Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  Jesse was watching him.

  He pulled out a folder of interview transcripts and went back to work.

  *********

  The lab had never been backed up with so many samples.

  And the whispers about where they were coming from… Olivia had a hard time containing herself. Her fingers itched, and going home at the end of the day was hard because there were more things to see, to catalogue, to analyze and write reports about. Boxes and boxes of samples, the lab techs working overtime on getting everything sorted into the pre-defined categories and prepped for observation and study. The first day, half the lab had been working to help them.

  It was an amazing time, and she found herself smiling as she went from station to station in the lab, just completely unaware of anything but the science, the questions that she was answering about the nature of the universe through the biology scattered throughout it.

  And there was an actual foreign terrestrial animal here. Celeste was working on moving it. Spike. Him, they were increasingly sure, though Olivia wasn’t the type to jump to conclusions, and Celeste insisted that Spike was a perfectly good name for a female Beast, if that was what Spike turned out to be.

  Someone would come up with a term for the species at some point, if the jumper who had helped ship him didn’t already know what they were called, but Olivia liked Beasts. It only worked once, but it only had to work once. The creature was awesome, even if it did make the innards below Olivia’s stomach feel a bit like jelly when she was in the same room with it.

  The lab around her went quiet. Actually, Olivia had no idea how long it had been quiet, but she suddenly became aware of it and she lifted her head.

  Cassie was standing in the doorway, looking around.

  Olivia’s temper spiked.

  “You’re supposed to be missing,” she said, turning her back on her slides.

  “I’m not very good at doing what I’m supposed to,” Cassie said. “I need you.”

  Olivia looked around, not really at anyone, but making a point.

  “Why?”

  “Because Troy needs you. There’s something wrong with him, and I need someone who knows him to be my extra set of eyes.”

  “I’m busy,” Olivia said, starting to turn back to her work.

  “You and he were talking about trying again, weren’t you?” Cassie asked. “You had a great conversation and you were actually feeling optimistic about it. You forgave him, even if you haven’t told him so yet. And then he went stone cold and he hasn’t just not spoken to you since, he blocked you out completely. Didn’t he?”

  Olivia grew angrier as Cassie spoke.

  “This is not the time or the place,” she said, realizing with hot shame that she was blushing.

  Cassie shrugged.

  “You project. Everyone here already knows, except him, and he’s intentionally ignorant because he’s in denial and keeps futilely waiting for a chance to ask you out.”

  The ex-human woman looked over at Craig.

  “You missed your shot. Women don’t give you a window where they’re available because they don’t know you’re waiting for it. You keep waiting, you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life. But you missed your shot with her. Live with it and move on.”

  “Cassie,” Olivia hissed, leaving her desk to grab the woman’s arm and drag her out into the hallway.

  Cassie didn’t have the decency to look chastened.

  “What are you doing here?” Olivia demanded.

  “Troy got broken and I’m going to try to put him back together,” Cassie said. “But I really do need another set of eyes, because I’m kind of going to be really busy just trying to find him.”

  “Find him?” Olivia asked. “I know where he is, and even if I didn’t, he has a personal assistant who schedules all of his time. Just go look at his calendar.”

  “That’s his body,” Cassie said. “I’m trying to track his energy.”

  Olivia blinked.

  Cassie wasn’t the type to just suddenly lose it. Nor was she a metaphysical, neo-spiritualist.

  “What are you talking about?” Olivia asked.

  “It’s not his fault he went cold,” Cassie said.

  “You say that a lot,” Olivia said. “I don’t need you to apologize for him.”

  “How’s Benji doing?” Cassie asked as Olivia turned away.

  Olivia stopped.

  Celeste’s vocabulary had gotten pretty dark about her long-time partner in crime.

  She turned back around again.

  “What do you know?”

  “I don’t know if I can help Benji or not, but I believe I can help Troy. I need you.”

  “Why isn’t Jesse helping you?” Olivia asked. There was nothing Olivia could do that Jesse couldn’t; they both knew that.

  “We’ve agreed to see other people,” Cassie said, and Olivia frowned.

  “What?”

  “It’s complicated Palta stuff,” Cassie said. “Look, I need your help. Is it a yes or a no?”

  “I’ll help you, if Troy needs me,” Olivia said. “I just don’t know what you expect me to be able to do.”

  Cassie nodded.

  “Would going through the portal room floor make you more comfortable?”

  “What?” Olivia asked. “I thought we were looking for… This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Troy’s energy is on another planet,” Cassie said.

  Olivia pursed her lips sarcastically.

  “Why is Troy’s energy on another planet?” she asked. Cassie grinned.

  “That’s exactly what I intend to find out.”

  *********

  It hadn’t yet been a week.

  It felt like a month, but Troy knew for a fact that it hadn’t been a whole week yet since he’d been in Washington with Senator Greene, trying to figure out how to wrest control of the base away from Donovan, discovering… Everything.

  It would be a week tomorrow.

