House of Midas

by Chloe Garner

  She watched his eyes for a moment then nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  He let the moment linger for another moment, then he kissed her forehead.

  “Okay,” he said, then let her go and went to search for a cab.

  *********

  He watched her sleep, unable to find sleep himself. He’d missed the warmth of a woman in his bed, but like everything about Olivia, this was different. She’d hidden herself away in the bathroom to get ready for bed, and he’d just waited for her. There was no unspoken contract of what would happen next, no hungry expectation. She had lay down as he’d gone to shower, and she’d been asleep by the time he came out of the bathroom.

  It was easy.

  Everything he’d been trained for had prepared him for danger. He justified it to himself that that was why he’d reacted with giddiness rather than fear, at first, but in the cool light of retrospective reason, he was struggling with making the evening fit with what he knew to be true about his life.

  He had given up any and every hope of being a jumper. It had taken him years, but he’d done it. He was a lab rat, now. He lived in the maze of labs and offices, in the network of people and data that was not just metaphorically the brain of the base. The jumpers came and went, things went bad, people died. People died. But for him they just failed to come back. There was a story, one that only the survivors could tell, and there was a body.

  Being in the midst of it, as easy as it had felt at the time, felt more now like he had stepped out of his life and come back. His life had been in danger. It didn’t feel like it, but he believed it probably had. Olivia’s life, though, had truly been endangered. She’d been there, right in front of him, and there had been nothing he could do to change whether she lived or died.

  And that wasn’t what was supposed to happen, when you worked in the labs.

  Sure, they took risks, just exposing themselves to foreign terrestrial technology, and sometimes things went wrong and people got hurt. Someday, someone was going to die in an accident or because of a misunderstanding. Someday, it was possible that someone would die because of sabotage.

  He knew about those risks. Everyone did.

  This was different. Someone had intentionally tried to kill Olivia for no more reason than that they wanted her to be dead. They’d tried to kill a lot of people.

  That didn’t happen here.

  And it didn’t happen to him.

  It wasn’t real. None of it could possibly be real.

  And the strangest part was that, as he struggled with the urge to run his fingertip down the length of Olivia’s arm for fear of waking her, he wanted it to be real.

  He wanted it to be every day.

  Under all those layers of analyst and scientist, all of the discipline it had taken to firmly give up hope, he wanted to be one of the jumpers, impatient to be on the other side of a jump again.

  Just as he wanted to be here. Now. In the cool clean of hotel sheets, laying alongside a woman he loved.

  He loved.

  It was maybe four in the morning when the thought flashed across his mind and he realized it was true.

  The sound of her breath was the only important thing he knew, low and even, close and confidential.

  He could stay here forever, he thought, and everything would be okay.

  Aliens.

  Aliens, aliens, aliens.

  It was such a forbidden word, but having seen them, it kept springing into his mind like a chorus.

  They’d been there. Two kinds! And he’d heard them and understood them. And they’d spoken to him.

  How could he possibly stay, when the universe was so big and just right there, above his head?

  Olivia sighed and rolled onto her other side, facing him now, and her breath spilled along his skin, warm and soft. It gave him shivers. Carefully, he pushed her hair up and behind her ear, then put his lips to her temple, smiling to himself as he leaned away to look at her again.

  She wasn’t beautiful, but she was pretty and she made him smile.

  Oh, it hurt how she made him smile.

  He pressed his lips together, holding back on the urge to kiss her again, then rolled away, searching for and finally finding sleep sometime before dawn.

  *********

  Monday morning, Jesse was sitting at Troy’s desk.

  Troy glanced at him then continued to put his things away before he stood straight again to face the Palta. Jesse flicked an eyebrow at him.

  “Figured,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Troy answered. Jesse grinned and hopped up, trotting down a hallway to find a confidential space in the back of an empty meeting room for them to talk.

  “When is your interview?” Jesse asked.

  “Ten,” Troy told him. “I’m going to tell them… I’m going to tell them what I know. I’m not going to tell them what I don’t know.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Do what you think is right.”

  “Where is she?” Troy asked. Jesse gave him an odd little look and then scratched his face.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Like hell,” Troy said. Jesse’s eyes were piercing.

  “You’re the one who’s known all this time,” he said.

  “But now you know she’s here,” Troy said. “Where is she?”

  “Don’t know,” Jesse said again. “She doesn’t want me to know, so I don’t know.”

  Troy frowned at him.

  “You don’t let anyone get away with that.”

  Jesse shrugged.

  “She’s always been special.”

  Troy frowned at him.

  “What happened to her? Where did you leave her, all that time?”

  “Not my story to tell,” Jesse said. “When she wants you to know, she’ll tell you.”

  Someone walked past outside, and they fell silent for a moment, even though the door was closed. It felt weird to sit in the dark, even with this many secrets whipping around.

  “What big damned secret happened while you two were gone that last time?” Troy demanded. “I’m fed up with the two of you keeping me in the dark, and then she acts like it’s this big deal that I not tell you she’s back, but when you see each other, it’s like you weren’t ever apart. Was she really gone, or are you two playing at some long con, here?”

