Gate Crashers

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  Bucephalus transitioned back into real-space with Magellan in tow as the hyper window snapped shut behind them. Ahead, the sun of the Ulamante system shone like a yellow jewel. They were not alone. Over seventeen thousand vessels revealed themselves on passive sensors alone, spanning every size and shape imaginable, and even some that weren’t. One was so large, it was initially mistaken for a small moon, until it opened a hyperspace window and vanished, a most un-moonlike thing to do.

  D’armic had spent the last several hours in an unflappably polite conversation with his superiors in the Bureau of Frontier Management. After explaining the situation to three different layers of bureaucrats, he’d finally negotiated clearance to approach the system and even secured an audience for himself and his co-accused with the reigning members of the Assembly.

  Even with the application of D’armic’s credentials and smooth tongue, the eleven Turemok prisoners in Magellan’s cargo bay were the only thing keeping their escorts from becoming their executioners. Bucephalus’s prisoners were of less consequence, mostly because they had none. Mr. Buttercup had apparently gotten loose and made a bit of a mess of his captors.

  D’armic stood from the chair provided him on Magellan’s bridge. “You are nearing the Exclusion Zone. There is a transfer station to starboard. You will be expected to approach it and then slow to zero velocity and power down your drive systems.”

  Allison looked at the helm station. “Wheeler, do you see the station?”

  “Yes, ma’am, a dozen of them, actually. The nearest one is just under five hundred thousand clicks out.”

  “Do as Mr. D’armic suggested and ask Bucephalus to match. No sense waiting around. Show them we’re being gracious and compliant.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  Allison craned her neck to look at the small gray alien sitting behind her. “I notice you’re still using words like you and your to describe our circumstances.”

  “I would not presume to count myself among your crew, Allison Captain.”

  “Too late for that, I think. Whoever’s on the other side of this thing isn’t going to distinguish between you and me. They’re just going to see us.”

  “You may have a point.”

  “What happens next?”

  “Once we reach the transfer station, yourself and Maximus will have to decide on the delegation you wish to send to the Assembly. The delegation will board the station and submit to a thorough search.”

  “Sounds pretty routine so far. Then what?”

  “Once the station attendants are satisfied we do not pose a threat, we will be transferred to the Pillar for our audience with the Assembly.”

  “The Pillar; what’s that?”

  “It is … difficult to describe to anyone who has yet to witness it. You will see it for yourself soon.”

  “Fair enough. Prescott, give me Captain Tiberius, please.”

  Her com officer nodded, and Maximus’s face appeared in the air a moment later. “Hello, Ridgeway. What’s shakin’?”

  “What’s shaking? The fate of the Earth is ‘shaking,’ Captain. You could at least pretend you’re taking this seriously.”

  “Sorry, Captain, but I drove nuke-armed drone carrier subs through two wars. This isn’t my first ‘fate of the world hangs in the balance’ type of mission. You become desensitized after a while.”

  Allison wasn’t sure which was worse, Maximus’s cavalier attitude toward the possibility of a literal Armageddon, or the fact this adrenaline-intoxicated, talking peacock really had held the destiny of Earth in his hands on several occasions. No, the second part was definitely worse.

  Allison straightened her tunic before continuing, “The ships can’t go any deeper into the system. The station ahead is like a customs checkpoint. We need to decide who’s coming with us to talk to the Assembly.”

  “Well, you and me, obviously, and Mr. D’armic as our star witness. I’d like to bring along Lieutenant Harris.”

  “We aren’t allowed weapons.”

  Maximus snorted. “Harris is a weapon. Besides, symbolically, he’s the first human ground commander to face an alien enemy, and he won doing it.”

  “That’s fair. But symbolically speaking, if Lieutenant Harris is our brawn, then Mr. Fletcher is our brains. They’re a matching pair.”

  Maximus was dubious. “A steel-toed boot and a flip-flop make a better pair than those two.”

  “Hey!” Felix shouted from out of frame.

