Envelopment

by Bernard Wilkerson

“Why can’t the Lord Admiral’s ship just jump back here, like the one we came in? It just jumped into the air over the castle. Couldn’t his ship do the same from space? It just jumped from the ground right out to space, didn’t it?”

  Eva gazed up at the sky, her hand extending the bill of the pink Cardinals baseball cap she wore, watching for signs of the Lord Admiral’s craft on reentry.

  “The AIs refuse,” the Lieutenant Grenadier answered.

  “Order them,” Eva replied. “They’re just computers. Program them to do what you want.”

  The Lieutenant Grenadier chuckled a little grimly.

  “You don’t understand the AIs. We don’t make them. We copy them from each other and build the units they are housed in, but there is something about them we don’t control. They always do what we ask, except jump where they can’t calculate a high probability of success.”

  He considered something, then continued, “We’ve learned to use it to our advantage. That’s how we recharge our main weapons.”

  “I don’t understand.” Tread carefully, Eva, she told herself. He’s about to reveal something important.

  “Carrying ammunition across interstellar distances is a waste of cargo space. That’s why we learned to use asteroids for planetary bombardment. Also, our smaller craft can discharge electromagnetic pulses that disable other vehicles. We charge the weapon during reentry.”

  This was huge. Eva kept her demeanor calm, her face only responding as if she were an innocent hearing something interesting.

  “And when they run out of charge? They just jump back into space, then enter and recharge?”

  “Yes.”

  “How clever. The Hrwang are so smart.”

  “Thank you,” he responded.

  “And your English is improving so much.” She didn’t want him to dwell on what he’d just revealed.

  “It helps talking to you, Lady. I remember more from my sleep conditioning when we speak. And I study several hours every evening.”

  “But you’re so busy. Do you ever sleep?”

  “Not enough, Lady.” He smiled at her.

  “Well, you’re very good. I’d hardly know you weren’t a native speaker.”

  “Thank you, Lady.”

  She turned to gaze back up at the sky, hoping the contrails of the reentry vehicle would be visible soon. She needed the Lieutenant Grenadier to forget what he’d just told her. She also needed to get the information to Juan.

  “Is that him?” She pointed.

  “Maybe.”

  They watched another few moments. The contrail became more evident.

  “It’s him.”

  “It could be another craft,” he said.

  “It’s him. I know it. I can feel it.” She didn’t actually jump up and down in excitement, but she pictured doing it and tried to let the emotions express themselves in her words. Something she learned in a drama class.

  “Oh, he’s going to overshoot.”

  She knew the Hrwang craft could jump back to the castle from wherever it ended up after reentry, but by saying that, she hoped the Lieutenant Grenadier would underestimate her understanding of their technology.

  But his underestimation wouldn’t be by much. She really did know very little yet about the aliens, despite having spent just over a week with them. Still, she probably knew more than anyone else did who might be trying to figure out how to fight them. She had to keep feeding information to Juan and Mark.

  In the meantime, it was best if the Hrwang thought she understood a lot less than she actually did.

  “Do not worry, Lady. He’ll be here soon.” The Lieutenant Grenadier’s voice sounded a little patronizing. Eva sighed in reply.

  The contrail disappeared over the horizon and a couple of minutes later, a vehicle appeared in the air over Hearst Castle. It circled the grounds a couple of times, then hovered over the designated landing area and slowly settled in.

  What was left of the visitor’s center lower down the mountain had been turned into the command computer center and a larger landing area had been created. The combat craft that came and went, their soldiers downloading reports and uploading orders and new information, operated out of that location.

  Eva was grateful they didn’t use Casa Grande or any of the other buildings in the main location. With so many soldiers coming and going at Griffith Observatory, there were always many eyes observing her. Here, fewer watched.

  The Hrwang craft landed. She tried to comprehend that it had just been in space, but that didn’t seem possible. She needed to experience it for herself. She wondered how she could manage that.

  The hatch cycled open and two soldiers stepped out, holding something. A stretcher followed with two more soldiers on the other end of it.

  The Lord Admiral exited behind them.

