by Chloe Garner
Troy smiled, glancing at his phone. He texted Olivia to let her know that they were coming, then sighed.
“I know she’d probably be offended, but I’m worried about her,” he said. “It’s completely like her to just disappear and not tell me where she’s gone, and she’s dealt with things I can’t even imagine, but… They knew that there was a Palta here… And Violet actually impressed Cassie.”
“Palta?” Bridgette said. Troy tried not to stiffen, realizing he’d used the wrong name. He was always so careful. He glanced at her.
“I’m clearly over-stressed,” he said. “You shouldn’t use that word.”
“We assign names to species as we come across them,” she said. “That’s what they call themselves, isn’t it?”
“I have no idea how we translate it,” he said, nodding. “You use that word and the wrong person hears it, you’ve just identified yourself as inner inner circle. If they’re taking hostages to use as leverage…?”
She nodded.
“Not a problem.”
He smiled, tired, and shook his head.
“You’re better at this than I am,” he said. She shrugged.
“Keeping secrets and keeping balls in the air,” she said. “You’re the one doing the actual work.”
He looked at his phone again.
“Wouldn’t mind being a Captain again, just running my own lab.”
“You’d hate it,” she said, “because the guy doing this instead of you would be an idiot.”
He grinned. She’d surprised him.
“Can’t even imagine what would be going on right now, if I’d never left the lab,” he said.
“General Ellsworth says that it’s best not to worry what could have been, because that’s a rabbit hole with no bottom,” she said. He wondered what normal looked like, for her.
They stood for several more minutes before the car arrived.
“Major Rutger?” the driver asked. “Captain Levine?”
“That’s us,” Bridgette answered. “And you are?”
“I’m Daniel Pace,” he said. She checked her phone and nodded.
“Good.”
Troy got the car door for her and got in after her, once more watching the world go by outside as they drove to the airport.
Olivia was standing on the curb with a large, well-taped cardboard box and her purse, nothing else. Troy considered that he wasn’t carrying anything but his wallet. This wasn’t supposed to be a multi-day event. Come, get Cassie, go home.
He suspected, looking back, that an overnight bag would have been prudent.
This was the second time he’d done that.
He shook his head, getting out of the car. Olivia handed him the box then took a step back.
“Did she tell you anything?” he asked. She shook her head quickly, taking another step back and looking at the airport.
“I have a return ticket,” she said. “And they’ll start boarding as soon as they get the plane cleaned.”
“Good thing security is going to be a breeze,” he said, then looked over his shoulder.
“Be safe, Troy,” she said. “Violet says…” She ducked her head, realizing she’d just told him Violet hadn’t told her anything. “She said that the foreign terrestrials are dangerous. That they’ll kill you and not think anything about it.”
Troy nodded.
“Okay.”
“You should go to Andrews and get them to issue you a gun,” she said. He frowned. He’d never heard her talk about guns in a positive light. “I don’t know what’s in the box, and maybe there are some weapons, but you should have one you know how to use.”
“I don’t know if I’m allowed,” he said.
“You have your permit with you?” she asked.
“Always,” he said slowly.
“Virginia reciprocates,” she said. “Maryland… doesn’t. D.C… I looked it up on the plane.”
She was worried.
Very, very worried.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll…” He didn’t know if he wanted to go to Andrews or not. He just wanted to find Cassie, and he didn’t want to go out of his way if there was something useful to be doing, but at the same time, he’d trained with guns exhaustively at jump school, and he didn’t like being without his side-arm when he had a choice. Even when it didn’t do real damage to at least some of the foreign terrestrials he’d come across. Odds that the Lumps were impervious seemed high, considering how worried everyone was about them. Olivia was still watching him. “I understand,” he said. “If I can, I will.”
She pressed her lips, and he registered how pale she was.
“Come home,” she said, then frowned and nodded. “Bring everyone home.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at the box. “Thanks.”
She pointed back behind her.
“I’m going to go,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said again. “Thank you for bringing everything.”
She turned and went back into the airport, and he got back into the car.
“Where to, boss?” the driver asked.
“Somewhere with scissors,” Troy muttered, turning the box in his lap. It was a couple of feet in each direction, ungainly to carry, and heavy. Things moved inside of it as it tipped, but not as much as they would if they were just piled in there.
The driver turned around in his seat.
“Olivia thinks I need to go get a gun from Andrews,” he said to Bridgette. She shrugged.
“Adds complexity, if you want to come back into the city,” she said. “But I get it. When you’re up against someone who might try to kill you it’s nice to have something to answer with.”
He looked at the box again, then nodded.
“Can you see what you can do to get updates on the investigation about what happened with Cassie?” he asked.
“I’m on it,” she said, picking up her phone. He looked at the driver.
“Joint Base Andrews,” he said. The man nodded and pulled away from the curb.
