by Chloe Garner
“You think someone brainwashed that man?” Secretary Langer asked. “We’ve had our top experts interrogating him for days and he hasn’t given us a thing. He isn’t brainwashed. He’s just one of our top men.”
“What are you interrogating him about?” Troy asked. “What information does he have that you want?”
The Secretary shook his head.
“Classified.”
Troy frowned, rubbing his finger across his lower lip as he considered.
“Are you trying to go around the base leadership to get information about us?” he asked. “You should have access to all of our reports.”
“I do,” Secretary Langer said, but the way Bridgette’s eyes came up told Troy he was onto something.
He didn’t press it. It was interesting, but not particularly relevant, right now.
Senator Greene took out her phone, and a moment later so did the Secretary. Troy sat back in his seat, looking out the window as they made their way across D.C.. This wasn’t how he’d pictured his life of service.
Life was strange.
They arrived at the Pentagon. Troy had been here a few times for training, but it was always a moment to stand there and appreciate it. If he’d had cause to say it, this building meant more to him than the White House did. He took a couple of quick strides to catch up to the rest of the group, going through the security check-in and then following Secretary Langer through the maze of hallways to the observation half of an interrogation room.
General Donovan sat in his fatigues, hands relaxed on the table, watching the glass. His hair wasn’t as… product-ed as Troy remembered it, but he was still over-groomed and smug.
“You wanted to talk to him,” Secretary Langer said, motioning. “Go ahead.”
Troy paused, trying to collect his thoughts, but there wasn’t anything there. He just wanted the conversation. He nodded, going back out into the hallway and letting himself into the interview room. He glanced at the glass, unable to not do it, then sat down across from Donovan.
“Major,” Donovan said.
“General,” Troy answered. “You made a big mess.”
“I made progress,” Donovan said. “Weak, how we have a weapon, but won’t use it.”
“Duping a bunch of under-civilized species into turning over priceless artifacts and piles of commodities in order to get away from people who wanted to kill them was using a weapon?” Troy asked.
“War costs money,” Donovan sneered. “You scientists don’t ever see the big picture. Just like your puzzles.”
Troy frowned.
“What war?”
Donovan gave him a dark smile.
“You don’t even know.”
“Sir,” Troy said slowly. “We captured the foreign terrestrial that you shipped down to Brazil. We’re giving all of their things back.”
Cassie had met him.
Sat across from him at his desk.
She’d have known.
“You don’t have all of the things to give them back,” Donovan said.
Troy blinked, looking for the key to the puzzle.
His tone was right.
Everything about him was right.
Jesse just had an instinct.
And no time.
They had Cassie.
He had to go with his gut.
“You think they’re going to come rescue you,” he said. Donovan shifted in his seat, smiling. Slick.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You watch smurfs when you were a kid?” Troy asked.
“What?” Donovan asked. “No.”
Troy grinned.
“She was like that. Blue as a blueberry. Giant eyes. Nose like… like a lemon.” He mimed. “I’ve never seen one like that.”
Donovan shook his head quickly, confused.
Calculating.
“No,” he said, shaking his head again. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
Troy stood.
“Where is General Donovan?” he asked. Donovan tipped his head to the side with a dark smirk.
“Now that’s an interesting game. Don’t like my answers?”
“Where have you been?” Troy asked.
“Like I know,” Donovan said, spreading his hands. “They put me in a box, I go somewhere new. They don’t tell me.”
“Who came to get you, at the base, the night you were arrested?”
“Didn’t get IDs,” Donovan said.
“Why aren’t you afraid?” Troy asked. “You’re going to be in custody for the rest of your life.”
He shrugged, spreading his hands again.
“When you’ve played the game as long as I have, you know that there’s always someone around the corner who’s going to need you more than the last guy hates you.”
Troy nodded.
“We’ll see,” he said, going to the door and knocking. A guard let him out and he went into the observation room again. Secretary Langer looked angry, but Senator Greene and Bridgette merely looked curious.
“You need to check his biometrics,” Troy said.
“What?” Langer asked.
“I don’t think that’s General Donovan.”
*********
Cassie breathed.
It was a way of counting time, one that helped keep her from getting angry and trying to blow them all up.
Jesse kept shooting her worried looks, and the two men in the front seat thought that Jesse was worried about what was going to happen next, but where they were wrong was assuming that Jesse was worried about what was going to happen next to him.
Cassie was worried about what was going to happen to Jesse, but he’d seen her fight. He was worried what she was going to do with her new Palta skillset, armbuckles or not.
They went from her wrists to her elbows, neodymium magnets all the way around her arms inside a steel casing, a gap just big enough that someone with the right hydraulic pry tool could get the magnets to pop loose. At the moment, her arm was stuck to the car door, but that was just incidental. She could have pulled it loose if she’d wanted to, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t change anything.
