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  PORTAL JUMPERS III

  BATTLE OF EARTH

  CHLOE GARNER

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  Portal Jumpers III: Battle of Earth Copyright © 2019 Chloe Garner. All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission.

  Cover design by A Horse Called Alpha

  Published by A Horse Called Alpha

  More Fiction by Chloe Garner

  Space

  Colonized by Earth several generations ago, Sarah Todd’s planet is sparse and wild. Sarah Todd is just wild. She’s been the law in her little town at the end of the line since the mines dried up, but now a new find is bringing change in by the train load.

  -Sarah Todd

  Urban Fantasy

  In the Sam and Sam Series an evasive Samantha joins Sam and Jason as they travel the country hunting the things that hunt people. As they work together and grow their skills they soon find they’re players in a game they didn’t even realize existed.

  -Rangers

  -Shaman

  -Psychic

  -Warrior

  -Dragonsword

  The Book of Carter is a four part series centered on the man who frankly needs little help centering things on himself. Samantha’s teacher in all things demonic, Aspen Carter keeps the demons of New York City in line with his bright smile and winning personality. Or whatever the opposite of that is. And a sword.

  -Book of Carter

  The Gypsy Queen series travels with a Makkai Gypsy tribe that uses their gift in crystal magic to defend human kind from evil, whatever form that takes.

  -Becca

  -Dawn

  -Bella

  Thriller (as Mindy Saturn)

  Whether it’s infiltrating the mob or challenging a drug lord, His Dark Mistress is keeping her hands on the strings that keep the bad people of the world good enough for now.

  -His Dark Mistress

  -The King of Miami

  .

  BATTLE OF EARTH

  Twin stars.

  Cassie sat next to the pool, legs crossed and a towel propped behind her head, watching the pink star chase the blue star down toward the horizon.

  The terrace overlooked a vast sea, one that was purpling under the sunset, and a lively breeze kicked up the waves, a building crash that syncopated the steady descent of the suns.

  Days here were short, only about fifteen hours, but Cassie’s Palta constitution had already adapted to it. As a human, she’d have been physically ill, trying to adapt to fifteen-hour days, and the portal program would have instituted a three-man two-up/one-down policy and rigorous artificial lighting.

  Sitting by the pool was so much preferable to that.

  She looked over as Jesse walked across the pool deck toward her. He was skeptical that she’d overcome the influence Midas had had over her, and honestly she wasn’t helping. It wasn’t her nature to help. Not anymore. She didn’t owe him an explanation for anything, and she wasn’t afraid of him misunderstanding something and suddenly underestimating her. She didn’t have to work to prove she was capable, so she didn’t.

  “Didn’t take you for the bikini type,” he said, not sitting.

  She gave him half a smile, settling against her towel. The foreign terrestrial synthetics were astonishingly good at absorbing water, but this was the first time she had found them warm and comfortable against her skin. Jesse knew his resorts, and when he’d chosen this one, he’d gone really high end. They’d actually gone back to personal wait staff to ensure that the guests had everything they could dream of available to them at any hour. Every place Cassie had been to on her own had a digital service, and the better ones had used ‘portal’ technology to deliver her requests. No interaction at all. Very private, very lush.

  The staff here on Luminos were better than point-to-point transfers, when it came to a sense of privacy. Keeping a secret when you were by yourself didn’t prove anything. Providing privacy while being around was remarkable, and Cassie had been watching how they did it.

  “Troy would die,” she said. “He barely even saw me without my hair up.”

  Jesse sat on the deck chair next to her. Lounging was approaching universal for a preferred form of relaxation, and they were capable of supporting nearly any skeletal structure the universe could have thrown at them, but when she lay in it, her chair looked like a plain human deck chair with a towel draped over it. Hard to beat the elegance of it.

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Jesse said. “But we have things we need to discuss.”

  She waved a hand at him.

  “This is the first week of my Palta life that I have not had Midas in my head. You leave me be.”

  “Except all that time you spent thinking you were a rancher’s wife,” Jesse said, and she tipped her head to the side ever so slightly to look at him. Was that really what he wanted to bring up now? When what he really wanted to talk about was Palta romantic relationships and how hard they were and how it really wasn’t a good idea for them to be involved, as much as he really wanted to.

  She could smell it on him.

  The anxiety, the guilt, the unbidden complete happiness.

  They were sharing a bed at night. He hadn’t so much as touched her since they’d gotten here. Not a finger.

  She watched the suns setting, reaching for her drink.

  “This is very good,” she said. “Do you want one?”

  There would be a server standing behind her, just to the right, his arms in an unassuming, open posture - exactly which depended on his physiology - watching Jesse attentively. It was as if one of them around here was psychic and was predicting when she might want something. Facial-recognition software in cameras somewhere? Some version of the Palta knack for not being noticed when they didn’t want to be? If she’d been human still, she’d have figured it was possible he could have been there the whole time and just that moment allowed her to be aware of it, but it was hard to fool a Palta. She would have known.