  She moved to greet him, not throwing herself at him like a wife might do for a husband gone many months to war, but as a new girlfriend, still a little timid, still a little in awe of him, hoping he would be as excited to see her as she was him.

  He smiled warmly and put his arms out. She went into them.

  “Aww, my dear. Did you miss me?”

  “Terribly.”

  He actually patted her head. She would have given a real boyfriend no end of grief about that.

  “Who’s on the stretcher?” Eva asked.

  “That is your Ambassador,” he said, confirming Eva’s suspicion. “He’s recovered well from the shoulder wound, but the ride back down was rough. He’ll be okay soon. Now, come show me around this little hovel you want me to live in.”

  “You learned the word ‘hovel’.”

  “Just for this occasion,” he replied, chuckling at his own humor. He squeezed her, then headed toward the main building with his arm still around her.

  “Stunning,” was his first reaction.

  Walking into the main building of Hearst Castle, Casa Grande, for the first time, Eva suspected it was the sort of place that would impress the Lord Admiral.

  It did.

  He gazed in wonder at the art work, the statues, the furniture. At everything. Several nudes impressed him in particular.

  “Who was Hearst?” he asked.

  Eva shrugged. “I don’t know. Some rich guy who had this place built and brought art here from all over the world.”

  “He was not just rich. He must have been the wealthiest man alive.”

  “Maybe. Follow me, Lord Admiral.”

  She led him up the stairs to the Celestial Suites, pointing his out, telling him it had the best view of the two.

  “Separate rooms?”

  “For now. Besides, it’s that time of the month.” It wasn’t, but she needed an excuse for the separate rooms.

  The Lord Admiral shrugged, not understanding. Eva asked for his tablet.

  “Women’s menstruation,” she said into it. It spoke Est to the Lord Admiral. His demeanor immediately changed.

  “Of course, my dear. I understand.”

  Eva had never seen him leave a conversation more quickly.

  “The bathrooms are private, down a winding stairwell,” she called after him. “There’s no toilet paper, though.”

  He turned and looked at her with a grimace.

  “Sorry,” she shrugged. She wasn’t about to tell him about the two rolls she had stashed in her bathroom.

  Eva went immediately into her room, shut the door, looked around at the gaudy architecture, and wondered again about the opulent desires of a man who would create such a place.

  She went to the bedside and knelt down next to it. She pulled her knife out from under the mattress.

  She took some cloth she had set aside for when she actually did have her next period and took it down to the bathroom. She made a small cut with the knife on the inside of her leg where no one
would see it, then squeezed out a little blood on the cloth. It was too red, too dark, so she diluted it with water and set it on the side of the bathtub. It probably wouldn’t fool another woman, but it would fool a man.

  She had a couple of hours to kill before dinner, so she took a long, hot shower.

  Hearst Castle had power courtesy of several independent generators. The refugees had run out of fuel for them, but the Hrwang had found sources and filled the tanks. They would have power and hot water for as long as Hrwang foraging groups could keep finding diesel.

  The Lieutenant Grenadier had prepared a feast for the Lord Admiral’s first dinner in the castle.

  The dining room table held more than twenty guests and Eva felt a little awkward. She hadn’t spent time before with this many aliens at once.

  The Lord Admiral sat at the head of the table with the Lieutenant Grenadier on his right, the Ambassador on his left, and sundry other officers down the length of the table. Eva was seated to the left of the Ambassador. One of his arms hung in a sling, wrapped in several layers of bandages. He did the best he could with his good arm and hand.

  He looked at Eva knowingly once or twice, but she ignored him. He probably wanted to know about the data drive, but there was no way they could talk about it here.

  Dinner was especially heavily spiced and the Ambassador ate little. Eva had gotten used to how the potatoes and carrots tasted, but they’d soaked the meat in something that smelled like old cow patties. She couldn’t stomach it.

  Most of the conversation swirled around her in Est and she still only understood a few words. She thought about asking for her own tablet so she could study but didn’t know how that would go over. She’d have to find the right moment.

