by Chloe Garner
Cassie nodded then stopped.
“There’s something else,” she said.
Jesse paused, waiting, and she nodded.
“Almost missed it because everything else was so obvious,” she said, closing her eyes and letting her body sway slightly. “There’s no magnetic field.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at the sky again.
“That’s bad.”
Jesse put his arms out, feeling with his fingers, then tapped on his arm, checking the readings on the electronics there. You couldn’t see it, but if you were paying attention, you could interact with them using the nerves in your skin.
“That’s very bad,” he agreed. “You’re right.”
She refrained from telling him that she knew she was right, just frowning out at the former sea-bed. He’d hit the ocean - she recognized it, now. The water was gone.
“Can you imagine how thick the atmosphere was, here, before?” Jesse asked.
“Star’s going to blow all of it away if the core doesn’t go magnetic again soon,” Cassie answered.
“Life is going to be different here, if it ever gets a chance to recover. The soot in the upper atmospheres will be reflecting some of it. It’ll help, but not forever.”
It was one of the ways that planets died entirely. Magnetic cores were the only way that they could possibly live this close to a sun, and if they stopped for long enough, the sun would blow away all of the atmosphere and then the planet would freeze, and as the core cooled and the iron there stopped moving, it was a permanent death. They would never recover the heat necessary to spin iron and create a new magnetic field that could shield them again from solar radiation.
“There isn’t a way to fix it, is there?” Cassie asked.
“There is,” Jesse told her, “but no one’s going to be willing to try it for a planet no one lives on.”
She nodded.
Even as she’d asked, she’d started building the equipment, in her head, that would have tried to stir the planet’s core, create a new field, but Jesse was right. It was much too expensive and had too little chance of working for anyone to even think about it, here.
“Water,” he said, and she nodded. She could hear waves, though they were rather subdued for an ocean.
“Bay?” she asked.
“Depends on how far off I was,” Jesse told her, picking up his pace.
They crested a small hill and started back down again, stopping at the edge of a huge cliff face where they both looked down at big rocks below and swirling gray water. For dozens of yards, the water was that same opaque, steely gray, but it did eventually turn dark as the broth got far enough away from shore.
“Oceans will eventually eat all of the ash that the ground can’t,” Jesse said. “And it will all eventually come down out of the atmosphere. It’s too heavy.”
“Just not going to happen fast enough for the sirens,” Cassie said. He looked at her and she nodded. The cold in her gut was getting more intense, but much more still.
“And it doesn’t solve the magnetics problem,” he said.
“Can’t be a coincidence,” Cassie said, and he shook his head.
“Probably isn’t.”
She sighed.
“We need to find them.”
“We’ll try,” he said. “But it’s possible there aren’t any here, anymore. That the reason they’re struggling is that they’ve abandoned their home world and don’t know how to find each other anymore.”
Cassie put her hand on her stomach.
“We need to get down to the water,” she said. “I need to see it.”
He gave her a sad, grim look, but he nodded.
“We’ll just go along, then,” he said. “Unless you want to try to climb.”
She shook her head.
She was clever. She probably would have survived, even. But it was foolish, when there wasn’t any reason to believe that the water three hundred feet below her was the water she was looking for.
“We’ll find a beach,” she agreed.
“And you can put your toes in and see what the siren tells you about it,” Jesse said. He reached back and after a moment’s pause, she offered him her hand.
In the early days, he’d always held her hand, when they’d traveled. He’d insisted on it, because there was no way to track down a stray human who had no tools for getting around anywhere.
He’d been worried about her, even if he’d never been willing to say it.
She could see it in his face, now.
He was worried about her again.
*********
Conrad came in without knocking. He looked over his shoulder with a sort of glee as the door swung closed behind him.
“She’s gonna hate that,” he said, coming to sit across from Troy. Troy rubbed his forehead and put his papers down.
“You’ve been calling?” he asked.
“Got a freaking huge animal on our hands and no one’s got any clue what to do with it,” Conrad said. The man had come from a dedicated program at Duke aimed at creating researchers who could deal with foreign terrestrial matters, the very first graduate hired into the portal program. Troy had hired him, himself, and it had been easily the best decision he’d made that month.
“How did the zoo consult go?” Troy asked.
“Useful,” Conrad said. “They offered to come and look at it in person, but we shut that down, for now. Basically, we’re going to trust him to know what he likes and what’s going to kill him, and try everything in very small portions until we get a sense for whether or not he’s good at choosing.”
“You look at his teeth?” Troy asked. Conrad snorted.
“Got a few dark pictures,” he said. “No one’s willing to go stick their fingers in his mouth, so we’re just putting a camera on the floor with his hay and hoping it tells us something useful.”
Troy nodded, rubbing his face briskly.
“How about manure?” he asked.
“Got loads of that,” Conrad said. “Bio guys are going nuts. It’s helping a lot, but since we can’t actually replicate his native foods…”
Troy nodded.
