Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

He stood, eyes closed, letting the cold hit the pain and enmesh.

  This was his body.

  He’d always liked it, actually. Counted himself lucky to be as fit as he was with as little effort as he put into it, happy with the shape his body took when he was well. Liked his face, his hair, the way his fingers were clever and quick on a keyboard.

  He just didn’t need it, and it was a new thought. One that was hard to overcome. Neither he, wandering the universe at whim, nor he, sitting at a desk dispassionately fixing the world’s problems, needed his body.

  He reached around the curtain and took a towel, using it to dry his face and his shoulders before wrapping it around his waist and pulling the curtain aside.

  Olivia was standing in the doorway, watching with concern. She turned her face aside.

  “Would you put down…” she started as he got out of the shower. “… a towel on the floor…” she faded away.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking at his wet feet. She peeked at him then moved to hide behind the wall.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s fine. Are you… Are you really okay?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m not going to ask Slav and Bridgette to cover for me longer than they have to. They shouldn’t be sticking their necks out while I eat pancakes. I’m going in to work today.”

  “And you’ll…” She started. He looked at the doorway corner where she’d disappeared, then went to get his shirt from where he’d laid it across the toilet. It wasn’t clean and it wasn’t pressed, but it was what he had. He’d send someone to his apartment to get fresh clothes for him after he got to the office. Olivia peeked around the doorway, then disappeared again when she realized he was dressing. “You’ll go home to your apartment tonight?”

  He hadn’t thought about it.

  “You want me to come back here?” he asked, sitting down to pull on his socks. He wasn’t sure where his shoes had ended up. She looked again, then came into the bathroom, taking the towel off of the sink and folding it, then hanging it over the curtain rod. He couldn’t stand while she was doing it. There wasn’t enough room for both of them. She suddenly realized how close she was standing to him and scrambled back to the doorway.

  “I mean, it depends,” she said, her fingers finding their way to her lips. “If you’re feeling… okay… I mean, normal and stuff, you should do what you want to do, but if you aren’t… normal… You should come back here when you’re done tonight.”

  He stood, straightening his shirt and his pants and going to look in the mirror. The uniform was a disgrace, and he frowned. Olivia tipped her head.

  “You’re always so well-presented,” she said. “Do you want me to go to your apartment and get you fresh clothes?”

  He nodded.

  “Can you meet me at the office?” he asked.

  She twisted her mouth to the side.

  “How are you going to get in?”

  “I’ll call Conrad,” he said. She shook her head.

  “You should call Slav. Conrad has a big meeting this morning.”

  Troy nodded.

  “Okay.”

  She gave him half a smile, sorry without knowing why.

  “You’re different again. Already. You’d have said that you’d call him anyway…”

  He could remember.

  She looked at the floor.

  Swallowed.

  “Olivia, do you want me to come back here tonight?” Troy asked.

  She looked up through a loose lock of hair, then tucked it away behind her ear.

  “Only if you need to,” she said, retreating toward the kitchen. “I mean, yeah, if you need to, you should, but…”

  He went to stand in the doorway.

  He was confused, and he wasn’t sure it was only because he’d been split.

  Any other woman, it would have been an invitation to share her bed, tonight, but he didn’t think that was what Olivia was asking for, and even so, she was embarrassed.

  She was standing at the counter, fingers working in the air like she was silently lecturing herself.

  He went looking for his hat and his cell phone, finding them on a small end table by an arm chair. He tucked the hat under his elbow and went looking for Slav’s number on his phone.

  He looked at her before he dialed.

  “Olivia, if you’re worried about me, I’ll come here tonight instead of going home by myself, or you can come home with me. Either way is fine.”

  Was it an excuse? Or was it what she was actually worried about? He couldn’t tell. She wouldn’t look at him.

  He dialed Slav, and the man answered on the third ring.

  “Cassie wasn’t lying,” he said. “I was trying to goad Bridgette into a bet that you were actually dead.”

  Troy shook his head.

  “Need a ride. You available?”

  “I don’t have a car, but you can ride the handlebars on my bicycle,” Slav said. “Where are you?”

  Troy grinned, then frowned.

  “Need your address,” he said to Olivia. She gave it to him, face in profile. He repeated it to Slav.

  “Give me ten,” Slav said and hung up.

  “Ten minutes,” Troy said, tucking the phone away.

  “I’ll go,” she said, looking around for a moment and then grabbing her keys off of a shallow dish at the corner of the counter. “I’ll see you at your office.”

  He stepped forward, catching her as she walked around the counter to go to the door. He didn’t actually have to touch her to stop her. It was like they were opposing magnets: when she got too close to him she bounced off and took a step back.

  She looked at the floor.

  He remembered how happy she’d been after the night at the dance club in Chicago, standing with her arms crossed across her chest, fists on her collar bones, but smiling up at him as he held her.

