by Rick Partlow
He made a noise which was the Helta equivalent of laughter.
“Everything was, as you say, already fucked, Andy. We do not have the votes.” He let his head sag back into the cushion on the mattress. “I had so hoped they would see the wisdom in adding your people to our Alliance.”
I glanced around, making sure none of my people were within earshot. Olivera had gone to meet the shuttle and the Skrith made Julie wait outside. Brooks was sweeping the rest of the facility for any more infiltrators and cross-checking every single member of our party to make sure they were who they said they were. I hadn’t seen Garcia since before the bombing but I assumed he was trying to politick his way through this.
I looked around, saw a pitcher of cut crystal on a stand beside the bed, filled with water. I pulled out my comm unit and dropped it into the liquid, then leaned close to Joon-Pah.
“Maybe they’re right,” I said, as softly as I could and still be understood by someone whose first language hadn’t even originated on Earth. His eyes sought mine, puzzled. “There’s something I was ordered not to tell you, but I have a feeling your boys in the Alliance are going to hang us out to dry, and you’re going to have to make a choice. You, not the Helta. You’re gonna think you owe us and you’re gonna want to help us out even if your people don’t. But I’m your friend, and I’m not going to let you do that without knowing the truth.”
He didn’t say anything, just stared and waited.
“You know about Earth. You know we’re not united, that America has rivalries and enemies. I told you about the Russians and the Chinese.”
“You did. What have they done, Andy Clanton?”
“We were keeping the Tevynian prisoner at the orbital construction base where we were building the hyperdrive ships. The Chinese and the Russians infiltrated and took the prisoner and one of the ships….”
I explained it to him as succinctly as I could. He seemed to be numb, and I wasn’t sure if it was the shock of my story or the pain medication he’d been given.
“That’s how they knew of this conference.” He was quick on the uptake, drugs or not. Joon-Pah was always smarter than the average bear. “How they knew to send their assassin.”
“Yeah. It was our fault.” I rubbed my fingertips against my temples. My head hurt again. “If anyone had gotten killed, it would have been on us. I wanted to tell you the minute it happened. So did General Olivera. Hell, even Garcia wanted to…well, he said so anyway. With political appointees, you never know if they’re just telling you what you want to hear. But we had orders not to do it because everyone thought the conference was too important to take a chance.” I shrugged. “I’m probably committing treason doing this. I don’t know.”
I did know, and I was committing treason. Maybe I’d been a civilian too long to ever really go back to thinking like a military officer.
Joon-Pah closed his eyes, his chest rising and falling regularly. I thought he’d passed out, given into the drowsy stupor of the pain-killers—that he would drift off, not remember anything I’d told him, and I’d be off the hook. But they fluttered open again and focused on me with such sharpness, I knew he’d understood.
“Thank you for telling me the truth, Andy Clanton,” he said. “Thank you for being my friend.”
His eyes closed again and this time he was out. I retrieved my comm unit from the pitcher and shook the water off. The thing still worked. Amazing. I was old enough to remember when they’d been built in China, when it was like everything had been made there. That seemed like forever ago.
One of the Skrith medics glared at me like he wanted to tear my throat out and I took the hint. One crisis at a time.
Chapter Fifteen
“Good to see you again, Major Clanton,” Justin Mansur said, the corner of his mouth turning up. The feeling was not mutual. He nodded toward the Tevynian strapped to the examination table between us and the Helta medics hovering over him. “Seems like old times.”
Mansur looked out of place here, still dressed for the street life in Caracas, his Hawaiian shirt loud and obnoxious, his jeans worn and faded. Only the boots gave him away. They were too expensive for the Venezuelans, the latest in hiking wear, made with materials from one of the new orbital factories.
“Why the hell did they bring you along on this mission?”
“It’s a good thing they did, isn’t it? How would you have handled squeezing the truth out of this fella without me around?”
