Lannon and the six other soldiers used a laser to gently cut a hole through one of the garage doors. They climbed through and vanished into the factory.

As I wasn’t crucial to this part of the mission, I was left behind to babysit the van and the creepy Revella clone.

I started sweating in the stale air in the back of the van, but there was no way in hell I was going into the cabin to sit next to that thing.

I synched my micro-communicator to the channel Lannon and the others were using. It was mostly quiet, occasionally picking up the sounds of whispered directions.

“Here.”

“Door’s that way.”

“Map says go left.”

Presumably the security in this factory would be minimal. According to Lannon, this entire Earth had been converted to mostly industrial facilities. Everyone who entered was a screened and vetted employee.

That is, everyone except us.

The group continued.

“Watch out!” someone hissed.

There was a scuffle over the radio. I heard the whirring of cooling units from laser guns. There was a distant shout picked up by one of the microphones.

“What’s happening?” I asked. The microphone in my cheek relayed the message to the shared channel.

“Ran into a security guard,” someone answered.

“You shot them?”

“Low power setting,” Lannon said in my ear. “They’ll probably survive.”

The crusaders pushed forward. I swallowed my doubts. Lannon was right – I’d thrown my lot in with this group as my best chance to save my home. It was too late for second-guessing.

“There it is!” someone spoke.

I heard the sound of spinning blades and cooling lasers faintly through the communicator.

A sound in my other ear caught my attention. The steady clack of hard rubber on concrete. I peered outside the back of the van and saw a security guard walking over.

My heart sank.

The man was alone. He walked with a heavyset confidence, plunking each footstep down with an ambler’s leisure. He slowly approached the van and rapped his knuckles against the driver’s side window.

“Hello!” he shouted, trying to be heard through the glass.

Revella’s clone, sitting at the wheel, didn’t react.

I didn’t have the controller to make her respond. Even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to work it.

He knocked again, more assertively.

This was not good. He was seconds from realizing something was very wrong. More commotion was happening through my micro-communicator, but I disconnected the channel. A tap of my watch activated the body shield with a static-lined snap. I leapt out of the van, gun drawn.

“Freeze!”

To his credit, the man was good at following orders. He froze, putting his hands over his head and slowly turning toward me.

“Who are you?”

His voice was calm. Too calm for someone in his situation. Did this guy have a body shield?

He tried another question, asking, “what do you want?”

“None of your business.”

I looked around. Lannon was carrying some anesthetic darts, but he wasn’t here. I didn’t want to shoot this guy, but if I didn’t do something to him, he could sound the alarm as soon as we left.

“Who is that?” he pointed at the clone in the cab.

“Revella Keyes,” I answered.

“I looked at her file after she scanned onto the facility. Revella Keyes is supposed to be hunting a radish demon outside the connected multiverse. Why is she here? What did you do to her?”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Something clicked behind his eyes.

“You’re MEAD, aren’t you?”

“Me? No.”

He ignored my response.

“You’re making a big mistake, you know?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“The Republic has devoted a task force to hunting you down. You’ve heard? A thousand soldiers, armed to the teeth, are currently searching for you. They won’t rest until they’ve destroyed your entire crazy rebellion.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t care.”

Truthfully, I didn’t. This was Lannon’s problem, not mine.

“Get out now,” he urged. “While you still can. Apply for leniency. You’re young. You can still make a good life for yourself.”

His shoulders began to sag with the effort of keeping his hands high, but he continued to hold the pose.

“The ship you’re on is sinking. Please. Get off while you can.”

He seemed genuinely concerned for me. I felt guilty pointing my gun at his chest, but not guilty enough to lower my weapon.

Why couldn’t he have just stayed in his office eating donuts or scribbling crosswords or whatever it was security guards did on night shifts?

“Look, I’m not with MEAD. I’m just trying to get home, and these are the only people who will take me there.”

He became confused.

“What do you mean? Where are you trying to go? Surely, I can help you find your way back.”

“I’m sorry. But I don’t think you can.” I nodded at the shopping mall mannequin of Revella inside the van. “Not unless she lied to me about the laws governing interdimensional travel.”

“There has to be a wa…”

Three pulses of red light flashed behind him, stabbing into the man’s back. They dissolved in the white sparks of his body shield. The guard turned to face the attack and ate a face full of laser light from the MEAD soldiers rushing him.

