Nearly an hour later, the door to the hub opened and Ray crutched out, moving as fast as she could back toward the cafeteria. Shadow was beside her, fiddling with a small Kilrathi device. It was about as large as a small camera, with a flat screen taking up nearly half of it.
"Remember, Ripley: Protocol Neary, subsection four, paragraph one."
Ray repeated it back a couple of times, never slowing. Shadow reached a hand out and squeezed her shoulder briefly, then passed her the device. "You may need this to get them moving. Good luck."
"You too, Colonel," Ray replied, looking over with solemn eyes. "Be safe."
Shadow broke off, heading away down a side hall at a jog. Ray fought the urge to watch her until she disappeared from sight, and instead kept doggedly on her way.
Just as she'd hoped, both Parry and Jon were still in the little cafeteria, though neither of them were eating. As soon as Ray came in, they both jumped to their feet.
"Do either of you have anything you want to get from your rooms?" Ray asked before either could speak.
"Ripley, what's going on? Why did-" Jon tried anyway, but Ray cut him off.
"There's no time. We've got only about five more minutes and we'll need every one of them. Do you have anything you want to get? We're leaving, and we won't be back."
Under other circumstances Parry may have found the question laughable; of course neither of them had anything they wanted to retrieve. They were literally wearing the only things they had, and even those were borrowed.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"To stop this war, hopefully," Ray said. "I can't say anything more until it's safe."
As they reached each other, she gripped Parry's arm, looking from her eyes to Jon's. "I need you two to trust me. Protocol Neary, subsection four, paragraph one. Can you remember that?"
Parry and Jon exchanged confused looks. "Protocol Neary? I've never heard of-"
"You don't need to have heard of it, can you remember it? Protocol Neary, subsection four, paragraph one. Can you do that?"
"Yes, of course," Jondell said. Ray nodded, giving him the device and then passing Parry her crutch.
"Jon, you're going to need that. Start scanning and tell me when you see it. I'm not entirely sure what's going to happen, but if either of you make it through and I don't, I want you to repeat those words as quickly as you can. Keep your hands in the air, and repeat the words, ok? I don't want anyone to get shot."
"Shot?" Jon looked at the device in his hand. "This is-"
"Start scanning, sir," she said. He shook his head as he activated the device.
"Answers had better come soon," he said.
"They will, I promise." Giving a half hop as she turned, Ray gripped hold of Parry's arm to steady herself, and found her balance. She looked at Parry with a soft, sad expression.
"I hope…" she started, then shook her head.
"Ray, please," Parry said softly.
"I can't," Ray said. "Not just yet. You'll know in just a few minutes, but I can't risk you. Just remember what I said. Protocol Neary, subsection four, paragraph one. Sir, I hope you're scanning."
"Yes, I am. Not sure what for, but I'm scanning."
Ray touched Parry's arm again, and awkwardly shuffled around until she was facing an open space just beyond the tables. Reaching out her hands, she held them palm out toward the space.
There was silence for only a heartbeat, before Jon suddenly started. He was looking at the scanner screen. "Holy hell! Ripley, how the fuck are you doing that?"
Ray ignored him. Leaving one palm still out, she groped over with her other hand, and found Parry's arm again. She gave it a squeeze, then took her crutch back without turning her head or otherwise moving. Parry gave it over, and Ray tucked it under her armpit.
"Both of you," Ray said, and her voice sounded strange suddenly; a strangely distant resonance seemed to hum through the words. "I need you to come right beside me. We need to go in together."
Jon moved over, passing Parry the scanner. She looked down at it and her confused expression turned into one of shock. The device showed the cafeteria for about ten feet in front of them, the chairs and metal walls showing as cool white shapes in the scan field. Filling up most of the space just a few feet in front of them was a strange shimmer; like heat waves rising off a desert road.