  She knew the answer. She was hiding it from herself as part of the game, and sometime in the next day or so she’d let herself find it, just a scavenger hunt.

  Just for fun.

  She was immeasurably able to entertain herself.

  It was no wonder Jesse had such a playful soul.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Jesse said. The crocodilian gave a little nod - one Cassie didn’t have to see to know about - and made himself scarce again. It was going to be a good solve, when she got there.

  “Your loss,” she murmured. “The sunset doesn’t get old, does it?”

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  She sighed.

  “Not yet, Jesse.”

  “I need to know,” he said. She snorted.

  “You do not. You want to know and you’re going to masquerade as concerned until you get bored and get curious about something else instead.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I want to know. I care.”

  She shook her head.

  “I know you do. But I’m not ready to go back there yet. I want to be here, now.”

  There was a rush of air as he pushed himself back up onto his feet.

  “Don’t drag it out too long,” he said. “I’ve made that mistake.”

  “By my count, you’ve made most of them,” Cassie answered. “I think I’m going to go for a swim.”

  Another member of the staff put a tray down onto the table by her elbow. A hairbrush and a tie. Neither of them looked at all like the ones she’d used her entire life, but she identified them easily. She smiled.

  “Thank you,” sh
e said as the female foreign terrestrial pressed her palms together and backed away in a rolling motion over eight densely-packed appendages.

  Cassie looked at Jesse, sitting up.

  “You could join me. You’re the one who came here. You may as well enjoy yourself.”

  “I don’t know why I came,” he said, uncomfortably honest. “I just knew you’d like it.”

  She smiled, earnest.

  “I do. Thank you.”

  He nodded, reaching a hand out toward hers, but without skin-to-skin contact, then turning and going back toward the extensively-landscaped courtyards. He would walk until dark, talking to ghosts.

  Cassie didn’t want to be there for that.

  She sighed delicately and put her hair up, going to dip a toe in the pool. This one: this one was tricky. Temperature depended on so many things about physiology. Core temperature, insulation, blood chemical composition, the natural flora and fauna that lived inside and on any given body. Humans were reasonably tolerant as it went. They’d colonized an entire planet with a divergent set of temperatures and natural settings, so they could survive quite a lot. A resort like this, though, wasn’t about surviving. It was about pitch-perfection with the exact physiology of each of their guests.

  Surprisingly, heating the water as she went through it wasn’t the challenging part. Adding heat was quick and easy. Not heating her at the same time was marginally more difficult, but for a culture that had adapted to portal technology a hundred generations before, it wasn’t that much more difficult. It was cooling the water that had taken a neat trick. Cassie would have had two tanks and portaled in the correct ratio of hot and cold water to reach the right temperature, but the Luminos resort was actually transferring out energy by microscopic agitations within the water that caused it to bubble and collapse. It was the same technology as an air conditioner on earth, but elegant in a way that Cassie deeply appreciated.

  They could have three or four guests in the water at any given time, and each of them would experience exactly the temperature they would have selected for themselves on a bath.

  She sat down on the edge of the pool, a slight grade to the wall developing to prop her legs out, away from her, and she looked out at the suns.

  She was wealthy beyond even her own ability to understand it.

  She was free of outside meddling and expectations. The only expectations she had to live up to were her own, but she needed time to figure out what those were. Not the superficial ones. Those had taken a second and a half to realize. But the more complex ones, with multiple interests intersecting in unlikely ways, those she wanted to inspect and prepare for.

  What if games.

  This was a beautiful place to do it, even if Jesse was being a drama queen about it.

  He’d kissed her, hadn’t he? Impulsive, even for a Palta, and hardly ambiguous. If he thought he was going to get to walk that back, play it like professionals, he was playing the game with the wrong Palta.

  It was fun, watching him squirm about it, though.

  She took a deep, easy breath and was ready to slide into the water to swim for a while when a flashing pink-and-yellow creature surfaced out of the pool with a gasp. Her hair crackled around her like magnetic forces were toying with it, and pale yellow eyes zeroed in on Cassie.

  “You must help us,” she whispered, her voice like the sound of the ocean. She made a diving motion with her arms, but instead of plunging into the water, she went fingertips-first into Cassie’s chest and disappeared.

  *********

  Cassie pursed her lips.

  The blue star was just beginning to disappear behind the watery horizon, and the light around her was pinking and purpling with lengthened wavelengths and dimming light.

  She sighed.

  “You’d best fetch Jesse,” she said finally, stretching her legs straight out in front of her and standing, going back to her deck chair and drying off her legs.

  “So inconvenient,” she muttered. “I just got loose.”

