It hadn’t taken any convincing at all to get Amarylis to lift him up to her shoulder. This view of her from was no less impressive than from her hand, with something incredible just from sheer size visible in any direction. Straight ahead, the side of her muzzle. Behind him, the waterfall of her hair. Above, mostly just her cheeks, with glimpses of eye and ear. Below, a blush-inducing view of the fringe necklace and the cleavage it rested on. Oof. He did his best to focus on the approaching group instead, hoping his ears weren’t burning. Look relaxed. Wait, should he look relaxed? Should he look scared, like he really was a hostage?
Hmm. Was he a hostage? Amarylis had started to let him go with a bit of prompting, but she sure seemed eager to keep him close by.
Look, that was literally your idea, kid. You don’t get to retcon it into her kidnapping you, even if she did technically magic you into her hand. Besides, it’s too late to get cold paws about it now.
“Let us move farther away from the fire.” Amarylis started walking slowly away from Building 4, toward the four moving toward them. Well, her walk looked slow, it felt slow, from here, but he bet he’d only be able to keep up with this pace in an all-out run.
All four of the folks approaching her stopped, staring. After a moment, the tiger men stepped in front, holding up their hands to signal “stop” to the caracal woman and the panther guy. One of them put his other hand on his earpiece, looking up at the military copter as he spoke. Great.
The panther looked impatient, then just ducked around the tigers. The caracal looked startled, then hurried after him.
Amarylis came to a stop, then lay down on her belly, forepaws folding in front of her. “We Sivra try to make ourselves appear smaller when dealing with littles, but you all are very little,” she muttered under her breath.
He slowed, staring up at Amarylis. “You’re…” He faltered, as if unsure what to say next.
“Real,” Sandy murmured under his breath.
“My name is Amarylis,” she responded. “My kind are called ‘Sivra,’ and before you ask, I am speaking to you by virtue of a translation spell.” She looked around and spread her hands. “I should not be here. Are you responsible for opening the gate on this side?”
“A translation spell,” he repeated, sounding incredulous. Then he cleared his throat. “My name is Dennis Pick. And it sounds like my group is responsible, yes, even if I don’t understand how yet.” He ran a hand through his scraggly hair.
The woman winced, giving Dennis a quick sidelong glare, then looked up at Amarylis. She opened her mouth, then closed it and looked at one of the tigers. “I want to say ‘we come in peace,’ but that’s a cliché, and we didn’t come anywhere, it did.” She looked up at Amarylis.
“I was pulled here,” Amarylis corrected.
She kept looking up at the giant vixen, but spoke to the lynx beside her. “What does it mean, Dennis?”
“As your language has gendered pronouns, mine are ‘she,’ not ‘it.’” Amarylis’s tone was starting to convey a clear I don’t like you, little cat woman subtext.
Pick lashed his tail. “From what Nelson said, she has to mean the quantum tunneling project.”
“What’s a Nelson?”
“Hi,” Sandy called, waving both arms.
After a moment, Pick waved back, hesitantly. The caracal stared through Sandy a moment, then looked back to the panther. “Explain?”
“The, uh…” He visibly gathered himself a moment, and started speaking with his hands, holding them about a foot apart. “The idea of the tunneling project is to take two points in space that could be millions, even billions, of miles apart, and connect them by folding them together through four dimensions.” He brought his hands together. “If you’ve ever seen any science fiction movie—”
“I hate sci-fi.”
“She seems like she’d be great fun at parties,” Sandy murmured under his breath. Amarylis’s closest ear flicked, and her lips curled slightly upward for a moment.
“Well, then you can think of it as…” He trailed off, considering.
“There are many worlds across the universe,” Amarylis cut in. “Over time, many of them find their version of what you are calling ‘quantum tunneling.’” She fixed her gaze on Pick. “Did you have control over the far end of the tunnel you were attempting to open?”
He swallowed, staring up. “Not precise control, no.”
“The ‘folds,’ in your metaphor, have a natural affinity for existing tunnels. Let me show you.” She lifted her head, and traced another set of glittering lines in the air with a finger.