“Cassie, where are you?” Troy asked quietly, looking at the box.
*********
Having mapped the building adequately, she started shifting from spot to spot inside the room, looking for information about the individuals inside of the building with her. As they moved around, their harmonics changed, and she had to shift, quickly finding the weak spots in the floor and the walls where movement transmitted most readily.
They were beating Jesse.
*********
The paperwork to get an off-base sidearm issued was significant, but somehow Bridgette wrangled someone else into doing most of it. By the time they got to Andrews, all Troy had to do was review it and sign, and they gave him a handgun from the armory.
He started to ask Bridgette how she’d gotten everything to happen so easily, but she just put up a hand and shook her head.
“Let me be magic, Rutger,” she said. They got a private conference room at an officers’ building and Troy cut into the box. He’d tried to get the tape off, on the way to the base, but it had been done too well, and he’d given up.
“Is this a bad time to express reservations about you opening an unknown box from an unknown foreign terrestrial?” Bridgette asked as he sliced through the tape with a boxcutter.
“Yup,” he said without pausing. “It did go through airport security, if that makes you feel any better.”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, but didn’t step back as he pulled the box open.
Inside of it, he found some stray equipment that was the reason the box was as big as it was, plus about a dozen smaller boxes.
Bridgette peeked into the box.
“No user manual?” she asked.
“I get the feeling she invented most of it this morning,” he answered, pulling out the smaller boxes one by one and handing them to her to put them on the table.
“Conrad’s gonna be pissed that you were the one that was here, and not him,” Troy said, lookin
g over everything once the box was empty.
“Cherry on top of a very rewarding assignment,” Bridgette said, handing him the first box. He opened it, finding more bits of metal and glass and electronics.
“Is it multiple items, or multiple pieces of the same item?” she asked.
“Or multiple pieces of multiple items,” Troy answered, unpacking boxes. Some of them had foam in them. He kept the pieces with their boxes, but worked his way through everything until he could see all of it at once.
“What in hell do I do with it?” he asked, scratching his head.”
“I keep waiting for it to mechanize and pull itself together and turn into a transformer here on the table,” Bridgette said.
“Would it be on our side or theirs?”
“I have no idea.”
He nodded, crossing his arms.
It didn’t make any more sense, like that, than it had before.
“She really doesn’t know much about humans, I think,” he said. “Maybe it would make more sense if you were someone else.”
“Are you really comfortable carrying around technology designed by an unknown foreign terrestrial?” Bridgette asked. “You could be bringing key material to the missing foreign terrestrials.”
Troy nodded.
“It’s certainly possible. I didn’t meet her for long enough to get a read. Even then, if she’s half as clever as Cassie said, there’s no way I’d ever be able to tell, if she was playing me. I’ve either got to decide not to trust anyone I don’t know, or I’ve got to trust Cassie’s judgment. Olivia said that they saw the footage of Cassie getting arrested on the news, and the foreign terrestrial reacted by asking Olivia to get the supplies to build this stuff.”
“So it lit a fuse,” Bridgette said. “Doesn’t tell you who she’s planning on blowing up.”
He nodded.
“You’re right.”
“It’s a double or nothing,” she said. “You willing to play that when your career is on the line?”
“It’s more than my career,” he said, still trying to puzzle together the pieces. He’d seen a lot of foreign terrestrial technology in his time at the lab, but this was different. It was complex and simple at the same time, sophisticated and improvised. It did have the feel of a puzzle that was more aware of its purpose than he was, not unlike a transforming robot. She’d designed and created the whole thing in the space of a few hours this morning, and it did have the feel of pieces that weren’t really designed to go together, but at the same time, it was so intentional for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Like looking at a flower with hundreds of petals in chaos, but dovetailing exactly the way they should have. He should have been better at this. He was the best on the planet, among humans. He believed that. And yet, he saw nothing.
“Sorry,” he said. “What was I saying?”
“That it wasn’t just your career,” Bridgette said, bemused.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t. It’s my life. Maybe a lot of lives.”
Double or nothing.
Take it or destroy it?
There was no way in hell he was destroying it. Maybe he’d have split it up and separated the parts by large geographic distances, but he wouldn’t have scrapped it for anything.
He trusted Cassie.
Trusted her completely.
Even knowing about Midas.
Even having traveled around with her on that strange, destructive kick.
Even then, he’d completely trusted her, and didn’t trust her any less, retroactively.
Was he a fool?
It didn’t matter.
It wasn’t going to change anything.
“We take it,” he said.
“Where?” Bridgette asked. He shook his head, pulling a chair away from the table and sitting down in front of the array of pieces, picking one up and holding it up close to his face where he could see the details.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Whatever happens next, we take this with us.” He glanced up at her. “I need paper.”
She snorted, bemused, and she nodded.
“I’ll see what I can come up with.”
*********
The room was closed. There was no air flow into or out of it, judging by her respiration and the rate at which the air composition in the room was changing.
