by Chloe Garner
“We going to talk about the foreign terrestrials you’re asking me to police?” Albero asked.
“Yes,” Troy said. “As soon as I’ve finished making sure the base is safe from outsiders.”
“We can cover the new complex, the gates, and the walls,” Major Bennett said. “But it’s going to leave some holes.”
Troy nodded.
“I can accept that. Give me a full list and I’ll review if there’s anything we can’t live without.
The woman nodded taking notes.
“MPs are at the barracks,” Troy said. “I need to keep absolute calm over there until we know exactly who we’ve got in our net and can filter out the threats from the people who just responded to the wrong job offer.”
Major Edwards nodded.
“They aren’t going to like how many civilians we’re dealing with,” he said. “We should have the FBI here for this.”
“Noted,” Troy said. “I’ll talk to Senator Greene’s people and see if we can get some of them here, too, or if they’re going to walk in and try to take over.”
“You let OSI from Washington take over with the shooting,” Bennett said. Troy didn’t have as much experience with her or Edwards as he did with Albero, but she had quick eyes that made him nervous.
“Because that’s their job,” he said. “And we aren’t equipped for investigations. Aren’t equipped for what we’re already doing. We aren’t going to let outsiders come in and run our base, but with how thin our resources are right now, with the purge of Donovan’s appointments…”
“Some of them were good men,” Edwards said. Bennett nodded, and Albero narrowed his eyes in something that wasn’t quite agreement but wasn’t disagreement either.
“And if they deserved the jobs they had, we’ll talk about bringing them back,” Troy said. “In the meantime, I’m only trusting people I know I can trust.”
“How do you know you can trust them?” Bennett asked. “You’re assuming that everyone on base the day Donovan got here was incorruptible.”
Troy sighed.
Okay, she was right.
“Do you have a better standard?” he asked.
“You could trust the people who are in charge of them,” she said, her tone even, her words dagger-thin.
“Who did you lose that you wish you had back?” he asked.
“A full staff,” Edwards said. Bennett nodded.
“I’d vouch for any one of the men who worked for me.”
Troy scratched his forehead.
Albero was the only one who knew about the foreign terrestrials in the secondary compound. The other two just assumed that Donovan had built an entire second complex for purposes of power, ego, and perhaps they guessed at the financial component. He didn’t think that anyone would have guessed that Donovan had been so rash as to voluntarily bring across foreign terrestrials, sentient or otherwise.
“I’m trying not to be surprised,” Troy said. “And it’s not working out so well, given that someone stole the one man who knew how to operate that complex.”
“You handed him right over,” Edwards said. Troy nodded.
“And I put two cadets in the line of fire,” Troy said. “Forgive me if I’m not really looking to welcome more people into my inner circle that I don’t know well.”
“I don’t know you,” Edwards said.
“That isn’t helping,” Bennett said. “How did they know to come for him now?”
Troy shook his head.
“I’m going through that in my head now,” he told her. “The number of people who knew this timing… It was small.”
“Then you’ve got a small pool of leaks to deal with,” she answered. “Would you like help with that?”
He pressed his mouth. The problem was that it wasn’t on his side. Malcolm had told him the timing not an hour before.
“I’ll let you know,” he said. “In the meantime, get your people ready for long hours and intense work. After this…? We don’t know what to expect, so everyone needs to stay armed, stay sharp, and call in anything they see or hear that doesn’t make sense. I don’t want any more of our people getting hurt while we figure this out.”
All three of them nodded and Troy slid off the corner of his desk to stand.
“All right,” he said. “Let me know if you hit a roadblock and we’ll get it fixed.”
Albero stood as the other two left, then he jerked his head at Troy.
“We need to talk about transportation.”
“I’m not getting a driver,” Troy said. “I’m perfectly capable of driving my car.”
He frowned.
“I meant the gooey pinks in the shadow building,” he said.
“Gooey pinks?” Troy asked. He realized immediately what Albero was talking about, but he hadn’t heard that term before.
“One of my guys started calling ‘em that - the foreign terrestrials no one has laid eyes on before. You know, like from the movie?”
“There’s a movie with gooey pink foreign terrestrials?” Troy asked.
“You’re too young,” Albero grunted. “Don’t worry about it.”
Troy frowned, but Albero waved him off again.
“I assume you want my guys picking them up and delivering them to interrogation without visibility issues.”
“If you mean in crates, no,” Troy said. “We will use careful timing and zone restriction to move them on their own feet. And you will do it on my schedule and theirs, not yours.”
Albero narrowed his eyes at Troy.
“You think someone died and left you their big boy pants, then, huh?”
“They are people, Major,” Troy said. “We will treat them that way until we have reason to believe that they are criminals, and even then we will treat them like people.”
“They don’t belong here,” Albero said. “We all know that.”
Troy shook his head.
