Chapter Two - Home (DX)

"Space is big.

Uh, yeah, some of you are probably thinking. It's space. Of course it's big, that's its whole thing. We get it.

No, you don't.

Consider this. The average Union superlight drive is so fast that if we put you in the cockpit of a ship with one button, and when you pushed that button, that ship would start flying around this planet, if you were to push that button again to stop it as soon as you realized it was moving, that ship would have made somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half to three thousand laps before the fastest of you in this room could hit that button a second time. Just in the time it took you to push a button.

For that same ship to get from here to the next planetary colony would take over half a tenday. To get from one end of Union space to the other, half an average solar year. To get from one spiral arm of the galaxy to the other, a century, one hundred of those years. To get to the nearest neighboring galaxy, three hundred centuries. There's about two trillion of those galaxies just in the region of the universe that we can see before light, itself, is too far away to reach us. And we have no reason to believe there aren't just as many universes beyond ours as there are galaxies beyond ours as there are systems beyond ours. And probably whole meta-galaxies of universes beyond that. You would literally need longer than time itself to find out in that little ship of yours.

Our ships are fast. Space is bigger."

--Anticausal Thermodynamics 101, A Basic Introduction to Reality

***

"Can you bring him back?!"

Ash could only imagine how cross the chief was, but the scrawny labcoat in front of the towering, thick-hided alien acted like he thought he was about to be eaten. Normally, she'd say that was hooey, that Chief Homkish was as cuddly and harmless as a teddy bear rolled through a cactus patch. Mostly because nobody around her knew what cacti, bears or hooey was.

Today, however, was one of those rare days he'd come out of his office for field work, to escort an extremely dangerous criminal the Defenders had finally pinned down.

... And then they lost him.

The Atellian had concealed a plasma micropick deep under his tongue, used it to cut through the cuffs, killed two Defenders with the element of surprise, and escaped into a nearby research facility through untimely open doors. This facility just happened to have an experimental gate that they were testing for the very first time just before he burst in, shredded the drone they were about to send through and jumped through the portal instead.

The sheer quantity of coincidence told her it was anything but. Forgah had come through here with a plan. He chose this route.

No doubt the scientist was scared silly that the chief would think he was in on that plan. If that were true, Ash wasn't entirely certain the fact the chief was an obligate herbivore would stop him from taking a bite out of the rodent-like man.

"N-no, officer," the much smaller man replied, and she doubted he saw the other half dozen Defenders in the room with the chief right in front of him like that. "Not in any automated fashion, anyway ..."

"Okay," Homkish boomed - he had never been terribly good at an inside voice on the job. "How about an unautomated fashion?"

"... Y-you mean ... manual?"

"DID I STUTTER?!"

Yeah, he was pissed, Ash decided.

"... Yeah, he's pissed," the shorter, feminine bird humanoid next to her muttered.

She glanced over to the medic. "We're all thinking it, Storey. There's a reason it's staying a thought."

Estoire only then seemed to realize he'd said it out loud and swallowed audibly, suddenly sure to stand extra straight.

"W-well, yes," the scientist, Dr. Muscula as he'd previously been introduced, was answering. "Someone could go through after him. We're certain enough the gateway is stable, we just don't know where it goes. Somewhere along a spiral arm, at a guess, but the waves get hard to--"

"How do they get back?!"

"Oh!" The doctor took a moment to set his mind back on track, fidgeting the whole while. "Well, the drones are equipped with a transponder to open the other end of the portal at whatever coordinates they end up occupying. We could transfer that to a handheld device operable by a sapient!"

"Finally, good news," the chief growled, then turned toward the Defenders. "Everyone check their gear and get environmental helmets from the truck. As far as we know, there's vacuum on the other side of that thing. I don't intend to lose anybody just to bring back a scumbag ice cube!"

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"Ahhhh," Muscula put in, finger raised, and wilted as Homkish rotated his upper body alone back toward him. A moment later, he seemed to realize he'd stopped making any noise, coughed to clear his throat, and tried again. "You ... you can't. More than one or two people, the machine wouldn't be able to tell all of the biosigns apart. You'd be lucky to arrive identifiable, much less alive."

The growl came from deep in his throat, but the fact that the warning was protecting the chief's officers probably did the most to still his frustrations. "So I can only send two Defenders?"

"Only if you don't intend to bring the ... the pred back, sir." He shivered like he had a fever, then coughed again. "Also ... um, it can't be you. The issue is mass, and ... and I mean no disrespect, but you have too much of it."

Very wisely, not one Defender in the room laughed.

Ash stepped forward when the chief started to growl again. "I'll do it."

He wheeled on her instead. "The fuck you will, Apex! I'll decide who goes!"

She was calm in the face of his outburst. She even saw a globule of spittle fly past the left side of her face. "Of course, Chief, but I'm volunteering, and I'm the smart pick. Name one other Defender here that can take Forgah down alone without any support besides the gear on them."

With the towering, horned humanoid's attention turned to one of his officers, the labcoat managed to find a little more courage to speak. "If, if it's any assistance, I can say with high certainty that protective gear should not be necessary. There are a number of precautions built into the gate in case opening it created a shared space, among those insuring there is a breathable atmosphere on the other side. It should also be impossible to appear in an occupied volume of space. The immediate area should further be clear of potential threats for at least a hundred secs. That's more for whoever or whatever is going through, though. The wormhole is very specifically designed not to remain open longer than necessary to deploy its contents."

