I sat there, stunned by what I was reading. I couldn't believe it. Simply could not...
She was gone.
Sarah Jordan was just ...gone.
I mean, I knew she was gone. I had been there in the conversion pod maintenance bay when the alarms had first sounded. ARCO's very first lost jumper. We all knew the drills, everyone had practiced. It had stuck me as only slightly odd at the time that I seemed to be the only tech remotely worried. Then again, given ARCO's track record there was little chance this would be an actual loss.
The first probe was launched, and we all seemed to hold our breath waiting. We waited for four hours. Everyone expected a damaged pod to be rushed into the bay, or a wounded jumper to be carried out on a stretcher.
While waiting for the probe, I looked up the relevant jump information, curious to see what kind of problems we might be dealing with.
And I saw her photo staring back at me.
Sarah Jordan.
She's gotten so much flack from other techs when they have to repair her poor dinged up pod in the past, and I'd heard she had trouble dealing with the other jumpers. I thought they were intimidated by her. In three years of jumping she has logged more hours and survived more dangerous missions than all but the first jumpers.
Personally I loved working on her jump pod. It was always a creative challenge to fix and each scar brought with it the jumper herself. I sighed and grinned, thinking of the parts I'd replaced while basking in her presence, listening to tales of narrow escapes, when the ping of a new email drew my attention.
to: All@ARCO.com
from: Rescue@ARCO.comsubject: Lost Jumper
Good morning everyone.
Let me start by congratulating everybody on near perfect response times for this event. It is clear that the drills are working as they should and everyone responded beautifully. It is with a heavy heart that we, at RESCUE, must inform you that the jumper, Sarah Jordan, is gone.
Initial signals from her pod indicated a rough but successful landing, but we can only assume that this was the last errors of a dying computer system. We have sent fifteen drones to her last dimensional coordinates to scan for our fellow jumper and work to bring her home. So far no evidence of Ms. Jordan, her companions or her pod have been found. We could not locate a landing site or even an trans-dimensional entrance vector.
All dimensional transit is suspended for one week while we review her logs and data to attempt to piece together what went wrong.
Grief councilors will be available to anyone who needs them, and details of her funeral services will be forthcoming.
Thank you,
James Matherson
Dimension Jumper and Head of RESCUE
Oh I was pissed. I was beyond pissed. Drones? When you have someone missing you don't just send drones, especially when the drones didn't find anything. And what was with the incorrect landing info? The AI's built into the pods weren't nearly companion level, but they were a damn sight better than most desktops. They wouldn't give bad reports. They might give them in German, as David's pod often did. The AI claimed it was a more precise language to communicate in, but I suspect David feeding it a book of German insults might have more to do with that.
I'd said as much to the VP of Resource Acquisition, the corporate term for the head of the jumpers. He told me to calm down and that things were being handled. He also denied my requests to see the raw data for Sarah's jump. Said they were sealed during the investigation, pending processing and archiving.
Well, fuck him and the horse he rode in on.
If no one else in this God damned place was going to do their fucking job and save the Best Damn Jumper ARCO had ever seen, then I was going to do it.
First thing I needed were the records of her jump. That was fairly easy, all jumps were processed and forms filed in the main archives. They were locked down, and not being the computer whiz I wished to be, I settled for going to the secondary archives. The physical archives.
Ever since the massive server crash about five years back, management has been a bit twitchy about storing everything electronically. So it all goes into storage somewhere, usually in the wrong folder in the massive collection of filing cabinets in our basement. Such files contain a lot of sensitive information, so the door had an electronic lock.
I could get by with the right key card, which I didn't have. I could also get in with the right number code, which I also didn't have.
Fortunately, the door had to adhere to fire code, so it opened outward into the hallway. That meant the hinges faced the hall. A few minutes with a hammer, a flat headed screwdriver, and a pair of locking pliers, and I pulled all the pins out of the hinges, swinging the door open on the lock.
I'd forgotten how big this place was, and was glad some poor idiot had the foresight to label the aisles. Here we are, jumpers. Lets see... Aa- Ad, Eh-El, Ho-Hp, Jn-Jo! The cabinet was locked, but I'd come prepared. Most tech's and maintenance personnel can pick locks with little more than a screwdriver and a paperclip, a necessary skill in a world where CEO's tend to leave their keys in their office. My brother, bless his heart, had actually gotten me a real set of lock picks for Christmas. As a gag, he'd locked them into a metal toolbox and lost the key.
Sarah's file was enormous. I realized in retrospect it would have to be. She had made roughly fifty jumps a year for three years, and each jump required six probe reports, one preliminary report, one launch report, one return report and a personal debriefing summary of not less than 500 words. A small folder with red markings stuck out, and out of curiosity I pulled it.
Ice World
I don't remember Sarah going to any ice world.
I pulled out her summary and skimmed it.
World summary: Fae World. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck ....
It continued like that for the whole page. 497 of the 500 words were just the word fuck. The last word was "NO" in capitals, bold, underlined, and italicized.
Realizing that it was only a matter of time before someone noticed the door was off it's hinges, I transferred the huge file into four boxes and loaded them all onto a cart.
I pushed my prize all the way back to the jump bay, noticing that with the week long shutdown, most of the techs had opted to take a vacation. I stashed the boxes in a pod I'd just finished overhauling yesterday and went to grab the other things I needed. A quick stop through the office supplies scored me a copy of the "Dimension Jumper's Primer," a short book that supposedly had information on the most common situations you would encounter on new worlds and how to deal with them. I tossed it into a backpack, along with a rope, pen light, knife, utility axe, purification canteen, a dozen MREs, and a few other odds and ends.
The last two things I grabbed, the things every jumper absolutely needs, were the companions. I could already hear people running around so I didn't have time to run through the activation, I just grabbed a spirit companion and an AI companion and ran towards the pod.
Locked inside and with the view window polarized, my pod was indistinguishable from the dozens of others littering the launch floor. I knew that someone was going to be digging through the tapes and trying to work out where I was before too long. Opening one of the boxes as best I could in the tight space, I dug through the folders until I found the last one. I popped open the internal keyboard and began entering the thirty seven different coordinates.
Now came the most dangerous part of this foolhardy mission. Once I pressed go, the launch bay would ID my pod and prep it for inter-dimensional jump. Normally there was a half hour setup, but I'd already done all the checklist items so I wouldn't be stuck and visible for more than about fifteen minutes.
The real danger is that I was firing myself right at where Sarah had gone, and whatever had happened to her might happen to me.
Still, nothing ventured and all that. I pushed the start button.
[START UP PROTOCOLS RUNNING...........DONE]
[CHECKING VECTOR PROTOCOLS...........DONE]
"HEY! I think someone's in that pod!"
Oh god they did that a lot faster than I thought they would. I crossed my fingers and hoped the lockout protocols would take a while to start. If I was very lucky, it would be a security guard.
*BANG BANG BANG*
"Alright you! Get out of there! Someone go shut this thing down!"
Yup, security guard. Well trained and reliable but they had no clue where the E-stop buttons were.
[CALIBRATION STARTING...........DONE]
[UNLOCK DIMENSIONAL GROUNDING? {Y/n} ]
"Yes."
[START DIMENSIONAL SHIELDS {Y/n} ]
"Yes!"
[START SHIELDING..
"Yes!"
[CORRECT PHASE VARIABLE..]
"YES!" The banging outside was becoming worrying.
[LAUNCHING POD]
A loud whirring noise like a jet engine drowned out the guard banging and I breathed a sigh of relief.
"Wait, what do you mean correct phase-"
A hole in existence opened below the pod, and I fell through into an ocean of darkness.