Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  And there was only one jumper outstanding from the secondary program. Everyone else was home and debriefed, living in the barracks with the rest of the secondary program staff, ready to be released into the civilian population with the full weight of the United States Air Force behind their employment nondisclosures. It wasn’t going to be enough - someone would talk to someone, and there would be rumors - but Troy had spent some time plumbing the depths of what the internet already believed went on, on base, and he was beginning to believe that no one would be able to tell the difference between the old rumors and the new ones.

  Bridgette knocked on his door and let herself in.

  “The technicians have just sent a report that one of the phones we took from the staff at the second portal had pictures on it that were pulled off of the device.”

  He looked up from the most recent reports on the interviews with the foreign terrestrials.

  “Let me see,” he said. She handed it to him.

  Security at the dormitory.

  “The pictures were…?”

  “You’ll have to check for yourself,” she said. “The technicians didn’t have access to the content; they’re just supposed to make sure that no data left the phone in a suspicious manner.”

  “Have them send it over, and send him over to speak with me,” Troy said. She nodded.

  “And Jesse is outside.”

  “In the hallway or out in the fresh air?” Troy asked. She gave him a tight-lipped smile.

  “He said he thinks you could use it.”

  Troy nodded and stood.

  “I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Have the phone and the officer here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He put on his coat and got his hat, walking outside and putting his hat on.

  “Where’s Cassie?” he asked. Jesse was leaning against her car, but there was no sign of her.

  “That’s the thing about Palta,” Jesse said. “We just don’t get along, long term.”

  “That isn’t an answer,” Troy said.

  “Let me buy you lunch,” Jesse said.

  Troy checked his watch. The morning had gone by quickly.

  “I’m busy. You were supposed to go through reports.”

  Jesse twisted his mouth to the side.

  “I’ve got more interesting things to do than that,” he said. “Like buy you lunch.”

  Troy shook his head.

  “I don’t have time to waste with you.”

  “Have I ever wasted your time?” Jesse asked, slowly grinning at him.

  “All the time,” Troy said. “You enjoy it.”

  “You feel weird, the last few days?” Jesse asked. “Like… maybe like a machine?”

  Troy sighed.

  “I’m going to go get back to work. You have a contract with this base that is still in force. You should come in with me.”

  Jesse laughed.

  “You should read it before you try to give me a direct order,” he said. “The grounds all changed.”

  Troy looked at him blandly. It was probably true. The contract that the Palta had signed with the base had been enormously complicated, and it relied upon Cassie being human and going on jumps with him. With Cassie gone, Jesse had gotten much more difficult to control. Complete loss of control had just been a matter of time.

  “It’s up to you, Jesse. I don’t have time to play games with you. You can belong here, or you can not belong anywhere.”

  He turned to go back into the building.

  “Oooh,” Jesse said. “Are you really that cold a bastard underneath everything, Rutger? You need a break and you need to hear what I have to tell you.”

  “Do you know where my missing Major is?” Troy asked without turning. “Or how about where all of the foreign terrestrial life forms are that we shipped out of here?”

  “Nope,” Jesse said. “But I do know something that I’m certain you don’t know you don’t know about.”

  Troy paused with his hand on the door handle.

  “One more sentence, Palta,” he said. “Then I’m going back to work.”

  “How about the fact that the guy running the base isn’t human?”

  *********

  Jesse breathed the greasy fumes coming up off of his short-order meal, a burger that was an inch too wide for its bun and a pile of fries that had lost a dozen of their number on the way from the counter.

  Say what you wanted about intergalactic cuisine, humans did some things right.

  “Eat,” he said happily to Troy as he picked up his burger.

  “I have people whose lives depend on me right now,” Troy said. “This isn’t a game.”

  “Nope,” Jesse said, “but food helps.”

  Troy sipped his coffee and Jesse shook his head, wiping his mouth with a napkin and putting his burger back down.

  “You said I’m not human,” Troy said. “What do you think I am?”

  Jesse shook his head, chewing happily.

  “It’s true that you aren’t human, but it isn’t true that you’re anything else. You’re just part of a human, right now.”

  Troy looked at his hands with a bored expression and shook his head.

  “By my count, everything’s here.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “But you’ve been strange, lately, haven’t you? Working too many hours, can’t be bothered to do anything else? People been asking you if you feel okay?”

  “I have responsibilities,” Troy said. “I’m busy.”

  It was strange to watch it. Jesse had read about it, the Lump traps, how they split people up in funny ways. They weren’t fatal, but they were designed to make people incapable of chasing them. Lumps were certainly willing to go further, to get what they wanted, but they had very creative non-lethal weapons. Jesse just wished he’d gotten more time to look at this one.

  Troy was human. Visibly. His language conformed exactly to human patterns, linguistically and vocally. His face moved with the exact expressions he meant to be there, and the exact expressions that should have been there subconsciously. The problem was that they were just marionettes. They were learned behaviors that were there because he knew they were supposed to be there.

