This is dedicated to ChristineX, Savivi and NorthwestMarmot for all their help in putting this story together. Thanks guys!

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Imperial Daughter

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::Part One::

I.

Honduras, 2019

In her wildest dreams, Kitrin never thought she would end up working I.T. at a museum of antiquities in San Dióscoro, but as she pulled another Cerveza Imperial out of the fridge, things didn't seem as bad as they had earlier. Sure, her upbringing in Montana hadn't prepared her for the weather; the museum was in a seedy part of town and was ordinarily guarded by two guys with Kalashnikovs; and the city itself, situated about halfway between Tegus and Choluteca, seemed far more quaintly attractive in the pictures on the Lonely Planet website then it did in real life. At least she liked baleadas and plantains, the beer was cheap, and most importantly, no one cared if she drank while she worked after hours.

But then the lights in the museum flickered and dimmed.

"What was that?" Kitrin asked herself uneasily. The new president of Honduras had promised, with much fanfare, that the Laguna Blanca nuclear power plant—only 18 kilometers to the east of here—would provide endless electricity for the once struggling country. But there had been rumors, that the storage sites overflowed with toxic waste and there were fissures in the plant itself…

Hoping that the main computer wouldn't be affected, Kitrin rushed out of the kitchen area, past the moldering Mayan and Lencan artifacts, and into the main office. She heaved a sigh of relief when she saw the computers were still up and running—Laguna Blanca or not, she was glad that the acting director had made space in the budget for the uninterruptable power-supply units she'd wanted. The diagnostics were almost done. She would shut down the computers when she was finished.

"Kitrin? Are you there?"

Kitrin started—then she realized the voice had emerged from her own laptop. She leaned closer. "Grandpa? Is that you?"

"Yes, love, it's me." When she pulled up the chat program and his webcam, she saw him relaxing in front of his own computer. She saw the big forehead, the white hair, the casual yet expensive clothes, and the smug expression. Same old, same old, she thought, once again beginning to feel defensive and paranoid. No doubt he could see her equally well, with the black Louise Brooks bob and tattooed arms. "Are you at the museum? What are you doing there this late?"

"Working," said Kitrin shortly. "I can concentrate better once everyone goes home."

"I'm sure you can," said her grandfather. "I'm sure it's very relaxing. Is that a beer I see you holding? And a cigarette?"

She knew he wasn't trying to piss her off, but Kitrin felt her face turning red. "Yes, it is! It's Honduras, Grandpa. No one cares about that here. It's not San Francisco."

"You don't have to get angry, Kitrin." Isaac Lang chuckled. "It takes me back to when I was a kid in the '80s, working on software in my friend Derek's garage. We could have snorted coke and no one would have cared, as long as we got the work done. Things really have changed, haven't they?"

Yeah, now you're stinking rich, thought Kitrin. "Sure, yeah. Hey, did Shannon get the doll?"

"The doll?" Isaac looked blank.

"Yes! The doll. The one I sent for her birthday!" Kitrin felt a sudden burst of panic that it might have gotten lost in the mail somehow. She had bought it from a Xicaque woman in the market a month ago, and there was something about it that was so simple and cute that she'd fallen in love with it immediately. A mother doll in pink was clasping a baby doll in white, and there were flowers picked out in orange and blue along the hem of the mother's robe. Shannon's favorite color was pink. She was still into princesses and stuff like that. It wasn't Barbie, but Kitrin hoped she would like it.

"Oh the doll!" Her grandfather made an almost dismissive gesture. "Yes, she loves it. She got a lot of gifts for her birthday, but she seems to like your gift the best of all. She even takes it to bed with her at night, and believe me, it's not as if she doesn't have lots of other toys to choose from."

As with most things her grandfather said, Kitrin couldn't tell if he was insulting her or not. To hell with him; she was just happy that her little cousin liked her gift. "Can I speak to her?"

"Oh, I'm afraid not. She's at school."

She started first grade this year, Kitrin knew. It was strange to think that Shannon was already six. "Well, ah, tell her I hope she had a great birthday, and that I wish I could have been there."

"Of course." Her grandfather leaned forward, with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Kitrin, you know that job is still yours, if you want it. If you moved back to San Francisco, you could see Shannon as often as you like. Just think how happy that would make her. You know, she talks about you all the time."

Oh God, this was just the crap she was dreading. Kitrin smiled back tightly. "Thanks for the offer. Look, Grandpa, it was great talking to you, but I have to go."

"Now really, Kitrin, I was going to ask—"

"Sorry, stuff to do! I'll catch you later!"

