by Chloe Garner
“I want you to re-open any case where a jumper died in the last six months, anybody working on the portal anywhere, and I want to reevaluate whether or not they deserve benefits.”
“You want us to re-open closed cases and look for liability?” the woman asked. Troy nodded.
“I do.”
“Bottom of the pile,” the taller lawyer said, and Troy shrugged.
“I’m fine if you don’t get to it by Monday, but I’m going to ask again on Friday.”
They looked at each other with a sense of exasperation and Troy gave them a grim smile.
“You can always hope that they appoint a new CO by then,” he said. “Otherwise, put it in the list and get it done.”
He went down his list, then nodded.
“Anything else?”
“We need to discuss the legal status of the Jalnians,” the tall lawyer said.
“We can do that when they get back,” Troy said. “I’m going to go check in on some interviews that are scheduled for today. I will see you here Monday morning.”
They paused and Troy stood.
“Dismissed,” he said, gathering his pages and waiting for them to walk ahead of him out the door.
That was actually fun.
He waited for them to start down the hallway, then he motioned Bridgette into his office.
“Tell me about the missing names,” he said. She nodded.
“Three of them, just like you thought. All from the same planet.”
“How did we not miss an empty room?” Troy asked.
“They didn’t,” Bridgette said. “It isn’t there.”
“What the hell?” Troy asked.
*********
The driver dropped him off outside of the secondary portal building and Benji met him at the door.
“Awfully early on a Saturday for you to be in,” Troy observed conversationally and Benji shrugged, taking a bite of a cream-cheese-sandwich bagel.
“We haven’t left,” he said. “Too much cool stuff over here.”
Troy grinned, showing his badge to the security officer and following Benji into the building.
“I haven’t been up to the dormitories, yet,” Benji said, and Troy nodded.
“You aren’t really supposed to be up there yet,” he told his one-time subordinate. “Still full of un-interviewed foreign terrestrials.”
Benji grinned.
“Celeste is going to have kittens that I get to go up before her,” he said and Troy laughed gently.
“I’m looking for a door that isn’t there,” he said, and Benji frowned.
“Sounds tricky.”
“Could be,” Troy said, “but I’ve got a dorm room number for the three of them and the guys who were supposed to be bringing them over for the interrogators to talk to them say the room doesn’t exist.”
“Did they try knocking on the wall?” Benji asked. Troy gave him a dour look.
“They work security. They don’t have the same kind of endless creativity that you do, to think of things like that.”
Benji grinned.
“Olivia said you liked my supergod theory for Thing.”
“He has two names, now,” Troy said dryly, and Benji grinned wider.
“You assigned him to me and Celeste. She wanted to call him Spike, but I told her it was either the collar or the name, not both.”
“Good man,” Troy said.
They walked past the guard in the barracks, a man Troy knew this time, and started down the hallway, counting doors.
At the end of the hallway, they turned, and the numbering scheme changed, but if the room on Troy’s papers was going to be there, it was going to be at the end of this hallway.
“This stretch of wall feel too long, to you?” he asked.
“Depends on how it’s shaped on the outside,” Benji nodded. Troy pulled out his phone and got the blueprints picture he’d taken, zooming in on it.
He took one, two, three steps back, measuring out the corner where the two hallways met against the door marked on the blueprint, then pointed.
“Should be right here,” he said.
He stepped forward, looking at the wall for signs of plastering. Benji stepped past him and knocked on the wall.
Troy never heard the sound.
*********
Cassie and Jesse walked off of the portal room floor. Cassie looked around, frowning.
“I see it, too,” Jesse said.
“There’s twenty percent too low a population here,” she said anyway. He’d have put it at twenty-three, but that was just compared to normal. Normal variation put her number at a more realistic value.
“What’s going on?” she asked one of the analysts as he scurried past her. He paused, looking from her to Jesse, then shook his head.
“Need to talk to the Major,” he said, then went on.
“The Major,” Jesse said ominously, and Cassie shook her head.
“Could be. They’d have to get rid of Donovan fast, and who else are they going to trust?”
“Hand over heart, I didn’t plan that,” Jesse said, and she shot him a dark look.
“I stand unconvinced,” she said. “Olivia will know.”
“You think she’s talking to you?” Jesse asked, and Cassie nodded.
“She will, if it’s about him,” Cassie said, taking a sharp turn and following a trickle of analysts and labworkers down into the basements under the building, going directly to the biology lab, where Olivia was standing over a microscope.
“Thought they didn’t have enough work for you,” Cassie said, looking around the room.
Olivia straightened and jerked her head to look at Cassie.
“You’re back,” she said.
“We’re back,” Cassie said. “Where’s Troy?”
“He’s at the other portal building,” Olivia said.
“Oh, so everyone found out about that, finally,” Jesse said. Cassie glared at him and he gave her a shrug that accused her of being disingenuous.
Yes, she’d known, too.
Today, it would have bothered her, but a week ago it had been a destructive secret that, simply by keeping it while she was here, she could get away with getting other stuff done.
