The bustle the next morning around Griffith Observatory made it clear to Eva the Hrwang were preparing to move. She left for an early morning run regardless, wanting to stay in the habit, wanting the Hrwang to know she ran every day, and wanting to see what the aliens were up to.
It surprised her a little that they were preparing for a move without the Lord Admiral present. She didn’t know how long he’d be gone, didn’t want to ask when he’d return, and was afraid to ask why the soldiers prepared for a move without him. She thought she’d have a few days before they left for Hearst Castle, but apparently someone had decided they had to leave right away, without their commander.
Perhaps someone had even gone into space to talk to him. It was ridiculously easy for the Hrwang to travel. They made their ships disappear and reappear anywhere they wanted, even in space. She had to learn how that technology worked. That could be a huge strategic boost for Earth.
A drone followed her while she ran.
“Where have you been, Lady?” the Lieutenant Grenadier asked on her return. He’d been waiting for her.
“I went for a run.”
“Why? We’re packing to leave.”
“No one told me.”
“Pack quickly. Your shuttle is scheduled to leave in fifteen minutes.”
“I hope they can put up with my stinky sweat. I won’t have time to shower.”
“At least change your clothes,” the Lieutenant suggested, trying to avoid looking at her legs below her pink neon running shorts. She grinned at him and moved so he had to notice them.
“Okay,” she said sweetly. He looked away from her.
Playing with him was fun.
She ran to her room and packed the few belongings she brought with her. She pulled her shorts off, pulled a pair of yoga pants on, then put her shorts back on over them. She grabbed a sweatshirt. Even though it was still summer, the constant cloud cover made it cold outside.
She knew nothing would grow during such a cold summer. How would mankind survive the winter without crops to harvest? How much food did the world store? She’d taken such things for granted before, that supermarkets and restaurants would always have food. Would they be able to get food from parts of the world with warmer weather?
Packed, she ran with her duffel back outside. The Hrwang were efficient. Even the mainframe computers where the soldiers downloaded and uploaded information on their tablets were gone. She couldn’t believe how quickly they’d packed. When she’d left on her run, all the equipment had still been in place. Perhaps everything they installed was designed to be moved at a moment’s notice.
“What’s the hurry?” Eva called as the Lieutenant Grenadier waited for her by the hatch of one of the craft. She felt like one of the last to leave. There were only three craft left on the ground when she got to hers. Even the ever-present drones had all landed.
He waved her inside wordlessly, then sat next to her while she strapped in.
“A large column of armored vehicles are moving this way. We’ve tracked them back to a base that had been destroyed out in the deep desert.”
Eva immediately thought of the Marine base at Twentynine Palms. She didn’t say anything.
She wondered, though, why the Hrwang didn’t destroy the tanks like they did airplanes. With their technology, it didn’t seem like an armored column would be much of a threat. But she kept her questions to herself. She wasn’t supposed to be the kind of person who thought about things like that.
The craft lurched a little as it jumped to a point in the air above Hearst Castle. The engines took control and it landed gently in a spot in the courtyard in front of the main building, the one with two domed towers that made it look like a Spanish mission.
“The Lord Admiral will be staying in this building. I assume you will also,” the Lieutenant Grenadier said. Eva nodded in response.
She followed the soldier out of the vehicle and toward the building he said they would be staying in. Statues of soldiers guarded the doorway, real soldiers stood below them, holding small, handheld weapons. They acknowledged the lieutenant and Eva, and she nodded back to them.
The building did look like a castle; domed towers decorated with blue mosaics, arched windows in them looking like Muslim minarets, bas-relief sculptures adorning the walls, and everything ornate, ostentatious, and overdone.
The interior had been decorated more extravagantly than the exterior; sculptures, mosaics, and paintings covering every inch of the walls and ceilings.
Dark, flamboyant, and garish. She preferred a simpler elegance.
But she had a part to play, and when she saw a sign knocked over, pointing to stairs that read ‘Celestial Suites’, she made a plan.
She took the stairs.
Two suites were located on the top floor at the west end of the building, the North Celestial Suite and the South one. She pointed to the North one and told the Lieutenant Grenadier, “I’ll take this one and you put the Lord Admiral’s things into that one. I think he’ll like it best.”
The Lieutenant Grenadier complied without grumbling.
Good.
If she was to be the Lady of this Castle, she’d have to act the part.
After putting her things into the conspicuously overdecorated room (what kind of a person lived in a place like this?), she heard a hesitant knock on the door. She opened it and the Lieutenant Grenadier stood there, humbly.
“Lady, we retained several of the existing staff members when we occupied this Castle. They seem loyal to it. More than to the people who were here.”
“Caretakers. I’m not surprised,” Eva replied. She grinned. “They probably had conniption fits when all the refugees showed up. As long as we don’t break anything, they’ll probably be happy with us here.” She felt pride at thinking to use ‘we’ and ‘us’, including herself with the Hrwang. It helped with her cover.
“Would you like to meet them, Lady?”
What would they think of her? Probably that she was some kind of a traitor. They might poison her in her sleep, or something worse. No, she didn’t want to meet them.
“Perhaps at another time,” she said. “I’m anxious for the Lord Admiral to return.”
She really wasn’t. She wanted to go running as a cover for scoping out the Castle grounds and checking out how the Hrwang were deploying.
