by Chloe Garner
They’d age out by twenty-five, twenty-six. Some of the men would make it to twenty-eight. They didn’t have the luxury of a Palta to escort them around the universe, and now Troy remembered it. Before, he’d ignored it because their unhappiness didn’t factor into making the right decisions.
He sat at his desk, holding up his head with his hair.
“Sir?” Bridgette asked. He hadn’t heard her open the door. He looked up and she frowned, closing the door and coming to sit across from him.
“Cassie told me what happened,” she said. “Slav and I didn’t tell anyone… because these are truly extraordinary circumstances, but you were developing a reputation of ruthless willingness to do what needed to be done. People didn’t like it, but they trusted it. I thought you’d just bought into leadership, but I can see now that that wasn’t what happened.”
“Is this a pep talk?” Troy asked, resting his head back down on his hands again.
“No, sir,” she said. “This is reality. If you fall apart under all of this, now, of all times, they will relieve you of command and the person who sits in that chair after you isn’t going to do any of the things that need to be done. He’s going to come in here with an agenda, because the only man who is going to make it through the affirmation process is going to be one with political strings. They’ll come in here and see the place as a candy bowl and they’re going to do whatever they have to, to keep their political masters happy. I’ve seen it before and…” She shook her head. “Quite frankly, I’ve been amazed at your autonomy, and I can only conclude that it comes from everyone around you knowing that if you aren’t the one doing what you’re doing, what you’re doing is going to fail.”
“Except Conrad,” Troy said, looking up when she laughed.
“I never thought I’d see him when he went away to college,” she said. “Figures he’d turn up somewhere being… Conrad.”
“And what is that?” Troy asked, heaving a sigh and sitting back in his chair.
“Elegantly competent without a touch of sophistication,” she said simply, without having to think. Troy grinned.
“You did hang out with him,” he said. She shook her head.
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
Troy tipped his head to the side and she gave him a ghost of a smile.
“He was never cruel. Ever. He is a kind young man. But I have never been so consistently exhausted as when I was trying to keep up with his pranks. And I have worked in active war zones.”
Troy nodded, and she narrowed her eyes.
“He grew up somewhere else, and he has a wife at home forming him into something new again, but working with you has changed him. Made him much more serious than he was before.”
Troy shook his head.
“He hasn’t worked with me. I offered it to him and then I left. Abandoned him. Haven’t really forgiven myself for that.”
She shook her head.
“No, that’s exactly why. He’s seen his father, he’s seen other high-ranking officers, but you’re actually doing the things that he thinks are important enough to do. Doing them. Not sitting at a desk writing about them.”
Troy nodded slowly.
She stood.
“But you must be that officer. For now. If you want to save this base from what everyone else wants to make it into.”
He shook his head.
“I wasn’t human.”
“You aren’t supposed to be,” she said. “You are an officer of the United States Air Force.”
*********
Cassie sat on a curb in front of the house.
She could walk in any time she wanted. The guards certainly weren’t going to stop her. If she was feeling churlish, she could ask for their weapons and they’d both hand them over on her way past.
She might be churlish.
The problem was the vibration.
There was a lot of power in that house.
A lot.
She’d had a theory, at one point, that if she really wanted to figure out where Jesse was based, she needed to look for off-grid power sources. All power eventually turned into heat, in theory. Then she’d developed a half a dozen technologies that would efficiently capture waste heat and turn it back onto an electrical grid, and she’d abandoned the theory.
She was re-structuring it, now.
The vibration was at thirty-eight hertz. American power ran at sixty, and European ran at fifty. The power lines over her head gave off noise at sixty hertz.
Thirty hertz would have been something else. Something human.
But something that ran on a clock that didn’t use the second as its base rate of reference? It wasn’t human. She didn’t know the rate of AC current used at enough planets in the universe, nor their base unit of time, well enough to guess where the technology was from, but she knew for damned sure it wasn’t Earth.
She was looking for other clues about what might have been in that house when the only one she needed came walking down the street.
“Jesse,” she hissed.
He came to sit down next to her like he’d expected her to be there.
He hadn’t, but it was convincing enough to anyone who wasn’t Cassie.
She stared at the house.
“They’re in there?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “There’s a gamer who is logged in right this minute, though, and… They’re good, Cassie. They’re very good.”
“Who would run a power system at thirty-eight hertz?” she asked. He put his hand on the ground, frowning quickly and nodding.
“That shouldn’t be here. Why are you here?”
“Brought Troy’s spirit back. Came to pick up a rogue delivery as a favor.”
“Any clue what it was?” Jesse asked.
“Slave girl,” Cassie said. Jesse whistled, low.
“Oooh, that’s not good.”
Cassie raised an eyebrow.
“Spill it.”
“How many planets did Mab get involved, here?” Jesse mused.
“Look, you guys are going to need to move on,” one of the guards said on Portuguese, approaching. Cassie put out her hand.