It would take a long time to kill her by asphyxiation, given the number of times she could re-process her own exhaled air, but it wasn’t possible to live indefinitely like this.
She didn’t think that that was what they had in mind, but she had a clock in the back of her head, now.
They’d stopped beating Jesse, and she knew where they’d put him, as clearly as she’d known how to find him by his scent as a pixie. If that door opened and they weren’t one-hundred percent prepared to deal with her, she was going to go straight to him.
That was just what was going to happen.
*********
Things fit together. It wasn’t clear exactly how, but Violet had used standard fittings for a number of joints before she’d disassembled the entire machine, and it meant that there were multiple different combinations. He’d found that a black slate, if you plugged it into a canister smaller than his fist, seemed to trigger other bits of equipment, but not in useful ways. If he hit the center of the slate with his thumb - but not his forefinger - that tangle of joints over there tended to crawl across the table. It was like watching a disconnected set of windshield wipers walk across the floor. Troy had no idea why he knew that, but he knew what windshield wipers would look like without a car attached.
“Anything on the manhunt?” he asked at one point after Bridgette brought dinner. They’d missed lunch.
“Nothing,” she said. “They disappeared. They’re expanding their search radius to include Kentucky, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.”
He shook his head, making another note.
“This is what you did before you ran things?” Bridgette asked.
“Damned straight,” he said.
“Can’t believe they ever promoted you,” she teased.
*********
The door opened.
The hinge on it was perfectly silent, but she didn’t have anything to do with her eyes but watch it, and she saw door lift the tiny, tiny fraction of an inch it took to get it out of its locking groove, and she was on her feet by the time the air seal broke, standing just to the side of the doorway by the time outside light came in and inside light got out.
“I’m not coming in there, Palta,” the male Lump’s voice said. “You will come into sight.”
Tempting as it was to make him eat his words, make him worry that she’d escaped, there were things that they could do to knock her out, if they had the knowledge and the skills, and Violet had probably known that they would be up against a Palta and given them exactly that toolset.
She stepped back and to the side, looking the Lump in the eyes.
He was standing about six feet away from the doorway, and there was a sheet of iridescent glass in between them. Cassie recognized the way the energy played across the surface of the glass at random. It was pretty, but it was dangerous. Electricity required a ground to go through you. Catalyst plasma would just eat you until someone applied the anti-catalyst.
She looked through the glass at the Lump, watching his face, his eyes.
He wasn’t human.
She could see that.
The face was a construct, an idea, and when she focused, she could take it down, see under it. Violet was a genius. Cassie didn’t know how she’d done it, but the Lump was flawless, even to intense scrutiny. His face moved, his eyes moved, they told a story.
It was the hole in the disguise.
It was too good. Too human.
To communicative.
She smiled.
She could read him.
And Violet would tell her the truth.
“Lieutenant Calista du Charme,” she said. “United States Air F
orce.”
“Palta,” he said. She shrugged. He shook his head.
“Amazing you let them degrade you like that. Call you to heel whenever they want, send you out on errands. Make you intimidate children.”
“He isn’t a child,” Cassie said. “And it surprises me that a Lump would be coddling him like that. Thought you’d be better at toughening him up.”
She tipped her head, watching the eye-tic. Anger. Surprise. Distraction.
Yes.
The boy was a lever.
How far was she willing to go to use it?
She’d find out.
He had the gun, but it was in a relaxed hand, dangling above his knee. A threat, but not an insecure one. He didn’t think he had her wholly contained or incapacitated, but he wasn’t afraid of her, either.
Smart. Careful.
She needed more data.
“You took General Donovan.”
He gave her a little mouth shrug. It was supposed to be clever, non-committal, but it flagged his next words as a lie.
“Haven’t seen him.”
Cassie nodded.
“Is he dead?”
Hungry eyes. Angry. Satisfied.
Yes.
“Wouldn’t know.”
“And the Major you kidnapped from base?” she asked.
“Not your interrogation,” he said. The Major might be alive. She didn’t think the Lump knew for sure.
“Well, you haven’t killed me, so I assume I know something you want to know,” Cassie said. “I suppose we ought to get started with me threading out information as slowly as I can to preserve my usefulness as long as possible.”
He nodded with a very self-satisfied grin and took a chair from out of view, sitting down.
“I want you to know that killing people… I feel nothing. I’ve done it many times, and I used to hate it, and then I loved it, and now it bores me.”
She blinked slowly, crossing her legs and slowly sitting down on the floor. It was a threat about Jesse more than it was about her. He was encouraging her to cooperate, but he wasn’t actually saying that he would refrain from or would kill Jesse, at the end of this.
He couldn’t leave Jesse alive. She knew that. She suspected that he knew she knew it. It left them at a little bit of a stalemate, when it came to the things he wanted to know.