“I’m not sure if I’m more amazed or alarmed that this worked.” Pick looked around BRC 9, a four-story office and laboratory building empty except for six people: Pick himself, Sandy, and four engineers. Two of the engineers walked around taking an inventory of the power and network connections available; two others busied themselves setting up a “control center” in a meeting room, gathering computers and monitors.
They’d parked on the access road Sandy had visited the day before, walking up the exercise trail. The damaged part of the campus remained deserted beyond the police presence, chiefly at the main gates and around the building Amarylis had destroyed. The only person they’d run into was a security guard outside, which was tense for maybe four seconds until he waved, called Pick by name, and cheerfully said, “Ms. Gilchrist said to expect you, but to keep it all hush-hush. Go on in.”
“I feel like I should be back at the hangar.” Sandy paced. “Making sure… I don’t know. Somebody’s got to run interference between Ms. Gilchrist and Amarylis. What could she possibly want Amarylis to agree to? She knows she’s not a diplomat or politician or…anything.”
“I don’t think Amarylis needs protection. I suspect she’s going to try to get Amarylis to promise to put in a good word with…someone, somewhere, somehow. She can’t ask for much without drawing Brickman’s notice, so I wouldn’t worry about it.” He pointed to Sandy’s laptop. “Besides, we can use your help here.”
“All I did was contribute a math library.”
“From what Tim tells me, you’re underselling yourself. You helped work out a few of the equations they needed.”
“That’s overselling myself. Figuring out which variables to plug in where isn’t a big deal.”
A jaguar standing by a junction box, making notes on a tablet computer, looked over. “Figuring out which variables to plug in where is literally half of our job,” he called.
Sandy shrugged uncomfortably. “I mean, that’s all worked out now anyway.”
“We still don’t know how to calculate Amarylis’s ‘points of reference,’” Pick pointed out. “You know, if you want an excuse to go back to the hangar that’ll fly with the suits, that’s it. Talk with her about how her gates work compared to how ours accidentally worked. Figure out how to translate what she means into what we need.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.” He grabbed his laptop and threw it in his shoulder bag.
This time, the checkpoint on the road in to the airfield was a relative breeze. Frustrated tech workers still tried to get to their nearby office buildings, but far fewer today. Probably the ones who hadn’t tried to come in yesterday and the ones who were too obstinate to take no for an answer. A flash of the new ID badge to the patrol officer now got him a nod and a wave through with no questions. Finding parking and getting into the building remained an exercise in security theater and media avoidance, but they’d ironed the kinks out of the process by now.
The sense of finely tuned bureaucratic machinery geared up to full speed continued inside the hangar. No one had time to mill around or gawk; different groups gathered around card tables, whiteboards, and big portable monitors, a series of makeshift conference rooms and dashboards and constant meetings. Everyone had somewhere to be now, some job to do, some position to argue.
Everyone except Amarylis. She sprawled in her corner of the hangar vacantly, with no one close by, no one taking the opportunity to talk to the giant alien. She might have been the catalyst for all the activity, but none of the agents, soldiers, scientists and politicans appeared interested in involving her with any work beyond finding ways to get her food and water. She had a giant barrel nearby as a cup. Had they managed to get another meal for her yet? Granted, just one dish a day at that scale made a hell of a challenge, but even so.
He jogged over to her. “Amarylis!”
Her ears lifted first, then her head, then the rest of her, back into a sphinx-like pose. “Sandy.” She smiled, but she sounded—and looked—tired.
“How are you holding up?” He walked to her forepaws.
“Holding…” It took her a moment to work through the colloquialism. “I am bored and restless. I am hungry despite the efforts I know people are making to get me adequate food, but I can tell that if I complain, people will begin wondering if I am about to eat them.”
“The size difference does bring out a little…um…primal fear. I’m sure nobody thinks Sivra actually do that.” Sandy coughed, trying not to add they don’t, right?
Amarylis looked down at him searchingly for a second, and a hint of a mischievous smile played across her muzzle. “Of course not. You are barely bite-sized. Think how many of you it would take for a single meal.”
His tail poofed out. “Ah…”
She leaned down, her smile becoming a full grin. “You are easy to tease.”
Sandy swallowed, his ears coloring. “Thanks? I mean…uh. So. Um.”
