The secret military base certainly seemed deserted. There were a couple of levels above the entrance, but they could find no other exits. There were a couple levels below that were also completely abandoned. And the place was certainly abandoned in a hurry, though the soldiers had time to secure whatever classified systems they had. But there was one final location to check: an elevator that seemed to go much deeper into the mountain. The place probably was some old gold or other precious metal mine a century ago, now confiscated by the military for some reason.

'Whoa!' Pardus and Panthera both exclaimed as they rode the elevator down. 'Those're some weird readings!' Pardus reported.

'What is it?' Trevar asked.

'Some sort of radiation, but nothing that makes sense!' Pardus said. 'There's no particulate signature…no gamma or X-ray…there's no E-M trace or interference at all…but…'

'…but…it feels as though space, itself, is vibrating!' Panthera jumped in. 'At a very high frequency, and getting stronger the deeper we go! If this was an E-M effect, it would be in the upper ultraviolet or lower X-ray!'

'Lethal?' Trevar silently inquired.

'With long-term exposure, very likely!' Pardus grimly stated. 'You should be okay, even if you have to use the Gateway to repair yourself. But I certainly wouldn't want to see what it does to a normal human down here for any length of time.'

The ride continued for another few minutes before the elevator finally reached the bottom.

'We're about half-a-mile down,' Panthera reported as the doors opened. Trevar's ears picked up the sounds of a crackling hum from one of the passages ahead.

'How's that strange radiation?' Trevar asked as they progressed.

'Our quarks are literally getting the shit shaken out of them!' Pardus spat. 'Matter, itself, down here is being attacked! I wouldn't put the odds of a biologic surviving much more than a few hours of this without some severe compromise. AND we're starting to pick up some soft X-rays, now! Mostly, those are well within safe levels with all this rock shielding.'

'Well, whatever's up ahead making the noise of a Tesla coil in continuous orgasm, I'd say that's going to be the same source of both the X-rays and this odd spatial radiation,' Panthera muttered.

They turned the final corner and stopped, stunned by the sight. A large, spacious chamber greeted them. A large structure sat in the center of the floor at a forty-five degree angle to their vantage point.

"Da'fuq?!?" Trevar exclaimed when he saw it.

It was a series of thirty-two large rings, each standing on their sides, starting at about six and three-quarter meters across at the left end and progressively getting smaller as the series moved back and to the right, where the smallest, most distant ring was only about eight inches across. The total length of the structure was about one hundred and seventy-five feet. The rings were kept aligned with their centers level by a wide ramp that rose and narrowed with respect to the size of the rings. A constant lightning storm played out from outsides of the pulsating and glowing rings, the bolts all arcing to either the ground, walls or ceiling of the chamber.

But the truly unnerving aspect of the scene was the obvious distortion of space that funneled into the large opening of the virtual cone on the left.

"FREEZE!" a soldier suddenly screamed, putting his rifle at the back of Trevar's head. Trevar didn't react as several more soldiers converged on him.

"Gentlemen!" Trevar calmly announced loud enough to be heard over the noise of the lightning storm. "That is a severely misaligned warp coil running wild at full bore! Do you idiots have any idea what the fuck you've done?" he demanded, turning his head to glare at the nearest soldier.

They kept him waiting in a small room for several hours. Unbeknown to them, Panthera scouted nearby Trevar's location while Pardus stalked further about, looking for the commanding officer. Both panthers maintained their telepathic link with him, letting him see and hear what they did.

Pardus soon found the base commander and was ready when the inevitable phone call was placed on the secure phone. The number Colonel Parson dialed was to his senior back at the Pentagon.

"Yes? Who's this?" the voice demanded from the receiver.

"I'm calling for General Moreland. This is Colonel Parson at the Colorado research site," Parson began.

"Nate! Is that you? What the hell is going on?" the voice yelled, surprising Parson.

"S-sir?" Parson asked, astonished. He hadn't expected the general to answer his own phone.

"We've been trying t….aise your base f….ours!" the voice that sounded somewhat like the general's, but the static on the line was pretty bad. "No one's answered th….hone! I've finally had to call in a favor from the Na…….gency to send someone out there to check up….you. There's a hell of an electrical storm goi….out your way. There should be a man showi….at your base…ny minute. His name is Allec Trevar. You're to brief him…...give him your full cooperation….soon as he gets there!"

