by Chloe Garner
There, she had vague guesses, but nothing concrete. He was smart. Not as clever as Violet, not at creating things out of nothing, but they’d gotten this far without either her or Jesse knowing that they were up to something, and that was not easy. Even with as distracted as they’d been. The list of things that she knew that were simultaneously relevant and things he couldn’t figure out on his own was quite short.
“You were supposed to be dead or deserted,” he said. “Why did you come back?”
She frowned.
It was an honest question. He looked at her through the glass, eyes narrowed, posture forward, watching her.
“You…” she started. “What do you know about me?”
“Donovan told us everything,” he said. “You were assigned to the Palta, then you turned into one, no one knows how, and they assigned another soldier to you, the way they assigned you to him,” he said, jerking his thumb, “and you took him and disappeared.”
“When did you leave base?” she asked.
“The night that Kalthar told us it was time,” he said.
Fear.
The way his eyes shifted, the wince to his cheek. He was afraid of Kalthar, but that wasn’t the only thing he was afraid of.
“I had an obligation,” she said simply. They didn’t know about Troy. She was almost certain of it. “The soldier they assigned to me died, and I had to tell his family.”
“Then why did you stay?”
Disdain. Outright dislike.
There it was.
He was afraid of winning.
He didn’t like the planet.
Didn’t like the people.
Was… She smiled. He was afraid that they were going to change him and make him want to stay.
The way they’d done it with his teenage son.
Being king of the lemmings was a pretty good gig when you were seventeen. Watching your son discover an affinity for it that dulled his interest in going after more difficult, more rewarding targets?
“You regret bringing him?” she asked.
He jerked his head back.
“Close the door.”
She smiled, tipping her head to the side to watch him as the black surface swung back closed.
*********
They got a hotel in Arlington, where Troy spent the evening continuing to work through Violet’s contraption while Bridgette worked her phone. She left at some point and came back with a plastic bag full of toiletries, half of which she left on his sink when she left at midnight.
He glanced at his phone when she left, realizing how late it was, and feeling bad. At least it was only eleven, back on base. He called Olivia.
“You’re alive,” she answered the phone.
“Haven’t done much since I saw you, actually,” he said. “But thank you. Again.”
“You’re not mad at me?” she asked. He scooted across his bed to lean against the headboard, scratching his head.
“It’s all a mess, Olivia,” he said. “At this point I’ve stopped being surprised at how sprawling it is.”
“You haven’t found her,” Olivia said.
“Haven’t figured out how any of the stuff you gave me even works,” he said. “I don’t… I don’t know why they took them. No. I do. They’re a threat. I don’t know why they’d still be alive, by now. I’m…” It was the first he was going to admit it, even to himself. “I’m afraid.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wish there was more I could do.”
“You could get me instructions,” Troy said. “Anything to help me figure out this thing. It’s…”
“Cassie’s tech was really simple,” Olivia said.
“Cassie’s tech?” he asked, but she kept talking like he hadn’t spoken.
“I mean, all I had to do was sit down and look at it, and it was obvious. I don’t know, like the first time you played a video game that was really well designed. Just intuitive.”
“When did you use Cassie’s tech?” he asked.
“Maybe you’re thinking about it too hard,” Olivia said.
“You could ask,” he said, putting his hand through his hair again. “Olivia… She’s my best friend. If I could save her…”
“She won’t tell me,” Olivia said. “She said…” There was a soft, strangled noise, frustration, sadness, just a choked intensity. “She said that it’s not for me, and it’s not for you, and there’s no point explaining it.”
He tipped his head back.
“Well,” he said, drawing a long, slow breath and looking over at the table where everything lay scattered. “Thanks anyway.”
“Troy, if I could…” she started, but he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No. You went against what Cassie told you, just bringing it to me. You’ve done…” He sighed, frowning hard, reality pushing down a bit harder. “You’ve done more than I have.”
“Don’t say that,” Olivia said. “You’re there. You’re trying. No one else is trying like you are.”
“Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work,” he said. “They want Jesse and Cassie because they’re the only ones who can shut this down. Even last time, if it hadn’t been for Jesse…”
“Last time?” Olivia asked. He closed his eyes. Hell. Why not?
“When I came to D.C. with Conrad,” he said. “Something happened. Something big. And Jesse showed up and stopped it. Not me. They’re giving me the credit for it, but he’s the one who actually did it.”
“How?” Olivia asked. “What did he do?”
Troy smiled wryly.
“He was Jesse. He made a threat he was perfectly capable of backing up.”
“And you aren’t,” Olivia said. Troy nodded at the empty room.
“You met the Gana,” he said. “The things I’ve seen… They’re so much more than we are, Olivia. We’re nothing compared to them.”
“Maybe compared to what they can do, but not compared to what they are.”
