by J. S. Bailey
Dalton didn’t know how big a kushkim was, but two million sounded like an awful lot. “You’re burning all the vegetation,” he said.
“We believe it’s safer that way.” Kedd sounded grave, and his lips drooped into a frown. “We lost sixty workers during our first week here. We’d heard the rumors about the locals, of course, but thought they might have been exaggerated.”
Conversely, Dalton found himself grinning. “You’re doing this planet an immense favor.”
Chumley whirled upon him, mouth falling open. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am. Kedd, we ought to give you an award.”
Chumley folded his arms. “It’s because of the fires this lot started that the Greens fled through your town and murdered your people.”
That gave Dalton pause. He closed his eyes and snuggled up closer to the wall.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” Chumley said. “So, you’re burning the planet down to drill for minerals. Why did you capture us?”
Kedd shrugged. “You were getting too close to one of our listening posts.”
“What’s a listening post?”
“It’s where we go to monitor human communication channels. Bureen and I heard your transmissions, came across your derelict transport, and tranquilized your friend, and you know the rest of the story. Where were you headed?”
Dalton opened his mouth to tell the man they’d intended to find out what was causing the fires, but Chumley spoke first. “We were on our way to Paris but got turned around in the sandstorm. Nasty bugger. Never seen one like it before.”
You don’t say, Dalton thought.
Kedd nodded. “And what were you to be doing in Paris?”
“Well . . . ” Inexplicably, Chumley blushed. “It was supposed to be a romantic getaway, just the two of us. There’s a little place up there that . . . well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? You’ve captured us. Well done.”
Dalton glared at Chumley, vowing to kill him at the first available chance.
“We apologize for the inconvenience,” said Kedd. “But you must understand why it was necessary.”
“What will you be doing to us now?” Dalton asked.
“Killing us, I suppose,” Chumley said, eyes downcast.
Kedd made a scoffing sound. “If we wanted to kill you, we would have done that out in the desert and burned your bodies. We’ll be putting the two of you to work once we reach Nydo Base headquarters.”
“Doing what?” Dalton asked.
Kedd’s grin spread wide. It said, Don’t you want to know?
The small airship began its descent from the sky about twenty minutes later and landed beside a hangar in a charred valley that had most likely been full of old-growth forest a few months earlier. An impressive block of office buildings sat in a row beside a stream full of sludgy, gray water, and when Kedd and his associate, a stony-faced Haa’la woman named Bureen, shuffled Dalton and Chumley out of the airship, Dalton could hear the low hum of mining equipment in the distance.
The air stank like a campfire, though nothing nearby was aflame.
Off to their left lay a long, one-story building that might have been flats for the workers. More white-clad figures milled about near the entrance, some of them in hard hats.
“How many workers live here?” Chumley asked conversationally as Kedd and Bureen steered them toward the largest office building, a completely white three-story structure with rectangular windows. Flagpoles had been erected out front, bearing violet banners emblazoned with white symbols.
“About two hundred eighty-eight,” said Kedd. “Nearly two hundred eighty-eight more are stationed at smaller mines outside of this valley, and a crew of one hundred forty-four is clearing more land south of here.”
“How lovely,” Chumley said, absently rubbing his hands together. Dalton noticed his pocket still bulging with that mysterious squarish shape. Their captors must not have deemed it a threat, or they would have removed it from his person.
They entered the building. It smelled sterile, like new buildings do. A white-haired Haa’la woman with purple eyes and a narrow face regarded them blandly from behind a reception desk. Kedd conversed with her in their own language before switching back to English for Dalton and Chumley’s benefit.
“We have taken other prisoners these past few weeks,” Kedd said to them. “We’ve employed some of them in our gold and diamond mines, but you two might do just as well here. How do you feel about cooking or cleaning?”
Dalton, who felt much more coherent now that the last of the tranquilizer had worn off, let out a snort. “You’re the jailers. Shouldn’t you be the ones to decide that?”
“Like I said, we’re businesspeople. You happened to be encroaching upon a listening post, so we had to get you out of the way in order to maintain our secrecy. Besides, our support staff here at headquarters got a trifle decimated when the natives attacked.”
Dalton looked him up and down, taking in Kedd’s solid white ensemble. “Your people have been in Richport. Why?”
“I’d rather talk about it in my office. Come this way, please.”
Dalton and Chumley exchanged a glance before following Kedd down a bone-white corridor. Bureen stayed in the lobby to converse with the receptionist, probably making snide remarks about humans.
Kedd’s office lay on the second floor, overlooking the polluted stream. Kedd motioned for them to sit in a pair of gray chairs.
“Would you like any refreshments?” Kedd asked, moving toward a waist-high cabinet. “I have grapefruit.”
Something about the word “grapefruit” made the skin tingle on the back of Dalton’s neck, but he couldn’t remember why.
“I’ll have water,” Dalton said. “Your kind does drink that, right?”
“Yes.” Kedd regarded him with some annoyance, which made Dalton feel marginally better about himself.
