He nods crisply, gestures sharply to the other MPs, and everyone gets back into their cars. Dalton rolls out first, followed by Rider, with the other squad in the rear. Chris and his husband wave as they go.

Dalton turns his siren on as they go, and traffic parts before them. What would normally be an hour and a half's drive is reduced to forty minutes, though they have to swerve around a few cratered stretches of highway. Along the way, they drive past some bombed out buildings, and a collection of prefab metal buildings people have set improvised grills in front of. The overall impression is one of life finding a way to continue amidst heavy destruction.

They slow down for a checkpoint as they reach the base, but get swiftly waved through, and soon park outside of one of the offices. The MPs all get out.

Rider follows along, of course. She could do a lot of other things, but none of them are things she wants to do. 

She stops, parks the bike, and gets off. 

A little frisson rolls down her spine at leaving the bike behind again, but she supresses it. This is fate-of-this-world stuff. Not fate of the world but fate of a world, and that matters pretty damn much. 

"Where do you want me?", she asks CWO Dalton. 

"Right this way, Miss Rider," he replies, leading her into the building. "No one will mess with your bike on base, and if you work with us more regularly we'll get you a parking pass sorted out."

"Very well." She follows CWO Dalton into the building.

A little ways into the building, CWO Dalton knocks at a door labeled "Lt. Cmdr. Edwards," then opens it. "I have Miss Rider here, Sir."

He waves them inside. Edwards is a reedy, tired-looking man with sandy brown hair sitting behind a metal desk covered in reports. "Welcome to Earth, Miss Rider," he greets her. "Have a seat.

"That will be all, CWO Dalton," he adds to the MP. "Thank you for getting her here so promptly."

Dalton exits, shutting the door behind him. 

She takes a seat. "I imagine you must have an armload of questions."

He nods, smiling thinly. "I do. I imagine you do as well. Chief Warrant Officer Dalton tells me you have technology and expertise that could be relevant in the defense against the Abyssal Fleet. What do you have, what are its and your capabilities, and what do you need to know to convince you to join humanity's defense?"

"First of all let me back up and give you a little more context. I'm from a multi-universe trade conglomerate called the Origin Trade Consortium, a little like the EU if you have that here but with technology that allows them to transfer between universes. I'm a private citizen and don't represent them, but that's important because in the long term if you're able to join they have the necessary infrastructure to guarantee agelessness to your citizens. 

As for me, I'm a member of a group called the Society of Sensation. We travel "wild" universes getting ourselves into situations of one kind or another and return home to share the memories via advanced technology. I encountered multiversal turbulence and pockets of plasma on my way in and made a near-crash landing.

I have...

Firstly, the hoverbike outside, which has a working miniaturized arcane-fusion reactor based on nudging the ignition point of H-11B so it's less hard to sustain, and two, a dimensional folder that's capable of making transit between worlds. It also has three, a spinal cannon for taking down big game, which fires balls of contained witchfire, which is essentially plasma. It's designed for dragons, basilisks, that kind of thing, but it should be capable of taking down your Abyssals as well. 

Secondly, the contents of the pack in the hoverbike. I carry one technological sidearm — a laspistol — and one magical sidearm — a kinetic slugthrower enhanced with accuracy and power boosting runic formations. I also carry a food synthesizer, which is not intended to be able to be used for synthesis of things other than hydrocarbons, but if its DRM was cracked would become a full nanoforge capable of almost arbitrary synthesis of war materiel. There may also be a few spare magical components left over from my old hunts that I've yet to sell, but I don't know what all I might have held on to, I'd have to check my pack itself. 

Thirdly, I have the contents of my body. I'm not a baseline human; my reflexes in particular are far faster than they should be due to modifications performed on me, as well as all my senses being sharper and sensations such as pain being less aversive. I have the ability to regenerate and my bones are stronger as well. What of that technology is duplicatable at your tech level I don't know, but I'd be willing to make survivable donations of tissues for you to try culturing. 

Fourth, I have the contents of my mind. I have a special interest in maintaining and being able to repair my bike in even the worst of circumstances, so I intimately understand all the principles and techniques that go into its manufacture. I'm not broadly read — I'm a gearhead, not an engineer — but I have enough in my brain to teach you how to build bikes like mine. 

Fifth and lastly, we have the possibility of my running the truly terrible astronomical weather to go do a shopping trip in the OTC. This would seriously risk both me and my bike, so I don't recommend it as a starting step, but the OTC has many civilian-available technologies that would make this look even better. The OTC could also just win your war for you if you caught its attention hard enough, but that would be a complex problem because the OTC is presently in the middle of a refugee crisis as it's evacuating a heavily inhabited galaxy due to unlivable conditions within it."

"As for how to convince me, to be frank, I'm already convinced, but I would like to hear the history of the war and what you know about the Abyssal leadership."

