The Mentalist Lord and the girl looked around and then back to Andrew.

“Well, the Alliance split after the attack on the Three Hundred. The Japanese all withdrew from the Alliance and then sometime later turned around and attacked Home. They were defeated, and all the Tier 2s had their gate complexes destroyed, along with many of the Tier 3s as well. With no zivvy being made anymore, there is some doubt as to their ability to recover. The Alliance is currently reorganizing into large trading blocs under President Vinogradov rather than hierarchical Tiers. As far as I am aware, no Japanese worlds have joined or even been asked. President Vinogradov is trying to do away with the constant invasions, chipping, and slavery in general throughout the remaining parts of the Alliance where he can.”

Andrew cocked his head slightly. The man had been speaking English, but he had an accent.

“English is not your native tongue, so what’s your accent?”

“Russian or German. That’s the other two main branches of the Alliance. We’re far more intermixed than the Japanese are. I expect that trend will continue until it’s just all one Alliance rather than Russian and German sections.”

“And this, Embassy? Is that in the Russian or the German part of the Alliance?”

The girl quite clearly bridled at that assertion.

“Certainly not! Embassy is an empty world where all the various worlds can come and build an Embassy and discuss matters peacefully rather than resorting to violence as well as trade with other worlds.” She nodded at Lord Roland. “The Alliance only just opened its Embassy very recently. Before the attack on the Three Hundred, the Alliance was regarded as a serious enemy by all the other polities that have embassies on Embassy. Disco has given aid to several groups fighting the Alliance, although the Empire of the One was mostly responsible for spreading the Plague and the attack on the Three Hundred.”

Disco! Andrew thought with amusement. He looked at the foggy gate again.

“The Japanese gate I could see through, and they had machinery on the far side for creating the actual dimensional gate.”

The girl nodded with a smile. “Yes. There are several worlds that use powered gates, these days mostly just for exploration. Once they find somewhere interesting, they come to Disco and get them to open a permanent gate back to their home world. Our gates are created using magic and natural phenomena that are found in the in-between.”

This was getting stranger and stranger, although possibly not.

“The in-between?”

Lord Roland nodded towards the gate.

“You see a rotating circle with a fog in the middle, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So do I.” Simpson put in from the back of the ATV.

“I don’t.” Henderson put in. “I can see their lawn.”

Andrew looked at Simpson briefly and then smiled at her when she looked at him before returning to his two strange dimensional travelers.

“If you close your eyes, do you sometimes see a blue that looks like soda with lots of bubbles and things in it?” Lord Roland asked.

Andrew nodded.

“Not a vehicle bay with tanks and cyborgs?”

“Nah. Looks like someone’s front yard.”

That was odd as normally the gates were opened from a large warehouse-like complex with lots of machinery on the far side that was required to create the dimensional gate. Mind you, he’d only ever encountered one gate before they took it down, but the gate had definitely been inside a large building, and some of the Japanese prisoners had confirmed that all the gate complexes looked very similar as they had all been constructed to the same blueprint, apparently.

The guy was dressed in casual, indeterminate clothes and looked to be in his early twenties. The young woman was very tall, but he could see that despite her height, she was quite young, probably late teens. She was dressed in a dark grey jacket and pants outfit over a black t-shirt with lots of pockets. They looked neither Oriental nor part of the Triple Alliance, as far as he could see.

“Hello.” The man said in English.

They were both keeping their hands in view and appeared to be unarmed, which meant nothing, as they were both clearly mentalists. Andrew hopped down from the ATV and stepped to the side to make sure Simpson had a clear field of fire before walking forward a little. She had her rifle resting on the window sill of the ATV door but not pointed straight at the two strangers.

“I’m Lieutenant Harris of the Ostrayan Defense Forces. Who are you, please?”

The two looked at each other.

“Officially, I am Destiny Quicksliverdaut of the Department of Interdimensional Security and Cooperation on Embassy. My partner is, technically, Master Mentalist Lord Roland Fey, currently attached to the University of Embassy while he researches his Doctorate in Mentalist Studies at the University of the Alliance on Home.”

Andrew had no idea what the Department of Interdimensional Security and Cooperation was, but he knew what the Alliance was. He heard the click behind him as Reynolds took the safety of her rifle. Lord Fey held up his hands, palms out, in a sign of peace.

“You people obviously had negative interactions with the Alliance, yes?”

“You could say that,” Andrew answered dryly.

“Well, you have nothing to fear from us. I’m an academic, and my partner is a junior agent of Disco. She was experimenting with opening gates, and we saw the gate scars this world has and naturally started with the northern hemisphere, which is normally the center of civilization on most near Earths.” He looked around. “Your world appears to have had a nuclear war at some time in the past, and then, I take it,” and he nodded at the ruined buildings across the road. “One of the Alliance worlds attacked you. Is that correct?”

