“Hala! Kurtil el muritallo?!”

Ugh, I hate it when they scream words at me. It’s not like I don’t get it, though. This guy’s nothing more than a common farmer fresh off his field. The calluses on his hands, the dirt on his face, the simple yet sturdy clothes on his back, I’ve seen them all too many times. A simple sort doing hard yet honest work to provide for themselves and their loved ones who suddenly found himself in a situation beyond his comprehension through no fault of his own. He just wants to get home and the man with the face-concealing helmet, snazzy uniform and fancy hat looks to be his only hope.

Really, I get it.

“Kurtil! Kurtil migoa shidenio!”

However, the pleading, crawling and ankle grabbing really isn’t helping matters.

*THWACK*

I pistol whip him in the neck, knocking him out. I know, it’s rough, but I’m low on tranqs and I’d rather save those in case something more dangerous than a confused farmhand fell through the breach. Admittedly I can’t see anything but barren, scorching desert around me and my visor’s picking up zero lifeforms other than Mister Handsy, but I know better than to trust everything I see.

The guy’s thin frame, reptilian tail, scaly hide and obvious intolerance for heat make it clear he’s one of the amphibian folk that live in the jungles of Naobos. That region has a bunch of nasty predators, and I wager he didn’t jump through a breach because he was bored. No, he was being chased by this ‘kurtil’ thing he kept shouting about. Which, if memory serves, is a type of flying apex predator from his home planet that has a really troublesome ability. Thankfully my readout says the local wind speed is a big fat zero.

Which means that it’s not the weather that’s kicking up sand some thirty meters ahead of me.

I hastily turn off my sidearm’s safety and aim directly above the disturbance, then pull the trigger.

*THUNK*

The gun makes the same unpleasantly dull sound it always makes when firing tranq ammo. The upside is there’s practically zero recoil, so I can fire off shots in rapid succession.

*THUNK THUNK THUNK*

“SKREEEEEEK!”

The first three shots missed and streaked off into the desert, but the fourth finds my target and shocks the sneaky bastard with a few hundred thousand volts. The goat-sized pterodactyl-looking thing loses its optical camouflage and falls to the ground, screeching and writhing against the hot sand.

*BEEEP*

“Oh, why thank you, lifeform scanner!” I shout inside my helmet. “I had no idea the thing I just shot was an extraterrestrial being that doesn’t belong on this world! So kind of you to fucking tell me!”

I swear, this fucking thing gets worse with every software update. Well, better to have it than not, I suppose. I sigh, reign in my sarcasm, put away my sidearm and take a Capture-Cube 6000™ from my hip pouch. I walk over and toss the glowing blue box of solid light onto the spasming creature. It expands and envelops it, instantly putting it in stasis. At least this part of my standard loadout isn’t a piece of shit, but god damn is it expensive. Then again, it’s not coming out of my pocket, so I got no right to complain.

“Come on,” I say through my helmet’s vocalizers. “Let’s get these two back where they belong.”

The AI-driven construct beeps in response and floats the pacified kurtil over to the collapsed farmer. I tap on the screen of the PDA strapped to my left forearm, bringing the device to life. It beeps at me with its green numbers, letters and lines as I use my other hand to operate its menus. The breach that caused this particular mess was a small one, so I need to be quick if I want to trace its point of origin. Thankfully this world doesn’t have any background radiation or radio static to mess with my readings, so I manage to finish the job in less than a minute.

“Okay, that was the easy part,” I mutter to myself and crack my neck. “Time to see if there’s any open windows.”

It takes me a while but I find a suitably large breach relatively nearby. Which in actual terms means a two hour walk.

Through a desert.

On a planet within a binary star system.

“God… damnit.”

I look down at the passed out farmer. His scales are already falling off from the boils forming underneath them, he won’t survive a trip like that. Hell, he’s lucky I managed to track him down less than five minutes after he fell through the breach. If that beastie didn’t get him, this heat would’ve boiled him alive. Another sigh escapes me as I use a second Capture-Cube 6000™ to put him in stasis, then lead him and his meal partner towards the site.

Seriously though, would it kill the agency to give us more climate-adaptive uniforms? I will admit, I love how the black boots, cream trousers and brown coat look. Very militaristic, official and authoritative. It’s the same reason why I insist on wearing my navigator’s hat on top of my helmet. I also make sure my gray dress shirt and black necktie are visible through my coat’s lapel. It’s not standard issue, but it’s not against regulation either. I wear it because it’s my way of saying ‘I may be rough on the outside, but I’m classy on the inside.’

I mean, yeah, only a few of the cultures in my district share my fashion sense, but looks are important, damnit. We’re here to enforce the law, and we need to look the part. Civilizations need to adapt to us, not the other way around. To disrespect the uniform is to disrespect the agency, and that just won’t fly. That aside, though-

“Why the fuck is this planet so damned hooooot!”

I can’t help but scream. As nice and important as the outfit is, it’s still making me sweat like an elluvian ogre’s ballsack. I guess I shouldn’t complain, though. Peterson said his new beat regularly has EMP storms and acid rain. Our regular gear isn’t designed to withstand that sort of extreme environment, so he has to walk around in one of those bulky power armors. He seemed pretty excited at the idea, but that’s because he’s still green. Yeah, you’re like a man-sized tank in one of those, but you’re way too slow and heavy, not to mention that getting in and out of it is a major pain in the ass.

