by Chloe Garner
Troy nodded.
“Give me the highlights.”
“No one is allowed to tell you or anyone else anything,” Andrews said. “Normally, we would say that a contract like that could be destroyed by removing the party who is willing to enforce it from a position of enforcement, but we’re going to have a hard time convincing the people who signed them that it’s true, because the terms are enduring. If someone, far down the road, decided to use these contracts for personal grudges, they’d have no problem doing so.
“You can change a contract after it’s been signed by bringing both parties together and having them agree to addendum clauses, but the way the contract has been structured, it would be very difficult to prove that we have a valid party on our part.”
“So we can’t break them,” Troy said. “Keep working on that. What information can they give me, if I interview the people who signed them?”
Andrews shook her head.
“It’s like they have to pretend that the time is gone,” she said. “They can tell you when they went into the classified area and when they came out of it, but that’s about it.”
Troy sighed.
“All right. Well. That’s less helpful than I was hoping for.”
“I have a friend in the private sector who is an expert at breaking corporate contracts,” she said. “I’d like permission to consult with her on this.”
Troy looked at the two men.
“The three of you know better than I do whether that’s legal and then if it’s even a good idea.”
“I’d recommend bringing in an outside expert,” the taller man said.
“Just make her sign one,” Troy said, an attempt at levity that didn’t do much for any of them. He shook his head.
“All right. Next. Illegal shipments. I assume you all know about the giant rhinoceros we’ve got over there.”
“I’m much more concerned with the sentient shipments,” the taller man said, and Troy nodded.
“That’s the last thing on my list,” he said. “But I know it’s important. Splitting it off separately, we have a whole lot of cargo that has gone off into the world unaccompanied, and I need to know what to do about it.”
“We have reporting duties,” the shorter man said. The taller man nodded, shifting to indicate that he was deferring his opinion to the shorter man. Troy turned to face him.
“Tell me about those.”
“The chain of command is a mess right now, I know, but if at any time we detect illegal behavior, especially concerning the portal itself, we have very little grace period to work with. We need to report it.”
“Does having Senator Greene there when we discover it count?” Troy asked. The man nodded.
“It helps. It makes it seem like we are doing a lot more to create an environment of transparency, but we have been operating well outside of our mandates, and we need to report it.”
“Any suggestions who we tell?” Troy asked.
“Secretary of Defense,” the shorter man said. “He’s the only accountable party left, outside of the President himself.”
Troy sighed.
He was not looking forward to even initiating that conversation.
At least Bridgette probably had his phone number.
“The State Attorney General issued subpoenas for Otherworld Security’s records last night,” the shorter man said. “And he has agreed to copy us on all evidence, so long as we agree to let any pursuit of Otherworld Security remain in his jurisdiction.”
“I don’t need any more responsibility than I’ve got,” Troy agreed. “When will we get that?”
The shorter man shrugged.
“Could be as soon as today. Could be Monday. Could be next Friday. It depends on how sincere he was about sharing information.”
“I need you to personally put pressure on him if we don’t have it tomorrow,” Troy said. “This is an issue of global security, and a territory dispute is just… unacceptable.”
“Monday?” the shorter man asked. Troy frowned.
“What’s today?”
“Friday.”
He grimaced.
“No. I’m sorry. We don’t take weekends until we have our hands around this, and they don’t either. Let them know our expectations today.”
The shorter man nodded, and Troy nodded back.
“If you need to drop a name, I have no doubt that Senator Greene will be willing to get involved in these kinds of fights, if we need her.”
“Yes, sir,” the shorter man said. Troy nodded.
“So I’ll make contact with the Secretary, and you’ll talk to the Attorney General. I don’t think that the rhino in our custody involves you any more than getting a sign-off on involving a civilian from the Kansas City Zoo.”
The shorter man nodded.
“I was on the call,” he said. “It was my impression that it went very well.”
Troy sighed.
“Good. I’m glad something has gone well. What do we do, to get everything that shipped out brought back here?”
The taller man shook his head.
“We’re going to need to see the shipping records before we can answer that. It depends on the countries.”
Troy shook his head.
“Isn’t customs supposed to keep this from happening?” he asked. “I mean, it’s our fault, we let it on planet, but isn’t shipping a five-ton live animal supposed to be harder than this?”
“We’ll know more when we have the records,” the taller man said. Troy nodded, frowning.
“I know you,” he said. His brain was slow. Very slow. He took another grotesque swallow of lukewarm coffee. “You prosecuted Cassie.”
The man gave him a tight-lipped smile.
“Sir, we try the cases we’re paid to try,” he said. “I don’t have a personal opinion about any of them.”
“Yes you do,” Troy said derisively. “You’re just too lawyered-up to say it.”
The three exchange glances that might have been humor, and Troy shook his head.