  She sighed again, standing and turning to face the gardens.

  A moment later, Jesse rounded a corner, running.

  She reached for her drink and took a sip of it, then put on her sandals - she couldn’t tell if they were a natural fiber or a synthetic, but she liked the way they stretched around her feet - and looked at Jesse again.

  He came skidding to a stop in front of her.

  “They just told me,” he said. Looked her up and down, forehead creased. “They said there was a siren here.”

  “Yup,” Cassie said, ticking her head to an angle. “Siren. Like from human mythology?”

  He frowned harder.

  “Not like you might guess, from the shipwreck stories, but, yes, they’ve apparently been to earth.”

  “She didn’t sing,” Cassie said.

  “They said something happened.”

  She nodded.

  “It did.”

  “What did?” he asked. Cassie looked at her chest, then lifted her head again as she picked up a robe from the back of her chair - that had not been there a moment before - and put it on.

  “What are they?”

  Jesse grunted frustration.

  “They’re power creatures,” he said.

  “Those words aren’t specific enough,” Cassie answered.

  “Sentient energy,” Jesse said.

  “Ah,” Cassie said, playing her tongue along her back teeth for a moment before closing her mouth. “I honestly can’t even figure out how that’s possible.”

  “It’s very, very complicated, and they’re very rare,” Jesse said. “The reason everyone knows about them is that most civilization develops within some proximity to bodies of water.”

  Cassie nodded.

  “What’s the water got to do with it?” she asked.

  He looked at the pool.

  “Energy,” he said. “The water molecules align in special ways, no other fluid in the universe does it the way water does, and it makes it so that special species who can work the nature of the water…”

  “Spontaneous portals,” Cassie said, the math clicking in her head. He nodded.

  “But they come in packs,” he said. “Big ones. They can’t survive on their own. Their energy isn’t stable enough.”

  Cassie scratched her forehead.

  “See, that’s interesting,” she said. “Because there was definitely only one.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Are you ready for dinner?” she asked. “It’s going to be dark out here, soon.”

  He walked alongside of her for lack of anything else to do.

  “Look,” he said, holding up his hands. “Look, wait. Just tell me this. Are you okay?”

  She nodded quickly.

  “I’m perfectly in control of the situation,” she said. “Something hot, I think. What do they serve here that’s on fire when they bring it to you?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, then shrugged.

  “They have chefs from three dozen planets,” he said. “There’s very little that even you could think of that they wouldn’t be able to figure out.”

  Cassie nodded.

  “I want something that’s just been on fire.”

  *********

  Troy opened his eyes, looking at the ceiling of his apartment.

  The panoramic window looking out over the town that had sprung up in the shadow of the portal program told him that it was still early, but he was on military time, which meant that if he wasn’t showered by the time the sun came up, he was late, and he was still on rather a lot of adrenalin from the last few days.

  He needed to get to base, to help figure out what was going to happen next.

  Donovan wouldn’t survive it. The hint of the things he’d been up to was enough to know that. He’d gone around his chain of command, and he’d exploited the capability of the base. He might get court marshaled, and Troy would likely have to testify, there, but mostly Troy was concerned with today.
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  Today was yesterday’s tomorrow.

  All those little problems that he’d been putting off until the big ones were solved - they’d piled up and spiraled out of control, and this was the tomorrow that they’d been waiting for.

  All of the officers who had taken roles after General Donovan had assumed command were suspect, guilty by association until someone trustworthy could clear them. The problem was that there weren’t many officers left from General Thompson’s tenure. Jamie Oliver was gone. No one in Troy’s old chain of command was left, above Oliver. As far as Troy was concerned, it made him the ranking officer on base until someone made a convincing case otherwise, and the only reason he had come home to sleep was because of a direct order from a US Senator. He’d called her the night before to tell her that he was back on base, and her exact words had been: jeez you look terrible; we’ll talk in the morning.

  It wasn’t the worst dismissal Troy had ever had.

  The entire air force chain of command was tangled up, with the Secretary of the Air Force under arrest as of yesterday afternoon, and no one sure which of his deputies would be approved to take his place as temporary Secretary, given that any one of them might have been involved either with the foreign terrestrial who had corrupted the office, or with Donovan, who had had cover from on high for what he had been doing.

  Meanwhile, the portal had to run.

  It was a machine that very much resisted shutting down, fortunately, so Troy didn’t expect that any of the critical planned jumps would fail to happen, or that the portal floor would just shut down, but all of that needed authority for it to happen, and, working through it in his head after they’d gotten back from… whatever the hell it had been that had happened at the house in space with the dwarf named Midas… When he’d worked it through, Troy couldn’t find any source for that authority but himself.

  So he got up.

  In the dark.

  He dressed.

  He groomed.

  He ate a quick, cold breakfast.

  He went down to his car.