The buckles met at the wrist, fixing her arms together the way handcuffs would have. Her fingers were free, but they’d given her new clothes to wear before they’d cuffed her, including paper shoes, so there wasn’t much to do with her fingers other than take the car apart.
So she’d been doing that for a bit, just mindlessly, breathing.
This was the intent.
The point of the whole thing.
To find the people who were grabbing other people and making them disappear.
People with orders at least knew who the next in the chain of command was.
It didn’t make it any easier.
She’d taken apart the entire interior of the door by the time they reached their first location, somewhere away from big population centers in Virginia. The windows were blacked out, but she could tell by the strength of the radio signals and the directions they’d turned along the way, no matter how many times they’d doubled back or taken an obtuse way of getting there.
Someone opened the door from outside, bits of plastic and metal falling onto the ground with a mild clatter, and she looked up, unconcerned.
“Calista du Charme,” a man said.
“Yes,” she said. “And you are?”
“Here to make sure you don’t make any more trouble.”
He lifted his hand, putting a gun to her forehead, and she crossed her eyes to look up at it, reading it.
A lot of the pieces were actually Earth-manufacturing. She recognized the metallurgy processes, as well as the hardware itself.
She knew guns.
Most of the people on base did.
It was the way it moved that suggested an odd balance, plus a purpling to the metal, at the middle of the barrel, that suggested a different kind of energy than what the external metal was designed to handle.
“T
hat’ll be the prototype, then,” she said, looking up the arm at a flat-faced man with big, dark sunglasses. They were already inside, a garage of some kind, just corrugated metal and beams visible from where she sat.
“You threatened my son,” the man said.
“No,” Cassie said evenly. “I used him to send you a threat.
The other door opened and there was another clatter as bits of car fell on the ground. She didn’t smile, but she felt the muscles in her cheeks reflex.
Someone jerked Jesse out of the car by his cuffs, but Cassie didn’t move.
“I didn’t think it would be this easy to find you,” she said. “They kept telling me how clever you are. I was expecting to have to work my way up through at least five or six layers of staff.”
“Rox doesn’t know a Palta on sight,” a woman’s voice said. “But we saw the video of you and we both knew what you were.”
“Rumor was that all of the Paltas were dead, save that one,” the man said, the gun ticking over toward where Jesse was presumably standing behind the car.
That was a gun that could kill her.
There was another over there that could kill him.
“Everyone knows Palta are tricky,” Cassie answered, then sighed. “Look, we bought the tickets. You’re the ones who are supposed to do the show.”
The man grabbed her by the elbow, dragging her up out of her seat and pressing her against the car with his forearm and his hips.
She had a tiny bit of wire, aluminum, inside her left cuff that would have inserted quite neatly into the inside of his hip, right there where she could feel the pulse.
Probably not enough to kill him, but enough to know better than to be within her physical reach. He pushed the gun against her temple, looking her in the eye, and she held her shot. He wanted her to be afraid.
It meant he wasn’t going to kill her - not right this second - and that he was afraid of her, for reasons that were important to her, but that she didn’t know yet.
“Look, guys,” Jesse said. “This is a bad idea. I’m a known quantity. I’m Palta, and as you’ll have learned from your Wob-wob friend, this planet is under my protection. There are easier targets all over the universe than this one. I’m not going to make it easy to take. But her? She was born human, and is Palta because of a genetic transmutation that is rather too complicated to go into, right now. I’m curious and playful and clever, but she’s got a human violent streak and she’s about as stubborn as the species comes. You don’t want to get involved with her, because she’s going to go out of her way to make sure that everyone you ever met knows what happened to you so that no one tries again.”
Cassie held her gaze on the man, taking in the way the woman moved with her peripheral vision.
“Human?” the man asked. “Stupid apes.”
“Redundant,” Cassie said. “And not particularly insightful. They are dull, but they’re quite creative, for their capability. You wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t something about them to interest you.”
“They invited us,” the woman said.
“It isn’t labor,” Cassie said. “There’s cheaper, smarter labor in the universe up for sale at every street corner everywhere. It isn’t for entertainment. They don’t do anything that stands out, artistically. They aren’t very good for target practice. They aren’t fast and they aren’t pretty. But there is something to them, isn’t there?” She nodded, reading it in his eyes, in the way he pressed the gun against her temple. Smiled. “It’s their pride. You love them for it, don’t you? You met your very first human and the first thought that went through your head was: I would just love to be the one who shows him just how stupid he really is. Didn’t you?”
She grinned.
“I’ve had people telling me that my whole life. And now I’m Palta.” She narrowed her eyes, teasing. “Means I really am indisputably smarter than you.”
“Says the one in the armbuckles,” the woman said.
Cassie wished that this was human tech. By now she’d have turned it all to dust and she’d have only had to shake her arms out and it would have all fallen on the floor.
