෴Fidel෴

෴Hex෴

෴Nicolette෴

෴Brock෴

෴෴෴ ෴෴෴ ෴෴෴

I Must Go

෴෴෴ ෴෴෴ ෴෴෴

The Ivaldison workshop was buzzing with activity. Assisted by Hex and Nicolette, Jim Hunter wheeled the last of his gear and supplies through the two way portal. At last, what seemed like an endless line of crates were sent through. The skittish way Hex assisted without ever getting within two meters of the portal itself, was a subject of much amusement to Brock and Nicolette.

As Jim looked around for anything he’d forgotten, Hex took him over to a slim briefcase.

“This should be enough cash, and it’s all the information I have,” she said as she handed it off to him.

Jim nodded, shook her hand, and leaned in close. “I’m sure the refugee site will appreciate all those supplies. It’s such a specific list, how did you know what to send them?”

She smiled, “Raz and Fidel both had lists of things they need, it’s all pretty basic stuff, so gathering it was no problem. Thank Brock here, his gate makes the logistics easy.”

“Got it, I’ll be off then. I won’t let you down!” Jim said before turning and walking through the portal.

“I hope not. There’s still a lot I want to know about those days,” she muttered under her breath.

Brock was just shutting down the portal when the biggest screen in the shop came to life. Brock, Nicolette, and Hex were treated to a wall-sized view of the rocky ground, as seen by one of the low-light cameras Fidel was setting up thousands of miles away. The image spun and shook, showing a drunken image of the sky, then shifting over to Fidel. His brows deeply furrowed, his tongue between his teeth in an expression of intent concentration. The wind moved his beard, then more nauseating movement and shaking, before the image finally stabilized as Fidel finished setting up the tripod and aimed it at Raz and Midnight as they walked away from the camera along the valley floor. Fidel popped his head in front of the camera, a relaxed, almost goofy smile on his face. The unselfconscious grin somehow transformed his normally severe and brutish features into the face of a younger man, someone laid-back, carefree, and just happy to be there.

“Camera is working?” He gave the camera a thumbs up and a questioning look.

All three of them were seated at keyboards, watching the display with quiet intensity. Several microphones sat on the table, positioned between the three of them. Nicolette touched a key and faced the mic. “We hear you Fidel, are you hearing us?”

Fidel frowned and cupped a hand to his ear. “Is windy here. Say another,” he moved his head most of the way off camera, placing his ear next to the speaker. The camera focussed in and out, struggling to keep Raz and Midnight in focus along with the edge of Fidel’s beard dancing in the wind.

Brock tried. “Fidel, do you hear us?

Fidel nodded his head on the screen then replied. “Dah, I hear you. Very quiet. Much wind here, noise like staya volkov—ah, many wolf.”

Nicolette looked over at Brock with a raised brow. He nodded with chagrin. “Jah, you vere right. Should have sent headphones. The onboard speaker is much too small.”

Hex muted the mic marked ‘Fidel’ and looked over at Brock. “Where’s the streams from the body cams?”

Brock shook his head. “Those cameras do not support live broadcasting. They can only upload footage locally. Ve vill see the footage after, or not at all.”

Hex glared at him. “What!? You should have told me! I could have…” she visibly struggled for calm, “Maybe I could have done something.”

He looked at her with a helpless expression. “You and your friend supplied them. I thought you must know.”

Nicolette looked to Hex. “This is your show. Let us know how we can help, or what you need. Otherwise we’ll try to stay out of your way.”

She clenched her jaw and nodded before turning her attention back to the keyboard. She opened the line to Wraith. “Wraith, everything should be ready for you. Let me know when you have drones and their cameras ready to stream.”

Wraith replied in the overly calm voice of a technopath deeply absorbed into a system. “Yes Hex, drones are starting up. I’ve got the aerial drone in final prep, and the spider drone is already on the way. Spider drone is pretty slow, so it can use the head start. That’s a negative on streaming from the cameras. Way too much interference. The area must have a lot of metal in the soil or something. At this signal to noise, I’ve barely got enough stable bandwidth to drive the drones.“

Hex slapped the table, her expression warring between angered frustration and worry. “Thanks for the update, let me—I mean us, know if anything changes.”

“Roger that.” Wraith’s laconic reply brought out his southern drawl.

Hex muted Wraith and returned to Fidel’s channel.

“Fidel, is everything alright there?” Hex said toward the microphone loudly.

