Touchstone 1 - Stray

Mum frowned and Dad looked suspicious. Then the Fourth Squad captain pressed the pad of nanoliquid to the centre of the harness where it crossed my back and the suit flowed over me, bringing immediate warmth. I hadn’t realised how cold I’d been.
    “Venom!” Jules signed, his face lit up. He loves the Spiderman movies.
    I smiled at him, but then said: “Can find gate?”
    “There are none in this area, possibly no tears at all into your world. There may be natural gates, but they are immensely rare.”
    This wasn’t exactly ‘no’, but I doubted I could force him to do anything, even if he could find a natural gate. “What realistic chances Tare find way get me home?”
    He was looking behind us now, that attentive survey familiar from my day with First Squad: searching for Ionoth. “Before today’s excursion, I would have said none. Especially having seen how far from the centre of the fractures this is. But if you can reproduce whatever you did to track your world, quite obviously reaching this planet’s near-space is possible.”
    The near-space, yes. But even if I could travel here at will, I couldn’t get further, and there was absolutely no way I was going to be the first person to tear a hole in Earth’s protection against monsters.
    They must have seen it in my face, when I turned back. Dad said something, looking upset, and Mum’s hands closed on the arms of her chair.
    “Have to go back. Don’t know ever find gate not hurt Earth. Chance low.” It was getting really hard not to cry. “Miss you so much.”
    “Can I come?” Jules signed enthusiastically, and then gaped as the Fourth Squad captain turned – quite casually – and skewered some thing leaping at us from the outline of the lounge room door. It looked like a spider made of rusty nails and old tyre rubber, which really isn’t what I expected Ionoth to look like, and as he held it up so he could get a better look at it I saw that he’d made a blade of nanoliquid grow out of the arm of his suit. I’d seen something like that in the movies I’d watched with Nenna, and it’s not that different from Terminator 2 , so I wasn’t particularly surprised. The Ionoth spider was shock enough.
    My Dad’s face had changed when I looked back. He’d wanted to argue, but now he wanted me to get to safety as soon as I could, no matter where safety was. “Happy Birthday,” he signed slowly. “Hugs.”
    “Love you,” I signed back, then looked over at Nick and made an X with my arms to give him a hug too.
    He copied me, and added: “Be happy.”
    “You too,” I signed back carefully. “Tell Alyssa, sorry miss party. Miss her.”
    Nick grinned. “Will do.”
    I smiled at my aunts, then looked at my Mum.
    “Live well,” she signed.
    It was exactly the sort of thing Mum would say. I nodded, thought for a moment then signed: “Thank you for being my Mum. Love you always.”
    That made us both cry and I tried to smile and then stepped back, wiping at my face as my family faded to shadows. I wanted to stay, to say more, to ask questions about a thousand things, but I wasn’t silly or selfish enough. If one Ionoth had come to attack us, more would.
    I turned to the Fourth Squad captain, who had gotten rid of the spider and who I really doubted wanted to stand around while I played happy families, but was at least managing not to look impatient. “Sorry,” I said. “Ready now.”
    He just handed me a small flask and a wrapped food bar, and said: “Follow close.”
    It was almost ten minutes’ walk to the gate, and I wondered how I’d managed to travel it while asleep, and how he had followed me. We met another of the spider things as we twisted a long path through the outlines of my neighbourhood, but it gave him as little trouble as the first one. Eating and drinking had succeeded in making me feel hungry and exhausted, but I did find a small amount of pleasure in being able to make myself a pocket to put the flask and empty wrapper in.
    The gate was in someone’s back yard, in what would be a swimming pool if the water had remembered to be there. I could see red earth through it, blue sky, a scatter of huge rocks. It wasn’t a clean tear: the edges were surrounded by tiny fragments, thousands of glinting glimpses of red and blue. And at the bottom of the pool were a half-dozen of the spiders and a fraying shadow with claws. Dead. It was hard to follow down to stand among the bodies.
    “Gates, particularly the ones you