by Lynne Murray
“The paperwork is pending. Do you want me to move my ship?” the giant grasshopper said in a deep voice that echoed a little.
“No, I not. As you well know, the house will collapse the moment you remove the support,” Wade said. “You will first repair the damage to the woman’s house and build her an infrastructure to support her home. Then you can move your ship.”
“I can’t do that.”
“The profile for your type of vessel says differently.”
“My ship is only equipped for self-repair.”
“If you can’t do the work, I have contact information for several local Harvester-linked firms you can hire to do the work for a reasonable price. Either way, you’ll need to fix the cliff face and stabilize her house, or I will confiscate your cargo.”
“You are robbing me of profit. What you ask will take days.”
“We know you are mentally controlling her, we need to see what kind of samples you are taking from her body. You are profiting off the body and property of a citizen of Earth. You have no legal right to do that.”
“She was a willing donor.”
“Thank you for pointing that out. I also require you to restore her mental faculties.”
“Such as they were,” the grasshopper muttered. “You’re only going to wipe her memory again.”
Isabel didn’t blink, her head tracking between Wade and back to the grasshopper as if watching an extended tennis match.
“What happens to her will be infinitely better than the fate you had planned for her,” Wade said. “We’re going to need to inspect at the stasis locker in your ship. My assistant and I will inventory your harvest while you fix the house’s foundations.” He settled back, I noted that his hand touched his hip. A hidden weapon there perhaps?
“I’m going to visit relatives in Bakersfield,” Isabel said, out of nowhere.
The words, “I’m going—to visit...” slipped out of my mouth before I stopped. Like a kick in the gut, I felt a narrowing of focus from the grasshopper. It tilted its head to one side and a stream of black particles rushed from the grasshopper’s helmet toward Wade and me. Dimly I registered one foreleg pulling a cylinder out of a slit on its abdomen.
Wade moved smoothly around me and slid up his sleeve to reveal a cylinder wrapped around his wrist. A weapon.
It took a second to get that.
Wade fired with a blast startling from such a small weapon. The impact knocked the grasshopper back off its legs, spattering green bodily fluids all over Isabel’s refrigerator and kitchen sink. I saw three more grasshoppers coming down the ramp with the same kind of cylinders clutched in their forelegs. A new wave of black particles flowed from them.
I raised my arm and threw power at the first one down the ramp. What was I doing? It didn’t matter, it worked.
The grasshopper collapsed and the one behind him raised its foreleg at me pointing the cylinder. I found its heart and squeezed. It fell on top of the first one I’d knocked out. At the same moment that Wade shoved me to the side. Even as I went down, I lashed out at the third grasshopper man. I targeted the creature’s abdomen and smacked it as swiftly and instinctively as I might swat a fly advancing on my dinner plate.
Wade and I landed on the floor as a whump of air passed over our heads. The grasshopper’s shot went wide.
The metal cylinder slipped out of its grip, hit the floor and rolled away as the creature tilted to one side and crumpled to the floor. The black cloud snapped out of existence
“Damn, you’re quick.” Wade’s eyes told me he knew he would have fired too late. “I called that wrong.”
He rose smoothly to his feet, holding his weapon in his hand and pulling out his amulet with his left hand. He pressed the amulet. Then he approached the tangle of fallen Harvesters, keeping an eye on the ramp in case more grasshoppers arrived.
I slowly got to my feet and followed him over to look. The Harvester Wade had shot, also known as Dave the Handyman, had been cut in half by Wade’s weapon, spattering green blood and guts. I noticed a barnyard smell like fermented grass, probably from the grasshopper’s insides. The three I had hit were not moving, tangled up together. The one on top had fallen backward. I could see a crack on the right side of the plate over its chest.
“Are they all dead?” I asked.
“Yes.” He cast another look at the ramp. “I think that’s all of them. But I just called for backup to inspect the ship. How did you know their hearts are on the right?”
“Didn’t know. Just lashed out by instinct.” I started to tremble. “It was different.” I gasped in surprise, more shocked by saying that out loud than by the creatures lying dead in front of us.
