“I just need to understand what you mean by ‘rescue party.’” Brickman and several of the ubiquitous agents stood on a catwalk running along one of the hangar walls, about thirty feet up, putting them closer to Amarylis’s eye level. “How many would there be? All, uh, Sivra, like you? Armed?” The lion was holding his sunglasses in one hand, looking up at the giantess with a worried expression.
Sandy, standing close to one of Amarylis’s forepaws, listened in. He could tell the government agents weren’t thrilled with his presence, but his status as “hostage but maybe friend of the giant alien” continued giving him a lot of leeway for the moment. Dennis had headed to another part of the hangar a few minutes ago to meet some of the tunneling project engineers who’d shown up.
“I believe the term ‘rescue party’ is clear. Yes, Sivra, and they would be prepared to deal with the possibility of encountering hostile situations.”
Brickman ran a hand through his hair, then turned to one of the agents. “We need to get word to the NSC pronto. We have to start preparations.”
“If you simply let me go home, you do not have to prepare for more Sivra to appear unexpectedly.” Amarylis rubbed her forehead, looking pained. “I am not sure that I have properly communicated how easy helping me could be. If I can determine a point of reference here, and your engineers help me correctly locate the corresponding point of reference for the Sivra gate that I help maintain, then all I will need is a sufficient energy source to open a gate back myself.”
“What, teleporting? You’re saying you can teleport?”
“I am saying what I have been saying,” she snapped. “If you wish to call a temporary gate ‘teleporting,’ call it teleporting.”
“But you need our help to do it.”
Amarylis’s voice took on a distinct have you been listening at all tone. “To get back home, yes, I do.” She pointed at the small group Pick had joined. Pick noticed and waved to her; one of the other engineers, a cheetah, waved too, looking wide-eyed. All of them looked wide-eyed, actually. Sandy sympathized. “Specifically, their help.”
“We really are working on setting everything up.” Brickman emphasized his words by waving both hands. “There’s just…a lot. It’s not an exaggeration to say the whole world is starting to watch what we’re doing here. Controlling the information environment is a top priority.” He jerked a thumb back at the engineers. “They have to be read into the situation and get on board with our way of moving forward. And the information you just gave us about this possible rescue team, it complicates matters, that’s all I’m saying.”
Sandy cleared his throat, raising a hand. “Can’t you just issue a press release that says what Amarylis has said?”
“What?” Brickman looked down at him, clearly irritated.
“Just say that the tunneling project confirmed there were other worlds by accidentally bringing someone from another world here, and we need to get her back home as a top priority.”
Brickman stared at him silently for several seconds, then murmured something to the men by him, nodded once, and headed toward the stairs. “I’ll take it under advisement. In the meantime, please just trust us and hang tight for a while.” He gave both Amarylis and Sandy a thumbs up, then strode away into a crowd, starting to bark orders.
“‘Hang tight?’” Amarylis murmured.
“Wait, basically.”
She sighed, looking down at the concrete floor. “I suppose I am being…impatient, and not seeing the situation as you would. I am not very diplomatic at the best of times, and…” She shook her head. “I am not used to being off-world.”
“Really?” He tilted his head. “I figured you’d get to see lots of other worlds as a Gatekeeper.”
“I maintain and operate the gate, but I do not use it. I do not like travel. I like learning about other places, other cultures, but I like staying at home.” She sighed, and waved a hand around the hangar. “Even for Sivra who do like to travel, most other worlds are challenging because of their scales, and where we can safely move is limited.”
“I guess it’s pretty awkward having the universe being ankle-to-knee high to you.”
“It is.” She smiled, with just a hint of unexpected impishness. “Although it can also be rather thrilling, even if convincing races that we have not met before that we have very little interest in trampling over them, either literally or metaphorically, can get tiresome.”
“What’s your world like?”
She blinked at the question. “It is…well. Hmm.” She started describing the Gate where she worked, the house she lived in, the town—city?—that contained both. Sandy tried his best to follow along, asking questions occasionally. The picture forming in his mind shifted quickly from “medieval village” to “European city” to something he suspected he didn’t quite have a handle on. Technology sounded vaguely last century, but with magic largely taking the place of engineering. Roads remained dirt and they had no vehicles, but had a public transit system comprised of short-jump gates: she lived about ten “miles” from her workplace, which sounded like it would be well over a hundred real miles, if not closer to two, but her commute only involved about a half-mile of walking to and from gate stations. They built mostly with wood, often magically strengthened and shaped. She had a favorite café, which she described as having tables and cushions but nothing like a chair for bipeds. She liked her house; it sounded small, on her scale, but cozy and well-located. Apparently, Sivra moved between homes freely when they needed more (or less) space.