“They’ll know this, but you compare in to out. The better he’s digesting, the more he’s getting out of it, and the closer we are to something that’s going to keep him going.”
“Not that I’m not thrilled about being able to actually get my hands on a live foreign terrestrial, if I ever get the nerve up to actually touch him, but are we talking about just dropping him back across and hoping for the best?”
Troy shook his head.
“Not until I know there’s someone on the other side to take charge of him. I mean, we’re pretty sure he’s domesticated, right? Wild animal wouldn’t put up with what he’s gone through.”
Conrad shrugged.
“Get a big enough dog, he’s gonna act like that, wild or not.”
Troy grinned.
“I wish I’d gotten to work with you,” he said, and Conrad nodded.
“You and me both, man.”
“All right. I’m going to get in touch with all of the jumpers on the far side of jumps on Monday, and start scheduling extractions. I have the name of the jumper who sent us that beast, and I’m going to ask him to send more information, though it’s possible he never saw it. Just handled the crate, same as the security team.”
“That’s possible?” Conrad asked. Troy nodded.
“That’s actually how we do some of the more normal, up-and-up economic transfers on our portal room floor,” he said. “The client brings across their own people to negotiate trade terms, and they don’t even have to be there when the transfer happens. Just the portal jumpers and the security force going with the merchandise. Hopefully, though, the creature we’ve got at the new portal isn’t massively endangered, and our jumper will be able to tell us how to care for him.”
“Maybe ship us some supplies?” Conrad asked. “And a halter or whatever?”
Troy nodded
.
“You guys give me your wish list and I’ll see what we can justify asking for.”
“All right,” Conrad said. “Truth? I’m about to pee myself, this is so cool. We’re just trying to do the right thing for him and get all the data we can from having him around. His skeletal structure is amazing.”
Troy grinned.
“I’d be right there with you, if I didn’t have sixteen other things demanding my intense attention every minute.”
Conrad whistled.
“I bet. They’ve got too much space over there for this to be their only vice.”
Troy frowned.
Conrad was a very insightful, observant man.
“Yeah. You’re not wrong.”
“Well, man, you called me. What can I do for you?”
Troy chewed his lip for a second.
“All right, so here’s the deal,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on over there that I’m trying to get my hands around, and I don’t have enough people I trust to manage it. Right now, I’m leaning on the guy who ran the whole thing and a bunch of faceless security grunts, and there’s every chance there’s a room full of shredders and… hell, a crematory running full time right now, hoping I don’t dig out the secrets before they can get rid of them.”
Conrad sat back in his seat, crossing his arms and throwing a foot up across the other knee.
“You think there are bodies?”
Troy blinked.
Of all the people on base he trusted, this man was the one who deserved it the most. Olivia and Celeste and the rest of the lab staff, Troy trusted completely and without reservation, but Conrad had earned not just trust but confidence. Without Jesse or Cassie here to talk to, and with Slav working for a tech startup out west, Troy needed someone to talk to, and Conrad was the best he was going to get.
“You’ve heard about the NDAs?” he asked. Conrad nodded.
“No more than that no one will talk about them,” he said.
“They’re awful,” Troy said. “We’re still trying to figure out how to break them, so I can interview the people who have been doing all of this stuff. At some point, Donovan just started staffing an entire shadow base, back there, security and jumpers and labs and everything, but he was short-staffed, and he didn’t have the expertise to do everything, so he was pulling from the main portal program, and I need to know what they were doing.”
“Okay…” Conrad said. “How can I help?”
Troy shook his head.
“It’s not that you can help. It’s that you need to understand that those NDAs were protecting big secrets. And I can’t trust just anyone to help me dig those out and deal with them.”
“Ah,” Conrad said. “Well…” He paused. He was still a young man, almost ten years younger than Troy, but he had such a natural level of confidence and leadership that it was easy to forget. He’d come here hoping that Troy would be his mentor. “I’m honored, if you’re saying that I’m one of the ones you trust.”
“You, Celeste, Benji, and Olivia are just about the only ones I trust,” Troy said. Conrad motioned.
“And Bridgette.”
“I assume you had something to do with her showing up yesterday morning?” Troy asked. Conrad grinned.
“She and my dad hated each other,” he said. “In the best possible way. I called him and told him you needed a dragon to guard the gates, and he called her himself.”
“You know her,” Troy said, and Conrad nodded rapidly. Licked his lips.
“Some day when the world isn’t ending anymore? Go out and get a Hershey bar and switch out the wrapper with a Solanna bar. Leave it on her desk with a bow. She’ll know it’s from me.”
Troy frowned, but Conrad just winked and nodded again.
Troy laughed and shook his head.
“If I remember.”
“So what can we do?” Conrad asked.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Troy said.
“You need the Jalnians here,” Conrad said, looking around. “Where are they?”
Troy shook his head.
“Don’t know. Don’t know when they’ll be back.”
“They’re good friends, when you can get ‘em,” Conrad said, and Troy nodded.
