Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  Bridgette whistled tonelessly.

  “All right,” she said. The line went dead and Troy pulled the phone away from his face.

  “What happened here?” the first agent asked as they got out badges and showed them to him. Troy gave them the brief summary.

  “You look after your people,” the second agent said. “We’ll go after White and the two who came for him.”

  “He is my people,” Troy said. “I put him in that car myself. Should have checked their badges, but I didn’t.”

  “Things happen fast,” the first agent said. “Can you describe them?”

  “Bigger than you two,” Troy said. “White. Buzz cut on one of them, frat boy cut on the other. We can get you security footage from outside of the barracks that ought to show them. Most everything outside of buildings here is captured.”

  “How’s your relationship with the city?” the second agent asked.

  “Decent,” Troy said. “We don’t cause problems, and we employ almost everyone.”

  They nodded.

  “They won’t stay here long. If they’re going to get caught, it’ll be in the next fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  Troy shook his head.

  “I have no idea where they’d take him.”

  “You look after your people,” the second agent said again.

  “All right,” Troy said. “But I do need him back as soon as possible. I have secure facilities that are literally booby-trapped until he tells me how to get into them. Let me see those badges again.”

  He took pictures of them with his phone, then called Malcolm back.

  “You heard from Bridgette?” he asked as the man answered.

  “How bad is it?” Malcolm asked.

  “One dead, one injured,” Troy said. “Just kids.”

  Malcolm cursed, and Troy nodded, angry.

  “Should have confirmed who they were,” he said.

  “Might have just gotten yourself shot, too,” Malcolm said, and Troy frowned harder. He hadn’t even thought about that.

  “At least I could fight back,” he muttered.

  “What do you need from us?” Malcolm asked.

  “Confirm the agents you sent,” Troy said. “Just to make me feel better.”

  Malcolm told him their names and Troy nodded.

  “Get them anything they need,” Troy said. “Then make sure that they keep me up to date. I’ve got bomb experts and I’ve got poison experts, but I need trap experts to help me get into my building, or at least mark out where I can’t go until we get the right people in.”

  The right people were Cassie and Jesse. Troy closed his eyes, as a new realization dawned on him.

  “We know that Donovan was working with a foreign terrestrial in Washington. There’s no reason he couldn’t have been involved in making sections of the complex inaccessible using technologies we haven’t even seen before.”

  There was silence.

  “Sorry, man,” Malcolm finally said. “I’m writing all of this down. This isn’t Washington-as-usual stuff, you know? I’m going to have to make some calls.”

  “Yeah,” Troy answered. “You and me, both. I need more boots.”

  “Let me see what we can get from other bases and here in DC,” Malcolm said. “You’re just so tricky with top secret stuff.”

  “I know,” Troy said, scratching his scalp. “Tell you what. This is all crazy. Let me get my people together in a room. Say, an hour? We’ll call you again and put together a plan.”

  “Senator is in session until three,” Malcolm said. “Can we push it until then?”

  Troy looked up at the sky, thinking through what was actually happening right that minute.

  “We can wait until three,” he said. “But you get me more boots.”

  “Yeah,” Malcolm said. “I’ll have an answer for you when we talk at three.”

  Troy nodded, hanging up. He called Bridgette.

  “I need everyone who’s still in charge of security anywhere to be at my office in ten minutes,” he told her. “And then I need legal, Conrad, anyone who thinks they’re in charge at the main portal, and Peterson in my office at three.”

  “You got it,” Bridgette said. “They put out a BOLO for me, but do you really think they’re going to stop in town?”

  Troy shook his head.

  “SIOs said that it isn’t going to do any good if they don’t find them in the next fifteen minutes, but we have to try.”

  “We’re at war, Major,” Bridgette said. “You see that, right?”

  Troy rubbed his face, looking around at the milling personnel.

  He found the two security officers standing by the guard hut on their phones.

  “You two are in charge here until you’re relieved. No one on base but actual base personnel unless I personally clear it. No one off base until I say otherwise,” he said without hanging up.

  “Yes, sir,” they answered. He put the phone back to his face.

  “If we’re going to be at war, I need to identify the enemy,” he said. He shook his head. The portal program didn’t train for war. There was a lot of self-defense and holding a location training that went on, but at the end of the day, if they encountered hostiles, protocol was very clear that he was intended to retreat in an orderly, well-defended way as quickly as possible. The idea of running a war, rooting out and destroying an enemy, was something he just hadn’t run simulations on, either for training or in his own mind.

  And there was a rhinoceros.

  “You met the foreign terrestrial who was manipulating the Secretary of the Air Force,” Bridgette said.

  “But I didn’t meet every foreign terrestrial through the portal,” Troy said.

  “You think they lost one?” Bridgette asked.

  “I think they may have invited him here for tea,” Troy said. “Everything I know about foreign terrestrials is that they’re smarter than we usually think they are.”

  “Everyone is on their way,” Bridgette said.

  How had she done that? He’d been on the phone with her all of the last three minutes.

  “I’m sending a car,” she said.

