by J. S. Bailey
Gwendolyn’s eyes were dilated far more than the lighting called for. “The ghosts are here again.”
Her words added a chill to the room, which was admirable when one took the climate into account. “Errin?” Carolyn said quietly. “Could you please call Monica and have her come over as soon as she can?”
“Certainly.” Errin stepped off to one side to make the call on their comm unit.
“Come sit with me,” Carolyn said, leading Gwendolyn over to the couch. Once the elderly woman sat comfortably beside her, Carolyn said, “Tell me more about these ghosts.”
“They come from the sky and burn the world.” Gwendolyn looked toward the stucco ceiling as if expecting to see something there other than the textured paint.
“You mentioned something about that before. Are these ghosts alive or dead?”
“Alive,” Gwendolyn said after a long pause. “But unseen.”
“So, invisible people are coming from the sky and burning the world.”
“Yes.”
“And they’ve captured Dalton and Chumley?”
“Yes. Salt.”
Carolyn felt taken aback by the hairpin turn in the conversation. “Salt?” she asked, making sure she’d heard correctly.
“Salt will win.”
“What does that mean?”
“It will win!” Gwendolyn cried, and then her head slumped forward, her chin resting against her chest.
In a panic, Carolyn grabbed the woman’s frail wrist and felt for a pulse, breathing a soft sigh of relief when she felt a reassuring thud-thud-thud.
“Monica is on her way,” Errin said, pocketing their comm and looking grim. “Is there anything I should do while we wait?”
Carolyn gave Gwendolyn a long, hard look. “Maybe head down to Slim’s and get more coffee. I have the feeling I’m going to need it.”
Gwendolyn woke shortly after Monica Kaur’s arrival with medical kit in tow.
“She seems fine,” Monica said to Carolyn in the other room, where Gwendolyn couldn’t hear them. “I can’t do any deeper testing here, but everything so far indicates she’s a perfectly healthy ninety-seven-year-old.”
“Her mind’s the problem, not her body.”
“And she’s sharp as a tack! You heard her ask how my cat Nibbles is doing. I’m sure I’ve only ever mentioned him to her once.”
“Errin and I both witnessed her acting strangely. Maybe she should stay with you tonight, for observational purposes.”
Monica put a hand on her chin. “We do have a spare room, and Gwendolyn shouldn’t mind having the company.”
“Good. Record everything she does and report all your findings back to me.”
“But patient confidentiality . . . ”
“She needs someone to care about her, Monica. That person can be me. Gwendolyn won’t say no.”
“Very well. But if she doesn’t agree to sharing her medical information with you, you’re out of luck.”
Carolyn thought of the black smoke billowing on the horizon and wondered if they were out of luck already.
Stay calm, stay calm, Keith Okpebholo thought to himself as he moved from shadow to shadow outside the dormitories, slowly making his way toward the hangar with the magic cube in his pocket. His heart was practically in his throat, and he missed the long, boring years he’d spent in Paris, helping Annaliese keep the peace. He’d never had to do anything like this while working for Annaliese. This was like—like espionage!
Keith flattened himself against a dormant ground transport with giant wheels the moment he heard voices, and he held his breath as he waited for the Haa’la to pass.
He was almost there. He could do this.
When the voices receded, Keith darted out from his hiding place and paused behind another ground transport parked ten meters away, nearly dizzy with adrenaline. Ahead of him lay the hangar. The bay door nearest to him had been left open, and a dim light glowed inside.
He counted off ten beats and made one final mad dash to the side of the immense metal building. He poked his head around the edge of the bay door to make sure no guards had been posted, then tiptoed inside when he saw the coast was clear.
“Middle ship,” he muttered. “Middle ship.” That’s what they’d said, right?
He peered up at the row of ships and frowned.
There were five various sorts of flying craft parked in a row—he remembered hearing the thrum of engines earlier, which must have been new arrivals to the base. Did Chumley and Dalton know about that? Probably.
Keith tugged the Cube out of his pocket and held it at eye level. “Good luck,” he said, not sure if they could hear him.
Then he turned toward the middlest middle ship—one much larger than those on either side of it—and strode up the gangplank as if he had important business there.
Keith let out another impressed whistle when he stepped into a gleaming silver control room lined with glowing screens. Several swivel chairs looked cozy enough to sleep in. Fully aware he could be caught at any moment; he kept his gawping to a minimum and hurried down a corridor to find a decent spot to hide the Cube.
A vast storage room full of cargo toward the back of the craft looked just the place for it. Keith wedged the Cube between a crate and the back wall, then brushed his hands together, his work complete.
On his way down the gangplank, a tall Haa’la woman strode into the hangar, her face unveiled. Two others trailed behind her bearing holstered weapons.
“You! Human!” the woman bellowed. Her eyes were like licorice, her skin paler than marzipan.
“Me?” Keith asked, pointing stupidly at himself.
“What were you doing on my ship?”
Keith was fairly certain this was Ashi’ii, the Haa’la in charge of Nydo Base. He’d seen her stomping through the corridors a few different times while he cleaned them.
