I rolled over and smiled, enjoying the feel of the soft satin sheets around me. For four glorious days Frank had done absolutely everything to make me comfortable. Being the first dimension jumper officially lost and recovered, especially after such a long time, had made me a bit of a celebrity. ARCO had spared little expense in getting me checked out and patched up after my ordeal in Equestria. The doctors were concerned about the loss of my companions and the mystical tattoo on my back, wanting to keep me in the hospital for observation.
Fortunately, Frank had other plans for me. Naughty, delicious plans that definitely kept me in bed but didn't give me much in the way of bed rest. Rolling over again, my arm found the empty space Frank should have filled. Opening my eyes I found him quietly dressing next to the closet, buttoning up a navy blue long sleeve shirt and contemplating ties.
"Good morning, lover," I called to him.
"Good afternoon, beautiful," he replied, giving me the kind of warm smile that had won my heart back when I was in accounting. "You ready for the big day?"
"I'm not sure I can take many more big events today," I teased, grinning at him. Something about the man satisfied me but left me wanting more.
"I got a text a couple of hours ago," He said. "The techs down at R and D have finished calibrating a new arm for you. I was going to go pick it up, but if you want you could come with."
Stretching I sat up. "Give me a few moments to shower?" I asked, skipping off to the bathroom. "I'll be right out."
"If you aren't I'm coming in after you."
ARCO's main facility was a buzz like always. The front office had the usual display of secretaries running around and mail clerks pushing overstuffed carts between cubicles. We walked past various departments, human resources, accounts payable, till we got to one labeled Resource Acquisition Appraisals.
A blonde woman stood up as we approached. "Frank," she said with warmth bordering on flirtation, "We were starting to think you'd retired. I saw Mr. Deccan come through a little while ago asking if anyone had seen you."
Frank grimaced and turned to me. "It's probably something important if he left his office to hunt me down. I'll have to go take care of this, love. You alright?" I nodded and he dashed off in the direction the woman pointed.
Turning back to me she saw my empty right sleeve and my eye. Her eyes got wide for a moment. "You must be Sarah Jordan! I've heard so much about you. I'm Karla, from resource acquisition appraisals."
"Hi," I replied, "I'm not familiar with that department. What resources do you appraise? New conversion pods?"
"No, no," Karla laughed. "Nothing like that. We look over the data from probes and test jumps to determine if a world is safe to land on. I have to tell you, we have been pouring over your reports, the scans, and files to try and find what went wrong."
"In some instances I wish you had done that before I dropped onto a world," I responded with a gentle jibe.
Karla nodded. "We have a number of automated systems to filter out worlds, but there are just so many out there that need a human to look over them and give final approval. It's a shame so many bad jumps ended up in your hands. You do have more jumps on record than anyone else so I guess you were statistically the most likely to get the rotten ones."
"Are we doing anything about how many bad ones are getting through."
"Yes, actually," Karla said, pointing to a corner office. My name was stamped across the front. "You've just been put in charge of that project. You get a personal assistant and access to all the 'bad' jumps, starting with your own. If you can find a pattern in the jumps we can add that as a filter to our systems, weed out any bad worlds before they get to my desk or your pod."
I nodded. "A worthy task, and a little relaxing after everything I've been through. If you'll excuse me, I hear R and D are waiting to give me a hand."
I flexed the bionic arm, enjoying the natural look after dealing with Machina and that chrome arm for so long. "It feels lighter."
"Well, it should be," the tech explained. He held out my hand and stuck my finger with a pin.
"OUCH!" I drew the hand back as the doctor beside us chuckled quietly.
"This is a functional replacement, not some companion attachment," he went on. "Don't go trying to lift cars or punch dragons with it."
"You make me sound like some superhero."
"Considering all the trauma in your medical report you are lucky to be alive," the doctor smiled and stepped away. "Congratulations on the promotion by the way."
"Thanks, though to be honest it sounds more like ARCO is trying to save on insurance premiums by not having me jump," I grinned at the doctor.
