Dalton Kane and the Greens

by J. S. Bailey

  The Haa’la pipped something at him and pointed toward the hangar door, probably telling him to go inside and talk to someone who could actually understand him. Dalton obliged, stepping through an immense bay door into a room housing four ships, one of which was in the midst of being unloaded. An even taller Haa’la stood at the base of a conveyor belt, scanning packages one by one as they rolled out of the ship before being loaded onto carts.

  “Do you speak English?” he asked the Haa’la with the scanner.

  The Haa’la spoke without looking up from his work. “Pip-pip! How can I help you?”

  “I’m supposed to pick up supplies for the kitchen. Where—”

  “Pip-pip! You will find four crates ready and waiting for you on the cart directly behind me, with more to come. My assistants will place your additional crates in the same place so you are able to find them on your next trip.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” Dalton spied the cart and grabbed it, wheeling it toward the door.

  He would have to find a clever way to ask about the other three ships in the hangar, namely who they belonged to, when they were leaving, and where they were going.

  When he steered the empty cart back into the hangar ten minutes later, four more crates had appeared in the place he’d taken the first batch from. “Are there more after this?” Dalton asked, panting.

  The Haa’la still didn’t look up from his work, so efficient was he at his job. “Pip—oh, right, I forget that isn’t necessary. There are most certainly more after this. This is food for the entire compound.”

  “Were those ships full of supplies, too?” Dalton asked, nodding toward the others.

  “No.”

  “Then what are they doing here?”

  “They are parked. Good day, sir.”

  Dalton had never been too skilled at subtlety. Trying not to let his scowl show, he brought the second load of crates back to the kitchen for Maasha and her crew to sort out, and when he brought the empty cart back for the second time, he asked the now-annoyed Haa’la, “Are those airships or spaceships? I’ve always been interested in alien craft and wondered how you can tell which is which.”

  “They are airships,” said the Haa’la, again without looking at him. “If you must know, the airships tend to be smaller than spaceships, and don’t have the shielding needed to protect the occupants from the perils of space.”

  “Where do people go in the airships?”

  That time, the Haa’la turned and regarded him with golden eyes ringed with a band of glowing amethyst. “Do you want to steal one and run back to your little human friends? You wouldn’t survive long, anyway. Nydo Base Corporation operates on thirty-six worlds and has razed a dozen of them to the ground, and yours will be no different.”

  Dalton tried not to look cowed. “Couldn’t fly one if I tried. And your people missed out on a big opportunity, burning all the forests around here. You could have sold them off as lumber instead.”

  “We burned the forests to burn the Greens as a safety measure. The minerals in your ground are more valuable than lumber, anyway. Why must you know about the ships?”

  So much for a diversionary tactic. “I told you, they interest me. Living on Molorthia Six, we don’t get many alien visitors. Your ships are much more interesting than ours.”

  “Anything about the Haa’la is more interesting than humanity,” the Haa’la grunted, and refocused on his work.

  He wondered if Chumley or Keith would have had an easier time extracting information from their captors, then did a double-take when he spotted a small shape darting around on the ground near the row of parked ships.

  He squinted hard.

  The small shape looked remarkably like a hamster, and it moved from one ship to the next as if giving them each a cursory inspection, which was not an action he would ordinarily associate with the typical rodent.

  Dalton took a few steps closer to the hamster. The tiny creature turned its head toward him, let out a little yip! he wasn’t even sure hamsters were supposed to make, and scurried off into a shadowy corner, where Dalton could no longer see it.

  Shaking his head, Dalton grabbed the handles of his cart and steered it out of the building.

  “What did you learn today?” Dalton asked.

  “Hmm?” Chumley looked up from his wineglass, somewhat bleary-eyed. The two of them sat on the veranda inside Chumley’s portable universe, Dalton wishing the tranquil, digital garden before them was a real place he could go and relax in after a long day of chopping even more stinky vegetables.

  “You were on cleaning duty again. Just wondered if you’d picked up on anything we could use.”

  Chumley’s face had become lined with a nervous apprehension, and he took another sip of his wine. “I might have gotten some information from a Haa’la earlier.”

  “Might have?”

  “I may have used some rusty flirting skills. I used to be very good at it, but they might suspect me, now.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “Probably not.” Chumley dug in his pocket and withdrew a crinkled sheet of paper. “This is a list of the three airships parked in the hangar this very moment. Each one has a serial number stamped on the side. This one here—” he held up the paper and tapped the third item on his list, which looked like a string of indecipherable scribbles— “is headed to a listening post ten kilometers northwest of Paris tomorrow morning.”

  Dalton stood. “Then let’s find Keith and have him smuggle us onboard.”

  “It isn’t that simple.” Chumley’s eyes looked bloodshot. “I checked each airship for their serial numbers. They’re all printed in Haa’anu, which makes them about as easy to read as cuneiform, and I realized my little Haa’la informant must have copied down the serial numbers wrong, because they didn’t match what was on the paper.”