“Yes. From the surviving prisoners, we learned that the world they came from was called Tier 4 Tomkya. They decided to invade us when they were attacked by something called the Plague. Later on, they were reinforced by people from Tier 3 Natori after their Tier 2 world was grounded following a failed attack on the Alliance’s home world. Natori had trouble first with the Plague and then with the zivvy remover and decided to throw in their lot with their Tier 4 and move here as well.”

Simpson was already stowing her portable cannon in the back of the ATV and grinned at him as she jumped into the rear compartment.

“Henderson, you drive,” Andrew commanded, jumping in the passenger seat. Stevens piled in the back alongside Simpson.

In seconds they were racing up the main drag with the other ATV right behind them and turned right into Mercer Street while Stevens got on the radio to let their commander know what was happening. They roared under the uncollapsed section of the bridge there, then down the slope, past the park, and into North Gilong. The downed overpass had been bulldozed enough that the road was passable, and they raced past the burnt-out shops facing the old highway and then the cricket and football grounds. He closed his eyes and felt for the gate.

“Next right.”

Henderson did his best to get the thing up on two wheels as he turned into the side street, and they powered down the road heading for the bay.

“Slow down.” He ordered and felt for the gate.

There were a few civilians about, a work crew trying to repair one of the brick warehouses, presumably hired by the owners of the business who were trying to get things going again without having to do a total rebuild. They approached an intersection that had empty ground on either side, apart from a small rectangular shed on the left corner. The gate was there somewhere.

“It’s in or behind that shed.” He said, pointing.

There was no driveway from the side street, and there didn’t appear to be one from the street they were on either, so Andrew assumed that the entrance was further down. The lack of a driveway didn’t stop Henderson, who simply drove over the destroyed fence and up the dirt bank while Simpson brought her rifle to bear and Andrew threw a shield around the ATV. The second machine followed them but kept behind as per the doctrine they had worked out.

There was all manner of junk piled up in the yard at the rear side of the shed, piles of rusting somethings, old crates, and drums. Plus, two people who were attempting to work their way through it. They must’ve heard the ATV coming because they’d stopped what they were doing and were simply standing there seemingly defenseless, but Andrew could tell they were well-shielded. The male was a bit under two meters and had dark hair. The female was slim, tall, two meters or more, and had dark glossy hair that seemed to glimmer purple in the light.

Behind them was a large door on the side of the shed that was standing open, and through the door, he could see an apparently rotating lighted circle that looked a lot like a gate. Unlike the Japanese gate, which he could see through, he couldn’t see through the rotating gate as the center looked foggy to him.

“What do you see through the gate?” He asked, hoping someone else could see something.

 “Looks like a lawn or at least a grassy area,” Henderson answered.

The following weeks were full of horror as the full extent of the Japanese invader’s lack of regard for the rules of war became evident. Hundreds of local civilians had been killed in the fighting despite the best efforts of the authorities to evacuate civilians in front of the  Japanese advance. Hundreds, possibly thousands, more who had been taken prisoner had been killed by the enemy after the fighting was over when they proved to be useless to the Japanese. No one who was crippled, paraplegic, or unable to work physically survived at all after their occupation of an area. Mass graves were found, and the laborious task of identifying the bodies began.

Captain Greaves found Andrew, and he was carted off to the Ostrayan headquarters, where senior officers congratulated him, and he was given several medals. Apparently, his report had been quite eye-opening. They were particularly interested in the fact that he could detect the beacons when they were operating. It seemed none of the other Ostrayan mentalists could detect the beacons like it appeared he could, so he was promoted to Lieutenant and put in charge of a beacon-hunting squad. He was given a Sergeant, six soldiers armed with a variety of weapons, and at his special request, Jessica Simpson was transferred in from the Nuzeeland corps.

He quickly discovered that the Sergeant and the six troopers were some sort of special forces, in the traditional sense of the word, if not undercover SAS, and weren’t overly impressed with being assigned to a rather uninspiring newly promoted Lieutenant. Simpson impressed them with her shooting, and they both impressed them once he started teaching her how to do magic, which they now had time to begin. He developed a routine, which the Sergeant in the special forces chaps kept him to religiously of checking for a beacon every hour on the hour regardless of what they were doing.

Epilogue

Andrew felt something mentally and closed his eyes, where he could see the silver thread reaching toward him. It wasn’t all jagged like the Japanese gate threads but rather smooth like a hose. It connected with the world somewhere in the north and well away from where he was, but even as he watched mentally, it wiggled, broke free, and moved. He could see it moving around the world in some definition of around and world, and then it reattached somewhere in the ruined industrial area in North Gilong.

He decided that it was definitely not one of the Triple Alliance powered gates, at least not one of those he was familiar with, but he was almost certain it was a gate of some description. The Japs, or someone else from the Triple Alliance,  had twice tried to reconnect with bright, jagged, writhing electrical snakes but hadn’t found any beacons to attach to. He had watched mentally as they writhed around briefly each time and then snapped out of existence.

“Heads up. A portal has attached somewhere in that ruined industrial area in North Gilong.  Load up! It doesn’t feel like a Jap one, but I could be wrong, so we need to get there fast and shut it down before they get another army through!” He yelled at his people.