"We need you in a position more important than just some random jumper," he said. "You might have had it the worst and I've treated plenty of jumpers who were badly wounded or sick."
"We really need you, and your experience with jump errors, to head up the appraisal department and double check systems and contingencies," the tech added. "Maybe then I can spend less time repairing jump pods."
"Not that I won't enjoy the break but that is a bit of a radical shift from what I used to do."
"Sarah, I've read most of your after action reports and treated most of your injuries," the doctor said kindly. "What you 'usually did' was run, and you can do that at the employee on site rec center with a lot less cost and danger. We need you to work with the techs and figure out what went wrong and fix it."
My thoughts flickered for a moment to the land of ice and snow and death and a shiver ran down my spine. If I could prevent that from happening to anyone else ever again, It would be worth a lifetime of boring charts and data analysis.
I sat up in bed gasping from the nightmare. It had started out like such a wonderful dream, Frank taking me out for dinner with a promise of clubs and dancing after. It had devolved into a memory, one of me telling Frank I'd found my old backups from before my transfer from accounting. I'd wanted to hand them over to disprove the lingering rumors of embezzlement that haunted me, despite there being no real proof I was involved.
Frank had dumped me. He was shooting for VP and if I was going to voluntarily put myself under internal affairs microscope then he couldn't be associated. It was a purely business politics move but it was also a dick thing to do.
I'd left the restaurant in tears, gone out and drank heavily, and then crashed my car into a tree. I ran my hand over the soft covering of my new bionic arm, tracing the spot where a tree limb had brutally severed my living one.
"Love?" Frank asked, rolling over. He sat up and kissed the back of my neck softly. "What's wrong?"
"Bad dream."
"Wanna talk about it?" It was clear he was still half asleep, it was almost 2 AM. He was making an effort to wake up though.
I thought for a moment. "It was about my crash, and the dinner before it."
Frank was silent for a long moment. He kissed around my shoulders and neck, pecking behind my ear once. "That is a day I have long regretted. I felt like I drove you to that, and it took a long time to come to terms with it. I did everything I could to help you after that but I was too much of a coward to face you in person."
"Help me?"
"Sarah, love," He kissed me again and ran a finger down my bionic arm. "Cybernetic replacements aren't usually covered in the employee health plan. I pulled some strings to get you the option to be a dimension jumper. If I had known how much danger you would be in..."
I kissed him back. "Jumping was some of the most excitment I've had in my entire life. I don't know if I'll ever jump again after the last one but I don't regret it."
Frank nodded. "That last jump. God, Sarah I don't know how ARCO managed to screw it up so badly but I swore I wouldn't stop till we brought you home." He grinned. "I'm actually getting a bit of hero praise from the boys upstairs for that. Great PR and all but your safe return means more to me than any of that."
He wrapped his arms around me and held me close. "I found you Sarah. Against all odds I found you, and I'm never letting you go again."
My life seemed to be fluctuating between heaven and purgatory. During the evening and night Frank deprived me of sleep in the best ways. During the day I was stuck behind a desk staring at charts and figures and going back over my own notes for the past three years.
"Miss Jordan?" a sultry voice called over my intercom.
"Yes, Mona?" I directed my eyes up from the dull numbers to the intercom. It wasn't that I minded having a personal assistant, but this one looked and dressed like she was sleeping her way to the top. I'd only been working with her for a few days and couldn't decide if she resented having a female boss or was going to "go for it" anyway.
"Justin from Tech Support is here for you."
"Send him in."
The door opened and I heard my secretary tell Justin I was ready to see him in a breathy voice. Maybe she was just willing to bed anyone?
"Thank you Mrs. Albtraum," he said, walking in looking a little flushed. "Ms. Jordan-"
"Justin," I cut him off. "We've known each other too long for formalities. What have you come to show me?"
"I wanted you to come take a look at the next generation conversion pods, to give your approval."