  “I have mine,” Troy said.

  “I’ll send someone to get it,” Bridgette said.

  “I have mine,” Troy said again.

  “Sir, I don’t like you having the idea that you go where you want to,” she said. “I need to know where you are and how to get you to the next place.”

  “With my keys,” Troy said, starting back toward his car. He lifted his head, missing what Bridgette said next.

  “Everyone back to your orders,” he called. “We’ve got a lot of work coming at us, and everyone needs to be doing what your CO thinks you’re doing.” He paused. “Now.”

  Bridgette had interrupted herself and started over again.

  “Drive yourself here,” she said, “but we’re going to set you up with a driver from there.”

  Troy glowered at his phone, going to his car and getting in.

  It was still running.

  “We’ll talk about it between now and three,” he said.

  Bridgette snorted and he hung up the phone.

  *********

  Jesse dragged Cassie back up the slope, finding a spot where the ground wasn’t too rough under the ash to lay her down. She shivered and shook for a full minute, and then she went still. He sat next to her, quietly, as she opened her eyes and sat up.

  “We always return home,” she said. He nodded to himself. He wasn’t surprised that Cassie’s instincts were right - both because they were Cassie’s and because she had the siren in her - but it was good to confirm it. “But home rejects us.”

  She turned her head slowly, finding Jesse and taking him in with wide, plain eyes.

  “We need to know what happened,” Jesse asked. “If we’re going to help you.”

  “This place is… not ours,” she said.

  Right planet, wrong spot. Well. He couldn’t get that lucky at the first shot. />
  “Do you know how to find your people?” he asked. She squinted at the sky.

  “The tide comes,” she said. “We must flee. Water will crush us.”

  He shook his head.

  “She floats,” he said. “We can both swim.”

  The siren scrambled, trying to find Cassie’s feet like someone who had never used them.

  “Water,” she said. “Water boils… crashes… crushes the things.”

  “You mean things that are mass, rather than energy,” Jesse said. Her head swung around to look at him again.

  “Mass,” she said slowly. “Yes.”

  “Water is that way,” he said.

  “I…” She stopped short. “I… know.”

  “So we go that way,” he said, thumbing the other direction. He didn’t miss the introspective moment as she caught a glimpse of her hands and looked hard at them.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll flee, if that’s what we need to do.”

  She swung her head, a motion that reminded Jesse of seaweed underwater, and she looked at him again. He reached for her hand and she jerked it away, looking at it again, then stabbing it at him in what was her best attempt at offering it back to him. He took it gently and gave her a quiet pressure, which Cassie’s reflexes responded to well enough not to fall down. The siren learned to walk as he led her away from the ocean, glancing back. The sound of waves was definitely picking up. It was still far away, but it was loud enough for him to hear it, now. He wondered what had tipped off the siren.

  “Do you have a name?” he asked as they walked. The siren wasn’t anywhere near as clever as Cassie, but Cassie’s body was making up for some of it.

  “We are… Song,” she said after a long pause. He was suspicious that she didn’t completely understand the idea of a name, but he could use it.

  “All right, Song. I need to know what happened here. What can you tell me?”

  “It rejects us. We wane.”

  “We’ve noticed,” Jesse said, encouraging her. “Sirens don’t show up as often as they used to, and they’re in smaller numbers.”

  She shuddered, and he slowed to help her stay on her feet.

  “Two and one, two and one,” she said. “We are less.”

  “But you can help us find the rest of them?” he asked.

  “We always return,” she said. “We rise, we expand, we are one. There is joy.”

  Jesse took a moment, listening to this.

  “Yes,” he said. “Joy. That’s the right word for it. For what you do. I’ve seen you before, singing, and it’s joy.”

  “It makes us strong,” she said, sounding more in her element.

  “Performing?” he asked.

  “Spreading,” she corrected. “You have siren joy in you. This one does not.”

  “Is that why you chose her?” Jesse asked.

  “She was in the water,” Song said.

  “Is that all it takes?” Jesse asked.

  There was a thunderous crash of a wave and Jesse looked back to discover that the gap in the sea cliffs was awash in white spray. He couldn’t see it very well from here, but he realized that the siren was right. They needed to speed up.

  A moment later, the wind hit them, stirring up the ash into wild shapes around them that quickly engulfed them like a wicked, gray fog. The light was too weak to make it through; they were in near-complete darkness, but at least the ground wasn’t under all of the dry, sliding ash. No, all they had to deal with now was the wet, slick ash.

  They were going to be underwater if they didn’t find the shore, and it was going to be a violent ocean that grabbed them and sucked them under.

  He could take them out again, if he had to, but it would be from open air, bringing up the risk of killing the siren, again.

  “Need to speed up,” he told her, drawing her behind him with more speed. She stumbled and fell, but she didn’t complain. He didn’t know whether that was because she was that tough or if she just lacked the words, but he kept on. The ground rose bit by bit, but the ocean sounds behind them were louder, when he could hear them over the slithering violence of the ash. He kept his arm across his face and his head low, but he could hear Cassie - Song - coughing as she breathed the stuff.