Why was he the only one who saw them as something other than liabilities?
“Fortunately, that’s not your call to make.”
“Don’t know what you mean to say, by that, but I don’t think I like it,” Albero said, and Troy shrugged.
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m still the commanding officer on this base until they relieve me, so we’re not going to worry about whether or not you like it.”
He stood straight, looking at Albero, who finally blinked and started toward the door.
“We will use force if we feel it’s necessary to transport them.”
“They aren’t prisoners,” Troy warned.
“If they try to hurt my guys,” Albero said ominously, then spread his hands, pulling the doors open and letting both of them fall closed behind him. Troy shook his head. Guy always did know how to make an exit. Bridgette came in barely a beat behind Albero.
“Resumes for three drivers,” she said, brushing past him and putting them on his desk. “All of them from other branches of the service, all with sterling recommendations and the clearance to go all the way to the door of any building on base.”
Troy didn’t turn around to look at her.
“Was I in any way unclear?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Nor was I.”
Troy didn’t like pulling rank. Okay, sure, with Albero it was kind of fun to be in charge of him rather than the security officer running roughshod over the labs, for once, but in general - and with people who weren’t just jerks for the fun of it - Troy preferred to reason with them.
Bridgette was not the type of woman who was going to reason with him about this.
He opened his mouth to tell her that he would not, would not be taking a driver, when she walked back around in front of him, her finger pointed at his nose from about an inch.
“You are going to be busier than you can imagine for some time now, Sir. You need to be able to walk out of a building and get into a car and go where you need to be without thinking about it and without interrupting what you’re doing. You will take a dri
ver, and you will be rude to him. You will turn up expecting him to be there, and he will be there, and you will be ungrateful. Because you need those minutes, and you need that focus.”
He felt like he was staring at a cobra coming out of a basket. He couldn’t look away from the point of her red-painted fingernail. The eyes were directly behind it, out of focus, and mesmerizing.
“Pick one,” she said, not moving.
He swallowed.
“I’d only give them a day,” he said. “And if I didn’t want to deal with it, I’d just be jerking them around.”
“That’s what they’re good at,” Bridgette said. “Just like me. They’re used to it. They’re trained for it. And they’ve worked with people a lot more important than you. Pick one.”
He looked over his shoulder. Blinked the world back into focus.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll look at them.”
“I have the updated stack of decoded records for the foreign terrestrials.”
“I want to start scheduling them for formal interviews at the main portal facility,” Troy said, going around his desk just to have it between him and Bridgette.
“Okay,” she said.
“Albero is going to provide transportation, but I’m going to be there to observe the interviews in person.”
“You don’t have that kind of time,” Bridgette said.
“I know,” Troy said. “That’s why I’m going to move my office there until the interviews are complete.”
“Wh-” Bridgette started. “What?”
He nodded.
“You heard me. We’ll put a guard on the door, you can stay here or you can set up outside of the observation room, either one, and I’m going to work from there.”
“During the interviews?” she asked, skeptical, now.
“I owe it to them,” Troy said. “Everyone else here, they’re going to either have a job or not when this is done. Some of them might go to prison. But these guys, the foreign terrestrials we took in - at a hefty price - are expecting asylum, and I’m going to do my best to represent their interests to my higher-ups when they come and decide to send everyone back where they came from.”
She shook her head.
“You owe it to your country and to the men and women serving under you to ensure their safety and your mission.”
“I’m not sacrificing either one of those,” he said, able to meet her gaze now, evenly. “The objective of this base is to collect information about foreign worlds and cultures, establish connections with them of a political and economic nature, and support those connections without risking the integrity of those cultures or the safety and interests of this country and this planet.”
She twisted her head to the side.
“So you can quote it to me,” she said. “Can you live it?”
“I intend to,” he said. “But those foreign terrestrials are people that we have established a relationship with. They are assets, in the most calculated, pragmatic sense, and I will preserve them if possible.”
“Their presence here is illegal,” she said. He shook his head.
“Check your charter,” he said. “Us bringing them here is illegal. Them being here is nothing of the sort. Jesse belongs here, and so does Cassie.”
The corner of Bridgette’s mouth ticked up.
“I think no one has any idea what Lieutenant du Charme’s legal status is, anywhere.”
He shrugged.
“Once she gets back, we’ll talk about it.”
“They’re going to try to charge her with dereliction of duty,” she said.
“You know something?” Troy asked.
“Just the way they work,” she said softly. “You should look out for her.”
Troy grinned.
“When you meet her, you’ll get why that’s funny,” he answered. “Get the interviews lined up. I’ll give you a schedule as soon as I’ve gone through these. Then do what it takes to make the interview observation room top-secret secure.”
“No one’s going to like you being there,” she said, and he shrugged. She nodded. “Good.”
He swallowed, sitting down.