Kitrin clicked off the chat window and shut her laptop, shaking. Jesus, that bastard! No wonder she'd moved so far away. It was a good thing she didn't take that job at Lang Technologies, or she'd be in jail for attempted murder or something. She ground out her cigarette in the nearest ashtray.

She hoped Shannon was okay. Even though they weren't sisters, Kitrin often felt that they were. Shannon's dad—Kitrin's uncle—was on a tour of duty overseas, and while it technically made sense that he would leave his daughter with his own father to take care of in his absence, it wasn't as if Isaac Lang had the greatest track record as a parent.

After all, look at how her own mother had turned out.

She sighed. God, she needed another beer.

She started back to the kitchen area, ducking around the pillar recently added to the not particularly impressive museum collection. It was an odd little thing, found at a recent dig in the Cacaulapa Valley—it was a pillar of white gneiss, heavily veined with quartz, surmounted by carvings that vaguely looked like a ring on top of an egg. There were several characters carved into it that might have been hieroglyphs, except they were so worn it was hard to tell what they were supposed to be. It didn't look Mayan, but it was extremely old, whatever it was. There had been a lot of controversy over the piece being admitted into the museum in the first place; the assistant director (among others) thought it likely to be a hoax, but was overruled by the acting director, a pompous and somewhat dim-witted guy who was the cousin of the mayor of San Dióscoro, and who correspondingly liked to throw his weight around.

Imagining the outrage in the jowly face of the acting director, she touched the top of the egg for good luck, as always relishing the feel of the cool stone beneath her fingers. Yet as she did so, the lights dimmed again.

One brown-out might have been excusable… but two? In less than ten minutes? I have a bad feeling about this, she thought.

The lights went out.

She felt vibrations beneath her feet, the whole building rumbling as if the earth shook, the figurines and artifacts rattling in their cases. Perhaps it was an earthquake. But somehow, Kitrin didn't think so. Her skin grew cold.

Whatever happened, she thought inanely, the beer's going to get warm now-

Part of her brain told her that she should run back into the office, to look toward Laguna Blanca. But instead, she was transfixed by what she saw right in front of her.

Seconds before, she had seen nothing but air and the dingy interior of the museum, but all of a sudden, above the pillar shimmered a glowing, pulsating circle of rainbow light. It looked just like pictures of the Ring Nebula, and it was the most beautiful and frightening thing Kitrin had ever seen. The outward edges crackled and bled out, like electricity, but the center was the milky blue of a blind cornea. But it seemed strangely aware—it seemed to stare at her, flickering, almost blinking like a curious eye.

Horrified but hypnotized, she stepped closer. She moved toward it until she felt she could part the blue veil of light with her hands, to see what lay beyond.

The next thing she knew, she felt herself being pulled through, with the air screaming past her ears, as if she were falling off the very edge of the world. Everything spun around her. Her stomach twisted into knots, and she felt an indescribable cold—

And then, blackness.

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Kitrin woke up in a mud puddle, dizzy, nauseated, with her head pounding as if she'd just drunk an entire bottle of tequila.

She staggered up, groaning. As soon as she could focus, she found herself gaping in amazement. She was no longer in the museum, or even in the city. She was surrounded by heavily canopied rain forest on three sides, almost identical to what could be found only a few miles outside San Dióscoro, while behind her was a steep mossy overhang. Beside her was a pillar similar to the one back in the museum.

She stared at it, terrified. What the hell had happened? Was she dreaming?

Kitrin grabbed the pillar. Had her touch triggered it? That couldn't be… she'd touched the thing before. Had it been something to do with Laguna Blanca? Had the whole nuclear power plant melted down like Chernobyl? Had she really been sucked through that eye, or that wormhole, or whatever the hell it was… or was she hallucinating?

Frantically, she examined the wall behind her. There seemed to be eroded carvings on it, but they were too worn to figure out what they could be. As she groped the stone, a strange three-eyed red insect skittered out, waving iridescent antennae. Kitrin shrieked, stumbling a few steps backward.

Where was she?

"You'll be okay, Kitrin," she told herself, trying to breathe slowly and calmly as she wiped off her shaking fingers on her shorts. She looked down at herself. She was still wearing the same khaki cargo shorts and white tank top that she'd worn earlier, except the outfit was rather the worse for wear because of the mud. At least she had on hiking boots and heavy socks, so her feet were well protected, if nothing else. She went through her pockets. There was her wallet, with a few Honduran lempira notes and centavos, her credit cards, various forms of ID, her favorite picture of Shannon, and one of her mother and grandfather, taken twenty years ago, before either of them had become too fucked up (or so she liked to think).

She also had a cigarette lighter, her keys, her penknife, and her mobile. She turned it on, and frowned at the lack of reception.