I nodded and followed him out, letting Mona know to hold my calls. Mona batted her brilliant green eyes at Justin as he passed, making him blush. I rolled my eyes and got Justin back on task, chatting about improvements being made to probes to scan for things the old probes might have missed.
Down at the testing floor I was surprised to see a car sitting among the various space age style conversion pods. Not just any car either, my old car, the one I had put hood first into a tree.
"Justin, what-"
"Isn't it great?!" He asked, waving at the car. "I knew you would be surprised."
"Are jumpers just going to drive between worlds now?" I asked, noting that he'd even gotten the old scratches right.
"What? Oh, no. It's a conversion pod. We designed it to shift shape into a local form." He snapped his fingers and the car shifted and changed until it was a little red coup. "What do you think?"
"I think Frank would have a heart attack if he saw his precious sports car sitting on your chop shop of a research floor," I laughed. "Where did you get the designs?"
"Scans and records. The AI component for a jumper can remotely link with the pod and change its shape. Good for hiding. We call it a chameleon circuit."
"A great idea as long as nobody hauls it away for scrap. Does it run?"
"No," Justin said sadly. "We figured it would be too much of a power drain. Also, if you noticed, you can't actually be in the pod when it transforms."
I nodded. The drivers seat had seemed to merge with the steering wheel as it had changed. "Frank never could get his car working well either." I smirked. "When I was back in accounting, I left one day to find he had taken apart my brake assembly to work out why his didn't function."
Justin boggled at the idea. "What, in the parking garage?" I nodded. "That's nuts! Did he figure out why his didn't work?" Justin asked.
I nodded. "He forgot the hydraulic fluid. Took him two hours to put my brakes back together."
I was honestly looking forward to the weekend. Staring at the various reports I had available to me was boring me senseless. Admittedly I wasn't getting a lot of chance to review them, but that just made the boring task worse. So far every time I opened a file or glanced at some numbers, I got a call from tech support or a vendor or a jumper.
Worse, I was coming to hate my assistant. It seemed everywhere I went I'd overhear some sexist remark or another about her. Yes, she was pretty. Yes, she was attractive. Yes, she had a tendency to flirt with the people around the office. But I didn't need or want to hear about it constantly. The worst was James, a jumper I'd always thought of as a misogynistic, psychopathic asshole. His constantly repeated "joke" was that a secretary was not permanent in an office until "someone screwed her on the desk!" He'd already made several passes at her, and had apparently started a betting pool about how long it would take me to give her some "overtime."
Mona didn't seem to mind such gossip, seeming determined to live up to it. I'd come back from one meeting to find Mona making eyes at Frank, who himself was there for a lunch date with me. Frank had had to work hard to cheer me up after that. He spent lunch digging himself a nice little hole with offhand chauvinistic remarks. He'd been able to dig himself out by dinner with wine, chocolates, and a night in bed I was still deliciously sore from.
"Ms. Jordan?" Mona asked leaning into the office. She had taken to getting more face time with me when possible, ignoring the intercom unless she was swamped with calls. Intercom use and neckline seemed to be declining hourly.
"Yes, Ms. Albtraum," I responded a little coldly. I had a large project I was working on and I didn't need my secretary flirting with or distracting me.
"I got an email about the report-"
"IF I HAD MORE THAN TWO HOURS A DAY AT MY DESK, THEY WOULD HAVE THE DAMN REPORT!" I yelled. It was Friday and it seemed like ARCO wanted me to work my first weekend back. Mona 'eeped' in a way even I found cute and retreated back to her desk. I sulked behind mine for another hour before finally making a decision.
It was against company policy, but I needed access to the files and there was no way I was going to get any work done in the office. I pulled a flash drive out of my purse and downloaded a number of the files down to it. With any luck, I'd take a look at them this weekend.
I stepped out of my office to find Frank consoling Mona, his arm wrapped around her shoulders as she hung her head.
"There there, I'm sure she's just under a lot of stress." Frank said. Mona nodded in partial understanding.
"Frank?" I asked a little sternly, causing both to jump. "How long have you been here?"
"About fifteen minutes," he said.
