by J. S. Bailey
“Sure. It looks like you’ve already cleaned my block of offices.”
“I might have misinterpreted my supervisor. All that pipping is making me a bit mad. What is it, anyway?”
The man cracked a lopsided grin. “Best I can tell, it means something like, ‘May I have your attention please?’ It’s considered impolite to not use it. I’ve started hearing it in my sleep.”
“I see.” Chumley scratched his head, then pointed to the room from which he’d just emerged. “How about we talk in here?”
“Works for me,” the man said with a shrug.
Inside the room, with the door closed, Chumley held out a hand and said, “Chumley Fanshaw. And you?”
“Keith Okpebholo,” said his new comrade, pumping his arm up and down. Keith had closely-cropped black hair and looked nearly forty. “I’ve been here a week. Annaliese Jamison sent out ten of us to see why everything was on fire, and the next thing we knew, we’d been captured.”
“I don’t know Annaliese,” Chumley said. “I’m new here.”
“Oh, she’s the sheriff in Paris. These creeps took our comm units, so we couldn’t even report what had happened.”
“I see they didn’t kill you for being with the police.”
“No, but they split us all up and sent everyone to different sites. I don’t think they wanted us to stick together and plot anything.”
“Have you learned anything important since you’ve been here?”
Keith snorted. “The Haa’la don’t take us very seriously. I tried to tell them Annaliese would send an army after us, and they just laughed.”
“Will she?”
The man shook his head, sadly. “You really must be new here if you don’t know the answer to that.”
“I see.”
Keith rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead. “I’ve thought about escaping during the night.”
“You could commandeer a vehicle.”
“I don’t know how to drive their stuff. I snooped around in one of their garages the other night, and I couldn’t even figure out how to start an engine.”
The sound of approaching footsteps out in the hallway made both their heads turn. Chumley held his breath, waiting for an angry Haa’la to burst in and berate them for fraternizing when work needed to be done, but the footsteps continued past their door and dwindled into silence.
“I’d better get back to work,” Keith said after a moment of hesitation.
“Let me know if you hear anything important that might help us get out of here,” Chumley said.
Keith just shook his head as he rolled his cart toward the door. “Sure thing. Just don’t hold your breath waiting. Pip-pip.”
“Did you learn anything?” Chumley asked, rolling onto his side on his cot to regard Dalton, who was doing his very best not to be ill from the headache raging behind his eyes.
“Yeah,” Dalton said. “I’ve eaten better dog food than what I helped cook today.”
“Dinner was a little strange,” Chumley admitted. Dalton had spotted him at the far end of the communal cafeteria during dinner, but had been too busy following Maasha’s orders to go over and compare notes.
“Don’t ask me what was in that stew,” Dalton said. “I’m just the bloke who had to me pots stir.”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind.” He winced as another jolt of pain shot up through his neck and temple. “Gods, my head.”
“I’ve got medicine, if you’d like some,” Chumley said, then clapped a hand over his mouth in inexplicable wide-eyed horror.
Dalton sat up, the room swaying around him. “Where?”
“It was a slip of the tongue. Don’t listen to me.”
“Is that what you’ve got in that little box?”
Chumley’s hand went to his pocket, where the little box in question stuck out like a squarish growth. “How bad is your headache?” he asked.
“I’ve had more pleasant concussions.”
“Do you think you’ll survive if you don’t have any medicine?”
“What the hell kind of question is that? Do you have medicine, or not?”
“I do,” Chumley said, glancing away from him. “And yes, it’s in this box, but not in the way you’re thinking.”
Amazingly, this conversation was making Dalton’s head hurt even worse. “Well, why don’t you open it up and give me some before my brain explodes into bits?”
“Fine, fine. I just know I’m going to regret this.” Chumley dug into his pocket and set a metal cube on his palm.
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” Chumley went on. “They were going to go on the market, but the manufacturer’s funding fell through before they could make too many of them. I was lucky to get one of the early ones in return for a favor.”
“What sort of favor?”
“I rescued the manufacturer’s cat from a tree.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“It was a very tall tree.”
“Right,” Dalton said at length. “So, what is it?”
“This,” Chumley said, pushing a button on the side of the cube and setting the object on the floor, “is my portable universe.”
A holographic doorway appeared midair. Dalton tried not to look overly impressed. Any child’s toy could generate a floating lightshow, but he had the feeling this was something a bit more than a simple plaything.
Chumley rose from his cot, said, “Follow me,” and walked through the holographic doorway, disappearing from sight.
Dalton blinked but remained motionless.
Chumley’s head materialized through the hologram a moment later. “It’s not hard,” he said. “Just walk through it like you would any other doorway.”
His head disappeared.
Dalton gingerly rose, his headache reaching critical levels.
He stared at the doorway a moment longer, shrugged, and walked through it.
He found himself in a cozy bedroom. A workstation occupied one wall, as did a bar, and a few windows looked out onto a well-maintained garden painted in the colors of twilight. A rodent cage, complete with shredded bedding, a water bottle, and an exercise wheel, sat on a table in the corner.