  “Olivia, we need to talk,” he said. There was alarm in the look that shot up at him and he shook his head. “Not like that. We just… I don’t know what we are. We were… laughing at dinner, and then… everything happened… and you saved my life. And…”

  He stopped. He had no idea what he was saying. He didn’t know how to do this.

  She nodded.

  “We need to talk about where we are,” she said. “I’ll get some supplies from your apartment while you’re there and you should come back here tonight. I’ll… make dinner. And we’ll talk.”

  He nodded, then reached forward. She swayed away even from just his hand, then let him touch her jawline with the backs of his fingers.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I haven’t said that yet.”

  She nodded, looking down again but not moving away from his hand.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He brushed her cheek then went to the door.

  He hesitated, feeling like he should have said something else, but he didn’t know what it was, so he just went out, going downstairs to wait for Slav.

  *********

  She took a plane to Brazil.

  Cassie’s bank account was ample enough, given that she didn’t pay for much on the planet anymore and she was still earning a military salary, so she sprung for first class, so that her knees didn’t get seat marks on them from the seat in front of her. She’d never flown first-class before. She’d been on air force special flights, but she’d never been in the front half of a commercial plane before.

  It wasn’t as special as she might have imagined.

  Experiencing what the wider universe considered luxury had put a damper on anything she was going to find on Earth, particularly among the things she could get into with her human, military ID.

  She was going to track down Jesse, after this, if he didn’t pop up. At some point, she was going to have to cut him open in his sleep and install a beacon on him, or something, because she was just about fed up with him disappearing on her like he did. If he was traveling linear, not jumping around, it might actually be impossible to find him. The time
s she’d caught him, in the past, it was generally because she’d known at a fixed time where he was going to be. Actually tracking him down was another knack entirely, and while she knew how she was going to do it, she hadn’t accepted yet that she wasn’t going to come up with a better idea, so she wasn’t thinking about it.

  Palta thought processes were still kind of odd, to her. Inverted. Knowing the answer well before she got there and just hiding it from herself because the discovery was part of the reward.

  She had a hard time saying just why she was using linear travel. Would have been easier to jump to Brazil, track down the foreign terrestrial woman, and then jump them both back home, but Jesse being gone as long as he had made her antsy, anxious, and it made her instinctively stay hidden in her own way. Sure, she used her own name to get on the plane, but you had to know that she was special in order to figure out that you should be tracking her. Acting like a human would keep her invisible to all but a select few who already knew that she was Palta.

  Lumps.

  Jesse had been concerned.

  It told her a lot.

  He wasn’t the type to be concerned about much, when he was there and had the time and energy to deal with it. The things that concerned him were the ones that he was going to have to leave, or that he was going to have to watch from the sidelines for one rule or another, because those were the things that went bad. When he got involved, he was just as confident as Cassie, and Cassie was pretty damned confident these days.

  Lumps were bad.

  They’d used technology Cassie had never seen before and they’d divided Troy in two.

  Benji, too, Cassie hadn’t forgotten. She’d gotten lucky, catching Troy. She didn’t know if she had the ability to track Benji. Didn’t even know where to start, and at this point, enough time had gone by that the odds of finding residual evidence of where he’d gone for his first jump were getting pretty long. Oceans flowed pretty quickly here and everywhere else.

  Benji was single, married to his work as it were, and while Cassie knew that he and Celeste were really close, she didn’t know if they were close enough for Celeste to be able to help find him. Celeste didn’t really get close to people like that. Wasn’t her nature.

  He might be lost.

  Which meant that Cassie was going to have to make the Lumps pay for it. It wasn’t about revenge. It was about prevention. This was her planet, her people, and if someone was going to come in and mess around with them, her response needed to be proportional to keep anyone from even thinking about it again.

  Cassie had no reservations about escalation.

  She wasn’t sure Jesse felt the same way, which was part of the reason she wanted to track him down before everything was said and done. She needed to be a part of the decision about what happened to them for being here, for hurting Troy and Benji, for whatever else they might have done since then.

  Base was a mess, and there were still new problems happening. She wasn’t sure Troy saw it, with as underwater as he was with the immediate, old problems, but someone was still actively causing them. Could be the Lumps. Could be a contact they’d made with humans off-base. Could be someone on base. Could be another foreign terrestrial, related or not to the Lumps.

  Cassie didn’t rule out anything.

  She needed time on base to figure out all of the symptoms, so that she could start tracing them back to a common cause, or multiple unique causes, but she was doing this instead as a favor to Troy, because of what he’d been through.

  And because she had just as hard a time standing by and watching humans take advantage of foreign terrestrials as he did.

  The file on the woman was in Cassie’s backpack, under the seat in front of her. She had a little bit of money, a little bit of tech, and a change of clothes in there, and that was about the size of things. She’d figure out what she was going to do next once she found the woman. She had the address where the security company had dropped off the crate - air force decals on a crate got through an awful lot of red tape without any eyebrows - so the start of the search would be simple enough. She also had a lot of names of people who had seen the woman, because that was how Troy knew that it was, indeed, a sentient woman.