The Lieutenant Grenadier didn’t take the bait; didn’t say anything about when his commander might return.
“I’m going to go running to get my mind off his absence.” She pouted and hoped she wasn’t pouring it on too thick.
“You like to run a lot.”
“It keeps me fit.” She struck a pose meant to accentuate her lean body. The Lieutenant Grenadier reddened a little.
Eva ran morning and afternoon, exploring the hills all around Hearst Castle. A drone always followed her, keeping a discreet distance, but always tracking her. She didn’t know if the things had cameras on them, but she felt she couldn’t safely stop and observe the Hrwang activities on the grounds. Instead, she maintained her cover and ran as if she did it for exercise.
She realized quickly she had no training to be a mole. She’d been trained to fight, she’d been trained to handle assets, she’d been trained in reconnaissance, and she’d been trained to use the equipment of her trade, but she’d never been trained to be a mole. She racked her brain to determine what she should be doing, what she should be learning, but she knew she couldn’t figure things out on her own.
She needed help from a handler. She needed contact with the Agency.
She watched for orchids everywhere when she ran, but never saw any. She hoped Juan relayed the message to Director Marceline. Flowers would be used as a means of contact, certain counts and colors indicating messages. Three red petals or flowers somewhere would mean her cover was blown and she needed to flee.
When she wasn’t running, the Lieutenant Grenadier watched her and she knew it, although she acted like she didn’t. She knew that around him, and around anyone else, everything she did had to seem like it stemmed from natural curiosity.
That part came easy. She did feel a natural curiosity about the Hrwang. Their ways were different. Alien.
The bit about not using names struck her as their strangest cultural trait. They treated their names as intimate parts of themselves, only to be shared with family and their closest, lifelong friends.
They followed a strict hierarchy. No two soldiers had the same rank within the same organization. If there were two captains in one division, one was the Over Captain and the other was simply Captain. If a third officer were promoted to Captain, he would be Under Captain. The Hrwang took pecking orders to an extreme.
The old visitor’s center down the hill from the main complex was converted into a command center where the combat units reported in. Their commanders stood in line to download reports and upload information and orders from the computer terminals, similar to the ones she’d seen in the main lobby of Griffith Observatory.
Just as the men watched her run in neon pink shorts, she tried to surreptitiously observe their activities.
She saw very little weaponry. Many soldiers had handheld weapons, but she never found large stores of ammunition. They would run out of ammo very quickly in a firefight. She hadn’t determined the nature of the weaponry on their aircraft, but from reports she’d heard before she infiltrated them, she knew the craft had essentially destroyed the world’s air forces. She just didn’t know how.
She debated asking for a ride along on one of the craft during a combat mission but finally decided that would be too brazen, too dangerous. She contented herself with playing the bored and lonely girlfriend, waiting for her powerful boyfriend to return from travel and attempting to amuse herself in the meantime.
She hated the food.
When not running, she used the gym. The Assembly Room in the main building, Casa Grande, had been converted, the aliens installing free weights and a couple of punching bags. Soldiers occasionally sparred on wrestling mats.
As Eva mercilessly punched and kicked one of the bags in the corner following a run, she tried to ignore the sheer chaos of artwork on the walls. If the Lord Admiral enjoyed it all when he arrived, it would certainly say something about him.
A bust from a Roman, perhaps Caesar himself, looked down at her while she worked out.
On the third day, fresh back from her morning run, beating her punching bag into submission again, and dreading going to lunch after a shower, a voice interrupted her thoughts.
“You have good form,” it said.
She turned, surprised and shocked, and almost fell over when she saw the barrel-chested Lieutenant Grenadier watching her.
“You scared me,” she cried, but then laughed. “I’m sorry. I guess I was lost in thought.”
“You are good at fighting,” he said. It sounded accusatory.
“It’s just a punching bag.”
“We must practice fight sometime,” the Lieutenant Grenadier said.
Alarm bells went off again in Eva’s head. Her form was too good. Too professional for a silly girl. She had to allay the Lieutenant Grenadier’s suspicions, and she had to get out of sparring with him.
“I think the Lord Admiral might get a little jealous,” she said, grinning at him suggestively. He immediately backed down, stammering that he intended nothing disrespectful.
“Juan, I could kiss you,” she whispered to herself that afternoon during another run. A crushed orchid lay on the trail next to a boulder about three miles from Hearst Castle. She turned and looked back at the Castle, eyeballing a window in line of sight that was close to her room. The drone didn’t seem to notice.
She’d send Juan a message back that she knew he was out there in the mountains somewhere, keeping an eye on her. She just hoped he could stay far enough away from any Hrwang patrols.
That evening she found the window and opened it, putting four potted plants on the sill. She hoped he saw them before someone else moved them.
Juan and Mark did, through a telescope and from miles away, the following morning.
“I told you she’d understand,” Juan said to his new partner.
“Yeah. She gets to live in that big ol’ castle and you and I get to sleep in the dirt and eat cold food because we can’t even have a fire,” Mark replied.
“Maybe. But she’ll be executed if she gets caught.”
“And if we get caught, don’t you think they’ll kill us just as fast?”
Juan stayed silent.
“Still glad you signed up as a spy?” Mark asked after a minute.
“I’d be dead if I hadn’t found Eva.”
“You and me both, buddy.”
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