Free Short Stories 2013

by Baen Books

  "This one." She thrust the memory chip at him and kept going. Kimberly paused, unsure which of them were the hotter story.

  Chloe kept pace with Jane. "Jane Kryskill, you’re the camera woman of Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden."

  "Field Producer." Jane growled her official title, which Chloe probably damn well knew.

  "You're working with award winning war correspondent Keaweaheulu Taggart."

  Did everyone in Pittsburgh but Jane know who the hell Taggart was? Keaweaheulu? What kind of name was that? It sounded nearly as bad as an untranslated elf name. Jane ignored Chloe and unlocked her truck. She needed to get back to Nigel before his hand swelled up to the size of a baseball mitt.

  "How is it that he's here on Elfhome with footage of Princess Tinker being kidnapped? Did your network have foreknowledge of this? How did your network know to send an award winning war correspondent this Shutdown?"

  The questions started to sound damning when left unanswered. It was almost lunch time, which meant Chloe might be broadcasting live, giving little opportunity for damage control by the channel managers.

  "Our network knew nothing about the kidnapping until it happened. By dumb luck, Hal Rogers happened to witness and get footage. Surely, all your viewers know Hal and his dumb luck. Taggart is not here as a war correspondent."

  "Then what's he doing here?"

  "Trying to get eaten!" Jane turned to face Chloe square on. "Taggart is here is with world famous naturalist, Nigel Reid, to film a network show called Chased by Monsters. They want to film Nigel coming face to face with Elfhome wildlife and hopefully surviving the experience." She let her sarcasm drip through since most Pittsburghers were slightly disdainful of newcomers. "If any of Channel Five's viewers hears of any monsters in the Pittsburgh-area – other than reporter Chloe Polanski – please let us know."

  #

  They ended up drinking Iron City Beer and eating blackened river shark and grilled water fairy in the Neighborhood of Make Believe.

  "I didn't realize you could eat water fairy." Jane had been dubious as Taggart carefully grilled the skewered pieces over the charcoal grill in the studio's parking lot. She wouldn't let him feed any to Chesty until he'd proved it wasn't fatal by eating some of the tentacles.

  "Both cuttlefish and jellyfish are common street food in East Asia." He waved his beer to take in the surrounding sets of fanciful puppet houses. "Can't believe I'm drinking beer in the Neighborhood of Make Believe. It almost feels blasphemous. King Friday's Castle. The Museum Go Round. The Platypus Mound."

  "The Platypus family was why I become a biologist." Nigel was eating left handed as his right was still swollen from the water fairy sting. "Dr. Bill Platypus and Elsie Jean and little Ornithorhynchus Anatinus."

  "I thought her name was Ana," Jane said.

  "It was Ana for short. Her full name was an in-joke. It's the Latin scientific name for platypus. I identified with them at first because they were Scottish, like me, and then because they were so not like anyone else." He pulled up his pants legs to show off the fact that both his legs were artificial. "Like me. I wanted to know everything about platypuses. And then to understand how unique they are, you have to understand the rest of the animal kingdom. One thing led to another and, voila, Dr. Nigel."

  "The only egg-laying venomous mammal on Earth," Hal said. "God knows what the hell their cousin is like here on Elfhome. Can you imagine?"

  "Have the elves even been to Australia?" Taggart asked.

  "Not that we can tell." Jane said and then tapped on the table beside her tablet to draw their attention back to why they were at the studio in the first place. "Focus. We need to figure out what we're shooting tomorrow. I've got all the monster tips that were sent to the station. We take the most mobile first, any warg or saurus sightings, if there's any. Then work down by mobility."

  Taggart lifted his eyebrows in question to what she meant.

  "Black willow and will-o-wisps are slow moving and will be in the same general area for a couple of days. Last on our list will be completely stationary creatures. Steel spanners. Strangle Vines."

  "They're also most common." Hal read off his lot of the tips. "Strangle Vine. Strangle Vine. Spanners."

  "Loch Ness?" Nigel said. "Elfhome has a Nessie?"

  Jane copied the tip and read over it. The caller had spotted "something huge in the river" from the I-79 Bridge. "What the hell was he doing down there?"

