Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  “And it got Donovan fired?” she asked. He considered, then nodded. The cause and effect there was obvious. “I heard a rumor that there’s going to be a new Secretary of the Air Force, too,” she said.

  “I can’t tell you anything about that,” he said, nodding. Her eyes flicked wider, then she nodded back.

  “I’m thinking,” she said after a minute, “I’m thinking that maybe there’s a benefit to having my boyfriend be the one who knows all the secrets.”

  He gave her a playful scowl, and she smiled, just sweet.

  “You’re thinking about it, then?” he asked, finishing his drink and putting it on the edge of the table for the server to grab on the way by. Cal’s, of all of the places around base, understood that they didn’t want waiters and waitresses stopping by often and unexpectedly while they ate. It was strictly against regs to talk about jumps or base business off of base, but everyone knew it happened, and Cal’s went out of their way to make itself a safe place.

  Olivia shrugged, putting her drink next to his to get refilled as long as the server was coming.

  “I’m thinking,” she said. “It doesn’t mean I’m thinking about it.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. I can respect that.”

  “You can’t tell me where you are, when you’re gone,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re with Cassie or not.”

  He raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t made that connection, but…

  “No,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t.”

  “You tried to bring me with, but that’s… I’m made for a lab, not a foreign planet.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t want to try to talk you into something you don’t want to do.”

  “And I don’t want to be an anchor.”

  He frowned.

  “You aren’t.”

  She laughed, looking away, shy.

  “I am,” she said. “And you need to be able to say it out loud. Okay, yes, I’m really angry that something happened with the two of you, because… I don’t know, it was like, you were both trying to prove that there wasn’t anything going on, and then there was and… It made me really angry. And I still am angry. But you told me, and… Whatever. But we didn’t work, before that, because I’m an anchor and you’re a bird.”

  Troy snorted.

  “I’m not a bird.”

  “You are,” she said. “You want to fly. You want to travel, everywhere. The idea of having a single permanent place where you go… It doesn’t make sense to you.” She looked at the table, licking her lips like she was deciding whether to say the next thing. He waited. “The idea of having one person that you go with. I knew it, when I changed jobs. That this might not work because you aren’t that type…”

  “Olivia,” Troy said. Technically it was interrupting, but it seemed like she’d run out of words. “Olivia,” he said again, and she raised her eyes to look at him without moving her head.

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said. “Even if you think it’s the truth.”

  He nodded.

  Took a breath.

  Took his time.

  He needed it to be the right words, and - she was right - they needed to be true.

  “I’m not going to let you go that easily,” he said. She pursed her lips delicately, waiting, and he nodded again. “I don’t know if we work, long term, but… I want to find out the hard way.”

  She gave him a pressed-lipped smile and moved her elbow as the server scooped up their drinks and kept walking.

  “What if I can’t live with you jumping?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Maybe that’s the hard way, and it’s coming faster than I think. But I’m grounded until I get the base up and going again, and in the meantime, I’m not sure I get to see you often enough for you to get an idea that we shouldn’t be together.” He shook his head. “The problems we have to solve, Olivia…”

  She nodded.

  “We’re working on them.”

  “Not fast enough,” he said. “We don’t have enough people. Donovan had an army doing what he was doing, and I just…” He shook his head. “I just put all of them into segregation.”

  She blinked quickly.

  “The building is empty,” she murmured, and Troy nodded. She shook her head and sighed. The weight of the previous two days came to sit on him all at once, and all Troy wanted to do was go home and lay down in his bed and sleep.

  He wanted Olivia to come home with him.

  To lay in his bed with him.

  To sleep with her hand on his chest, folded in his hand.

  Like Cassie.

  Like Starn.

  It hadn’t been that long back…

  Olivia was looking at him oddly, and he wondered what memory she’d seen in his eyes.

  “Sometimes you just… go,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t be. I… That’s the part of you that I found attractive, at the beginning. You’d be sitting at your desk and you’d be staring at nothing, and when you came back, there was this new energy and this new idea, and I just…” She looked down, turning her head toward the table. “I’d sit and stare at you, waiting to find out what you were thinking, when you came back.”

  “And I never saw it,” he said. She shook her head quickly, looking back at him with sparkling eyes.

  “But Celeste did,” she said, and he grinned.

  “Of course she did.”

  “You’re dead on your feet, soldier,” she said. She jerked her head away from the wall, not actually toward the front door, but a leaving motion. “Come on.”

  He pulled out his wallet, leaving a stack of cash deep enough to cover the meal, plus, then he nodded and stood.

  Swayed.

  Olivia caught his shoulder.

  “When was the last time you slept?”

  He shook his head.

  “Two days,” he said. “I shouldn’t be this bad.”

  “Two hard days,” she said. “And before that…” She shook her head. “Come on. Do you need anything at home, or just to go?”

  He thought about it.

  He needed various things with various levels of urgency, but…

  “Nothing I can’t live without until tomorrow,” he said, stifling an unexpected yawn. She smiled.