I turned to Mona. "Why didn't you page me?"
"Sarah," Frank said, stepping between me and my secretary. "You are scaring your employee. Come on, I know that report is important but it's five o'clock on a Friday! Let's go have some fun."
I waved the flash drive at him. "Not too much fun now Frank," I chided him. "I have some work I had to take home with me."
He looked panicked for a half second then frowned. "Sarah," He hissed, "you know you aren't supposed to take files off site!"
"Relax Frank, it's encrypted. Besides," I grinned at him. "I need something to do between the fun times."
"You think you've had fun before, I've got something planned that will really get your blood pumping."
I love the amusement park. No, really. I do. My adrenaline junkie itch is one that ARCO had scratched fairly well for years. I loved running. I loved spinning. I loved being upside down.
I was doing my very best to remember that as I squeezed Frank's hand while the seat I was locked into continued its accent.
"It's OK, Sarah," Frank called to me, grinning like an idiot. On my other side, a pair of teenagers hooted and laughed, pointing out how far you could see. I couldn't see it because my eyes were shut.
I was breathing like I was in a lamas class. My heart was pounding in my chest so loud it was nearly drowning out Frank. He squeezed my hand and I looked up at him.
"Hey," he said. "I love you."
I smiled and opened my mouth to respond when the chair came to a stop with a lurch. Nervous laughter and startled screams burst around the ride as we hung there for several seconds. I looked around, seeing only the height and not the view. More seconds ticked by.
"Heh," I said, smiling weakly at Frank. "Maybe it-"
I didn't fall. The chair under me fell. It dragged me down, pulling the air from my lungs in a long scream. Something flashed in the corner of my eye and for a moment I was back in my conversion pod falling through the atmosphere. I fought the wave of insane panic that threatened me and looked towards the flash. Those damn teenagers had put quarters on their knees and were watching as the coins fell slower than us.
The rushing wind slowed as the ride gently caught us, bringing our downward velocity to a nice stop. I stumbled from my seat and out of the ride before collapsing on a bench. The ride was over but I was still falling. I covered my face but kept my eyes open because when I closed them, I could see the pod and the flames and I could feel the falling.
A hand on my shoulder startled me and I looked up. "Sarah, are you alright?" Frank asked, obviously concerned.
I waved him back a bit as I gathered my breath. "That-," I gasped, "was a bad idea."
"You said you wanted to face your fears," Frank said.
"Consider them faced," I said. "Never let me do anything like that again!"
Frank knelt down in front of me, holding my shoulders and trying to calm me. After what seemed like forever I finally stopped shaking. "Better?" he asked. I nodded.
"Well," he said, shifting his weight to one knee, "if you can face your fear of falling after everything you've been through, I guess I can face my fear of commitment."
My eyes went wide as he pulled out a small black box.
"Sarah Jordan, adventurer beyond compare, woman of mystery, will you URK-"
I tackled him to the ground shouting yes over and over again.
Tuesday's clock ticked down to one as I ate quickly at my desk. Even without getting to peak at the files in the drive over the weekend I had finally managed to reschedule enough to get some real work done. There was a pattern within the files that was eluding me, but I couldn't see it just yet.
The door opened and Frank walked in with a smile. "Hello, my dear fiance."
I couldn't help but squeal when he called me that. "Hi," I said back, grinning ear to ear. I leaned forward and hugged him over the desk before pulling back. "Whew! Frank, that cologne is strong enough in small amounts, you don't have to bathe in it."
"I do if I don't want to smell like cigar smoke or something else," he huffed. "Upper management keeps treating me to lunch and I swear those guys are trying to fund the tobacco industry all by themselves," he chuckled. "I'll run home and take a shower in just a bit, I got a half day today."
I laughed then my eyes lit up. "Oh, when you get home, can you reactivate my Hulu account? My password is-"
"Jordan backwards with the 'o' and 'a' as a 0 and 4," Frank said. I blinked at him. "What? You always use that password."
"I know, I just don't remember telling it to you."
