Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  Cassie laughed.

  “You never said I was supposed to.”

  “Childish,” he said, and she laughed again.

  “Just wait until you see what I can do when I’m armed.”

  “Don’t even want to think about it,” he said. It was true. An armed Palta was a bad thing. An armed Palta with a human worldview was capable of most anything.

  He’d already helped her destroy a planet.

  She was watching him.

  He looked up from the computer, putting his finger on the screen to keep track of the rest of the conversation through the tactile interface he’d hacked onto the machine.

  They met eyes, and he felt that odd surge of interest. Wanting to know what she was thinking, what she would say when he spoke.

  He’d kissed her.

  Stupid.

  Impulsive.

  “Where are they?” she asked again.

  “I think the other two are in D.C.”

  She was very still.

  “Troy is missing an officer, and I never did hear what they did with Donovan when they deposed him.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I’d thought about that, too.”

  “Is this a decoy?” Cassie asked.

  “Lumps aren’t above it,” Jesse said. “But…”

  “Where is he?” she asked, standing.

  “Cassie,” he said. “Not like this.”

  She looked sharply down at him.

  “People are going to die because you aren’t willing to go after it until you see a grand, unified solution.”

  “Is that wrong?” he asked.

  “You let a Wob-wob run the base,” Cassie said. “If you hadn’t hesitated back then, they wouldn’t have even brought them here.”

  “I didn’t know where he was,” Jesse said. “And he could still be here.”

  “Because you let him go.”

  “You want to kill the Lump upstairs,” Jesse said, closing his computer when he realized she was reading his screen with her peripheral vision.

  “I want information,” she said. “And they’re the ones who started it.”

  “Are they?” Jesse asked.

  “Well, if they aren’t, they’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” Cassie said, starting for the elevators. He tucked his laptop under his elbow and followed her.

  “He isn’t human,” Jesse said. “You can’t just brute-force him to tell you what you want to know.”

  Cassie looked over her shoulder at him, not slowing.

  “You’re using the wrong definition of brute force,” she answered. This alarmed Jesse, and he chased after her faster, now.

  “They are clever,” he said.

  “Only because they put a Caladais in a cage and made her think for them,” Cassie said, pushing the elevator button. Jesse wondered what he’d done wrong to give away the room number. Or if she was baiting him into making a mistake, now.

  “No,” he said. “They’re clever all on their own. Do you know how hard it is to break a Caladais’ spirit? It takes years of intentional planning and execution.”

  “Or you take her out of her mother’s arms as a baby and tell her she’s never going to be anything other than a prisoner,” Cassie said.

  Oh.

  Jesse sighed, turning to face the elevator doors with a sense of inevitability. Maybe he’d get both of them out of this alive, if he thought fast enough.

  “It’s supposed to be illegal to breed them in captivity,” he said quietly.

  “Where is their home world?” Cassie asked. Jesse gritted his teeth. He should deflect, but that was just going to spike her temper more. Serene, manipulative, Palta Cassie was hard enough to deal with. This?

  “They don’t have one,” he said, trying to keep the pitches in his voice right to trigger calm without being so obvious about it that she’d resist.

  “That’s not possible,” Cassie said. “You’re being simple in order to hide a truth from me that you don’t want to tell me.”

  “They formed on a very small corner of a planet full of very territorial species,” Jesse said, not looking at her and no longer trying to manipulate her mood. What was the point? “There was a lot of aggression, fighting over territory and critical resources, and the Caladais were… They were weapons merchants. They made good money at it, and they were wealthy. Bought themselves mercenaries to protect their borders.

  “The problem was that not all of the species on their planet consider sentience to be sacred, and they started buying Caladais infants on the black market. They’d kidnap women and force-breed them, and the babies turned into just another weapon. Their money couldn’t protect them all, and the Caladais became commodities on their planet, long before the planet made official contact with the universal communities.

  “By the time they made contact, the population of Caladais on their historical homeland was small enough and besieged enough, generation after generation, that they just moved. They picked planets they liked in community groups, a few dozen, and they have largely been successful. They’re good colonizers. They get to the point that they’re competing with each other for the really high-paid work, and the ones who aren’t established just move and find a new market to work in. They marry and pick a new planet and start a family. Some planets only have two. There aren’t any free ones on their ‘home’ planet, and haven’t been for hundreds of years, but off of their original planet, it’s very illegal to force-breed them, and the laws, even where slavery is legal, all say that the product of consensual union is a free individual.”

  “Gee,” Cassie said. “How generous.”

  “I’m not defending it,” Jesse said. “You know how Palta react to the simple idea of being controlled. I’m just saying… She doesn’t have a home to go to. We could find her one of the larger colonies, if you wanted, and take her there. She could learn how to be a Caladais from them. But she’s not going to have any less success learning it on her own than you have. They’re just as independent as Palta are.”

  Cassie shook her head.

  “Troy wants to send her home. But there’s no home to go to. No family. Best we can do is drop her with friendly strangers and wish her luck.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” Jesse said. “You aren’t trapped here, and neither is she.”