"Uh—yes, sir! But, sir! We've not received any orders!" Parson protested.

"Well we don't hav…ny links to your computer….stems. The connection seems to be kno…..out by whatever's happened over there!" the voice on the phone said. "You have it on my voc…..thority to extend to Mr. Trevar every courtesy and whatever he needs to help you fix the problem. I've been told….if anyone can fix it, he can! Now what do you need from….to confirm his authenticity?"

What few people understood was that secure phones could easily be compromised with the right technology applied. Fortunately for Trevar, Pardus was just such technology. With a combination of a graviton tractor beam, a holographic display overlaying the actual phone as well as focused inductive beams directed at the handset, Colonel Parson never knew the "voice" on the other end of the line was actually right there in the same room with him the entire time. Of course, the fact that Colonel Nathanial Parson had his full name on awards displayed on the walls for Pardus to see that was the primary thing which helped sell the idea to the colonel that he'd been speaking to his immediate superior the whole time.

And Trevar was completely in the know.

"You might want to try switching off that bitch out there!" Trevar yelled as soon as the door opened. "You might also like to know, it's causing that storm outside! And, you've got shitloads of X-rays going on in that chamber. Not to mention the effects that warp field is having on the local space-time which is doing wonders for everybody's DNA. I'd hate to see what any of your kids are going to be like if they're born after this shit—assuming any of you live that long. Oh, and your entrance is buried under an avalanche due to the storm." Colonel Parson and Major Jenkins, Parson's Second-In-Command, were taken aback by the man's abrupt and gruff manner.

"We tried shutting it down!" came a female voice from outside the room. A young lieutenant followed Jenkins into the small interrogation room.

"So, of course, the power's coming from the other end of the warp tunnel. Naturally," Trevar sighed, knowing his headache was soon coming. "And by that, the only way to fix it will be to go down the tunnel and pull the plug at that end!"

"We don't know if that's going to work for us," Parson spoke up. "Pardon us, but we haven't had introductions…"

"Sorry, but introductions can wait," Trevar said. "But since you're probably worried that I might be a security risk, my name's Allec Trevar. I do believe, Colonel Parson, you just got through speaking with someone who told you I'm here to help you try and fix your spectacularly entertaining little FUBAR?" The three were surprised by Trevar quickly jumping to the point.

"Sorry, but you don't exactly look like an NSA agent," Parson pressed, noting the long, shoulder-length leonine mane, sharply trimmed goatee and drooping Fu Manchu mustache Trevar sported.

"And just what is a spy supposed to look like, Colonel?" Trevar quickly responded. "Nicely clean cut, like James Bond, or James West, perhaps? But if our perceptions of what a spy is supposed to look like are going to be based on fictional characters, let's not forget the contributions that Artemus Gordon made with all his little disguises. Only as the troubleshooter I am, I don't really need a disguise. And, as your little phone conversation has already established, I am who I say I am. The reason I don't carry a government badge is if I'm ever caught, my cover's blown. Anyhow, I was finishing up my latest assignment and was just passing through at the time when I was informed I needed to divert here. My driver's license ID'd me and the person you just got through speaking with confirmed my description. Now—back to your little matter:

"The problem is," Trevar continued, "this planet of ours has been losing trillions upon trillions of electrons due to the solar wind for billions of years. That other world's probably been doing something similar, but at a different rate. So, whatever you've latched onto, it's trying to equalize the charge differential between our two planets.

"Okay! We've got two choices: One, let the warp tunnel complete the job, which may take a few hundred years…Oh, and given the amperage we've got right now, let's not forget there'll be current overshooting and an oscillating ring voltage probably for decades before we'll be able to safely shut it down. Or two, we go to the other side, figure out what sort of warp coil they've got over there and hopefully find a way to shut it down."

"Wait!" the lieutenant spoke up. "How do you know there's a warp coil on the other side? And how did you recognize that we've got a warp coil?"

"Because I can bloody well tell a warp coil when I see one!" Trevar yelled at her. "And what I see out there is that you've built a severely misaligned one! If you idiots ever try putting that on a ship, you're not going to go anywhere except straight to hell! All you'll end up doing with that thing is punching a hole in space-time, shortly before you blow yourselves to shit!" he tossed in with a shrug.

