Entry Nine:

Entry Nine:

            Deborah was the first to greet him as the three legs of Jackie’s hoverbike skidded across the extensive driveway leading from the main gate up to the palace doors where it formed a circle with a large tree in the centre. He had taken the bike when it became apparent that he was not going to be allowed to accompany Jackie to the hospital. She had gone with her father in the back of an ambulance under military escort. Gavin was treated for his injuries on the scene by a hastily erected hospital tent. It seemed like half the city had shown up to watch firefighters tackle the blaze. A score of reporters tried to get a sound-byte from Gavin had entered and exited the tent. Their questions ranged from his involvement in the attack to his relationship with Jackie. The Arms had kept them at bay while he was bandaged. Long Tom had sat with him, as Gavin was the closest person on the scene to witness the attack. Gavin explained what he had seen, and then repeated himself twice more. Long Tom was understanding, but sceptical. One of the officials had wanted to keep him longer, but Tom had excused him, perhaps as a favour.

            Gavin had learnt the controls for the bike in the short time he and Jackie had ridden it together. The pedals at the feet controlled the speed, while the handlebars had the controls for pitch. It wasn’t particularly complicated in theory, but the finesse for regulating the speed took a little practice. He alarmed several people when he took off vertically with almost enough force to dismount him. In a heartbeat he had climbed higher than the black plume of smoke where the air was chill. From there, it was easier, although his landing was a little jagged. It brought a moment of levity to a dark morning. The ornately dressed guards stationed outside the gates hadn’t even noticed it wasn’t Jackie returning on her favourite bike until he was past them.

            “Before you ask, I’m fine,” he told her as she raced down the short flight of steps. It was a lie. He was covered in bandages and his hair was singed and matted to his head with blood. It was still difficult to talk and he had a slight limp, but he was in little pain. They offered him medication, but he refused. “I’ll assume you know what happened.”

            “You’re all over the newscasts,” she explained. “You’re live as we speak,” she pointed up to the sky. Turning, Gavin saw the faint glimmer of metal catching the first rays of sun. There was a drone in the sky watching him. He waved for effect, although he felt foolish.

            “How’d I look?” Gavin asked. For the past three days the news had been talking of nothing but their arrival, although they had no footage of them aside from them leaving the police station.

            “A little bit on the heroic side. They said you saved the Princesses’ life, and Victor’s too. Other channels say you were the one that led them there,” Deborah said hurriedly. She looked uncomfortable and had her arms crossed with her hands on her elbows. She wore her full uniform and had tied her hair back into a knot.

            “I did, in a sense. Where’s my sister?” he asked, scanning the entryway. Lance was standing inside and he saluted him.

            “She’s in a furor,” Deborah whispered to him. “She broke some things, and I imagine they’re rather expensive.”

            Shaking his head, Gavin limped up the stairs and into the palace. He found the rest gathered in Victor’s study, sitting around the holoprojector. The image was of the front door he had just entered with a long banner of text at the bottom describing the attack. Kylie was staring out the window with her hands on her hips. She was wearing her cloak again.

            “How are you holding up?” Video asked with concern.

            “I’m fine,” he lied again. “I need your help, though, with a tech question. Our wrist units can track other Generates, but can we track wrist units?”

            Goldie answered for Video, which surprised him. Over the past two days she had become more talkative and outspoken. While he had slept one night, she had taken her long golden tresses and braided them into dreadlocks over several hours to make her self look more outlandish. Lance had apparently helped her and had chosen to shave his own head down to stubble with her help. “How soon do you want it done?” she asked.

            “Immediately,” Gavin told her. “Conner took my unit and a part of Victor’s arm with it.” Goldie grimaced at the sudden image. “He went on about how it was the key to everything, but it didn’t make sense. The unit’s not much more than a glorified phone.”

            “You don’t really know a lot about our tech, do you?” Goldie wrinkled her nose at him. “Calling it a phone is like calling a computer an abacus.”

            “What I mean is that I thought about what was actually stored on that device. There’s technical specs about our organization, world and its technology, but he has no way of utilizing that information. The only thing it could be good for is accessing our ship,” he explained. “He’s trying to steal the Aurora.”

            “The Aurora’s already stolen,” Kylie complained. “No thanks to you.”

            “How could he know where to find it? We tried tracking it down, but we lost the feed when they put it onboard a ship,” Video explained.

            “Exactly, they had to take it by boat,” Gavin pressed. “We checked online and read the report about how they put it on the back of a covered flatbed truck and drove it down to the docks, where they were able to scramble our scanners somehow. That means they couldn’t get inside to pilot it because only our wrist units can open the doors.”

