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Get your priorities in order.
The rescue phase of the princess’ plan was over. Now, it was time to go home. Bigger brains than hers had been working to build a portal. The head engineer, Luca with the baby face, explained to her once about old satellites in the kingdom that recorded the portal event and used that data to figure out the origin point. It sounded very plausible, but it was above her pay grade, so she nodded and smiled. She didn’t care how it worked as long as she got back home.
Home.
She missed home so much that it hurt, but it also worried her. Things would have changed. Her life simply wouldn’t be the same. She accepted it on an intellectual level, but the uncertainty of it still worried her.
“What’s that look for?” Sarah asked.
“Just feeling a bit homesick.”
Sarah made a sympathetic noise. “You’ll be home soon. Do you want to be distracted with party talk?”
“Lay it on me.”
“Okay, just as a word of warning, people are going to, I don’t know, roll their eyes and make fun of you just over here.” Sarah waved to a spot by her shoulder. “They think teasing us about our lack of peripheral vision is funny.”
“Why would they do that?”
Sarah shrugged her shoulders. “People are massive assholes.”
“A universal truth.”
She laughed. “Don’t worry. No one would dare make fun of us in front of the king.”
Yeah, Lenore had met the king three times now and wasn’t terribly impressed. His words about her appearance, while accurate, hadn’t been kind.
“People will behave if they know what’s good for them,” Prince Vekele said.
That actually made her feel better. She and the prince shared the same grumpy disposition.
Currently, she stood on the observation deck of Station K-7, a military space station. An atrium was below, staged for a ball, and a field of stars spread in front of her. The portal to Earth was experimental tech, so a military installation made sense for resources and security, but it lacked creature comforts. K-7 had a brutal aesthetic thanks to the harsh lighting. It was cold, both visually and literally. The temperature was set lower than Lenore found comfortable, encouraging her to bundle up. The atrium, however, was kept a bit warmer than the rest of the station and provided a bit of a greenery break from the bleak utilitarian design.
A sleek ship docked on the other side of a translucent barrier. Lenore pressed her hand to the glass—she knew it wasn’t glass. It was some sort of high-density carbon filament poly-blend technobabble that happened to be crystal clear. Her brain processed it as glass. Rolling with these things kept the feelings of dissonance to a minimum.
The not-glass was cool to the touch. Her faint reflection hovered on the barrier, ghostly against the black of space.
She’d be home soon, whatever home now looked like.
“Do you think anyone’s made it back to Earth?” Lenore asked. She wondered if she’d be able to get her job back and finish her residency. Did practicing two years of medicine on an alien planet count? Her patients were all humans, but she used alien tech, and that had to be something she could spin into a paper or lecture. The status of her student loans was a worry. If lots of people vanished, had they been forgiven? Written off? Or would she get a grace period to get herself sorted before she had to start repaying? Did she even still have her bank account?
She’d have to live with her parents while she put the pieces of her life together. That would be…interesting. Lenore stayed with her parents for three vexing months after the divorce. They weren’t bad or mean-spirited people. Her mother had opinions that she felt necessary to share with the world. Her father was very particular. Things had to be done in such a way, and heaven forbid you make noise.
Moving back home as an adult who was also particular and liked things done her way had been tough. There just hadn’t been enough hours in the day to go apartment hunting after her rotation. She had to sleep. In the end, she rented a room, the first available one-bedroom, sight unseen because anything would have been better than her mother’s constant nitpicking.
“It’s a big universe,” Sarah said. “Hopefully, someone landed on a planet with the tech and knows how to get back to Earth.”
That was another problem. Earth was a long way away, and they simply didn’t have a ship capable of the journey. One night, when Lenore felt particularly maudlin, she made Luca explain the problem to her. Basically, space was big and empty. Super empty. More empty than anything else. Navigators used waypoints, never straying too far off certain paths. It reminded Lenore of a computer strategy game when her civilization first built boats. Rather than exploring and conquering the seas, she had to end each turn adjacent to land lest the boat sink, at least until she developed the compass.
Arcos had no compass. Well, space compass. Something like that.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get back to Earth?” Sarah asked.
“Locate the first aid kits. Triage. Determine our location.” Lenore rattled off the list of tasks that needed to be completed on the other side of the portal. The first trip through was stomach-churning, and she expected the second round to be just as nauseous.
“I mean home. Like drinking a cold beer and eating a steak dinner when you finally get out of prison.”
“Oh.” Lenore hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I really hope it’s pumpkin spice season.”