But it has air conditioning, so I find myself feeling rather envious of him right now.

I keep grumbling and complaining under my breath for the rest of the trip, just to keep myself sane. At least I don’t need to worry about getting turned around and lost in this featureless black desert since my PDA handles terrestrial navigation. Too bad it can’t navigate me to a cold drink. It’s also probably a good thing I can’t trap myself in a Capture-Cube 6000™, otherwise I definitely would have by now. By the time I make it to the breach I’m so miserable that I’m practically happy to see the gaping hole in reality.

I stare into the swirling abyss as I catch my breath. The event horizon is a standard circular shape about three meters in diameter. I consult my PDA yet again, noting that it is, indeed, as stable as it looks. I gather my wits and push a button on the side, causing a device the size of my thumb to stick out of it. I pull the sensor out, give it a few seconds to link up with my arm-mounted computer and toss it into the breach, then stare intently at the screen.

My vision is flooded with lines that spread out, bend, branch off and come together, rapidly forming a pattern that would make even the webspinners of Malchior feel inadequate. I sharpen my focus as the computer does its best to visualize the disposable probe’s readings. I try to track dozens upon dozens of potential routes through the multiverse all at once, searching for a path that leads me to my destination. My world dissolves into nothing but lines, angles and numbers until I start feeling dizzy, but that’s how it always is.

“There!”

The solution leaps out at me seemingly out of nowhere, as per usual. Hurrying to take the route I’ve seen before it collapses, I take a pen-sized device out of my belt and push the button on the end. It extends into a meter-long stake, which I drive halfway into the sand. I spend a few seconds linking its signal to mine and that of the two self-propelled stasis fields. With my preparations ready I turn to face the breach and leap through it before I can start to hesitate.

My world dissolves into a nausea-inducing swirl of lights. I feel dizzy, happy, angry, cold, hungry, drunk, constipated and a hundred other things all at once as my brain struggles to cope with the tenuous space between realities. It soon adapts to it though, allowing me to feel the interdimensional currents that are tugging away at my body in every imaginable direction and then some. I shut my eyes and begin to swim through them by sheer force of will alone. I turn left, right, right, right, left, up, up, down, back, inward, back, back, left, up and a few other directions I’m not sure how to call in an effort to adhere to the route I’ve already selected.

My body crashes into the swamp seconds before my consciousness does. I lay completely still for ten seconds to let my brain settle back inside its skull before I stand up. My head rises from the filthy water and I look around. The sky is gray, heavy with rain clouds that have yet to release their load. There’s a neat row of green plants poking up from the water nearby, a simple-looking hovel on the mud bank further beyond. My visor detects three native humanoid lifeforms inside, no doubt there to witness my spectacular arrival.

I wipe some of the mud off of my visor and PDA screen, then tap it a few times. Looks like I’m within three meters of the breach that my ‘clients’ fell through, though the culprit seems to have already collapsed. I push a few buttons on the display and am relieved to see it respond with a message saying ‘Tether Link Established,’ followed shortly by ‘Cargo transfer commencing’ and ‘Please stand by.’ I look up at the ‘exit wound’ my interdimensional hop made. It’s not quite as impressive as the gaping abyss of a full-blown breach, but the wave-like ripples through the air make it clear something’s there.

A few tense seconds later the tear in reality spits out the two stasis cubes and my anchor pin. I catch the high-tech stake before it falls in the water, collapse it, then put it back in my utility belt. I then have the Capture-Cube 6000™ AI deliver the farmer to his family.

I watch silently as the farmer I rescued is released from stasis in front of his home and wakes up almost immediately. What I assume are his wife and children rush out of the hovel and crowd around them. He instantly embraces them, ignoring the pain his burned and dry skin is no doubt causing him. He looks over his shoulder at me, his reptilian eyes conveying an emotion that I choose to interpret as fearful gratitude.

As for the flying monster that threatened his life, I’m supposed to release it in the wilderness unharmed. Not by choice, though. If I had my way, I’d kill this fucking thing for all the trouble it’s caused both to myself and these simple folk. I’m also aware that this kurtil will no doubt endanger the family again. If it ventured this close to civilization once, then it will surely do so again. I mean, I don’t know for sure whether that will happen, but I’ve always been more of a realist than an optimist.

However, I don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Us navigators are supposed to ensure we cause minimal impact to native ecosystems, and doing what I want to do would be considered interfering with the local food chain. A big no-no, to say the least. Our PDAs log all of our activities, ammo and gadget usage, so I’ll be instantly found out if I killed the thing without ‘sufficient cause.’ I would be putting both my job and my freedom at risk if I did that.

So, I do the only thing I can. I move away from the farmhouse and release the murderous invisible beast into the wilds. Of course, it’s not exactly my fault if said wilds happened to be some nasty bubbling tar pits. Nor can I be blamed if the creature accidentally fell into them immediately after my Capture-Cube 6000™ disengaged its stasis field and logged a ‘successful catch and release.’ After all, I’m just doing my part in maintaining the local environment in all of its merciless beauty.

Okay, I better cut it out before my sarcasm slips. I turn away and leave the screeching beastie to its fate. I use my PDA log the completion of my mission, then have it scan for any illicit or accidental spatial matter transfers.

“Let’s see then,” I mumble as the screen overflows with results, “which one of these lost souls needs a navigator’s guidance the most?”