Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  Celeste gave him a little frown, then shrugged.

  “We’re going to need a stable,” she said.

  “For now, we’ve got a receiving room,” he answered. “With biology, first priority is survival - food, water, temperature, air - and the second priority is sedation. We need to know how to control it if we have to.”

  Celeste nodded.

  “Amen to that. All right. Okay.” She dropped her arms. “It’s a hell of a thing, what they’ve got over there.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Troy answered, and she nodded.

  “We’re all glad you’re the one whose lap it landed in.”

  Troy grinned despite himself.

  “I can’t tell if that’s praise or a curse,” he answered, and she nodded.

  “Just the way I meant it. Okay. I’m off. Any more unidentified pachyderms show up, let us know. We’ll start a breeding program.”

  She actually skipped down the hallway, and Troy shook his head, watching her.

  “Colonel Pau is on his way,” Bridgette said, coming around her desk with a thick folder. There was a full ream of paper in there, and the folder was just to show that they went together; it certainly wasn’t up for the task of containing them. “These are the signed NDAs.”

  “Damn,” Troy said, taking the stack from her and pulling the first one out. They were about twenty pages long, each, stapled on alternating corners so they would lay flatter. He shook his head. “I guess I’m going to go read this. I need whoever Celeste talks to in legal to come work me through it, when they’re done.”

  “You trust her that much?” Bridgette asked. “To let her contact outsiders on her own discretion?”

  “There’s more than just her making that call,” Troy said. “Conrad will sign off on everything she does. Celeste knows better than to get caught holding the bag if it goes wrong. But…” He shrugged. “Yeah. There aren’t many people on this base I trust more, and I’ve got to trust some of them, if I’m going to get anything done. I’m going to ask Colonel Pau when he gets here, but I need anything you can get me on how they enforce security on the other side of portal operations.”

  “The wall between the rest of the base and them is pretty thick,” Bridgette said. “All I’ll be able to do is tell you who to talk to, and it’s probably going to just be Colonel Pau.”

  Troy nodded.

  “That’s where it’s going to get away from me,” he said. “I want base security to identify all plausible points of entry and exit from the new compound and I want them to make sure that I hold all of them. I can’t shake the feeling that someone’s got a room full of shredders going, somewhere over there.”

  “Probably do,” Bridgette said. “That’s why you’re working fast.”

  Troy nodded.

  “All right. Yes. I want Security Forces to go through the entire building with Major White. Any non-critical staff need to be taken into temporary custody and any critical staff need to have a shadow from the normal portal program assigned to them to verify what they’re doing. Take portal operations down to the bare minimum. No commercial jumps at all, and only critical jump support for jumpers.”

  She was writing, nodding.

  “All right,” she said. “Where do you want them to put everyone?”

  “Barracks,” he said. “I’ll figure out what to do with them individually, but everyone is on duty until then, so put them in the barracks.”

  She nodded again.

  “I assume you want zero communication.”

  He sighed.

  It was extreme, but so was the presence of a shadow jump program.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded again.

  “I’ll get started.”

  Troy lifted his head as Colonel Pau walked quickly down the hallway.

  “About time,” the man said. “I have many complaints.”

  Troy twisted his mouth.

  “I’m not sure whether or not I’m going to have time to hear them, today. What I need to know now is how the other side of the wall works.”

  Pau grimaced.

  “That’s going to take forever.”

  “You’re going to come in with me and sit down next to Colonel Levine and you’re going to tell me how I control the engineers who run the portal and keep them all from doing something stupid.”

  Pau snorted and shook his head.

  “They’re always doing something stupid.”

  Troy sighed and went back into his office, sitting down across from Levine and waiting for Pau to take the other chair.

  “All right,” Troy said. “We have a problem. I need the two of you to tell me how to fix it.”

  *********

  Cassie didn’t move in her sleep.

  It was odd, because ordinarily, she was a restless sleeper, reacting to vivid dreams and often waking to roll over before going back to sleep again. Jesse wasn’t sure what was her personality, what came from her training as a jumper, and what was the odd mishmash of Palta and human in her brain, but it didn’t seem to bother her, how little continuous sleep she got in a night.

  But now.

  Now, she was stone dead asleep, unmoving but for her breath, and she had been for hours. He checked her temperature a few times, and it was dropping, but not fast enough or far enough for him to worry about her.

  Yet.

  If she didn’t wake at dawn, he’d intervene, and if her temperature started to roll off any faster than it already was, he’d intervene, but for now, he let her sleep.

  Odd that an energy creature would cause her body to drop temperature, rather than raising it. Add a bunch of energy, get a bunch of heat was the simple standard.

  She was going to be a handful.

  He’d known that from the moment he’d realized she was Palta, but it was still sinking in. And now, with Midas gone, he could see her original personality so much more clearly, and he understood what the transformation had done to her. It had been obscured, before, with the mind control, and he hadn’t drawn conclusions, but now he could.

  She was going to be uncontrollable, but then all Palta were.

  She was going to have a complex and playful sense of humor, but that was also distinctively Palta.