  “Don’t get all huffy, kid. You both do great work, but nobody’s likely to mistake you for twins.” Maximus looked back to Allison. “But I see where you’re coming from. So the five of us, then?”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Good. We’ll meet you on the station.”

  “Actually, I think it would be better if we take my shuttle, being that yours are armed. We don’t want to send the wrong message.”

  “Okay, you can pick me up at my house, but I need to be home by eleven.” Maximus cut the link.

  Allison gritted her teeth and let the frustration pass. If she couldn’t make Maximus take the situation seriously, she could at least prevent him from distracting her. “Prescott, call Jackie. Tell her I need a cab.”

  Within the hour, Jacqueline slid the shuttle and her five intrepid passengers into a docking slip outside the transfer station. A fleshy tube extruded from the station’s hull, straining toward the shuttle like the proboscis of a thirsty elephant.

  Maximus put words to what everyone else was thinking. “What the hell is that?”

  D’armic was the only one in a position to answer. “An All-Seal. With thousands of designs from hundreds of manufacturers, standardization is difficult. The All-Seal is adaptable to any hatch.”

  “It looks like a mohel’s recurring nightmare.”

  With an unsettling sucking sound, the All-Seal made contact with the shuttle. The hatch sensors on Jacqueline’s display chimed. “Board is green. We have a hard seal, ma’am.”

  Allison moved to the rear doors and pressed the release. A front of hot, humid air crept through the interior. “Come along, everyone. Let’s not keep our hosts waiting.”

  Maximus led the procession, with Harris, Felix, and D’armic following in his wake. Allison waited by the door. “Jackie, keep the engines warm.”

  “Good luck, Captain.”

  Allison caught up with the rest of the party floating in the meaty tube beyond the hatch. D’armic had glided to the head of the line, while the others wallowed through the microgravity.

  Eventually, they crawled, hopped, and swam their way into the transfer station, and into the bane of travelers throughout the galaxy: a TSA checkpoint.

  In this case, the acronym stood for Transfer Safety Authority, but the experience wasn’t improved by the change of verbiage or management. Two aliens, one Lividite, one like a moss-coated crab, stood on either side of a cylindrical chamber only marginally more inviting than a dentist’s chair covered in rusty nails.

  The mossy crab waved a spiky forearm at the newcomers. “Step forward and place your insulation on the conveyor.”

  Allison cocked an eyebrow. “Insulation?”

  Maximus grinned devilishly. “He means our clothes.”

  “She,” D’armic corrected.

  “What?”

  “The technician is a female Ish. You can tell by the shape of her mandibles.”

  “Oh, of course. Not sure how I missed that. Sorry about that, miss.”

  “Are you going to remove your insulation or not?” the guard asked.

  “Sure.” Maximus and Harris started unfastening their tunics. Allison crossed her arms over her chest.

  “What’s the problem?” asked the technician through comblike mouthparts. “You have nothing to fear, so long as you have nothing to hide.”

  “I have plenty to hide, thank you very much.”

  “C’mon, Ridgeway.” Maximus shucked his trousers like corn husks. “You don’t have any equipment I’m not already qu
alified on. Let’s not dillydally. Fate of the world, remember?”

  “Fine, but I’m going first, you’re turning around, and if I so much as feel your eyes on my backside, I’ll find you in your sleep.”

  “Now we’re talking.”

  “Turn around!”

  Only once Maximus made a half pirouette to face the entrance did Allison disrobe. At least the room was warm. She fed her uniform and undergarments into the scanner.

  “And the contents of your pouch.”

  “My what?”

  The Ish coiled her eyestalks. “Don’t try to play me the fool. I know mammals of your world have skin pouches.”

  “That’s marsupials, and none of us are Australian.”

  “So, no pouches?”

  Allison shook her head. “I would’ve noticed by now.”

  “Fine. Step into the scanning tube.”

  Allison did as requested. The clear door shut tight behind her.

  Felix stepped forward to investigate the chamber. “She’s already naked. What could she be hiding?”

