by Chloe Garner
“That risk exists,” he said.
“And you just let them attack me,” she said.
“I knew you’d be fine.”
“Really. How? There were a lot of times that I was only an inch away from getting bashed against a wall.”
He suppressed a smile and her rage flared.
“Tell me the truth,” he said, “you were more worried about me than you.”
“Rightly so,” she said. “You’re an idiot.”
He grinned now.
“You did great.”
“This is life for you?”
“Tell me you didn’t enjoy it.”
“Of course I didn’t enjoy it,” she howled.
“Look back and tell me that you’re not itching to go tell Troy everything about it.”
She growled and stalked away. He had a point.
She didn’t ask about Palo Alto or whatever, because while she was angry at him, she wasn’t actually angry at him. She didn’t blame him, and she didn’t regret being here. She just had to be angry. Though his apparent amusement threatened to push her across the line if he wasn’t careful.
“Do you want to go?” Jesse asked after a minute as she stared out the window.
“No I don’t want to go,” she answered, outraged. “We came this far and there’s a whole city out there I haven’t seen yet, and after that, there’s the rest of the planet. I just want you to tell me, next time, when we’re abducted by someone who is immune to bullets. I want my gun back, by the way.”
“You showed a lot of moxy,” Jesse said, coming to stand next to her. She raised an eyebrow at him.
“I think my great grandmother would have said that.”
He shrugged.
“I like it. You’ve got moxy. I’ve gotta say, though, I expect you had to try shooting him, no matter what I told you.”
“You couldn’t just say, ‘shooting him won’t work’?”
He leaned against the glass, eyes dancing.
“And you wouldn’t have tried it anyway?”
He produced the gun and handed it to her. She needed to clean it. And reload it.
“I’d have shot him either way,” she admitted. He nodded.
“In all fairness, you’re the one who nearly got us killed.”
She shook her head.
“No. I wouldn’t have gone with him in the first place,” she said. “What was he going to do? We were on a street with all of those windows facing it.”
Jesse shook his head.
“Always better to go along with a Gana than wind him up by resisting.”
She wagged her head back at him.
“That’s where you’re wrong. React hard and fast, surprise them and get clear before you’re in their den.”
“We did fine, didn’t we?”
“How much of it was luck?” she accused.
“I’d have come up with something else if I’d needed to.”
“Uh huh. That’s very comforting.”
“You want dinner?”
“I’m starving.”
“So what are they?” Cassie asked over plates of food that helped bring the tone of the conversation down substantially.
“Who?”
“The Gana? The ones today? Mob? Scavengers? Montana freaks with guns?”
Jesse sighed.
“They’re purists,” he said. “The Gana have enormous physiological advantages, but for a season of their existence as a race, they were hunters. Brutal ones. The planet is nearly devoid of native fauna. The leadership are well past it, but there are sects that still believe that they have the right to kill and eat by natural mandate.”
“Is that common?” Cassie asked. Jesse shook his head.
“Most societies consider the consumption of the sentient to be criminal. Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by common. Most races have a history of it or one-off groups who practice it, but it’s as common as cannibalism is on Earth.”
She ate for another minute, then wagged her food utensil at him.
“Why didn’t you just give them the money?”
“Asks the one who shot them,” Jesse said. She shrugged.
“Is it that big a deal?”
Jesse sighed and sat back in his chair, fidgeting his fingers for a second.
“When the Consciousness was spreading, I told you the banking sector was behind a firewall of sorts.”
She nodded, putting the utensils down and watching him.
“We have protocols… had protocols for what would happen in the event that something took over through our electronics,” he said, shifting. “Firewalls, emergency procedures, people who were prepared to do what was necessary.” For a moment he glanced up at her with a hint of dark humor. “You people would be toast. The Consciousness would have been worldwide in three hundred milliseconds, before you could have even squeaked.” He looked away again, rubbing his arms. “We had a plan, though. It was called voluntary segregation. In the few seconds between confirming the Consciousness and loss of protection, one of the heads of our financial sector took all of the currency controlled by Paltas and sent it to a single account on the universal banking network, with instructions that it could be accessed only by those with Palta DNA. And then the head of technology shut down - self-destructed, really - all of our external communications and set up the external defense network to keep the Consciousness from rebuilding. I would have been the last thing out that didn’t get shot out of the sky.”
“So when you went to the bank when we got here…”
“I have access to the wealth of my entire species,” Jesse said. “I was never going to give that up to a group of retrogressive Gana punks.”
“But you let them take us. They could have just taken it from us.”
Jesse settled over his food again, picking at a grain-based food that Cassie was rapidly developing an addiction to.