“Give it.”
It didn’t matter that she answered in English. He took the rifle strap up over his head and handed her the gun. She shooed him back across the street, where the other guard asked him a couple of confused questions and came to talk to her. She just put out her hand, and he gave her his gun, walking back across the street to face his confederate. Neither of them would notice that they were both unarmed.
“Been here long?” Jesse asked, amused.
“Long enough,” she answered, laying the guns against the curb behind her feet.
“Shouldn’t mess around with that, here,” he said, still nodding with some appreciation.
“I’m armed now, so you don’t have to be afraid,” she mocked without malice, and he laughed quietly.
“I’m quite aware of how capable you are of protecting yourself and others,” he answered. “And that was as a human.”
“Who’s in there?” she asked.
“A Caladais.”
She shook her head.
Even as a Palta, it was statistically unlikely that she would have heard of any given species, even when you filtered it down to the ones most likely to be jumping around the universe, which wasn’t a correct assumption, given that the portal program had brought her here.
“It’s a technical genius,” Jesse said. “She’s… You guys have a character who could build a shopping mall out of bubble gum and chopsticks?”
“MacGyver,” Cassie said, nodding.
“Think slightly sub-Palta level MacGyver,” he said.
“Then why is she in there?” Cassie asked. “I’d just walk out the front door, don’t care what anyone thought they were going to do about it.”
“Caladais are trainable,” Jesse said. “If you break their spirits, it’s well-documented that you can get them to work for you wit
h just a token security system, but you have to demoralize them consistently enough to make them focus on how miserable they are rather than how to get out.”
Cassie narrowed her eyes.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Jesse said.
“You would?” she countered.
“I’ve seen it,” he said. “They’re a commodity.”
Cassie shifted.
“Not today.”
“Any other place in the universe, I’d just walk straight in there with you, but there are Lumps involved, and maybe a Wob-wob.”
“Speaking of,” she said. “Tell me how you ended up here.”
He nodded, rolling his jaw to the side, then shaking his head.
“I’ve been tracking them everywhere. Got a solid lead on this one because he plays a subscription game online, and it doesn’t matter where he goes, he keeps playing. Thing is, I’m not sure if he’s actually one of them.”
“Who else would he be?” Cassie asked.
“Don’t know,” Jesse said. “An accomplice who’s trying to distract me.”
“Who brought you here?” Cassie asked. “Why would he come here unless it was all tied together?”
“Could be he doesn’t know I’m following, and he’s involved, but not one of them. Could be this is a trap.”
“Then they truly don’t know that you’re following,” Cassie said, narrowing her eyes at the house. The simple idea that someone would try to trap her was insulting. You don’t try to cage a Palta. Not any more than you try to leash one.
Jesse laughed.
“Mab had your number,” he said. “You maybe one of the most aggressive Palta I’ve ever met, but boy are you Palta.”
“I’m going in there, I’m taking my prize, and I’m walking back out,” she said. “Doesn’t matter what’s between here and there. I’ll put a hole in ‘em, and you can do whatever you like with what’s left.”
“You don’t mean that,” Jesse chided. “You’ve been hoping to get a chance to catch up with me before I found them because you’re afraid I’m going to go non-violent on them and let them get away.”
She glared over at him.
“What you did with the Wob-wob, and look where that got us.”
“I’m not going to apologize,” Jesse said, looking at the house with a truly obnoxious sense of self-righteousness. She glared harder and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Playful. She might have decked him for that, if she’d been standing up.
“It’s like this, du Charme,” he said. “You want the universe to know that this planet has got the two of us protecting it, you’ve gotta let a few of them go.”
She shook her head.
“No. You make sure none of them ever get out.”
He shrugged.
“Two different strategies. I think mine works faster.”
“Says the one who let the guy go that he’s afraid of… right across the street.”
Jesse grinned.
“Never said I was afraid.”
“No, you’ve got me,” Cassie said darkly and he grinned wider.
“Safer than I’ve ever been in my life,” he teased.
“All right,” she said, still dark, “you tell me. What’s going to happen next?”
He shrugged.
“You’re going to go in there, you’re going to find the Caladais, and you’re going to take her back to base and make sure she’s okay.”
“You just said I didn’t mean that,” Cassie, feeling a real need to assert her Palta-ness. He’d treated her just like this as a human, and it was unacceptable.
“You don’t mean it,” he said. “But you’re going to find out when you finally think it through that it’s the only right way to do this.”
“And what are you going to do?” Cassie asked.
“I’m going to go give those nice men their guns back, and then I’m going to sit here and watch who comes pouring out of that house.”
“I’m coming back,” Cassie said, standing.
“I know,” he said. “It’ll all be over by the time you get here, but I’ll wait for you.”
She nodded at the house.
“That much power, they can jump.”
He nodded.
