Chapter 20
“Al, scan the videos and images I took earlier, identify anything of interest and flag anything that doesn’t fit your pattern recognition parameters.” Seb said as he settled behind his small desk and flipped through the images himself, using a tablet computer.
“Of course, Mein Herr,” Al said. “Processing images and video.”
While VI’s were demonstrably less effective at finding the enemy camouflage than human eyes, Seb wasn’t going to put everything on his poor skills if he had a choice.
He was still waiting on Al’s results when an image caught his eye and he stopped.
I don’t remember that… something glinted as I took the picture? Seb frowned, zooming in on the image on his tablet, scowling as the reflected light destroyed the quality of the imagery up close.
“Al, priority run. Check the image I’m viewing, focus on the glint of light.”
“Processing paused. Image loading… scanning… the reflected light is consistent with refracted sunlight from a reflective object.”
Seb laughed softly, “I got that, yes. I was using one of the military cameras… run a full spectrum analysis on the flare.”
“A moment… processing… full spectrum scan indicates that the reflective materials includes a meta-material alloy. Mein Herr…”
“It’s them,” Seb nodded, “I was looking right at them. Damn it.”
He got up, pausing at the door to his room as he listened. His mother was watching TV. He hesitated a moment, then called out, “I’m gonna crash, mom! It’s been a long day.”
“Alright, rest well, good night,” She called back as he closed the door and turned off the lights.
Seb paused for a moment, taking a breath.
“Alright, let’s go.” He told himself before he opened a rift point and stepped away from his room into the space in between.
*****
The forest was dark, darker than the sky as the sun fell with deep reds coloring what little light made it down through the canopy. Seb stepped out of the rift and let it close behind him as he took stock of his position.
I wish I’d collected night vision devices, He thought as he started moving through the trees. He didn’t dare use a flashlight, that might as well be an open invitation to the invaders.
It’s over this way, He thought as he picked his way through the forest, listening for any sounds that didn’t seem like they belonged.
It was hard.
Everything sounded terrifying to him, though mostly he could only hear his own heartbeat it seemed.
If I can get close enough, I might be able to hijack their rift point.
The alien’s rift gate technology, if that was indeed what it was, was still something of a mystery to the best minds who’d ever looked at it in the future Seb hailed from, and that despite humanity’s own growing applications of the technique.
Still, they’d learned a few things along the way.
Most important was that, while it was possible to detect rift points, you had to be very close. Visually, they were easier to spot from a distance than by any other means, even if you had sensitive scanners looking for the brief radiation pulse they put out when opened.
The radiation was short lived, extremely high energy, and largely non-interacting. Functionally similar to neutrinos, the particles really could only be reliably detected with absurdly large and heavily isolated detection arrays.
Directional detection was almost impossible for that very reason.
It made using the rift points a relatively secure activity, vulnerable only at close range… but if you could get close enough, and had the right equipment, well there was no ‘lock’ on the door, so to speak.
An active exit was also an active entrance.
Just have to find it.
*****
Finding it was easier said, or thought, than accomplished.
Especially in the dark, in a forest, with no advanced equipment!
Seb nevertheless made his way closer, taking circuitous paths to get there… not as a matter of evading detection but more because the terrain was difficult to pick his way through.
It took longer than he wanted to get to the position where the reflection had come from, but he found himself creeping up on it as quietly as he could manage… which, to be fair, was pretty effectively quiet.
There’s something to be said for a small, light weight body, I suppose, Seb thought as he paused not far from the place he’d photographed and just waited, eyes staring into the darkness.
He was adjusted to the light levels, and it was startling how well he could actually see, especially considering what he remembered of his eyesight.
No shimmer, no hint of anything out of place… but more importantly, Seb listened, turning his head slightly.
The insects were chirping, and he could hear an owl not far off.
They’re not here.
He moved in closer, staying quiet despite his relative confidence that the area was clear.
Seb pulled his EMF detector from his pocket and turned it on, eyes on the cheap LED bar as it immediately went right to the maximum, even as he turned the gain down with ticks of the potentiometer attached to the knob.
Even with the resistance turned as high as it would go, the signal was as strong as it could be.
Seb nodded, confident now.
The rift point is here, though.
He put the EMF detector aside and pulled out the little rig he’d drawn from his inventory.
Haven’t used this in a long time.
It was a mishmash of technologies, easily half of it stolen from one of the invader’s drones, and the little device looked like a bio-tech nightmare from a horror film as a result.
Linking the inventory space to himself had made it unnecessary for him to use the original device to open his own inventory or rift points, but that hadn’t always been the case. Originally, when the alien weapons were discovered, the rift point generators were just one of them.
Pulling them from the drone’s bodies had given humans the means to begin studying and using the technique, but mastery of it came in combination with entangled quanta.
His inventory space and rift points were linked to him in a way that transcended space and time, which went a ways to explain why it still functioned even in his younger body as it did.
However, the old way of manipulating the rift points still had a place.
Let’s see here… you’ve got to be around somewhere… Seb thought as he silently moved around the area, waving the device in front of him like some neo-horror dousing rod. Wait… back that way… got you.
He nodded as he got closer, the signal of the rift point being recognized by his little device growing strong enough to confirm it was right in front of it.
Seb took a deep breath.
This is really stupid.
He didn’t give himself time to overthink, though, not this time. Not this life.
The rift point opened on command, and he took a breath… then stepped through.
*****
The ground crunched under foot as Seb exited the rift and found himself in a dark area, he felt the ground for a moment.
Dirt, dust, rock. A cave? I wonder where I am?