  The Ish pointed a shrimplike finger at the machine’s display. “Implanted bombs, biological weapons in the bloodstream, nanite infestations, and infectious diseases.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot. Have you foiled any attacks?”

  “Never. That’s how we know it’s working.”

  Felix nodded slowly. He knew better than to argue the point. Toward the end of her life, Felix’s paternal grandmother took to wearing a necklace of small wooden spikes and silicon chips to protect her from cybernetic vampires. He once sarcastically asked how many times she’d been attacked. She answered, “Never. That’s how I know it’s working.”

  “Did she say ‘infectious diseases’?” Allison shouted through the door.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell her not to look too closely at Tiberius. Who knows what he’s caught in port.”

  Maximus laughed. “Touché, dear Captain.”

  The debasing process eventually wound to a conclusion, and everyone dressed and moved on to the next station. They lined up in front of a small room that looked a bit like an airlock. Felix was the first to enter, but the door snapped shut behind him.

  He looked at D’armic with eyes like cue balls. “What’s going on?”

  “Wasn’t it clear? You’re in a transfer booth, Mr. Fletcher.”

  “What does that mean? I thought we were waiting for a shuttle.”

  “Oh, no. Far too many beings visit the Pillar to make shuttles practical. The transfer booth transports without the need of physical conveyance.”

  “A teleporter?” Felix panicked, beating his fists against the glass. “Get me out of here!”

  Harris sprang to the door and tried his hand at the controls without success.

  D’armic looked confused. “I do not understand, Mr. Fletcher. What is causing your anxiety?”

  “What’s my anxiety?” Felix wailed. “Having my atoms boiled off, digitized, broadcast, and reassembled. I’ll be dead! Whatever comes out the other side will be a copy!”

  “Ah, now I understand your confusion. This machine isn’t a teleporter, Mr. Fletcher. The computing power and scanning resolution required make them effectively impossible.”

  “How does this thing work, then?”

  “It’s simple, really. Your thermal energy is lowered to a fraction above total zero. Then your atoms are aligned into a state, which I believe you call a Bose-Einstein condensate. Then we quantum tunnel the whole superatom through space to the transfer pad on the Pillar and reheat you. The process is nearly instantaneous. You probably won’t even notice.”

  Felix threw his arms over his head. “But that’s even more ridic—”

  Flash!

  CHAPTER 42

  Flash!

  “—ulous than teleporting … a … Wow.” The window ahead of Felix was no longer filled with Harris’s concerned face, but an enormous tunnel of beautiful lattice and glass covering a boulevard bustling with a greater variety of life than found on all of Earth.

  Felix didn’t feel like a copy. Still, he patted himself down, just to be sure everything was where it was supposed to be. Once the standard inventory of parts was accounted for, he gave up and stepped out of the chamber.

  “Welcome to the Pillar. Now stay where you are, human.”

  Felix turned toward the source of the warning, only to come face-to-mid-torso with a Turemok pointing a rather large laser at his temple. Five other guards accompanied him, all Turemok.

  “You have some hard scales coming here, I’ll give you that much, but if you as much as twitch, I’ll give your head a ventilation shaft. Understood?”

  “I’d nod to say yes, but I don’t want you to mistake it for a twitch.”

  “Smart. We wait for the rest of your geocidal friends to transfer. Then you can spin your story to the Assembly before your execution.”

  “Peachy.” Felix crossed his arms and waited while his compatriots popped into existence at fifteen-second intervals. Upon D’armic’s arrival, they were prodded toward the boulevard. Their guards took up positions like a six-pointed star around them.

  The congested crowds saw them coming and created a space for the procession of prisoners to pass unperturbed. Hundreds of pairs, and triplets, and quartets of eyes leered at them, as did several echo-locating organs, magnetic sensitive antennae, and one exceptionally sensitive set of olfactory tentacles. This was followed by a flood of camera flashes, image scanners, and holo-feeds documenting the newcomers.

