Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  This guy—is he—is there any way—could he … is he shaking me down?

  No. Fuck this. He needs to be put in his place and hard.

  “Lemme get this straight,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “Fraternization is explicitly prohibited by—”

  “You come to me just before a critical event, a visit from the people who own your life and the life of every person here, an event I cannot restaff for the simple reason that it’s starting in hours—”

  “I just thought it was appropriate—”

  “Interrupt me again.” I stared him straight in the eyes, not caring that anyone looking over at us could tell I was a hair’s breadth away from tearing off his arms and whipping him with them. I gave him a chance to speak. He appeared to be demurring. “Wanna say something?”

  “I’m sorry, Chief.”

  I brought my voice down to a whisper. “You wanna do this? Come back to me tomorrow. Today? Do your fucking job.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “Hit your post.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  And he hurried off.

  I made a conscious decision not to exhale. I just breathed.

  He didn’t mean me. He didn’t mean you. Jesus Christ, I damn near puked on his shoes.

  “I’ve pulled some people together to be practice VIPs.” Patty was suddenly next to me again. I almost jumped.

  “Thanks, Patty.”

  “That Grant thing, is that…?”

  “Nah, it’s horseshit. Let’s roll.”

  * * *

  FIVE HOURS later, 11 a.m. on the dot, I was out front trying to look invisible behind Harrison and Lloyd. All things considered it looked like it was going to be a lovely day topside: temperate, breezy, the tang of eucalyptus in the air. Behind the lush treeline, the sky was calm and untroubled.

  Down on our level, a convoy of three vehicles had pulled up to the gates and Parker, having been given his own special instructions, was waving them through without any impediment.

  “I’m sorry, Dak,” Harrison muttered for at least the third time, “just tell me again that Lauren’s not going to make a scene…” I assured him, again, she’d been spoken to. “And Rosh won’t be … Rosh?”

  “We’re good, sir.”

  Harrison shot a look to Lloyd, who was knitting his hands together, pinching a point between his thumb and forefinger. Lloyd looked up, as if from dozing.

  “Yes! Yes, um, short answers, to the point—”

  “And we’ll be steering clear of the word ‘obviously,’ yes?” Harrison cocked an eyebrow.

  “Obv—uh, indub—uh, yes. Yes.” Lloyd pressed harder on the soft spot on his hand.

  A tall, red-haired man of about forty got out of a car as black and shiny as a pool of undisturbed ink. All three cars looked that way, in fact—it was a convoy that practically screamed, “Important People Up to Nefarious Things.” A bald assistant scurried out behind him.

  “That’s Haydon?” Lloyd asked. He sounded fascinated, like he’d just witnessed some mythological specimen cross in front of a camera lens. “He’s so … young and nondescript.”

  “Right, you never met him, did you?”

  “I was, uh, in a junior position last time he came.”

  From the third car, a security team emerged, two blacksuits chaperoning a person with a dark mesh bag for a head. It appeared to be a woman.

  “And,” Lloyd gulped, “presumably, presumably that is—”

  “Nothing you have to handle, Lloyd,” Harrison whispered kindly.

  I radioed for Shel and Vonn to report topside so they could receive X from Haydon’s people.

  “Probably wishing you still were junior man, huh?” Harrison chuckled ruefully to Lloyd, who was practically rubbing his hands into a single glob.

  Lloyd gave a weak laugh, then swallowed. “Here they come.”

  * * *

  “MIKE,” HAYDON cooed, grabbing Harrison by the arms. That’s right. Here was the guy who could stroll up to a former colonel and decorated war hero and just say, “Mike.”

  “Mr. Haydon. It’s an honor to welcome you back to—”

  Haydon gave me and Lloyd a cursory once-over, as if we were tuxedos he might have to wear later for events he didn’t care about. “Okay, I don’t know you and I don’t know you.”

  Lloyd began to stammer immediately. I stepped forward, hands at my sides.

  “Security Chief Dakota Prentiss, sir.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Were you here last time?”

  “I wasn’t chief at the time, sir. You would’ve dealt with Russell.”

