House of Midas

by Chloe Garner

  “And he was saving the lives of everyone downstairs, Ms. Macon and Lieutenant du Charme included,” Troy said. He wasn’t going to let Stenson bully him into apologizing for not knowing what happened next, even if he personally knew there was no way in the world Jesse would have taken Troy with him.

  “I see,” Stenson said. “Go on. What happened next?”

  “He came back with a different group of foreign terrestrials,” Troy said.

  “Different?”

  “Different species,” Troy said. “Sorry, that was unclear.”

  “Describe them,” Stenson said. Troy did so again, feeling sorry for the third man. Stenson waited until he was done.

  “And did you interact with these foreign terrestrials?”

  “Yes,” Troy said. “I confirmed that the original group of foreign terrestrials had not to my knowledge been invited to our planet.”

  “That’s a big leap for you, Captain,” Stenson said.

  “Yes, Sir,” Troy said. Stenson laughed once, an airy barking noise, then nodded.

  “I see. Go on.”

  “They took the original foreign terrestrials and they left,” Troy said.

  “Where did they go?” Stenson asked.

  “I don’t know,” Troy said.

  “Do you believe they are still on the planet?” Stenson asked.

  “No, Sir.”

  “Do you believe they might return?”

  Troy considered.

  “No, Sir,” Troy said. “I did not get the impression that they were interested in anything other than the dancing foreign terrestrials.”

  Stenson watched the other man write for a minute, then nodded that he was going to continue.

  “Do you believe that the Jalnian is in communication with foreign terrestrials?”

  Troy opened his mouth and closed it.

  “Sir, I don’t think it’s ever safe to guess what he might or might not be doing. You read about Cassie that she was assigned to be his custodian when she caught him sneaking out through the portal. If it hadn’t been for who she was, no one would have believed her when she said he was doing it. They almost dismissed it, anyway. General Thompson took her at her word and assigned a group of airmen to wait to see if Jesse came back when she said he would. He shouldn’t have been able to manipulate the portal from that side. We still don’t know how he does it.”

  “And you continue to assert that he is not a security risk?”

  “No more than he is an asset,” Troy said again. Stenson nodded.

  “So you were left in an empty room with the Jalnian.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “What happened next?”

  “We went back downstairs,” Troy said.

  “And what did you find?”

  “Jesse knew that nothing had changed, there. He went and made Mr. Warble stop the music.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Everyone fell down.”

  “Like they did upstairs.”

  Troy paused.

  “I believe it was different, this time. The symbiotic relationship, the parasitic relationship between the humans and the music left them unable to live without it.”

  “So the Jalnian tried to kill them,” Stenson said.

  “No, Sir,” Troy said. “No, Sir.”

  “How would you explain it, then?”

  Troy gave himself a moment to collect his thoughts, then laughed.

  “We couldn’t just leave them there, attached to the music like life support. He pulled the plug.”

  “Still sounds like attempted murder to me,” Stenson said.

  “Cassie brought them all back,” Troy said. “Jesse knew she would.”

  Stenson frowned.

  “Explain that to me.”

  Troy shook his head.

  “Something about a network. Something about her being hard to kill. Something about rebooting her brain.”

  “I need more from you than that, Captain,” Stenson said.

  Troy focused.

  “I believe. It is my guess that Cassie acquired a special immunity to the music in her previous travel with Jesse. It made her difficult for the music to kill, when it went away. And somehow she was linked to the rest of the humans, the same way they were linked to the music. And she just… dragged them all back.”

  “How could she do that?” Stenson asked. Troy shook his head.

  “I can’t give you an answer to that.”

  The door behind him opened and closed and Cassie threw herself into the chair next to him.

  “Major Chris Stenson?” she asked cheerfully. Troy, Stenson, and the scribe all looked at her with varying degrees of disbelief. She grinned from one to the other, leaning back in her chair casually.

  “You should have just gotten to the point where you were asking Troy some questions about how I could save so many people. Yes? Did I hit my cue?” She waited, but no one answered her. She grinned even more brightly. “Good. I’ll tell you the answer to that. It’s because I’m Jalnian.”

  *********

  “What?” Troy said.

  “I don’t appreciate my interviews being interrupted, even when it’s someone as high priority as you, Lieutenant,” Stenson said. Troy looked hard at the OSI officer.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “He isn’t, actually,” Cassie said. “A sense of humor isn’t standard issue for these guys.”

  Troy looked at her with increasing disbelief.

  “Cass,” he said. She gave him a sincere smile that was almost sad.

  “The world changed, Troy. It does that.”

  “So long as you’re here, you may as well explain what you’re doing here,” Stenson said.

  “That’s your first question?” Troy asked.

  “Shhh,” Cassie said, putting her hand on his knee for a moment, then crossing her legs and twining her fingers around her own knee.

  “I’m here because I suspect you’re making all kinds of dastardly threats toward my friend, here, and I’m going to clear his name.”

  “And how do you intend to do that?” Stenson asked.

