Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  Fifty-fifty.

  Didn’t matter.

  She walked across the room carelessly and he gripped the chair to keep from tipping off of it onto the floor.

  She smiled down at him.

  “You’re going home,” she said. “And that’s if you’re lucky. Your parents aren’t leaving the planet.”

  “That’s not how you do it,” he said, ego overcoming shock. “You have to offer me what I want, first.”

  “Only if you have something I want,” she said. “I know where your parents are, and how to find them when and if they move.”

  She knelt, looking up at him, every inch of her the predator that he thought he was.

  “You’re a Lump, he’s a Palta, and I’m something else entirely,” she said. “I’m the one they bring in to fix the messes.”

  “They wouldn’t,” he said. “Why would they?”

  She shook her head.

  “They don’t tell you anything, do they? Regime change. Your people aren’t in control, up at the top anymore. They’re bringing in fixers, and you’re outnumbered and outgunned. You’re not hunting, anymore. You’re the hunted. And I like to take my prey on the run.”

  She reached up, pushing his chin up with her fingertip until he jerked his head away.

  “Run,” she said, standing and walking out the door. Jesse followed her to the elevator, where she looked up at the ceiling.

  “We need to find General Donovan and Major White,” she said. “They know things we need to know. That’s why they’re hiding them.”

  “Lumps are hard to find,” Jesse said. “Needle-in-a-haystack hard. I haven’t had any luck finding a specific blade of hay in that same haystack.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re going to do,” she said, glancing over at him. She felt bad. This wasn’t how he was built to operate.

  It just, was, with her.

  “How much of that was a lie?” he asked.

  “None of it,” she said. “Every word of it was true.”

  “Well, not about being out-gunned,” he said. She shook her head.

  “You haven’t seen my stockpile at the Midas house.”

  *********

  The deportations were set. Two a day starting at the end of the week. Three days. They’d use the secondary portal room, pulling in the better-trained staff from the main portal, and it would be done in secret. Only the people who had to be there would be there. A few members of security, Conrad, Troy, the portal floor operator, and the nerds up in the crow’s nest.

  Troy had managed to get Wink at the end of the list, but that was all he could do. Almost all of them were going back. They’d pick other points on the planet to drop them, when that was the request that they got, but everyone was going back, and everyone was going back to their own planet.

  Very few of them were getting refunds, because the things that they had brought that were of value were gone, and Troy’s people hadn’t managed to find them. Sketchy fences had taken them and disappeared, exchanging foreign terrestrial valuables for American dollars. There was nothing to be done about them, and the pressure from on high to just get rid of all of them made Troy concerned that the next option might have been execution.

  It made him sick.

  He could feel the way that his sense of freedom, of joy, of wonder was pulling away from his sense of responsibility and loyalty, of pragmatism. There were no better roads to take, so he would take this one.

  He signed the last of the orders, leaving them in a basket on his desk where Bridgette could deliver them in the morning, and he picked up his phone.

  It was late.

  He hadn’t even realized how late.

  He set the phone down again, sitting back in his chair and rubbing his eyes.

  This job sucked.

  He’d always worked late, just by nature. Came in after dawn, left around midnight unless he had plans. No one questioned his hours any more than they questioned his devotion. He didn’t miss the jump school hours.

  Lately, he’d only seen sunlight in between buildings and in the car, and despite having a picture window in his bedroom that overlooked the entire town that had sprung up around the base. It was dark when he got up, dark when he left for work, and it was deep dark by the time he got home.

  He felt bad for his driver.

  He picked up the phone again.

  If she was actually at her desk, she was waiting for him. He wouldn’t call her cell.

  He went through his contacts to pick her desk number intentionally, and she answered on the first ring.

  “Troy?” she asked.

  “Is that really how you answer your desk phone?” he teased.

  “Shut up,” she said. “I haven’t had dinner and I’m cranky. Where are you going tonight?”

  He hadn’t actually thought about that yet.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I saw you go into cardiac arrest three times, day before yesterday,” she said. “I don’t want you to be alone.”

  “All right,” he said. “Are you more comfortable at your apartment or mine? Or do you want me to commandeer a room at the barracks?”

  “No,” she said. “Not that.”

  He smiled. He liked her voice. How this was the worst decision she was going to have to make all day.

  “Do you want me to come pick you up?” he asked. “We can decide on the way.”

  “Did you drive your car today?” she asked. He frowned.

  He hadn’t actually thought about that.

  She’d changed jobs to get out of his chain of command so that they could try dating, and now she was right back reporting to him. There was a clear conflict of interest, as he was cutting back portal staff left and right. Yes, they were every single one of them from the secondary installation, but that wasn’t something they were going to be willing to admit publicly. If the wrong one of those job terminations heard about Olivia, they would have a case that she got preferential treatment and that they lost their job because he wasn’t willing to fire his girlfriend.

  And the base wouldn’t fight it. They’d fire him, rather than have any attention on the real reasons they’d fired who they had.