The helicopter edged closer and lower. Yeah, that definitely had a military, fighter jet look, and those were definitely side-mounted guns. Cannons? Whatever they were, they almost certainly would hurt or kill Amarylis if they opened fire. Hopefully they were less trigger-happy than the lynx.
Amarylis spread her hands, and a glowing, three-dimensional image appeared in the air: a cloud of colored balls, dozens of them, each about a foot across—although a few were noticeably smaller or larger.
Then, shimmering lines started to form between them. Each ball connected to at least one other; most connected to five, ten, twenty or more.
“Nodes in a network,” Pick said.
“Planets,” Amarylis replied.
The panther’s eyes widened, clearly in shocked delight. The caracal’s eyes widened, too, clearly in calculating worry.
“Each of these are worlds connected by your quantum tunnels. The tunnels run between what we call gates.” She pointed to one of the noticeably larger planets. “My people, the Sivra, created ours with magic several hundred years ago.”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” the caracal murmured.
Pick finally gave her an exasperated glare. “Look, I don’t know what she means by magic, either.” He waved his hand up at the floating diagram. “But does that look like a fucking PowerPoint to you, Rory?”
The woman narrowed her eyes, but stayed silent. Rory? Sandy lifted a brow. Aurora Gilchrist, the vice-president at Strategic Industries who “oversaw,” in air quotes, BRC? He didn’t think she even worked in the area.
“Different worlds use different technologies, and you may consider magic a form of technology if you wish. The point is that you succeeded in creating a gate and connecting it to my world’s.” She waved a hand, and the model of the network shimmered out of existence. Then she crossed her arms and looked down at Pick, Gilchrist, and the tigers. “However, your connection should not have brought me from our gate to yours, even though I was standing in ours at the moment you made it. You apparently also succeeded in creating some form of negative flow between gates. Rather than pushing from here to there, you pulled from there to here.”
“We didn’t know.” Pick looked pained. “I didn’t—all the data suggested the tunnel shouldn’t have been more than a few angstroms wide if we were lucky. We were expecting that maybe in a decade it’d lead to advancements in radio astronomy.”
Gilchrist rolled her eyes.
Amarylis sighed. “Do you have another similar set of equipment somewhere else, Dennis Pick, that we may use to recreate the gate?”
“No. Well, yes, but only partially. It would be months of work, at best, to bring it to the point we’d reached here.”
The Sivra winced, rubbing her forehead. “I may be able to help you accelerate that process, if I talk to your…what is the word you used, Sandy? Engineers.”
The tiger who’d been holding a finger to his earpiece was at it again. Or maybe it was the other tiger; as far as Sandy could tell, they looked identical. “Yes, sir.” He turned toward Gilchrist. “Field Director Brickman asks that he be involved in any negotiations with the alien. It’s essential you make no promises to it until he arrives.”
“Her.” Amarylis’s voice carried a distinct snarl to it. She added sotto voce, “Do I not look female even by your people’s standards?”
Sandy couldn’t help another glance down at her chest for a moment. “You do. Definitely.” He cut himself off before he blathered on with Very. Quite. For heaven’s sake, cat, this was absolutely not the time to start feeling hormonal, and absolutely not the being to let trigger that.
Pick gave the tiger a sour look. “But apparently not essential we avoid offending the first alien our world’s made contact with.”
The tiger readjusted his mirrored sunglasses, looking impassive but for the slight droop of his ears.
The panther looked back up to Amarylis. “You are the first alien who’s been to our world, right?”
She lifted a brow. “As far as I am aware, yes. There’s nothing like your kind in Sivra records, at the least, and given our scale difference, I would find it…surprising if we had traveled here without being spotted.”
“Right.” He put a hand on his hip, looking thoughtful.
Gilchrist, the caracal, spoke up. “How many worlds with gates are there, Ms. Amarylis?”
“Forty-three, controlled by twenty-nine different species.”
“And what are the gates used for? Trade routes? Leisure travel? Immigration?”
“Primarily trade, but all kinds of business and travel have taken place over time. Including immigration, although that can be fraught.”
“I’m sure the politics are…complicated.”
“And just adjusting to size differences would be, too,” Sandy added. Gilchrist stiffened, nodding with a gritted-teeth smile.
