Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

For our next mission Simon and I were attached to a TacStrike battalion providing support services to multiversal gate patrols in a continuum allied with the Cadre. For those of you who haven’t read or seen Alongside Night, TacStrike is the Cadre’s military arm. This was not a flying world; it most resembled paraverses that Simon and I came from. We’d feel right at home.

We reported to the commander, Lt. Col. James LaRue. We could see the multiversal gate—known by the locals as the Gateway Arch—from his base office in St. Louis. The Gateway Arch is a U.S. national park. Cadre personnel aware of the gate’s nature as an Einstein-Rosen bridge—and knowledgeable about its strategic importance if used for invasion by the F-staters—are embedded in the park police.

Col. LaRue is a fan of manga and anime. His office has shelves of the stuff. There’s also a large poster from the animated series Daria in his office. I didn’t make it out of there before I signed both my Prometheus-winning novels for him. Simon, likewise, inscribed the officer’s copy of The Agorist Primer, though the author’s name on this edition was Samuel Edward Konkin III. Simon didn’t mind.

Down to business, finally. LaRue said, “We’ve been picking up increased signal activity through the gate. They’re probing us more. There’s also a build-up of life signs possibly indicating staging of troops. You two need to go through and see what the Free State is up to.”

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Regardless of whether Simon and I went through virtually naked wearing only Smith-suits—or whether we went through the gate flying a cloaked AEV at hypersonic speed—we were going to need a diversion.

I favored riding the AEV, which would allow us to take a series of aerial snapshots of the enemy base and hopefully return through the gate before they knew we’d been there.

Call this “U-2 over Cuba.”

Or YouTube over Cuba.

Simon favored the two of us going through the gate with lowest possible impact—just two Smith-suited bodies—and doing a ground-based eyeball inspection of the facility.

Call this “James Bond and Quarrel on Crab Key, the Island of Dr. No.”

Neither plan came with an assured probability of our safe return.

But, as it turned out, the need for a diversion required both plans to be executed simultaneously.

An auto-piloted AEV would blast through the gate but instead of an intelligence run would head almost straight up and make for a low-earth orbit. Hopefully this would provide cover for two low-profile Smith-suited bodies—Simon and me—infiltrating through the gate a few seconds later.

The AEV would be our ride home once we had done our ground reconnaissance.

Obviously this was going to be a night insertion.

You know what they say about the best-laid plans.

Ready? Set? Go!

Night provided zero cover because the F-Stater base was lit up like a sports stadium during a night game. Yes, the AEV got most of the attention from the blast-through but Simon and I literally had only seconds to find concealment before we were spotted by what looked at first glance to be hundreds of soldiers on high alert. Plus overhead drones were everywhere. The Smith-suits’ invisibility mode was only good for the visual bandwidths and infrared. But we were solid objects and any soldier’s motion sensors—any drone—could detect us.

Col. LaRue was right to call for an otherside. This was a gate-adjacent base looking like it was preparing for an invasion.

If Simon and I were going to play Paul Revere we needed as much documentation as possible.

We set our Smith-suits to display F-Stater uniforms. But that would only allow us to walk through non-secure areas not requiring transponders. Luckily, with the base on full alert, the activity level around us was high and two individual soldiers double-time jogging through the base were unlikely to spark a challenge.

Our heads up recorded activity around and above us … and it was within a half hour that we had all the intelligence we needed.

The problem was rendezvousing with the AEV and making it back through the gate undetected.

We had to get off the base and find somewhere the AEV could pick us up.

The first part—getting off the base—wasn’t all that hard. Simon and I simply climbed onto an outbound tram. The security for a vehicle leaving a base is never as tight as a vehicle entering a base.

We waited until the tram made it downtown then hopped off.

It’s always the things you can’t anticipate that get you. Who could imagine that a civilian bar frequented by F-Stater enlisted personnel would have scanners checking ID’s?

Just walking on the sidewalk in front of the Paradise Bar and Grille set off an alarm that painted Simon and me as intruders.

So we did what any criminal does when the cops are after them.

We ran.

Unlike the typical perps on any cop show, Simon and I can really book. Plus, every time we got more than a half-dozen people around us we had our Smith-suits change the display of our appearance. One moment we were hipsters, the next we were doctors in scrubs, then a pimp and his streetwalker.

Finally, we took the appearance of two well-dressed African businessmen and went inside a Starbucks. We had no local money so paying was going to be a problem.

I like a challenge. “We’d like to collect our slave reparations,” I said to the blonde barista. “Two venti Pike Place with espresso shots and please leave room for half and half. Also two bran muffins.”

Simon said, “Blueberry muffin for me.”

“Name?” the barista said without missing a beat.

“Obama,” I replied.

She wrote that name on our cups.

“Pick up at the end of the counter,” she said. “Thank you for allowing Starbucks to expiate our white guilt.”

An hour later things had calmed down enough outside and Simon and I felt it safe to start walking again.

We found a WalMart parking lot, set our Smith-suits to look like employees, and started collecting stray shopping carts and moving them inside.

When the AEV landed we got in and were back through the Gateway Arch in minutes.

 

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