            “Again, how would Prince Conner know where they took it? It’s a classified military secret. We can’t even find the ship on satellite imaging,” Video added.

            “Conner somehow knew Victor was going to be in that room today. I can’t explain why, but he had it all set up. Donovan had been held there captive for hours, if not days, and Conner was waiting for us to walk into his trap. He must have some source he’s using for information, or else he’s a mad genius. In either case, he can sneak in and out of virtually any location undetected with this weird suit of his. It’d be no problem for him to sneak into a military complex and take the Aurora using my unit. The only question is what he intends to do with it,” Gavin looked at them all to see if they were following his line of reasoning. “What type of weapons did you have stashed on there?” he asked Kylie, who looked abashed by his sudden question. Everyone turned on her.

Deborah was the most concerned. “What weapons?” she asked suspiciously.

“Bargaining chips,” Kylie corrected her. “It’d take too long to explain all of what I brought, and I doubt you’d know the names or manufacturers. All you need to know is that any one of them would make today’s attack look like a BBQ,” she indicated the holoscreen image of the fire. “He’d have no way of knowing what we have stored on the ship. It’s hidden well enough to slip past customs on Last Point. Even someone like Victor wouldn’t know to look for them, and he could practically build the ship from scratch.”

“He may not know about them, but if he has the ship, he’ll have the weapons,” Gavin explained. “This ship by itself is dangerous enough. The A-6 ship, the Nettle, was sabotaged by Donovan in a terrorist attack years back. It killed seven members of A-6 and over three hundred civilians on the ground.”

“What would he even know to do with it? These people are basically monkeys by our standards,” Kylie argued.

“You’re selling them dangerously short. Besides, whatever Donovan hasn’t learnt already from his step-father, Victor, he’ll be able to find out with my wrist unit,” Gavin explained.

            “I can lock him out by remote, but he’ll catch on to what we’re doing and probably ditch it,” Goldie said as she worked with her own unit. She had opened a panel on the side and was making some minute adjustments with a tool she had stored in the tiny compartment. “Then we’d have no way of tracking him. Right now, his signal is all over the place and I can’t quite pin it down. He’s either moving too fast, or there’s something interfering. All I can tell is he’s heading overseas.”

            “Then we chase after him,” Gavin declared.

            “That’s suicide,” Deborah argued. “We can’t go chasing after a terrorist by ourselves.”

            “Ourselves,” Gavin emphasized. “Us. Together.” He held out his hands to signal the room. Video and Goldie shared a look together while Fredriks fidgeted.

            “Oh, count me in,” Kylie said. “I want his hide.” After an initial bout of bravado, she put her hand over her mouth and turned back towards the window. Just as he could not visit Jackie, she couldn’t visit Victor in the hospital.

            “You’re recruiting us to fight a war we’re not a part of?” Deborah grew worried.

            “We’re neutral in this,” Gavin lied. “All we need is the ship back. As long as we have the Aurora, Conner won’t. Neither will the Arms.”

            “What will we do then?” Deborah demanded. “We can’t get home and we’ll be hounded by this terrorist Prince and the rest of the world’s armies.”

            Gavin was about to give an answer, but he didn’t have one. “I don’t know. Do we want to go home?” he asked after a moment of consideration.

            Everyone looked at each other while Deborah looked at the floor. “We don’t belong here,” she told Gavin. “We’re hostages.”

            “We’re guests,” Gavin told her. “Jackie has shown us nothing but her courtesy.”

            “Oh? And what else has she been showing you?” Deborah asked sarcastically.

            Gavin stood with his mouth open for a second.

            Deborah saw his expression and quickly apologized. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve been through a lot. I suppose you’re right about this being the correct course of action. We need to protect our assets.”

            “I think you mean our asses,” Video corrected her. “We’re going to get killed.”

            “I slipped some sidearms into the gear we have stashed here,” Kylie said. “We won’t be unarmed.”

            “Who said anything about arming ourselves?” Video asked. “If we head off to a foreign military base with guns in hand, we’re going to get blown away.”

            “We could be arrested just for stepping off the premises,” Deborah noted.

            “We need to get permission,” Fredriks suggested. “The President returns to the Capital today with the Queen. We can enlist their help if we can contact them.”

            “That’s easier said than done. Much easier,” Gavin told him. “Victor couldn’t even reach the President to debrief him. It looks like incoming call are screened by the Vice-President, who’s anti-Generate.”

            “We should at least try,” Fredriks insisted.

