by Chloe Garner
It had snapped closed around his stomach and across his collar bones as he’d put it on, and it wouldn’t come off, anymore. It was making him mildly claustrophobic, as he walked down the street toward the warehouse.
He had an image in the back of his head that he looked like a Ghostbuster.
As he got closer to the warehouse, the devices on his back warmed and hummed, but nothing like the briquette in his pocket. He closed his hand around it in his pocket once, and his direction only changed slightly, headed for the curb rather than staying on the sidewalk.
He was here.
He let it go again, pausing only for a moment as he looked at the warehouse across the street before he crossed the street and the parking lot, headed for the small office at the front of the warehouse and its two plain glass doors.
It was just a normal, cheap building in a blue-collar section of town. Nothing remarkable about it at all but the number of cars sitting under the streetlights. Even their quality was about right. He tried the door, finding it locked. The briquette in his pocket went off and he took it out, holding it carefully so it didn’t march him directly into the doors. It buzzed, a different motion from what it had made before, and the door clicked.
Troy tried it again and it pulled open normally.
Well, that was useful.
He went into the small office, and a pair of lights on his shoulders turned on, casting a diffuse light around him that made it easy to see that the office was unoccupied, unless someone was hiding behind the counter.
He checked, then went to the door that led back into the warehouse, holding up the briquette and hearing the very satisfying click as the lock popped.
Damn.
He might have had a hooligan streak in middle school, if he’d had something like that.
No, he wouldn’t have.
He put the briquette back into his pocket and drew his gun before opening the door, wishing that Slav was here. Or Cassie, but that was obviously a pointless wish. They’d practiced this so many times, all those years ago, but the two of them had actually used it after their teenage years, and he was rusty.
He peeked through the door, his back against the wall, then he slid into the room, letting the door close quietly behind him.
It was a big, open space, smooth concrete floor, corrugated metal walls and ceiling. The lights were almost all off, and his shoulder-lights turned off as he stood, just watching, controlling his breath.
He didn’t see anyone, but it didn’t mean they weren’t there. Foreign terrestrials were clever at hiding, like that. He slid along the wall to the corner, where he was less obvious, and he took a moment.
There were three cars in here, two of them big, black SUVs and the third was a low, gold car with brass trim. Absurd.
A door opened and a man in a suit walked across the room, going to a table near a rolling garage door and leaning over it, tapping on a computer for a moment, then standing and going back across the room to a different door and leaving.
As Troy got his heart rate down far enough to be able to hear again, he realized that he could hear voices. They were a long way off, but they were angry. Troy took a cautious step along the wall while the things on his back whirred and reshaped. He hoped that the whole thing didn’t just curl in and crush him, but he didn’t have time to worry about it right now. The man hadn’t seen him, but it was just out of carelessness. Out here in the open, it was just a matter of time before someone spotted him and either captured or killed him. He needed to find better cover.
Which meant he had a decision.
The cars were probably empty and, if they were unlocked - a good chance, there - he could probably get to them and get into them without anyone noticing him. From there, he could watch everything that happened in the garage with very little chance of anyone seeing him, on account of how deeply their windows were tinted. The downside to that was that he would be there, hiding in a car, until he figured out his next step, which really wasn’t going to be any more obvious in the future than it was now, he suspected.
And that wasn’t why he was here. He could have hid in a car down the block.
The other option was to choose a door and hope for the best.
If he’d have told Colonel Peterson that that was his plan, back during his tests at jump school, the man would have made him run a dozen miles and restricted his R&R time for a month.
And yet.
Here he went.
The door that the man had come out of and the one that he’d gone into seemed like bad choices. The first door had voices behind it that Troy could hear even as he got close. He couldn’t catch any words, but he kept moving, low, pressed against the wall. The second door had a glass pane in it and he peeked through it, finding five men drinking beer and talking. Incongruous to the shouting he could hear further down the row.
The door behind him flew open, hitting the wall, and Troy froze as a man and a woman came out, speaking… a language he didn’t know. All his interpreter could tell him was that it was angry. They walked quickly out toward the cars and the desk, and he slid along the wall, darting through the door before it closed behind them, then turning to look at where he’d ended up.
It was a control room.
Lights flashed and screens played images of all around the warehouse. Buttons and levers and dials everywhere. There was only one door.
“Damn,” he whispered, going to look at the screens.
They told him that the two foreign terrestrials - were those the Lumps? - were over at the desk, crouched over the computer, still arguing. That the men in the break room were dealing a new hand of cards. And that there were at least another dozen people in the building in various places that he had no context for. He expected that Cassie could have pieced together the entire layout of the building from just these images, he didn’t have that skillset without an awful lot of time to work it out.
There was a sort of malicious instinct to twist all the dials and push all the buttons, just to mess things up as much as he could, but for now, no one knew that he was here, and it was best for him if it stayed that way as long as possible.