“They’ve been avoiding point-to-point transfers for the same reason you have. They’re easy to track compared to traditional transportation on a planet like this one.”
She shook her head.
“It’s not as simple as it used to be,” she said.
“No,” Jesse said. “And it’s nowhere near as complex as it’s going to be. Stop defending your planet’s honor and go get that woman. She doesn’t deserve to be in there, and we both know it.”
Cassie nodded and stood.
“You’re really going to give back the guns?”
Jesse nodded, settling on the curb a bit more.
“They’re going to notice un-armed guards, but if I’m very clever, they won’t notice me. It’s possible they’ll think that you’re just here for the Caladais and they won’t know that I’ve been tracking them.”
Cassie pursed her lips.
“You want me to act like I didn’t notice the power source?”
He shrugged.
“If you can get in and out without tipping them off that you’re Palta, it’s possible that they won’t recognize you. You see a Wob-wob, though…”
“I’ll jump a piece of furniture into the middle of his chest,” Cassie said.
Jesse grinned.
“Won’t work; they have tech that keeps that from happening to them, same as you.”
Cassie sighed and shook her head.
“How do I recognize the Lumps?”
“They’ll be the ones who see you,” Jesse said. “Unless you’re planning on going in there without perception screens up.”
She twisted her mouth to the side.
So tempting.
“No,” she finally said. “I don’t want to shoot the guards, even if they do guard a house that keeps at least one slave.”
Jesse tipped his head back.
“You’re going to take any you find, aren’t you?”
Cassie frowned and then nodded.
“If they’re foreign terrestrial, hell yes. If they’re human? I’ll see how it goes.”
Jesse shook his head.
“Your problem, figuring out what to do with them after.”
She gave him a withering look.
“Like it was ever going to be yours.”
He grinned.
“Not with you around, it wasn’t,” he said, then made a shooing motion at her, the same she’d given the guard moments ago. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”
She pursed her lips, then shook her head and started for the house.
It was a way of moving, one that it hadn’t taken her long to figure out. The sway, the beat, all of it was about the species that was trying to see her. Fitting into the world in a way that felt familiar and native to them, never standing out from the background, the way their brains worked down at their fundamental level of interaction with the world.
It didn’t work on video feeds, but it would work on the guards on the other end of those feeds, so long as the video was continuous enough.
She went to the door and peeled a strip of electronic membrane off of her arm, finding the magnetic lock and popping it. Highly secure, if you were worried about lock-pickers. Worst choice possible, when you were trying to keep out Palta.
The door opened at a touch, swinging into the house soundlessly as she stood, looking, smelling, listening, feeling.
The floor had an odd shape to it, just inside the door. It was grouted terra-cotta tile, but the first rows of tiles were slightly higher than the rest of the room. Cassie knelt, programming another strip of electronic membrane and putting it on the floor. It answered her, confirming that there was a DNA sensor in the floor. She admired the design of it for a moment, then overrode it and walked
into the room after she recovered the electronics from the door and the floor.
They weren’t easy to get, and she needed a minimum of them to jump. She had some stashed around the base, in case of emergency - rule one of survival: never allow your survival to rely on something you can’t get to without an ample ration of it. Camp near water and food. Keep electronics on hand that you needed in order to jump to additional electronics.
The lights overhead flickered, and she found a lightswitch to turn them off. She couldn’t reach them easily, and she knew that they were going to know she was here before too long. Outside of the building, they would only have human guards. Even if they blended in well, they couldn’t be human, and it was too small a cost to keep all foreign terrestrial guards inside.
The technology was ramping up as she advanced, too. Air sensors were checking her breath for signs of foreign terrestrial metabolism, the walls hummed with energy that checked her density, looking for organ configurations that were non-human. She shut down the things she could see, but the cleverness of the design warned her that it was inevitable that she would miss or misunderstand one, and that would be the end of it.
She got to the end of the atrium and stood in a wide doorway. The entrance had been shaded, but here, sunlights painted the walls gold and a pale floor radiated light back up at her. Her eyes adapted quickly enough for her to see the paintings on the wall shift.
“Now that’s cool,” she murmured, going to look at one of them. It was subtle, and it was supposed to happen before you got used to the light differential between the two rooms, but it wasn’t designed for Palta levels of capacity.
Something whistled past her and embedded into a wall and she tipped her head at the painting.
“Poison darts?” she asked. “Really?”
She took a step back as another one shot past her, but the third one hit her squarely in the side, under her elbow. She winced the side of her face and lifted her arm, pulling out the long, narrow dart.
She didn’t recognize the design. There was no large body to it, like a traditional human dart, but it did have an odd heft to it. It was almost diamond-shaped, in cross-section, and it had embedded itself into her side several inches before the widest part of it had finally stopped it.
It hurt quite a lot. She pressed her elbow against her side, triggering the cellular-level repairs that the wound hormone triggered, then looked at the hole in her shirt.