She laughed, then straightened up, rolling her shoulders and sighing. “I would like to get out of this building and stretch. If I cannot go home yet, I would like to be treated better than I have been. Despite the promises of working with Dennis Pick’s engineers, I have hardly been introduced to them, and I have not seen them here this morning.”
“I can help with that. I mean, the last part. Uh…could you please pick me up so I can talk more quietly?”
She held out a hand, and lifted him to her muzzle when he climbed on.
“So…” He trailed off, looking at her lips and teeth, past them at her neck, barely bite-sized echoing around in his brain. Focus, cat. “Mr. Pick, uh, Dennis and his team are off-site trying to get going on setting things up for your teleportation spell.”
Amarylis looked puzzled a moment, then her giant ears lifted. “Without waiting for permission from Ms. Gilchrist and Mr. Brickman?” she whispered.
“Right. They know—”
She cut him off with a nuzzle. A quick, light nuzzle from Amarylis’s standpoint, no doubt, but it pressed him back into her palm pad, soft black lips pressing against his face and legs to hold him in place for a push from a soft, wet tongue tip wider than his whole body against his chest and hips. “Thank you.” Her voice was an even softer whisper than before, but the warm vibration from it lit up the few nerve endings he had that weren’t already buzzing on overload.
“I—uh—oh wow.” He closed his eyes, breathing shakily.
She drew back. “I am sorry if that was…too much. But hearing that makes me so happy.”
“No.” Yes, it was too much, but in the best way possible. He hadn’t known it was possible to feel primal terror and a distressing level of lust simultaneously. “Uh, no. I mean, I’m glad.” He opened his eyes and gulped in air, hoping he wasn’t blushing madly. “They. Uh. They know they’re going to need a lot of power and an amplifier like they used the first time, and they have that, but we need to understand what you mean by points of reference. Points in three-dimensional space?”
She nodded. “Yes, the position of your gate and the position of mine.” She set him down gently on the floor again. “A teleportation spell from one part of a planet to another needs only the positions on that globe to be determinate; a spell-caster can summon enough power on her own for that. But to simulate what a gate does requires power similar to a gate. And, for the initial casting, you must consider both position and momentum.”
“Because the gates are both moving fast on their planets through physical space.”
She nodded.
“That’s the challenge we had. I mean, kind of. We know where the connector is on our end, but we can’t reliably determine where the other end’s going to be. We baked assumptions about the Uncertainty Principle into our model, but I’m not sure that they were right. The other side of the connector was supposed to open in…nowhere. Empty space. But it was a wide range of empty space that the end point could have appeared in.”
“The ‘Uncertainty Principle?’”
“It’s the theory that some physical properties, like position and momentum, are complementary variables, so the more accurately you measure one for a given particle or wave, the less accurate the measurement of the other one can be. Position and momentum are one pair, and energy and time are another.”
“I see.” She considered. “You were controlling for the wrong variable.”
“We…were controlling for the one we had control over. The way our experiment sets up the traversable connector is warping space with the momentum from an immense amount of focused energy. It’s almost…temporarily rearranging gravity through higher-order dimensions to create folds in space and bring them close together. So we’re focused on momentum so much that calculating the end position gets, uh, fuzzy.”
She nodded slowly. It was difficult to tell if she’d gotten lost working through his awkward explanation. He knew he wasn’t using the right terminology because he didn’t know the right terminology, but the chances were the “right” terminology from her perspective was entirely different anyway.
At length, she said, “I still think I am right.” She traced a rune in the air with a claw tip in front of him, and another one of her magic diagrams appeared, this one a mere three feet across—just for Sandy’s viewing. “It does not matter if the end position is ‘fuzzy’ as long as it is close to an existing gate. Or, as you put it, an existing fold in space.”
The diagram looked admirably incomprehensible, halfway between a mathematical plot marked in languages he didn’t understand and calligraphic art on a scroll unfurled by a wizard at a climactic moment in a fantasy movie. He took his phone out of his pocket and snapped a couple of photos of the image. “I’ll pass it on to the engineers. That still leaves the problem of knowing where the reference point for your homeworld is, and how to translate it into coordinates we understand.”
She laughed, shaking her head. “I have the reference point for my home world, Sandy. I need the reference point for this world, your world, relative to mine.”