  “Come on. You need sleep.”

  He didn’t tell her that he wanted her to come.

  There just wasn’t any point.

  *********

  Cassie fell onto the bed awkwardly. He’d misjudged the height and dropped her from about six inches, triggering all kinds of self-preservation reflexes damped by true exhaustion.

  “Sorry,” he said pressing her shoulder back onto the bed. She closed her eyes, amused.

  “Hello,” she answered, heaving a huge sigh and settling more voluntarily.

  “Food?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “Warm,” she said. “And sleep. Without her being awake while I’m supposed to be sleeping.”

  He frowned. He hadn’t thought about that. Cassie’s mind had gone wherever it had gone, but her body hadn’t slept normally at all, since the siren had taken her.

  “All right,” he said. “Your hair is wet.”

  “You don’t get enough practice with truly complex surfaces,” she teased, her eyes still closed.

  “You could have done it?” he asked, and she grinned, not answering.

  Yes.

  She could have.

  It was a startling realization, to read it on her face. She was better than he was at something.

  Something he’d been doing since long, long before she’d existed.

  How had that happened?

  “I wrote an algorithm,” she said.

  “I see,” he said, straightening and going to put things away around the room, things they’d left out from planning.

  “How does it feel?” she asked.
/>   “Hmm?”

  “To have just killed a planet on purpose?”

  He looked back at her, but she was still, laying on the bed with her hands folded over her stomach.

  She would be okay.

  She was Palta.

  “You’ve done something like that before?” he asked. She shrugged.

  “I’ve destroyed worlds,” she said. “Just littler ones.”

  “Then I guess we’re tied,” he said, “if we split this one.”

  “You didn’t do yours on purpose,” she said. When he looked again, she was sitting up, eyes intent on him.

  “I don’t think you did, either,” he answered, turning his face away again. It was frightening, what she could see on him, now. Sure, he’d always been able to read her like that, but he wasn’t used to someone doing it back to him.

  “Tell me about your wife,” she said.

  He swallowed, looking up from a map.

  “Tell me about being married to a human, as a Palta.”

  He turned and looked at her, his face as even as it could be, and she tipped her head.

  Such an odd, disconcerting combination of human and Palta, there. Everything she’d learned was still human, but the way that her face was wired - that was Palta. He’d never seen a classic study in where expression came from that was so clear-cut.

  She waited, and he went to sit next to her on the bed, pushing his shoes off onto the floor and tucking his legs under the heavy blankets.

  This war had been due.

  Long due.

  A war of secrets and stories and truths, of disguised intentions and goals. She held his eye, and he wondered if she might beat him.

  “My wife,” he said. Drew a breath and sighed. “She was maybe ten years younger than me. Pretty. Smart. Loved to study and to learn, but… She preferred pictures over the real thing. Where she had time to meditate. She could spend an entire day looking at a picture of a flower. Or a bird. Or a stone.”

  Cassie nodded.

  What those eyes saw.

  He tried to shut it down, but she’d gotten a crow bar underneath it, and she wasn’t going to let him get away that easily.

  “He knew that we didn’t match,” she said. “And so did I. But it didn’t matter, because we belonged together, and that was enough.”

  He twitched the muscles under his eyes, reprimanding her for making an analogy rather than giving him the real truth. She answered with the slightest tic in her shoulders. Human and Palta. It was the truth, just the way she was choosing to give it to him.

  “We met…” Jesse said, the truth torn from him as a condition of hearing more from her, things he hadn’t even thought about since he’d left his home behind. Longer. “It was almost two-hundred years ago, now. I was seventy and she was sixty, and we were considered young, by Palta standards, to be forming a union like that, but it was… We both agreed, and there wasn’t any point waiting, after that.”

  Pity? Was that pity? Or empathy? Was that her imagining having a marriage last that long?

  He couldn’t tell.

  Not with certainty.

  There was a wicked, whip-flash of temptation to dig into it, to ask a question, but that wasn’t how it worked.

  How did she know how it worked?

  “I trusted him,” she said. “He wasn’t ever going to be able to lie to me, and I think we knew that from the beginning. It’s not like many other humans are ever going to be able to lie to me, either, but someone who never needed to lie to me? That meant something. And he trusted me because he was too dumb not to, and that was… endearing. He didn’t need to doubt. Didn’t need to question. Simple and dumb and trustworthy and… He loved me completely. I didn’t need an equal for that to be enough.”

  Troy was dumb.

  Jesse had said it, himself, enough times.

  But to hear Cassie say it, that plainly, it was a death of sorts. She wasn’t human anymore, and as fond as she might have been of them, she didn’t identify with them.

  He wondered who she did identify with.

  If she thought herself Palta, or something new.

  Like Song.

