Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  For a moment she considered it.

  Leave was complicated for analysts, but not like it was for agents. If she really wanted it, she could call in the right favors and be gone tomorrow. The general would sign off on it, she was almost sure, if it made it to his desk.

  Just drive.

  The plains would be mowed flat, the remains of cornstalks poking out of the ground like dry weeds, and the highways were straight until the mountains came in sight. Turn north through the foothills, stop where she wanted. It was odd, when she thought about it. There were enough places she could get without even a passport that she had never seen. It was silly, she rationalized, to be so desperate to be on a new world. Silly.

  She went home.

  Ate half-stale crackers out of a box, then got a pizza delivered. Worked out for an hour, then watched television until her brain was numb enough to sleep.

  She was just being silly.

  She got up in the morning, scolding herself for forgetting to turn on the heat the night before, and took a shower, long enough that she ran out of hot water. She never did that, but she was stalling this morning. She was going to go to work, open the file she had gotten last thing the night before, and continue doing cultural research on the latest contact planet. She already had half a dozen reasons to burn it, but none of them were red-flag reasons, so she could afford to let it play out a little longer before she pulled the agents.

  She ate cold pizza for breakfast and left for work.

  The cadets nodded to her at the security gates - she wasn’t important enough for salutes, but they were good kids and respected that she had a rank. If they’d known what she had done to get the rank, most of them would have stopped her for advice on getting into the program, even knowing they were too old. Everyone knew that if you were assigned to Kansas, you at least had a shot of coming in contact with the portal.

  They had campaigned to put the base somewhere less central to the country, when they were first negotiating the bill in Congress to build a permanent military installation to run a portal - back when they were considering licensing the technology to other countries. If things can go out through a portal, they can come in through one, as well. Wouldn’t putting it in he middle of existing military fortifications make more sense? Norfolk? Hawaii? How about moving it further away from population centers? Alaska? Lease land in the arctic from Canada? Put an American flag on Antarctica and be done with it?

  In the end, a reasonable argument was made that the flattest states in the country would be hardest to defend, from an invader’s point of view, and were in reasonable proximity to military forces without having east- or west-coast population centers at risk. The reason they chose Kansas was because of an unrelated budgeting bill. Compromise, something about sausage. Cassie liked it well enough.

  The sky was big.

  The sky was her favorite part of other worlds, because it was the part you noticed first. Were there moons? What colors were the suns? What was the spectral makeup to color the atmosphere? Most of them were blue, but she’d once been to a thin-atmosphered planet with a pink sky and fourteen moons. The moons were slowly, ever so slowly burning away, because the atmosphere was so thin and so deep that they orbited in air. They cast a tiny tail behind them as they spun in the sky.

  She parked the car, trying not to think of pink skies and moons like shooting stars, making her way to her desk and picking up where she left off.

  She’d been okay. She was still doing one of the most coveted jobs in the country, and she did it at a level that most people couldn’t. She liked her life, and she liked being able to be around Troy - being able to pick her friends at all. There were good things about being here.

  She sat.

  She worked.

  The buzz around her was pleasant and familiar.

  She was okay.

  A stack of pages landed next to her elbow like a door slamming. She jumped.

  “Read it, sign it,” the general said. He looked grumpy.

  “What’s going on, sir?” she asked, hesitating before she picked up the document. It was about Jesse. Agreement with the Jalnian Refugee Pertaining to Rights, Freedoms, Responsibilities, Limitations, et al.

  “You’re such a bright girl. You figure it out.”

  “Do I have an option not to sign it?” she asked. The room had grown quiet, but General Thompson’s reply was still so low that even the analysts on either side of her wouldn’t have heard it.

  “You opt out of this, your career is over,” he said. “And so is mine.”

  He turned and left. She pushed back from her desk and put her knees up on the front edge, taking out a pad of paper to take notes. Page one.

  “Holy cow,” Troy said that night, laying in bed with the important pages from the contract scattered in between them. “He got what he wanted, but boy did they bleed him dry for it.”

  Cassie was speechless.

  “This is happening,” she said. “I’m actually thinking about it.”

  “Babe, there was never a moment you weren’t going to do it,” Troy said, rolling onto his back and picking up the first page where she was mentioned. “You’re going back out.”

  “What do you suppose they know?” she asked.

  “You know I tried to sequence his DNA?” Troy asked abruptly, sitting up and reorganizing the stack of papers.

  “You what?”

  “He has DNA. All foreign terrestrials do,” he said.

  “What are you telling me?”

  “The little double-helixes that tell us how to be people. He’s got ‘em. So does everyone else we’ve come across. I can peel them, but I can’t always sequence them. Something strange about his DNA. It’s like it falls apart before I can sequence it.”

  “What else do you do in your little lab that you forgot to tell me about?”

