Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  It was complete.

  And only then did she look up and discover that Breath of Air was gone.

  *********

  The car dealer had been useful. Jesse had thrown around some official-sounding jargon about following up with a discipline issue on base with three missing airmen, and the dealership had gone into scramble mode, trying to make sure he didn’t find anything out while at the same time trying to look helpful and friendly toward the base.

  Because the base was life, around here.

  In the modest chaos, Jesse had walked himself back into their accountant’s office and pulled up the purchases from the last couple of weeks, easily finding the car that they’d paid cash for, and its temporary registration information.

  Troy had wanted to use the human system to track the car, but Jesse had told him it was pointless. The Lumps wouldn’t use any formal system that would track them. They’d lie, they’d steal, and they’d obscure any time they came up against such a system.

  But he knew what their car looked like, and that was something.

  He could work with that.

  *********

  They came across the first sentient foreign terrestrial in Brazil.

  There were reports online, when Troy had told them where to look, about a wealthy man in Brasilia who had a green-skinned woman who served at parties and danced. The authorities in Brazil were interested in avoiding a story about slavery, and the US authorities wanted to recover the woman before it got out that the portal program had sold her, and Troy knew that he would have been troubled at being a part of a coverup of something like this, if he’d been whole, but right now he wasn’t bothered, and he was in recovery mode.

  He knew what had happened.

  He had the documents from the security company and the woman herself to prove it, if he later changed his mind about what to do about it.

  And Senator Greene had been furious.

  “Ma’am, can I ask what did happen to Donovan?” Troy had asked at one point.

  “That’s the kind of question you don’t ask,” the senator had told him.

  The zoologist was getting settled in, at the dormitories, and Troy was signing all manner of purchase reports. Strange things, but Conrad and Slav were both keeping an eye on the man, and they agreed that life in the dormitories - as well as the mood - was improving. The Senator increased Troy’s budget on an emergency basis through an earmark on an unrelated bill, so now Troy had a slush fund for cleaning up the mess, and he signed the purchase reports unquestioned.

  The interviews were almost wrapped up, and most of the auxiliary staff had been released to future professions with ample threat about not talking about the work they’d done for the program. The people who were left were the portal operators themselves, the jumpers, and a few members of security.

  OSI was doing a good job with them, though Troy kept them close.

  There was no sign of Major White.

  The returning shipments were numbering two or three a day, but they’d slow soon as the harder, more dug-in buyers were going to be the only ones left.

  Lives.

  They’d ruined lives in the name of money. Funding secrets.

  Troy wondered how many of the worst of the buys were because Donovan had sold once and gotten himself blackmailed into selling other things. Sell a carnivorous plant this week, when they came back and demanded a plant-keeper to go with it, you went along to keep them from getting themselves into too much trouble.

  The forensic accountant that had come on through legal was doing at least as much work finding where the shipments had gone as the files from the security company. They were getting closer.

  All it took was one.

  Conrad had put three resumes on Troy’s desk from the research program at Duke, and Troy had signed off on all three of them. The labs were starved for qualified staff, even just the ones supporting the regular program, and Troy trusted Conrad as much as anyone to choose who should be there.

  Bridgette reminded him that he needed military personnel in there, too, and Troy had gotten a stack of resumes from Colonel Peterson, washed-out jumpers like Troy who were desperate to stay attached to the program any way they could. They sat on his desk for another day.

  Another day.

  He was sleeping six hours at night, working in the car both ways. Bridgette had kept them off of him for the first week, but there were budget meetings and promotion reviews and mission debriefings that he needed to sign off on every single day, and the fact that the entire base was at risk didn’t change that at all. The portal had to keep running, even at partial capacity, because there were jumpers on foreign terrestrial planets, there were schedules to keep to, there was critical maintenance that had to go on.

  Every day.

  His days were getting squeezed out from both ends, and he needed two more of himself to keep up.

  He needed to set up breakfast with Conrad to hear how the shipment reclaimations were doing. Slav spent a couple of hours a day in Troy’s office, and he gave off-handed updates as he thought of them, but they were both busy, and Slav wasn’t the type to organize his thoughts and give them to you straight. He thought of things when he thought of them.

  Conrad would tell him everything, in outline form, and then wait for feedback on what Troy wanted him to do differently, moving forward.

  He was still a young man, but Troy couldn’t have built a better replacement to take over the lab when he left.

  He pressed the button on his phone.

  “Sir?” Bridgette answered.

  “Contact Conrad and let him know that I will meet with him for breakfast tomorrow,” Troy said.

  “It’s late, sir,” Bridgette told him. “He’ll have eaten breakfast by the time he gets here in the morning.”

  “He isn’t going to turn down another breakfast,” Troy said.

  “All right. I’ll have word waiting for him,” Bridgette said. Troy looked at the stack of resumes again then stood, putting away the critical and secure information in his desk and locking it.

