by Chloe Garner
Finally, the interrogator turned to more modern concerns.
“Tell me about your time since you came to Earth,” the man said.
“Earth,” the woman, Rina, scoffed. “Think you’re so big and important, but everything here grows without you even having to do anything. You know that they offered to bring us plants that would grow inside? All we’d have to do is water them, and they’ll just… grow. Anything you accomplish, it’s because you’ve got it so easy. We work hard to get what we have…”
“Please tell me about your time here on Earth,” the interrogator redirected.
“We wake, we sleep, we talk about the old times. I don’t like your days. They’re too long, and it’s too hot. There’s a nob that tells the room how hot to be, but it doesn’t listen. There are fights in the hallway. If I weren’t here I’d be dead, so what do you care what I complain about?”
“Do you complain?” the interrogator asked.
“No one listens,” Rina said. “Why would I?”
Troy opened his eyes, sifting through the pile to find her sister’s file. She’d been involved in the whole thing, too, though the summary on Bint’s file wasn’t much more helpful.
He stood and opened the door.
“I need the financial reports that I went over with the lawyers,” he said, and Bridgette looked up and nodded, going back to work.
He went and sat again.
There was supposed to be money.
Donovan had been doing these things for money.
Wink had brought the scepter, for whatever good that had done them - collector? specialized stones? - but there wasn’t a part of Rina’s story that involved anything of value crossing.
And then he figured it out.
Regime change for hire.
The throne to the highest bidder.
Take the scepter, hand it to someone who was willing to pay good money for it, because it made him king. Employ a pair of over-enthusiastic sisters who knotted up the inner workings of an entire kingdom and someone who saw it coming steps into power in the chaos.
There was value there.
Real value.
Could fund the entire program on that, if the program was willing to arbitrarily involve itself in politics on other planets, just based on who was willing to pay.
Troy spent the rest of the interview only listening with one ear, going through all of the files - conveniently organized by interview order - and restacked them by political intrigue. There’d been a foreign terrestrial involved. One who had the ability to jump, from all appearances, which meant that Troy couldn’t rule out more clever methods of shifting power, but that stack, there, was at least obvious enough that he didn’t have to listen to the interviews to catch it.
Risk assessment.
Someone who was willing to intentionally topple a government was more likely to be willing to do it again. So there was that. He sorted the political actors by level of intent. He’d have to listen to part of the interviews, he revised, to determine how intentional they’d been in their involvement. Anyone who had fully and intentionally assassinated a member of a ruling establishment probably deserved to go back and face their punishments, but the unwitting ones were a different case.
He might decide to advocate that they stay, because the balance of justice was such that his program had caused them to involve themselves in something that they didn’t want to be involved with or didn’t know anything about, and there was a sound argument that they owed them that much.
Not that the military had a great record of looking out for its foreign pawns.
He frowned.
Something about that thought was unusual.
He went to the door again.
“Schedule an hour for me to review results with Jesse and Cassie,” he said. “And if Olivia comes by, tell her I’m too busy to see her today.”
Bridgette looked up.
“No one has seen the Jalnians since you left the secondary building,” she said.
He thought.
“Check for Cassie’s car in the parking lot here,” he said, then went back into the booth.
The interrogator was up to Troy’s list of physical needs that might not be met by the current lodging, and he tuned this out. The interrogator knew to keep the list, and the interview was recorded. He’d have people take the important information out of it and figure something out. Just as soon as he had the people to do it.
He was spending way too much energy trying to figure out what Donovan had been up to. He didn’t have that energy to spare, and his curiosity was sacrificing his quality. He needed to pull everyone out of the building just as soon as they’d gotten all of the jumpers back across. Once they had all of the fires out, he could worry about what was going on over there, before he stopped it. Right now it just needed to be stopped.
He wrote it down on a spare sheet of paper and put it aside.
He would hire a zoologist to take care of the dormitories. They hired professionals all the time to work in the labs; the dorms were just another lab. The NDA would keep them from telling other people what they’d seen, and Troy would have a professional making sure everyone stayed alive.
Cross that one off his list.
Which left the staff, the shipments, and the missing Major.
And the missing foreign terrestrials.
Cassie had said they were gone. Hadn’t she? Those first few moments awake were still kind of sketchy in his brain, but he was pretty sure that’s what she’d said.
He’d need to find them.
He pulled the folders for the three of them, Feldas, and he lay them out alongside each other. There were no pictures and only very generic physical descriptions, out of an overgrown sense of secrecy, but all three of them had paid their own freight to get here. A million dollars apiece in gold, exotic compounds of an unspecified nature, and ‘weapons’. Unlike the Galwot sisters, they’d come across weeks apart, and they didn’t have any specified familial relationship.