"It's something I picked up a long time ago, before I was stupid and lost you for so long." Whenever he looked down like that, he always looked like I'd just kicked his puppy.
I leaned over and kissed his forehead. "Well you found me again, and I'm not letting go this time."
Frank let himself out and Mona brought in my newest charts and printouts. I was trying every kind of data comparison I could to find some trend in my "accidental" jumps. I wrinkled my nose as she approached.
"Don't look at me like that," she countered. "I took the elevator up with him from lunch. There have to be a half dozen people on this floor that will smell like your fiance for the rest of the day."
I chuckled. "He really does need to cut down on that stuff. It isn't cheap." I looked over the charts then sighed and handed them back. "Shred these too please."
"You must be having a good day," Mona said, taking the charts back. "You asked me to burn the last set."
"Every time I try and compare one set of data to another, I get nothing. There is no trend, no plan, just plain coincidence."
"So when the Safety Assessment Committee asks you what happened you're going to say 'I don't know, dumb luck'?"
"Looks like," I said. "I'll get working on it now so I can get the yelling out of the way."
Three thick binders sat on a rolling cart in my office and I glared at it in the hope they would turn into something better than the condensed failure of my greatest calamities. "Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked.
"It's the job of a personal assistant to take some of the heat sometimes," she said with a shrug. "You had a new idea you wanted to look at, so I'll spend time going over notes with the committee head, the VP of acquisitions, and buy you some time. Who knows, maybe he has a good idea or two."
I nodded to her as she pushed the cart out and went back to work. No more trying to compare data from scans en mass, it was time for a piece by piece comparison.
First was the world where I'd made an orbital entrance. I flipped back and forth through the data before something caught my eye. Of the two dozen probes only three were used for calculating the entry vector. I fed the three into my computer and was stunned to find that it did indeed give me an entry point several miles straight up. I fed another random vector and saw an error message pop up. The inconsistency caused the vector program to demand additional readings.
"Why only those three then?" I asked, flipping through the notes trying to find something to justify it. "Someone running the program late and didn't want to waste time?" The scans weren't sequential. Finally I entered all the data into a spreadsheet and mapped it out.
I blinked. The three coordinates used were outliers, well beyond reasonable bounds of acceptance. They should have been tossed as bad data, not accepted as valid.
I flipped to another jump, this one into the Ice Fae realm. The probes had shown signs of civilization, but the local bio/socio/political reports were missing. Such a thing might get by on worlds with small populations, and this one was inhabited by only a Fae and her toys, but it still seemed suspicious.
Another world: the one on the edge of war. The political update report from three months prior was missing. The jump hadn't been done and no probe had been sent. That shouldn't happen.
None of this should have happened. This spoke of high level manipulation of very sensitive data.
I stood up from my desk, taking my findings and walking out the door and down the hall. A short elevator ride up and I reached the office for the Vice President of Acquisitions.
"He's in a private meeting right now," the secretary snipped, looking sour.
I nodded and sat down. "I'll wait." The secretary huffed and went back to work. I focused on what I had discovered.
The way the data was manipulated seemed to intentionally put me into danger. The reason I'd missed it before was because I was looking for faults or accidents. This wasn't just some accident, but a deliberate manipulation of the data. Worse, it all seemed targeted at me.
But why? I wasn't a threat to anyone. At least, I couldn't be a threat to anyone high enough up to do the manipulation.
I was stirred from my musings when I heard a very feminine moan from inside the room. I recognized my secretary's voice, even though I wasn't used to it in that tone. The VPs secretary growled and hammered at the keys louder. Suppressing a grin, I went back to my musings.
If all the "accidents" were a plot to get rid of me, who did I threaten? The only thing I was involved in was that damn stupid embezzlement thing. But if that was so, why didn't they try and get rid of me before-
My mind flashed to a darkened road, the trees rushing up, the brakes seeming not to respond through my drunken haze.
"He even took my breaks apart in the parking lot once!"
"I swear I locked my computer."
"Your password is Jordan backwards..."