The device on his back popped, just once, and an alarm went off on one of the control benches. People on the monitors, some of them, raised their heads and switched directions, and just as Troy was making the decision that he needed to not be pinned into the control room - not when the one wall over there was just corrugated metal that he could have put a foot through - he noticed a flash of pink across one of the corners of one of the screens.
He’d seen that pink before.
The foreign terrestrial from the Secretary of the Air Force’s office. He, or another of the same species, was here.
Troy swallowed hard, shaking his head and checking on the pair in the main section of the warehouse.
They were walking across the warehouse floor, coming straight for the control room. He’d missed his opportunity. He was going to have to fight.
He went to stand with his back against the wall next to the door, gun at the ready, and he waited.
The door opened, and the pair came in, heading straight for the control desk with the new alarm on it. In shock, Troy slipped back out the door and into the warehouse, standing with his back against the wall again with his heart racing and his breath coming fast. He forced a deep, hard breath, then gritted his teeth. If he could see them while they were out here, they could see him.
He needed to not be here, but he needed to be slow, to try not to attract attention.
He slid along the wall, foot across foot, ducking below the window to the break room and going to the next door.
The man he’d seen first had come out this door. There were only five to pick from. Rather than keep hanging out here, where the two in the control room were inevitably going to notice him and come after him, Troy opened the door an inch and peeked through it.
Stairs.
Unlit stairs.
Well.
There
was an awful lot more building in evidence on the security monitors than what he could see from the outside.
They were going to catch him. He was beginning to accept that that was going to happen, no matter what. He would put up the best fight he could, if he couldn’t find Cassie before that. If he could find her, maybe she’d know what to do with the equipment on his back.
He slipped through the doorway and dropped down the stairs as quietly as he could.
At the bottom, there was a hallway that went some distance to his left and to his right. To his right, the hallway looked like a simple dead end with just doors off of it, but to the left, there were two more hallways, turns, that continued on away from the warehouse and its concrete floor. Troy didn’t know where the cameras were, but it seemed like not being pinned was better than being pinned, at least until he figured out where he was going to take his stand.
He went left.
A door opened behind him and he froze, but over the sound of a machine chugging, he heard footsteps and another door opened as the first door swung closed and muffled the machine noises again.
He looked over his shoulder, just flat stunned, then turned down the first hallway.
Where would you keep a prisoner around here?
The first door on his right opened, a big, heavy door that swung noiselessly, and Cassie stepped out into the hallway.
*********
The final piece of the lock dropped out of action and Cassie drew an even breath, feeling for controls. The lock was one thing - it was supposed to present a wall to her, and it had. The controls were more elusive, something that she had to be more nuanced with she handled them. She shifted her arm, just a minute fraction of an inch, finding the signal wire that came from the control panel to the control module and twitching to generate a signal on it. It needed the right pattern to trigger the lift, because even she couldn’t open it from the inside.
She caught on to the signal that the software was looking for, impatient, and then smiled as the software finally responded, lifting the door a fraction of an inch. She took a step back and breathed as the door swung out into the hallway, no glass this time.
She went out into the hallway and was already a step toward Jesse when something triggered her attention.
Something strange.
“Troy?”
*********
“Troy?” Cassie asked, turning to look at him. He heaved a huge sigh.
“I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” he said. “I thought you were going to be dead, by now.”
“They wanted me to tell them about humans,” she said. “Their mistake. What are you doing here?”
He shrugged.
“I’m the cavalry. I’m here to get you out.”
She shook her head.
“I can only just barely see you,” she said. Pause. “Ah. Violet.”
He let his shoulders drop and he stood straight.
“Well, that explains a lot,” he said. She grinned.
“You thought you made it all this way on your super agent skills?” she asked. “Come on. We need to go get Jesse.”
“He’s still alive, too?”
“They were planning on using him as leverage,” she said. “They don’t understand Palta.”
Troy didn’t understand, either.
“We need to get your arms loose,” he said, and she looked down at her arms. The thick metal around them didn’t have any obvious seams or locks, and for a moment Troy worried that they were forged there, but she held up her arms toward his exoskeleton, and there was a more intense whirring, then a pair of pops and she caught the two sleeves as they fell away from her arms, tossing them back into the cell behind her.
“I’m armed,” he said, holding out the gun. She reached out a hand, letting him give it to her without looking back at him.
She looked down at it, then stopped dead, looking much harder at it.
“That woman is amazing,” she breathed, turning the gun over in her hand. “I can’t give this back to you.”
He sighed.
“I kind of figured that was how this was going to end up. Is this thing going to crush me when it’s done with me?”
“No,” she said, “but I’d guess it’s going to disintegrate somehow and become as worthless as she knows how to make it. Did you talk to her?”
“No, she talked Olivia into bringing me a box of gear,” he said. “No instructions.”