  “She was gone,” Jesse said calmly, watching as a pair of women walked past without turning his head. “Saturday night was the first time I’d seen her since my last trip through the portal, and she walked out of the cafe where we went to talk and I haven’t seen her since.”

  Troy glowered at him, frustrated, but unwilling to complain in exactly the moment that Jesse finally volunteered some kind of information.

  “She’s different,” Troy said finally. Jesse nodded.

  “You’ve noticed.”

  Troy frowned harder.

  “Before it was just about keeping the confidential confidential. This is something else. She’s never acted like this before.”

  Jesse pressed his mouth into a line, a silent sympathy that Troy knew was masking more information. It always was.

  “You’re different, too,” Troy said. “You used to have more fun. Is that because of the same thing?”

  Jesse shrugged.

  “Maybe. Depends on how you look at it, I suppose.”

  Troy growled.

  “So you do know what’s going on with her,” he said after a moment of consideration. Jesse laughed mirthlessly.

  “If you’re trying to trap a Palta into telling you something he didn’t mean to, I’d give up. Double- and triple-think are only the beginning of that game.”

  “She’s okay, though?” Troy asked after another long silence. Jesse settled his elbows onto his thighs, putting his palms flat against each other and looking up at Troy with a convincing expression of earnestness.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s changed, and I only saw her for a few minutes. I don’t know i
f she’s okay, and if she isn’t, I don’t know what’s wrong with her.” He paused. “I will say this. You know Cassie, and so do I. If she isn’t okay now, she will be. That’s just who she is.” Jesse gave him a small hint of a smile. “She wins.”

  “You two acted like all of that was normal,” Troy said. “That’s what it’s like for you, when you go on jumps. Isn’t it?”

  Jesse licked his lips and sat up again.

  “Sometimes.”

  “And Cassie coming home hurt all the time.” Troy felt his eyes get distant, thinking of the room full of foreign terrestrials. “She never really cared, did she?”

  “Not like you did,” Jesse said. “You’re a good friend.”

  Troy had a strange thought, and then felt really fuzzy for a minute as he tried to remember what it was. Jesse was frowning at him when he came back to himself.

  “You okay?” the Palta asked.

  “I’m fine,” Troy said. “I need to go prep my notes for my interview.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “And I’m late for my day in botany.”

  Troy grinned at him.

  “Try not to make anyone too mad today. Things are gonna get…”

  “Political,” Jesse supplied. “Again.”

  This stole the mirth from the moment and Troy nodded.

  “When aren’t they?”

  Jesse shook his head as he stood.

  “When aren’t they?”

  *********

  The OSI officer was stone-faced. There was a younger man sitting next to him taking notes even before Troy sat down or began speaking.

  “Captain Troy Rutger?” the officer asked.

  “Yes, Sir,” Troy answered.

  “I’m Major Stensen, and I’m leading the investigation concerning the events in Chicago this weekend.”

  “That’s what they said on the phone, Sir,” Troy said. The man nodded. It hadn’t been the wrong thing to say.

  Oh, good.

  Troy waited.

  “Why were you there?” Stensen asked. Troy shrugged.

  “A friend suggested it a few weeks ago and I went with Olivia Macon.”

  “She was one of the victims,” Stensen said.

  “Yes, Sir,” Troy said. “She enjoyed Whisper…”

  “Bean Warble,” Stensen said.

  “I never knew his given name,” Troy said. “She enjoyed… Mr. Warble enough that she wanted to go back.”

  “Which you did,” Stensen said.

  “Yes, Sir. This past weekend.”

  “Why this past weekend?” Stensen asked. “Was it just a coincidence that you were there the weekend that the event happened?”

  “Yes,” Troy said. “It was. We went this weekend because…” there was only a half-breath of pause, here. He knew what he was going to say, but it still felt weird to say it. “Lieutenant du Charme came home. We were celebrating.”

  Stenson had one hell of a poker face. It only twitched once, then he put his hand out and waited while the junior officer paged through several manila folders to find a stapled document and gave it to him. Stenson took a full minute to read, then he looked up at Troy.

  “You know the whereabouts of an MIA officer, a portal jumper no less, and you withheld those from base authorities? Have you thought about the potential consequences of that?”

  “No, Sir,” Troy said. It was the truth. Somehow he’d completely missed that in the last week. “Mostly, I don’t know where she is. She kind of comes and goes as she wants to.”

  “She needs to be debriefed,” Stenson said. “The information she has is top priority. Assisting her in withholding it is serious, Major.”

  “I don’t see that I am in any way keeping her location from you. I have no way of finding her, no way of contacting her.”

  “But you set up plans with her to go dancing in Chicago.”

  How had he not seen this coming?

  Everything was more complicated, when Jesse was involved.

  “Yes, Sir,” Troy said. Stenson nodded at the point and Troy waited. Whatever happened was going to happen, now.

  “We’ll come back to that,” Stenson said. “Tell me about Chicago.”

  This part, Troy was prepared for.

