Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  “Perfect timing. They solve each other,” he said, picking up the phone and crooking his finger at the man in the chair, then going into his office.

  A man and a woman, both wearing black suits, turned to look at him as Troy went to his chair.

  “Your assistant expected you twenty minutes ago,” the first one said. “I’m Special Agent Yost and this is Special Agent Wu.”

  “This is for you,” Troy said, handing Yost the phone and sitting down.

  Both agents turned to look back at the man standing in the doorway. Troy pointed at the couch.

  “Have a seat. They’ll be taking you with them.”

  “Who is he?” Wu asked. She was an attractive middle-aged woman with perceptive eyes, and she took the phone away from Yost with an air of authority.

  “He took data off of that phone,” Troy said. “I don’t know what it is, yet, but I know he took it off, and I know he’s your problem, now.”

  “That’s not what we’re here about,” Yost said. “You have a base that is completely out of control, and we’re here to look into multiple infractions against the base charter.”

  “Yes,” Troy said. “Which is exactly what I’m doing. Did Senator Greene send you?”

  They looked at each other, and Troy gave them a dry smile.

  “You heard I have a missing Major?”

  “We did hear that,” Wu said. Troy nodded.

  “Taken by men with Secret Service badges. I’m not letting anyone walk onto this base and exercise any kind of authority at all unless Senator Greene sent them herself, and I can confirm it through her office.”

  “She doesn’t have that kind of authority,” Yost said.

  “I was there when the Secretary of the Air Force was… What’s the term they’re using for the media?”

  “He resigned for medical reasons,” Wu said, and Troy nodded.

  “Yes. I was there when he resigned.”

  “So?” Yost asked.

  “Your chain of command is all screwed up,” Troy said. “So is mine. I’m adapting until someone else gets it all straightened out, but you’ll understand if I’m highly suspicious for a while.”

  Wu nodded, putting the phone down on the desk and shifting in her chair.

  “It’s inappropriate to have this conversation in front of him.”

  “I don’t know what conversation you plan on having, but he’s not going anywhere but with you,” Troy said.

  “You don’t have the authority to give us commands,” Yost said.

  “Seems to me that the only point of authority this base has right now named me the interim commander, and while I respect the authority that you have here, I’m not able to find where those two paths converge.”

  “We didn’t expect to run into this kind of resistance,” Wu said, and Troy nodded.

  “I can imagine.”

  “We need to discuss with you the things that have been going on, here, and what’s going to happen next.”

  “I have a conference call with the senator tomorrow afternoon,” Troy said. “I will tell her you would like to be included.”

  “We have additional colleagues who will be arriving tomorrow,” Yost said. “We need to investigate.”

  “And I’m not going to say you can’t,” Troy said. “I’m saying you can’t until I get a green light from the senator.”

  Wu gave him a tight-lipped smile and stood.

  “We’ll be back in the morning,” she said. “This doesn’t have to be adversarial.”

  Troy looked her in the face, knowing that that would have made him angry, a few days before.

  “A young man died on my base,” he said. “Because of this. We are at war, and we do not know the enemy. Until we find the battle lines, everyone from outside of this base is the enemy.”

  There was a flicker, respect, and she nodded.

  “We’ll be back in the morning.”

  Yost stood and looked at the man on the couch.

  “What do you expect us to do with him?” he asked. Troy nodded at the phone.

  “He committed a crime that I would have turned over to OSI before. I’m turning him over now.”

  Wu picked up the phone and walked over to the man on the couch.

  “You take pictures with this?” she asked. He nodded, almost vacant. Too much stress in too few days. Knowing they were going to catch him, Troy guessed. Over-taxed him.

  “You take pictures off of it?” Wu asked.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” the Airman answered.

  “What were you planning on doing with them?” Wu asked.

  The man looked at Troy.

  “Donovan was a bastard, Sir,” he said.

  “I know that,” Troy answered.

  “I gave them to my wife,” he said. “Told her if I ever didn’t come home from work alive, to put ‘em all online.”

  Troy nodded.

  The world did deserve to know, if no one was going to fix it.

  But Troy was going to fix it.

  “You’re going to pay the penalty for that,” he said, and the airman nodded.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Have you told your wife not to post them?” Yost asked. The man nodded.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “We’re going to have to take you home,” Wu said. “And take all of your equipment. Your neighbors are going to know that it’s happening.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

  Not everyone working over at the second portal was a bad person.

  Troy had known that, before.

  He needed to remember it, now.

  The young airman looked up at Agent Wu again.

  “It’s not like I really have neighbors,” he said. “I just started here three months ago, and my neighborhood is all empty houses.’

  Troy frowned.

  There was something important there.

  Empty houses.

  Donovan had had big plans for the second portal, if there was that much building, going on.

  “You live on base or off?” Troy asked.

  “On, Sir,” the man said.

  Troy looked at Yost and Wu.

  “You have what you need?” he asked.

  Wu gave him another dry smile.

