Everyone in the room watched in breathless tension as Commandant Belkin scowled at each of them in turn. His eyes stopped on Crash, and there was a surprising amount of fury there. Fury, and…fear? “You. Get back to bed. You only had two hours. This interview is over. Marks, send a memo to that little shit. If I so much as catch a whiff that he’s come back here, tell him I’m going to revoke access to Captain Ellis’s comic collection. Got that?!”

“Y-yes s-sir,” Marks stammered.

The Commandant’s eyes darkened as they settled on their prisoner. “And get that fucker back to the brig. I don’t like the way he was looking at the Engineer. I wouldn’t be too upset if you gave him something else to think about for a few hours, like a fucking concussion.” Then, without another word, he grabbed Crash by the arm and dragged her back out of the room, back down the hall, and shoved her back into her barracks room.

“Keep her in here until ten,” he ordered the two wide-eyed soldiers outside. “She tries to come out beforehand, tase her.”

“Yes sir!” one of the men asked. Then, hesitantly, he said, “For real, sir?”

“Yes. Tasers are in the armory. I’ll call ahead.” Then, to Crash, he said, “Get in here.” He shoved her deeper into the barracks room and slammed the door behind them, so that the two of them were alone.

“Is that really necessary?” Crash demanded. “Tasers, really?”

“Yes,” he said, jabbing a finger at her breastbone. “Tasers. Because I swear to God Crash, I told you never to put him in a dangerous situation, and you had him three feet from an interdimensional monster that killed eight hundred people and ate their fucking livers in less than forty-eight hours.”

“Hey now,” Crash snapped back. “He came to me. I have no control over where Quad goes. Obviously neither do you.”

“You should’ve told him to leave,” Travis snapped. “As soon as he fucking showed up. That was stupid, Crash.”

“I did! And he insisted on asking Sabbaht about tech. You know how he is. I was getting good stuff about surprisingly undivergent Egyptian root words because they’re literally written in stone and how the Pharaoh rides palanquins because she’s a haughty immortal bitch before he showed up and wrecked it. Everyone else in that exploratory party thirty-three years ago is dead, by the way. Sounds like they threw your dad into a volcano, but the Pharaoh kept the second-in-command alive as a fucktoy. Oh, and their War Minister is bald because his hair got set on fire. Thought you’d get a kick outta that.”

Travis’s face darkened to a thunderhead and he gave her a really long, really terrifying look, then without another word, went to the door, yanked it open, and slammed it shut behind him.

Too late, Crash realized that Travis, as a man in his late forties, was probably close to balding himself, and he probably had taken her bald comment personally.

Damn she thought, kicking herself. Her P.E. teacher had always told her she was ‘stunted as a peewee goat’ when it came to her people skills. And she liked Travis. Someday, she was even hoping to work up the courage to ask him out on a second date. The first one hadn’t gone so well, what with Quad interrupting it just when they were getting frisky on the couch, starting to get to the good stuff, but Crash could always hope.

I’ll get better, she promised herself. No more bald quips. He didn’t look like he was going bald, but she remembered her grandmother saying guys were sensitive about that sort of thing…

#

Quad waited until his scans showed the section of the brig holding the Tuliin prisoner empty of all but the captive, then bounced back to the visible spectrum, intent to try to get the information about the staff on his own, maybe using diagrams and math equations as props, since Crash would get in trouble if she helped him. Most people couldn’t recognize math equations as a language, but if these guys were as advanced as their weapons indicated, they’d be able to do simple interdimensional boundary equations and he could use that to figure out whether the electrostatic component was actually playing a part in the interdimensional transition or if the purple lightning bolts were just a pretty—and painful—prop.

When he popped into the room, however, all Quad’s thoughts of interdimensional physics fled him in a startled release of his lungs and he forgot all about pronged electric staves and unexpected new interdimensional anchors.

The Tuliin hybrid man was huddled in a fetal form on his side, his arms still chained behind his back, every inch of his body bruised and bloody.

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“Oh no,” Quad babbled, looking the man over. “Did you fall?!”

The man whimpered and cringed away from him, and Quad immediately felt horrible. “I’m sorry!” he cried. “Here, let me help you…”

Knowing he didn’t have a lot of time if there had been internal damage from his accident, Quad opened his PackRat 3.0 and yanked out a dose of nanos from his interdimensional storage suite and popped the cap. Then, even as the prisoner was trying to inch away from him on the floor, he plunged the whole vial into the man.

Nothing happened.

Quad frowned, waiting for the wounds to heal, but minutes passed with the man’s situation only becoming more dire. Thinking he’d gotten a bad batch of nanos, Quad quickly reached into his PackRat 3.0 for another dose, careful to get a different batch number, then tried again.

Still nothing.

Frowning, Quad activated the Q-Nostics patch on his temple and took a reading of the dying man on the floor.