  The Ambassador didn’t speak much. He still looked uncomfortable, perhaps in pain. The Lord Admiral ignored him.

  After Eva finished eating what she could, the Lord Admiral still went on, asking for seconds. He also had wine brought up out of the cellar and most everyone drank. Eva wondered how old it was and how much it was worth. Probably thousands, if not more. But the aliens enjoyed it.

  “You’re not drinking, my dear,” the Lord Admiral said in English. Eva turned to focus on him. She’d been lost in thought.

  “Not in the mood, I guess, Lord Admiral,” she said, trying to sound deferential.

  “The Lieutenant Grenadier and I have been discussing some things. He’s shared some interesting observations about you.”

  Eva looked at the Lieutenant Grenadier’s face. He didn’t look back at her and she couldn’t read his expression. Alarms went off in her head. She’d have to tread lightly.

  “He has done some research and he comes to me with a most disturbing accusation.”

  Eva kept herself from looking around. She already knew there were armed soldiers at the entrance. She’d never get past them. About the best she could do was grab a steak knife and hold the Lord Admiral hostage.

  It wouldn’t work.

  “He told me something and I’ve decided I completely agree.” The Lord Admiral stared at her, malice in his eyes. The conversation around them had stopped.

  “I know exactly what you are,” the Lord Admiral announced.

  When Eva was fifteen, her father had told her she had an incredible poker face. She didn’t even know what he meant until she looked it up online. After that, she practiced in front of a mirror and found she could control her face, control any expression of emotion regardless of how she actually felt. First, she thought that would make her a great actor, and since she lived in Southern California, that seemed a natural career path.

  But actors needed to over express emotions, not under express them, and as she thought about it, acting in theaters or in movies didn’t appeal to her anyway. She’d heard enough horror stories at school to know it wasn’t all glamorous.

  What could she do with a poker face?

  To challenge herself, she played online poker for two or three months, no gambling involved, until she knew the rules well. Then she challenged three boys in her grade to a game of strip poker. They readily agreed.

  She learned quickly how easy it was to manipulate them. After a couple of hours, she left the garage of one of the boys, whose parents were out of town, in her bare feet, carrying shoes and socks. She hadn’t won every hand.

  The three boys sat stunned around a card table, all three in their underwear.

  They never spoke to her again.

  Researching careers, she decided some form of intelligence, perhaps military intelligence, would be the right career field for her. She used her newfound skills of manipulation to persuade her father she needed self-defense training, and that he had to enroll her in several martial arts classes.

  “Not just one type could be enough,” she had suggested.

  She also persuaded him to teach her to shoot and she even signed up for a semester of boxing after reading that it was a required class for West Point cadets because learning to punch another individual in the face was one of the hardest things a new cadet had to do.

  It never bothered her to punch someone.

  She dropped out of boxing though, worried she might mess her teeth up.

  And she ran.

  She never won any cross country meets, but the coaches never had enough girls for the really long races, and she had enough endurance to finish. She ran a marathon her senior year although it wasn’t a school event.

  All of the training, all of the practice manipulating others, getting boys her age to do whatever she wanted them to do, all of it prepared her for college.

  She quickly decided that ROTC was a joke and she changed her major to international relations and learned everything she could about applying for the Agency.

  She got busy one semester her junior year and couldn’t bring herself to go to a boring, once a week, one credit hour seminar she was supposed to attend.

  The students weren’t graded on attendance but only on one, final exam. As the final approached, she realized she’d missed almost three-quarters of the seminars. In a panic, she found a boy who liked her, used her abilities to sweet talk him out of his notes, studied for a couple of days, and passed the class with a ‘B’. She never saw the boy again.

  She was accepted into the Agency her senior year.

  Training as a field agent had been hard. More than hard. Impossible. But some passed and she was one of them. She graduated with a desire to use her skills for something good, for a greater purpose. She knew saving the world was a fantasy many spy wannabes had when they applied for the Agency, but she also knew she could make a difference.

  She had a poker face and the skills to back it up for a reason.

  She had passed the impossible training for a reason.