“I think we did just fine with the last Tevynian prisoner without your help, Mr. Mansur,” Captain Lopez ground out, glaring at the CIA field officer from beneath dark, bushy brows.
Lopez was OSI, Air Force Office of Strategic Intelligence, and while I liked him, I would quite honestly rather have seen Army MI along because what the hell experience did the OSI have in field operations? But yeah, he’d done all right with the last enemy we’d captured, I’d give him that.
“I was sent along for the sake of versatility, Captain Lopez,” Mansur replied, not seeming to take offense…at anything. Ever. “Someone gave me an order to come along in case I was needed and here I am, in like Flynn with a great big grin.” He tapped one of the Helta on the shoulder and the female bared her teeth at the uninvited touch. “Is he ready?”
“The drug has been administered,” she said. “It should take effect in a few minutes.”
The Tevynian looked uncomfortably like one of our own, still wearing combat utilities, his hair cut short, face clean-shaven. I wondered how hard it had been for him to consent to shaving it off. We hadn’t come across any male Tevynian soldiers who hadn’t had at least some semblance of a mustache. He was gagged, mostly because he wouldn’t stop spitting on everyone, and metal straps held him down to the table, including one across his forehead. Tevynians were, I’d been told, notorious for headbutting.
His blue eyes seemed out of focus and I reached out and yanked down the gag, one hand cocked to punch him if he tried to bite me. He didn’t. He was drooling, just a little. I nodded to Lopez.
“You go first,” I told him. “The language will sound more natural to him coming from you instead of the translator.”
“What’s your name?” Lopez asked in Tevynian, which was very similar, we’d found, to modern Lithuanian. I heard it in English a second later via my ear bud and the translation program in my comm unit.
“Vitosourix,” he said, mumbling. I wasn’t sure if it was a name or an insult until the translator repeated it more clearly and didn’t give it an English equivalent, which clued me in. “Son of Britomartus.”
“Ask him how he got here,” Mansur said. Lopez’s cheek twitched and I thought he was trying to control an impulse to tell the CIA officer that he didn’t need help.
“How did you come to be on this world, Vitosourix?” he asked, instead.
“It was my duty.” The man wasn’t looking at me or Lopez or anything in particular but scowled, nonetheless. “It was not the fate I would have chosen. A warrior dreams of dying in open, honest battle, but to kill the enemy by stealth is honored as well.”
Mansur rolled his eyes, making a “get-on-with-it” gesture at Lopez.
“How were you able to infiltrate this world?” the OSI officer clarified. “What method did you use to get here?”
“A ship,” Vitosourix said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “How else?”
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” I muttered, covering my comm unit so it wouldn’t try to translate that. I looked at the Helta. “Is it the drugs or is this guy just a huge moron?” The medic didn’t answer, which was just as well.
“How were you able to land undetected,” Lopez said, as if he were speaking to a child, “and pretend to be one of the crew of the American ship?”
“We emerged from hyperspace in line with their star,” he explained, and it seemed as if he was very pleased with their ingenuity. It was a nice change, I thought, dealing with an alien whose expressions and body language weren’t outside the realm of our ex
perience. “It wouldn’t have worked for the Helta, weak as they are, with their observation platforms. Even the Chamblisi have telescopes and satellites. But these Skrith, the damned dogs, they are primitive beasts. We knew it would work. I was launched toward the planet in a stealth pod, covered in foam rubber to avoid detection by their sensors. A parachute brought me the rest of the way down.”
“What about the uniform?” Mansur wanted to know. “The language? How did he know the conference was here and when it would be held?”
I was dolorously certain I knew the answer to all of those questions, but I remained silent and let Lopez ask them.
“The Earth people who came to us,” the Tevynian admitted. I didn’t know how much the drug loosened his tongue and how much he just wanted to brag. Getting a Tevynian to talk didn’t seem much of a problem. Getting them to shut up was the hard part. “They revealed all of the secrets they knew, held nothing back.”
Mansur’s head snapped around to the Helta medics.