He smiled.
“That’s why I like you,” he said. “That and so many other reasons.”
“What time is it there?” she asked. “It’s after midnight, isn’t it? You should get some sleep.”
“You’re still at the lab,” he said.
“You don’t know that,” she said.
“You’re a terrible liar,” he said, and she laughed.
“That’s what I told Cassie.”
“What did she say to that?”
“That I shouldn’t lie,” she said. “Just hide things.”
“You’re a terrible hider,” he said, smiling.
Something over on the table buzzed, and he sat forward, leaning out over his toes and then crawling across the bed as Olivia said something back.
“I need to call you back,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
Something buzzed again.
“I’ll… I need… Bye, Olivia.”
“Be safe,” she said as he hung up the phone, bending his knee up between his arms to get his foot down onto the floor as slowly as he could. He didn’t want to upset whatever was happening there on the table.
It buzzed again, one of the pieces walking across the wooden surface, and Troy squatted, looking at it across the table at eye level. It vibrated hard, like it wasn’t just trying to communicate something, but like it was intended to be able to move when it did it.
He stood, still cautious. Could be dangerous, could be sensitive.
Finally, not able to figure out anything else, he touched it. It was approaching the edge of the table, and he slid it back across the wood with his fingertips, watching as it worked its way back toward the same edge.
He lifted it, amazed at how much energy it had. He could still hear it buzzing as he held it suspended between two fingers. He closed his hand around it, and his whole body jerked forward, his feet moving on their own.
He opened his hand and dropped the wallet-sized ribbed device onto the floor, staring down at it.
He’d w
alked.
His brain had had nothing to do with it. The thing had coopted his nervous system and he was going.
It hadn’t been a random flail.
The device went still and he waited, then picked it up gingerly between two index fingers, looking at it from above and below. There still wasn’t anything about it that told him anything useful.
He closed his hand again and walked into the bed, dropping it there, where it went quiet.
He looked at the rest of the things on the table, licking the corner of his mouth.
He didn’t have the time to work it out.
He didn’t have the tools to analyze everything and learn what he needed to.
He had to go with his gut and he had to decide who and want to trust.
He packed everything up into the box.
*********
Hours passed.
Cassie didn’t move from the floor.
She tracked everyone as much as she could, following them around the building, identifying individuals by their footpatterns as they came and left. There were a lot of people here, for as small as the building was, in a relative sense.
Most of them were human.
She wondered how many of them knew who they were working with, really. Or if they were just collecting a paycheck and a sense of power.
There was a slow, big-strided, shuffling gait that she didn’t know, but the way the two Lumps stuck to it while it was in the building told Cassie that she’d met Kalthar the Wob-wob. Damn Jesse for not killing him straight off.
She wouldn’t have made that mistake.
Especially not back then, when Jesse had made it. He’d just have been a bonus moment of destruction right there in the moments before she’d rid herself of Midas.
He stopped outside of her cell, but they didn’t open the door, and she didn’t even breathe.
She was on to secondary respiration, mostly, now. Her body temperature was dropping and her reflexes would be slower until she’d been in good air for at least five minutes.
The Wob-wob left.
She hoped he came back before she got out. He was at the middle of this, and she didn’t want him getting a third shot at it.
Somewhere in the building, Jesse was still alive.
*********
“I need your keys,” Troy said when Bridgette opened her door. She’d taken off her makeup and was wearing a robe.
“How do you know I have keys?” Bridgette asked.
“Because you took too long to get shaving cream and shampoo,” he said. “You went and rented a car because you don’t like being out of control.”
“I got it out of the motor pool,” she said, insulted. He put out his hand and she closed the door against the dead bolt, coming back and holding them suspended above his palm.
“I can come with you,” she said. He shook his head.
“Not unless you want to be in active combat,” he said. “I know you’ve supported it, but this may be beyond your trained skillset.”
“You shouldn’t go by yourself,” she said. “If you know where they are, you should get Security Forces from Andrews. Or OSI.”
He shook his head.
“They aren’t prepared to deal with foreign terrestrials,” he said. “Not here, especially. And I don’t have time to wait for ones from Greene.”
She signed, dropping the keys.
“Don’t make me regret this,” she said. He nodded.
“I’ll call with my destination once I know where it is,” he said. “Then you can call in the cavalry.”
“But you’re going to go in on your own,” she said dryly, and he nodded.
“I’m the one who’s trained and who’s armed. People have already died over this. If I get myself killed, at least I’m not responsible for anyone else.”
She shook her head.
“We need you,” she said.
“We need the Jalnians,” he answered. “I’m only important because I might be able to find them.”
She shook her head.
“You’re selling yourself short.”
He shrugged.
“Thank you,” he said, holding up the keys. “I’ll call.”
She pressed her mouth into a line, then nodded and he left.