  “He has a stomach and a heart and he processes animal and vegetable matter in the usual way,” Troy said. He laughed at Cassie’s expression. “Mostly we just get tissue samples. Stuff that comes off of their goods, stuff that the agents gather by mistake. We never send people out to get stuff for us on purpose.” He grew serious for a moment, handing her the papers. “We don’t know what kind of pathogens might be out there. You remember the agents that started getting sick at Pi-four, a few years back?”

  She shook her head and he sighed.

  “I’m not sure their disclosure with you guys was ever complete enough. We thought for a while that they might have picked up some kind of parasitic single-celled organism that was altering their DNA. A virus of some kind. Turned out that the planet had a bunch of background radiation that our initial scans hadn’t picked up, so we burned them and updated our equipment to catch it in the future, but we can’t rule it out. We can’t be certain that there’s never going to be a virus or a bacteria that decides that humans are the softest target it’s ever found. We could unleash the new smallpox on the world, you know?”

  Cassie nodded. She’d never thought about it. Troy shrugged.

  “So we try to stay prepared. We do all of that other stuff, supporting agents and building gadgets and being Q, and all that, but…” He shrugged again. “Jesse is the first of them I’ve gotten to examine in person. There have been others, but they ended up in other labs. Didn’t want to keep them too close to the portal. Jesse, they wanted to be around real portal analysts. I think they figured he wouldn’t even know it existed, though that was kind of dumb. It sounds like he remembers us being there.”

  “What are the odds?” she asked.

  “What are the odds of him picking us?” Troy answered. She nodded. Troy rubbed his chest for a second, then lay back down. “He was a nice enough guy about all of it. He picks up on culture like you wouldn’t believe. Joked about probes and abductions and stuff. He’d only been here a few days. We had him on life support until we were sure he was stable, and then we started the exams, and he was joking with us in English like he’d been here for decades.”

  C
assie put the contract on the nightstand and crawled under the covers, laying on her back and staring at the ceiling.

  “He acted like he was one of them, when we jumped, too. It’s different when he doesn’t look like them. He stands out, but no one can not like him, when he wants to.”

  “Best you remember that,” Troy said, settling next to her.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I know you trust him, and…” he shrugged. “Look, he got you what you want. I’m not going to say that you should turn your nose up at it. Just… be careful. Don’t get yourself stranded or dead out somewhere where we’ll never hear from you again.”

  “I don’t think he’d do that,” she said. Troy laughed.

  “I know you don’t. Honestly, I don’t either, but you have to be objective. We work assets all the time. We’re turning him into one. You have to expect someone as smart as he is to do the same thing. I’m not saying you’d ever be disloyal on purpose…”

  “Then don’t,” she said, just enough cold in her voice to get the point across.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I get it,” she answered.

  “I’d be very upset if you didn’t come back,” he said. She laughed as he turned off the bedside lamp.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  She turned in the contract, signed and notarized, the next day before lunch. She was to be Jesse’s observer and escort when he was off-planet, and when he was on planet, she would be responsible for finding suitable occupation for him and ensuring that he lived up to the expectations of the contract. In exchange, he was expected to contribute his intellectual prowess to any number of projects, including advance-guard support from Earthside, data reduction and analysis, technical, medical, and economic development, anything they did on base. He was explicitly restricted from using specific knowledge or methods he already had - he had to learn the existing knowledge and processes before he was allowed to contribute - but anyone who had been in a room with him for an hour would have been able to see the nature of the contribution he could make anywhere he applied himself.

  She left the general’s office and went directly to the interrogation rooms, where Jesse was standing outside of the door, chatting with the guard. The young man looked petrified when he saw Cassie, and made a lackluster effort to get Jesse to go back into the room.

  “It’s okay,” Cassie said. “I’d have you on cleanup duty for a month if I didn’t know how hard it is to keep him in one place.” She raised an eyebrow at Jesse, who gave her an innocent look. “You might have the best luck keeping track of him by keeping him right in front of you.”

  “Is that going to be your strategy?” Jesse asked.

  “Have you ever had a meal off base?” she answered. He shook his head. She indicated he should walk with her, and the guard made a noise. “Oh,” she said. “You should check your orders.”

  He pulled his phone out and pulled up his recent messages, then shrugged.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she answered, making her way back out of the building with Jesse.

  “Not a bad guy,” Jesse said as they walked. “Jeremy. A bit… thick, maybe, but a good husband and a good guy to have your back in a firefight.”

  “He ever been in one?” she asked. Jesse looked over his shoulder.

  “Probably not. You have?”

  “A few,” she said.

  “Oh, you’re so hard, Cassie. Mean streets, too, I guess?”

  “Country club in Cambridge,” she answered.

  “Thought they only tapped orphans as agents,” he said.

  “Who told you that?”

  He blew air through his lips.

  “They don’t have to tell me. You’ve all got ‘orphan’ written all over you. Loners, self-sufficient types desperate for approval… You have food issues, or did they get to you before that?”