He went through the rest of the pile once more, finding a few other cases where foreign terrestrials had bought their way here and setting them aside. Glancing up as a pair of security officers came to escort Rina out, he waited for her to get out of the interrogation wing, then stood and went back out. Bridgette was standing, waiting for him.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Cassie’s car is gone,” she said. He nodded.
“They won’t be on any of the security cameras leaving base, but they won’t be here, either. No one will have seen them. There’s nothing we can do. Move up these three foreign terrestrials on the list of interrogations today.”
She took the folders with a frown.
“How would you find three men who don’t look human but who have gone missing?” Troy asked.
She paused, laying the folders on her desk and straightening.
“Are they able to get over the fences?” she asked.
“Assume yes,” Troy said.
“Then I’d just watch the internet for crazies,” she said.
He nodded.
“Do it.”
“Sir, that’s not my job,” she said.
“Find someone whose job it is,” he said.
“Are you feeling okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, turning and going back into the booth. One more problem off his list.
*********
He read the NDA during the next two interviews. He didn’t have the skills to understand it, but he could see the reason no one had been willing to break it.
Where it didn’t have teeth, it had threats. And it had a lot of teeth.
“I want to see OSI here for an update,” he said when Bridgette brought in his lunch.
“I’ll see when they’re available,” she said. He took out his fork and stabbed it through the salad.
“This is my base and they’re operating on it,” he said. “They’ll make time.”
“Okay,” she said.
�
��Interviews at the barracks,” he said. “What percentage are complete?”
“They aren’t interviewing today,” she said. He turned to look at her, and she shook her head. “Everyone else is on full-weekend mode, but they’re civilians from a shut down part of the base.”
“Where are the interrogators?” Troy asked.
“Here,” she said. “They’ve divided the foreign terrestrials among themselves to split up interviews as much as possible.”
Troy lifted his head.
He’d missed that they were changing out the interviewers for each foreign terrestrial. They’d just been backs of heads to him.
“Get them back over there,” he said. “Reshuffle the assignments.”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“Yes, sir.”
“And the subpoenaed records? Are they here?”
“Yes.”
“Give me the entire list of the people who have been in the portal room since Jesse got here. And there’s going to be an employment offer that goes out to Stanislav Peterson. I want that on my desk to sign and Slav here working for me by Monday.”
“Do you really think you can get the background clearances done…?” she started.
“Slav was a jumper,” Troy said, talking around a mouthful of lettuce. “We don’t need to redo background work on him.”
She wrote it down and nodded.
“Okay.”
Where had Cassie and Jesse gone? The car had just been a division point: if it was here, they’d jumped again, if it wasn’t, they were on Earth. It didn’t give him any leads on how to find them, and it wasn’t as if he had the ability to do it.
“Start pulling together an executive summary of what we’ve done to send to Senator Greene on Monday.”
“Has she asked for one?”
“No, but I don’t want her to,” Troy said. “I’m going to get her used to information showing up without her needing to ask, which means she’s less likely to come bug me for things I’m not ready to tell her.”
“I’ll need input from Mr. Leal,” she said.
“Anything you need from him,” Troy said. “We’re going to have an army of OSI agents descend on us next week. They’re going to want to tell us what to do. I want the orders to go the other way. I need Senator Greene to give me command over everything going on, on base.”
“Are you saying that you want the agents looking for Major White to report to you?” she asked. He shook his head.
“No one is going to issue commands on base,” he said. “We have missing foreign terrestrials, men with Secret Service badges killing my people, and a complete lack of confidence in anyone up or down the chain of command. I’m not leaving this post until we know that all of the enemies are neutralized.”
“That’s a very aggressive stance,” Bridgette said, not critically.
“I’ve made it this far by simply being so indispensable that they couldn’t afford to fire me, no matter how much they wanted to,” he said. “Being the best and important. At the same time. Nothing has changed but that the people who are going to push me out of the way aren’t doing it because of a grudge. They’re just going to come pouring in here and they’re going to think that they are exempt from all of our protocols. They aren’t, but everyone is going to forget, if I don’t hold tight.”
“Yes,” Bridgette said. “You sound like General Ellsworth.”
“While we wait for Conrad to turn up Slav, I want the records from shipments here,” he said.
“Here?” she asked. “All of them.”
“Store them along the wall out there. I’ll give criterion for the interrogators to use to sort them, as long as they’re just all hanging out.”
“They’re preparing for interviews,” Bridgette said.
“I wasn’t unclear,” Troy said. “Give the orders, or I’ll do it in person.”
“Sir,” she said, giving him a sharp nod and leaving.