“I want any updates on the cadet who was shot,” he said. “And if he’s on base or in town tonight, I want to go see him. Find me something thoughtful to bring.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Anything else?”
He checked the time. He had forty-five minutes until everyone showed up.
“Lunch,” he said.
“Ms. Macon called,” Bridgette said.
“You… failed to tell me that?” Troy asked.
“Seemed like everything up until ‘lunch’ was more important. Should I call her and ask if she wants to eat with you?”
“Please,” he said. She nodded.
“Pick a driver, Major,” she said. “I have a feeling that, before this is all over, I’m going to be giving you a stack of pilot resumes to look at.”
He wrinkled his nose.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Senators don’t normally come to you,” Bridgette said, glancing back once as she left. “No easy solutions, there. Fixing the base is one thing, and I can see that you’ve got what it takes to do that, but fixing what happened in Washington’s eyes may end your career. You’ve got to toughen up a lot more, if you’re going to make it through that minefield.”
He nodded to her.
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
*********
The tide came in completely after a little under an hour, by Jesse’s count, but the clouds of ash remained unsettled for another thirty minutes. Cassie’s body was struggling under the siren load, her breath shallow and her muscles twitching with cold shivers, but Song kept her eyes out on the sea the whole time, and Jesse held her tight against his chest, forcing heat into her to keep her body functioning.
Finally, the ash settled enough that Jesse thought that he could pick out a point to jump to, there where the ocean hit the shore, where it was washing away the deep rifts of ash and giving them a place to stand. It wouldn’t be dry or warm, but at least it wouldn’t suffocate Song. He could only hope that there were other sirens out there who could help Song and help him - and Cassie - figure out how to help them.
He lifted Song to her feet and put his arm around her waist to hold her there as he did the math on the point-to-point, executing it without hesitation. His feet found wet stones without issue, but Song nearly fell again, even with him holding her up.
The ash was mud, here. Like a wet sand that had almost no integrity, it slid around their feet and made everything treacherous, but the beach was no solution; the ash there was still sloughing off into the water from a depth of at least three feet.
He shook his head.
This, after years. The ocean couldn’t absorb that much material, could it?
He looked out at the water, waiting as Cassie’s bare feet sat in the water and Song clung to his shoulders for balance.
“You’re quite an adventurer,” someone said. Jesse turned his head to find a large blue energy form slipping up out of the water off to his right. It took a moment for it to adopt a face and a body that Jesse recognized.
“Where are they?” he asked.
He and the elemental looked out at the ocean for a moment as Song moaned.
“She’s dying, isn’t she?” the elemental asked.
“Looks to me like they all are,” Jesse answered. The elemental nodded.
“Yes. Beautiful creatures. It’s a shame.”
Jesse looked over again, curiosity getting the better of him.
Elementals were legendary. You didn’t just meet them, because - unlike sirens - they loathed attention and curiosity. Jesse had heard rumors that they met routinely with the Adena Lampak, because they were meditative thinkers, kind of the way you expected a creature so deeply affiliated with the ocean would be, but it wasn’t like the Adena Lampak to talk about it, one way or the other.
If you were looking for one, you’d never find one, and if you weren’t looking for one, you’d never find them, either. They were that mythical.
“They can’t draw enough energy here, anymore, can they?” Jesse asked.
“No,” the elemental asked. “It used to be that they came here to spawn, so full of energy that they split, and they celebrated it, but any more they come here and they merge. They’re returning back down to the original sirens, the original consciousness that spawned the choruses you know, and when they become their original consciousnesses, they’ll simply expire. There’s nothing less for them to be.”
“Us,” Jesse breathed. “They’re all one.”
“Yes,” the elemental said.
“Do you know how many there are?” Jesse asked.
“It isn’t my nature to ask or to count,” the elemental said. Jesse nodded. It wouldn’t matter much.
“How do I save them?” Jesse asked.
“I love them for their beauty and for their song,” the elemental said. “But I don’t change the direction of the world. Not like you do.”
Jesse frowned, resisting looking at the elemental.
“I may not know many Palta, but I would recognize the son of Eno-Lath Bron anywhere.”
“Of course you would,” Jesse murmured.
“They’re still here,” the elemental said. “Just not in the numbers they have been. They’re migratory. They wander the universe as they please, only coming back here when, as an identity, it’s time for them to spawn, or contract as the case may be.”
Jesse sighed.
It meant that, even if he could come up with something clever for the sirens who were here, there would be more elsewhere - many more - who would come here looking for energy and finding… gray mud.
He swallowed and glanced over again, but the elemental was gone. He had a light sensation in his chest, that he’d actually met one, but looking out at the gray water again, he wondered if Cassie had adopted a species that was headed for extinction no matter what they did.
Song lifted her head.
“Breath,” she said. “Breath is so hard.”
Jesse nodded.
“Compared to what you’re used to, I can only imagine.”