The rift points weren’t limited by physical space, possibly not even by time if he remembered the research correctly, though no one had ever proven that bit. In theory he could be across the universe from where he’d entered, but in practice that was… unlikely.
Running the numbers for distant stars and the planets that surrounded them was… complex, to say the least. Even with the best Quantum systems, running those numbers took days on even relatively nearby systems.
Worse, the calculations grew exponentially more complex with the square of the distance.
Seb doubted very much that the invaders last origin point before Earth was much more than twenty five lightyears away.
However, here, where he was right now…
Definitely still on Earth. Gravity and air are too close a match.
He crept along the rough wall, it felt like a natural cave and as his eyes finished adjusting he could see a glow up ahead.
*****
“This is taking too long, you said it would be finished hours ago!”
“I’m sorry, Sir, the engram mapping is taking longer than estimated. Children are… less static than adults, it’s affecting the scans.”
The tall figure growled, scratching at the back of his neck in irritation.
“That was the whole point of this entire process,” He grumbled. “So I can’t fault you there. These… grubs… are the reason we’re here. No one who matters will notice anything that happens to them. Finish the job.”
“Yes, sir.”
The figure growled, scratching at the back of his neck for a moment before he turned and stalked off.
Those remaining relaxed only marginally before returning to their work.
*****
Seb was crouched behind a splinter of rock as he noted the temperature for the first time.
It’s hot here. How far down are we?
Cave systems were generally cool, until you got deep enough. He knew of some crystal caves in South America, or possibly central america now that he thought about it, where the temperature and humidity exceeded long term human survivability.
Ten minutes, if I’m remembering correctly, but this doesn’t feel that bad… it’s drier than the crystal caves. We’re not at the wet bulb temperature here, but… Seb frowned, searching his memories, trying to pull out any bits of trivia he could remember.
Forget it, Seb thought after a moment of trying. I’ll ask Al about it later.
It was warmer in the cave than it had been in the open air of the forest he’d stepped from, but drier as well and that made the temperature comfortable, for the moment, at least. Seb knew that even relatively low temperatures could induce heat stroke and death if the humidity exceeded the wet bulb temperature.
He wasn’t sure how warm it was, but it had to be the mid twenties at least, possibly higher. Thirty degrees and humidity exceeding the wet bulb was enough to kill you in minutes even if you were doing absolutely nothing.
He wasn’t sure how dangerous this cave was, but he was quite certain that it was deep.
Two, maybe three hundred meters down. Seb considered as he crept forward, finally seeing a glow of light around the stone outcroppings. There’s air, so either it’s connected to the surface… or they’re pumping it in. Why? The drones don’t need to breathe… are… are they here?
In his previous experience, they all believed that the drones were the invaders. Seb was no longer certain of that, not with what he’d come to realize since waking in the past. In fact, he was all but certain that they were nothing more than what he’d come to call them.
Drones.
He continued to creep forward, inching around the stalagmite so he could see the source of the light… and then he heard the voices.
Voices.
The drones didn’t speak. They… grated. They howled. They even somehow… scratched at the back of your brain, not that Seb had ever been able to figure out what that meant. He’d never seen them in person, after all.
Well, not quite never. Just the once. When they killed me.
The language problem he’d been able to bridge, at least partially, had never been fully solved.
A lot of reports from first hand people included details that just didn’t show up on video or audio recordings, or if they did…
no one knew how to connect them with the sensory experience of first hand viewers.
I never did figure out all the discrepancies.
Reports from the field had been like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle when you didn’t have a reference image, and were missing most of the pieces. Every solved piece was worth more than its weight in gold, but often cost blood instead.
Now, Seb rounded a corner and found himself staring.
It wasn’t the people that got his attention first, no. It was the… Seb suddenly didn’t know if drones was the right word anymore. Not now, not after seeing them for the first time… or, the first time with something other than his own death on his mind.
They weren’t static. They folded in on themselves as they moved, limbs appearing from nowhere, then vanishing just the same way. They moved like they were looking one way, walking another, and… actually moving a third.
It was disorienting to see, but in that moment…
He understood.
They’re tesseracted. They’re existing in a… fourth dimension? Maybe more.
Seb’s head was reeling as he stood there, frozen in place as his mind tore through every piece of data he’d learned in over a decade of warfare. Suddenly the jigsaw puzzle began to snap into place.
Videos are one dimensional representations of a three dimensional world. They couldn’t record what a human sees, not like this… not anymore than my human eyes can properly perceive those things.
The video evidence they had gathered, curated, studied… all worthless.
Seb wanted to cry. He wanted to scream eureka. He wanted to do anything… but instead, he broke through his shock and found cover as quickly as he could while he tried to ignore the parts of his brain that were now trying to slap together a full picture from pieces he hadn’t even known he had.
Later, brain. Focus on the now.
There were people down there, with the drones… or whatever they were… humans.
Or, they look human at least.
Seb forced himself to stop thinking about the puzzle he now desperately wanted to work on and, instead, take in everything else.
He counted four people, three men and a woman, standing over some crudely rigged hospital beds as best he could tell. The cavern looked like a treatment center in that corner, in fact, with monitoring tech that seemed to have been pulled right from a modern hospital.
On the beds, a dozen kids… and two adults.
The missing hikers, huh. Are they actually scouts?
He’d been a cub scout for a year when he was like… six maybe? Seb wasn’t sure. It hadn’t been a memorable experience, in all honesty, though what was at six?
The uniforms and scarves seemed to match up on the boys, and from the look of the girls they were girl scouts, of course. All unconscious, and all rigged up to some pretty impressive monitoring.
Well… you found them, Seb thought. Now what, genius?
******