  “I hadn’t seen her in two or three years when it happened,” Jesse said. “When you live as long as we do, things stretch out, sometimes, and other things fill in the gaps, and that’s okay.” He saw a pique of curiosity there; she was wondering about love, or - more likely - passion. The immediacy of human desire to invest their time and energy into each other. She still felt that. He’d wanted to know. Truth went both ways. “I worked with Mab more often than any of the rest of our family, but I hadn’t seen her in six months or more. There’s a tradition, every decade, of regathering the family and celebrating our accomplishments, and that was coming up for us, so we’d started sending messages to each other, setting it up, arranging a time and a location. Gayle was choosing which accomplishment to feature, but she hadn’t told me yet.”

  Concern.

  Fear?

  Cassie needed to know.

  She needed to hear.

  This. He wasn’t going to answer her real question unless she truly mastered the game and forced him to, but this was what he needed her to know.

  Sadness.

  She was sad for him.

  That was insulting, and he made sure that she knew it.

  She wasn’t going to pity the Palta experience, Palta traditions, because she liked her short, squalid human priorities.

  And then she was offended back at him.

  Humans did it right.

  He mocked her for her childish emotionalism, and she strengthened behind it.

  Something he’d needed to know, too.

  “I made him successful,” Cassie said. “I was smarter than everyone, and I made him more successful than anyone else. I saved his life. Made him a hero. He made me free. Everyone knew I was clever, but he was the face, the one that they all respected and admired. If he hadn’t been there, I’d have given off too much light, and they’d have all come after me to fix their problems. Having a simple, strong face to be the hero meant that they only came to him with the problems he could fix, and they left me to do what I wanted to do.”

  It was insightful.

  And manipulative.

  And Jesse wasn’t sure it was actually about Troy, though his question had been about being married to a human, not about Troy specifically.

  “She was my partner,” Jesse said. “And I loved her. I still do. But you can’t understand the nature of a relationship that lasts that long. That should have lasted for hundreds of years longer.”

  Probing.

  She wanted to know if he still thought of her.

  Gayle.

  With dark, gold hair and eyelids that could drop closed so slowly you swore she was stealing everything about you with a look.

  He didn’t answer her, because he didn’t have to.

  “The sex was great,” Cassie said. It was a slap. About passion and chemicals. Directly intended to try to make him tell her what he felt. He’d told her about his wife, but he wasn’t obligated to tell her about that.

  He didn’t.

  He didn’t ever think about it, so it wasn’t there for his face to betray him.

  First stalemate. He either had to offer her something new, attempt to redirect, to tease her into a new kind of information, or he could start the next round.

  Her first bid had been better than his, but he had much more experience at this game than she did. He was clever and disorienting.

  He wondered how she knew this game at all. Was it derived from how he’d behaved since she’d met him, or was it so fundamental to Palta nature that it was obvious? An interesting question, to be sure, but a distraction, right now. He needed to plan his next move.

  He had a sudden, flyaway thought that boggled at the amount of information he’d given away to Troy for free, but Jesse considered it and decided that it had only seemed fair: Troy gave everything away for free.

  “Tell me about
Midas,” he said after a long pause, and she turned down the corners of her mouth, nodding.

  “Tell me about your father.”

  Jesse narrowed his eyes.

  It was a good bid.

  A very good one.

  The trick to the game was to get exactly as much information as you gave, of the same quality, without asking for so much that the other side refused. When they did it, you lost, but more importantly, the game ended and the information exchange stopped.

  You had to bid right.

  The problem was that he didn’t see the motive behind it.

  While it was an excellent bid - he wouldn’t have told her about Eno-Lath Bron otherwise - he didn’t know why she cared. It made it difficult to shape the response to get the information he wanted about Midas. Too indirect or uninteresting, and he’d get the same in return.

  And Midas had been in Mab’s head.

  Without begin willing to think about it directly, Jesse desperately wanted to know about Midas, and what he had done to both women.

  The problem with being the one to start the next round was that he had to answer first.

  There was a risk to that.

  There was honor in meeting answer for answer but she wasn’t bound to it.

  If she even knew the rules.

  He suddenly felt out-bid, strangely enough, even though he wasn’t particularly protective about information about his father.

  “My father,” he started, watching her closely to help him guide what he told her, “was called Eno-Lath Bron. My given name is…” Ding. He nodded. There was nothing wrong with that. She wanted to know his name. It was an intimate question, but hardly invasive. “My given name is Janna-Lath Del.”

  “Jesse,” she breathed, and he nodded. It was out of turn, but he’d forgive it.

  “He was a diplomat to the universe. I spent easily forty years with him on one planet or another, learning the politics and the economics and the political players. The Palta are…” Again, the little shift in her face that expressed interest. Learning the politics and the economics and the political players. She was trying to grasp her heritage, from a genetic standpoint. This wasn’t necessarily about him at all.

  Outbid, indeed.

  “The Palta area reclusive species, when you consider it. We don’t welcome in other races readily and we don’t travel extensively because… Well, because most species are pretty boring to meet in person. We read about them, and we speculate about them, and we interact with them economically and therefore politically, but the Palta have historically only had a single ambassador-diplomat, and he’s usually from my family, because we’re weird. We like to go see things.”