"Now, were you aiming to make some sort of time-tunnel?" Trevar asked, continuing his rant. "Sorry, if that were the case, then the only place you'd possibly be connecting to right now would be your future. Except the electron differential is flowing into us, right now! Which, logically, means you've connected to the past—but—since you've only just built that bitch in the last few weeks, that can't have happened yet! So, that leaves only one other possibility: another planet with a warp coil that you somehow reached out and latched onto.

"Now, if that other world is future or past with respect to this exact moment of space-time where we are is irrelevant. There has to be a distant coil that you've linked to because this warp tunnel is stable! If there was no distant coil, the warp would've collapsed the moment you cut the power!

"Now, did all that convince you that I know what the fuck I'm talking about?" Trevar demanded, glaring at the lieutenant.

"S-s-sure!" the lieutenant stammered with a nervous gulp.

"Plus, we're going to want to shut this thing down before you suffer too much more damage to your DNA," Trevar continued. "The storm out there's been going on for a couple hours at least, and some of you—if you've been exposed to the quantum fluctuations long enough—you're probably dead already! Ten years, maybe fifteen on the outside."

"Wait! How do you know the current's flowing in from the warp and not going out?" Jenkins demanded. Trevar just blinked and suddenly got an exasperated look on his face.

"Because the X-rays being generated are being emitted from the walls of your chamber and not the coils," Trevar snapped, glaring at the Major. "And if you ask me how I know the X-rays are being emitted from your floor, ceiling and walls, I'm just going to go home and let you all deal with option number 1! Now, am I going to win my bet or not?"

"Uh…" the lieutenant interrupted, making Trevar glare at her.

"You've got something else to say?" he demanded.

"Uh, sir?" she started, but then remembered her superiors and silently looked at them for permission to proceed. Colonel Parson nodded grimly. "The field's actually been running for four days," she finally said.

"Wh-wut?" Trevar stammered in shock.

'Oh, shit!' the panthers both telepathically exclaimed.

"Ninety-eight hours, to be exact," the lieutenant clarified.

'How long have they got?' Trevar asked the panthers. He felt the blood drain from his face as he knew the answer wouldn't be good. It wasn't.

"Good God!" Trevar whispered.

'But the storm?' Trevar suddenly ventured to the panthers. 'If this has been running for this long, then why is the storm just beginning to fire up?'

'Maybe the metal content in these mountains?' Panthera finally ventured. 'It's no doubt been spreading the incoming charge up and down the entire range before getting strong enough to affect the atmosphere.'

"What was this mine originally?" Trevar gently asked. "Gold?"

"Silver and lead, if I recall," Colonel Parson replied. "Does that make a difference?"

"It—it threw off my calculations about how long you've got to live," Trevar softly said. "I didn't take into account how far widespread the charge differential would get before affecting the atmosphere. If you've been down here the whole time, trying to put this thing out—" he paused, swallowing, "you've only got a few weeks—maybe six to eight—or nine, at most." All of the army officers looked pale.

"H-how w-will w-we go?" Parson asked.

"I can only guess," Trevar said, relaying what he got from his companions. "I suppose it'll be much like a lethal dose of radiation, but without the cooking effects you'd normally see. You should be pretty healthy up until the moment your quantum states begin to revert to their normal energy levels—and—then your biology will just—fail.

"I'm sorry. I really am," Trevar finished, sadly shaking his head. "All we can try to do is save both planets from any more damage. There's nothing I can do that will save any of you."

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Trevar asked as they geared up in their rubberized hazmat suits that would protect them from the electrical discharges.

"Well, I did help build this," the lieutenant said, jovially shrugging her shoulders. She had finally been introduced as Melisa Scott, the lead technician on the warp coil project. Trevar and she worked out the gear they planned to take with them and how they would be able to survive the trip. "I suppose, if we had gotten it to work properly, I'd probably never have gotten to go on a trip through the portal anyhow. But since I'm not going to be around for whenever they do get this up and working, I might as well take the opportunity to see what the other side is like, just this once!" Trevar nodded his understanding before moving to put on his hood.

"Can I ask you something?" the lieutenant spoke up interrupting. "When you still thought we would live through this, you were very abrasive and condescending. So why the change when you found out how long this has been going on?" Trevar sadly smiled before replying.