The car was a black sedan that Troy didn’t know by sight, but it ran fine. He put the box into the back seat, then looked around the parking lot with a sense of self-awareness, then took the ribbed briquette out of his pocket, closing his hand around it. He was walking before his shoulders caught up, whiplashed into a new direction, but once he set off, it was a consistent direction. He put the briquette back into his pocket and let go, and his legs were his own again.
Strangest sensation he’d ever known.
He took out his phone, finding his direction and set a destination about five miles out, that way, then went and got into the car and started driving.
He stopped about every five miles to check his bearing, but it didn’t change. After thirty minutes, he decided to do something more efficient. It took some doing, one of the stops, but he worked out a way to mark a map with bearing lines, then he went perpendicular to his bearing about ten miles and got out, finding the new direction he was supposed to be going and comparing the two telemetries.
The math wasn’t very precise, but it looked like he had more than a hundred miles to go. At that distance, it was possible that the device was just a compass and not a tracking device, and he didn’t want to be hours out of position if something important happened, but he sat in the car, looking at the briquette and the box in the back seat and made the call to keep following.
At least he was actually allowed to carry a gun again, as he made it further into Virginia.
He didn’t go directly along the path that the briquette was pointing to, but went straight east-to-west, getting out of the car thirty minutes later. This time it was clear - the briquette was pointing him at a specific place, and it was still most of a hundred and fifty miles away. There was a little town in central Virginia where his directional vectors converged, and he set a path for it, but he knew that he hadn’t been anywhere near that precise with his measurements.
He checked every half hour from there, but the direction didn’t change much, just wandering around the same three little towns. At around three in the morning, he filled up the gas tank in a town called Clairmont. He got a new direction and started working his way through the town, coming to a small industrial area. He knew without checking that he wanted the building with all of the cars parked outside of it at three-thirty in the morning. He kept driving, going to an office complex and pulling into the small parking lot to get out his phone again.
“Sir,” Bridgette answered her phone.
He gave her the address.
“It looks like there may be more than a dozen individuals in there, from the number of passenger cars,” he said.
“Sir, you should wait,” she said. He shook his head, just staring out the front windshield.
“No,” he said. Something in the back seat shifted, and he looked over his shoulder. “I need to go.”
“Sir,” she said.
Cassie was in there. That was the only thing he could think. She was in there, and Violet had given him what he needed to get to her.
He needed to do it now, in case there was any chance that he could save her in the window between now and when they killed her. If he’d had a chance and passed because he didn’t have enough people behind him? He couldn’t live with that.
“Let Secretary Langer and Senator Greene know what happened,” he said. “I’ll take full responsibility for whatever they might think of my decisions, but I’m doing what I think is best.”
“Major,” Bridgette said. “Do. Not. Die.”
He grinned.
“It isn’t a suicide mission,” he said, getting out of the car and opening the back door. “I just don’t know what in hell I’m doing, yet.”
He heard her sigh.
“Good luck, Troy.”
“Thanks, Bridgette.”
*********
The floor stopped vibrating.
Somewhere close by, the thing powering the building and its technology had shut down.
Cassie stood, going to put her fingers against the door, feeling the power tech inside of it.
It was loose.
It was a concept that she didn’t have a specific explanation for, but…
She raised the armbuckles, feeling the magnetics that Violet’s technology had been shielding, and she smiled.
It was like trying to pick an elaborate lock with a paper clip, but she was just the person to do that. She braced her feet, finding a stance where she could hold herself perfectly still as she moved the magnets on her arms along the door, feeling the wires respond to the magnetic field.
She would have to finish the hack before the power came back up, and doubtless someone was down trying to work it out right this moment, but she wasn’t going to let the opportunity go past, just because she might not be able to use it.
The central processing unit, as much as there was one, woke up as she tickled it, and she nodded to herself.
This was her window, and she was gonna smash it.
*********
Troy looked at the gun on his hip again.
He didn’t like carrying it, given that something had happened to it, but trust was trust, and it wasn’t like he was going to turn back, now.
When he’d gotten into the box, the gun had ripped out of his holster and buried itself into the pile of stuff, which mostly looked nothing like it had when he’d put it into the box back at the hotel.
It was a freaking transformer.
He’d dug the gun back out, and it was a new shape. The pieces were mostly still there, but they were modified with subtle bits here and there, and the magazine was completely missing. Something else was there, and nothing he’d tried had been able to pry it loose.
So he was armed, but he had no idea with what. Hopefully it was on purpose, and hopefully the fact that the thing still had a barrel and a trigger meant that he was still supposed to use it like a point-and-shoot.
The rest of the gear had formed itself into a backpack of sorts, a sort of exoskeletal framework that fit him… like it was designed specifically for him.
Violet had his measurements.