            “Well this is the phone,” Gavin indicated the holoprojector. He used gesture commands to bring up the appropriate menu. He ran his fingers through the projection of names and reached the President. He pressed call and waited. “I have no idea what to say to him,” he admitted after the first ring.

            A cycling image of hawk in front of a shield swirled before them for a moment before dissipating and being replaced by plastic face.

            When established, the government of New Gaia became a political experiment. Democracy on Earth had grown stagnant as two equal and opposing parties warred with each other with the good of the people being a trivial concern. Elected officials had difficulty serving out their entire terms as their rivals tried to force them out. Politics kept sliding further into the fringe while Presidents failed to inspire and instead focused on gallup polls. Eventually, people came to realize that elections to find a new leader every four years was getting them nowhere when the leaders themselves did nothing once elected. People wanted a change.

            Cloud politics were created to solve voter apathy. Instead of electing a leader, people voted for what they wanted in a leader instead. They were given the ability to vote for what policies they wanted and it became the leader’s job to see these policies put into place, instead of electing an official and hoping that their will would be heard. Since the person implementing these policies became moot once that control was wrested for them, they used a stand in. This stand in was the President.

            They created an android and programmed him with the characteristics the voters most wanted. His personality would thus change with the mood of the people, which was monitored live though countless media sites and channels without having to resort to polls or elections. He could adapt to the whims of what people thought most prudent and make the best decisions based on their values, not his own ego. Since crowd-sourcing politics could lead to very dangerous scenarios, he was programmed to put the well being of his people and their economy before anything else. His power was also counter-balanced by the Vice-President and the rest of his cabinet, who were elected on the policies of their platforms. All elected officials were independents, although loose-fit parties still existed in the background. Elections themselves were triggered when an individual fell beneath an acceptable public rating, meaning an individual candidate could stay on indefinitely, or be thrown out of office immediately based on public perception.

            The President was specifically designed so as not to appear human. His head was an egg-shaped oval while his eyes were glowing blue lenses. He had no nose or ears, but he had a mouth and brows to mimic expressions. His face looked like white plastic or rubbed while the rear of his head down to his neck was chrome. He wore a tan suit and tie that fit oddly on his body. His hands were metal with soft white pads on the fingertips and palms, and only three fingers and a thumb to each hand, with an extra thumb opposite to where the proper one was. He’d undergone numerous upgrades and changes since his first model, which was as a computer program without a body. People thought it was too strange to follow orders from a formless being occupying their internet and he was transferred to a robot body.

            “Victor, is that you?” the blue lenses of his eyes peered through the projection. He quickly saw Gavin and changed the familiarity of his tone. His voice was entirely human sounding. It was masculine and reassuring. “Captain Gavin Dales, I presume? To what do I owe this honour?”

            “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr.President, but we don’t know who else to turn to,” Gavin rubbed his sore jaw. “We’re isolated here at the Royal Palace and we’re essentially prisoners.”

            “You are correct in your assumption,” the President agreed. “You are the political prisoners of Princess Jackeline. I trust your cell is to your liking?”

            “If I may,” Fredriks asked Gavin as he stood up. Gavin reminded himself that Fredriks was his Ambassador and it was his job to speak with elected officials and dignitaries. “It is an honour, sir, to be speaking with you. I realize that you’re facing a trying time in your career and our thoughts are with those your people have lost tonight. We offer you our condolences and our support. We’re calling you tonight to ensure you that while we are guests here on you world that our allegiance is with you and your campaign. There is a matter we would like to discuss with you, sir, if we may. We may know the location of Prince Conner.”

            “Then please divulge it,” the android asked him.

            “We can’t quite do that, sir,” Fredriks told him reluctantly. “As I said, we, ‘may,’ know his location. We haven’t been able to narrow it down, but we have a fairly good idea where he’s headed. He’s going after the vessel we came here in, the Aurora. I’m telling you this is good faith, as we would like to recover our vessel and keep it safely from him.”

            “I can confirm that the Aurora, as you call it, is in our custody and it is well guarded. It will have to remain that way for the time being. I thank you for brining this information to the table, but I would like to know what’s behind your suspicion,” the President told him attentively.

            “Sir, we are telling you this as a favour to your government, but make no mistake that we would like a favour in return as a show of goodwill. We would like to be granted diplomatic immunity as ambassadors of Universe #716262-B, as is our right,” Fredriks insisted.

            “I’ll draw up the necessary paperwork. Please note that the term, “immunity,” does not grant you the same privileges here as it would on other worlds. Our version is essentially a pardoning of your crimes of trespass. You can still be held accountable for any future crimes you commit, but you are granted reasonable flexibility in terms of our cultural differences. My authority in this matter does not stretch as far as it use to, as my territories are shrinking. Entering disputed zones will null my authority. Do you understand?”