  “We’ll see you in the morning.”

  *********

  It was like falling, the way water blended into water. It didn’t work for her the way it did for the sirens; she had to trigger the point-to-point transfers by hand, rather than just whooshing through them the way Song had done it, but the breathlessness of it, chasing after Troy’s spirit, it had a wildness to it that she could have chased after for a long time.

  She was hours behind him, and twice, he’d gotten out of the water to explore a planet, returning to a shore not far from where he’d come to the planet, but far enough away that she’d had to employ some pretty serious tracking concepts to pick him up again.

  She’d recognized the smell of baking bread in the atmosphere of one of the planets he’d gone past, and she was pretty sure they’d hit Gana and left again without even breaking the surface of the vast ocean.

  She remembered being Adena Lampak, feeling the ocean around her like that, but he’d moved on immediately, and she did it, too.

  Chasing.

  Always chasing.

  And then he’d left the water, drifting rather than blitzing across the surface of the planet at light speed, feeling out the place, taking it in on a much more real level.

  Looking around, Cassie wasn’t sure why. She didn’t immediately find anything special about it. Every planet was unique, but this one didn’t have anything that was special unique about it.

  There were foreign terrestrials on the beach, dark-skinned with a light impression of fur on long limbs.

  Climbing limbs.

  Shoulders and hips were ball-in-socket joints, but they had an additional ball-in-socket joint out just before the thick transitions that would have been wrists, in addition to bi-directional elbows and kne
es.

  The thing about joints was that it made you weak. Your limbs took more effort to support - especially without locking joints in the legs - and it took more muscle to control each additional joint, where a straight bone would have been perfectly functional. It meant that they were fast, agile, and likely rock-climbers by nature, but that they weren’t the top predators the planet had seen. Flexibility and range of motion were one thing - top predators could very easily have those - but not at that tradeoff of agility.

  They had smooth, expressive faces with white eyes and white lips, markings down the sides of their faces that were dyed a wide variety of colors; social status and personality. She started picking out genetic components to the markings themselves, but the colors would take more investigation to make clear sense of them.

  If it had been Troy, himself, who had stepped out of the sea foam, she’d have asked around about a pale-skinned man, short by their standards, and thin, but no one would have noticed an energy creature here. Not in broad daylight, if he didn’t want them to see him.

  She walked along the shore for about a mile, looking for signs that he’d been there. She needed more equipment - any equipment - if she was going to be truly effective tracking him, but the air and electromagnetic samples she could take with just the electronics on her arm were making good for now, and she didn’t want him to get any more lead over her.

  Especially not here, where he’d gone up the sharp cliff faces after spending some fifteen minutes on the beach. This was where she could catch up to him.

  But what about the place had stopped him?

  The creatures were watching her with open curiosity, staying back as she walked past, but she didn’t pay any direct attention to them as she went past, and while they continued to edge away from her, the fact that no one else had run meant that the ones she passed now didn’t flee when she straightened and looked at them.

  It was a group of four, two couples, if Cassie made her guess. There was a lot of touch among all of them, as she’d gone past, and they held hands with arms wound around each other’s arms and waists, but there was an increased sense of intimacy among the pairs.

  “Hi,” she said.

  They chattered at each other.

  It was a fast language, lots of consonants, lots of syllables spoken with lips and tongue and a very, very shallow sinus. They had front-row molars, but they had an odd clicking noise that they made that suggested cutting teeth somewhere in their mouths.

  They were arguing over whether she was sun-bleached or a sea-creature they’d never come across before.

  “I breathe air,” Cassie said. “Like you. What is the name of this place?”

  “Brushwire,” one of the females said. The daring one of the four. The male - the one with the other female - was opinionated and willing to be aggressive if he needed to be, but she was daring in a very different way.

  “I’ve never seen a people like you,” Cassie said. “What do you call yourselves?”

  They laughed.

  “What are you?” the aggressive male asked.

  “Palta,” she said. It didn’t mean anything to them, and she hadn’t expected it would. It was an artful interpretation of ‘Palta’, anyway.

  “We are Band Rung,” the daring female said. “What is a Palta?”

  “I am not from here,” Cassie answered, knowing within her margin of error that they were going to assume that she meant she was from somewhere else on the planet, but there was nothing wrong with that. “But I am a ground-walker, and I’m looking for my friend.”

  The language had a profound number of verbs. She was still working through the shape of them, and ground-walking was the best way to describe her motion. Motion was core to everything.

  “We haven’t seen anyone who looks like you,” the bold one said.

  No use pointing out that the odds they would have seen Troy standing right in front of them were quite low.

  He was solid energy, and not just literally. He could move with a speed his mind was only just getting used to, and he could jump at will, no restrictions on any of his motion at all. Air was no object, though he did have to end up some place where there was liquid water, for his ability to move through the universe to trigger, so there would be some kind of pressure, but it didn’t matter to him at all if it was oxygen, carbon dioxide, or argon, he was liberated from his own physical needs.