Ray was already starting forward. Lowering the scanner, Parry took a hurried step forward toward Ray's left shoulder. Jon had moved in on the right. For a moment she saw the oddest sight; the entire front of Ripley's body vanishing as if she was limping face first into nothingness. Then Parry's step brought her forward as well and just that simply, the cafeteria vanished.
In its place stood a windowless, brightly lit conference room. Men and women were gathered around a massive table, most in military dress. Parry recognized several faces instantly; General Bastille of Houston, General Lowman of the First Fleet, and the Minister of Defense, Solomon Rojas. At the far head of the table, on her feet, was a sternly dignified woman of later years, and Parry recognized her too.
It was President Diamila Ndiaye of Earth and the Terran Confederation.
All of them, both familiar and not, were staring at the three of them. More than one reached for sidearms at their belts out of what appeared to be reflex, and Ndiaye's hand lifted to halt them- also almost out of reflex.
Realization hit Parry like a physical force. That shimmer on the scanner, the very one still clutched white knuckled in her hand, had been a wormhole. Somehow, Ray had opened a wormhole without the use of jump gates, and they had just stepped through into the President's own conference with the Fleet Generals and her Chiefs of Staff.
They were home. They were back on Earth.
"Protocol…" Ray said, but something was wrong. Her voice trailed off and suddenly she was crumpling, eyes rolling back as she fell into a dead faint. Parry and Jon awkwardly caught her as both crutch and scanner dropped to the floor.
"Ray?" Arm under her wingmate's neck, Parry lightly began to pat her cheek. Jon looked up as a few chairs rolled back, then quickly straightened.
More than a few hands went to sidearms this time, and Jon lifted his hands and his voice.
"Protocol Neary! Subsection four, paragraph one!"
Ndiaye lifted her hand again toward the others and regarded him. "Yes," she said, in a rich and lightly accented voice. "We had to dust off the regulations when your message…appeared."
She gestured at a data post on the table in front of her.
"Ma'am, I'm sorry but we have no knowledge of what is going on here," he said.
"I must stop you there. Before you continue-" she looked over at Bastille. "They are your officers? You can verify their identities?"
"They certainly seem to be," Bastille told her.
"We'll need full scans to determine for certain," a narrow, fox-faced man said. "For now, my earlier suggestion holds. They should be put into custody."
"Ray?" Parry sighed in relief as Ripley's eyes fluttered, and then opened. An exhausted, bewildered expression filled them for a moment. "Ray, are you ok?"
"Parry…" she blinked rapidly, then nodded as her eyes cleared into alarm. She gripped hold of the other woman and tried to pull herself up. "Protocol Neary!"
"Yes, your companion has said," Ndiaye told her calmly, as Parry and Jon helped to heave her to her feet. "You three are confirmed members of the Confed-"
"Not quite confirmed yet!" the fox-faced man protested, but she ignored him.
"-so I must ask; to whom are you applying Protocol Neary?"
"Me," Ripley said. She was back upright now, one arm slung over Parry's shoulders. Her face looked pale and gray, her eyes hollowed. Parry held her tightly, afraid she'd faint again.
"You," Ndiaye said evenly, then looked at Bastille.
"This is Ray Caruso," Bastille told her, and the fox-faced man snorted.
"You mean Rayna Ckinlin," he said. Jon's jaw tightened as he looked at Ripley in surprise. She did not look back.
"Madam President, I invoke Protocol Neary, subsection four, paragraph one in regards to myself. I also humbly ask that my two companions be granted clearance for any confidential information that may be imparted in this room, and pardoned for any confidential breeches that they may have inadvertently been party to."
"I understand, 2nd Lieutenant," she said calmly. "However, we have some small conundrum here. You are a confirmed member of the Confed and are certified as human. We have records tracing you back to birth. If you are who General Bastille says you are, then I cannot see how Protocol Neary applies."
"Before I explain, I really need clearance granted for my companions," Ray replied.
"Madam President," the fox-faced man said. "I can escort them out and have their identities genetically verified."
