I gave them the phone. “Hold this.” I fished out my phone from my pocket. “I’m not going to send an email. However, I am going to use near-field communication to transfer these files.”
“Look at you being a computer nerd,” Niamh said, not quite admiringly.
“I did work at a tech start-up, once,” I said. “I learned at least a couple of things.”
“Then make it go faster,” they said. “Or I’ll have to zap this poor bastard again.”
When the files were transferred over, I turned off the guy’s phone and chucked it far into the woods. “Come on,” I said to Niamh. “We need to get moving. Whoever this guy is, he’s probably going to be missed soon. We don’t want to be there when anyone comes looking for him.”
We started walking and found Kahurangi and Aparna coming toward us. “We heard voices,” Aparna said. “I think they’re looking for their friend.”
I looked up toward Bella and saw flashlights waving about. “Right,” I said. We headed out, away from the unconscious henchman and the flashlights of his pals.
We hunkered down a couple of hundred meters away, and every one else looked out while I went through the files I downloaded. “Here,” I said. “It’s a dos-and-don’ts document about that perimeter. They call it a trans-dimensional portal.”
“Mate, they did not just rip off Doom Eternal for that,” Kahurangi said.
“I’m afraid they did.”
“Copyright violation for sure.”
“I don’t think they’re going to try to sell this,” I said, continuing to read. “It looks like it requires a ridiculous amount of energy to work, so it needs to be primed before it can be activated. Those barrel-looking things are capacitors. Once there’s enough energy in the system it can be discharged into these components at the top of the barrel, which thins out the barrier between worlds to nothing.”
“Exactly how?” Niamh asked.
“It doesn’t say. It’s not a schematic or anything. It’s just describing how it works enough so that some jerk doesn’t get himself killed working around it.” I flipped the screen over so they could see it. “Like, ‘Don’t go near the capacitors, they’re not actually safe and might accidentally discharge a hundred thousand volts into you.’”
“That’s … good to know,” Aparna said.
“Seriously, it looks like a really bad design,” I said.
“If the capacitors are charged, then something is charging them,” Kahurangi said. “There’s a generator here somewhere. And if there is, that’s probably where the switch to discharge them is.”
“Find it, discharge the capacitors on the perimeter, send Bella home,” Aparna said.
I nodded and flipped through the document until I found a rough design illustration. “There’s where a generator would be,” I said. “I’m guessing, since we didn’t see it immediately, that we’ll find it on the other side of Bella, along with all the rest of whatever camp they have set up.”
“So, let’s go and flip the switch,” Niamh said.
“It’s probably guarded.”
“Why would it be guarded? Do you really think these assholes are expecting visitors?”
“Maybe they weren’t, but then one of them went missing because someone who shall remain nameless zapped the shit out of them,” I pointed out.
“I acknowledge your point even as I defend its necessity,” Niamh said. “But what that just means is that whatever we do, we need to do it quickly.”
“That, I agree with.”
“What if we just told them?” Aparna said.
“What?”
“I know we’re going with the assumption that these are bad people—”
“They actually are bad people,” Kahurangi reminded her. “They killed our friends.”
“I know that,” Aparna acknowledged. “I’m not forgetting that at all. But I also don’t think they intended for Bella to go nuclear when she came over. I don’t think they understand the danger here, to themselves even if they don’t care about other people. I think it’s possible that if we just told them, they might send her back.”
“Do you really think that?” Niamh asked.
“I’m not sure if I do,” Aparna admitted. “But I think at least one of us should say this out loud before we do anything else. We should be at least willing to entertain the notion these people, even if they are evil, are rational actors.”