  Underneath that, there was no connection between his brain and his face, his eyes. Jesse had no direct power over him, and it was haunting, chilling. It wasn’t that Jesse would have used it - not for this, at any rate - but to feel the strings go loose and watch the puppet walk, anyway, had a surreal feel.

  “You’ve lost part of your self,” Jesse said. “The part that is your personality, the things you enjoy and that you hate, your sense of humor. Hope. The sense of the infinite and the immortal.”

  “Where did Cassie go, really?” Troy asked. “And why are you avoiding work?”

  “Tell me about your mom,” Jesse countered.

  Troy shrugged.

  “All right. Um. She lives outside of Austin. She does the books for a car dealership. She’s sixty-one years old. She’s five feet nine inches tall with gray hair that she has been dying brown for eight years… I see your point.”

  Jesse gave him a grim smile and nodded.

  “What do I do?” Troy asked. Jesse took another bite of his burger.

  “Keep working. It shouldn’t have any significant impact on your ability to keep the base under control. Might actually help, some, in some ways. But be aware that your empathy is broken and you aren’t going to be much fun to be around.”

  “You’ve seen this before?” Troy asked.

  “No,” Jesse said.

  “Then how do you know what happened?” Troy asked.

  “I’ve read about the trap you triggered.”

  “That it… split me from my spirit?” Troy asked. Jesse nodded.

  “And what does it mean? That I don’t have a spirit?”

  “Not a clue,” Jesse said. “Means you’re just a body with a brain. I’m guessing in the dark how that’s going to impact you… Well, educated guesses, given a decent
history with your species… and I’m really a pretty good guesser, anyway, so it’s better than just educated guesses…” Jesse chewed thoughtfully. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “And where is my spirit?”

  “Cassie knew where to look,” Jesse said. “Galveston Bay was where she was starting.”

  “You left right after it,” Troy said. “And I assume you had a car. How did it make it all the way to Texas before she caught up?”

  Jesse grinned.

  “We’re talking a being made entirely out of energy,” he said. “That part of you can travel at the speed of light. And we took a car.”

  “Why Galveston?” Troy asked.

  “Curiosity. Sense of humor. Everything about you that isn’t preoccupied with responsibility and being boring,” Jesse said.

  Troy frowned harder.

  “Why Galveston, then?” he asked. “If I were an energy creature that could travel at the speed of light, I wouldn’t stay on the planet. I’d go see Jupiter.”

  Jesse gave him a little frown.

  “It’s a good plan, but are you sure you could find it?”

  “Why would I stay on the surface on the planet?” Troy pressed.

  “Surfaces are familiar,” Jesse said. “It reduces decision making a lot. It’s really easy to get lost in three dimensions without some very firm landmarks.”

  “I still wouldn’t go to Galveston,” Troy said.

  “Cassie was pretty sure,” Jesse said.

  Troy shook his head, not arguing.

  “I trust her.”

  That seemed to be it. Jesse was glad. He hadn’t wanted to outright lie to Troy, but the truth was demoralizing. Galveston was the nearest emotionally-charged body of water, and Cassie was certain that Troy would sense the potential of it, the same way the sirens did, and head for it with an eye to traveling the universe.

  The same way the sirens did.

  She was in for the chase of her life, if she could even figure out how to follow him across the first jump.

  “What about Benji?” Troy asked.

  “Cassie’s got a shot, catching your wild other half, because she knows you,” Jesse said. “I’m going to have to come up with something unprecedented if I’m going to help him, and I think that you need me working on other things more.”

  “The longer you wait, the further away he could be,” Troy said.

  “You have no idea,” Jesse said.

  “Is he in any additional danger because of it?” Troy asked. “More likely to take risks or miss dangers?”

  “More likely to objectively calculate risks and more aware of real dangers, on balance, I’d think,” Jesse said.

  “Then your priority is tracking the Feldas,” Troy said. Jesse frowned. Figured it out.

  “Oh. The Lumps.”

  Troy blinked.

  “It’s how their self-identified species name translates into English. As in ‘face reality and take your lumps’.”

  “There are three of them,” Troy said. “I can give you their names, and how long they’ve been here, but not much else. No pictures, no useful descriptions, no histories.”

  “That doesn’t sound much like the portal program I commonly loathe,” Jesse said.

  “They were keeping secrets by not writing them down,” Troy said.

  “You don’t know anything else about them?” Jesse asked.

  Lumps had lots of ambitions. Diverse ones, with diverse tools that went with them.

  “Can you tell me what they look like?” Troy asked back.

  “They’re fast,” Jesse said. His father had never had dealings with them, because they were notoriously unreliable in agreements outside of their own species, but he had seen them, in Gana and elsewhere. “Joints would obviously indicate foreign terrestrial to you, if you got to see them, and so would their muscular structure, but under the right layer of clothing, with some clever work on their heads - some distracting technology and some… makeup - they could pass for human. Eyes are set about like yours, a little wider. They don’t have a nose, really, but that isn’t hard to fake. Mouth is the wrong shape, but they could keep you from looking at it, if they tried hard. All of their sinus activity goes on in their chests. Skin tone is generally greenish compared to yours, but that’s just a good foundation away from human. Their skull shape isn’t far off, and they could cover their ears with a wig.”