  “None of them did?”

  Chumley shook his head. “So now I have to assume I’m going to be reported to whoever’s in charge here, and I’ll be punished accordingly for trying to catch a lift. It’s only a matter of time before someone comes knocking at our door holding a set of handcuffs.”

  “Let me see that.” Dalton took the paper from him and squinted in an attempt to decipher the alien text. “When were you able to sneak a look at the ships?”

  “Oh, earlier.” Chumley sounded oddly evasive. “I did it when everyone else was distracted.”

  “You mean when they were unloading the cargo?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “I’m very furtive.”

  “Come to think of it, the only thing I saw over there was a hamster. You ought to catch it and put it in your little cage.”

  Chumley’s face seemed to darken a moment, but he made no comment.

  “Anyway, what do you know about their language?” Dalton asked, returning his attention to the sheet of paper.

  “Only what I heard about in school. I think instead of past and future tenses, they have tenses that describe what mood the speaker was in at the time, and whether or not they like the person they’re talking to.”

  “That isn’t very helpful.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got a computer in there. Does it have translation software?”

  Chumley’s eyes lit up. “I think it does—and I shouldn’t even need a net connection to use it!” He snatched up his wineglass and rushed back inside the bedroom-slash-office, and he was already firing up his computer when Dalton straggled in behind him on weary feet.

  “Let me see, let me see . . . ” Chumley muttered to himself, sitting in his swivel chair. Dalton drew up beside him, peering at the screen. “If I can scan this into the program, it might be able to decipher it.”

  “Need me to do anything?” Dalton asked.

  “Just keep an eye on the security scr
een and make sure nobody’s barged in and found the Cube.”

  Dalton looked to the screen displaying the interior of their dormitory. They did not appear to have company.

  Chumley fed the paper through a scanning device, and a blown-up copy of the Haa’anu serial numbers appeared on the main screen. He clicked “Translate Now,” then sat back to wait.

  The computer hummed. Dalton found himself tapping his foot with impatience. He wanted out of here, dammit, and the sooner, the better.

  Eventually, a soft ding issued from the computer’s speakers, and a translated duplicate of the scanned paper appeared beside the scanned image itself. Dalton leaned forward to get a better look, and read, “The one you seek is in the middle. But beware, because transgressions are not taken lightly?”

  Chumley put a hand to his forehead. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Looks like your informant didn’t want you to lose your note and have someone figure out what was going on.”

  Chumley sighed. “So, it’s the airship parked in between the other two. How simple.”

  “You don’t think it could be a trap?”

  Chumley chewed on his lip. “I don’t know. But we have to risk it. Otherwise, your planet is toast.”

  “I don’t see why you care. You could have run back home days ago.”

  A long sigh escaped Chumley’s lips. “No, I couldn’t have.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t.” Chumley folded his arms and swiveled his chair around to face him. “I wasn’t always a conman. My gran died after a long battle with chogavirus.”

  Dalton winced—chogavirus was rare, but ruthless once it started wreaking havoc on a patient’s internal organs. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “The cost of her care and the cost of the funeral nearly bankrupted me. I was working fifty hours a week counting beans at my day job, and it still wasn’t enough. I had to do something on the side to make up for it.”

  “You didn’t have family who could help?”

  Chumley shook his head. “Not on that side of the family. My parents fought a lot when I was a boy. One day it got out of hand and, well, I had to go live with Gran. She moved me to Pelstring Four so we could get fresh starts. She was my dad’s mum, and he was her only child.”

  “That . . . must have been very hard for you.”

  “Yes. Well. That’s life, isn’t it? After I turned to some . . . new professions, law enforcement on Pelstring Four got on my tail, so I fled here, where I didn’t think anyone would find me. I used a forged passport and paid cash to throw them off. If I go home, I go to prison.”

  “But you were still conning people even when you arrived here.”

  “I still have bills to pay off. I was hoping to wire in the payments through a dummy account so they couldn’t trace where they’d come from.”

  “What were you planning on doing when the people here didn’t get the tanning beds they’d paid for?”

  “I’d have thought of something. I always do.”

  “Surely there was another way—”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Because it hurts.” Chumley’s shoulders drooped. “Gran raised me. She meant everything to me, taught me right from wrong, took me away from a family that did more harm than good. She’d hate what I became because of her illness. I hope she’d understand that I acted not out of greed, but out of desperation.”

  Ordinarily, Dalton would have said that surely there were plenty of other ways Chumley could have survived the financial aftermath of his grandmother’s illness, and that Chumley just hadn’t thought of them, but the expression of sorrow that had appeared on the man’s face made Dalton keep his mouth shut. He understood pain, too, after all.

  “So, the airship,” Dalton said instead. “Shouldn’t we go find Keith and have him stash us onboard?”

  “Just what I was thinking.” Chumley rose. “You wait here while I go find him.”