  The human part of her was driving that unique sense of agenda. She was setting her own objectives, now, with her own priorities, but she was still driven by an agenda. Because she was Palta, Jesse had no idea what it was, most of the time, and he suspected that it was worse than that: that she was driven by a mix of objectives that obscured each other in each of the things she did.

  She’d been fun, as a human. He’d enjoyed her company.

  As a Palta, though, it had gone from a carousel to a roller coaster with loop-the-loops, and he was struggling not to let her suck him in.

  He wanted to go out and play rough with her, because he could tell that the capability she would bring to the things she was doing would be stunning, but he also knew… he knew how dangerous Palta could be, and he knew… He knew that she thought relationships should be simple. Emotional and simple. Because she was still thinking about her lifespan from a human perspective. Looking for a companion for a handful of decades, one that she would slowly lose physical capability with, grow old together and eventually die.

  It wasn’t like that with Palta.

  Not at all.

  And he didn’t know how to explain it to her, because how did you explain relationships to someone who had never seen one? She would model the normal she’d been exposed to until it didn’t work, and when it didn’t work, it was going to blow up spectacularly.

  And Jesse didn’t want to be there for that.

  Not that there was much choice.

  If she was going to have a relationship, now, he was the only choice.

  And that thought, that one, it made him feel sick down deep in his stomach.

  Her eyes opened.

  Her body was completely still, and her breathing was unchanged, but her eyes opene
d.

  Jesse didn’t shift, but he looked down at her, waiting for the siren to get a feel for how things worked.

  “Cold,” she breathed. “We are cold.”

  “Hello there,” Jesse said. “You’re in the body of a friend of mine, which means we have a problem.”

  “Thump… thump… thump… waves on rocks.”

  “Your heart,” Jesse said. “You’ll get used to it. Or you won’t. Either way. I need to know why you possessed her.”

  “Cold,” she said, eyes vacant, staring somewhere past the ceiling. “We are cold and we are dying.”

  “Communal identity,” Jesse said. “Yeah, that shouldn’t surprise me. You rely on their electromagnetic energy to keep yourself contained, don’t you? Not used to being alone. Why were you?”

  “Death haunts us,” the siren said. She took a breath, as if realizing that that was necessary, and she moved. Sirens had arms, legs, a core the way humans did. They were aware of the way those things should move. But this would have been the first time she’d ever interacted with joints or gravity. Jesse waited once more.

  She sat up, looking left and right with her whole head. Jesse looked up at her from where he lay on his side in bed, chilled faintly at the odd way that Cassie’s body was moving.

  “You’re an energy being who exists almost exclusively in water,” he said. “You aren’t going to make it for very long in there, are you?”

  “Help us,” Cassie’s distorted voice said, and Jesse nodded.

  “She could have fought you. Probably would have won. But she wanted to help you if she could. We need to know why you need help.”

  “Voices fall silent, we are… less,” the siren said, and then she shuddered and fell sideways onto the bed. Jesse frowned, taking Cassie’s shoulders and adjusting her so that she lay on her pillow again, then tucking her in carefully. He looked down at her for a moment, then he got up and went to a data screen in a window and started reading news.

  *********

  Troy ate a cafeteria lunch at his desk, reading NDAs. He wasn’t a lawyer; he knew better than to try to pretend that he knew what the things said, but even where he could see the meaning of the ongoing terms and legalese, he could tell the thing was evil. He felt bad for telling Celeste to use it as a foundation for talking to the Kansas City zoo. He wished he had Cassie or Jesse here to read it, to really get a sense for all of the spring-loaded traps in it, but that just wasn’t going to happen. He’d have to wait until he could get a qualified legal opinion from a licensed attorney. Whenever that was going to happen.

  Bridgette brought in another deep stack of papers - two folders, this time - and put them on his desk.

  “Shipping records,” she said. “Major White says it’s a record of every use of the secondary portal room, not just the ones that involved cargo.”

  Troy nodded, setting aside the NDAs and beginning to browse through the jump records.

  He moved his lunch to clear off more desk space, sorting out the early records - just jumps - by where they’d gone, astonished at the spelunking that Donovan had apparently approved for jumpers in the secondary program. Troy picked up the phone and dialed Colonel Peterson.

  “Have that assistant change the name on your phone number,” Peterson answered.

  “Hi,” Troy responded. “Jumpers.”

  “Got a lot of ‘em,” Peterson said. Troy read the first six names off of the early jumps. Peterson was quiet for a moment.

  “Alexa died three months ago. She’s on the wall. Liv and Yeats are missing, as far as I can tell.”

  Troy felt a cold chill, looking at the rest of the papers.

  “As much as we’ve resented their restrictions, I think I’ve got data to prove that the restrictions do reduce casualty rates,” Troy said.

  “Of course they do,” Peterson said. “But so does staying in bed in the morning. There’s got to be a balance.”

  “I think they pushed it too far,” Troy nodded, hooking the phone on his shoulder and pulling out the next set of records. “I’ve got jumps, in chronological order, and going through the first… fifteen… they had people on eight different planets.”

