Far Side Two
Copyright© 2025 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 1
I
Andie Schultz stood with Linda Walsh next to her. Andie was short and blonde; really short, only four and a half feet tall, and really blonde. Linda was the taller version of Andie, the woman Andie would marry in a few years. She acknowledged that Kurt Sandusky, her chief of staff, had been right: famous leaders didn’t stand with their arms around the woman they love when addressing their troops, but she had been parted from the love of her life for nearly three months, and what had happened to her friend in that time was unspeakable. At least she had cleared up the vast cover-up that the LA Police Department, the LA Sheriff’s Department, and the FBI had tried to run.
She grinned to herself. Nothing like a dramatic statement! She was fond of dramatic statements! She’d formed a Far Side door in front of the LA police headquarters, a building that had starred in dozens of movies and TV shows. She’d formed a force bubble around herself, then proceeded to write her name in letters ten feet tall and then her message: LAPD Harbors Murderers and Torturers. There had been over a hundred cops shooting at her at the end, wounding about two dozen bystanders, but wonder of wonders, killing no one. She’d left, patting herself on the back for a job well done.
The public outcry had forced the police’s hand, and a list of fifty-five names had been given to the local Assistant US Attorney, and those men and a half dozen women were adjudged flight risks and housed in the Colorado Supermax prison, in solitary, because they would have been killed in a heartbeat if they had been exposed to the other inmates. They were still awaiting trial, though, as the nearly hundred lawyers had pulled out all the stops on a “Maybe the thief will die, maybe the king would die, or maybe the horse would learn to sing” defense. Linda had, even though stripped and repeatedly beaten, never revealed how she had recorded everything that happened to her, with the YouTube videos being some of the most watched in history.
She dragged her attention back to the woman in front of her, reporting on the location of the Tengri warships searching for the ship of their new ally, Danei of the B’Lugi. The three of them were standing in a well-lit room in what had started out as a natural cave, then had been modified as a rookery by pterodactyl-like flying reptile predators, then further modified many years after the predators had been eliminated by a group of pirates as their main hideout. Andie had created a means of moving between places, and the first place she had found had been the rookery, long abandoned by the pirates. Andie, Kris Boyle, and Ezra Lawson had been marooned here when they were betrayed by employees attempting to steal her invention -- which not only created what Andie called “Far Side Doors” but also cheap fusion power.
Monica Lewindowski had been a fellow graduate of Caltech with Linda’s, the resident cryptologist, linguist, and analyst and general dogsbody, jack-of-all-trades at the rookery that had become the center of the operation on the new planet. “So, we think that the first line is being extended further south. They have sent the ships furthest south to resupply first at their new base. They haven’t yet gotten but two shiploads of supplies in from the Tengri homeland, the viceroy is livid that he received only slaves and not soldiers, and not many supplies. Still, he has to be careful -- for one thing, those ships were dispatched before we kicked them off the mainland.”
“Can I add a personal observation?” Monica asked.
“Of course, I value your input,” Andie replied.
“Look, I’m not a soldier. Neither are you and Linda. I think Charles needs to talk to someone whose background is similar to his and not us ivory tower types.”
Linda Walsh laughed. “My sweetie isn’t really an ivory tower type. You have to be a college graduate to qualify for that.”
Monica grinned and shook her long, brown hair. She was tall and thin, and very, very good at what she did. “I heard you say a few months ago that it’s just a matter of time before Andie knows more about everything than you do. She’s been studying the Sedgewyck files, Linda. That time is now. She knows way more than anyone else on this planet, and the same is true back on Earth.”
Andie was nothing but decisive. “Kris Boyle had a roommate who is one smart cookie. She actually had the balls to tell Kris to her face that Kris was a distraction, her grades were tanking, and could she change roommates? Now the roommate is back in contention for graduating first in her class. Probably someone like that could skip a few months and not lose much. Did I mention that the roommate hit me up for a job on Arvala when she graduates? This would be an internship, like.”
Monica nodded and said sarcastically, “Someone like that, yeah. An internship, yeah.”
Andie consulted her watch. It resembled a pilot’s chronometer with various dials and buttons. “It’s midnight back at the new California site. I’ll go back to Earth in a few hours, and roust General Briggs out of bed. I’ll roust Jon Bullman even earlier, and get an aircraft arranged for her. She’ll be here, if she’s willing to come, tomorrow and ready to go to work the day after.”
“Sweetie, do you really think General Briggs will let another student come here?” Linda asked.