“They are. All right, look, so, you’ve already seen basically the biggest secret in the country, at this point. And you’re still here and working.”
“What, that the Secretary of the Air Force was under the influence of an unknown foreign terrestrial?” Conrad asked.
“Yeah,” Troy said slowly. “And Senator Greene hasn’t breathed a word about you, since, so I’m assuming she’s fine with you just… keeping that to yourself and that being the end of it.”
Conrad shrugged.
“What am I going to do about it?”
Troy nodded.
“So I’m just going to keep trusting you at that level, because hell if that creature at the second portal isn’t the least of my problems.”
“Lay it on me,” Conrad said.
Troy nodded.
“There’s a second jump school, operating over there,” he said. “There’s an entire new group of brains up in the control room, don’t know where they came from or how they trained. And apparently we’ve been taking on refugees from other planets for the last six months. There are sections of the new complex that are protected by chlorine gas, and you have to have someone let you in who knows how to get through. And we’ve apparently been illegally shipping live foreign terrestrial animals all over the planet for no less than four months, at massive profit to the base and, I expect, General Donovan himself. I need to track down the money to figure out who else was filling their pockets, but that, at least, can wait a few weeks.”
“Back up the truck,” Conrad said. “What do you mean refugees?”
“I had a man in my office an hour ago who refers to himself as a Keld. He’s from a planet called… well, a place called Ron-telle Oland Illi’alllae’el, and I’m not sure which part of that, if any, is a planet name.”
“Damn,” Conrad said.
There.
That was exactly the reaction Troy had needed.
“Right?” he asked, finally feeling less like the not-a-General that he was and more like the lab leader he was good at being.
“Damn, damn,” Conrad said.
“I know,” Troy said. “His name is Wink, and his story is awful, and apparently we pulled him across in exchange for a gold scepter. I mean…” Troy spread his hands. “Why?”
“Musta been one hell of a scepter,” Conrad said.
“I can’t find the record of what happened to it,” Troy said, “but it’s not like I have even half of the stuff I need. Anyway, I’ve got an entire dormitory of these guys to get through, and all of them paid their way here, somehow.”
“Sounds like a program that’s rife with conflicts of interest,” Conrad said, and Troy nodded.
“Exactly. The law department wants to just dump them back across the portal and be done with them, but I can’t do that. It’s not right, and some of them - the Keld included - might die if we just drop them across without doing something clever.”
“So we need the jumpers to come tell us what actually happened,” Conrad said.
“Which means more interviews,” Troy said. “Interviews that I don’t have the skilled staff to handle.”
“You have an entire department dedicated to interviews,” Conrad said.
Yes. Yes, he did. But he and Cassie had mistrusted all of them by nature, because of the adversarial way that they’d been set up against jump school. They were there to be suspicious and to drag information out of unwilling jumpers.
“Okay, maybe they could do it, but I still…”
“You don’t like them,” Conrad read. Troy rolled his eyes.
“All right, no. I don’t. But neither does Cassie.”
Conrad winced his face to the side.
“I haven’t spent that much time around her, and O
livia swore she was awesome for a while, but the rumors all say that Cassie never liked anyone.”
That was true, too.
Damn Conrad and his good intel.
“Okay. Maybe I use the interrogation squad for some of the foreign terrestrials, but given the story I just heard from Wink, I have to think that some of them have been through some pretty terrible stuff, and I don’t even know how much English any of them speak…”
“Look, dude, you want me to go out drinking with you and talk about how much it sucks, I will, but you’re in charge now, and you need to get the job done. We can bridge the language barrier, no problem, and we need to find out who’s a threat and who isn’t. You gotta do it.”
Troy folded his arms and leaned back in his chair.
“Yeah. No, I hear you. It’s just… I don’t like being responsible for people’s lives like that.”
“That’s why you’ve got me,” Conrad said cheerfully. “I don’t have that weight, so I can see things the way they are.”
Troy looked away.
“They’re going to send them all back,” he said. “For the same reasons. You can’t endanger the entire planet for one foreign terrestrial’s life.”
“Move on,” Conrad said. Troy looked at him sharply and Conrad shrugged. “You know what you need to do. Make the move and move on.”
Troy grimaced, and Conrad gave him a sideways smile.
“Sorry, dude. You know it and I know it.”
Troy closed his eyes and nodded.
“Need someone to go through the rest of the compound. Identify and decommission traps, inventory what’s there.”
“That’s where my team comes in,” Conrad said. “Us plus security at the main portal, they get us through, we catalogue it and bring it back.”
“You have enough people?” Troy asked. Conrad shook his head.
“Not remotely. But we’ll make it work. Everyone’s been thin for months. Now, at least, we’ve got the light at the end of the tunnel.”
“I’ll see if Peterson’s got some jump school students who can help,” Troy said. “Just to be eyes and hands. It’s a big building, and we need to be sure that we go in with big enough numbers to get there before they can react.”
“Too late for that,” Conrad said. “But… yeah.”