Thanfield nodded acquiescence and ticked off their woefully short list of options as though running through a high school multiple choice exam. "We could leave a marine detachment here to stall our enemies until reinforcements from Earth arrive - the zoning signal as already been sent, by the way. Or we could launch an emergency spacepod for the civilians and hope it reaches Earth's atmosphere before the Bhorki catch it. Or we could take them with us." He lifted an incredulous eyebrow at the last one. They weren't exactly going for a jaunty walk in Central Park.

He glanced over at the engineer - Alanna - and couldn't help but feel a surge of respect. She appeared the most experienced of this lot in any case. Two hours? He wasn't even certain they could hold out that long, though it would be helpful if the perimeter surveillance was functioning. He moved over to inspect the monitors. The battery-run cameras should still be working, but the monitors' wires hooked to the station's central power source had been completely fried by all the jarring. He began rummaging in the numerous cabinets for a battery.

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Siym spoke up. "If my calculations are correct, I believe that it would approximately one hour to 'prime' the crystal, as you have put it." He looked from Alanna to Cortez, unsure why the former was glaring at him.

Carson knew he wouldn't be much help to Alanna right now- his skills were largely in computers. Instead, he walked over to look at the blast door- or rather, what was left of it. The door itself looked beyond repair, but a reasonably strong barricade could be constructed from outside the room.

He walked behind one of the overturned desks and retrieved some ammo for his pistol. "I'll try to get something for that door rigged up." he said. "I shouldn't be too long."

He was able to climb out of the room over the blast door, and he headed off down the hall, carefully watching for any more aliens.

(*deep breath* here goes... yay for fictitiously applying stuff you learn in school)

Alanna threw the little grey alien an "I'll get you" look. "Then recalculate," she shot back, rising. "I've got to design an entire control system here." Strictly speaking, the control system would be only for the pump, but she didn't see why she should mention that. She still needed to establish precise automatic control over a decorative fountain pump, which hadn't been designed for that sort of thing.

Turning to the biologist with apparent computer talents, she asked, "Holly, are you familiar with the LabSis language? This would go a lot faster if you could write an energy modulation routine to compensate for the refractive index of the coolant we'll be using. It's not that hard, but it'll free me up." Alanna pulled out a screen and brought up the coolant specs, handing it to Taelor. "These will come in handy. Daniel, hook up a DAC to the Portal control computer. Double-check the interfaces; we can't afford to have problems there. Morris? Morris, there's a fountain in Dr. Yenkovich's office. I need the pump and any relevant tubing and wiring."

Grabbing a screen for herself, the engineer found a stylus and rolled her chair up to the Portal control station. She was going to have to calculate the transfer function parameters that would properly utilize feedback from the portal to regulate the pump's flow rate. Too much coolant, and the crystal wouldn't focus the energy correctly. Too little, and it would shatter before a singularity could be formed.

Biting the end of her stylus thoughtfully, she stared off into space for a few minutes before starting the calculations, glad that she didn't actually have to perform them by hand.

Once she had the control parameters, she pushed them through a simulation to confirm their efficacy, then plugged the completed transfer function into the LabSis program on the Portal computer. Coupled with the DAC, it would enable automatic regulation of the coolant pump.

A gruff "Here you go," from Morris signalled the arrival of the pump itself.

"Thank you, Morris dear," she replied brightly, "could you possibly drag out a tank of coolant?" Each tank, mounted on a rolling base, contained about a cubic meter of liquid. She hooked up the pump's positive and negative to the DAC. Child's play, quite literally. She'd been about eight when she'd discovered, to her utmost enchantment, that changing the power flow to a motor or pump changed its rate. "Holly, how's that routine coming?"

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

"Receiving necessary data as we speak," said Holly, entirely occupied with a bewildering maze of symbols that looked like anything but ordinary English. "I'll transfer it to you the moment it's ready." Her computer beeped insistantly and, frowning in concentration, Holly beamed it at a wall to enlarge what was happening on the miniature screen.

She muttered something incoherent but hardly complimentary, and hastily halted the data transfer. "Bother," she muttered. "Routine taking an unexpected detour, ready in approximitely another seven minutes."

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(Assuming ultimate frisbee is still played in a hundred years ... which of course it will be )

"Take your time; no pressure," Alanna said casually, meaning of course the exact opposite. Funny how those phrases always came into play at the least applicable moments. Take ultimate, for example. If you had the disk and someone yelled that at you, you knew you had about a tenth of a second before someone had you marked and covered.

Morris rolled up the coolant tank, grudgingly efficient as always. "Ah, it's the man of the hour!" Alanna unsealed the tank valve, discarding it, and dropped the pump's feed tube directly inside. The outlet she positioned over the crystal mount.

"Hang!" She stopped abruptly as a new thought hit her. If the coolant was just flowing vertically over the crystal, wouldn't it just be controlled by gravitational acceleration ... Freezing, she gave it more thought. No. Whew. It was still fine; gravity wasn't the only force acting on the fluid.

She shouldn't scare herself like that. She'd better find something to collect the runoff in. And mount the small sliver of crystal left. It was small; it would probably only take one clamp ... After that, install Holly's compensation routine, and test the pump.

The engineer got to work. This was looking like it would come comfortably under her personal one-hour estimate. She could see a salary rise in the offing - provided that the Portal didn't explode or anything.

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

Several minutes later, Carson and several other men came down the hall, lugging a large metal sheet. They propped it up against the crumpled blast door and bolted it in place. It wasn't much, but it would at least give the marines and scientists a few minutes if more Bhorki attacked.