He swept into a bow. “Pip-pip! I was merely inspecting your vessel to ensure the safety of your passage.”
“From whom did you receive those orders?”
Keith tried and failed to come up with a name.
Ashi’ii’s guards stepped toward him.
Bugger, Keith thought.
“Did he put us in the right ship?” Dalton asked, squinting at the security screen and seeing only a solid wall in front of them.
“We can step out and take a look if you’re feeling brave enough,” Chumley said, lying back on his bed with his ankles crossed. “I, for one, don’t want to risk being captured just yet.”
“But if he got the wrong one—”
“Keith is an intelligent man. He works for your friend Annaliese, right?”
“Right . . . ”
“And even if this isn’t the ship we asked for, it’s still a ship, and more likely than not, it will eventually do that thing which all ships do sooner or later.”
“Sink?”
“Get us out of here.”
Chumley’s words held a certain amount of logic, and Dalton relaxed.
“And now we wait?” Dalton said.
“Not much else to do in the meantime, is there?”
They fell silent for a spell. Dalton felt suddenly uneasy.
“What?” Chumley asked, detecting his change in mood.
“If we’d been fast about it, we could have activated the doorway and let Keith in here without anyone seeing us.”
“But the light—”
“Is probably less noticeable than a full-grown man sneaking around where he shouldn’t be.”
“Ah.” Chumley paused. “Well, I’m sure he’ll be all right.”
“Right.”
Dalton looked back to the security screen. Wherever Keith had stashed them was dark, and the Cube’s external camera had painted the rather lacking view of the wall in the shades of night vision. �
�Wish he’d thought to leave us in a spot where we could see if we’re on the move yet.”
“Well, we can’t get everything we want, can we?” Chumley looked at the time on the wall clock, which of course was far from correct.
“You know Molorthia Six has a twenty-eight-hour day,” Dalton said.
“No wonder I feel like shit.” Chumley regarded the clock again. “We’ll wait thirty minutes before I go out and check on things.”
“What if you’re seen?”
“Then I get caught.”
“What do I do, then?”
“You’ll think of something. Why don’t you try and get some sleep?”
Dalton ground his teeth together and then extracted the last shards of toothpick from his mouth. “Don’t see the point.”
Stop being an arse, Darneisha’s voice advised him from beyond the grave, not that she had a grave—none of them did. Just lie down and shut your eyes before he chucks you out of an airlock.
Dalton looked toward the veranda, where the digital garden rustled in a harmless, digital breeze. “I’ll sleep out there,” he said. “Let me know if anything happens.”
Chumley watched the minutes tick by on the clock, then heaved himself off the bed and activated the archway. He took a deep breath and strode through, finding himself in a space so dimly-lit, he wouldn’t have been able to see a Green standing two inches in front of him—the holographic light of the archway certainly didn’t do much for illumination, which he supposed might be in his favor.
He held his breath, and he listened.
Chumley detected a hum so faint it lurked at the farthest edges of his hearing. The floor seemed to be vibrating, as well.
“Good,” he muttered, and quickly retreated into the Cube.
Chapter 17
“Salt will win,” Carolyn muttered as she lay wide awake in bed, unable to get comfortable. “Salt will win?”
She was, of course, fully aware that anyone who claimed to have portents of the future was full of shit. Soothsayers of old had either breathed in too many vapors, or they were pulling a fast one. Not that Gwendolyn was claiming anything—oddly enough, she seemed an innocent victim in the matter.
Carolyn had never been particularly religious. Sure, she made her way over to the gurdwara about once per month, but the fact that a Creator might be responsible for everything just seemed like too much mumbo-jumbo for her logic-hardened mind to take. Believing Gwendolyn might have developed psychic powers was its own sort of mumbo-jumbo, and it made Carolyn deeply uncomfortable to think it might be true.
What did she mean by salt?
She switched on her bedside lamp and sat up, then pulled open the drawer in her nightstand and removed from it a notepad and a pen.
Salt, she wrote at the top of the notepad, and underlined it twice.
Beneath it, she wrote, What does salt do?
-Adds flavor
-Melts snow
-Makes things float in oceans
-Kills slugs
She reread her short list. “Salt will win,” she said again, and scratched at her temple. She was about to add Preserves food to her list when a shout rose from the still night air outside her flat.
“What now?” she hissed as she yanked her curtains aside and peered down at the street.
A man stood in the soft glow of one of the streetlights, pointing at a white-clad individual with one quaking finger. Pursing her lips, Carolyn jammed her feet into slippers and raced down the stairs, then burst outside to see what sort of incident needed defusing now.
The man was Louis Hopkirk, who lived in her building and often stayed up late blaring Kaktian opera music that made Carolyn want to jam icepicks into her eardrums. He gripped a paper bag in one hand, evidence of a late-night booze run. The person in white had disappeared, though Louis was still pointing as if they hadn’t.
“Louis, what’s going on?” Carolyn asked, skin prickling.