  “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “Opposite of me, sir. Tall. Blond. Male.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I remember.” He snorted. “Opposite is right.”

  Meanwhile, Harrison had given up on Lloyd putting together a coherent introduction just yet. He put a hand on Lloyd’s shoulder.

  “Lloyd Simon is the head of research in our xenobiological division. Also new to the position since last time.”

  “Christ,” Haydon rolled his eyes. “You’d think this is one gig where we could keep people around.” I supposed given Sierra’s extensive network of prisons, sweatshops, and hazardous clean-up sites, this was one of their cushier locations.

  “Lloyd was in the junior position during your previous—”

  “Oh!” Haydon turned to Lloyd with a massive smile: all teeth, no eyes. “But now you’re Senior Man. Congrats, you’re gonna be answering a lot of questions today. Meanwhile standing around outside is getting really goddamn old.” He turned back to Harrison.

  “Absolutely!” Harrison kowtowed, making my heart ache. “We’re ready for you right this way. How many—”

  “Just me and this one.” He cocked his head at his bald assistant. Harrison’s eyes darted to the second, unopened car. “That’s just for in case I get bored.”

  “Very good. And your…” Harrison gestured toward Haydon’s contingent of scowling, intimidating men in black suits, swarming in and around the cars.

  Haydon gave a mock gasp, a hand to his chest. His eyes slid over to me—they were swimming with condescension. “I should hope your security’s good enough to protect little old me while I’m inside.”

  “Of course,” Harrison sputtered. “Let’s get you all inside.”

  We led them into the mouth.

  * * *

  AS WE approached the first checkpoint, Harrison explained that we had security protocols suspended, but had every person and mechanism still in place so he could see how we’d upgraded the base since his last visit.

  “Cooool,” Haydon cooed disinterestedly.

  We continued walking past Rosh, like he was an exhibit at a museum we’d already patronized for too long. We weren’t being swallowed by the Big Bug—Haydon was forcing his way down its throat. Choking it. Rosh had a look on his face very similar to the one he wore when I wheeled out a Turndown box.

  “Great mustache,” Haydon threw over his shoulder as we passed.

  Haydon’s assistant fluttered up to Harrison.

  “I’d like us to review the itinerary, please,” the assistant (who I’d already begun to think of as Needledick for the way he just inserted himself into everything) said. “Mr. Haydon is on a very tight schedule.”

  “Of course, of course,” Harrison agreed. “Lloyd will be making an initial presentation in our conference room in an hour, as we discussed. And I thought we might start off with some lunch.”

  Haydon stopped in his tracks. “Lunch?” He wore an expression that seemed to suggest Harrison had just suggested we all put potted plants on our heads for good luck.

  “We’ve prepared several menu options that I’ve been assured are—”

  “I’m not gonna spend an entire hour eating. That’s bizarre.”

  “Let’s have the food sent to the conference room,” Needledick offered. Harrison started to agree and Haydon barreled right over him.

  “The presentation’s r
eady, right?” He turned to Lloyd. “You’re not buying time to finish it, are you?”

  Lloyd went bright red. “No, no! No, it’s, no, it’s fully, it’s unambiguously—”

  “Then let’s just do it now. Jesus, who just eats?”

  “Of course, we will contact the kitchen—” Harrison stumbled. My stomach burned a little for him. Longtime officers tended to forget what it was like to be down the chain; casual humiliation buckles them. I’d been in the middle long enough that the ability to be humiliated had been sanded off of me.

  “Let’s keep moving, sir,” I said.

  Haydon purred. “Terrific.”

  * * *

  WHEN WE made our way past Lauren, she stayed in her booth and kept her eyes down, not even watching us pass. It almost looked as if she were praying.

  * * *

  MOSS HOVERED above us, bending, flexing. He was finally free of his mossy covering, which floated a few inches off to the side, and he was lifting his arms, stretching his neck, even doing an incredibly slow and controlled barrel roll in midair while we sat and stared.

  We were down in Conference Hall, blinds drawn across the window. Lloyd stood before our tiny group, taking us through a series of holographic images he’d said were culled from eighteen months of footage of Moss.