  People talking about her online.

  In the unlikely case that the delivery address didn’t take her straight to the woman, she’d find a human with an easily-hackable mind and she’d ask a few questions. Be back on a plane before the sun went down, if that was how she decided to get home.

  She could afford a day and a half of flying time.

  She could afford it because she wasn’t willing to not afford it.

  She tried not to think about how far ahead of her Jesse was getting.

  *********

  Jesse had memorized the list of log-in IPs for the gaming account.

  The Lumps had been moving around a lot, over the past couple of weeks. He didn’t know where they’d been before that, because the account was new, but he suspected that they’d covered a lot of ground even before that. There weren’t any patterns to help him predict where they might go next, or even any evidence that they were still together.

  The Lump who was playing was on his own. The other two weren’t using the account and didn’t have their own, as far as Jesse had been able to find.

  He started at the beginning, going to the extended-stay hotel and getting the room number that the Lumps had been in. He talked to the clerk for a few minutes, but either she hadn’t been the one to check them in or out, or they were truly unremarkable enough that she hadn’t noticed them.

  He went through their room, but they’d been immaculate when they’d left it. There weren’t any traces of off-planet technology use, nor of odd usage of any of the human implements there. They would probably have been comfortable enough with the facilities, sleeping in beds, sitting on chairs, but Lumps had non-human grooming routines. Slime scrapes, corneal sloughs, tooth de-sheathing.

  The bathroom was clean. Either they’d used cleaning products capable of dissolving their organic tissues, or they hadn’t actually been here.

  Did they know that he was chasing them?

  Had they found the records of him pulling their data?

  How many of them were here? One? All three? More?

  He was frustrated. He didn’t have the bulk of the tools he would have used, if he had access to a Palta lab to work with, but he also didn’t think he would have found much of anything useful even if he had had all of it. They’d done a good job. It meant it was likely they’d done a great job.

  Why were they even here?

  The date on their stay was long enough after the day that they’d bought the car that he didn’t think this was just a landing spot. They’d come to Orlando on purpose. The game data tracked them all over the planet from here. Paris. Beijing. Sydney. Dusseldorf. He’d looked for transportation records for them, but he didn’t think that they were traveling on the same identification everywhere they went, because he hadn’t been able to find any patterns in airline data even among the continental searches he’d done. So unless they’d flown from Queensland to Cairo and driven from there to Germany…

  They had resources.

  They didn’t have to have someone helping them. They were Lumps, which meant they were clever and resourceful and they knew how to make solid plans well in advance. But he suspected there was a human helping them.

  Or a foreign terrestrial who had been here long enough to know how to work the human system flawlessly.

  Mab could have done it.

  He needed to go see her. Cassie had sent the box that his daughter’s awareness lived in home with Troy and Olivia, and Troy had promised to take it back to Cassie’s house at his earliest opportunity, but Jesse wondered if Mab wasn’t still living at Troy’s apartment at this point.

  Palta were built for being alone, but hers would be a lonely existence, even by Palta standards.

  He locked the door to the hotel room behind him and went to stand at
the end of the hallway, looking through a picture window out at parking lot and palm trees. The air had a healthy smell, here. Not in the sense that it smelled good, really, but in the sense that it was clear that life was flourishing all around him. There was mold under the carpet, and the humidity was intense, even in the air conditioning, but it was a healthy place.

  He wondered what the Lumps thought of the place. Their home planet, Ondu, was crowded with diverse, hard-living species who scraped an existence off of the dim planet. A place like this would feel like it had an exhibitionist quality to them.

  Lumps weren’t a jealous species, by practice, but they wouldn’t hesitate to take something that was unguarded just because they could, most of them. The consequence of living in such a tightly-budgeted society.

  Earth was a candy land for them, if you discounted the complete lack of technical sophistication.

  Like a human turning up in a caveman garden of Eden.

  You gorged for a while, but then you started to miss the trappings of real civilization.

  Then they’d get down to what they were actually here for, but in the meantime, they’d be getting themselves ready. It might or might not even matter where they were, he considered. They might be doing a tourist loop of the planet while they worked on completely unrelated plans.

  He shook his head, then turned away from the window, going down to the parking lot and the rented car waiting for him there.

  *********

  Troy was overwhelmed.

  More than once, that first day, he wished he could send away his spirit again and go back to the mechanical decision making he’d been doing day-in and day-out.

  It hurt less.

  He was burning planets for no reason beyond the fact that he couldn’t support all of them with the limited lab capacity he had right now, and the jumpers were getting ready to revolt. They’d all had the impression that having someone out of jump school was going to give them new opportunities, and he could hardly blame them for it. His first reflex had been to open the floodgates, himself. Peterson had a stack of resumes on his desk for jumpers behind schedule on graduating because there weren’t jobs for them on this side of the wall.

  Their clocks were ticking.