  Peterson cursed.

  “Spread too thin. How many per group?”

  Troy shook his head.

  “Looks like just two.”

  Peterson cursed again, louder.

  “You don’t do an advanced guard with a thin group,” he said. “My jumpers know that.”

  “You knew this was happening,” Troy said. “That’s why you stopped graduating people.”

  There was an instant of stony silence.

  “I know that the people who are most willing to take risks are the young and un-entrenched,” Peterson said. “And the retired.”

  Troy gritted his teeth, nodding.

  “What do you want to bet I find out that he altered the age-out criteria to keep people jumping, after you cut off his supply?”

  “Let me know what you find out,” Peterson said. “It’s only going to make my blood pressure worse, but I need to know.”

  Troy nodded.

  “Will do.”

  They both hung up and Troy went back to his papers, sorting by location. He ran out of space on his desk and moved to the floor, creating an arc three rows deep all the way around his chair. His phone beeped and he punched the button on it without turning around to face it.

  “Facilities is here to help you break into your desk,” Bridgette said. Troy frowned, looking at the next jump in the stack. Yet another new planet. He scanned dates. He was only about a month in.

  “The other desk out there,” he said. “It’s still there, right?”

  “There are two desks out here, yes,” Bridgette said.

  “Have them bring in the other one,” Troy said. “I’ve got classified material out. I need you to move everything from my desk to the other one before they can take mine and work on it out there.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Bridgette said. He continued sorting as Bridgette stole away the stacks on his desk and a pair of men carried away the preposterous black desk.

  “I can help you move the other desk over here, if you want,” Bridgette said. Troy looked up.

  “Yes. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.”

  “What obstacles can I move?” she asked as he stood up and lifted the side of the desk opposite her. They slid the desk into position and Troy went to sit in his chair again.

  “I need a roster of all active, missing, and deceased jumpers,” he said. “And their physicals.”

  “I’ll have them in an hour,” she said. “I have a catalogue for chairs when you need a break.”

  He nodded absently and when he looked up again, she was gone.

  Freight had started going through the portal about a month and a half after it had opened. Some of it was outward-bound, textiles and metallurgical products that some societies didn’t have the skills or the cheap labor to create. The returning payment looked pretty standard - gold and precious stones - but there were notes on the records that Troy didn’t understand. He punched the button on his phone.

  “Yes, sir?” Bridgette asked.

  “Can you get Major White on the phone for me?” Troy asked.

  “Just a second.”

  The phone line buzzed for a moment, very quietly, and then it rang.

  “Major White,” he answered.

  “White,” Troy said. “I’m looking at a notation on your portal records that I don’t understand.

  “All right,” Major White said.

  “NDJ,” Troy said.

  “Neil Jordan,” Major White said. “He’s our jeweler.”

  Troy looked at the pages around him, just reeling for a moment.

  “Jeweler.”

  “Yes, sir,” Major White said.

  “Civilian?” Troy asked.

  “Yes, sir,” White answered.

  “Cleared?”

  “Of course.”

  Troy shook his head.

  “What ab
out QR?”

  “Quarantine required.”

  Troy picked up another record.

  “HER?”

  “Hostiles encountered, retreat.”

  “Why is that encoded?” Troy asked. “If you’re going to burn the planet, you burn it.”

  “No, sir,” White said. “On planets with a high enough economic quotient, we would just find a new place to set up an advanced station.”

  “Economic quotient,” Troy said.

  “It’s noted on each of the reports,” White told him. “Front page, on the summary. If anything in the report has an impact on the quotient, it’s always on the front page.”

  Troy sat back in his chair, staring at the phone.

  “You sent jumpers onto hostile planets because we thought we could make money at it?” he asked.

  “No one ever complained,” White said and Troy sat forward in his seat, angry for the first time.

  “Of course they didn’t, idiot,” he said. “You speak up that you don’t want to go on a mission, they replace you and you don’t go. Jumpers live for the next jump. All they’d be doing is asking for you to give it away. Don’t you see that? You asked them to choose between risking their lives and sitting the bench, and they aren’t going to give up jumps. Not for anything. Did you even know any of them?”

  “They kept to themselves,” White said. Troy hung up.

  His phone buzzed.

  “What is it?” he asked with more residual temper than he was happy about.

  “Roxy Tannis and Michael Cauldwell are here from Otherworld Security,” she said. “The supervisors for the security crew at the secondary portal.”

  Troy nodded.

  “Let me get cleaned up,” he said. “Give me two minutes.”

  He looked at the piles and piles of missions, risks that the jumpers had known they were getting into, but that they’d been unwilling to opt out of - if they even could have. Lives. Lives that were gone, now.

  He stacked them up and put them on the floor next to his desk, covering the top one with a folder.

  “Send them in.”

  The doors opened and a woman dressed like a lawyer and a man like a dressed brick wall came in, shaking hands with Troy and sitting down in the two chairs. Troy needed to replace those, as well.