  Chumley stepped as lightly as a cat when he emerged from the Cube, feeling furtive even though the moment did not yet require it. The hour grew late, and the Haa’la who worked the day shift would be bedding down about now to dream sweet dreams of death and destruction.

  He was primarily worried about the night shift people. There didn’t seem to be as many of them, but it only took one to sound the alarm.

  He opened the bedroom door and glanced left and right. The vacant corridor was lit with dim bulbs to mimic dusk while still giving off enough light to see by.

  Remembering it was important to make it look as though he had business being where he was, Chumley straightened his shoulders and strode off to the right, toward the communal area in the center of the building where workers mingled between shifts.

  As he’d expected, Keith sat in one of the white upholstered chairs, squinting at a magazine printed in Haa’anu. Keith glanced up when Chumley entered the room, then gestured with his eyes toward the room’s other occupants, as if Chumley hadn’t noticed them.

  “Captivating read?” Chumley asked, taking the chair beside Keith’s and slouching in it as if he planned on sitting there comfortably all night.

  “I can’t make any sense of it.” Keith held up a page, which showed a photograph of a Haa’la couple holding hands while a wildfire raged behind them. “I think it might be like Golfer’s Digest, only for people who demolish planets.”

  Three Haa’la stood near a snack machine, speaking in low tones but hardly giving Chumley or Keith the time of day. He couldn’t tell if any of them were the one who’d given him information about the soon-to-be-departing airship.

  Keith coughed lightly into his hand. “So, how are things?”

  “They’re absolutely spiffing.” How much English did these particular Haa’la understand? “I do believe,” Chumley went on, “that it might be in our best interests to use . . . colloquialisms of the highest caliber, in order that those who accompany us are less inclined to comprehend the intentions behind our speech.”

  Keith blinked at him. Then a conspiratorial glint appeared in his eyes, and he said, “Indeed? What news have ye of events yet to unfold?”

  The Haa’la by the snack machine still hadn’t looked their direction. “As I said, it is news most advantageous. Our . . . mode of conveyance has been identified. We need only our courier.”

  Keith set the magazine down on the small table beside him and rose. “Then a courier, you shall have.”

  They left the room together, and Chumley led Keith down the hallway toward the room where Dalton and the Cube awaited them. Once inside, Keith let out a long breath and said, “I haven’t felt so nervous since I had to do improv in front of my whole drama class back at university.”

  “You’re about to feel even more nervous.” Chumley felt the increasing onslaught of his own apprehension. “You’ll have to get us onboard the middle airship in the hangar without anyone seeing you. It’s supposedly headed to a listening post close to Paris.”

  “That’s perfect—I live there!”

  “It’s too risky to take you with us. We’d have to activate the doorway to let you inside after you place us on the ship, and the light might draw unwanted attention.”

  Keith’s lip curled. “I understand, but it doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”

  Chumley pushed the button to activate the holographic entrance to the Cube, then said, “As soon as this doorway vanishes, put the Cube in your pocket and make your way to the hangar. Like I said, it’s the middle airship. Once we’re securely onboard, get out of there as fast as you can and don’t let anyone see you.”

  “Understood.” Keith gave him a long look. “Best of luck to you both. Maybe I’ll be the lucky one, getting to stay behind. You know, if things turn out wrong.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be fine. And thank you
.” Chumley dipped his head and strode through the archway into his portable universe.

  “Everything working as planned?” Dalton asked. He lounged on the swivel chair, picking his teeth with a toothpick Chumley had dug out of a cabinet for him.

  “So far.” Chumley prodded the panel on the wall to deactivate the entrance, and on the security screen, he watched Keith’s hand loom large as he closed his fingers around the Cube. Then everything went dark, presumably because Keith had just put them into his pocket.

  “And now we wait,” said Chumley.

  Chapter 16

  Carolyn stood alone in her flat on the north side of the city, staring out at the star-speckled sky from her balcony window, grateful that work crews had gotten the rest of the city’s power back on by sundown. A beeping truck with an attached sandplow rumbled by below her, clearing out the last of the mess. By fourteen o’clock midnight, Richport ought to be back to normal.

  Well, almost normal. Her police force had yet to reappear.

  Maybe she’d been too hard on Dalton. The man had been through an ungodly amount of stress, and the recent Green attacks had set it all off again like a big, nasty bomb.

  She hoped she’d get the chance to apologize.

  A soft rapping at her flat’s door made her jump, and she sighed, wondering which fires she would have to put out this time.

  She opened the door and blinked as she regarded Errin Inglewood, accompanied by none other than Gwendolyn Goldfarb, who was wearing one of her neon shawls again.

  “What’s going on?” Carolyn asked, her voice coming out colder than intended.

  “I stayed late at the office, and Gwendolyn caught me right outside the door when I was leaving,” Errin said, giving the old woman a sidelong glance. “She insisted she needed to see you.”

  “Well, come in, then.” Dread bubbled inside of Carolyn as her visitors stepped past her and she closed the door. “Gwendolyn, what did you need to see me about?”