by Chloe Garner
“You were emotional,” Bridgette said.
“What she said,” Conrad agreed disagreeably. Bridgette shot him a look and he grinned without looking back.
“How are the labs holding up?” Troy asked.
“Getting too much stuff,” he said. “Happy as pigs in slop.”
Troy laughed.
The bounty of big jump days. He remembered that sense, like Christmas morning. He nodded.
“I’m not looking to supplement your staff at all, or any of the other labs. You do what you do and don’t worry if you have to take some time to work through backlogs.”
“Why wouldn’t we supplement the staff?” Conrad asked, and Troy frowned. Conrad nodded. “There were some guys working out in Seattle for a while, good guys from the sound of things, lost their contract to renew, but I thought I might float some job offers and see if I got any bites.”
Troy grinned.
“Make sure you tell Slav what I’m up to when you talk to him,” Troy said.
“Are you sure this is a good time to be brining on new staff?” Bridgette asked. Troy nodded.
“Slav and his guys got cut because of politics, getting back at me. If any of them would come back, they’re definitely my people.”
Bridgette gave him a quick little frown, but nodded.
“I’ve got someone coming tonight to do a secure transport of your documents. The security at the interrogation facility has been upgraded for the level of secrecy of your documents, but you won’t have electronic records of anything, there. I can’t retrofit the facility fast enough, and you don’t have the budget.”
“Paper is fine,” Troy said.
“Dinosaur,” Conrad mocked, looking up at the ceiling like it was interesting. Troy grinned and returned his attention to Bridgette.
“Interviews start tomorrow, based on the list you’re going to give me… right now,” she said. He paged through a notebook and tore out the sheet she needed, handing it too her. She frowned disapproval, but put it with her things.
“How are you going to aggregate the information from the staff interviews?” she asked. He sighed.
“Not a clue. You want to do it?”
She gave him a stern look.
“I do not have the time, nor the skills. You need to talk to the interviewers yourself to figure out where to start, and then make a plan.”
Troy grimaced.
“All right. You’re right. Get them each on my schedule tomorrow.”
“Has anyone pointed out that tomorrow is Saturday?” Conrad asked.
“It’s got twenty-four hours, just like any other day, hasn’t it?” Bridgette replied.
“Just saying,” Conrad said. “When you’re trying to keep up goodwill and endorsement for a new senior officer, working everyone twelve or sixteen hour days on the weekend isn’t gonna help.”
“It’s worth remembering, but unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about it right now,” Troy said. “There are too many secrets running around that I haven’t even seen coming. I need to know what I don’t know, and then I can really start digging.”
“Spoken like a true analyst,” Conrad said with a grin.
Troy shook his head, feeling the overwhelm hitting him.
“I need to go see the cadet who got hit,” he said.
“I need to get back to Bianca,” Conrad said. “We’re getting manure results in any time now and I want to be there.”
Bridgette frowned at him and Conrad waggled his eyebrows at her.
“Could you be more of a child?” she asked, and he grinned. Bridgette turned her attention to Troy. “I’ll have the individual interviewers here before the end of the day. I have the cadet’s parents on a plane now, and a driver waiting for you to meet them at the airport. You need to leave now, if you’re going to be back in time to talk to the interviewers.”
Troy nodded.
“All right. Thank you.”
“A driver, huh?” Conrad asked.
“I have too many files to go through to lose my time in the car,” Troy said. “It’s not permanent.”
Conrad grinned, raising a hand.
“Doing a good job, boss.”
Bridgette nodded.
“I’ll try to track down the OSI agents and see if I can get an update for you before you talk to the interviewers.”
Thank you,” Troy said, picking up the newly decoded foreign terrestrial files and heading for the door.
*********
Cassie splashed through thick, sucking water that nearly left footprints behind her, finding her footing on wet rocks as Jesse tried to get a hold of her arms. She kept them out of reach so that he didn’t accidentally end up making her fall. She was better off on her own.
She looked around.
The sea cliffs were gone.
“How long was I away?” she asked.
“A few hours,” Jesse said. “She’s getting weaker.”
“What did you figure out?” she asked, looking out at the ocean. “Where did all of the ash come from? How far did we go?”
“I know why they’re dying and what they want, but not how to fix it,” Jesse said. “The tide, about two miles.”
She looked around, doing the math.
Whistled.
Jesse waited.
“Tell me,” she said, feeling the tumultuous shape of the siren in her stomach.
“They stem from a finite number of initial consciousnesses,” he said. “They come here to split, but they don’t have the energy to do it, anymore, so they’re collapsing back down to the original individuals again.”
“We,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So they need to go someplace else,” she said. “Without collective awareness of all of the data about the universe, they couldn’t possibly know where to go.”
“We can’t communicate with them,” Jesse said. “The idea of an individual telling them something doesn’t make sense.”
She blew a raspberry and shook her head.
“So use the one in me to do it,” she said. “Does she know?”
