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It wasn’t until the next year when Mateo, Leona, and Angela could safely
reactivate their tandem slingdrives. They technically could have left
shortly before midnight, but they decided it was for the best. They left a
message with the Vitalie who lived on Vitalemus, to relay to the Vellani
Ambassador if she ever heard from again. She hadn’t, but had kept apprised
of Goldilocks Corridor news, and no one had reported seeing them lately, so
no one knew where they were at this point. With nothing left for them
here, they made the jump, and returned to the beacon floating around in the
space where Castlebourne once was. They weren’t alone. They quickly picked
up comms from Ramses, Marie, Olimpia, and Romana. They only had to make a
few jumps to rendezvous with each other.
“Gang’s all here,” Mateo mused.
“How did you get back here?” Angela asked the other half of their team.
“You were taking too long,” Ramses began to explain. “We decided to come
back here to see if you were stranded after failing to track Castlebourne’s
new location. The rest is obvious. We were just about to come find you on
Vitalemus.”
“Did you put a pocket dimension in the buoy thinking Romana would be able to
use it?” Leona asked.
“No, that didn’t occur to me,” Ramses replied. “It was just a failsafe if
something went wrong. With no other habitable structure around here, there
needed to be some way to survive, like if you had a stranger in tow with a
less advanced vacuum suit, or no suit at all. As it turns out,” he went on
while tapping a piece of the buoy that he had separated from the rest, “it
was necessary.”
“Is someone in there?” Leona questioned.
“You’ll see.” That was a weird way to put it.
“Can we all go back to Castlebourne together now?” Mateo asked.
Ramses shook his head. “I’m afraid this was a one-way trip. Hrockas
scrambled the tracker from his end. Where they are by now is a mystery. I
could probably write an algorithm that could predict their movements using
their last known location. The choosing one he’s using to push the
host star around is powerful, but she has her limits. They can’t be all the
way to the outer arm of the Milky Way, or something. But we would have to
leave something behind to keep trying to track them...”
“Or I could do it again,” Romana volunteered.
“No,” Mateo countered decisively. “I don’t want you breaking your pattern
ever again.”
“Do we really need to find Castlebourne at all?” Marie asked the group. “We
were trying to leave it at one point.”
“That’s true, I remember that now,” Mateo affirms. It was the closest thing
to home they had ever had, but it was always going to end eventually. It was
supposed to end a long time ago, but they got sidetracked with all
that Pacey-Underburg stuff, which kept them tied to Castlebourne for a bit
longer.
“Do you want to try another aimless jump?” Romana offered.
“And end up back in that hellhole?” Leona added. “No, thanks.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Romana reminded them. “I liked the outfits.”
“You could always wear that kind of outfit, whenever you want,” Leona said.
“True,” Romana replied. She shed her suit, and shifted her nanites to a
1950s-esque dress, not exactly like the kind she wore when they were
oblivious and trapped in Underburg, but similar.
“Put your suit back on,” Mateo shouted.
Romana couldn’t reply in the vacuum, but she could still hear via
conduction, yet she pushed the back of her ear forward as if she couldn’t
even do that. After her father pointed at her with stern determination, she
switched her suit back on. “Geeze, Papa Bear,” she joked. “Rambo’s got me
covered. That man knows his way around a woman’s body.”
“Goddammit!” Mateo complained. “Don’t say things like that!”
“Okay, okay,” Leona jumped in, as she usually had to do when those two were
at it. Romana knew how to push her dad’s buttons, and Leona knew how to put
a stop to it, which was to change the subject as quickly as possible. “Let’s
just go back to Earth. I’m feeling a little homesick. And it was home
for all of us at some point, though not technically the same version of it.”
“That’s a good idea,” Marie concluded.
Ramses looked at his forearm readout. “My coherence gauge is in the Orange,
where are you?”
“We just arrived, so it’s still Red,” Leona answered. “We won’t be ready to
jump until nearly the end of the day, probably.”
“I’m doin’ a bottle episode!” Olimpia suddenly shouted.
“I was just thinking about that,” Angela said. “Not the bottle episode
thing, that’s nonsense. “We should call it slinging. Why are we calling it
jumping?”
“Seconded,” Romana agreed.
“All in favor,” Mateo posed. They raised their hands. “Motion passes. New
lingo established.” He paused for a moment. “Great, that entertained us for
all of ten seconds. What do we do in the meantime? And don’t say RPS-101
Plus. I don’t like playing in my suit. I can’t control my objects right.”
“You just say that because you consistently lose!” Olimpia teased.
“Mah-ri?” Angela began, “why are you looking around?”
“Oh, we just made a decision to go to Earth,” Marie replied. “That’s usually
when God laughs and intervenes.
That was true. Everyone started to look around too, but found only space.
The sudden intervention she was talking about didn’t usually happen when
they were actively looking for it...kind of a
watched pot never boils sort of thing, but it was still prudent to
check.
“Do you guys realize there are three wars?” Angela offered. She opened the
floor up to anyone, but no one responded. “The Exin Empire, the Sixth Key
conflict, and those dragonfly aliens. I don’t know if you’ve realized this,
but we’ve been switching between them. Once we close one chapter of one
book, we start the next chapter of one of the other two books.”
Ramses glanced down at the piece of the buoy he attached to his chest. Only
Mateo noticed, and he chose not to address it.
“Yeah, you’re right about that, aren’t you?” Leona asked rhetorically. “We
just closed one of the books, but we don’t know which one we’re about to
open, if either of the others.”