Fidel put his hand in front of the camera and gave them a blurry thumbs up. “Dah, is ok. You very quiet, wind loud.”

The camera re-focussed on Raz and Midnight, they had stopped walking, facing each other in discussion.

Fidel sighed. “Man inside metal is truly another Mr. Owens? I see very different men.” his voice overlaid by howling wind.

“Yeah, I feel you there.” Hex said softly.

The noisy transmission from Fidel’s end resumed. “Cannot hear. Please say another,” he paused, then spoke again, his tone urgent. “Quickly! Ghost must stop! Fly lower. Is too high!”

Once she parsed the meaning, Hex switched over to Wraith’s channel. “Wesley, Fidel says the aerial drone is too high. Please reduce ground clearance. Do you see anything that looks like a problem?”

Wraith’s preternaturally calm voice came in clear. “Roger that. I’ll bring it down some. Side note, the ground is less flat than expected so the spider drone is behind sched—.”

Fidel’s distorted, concerned voice talked over Wraith’s calm tone. “No! Has hit it!. Flying too high!!” he shouted.

Fidel’s camera showed Midnight and Raz walking toward the distant stone doors. Nothing seemed to be amiss.

Still on Wraith’s channel, Hex tried again. “Hey Wraith, your aerial is still up, right? Fidel is saying it hit something.”

Wraith’s reply was colored by the faintest tinge of irritation, as though even in his machine-like calm, he was irked. “That’s a negative. He might have spotted it moving a bit erratically. I just ran into a weird spot of interference, but it’s all good now. The copter has not hit anything, repeat, the copter is still in flight, no impacts.”

Nicolette waited for a moment to interject and whispered in Hex’s ear. “I’ve adjusted your outgoing volume for Fidel’s channel.”

Hex nodded thanks to Nicolette and reached out to the audio controls “Thanks Wesley,” she said, before switching back to Fidel. “Fidel, the drone is fine, repeat, the drone is fine. It didn’t hit anything.”

Fidel made a disgusted sound as he adjusted the camera so it was zoomed in further at Raz and Midnight as they walked. “Why not listen! Is not drone,” his tone full of disgust, “my concern is for! Have you trust problem for me also?!” his grammar seemed to be further breaking down under stress.

Hex looked at Brock and Nicolette, whispering the word ‘Also?’ before turning her attention to the mic. “No Fidel, we’re all good here. Just reporting what Wraith said.”

Fidel grunted. “Cannot hear you. No matter, is too late, cannot undo.”

The three in Brock’s workshop watched in relative silence as Raz and Midnight approached the doors. Each time they stopped to talk, the three muted their mics and tried to guess what they might have stopped to talk about.

The final stop right at the doors had the three back in the shop waiting at the edge of their seats. Even Fidel seemed to feel the tension.

“No time talk! Already hit it! Need hurry now!” he shouted, like a fan giving directions to their favorite sports team.

The pair appeared to come to some agreement. As they turned back toward the doors, many things happened so quickly it was hard to keep track of it all. The giant doors flew open with a deep resonating thump, Raz jumped backwards away from them, Midnight vanished, and a large circle of deeper darkness, spotted with flickers of light, appeared in the air near the stone doors. Raz started to desperately crawl away from the gaping black circle of nothingness that loomed over him. Visual defects and noise began to rapidly build up on the screen.

A soft gasp of dismay escaped Hex as she watched Raz fight to get clear of some kind of vast vacuum, sucking in huge amounts of dirt and debris in the area, air movement quickly filling the area with a cloud of dust. The camera image was still degrading, slow at first, then faster. As Raz scrambled along the ground, the video feed degraded into uselessness, washing out into a checked white and black mess. An instant after the video seemed to have failed entirely, there was a scattered flash followed by a loud blast of noise and static audio feedback. The main feed went dead.

“What just happened!?” Hex cried out as she tried to make headway with an unfamiliar system.

Brock and Nicolette had already gotten to work. As a team, they ran down the list to try and get things back online. Their fingers flew across the keyboards, each working on their own systems, working at command terminals to diagnose and resolve the problem. Occasionally, schematics with highlighted parts and warning icons flashed across the large main screen.

Hex looked at them, and teleported an aspect to Wraith’s side. He was in the process of getting to his feet. His office chair was lying on it’s side across the narrow mobile command center.

She helped him up. “Are you still controlling the drones? What just happened?”