  Spending most of her time recruiting college kids who had almost no hope of passing the rigorous requirements was not the reason she had spent her life preparing for this job.

  Making a difference was.

  She didn’t know how she was going to make a difference now, especially now that the world did need saving. And in this moment in Hearst Castle, sitting at the Lord Admiral’s dinner table, preparing herself for his inevitable accusation, she suddenly realized she had failed.

  She guessed she would probably be executed shortly, as soon as the Lord Admiral revealed the allegations the Lieutenant Grenadier had made about her. She also wished she had never suggested a strategy for taking over Hearst Castle with no bloodshed. She should have kept her mouth shut. It wasn’t her business to understand military strategy. She also should have laid off the punching bag. Anyone who observed her would know she’d been trained to fight.

  But hope springs eternal, and Eva kept her face passive, staring at the Lord Admiral as innocently as possible.

  Inside her, emotions roiled and she made sure she knew how close her hand was to a steak kn
ife. The Lord Admiral was too far away. Was the Ambassador important enough to take hostage?

  She made herself breathe.

  “You, my dear,” the Lord Admiral said, his white teeth showing through peeled back lips, his eyes burning into hers, “are a gold digger.”

  She wanted to bark a laugh.

  Relief flooded her, but she still kept her face passive. “If only you knew,” she wanted to say to him, to spit in his face and in the face of the Lieutenant Grenadier.

  She had these men completely wrapped around her finger.

  Time to play the hurt and offended girlfriend.

  She couldn’t bring tears to her eyes. The relief inside was too much for that. But she bit her lip, made a hurt pout, stood, shoving her chair backward with her legs, hoping it would fall over, but it was too heavy for that, and threw her napkin down on her plate.

  “You’re mean,” she said to the Lord Admiral in as hurt a voice as she could muster. She glared daggers at the Lieutenant Grenadier, that was easy, and she turned and fled the dining room.

  She lost her composure on the way up the stairs and couldn’t breathe. It felt like an elephant stepping on her chest.

  She knew she couldn’t be having a heart attack, so it must be panic. She ran up the stairs holding her breath, and burst into her room, falling on the bed. She sucked air, told herself to calm down, and tears came.

  Good. If someone walked in on her now, the tears were the perfect cover.

  Part of her mind clinically analyzed what had happened and what was happening and she knew she reacted perfectly. The other part whirled in panic because she had thought she was so close to being discovered, which meant that close to death.

  A person entered her room. She felt him walk over to the bed and she buried her face in her pillow. The Lord Admiral’s hand touched her back.

  “Go away.”

  He caressed her softly.

  “I apologize, my dear,” he whispered.

  The analytical part of her mind was completely back in control and she pondered how she could use this to her advantage.

  “I did not mean to harm you,” the Lord Admiral continued. “Perhaps the word is more offensive in your language than in mine.”

  “You really hurt me.” She turned to glare at him and welcomed the surprised look on his face. Her crying must have smeared her mascara, and throwing her face into a pillow must have messed her hair up. Women looked scary that way.

  He touched his hand gently to her face and rubbed tears away with his thumb. He did look genuinely sorry.

  “Don’t blame the Lieutenant Grenadier. He was telling me about seeing you fight a punching bag. He said you were a skilled fighter.”

  “My father had a punching bag. Hitting a punching bag can’t be like fighting a person. I’ve never done that.”

  “We should spar sometime. It’s good exercise.”

  “I don’t know how,” Eva said.

  “I’ll teach you. Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. Not again.”

  She made her face relax a little, a tiny hint of a smile on her mouth. She had to give him something.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “Good. Do you want to come back down to dinner?”

  “No. I would be too embarrassed.”

  “Okay.” He moved to stand up, scooting off the bed. Sudden inspiration came and Eva grabbed his hands, keeping him from making it completely off. He balanced with one foot on the floor and one knee on the bed.

  “I really missed you,” she said, as much love and tenderness as she could put into it.

  “I missed you also,” he replied.

  “Could you take me with you next time? When you have to go into space? We could share a cabin and it would be so much easier.”