  “You just told me that they could look like anything, and I’d never know,” Troy said. Jesse nodded.

  “Dragons in trench coats could make a living on this planet,” he agreed.

  “Depends on the city,” Troy said, and Jesse grinned. It was funnier because Troy hadn’t meant it to be a joke.

  “I have records for you to go through,” Troy said. “You will review the shipping records from the base security contractors and give me your best guesses on where the shipments from the secondary portal structure went, and what they might have been. You will review interview records from the personnel at the secondary base and give me threat assessments on each of them. You will review interviews with the foreign terrestrials and identify threats there. You will find the foreign terrestrials at large and give me your recommendation on next steps to dealing with them.”

  Jesse waited, one eyebrow poised.

  “Nothing about your lab personnel hired after Donovan started, your contact list with other planets through the secondary portal, safety and security review of the portal building itself, or your missing Major?”

  “The Major is a human concern,” Troy said. “The rest of those we’ll meet next week to discuss.”

  Jesse nodded slowly.

  “You know, I’d have given you a good wallop for treating me like that, not long ago, but I’m going to give you a pass, seeing as you’ve had a traumatic event to your sense of tact, and I’ll put it on the Lumps’ tab instead. That said, I’m not your paper processor. I will deal with the foreign terrestrials on your planet, if I perceive them to be a threat to the way I like things to be, around here, and I’ll even extend that to your building full of prisoners. But I’m not dealing with your security sub-contractors or the humans who work for you.”

  Troy pursed his lips thoughtfully.

  “They’ve sent me perhaps as many as a million documents in an effort to keep me from finding all of the shipments. I suspect that it’s because they know some of them are worse than others.”

  Jesse shrugged.

  “I need you to tell me which box they’re in,” Troy said.

  Jesse narrowed his eyes.

  “You live in a digital world, Rutger. Why are they in boxes?”

  “Physical records are harder to search,” Troy said. “They will have kept their most sensitive information away from digital records, if they had Donovan advising them.”

  It was an interesting observation, Jesse had to give him that.

  “Are they all in their original boxes?” Jesse asked.

  “No. They’re copies from the FBI office,” Troy said.

  “I need to see the originals,” Jesse said. “As close to the condition where they were stored as possible.”

  “I’ll make call,” Troy said. “Be ready to go with me tomorrow.”

  Again, the instinct to rebel spiked and Jesse stuffed it back down.

  He was doing this for Cassie, and he was doing this for the Troy that had been.

  The Troy that had been and that would be, again.

  There was no way Cassie would give up on him.

  “Is that all?” Troy asked.

  “It is,” Jesse said. “But I will say that you need to try to learn how to be less rude to people. I’m having a hard time forgiving it, and I know why you’re being a prick.”

  Troy frowned.

  “I can… tell… that what I’m saying is different than it would have been, but… it’s like I can’t remember what I would have said.”

  “Start with please and thank you,” Jesse said. “Direct orders to your subordinates aren’t neces
sarily bad, but you were a friendly guy. People liked you for that. You don’t want to burn all those bridges, if you can help it.”

  “I should avoid Olivia,” Troy said. Jesse sat up straight.

  “You patching things up with her?” he asked. “Cassie and I weren’t sure if you could do it. After everything.”

  Troy frowned.

  “I can tell you how tall she is and her major in college, but I can’t… I can’t remember how I feel about her.”

  “Do you trust her? Like you do Cassie?” Jesse asked. Troy nodded slowly.

  “Not like I trust Cassie. Cassie is going to come through for me if she has to kill someone to do it. But Olivia would never intentionally do something to hurt me. Except slap me. She has done that.”

  Jesse grinned.

  “Watch for my signal.”

  He stood and started for the door.

  “You drove,” Troy called after him.

  *********

  Troy called his driver and the driver came and got him while he finished the lunch he’d ordered at random off of the menu.

  Knowing what was going on made it impossible to stop seeing the symptoms.

  He’d ordered a salad with fish, a fruit side, and orange juice.

  He didn’t eat any of those things unless he was trying to impress someone, normally, and yet, there they sat on the table in front of him.

  And he ate them.

  And he didn’t enjoy any of them.

  He was just eating them because his body told him it was time to eat.

  And then he’d left.

  He didn’t look out the window on the drive except to see how the guard station was doing, and he wasn’t worried about what Bridgette was going to think of him disappearing for that long, when he’d given her sharp orders to have his next appointment ready for him.

  Jesse was more than a little right that he was going to have to be careful with this.

  “There are two agents in your office from OSI, and this,” she said, nodding to a glum man sitting on a chair across the hallway from her, “is the man with the cell phone in question.”

  She pushed the device across her desk toward him and he picked it up.