"No," Ray said, and she sounded almost angry. "They need clearance. They need to stay."
"You're not in a position to make such requests," he replied tautly.
"If Protocol Neary does apply to her, she is," Bastille told him.
"Yes, however we haven't yet determined that Neary applies," he shot back.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, please," Ndiaye lifted her voice. "We just saw a data post appear out of mid-air and land directly on this very conference table. Only fifteen minutes after, just as it warned, three people also appeared out of nowhere. I think we can give the benefit of the doubt for a moment. 1st Lt. Killdare; 2nd Lt. Mazurek. You are, at least temporarily, pardoned of any incidental breeches of confidentiality that may have occurred prior to now, and you have clearance granted for any such information that may now be imparted. If we are able to determine that Neary does apply, those pardons and your clearance will stand. You will have diplomatic immunity, the same as Caruso, under paragraph one of the Neary Protocol."
"Madam President, my apologies. I was not informed of any of this before we came here. I'm still not even sure how we came here. I think it's safe to say the same of Angel," Jon told her. "I don't even know what the Neary Protocol is."
"That is unsurprising; as I said, we had to dust off the regulations ourselves. General Ghislin?"
The fox-faced man picked up the data post on the table. "Protocol Neary was written almost the day the Confed was founded," he said. "It is, quite simply, a set of rules and regulations that are meant to be followed if and when a new, sentient, extraterrestrial life form is encountered. It discusses first contact procedures, but most importantly to our situation here- subsection four describes the powers and conditions that should be granted to any first contact member of that extraterrestrial life form. Essentially, the first of any such being encountered by us is presumed peaceful, unless demonstrated otherwise. They are granted ambassadorial standing and are not subject to our laws; especially those that may have been inadvertently broken before. With such standing they are privy to confidential information that directly pertains to that role, and also have the power to extend that privilege to subdelegates of their own choosing."
Parry stared at Ripley a moment. Although Ray still had her arm around her shoulders, she did not seem able to look back at her.
"The difficulty here is, Caruso is not an extraterrestrial life form and thus does not fall under first contact protocols," he finished, dropping the data post again. "Madam President, I don't know how they managed to open a Jump into this room, with neither jump gates nor jump engines to access it; but on this particular there can be no doubt. Rayna Ckinlin was born human, of human parents. We have full medical records and documentation throughout her entire life. Name change or no, she is human. And as such, Neary does not apply."
"Well, 2nd Lt. Caruso?" the President asked. "Your companions now have immunity, as your ostensible delegation, for anything they hear in this room. Can you explain yourself?"
"May I sit down first?" Ray asked in a weary voice. "I was not expecting it would be quite like that."
Ndiaye nodded, and Parry helped Ray over to one of the chairs around the table. The other officers and generals in the room started to take their seats again as well. Unsure what else to do, Parry and Jon stayed on either side of Ray's chair. Parry kept her hand on her wingman's shoulder, still trying to process what was happening. She felt like she was stuck in some kind of dream.
"Madam President, I know about Project: Lure," Ray said. "I know how the Confed experimented, trying to bring back ships that vanished in the Jumps. I know how they sent unknowing human test subjects through, lost their ships deliberately, to see if they could be brought back after they enjoyed some success with their initial probes."
Ray could feel Parry's fingers digging in to her shoulders. She knew that neither of her two companions knew of this, and that it would rock them to their cores, but she had no choice but to press on.
"I know that my family, the Ckinlin family, was sent through as part of this experiment," Ray said. "I was. But what you brought back was not the Ckinlin family. Every time you got a person back successfully, even for a short period of time, it wasn't really them."
She leaned forward, threading her fingers together to stop her hands from shaking. She looked only at Ndiaye. "Jump technology works by opening a wormhole between two gates, that connects two points of the universe together and bypasses the physical space between. This is what we know. Ships that vanish in the wormholes vanish through fissures that open up in this wormhole; this is what Project Lure learned. They learned how to open the fissures deliberately, to pass something through and back again. What you don't know is that the wormholes work by punching a hole through another universe entirely. These fissures are tears in that place, tears that open into that separate universe."