“Is it possible for, uh, people on my scale to visit?”
She nodded. “It is straightforward. It’s advisable to have an escort to keep you safe, but if you wanted to visit, I would be happy to do that for you.” She smiled, then tilted her head. “Tell me some about of your world, then, since I have seen so little of it.”
He rubbed his ear, then started talking about parallels to what she’d told him: about cars and trains, about the apartment he rented (she seemed to know the idea of rental homes—and home ownership—in only the most abstract way), about a coffee shop he went to a lot and a bar he went to occasionally.
In the middle of this, Brickman walked up again, and motioned to Sandy. “Let’s chat.” He didn’t wait for acknowledgement, just headed off. The ocelot flashed Amarylis an awkward smile and jogged over to meet the field director.
“Okay.” Brickman glanced up at Amarylis with more of a forced smile, and lowered his voice, staying close to the wall and leaning toward Sandy. “Nelson, wasn’t it? Sandy?”
“Yeah.”
“Sandy. Look, we do have to get Ms. Amarylis here home as soon as we can. We all know that, right? But if we’re opening a gate to another world—multiple other worlds, full of giants and magic and space tech and god knows what other shit—we have to do it in a way that lets us control who and what comes through.”
“That’s what she said she’d help us do.”
“No, it isn’t. What she said was to send her home and then wait for an unknown number of aliens to pop through at an unknown location at an unknown time. You see how that’s not the same thing, right?”
“That’s not…” Okay, it was, if Brickman wanted to give it the most cynical reading possible. “You’re saying you don’t trust her?”
“I’m not saying she isn’t trustworthy, kid, I’m saying that we don’t have any track record of dealing with, what are they, Sivra before. And she hasn’t exactly been the friendliest ambassador we could have met so far, even before the threats about an armed rescue party.”
“She’s not an ambassador, she’s…basically an engineer. I know engineers. I am an engineer. She’s an introvert.”
He crossed his arms. “I’m pretty sure they say you should never get a crush on someone who can step on you.”
Sandy’s ears flushed. “I don’t have a crush, and I don’t think anyone has ever said that.”
“Sure, kid. I’m just saying, we need all the bases covered, right? Make sure all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed in whatever contract we’re working out with her. And like you said, you’re an engineer, which means you’re not a negotiator. What you can do to help make this go faster is to talk to your people.” He jerked a thumb toward a crowd past the sentry station. “Like, see if you or your friend Mr. Pick can make VP Dragonlady stop threatening to go on strike.”
“What does—”
Brickman held up both hands. “Gotta go. You talk to her, not her, if you get my drift.” He strode off.
Sandy ran a hand through his hair as he walked back toward Amarylis. Strike? What the hell was he on about? People went on strike against corporate executives, not the other way ’round.
The vixen’taur remained sprawled on her flank, a position whose comfortably loafing appearance was undercut by the tension visible in her upper half. She leaned over as he approached, speaking in what must, for her, be a bare whisper. “You do not look pleased with Field Director Brickman’s words.”
“Well, it’s not…” He trailed off, and glanced around, speaking softly. “How easy it for you to hear me at this volume?”
“Your voice is faint, but I can hear it.”
“It sounds like Mr. Brickman’s not, uh, not completely confident about sending you back to your home and waiting for you to send people back here.”
Her gigantic ears lowered. “Does he expect your engineers to rebuild your gate entirely on your own?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how fast we’d be able to do that with your help. I mean, I’m sure it’d be a lot faster than the original tunneling project took, but…”
“How fast was that?”
Sandy grimaced. “Uh, eleven years, I think? But that’s counting all the—”
A thunderous growl from Amarylis cut off the ocelot’s sentence. She quickly rolled back to a standing position, paws smacking the concrete floor hard enough to vibrate the hangar’s metal frame.
Sandy scrambled backward reflexively, nearly running into Pick, who’d jogged back over to see what the hell was going on. He gave Sandy a wide-eyed, questioning look.
“Brickman seems like he wants to send her home on his terms, not hers, and I don’t really know what that means besides probably keeping her as long as it takes us to make a new quantum tunnel that we can control. Or something.”