“The bigger the banking sector, the more incentive there is to hack it,” he said. “Both sides escalate. The access card she gave me at the bank is keyed to my biometrics. After I put it on, no one else can integrate it. Not without replicating the key biometrics that are in the security protocols, which is possible, but it takes a truly high-end hacker to do it. The Gana are smart enough, but the ones today aren’t into that kind of crime. It isn’t an intellectual rush to hack something that’s supposed to be unhackable. They just want me to be afraid of them and transfer it to them voluntarily.”
“Would they have killed us, after?”
Jesse nodded, head still over his plate.
“Undoubtedly.”
She ate for a moment, listening to the half-familiar sound of voices in the room at their quiet, restaurant levels.
“What kills them?”
“The Gana?” Jesse asked. She nodded.
“I’ll remind you that everything that happens this side of the portal is not the business of the American military,” he said. “I’ll tell you, but it isn’t to ever show up in a report or to spawn weapons development.”
Cassie considered. The restrictions in the contract hadn’t seemed that onerous, before, but she could see now why he had been that detailed with them. Other than a high-level summary, she wasn’t even allowed to tell Troy what happened.
“I understand,” she said.
“They can convert most anything into energy, and they then convert that energy into the sugar and protein content that they need to live,” Jesse said.
“They’re nuclear power plants wearing scales?” Cassie asked. Jesse’s eyes roamed the room, not seeing, but considering.
“I guess that’s accurate enough,” he answered. “Lead is a bit tiresome for them to convert, so he just spat it out, but if you’d hit him with something lighter or heavier, he very well may have just synthesized it. They have enormous regenerative capability, and dual hearts and brains, dominant and subordinate. Unless you hit both brains fast enough to make them forget how to regenerate, most physical damage isn’t going to get you
there.”
“So how do you kill them?” Cassie asked.
“Anti-matter.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it.
“You’re kidding,” she finally said. He shrugged.
“Not that hard, when you know what you’re doing. Your theories on the stuff aren’t very good yet, but at its root, it isn’t that complicated a concept.”
“Anti-matter gun,” she said. He nodded.
“Started with simple anti-matter on anti-matter weaponry; the side whose technology failed first tended to get swallowed alive by their own weapons. Then the weapons started getting more advanced, they started manipulating gravity at the same time…” he looked up, playful again. “A lot of races are insulted if you just try to use a ballistic weapon to kill them. It implies that you think that they’re prehistoric in their weapons technology. Of course, the funny part is, if you want to fight an advanced civilization that uses anti-matter, the clever ones have gone back to matter weapons. Cutting-edge warfare gets craftier and craftier.”
Cassie blinked and shook her head.
“You’re making that up.”
“Not at all,” he said.
“We didn’t get any hint of technology like that when we were on Jalnia,” she said. He grinned.
“We thought you were cute,” he said. “Most of the races you have real contact with, I suspect, tolerate you out of humor and curiosity. We have to keep you away from anything serious, but it isn’t that hard, because you bunker in with your walls and your guns and only come out for a few hours at a time.”
“Anti-matter,” she said. He nodded, chewing again.
“Your walls look a bit silly, by comparison, don’t they?”
She’d built one of those walls by hand, when a technical issue kept them from importing the right construction equipment during an expansion. She looked at her plate, feeling odd.
“Don’t feel too bad,” he said. “The planets you burn may very well be dangerous. For every civilization, there are a dozen populated planets that are at your level or below for technology. There’s no telling how they would react to you.”
“You’re an elitist snob,” Cassie said. He grinned.
“One does what one can.”
More days passed. They explored. They traveled some, but Jesse kept close to the main city. They shopped, though he warned her that he never carried anything with him but sometimes a clean set of clothes. Too much stuff in the universe, too much universe, to start trying to make a pile somewhere.
She finally made up her mind to ask, more than a week later.
“Why were they afraid of you, when you told them who you were?”
They were looking at art, her hand in his as always, in an open-air gallery, and they stood in front of a giant painted surface portraying a Gana court of some kind.
Jesse stared up at the painting for a long time.
“This is old,” he said finally. “More than a thousand years, I think.”
“And they keep it outside?”
“They don’t have as much UV as you do,” Jesse said, “and the materials were made for the humidity. Your art is still so fragile.”
Cassie flicked her eyes.
“Why didn’t we think of making more durable art?”
He squeezed her hand, then sighed and took a step forward. The curator gave them a look from across the clearing, but didn’t approach. Jesse tipped his head back as he grew close to the surface, tracing his fingers over it without touching it.
“It’s a king’s court, from the days that they had them,” he said softly, turning his head to the side when he spoke. Cassie watched his fingers play over the figures in the painting. So many of them. Such a complex scene. His hand paused.
“Here,” he said. He stepped to the side and she looked up at the figure he held his hand over. It was human.
“Is that a Palta?” she asked. He nodded, pulling her back a step.