Only someone in power.
"I got a promotion.."
"Resource Acquisition Appraisals. We deal with finding new worlds and anchors"
".....I'm going to be VP of Resource Acquisitions."
My head shot up as I took in the nameplate on the door with a very familiar name.
The same name my assistant was yelling out in ecstasy right now.
"OOOOOOOHHHHH FFFFFRRRAAANNNNK!"
"FRANK!" My kick tore the door lock from the frame, revealing my fiance with his belt around his ankles and his cock balls deep in my assistant.
"YOU LYING!" The cart full of unread binders spilled across the floor.
"THIEVING!" I shoved the guest chair aside. Frank had a look of glorious terror on his face.
"CHEATING!" The fucking desk flew across the room, hurled by dark tentacles.
"MURDEROUS!" My left hand fasted around his tie knot, his hands coming up in impossible slow motion. My bionic right arm drew back as far as it could.
"BASTARD!"
"This is wrong, Leo," Scorpio said, pulling against his restraints. He ran his dry tongue over his parched lips. 'You'll never get away with it!"
"You've been saying that for over a week now," Leo said, checking the restraints on Gem and Ini. "It's like your manta."
"It's mantra you idiot," The twins responded.
"Shut up, worms," Leo spat. "The queen is coming, and I'm going to be the one to present her with a brand new base. All she has to do is pose as this pathetic creature," Leo kicked the side of the large cocoon, "and we can swap out foolish ponies who come for concerts."
"We could have gotten more than enough food from just the concerts you idiot!" Gem and Ini said in unison.
"When she wakes up-" Cancer said.
"She isn't going to wake up!" Leo said. "She is going to dream of her perfect lover taking her home and treating her right for a long, long time."
"She's tossing an awful lot for someone with a good dream," one of the changeling guards said.
"It's probably just a really good bit of the dream again!" Leo said.
A muffled "Frank" came from the squirming cocoon.
"See?" Leo said. "Good part. In fact, I think a little snack would really hit the-"
There was a sound like fabric tearing, followed by a sickening crunch as Sarah's metal arm tore free of the bindings and broke Leo's nose. The changeling rolled over before coming to a rest against the far wall.
"OW! Bitch, just for that, I'm going to give you nightmares-"
"What did you call me?"
Leo looked down at the cocoon and saw a flaming turquoise eye glowing through the thin wrapping. As he watched, more and more eyes opened, and darkness poured into the room.
The changeling queen swept into the castle with the same smug, self-satisfied grin she'd had the day she had almost, almost captured all of Equestria. Here was a new staging ground, one that allowed changelings to come and go as they pleased, one the foolish Princesses had even sanctioned!
"Hello, my children!" she said, her accompanying guards opening the main doors for her. "What delicious new morsel have....you...found......."
Shadows seemed to drip and pool from the inside of the castle. The few torches burned a magical blue and did little to push back the dark. One of her changeling spies, Leo, lay on the ground before her, his carapace cracked and pitted, a look of horror on his face. Behind him in a throne of night sat something old and dark and terrible, and it had the rest of her children bound in shadow around it.
"Hello your highness," it said, its voice echoing in strange ways off the walls. "I think you and I should have a little chat."
It waved a hand, and the doors behind the queen slammed shut.
Ponies were making their way to shelters or piling up supplies onto carts. All of Ponyville seemed to be in motion, but not quite in panic yet. The near deafening alarm was finally silenced.
"We will gather on Bunnytop Hill, just south of White Tail Woods!" Twilight shouted, her voice compensating for the now silent alarm. "Oh, that's better. If you can, meet the jumper in the woods and give us a signal like we discussed." D and Machina nodded and turned to leave.
Nearby, a grey earth pony who was helping to pack up a cart stepped away. "I'll be back in a moment, I've got to grab something." She dashed around the corner and, in a flash of green fire, a yellow pegasus stood in her place.
This was what her queen had wanted. Knowledge of where the two alien beasts were going.
So the Nightmare could follow.