“We haven’t had problems except when we run people around, and not even then, at least all the time. She’ll be as safe as you are at the rookery,” Andie said. Andie stopped and looked at Linda, then Monica.
“I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I was about Denise. Three guards were obviously not enough. I know it was a miracle that we rescued Charles Evans; thousands of things could have gone wrong. The men who did it all paid with their lives ... except maybe their leader, but he had a fifteen-mile swim in order to survive.”
Linda sniffed. “I’ve talked to the biologists you’ve brought here. They think there is something seriously wrong with the oceans. We’ve seen nothing larger than about four feet, and they are plankton eaters. There is a huge deficit in the predator species. They are small and rare. You can swim in the ocean without worrying about great whites.”
Andie punched her friend lightly on the arm. “Tides, sweetie. They are fearsome. Maybe there’s a connection.”
“The oceanographers didn’t think so. They think the evolution here has been reset many times, more so than on Earth. They think the last big extinction event favored climax predators on the Arvalan continent and disfavored life in the oceans, but there are some inconsistencies,” Linda told her friend. “Mostly, they say that paleontologists will have several centuries ahead of them to be anything like sure what happened here.”
Andie grumped. “Except a small field crew would be intensely vulnerable to the dralka, and large ones would be prohibitively expensive. And we don’t even know yet how large this continent is.” Dralka was the local name for the smaller pterodactyl species. There was at least one species larger even so.
Linda grinned. “The Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office are giving you a spy sat and an ICBM to put it on in a couple of weeks when they get the ground station ready.”
“Sweetie, we weren’t supposed to talk about that in front of anyone on Arvala ... we don’t want people to be made targets for what they know.”
“Monica,” Andie said, “forget what Linda said about an ICBM and a spy sat. It’s Top Secret, Andie. Please don’t tell anyone about it.”
“I interviewed at the NSA before I came here. They made no bones about their work being secret. There have been too many leaks, and they are going to get serious about security. Gasp ... they are even going to try to stop the leaks to the media and politicians and not just in DC. Since the start of last summer, it’s been a crazy patchwork of national intelligence being leaked.”
Andie grinned. “Now, it’s places to go, atoms to fuse, and villains to be foiled. Don’t tell Charles about a new liaison, not until we’re sure.”
II
Major General Tom Briggs, the President of Norwich University, stood as the female cadet entered his office and saluted him. He returned the salute to the young woman and waved her to a chair. She sat after he did.
He steepled his fingers and watched her for a moment. Most cadets were nervous when called in front of him. He smiled to himself. This was the second cadet in his experience who was not nervous, he thought, only curious why she had been called in.
He smiled at her and started to speak. “Cadet Mirableu, let me say that I understand why you requested to be moved at the end of your first term. Everything that happens around Cadet Boyle is reported to me. And Cadet Boyle told me that it was your desire after graduation to be assigned to Arvala. Andie Schultz called me earlier today and asked for someone from Norwich to be assigned to Arvala right now, with a particular job envisioned. It is currently envisioned that the assignment would be for six months.”
Erica could hardly believe her ears. “Me, sir?”
“You told your tac officer that being Kristine Boyle’s roommate had been highly distracting, which is why your grades had slipped. That certainly seems to have been the case as your grades ever since have been stellar. You went out on the Seattle rescue attempt to observe -- yet even though the mission failed, you still want to go to Arvala. Even after Cadet Evans was kidnapped, even after a massive dralka attack that killed more than 200 people, including three Americans and an Israeli, you want to go.”
“That’s true, sir. My mother is a French diplomat; my father is an American who served in the French Foreign Legion. I am here at Norwich because following in either of their footsteps isn’t my cup of Bordeaux. In Seattle, I was never afraid, even when we heard about the nuclear detonation in France. What riveted my attention was my roommate. Her analysis was spot on -- an analysis that she arrived at far ahead of anyone else.
“I looked at my hole card. I simply didn’t know enough; I didn’t have the experience to do what she seemed to do without effort. I told Kris that I wanted to change because I wanted to focus on the skills I needed to acquire. And you think I am ready for Arvala?”
“Miss Schultz asked for you by name. I have it on good authority that you have never met Miss Schultz ... so the recommendation had to come from Cadet Boyle. Nobody, I believe, has the stones to say that Cadet Boyle’s analysis is deficient.
“Miss Schultz told me what you would be about. Did you hear about the extraordinary conference we held at Norwich last spring?”
“Only that there was one, but no one among the students knew what it was about.”