  “I’m here,” she said. “You’ve no longer got any reason to hold him accountable for me still being missing. And from…” she glanced at the idea of a watch on her naked wrist, “now on, I’m someone else’s problem. If you can’t keep hold of me, it’s not his responsibility to do it for you.”

  “Why would we need to keep hold of you?” Stenson asked. She gave Troy a comedic frown.

  “He hasn’t met Jesse, has he?”

  “Cass,” Troy said. She winked at him. It almost made him angry.

  “I was asking Captain Rutger how it was that you saved all of those people in Chicago,” Stenson said. Cassie shrugged.

  “I’m hard to kill,” she said. “It’s hard to do anything to a Jalnian if they aren’t going along with it.”

  “You are not a foreign terrestrial,” Stenson said. “Have you had any professional treatment since your return?”

  There was a moment when Troy wasn’t sure what was going to happen, then Cassie spread both hands flat on the table in front of her and leaned forward, engaging Stenson’s gaze lightly but unwaveringly.

  “Major,” she said. “You can do anything you’d like to verify that I am, indeed, Jalnian. I’ll go along with it, just to see you be wrong. And I must say that I expected more from the lead investigator from the portal-branch OSI. You’re supposed to be the ones capable of dealing with the unimaginable.”

  Stenson turned to face Troy, his expression unchanged.

  “You didn’t tell me that she’d had an episode,” he said. Troy shook his head.

  “It’s actually plausible,” he said. Stenson leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.

  “You believe that this is Lieutenant Calista du Charme and that she is a foreign terrestrial?”

  Troy looked at Cassie, trying to find the classic signs that distinguished Palta from humans. Most species weren’t that cha
llenging. There were various kinds of human-like foreign terrestrials that the portal program had come in contact with, but the Palta were shockingly difficult to identify. Cassie had never had a problem with it, because she had such a gift as a jumper, but Troy couldn’t tell that Jesse wasn’t human, just by looking at him.

  He couldn’t tell with Cassie, either.

  “Jalnians are nearly-indistinguishable from humans,” Troy started, still looking at his friend. “But Lieutenant du Charme had a… condition, the last time I saw her. It’s possible.”

  “Your existing relationship with her has clouded your judgment,” Stenson said. “The Lieutenant needs counseling and you need to help her understand that. It’s not uncommon among jumpers.”

  Cassie laughed.

  “Up to you, Major. I just wanted to let you know the answer to your question.” She looked once at Troy, playful and serious in one, then smiled. “Troy knows.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him and stood.

  “Lieutenant,” Stenson said. “You will surrender yourself to custody and treatment until we conclude our investigation.”

  She frowned at him, leaning on the back of Troy’s chair.

  “No.”

  Stenson looked surprised.

  “That was a direct order, Lieutenant.”

  She gave him a half smile then stood and headed for the door.

  “And if you were still in my chain of command, I would take it as such,” she said, then opened the door and closed it behind her.

  “Stay with the Captain,” Stenson said to the third man, then rose to go after Cassie.

  Troy waited for a minute as the other man finished writing and put his notes away, then they kind of just stared at each other.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Troy observed. “If it makes you feel any better.”

  The other man shrugged.

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  Troy nodded and they waited.

  “I don’t think he’s going to catch her,” Troy said. The other man let his head wobble back and forth.

  “I wouldn’t underestimate the Major,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t underestimate Cassie,” Troy answered. Or Palta, he added mentally.

  They waited some more.

  “Did you have any other questions you wanted me to answer?” Troy asked.

  “Not without the Major here,” the other man said. Troy nodded.

  “Okay.”

  In all, it was maybe thirty minutes before the door opened again.

  The third man scurried out of the room before Troy had a chance to turn around. When he did, he found himself face to face with General Donovan. He jerked to his feet.

  “General, Sir,” he said.

  “When you see her next, you send her to me,” Donovan said. “That’s an order.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Troy said, wanting to add that he would do his best to suggest she do it, but unable to give words to his skepticism that anyone could make Cassie do anything right now. Donovan nodded.

  “Did you know?” he asked.

  “Know what, Sir?” Troy asked.

  “That she was a damned foreign terrestrial,” Donovan said.

  “No, Sir,” Troy said. “I thought she was human.”

  Donovan looked flustered. Troy thought it was the first time he’d ever seen the General anything other than polished. Slick.

  “You tell her,” Donovan repeated. “I want to see her as soon as possible. No delays, no games.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Troy said. Donovan turned on his heel and left, and Troy felt his knees give. He collapsed back into his chair.

  Palta.

  *********

  Jesse read it on his face the moment Troy came charging into the botany lab.

  “Wasn’t my story to tell,” he said, returning to his microscope. “You know you’ve actually got an interesting sample here?”

  Troy pushed him.

  “You knew,” he said.

  “Of course I knew,” Jesse said, tuning to face him. “And you didn’t. And you were sleeping with her.”

  That hit Troy with enough force to make him physically stumble backwards.

