“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.”