  He was waiting for OSI to show up to give him a report on the investigation into what had happened to Major White. They’d kept saber-rattling at him, trying to get him to give them control rather than access, but he hadn’t even given them access to the secondary portal building. He’d spoken briefly with Conrad that morning, and they had a shelter set up for the foreign terrestrial animal; they were getting him out. There was no place to put the foreign terrestrials from the dormitory other than where they were, so that part of the building was going to remain functional for the time being, but the rest of it was down. Cold. He would wait to disassemble the controls until he had experts he trusted to do it and there weren’t so many other moving pieces running around, but he’d been there to watch the maintenance crew as they completely disconnected the building from power. They had isolated the dormitories and installed a generator to power their activities, and there had been some additional temporary measures to keep the animal alive and well until his new temporary shelter was ready, but there was no source of power to allow the portal to function, and he had security keeping the control portion of the secondary portal completely locked down.

  All the jumpers were back, and Troy was reading their debrief reports as he waited for OSI.

  Senator Greene had been talking about adding an appropriations rider to an upcoming bill, and there were final candidates on the President’s desk for filling the General’s role. He didn’t have a lot more time here. The problem with that was that an outsider was going to come in with an agenda, and Troy expected that that agenda would revolve around ‘cleaning things up’ and demonstrating that he was the right man for the job, given the chaos on base.

  Which would lead to unnecessary destruction as the new General demonstrated his ability to get rid of the bad.

  The further down the road Troy got, the less there was going to be on the new General’s desk, and the fewer bad decisions the man would make.

  They’d served papers at nine locations around the country, based on the box Jesse
had pointed at.

  There hadn’t been another qualified zoologist, so Troy had put in the request to start the interview process with the one they’d come up with.

  There were six animals, two plants, and a weapon in the boxes that had left the base and gone to Americans.

  The plants required special enclosures to create the right atmosphere for them. The labs could care for those two, for the time being, and Conrad would receive the weapon for processing, when it came in, but the animals needed an expert watching over them. The jumpers who had collected them hadn’t mentioned them in their debriefs - either because they’d debriefed those missions already or because they knew that it had been highly illegal and they’d omitted it out of self-preservation - and they’d go back into interrogation today and tomorrow to get the information about how to care for the animals, whether they were wild or domestic, and how to return them to their native planets safely.

  If it proved to be too challenging, Troy was working with Conrad on a euthanasia solution for the non-critical species. He was aware that taking an action like that would create outrage all over the world, if anyone ever found out, but he needed to have the plan ready. They weren’t chartered for a zoo, and he didn’t want tourists.

  His phone buzzed and he hit the speaker on it without looking up from his report.

  “Agents Yost and Wu here from OSI,” Bridgette said.

  “Let them in,” he answered, disconnecting the phone again.

  He looked up as the two agents came in.

  “I want to know about my missing officer,” he said. The two agents sat and Wu nodded, taking out a folder and putting it on his desk, her hand resting on it.

  “We’re combining investigations,” she said. “Clearly this was related to everything else going on, on base, and while the field agents are still running point on the ground…”

  “Cut it out,” Troy said, reaching for the folder. “The whole scheme has roots in Washington and that’s your sandbox.”

  Her mouth twitched and then she nodded.

  “Yes.”

  Troy shrugged.

  “Hardly a secret, there. Were the two men fakes or real?”

  He took the folder. Both agents were quiet for a moment as he looked at the pictures.

  “You’ve been doing good work,” Troy said. “I expected an update before this.”

  White was dead.

  “As you say,” Wu said slowly, “chain of command is tangled right now. You don’t completely trust us…”

  “And you don’t completely trust me,” Troy said. “All right. Were they real or fake?”

  They looked at each other. Troy wasn’t sure what he saw there. Maybe confusion that he wasn’t reacting to the violence of the pictures, maybe a reluctance to answer his question.

  “They were real badges,” Wu said. “They were both actually employed with the Secret Service, and we believe that only one of them knew the actual plan when they came to base.”

  “Why is that?” Troy asked. Wu nodded toward the folder.

  “The other one is dead, as well.”

  He turned the page, reading the photos more carefully. Major White wasn’t the only body there.

  “Who are they working for?” Troy asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” Wu said. “But we’re talking about high-level espionage, here. We have to be careful who we trust.”

  “And who we accuse,” Yost supplemented.

  Troy gave him a dry look.

  “Hate to risk your career on figuring out who is abducting and killing military officers,” he said. For a few days, he’d forgotten how to be sarcastic, but it was coming back to him as a sort of affectation.

  “It’s complicated,” Wu said. “It doesn’t mean that we’re afraid to hit someone in the nose, when we’re sure we’re right. We just need to not be wrong.”

  “Who gave them their orders?” Troy asked.

  Wu shook her head.

  “We’re working on it.”

  “You’ve had days,” Troy said. “How is it that hard to figure out who told them to come to Kansas and collect a man off of a military base? With that specific a timing?”