“Both of those are issues, yes. We are the largest of the races that use the gates, but there is wide variance in physicality.”
Gilchrist nodded. “I assume we’re somewhere close to the average.”
“You are not.” Amarylis shook her head, a hint of a smile visible. “You would be the smallest.”
The caracal’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth, but didn’t say anything. Pick grunted, brows lifting. Both of the tigers were instantly back on their earpieces.
Another helicopter landed in the distance. Amarylis watched it, then glanced up at the military ’copter. She remained silent for several seconds. “How far is your second laboratory from this location?”
“That’s not as easy to answer as it sounds. We have other offices, but this is the main research center. We’ll have to find a new place to set up, and…it has to be big enough for you, doesn’t it?” Pick rubbed the back of his head, glancing at Gilchrist. “The hangar?”
She managed to shift her pained, slightly panicked expression back to an all-business smile. “Let’s circle back around to next steps when we have more clarity, Dennis.”
Amarylis narrowed her eyes slightly, fixing her gaze on Gilchrist.
The caracal looked back up, her smile freezing. “This isn’t a situation we have a playbook for,” she said tightly. “Please be patient.”
“And what is your name?”
One of her ears flagged. “Gilchrist. Aurora Gilchrist, Vice President of Systems Development.”
“If I understand your land’s names, they are a personal name followed by one that signifies…family? Home region?”
“Family,” Pick said. “Sometimes it might have come from a region, or an occupation, but at least in our part of the world, it’s become just a family signifier.”
Gilchrist nodded. “Using the family name is more formal, and the first name is more casual.”
“Which would you prefer I use?”
“Call me Dennis. Please.” Pick barely restrained clear nervous excitement, as if he were a superfan meeting his favorite singer.
“I, ah, whichever you would like. Ms. Gilchrist or Aurora. You have…just one name?”
“Customarily, yes. We only elaborate with other signifiers when necessary. I could be called ‘Amarylis, Gatekeeper’ if one had to differentiate. Now—” She stopped, looking into the distance.
Sandy followed her gaze; so did Pick and Gilchrist. A black sedan with a flashing amber light stuck to the roof screeched to a halt about a hundred feet away. A lion in a business suit, charcoal gray rather than black, no tie, got out, leaving the door open, and dashed toward them at a fast jog, two more tiger MIBs trailing behind him. He had more of a fashion model thing going on than a secret agent thing, but he sported the black sunglasses that his agency had apparently made standard issue.
As he reached them, he had a badge out in one hand. “Field Director Rob Brickman,” he announced breathlessly, waving the badge at Pick and Gilchrist but looking up at Amarylis. “Holy shit, it’s real.”
“She,” Pick said quickly. “Amarylis. She.”
“Uh huh.” Brickman kept staring. “How do you know her name?”
“Because I told him,” Amarylis snapped.
Brickman pushed his glasses up to the top of his head, blinking rapidly, then gave the two MIBs who’d been shadowing Pick and Gilchrist accusing glares. One of the tigers shrugged uncomfortably; the other shuffled his paws, looking down.
“You’re the science guy?” Brickman pointed at Pick.
“Yeah.”
“You tell me what’s going on.”
Amarylis began, “I can—”
Brickman held up a hand to her. “Let me get briefed.” He motioned Pick to follow him a few steps away. Gilchrist and the MIBs followed.
The Sivra stared after them, then shifted on her haunches, muttering. “I am often teased by friends and other gate workers about how I prefer to fade into the background. I am now stuck in a situation where that should be impossible, where I am not only your world’s first contact with aliens but I am literally giant. Yet I am being treated as a side effect to be dealt with in their spare time.”
“I’m sorry. It’s not a great introduction to our world, is it?”
“I know from your perspective, this is a spectacularly bad introduction to larger galactic civilization. You should have met diplomats, leaders, been…gently eased into the idea.” She sighed. “But thank you for being the only one among you who has apologized, even if it makes me feel all that more abashed for using you.”
Brickman strode back toward them, waving over his shoulder at the police. “All right. We have a first order of business: moving you,” he pointed at Amarylis, “somewhere secure.”