He blinked rapidly. “I wish I knew. I got some raw footage from the high speed camera, but—” his eyes unfocussed, for an instant, then snapped back to Hex, “Ok, Doktor Midnight got scooped up by something invisible that made him disappear super fast. He’s gone in less than two frames. Your boy dodged that, not sure how, looking at it frame by frame, it looks like he started to react almost before it happened, then he zigged real good. When that second thing that happened, it was like a vacuum, sucking everything around it up!”

Hex grabbed his shirt and pulled him close. “Did Raz get sucked in?”

He shook his head. “No, the aerial drone did though. I lost connection with it almost the second it hit whatever that was. Spider drone feels like it’s doing a hard restart, no idea when or even if it’ll be back in action.”

Hex picked up his chair. “Ok, let's do everything we can to get you connected and back on that spider. I need to know what’s happening there!”

Back in Australia, Hex had kept Brock and Nicolette updated in real time. When she let them know what Wraith had seen, Brock stopped looking at the footage and returned to their work of bringing the other subsystems back online.

Nicolette was looking at the last frames of video with great interest. “You see the way those parts of the video get cloudy, then die? That’s not a signal to noise attenuation we’re looking at. There’s no pixelation or interpolation errors here. I don’t think we’re looking at any kind of signal loss at all.”

Hex looked at the screen. “But look at all the spots that are whiting out. What else could it be?”

Nicolette’s brow furrowed, then her face lit up with an epiphany. “The only thing I can think of that would do this is radiation! It’s got to be! I’m willing to bet that thing, that glittery black circle that appeared, was emitting radiation, even while sucking in all that dirt.”

Brock nodded. “Jah, could be. None of this is military. Commercial hardware is not shielded, and vill fail quickly in radiation,” he looked to Hex, “This enemy, Mercator. He’s a teleporter?”

Hex shrugged. “I don’t know. He has what Midnight calls a ‘spatial’ ability. He never specifically said this guy can teleport, but talked about him using some kind of portals.”

Nicolette’s eyes widened. “Of course, so maybe he can open portals to other locations! That would explain it. A portal several hundred miles straight up into the ionosphere would encounter radiation and charged particles galore. No wonder it took out the camera. Not only would the pressure differential be immense, it would let in a veritable storm of EM interference. I mean, sure, it's not EMP level, but most commercial equipment can't stand up to a constant barrage of that much radiation and charged particle density. Especially cameras!”

Brock pulled Nicolette in for a one armed hug. “Jahwohl! Of course. This vould create great local suction as vell! Wery low pressure!”

Hex couldn’t stand it anymore. “That’s Raz out there, and you’re geeking out about the science! We need to get the connection back now!”

Nicolette reached out and squeezed her shoulder, “I’m sorry dear, we’re talking about science to hide from the fact that there’s nothing we can do. Even if we get the camera back, it’s out of our hands now.”

Back in the mobile command center, Wesley had disappointing news. “The spider drone is in a boot loop, I’m still trying to get it back, no idea if I can from here.”

Hex hated everything she was hearing, and hated even more, that Nicolette was right, they were all doing everything they could do.

Back in the US she had finished helping Wraith get situated, then sat idly as he worked, wishing she had something, anything, to do. “Hey Wesley, do you think any of those cameras would be able to stand up to any radiation?”

He mentally disengaged just enough to answer her. “Radiation! Of course! That would explain the way the camera was starting to fail. Radiation fries the CMOS sensor a pixel at a time till it’s gone. Depends on what you mean. How much radiation we talking about?”

“Nicolette thinks Mercator opened a portal to the upper ionosphere.”

Wraith’s gaze drifted off. “That makes sense. Honestly, the cameras are probably toast. The drones, hard to say. The docs for them say they tap out at around 10000 millirems. I don’t know much about the ionosphere, but that's where a lot of satellites and stuff are, right? My understanding is there’s a lotta radiation at that altitude.”

“Damnit! We need those cameras back up!” Hex insisted.

“Nothing I can do. If they’re dead, my ability doesn't extend to resurrection. If it helps, the body cams are mil-spec. They can handle more radiation than a person can survive, so they should keep trucking long after a person is fried.”

Hex didn’t let herself think about the bigger implications of that.

As before, she’d kept the Ivaldison’s updated as she talked to Wraith. Brock nodded along as she did, until he and Nicolette had a quick chat rife with technical details.