            “Yes, sir,” Fredriks nodded gratefully. “If I may continue, however, I would like to make a proposal. With our newfound freedom, I would ask that we be allowed access to the Aurora.”

            “I thought I made myself clear on that point,” the President furled his synthetic brow. “The Aurora is being held in a restricted area.”

            “And it can remain that way,” Fredriks assured him. “We merely ask to be allowed access to it and our equipment. In exchange, we can provide you with the means to capturing your most wanted fugitive. This device,” he held up his wrist unit, “allows us to track his movements over broad field. From the description given to use by the media, and by Captain Dale’s firsthand account, Conner has some form of cloaking device or teleportational device that makes him otherwise undetectable. He has erred, however, by taking one of our devices with him, which we can easily locate. Furthermore, your weapons are incapable of harming him in his special armour. We have access to weapons and technology that can compensate for that. By granting us our simple request we can help aid in his capture.”

            “And you will not offer this help freely?” the President asked.

            “We are traders by trade,” Fredriks explained, “but we are also your allies. We know you can’t board the Aurora without the use of our devices, where we have the means to his capture. We also know that Conner is heading straight for the Aurora. We can make is so he walks right into a trap. Refuse our help and you will still know where Conner will be, but you won’t be able to stop him. He has one of our devices and he can walk right through your restricted base without hindrance and take the Aurora. Then it will be the Black Harvest all over again, I’m afraid. You saw what Donovan did with one of our ships. Imagine what a madman like Conner will do.”

            “You have me in a tight spot,” the President admitted. “It appears as if I will have to take you up on your offer. Your access to the Aurora will, of course, be under heavy guard, but given the circumstances it will be as much for your protection as it is ours. I’ll have an escort ready for you shortly. Please prepare yourselves. As for me, I have other matters of State to attend to, but you may contact me directly any time you wish. We will have to meet in person at a later date, as these events have given me a busy schedule. I hope you’ll forgive my rudeness.”

            “Of course it is forgiven, and might I say what a delight it is working with you, sir.” With that, both parties ended the call.

            Kylie went up to Fredriks and slapped him on the shoulder. “You did a fantastic job,” she told him proudly. “And here I was beginning to worry that you were brain dead.”

            Fredriks didn’t know how to take the backhanded compliment, but he was still glowing in his first accomplishment as Ambassador.

            “So are we going to go through with this plan?” Deborah asked. “Do we help them out or do we take the Aurora and leave?”

            “We’re taking the Aurora,” Kylie told her.

            “We’re not stealing the Aurora back,” Gavin argued. “We don’t have anywhere to go even if we could.”

            “We need our ship, Gavin,” Kylie told him. “We can’t leave it with these savages.”

            “They’re not savages. We won a valuable ally and we don’t need to throw that away just because you feel possessive. They’ll let us on board our ship and we can recover the weapon stash to help the real authorities capture or kill Conner. I personally don’t need to be the one to deliver the bullet.”

            “I thought you were a man, Gavin. Now I see you’re more of a woman than I am,” Kylie raged. “Conner tore his own step-father’s arm off and beat up your girlfriend in front of you. Are you not going to do anything about that?”

            “She’s not my…” Gavin stopped himself. “I am doing something about it and it’s the right thing to do. Conner is dangerous. That’s why we can’t let him have the Aurora. If we could, I’d take the ship away from these people as well, but we can’t right now. Fredriks got us the access we need to do what we need. After that, the ship stays grounded.”

            “What makes you think you have a choice in this matter? Your title? I outrank you, Gavin. My unit can control the Aurora just like your. I can take this ship and get out of here,” Kylie insisted.

            “Where would you go?” Gavin demanded, frustrated. “We’re stranded. Besides, it’s not like you really want to leave. You have more invested in this world than anyone.”

            “Can someone clue me in to something,” Deborah interjected. “Weapons? Why do we have weapons?”

            “They’re a bargaining chip, that’s all,” Kylie told her, “and that’s all you need to know.”

            “Excuse me,” Deborah did not back down and was becoming agitated, “I do need to know. We shouldn’t have brought any weapons along aside from our sidearms. Besides, I didn’t see them in the ship’s manifest. Did you smuggle them?”

            “A little,” Kylie threw up her hands. “So what? Are you going to report me? Here, let me call for you,” she activated her wrist unit. “What’s that? No one’s there? That’s right, our universe is frozen in time.”