Another five rapid blasts vanished in the static of the body shield, but then the barrier spluttered out. Before the guard had a chance to reach for a weapon of his own, beams stabbed through his gut, dropping him to the ground in a gasp of agony.

Lannon pulled out a small pistol and shot a dart into the guard. He went limp.

“You killed him!” I exclaimed.

“Just had to punch through his body shield to inject him with a sleeper dart,” Lannon said.

He knelt down and rolled the guard onto his back, spraying a canister of medical foam into the wound. It fizzed and expanded, turning red with blood as it tamponed the injury.

“He’ll be fine,” Lannon told me. “Someone will get him to a hospital soon.”

“Let’s load up!” someone said.

I looked over. The MEAD soldiers had rolled out a contraption the size of a refrigerator turned on its side. It had a flat base upon which rested a dozen metal arms folded into a neat stack. They carried it easily with their augmented strength, but the machine was probably a few hundred pounds.

A bridgemaker.

“Be careful with it,” Lannon instructed. “You could buy a small country with how much that thing’s worth.”

The soldiers splayed out a ramp and loaded the machine into the back of the van.

Lannon clapped me on the shoulder.

“Good job handling security. We’ve got our prize. Now let’s go save your home.”

We all piled back into the van, which sagged on its chassis under the weight of the bridgemaker. We peeled out of the factory before any alarms could be sounded and motored off into the countryside.

We arrived at the predetermined location: a thicket not far from the barn where we’d first entered this dimension.

In the cover of some towering birch trees, the bridgemaker was set up. The base was sunk deep into the soil and the arms unfolded into a tall ring. A heavy wire was connected from the bridgemaker to the collection of bulky battery units we’d brought – turns out, it took a lot of energy to stab into another dimension. In the back of the van was enough stored electrical power to run a small city for a month.

Batteries were snapped together. Startup sequences were initiated. Blinking lights flashed to life on the bridgemaker.

Lannon input directions to a handheld device he’d synched to the bridgemaker’s computer.

“I’m using all the codes our engineers gave me. Safety protocols, structural guidelines, all of it,” he explained. “Should let us operate this thing just as good as the Republic.”

“And if it doesn’t work, and the bridge collapses? What would happen to us?”

Lannon didn’t look up from his work.

“It wouldn’t be pretty.”

I really didn’t want to have made it this far only to die in a flaming explosion or be swallowed into a black hole.

I hoped Lannon’s confidence wasn’t misplaced.

“Where’s a good place to touch down?” Lannon asked me.

“Near my home in Pendervale.”

“I’ll do my best to create an exit portal in the area, but we don’t get the same kind of pinpoint accuracy laying down a whole bridge the way we would if this were just a thread to your reality.”

“That’s fine. Just get us close.”

He nodded and typed in a set of final coordinates.

“Earth five hundred ninety-six beta,” he announced. “Everyone stand back.”

We did.

I made sure to put the van solidly between myself and the ticking machine. If it exploded, I hoped the walls of the vehicle would protect me from flying shrapnel.

I wondered if it would be rude to activate my body shield, indicating I didn’t trust Lannon’s code and his engineer’s ability to operate the machine.

Without speaking, I turned the dial on my watch and snapped my shield into place. From where I was standing behind the van, I didn’t think anyone noticed the flash of sparks that accompanied the force field’s appearance.

Rudeness be damned. I didn’t want to die in an alternate dimension. Was that so unreasonable?

Lannon pressed a button, and the ring filled with white light. I heard a deep thrumming sound grow louder and higher-pitched. It crescendoed into a metallic scream that echoed for miles over the empty countryside. The circle of light swelled with so much radiance that it became impossible to watch. It illuminated our position like a small moon brought down to the Earth’s surface.

A small, screaming moon.

The light and noise grew in intensity until I feared the machine would collapse under the strain. Just when I couldn’t take any more, a heavy thunk reverberated from the circle. Like a giant hole puncher clunking down and taking a bite out of the universe.

The noise vanished, and the light dimmed away to reveal twinkles of starlight peppering a circular canvas of inky black. A portal. Activated and ready to use.

There were more cheers from the soldiers as they uncovered their eyes and saw the outcome. I joined them, laughing with full-bellied relief. It had worked.

I was going home.

The thought finally sank in.

Holy shit.

I was going home.