  The driver would be waiting outside. He had recommendations to write for the foreign terrestrials in the dormitory, and he was going to outline them tonight.

  Another day.

  *********

  Olivia had never imagined equipment of this quality.

  It was all so small and so intuitive. The idea of going back to her lab and lugging around everything that she needed, rooting around under her desk to plug it in, using it, and then boxing it back up and storing it back away after another trip under her desk… Her professional life was never going to be the same again.

  She had samples laid out on small cloths that she’d found in the case; it didn’t matter what she did with them, they always came up off the floor clean. She’d been using one to clean her hands after meals for two days now.

  Or so it felt like.

  She’d read a study, at one point, that said that if you kept human beings in perfect darkness twenty-four hours a day, they tended toward a twenty-six hour day with two four-hour sleep sessions per day, but she didn’t think she could have possibly made that transition this quickly. She was cat-napping rather than getting good sleep, because she never had any idea how long she’d been asleep, but the thrill of working kept her from minding. She’d get up, rub her eyes, scramble through the darkness for the lamp from Cassie’s box, then turn it on with her eyes closed and find the working surface, turning her back to the lamp until her eyes adjusted, but not waiting to get started on her work again.

  The notepad device was ingenious. It had taken her a full day to get it to do what it was doing now, and she had no illusion that she was using its full capacity, but she browsed her notes from the previous days like the thing was mind-controlled, then she returned to the stones.

  They suggested things about the geographical makeup of the planet that she couldn’t entirely read. The limestone was pretty obvious, and so was the granite, but the stone she didn’t re
cognize had such an interesting makeup, such interesting colors. She didn’t have the specific knowledge to figure it out, but she knew she had the key to figuring it out, and all she had to do was show it to Cassie…

  She didn’t know where Cassie was. It made her nervous when she stopped to think about it, so she didn’t stop.

  Band Rung came down periodically, sitting with her or just delivering things and leaving, and Olivia admitted readily to herself that she wouldn’t have recognized Breath of Air or Still Water again, without them speaking to her. If one of the elders had come down here and stood behind her, she wouldn’t have known about it until they tried to drag her out. She couldn’t do anything about it, and while she always ducked her head, wishing she had a place to hide anytime she heard footsteps, there wasn’t anything for her to do about that, either.

  She was a mouse, but at least she knew that about herself.

  The life cycle of the plant cells was novel. Unique, compared to any organic system she’d ever seen or read about. The use of salt and heavy metals was… It was an evolved trait, and the fact that it was as symbiotic as it was with a completely autonomous, not to mention sentient, species…

  She didn’t have a contract.

  Cassie had had a contract, and Troy had a contract, but she could go back home and write a paper about this and there was nothing anyone could do to stop her. She knew her contract inside out. Always had, but after Cassie’s entanglement, she’d gone back and read her own contract word by word, and anything that she did or discovered off base using non-base equipment wasn’t covered by it. She knew that in industry, there was a standard clause in most employment contracts that said that any intellectual property developed at any time during employment - during private time or otherwise - belonged to the employer, but her contract was different.

  If this had been a part of her official duties, they owned anything she learned.

  If it wasn’t?

  Well, they could fire her for not coming into work.

  But she owned all of the knowledge from the trip.

  She could be a world-renowned expert on non-terrestrial life. More, the things that she was looking at through her microscope - Cassie’s - could shake every biological science on the planet.

  The single slide, the images of the tree leaf cells, its bark cells, it shook up any number of standard assumptions about the nature of cellular life.

  She wasn’t naturally combative, not naturally confrontational, and she hated speaking in front of large audiences, but she had this phantom image in the back of her head of standing in front of a huge gathering of scientists, on a stage, in front of a presentation of her work, smiling, waving, modestly shrugging off wild applause.

  Everyone would have understood how important this was, once she explained it.

  The dirt was almost as interesting, though perhaps on more of a narrative level than an earth-shaking one. The biomes going on in there…

  “We need to move,” a voice said. Olivia looked over her shoulder at the shadow of a Band Rung near the doorway. The pathway up was that way, somewhere, but she’d never been out of the room. Not since Cassie had left her here.

  “What?” she asked. She was pretty sure that was Breath of Air, but she hadn’t been paying enough attention when he’d started speaking. She had gotten to the point that her implant was able to recognize the difference between male and female voices, and it altered their pitch to cue her when they spoke.

  “Now,” he said. “They’re looking for you down here.”

  She looked at the spread of technology, all of the tiny, intricate pieces.

  “Help me,” she said, starting to pick things up. They’d all only just barely fit in the box to begin with. She couldn’t just shove them all back in…

  She could leave the cloths… maybe that would leave enough space…

  “We need to go right now,” Breath of Air said, coming in and taking her wrist. “If we don’t get back up before they come down, you’re going to be trapped.”

  Olivia let him pull her to her feet, but still she paused, resisted. She wasn’t supposed to leave technology like that lying around where cultures like this one could find it. It would fundamentally alter them, if they figured it out.