  The hologram projector, a small black box the size of a Rubik’s Cube, tossed up high-definition, three-dimensional renderings of Moss. For a better view of the actual body, Lloyd had pressed a button and the moss on Moss’s chest had cleanly shifted over to the side. Lloyd was able to rotate both with a tiny remote control, giving us a 360-degree look at points of contact and how the two substances interacted. Lloyd could even change Hologram Moss’s positions, show the various ways his alien joints articulated (which, to be honest, were hardly different than our own save for a few fun exceptions: knobby elbows that could hyperextend, wrists that could swivel almost a full 360 degrees, hands with only four spidery fingers, and feet with only two giant thumb-like toes), or zoom in and out to get an unnaturally close look at any area or aspect a person could desire. The images were impressively detailed. They were also, for all intents and purposes, a lie.

  It felt awful shutting the door on my whole team, especially Patty … but given the misdirection we were trying to pull on Haydon, the fewer eyes the better. Lloyd wasn’t actually showing eighteen months’ worth of images of Moss—more like three. Anyone who worked a daily rotation guarding Moss’s body would recognize the discrepancy.

  It also felt wrong hearing Lloyd give a lecture so remarkably un-Lloydian. Sure, it was quicker (in fact, he was blasting through his presentation), more concise, but the passion was gone, the fun was gone, the frequent prompts for participation were gone. I gave him immense credit, though: he lied better than I would have imagined.

  To cap off the absurdity of it all, on the table, surrounding the hologram projector, and with all the élan of a cold cuts party tray, were various plates of steaks, fish, shrimp cocktail. Exactly the sort of spread you prepare for the exorbitantly rich in an attempt to curry favor. From previous Sierra visits with a larger number of attendees, we’d known that some of the suits had special favorite dishes. Since we hadn’t known who to expect this time, those dishes were now scattered across the large conference table. Patty was right—those marksmen probably despised her for making them prepare all that.

  “Now,” Lloyd whirred, “I do want to stress that while we take regular measurements of the growth on Moss’s chest, we don’t necessarily extrapolate that—”

  Haydon let out a guttural chuckle. “Yeah, I don’t know whose genius idea it was to name it Moss and also call that crap on him ‘moss.’”

  “It is confusing,” Needledick concurred constructively.

  Lloyd wobbled on his axis a bit. “Well, of course, we’ve … grown … accustomed—”

  Haydon spun one finger in a circle. “Yeah, keep going.”

  “While we don’t necessarily extrapolate the recession of the growth to any sort of understanding of Moss’s life cycle or physical integrity, we do closely monitor—”

  “Actually, you know what?” Haydon held up a hand. “Actually, what’s even happening right now?”

  “Um … s-sorry?”

  Harrison piped up from where he was sitting. “Lloyd’s presentation is specifically geared toward—”

  “Yeah, why am I looking at a hologram of Moss instead of the real thing?” Haydon picked a shrimp off of a plate and bit into it. He flicked the tail back onto the plate with a soft plink.

  Lloyd, Harrison, and I exchanged glances.

  “Well.” Lloyd gave an anodyne laugh. “Obviously—er, I mean, actually, this—”

  “How much did this even cost us, making holograms like this?” He picked up another shrimp.

  “Lloyd’s holograms are really quite remarkable, aren’t they?” Harrison chirped. “They’re constructed from raw footage taken from several different angles—Lloyd, maybe shuffle through a few more before—?”

  Lloyd nodded and Moss began to spin and shift in all sorts of directions. Captions flew in and around the air. Moss = moss food? read one. Space ears! read another.

  Plink. Another shrimp tail landed on the plate. “Right, thanks, but … the real thing, the actual alien, it’s literally, like, over there”—Haydon was gesturing through the wrong wall, but no one was about to correct him—“and I can look at it from any angle I want, right?”