“We’ve had ambassadors to the Gana for as long as most of our history can remember,” he said. “After a while, things get confused, no matter how good your records are. People are always counterfeiting history for their own purposes.”
“They recognized what you were, not who you were.”
“They had various reasons, but that’s the big one,” Jesse said. “Most of the races who know who we are respect us, and a few outright fear us.”
“Why?”
He looked at her with mock insult.
“That you even need to ask…”
“Right, right, you’re really smart.”
He laughed.
“We’re more than smart. The Consciousness was the first thing that beat us, since we stopped beating ourselves,” he said. “And it was something that we made.”
“What do you mean?”
“It changes, with time, but there’s a loose agreement among the higher civilizations about war. You do what you want, as long as you’re fighting at your own level. Lots of civilizations break the rules and get away with it, but it’s frowned on, and that’s actually a big deal with civilizations as old as these. When the gentlemen’s club doesn’t let you in anymore, as a race, the gentlemen who made all of the profit off the war get upset.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Cassie said as Jesse meandered on to the next painting.
“I’m getting to it,” Jesse said. “My point is, war is normal. Not common, but normal. And the Palta have won all of ours.”
“You haven’t won all of them,” Cassie said. He nodded, suddenly serious.
“We have. We had.”
“Then why aren’t you the ruling race in the universe?” Cassie asked. He shook his head.
“We aren’t built like that,” he said. “We’re curious, but not in a conquesting kind of way. We just tend to have thought everything out long before the war starts.”
“If you always win, why does anyone ever attack?”
“Because they want our technology. And us.”
“What does that mean?” Cassie asked, knowing she had a good guess.
“There are a lot of stories out there about what you can do with a Palta slave. Could do.” Jesse swallowed, moving on to the next painting. “Trying to control a Palta is always a bad plan, though. The instant you get a leash on us, we turn around and bite you.”
“Like what we did,” Cassie murmured. He turned to face her.
“No,” he said. “The general might have thought he was using a threat as leverage, but you never had the power to make me do anything. I might make fun of you for it, but I considered it a fair trade. Your time for mine.”
She blinked.
“I was a hundred-fifty page contract, and that’s all you wanted out of it?”
“I couldn’t be that transparent about it, could I?” he asked.
“Why?”
He moved on again, looking up at a very tall painting of a great purple tree. There were animals on and around it unlike any Cassie had ever seen. Jesse was silent for a long time, looking up at the painting.
“You make me feel less alone.”
They spent more than a month away before Jesse looked at her at breakfast one morning and breathed in to speak. She looked up.
“Is it time?” he asked.
“Time?”
“To go back?”
She looked up at the gold sky and the blue sun that was just visible over the smaller buildings around the center of the city and sighed.
“It feels like if we go back, I won’t get to leave again,” she said. “Someone will have come up with some convincing reason that I’m not allowed to, anymore.”
“Have I told you how stubborn Palta are?”
“Jalnians?” she asked. He grunted.
“I’m going to have to get used to that again.”
“Why don’t you just tell them?” she asked.
“Because they don’t deserve it,” he said. “They make no effort to get to know the cultures they work in beyond what’s necessa
ry for security and trade. They lack so much curiosity. I don’t know how you stand them.”
“Mostly because I am one of them,” she said.
“And here you’ve been masquerading as an interesting person so well…”
“Shut up. You like them. Don’t lie.”
He chuckled.
“I do at that. No, I promised Troy I’d take care of you, and at this point I expect he’s given you up for dead. I hate the idea of giving him that much grief.”
“No, just a little,” Cassie agreed. She sighed. She’d felt the call, too. The days were less new. They had to go further to get someplace new, and the city was beginning to feel familiar. She wanted more time, but it was probably a good time to go.
“That sounds like resignation,” Jesse said.
“Yeah, just remembering what a pain you are to work with,” she said. He nodded.
“I am.”
“And I have to go be in charge again.”
“And I make that such a chore.”
“You do. Always calling everyone children and making me stand up for them, even when I don’t really even like half of them.”
“The burdens we all bear…” he said, paying for the meal and standing. “So we’ll go rustle up your silly bag and go?”
“It isn’t silly,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “How much of that stuff was useful here?”
“You never know,” she said. He gave her a smug look.
“Yes I do.”
“It’s so different,” Cassie said, sitting at dinner with Troy.
“How?”
“They have tourists. We stayed at a hotel and just… went and did things. Whatever we felt like. No agenda.”
“And you enjoyed that?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
He laughed.
“No, it’s just…” He shrugged. “I get that you’ve always done your own thing, when you could, but… You’re company, you know?”
She thought about it as she ate, enjoying food that was familiar again.
“I think I was…” she started, but then didn’t know what the rest of the thought was.
“So what did you do?” Troy asked. She shook her head.