The suppressive energies of the man’s neck jewelry were preventing the individual nanotech from communicating with each other, keeping the tiny bots metaphorically spinning their wheels.

“Oh that’s the problem!” Quad cried. He immediately pulled out his QuickPick Beta from its spot on his belt and rolled the shivering man onto his back far enough that he could see the lock on his breastplate. He slipped the QuickPick into the rectangular peg hole and, when his pick whirred and recalibrated and then flashed as it found and bypassed the onboard security system, pulled the device free of the man’s shoulders and lowered it gently to the side to the jingle of chains.

Quad still didn’t understand why people wore things that were such hinderances in the name of beauty. Ella had tried to explain it to him back on Fortune, but he still didn’t grasp the concept of why someone would wear pants without pockets, or, in this case, a necklace that stymied interdimensional transit and subatomic communication. Made no sense.

“Okay,” Quad said, “I know you can’t understand me at all, but you’re about to be all fixed up. I had to use a couple of my last nanotech doses—I can’t make more until I get back to my lab in the Outer Bounds—but I think that should save you.”

The man stopped panting and trying to crawl away from him, then went still as the nanos did their work.

“There. See? Everything’s all right. We’ll just have to tell the Commandant there’s a trip hazard around here somewhere and they’ll get it fixed.”

The man’s dark eyes fixed on Quad as he slowly sat up, making the heavy chains rattle on the floor as he dragged them with him.

“Anyway,” Quad said, dragging out a diagram, “think you could show me how that staff of yours works?” He 3-D rendered it in a blue hologram between them. “I think I’ve got the general gist, but I need you to confirm a couple details. Is that a battery pack?” He pointed to the denser area behind the hand grip. “And if so, how are you guys charging it? It didn’t have any exposed electrodes that I could see, which makes me think maybe you’ve somehow figured out an electromagnetic charging apparatus—”

The chains made an odd popping sound behind the man’s back, and Quad blinked as pieces of steel skittered away across the cement floor.

“Wow, you’re really strong,” Quad said. “Is that a natural physiological thing or are you carrying some other onboard biological system that is invisible to material scans?”

The man’s hand snapped out and he grabbed Quad by the wrist and yanked him forward.

“Hey!” Quad cried, “that hurts—” He froze when he realized the man was tearing off his BounceBack 2.3 apparatus and wadding it up and breaking the metal components and inner power structures, then tossing it aside. Quad’s mouth fell open, staring down at the pieces of his jump tech. “You just broke my BounceBack Two Thousand.”

The man’s face twisted in a sneer and his big arm snapped out and he caught Quad by the throat in a fist…

#

Travis woke to the sound of ripping metal and crumbling concrete. Outside his temporary barracks room, men were yelling as their feet pounded past his door. Even as he was hurling himself out of bed and grabbing his weapon, he heard automatic gunfire and screaming. He grabbed his comm without even getting dressed. The base colonel was already calling him, and he answered it while opening the door with his other hand.

“Sir, the alien got loose! It’s mowing through the base! Bullets aren’t stopping it, sir!”

“Use grenades!” Travis snapped. Of all the things they had tried in the past, grenades seemed to be the most effective.

“We can’t, sir! He’s got the Engineer with him!”

Travis froze. “What do you mean by that?!”

“He’s got him in a suppression collar, dragging him through the base as he slaughters everyone! I think he’s looking for—”

“Get the Scholar out of here!” Travis shouted, on a stabbing pang of horror.

“Her guards already did, sir,” the Colonel said. “Debbins got her to a rover. Lionne died trying to slow him down.”

“Make sure he gets her out of there!” Travis screamed into the comm unit, hating how impotent and desperate he felt, struggling to get outside where he could see. “Do not let that fucker get her too!”

“She’s okay!” Colonel Freedman said. “Debbins got them out of range… Sir, now he’s going for a spaceship.”

Travis felt himself go cold. Could a stick-throwing savage run a spaceship?

No, he realized, but Quad can…

“Do not let him get a ship,” Travis snapped, already changing direction to get to the tarmac, still in his underwear.

“We’re trying. Oh, God, we’re trying!”

Travis was running, hurling down the hallways in his underwear.

“He got onboard, sir! Sorry—he killed so many—”

“No, goddamn it!” Travis snapped, already seeing it in his mind. The Engineer, which had raised their civilization back out of the Stone Age in a matter of a few years, transported across the Edge to serve the Pharaoh. “Keep it on the ground!”

“He’s already powering it up! We had it prepped for your departure!”

Travis’s guts were sinking with dread as he thought about the weapons on board that ship. “I don’t care if you have to blow up the goddamn thing, don’t let it—”

But on the other side, the comm went dead, and the explosion that rocked the building at the same moment left Travis tumbling head over heels in a wash of rubble and fire.