She’d wrecked the base.
“You should talk to Bridgette,” Olivia said. “She’s in charge of his schedule, now.”
“Say that again?” Cassie asked. Jesse grinned.
“Hand to heart, I didn’t plan on that,” he said.
“She’s a friend,” Conrad said. Cassie turned to look at the tall man, but Jesse watched Olivia for one more moment. Conrad was full of all kinds of interesting information, but he needed to know how Troy was holding up, and if anyone was going to tell him that at a glance, it was Olivia.
She was relieved that he and Cassie were back. Troy was underwater, but mentally whole.
Good.
Jesse spun.
“Good to see you,” he said.
“You two make quite a splash everywhere you go, don’t you?” Conrad asked. “I’ll take you over to the other building to see him. He’s been waiting for you.”
“Unavoidably detained,” Jesse said with a quick, fake polite smile, walking through the doorway past Conrad.
“You’re Lieutenant du Charme?” Conrad asked Cassie.
“Not anymore,” she answered, her footsteps following Jesse. “You can call me Cassie.”
Conrad walked back up to the surface level with them, leading them out the wide set of glass doors and into the main parking lot.
“My car is over there,” he said.
“Cassie’s car is that way, but it’s so keyed up I’m not certain it still holds together,” Jesse said, and she shot him another look. She hadn’t loved that car, so there was no reason for her to pretend to be defensive about it now.
“I heard about that,” Conrad said with a wink. “You like to stir the pot.”
“That’s how you find out what’s in it,” Jesse answered.
They
got into Conrad’s car and drove to the shiny new building. Jesse had been inside it before, while they were building it, and he had a good guess what they were using all of the bits and pieces of it for, but they’d actually instituted pretty good security after that.
Security you couldn’t buy on earth.
There was stuff going on here that Troy needed to figure out, and stuff that Jesse had needed to stay well enough out of, because you can’t leash a Palta. That was their nature and that was their rule. He wasn’t going to let the humans leash him and try to use him against the entire rest of the universe, as much as they’d like to.
Conrad let them in the door and both Jesse and Cassie scanned the ceiling, noticing things that most - all - humans would fail to notice, given the knowledge they had, today.
Cassie might have seen some of it, back when she’d been human. That was what had made her special. That odd sense of perspective she brought to the things she saw.
“They’re up in the dormitories,” Conrad said. “Troy’s supposed to have interviews today. Don’t tell him I told you that. It’s secret.”
“Why?” Cassie asked. “The entire base knows something is going on.”
“But they don’t know that you’ve been hosting ‘foreign terrestrials’ here for the last six months,” Jesse said.
She tipped her head up, toward the little cell block of apartments, as if living a memory, and she nodded slowly.
“They were closer to ready than I thought. I guessed they were a part of an expansion plan that would happen later.”
“You’ve seen them?” Conrad asked.
“We’ve both been up there before,” Jesse said. “We can find our way from here.”
Conrad hesitated.
“They say there are parts of the building that are dangerous. We’re supposed to stay in green zones.”
Jesse chuckled and Cassie reached out to touch Conrad’s shoulder in an intentionally overly-condescending motion.
“You think they’re dangerous to us? That’s sweet.”
She winked, and she and Jesse started off toward the cells.
That’s what they were.
They had a guard, they had a single entrance, and the windows were barred in multiple, clever ways.
Go in and don’t get out cells.
Cassie turned her head.
“Do you hear that?”
He paused.
That sense of awareness.
Of course he did, now that she pointed it out.
The thrum of a powered floor.
“I know that technology,” he said. “It vibrates at a frequency that makes it impossible to walk, and when you fall down, it destroys your soft tissues.”
Cassie nodded.
“There are things around this building that are intended to kill men.”
“Or prisoners,” Jesse said.
“They’re all both,” Cassie said. Jesse frowned.
“When would you normally start interviews, if you were an important person on a military base?”
“First thing in the morning,” Cassie said, immediately grasping his concern.
They ran.
The guard at the entrance to the block tried to stop them, but Cassie stunned him with an exquisite hand motion, running past and turning down the hallway. Troy and the man called Benji were slumped against a door that was hidden from common perception.
“Go,” he said to Cassie. She glanced at Troy on the way by, but went straight through the door. It didn’t appear to be locked at all, just hidden. Jesse could feel the energy trap that they’d sprung, though, and he was glad that Cassie knew well enough to avoid it.
He checked Troy’s pulse first, then Benji’s, though Troy began to stir as Jesse touched him.
“What happened?” Troy grunted, trying to push himself away from the wall. Jesse looked up as Cassie came back out.
“Window’s blown, but no one would ever know it, if they got in to look at it. They’re gone.”
“Who was in this room?” Jesse asked.
Troy rubbed the sides of the bridge of his nose.
“What happened?” he asked again. Benji rolled onto his back and coughed. Jesse went to sit in front of Troy.
“I need you to tell me who you lost.”
“I didn’t lose anyone,” Troy said.