He ate his salad, listening to the next foreign terrestrial story with half an ear while he wrote out the parameters he wanted the boxes sorted and searched by. Bridgette came back a few minutes later with a short list of names.
“Analysts,” she said. He looked down the list.
“They’ll be fine,” he said. “Get all of them up here to go through boxes.”
“I tasked Romney with monitoring the internet,” she said, and he shrugged.
“The rest of them, then.”
Sir,” she said. He handed her the search list for the subpoenaed data.
“Copy it,” he said. “Everyone who has the clearance to know about the foreign terrestrials has the clearance to know that we off-shipped uncleared foreign terrestrial goods, and this is the start to finding out where they went.”
“We have the first half of the papers,” Bridgette said. “The federal office is duplicating everything as quickly as they can. I also have copies of hard drives.”
Troy nodded.
“Only offline computers. Split up the hard drives same as the boxes.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, frowning. “What happened over at the dormitories?”
“Trap sprung and knocked me out, with Benji,” Troy said. “Cleared for duty, no harm done.”
“If I may say so, I think it’s clarified your thinking somewhat.”
He glanced at her, finishing his salad. He handed her the container. There was a trash can in the observation room, but it was incinerated to protect state secrets, and a salad container was a waste of effort.
“These are the things we need to get done,” he said. She nodded.
“Yes, but… I wasn’t sure they were all going to get done, yesterday, as much as you were trying to take on, yourself.”
“I can’t do all of it,” he said. “I have to prioritize, or else none of it is going to get done.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” she said, giving him another curt smile and leaving.
He turned back to the three Felda men.
It was possible they looked human. Jesse and Cassie could walk completely undetected anywhere in the world, and he’d seen a woman on a planet, when he’d been jumping with Cassie, who had looked like a beautiful Italian woman. The odds had to be vanishingly small, but the universe was big enough to overcome those odds, and… He didn’t know the odds of running into one of those species at random, but they did come from comparable environments. Maybe it wasn’t quite so unlikely as he thought.
Odds were still overwhelmingly in favor of the three men not being able to hide without darkness or cover of some kind. Someone would see them, talk about them online, and he’d have his lead.
Maybe they’d just needed a place to hide, sure, but putting a trap on their room and disappearing seemed to suggest they had other plans. Earth was a rather squishy place in the face of advanced foreign terrestrial technology. What would Troy do, if he had the opportunity to take over an entire species because they were too dumb and unarmed to do anything about it?
It didn’t tempt him, but the path to doing it was too easy.
Too many political coups in the group to assume that these three were just afraid.
Fighting in the hallways.
What would foreign terrestrials have to fight about?
He stuck his head out.
“They need to find out who was fighting,” he said.
“When?” Bridgette called from her desk.
“At the dorms,” he said. “In the hallways. Who was fighting?”
She nodded and made a note, continuing to eat her sandwich.
Troy went and sat.
Donovan hadn’t know what was going on at his own base.
They were being invaded, and Donovan had held the door.
*********
Cassie stood on the rocky shore of Galveston bay, looking out over the gray water.
“You know what you’re doing?” Jesse asked.
“Like hell,” she answered. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”
“You’re s
ure you don’t want me to come with you?”
She shook her head.
“You know we can’t stand each other that much longer,” she said, glancing at him. “You know that.”
He did.
So did she.
That was what made it so hard.
She was still human, believed so many human things.
But they knew.
“All right,” he said. “Don’t drown.”
“Keep his head above water,” she answered, starting forward into the water.
*********
Tuesday.
They had a lead on Slav, but he was international and away from digital communication, apparently. Skiing, the rumor went. Troy had a few guesses what that might mean.
The documents were immense, but they were turning up the shipments, one by one, like panning for grains of gold. The attorney general had come up with a few, and Troy’s people had come up with more, and the OSI was beginning to work on getting them back.
The one from California had turned out to be a potted plant, which was presently on a truck back to base.
One down.
The forensic accountant was working on an estimate of how many more to go.
It was a messy business.
They were looking for a zoologist who fit the bill to run the dormitory, but security requirements were simply too tight for most of them. Troy understood that Bridgette had employed a headhunting firm without a job description - just a list of professional requirements. He had one resume on his desk - back in his own office - and he was waiting for at least one more to make a call. Conrad’s people were pretty confident they had the foreign terrestrial animal under control, and they were working on the physical requirements for the dormitory occupants, until the shipments started to return, so Troy had at least a couple of days before he had to hire someone.
There was still no sign of Major White.
Or the foreign terrestrials.
But he was getting a better picture of what was going on at the secondary portal, in terms of personnel, and that was something. He was going to start categorizing them by degrees of involvement with the brass and the nature of the projects they’d undertaken. The ones who should have known better were quickly becoming visible.