“Your pet’s missing,” Dalton said, as if that were the most unusual thing here.
Chumley emerged from a bathroom holding a pill bottle. “These are left over from my appendectomy last year,” he said. “If they don’t knock out your headache, nothing will.”
“Did we just walk through a wormhole?” Dalton asked as Chumley placed the pill bottle into his hand.
“Sort of. I keep all my things in here. I thought I’d lost it in the fire, but then I found it in a pile of rubble before we left town.”
Dalton squinted at his deputy, who’d shoved his hands into his pockets and was looking slightly sheepish. “Including your money?”
“All safe and accounted for.”
“Then why didn’t you book a flight off this stinking rock and go back to wherever you came from?”
“It wasn’t in my best interests.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you wouldn’t have the best painkiller in the universe if I’d left. Just take one pill, though, because it’s awfully potent, and I wouldn’t want you to, well, you know. Die, or something.”
Dalton let his gaze linger on Chumley’s face before he unscrewed the cap on the pill bottle and swallowed one of them dry.
He handed the bottle back to him. Chumley dipped his head, went back into the bathroom, and returned with his hands in his pockets again.
As if by magic, the edge was already disappearing from Dalton’s pain. He said, “You’ve had this cube thing since before we left town.”
“Well, I didn’t conjure it out of thin air.”
Dalton glanced to
the shimmering place where they’d entered the room. “Can anything from outside blow into here?”
“It depends. I can seal it off completely so nobody walks along and sees a holographic entrance floating midair.” Chumley walked toward the wall and slapped a panel, and the shimmering vanished, leaving a plain expanse of blue paint.
Dalton regarded it with a frown. “We could have waited out the sandstorm in here.”
“Yes. Technically.”
“Technically?”
“I didn’t want you to know about the Cube. You might have tried to steal it.”
“I’m the bloody sheriff!”
“Which does not preclude one from committing theft.” Chumley wagged a finger at him.
“I’m not going to steal your portable universe.”
“To be technical, you’d be stealing the doorway, not the universe itself.”
“What?”
“This is a different universe from the one out there.” Chumley gestured vaguely at the place where the doorway had been. “That means it doesn’t exist anywhere in our universe, and therefore can’t be stolen. The Cube generates a doorway allowing us to enter the portable universe. Without the Cube, we have no way of getting inside.”
“Can the Cube move?”
“Only if someone physically moves it.”
“Ah.” Dalton felt his briefly-acquired hope dwindling. “Then it can’t help us escape.”
“It could if we had someone smuggle the Cube onto a vehicle. I met a human named Keith earlier. He’s a prisoner here, too.”
Dalton licked his lips in thought, wishing he had a new toothpick to chew on. “We need to get a message to Carolyn. Do you have a comm unit in here?”
Mild amusement entered Chumley’s eyes. “You do realize that those of us from civilized worlds don’t use comm units, right?”
“Then how in the bloody hell do you communicate with people?”
“I had a sat-phone, but I didn’t pay my bill so they canceled my service. Does Carolyn have an electronic address?”
“Probably, but I don’t know what it is. Can you contact the Feds through your computer? They can arrest all of these Haa’la folks before they turn the rest of the planet into an ashtray.”
Chumley’s eyes widened. “You actually care, then?”
“I’ve decided I like oxygen.”
“Well, let me see what I can do.” Chumley planted himself in his swivel chair and woke the screen, then leaned forward and frowned. “That’s odd.”
“What?”
Chumley clicked at a few icons. “There’s no net signal. Usually I can get something, even if it’s weak.”
“The Haa’la must not want humans sending messages right under their noses.”
“I was hoping they wouldn’t be that smart.”
Dalton started pacing back and forth, racking his brain for ideas. “Kedd worked at a listening post south of here. Maybe we can have this Keith smuggle the Cube with us inside it onto Kedd’s airship before he goes back. When Kedd falls asleep, we get out of the Cube and walk the rest of the way back to the motorhome, dig the spare comm units out of the sand, and call Carolyn. She notifies the Feds, the Feds arrest the Haa’la, and everyone lives happily ever after.”
A grin spread across Chumley’s face. “Do we know if Kedd is still here?”
“No idea.”
“All right.” Chumley rubbed his hands together. “How about we sleep on it? In the morning I can find out more, and see if Keith would be willing to help us.”
“I like it,” Dalton said.
It was as good a plan as any.
Chumley kept his eyes peeled for any signs of Keith as he rolled the cleaning cart through the workers’ dormitories the next morning. He nodded politely at any Haa’la he passed, most of whom turned their noses up at him before continuing about their business.
Close to lunchtime, Chumley spotted Keith striding across the desolate courtyard between the dormitories and the office building, carrying a package of paper towels under each arm.
“Oi!” Chumley hissed, causing the other man to look his way.
Keith stopped in his tracks, looking furtive as a pair of tall, veiled Haa’la passed them, heading toward the large hangar just south of the compound. “Yes?” he asked.