Hex was nearly vibrating with tension. “This is taking too long! We’ve been out of the loop for over five minutes!” Just as Hex was starting to think she needed to figure out a way to get an aspect on site, the Ivaldison’s turned back to the keyboards.

“Ve must restore audio!” Brock announced.

Nicolette suddenly spoke up. “I have an idea! We didn’t plan for this, but there is a secondary camera on that relay unit. The main camera may be shot, but perhaps Fidel can switch to the secondary camera, swap the lenses, and use the short range camera with the long range lens to restore some kind of video feed.” Nicolette continued.

“Vell, perhaps not a wideo feed, but even rapid photos is besser als nichts!” Brock blurted out.

A moment later the audio feed was back. They called out for Fidel, but received no answer.

Back in the US, Hex asked Wesley if he could see the camera relay.

“Yep, tripod is laying on the ground, relay equipment looks fine.” He replied.

“Where is Fidel?” she pressed.

Wraith shrugged. “I don’t know man, this spider drone doesn’t have a great long range camera. It’s meant to explore caves, tight spaces and stuff. I don’t see him anywhere.”

“Keep looking, and tell me when you get to the doors!”

“Roger that.” his lackadaisical cadence suddenly grated on Hex’s nerves.

Back in Australia, she and the Ivaldison’s stopped trying to get Fidel on the radio and focussed on getting the audio buffer downloaded.

The download status bar seemed to mock them as it slowly crept across the screen before starting to play.

Hex skipped through the recording until she reached the timecode directly after the video died and the burst of noise. Fidel’s voice was distorted and warbling. He sounded far away from the mic. “Nyet! No! Chto ty delayesh'? Not go there! No! Do not do that! Stay here! Why!?” They couldn't tell who or what he was talking to, but he sounded like a man in crisis. There was a moment of windy silence before he spoke again, this time his voice sounded shaky, but much closer to the mic. “Hello? Can you hear? Camera has fatal error. Hope you can hear. What must I do for fix camera?” Even through the noise and wind, his voice sounded conflicted, “He went in tunnel!”

There was nearly a minute of whistling wind and crackling noise before Fidel spoke again. This time he sounded eerily calm as he spoke very slowly, clearly taking the time to select his words with extraordinary care. “You make no response. I hope, at least, the machine can record my words. I truly hope I am heard. Accept my apology, but I will not stay here as the –steward?– of a broken camera any longer. Doktor Midnight explained everything to me clearly. He was very –specific?– that this enemy cannot be escaped on foot if I wait here to be found. I know, I took the –responsibility?– to support you here, but I will not sit here and wait to die. I cannot,” the wind whistled on the audio track for nearly thirty seconds before they heard him again, “Again I am sorry. With these–events–my obligation to you is—I am sorry, I do not have the words. I cannot help you anymore. I owe you nothing further. I must go.” They heard the faint sound of retreating footsteps. A few seconds later, they heard what had to be the tripod falling over, then nothing but the howling wind.

All three of them sitting in Brock’s shop sat there in silence until the audio buffer ended.

“That bastard! I knew I shouldn’t have trusted him! Damn Russian, we practically sent him home.” Hex fumed.

Brock hurried over to his gate controls. “Let me see how quickly I can—oh no.”

“What?” both women said as one.

“The gates—the Incursions, as Midnight calls them. They are in flux.”

All three of them crowded up to look at his console. “What does that mean?” Hex pressed.

He shrugged. “Ich weiß nicht!—I have no idea. This has never happened before! Look at it!” He pointed at the rapidly shifting lines and graphs below each of the Incursions shown on his screen.

“The Incursions, they are spitting out energy. Something is happening.”

Hex grabbed his shoulders to spin him around toward her. Her best effort barely shifted the solid man, but he turned to face her.

“Brock, we need to get Raz out. Can you get a gate open there? I’ll get ready to go!”

Brock and Nicolette both shook their heads sadly as Brock answered her. “I am deeply sorry. In exchange for his help with the weapon, I have given Midnight my promise not to send you anywhere near this place.”

Hex clenched her fists, glaring at both of them until she silently turned away, shaking with pent up anger.

Brock hurried to continue. “Vait! Come look, I cannot do it anyway! I cannot send anyone vithin many kilometers of any Incursion now. Ve are, ourselves, vithin that same radius here. Until vhatever is happening is over, I have no gates.”

She spun, her eyes still full of anger. “Show me.”