaching from that crowd. And others stopping them.” She looked at him, clearly expecting an explanation.
“One’s probably Mr. Pick, the scientist. Um, head engineer, but he was involved with the quantum tunneling project. The others, are, well, I don’t know. Guys in black suits.”
“What does that signify?”
“I’m…not sure.” Truthfully, he wasn’t sure how to explain “government intelligence agency” to her. After another few seconds, though, a group of four people—a heavyset panther guy in jeans and a polo shirt, a sleek caracal woman in a sharp burgundy business outfit, and two tiger men in black—started marching their way.
“Let me set you on my shoulder, so I have my hands free.”
“Uh.” Sandy swallowed. “You could just set me down on the ground, couldn’t you?”
“I…” She bit her lip, toes curling on her forepaws enough to dig into the pavement. “Yes. Of course.” The reluctance was clear in her voice, but she started to lower her hand.
“Why don’t you want to?” He looked up at her.
“A selfish notion that they will be less likely to use larger weapons on me if doing so would put you at risk.” She sighed. “I am sorry.”
“Oh.” Yeah, that was selfish. The smart thing to do would be to run to the group, scream tag, you’re it, and keep running. Her hand had reached the ground. He could just step off.
But was it as much selfish as it was just scared? As huge as Amarylis was, she was frightened. It might be dumb luck—or too much curiosity—that had put Sandy literally in her hand, but he was as close to an ally as she had at the moment. And that helicopter flying their way looked disquietingly military. He wasn’t much of a shield for her, but he was more than she had without him.
“Maybe it’ll work.” God, this was stupid. “Put me on your shoulder.”