“The holy grail of explorers. A man went through a Far Side door and came back five months later with a computer probably a thousand years in advance of ours ... with not only one, but two advanced alien races’ entire corpus of their science and technology. Power, weapons, theory, medical, engineering ... everything under the sun. We, and most of the other countries of the world, are currently going slowly, trying not to destroy our societies. Cancer? Cured! Far Side doors? We can pick and choose which ones can open and block any others, either outbound or inbound. There are some nasty races haunting the universe, but now we can defend against them. I think we lucked out as Chicago and France were races who don’t have the facility with Far Side doors that we now have, but evidently know about the nasties ... and were just defending themselves.”
“Getting back to your question, Cadet, Miss Schultz said you would be assisting our former cadet, Charles Evans. Think of the position as a mission communicator on an Apollo mission. Evans is more alone than most people ever are; he is about a month into a three- or four-month voyage in an ocean larger than the Pacific and Atlantic combined. Miss Schultz says that a sympathetic feminine voice would be ideal.”
“I heard he was kidnapped, then he was rescued. After that, he fell off the map,” Erica said.
“What do you know about the situation on Arvala?” the general asked.
Erica smiled. “Not much; there is practically nothing in the papers. The media seem to have an allergy to anything about Far Side doors. Andie Schultz is never mentioned, and Kris Boyle is the ultimate poison pill. Once I stopped rooming with Cadet Boyle, I was out of the gossip loop.”
“The media is once again in a massive denial campaign, but the shocks of the last year have taken their toll. As I said, an electrical engineer from Rice went to a planet where he was given the sum total of the knowledge they had, as well as that they had gleaned from another civilization even more advanced. The media doesn’t want to report anything that would add to Miss Schultz’s reputation. We have faster-than-light travel now, we have power sources that make a fusion bomb look like popping a pimple, we have the cure for cancer ... all forms of it. One thing the government is suppressing, at least for the time being, is functional immortality.”
“The Arvalans are refugees ... think about Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome, who were reputed to be refugees from the fall of Troy. The Arvalans fled genocidal attackers; the attackers were the Tengri. Cadet Boyle destroyed a Tengri ship and rescued her ward, Diyala. A good friend of mine, Kurt Sandusky, fired the actual round that did the damage. He didn’t know there were hundreds of women and children aboard ... Diyala was the only survivor. The Tengri practice slavery. And, guess what? Irony is alive and well through the Far Side doors. Tengri are black and the Arvalans and their ancestors are white. The Tengri enslaved all of those who couldn’t flee.
“After 1500 of our years, the Tengri have found the Arvalans again and are intending to enslave the remnants. The Arvalans, with the assistance of Miss Schultz and Cadet Boyle to help, defeated the first Tengri invasion, but they only retreated to a series of islands a hundred miles offshore.
“Of the Arvalans who fled, only a few survived. Women were a small minority and were cosseted and protected, an attitude that persists to the present time. The Arvalans had to deal with the population crash and really nasty environmental predators. My friend Kurt blew off the warnings Miss Schultz and Cadet Boyle had left and as a result lost a man to what are predators like pterodactyls. Ate him up! Since then, we’re still losing people to the critters, even though machine guns are a sovereign remedy -- until you have an empty magazine. Then it gets sporty.
“There are other problems, and I want to blow Cadet Boyle’s horn here. There was an attempted civil war among the Arvalans. One of their fighting orders wanted to replace all the others using methods that leave a bad taste in any rational person’s mouth. At first, it was thought they had tamed and controlled some of the dralka, the aerial predators. If you meet just one, it’s a slam dunk -- if you see it first. The realization of the truth came slowly. At first, it was thought a coincidence that a flock of a hundred hit Arvala right after Miss Schultz and company dispatched the civil war plotters.
“Another big attack, this time by more than five hundred of the creatures, when the cadets from Norwich arrived in a small Arvalan town. Cadet Evans was a former enlisted man who had served as a sniper in Iraq. The Arvalans and the other Americans started to defend the town under attack, but Evans had a Barrett and four hundred rounds. Ezra Lawson handed him his personal weapon when those ran out. About 95 percent of the flock was killed by Evans.
“Then, when he had been rescued and was about to be returned to our control, a flock of more than a thousand of the predators hit our friends who had participated in Cadet Evans’s rescue, as well as various and sundry allies. More than two hundred of the folks who had liberated Evans from slavery were killed, plus fifty Arvalans, and as I said, three Americans and an Israeli.
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