Both Defenders turned to look at him until the spiel stopped, and stared a little longer as if they hadn't noticed he'd gone silent. They held it just long enough for him to start squirming again.

"Of course they over-engineered it to such a ludicrous degree ..." Ash groused as if it were somehow offensive.

His work being criticized seemed to give him some more spine as the hair down his neck bristled. "W-well, what would a bunch of pred-hunters have done, shot space-time with a cannon?!"

She actually seemed to consider that for a moment. "Possibly. My people had some terminal slingshot experiments."

"Y-you weren't supposed to take that seriously! How would they secure a gateway in case of a breach?!"

At that, Ash grinned. She knew exactly how humans would have done it. "Vacuum-sealed the room with a tethered volunteer in an armored EVA suit and some hard-cabled turret drones inside, a squad of soldiers outside, and a fission bomb underneath."

The doctor was now staring at her like she was a fission bomb. Or at least an automated turret. It probably didn't help that Union races didn't like her grin, it showed her canines. Slowly, he managed to raise a shaking arm to point accusingly at her like an old Catholic woman seeing an evil spirit. "You, you ... This is why primates are kept out of respectable academia!"

Her grin fell down into a scowl at the racism, and his arm jerked back against his chest. "What can I say? Human defense philosophy tends strongly toward fucking anything that fucks with us. And you can be sure some random pred wouldn't have been able to run right in the front door and all the way to a dangerous spacetime experiment."

The rodent-like little man went silent with a gobsmacked expression at that, though it was hard to say if it was because of the reprimanding reminder of his facility's security failure or if he was trying to decide if he'd accidentally fucked with her and should be running.

Chief Homkish pulled a massive three-fingered hand down his face with the deep, rattling sigh of a man not paid nearly enough to put up with shenanigans. "Apex, stop intimidating people."

Obediently, she stepped back away from the scientist. "Of course, chief. Wouldn't want to step on your toes."

Aside from a warning snarl, he made it blatant that he was ignoring her. "This transponder, doctor. How long will it take to convert for us?"

"Oh, um, five minutes?" The labcoat glanced around for another person to verify that with, but he was alone with the Defenders. "We have a wrecked drone right here and all other necessary components in the other room. If it's in one piece, anyway. Otherwise, it could be longer?"

"Get started," the large alien growled at him, and the scientist gave a fervent nod before scurrying off.

***

Ash had stepped through the glimmering, static-like gateway with her eyes open, but there was a barely perceptible moment where they detected nothing. A moment that stretched for an eternity and then was gone in a plank second, and she was left only with the knowledge it had happened.

As soon as her eyes were once again registering light, she hit one knee and turned with her pulse shotgun raised, ready to fire on anything that looked even vaguely Atellian.

The hyperalert moment passed as she realized that she was alone on an empty rooftop, nothing but HVAC units and antennae around her. If this was where Forgah had shown up, he was long gone, and according to Dr. Muscula, even that wasn't very likely due to a vast array of variables. At best, he could only promise they were in the same region of the same planetary body.

She released the tension with a long exhalation and flipped the weapon back into its folded state. It connected to the selective magnet at the small of her back with a satisfying click and she took her first real look at her surroundings.

It was a megacity, not all that different from a lot of the urban design in the Galactic Union, though rather more drab. The air was filthy enough that she was pretty sure they lacked even basic scrubber tech, but they were at least advanced enough to have hovertech, judging from the skyways she could see in every direction there was open air. The buildings didn't look of particularly stellar quality, either, but they still built high enough that a look down gave her a sharp stab of vertigo.

The planet was probably heavily capitalist or corporatist, too, judging from all of the ads and billboards everywhere. That would explain the corner-cutting quality of everything, too, she noted sourly.

... Wait.

She turned her attention back to all of those eye-piercingly neon displays she could see plastered on every free inch of space. It took her another long moment to realize her language implant wasn't translating them to English. There was always a vague haze that she'd quickly learned to ignore where the augmented reality replaced the text that was actually there with something she could read, or a slightly doubled tone when it translated what someone was saying.

These signs weren't being translated because they were already in English. But there was only one way that was possible, and that answer was contradictingly impossible. Earth, or at least the one she knew, was such a planet-wide ruin that the Union had mistaken it for a tomb world, a planet that had once hosted an advanced civilization that had gone extinct.

Turned out they were wrong, but humanity certainly hadn't recovered to something like this already. It was possible they'd eventually do so, but it could be centuries. More, what with the elements left in play there.

Ash sheltered her eyes with one hand as she looked skyward. Gray clouds threatening drizzle at any moment filled the atmosphere from one horizon to the other, but she could just make out a yellow sun beyond it. Of course, that didn't really mean anything, lots of planets had yellow suns. But something about it definitely felt familiar, as unscientific as that metric was. Like the smells of a home you grew up in.

She narrowed her eyes as she spotted a streak of fire against the gray sky only because she'd already been looking. Some sort of meteorite? A decommissioned satellite, perhaps?

More of them started breaking the cloud cover just as every neon display around her changed to a single color, bathing the concrete and steel of the buildings a blood red and a sound like a tornado siren began to fill the air.

"Incursion Alert. Incursion Alert." The robotically female voice came from countless speakers throughout the city beneath her. In English, she noted almost unconsciously. "All civilians in the affected zone are to move to a designated shelter immediately." The message repeated again, then two more times in French.

... Wait, was she in fucking Canada?!

Her bewilderment at the possibility was derailed when more movement pulled her eye skyward again. One of the fireballs didn't look like it was moving so much as it was growing bigger.

... Oh. Oh fuck.