“Different from what? Wade asked.
“The time my boss died because of me.” I still had trouble saying I’d killed him. Somehow admitting it was harder than doing it.
“How was it different?” Wade’s weapon was about size and shape of a pager. He tucked it into a small holster at belt level under his jacket. I hadn’t noticed until then.
I took a minute to think about it. “I felt it trying to control my mind and I just reacted, like a reflex. When I was a kid, bullies targeted me all the time. Sometimes they threw rocks at me and yelled insults. The feeling would build up inside of me and sometimes it kind of overflowed, like a long-distance shove when I lashed out.”
“Do you aim? Or just point and shoot.” Wade seemed genuinely curious. I tilted my head toward Isabel, who was gazing at the fallen grasshopper. Wade nodded. “Just relax, Isabelle. It seems like your handyman is taking a nap. Would you like to lie down for a while too?”
“Not alone.” Isabelle blinked up through her eyelashes at Wade. Her delusion hadn’t died with the Harvesters and neither had her libido.
“Well, just stay in that chair for now. We’ll be done soon.” He turned back to me. “You were telling me whether you aim or strike out blindly.”
Find the heart. The words in the man’s came unbidden to me from the mists before memory. “I think I was trained to seek out heartbeats. It’s too fast to do that consciously, but when I sense an attack on me I throw it back on them.” The memory of Caine’s red face, the man leaning over me, cornering me. “If I’m trapped and people keep hammering at me, I might concentrate on squeezing the heart, like that old man last week, cutting off his blood flow to stop him screaming at me. Just to shut him up.” I felt breathless, as if Caine stood in front of me.
Wade put his hand on my shoulder and I looked up, returning to the kitchen, chilled by the wind, banging the door against the ramp to the Harvester ship.
“We’ve got company.” Wade pointed out the kitchen window to reveal three black helicopters flying toward us. One hovered over the ship while another landed beside the house. Two passengers walked without a hint of hesitation around the sliver of land, onto the ramp of the alien vessel and into the kitchen.
Mr. Kirby led the way. Walking beside him was a grasshopper even taller than the dead one. By his slow, deliberate movements, I guessed he was older.
“Look over your glasses, this guy is disguised,” Wade told me softly. “It’s Harvester Prime. The black rings at the base of his antenna show his rank. He’s in charge of their delegation here.”
I slid the glasses down my nose and saw a very tall, thin, elderly man in a tweed suit. He went straight to the fallen grasshopper, stepping over the gore of the one Wade had killed, to feel the cracked thorax of the one on top of the two I had hit. He looked up at me.
“Wade, can you tell us what happened?” Kirby said.
“As you can see. All three Harvesters pulled weapons. I killed the Captain of the ship with a Guardian-issued blaster before he could fire on us.”
I’d just killed three more people, well, grasshoppers, but still. This was what I had spent my life trying to avoid. My knees went weak and I sat down suddenly on the nearest kitchen chair.
Isabel nodded at me as I sat next to her. “I’m going to Bakersfield,” she remarked. She didn�
��t seem to be grasping that her house was filled with strangers, let alone the ship and the dead grasshoppers on her floor.
“Three more armed Harvesters came out of the ship. One fired at us. We hit the ground and they missed.” Wade pointed to a hole in the wall behind us. I hadn’t seen it before. “Angie fired back got the three attacking us.” He pointed to the Wade said.
“How did she do that? She doesn’t seem to have a weapon,” the elderly grasshopper said.
“We didn’t issue her a weapon,” Mr. Kirby said.
“She is a weapon,” Wade said matter-of-factly.
“A Death Dealer.” The old grasshopper said in a carefully practiced neutral tone. “I have only heard of your kind.” He looked at me steadily
I didn’t know what to say. I just looked back.
There was a knock at the front door. Isabel went to answer and came back with half a dozen technicians in protective gear.
“We’ll have to let these people do their forensic work,” Kirby said. “We’ll need permission to board this Harvester’s ship. We have reason to suspect he’s hiding contraband.”