  Cassie glanced at him, and he shrugged.

  “You could take her to your Midas retreat,” he said.

  “I’m not taking anyone else there ever again,” she said. He glowered at the doors as they slid open.

  “Don’t pretend that you aren’t storing everything you can think of there as a doomsday bunker.”

  She didn’t look at him, but he hoped she was surprised he knew.

  It was a certain scent she had on her. He could always tell how long it had been since she’d gone, and he knew, now, that she’d gone recently. Even when he hadn’t been able to get in, after he’d left her there, he could tell how long she’d been away from the place.

  “I won’t,” she answered. “But I’m not taking her there.”

  “She’d love it,” Jesse said. She shrugged.

  “It’s a prison,” she said. “I don’t care how pretty the views are from Alcatraz or how fascinating their library is. People died there, and people lived out pointless lives, waiting to die there. You don’t just populate it.”

  “Could blow it up,” Jesse offered. She shook her head.

  “No. You keep it as a monument. To remind everyone what it was.”

  “They give tours of Alcatraz,” he said. She drew a breath and sighed her shoulders back.

  “I still tour it.”

  He shook his head. She pushed a button, finally confirming that she’d read the room number off of him, and the elevator moved.

  “They fight,” he said. “If he thinks you’re there to kill him, he will not hesitate to kill you. Do anything it takes to kill you.”

  “You walked into a closed room with a gang of underworld Gana and did
n’t blink an eye,” she said. “Let me go in there with you.”

  “I was planning on talking our way back out,” he said. “It shouldn’t have gone like it did. I survive because I don’t go looking for violence.”

  “And I’ve always survived because I’m not afraid of it,” she answered. He couldn’t tell if her temper was cooling or if it had just gone molten and glassy.

  The elevator doors opened and she stepped out. They both faced the wall.

  He didn’t wiggle.

  Neither did she.

  She was reading him. Live.

  He turned to face her, relaxing, then there was a shout and a stream of profanity. Cassie smiled slowly.

  “Gamer, you said,” she said, walking down the hallway and knocking on a door.

  Jesse closed his eyes, then spun over his toe and followed her.

  The outside of the door didn’t have anything protecting it, though there was filming paint on it. Jesse could tell that Cassie saw it from where she stood, just off to the side of the door. The floor was covered with room service trays.

  “Thought he’d only been here a day,” she murmured.

  “So did I,” Jesse answered.

  “Go away,” a voice shouted from inside. Cassie peeled electronics off of her arm and put them on the door handle. They hissed and melted away, and someone inside cursed again. Cassie shook her head, muttering something Jesse didn’t catch and peeling another strip, sliding her hand along the door until she found a weakness she liked and affixing it there, instead.

  “He should have jumped by now,” Jesse said.

  “Not without his power plant,” Cassie said. “And I blew that up.”

  A series of clicks and pops indicated that her solution was working, and she peeled another strip of electronics, trying the door handle again. This time, it popped open, and she turned the handle, putting her back against the wall as a blast of radiation lit up the opposite wall.

  “Who’s in the room?” Cassie whispered to Jesse. He shook his head. “I’ll find out.”

  She nodded and spun once more, looking into the room through a cracked door. Jesse stayed where he was.

  He’d been through this with her before. Chased her around on soldiery missions, trusting her instincts and her gun. Before, though, they’d been up against creatures he knew how to work with, and he’d been able to backstop her mistakes. Now, he didn’t think she was going to make any mistakes, but they were about to charge into a Lump lair. No one in the building was safe.

  She peeled her electronics off of the door and put them back onto her arm, reconfiguring them quickly and then sliding through the door.

  And letting it close behind her.

  Jesse tipped his head back against the wall.

  How had he not seen that coming?

  He pulled his arm up to start configuring his own way in.

  *********

  The Lump was sitting on the floor in front of the television. He’d hooked it up to a laptop and he had a keyboard that had been sitting in his lap and a headset. Both were on the floor against the wall now as he scrambled to his feet.

  Cassie tipped her head back.

  He was skinny.

  Didn’t move right.

  And terrified of her.

  Or, at least, he put that on.

  The skinny was real. That wasn’t a perception trick. The way he moved and the way he felt - he could fake those. All the same, she was pretty sure.

  “You’re a kid,” she said.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “I set up the room myself, and if you move, something is going to kill you.”

  “Sit,” she said.

  His knees gave, but he grabbed a table and stayed on his feet.

  “You’re the one who blew up the house,” he said. She watched him, learning. He had a temper, yes, but he hadn’t learned to control it, yet. “You got lucky. I was watching. You didn’t know they were both going to be in the doorway when you killed them. I saw at least four better ways of doing it than you did. You’ve been on this planet too long. They’re making you stupid.”

  Cassie twisted her mouth up to the side, a cool smile.

  He was good at manipulating people. Using emotional responses to get what he wanted. Probably very good at giving them what they wanted, but only after they suffered for it.