            “You see, you admit the futility in what you’re suggesting,” Gavin continued arguing with Kylie. “We can’t go home right now. Especially you.”

            “Or you,” Kylie told him with a warning smile. Gavin blinked at her for a moment, trying to comprehend.

            “Kylie, please, listen to reason,” Fredriks said. “Gavin’s right about this. The Aurora will be in good hands. If we can help these people further their inter-dimension program, it will only benefit us.”

            “Fine,” Kylie decided without any conviction. “Let the monkeys play with it for a while. Hopefully they don’t pull the planet into a black hole. What about Conner? Are you not going to man up on this, Gavin? Are you scared of him?”

            “I was there. I saw how he appeared. I saw how our guns were useless. Why wouldn’t I be scared? I want to stop him, but I don’t need to kill him. I’m not bloodthirsty like you,” Gavin admitted.

            “So basically you want all of use to pile into the ship with an unkillable monster and then what?” Video asked.

            “That’s our job,” Goldie told him as she finished adjusting something in her unit. “We have to figure our what kind of suit he’s got and how to counterman it.”

            “I’ve done my research,” Deborah claimed. “This world or this universe in general shouldn’t have that kind of technology readily available.”

            “You’re right,” Goldie told her. “I can understand the scrambling technology that he might be using to cloak himself and lock up his signal, but teleporting around using nothing but a suit which seems to be as invincible as…” she paused.

            “As what?” Video asked her.

            “I get it,” Gavin realized. “His suit is a miniature Aurora.”

            “This universe hasn’t reached the reality-hopping stage,” Deborah told them.

            “What if…” Lara spoke up, but grew silent.

            “What is it Lara?” Gavin prompted her to speak.

            “I’m sorry, I just had an idea, is all,” she was off by herself and looked shyly out the window at the sunrise.

            “Well?” Gavin urged.

            “What if we’re not the only travellers here? What if someone else has visited this universe and gave Conner the technology he has?” she said with a shrug. “I know that’s unlikely.”

            “No, that makes sense,” Kylie said. “If Conner has a shift-suit, there’s only one place he could have gotten it from, and it’s not this universe.”

            “A what?” shook his head. “You know what he’s got?”

            “It sounds similar enough to something I’ve seen before. If I saw a picture of it I might have a better idea, but for now it sounds like a shift-suit. There was a warrior race in one universe that used them, but they got them from another universe again. Funny thing was, they didn’t have any previous ability to warp out of their own dimension.”

            “Someone gave it to them?” Gavin asked. “Who?”

            “We’re not the only Corps,” Kylie explained. “Don’t you get it? If there is an infinite number of alternative realities, and we have the technology to travel between them, that means there’s an infinite number of alternate realities that can do the same. Mirror Universes. Ask Lara, if she knows, she’s a Navigator.”

            “I don’t really know a lot,” Lara admitted. “My training was never fully complete, but it was explained to me that there’s an infinite number of Corporations in an infinite number of universes. The ways in which they differ from us are too numerous to count, but they have similar goals and means. They’re all trying to expand into as many universes as possible, just like we are. The difference is that our Corporation tries to avoid dealing with them directly. Sometimes, it’s not easy to do. We’ll often happen upon universes that have already been claimed by them, although it’s not always so easy to tell. Sometimes they’ll have completely inhabited a new universe and other times they’ll have done little more than planet their flag. Some of them are traders like us. Others are weapons dealers.

            “Our own universe exists within a frequency pattern like the Earth’s solar system exists in the Milky Way. Everything close to our frequency is moving the same direction along the same lines. The universes closest to our own are called Mirror Universes. This universe itself almost qualifies, as there’s nothing entirely alien about it or it’s people. Other universes are closer still and possibly indistinguishable. That’s why we encounter other universes with their own Corporations so frequently, as we co-exist closer together. Right now, there’s a reality race going on, and we have no idea the scope of it aside from ticking off the universes that have already been claimed. Before the attack in our home universe, interactions with rival Corporations were becoming more frequent and… violent.”

            “That’s why we think we got hit by a rival Coporation,” Kylie told Gavin. “Now it might be that they’re here in this world. That’s bad for business.”

            “That’s good for research,” Deborah said on a positive note. “If we can isolate any potential rivals, we can investigate their involvement with the attack.”

            Kylie was about to say something, then agreed. “I like that thinking.”

            “Why would anyone ally themselves with Conner?” Gavin asked. “He’s on the losing side.”

            “A side that’s been losing for dozens of years and still going isn’t losing,” Kylie explained. “It’s a buyers market out there. People will sell to whoever is going to pay.”

            “So things just got worse,” Gavin sighed.