“Never mind. All right. Jumpers. We have an entire second jump school going on over in the new compound. Jumpers without standardized training who are currently off planet, ones who have died without ever being on record as jumpers. I need someone to put together a plan for how to deal with the liability we have for this. Compensation and dismissal.”
“You won’t keep any of them?” the taller man asked. Troy shook his head.
“Jump school is hard, and they only take the best of the best. I don’t have any other method of getting jumpers that I trust.”
“All right,” the taller man. “I have someone else at the office that I can put on this. I’ll need loss records for the deceased…”
“You can get a copy of everything from Bridgette when you’re ready for it,” Troy said. “I’m going to get everyone back on this side of jumps ASAP, and I don’t want to just hold them indefinitely. I need that plan in place as early next week as we can get it.”
“There will be budget problems,” the taller man said. Troy laughed.
It was unexpected, and he was a little ashamed of himself for it.
“I’m not thinking about money yet,” he said. “We’re going to make things right, and then we’ll worry about whether or not we can even afford to keep running.”
He said it before he thought about it, but he believed it both before and after considering it.
If Senator Greene didn’t like it, she should have picked someone else to be in charge.
“Okay,” Troy said, checking the time. “The dormitories.”
“We can’t keep them,” Andrews said.
“No,” the shorter man said. “We can’t.”
“Where would you suggest we send them?” Troy asked.
“Back,” the taller man said.
Troy shook his head.
“They were willing to give up everything about their previous existences, up to and including the possibility of ever seeing someone e
lse of their own species again. I’m not just dropping them onto a planet and walking away before I at least understand why.”
The taller man shook his head.
“You don’t know.”
“Inform me,” Troy said.
“I’m sorry, sir, we were going to send you the results as soon as we had them. It was an unintentional oversight. We have the authority to engage forensic accountants periodically to review base finances. Usually it’s because a member of congress or the cabinet asks for it, but it’s intentionally set up so that we can do it in secret, so that no one has a chance to cover their tracks, if there has been financial malfeasance, but we just did it, this time, because we thought the results might be important.”
“So tell me what they were,” Troy said. It wasn’t as if he could have gotten to them in a meaningful way, by now, he thought, looking around his office.
“Large, single-event lump sums that were used to fund construction and other operations at the secondary portal,” the taller lawyer said. “By now, the portal is self-funding, but at the beginning, these deposits were crucial for funding… whatever it was they were doing.”
“Dates,” Troy said, getting out the few folders he had on the foreign terrestrials living on base. The taller man got out his phone and started paging through it, nodding. He had them. Troy opened the folders and lay them out one next to the other on his desk, then lifted his head and waited.
The taller lawyer began reading. It took him a moment between dates - he had a full list of transactions, not the specific dates of the big transfers - and the first few didn’t mean anything to Troy, but the fifth one, Troy pushed a folder forward. The twelfth was another match, and the thirteenth. After about five more minutes, they found all five folders. Troy nodded.
“That looks pretty conclusive.”
“Sir,” the shorter man said. “We’re talking about individuals who paid a massive sum to come here. Some of them may just be looking for safety, but you have to consider the other motivations they may have, for parting with that money to come here. Any number of them could be dangerous and planning on exploiting our relative lack of technology here.”
“Or it could just be wampum to them,” Troy said, nodding. “No, I see your point and I will consider it. But I reiterate, I’m not just dumping people back across the portal because they’re inconvenient to us. I plan on finding out what I can about them before I make a decision.”
“It may not be your decision,” the taller man said. “Once we disclose it, that type of decision is likely going to be over your head.”
Troy nodded.
“Then I’ll be ready with as much information as I can, when they come to make the call.”
The three seemed satisfied with this, and Troy scratched his face.
“I want the financial records, I want the subpoenaed records from Otherworld, and I need you guys to play heads-up. Anything that you think I’m missing or I need to know, I need you to speak up.”
“I would suggest that we get together for an hour every morning,” the taller man said. “To review what’s going on and the legal implications of it.”
Troy sighed.
Awesome.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s plan on that, at least for tomorrow and Monday. After that, we’ll play it by ear.”
“You’re hoping to have this under control by then?” Andrews asked. There was live skepticism there. Troy smiled.
“I came up through jump school,” he said. “We’re trained to deal with the problem right now, and as fast as possible. It isn’t all going to be fixed in two days, but we’re going to be a lot better off, by then.”
She gave him a little frown, still skeptical, but she nodded.
“We’re all rooting for you,” she said, then the tall man gave a curt nod and stood.
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
“Hopefully you have something for me before that,” Troy said, walking with them to the door and opening it.
Henry the foreign terrestrial looked at him from a bench next to Bridgette’s desk. Troy frowned.
“I was supposed to have another hour before my meeting with him,” he said.
“Security brought him,” Bridgette said with a completely undisguised disdain. “Apparently they don’t run on anyone else’s schedule but their own.”