“I am curious about what’s going on with the Sixth Key,” Marie
admitted. “It’s been a long time. I spent some years in one of those
worlds.”
“So did I,” Romana said, referring to having grown up in ancient Third Rail.
“But the Ochivari are so fascinating,” Angela insisted. “We could end up in
any universe, dealing with any new, unfamiliar culture.”
“Well, we might be able to trigger the Transit to show up if one of us makes
a declaration that we want to fight in a cosmic war, or join the military,”
Marie suggested.
“Let’s not do that,” Leona volleyed.
“Then the Sixth Key it is,” Angela responded. “Raise the sails! Navigate us
to the aperture!” She pointed in a random direction. It was a little funny,
but nobody laughed. They just fell silent for a time.
“That lasted us another five minutes. How’s everybody’s coherence? Mine’s
still in the Red. Do we all have to be Green, or...”
“Maybe not,” Ramses explained. “I would feel safer if we were, though. I
would feel even safer with Violet.”
“If you’re bored, we could just go into stasis for a few hours. It’s not bad
in here. I found it easy to wake back up when they found me.”
“Well, yeah, Rambo knows his way around a woman’s body,” Olimpia echoed
Romana from earlier.
“I want a divorce,” Mateo said, joking, but...clearly not happy for real.
The seven of them continued to hang out there while they waited for their
coherence gauges to rise up to acceptable levels. They mostly held onto the
buoy to stay close to one another, but occasionally, one of them would push
off and float around. They could always return by utilizing their
maneuvering thrusters, or just teleporting back. That was what gave Romana
the idea to play hide-and-seek. It was a dangerous version of the game,
which not everyone in the galaxy would be able to play. Because space was
empty and black, the chances of finding someone just by the naked eye were
incredibly low. They could use their heat signatures instead, but then
detection would be incredibly easy. The only way to do it was for
each hider to shut off their own life support systems, and stay in one place
for long enough for the seeker to find everyone else first. They could still
use their comms, but they would be untraceable. Some of them could withstand
the cold for longer, and were better at hiding. Others were caught when they
just couldn’t take it anymore. At this point, they could try to teleport
away, but the seeker could always jump right to them wherever they ended up.
They played the game for a couple of hours before noticing that the same
people were winning each time. It was always either Mateo or Ramses, which
made this whole thing feel very unfeministic. Even though Ramses
supposedly built their superstrates equally, it seemed as though the
women got colder faster, just as they would if they were simply wearing
business clothes in an office. The coherence gauges still weren’t Green for
everybody, but they were sick of playing around, so most of them just took
naps. They floated aimlessly there in the black, mostly apart, though Mateo
and Olimpia held together like the two lovers they were. Leona was working
on the self-destruct sequence for the buoy. Instead of bringing it with
them, they were just gonna blow it up, so no one could have any hope of
finding any information on it. It took a lot of time and work to engage the
explosives. This was by design, so it couldn’t be switched on incidentally,
or when the user wasn’t thinking rationally.
Finally, the last of them turned Green, and it was time to leave. Ramses
woke everyone up with a calm, but crescendoing, song. They teleported back
into a group, and magnetized their suits so they could watch the explosion
together. It was a bit anticlimactic because of how fast and efficient it
was, but still something worth seeing. They synced up their slingdrives, and
with one final goodbye to the Castlebourne that was no longer there, they
slung away.
They landed on the surface of what they assumed was Earth. They quickly
detected a breathable atmosphere, and were able to recede their nanites into
regular clothes. This did look like Earth, but perhaps one from long ago.
Earth didn’t really have any cities anymore. They just lived in arcological
megastructures, and some seasteads, if they weren’t just orbiting from
space. They were on a street, though. The buildings were sleek and advanced,
but just too dense for Earth in this time period. People were staring at
them, including parents trying to hold their children close. A man
approached them cautiously. “Do you mean us harm?” he asked.
Leona stepped forward. “Absolutely not. We’re travelers, attempting to
return to Earth.”
The man looked over his shoulder at the crowd, and then back at Leona.
“Never heard of it. How did you do that thing with your clothes?”
“Have you heard of other...” Leona trailed off. She slowly darted her eyes
side to side, looking for the right way to word this. Unfortunately, the
beginning of her sentence might have painted her into a corner. No, she
could figure this out. The Prime Directive applied here until she determined
otherwise. “...other cities.”
“You mean on the other side of the tunnels?” the man guessed. “Yes. We don’t
interact with them, except to exchange some technologies sometimes.”
Tunnels. Leona looked up at the sky, or what appeared to be a sky anyway.
She pulled a small swarm of nanites over her eyes, and used them as sensors.
“Yeah, that was definitely a hologram, and they were under a dome.
Goddammit, they were back on Castlebourne, and in some kind of simulation.
Wait.
The man looked up at the sky too, trying to figure out what she was so
baffled by.
The dimensions were off. This wasn’t one of the Castlebourne domes. It was
too small. Not by much, but other than the ocean caps, and a few rare
exceptions, all Castlebourne domes were pretty much the exact same skeletal
design. Where would they be where people would be living under a dome, but
alarmed by their use of nanite technology. She looked back at the stranger
and breathed. “Have you heard of Proxima Doma?”
“Yes,” he replied. “We don’t know what it means.”
Leona looked back at the rest of the team. She just regarded them for a
moment, trying to decide the best course of action. There was really only
one. They couldn’t teleport, and they couldn’t explain their odd behavior.
The locals wouldn’t understand, and it would break their worldview. “Run.”