  “We got there in time to get in line for the club. It has become very popular since Mr. Warble has been there, and you have to get there in advance if you want to get in. We got in, we waited through the warm-up guy, and then Whisper got up there. Cassie knew there was something wrong immediately, and she asked me to call Jesse.”

  “Jesse the Jalnian,” Stenson said.

  “Yes, Sir,” Troy said. The junior officer wrote furiously.

  “What happened next?” Stenson asked.

  “Jesse got there and…” Troy started.

  “He was in Chicago already?” Stenson asked.

  “I don’t know how he got there,” Troy said. This was the line he had chosen. He waited. Stenson waited for a moment, meeting Troy’s eyes, then gave him a small nod.

  “Go on.”

  “He got there,” Troy said. “And he knew what the technology was that was in use.”

  “Describe that,” Stenson said. Troy lifted a couple of fingers off his knee as a sign of warning.

  “All I can tell you is what my conjecture was at the time, and is at this time. If you want a better explanation, you’ll have to ask Jesse.”

  Stenson gave him a cold little smile.

  “I understand that he’s difficult to work with, and that you are under obligation to cooperate with me.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Troy said. The note he’d gotten from General Donovan had been inescapably clear.

  “Conjure,” Stenson said.

  “Conject, I believe,” Troy said, not missing the tiny flicker of humor across Stenson’s eyes. “Jesse said they’d weaponized their language, and that they spoke in motion of some kind.”

  “Like sign language,” Stenson said.

  “Not precisely, but close,” Troy said. “It’s musical. The music is a part of it. I don’t think they can talk to each other in silence.”

  “How strange,” Stenson said. Troy nodded.

  “Like everything we do,” he said. Stenson gave him a nod of agreement there. Troy went on. “Something about the way the music went. I don’t have anything resembling a clear understanding, and I would very much like an opportunity to interview Mr. Warble and to get access to his music for further analysis, but they all said about the music that some people get it and some people don’t. I think that what it indicates is that some humans have an inborn comprehension and predisposition to the language of the foreign terrestrials in question, and that predisposition, as it were, gave the foreign terrestrials a window to exploit.”

  “Exploit how?” Stenson asked.

  “They created a symbiosis between the humans and the music, for lack of a better way of explaining it. Whereas on previous evenings, those individuals simply enjoyed the special nature of their relationship with the music, on that night in particular, the music took on something of a parasitic nature, with the ultimate intent to kill them all.”

  Stenson waited as the junior officer scribbled, turning a page and continuing to write.

  “To what end?” Stenson asked.

  “It was a wedding sacrifice,” Troy said. “That part, Jesse was pretty clear on.”

  “Why were they here?” Stenson asked.

  “I don’t know,” Troy said.

  “Is it related to the portal program?” Stenson asked. Troy frowned. He hadn’t considered this.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Conjure,” Stenson said. Troy took a breath and sighed. He was too much a scientist to answer this the way he should have.

  “In the sense that all contact we have as a species with foreign terrestrials is inevitably because of the fact that we initiate contact with the broader universe, yes, the statistics say that it’s probably because of the portal program. Is it because of a specific initiativ
e or mistake on the part of the program? I see no evidence of that.”

  “Why do you think they were here?” Stenson asked. Troy thought about it.

  “I don’t know.”

  Stenson gave him a firm look.

  “I am ordering you to make your best guess.”

  “Jesse,” Troy said. He wouldn’t have even thought it, if Stenson hadn’t made him. The other man nodded.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because the foreign terrestrials who were here, we’ve never made direct contact with, but Jesse knew who they were.”

  “Do you believe that he is a security risk to the planet?” Stenson asked. This, even more than the threat of court-martial and discharge, surprised Troy.

  “No, Sir,” he said. “Not any more than he is an asset.”

  Stenson looked over his subordinate’s shoulder as the younger man wrote, then turned back to face Troy again.

  “Moving on to what happened next,” he said. Troy nodded.

  “Jesse knew that the foreign terrestrials in question would prefer to conduct their ceremony from a high place, so we went to the top floor of the building.”

  “What did you find there?”

  “A ceremony going on involving a substantial number of foreign terrestrials.”

  “Describe them.”

  Troy did so as best he could, pausing from time to time to try to let the scribe catch up.

  “Did you interact with them?” Stenson asked. Troy tried to remember if he’d spoken to them or just listened.

  “No,” he said.

  “What happened next?”

  “Jesse did something,” he said. Stenson’s eyebrows went up and Troy shook his head. “I’ve got no clue, Sir. He did something. I watched him do it, and I can’t even make enough sense out of it to try to describe it, not to mention explain it. He did something, and they all fell down.”

  “There were no corpses on scene,” Stenson said. Troy shook his head.

  “No. After that, he left…”

  “Where did he go?” Stenson asked.

  “Haven’t a clue. He asked me to stay and keep watch, so I did.”

  Stenson paused with enough force to make Troy wait.

  “I would say you shouldn’t have let him out of your sight, but I understand that he is technically not your responsibility.”