Kitrin looked around helplessly. She had no idea where she was, or how she'd gotten here… but she couldn't just stay here, or hope to wake up. The only thing she could do was hike back to civilization. It was a good thing her Spanish was decent, she told herself grimly, or else why would she have come to Honduras in the first place?

She set off randomly, hoping the trees would clear at some point so she could get a better sense of where she was.

But as she struggled through the undergrowth, slapping at the insects, Kitrin couldn't shake the eerie feeling she had about this place. It looked so much like the jungles of Honduras, which she was familiar enough with, having hiked near the ruins of Copan and through the Pico Bonito national park. But there was something off about it all. Birds cooed in the upper reaches of the canopy, but they weren't macaws or jacamars or quetzals; they were large and golden, with long swan-like necks and vaguely pterodactyl-shaped bodies. Somewhere off in the near distance, she heard the grunting and whuffling of something that might have been a water buffalo. Since when were wild water buffalo found in Central America? She saw the occasional glimpse of something that might have been a monkey, scampering on a far-off branch, but it was… blue?

As the blue creature approached her more closely, Kitrin squinted at it, wondering just what it was. It was definitely simian, but it had three-fingered hands, and the most outlandish blue and yellow striped fur. It was definitely not pleased to see her, since it began jumping up and down, screeching and growling.

"Hey, calm down," said Kitrin with her hands up. "I'm leaving—really!"

The blue monkey didn't believe her, apparently, because the next thing she knew, she was ducking missiles of what seemed to be rotten fruit. Glad it wasn't dung, Kitrin still made all haste to move along as quickly as possible, trying not to trip on any roots as she did so. The last thing she needed now was a twisted ankle.

"Have I travelled back in time?" she asked herself aloud, when she was finally sure she left the blue monkey thing far behind. Was she back in the early Cenozoic? What else could explain the unearthly feeling she had? It didn't feel like the twenty-first century, that was for certain. Or was she just losing her mind?

Just as she was thinking this, the forest abruptly ended. She found herself walking out of the shelter of the trees, onto the edge of an escarpment. There was a valley below, with jungle spreading out as far as the eye could see. Not so different from the foothills of Honduras. But above her, in the beautiful blue sky, hung a huge striated gas planet—almost like Jupiter—but the color of blood.

Her body felt boneless. She fell to her knees, stunned. For a moment she thought she would really faint.

"Oh my God," she whispered. "I'm insane. That's it. I've gone fucking crazy."

She didn't know how long she stood there, trembling. It took all her will not to curl up into a fetal position and start whimpering. But she did close her eyes and wish to be home, with all her might. Yet when she opened her eyes again, the splendidly lush alien world still remained before her, unchanged. A wave of absolute terror washed over her.

The golden birds she had seen earlier didn't seem concerned, though. They continued to fly serenely across the sky, past the vast scarlet hemispheres of the gas giant, singing at each other.

As nightmarish as this all was, Kitrin watched the birds for the longest time. In a way, they were oddly reassuring.

This couldn't be a hallucination, she thought, once the panic had eventually subsided. Even at her most high, or at her most amped, she'd never had a hallucination that was this… thorough. How could she have imagined a world this complete? Maybe she was in a coma? But why would she have imagined herself into the middle of a Clark Ashton Smith story, or into an old Outer Limits episode? The mind was a strange thing, though. For all she knew, her mother, grandfather and Shannon were standing around her hospital bed, talking to her and holding her hand.

But that was really not a useful hypothesis, she thought. She was sweating and hungry and sore all over. Telling herself she wasn't really hungry and sore wasn't going to do any good. For whatever reason, this world was being forced on her; and it was beginning to look as if she couldn't wish it away. She was going to have to treat it as if it were real. Unfortunately.

Are there any people here? she wondered. She wasn't having any trouble breathing. If there were inhabitants, would they be humans, or would they be grays or little green men or even floating sentient beings of light? She had no idea.

If no people… or humanoids… or whomever… showed up, then she was really going to have to start thinking about shelter. And food. At least she now knew there was fruit back within the trees. And perhaps she could stay by that mossy overhang back by the pillar…

She was not looking forward to this though. She closed her eyes, and prayed fervently to every deity she could think of to send someone to help her.

When she opened her eyes again, she gasped. God must have been listening, because descending from the sky into the valley was a spaceship. It wasn't a saucer-shaped UFO, but rather an attractive and very futuristic little thing with three wings, like an inverted Y. It was hard to tell at this distance, but the scale of it seemed quite human. As it prepared to land, it raised and retracted its lower wings, and disappeared into the trees.

It seemed that help had arrived at last.

If not, well…Kitrin hoped it would be over quickly. She didn't think she'd like being the subject of alien experiments, she thought with a grim smile.