“Oh.” His ears skewed. Of course. “Well. Uh. Okay, I’ll send that note to Dennis, too, and see if we can figure out…that. If you have star charts labeled with your coordinate system, it might help.”
“I do.” She traced another rune in the air, and another glowing diagram appeared. “You are able to send these to Dennis’s engineers?”
“Yes.” Sandy got out the phone and took a picture, and kept taking them as Amarylis changed the image by waving her hand, as if advancing through a slideshow. On the fifteenth one he paused, a realization snapping to him. “These are points on the portal network, aren’t they? Other gates?”
“They are. The first image was Sivrali, our homeworld. The last image will be a system-wide map, although if your images are only two-dimensional, I do not know how well it will translate from three-dimensional space.”
“If you can have it slowly rotate, I can take a video.”
“That is a good idea!” Even so, she methodically cycled through the remaining twenty-eight worlds in the gate system before starting a slowly rotating system map, each point labeled in the same beautiful, inscrutable text that the gate maps had used.
Switching the phone to video, he filmed until it made one entire rotation, about half a minute. “Got it.”
“What’s going on here?” someone yelled from below. “Nelson!”
Sandy’s ears lowered; he knew who the shouty guy was even before he spotted Brickman striding across the floor so fast that the two tiger agents trailing him—and Ms. Gilchrist—had to jog to keep up. “I, uh, we’re getting information we’re going to need for the gate from Amarylis.”
“You don’t have a go-ahead to start work yet!”
“Surely we don’t need a go-ahead to gather information, sir. The faster we can do that, the faster we can get the gate open.”
“And why are you gathering this information instead of that panther? Pick? Isn’t he the chief scientist?” He looked around, squinting suspiciously. “I haven’t seen him here today at all.”
“His team is off-site,” Gilchrist cut in.
“Why?”
She glanced at Sandy, then back at Brickman.
“You two…” He thrust a finger at Gilchrist, then at Sandy. “No one on this project should be off-site. What’s going on?” He looked between them all. “I’m getting to the bottom of this.” He strode off again.
Gilchrist rubbed her face. “Was he born that insufferable, or did he take special training courses?” She took a deep, steadying breath, and looked at Sandy, crossing her arms. “I very much want to yell at you to be more circumspect, Mr. Nelson, but I recognize there’s only so much one can do given Ms. Amarylis’s size. So I’ll gently urge you to do your best, all things considered.”
“I will, Ms. Gilchrist. This information is probably the key to making a new gate, if we can translate it.” He began sending the images to Pick through the messaging system.
“I admit that I don’t understand why Mr. Pick’s team can’t simply recreate what we did to accidentally bring Amarylis here in the first place. We have the data from that experiment, don’t we?”
“Your portal had a negative flow,” Amarylis said.
“And we…need a positive one?”
“For a permanent gate, you will need one with no flow except when you intend the gate to be open. But sending me home does not require a true gate, only groundwork on your part backed by my magic. As I said, this is much simpler than it might first appear.”
“I’ll take your word on that.” She looked back up at the giantess. “As unkind as it may be to drag you into our politics, we’re all taking a risk by accelerating this project without approval.”
“And you wish to ‘chat’ about what you need from me to make that risk worthwhile.”
“I…” Gilchrist fell silent, looking away, then sighed, crossing her arms. “When you do get home, is there anything you can do to support us—the company that Sandy, Dennis, and I work for—in building and operating the gate on this side? As both a gatekeeper and our first point of contact, your words will surely carry weight with your people, and they will with ours, too.”
“When I return home, I will give as full and true a report on what I have seen here as I am able to. What happened to bring me here, the steps you took to resolve your problems, how I have observed you behaving both to me and to each other.”
The caracal’s ears splayed. After a moment, she laughed uneasily. “I’ll go see what I can do about correcting problems.” She turned and strode off.
Amarylis watched her walk away, tilting her head. “I think I have failed at the politics of the situation again,” she murmured, looking down at Sandy.
“You were being honest.”
“It is a flaw of mine, yes.” She sighed.
He patted her closest forepaw. “I’m going to check if Dennis needs anything I can do for him from here.”
She nodded. “I appreciate you staying with me.”
He flicked his ears and smiled up, then sat down cross-legged between her paws, taking out his laptop.