“Of course. Fucking idiot.” Pick put his hands on top of his head, staring up at the ceiling. “All right. All right. It’s our team that’s going to be working on it. We can just tell him what he wants to hear while we do things her way.”
Sandy stared up at the giantess, who was surveying the crowd with an angry expression. “Uh. Yeah, that’s…”
He trailed off as Amarylis started striding forward. It took about two steps before people in front of her, soldiers and agents and Mysterious Important People In Suits, began scattering; nobody screamed, but the level of anxious murmuring rose sharply. Some soldiers started chasing after her, or waving up as if to block her path. One with a megaphone tried to warn her off. “Ma’am, please stay—you can’t—”
She could, of course, by just walking right over the sentry barrier.
Pick and Sandy looked at one another, then ran after her. They couldn’t see just where she was going, but they didn’t have to. It was crystal clear who she was going to have words with.
“Field Director Brickman,” Amarylis called. Her voice didn’t quite shake the catwalks, but it was loud enough to make everyone go silent for a moment.
The ocelot and cougar pushed through the crowd, heading toward where Brickman, Gilchrist, and several Mysterious Important People in Suits (Sandy realized he was already starting to think of them as the MIPIS) stood, mostly gaping up at her.
“Is it true,” she said without preamble, “that even after what I have told you, you intend to keep me here while you rebuild your own attempt at a gate without my help because you do not trust my word?”
Brickman stared directly at Sandy for a second, eyes narrowed, then looked up at the giantess, raising his hands. “That’s not what I said.”
“Good to hear it isn’t,” Pick cut in, staring daggers at the agent, “because we can’t build a gate without her help. We only transported her here because we accidentally hooked into to her civilization’s existing gates system, remember? Our experiment was set up to make a connector maybe a nanometer or two wide. We don’t know how to intentionally construct one that could zap a grain of rice to another part of the galaxy, much less anything her size.”
Brickman rubbed his face, then gave Gilchrist a dull stare. “So what do we need your guys for at all?”
Her tail lashed. “Because ‘your guys’ don’t have the expertise or information to do any of this, either with or without her help. Which you know, as we’ve already been discussing this.”
“If by ‘discussing’ you mean insisting the feds give you full control of everything or your team doesn’t do jack shit, yeah, the talks have been really fucking productive.”
“I’m not asking for full control, I’m asking for our fair—”
“Stop!”
That time, Amarylis’s outburst really did shake the catwalks. Several of the stanchions around the sentry gate fell over, clattering loudly in a sudden silence as everyone in the hangar stared at her.
She looked around, ears folding back, then stared down at Gilchrist and Brickman, taking a deep breath. “I am tired and I am thirsty and I am hungry, and if you think I am being impatient, I am sorry, but you are being rude. Work out whatever you are fighting over between yourselves without putting me in the middle of it, show me enough trust to work with your engineers in the interim, and for all the stars’ sake, please find a way to get me some water.”
Gilchrist and Brickman—and most of the crowd by them—stared back dumbly, but the caracal was the first to snap out of it. She waved at assistants. “Work on getting her water first, then we’ll figure out food.” People started scurrying around. She looked back up at Amarylis with a more pleading expression. “We’re doing what we can, but please understand how…outside the entire planet’s experience this all is.”
“I do,” Amarylis replied more softly. “But I also understand that I am asking for help that is very much within your power to give.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “We’re doing what we can,” she repeated after a moment.
Sandy was distracted from the scene by his own growling stomach. Dammit, he hadn’t had anything to eat since this morning, had he? And he’d had his usual breakfast of a medium coffee and a granola bar.
“Um.” He looked up at Amarylis. “I’m going to have to go get food myself. I’ll do my best to get back in—” He looked to the executive. “Ms. Gilchrist, can you make sure I can get back in?”
“That’s Brickman’s department.” Her tone made it crisply clear what she thought of that arrangement. “Frankly, I don’t know what he’ll say about it. You’re…” She spread her hands. “Unless I’m misreading the situation, and I’m not, you’re here by dumb luck. I’ll ask him, though.” She narrowed her eyes slightly. “No, I’ll tell him.”
“Make sure that you do,” Amarylis said. When Gilchrist looked up at her with eyes that had just gone wide again, the Sivra added, “Please,” and smiled widely. The caracal’s tail fluffed out.