“That—that person just appeared out of thin air!” Louis’s voice strained with disbelief. “I was about to get out my key, and ta-da!”
Carolyn squinted at the spot midair where the man pointed. It seemed perhaps a bit more shimmery than air was supposed to be.
“You see the person now?” Carolyn asked.
“You don’t?”
“No.” Carolyn paused as a knot of dread tightened in her abdomen. “Are they dressed in white?”
“Obviously! And they’re holding a sack.”
“I don’t believe this.” But she did, and hated herself for it.
Carolyn took one step closer to the shimmery place, and Louis gasped. “They just disappeared!”
The earsplitting wail of the sandstorm sirens cut through the air, and Carolyn whirled toward the west, where the police station lay, feeling shards of ice fill her veins.
“Louis, get inside now,” she ordered, then broke into a run toward the station without waiting to see if he complied.
She knew it would be too much to hope that the blaring siren was experiencing a malfunction.
Several dozen citizens were already peering out their windows as Carolyn rounded a corner onto the street where the police station lay. She rushed up to the squat adobe building, where lights blazed behind the windows and the glass front door.
Cadu Mão de Ferro’s bag-lined eyes met hers as she rushed into the building. He looked like someone who had missed a few weeks of sleep and then fallen off a cliff.
“What’s happening?” Carolyn asked.
A croak came out when Cadu opened his mouth. He closed it, cleared his throat, then said, “I couldn’t sleep, so I came in a few minutes ago to see if I could bore myself to death, and I thought I heard a noise like someone rummaging through cabinets. Don’t know how anyone could have gotten in, though; the door was locked.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So you were spooked, and set off the alarm?”
His face grew particularly grave. “I was more than spooked. When I switched the lights on . . . well, you’re not going to believe it.”
“Let me guess,” she said evenly. “You saw a person dressed all in white, holding a sack while they looted the place, and then they disappeared.”
Cadu’s mouth fell open. “How did you know?”
“An identical person was just terrifying one of my neighbors.”
Cadu ran his hands over his face. “That’s at least two of them, then.”
“Why did you turn on the siren?”
“To let people know there’s a threat!” He blinked red, bleary eyes. “I wish Dalton were here.”
“Dalton, who spends most of his shifts filling in crossword puzzles?”
“He’d know what to do. Or he’d at least pretend to. I just tell people how to stop themselves from bleeding to death while they wait for the medics to come rescue them. I don’t know how to handle . . . this.” He made a vague gesture in the direction of the door, and then his eyes widened. “Errin’s here.”
Before Carolyn could speak, Errin rushed into the station wearing a t-shirt and a baggy pair of shorts.
“How did you know what was happening?” Errin panted, looking from Carolyn to Cadu, their face ashen.
“What do you mean?” Carolyn and Cadu asked in unison.
“I was just about to call you! You know I live behind the hardware store? I woke up hearing a clatter, and I went over to make sure no one was breaking in. I peeked in one of the windows and saw tools lifting themselves off the shelves and vanishing.” They let out a nervous little giggle. “I can’t believe I just said that. Please don’t fire me.”
“Do you think the thieves are still there?” Carolyn asked.
Errin’s sand-colored eyebrows shot upward. “You believe me?”
“Just answer the question.”
“Well, I—I wouldn’t know. The sirens started
going off, so I came here to see why. I was hoping it wasn’t another storm already.”
“Cadu set off the sirens because he saw a thief vanish before his very eyes.”
“A thief, in here?” Errin frowned, looking toward the row of open cupboards along the back wall of the main room, their shelves in disarray.
“I think they took some of the guns left over from Old Man Sondhi’s day,” Cadu said, rubbing at his eyes. “Joke’s on them; we don’t have any ammo.”
“How is the siren going to help us stop a couple of thieves?”
“Cadu isn’t thinking clearly,” Carolyn said; then, turning to the emergency operator, asked, “When was the last time you got any sleep?”
“Before Dalton went missing. I think.”
“All right.” Carolyn put her hands on her hips. “Cadu, you stay here and do what you do. Errin, you and I are going to take a little look at the hardware store.” She paused, thinking of Gwendolyn Goldfarb’s mysterious words. “And bring some salt.”
Every few minutes, Chumley risked exiting the Cube to see if the airship had landed. So far he’d entered the dark cargo hold three times, and each time, the faint hum of engines had indicated they were still in the air.
Shouldn’t they have landed already?
The Haa’la had mentioned having listening posts out in the desert. They clearly possessed teleport technology, so they could have teleported out to their posts and saved themselves the time, but perhaps the airships themselves were the listening posts. They were probably scanning the airwaves for any mention of a Haa’la invasion, and at the first sign of trouble, they’d scamper off this rock and find some new planet to decimate.
On his fourth trip into the cargo hold, Chumley sensed that something had changed elsewhere in the ship. There remained the hum of the engine, but it sounded different somehow in a way that sent a chill straight into his heart.
A second fundamental change was equally alarming.
He hurried back inside the Cube and out onto the veranda, where Dalton was snoring softly.