  And he’d left the water, here, and as far as she could figure, he hadn’t come back.

  It was a big world - they all were - but something here had maintained his interest.

  “Do you have a city nearby?” Cassie asked.

  They looked at each other, limbs twisting around each other in a sign of mutual concern.

  “Is there a conflict here?” Cassie asked.

  “We should go,” the second male said, and the four of them turned, continuing along the beach albeit much closer to the cliffs.

  Troy had found something here interesting. Cassie was increasingly convinced of this. The problem was that the planet didn’t have a beacon on it, which meant she couldn’t hit the same point on it exactly, if she left.

  But she needed supplies, and she needed a second set of eyes.

  She lined up her transition and she left.

  *********

  Lumps were smart, they were efficient, they were equipped, and they were diverse.

  Standing at the fence where they’d melted and re-formed the steel behind them, Jesse was having a hard time not smiling.

  People were going to die.

  People had already died.

  But this was going to be the biggest challenge he’d ever faced, and he was genuinely looking forward to it.

  *********

  Thursday morning, Troy and Jesse walked into the FBI office, where a paralegal escorted them to the evidence room where the Otherworld evidence was stored. Jesse stood on his toes for a moment, peering at the mountain of boxes, then nodded.

  “That one,” he said.

  There was nothing special about the box that Troy could see. It was the second layer of boxes from the front, two boxes off the ground.

  “Which box number is that?” Troy asked. The woman went and checked, then wrote it down on a post-it note for him. Troy called Bridgette on his way out of the building.

  “Have them go through box one-six-three with a fine-toothed comb,” he said, hanging up.

  “Please,” Jesse corrected, and Troy shrugged.

  “Ridiculous for them to make you drive all the way here with me for that,” Jesse said.

  “That was the only way they were going to let you in the building,” Troy answered. “And worth the time. I need to know where the big secrets are hidden so I can find them before anyone else.”

  There were reporters involved, now. OSI had managed to contain the leak from the phone, but rumors were harder to stem, and the reports on the dead cadet and the missing Major were public. The complete overhaul of base leadership wasn’t any easier to hide.

  Especially the investigative reporters with history with the military or with scandal had caught a scent, and there would be no shaking them. Too many people involved with too many hurt feelings to expect that no one would talk.

  He’d told Senator Greene that the fact that there was a second portal was going to get out. She said that she still wanted to spin it as a planned expansion, and she told him to let her manage those press releases, but he knew that the presence of the building and the existence of a staff running it was going to hit the news soon.

  That they’d been shipping goods out of it was the next step, and then it just took one recluse feeling the breath of American agents trying to reclaim that shipment who would expose to the media whatever it was Donovan had brought across, and then…

  Well, the world would go on.

  He was even pretty sure the portal program would go on.

  But the innocence of it, the public perception that they played strictly by the rules and that they
were a source of scientific inquiry and exploration first, and a commercial enterprise only where it would be wasteful or insulting to neglect opportunities, that innocence would be done. They would have to deal with skepticism of everything they did, moving forward, a mistrust of their secrecy, even where it was necessary to protect humans from exposure to technology and ideas that were unsafe, and a desire for external oversight of what they did, even where it damaged their scientific freedom. Perhaps especially where it damaged their scientific freedom.

  They’d behaved like a corrupt commercial enterprise, and they would be treated like one for the foreseeable future.

  Even Troy could tell, emotionless as he was, that this was going to hurt the spirit of the program. So many of the people who worked there did it out of a sense of passion, and being treated like villains would hurt that. It might kill it, and they would lose some of the holdouts among the lab workers, off looking for other ideological mountains to climb.

  He wasn’t sure about the jumpers themselves.

  Most of them did it for the adrenalin rush and the opportunity to see things no one else did. The fact that so many of them came back as glorified mall cops, standing as unarmed security for shipments, told him everything he needed to about what they wanted out of their jobs. Jump school was probably safe.

  But he could see some of the jumpers ruffling under a swarm of new restrictions. They spent so much of jump school studying them, and then to get a host of new ones, ones that might be unclear, mutually exclusive, or impossible to follow? Just the kind of rules you got when someone somewhere said that there ought to be a law. Some of the jumpers might go so far as to forge their own way.

  It would be someone else’s problem, though. Troy was going to get the worst of the worst back, cap off the risk from having undocumented foreign terrestrials on the planet, wind down the unauthorized programs, and then react appropriately to the Lumps. Once he was done with that, he’d hand the program over to whoever Senator Greene said to, and…

  Well, he had no idea what he’d do then, but he’d figure it out when the time came.

  Usually he knew what he wanted, but right now, it was just tasks in an order to accomplish them. Nothing making him angry, nothing making him excited. Just objectives.

  He liked it, in a dispassionate sort of way. It was clean and it was very, very low stress, but he knew he should have missed the feeling of connecting with it, knowing that it was important, not just because it was important, but because it was important to him.