No one spoke. Everyone was staring at her with mixed expressions of disbelief and shock.
"It is a quantum space," she continued. "The laws of time and physics do not flow there, the same as they do here, in this material space. As is this material space, that quantum space is inhabited. Highly intelligent beings call that place home. While you have been creating Jumps, you are literally putting holes in that quantum space. We, the inhabitants of that place, did not understand what was happening. Your wormholes were disruptive, dangerous, but we had no concept of your material space, just as you had no concept of us. We started trying to learn what was happening.
"And then, your ships started to come through the fissures. Such alien things; we'd never encountered anything like them. We studied them, trying to understand. We eventually learned that you were material beings somehow falling through these disruptive phenomenon into our space. We also learned that you could not survive in our quantum space. To pass into it, for you, means instant death. Always."
"That isn't true," Bastille said, her brows knit. "We have successfully brought people back."
"No," Ray said sadly. "You haven't. You've brought us back."
She looked at her hands, and after a long pause she continued. "Ever since I was a child, I felt out of place with humanity. I didn't seem to think like you, feel like you. Human beings, your emotions and social interactions- I just didn't understand them. That is because I am out of place. You sent the Ckinlin family through, and they all died. We came back, in their bodies, instead. We were trying to understand what was happening just as you were.
"We were trying to understand you, trying to understand where you were coming from. When you first managed to pull some of your probes back, brave volunteers of our kind attempted to 'go along for the ride'. We couldn't distinguish that your bodies were lifeforms at first- to us, they were no different than the ships and probes you sent. We quickly found that trying to hitch a ride to your space in the probes didn't work. Almost instantly the volunteer would be drawn back to our space, as if connected by an elastic cord. When we worked out that the ships and the creatures inside them were actually different; one a tool and the other the actual occupant, we tried to come back in them. Our hope was to not only explore the strange realm you were coming from, but also to possibly warn you. We wanted to let you know what was happening to your people, and the havoc you were wreaking inadvertently to ours.
"However, our people are so different, these attempts proved catastrophic. We could link to your brains, occupy the physical form of your body, but our memory was gone. Crossing over into your space wipes out our memory of our true selves, just as it wipes your minds of all that is you. We do not die as you do, because of our different nature, but the volunteer ends up lost, trapped in a body that is as alien to them as anything you can imagine. It is little wonder our 'terronauts' lost their sanity. It is little wonder that, more often than not, they committed suicide. Even with no memory, trapped in such an alien world, such an alien body, they could think of nothing other than freeing themselves."
"Do these quantum creatures- the ones inside the bodies of those we bring back- die when they commit suicide?" General Rojas asked.
"No. I don't think we can die here the way you think of death. They returned to quantum space, but they were traumatized, terrified. Mentally scarred. They were able to impart to the rest of us some of what they had learned, and as you were perfecting your methods for bringing your people back, we too were perfecting our methods of sending people to you. We also worked to try and save the lives of your people, so that they didn't die the moment they entered our space.
"When you sent the Ckinlin family through, two simultaneous experiments occurred. First, at the instant that ship crossed over to us, several of my kind tried to keep one of your minds alive. The pilot. The man you know as Armin Ckinlin."
"He wasn't one of you?" Ghislin asked. She shook her head.
"No. He was our first attempt to save one of you."
"You succeeded," Bastille said, but Ray was shaking her head.
"We succeeded in keeping him alive, but as I said, your biological workings, your minds- they are incredibly alien to my kind. It was like trying to put together a four-dimensional puzzle that ran on electricity, in the dark, with no picture to show how the puzzle was even supposed to look when it was whole and no power to test it when we finished. We kept him alive but our sloppy efforts fundamentally broke his mind. Unfortunately, you experienced the results."