“They need to get out of here,” he said.
The chamber was as close as the Skrith came to a cell, bare, windowless stone, and I was willing to bet the Skrith didn’t go in for bugs. But…
“The cat’s out of the bag now, Mansur,” I told him. “They know. And if these two….” I nodded at the medics. “…don’t speak enough English to understand, when they play their recordings of what the prisoner said to Joon-Pah, he’ll be able to figure it out. Plus,” I added, “if he goes into respiratory distress or something from the drug, it might help to have medics around.”
Mansur didn’t seem happy with that, but he nodded.
“All right,” he conceded. “Go on.”
I very carefully didn’t sigh with relief, but it was a near thing. I might be off the hook. Now there was a plausible reason for Joon-Pah to know about the Chinese besides me telling him.
“How many of you are there?” Lopez went on. “On this mission? How many landed with you?”
“No one landed with me. This was my mission alone.”
“Then how were you to escape?”
“There was to be no escape,” the Tevynian said, and I noted pride in the set of his face. “I was to blend in as long as I could and cause as much damage as possible before I was discovered and killed.”
“And there were no others?” Lopez asked again, sounding skeptical. I was, too. If they could sneak one guy onto the planet, why not put down a dozen? Twenty?
“Only a few could learn enough of their language in time,” Vitosourix explained. Their language, he’d said. Did he really not comprehend who we were? He seemed more out of it than Vercingetorix, the other Tevynian prisoner. “We could not conceal many. There would be nowhere for them to hide unless we could pass for the enemy, the Americans. And we didn’t know how many you would land, how many we could pass off as your people.”
Which made sense, but I still didn’t believe it.
“And that was your entire plan?” Lopez pressed him. “To assassinate the Helta delegation and disrupt the conference?”
“That was only one part of it.” Again, he seemed damned proud of it, less an admission than a boast. “Divide and conquer. Once we had split the Alliance from the Americans, once we had made sure they were completely alone, both here and on The Source, the planet they call Earth, we could move in for the final assault.”
“Shit,” Mansur said.
“You lost most of your fleet at Helta Prime,” I said, ignoring what I’d said earlier, letting my translator do the work. “How would you be able to take Earth?”
“The Americans have one starship. All we have to do is destroy it and they are helpless. Their own enemies on The Source will take care of the rest for us. And they will bow the knee to us in return for our help in defeating their enemies. We will have The Source as the Elders intended from the beginning. Even now, our forces wait at Alpha Centauri, prepared to strike.”
Mansur met my eyes and despite our differences, we shared the same, stricken look, and when he spoke, it was for both of us.
“We have to get back.”
***
“This is most disturbing,” the One Who Goes Chasing Waterfalls said. Okay, I wasn’t even trying anymore.
“For an octopus,” I told Julie, “he has a gift for understatement.”
She didn’t try to shush me. Even Garcia slumped in his chair, hopelessness written across his salesman’s face. Which was sad, like a puppy who’s tried to get everyone in the house to play with him and been rejected. He’d been working the Chamblisi for hours, almost from the time the bomb went off. From what I’d overheard, they’d been less than receptive.
There wasn’t a trace left of the explosion. Even the table had been replaced. The trust, however, hadn’t been quite as easy to restore.
We’d interrogated the Tevynian for five hours, which had been four hours more than we needed. The Helta drugs were very effective and the Tevynians weren’t big on keeping secrets, anyway. Spies were nearly unheard of in their culture, though they were big on assassins. The Tevynian had copped to the whole thing. He didn’t know the whole story, but he knew about the Chinese, knew the date and location of the conference had come from them. We hadn’t shared that part with the Chamblisi, though I wasn’t sure if it would have made any difference to their decision.
They’d taken the stage first when the conference reconvened. It was late, much later than these things usually ran, but even the Vironians had allowed that these were emergency circumstances.