"To be honest, when I saved the day, I was planning to lord it over all of you, to remind you that you guys owe me. Someday, I figured there would come a time when I might need to collect on that debt," Trevar admitted. "But—knowing you won't be around much longer…well…what's the point?" he sadly asked.

"Well! This fix is on the house!" he said, suddenly laughing. "If we're successful, you guys will all die heroes, and I can bow out of the credit on this one," he finished with a wink before putting on his hood.

Scott could feel herself blushing as she put on hers.

Panthera and Pardus had preceded them, cloaked of course. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the other end of the tunnel and they found themselves in the lighted hallways of a stone worked structure also being bombarded by lightning.

'Well, there's the other set of warp coils,' Panthera observed, looking at the X-ray glow from the structure. 'Looks like there's a control system to it. All this planet's electrons are being pulled through it!'

'At least they built this end correctly,' Pardus responded. 'There seems to be some damage to the controls, but still with enough functionality to let the warp field connect with the one back on Earth. I wonder how far out we are.'

'There's considerable interference from the warp field,' Panthera said. 'I'll try to put some distance between me and these coils to get a reading.'

'Hmm,' Panthera noted, as she approached the entrance of a narrow passageway. 'Spatial distortions aren't nearly so bad at this end of the warp tunnel. I'm getting positional data from known galactic neutrino sources already!'

'Really?' Pardus asked, astounded.

'Yeah, we're only about fifteen to sixteen hundred light-years out,' Panthera reported.

As Panthera got closer to the passageway, she spotted a couple of quadrupedal creatures nervously looking around the corner at the lightning storm surrounded warp field. She was stunned by the sight of the small horse-like creatures, the details being more confusing as she entered the passageway. One was primarily orange furred, but with a straw-yellow mane and tail with a small number of pink ribbons tied into the mane and tail. And it wore an old beat-up cowboy hat on its head. The other creature was a cyan-colored—and Panthera had to blink to confirm what she was seeing—a cyan-colored pegasus, with a prismatic mane and tail.

"Whudya suppose tha thar thing is, Rainbow?" the orange one asked its companion.

"I-I don't know! But I'm bettin' it's got somethin' to do with the storm outside!" the cyan responded with a gulp.

'Hey, Pardus! Check this out!' Panthera called, sending him her telemetry.

'Is—that—a pegasus?' Pardus asked after a few seconds.

'Sure is! What's more, they're talking! And they're speaking English!' Panthera responded. 'Hey! This gives me an idea. You remember that Wormy comic strip from Dragon Magazine? You know that one character, Shadowcat?'

Panthera began instructing her body to change and she was soon sporting a pair of wings to match her memory of the cartoon figure.

'Yeah,' Pardus replied. 'Are you thinking of modifying your body to appear like that when we reveal ourselves to Trevar and Lieutenant Scott?'

'Already did!' Panthera responded, laughing, sending him the parameters.

They carefully pushed the tool cart alongside themselves, having to contend with their footing against the slick bottom of the warp tunnel.

They had just pulled the cart from the vestibule of the tunnel an onto solid ground and stepped away to get a look at the alien warp coil system when a large glowing blue crystal slipped out of its restraints and fell to the ground, smashing to shards. Instantly, the warp tunnel closed and the lightning continued for a second before momentarily stopping.

"GET DOWN!" Trevar screamed, diving for the ground and pulling Scott down with him just as the lightning restarted for a few seconds before finally ceasing and plunging them into darkness.

"Ring voltage!" Trevar yelled over the muffled dullness that the discharge noise did to their hearing.

They slowly got up and turned on flashlights to inspect the mechanism.

"Looks like we got through the tunnel just in time," Trevar muttered, removing his hazmat hood. "Vibrations must've been working the crystal loose. I guess it was about to shut itself down and we never even knew it." Except that Trevar knew it had actually been the efforts of his companions that removed the crystal.

"So, there's no way back?" Scott calmly asked as she unsuited.

"Not with this thing in a billion pieces, no," he said staring at the debris. "So—let's take care of that nuke you brought along, since we no longer need it to blow up this end of the tunnel." He turned to see her holding her .45 on him. "What?" he asked surprised. "You thought I wouldn't be able to tell there was a nuke tucked in the bottom drawer as I was moving it about?" Of course, it had been a cloaked Pardus that had revealed the information to him, having watched the tool box being loaded back when Trevar and Scott were getting into their hazmat suits.