  “The agents are doing their best, and they have all the support we can offer them,” Wu said. “We owed you an update and we wanted to deliver it in person.”

  “You have foreign terrestrials missing,” Yost said.

  “Yes, I do,” Troy said. “And my investigator is on it, doing his best, with all the support I can offer him.”

  “We want to lead the investigation,” Yost said. Troy shook his head.

  “You have an investigation. I have portal business. It’s ugly, but this is still just portal business. If you want to investigate who decided it was a good idea to bring them over here in the first place, I believe you have that man in custody, and you’re welcome to interrogate him on your own time.”

  They all knew Donovan wasn’t talking.

  Given that someone had killed White, it didn’t seem likely he would talk any time, soon, either.

  “Who brought them across?” Yost asked. “The jumper?”

  Troy indicated the stack of files in front of him.

  “I’m working on that. But he reports to me, and while he may have suspected that what he was doing wasn’t standard protocol, he was operating under a paradigm where they brought numerous foreign terrestrials across to Earth under Donovan’s direct orders. Unless I find that the jumper involved had a reasonable suspicion that these foreign terrestrials were a disproportionate risk, he remains my responsibility to discipline.”

  The new jumpers were civilians.

  One of the key tenants of jumpers was that they were military and subordinate to the chain of command, but Donovan had cut the line with contractors, and they didn’t have the same level of accountability.

  Troy was still working on how to get the man to talk candidly, given the NDA in place.

  If Special Investigations took over, the jumpers’ beliefs about how the NDA would get enforced would go from intangible fear to imminent threat, and Troy might never get the information he needed to get everyone home safe.

  “When they find out how much leeway you’ve taken with your command, they’re going to bust you back down to Captain,” Yost said, and Troy shrugged.

  “Wouldn’t mind being back in the labs again,” he said. “It was good work.”

  He saw Wu’s slight smile. Nostalgia for simpler times.

  “I still want to know who is investigating the missing foreign terrestrials,” Wu said. “And what information you’ve given them to go on. The files are… lean.”

  “That’s being generous,” Yost said.

  Troy looked from Yost to Wu and shrugged again.

  “My investigator is doing his best, and you wouldn’t do any better.”

  “It’s the Jalnian, isn’t it?” Wu asked.

  “Illegal,” Yost commented. “You can’t assign work of this level of sensitivity and security to another foreign terrestrial.”

  Troy knew things they didn’t. Like that Jesse had saved the Secretary of the Air Force’s life, as well as Senator Greene’s. Like that Jesse could leave any time he liked, and he stayed, not because of the portal room’s amazing security keeping him out, but because he cared. Like that Jesse was the only one with any chance of catching the foreign terrestrials unless they made an epic mistake.

  They didn’t need to know any of those things.

  “It is my call, and I chose someone I trust,” he said. “If you disapprove with my results, you can take that up with Senator Greene.”

  “She isn’t going to shield you forever,” Yost said. “You’re eventually going to have to answer to your own chain of command again, and no one is going to like you flouting the rules like this.”

  “No one did anything about it while Donovan was here,” Troy said. “It will never be on the formal record, but I was the one who called attention to it in the first place.”

  “D
oesn’t excuse you continuing his behavior,” Wu said evenly. “When this is all over, your decisions are all going to be reviewed and you’ll have to answer for them. You should remember that.”

  From her, it wasn’t a threat. It was career advice. He gave her a quick nod.

  “Thank you.”

  She gave him half a smile.

  “I hope you come out a hero,” she said. “I really do.”

  Yost looked at her and she shot him a look out of the corner of her eye.

  “Is there anything else?” Troy asked. “I have shipments coming in today that I’m going to supervise personally and I’m sure you’re quite busy as well.”

  Conrad had lab supplies coming in, as did several of the other labs. They were tearing through basics, and the power plant was up for its yearly audit and review as well. Bridgette had shielded him for the first few days, but the everyday work of keeping the base running had to eventually show up on his desk, and the more urgent things were beginning to make it.

  “We have three specialists who are going to get here tomorrow that are going to take over the personnel evaluations from the new facility,” Wu said. Troy let that sit for a minute before he nodded.

  “You spring a folder like this one on me again, I’m going to kick every last one of you off of my base,” he said. “You’ll give me daily updates from your office on what they’ve accomplished and any decisions.”

  Wu held his eye.

  “We have autonomy,” she said.

  “You do your jobs right, I won’t interfere,” he said. “But I’m not giving you free rein to do whatever you want where my people are concerned.”

  “They aren’t your people,” Yost observed.

  “They were the day I took the commanding role on base,” Troy said.

  They held eye contact for a moment loner, and then Agent Wu stood and offered him a handshake. Troy stood to shake hands with her, then Yost, then he walked them to the door.

  He opened it and stood aside as they left.

  “Alright, Rutger,” a familiar voice said. “What have you got yourself into, that you’ve got a dragon guarding your door?”