After a long pause, the grasshopper man stood. “Of course, I will accompany you in case there are traps for the unwary. I apologize for my fellow Harvester’s crimes. We will fix this woman’s dwelling and remove the vessel.”
“Wade, I need you to go with Harvester Prime to inventory the stasis locker. Medical or forensic teams are here and they can fly you back to the City. Angie’s had a rather full first day. With your permission I’ll drive her home. I’ll leave your truck in the lot next to the Brannan Street portal. We’ll go over this incident tomorrow at the Station,” Mr. Kirby said.
“Okay,” Wade didn’t seem to upset to see the last of me. Had I humiliated him by saving his life? I couldn’t see how, considering that he saved mine first. Was he upset because I killed more grasshoppers than he had?
Men were a mystery to me and the ones I liked even more so.
Mr. Kirby drove me back home, I grabbed my go bag and we headed for the Brannan Street portal.
Chapter 11
At the Station, Kirby went directly to a door overlooking the main floor. None of the interior walls were glass. Evidently what went on behind these closed doors was not for public display. A red light blinked on when Kirby approached and he pressed on the palm print lock to let us into a narrow room with computer screens mounted on three of the walls. Disconcertingly the screens offered 180-degree Bay view—physically impossible and kind of dizzying.
I pointed at it and asked. “Is this supposed to mimic some kind of high-priced executive eagle’s nest? You know with the panoramic view?”
Oops, that was kind of too close to the truth. Kirby stared at me for a moment.
Then he laughed. “Yes. You’ll get used to it. Think of it as a 3-D screen saver.” He took a deep breath and pulled a wheeled office chair for me on one side of a narrow desk. He went to sit in an identical chair behind the desk. “The kind of attack you and Wade suffered today was rare. We would have sent an armored unit if we had known how desperate the situation was. Harvesters have a license to operated cloaked vessels on Earth just to remove discarded items, usually from city dumps or trash collectors. don’t know what they do with it, but they’re always eager to take large quantities of styrofoam, and we have trouble recycling that, so it’s a win-win, unless the they violate the terms of the agreement.”
“Kidnapping people sounds like a pretty major violation to me.”
“I agree. Most Harvesters are ethical but they have criminals who try to defend taking humans by arguing that no one used to oversee them before the Forbidden Zone was imposed and no one should now. You two managed to save the day. Harvester Prime admitted that the Harvesters would have been subject to death under their laws. He’s helping us try to make things right with the human victims. But it could have gone wrong. I’m concerned that until you master your gift, you might cause more problems than you solve.”
“That’s the story of my life.”
“A good place to start.” Kirby settled into his chair. “Tell me the story of your life. Concentrate on the major incidents.”
“I don’t remember my parents. My earliest memories were moving to a new place with my aunt. She taught me the drill. At first, it was like a game to see how quickly we could move if we needed to. We just took what fit in her Toyota.”
Kirby listened while I described the frequent relocations. It didn’t take too long. Times when I hurt someone without ever touching them remained clear in my memory, no matter how I tried to banish them from my thoughts. I left out the part about the boyfriend and the suicide attempt. So far Sophie was the only one who had seen my scars and she only knew I had done it, not why. I didn’t like talking about it.
When I was done I realized I hadn’t talked about the voices I heard sometimes and the swarms of black dots. What can I say? I didn’t want to screw up my new job prospects by admitting to hallucinations.
Kirby finally nodded. “I’m impressed by how strong you managed to emerge from a chaotic upbringing.”
“My aunt was an unshakable rock of strength.”
“You seemed to have inherited that.”
I shrugged, not so sure I felt that way.
“It’s usually not this crazy around here,” he added.
“Good, I wouldn’t want to have to deal with homicidal grasshoppers every day.”
“Most of our ET residents only want to be left in peace, so a great deal of our job is gathering information. We’ll be honored to have you join our ranks. Are you still ready to join our crew?”