  "What you mean?" Taggart asked.

  "Oh I-79 is practically a road to nowhere since it's right on the Rim. Oh, it was right after Startup. He was coming home."

  "A Loch Ness sounds promising," Nigel said.

  Jane shook her head. "No. He probably saw two sharks close together or just one really big shark. We don't need more sharks for now. Besides anything in the river is going to be hard to find and bloody dangerous since we'd have to beg, borrow, or steal a boat."

  "That would be fun," Hal said.

  "No!" Jane snapped. "We'll do spiders before river monsters that may or may not be there."

  "Gossamer?" Taggart said.

  "What?" Jane held out her hand for the tip. The caller pointed out that no one had ever been able to coax the elves into a close look at their living airship. "Now that has merit. I'll see if Dmitri can get us onto the Viceroy's gossamer."

  "I can call the homeowner from this morning," Hal offered. "He and his boss owe us."

  "The Viceroy owes us," Taggart said.

  Not that their video had lead to Tinker being found. Jane had checked for updates on the search all day. The EIA confirmed rumors that Windwolf had sent word to his cousin, the Queen, requesting for royal troops to help find his bride. The Pittsburgh Police were asking for people to avoid known deserted area. The updates accounted for everyone involved except the oni. It made it seem as if everyone in Pittsburgh was battling an invisible giant.

  Jane put the gossamer tip aside. "Okay, that goes near the top, pending permission from the elves to tour the Viceroy's airship."

  "Oh, I can try out my call," Nigel said.

  "Your what?" Hal asked.

  "Gossamer call." Nigel got a shy, embarrassed grin. "We've spent the three years of waiting for visas on researching everything known on Elfhome. The oddest thing was that the most comprehensive videos on Elfhome are a series of animated shorts by a strangely secretive production company known as Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo."

  "Actually their name is the only thing anyone knows about them." Taggart added.

  "Animated?" Jane wondered if she had heard them wrong.

  The grin got even shyer. "The videos use a fairly crude method blending modeling and CGI work but they're hysterical. Each is about ten minutes of pure farce but the storylines interlock creating a very detailed world. The thing is, if you check their facts, they're spot on."

  "What you can check," Taggart said.

  Nigel nodded. "Which loops us back to the idea that all information about Elfhome is being strictly limited. One of their videos mentioned a gossamer call and indicated that it was ultrasonic in nature."

  "What exactly is a gossamer call?"

  "What they'd discovered was if you analyze video tapes of the gossamers arriving and leaving Pittsburgh, you can isolate the ultrasonic commands that the elves use to control the living airships. They've also pieced together information that any creature bioengineered with magic – such as wargs – have similar 'call commands' embedded at an instinctual level.

  A month ago, Jane wouldn't have believed it was possible, but then the undeniable evidence had surfaced that the elves could manipulate DNA at fantastic levels via magic. "They had enough information to build one of these calls?"

  Nigel's grin went from shy to incandescent. "I can't wait to try it out."

  Jane made a note to herself to steal Nigel's gossamer call before they toured the Viceroy's airship.

  "Oh! Oh!" Hal cried. "A saurus!"

  Secretly she was hoping that they wouldn't get any tips on saurus sightings. Wi
th Hal, the filming was fairly simple: find it; kill it. They would pad the footage with how to tell if a saurus was in the area, the type of guns needed to successfully drop the big lizard, the dangers of bringing too small of a gun to the fight, the merits of such tactics as shooting from second story windows or tree stands and any other bullshit they could think of.

  Nigel and Taggart, though, probably wanted to do something stupid like film the saurus without trying to kill it first. Things could get messy fast.

  "Where was the saurus spotted?" Jane hoped the location was near the Rim where the T-Rex's Elfhome cousin might wander back off radar.

  "Dormont," Hal said.

  "Dormont?" Jane said. "That's nearly downtown!"

  "It says Dormont." Hal read. "Sleepy Hollow Road. Where old Mt. Lebanon golf course used to be."

  Jane took his tablet to read it. The tip had been sent by "Beef4U." The name sounded slightly pornographic and juvenile. Was it a joke? "That's Castle Shannon."