The problem was, Violet made it. She could see the woman’s flair for the creative in every facet of it, and she loved the design.
Cassie blew air through her lips, finally looking over at the woman.
“I’m not impressed that you bought a slave and made her do things. I’m very impressed at what she can do, but you certainly don’t get any credit for that.”
“We’ll just buy another one,” the man said. “Two, maybe. I’ve heard that, if you can get them to work together without ever realizing it, they come up with things that no one has ever imagined.”
Cassie shook her head.
“No.”
“No?” he asked. She shook her head again.
“No. You aren’t leaving this planet again. I’m not sure if you’ll ever leave this building again. She looked at him without turning her head. “You picked the wrong planet.”
“This doesn’t have to be a battle,” Jesse said. “You leave right now, let the rest of the Lumps know that Earth has two Palta watching over it and its people, and this could be over.”
“Kalthar would never hear of it,” the man said. “He’s invested too much, here, to just walk away.”
“Walking away is always better than losing everything,” Jesse said. “I don’t care how much you’ve invested.”
Cassie let the corner of her mouth come up.
“You’re afraid of him,” she said.
“You ever met a Wob-wob?” the man asked. “They kill people because they’re bored.”
“But they’re rich,” the woman said. “And everyone knows who they are. Knows to be afraid.”
The man nodded.
“Great business partners, when you come through on your end.” He raised his eyebrows behind the big sunglasses. “And my end is to make sure there aren’t any more problems.”
Cassie turned her head slightly, smelling the gun.
“Anti-matter,” she said. “Didn’t think you could get it that small without it going unstable.”
“The rules only apply to everyone else,” the man said with a smirk. Cassie nodded.
“Too bad your Caladais was defective,” she said.
“Cassie,” Jesse warned, and she smiled.
“They rejected your olive branch,” Cassie said. “I get to do what I want, now.”
She raised her arms slowly, using the armbuckles as leverage against the Lump man, forcing his body away from hers. He pushed the gun against her temple with slightly more pressure.
“We still have questions for you,” he said. “But if you don’t quit moving, Bexa is going to put several key holes into your friend, and believe me, we all know how to kill a Palta.”
“You ever done it?” Cassie asked. “Because until you do it, I’m the only one who actually has killed one.”
The Lump grinned at her, looking over at the woman.
“Tell Rox to get up here,” he said. “I want him to watch. This is going to be a one-of-a-kind learning experience.”
Cassie held his eye, her fists in his stomach and his arm at her throat. He gave her a little shove, just proving he had won, then stood and took a step back.
“Move,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow, feeling every major pulse point in his body, calculating how long she would have to keep a wound open for him to bleed out. He had a squish to him that hinted at reservoirs of fluid that would keep him functioning much longer than a human would have, and she could smell the iron on him. Humanoid blood meant a dependence on iron to move other key chemicals around, and he had a lot. He could live on a lot less blood than a human.
It didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.
It meant it would take longer.
“Move,” he said again, pointing. “We may want to talk to you, but him? He doesn’t know anything we don’t.”
“I know lots of things you
don’t,” Jesse said, but the Lump laughed.
“Go.”
Cassie took a step sideways, still watching, then turned to walk easily the way he’d indicated. She listened to everything, counting the number of people around her, calculating their weights and their levels of confidence. Which ones were going to be easy to distract, which ones would be afraid of her when she got loose, which ones would shoot at random and which ones would be willing to stand their ground and utilize a weapon Violet had designed.
They went through a regular door, then she stopped at a void-like black door. Light simply didn’t reflect off of it at all. She wanted to touch it, but it was a bad time to engage her curiosity. The male Lump stepped past her, leaving his jaw exposed as he used a key that she never did see to unlock the door. She resisted the temptation to see how rigid his bones were, at a molecular level, because this wasn’t the time to fight.
Fighting and getting away just meant losing them and having to do it again, some other way. For now, she had them, even if they had her.
Even if they were putting her in a cage.
She went through the black door, turning as it closed behind her.
Jesse hadn’t come through with her.
She closed her eyes, feeling the familiar-but-distant biological reaction. Fear. Grief. Guilt. Sickness.
She stared at the door, unmoving.
She hadn’t known she could feel those things, as a Palta.
*********
They sent a technician in to draw blood and verify General Donovan’s DNA, but the General stood as the man came in.
“What are you doing?” he thundered.
“It’s a simple blood draw, sir,” the technician said. “Just routine.”
“No,” the General said. “I won’t consent to that.”
“I’m… Sir, I don’t have to ask.”
General Donovan looked at the glass, then wrinkled his nose up into a deep snarl and roared. The sound tickled Troy’s implant, but he didn’t get anything before General Donovan disappeared.
Everyone was quiet for several moments.
“Major, it appears I owe you an apology,” Secretary Langer said. “But I’ll only offer it if you can explain what just happened.”