“I’ll take some too,” Chumley said, raising a hand. Dalton noticed for the first time that a pair of binoculars hung around Chumley’s neck. Where on Molorthia Six had he found binoculars?
Kedd handed them each a room-temperature bottle of water from the cabinet, then withdrew a grapefruit for himself and sliced it open with a small knife.
“As I was saying,” Kedd went on, “would you prefer cooking or cleaning? We already have enough people in the mines and won’t need more until the next mine is ready to open.”
Dalton leaned forward. “How about you tell us why you’ve been sneaking around in Richport? I saw some of you lot, but nobody else could.”
Kedd popped a slice of grapefruit into his mouth, chewed it, and swallowed it wearing a look of ecstasy. “Our cloaking devices scramble some of the signals going to your visual cortexes. It’s not perfect tech, so sometimes people catch glimpses of us anyway.”
“Why were you in town?”
“We were seeing if anything could be of use to us.”
“You’re talking about plundering. Theft.”
Kedd’s platinum blond eyebrows rose. “Am I?”
“That’s what humans call taking things that don’t belong to them.”
“Which is ever so ironic.”
Dalton had no response. Chumley twisted his hands together in his lap while making discreet glances around the room.
After a spell of silence during which Kedd consumed more of his grapefruit, Dalton said, “What about the forests down south? Are you burning them, too?”
“That will be our Phase Two project,” Kedd said. “This year our efforts will focus on the northern hemisphere, and once we start turning a profit, we’ll fly south and begin our work there.”
“Burning all the forests, you mean,” Dalton said. “To clear out the Greens.”
“That would be the idea, yes.”
“Will the forests be replanted once you’re done here?” Chumle
y asked.
Kedd cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean?”
“Once you’ve concluded your business on Molorthia Six, will you be replanting the forests?”
A chuckle escaped their captor’s lips. “Our scanners indicate that Molorthia Six has extra concentrations of gold, diamonds, petroleum, and a hundred other resources that make our other project planets look utterly worthless. Our work here will last many lifetimes—we’re just getting started.”
“What if my people worked with you?” Dalton asked.
Kedd gave his head a slow shake. “We prefer our own kind. We’ve only taken you into custody so you don’t go sounding the alarm—for some reason, the Feds don’t like us.” Kedd smiled, showing his delicate yet sharp teeth again. It made Dalton think of one of those spooky, deep-sea Earth fish with the dangly lights. “Now I’m going to give you two options: you can stay here and put yourselves to work, or you can try to walk back to your little city and tell your little friends about us and what we’re doing. I’d like to see you survive the desert heat and any rogue Greens we might have missed.”
Dalton knew he needed to formulate a plan, but he was too exhausted to think of one. “I can cook,” he said, “but I’ve never done alien food.”
“I’m sure you’ll do your best,” said Kedd. “And what about you?”
“I’ll clean,” said Chumley. “Now where will we be staying while we’re here?”
“Why in the bloody hell did you split us up?” Dalton grumbled after Kedd left him and Chumley in a small “flat” of their own, which consisted of a bedroom-slash-sitting area and a bathroom with a shower. Clean, white uniforms were folded and stacked on the room’s only dresser, waiting to be worn.
Chumley crossed his arms. “We can each gather intel this way—you from the kitchens, me from the cleaning staff.”
“He already told us their plans! And if you haven’t noticed, neither of us speaks their language.”
“It’s still a good idea,” Chumley went on, undeterred. “There could be plenty more he wasn’t telling us. He’s probably not even the boss of this place, because whoever’s really in charge wouldn’t have been hanging out in a secret listening post in the middle of the desert. Kedd is just trying to cover his arse by getting us out of the way.”
Dalton nodded and sat on a cot that squeaked beneath his full weight. “Why did you tell him we were on a romantic getaway?”
Chumley’s expression grew coy. “I had the feeling you were about to tell him exactly what we were doing.”
“Had the feeling?”
Chumley sank onto the room’s other cot, sniffed one armpit, and winced. “Look, Sheriff—Dalton—you’ve been kind to me—”
“Kind?”
“—and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you’re a bit naïve.”
Dalton clenched his fists. “Now just a minute!”
Chumley held up a placating hand. “You’ve led an innocent life, marrying your wife and raising your children, and when that all ended, you became sheriff because you couldn’t help your family.”
“So what?”
“What I’m saying is, you haven’t lived a deceptive lifestyle one single day in your life. You are deceiving yourself, telling yourself you’re the big, bad policeman, but inside you’re just a dad.”
“What are you talking about?” Dalton felt very cold, then remembered that was probably because they weren’t in the desert anymore.
“You rescued me! You gave me food and a place to stay. I couldn’t figure it out at first, but now I know you missed taking care of people you cared about. But I digress—I didn’t think our captors should know we’re police.”
“Why does it matter if they do or not?”
“Because we don’t know where they draw the line on violence.”
Dalton could find no holes in that argument. “That’s . . . actually kind of smart.”
“I know.” Chumley’s eyes twinkled. “That’s why I did it.”
