Miles took a bite out of his sandwich and placed it back in its spot. It was his third bite in ten minutes of the first thing he’d eaten since breakfast, and it was already after five o’oclock. After his interviews with Charlie and Echo-- or rather, Casimir and Sizilen, he had emailed the videos of the interviews to Colonel Burke. Later that afternoon, he had a secure video conference with the Colonel.

Despite his matter-of-fact attitude, the Colonel was actually very calming to be around. If Miles hadn’t read up more on his history, he might have thought him to be a pushover. But the man was anything but. In the nineties, during the Kosovo conflict, his unit had been deployed on a peacekeeping mission into the region. They’d been assigned to handle rebuilding efforts in the south of the province after the ceasefire had been called. At the time he was a corporal.

One thing that people rarely realized when it came to conflict was that ceasefires didn’t mean the fighting stopped. It only meant those engaging in it wouldn’t be in uniform when they did. The Serbs still hated the Albanians. The Albanians still hated the Serbs. That wasn’t something that could change overnight, and it was true of almost any major conflict.

One night while on patrol, his squad came across a group of Serbian men who were in the company of a quiet young woman. The woman had seemed frightened, but the men kept assuring them the woman was their cousin and they were taking her home.

When he’d attempted to talk to the woman, they answered for her. When he pressed them, they shot him in the shoulder.

Suddenly, everyone started shooting, but Burke didn’t let getting shot stop him, he tackled one of them to the ground and got the woman to safety, all while in the middle of a hail of bullets.

Oddly, nobody had died. But seven Serbian men were arrested. They were later discovered to be a part of a Serbian gang, and the girl was destined to be trafficked.

They were going to retire Burke due to his injury, but Burke refused. Instead, he got onto the commissioned officer track.

Miles wasn’t sure he could ever act in such a manner while under fire. That alone made him respect the man.

His conference, however, was encouraging. Burke was pleased with the interviews, and agreed that the two of them would be ideal candidates for their focus, but wanted the others questioned wherever possible once they had a better grasp of the language.

But the bombshell came when he forwarded Miles an email he’d received from the Governor General. The head of state herself. The one woman who had the ears both the Queen and the Prime Minister. It outlined a list of questions that were deemed as in need of urgent answers.

He scanned the list on his tablet as he transcribed them as headings on some of the pages of his notebooks.

What methods were used to create the portal and the tree?

Can other portals be made?

How can we shut or destroy the portal?

Why did you come here?

Why did you attack and kill our civilians?

For what purpose are you here?

Each question, he knew, would take time to appropriately translate and put across to the Embrayyans. It would take longer to understand the responses, and each response would inevitably breed more questions.

Miles couldn’t wait.

Much of the rest of the meeting had been clarifying his orders and explaining his methods to Colonel Burke, as well as being debriefed on what was happening with the portal. Not long after the invading Embrayyans had begun their retreat, volleys of arrows started being shot out of the portal. It was assumed to be an attempt to prevent Canadian forces from following through, but Burke had no intention of sending soldiers into that portal until such time as they understood what they could expect on the other side, so it only resulted in injuring or killing their own men with friendly fire as they scrambled to escape.

They’d attempted to send a drone through to see the other side, but the moment it passed through, the signal was lost. It caught exactly three blurry frames of whatever was on the other side before, presumably, falling to the ground on the other side. Burke said the pictures were alarming, but didn’t offer anything more.

Instead of sending more technology through, he decided to erect a barrier directly in front of the portal, preventing anything from coming through from either side.

Of further interest was the initial findings reported by the science unit studying the tree-- they’d managed to take samples of the bark, but any attempt to cut deeper than the bark ended in failure. Blades simply wouldn’t penetrate beyond the bark, chainsaws broke before scratching the surface and even bullets ricocheted off of the wood of the tree, and whatever bark was damaged merely grew back so quickly they couldn’t even get a glimpse.

The findings of the bark and leaf samples revealed nothing extraordinary. It was proposed that whatever force was generating the portal was also protecting the tree. The wood was impervious. The portal itself emitted a light magnetic field, but nothing stronger than walking through a metal detector at the airport. As far as they could tell it shouldn’t have been able to affect electronics, but they couldn’t detect anything else.

More importantly, they couldn’t detect any radio signals from the other side-- not even background signals.

That either meant that radio signals could not penetrate, or stranger yet, that radio signals did not exist on the other side of the portal.

The ramifications of the latter possibility made Miles’ mind reel. If radio signals didn’t exist on the other side, did it mean they couldn’t exist on the other side? That would pose a problem if they meant to cross over to attempt diplomatic talks with the Embrayyans on the other side.

Worse yet, it meant that the laws of physics worked differently on the other side. If that were the case, it would lend credence to the thought that whatever existed over there was its own universe, separate from their own instead of being a different place in their own universe.

But Miles wasn’t sure that was the case. The existence of the three frames they’d managed to capture meant that technology could function over there. At least for a moment. And whatever force they used to create and grow the tree on their side of the portal suggested their own form of technology worked on Earth.