The Lieutenant Commander takes detailed notes as Rider explains. His eyes widen slightly at the mention of dragons and basilisks, and widen further when she mentions turning the food synthesizer into a nanoforge.

Finally, he nods. "We need to test all three of your weapons against an Abyssal, but I expect your magical sidearm and your bike's cannon to have the most interesting results, the former because the accuracy magic may get around a major limitation in our ability to fight Abyssals with anything other than shipgirls, and the latter because we may be able to refit some of the girls with it. I'm not aware of the current state of genetic engineering research after the shift to wartime priorities — I know some groups switched to trying to understand how shipgirls even work, and there was a significant increase in food-related research — but I expect some team or another will be interested in your samples. 

"To properly understand the context of our requests and the current state of the war, however, we need to start about six months ago. An amateur archaeologist in Turkey uncovered thousand-year-old writings, documenting a ritual. Detailed photos of these writings and the site where they were found were uploaded to an internet forum called Reddit, and an ad-hoc translation team was assembled from users around the globe. They got the instructions finished before they got the accompanying warnings, though, and when they finished the translations — revealing that it would summon a 'Princess of the Abyss', who would scour the Earth of all but her faithful — they tried to quarantine all of it.

"Unfortunately, they were too late. As best we can tell via forensics, some group of college students in the Midwest had already performed it, and the Abyssal Princess killed them and headed for the coast. No one realized that murder was relevant until weeks after the invasion. 

"We caught her on a few security cameras on her trip to the ocean: bone-white skin, white hair, tar-black coating on her hands. Easily strong enough to bunch a tank across a field."

He sighs tiredly. "Wish we'd realized any of this before it was too late." He clasps his hands and takes a slow breath, then continues.

"That violence on her escape to open water was the last documented sighting of her, and the last sighting of any Abyssal before the invasion. A bit over a month ago, large raiding parties of Abyssal ships struck every port large enough to host a military vessel, simultaneously. It turns out that mortal fire control can't reliably target Abyssals, and they devastated us. They landed companies of tar-soaked marines with inhuman proportions and rictus grins, and pushed inland. Each Abyssal marine was more durable than a human, not dying despite wounds that would have killed one of us several times over. Each Abyssal ship is a quarter the size it should be for its armor and firepower, and we can't hit them properly. It was a massacre.

"We call that first week Blood Week, now. It took five days and immense bloodshed to finally repel their marines, and by the end of the week all human navies were sunk. They started patrolling, after that, blockading all our ports to prevent shipping.

"Then we finally caught a break. Someone in the JMSDF figured out that the ritual that got posted online was possibly involved in summoning a leader of the enemy forces, and manages — with a lot of help — to rewrite it into an inverted form, trying to summon the opposite of that. They managed to summon the spirit of a decades-sunk IJN battleship, Kongō, in the form of a young woman."

Rider holds up her hand for a pause. "A few notes in reply..." 

"Firstly, I don't know how the accuracy magic in the sidearm works, but I do know that it's theoretically scalable to larger weapons, it's just that that kind of weaponry isn't considered civilian by the OTC. Strictly speaking the bike is a grey area, I'm able to have it because I have connections and I'm not hunting with it in OTC space."

"As for this abyssal princess... I'm sorry that's how you learned magic was real, if the OTC had contacted you even a year earlier things might have turned out better for you."

"As for summoning magic — I have a friend who works in dimensional folding and I bet she would know a summoning specialist, but she's on the other side of some truly awful weather and I don't know if whoever she'd get would be willing to risk their life for strangers. If you could work out a banishing spell you might be able to send the abyssal princess back to wherever she came from, but that might just make her someone else's problem."

She sighs. 

"Please go on about the shipgirls. They're based on the reversed summoning ritual — how many of them are there?"

"It'd be great if you could get a specialist, but we'll find a way to manage with what we've got," he replies. "As for the shipgirls, there are currently a bit over fifty, across the various navies of the world. The JMSDF were the first to summon more, swiftly followed by the British. Our shipgirls didn't appreciate the 'imperial fealty' garbage, and we didn't really count as being at our 'hour of direst need', so we had to tweak the ritual a bunch before it worked. At this point the Japanese have sixteen across various classes, the British fourteen, and we have twelve. Each shipgirl can summon her guns as 'rigging' that floats around her, can basically skate across the water, and is durable enough to laugh off heavy machine gun fire. Kongō says it tickles." He chuckles at that.

"Kongō was able to single-handedly demolish an Abyssal patrol fleet on her first sortie, the day she was summoned. Watching her do that is when we started to figure out why we can't hit Abyssals with normal weaponry: they're half in some kind of spiritual plane, and that plays merry hell with our targeting computers, and even normal human aiming. Shipgirls are also on that same spiritual level, and so they can compensate. That's why I'm so interested in your sidearm, because magical targeting might be able to compensate the way shipgirls can."