Ndiaye nodded solemnly. "And the rest of those on the ship?"
"Volunteers of my kind entered into them after they had died," she said. "I was one of them. And it was a breakthrough."
"Because you are here," Lowman said. "You are here, and alive, and still sane."
"Yes. Something you learned in the experiments as well- the younger the child that went through, the more they recovered. That is because it wasn't a recovery, it was one of my people learning. The brain of a young child is still forming, it still has plasticity. The rigidity of human and Kilrathi adult brains made the job of our volunteers more difficult; impossible in fact. Yet in the more plastic brain of a young child, we are able to get a stronger hold. Once there, the fact we could not remember who we are or where we came from was no longer a hindrance; very young children cannot remember those things very much naturally. As children, my two companions and I grew and learned as humans would, never questioning that we were anything else. The world still felt unusual and alien, we still didn't feel as if we quite fit in, but we were able to grow and adjust.
"Even then, it was quite difficult. One of my companions made it to their teenage years before they could no longer cope, and killed themself."
"The boy," Lowman said. "Did he return to quantum space as well?"
"Yes, that is why I know what I am telling you now. He was able to bring back vital information, as was the one who had inhabited Karfa."
"The Kilrathi?" Parry spoke up for the first time. Ray looked up at her, but didn't quite meet her eyes.
"Yes. The Kilrathi have done this as well. Their Nedris are, in truth, my people. My people don't really distinguish between you and the Kilrathi. To us, until recently, you were both indentical."
"How do you know they brought information back," Jon asked. "How do you know any of this? You're still alive."
"I am," she admitted. For the briefest of moments, she half-looked at Parry again. "I'm sorry," she said.
Parry shook her head a moment, baffled. Ray straightened her shoulders.
"When I was nearly killed in that attack on Little Ippy- the one where my companion here was captured by the Kilrathi- I was able to make several communications, witness several events, though I was unconscious. This is because I wasn't. I have learned I inhabit this body, I have joined with it; but in the nature of a human flying a fighter, or driving a car. I am in it, but I am separate. When I was injured, when that missile hit, I was knocked out; not out of consciousness, but out of this body. The sudden trauma separated me from the unconscious body but I, the real me, was still whole. I was able to communicate, able to witness events unfolding on the moon when Parry was captured. I…was even able to speak to her, later on- and she was able to hear me. To see me."
Parry's hand had vanished from her shoulder, a look of horror crossing her face as she took a step back from Ray's chair. A rumble was going around the room, and the President patted her hand on the table to try and calm it.
"Is this true, Angel?" Bastille asked, but Parry barely heard her. She could hear very little but the thunder of her own heart in her ears.
"I am in this body," Ray said. "I am tethered to this body, but I am not this body."
Suddenly Ray slumped forward. Fumbling, Jon barely managed to slide his hand under her head before it could crack on the table, then caught her before she could slide out of the chair entirely.
Another murmur went through the room, one that erupted into surprised shouts and more than one person again jumping to their feet as Ray was suddenly standing on the table itself, facing the President. She was transparent, barely there, but unmistakably her.
Jon, still holding onto her limp body, stared at the other one standing there with as much open jawed surprise as the rest.
The Ray on the table wavered for a moment, before a form of grey and soft pink appeared in its place. It was shapeless, formless. It had an edge but it was almost impossible to perceive it. A thin tendril of white, like a cord woven of diaphanous light, wavered between this form and the slumped pilot in her chair.
It was there only an instant, but when it disappeared, the Ray slumped in Jon's arms did not move. Instead, the now empty air over the conference table spoke.
"Madame President," the voice sounded like Ray's had, back in the cafeteria, when she'd opened the wormhole- familiar, but deep and resonant at the same time. "On behalf of my people and myself, I invoke Protocol Neary: subsection four, paragraph one. We need your help, and in return, we pledge ours to you."