“If you’re looking for a good time, meet me and my friend in our bedroom during our two o’clock break,” Chumley said, making an exaggerated wink.
Keith took one step backward. “Excuse me?”
“I’m sure it’ll be worth your while,” Chumley went on. “In fact, I’d dare to call it a Great Escape.”
Keith’s eyebrows shot upward. “Oh yeah?”
“Now you get it? Two o’clock, my bedroom. It’s the third one from the end on the east side of the hallway. Has a squiggle on the door that looks like a crab.”
“Duly noted. I guess I’ll see you then.”
They parted ways, and Chumley grinned to himself. That part had been easy enough.
He craned his neck toward the hangar, looking for Kedd’s airship. He couldn’t see it, but that might have meant someone had pulled it inside.
It didn’t necessarily mean Kedd had already gone back to his listening post, did it?
Because otherwise their escape plan would be an incredibly short one.
Dalton didn’t see Kedd as he crossed the open space between the dormitories and the offices.
He didn’t see Kedd in the lobby or in the hallways.
He definitely didn’t see Kedd in the kitchen, where he wouldn’t have been anyway.
“Pip-pip! Morning that is good,” Maasha said to him when he reported for duty. She wore a fresh apron and a new hairnet and leaned over a recipe book open to a page showing a picture of something green, gloopy, and possibly still alive.
“Uh . . . good morning,” Dalton said after a moment of delayed translation. “How are you?”
Her pale lips formed a frown, more confused than disapproving. “Pip-pip! What are you meaning?”
That gave Dalton a moment’s pause. “It’s just a friendly question. People ask how other people are as a polite greeting.”
“Pip-pip! Why?”
“They just do. And—I’m sorry. I don’t know what ‘pip-pip’ means, but you don’t need to use it in English.”
“Pip—my apologies. Always forgetting.”
“Don’t worry about it. What do the Haa’la say instead of ‘how are you?’”
Maasha smiled, showing her many pointy teeth. “The Haa’la say, conquer world before set the suns? And we reply, always.”
“Right,” Dalton said, feeling slightly unsettled. “Now, what do you want me to do today?”
Maasha set him to work chopping tubers into cubes, and while he worked, he casually asked, “Have you seen Kedd? I wanted to ask him something.”
“No Kedd today. Working, him.”
Dalton’s heart sank. “In the desert?”
“Yes.”
“When will he be back?”
“It is unknown.”
Don’t panic, he thought. There are other airships here, surely. We can smuggle ourselves out of here on a different one.
“Do you know Kedd well?” he said a few minutes later, his hands already tiring from the repeated chopping motions.
“We are . . . ” Maasha paused. “Cousins.”
“Do you have a lot of family here on Molorthia Six?” Ordinarily he would have cursed himself for engaging in such mindless small talk, but he found he needed the company.
He imagined Darneisha watching him from somewhere, laughing.
“Kedd only,” Maasha said. “Other family stay on Leeprau. Kedd ask, do I want job? Family are poor, I send money to them.”
“Kedd hired you?”
“No, no. Nydo Ba
se Corporation in charge. Ashi’ii is boss here, you see her in corridors?”
“I have no idea.” Dalton made note of the name, not entirely sure how it could help him but knowing it wouldn’t hurt. Who knew what information might give them an advantage here? The more they had, the greater their chances of escape.
The secret meeting they’d planned began four minutes late that afternoon because Maasha wouldn’t let Dalton leave the kitchens until after he’d sterilized every surface following the noonday meal, which had smelled like a combination of cat litter and yeast.
The man Dalton supposed must be Keith sat on Dalton’s cot with his arms folded across his broad chest while Chumley animatedly told him some rowdy tale about fleeing the police wearing nothing.
“How did you get away from them?” Keith asked, trying not to smile.
“I ran into an alleyway where someone had hung out their laundry to dry and stole clothes off of it. The police didn’t recognize me dressed, so I was safe.”
“And is that a true story, or are you just trying to impress our guest here?” Dalton asked, locking the door to their room.
Chumley placed a hand over his heart. “Sheriff, you insult me!” He looked back to Keith. “To make this short, Dalton and I need to get back to Richport so we can get word out to the Galactic Feds about the Haa’la here. We want you to help us.”
“I already said I don’t know how to drive their vehicles,” said Keith. “Believe me, I tried.”
“You won’t have to drive anything,” said Dalton.
“I’m not walking across that desert.”
“You won’t have to do that either.” Chumley smiled. “You’ll need to stay behind.”
Any hope that had been on Keith’s face vanished beneath a scowl. “No offense, but I’m liking this Great Escape plan less and less.”
“Just hear us out,” said Dalton. “I’m Dalton Kane, by the way,” he added, remembering belatedly to introduce himself. “I’m the sheriff in Richport.”
“Keith Okpebholo.” Keith held out a hand, and Dalton shook it. “I’ve heard Annaliese mention you a few times. She sent me and some others out here to see what was up with the fires, and you can guess the rest.”