“Jesse, what is this?” Cassie asked, finally dislodging the membrane around the door that was generating the trap. She let it flutter to the ground, frowning at it. He glanced.
“Can you tell me how many you lost?” Jesse asked.
“I didn’t lose any,” Troy said. “There were three of them.”
Jesse stood and Cassie gave him a disapproving look as she helped Troy to his feet, looking into his eyes and taking his pulse. She looked back at Jesse again.
“What’s wrong with him?”
Jesse nodded.
“Lumps,” he said. “You brought three lumps to your planet and left them on their own for months. If it weren’t for the fact that this is going to be such an interesting challenge, I’d just say that you deserve whatever you get.”
*********
Human medics cleared both Troy and Benji to go back to work, and Jesse held Cassie back as Troy walked out of the building, going to oversee the interviews that could happen on account of the humans not misplacing the aliens in their custody.
“I have work for both of you,” Troy said as he left.
“Lumps,” Cassie said. “Tell me everything.”
Jesse shook his head.
“I need to know your priorities. Because there’s no way we can do this any order than what you chose, but the one that’s most important, we need to get started immediately.”
She watched his face, seeing the information that he needed her to have, and she gave him a firm nod.
“Troy.”
“All right,” Jesse answered. “He’s lost his spirit.”
She blinked.
“Not in the mood to deal with your metaphysical metaphor,” she said, and he shook his head.
“I’m serious. His life is still in his body, but his spirit has vacated.”
She was still reading, those clever, intense eyes still trying to make sense, but she didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.
“You just shared a body with an energy being,” he said. “You of all people should understand the difference between mind and spirit.”
“Those are just… intangible ideas,” she said, and he shook his head.
“Nope.”
“Are you telling me that there’s an afterlife where… spirits go to get weighed?” she asked.
“How would I know?” Jesse asked. “And why would an energy creature have a weight? Yes, I know the reference. I just… so strange. Anyway. You managed to cram two of those things in there and you saw the damage. You know how they fit, and you know what they do.”
“But Troy is still Troy,” she said, and he shook his head.
“You know better than that,” he said. “That wasn’t Troy walking out that door. Thought like him, but didn’t feel like him, did it?”
Cassie pressed her lips.
“Troy would have said he needed us,” she said, and Jesse nodded.
“That’s about the size of it.”
“How do I fix it?”
He smiled.
“Well, I just so happen to know a woman who is the universal expert on ferrying around energy creatures inside her body.”
Cassie frowned, but Jesse just grinned wider.
*********
They started the interviews without him. He gave Bridgette a firm look as he walked in the door and she shrugged one shoulder at him.
“Schedule,” she said.
“Both of the Jalnians are at the secondary portal building,” he said. “Get all of the documents I’ve been reviewing into one place where they can review them securely.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. A guard let Troy into the observation booth, where an inter
rogator that Troy knew by face was talking to a woman. Troy opened the first folder and browsed it.
Her assigned species identifier was Galwot, from a planet with the same name. She had a solid base, like an upholstered foot rest, and a long, askeletal muscle that lifted her eyes and mouth up above the table. If Troy had to guess, she probably spent most of her existence eye-level to the ground. Her file did confirm that she was female, and she held herself at a steady bearing, holding a conversation in her native language.
It took him several minutes of steady dialogue to catch up with the language.
File said she was the victim of an internal reorganization of power structures.
The story that Troy came in on the middle of seemed more like she was an asset in that regime change, and she’d been busted.
She had attitude and a strong sense of self-value, and she interrupted the interrogator frequently to correct him.
“No, you’ve got it wrong. Thelba and Minoa are the ones who were supposed to be looking after the food supplies, and Gaan and Richard were portioning out water for crops. And when I told Vie that the stonework was starting to wear because Ulta wasn’t doing her job to protect it, Beela was the one who got in trouble.”
“But the stonework was fine,” the interrogator said.
“No, I had sabotaged it, but I didn’t tell you that part yet, because I hadn’t gotten to it.”
Troy closed his eyes, just listening. The way she moved was distracting, not to mention the way she looked.
The story ranged all over the place, and he focused more on whether she was being deceptive than the details of it. No matter what, she was going to be the hero of the tale, and the pieces of it would fall into place to support it. That was just how people experienced the world, and foreign terrestrials were no exception.
There was definite lying going on. The interrogator caught her out in loops with direct contradictions of previous parts of the story, but was it because she’d been caught up in a whirlwind that she had no control over, so she’d made up the story that fit best, or was it that she was trying to hide what actually happened?
It was mostly an academic exercise.
Her skeletal structure was too compact to be of much use in a fight, and while that neck was an intriguing constriction tool, it wasn’t like the men on base were ill-equipped to deal with stray boa constrictors any more than they were to deal with her. He didn’t want to underestimate her, because she had arguably come from a society that was arguably not much behind the human race for development - he made a mental note to check for technological development trends, then he struck it and replaced it with a note to tell Cassie to do it.