  “No,” he said, realizing he’d been quiet for too long. “Sorry. I’m a bit dull-witted right now.”

  “Let me come get you,” she said. “Send your driver home.”

  “Where should he pick me up in the morning?” Troy asked. She sighed.

  “Your couch is more comfortable than my loveseat,” she said.

  “Sold,” he answered.

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “Thought you were hungry,” he said. “I’ll cook dinner for you when we get there, if that will speed you up.”

  She laughed quietly.

  “I was just going to order a pizza… What time is it?”

  He shook his head.

  She’d lost track. Everything save a few nightclubs downtown ran on base time. You couldn’t even order a pizza after ten on a weeknight.

  “Right,” she said. “Make it ten minutes.”

  He nodded, looking at his phone.

  “I’ll see you in five.”

  He hung up, smiling for the first time in long enough that the muscles under his ears tingled. He got up and straightened away the sensitive material, locking his drawers and then locking his office, then going out to sit in the cold night air. It would just get more and more brutally cold, from here. Summer was gone.

  His driver pulled up to the sidewalk and Troy bent down to speak into the window as the driver rolled it down.

  “I have another engagement tonight,” he said. “I won’t need a ride home.”

  “You’re sure, sir?” the man asked. He had a bristly mustache and runaway ear hair, and a voice that always sounded like he’d been yelling, recently. Troy liked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll see you at my building in the morning.”

  The man touched his brow and put the
car back into gear. Troy stepped back going to lean against one of the awning posts in front of the door with crossed arms.

  He couldn’t remember being this mentally tired, before. He’d been tired, certainly, but this wasn’t physical. It was a sense of dis-ease, unwellness, unwholeness that was new to him, and he closed his eyes, nodding to himself. Cassie had been right.

  He’d been right, too. He’d needed to be here, today. The things he’d gotten done were important, and no one else could have gotten them done. Also, being out of sight for a day and a half was one thing, but Slav and Bridgette would have had one hell of a time explaining him being gone for another day without people starting to ask hard questions.

  Bridgette had counsel about how to deal with it, and it was counsel that he would hear and take very seriously, but he hadn’t been ready to begin thinking about it today. Today was just about getting through.

  And Cassie hadn’t made it any easier.

  The foreign terrestrial was in official reports. They’d documented where she was in Brazil, and they’d documented her trip back to the US. It wasn’t like he could pretend she’d never existed. He was accountable for where she ended up, and if he had had even an iota of hope that he could have stopped Cassie from walking the woman back out the door - by any means of force or persuasion - he’d have done it. But it wasn’t like that with Cassie.

  The woman was in the wind, and it could very easily be the thing that ended his career.

  The whole thing, not just this playing-at-general thing he was doing.

  This was a treasonous level of behavior, if someone chose to try to press the idea that he’d in any fashion helped or supported the untracked disappearance of a foreign terrestrial.

  Jesse had been one thing. He’d disappeared on everyone’s watch. And Cassie was more of the same. No one expected to be able to hold or control her, once she’d turned up Palta. But this new species, that was something he could hang for.

  Another engine approached and Troy opened his eyes. His body was willing. His mind took several extra moments to remember where he was, why he couldn’t hear the ocean.

  He got into the passenger side and sat down, tipping his head back against the rest.

  “That bad?” Olivia asked quietly.

  “We all did what we had to,” he answered. “I just need sleep.”

  “But… you’re still all one… self?” she asked. “You didn’t break anything?”

  “If I could bounce my experiences off of someone who’d gone through this before, maybe I could answer that,” he said. “I don’t think I broke anything. I’d have missed a jump day for this, but everything I did today was more important than a jump day.”

  “Nothing is more important than jump day,” Olivia said with the sound of a smile in her voice, rolling away from the curb. The first day that jumpers brought back artifacts and samples. Like Christmas morning.

  He sighed.

  “What do you want for dinner?” he asked.

  “Is eating worth it?” she asked. “You could just go to bed. You look exhausted.”

  “I feel like I’ve been carrying a horse around on my shoulders all day,” he said. “But I should eat, so you may as well have something you like.”

  “You eat lunch?” she asked. He frowned, trying to remember.

  “I think so. Bridgette usually makes sure.”

  “I’m glad she’s looking out for you,” Olivia said.

  “Look,” Troy said. “In case you missed it in all of this - and I just thought of it today - I’m your commanding officer again. So, I appreciate you helping me…”

  That had come out just completely wrong. He opened his eyes and looked over at her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. She shook her head, looking out the windshield.

  “No. We’re both rules followers. And I had forgotten. It’s not… It’s not a big deal.”

  He shook his head.

  “But it came out like I’m a jerk,” he said. She laughed without looking at him.

  “You are a jerk, right now,” she said. “That’s okay. You’re in two pieces, in there, and working too hard. I can give you a pass for tonight.”

  “No one should know that you and I are spending time together like this,” he said. “Not until all of this is over and I’m back in my lab and you’re in yours.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I understand.”