Miles still had a problem accepting the existence of other dimensions and parallel realities, and his time with Casimir and Sizilen had revealed other similarities between Embrayyan and ancient Earth languages. It seemed, much like English, to borrow some words from older languages.

But it was the Colonel’s last revelation that confirmed Miles’ suspicion that they shared common ancestry. Tests were run on the blood and saliva of not just the prisoners, but the captured wolves and wyverns had revealed familiar DNA. The humans were almost entirely genetically identical to modern humans, with few identifiable differences. The wolves were much the same, and the tests on the wyverns were… inconclusive. They’d found rodent, amphibian and even elephant DNA in them. It made very little sense.

It would be weeks still before the prisoner’s DNA could be fully studied and identified, but they’d already found genetic markers shared by those of African, European and Asian ancestry.

If that were the case, that meant they split off from the rest of the human race at some point in the past forty thousand years. Either way, Miles suspected it was prehistoric, before the invention of written language.

He suspected both their ancestors spoke Proto-Indo-Iranian languages and each evolved independently of one another. It definitely pre-dated Vedic Sanskrit. It most likely predated Sumerian language.

That meant they split off of the rest of the human race at least five thousand years earlier. He suspected it might even be double that.

“What about Buster Keaton?”Sub-Lieutenant O’Neill asked from across the table, breaking him out of his train of thought. He was leaning back in his chair, his eyes staring into the air above him.

Miles looked up at him. “What?”

O’Neill met eyes with him and suddenly sat straight. “Sorry,” he said curtly. “What about Buster Keaton, sir?”

Miles blinked, then recalled what he was talking about. Miles had used O’Neill as a sounding board for ideas to help assist with teaching the prisoners English. One of the ideas was to show them films.

“Wasn’t he a silent film actor? Hard to teach them English without speaking.”

“Ah. Yes. Right. I just thought it might be good to start with early film.”

Miles cocked his head to one side. The man had a point. From the reaction he’d caught off of Sizilen just by seeing a picture of charcoal on Kia’s tablet, they might not be able to understand what it is they’re looking at. Starting them off with Harry Potter or Star Wars might… well, give them the wrong idea.

“You might have something there,” Miles said. He took a break from his notebook and took a fourth bite of his sandwich. “Start them off slow, help them understand what film is before we start showing them anything they’d have trouble understanding. Work them up to modern films.” He thought about it for a moment.

He’d had a chance to read over O’Neill’s file since the morning, among the other men assigned under his command for the project. They were all Navy, with the sole exception of Kia. Most were assigned as guards for their prisoners, but he’d been granted a small team of officers that came from Intelligence. O’Neill was fresh out of his cadet bars, but he’d already earned himself a reputation among commissioned officers.

They called him Google. Partly due to his ability to recall information, and partly due to the fact that he consistently over-explained the information he had.

Miles thought it was apt.

“Make a list,” he ordered.

“Yes sir. Any criteria?”

“No sex or violence,” Miles began. “Well, comedy violence should be okay. Nothing too complicated in terms of language, not to start. Short films. No fantasy, no science fiction and definitely no horror. Stick to comedies, dramas, romances. We’ll show them films individually, too. Change it up. We’ll see if they start talking to each other about what they watch. We’ll go with that for the first week, then show them… Fantasia.”

It wasn’t about entertaining them or specifically teaching them English, either. Rather, the prisoners would be studied while they watched the films. Their reactions, gestures and vocalizations would be watched with scrutiny. If they could laugh or cry, it meant they could find common ground in order to enhance communication with one another.

He thought again about the questions they had to ask, then had a thought. “And put the Great Dictator on the list,” he said. He loved that movie.

“Ah, Charlie Chaplin,” O’Neill said. “Good choice!” There was a short pause before he added, “Sir.”

The door behind them suddenly opened, and Miles looked behind to to see Kia enter the room. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Eating?” Miles replied, holding up his sandwich. He took his fifth and final bite.

“Look at the monitor!” she exclaimed.

Miles looked up at the monitor in the corner of the room. It had been set up in there for the purpose of Miles being able to observe the prisoners while they ate-- but he’d been distracted.

What was happening on screen, however, made his jaw drop. Every last one of the prisoners was kneeling.

Except for Sizilen. He realized they were kneeling before her.

He swung his head back to Kia. “How long have they been doing that?”

“It just started,” she explained. “At first it looked like a fight between Charlie and one of the other prisoners. We were going to intervene, but then they started talking and… well, they all started kneeling.

“Why are they kneeling?” O’Neill asked. “What does that mean?”

Miles watched the screen intently. He watched as Sizilen directed them to stand… and they did.

“It means,” Miles began. “That she’s no concubine. Maybe she’s in command or... “ He looked back at Kia. “Some kind of royalty?”

“It would explain why she’s the only woman in the whole bunch,” she said. “Either way, she’s clearly important enough for them to revere her.”

Miles was suddenly very interested in his next interview with Sizilen.