  He frowned briefly, but she pleaded with her eyes, holding his hands close to her.

  “Alright, my dear. You can come with me next time.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “And, Lord Admiral?”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “Can I learn how to speak Est? Your language?”

  He grinned, his smile genuine and tender-hearted.

  “Nothing would please me more.”

  She smiled and they kissed. He held her for a moment, patted her head, then excused himself.

  As soon as he left, she flopped back on her bed. The shaking began as a tiny tremble in her hands and a tic in her eye, but it soon controlled her entire body.

  She couldn’t make it stop for several minutes.

  In the morning, Eva prepared for her run. The Lord Admiral was not to be found, but the men were used to her running on her own, so she set off alone, winding her way down the long corridors and endless stairs of the main building to make her way out.

  She had so much information to share with Juan, she didn’t know where to start. She needed to work out a drop schedule with him somehow, leaving items behind the boulder. She wasn’t sure what to do, she knew Juan wouldn’t know what to do, but the Agency had to have experts helping him.

  Lost in contemplation, the human Ambassador for the Hrwang surprised her when he stopped her in the main lobby. He asked her to walk with him.

  “For a minute,” she said, trying to sound irritated.

  They went out to the pool area. No Hrwang were around.

  “Where’s the drive?” he hissed.

  “What are you talking about, Ambassador?”

  “My name is Stanley. Call me Stanley. You’re human, right?”

  Eva worried it was a setup.

  “We’re all human, aren’t we?” she replied, adding a touch of bright innocence to her voice. “The Lord Admiral says it doesn’t matter which planet you’re from. God created all of us in his image.”

  That exasperated the Ambassador.

  “What did you do with the drive? I gave it to you before they took me to the hospital in space.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eva replied. “You had some kind of a drive? A data drive? What was on it?”

  She hoped her question sounded innocent. She hoped he would reveal the contents that were on the drive. His answer disappointed her.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He rubbed his good hand through his hair. “I don’t know what was on it. I thought I saw you before they took me up to space. I didn’t know where to hide it. You were, you know, a woman, so I thought you weren’t Hrwang.” He looked off in the distance, out toward the ocean.

  The view from Hearst Castle couldn’t be beaten.

  “I’m from this planet,” Eva assured him, “but I don’t know anything about a data drive. How big was it?”

  The Ambassador swore at her, then apologized.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that someone important gave it to me. I wasn’t supposed to lose it.”

  “I wish I could help you,” Eva replied sincerely. She grinned. “It sounds mysterious and fun.”

  The Ambassador glared at her. He must have decided she was just a stupid girl and he spun on his heels and stomped back up to the main house. Eva kept her next grin to herself. She had come across to him exactly as she wanted to.

  She just wished she knew what was on that drive.

  And she wished she knew how she was going to reach Juan to tell him everything she’d learned.

  Director Olivia Marceline looked at the data drive Eva’s partner, Juan, brought her. It sat on her desk and she was absolutely unsure what to do with it. She had no idea how Eva had gotten it, who had made it, or how authentic it was. Only that Eva had smuggled it out under the Hrwang’s noses.

  She worried about the risks her agent took.

  She’d watched the short video on the drive three times, pondered what it meant and how the information might be used, then showed it to
her staff.

  None of them had any decent suggestions either.

  It was too big to sit on, but she hadn’t found a chain of command she could report it up to. As far as she knew, she was the highest-ranking intelligence officer left in the country, although she hoped that wasn’t true. She hoped there were other officers trying to do something about the aliens. Hoped that her paltry efforts in Southern California weren’t the only efforts against the invasion the world faced.

  Hoped that others were planning a counterattack.

  She had to get this information to them somehow.

  She had to get it broadcasted.

  An open broadcast. What a wonderful idea. Send it out for the entire world, even the aliens, to see. She had no idea how her people would arrange such a broadcast, but someone would figure out a way.

  It was the right thing to do. It might be the only thing she could do.

  She felt better. Making a decision improved her mood. It made her feel not helpless.

  It also made her wonder why none of her staff had thought of the idea first.

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