Waypoint Kangaroo Read Online Free Page A

cutters, a portable plasma torch, maser cannons, lots and lots of battery packs, several bricks of malleable explosives with matching remote detonators, bundles of Kazakhstani banknotes, and three field ration bars.
    This accounting is one of our post-op rituals. I always keep a lot of stuff in the pocket—it’s the size of an entire universe, so why not?—but the agency demands that certain equipment be accounted for periodically. Other things, like perishables or delicate machinery, wouldn’t survive floating in deep space for more than a few days.
    Most equipment that goes into the pocket has to be stored in therm-packs to prevent freezing. It takes Oliver a few minutes to unpack everything and lay it all out on the table. I tried to help him once, and he nearly ripped my head off for lining up a set of seemingly identical power cells in the wrong order. So now I just wait while he does the count.
    â€œI see you got hungry in the desert,” he says, putting the ration bars in what appears to be alphabetical order by flavor name. “Where’s the canteen?”
    â€œSorry,” I say. “Forgot it in the hovercar when the Rangers burned it.”
    The soldiers who airlifted me out of the desert also used pyro charges to destroy any trace of our having been there. I could have put the hovercar in the pocket, but it was a bit large for a souvenir.
    Oliver gives me an exasperated look. “That was a thermal canteen. State of the art. Do you know how much trouble it was for us to develop that? Not even astronauts need special containers to keep their water liquid!”
    â€œGive me a break, will you?” I say. “I drove through the desert for three days straight. I’d already melted out all the ice I had. I needed to rehydrate after using the pocket. I was taking stimulants to stay awake. It was an emergency situation.”
    Oliver glares at me. This is another familiar post-op ritual. “I’ll look forward to reading your full report.”
    â€œAre we done here?” I ask. “I can come back later if you want to yell at me some more.”
    â€œMuch later,” he says, turning back to his flying disk. Is that a smirk on his normally languid face? “By the way, Science Division would like you to stop by and run some new scenarios for Project Backdoor.”
    â€œI just got home,” I groan. “By the way, can we change that project name to something else? Anything else?”
    Oliver shrugs. “It’s descriptive. Quite elegant, really.” He holds up his hand with the palm facing flat toward me. “Front door.” He rotates his hand 180 degrees, so the palm faces him. “Back door. And it was your idea, as I recall.”
    He returns to tinkering with his flying disk. I imagine using my own palm to slap that grin off his face. The bastard knew letting me choose that ridiculous code name when I was a teenager would come back to haunt me later in life. Nobody at Science Division ever says “Project Backdoor”—they say “the rotation problem” to avoid snickering. And they say it a lot, because pocket rotation is kind of a big deal.
    After I put something in the pocket, when I want to pull it out again, I can open the portal on the far side of the item, rotated 180 degrees around it. Because the portal is locked to the item in the pocket universe and my location in our universe, Newton’s laws of motion dictate that if I threw the item into the “front door,” it’ll come flying out the “back door” at the same speed. I just have to make sure I associated the item with a reference object that has two distinct sides—like a room with two entrances.
    The problem is, I can only reposition the portal in that specific way, on the far side of the item directly opposite its original placement. If I could arbitrarily adjust the angle of the portal with respect to the item, I could add a