  Jesse nodded.

  “You’re in a big mess, kiddo. We all are, and right now I’m not sure who’s the spider and who’s the fly.”

  “What do you mean?” Troy asked. Jesse waved him off, and Troy’s anger spiked again.

  “This is all your fault,” he said. “You turned my best friend into an alien.”

  “Aren’t you glad you don’t have to worry about prophylaxis?” Jesse asked, returning to his microscope.

  “Why were they here?” Troy demanded. Jesse looked at him with what might have been real tiredness. It might have been fake.

  “I told you that already.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Troy said. “You always keep everything to your damned self.”

  Jesse sighed, then scratched his head.

  “She’ll be waiting for you at your apartment, I expect.”

  It was like someone had put a hook in his mouth and pulled, the way his body wanted to lurch for the door.

  “Why would she be there?” Troy asked. Jesse blinked at him once, then returned to work.

  Troy didn’t know what to do, so he went back to work.

  *********

  Cassie walked down the short hallway to General Donovan’s office, ignoring his vapid pair of competing secretaries, the harpy and the basilisk, neither of whom tried to stop her. They had intimidated her, once, in their way. Now she didn’t even look at them.

  She opened the pair of doors to his office and left them open behind her. He looked up from his desk and gave her a slight head motion to the side in greeting, then returned to something he was making notes on, on the wide, black desk top in front of him.

  She waited, standing, but without putting her hands behind her back the way she would have before. Now, she circled his office, looking at things. Her curiosity was greater than it had ever been, but she didn’t normally indulge it like this. She wanted to annoy him.

  He didn’t have much on the silver-painted walls. The trim was stained almost black, the furniture was all black and either formed out of steel sheet metal or painted aluminum, depending on its function. There were framed documents and two photos, but it was spare to the extreme, like Donovan wasn’t really a person. He was a puppet being controlled from far away.

  The problem was that Donovan didn’t know that part.

  Well, Donovan’s problem was that he didn’t know that part.

  Cassie’s problem was that she didn’t know who the puppeteer was.

  “Please sit,” Donovan finally said. She came casually across the room and sat neatly in the chair he indicated, neither informal nor particularly subordinate.

  She’d been afraid of this man, once. Not in fear of, but holding a significant a respect for what he could do to her life, if he chose. He could have taken away all of the things that mattered to her, had openly mocked her for aging and failing out of the jumper program.

  No more.

  Not this time.

  The serpentine man with his waxy hair and his stupid-coy eyes thought he was still in charge. He had no idea what he was dealing with. He’d never dealt directly with Jesse as far as Cassie knew, and he was going to underestimate her.

  He was going to try to manipulate her.

  He cleared his throat.

  “I wouldn’t have believed it, you know,” he said, folding his fingers together over the surface of the desk. “That a woman could become something other than human simply by traveling around the universe with a foreign terrestrial. But they assure me it’s true. That you couldn’t possibly be lying.”

  She watched him, feeling calm. Powerful.

  Jesse was the only one who could keep up with her at this game. She sensed it instinctively, the inadequate scrabbling for information that she had no interest in giving away.

  He was going to have to buy wh
at he wanted to know.

  “You’re Jalnian, then?” he asked. She blinked at him once, sinking a fraction deeper into her chair. It was of rigid, angular construction, designed to be uncomfortable, but the flexibility of her spine and the rigidity of her will seemed to know no limits.

  “Right,” he said. “You need to understand that you have, in a word, become the most important asset that this base has to offer the world.”

  She snorted.

  “You assume I’m available to offer,” she said. His eyebrows went up.

  “I understand that you think you have exited the chain of command,” he said, floating her what he thought was an opportunity to reaffirm her commitment to the base. Trying to appeal to her inner soldier.

  Clueless.

  You don’t try to leash a Palta.

  “I’m not human, Leonard,” she said. “You established quite clearly at the trial last year that non-humans have no legal standing in our system. Which means just as clearly that any obligations I incurred as a human are now void.”

  Using his first name plucked his ego just the way she wanted it to. He’d grown accustomed to base deference, in his time here. Liked being called General.

  She watched him wrestle his ego and lose, then win momentarily just to lose again.

  He plastered a smile on his face and fidgeted his fingers. She could have played him like a child’s instrument. She sat still, just waiting.

  “I know you better than that,” he said. “I don’t care what you’ve been through, you are still loyal. To a fault. Even if you are feeling your oats, just this minute.” The fingers fidgeted, then finally grew still as he regained his control. He gave her a little mouth shrug. “After all, you snuck back here. Why would you do that if we didn’t still have things here you cared about?”

  “I’m an American, Leonard. That’s never going to change. I may not be human, and I may not be yours to order around, but I will always make sure that nothing bad happens here.”

  His eyes lit up, thinking that she had just handed him a lever.

  “The opportunities that you have now are staggering,” he said. “The people who will want to work with you, the power that those people are going to be willing to give you in the interests of protecting America.”