“She’s got less clue than anyone,” Jesse said. “I think she was a sacrifice that they sent off to try to find someone to change an inevitable extinction.”
Cassie lifted her head.
“She’s not going to die.”
“She is.”
“No,” Cassie said. “She’s my ward. I won’t permit it.”
Jesse laughed.
“I’m not sure that you can do both, save the species and the individual.”
Cassie frowned at the gray, swirling water.
“Watch me.”
“Step one,” Jesse said, his tone drawing her attention back to him. “How do you save either?”
“You send them somewhere else,” Cassie said.
“Where?” Jesse asked.
“You found four planets with likely sites,” she said. “Pick one. Hell, pick all of them. Better a third of them survive than none.”
“That’s cold math,” Jesse said, and she shrugged.
“You asked for a solution. There it is.”
“How do you tell them?” Jesse asked.
She nodded at her stomach.
“Make her know. Find a way to give her the path, and then let her propagate it. Like bees.”
“Like bees,” Jesse said with half a smile. “And if it isn’t that simple?”
“Tell me why it isn’t, and we’ll fix it,” Cassie said. “Come on. Isn’t this what we do?”
“Do?” Jesse asked, putting his hands behind his back. “Why would you think Palta have a unifying trait and purpose?”
“I didn’t say Palta,” she said. “I said us. You and me. We see a problem and we step in and we fix it.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Jesse asked.
She narrowed her mouth.
“I have a living consciousness inside my body who is dying, minute by minute, and you want to talk about what I did on summer va
cation?”
“I want to know what experience you have being a Palta before I count on you being able to use that skillset in meaningful ways,” Jesse said.
Cassie narrowed her eyes at him.
It was a lie.
She knew it was a lie and he knew it was a lie.
The problem was that it was a good point.
“I did lots of things,” she said. “Sometimes I fixed problems and sometimes I caused them. I had Midas riding around in my head the whole time.”
“You go back and fix them yet?” Jesse asked.
“Clearly not,” she said. “We’ve been together since I got rid of him.”
“You could have done it while he was still in your head,” Jesse said. She shook her head.
“No. He wanted to break things. That was what made him happy. The chaos. He thought that if I left a wide enough chaos trail, you’d show up to fix it because you knew who I was, and then he could trap you.”
“So you break something new and go back and fix the old thing,” Jesse said.
Cassie shifted, looking at her bare feet. She couldn’t feel them anymore, but there wasn’t any damage going on.
“You think Mab didn’t think of that?” she asked. He bit his lower lip. Human affectation. Mab had never done it except with a sense of play. All the same, it told her what he wanted her to know. There was nothing on his face that wasn’t there for her benefit.
“She had the consciousness running her brain,” he said.
“And she caused dozens of mass extinction events,” Cassie said. “I caused wars. Dynastic overthrows.”
“Unplugged one of the gemstone cities of the universe,” Jesse said. She smirked.
“I stand by that one.”
“What did you do with her?” Jesse asked. The power plant of the Gana race, daughter of the king, tied to a chair her entire life and use for nothing but power and offspring. Cassie shook her head.
“We’re still not okay that you knew about her and left her there.”
“You caused death when you did that,” Jesse said. “Did you ever go back and look at it? Own what you did?”
Cassie’s stomach stirred, and she wasn’t sure what was guilt and what was siren.
“No,” she said. “I don’t need to grieve over the consequences of a right action. Especially not if it’s going to make me less likely to take that action in the future.”
“You should,” he said. “It makes you less likely to do something without considering the consequences.”
“You think I didn’t consider them?” she asked.
“I have to hope that Mab wasn’t considering them,” he said quietly, and Cassie turned her head away.
She knew what it felt like.
Knew what had been going on with Mab, at least to some extent.
She knew that Jesse couldn’t bear to hear it.
“That’s not what you want to talk about,” she said.
“I want to know where you were.”
“I want to know why you kissed me.”
Silence.
It was the winning bid.
He regretted it.
Taking him back to why he’d done it, before he’d talked himself out of it, before he’d come to the ethical conclusion that there was no way to justify a relationship between the two of them, no way for it to work, taking him back there and making him talk about it… it was cruel, but it was exactly as cruel as making her talk about what she’d done with Midas riding around in her head.
She didn’t look at him.
Didn’t want to see his face.
Didn’t want to hear what he wanted her to know, to see the things he would try to keep private.
He underestimated her.
Hadn’t been around her enough, yet, to know just how Palta she was, and just how human. It was part of the purpose of their little vacation - he wanted to calibrate, and they both knew it. He was curious.
She didn’t hold that against him.
But it also didn’t mean that she had to be nice about it.
“So how do we communicate with them?” she asked.
“We can’t,” he said. “Even if we found a way to give information to the ones who are here, there’s no way to tell all of them. They come here as they see fit. We’d have to station ourselves here and catch every new wave of them as they came in, and if your solution to all of this is the siren you’re carrying around inside of you, I suspect that’s only going to work once.”