  “They aren’t food issues,” she said. “And no, I don’t have any.” But she did know agents who did. Jesse was watching her.

  “Look, I’m not easy to live with,” he said. “I don’t try to be. I’m not mean, but I say what I think. You need to be cool with that.”

  “You’re just trying to push my buttons to see what happens,” she said. He shrugged.

  “I’m a scientist.”

  “You’re a punk.”

  He grinned.

  “That might be true, too.”

  “What do you want for lunch?”

  His eyes scanned, and then he shook his head.

  “Something that you consider ‘good’. I’ve only had prisoner rations at this point, more or less.”

  She shook her head.

  “We have a whole planet full of excellent food, and you’ve been eating boiled grease. Sad.”

  “Sad,” he echoed.

  “So why me?” she asked over baskets of fries and burgers from one of the neighborhood grills that sprung up with the off-base housing. He didn’t appear to be enjoying it as much as she thought he should, but that was probably because this was her favorite lunch when she had time to get off base.

  “Why not you?” he answered.

  “You know you could have gotten your terms a lot cheaper if they hadn’t had to get approval from a presidential appointee for me to do jumps again.”

  He stuck his finger in the catsup and then in his mouth, frowning.

  “That’s good,” he said. She nodded.

  “There are people who put it on everything.”

  “I can imagine. Solid salt and sugar.”

  She glowered at him.

  “It’s good,” she said.

  “I said it was,” he protested.

  “So why me?”

  “I don’t think they would have let me wander as much as I wanted to unless I was willing to commit to major work here,” he said. “Which I have no intention of doing, by the way.”

  “Yeah, well, you signed it, and I’m going to hold you to it.”

  He grinned.

  “We won’t be here enough for that.”

  There was a tickle of excitement that she kept from him.

  “Is that so?”

  “They didn’t put any restrictions on how much time we spend here versus how much we spend other places, and, frankly, I’ve been here.”

  “You’ve been on one little air force base in Kansas,” she said. “There’s a lot more to the planet than that.”

  “How much of any planet have you seen, Cassie?” he asked. She chewed, thinking. Not much more than the size of a little air force base.

  “What’s your point?”

  “We’ll spend time here. I will owe you that much. But there are whole planets out there to see.”

  “Why me?”

  His face grew still for a moment, the playfulness put aside.

  “You caught me.”

  “So?”

  He grinned, a wistful, sad sideways grin that made her look away.

  “If you woke up one day and all of the adults you knew were gone, and instead, there was nothing but six-year-olds to talk to, how would you feel if you stumbled across a teenager?”

  “Did you just call my entire species children?”

  “You’re clever, Cassie. And you don’t think you’ve got it all figured out and tidied up in a bow. You know there are things you don’t know. And you want to know them. Why did you ever let anything get in the way of that?”

  “I aged out,” she said, trying to keep the bitterness out of it. It was a simple fact. Simple.

  “You and your rules. You need to learn to break them more often.”

  “They’re there for a reason,” she said. Sure, she’d run up against her share of bureaucratic snafus, but this wasn’t one of them. They had high standards because there were people to replace the ones aging out, and because it was hard work. Things went wrong, and they needed people who were at their peak ability to react. It made sense.

  She was startled to realize that Jesse looked like
she had slapped him.

  “Yeah. Some of them are, I guess.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “Just remembering.”

  She felt cold, for a moment, then it passed.

  “So I’m still a child compared to you, but I’m less annoying than the other children?”

  “That about sums it up,” he said.

  “Charming.”

  “Du Charme,” he answered.

  “Oh, you’re funny.”

  “It’s an odd name, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  He spotted something on her face and his eyes lit up.

  “The man whose bed you sleep in. What does he call you? Not Cassie. What does he really call you?”

  She glared at him and he ran his tongue over his lips playfully.

  “It was just a guess the first time, but it strikes such a nerve. Why is that?”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard how that works.”

  “From who?” she demanded. “Never mind. We really are just friends. Nothing more.”

  “Then I won’t feel bad, stealing you away for weeks at a time. But what does he call you? Something with your family name.”

  “Cassie D.C.” There was a musicality to it that she couldn’t avoid, and Jesse grinned.

  “You hate it.”

  “I don’t hate it.”

  “You do. You hate it, but you love him.”

  “You’re a punk.”

  He grinned.

  “We’re going to have fun.”

  She set him up with an apartment in Troy’s building. It was just easier that way. He had a budget that she was trustee for that would eventually turn into a salary that he controlled. She tried not to think about the headache of turning him into a legal entity. They bought furniture; she showed him how to shop for groceries. It felt patronizing to hand him a stack of twenties, but it was the only way he could buy anything for himself. Technically he had no legal signature in the banking system. His script was elegant, near-perfect, so once he became a legal person, the handwriting identification scripts would have no issue identifying him, but in the meantime, she had to put him on an allowance.