Chapter 14
The long, hot shower Dalton took prior to checking in with Kedd at his office did not improve his mood, nor did it improve when he crossed the ashy courtyard toward the office building.
He couldn’t see why these people wouldn’t just let them go, when Dalton was clearly on their side. Let every Green on Molorthia Six burn to a crisp! The whole world would be safe, if a little airless.
His heart skipped a beat as he rapped on Kedd’s door.
Airless?
Would Molorthia Six really be airless, with all the trees and Greens gone?
Kedd’s office door swung open, and the alien ushered him inside. Dalton nervously adjusted the starchy, all-white outfit he’d been given to wear.
“Where’s your partner?” Kedd asked.
Dalton coughed. “He was still washing up when I left.”
“Good—the two of you smelled terrible. Now come this way.”
Dalton tried hard not to protest as he followed the Haa’la man out of the office, down a corridor and a flight of stairs, and into a stainless-steel, industrial-sized kitchen, where four other Haa’la people dressed entirely in white were laying out ingredients on a long countertop.
“Your supervisor is Maasha,” said Kedd, nodding toward a tall figure Dalton guessed to be a woman. Maasha’s platinum blonde hair peeked out from beneath a hairnet. “She studied English her first year at University, so I trust you’ll handle things just fine here.”
Then Kedd was gone, retreating the way he’d come. Dalton stared after him, wishing Kedd would smile and say, “Just kidding! Now let me take you home,” but of course this was reality, where good things only happened to people who didn’t deserve it.
Dalton turned to Maasha and stared up at her. She eyed him with a measure of disdain. She pulled a hairnet out of a box and handed it to Dalton, who grudgingly stuck it on his head.
“Pip-pip! You pots stir,” she said gruffly, pointing to a row of cauldrons sitting on burners not yet lit. “No make meal to bottom pots stick.”
Dalton remembered his Hindi and Spanish classes from a million years ago and felt his brain cells crying. “No pots stick,” he said. “Got it.”
Another worker dumped an assortment of ingredients into each of the cauldrons and lit the burners, and Dalton dutifully stirred each one as they boiled, not having the faintest idea as to how he could gather intel while supervising several hundred gallons of fetid alien stew. Various green and brown things that were neither peas nor beef floated in it like dead fish in a lake.
“Have you worked here long?” he asked after a time, knowing it was a stupid question since the mining base couldn’t have been there more than a few months.
“Pip-pip! Work here from beginning,” Maasha said without looking at him. She was busy chopping up something that looked like shallots and smelled like wet dog. “Feed family on Leeprau.”
Dalton couldn’t stop thinking about Molorthia Six running out of oxygen, and imagined children dropping dead in the street all blue in the face.
“Why get involved with the planet-killers?” he asked. “Aren’t other jobs less . . . destructive?”
Maasha paused to process this, then said, “Pip-pip! My home is Leeprau, Land of Golden Suns. What happens to Molorthia Six, the Haa’la do not care.”
Dalton went down the line again, stirring each cauldron in turn and hoping they’d have something more suitable for his own palate when it came time to eat.
“What if it happened to you?” he asked.
Maasha’s thin brows knit together. One of the other cooks came over and consulted with her on another recipe brewing on the other side of the kitchen, and after they had gone away, Maasha said, “Pip-pip! Understanding, am not.”
“Suppose,” Dalton said slowly, “humans came to Leeprau and burned your forests and mined your m
inerals. What would you do?”
Maasha’s expression grew most solemn as she did her best to decipher his words. Dalton knew that feeling well enough. Finally, she said, “Pip-pip! We would fight.”
Chumley wondered what his grandmother would think if she could see him now, rolling a cleaning cart down a hallway in an evil alien mining base, dressed in an all-white outfit designed by a race that had never developed the imagination to utilize any other color.
A housekeeper? she might have teased him. Chumley, you could barely keep your room clean when you were a boy.
He kept his room clean now, though, and had tucked it, snug within its portable universe, into the pocket of his borrowed work uniform for safekeeping.
The Haa’la woman in charge of maintenance had pip-pipped orders at Chumley for a few minutes in Haa’anu, and Chumley had just smiled and nodded and then headed to the first office along that hallway to begin cleaning it, even though the woman could have been telling him to strip and do the Chicken Dance, for all he knew.
He rapped on the plain, white office door, heard no reply, and shoved it open, rolling the cart inside. The office contained one desk and a few shelves, and Chumley wet a rag with a bit of cleaner and wiped all hard surfaces down so they gleamed, dust-free.
Then he plucked the tiny vacuum cleaner off the bottom of the cart, plugged it in, and ran it over the plain, white carpet.
It took him all of four minutes.
Chumley repeated the process in the next room, starting to feel a trifle bored.
He repeated the process in the third room, wondering how he could gather intel when he worked alone.
When Chumley rolled the cleaning cart back out into the hallway again, he came face to face with a dark brown-skinned man rolling an identical cart toward him.
“Oh, thank God,” said the man, relief washing over his face. “Another human!”
Chumley glanced behind him to make sure they were alone, then lowered his voice. “Just what I was thinking. Do you have a moment?”