  She didn’t sound like it was fine, but he didn’t press it, mostly because he didn’t want to know why, especially when he didn’t think he could fix it.

  He rolled his head back against his headrest again.

  Sighed.

  “I appreciate everything you did,” he said. Why was he still talking?

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  Just shut up.

  Just shut the hell up.

  “I know that going looking for me was out of your comfort zone,” he said.

  “Not to mention technically me being AWOL and something I could get fired for, if someone decided,” she said. “I don’t have a big, fancy contract protecting me from people getting angry at me.”

  “Then why did you go?” he asked.

  Why?

  WHY?

  Just stop talking.

  “Because she said she needed me.”

  He remembered.

  The drift.

  The way he felt in the sun, like a physical wind, the sound of the waves, completely without awareness of gravity. The beauty of the place.

  Knowing she’d been there, being able to feel her in the same way he could see her now, an energy of light, and taking time to recognize her. She was a different shape from any of the foreign terrestrials he’d come across, but it was more. Her light was distinct, but he’d never seen her like that, and realizing it was her…

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been… so happy… the surprise,” he said. Just stop.

  She glanced at him. He heard the rustle of her hair.

  “I know we aren’t… you know, talking about being together or not, but you’re supposed to talk to me, Troy,” she said. “This is stupid, you trying to be polite and not talk to me, but I want to hear what you’re thinking, not what you think I want to hear.”

  He didn’t point out that this was a very poor time for him to be talking about what he was thinking, unfiltered.

  “I didn’t expect you to be there,” he said. “I knew she’d come looking for me, but I didn’t really even think she’d catch me, but then for you to be there? It made me happy. It surprised me, how happy I was to see you.”

  “You never seem that happy to see me,” she said. “And Cassie was the one who talked you in.”

  “She’s been my best friend for more years of my life than she hasn’t,” he said. “And she’s Palta. She’s good at talking people into things. It wasn’t about you. It was just…”

  “What was it like?” she asked.

  He sighed, letting the warm bask over him.

  “I don’t know if you’d like it,” he said. “But it’s everything I’ve always wanted. That… feeling. That was why I went to jump school. There wasn’t anything… in the way. You know? Between me and the next thing. All I had to do was think it.”

  “Frictionless,” Olivia said. He nodded, looking at her.

  “Yeah.”

  She smiled.

  “I…” She sighed. “I feel like… I felt like, even then, I had to apologize to you for wanting you to come back. I felt selfish.”

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t. I mean it. I’m allowed to regret that I can’t live my life like that, but I’m here because this is the life I chose. I could have been out west, surfing every day, if not having responsibility meant that much to me. And I also remember every minute of being the other me, and that was just…”

  “Soulless,” she said darkly. He looked up at her and then smiled.

  “It was. You can’t know. I didn’t have any real… wants. I would have taken every j
ob they offered me where I could have done a good job, and I never would have… loved anything again.”

  “Benji is still like that,” she said. “Have you talked to him?”

  He shook his head.

  “Can I admit something?” he asked.

  She glanced over.

  “Okay.”

  “I knew that they got him, too,” he said. “Jesse told me, and I decided not to pursue it, because everything else going on was too important.”

  “But he’s your friend,” Olivia said.

  “I know,” Troy said. “And that’s why you did the right thing. I’m not saying I was wrong. I don’t even know if we can help him. But I told Jesse not to.”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t tell Celeste that,” she said, and he nodded.

  “I know. She’d punch me in the stomach.”

  “It’s bad,” Olivia said. “He isn’t who he was.”

  Troy sighed.

  “I’m sorry. I wish that there was something I could actually do about it. But… Don’t feel selfish, telling me that I needed to get it together. You saved my life, as hard as this has been and as much as I could have done, otherwise. You saved me.”

  She pulled into the parking lot under his building and parked, turning off the engine and resting her wrists on the steering wheel for a moment as she looked at him.

  “I’m glad that that’s how you see it,” she said. “But it doesn’t stop me from feeling guilty. I wanted you back. I was starting to feel like… maybe we missed our shot, because I was so angry at you over you… and… you and… you know.” She looked at her lap. “I didn’t want that to be… it. You know?”

  He was tired.

  He was fragmented.

  He was overwhelmed with the badness of everything going on all day long.

  At how completely out of control he was of things that were genuinely important.

  He reached across the car to lift her chin, putting a hand on the back of her seat to lean over and kiss her.

  She jerked away, surprised, then her eyelids fluttered and she shook her head.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean…”

  He slid his fingers behind her jaw, feeling the point there where, if she wanted to, she would let him guide her face back forward. Her chin lifted slightly, and he would have read defiance if it hadn’t been for the eyelid flutter again. She started to apologize again and he kissed her again, just touch, laying almost flat across the front seat of the car now, completely extended. He tilted his face down, retreating slowly, slowly. She would follow him if she would. If she wanted. He let his fingers slip along the curve of her chin. Magnetism.