“Please contact Major White and let him know that they need to adjust their attitude toward their commanding officers.”
“Yes, Sir,” Bridgette said. Troy put his arm out.
“Henry?” he asked. The foreign terrestrial sat straighter. He had a herd animal’s posture, naturally, a head that sat on the end of a long, sturdy neck that was very good at up-and-down motions. His head natively sat low, his posture taking a sort of stooped shape. Tall grass, Troy pictured. The foreign terrestrial had long arms that, with just a little slope to his back, would have reached the ground, and the ends of his fingers looked hard, not just fingernailed, but almost individually hoofed.
Troy was going to have to resist the urge to take interest in Henry’s physiology for at least as long as it took to understood his social circumstances.
“Sir?” the foreign terrestrial answered.
“As long as you’re here, you may as well come on in.”
Troy held the door for the man, then let it fall closed and, as Henry worked his way carefully into a chair, Troy went through the room, making sure everything that was visible was unclassified. He still had papers scattered around the office that he hadn’t screened for the lawyers, but Henry was a different matter entirely.
“You read English?” Troy asked.
“Some, sir,” Henry said.
Troy shook his head.
“You military?”
“No, sir,” Henry said.
“Then I’m just Major or Troy,” Troy said. “I’m not ‘sir’ to you.”
“Yes, sir,” Henry said, then twitched his face to the side. Troy smiled, going to sit in his seat.
So grateful for his new chair.
So grateful.
“All right,” Troy said. “I know that the people you’ve been working with already know almost all of this, and a lot of it should have been written down so I could just read it, but we’re going to start with the basics. Assume all I know about you is your name and what you look like.”
“Okay,” Henry said. He tapped his fingers together, the sound of a wooden pencil on a desk.
“Where are you from?” Troy asked.
“Ron-telle Oland Illi’allae’al.”
Troy paused. Took out a pad of paper and wrote it down, asking Henry to say it three or four more times so that Troy could catch the phonetics closely enough.
“And what species are you?” Troy asked.
“Keld,” Henry said.
The buzz Troy felt at meeting a new species of foreign terrestrial was indescribable, even after Gana with Cassie and Olivia, where every person there had been a new species.
“Henry isn’t your given name,” Troy said. Henry shook his head.
“They tell me it’s how my name translates in English,” he said. Troy nodded.
“I’d like to hear your given name, if you don’t mind.”
Henry nodded.
“Winkla Ollamb,” he said. “My mother called me Wink.”
“Wink,” Troy said. “I like that. Do you mind if I use it instead of Henry, or do you like Henry?”
The foreign terrestrial shifted, uncomfortable in his chair and uncomfortable, if Troy made his guess, at something about the name.
“Do you have furniture in your… apartment that suits you better?” Troy asked.
“Yes, sir,” Henry said, twisting his head to the side again.
Troy pushed the button on his phone.
“Bridgette, can you arrange for someone to bring something from Henry’s apartment for him to sit on? Quickly, please.”
“Yes, Sir,” Bridgette said and Troy nodded, looking back at Henry
.
“Hang in there,” he said. Henry dipped his head.
“You can call me Wink,” he said. Troy shook his head.
“Not if it bothers you.”
Wink’s head came up, adding eight inches to his height, and his fingers went still.
“You think you’ve offended me,” he said. Troy was remembering his training, that leaving his face still was the best way to communicate until he understood unspoken cues. He put his hands on the desk, flat, fingers apart.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We have a long way to go, understanding each other from the perspective of physical motions. I thought I had upset you.”
“You did,” Henry said. “But it’s because no one has called me Wink since I left Ron-telle Oland Illi’allae’al.”
Troy paused, trying not to let it show on his face, what he felt. True empathy.
“Wink,” Troy said. “I’m sorry that the people around you haven’t thought about the difference between your name and what your name means.”
“They’re all so busy,” Wink said quickly. “There are so many of us.”
“There are,” Troy agreed. “And I’m going to talk to all of them to try understand how they ended up here and what… What needs to happen next.”
Wink’s fingers started up again.
“You’re going to send me home,” he said.
Troy paused.
He didn’t want to lie.
It wasn’t his nature.
But he hadn’t done interviews with an adversarial context, before. Not many.
Doing his job well might mean lying.
But.
Not yet. He could be vague and truthful, at least for now.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Troy said. “In the end, it probably won’t be my decision. But I will be advocating for what I believe should happen, and I believe that the people who will be deciding will at least hear what I have to say.”
Troy noticed that the pattern Wink’s fingers were taking as he tapped them against each other was changing. A cleverer mind than Troy’s might have been able to make something of it.
“I need you to tell me how you ended up here,” Troy said.
“A human came to me and brought me to an open space, and then I was standing in your big white room, and they asked my name and took me to my new room.”