  “Very impressive,” she said. “Trying to prey on my sensitivity about my intellect. Clearly someone as smart as me must need to prove it, right?”

  “You given up on it?” he asked. “It’s for the best. No one here is smart enough to figure out whether or not you’re lying. But it is a use-it-or-lose-it skill. Thinking. You stay here much longer, you’re going to forget how to even look smart.”

  Cassie frowned, nodding again. The room was full of equipment. Things that should have stopped working, when the methane explosion had hit them. Had Violet underestimated how robust her designs were?

  “Where did all of this come from?” she asked.

  “You do make that look easy,” Jesse said, finally making his own way through the door. She put out a hand gently, signaling him to watch his step. He took a step casually forward.

  “I do,” she answered. “You just don’t breech enough doors to really stay in practice. Our friend was just telling me about that. How you have to practice to stay in form.”

  “You’re the Palta,” the kid said.

  “And you’re the Lump,” Cassie said. “You want more formal introductions than that? Or are species identifiers going to do us, for now?”

  He frowned.

  “Who are you?”

  “Someone who embarrasses a Palta with how well she uses configurable membranous electronics,” she said with another cool smile.

  The kid stared at her, hard, and she could see the makings of a predator, there.

  “Where are your parents?” she asked. “I assume that’s why there were three of you? Mommy, Daddy, tagalong, nuisance teenager who does nothing but play video games?”

  “I’m learning about humans,” he spat. “Beat you online, beat you in the real world.”

  “I was just asking him where all of his gear came from,” Cassie said. “I expect Violet would like some of it back.”

  He blew air through his lips. He was frighteningly humanoid. Even Cassie couldn’t see where his physiology failed to match up, under his loose-fitting clothes. He was every inch of him a human teenager, perfectly capable of fitting in anywhere in the world, insofar as any human teenager would.

  “Violet?” he scoffed. “Is that really the best you could do?”

  “It’s a flower, too…” Cassie started to argue, then she shook her head and sighed. “It doesn’t matter. She liked it. It’s done. I’m just going to go shopping, here, and figure out what she’d like back, most.”

  “It isn’t hers,” the kid sneered. “It’s mine. We paid for it.”

  “Get your own dirt,” she said, taking a step toward a black cabinet.

  The electronics on her arm warned her of an increase in the activity of the machine, though the power running it was subtle enough that Cassie couldn’t feel it, herself.

  “Dirt?” the kid asked. “Get away from that.”

  It was a ploy. He wanted her to take the next step. There was a scent to the air that suggested something in the room was trying something to knock her out, but it hadn’t found the right mix, yet.

  “I wouldn’t talk about Violet like that,” Jesse said. “See, she’s sensitive about keeping sentient life forms against their will, and she’s already angry enough about what you did to a friend of hers back in Kansas.”

  “You’re one of the dormitory mice?” the kid asked. “Never saw you.”

  “Never spent much time hanging out in the hallway,” Cassie answered, squatting.

  No power cords. It was drawing off of a field within the room.

  She could work with that.

  She started a new batch of disruption code, but she’d failed to go back
to Midas’ house to get more electronics. Stupid oversight seeded by a desire to not jump until she had the Lump situation in hand. It was too trackable. To identifiable.

  “Humans are stupid,” the Lump said.

  “Not arguing,” Cassie answered, condensing her design onto a narrower strip of membrane. It would still work, but it was just ten times more clever, and that took time.

  “What are you doing?” the kid demanded.

  “Shutting down your defenses so that I can walk over there and make you tell me where all of this gear came from and where your parents are,” Cassie said.

  “You’ll never make it over here,” he said. “It’s beyond state-of-the-art.”

  She glanced over at Jesse, who had taken another step forward. Either he was playing a very cautious game of hopscotch across the living room, or he was battling off the defenses as he went.

  “He talk too much, you think?” she asked, putting her hands on the floor to feel the differential power. Same frequency as the house, but very, very subtle. It was Violet’s design, but it wasn’t assuming the massive power supply at the house. It was designed to be hidden.

  “He’s been here all along,” Cassie said, standing. “He’s a decoy.”

  “How do you figure?” Jesse asked, taking another step.

  The kid backed up and Cassie shook her head.

  “I was the fuse,” she said. “We were supposed to find the house first. The pictures of the foreign terrestrial and that?” She indicated the screen, where men screamed and yelled in tinny voices out of the headset. “He couldn’t possibly be so immature as to actually spend as much time playing it as you told me he does. He was drawing us down here to the house so that they would know where we are in looking for them. A tracer mine. I blow the whole thing up, and they know how much time they have before we get to them.”

  “Why not just kill us?” Jesse asked.

  “Oh, they tried,” Cassie said, taking the strip off of her arm and leaning out over her toes to stick it to the black cabinet. The kid squeaked and she pointed at him.

  “Sit.”

  He hit a chair on the way down, eyes bugging.

  So human.

  Was it still just affectation? Or was it natural enough, that physical behavior, raising eyelids to take in all information possible when surprised or frightened?