  "Another castle?" Taggart asked.

  "It’s a town," Jane said.

  "Was a town," Hal muttered.

  She pulled up a map to double check her memory. "Yes, for some reason the early settlers in this area all wanted castles. Castle Shannon was a farm that grew into a town."

  "Pittsburgh never lets go of the past." Hal continued to mutter. "You get directions by what used to be there. Castle Shannon is mostly empty rowhouses."

  Nigel sprang to his feet. "We go now?"

  "No!" Jane cried. "It's already dark."

  "It would be very atmospheric," Nigel started for the door.

  "Sit!" Jane barked and pointed at the chair he just vacated.

  He wavered and glanced to Taggart.

  "You're hurt. I'm drunk." Either Taggart was a lightweight or exaggerating as he was only on his third beer. Jane always kept count of other people's drinks so she knew when to shut them off. She had thought Taggart would be good for at least four beers before hitting "drunk." "Hal is on pain killers. It's dark out. And there's a fucking war brewing. Jane is right. We finish setting up a shooting schedule, get another good night's sleep and start out at dawn."

  #

  They transferred everything she thought might be useful from PB&G's production truck to the CBM truck. It would be a week until Hal's face healed enough that they could film, so they could focus first on the network show. They hadn't resolved the housing issue except to verify that no one in the offices was actually handling those duties. She really didn't have any choice but to take the men home again.

  It was nearly ten o'clock when they left the offices, a full fifteen hours since they left her house, but it still felt like she was slacking. Part of her soul wanted to be out looking for lost little girls. Even if Tinker were found, though, her soul wouldn't be satisfied. She would need her Boo back for her to be at peace and the nightmares to end.

  Before she pulled out of the parking lot, though, she turned on the radio and tuned to KDKA. Her cousin Sean was doing the news before leading into his show on local fusion music. Their video clip of the tengu was still the headline story. Pittsburgh Police had set up a tip line for anyone who might have spotted a black winged man flying over the city. Director Maynard of the EIA reported that he had requested additional troops during Shutdown. As Dmitri pointed out, the United Nations would have to approve the request, influenced most strongly by the United States. Sean repeated the news that Windwolf sent for royal troops. Once again, everyone in Pittsburgh was reporting in except the oni.

  Sean transitioned to commercial with "You're listening to Sean Roach on KDKA."

  Taggart chuckled quietly. "He's using the name Roach? Seriously."

  "There's nothing wrong with Roach," Jane growled.

  "They're cousins," Hal sang from the backseat.

  "Your cousin's name is Roach?"

  "Yes, my Uncle Bill Roach is a very successful businessman. All his kids are business savvy."

  "And they stayed here in Pittsburgh?" Taggart asked.

  "New York is not the center of the universe," Jane said.

  "I didn't say it was. In fact I don't really like New York." He stared out the window at the forest to the north of the city as they drove down Bigelow Boulevard. The streetlights went up to the Rim and stopped abruptly. Beyond it, elf shines drifted over the dark canopy, a million earthbound stars. "I like quiet and solitude."

  "Mine." Hal grumbled quietly in the backseat.

  "What is that?" Nigel leaned forward to point through the windshield.

  She glanced to see where he was pointing. They were crossing the Fort Pitt Bridge. Downriver was a glimmer of lights moving in the dark water below.

  "Water fairies," Hal said. "Lots of them. I've never seen anything like it."

  It was probably most dangerous section of road in Pittsburgh. Five lanes of traffic fed onto the bridge from three directions and had approximately five hundred feet of road-planning insanity to merge to two lanes into the tunnel or take the off-ramp to the river hugging Route 51.

  During the day, Jane wouldn't have thought about stopping, but traffic trickled to a halt at night. She checked her rear view mirror. There wasn't any other traffic following them. She put on her flashers and stopped at the center of the bridge.

  "Stay off the road," She warned.

  A large truck rumbled across the inbound deck overhead.

  They scrambled over the jersey wall to the sidewalk and set up tripods for the night shooting. The mass of water fairies flowed inexplicably closer, coming upriver.