  “If they catch you, they will give you flying lessons,” he said. “There is no question. They’ve started capturing side-walkers, and they think that you’re a spy for them.”

  “Why?” Olivia asked, taking a few reluctant steps away from her equipment. “How could I be a spy for them? Clearly I’m not one of them.”

  “They’re afraid,” Breath of Air said. “They’re threatening to give the rest of us flying lessons, too, from the top of the city, just for disagreeing.”

  Olivia looked up at him.

  “What?”

  “Come,” he said, pulling her toward the doorway. “We may already be too late.”

  She let him wind his arm around hers, strange, the way the straight bones flexed at all the right places to get a fully round grip around her arm, and he pulled her down a dim hallway and toward solid darkness.

  There were voices ahead of them, but he kept going.

  “Can you see?” Olivia asked in a whisper.

  “No,” he answered. “Can you?”

  “No.”

  “I come this way by touch,” he whispered to her. “We all do. They might be able to smell us, but I don’t think so.”

  He kept going, pulling her up a set of steps that were too big to be comfortable for her, and then he leaped up through a hole at the top, clinging to a wall and curling her in against his chest. Olivia’s eyes popped out of her head as her shoulder all but dislocated, but she managed to stay quiet as he climbed up a rough section of wall. There were more voices behind them, Band Rung searching rooms, talking to each other about where they’d looked and where they hadn’t.

  Breath of Air stopped breathing. Olivia put her forehead against his shoulder, eyes closed, and she stopped breathing, too.

  Feet along dusty stone floor, fast, and then a slap as they hit the ground below them.

  Olivia had no idea what Breath of Air was holding on to. The stone behind her back was rugged, but not featured. He was like an insect, clinging to nothing but texture.

  More footsteps, four more slaps down on the ground below them, voices echoing up through the floor at them, disorienting. The orange light of a torch flickering along the rocks below them for several moments, and then it was gone.

  Breath of Air waited several more minutes, but he breathed slowly. Olivia turned her face away, finding her cheeks wet. She was trembling.

  His grip around her shifted, and she put her arms around his neck as he switched from holding her arm to her waist, then flung himself noiselessly away from the wall, landing with a dramatic crouch. Her feet never found the floor as he stood, waiting, then continued forward, just carrying her outright, now.

  He moved over to a wall, his breath stopping again, and Olivia didn’t move, listening to the voices below them.

  They’d found her lab.

  They didn’t understand it, but they’d found it.

  She should have turned off the light. It would have bought them more time.

  Breath of Air moved again, heading toward a corner that Olivia could just make out by the shadow it cast in the dim light behind it. He went around the corner and toward a pool of gold light, a square on the floor and a lit wall behind it, running on silent feet. He hit the wall head high and climbed through the hole, and suddenly Olivia remembered that they weren’t going to be alone, anymore.

  The first time through Llargon, no one had paid all that much attention to her. They’d looked, sometimes they’d even fallen silent, but it had been a prisoner march. They hadn’t been concerned about what they were seeing.

  This time, three Band Rung nearby lurched toward them, calling out.

  “Breath of Air,” one said. “What are you doing?”

  “There she is.”


  He turned, swerving past hands, dark furry arms as they tried to hold him back. Someone grabbed his arm where it was around Olivia’s waist and Breath of Air jolted, dropping her. Olivia landed in a hard tangle on the ground, trying to find her feet. It was too noisy, too angry, too bright. Too full of foreign terrestrials who were content enough that she die. Who would take her to people who would kill her, just for being there and unexplained.

  She got back to her feet, but someone grabbed her wrist, pulling, and she’d lost Breath of Air.

  “Stop.”

  Everyone went still.

  Olivia knew that voice.

  Moonlight on Still Water had sat with her for hours, both days, brought her food twice. She’d asked questions about everything. Looked through Cassie’s things with tentative fingers.

  “Breath of Air will answer for his crimes, but I will take this one up to the elders myself,” Still Water said. The hand on Olivia’s wrist loosened, and Still Water stepped forward, looking once at Breath of Air, expression still inscrutable to Olivia, then she reached out, taking Olivia’s elbow rudely and jerking Olivia to her side.

  Olivia went lax, not just an act, and followed mutely as the Band Rung behind them discussed what was going to happen to Breath of Air.

  Cassie was late.

  Whatever she’d found, whatever she was seeing, she was late, and Olivia was going to die.

  She trusted Still Water. That wasn’t it.

  It was that there weren’t hiding places.

  There weren’t places to go, where she could be safe, where Cassie could get to her in time.

  And Breath of Air was going to die, too. They’d kill him for helping her, and she wouldn’t have accomplished anything for it.

  Still Water pulled her up through the first gap in the floor, then waved an arm broadly.

  “Make space,” she said to the Band Rung gathered there. “They caught this one; Breath of Air was helping her.”

  There was chatter, too much for Olivia to process, and she turned her face in.