  In the middle of the boulevard, the floor seemed to distort and surge, like a river of liquid marble. The lead guard stepped over the turbulent boundary layer and into the flow and was whisked down the hall. D’armic went next.

  “Move.”

  Felix felt the muzzle of a weapon dig into his ribs. He took a tentative little hop, still half expecting to sink like a rock, but the surface supported him easily.

  “It’s fine. Just a moving sidewalk.”

  The rest of them piled on, and they accelerated down the endless boulevard at breakneck speed. Felix had to brace himself against the rush of wind.

  “How do we get off this thing?” he shouted to D’armic.

  “It knows our destination. We will decelerate upon arrival.”

  “Where are we? Why is it called the Pillar?”

  D’armic pointed up through the crystal lattice that formed the ceiling. “Witness for yourself.”

  Felix looked up for the first time since getting out of the transfer booth. A world looked back. A blue halo surrounded it, belying a thick atmosphere. The terminator bisected the planet precisely down the center. The dayside was covered in red plains, white-capped mountains, and purple seas. The night side was lavished with city lights like clusters of galaxies, each connected by winding ribbons of illumination. The base of the Pillar reached out like an Oriental fan, each spine extending outward hundreds of kilometers into the land surrounding the hub, doubtlessly to distribute its immense weight.

  “A spacescraper. That’s incredible. The tallest building we’ve managed back home is only seven kilometers, and it fell down after a few years. How tall is it?”

  “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Fletcher.” D’armic pointed over Felix’s shoulder. “Look behind you.”

  He did, and was greeted by another planet. The Pillar reached down to its surface as well, connecting the twin worlds like the shaft of a cosmic barbell.

  An attentive listener could have heard the fuses in Felix’s head blow. The incalculable engineering obstacles, not to mention the fundamental principles of physics that had to be overcome to build what he witnessed, were insurmountable. It would have been easier for him to believe his eyes were simply lying to him. He stared onward in mute silence for almost a minute before the spell broke.

  “It’s … it’s a tether.”

  “Quite the opposite, Mr. Fletcher. It is, as the name implies, a pillar, built to prevent the twin planets of Ulamante from falling i
nto one another.”

  “That’s impossible,” Felix said reflexively. “Nothing could hold up against those kinds of compression forces.”

  D’armic shook his head. “Not impossible. Merely very, very difficult.”

  By this time, the rest of the party had noticed the gob-smacked look on Felix’s face and discovered the marvel for themselves.

  Allison found her voice. “Who? Who could manage something like this?”

  D’armic turned to face her. “No single race is responsible. The Assembly of Sentient Species undertook the project soon after its formation. It had long been known that the Ulamante twins were in a decaying orbit and that they would eventually collide. However, evacuating and relocating two industrialized planets full of sentients, and their ecosystems, was an enormous logistical challenge.

  “The Pillar was the answer. As enormously expensive as it would prove to be, it was still cheaper to the galactic economy than the loss of two planets and the flood of refugees that would follow. So the Assembly voted to undertake the project, still the sole unanimous decision in the body’s history. Construction took seven centuries, but upon completion, it became a symbol of what could be achieved with united effort. Out of gratitude, the Ulamante offered the Pillar as the permanent home of the Assembly. It has been headquartered here ever since.”

  “That’s great!” Maximus had to shout against the wind. “Thanks for the narrated tour, but I’m less worried about how your Assembly saved these planets than I am about stopping it from destroying ours.”

  “The facts are with us, Maximus Captain. We must trust the Assembly to see reason.”

  “Trust politicians to see reason? Damn, and they just finished the Crazy Horse monument, too. I wanted to see that.”

  “Don’t be such a pessimist, Tiberius,” Allison said. “Nothing could be more incompetent than our parliament, and even they would have trouble screwing this one up.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right.”

  They continued onward as the crowds of gawking onlookers blurred past. News of their appearance traveled through the Pillar even faster than the flowing walkway they stood on.