“I thank our new friends, the Americans for detecting the enemy saboteur,” Octopussy began with his usual charm. “Were it not for their prompt action, many of us could have died, and we owe them a debt.” I thought he might actually change his mind, but either the translators weren’t good at representing equivocation or he was just an expert at couching bad news in soft-serve words. “I would that we could pay this debt by giving them membership in the Alliance, but such is not in our power. The enemy was able to infiltrate this conference because of their biological similarities to the humans of Earth. If we were to have regular dealings with Earth, the Tevynians could slip their assassins into our midst at will. We can’t take the chance that such a thing might happen again. I would call for an immediate vote.”
I glanced at Garcia, but he wasn’t even looking at the Chamblisi. I tried Olivera.
“Is anybody gonna say anything?” I asked him. “Are we just gonna sit here and take this?”
Garcia might not have been watching, but he was, apparently, listening, because he answered.
“I’ve been ‘saying something’ for hours,” he told me, bitterness dripping off his words. “There’s nothing else to say.”
“You mind if I try, then?”
I was screaming inside my head, like some weird parasite had trapped me inside my own brain and was controlling my actions. If there was anything I didn’t want to do more than getting endodontic work done on my teeth, it was public speaking. And public speaking in front of a room full of aliens didn’t even bear consideration. But I was also desperate and this was way too much like giving up without a fight.
“Go for it,” Garcia said, dismissing both me and my chances with a wave. “You can’t make it any worse.”
“Oh, don’t go and underestimate my man like that,” Julie said. “The situation hasn’t been invented that Andy couldn’t make worse by opening his mouth.”
I rolled my eyes. She wasn’t, I reminded myself, taking this any more lightly than I was, but snarkiness was her primary defense mechanism when everything was going to hell.
Olivera ignored her. “Whatever you have to say, say it now.”
“Ambassador!” I said, coming to my feet.
There had been some sort of procedural argument going on between the Vironians and the Skrith and I’d interrupted it, but I didn’t apologize.
“Will we be allowed to speak in front of the conference?” I asked, not waiting to be recognized. “I’d like
to make our case before the vote is called.”
The Chamblisi looked down at me with a face so unreadable it might as well not even be a face.
“You may speak,” he said, “if one of the other delegations will agree to cede their time to you.”
“The Skrith will give their time to the humans,” Anu Neeme Klas said immediately.
“So let it be noted.”
The Chamblisi descended and I had to wait until he was all the way down before I approached the steps. I mean, it was what the other speakers had done, but even if it wasn’t, I didn’t intend to try to squeeze past him and get knocked right off the stairs.
“You sure you want to do this?” Julie asked me, her eyes serious.
“Oh, what the hell?” I shook my head. “Just one more check off the bucket list. Get shot into space on board a rocket, meet aliens, go to another star system, meet the love of my life, speak in front of a multi-species galactic federation….”
The octopod ambassador cleared the steps and I began to climb them. It took longer than I thought it would. I’d been impatient with all the different speakers taking their sweet time getting up to the platform, but it was quite a haul and by the time I reached the top, I was wishing I’d worn my Svalinn. And wishing there was a fucking guardrail. It was high up here and I felt like one false step would end with me on the ground, with everyone debating if it had been the embarrassment or the broken neck that had killed me.
I shot a look at Joon-Pah, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Ambassadors of the worlds of the Alliance,” I said and felt a bit of a shock when I heard my words amplified through the hall. I didn’t see any microphone and I wondered how they pulled that trick off. “I’m Major Clanton of the United States Marine Corps. I serve as the Chief Security Officer on the ship we call the James Bowie, and it is my responsibility to prevent such attacks as we experienced earlier today. The failure to detect the Tevynian before he had a chance to plant the explosives was mine and mine alone. We were complacent, believing there was no way the enemy could insert their agents onto your worlds. Now we know better and I will not make such a mistake in the future. We will verify every Earth human with biometrics prior to any contact with races of the Alliance. We will have strict accountability, and I swear to you on my honor that I will not allow this to occur again.”