I hesitated. Was this a good thing? Were my new associates going to encourage me to do the very thing I’d spent my whole life trying not to do? I took a deep breath. “I’d like to try.”
Kirby stood up and held out his hand. I stood up too and we sealed the agreement with a handshake. And a stack of paperwork.
“First you need to sign a formal contract of employment so we can pay you.” He took out some forms. I read them all and they were remarkably vague on job title and duties. As I signed the forms to have that impressive salary deposited in my account, I had to wonder if that was the going rate for an inexperienced assassin.
I’d killed three people within a week. Well, one human and a two giant grasshopper if you want to get technical.
“Now we’ll set up a training program based on what we know about Death Dealers, which isn’t much. They’re a secretive lot. Every source I can find suggests that your kind of power is rare, even among them.”
“Where do I go next?”
“It’s up to you. The room in the Guest Quarters assigned to you is still active. I’ve been a poor host. I wanted to get your initial report immediately when I probably should have given you some time and space to clean up and change after the attack you suffered.”
“It’s okay. I wasn’t wounded,” I said.
“I know, but um...” he waved his hand at my blouse. “Those suspicious green stains are...”
“Oh,” I looked down. “Yuck.” It dawned on me that I was still slightly shocked after the attack or I would have noticed that some of the Harvester’s spatter had reached my clothing.
“I won’t keep you. We’ve sent a map to your phone, but the station is programmed to allow you access to most of the non-classified spaces. Feel free to explore or just rest. Wade said you’ve seen the canteen and the Data Center, you’re welcome both places any time. Tomorrow, we’ll start finding out where on the Station you need to go in order to do your job.”
“Which I don’t understand yet.”
“We’ll start tomorrow. I’ll call you later with details.”
I took the hint and headed for the Guest Quarters with my duffle bag in tow.
Chapter 12
Showered and in clean clothes, I made my way over to the Data Center. I could have accessed the data bank from the terminal in my room. But I just needed to be around people right no
w. True, the only one I knew was Star, a blue Ridularian hive creature with 360 degrees of eyes, floating in a basket and possibly afraid of me. Come to think of it, she was a definite improvement over Francine, Call-Me-Clara and my former co-workers at the law firm.
I wandered over to Star, who pointed the silky tendrils facing me toward me, but kept the rest of its attention on the screens. It seemed to have gotten over her fears. I wondered if she’d heard about the Harvesters I killed.
“Hi Star,” I said, “Sorry to interrupt, but I need to access some data.”
“Greetings Angie.” She showed no alarm, although the tendrils pulsed a little faster, that might have been just being sociable. Or cautious. “The terminal screens next to me are vacant. No doubt you wish to observe the clean up in progress on the Harvester ship in Pacifica.”
Clearly, that was no secret. “Please, that would be great.”
I sat, feeling a little shaken to be at eye level with Star’s many eyes and pulsing tendrils.
“Touch the small pad at the base of the screen. You are in the system. It recognizes you.”
A keyboard slid out in front of me. The system clearly knew I was a keyboard user, unlike Star, whose tendrils roamed all over the screens in front of her.
The Ridularian showed me how to pull up the feed from the Harvester crime scene, then it turned back to its own inquiries.
I felt relieved to be able to explore on my own and oddly comforted by the presence of others at work. I watched dazed humans being led from the ship. Wade and Chad were both there. My reaction to Wade was too strong. If I kept watching that feed, I’d start to feel like a stalker. I exited the feed, which popped up as a tiny window along the bottom of the screen. I suspected that my every move in the system would be recorded or analyzed. I could live with that. Carroll Caine was famous for monitoring every keystroke of his employees and setting up a hidden camera in the supply room to catch anyone stealing pencils.
I went to look up information about Harvesters.
Harvester, licensed to collect salvage items of value to its species. Until Earth year 1947 Harvesters collected isolated and vulnerable humans, whom they classified as “discarded humans” simply because there was no Galactic law against it. The Treaty that made Earth a Forbidden Zone formally prohibited exporting humans. Approach with caution and full understanding of Treaty protections.