“I’m listening,” she said.
“We don’t know enough about them,” Jesse said. “And there’s no way to get more information. They might only come back here every few years.”
“How do they find it?” Cassie asked, moving deeper into the water. The ground under her feet, apart from being very uneven for rocks and debris, was pretty flat, and she waded several yards away from Jesse without the water really getting much deeper on her shins.
“Home,” Jesse said. “How does anyone ever find home?”
That was pain. She wasn’t supposed to hear it, but she did.
“There aren’t any beacons,” she said. “The magnetic field is gone. What about this makes it home?”
She looked up at the sky, and the answer occurred to her at the same time that it did Jesse.
“The water,” he said.
“The water,” she echoed.
Cassie shook her head.
“That’s not possible. You can’t boil the ocean,” she said. “It’s a truism.”
“You can,” Jesse said. “But you have to have something bigger than yourself to do it.”
She looked up again.
“You’re talking about killing the planet,” she said. “On purpose. Completely.”
“I am,” Jesse said softly after a minute.
“It could come back,” Cassie said. “Magnetic fields aren’t constant. Sometimes they give for a while and come back.”
“And it could go and stay forever,” Jesse said. “And wipe out the entire species, and then kill the planet.”
“And you take it personally that I saved a sex slave from the royal family,” she said. “You’re talking about ensuring that no creature who has ever existed on this planet has any chance of recovering, for a chance at saving a species of energy creatures who are too dumb to stop coming back.”
There was another gap.
“I am.”
“Let’s do it,” Cassie said.
*********
After the hospital trip with Rodriguez’ parents, excruciating but the right thing and absolutely the only thing Troy would have done, and then after the interviews with the interviewers - still way too incomplete, but encouraging for the information they had so far - Troy had one more trip to make.
He went to the airport once more to get Evans’ parents.
His mother had red eyes, and his father was only just holding it together.
“He’s at the medical examiner’s office,” Troy said as they got into the car. “I can take you directly there, or, if you need a few minutes after your flight to just… take them, I can take you back to my office.”
“I want to see my son,” his mother said, and Troy nodded at the driver.
“No one would tell us about what happened,” Evans’ father said.
Troy sighed, not burdened, but sad.
“There are things going on, on the base, that I can’t tell you about, for security reasons. He was on duty guarding the front gate on base and two men shot him as they were trying to leave.”
“Was he trying to stop them?” Mr. Evans asked.
“On my orders, yes,” Troy said.
“It’s your fault?” Mrs. Evans asked.
“He was just supposed to shut down the gate,” Troy said. “There wasn’t supposed to be a confrontation.”
“Larry,” Mrs. Evans said sharply and the other man glanced at her.
“I’m sorry,” Troy said. “It’s… It’s shocking, for this to happen here. We’re a
small base, and it feels like a family…”
“You aren’t his family,” Mr. Evans said.
“He wanted to stay here,” Mrs. Evans said, her voice cracking as she pushed at her eyelids with her fingertips. Troy offered her a handkerchief that Bridgette had tucked into his pocket on the way out, and she took it, holding it to her cheeks until she’d regathered herself. “He wanted to stay here, after graduation. The idea of being around people who had touched other planets…”
She pressed the kerchief to her eyes again and looked away, pressing her lips hard as they wobbled.
“Did you know my son?” Mr. Evans asked.
“No, sir,” Troy said.
“Have you been… through the portal?” Mrs. Evans asked.
Troy drew a breath, considering.
“Yes.”
She looked at him, fresh tears.
“That’s why he wanted to be here,” she said. “Because of people like you.”
“Got him killed,” Mr. Evans said.
“He joined the military,” Mrs. Evans said, her voice sharp. “Did you really not think it might happen?”
“He was stationed in Kansas,” Mr. Evans answered.
Troy felt completely out of his depth.
With secrets and foreign terrestrials and physical risks, he felt much more like he was in control - there was a situation, and all he had to do was react. Make a choice.
Here, he was trapped with grief that wasn’t his own, and that he had no power to fix. All he could possibly do was make it worse, so he tried to just keep himself to himself, let them say what they needed to say.
They finally made it to the ME, where Mrs. Evans cried some more and Mr. Evans raged at the poor assistant who had stayed late for this.
“When can we bury him?” Mr. Evans finally asked.
“When OSI and the ME say that you can,” Troy said. “There’s a Sergeant from the school who will take you to guest lodgings and make sure that you have everything that you need tonight. I am so very sorry for your loss.”
He walked them back out, finding the man Bridgette had promised would be there, and he stood in the light as the Sergeant walked the grieving couple out to a car in the darkness.
Troy sighed.
He was exhausted.
Emotionally, physically, mentally spent, and he had lawyers showing up in his office first thing in the morning.
He hadn’t eaten dinner yet.