  The holograms stopped cycling as Lloyd tried to put on a calm face. “Well, certainly—certainly the footage for the holograms was taken with lighting that—you may find preferential—”

  “Lloyd’s just trying to say that Object E is rather dimly lit, and these holograms actually—”

  Haydon picked up another shrimp. “But it’s the actual alien, yes?” The shrimp waggled in his hand as he spoke. “The last time I checked, my phone has a flashlight. Can someone please explain to me why I’m watching Jurassic Park when I own a fucking dinosaur right over there?” He tossed the uneaten shrimp back onto the plate. It landed with a wet, heavy thud.

  “We can … certainly … relocate,” Harrison gulped.

  “Great, Mike, then relocate us.” Haydon instantly became chip and chipper. It was pure poison. He picked up a napkin and wiped his hands. “The faster you can get us through our itinerary, the faster you can get back to your office for an ‘afternoon break.’” He tipped Harrison a knowing wink.

  It was a shitty moment. Rather than let it hang in the air, I quickly opened the conference room door and called out to my team:

  “We’re moving.”

  * * *

  SO THERE we were, packed into the dim, glowing cockpit of Object E, as Haydon shined his cell phone flashlight onto Moss’s chest. Needledick stood by, an actual paper cup full of coffee in his hand. Needless to say, I wanted this over with as fast as possible.

  “God,” Needledick whispered. “It’s a totally different thing being in the room with it.”

  “Touch it.” Haydon’s face was stony, unreadable.

  Needledick gaped. “Seriously?”

  “Or I wouldn’t have said it.”

  Needledick nodded and slowly reached out a hand.

  Lloyd had been holding back, clenching everything to stay silent. He finally let a small protest slip: “It’s just, in, in terms of the coffee—” Harrison shut him up with a look.

  As soon as Needledick’s hand made contact with Moss’s shoulder, he jumped back, disgusted. Coffee sloshed over and onto the floor of the spacecraft.

  “Oh my God! He’s … warm!”

  “I love that,” Haydon smirked.

  That made me think of your reaction upon touching Moss—that awed, grateful smile, lighting up your beautiful eyes. Patty had wanted someone stationed in the Tent while our small group “toured” the ship and I’d chosen you. The reason I gave was that you hadn’t been around long enough to know, or accidentally spill, how fast the Moss was receding. But the actual rea
son was simpler: I missed those eyes.

  He had that same look when he—

  I forced the memories out of my head … for just a little while longer.

  “But wait,” Needledick was saying, wiping his hand on his shirt, “… if he’s warm…”

  “So we still don’t know if he’s alive or dead?” Haydon took the coffee from Needledick and sipped it, but that was a question for us.

  “Well, obv—” Lloyd stopped himself. “We, we don’t actually know how to approach … assessing that.”

  Haydon handed the coffee back to his assistant, who held it lovingly with both hands. “No heartbeat, no breathing, no blood pumping, no brain activity, correct?”

  “If by ‘brain activity’ you’re referring to measurable electrochemical—”

  “The point is there’s none, right?”

  “No indicator that we would use to define life in a human body is present in Moss’s body,” Harrison supplied. He looked so tired, especially drained in the surreal glow of the ship.

  “Except he’s warm.”

  “Other than the body-temperature factor, correct.”

  “I gotta tell you, guys, there’s a lot less moss here than last time.” Haydon tsked. “Even than in the thingies you were just showing me.”

  This time we all, as a unit, made a conscious decision not to exchange looks.

  Lloyd ticked his head to the side as if he were explaining a particularly knotty conclusion. “Yyyes—uh—certainly, we have noted a, a slight decrease—”

  “And when all that’s dead he’s dead too, right?”

  “That’s, well, that’s just one of several possible—”

  “Oh, you mean like E.T.’s flower!”

  We all turned to Needledick. His face was bright with excitement.

  Haydon glared at him. “What are you even—?”

  “Like E.T.,” he explained. “From the movie. When the flower was dying, he was dying, but then when it came back to life—”

  “It’s mind-boggling that you’re still talking,” Haydon said through another poisoned smile. Needledick shut up right quick.

  Seizing the opportunity, Harrison took a small step forward. “We don’t, as yet, understand the relationship between the moss and the body well enough to answer that question.”