  "We could go to the Point," Hal murmured in the darkness beside her. He pointed across the water at the fountain set in the wedge of concrete that marked where the Mon and Allegheny Rivers flowed together to create the Ohio River.

  Jane shook her head. "It would take us fifteen minutes to drop down to 51, swing across the West End Bridge, come back across the Fort Duquesne and get into Point Park. Another three or four minutes to walk through the park and set up."

  "We could U-turn – there's room enough and --" Hal started.

  "Hal, last time I listened to you, I nearly lost my license. No!"

  "If they go up the Allegheny, we'll miss them," Hal said.

  Nigel suddenly blew a loud piercing tri-toned whistle.

  It made Jane jump, swear, and smack the man. "What the hell?"

  "Am I supposed to hear it?" Hal asked. "I thought it was ultrasonic."

  "It has four tones. Only one is t—…" Nigel started to explain.

  The last of his explanation was lost under a deafening roar, seemingly in answer to his whistle. It was stunningly loud despite obviously coming from down river somewhere. The deep rumbling noise echoed off Mount Washington, making it impossible to pinpoint the exact origin.

  Chesty leaned out the window of the truck and growled.

  "What the hell is that?" Taggart asked.

  "I don't know." Jane peered into the dark. The glittering shifting carpet of water fairies darted suddenly to the left and flowed up the Allegheny River. There was another roar and it seemed closer. Louder.

  "You think it might be the Nessie?" Nigel asked.

  "What the hell is the Loch Ness?" Jane said.

  "The most popular theory is that it’s a plesiosauria, about the size of a sperm whale."

  "Shit!" Jane cried. The last thing Pittsburgh needed was a huge river monster.

  Nigel blew his whistle again. The answering roar from the dark waters sent shivers down Jane's back.

  "Nigel!" She cried and snatched the whistle from Nigel's hand. "What the hell are you thinking?"

  "That we get a picture of whatever it is." Nigel's tone indicated that he had no clue why she was angry.

  "Is that it?" Hal was leaning far out over the railing to point at something arrowing through the river, coming at them at alarming rate. It seemed comfortingly small – barely a dozen feet in length -- until Jane realized that she was just seeing the creature's head. There was another wedge behind it, easily addin
g thirty feet to the creature. Suddenly the forty-some feet that the bridge deck was from the river's surface didn't seem far enough.

  Chesty had gone full throttle warning snarl.

  "In the truck," Jane commanded. She reached out and jerked Hal back. A second later, electricity flared in the water like a tesla coil discharging, outlining a massive crocodilelike body. The monster was nearly fifty feet long from nose to tip of tail. "Truck! Truck!"

  "How wonderful!" Nigel cried. "Shouldn't we be filming this?"

  "Too dark." Taggart shoved him into the backseat, earning Jane's love. "We'll film it tomorrow!"

  #

  They cautiously looked for the river monster the entire next day, careful not to stray too close to the water's edge, and Chesty on watch. Jane kept hold of the whistle and refused to let them use it.

  "We could call Nessie to us," Nigel pointed out many times.

  "No!" Jane kept shouting back.

  Taggart finally broke the pattern. "Can you at least explain why?"

  Jane growled. God, she hated being outnumbered. This was like riding herd on her little brothers, only worse because "I'll beat you if you do" wasn't an acceptable answer. "First rule of shooting a show on Elfhome." She grabbed Hal and made him face each of the two newbies so there was no way they could miss the mask of dark purple bruises across Hal's face. "Avoid getting 'The Face' damaged. Viewers don't like raccoon boys. Hal is out of production until the bruising can be covered with makeup. We've got fifty days and a grocery list of face-chewing monsters to film. We have to think about damage control."

  "Second rule!" She let Hal go and held up two fingers. "Get as much footage as possible of the monster before you kill it. People don't like looking at dead monsters if you don't give them lots of time seeing it alive. Right now we have got something dark moving at night in water. No one has ever seen this before, so we can't use stock footage to pad. We blow the whistle and it will come out of the water and try to rip your face off – violating rule one – and then we'll have to kill it and thus break rule two."

  "Sounds reasonable," Taggart said.

  "Would we really have to kill it?" Nigel's tone suggested he equated it to torturing kittens.