  It didn’t matter what was in it, Cassie’s body could withstand it, so long as she stayed healthy, otherwise. All the same, he turned back and showed Song how to cover her face to keep the worst of the ash out of her mouth and her lungs.

  “Poison,” she gasped between coughs. “It’s all poison.”

  He wondered what impact the changes on the sea and the air would have on a creature made entirely of energy.

  The wind only grew more violent but it finally thinned the ash out enough to let some light down to them again. Jesse looked up, guessing that the cloud overhead might have gone thirty feet or more. That much water pushing that much air, it would all suck back down with the tide when it went out again.

  How much ash was there going to be when they reached shore, he wondered.

  The siren wouldn’t have any awareness of it. She’d only be in the water, knowing about the tides, but completely ignorant of anything going on, on the land.

  This was the ash that drifted down after each tide. The supply of it on land?

  They might not be able to walk through it.

  Everything.

  Everything on this planet was going to die.

  He ran, pulling a stumbling, scraping, scrambling siren behind him as the elevation continued to gain.

  And then, despite the wind, they started sinking into ash again as they walked. It thickened, enough that he couldn’t see anything below his waist, though his legs told him he was only shins-deep in the drifted ash, and he couldn’t see enough overhead to even guess how deep the storm was.

  They were going to drown in water or drown in ash.

  There wasn’t another way.

  He started doing the mental calculations to get them out of there, back to the resort, when a sudden breath in the wind caused the ash to fall down on them like dead rain, and he saw a mountain peak in the distance.

  It wasn’t that far.

  If he could find it, it would probably have less drifted ash on it, being up that high…

  He calculated. Guessed. Tried. Checked. The ash rose up again, choking off everything. Cassie’s body struggled to get enough air, the siren was breathing so much of the stuff. He grabbed her hand and hit the execute function on his arm.

  Cassie, or Song, sagged against him, coughing helplessly as he stood, looking down at the catastrophic storm of ash on the coastal plain below.

  The mountain was exposed to enough air from the tide that all of the ash blew off of it, down into the valley behind it or the plain in front of it, but there wasn’t enough wind to blow that ash back up; they stood on exposed rock.

  Upside.

  The downside was that it was freezing cold at this elevation, and Song - he was convinced it was still the siren in there - was flagging hard.

  “Tip your head forward,” he said. “Good hard cough, then get it all up and out. The body will help you, if you control it.”

  Her next attempts weren’t that much better, but she seemed slightly less panicked. He clapped her on the back and looked out at the sea again.

  “Do you know where your people are?” he asked, looking at what they could see of the coast line from here. “Are we even close?”

  He’d been shooting for near equatorial. He didn’t know how far off he was, though he was beginning to be able to place topographical features against the known maps of the planet. He didn’t think he was that far off, though he would be certain, once he could see the exact shape of the coast with the tides in.

  That had been his mistake. Assuming that the tides were rational. Hadn’t anticipated the mass of the moon.

  Song leaned against him, hands grasping at his elbow as she tried to stand. She pointed.

  “There.”

  He looked at
her and she sagged again, falling to the ground and staying there in a huddle.

  She was cold.

  She was dying.

  Cassie was killing her, as unintentionally as possible, but she wasn’t meant for a body, and the body wasn’t meant for her. In this case, the Palta was going to win.

  He squatted next to her, then looked around, finding a dip in the rock where he could get his back against it and pulling her over to it. He pulled her, facing the ocean, against his chest, folding his arms around her and putting his face against hers.

  “That’s your home,” he said. “You hold on to that.”

  “It rejects us,” she breathed, and then she was quiet.

  *********

  Troy had been in high-level meetings, before.

  Standing in front of this group of officers, though, made him uncomfortable. Portal security, base security, Security Forces, everyone who had ever frowned at him as he went by, wondering if he really needed to be there was represented in his office, and they were all scowling.

  “We need to identify the green areas of the new compound and mark off everything else,” he was telling them. “I’ve got people in there working, and I don’t want any of them anywhere that is remotely unsafe. We’ll get Major White back and he can help us narrow them down, but for now I just want a record of everywhere we’ve actually been, getting the staff out, and we’re going to shut down everything else.”

  “Who’s doing the work?” Major Albero asked.

  “I need the portal staff doing it,” Troy said. Albero had known that was what he was going to say, and the man prepared to argue it. Troy shook his head.

  “I know you’re stretched thin, but it’s going around, right now. I told Washington we need more boots, but they aren’t going to be here in the next three days, and we still need to get a grip on this in the meantime. Base security needs to reprioritize toward three things: keeping exactly the people we want going in and out of the secondary portal complex the only ones who come or go, keeping the gates on and off of base under professional, armed control, and patrolling the perimeter fences and walls.”

  “Who’s going to be responsible for the main portal?” Albero asked. Troy gave him a slightly exasperated look.

  “You are,” he said. “We’re going to postpone all non-critical jumps, but, yes, you still have to keep people where they belong at the main building.”