“Looks like it worked,” Cassie breathed, resuming her quick walk down the hallway. “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?”
“Hmm?” Troy asked, alert and keeping up.
“Violet,” she said. “Olivia.”
“Not even thinking about it right now, Cass.”
She glanced back at him, but shook her head and looked away.
“That’s intense.”
“What?”
“Can’t see you when I look at you. She’s amazing.”
They took one more turn and came to another deep black door. Cassie put her hand on it, then pulled a membrane strip off of her arm and put it on the door.
“Easier when you’ve already hacked it once,” she murmured as the door popped open.
“Oh,” Troy said. “I’ve got an unlock thing in my pocket.”
She put out her hand and he gave it to her, looking down the hallway. There was shouting from behind them; Cassie wasn’t invisible like he was.
“This will work on mechanical locks and simple human electronic ones,” she said, handing it back. “I can’t let you keep it.”
“No surprise there,” he said, looking around the door as it swung into the hallway.
Jesse sat with his legs bound to a chair and his arms fastened together with the same blocky black equipment that Cassie had had on her arms. There was a pool of blood under him and spatter for a large radius around him. Troy put his hand to his mouth, then went into the room. Cassie stayed in the hallway, on point, while Troy unlocked Jesse’s arms and legs by proximity.
“Come on back, Palta,” Troy said, putting his thumbs under Jesse’s chin to lift his face. “We still need you here.”
Jesse grunted and the suit buzzed hard for several seconds, then the Palta groaned and tipped his head back.
Troy looked back at Cassie.
“Something just came out of his stomach, if you look,” she said. “Give him a minute. He’ll come around.”
Troy wasn’t sure what she meant by look, but he put his hand to Jesse’s stomach and found a small ball there, under his shirt and fresh blood wicking into the fabric. He lifted Jesse’s shirt to see a round wound closing, and a metal orb fell into his hand.
“What is that?” Troy asked.
“Give it to me,” Cassie answered, putting it into her pocket. “Get him moving.”
Troy looked back at Jesse as the foreign terrestrial blinked, slow, woozy.
“I’m going to help you out of here,” Troy said. “Can you lean on me?”
Jesse swallowed, looking around.
“They’re coming,” he said. “You should hide.”
“Like hell,” Troy said, trying to get Jesse to his feet.
“Troy, you’re camouflaged and disarmed,” Cassie said. “Find a spot out of the way and be safe.”
“Like. Hell,” Troy said, still trying to get Jesse onto his feet. “You need more able bodies than you’ve got, not less.”
“He’s Palta, Troy,” Cassie said. “And you just delivered the tech necessary to pull out the drain that was keeping him down. Now, he’s not going to be much use to me, given he won’t fight, but he’s going to be fine, so long as I don’t have to keep both of you alive.”
“There are two big black SUVs in the garage,” Troy said. He didn’t like it, but he had the ability to get out and right now it did look like the right plan. “Don’t make me come back down to get you.”
Cassie glanced around the doorway at Jesse, then took a step forward and out of view.
“I
have a lot of work to do down here,” she said. “I’ll find you when it’s done.”
Jesse stood, looking down at the floor, at the blood there.
“I’m going to want to get something to eat after this,” he said quietly. “You did good. Now let’s all get home alive.”
Troy nodded.
“I don’t have a gun for you.”
“Wouldn’t use it if you did,” Jesse said.
“Why don’t we just jump?” Troy asked. “Why fight our way out at all?”
There were more shouts, the sound of trained men taking a position against Cassie.
“They’ve got defenses against it,” Jesse said. Then frowned.
“Cassie,” the Palta man said.
“Busy,” she answered.
“Cassie,” Jesse said again. “Nobody dies.”
“Like hell,” she said. Troy looked at Jesse with a half a smile.
“Nobody dies, Cassie,” Jesse said, his voice lower, an order. She walked around the doorway, angry.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m using anti-matter versus anti-matter weaponry, out here, trying to get us out. Violet didn’t give me knockout darts. She gave me the right weapon for the job.”
Jesse shook his head.
“No, she gave you a back door.”
Cassie paused.
“The generator is down,” she said, and Jesse nodded.
“The generator is down,” he agreed.
“Guys?” Troy asked.
“Take him,” Cassie said. “Get both of you out of here. Go someplace actually safe.”
“No,” Jesse said. “I’m not leaving you here to kill all of them.”
“I’m safer on my own than with anyone else with me,” she said.
“That’s not what I said,” Jesse answered.
“What, and you expect me to just hang out while foreign terrestrials try to take over my planet?”
“No,” Jesse said. “I expect you to be more clever than that.”
She looked at the gun.
“I’ve killed people before.”
“And I’m not saying that maybe you didn’t have to,” Jesse said. “I’m saying you don’t have to now.”
“Defense always comes at the end of a gun,” Cassie said. “So does peace. I don’t care what the diplomats and the scientists say.”