"Thanks, guys." Carson said to the other men, and they all scattered to get back to their jobs. The scientist had recruited them after finding the base's forklifts severely damaged.

He made his way back to the fire escape, walking a bit unsteadily as the base was tilted and jarred. "There we go." he said as he came back in to the room. "Hopefully that'll hold for awhile."

Winter glanced around. Well, glared around, to be more specific. Gather Wargear? So far as he could tell, the only weapons and equipment that were on this were the ones that were still sitting outside on the Puma. And the ones that were out of ammo and laying around here. You'd think a scientist would know how to shoot a rifle in an ammo-conservative way. What were they teaching them nowadays? A scientist that didn't know how to shoot a gun. Patheti--wait. Scientist didn't necessarily use guns, did they?

He abandoned that line of thought--it was confusing him, and messing up his glare. He had settled on a specific one that he was using, one with a kind of rather-very-angry sort of appearance, and he didn't want any confusion making it look weird.

He noticed Thanfield standing aimlessly, and poked him. "Private. The Sergeant gave us a job. I'm subdividing that assignment and telling you to come up with a plan," he said. It was so nice being able to pull rank on Thanfield.

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"Transferring," said Holly crisply, lines of text whirring across the screen projected onto the wall. "There was reason to alter it slightly to compensate for destroyed Portal files." Holly had destroyed them herself, but she did not apologize for doing so. It was more important that the aliens did not get their hands on them - though they'd already gone through the Portal in any case. "In any case, a few glitches may be encountered, but there shouldn't be anything overtly problematic."

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Carson came over and looked down at the screen. "Dodge City?" he said incredulously "Why would an alien go to the Wild West? Do you think they knew where they were going?"

Thanfield hadn't done his history homework in years, but he nonetheless had the guts to sardonically point out, "The Wild West. Picture macho, clueless cowboys running around and accidentally shooting off their mamas' heads. Seems an ideal place to begin a conquest."

He dragged over a plastic bucket that happened to be sitting around somewhere and placed it under the crystal. As soon as the coolant dripped inside, he swore he heard the plastic crack. He spared a glance for the Portal, which was doing an interesting interplay of electrical surges and flickers.

"I'm not exactly the smartest crayon in the box," he ventured to say with an emphatic look at the portal, "but whatever coolant you're using seems to be having a negative effect on the Horalium."

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Curious in spite of herself, Holly leaned over to see what had got the implacable Cortez so excited. Her eyebrows practically disappeared into her disheveled blonde hair. "The Wild West? What is this, a bad novel?"

In another moment insistant beeping commanded her attention but Holly's expression retained vestiges of incredulity. "Bother," she snapped, scanning the screen. "Data not compatible. Be another minute or two."

Intent tapping followed - and Holly resisted the temptation to chew her fingernails down further than they already were. "Please do not tell me we intend to follow this alien into the Wild West or whatever it is," she said at length at a pause between frenzied bouts of typing.

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Alanna was too occupied with the ongoing test to look at the results of Cortez's search, but she got the gist of it. "Why, what will those things masquerade as? Native Americans with a really bad sunburn?" She cut the coolant flow and glanced at Holly, willing her to be ready. The intense young blonde was still hammering away at her keyboard, so the engineer took the time to comment, "If you really do intend to sent a pursuit party, they'll stick out like a sore thumb. I don't know if there's much in the way of period costumes in the lab, though. We haven't thrown a fancy-dress party for ... well, never." They should think about doing that sometime. Back on Earth, Alanna had been fond of heating up the salsa club floors.

"Yee-haw," she added, semi-enthusiastically, wishing she could throw in a "Giddap" to the biologist.

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

A bizarre image of Thanfield in a feathered headdress dancing around a campfire made an unexpected appearance in Holly's head, whereupon she hastily banished it. Concentrate. Her ancestry wasn't changing if she had anything to say about it.

"Right," she said tersely, after a minute of scrutinization. "Ready over here." The data needed was proving irritatingly reluctant to comply with her demands.

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Winter gave the Sergeant a blank look. Himself as a Native American? How were they going to accomplish that? As far as he knew, they had no make-up to manage it, and no colored contacts, either. He knew enough history to know that no Indians had blue-grey eyes--he would stand out like a Viking at a tea-party. He snickered at that thought. That was something he should try sometime. Perhaps Thanfield would be willing to play the role of the brutalized Viking victim.

Of course, perhaps he would be able to act the role of a Cowboy--that could always be fun. The weapons, though, wouldn't be too great. He wouldn't be able to use his Autogun, and he doubted that there would be any of those little stress-relieving aliens around, either.

He sighed. Those little things were so much fun, after all.

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"Right, then." Alanna accessed Holly's routine from her network account and dropped it into the pump process directory. The calls to the function were already in place. "Time to party."

Disconnecting the actual singularity-establishing part of the Portal, she started the pump, letting it smooth out and checking the flow rate before introducing the energy stream. Slowly, she brought it up to full power.

Nothing happened.

"Good." In answer to the puzzled looks thrown in her direction, she explained, "The actual Portal is disconnected; we know it works." If the Portal had been connected and the crystal had shattered while it was operation, the entire station would probably have been sucked in to the collapsing wormhole.

The engineer raised an eyebrow at Cortez while reconnecting the Portal. "Mission accomplished. It works. Your turn, wonderboy."

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<center>Nothing but the Rain</center>

((is Cortez getting ready to go through the Portal? Could Carson come, too?))