by J. S. Bailey
“We’re assuming that’s what it is. It came from the north.”
“More will be coming.”
“What?”
Dalton hurriedly explained the situation with the Verdants, and when he’d finished, Cadu said some words Dalton didn’t think he’d ever heard the man say before.
“Dalton, we need to hurry,” Chumley said, peering out one of the windows into the street.
Dalton closed his eyes, counted off ten seconds, and opened them. “We have to get to the weapons cache and arm everyone capable of fighting.”
Cadu nodded, his lips drawn tight. “I’ll do that. You can let the people know what’s going on, since you seem to know a lot more than I do.”
Shouts outside drew Dalton’s attention to the glass door. A few of the people lingering at the edge of the gathered Greens were pointing at the sky.
Cadu hurried out the door without another word. Maxine of the City Watch peeled herself from the throng and followed him.
Chumley took one step closer to Dalton. “What are we going to do?”
“I was never supposed to be the sheriff,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. “I was a florist. People were happy with flowers. Flowers never hurt anybody.”
“We’ve got to do something . . . ”
In his mind, Dalton saw himself inside his old greenhouse, cutting the tulips and carnations he’d planted and arranging them just so in decorative ceramic vases that Darneisha made in her kiln and then painted. Imani and Kendra would play on the floor, picking up any petals that had dropped and sticking them into each other’s hair.
“I was never supposed to do this,” he said again. “I just needed a job. Sheriff seemed easy. Nothing ever happens in Richport. It’s the most boring place in the whole fecking universe.”
Now Chumley was standing in front of him with his hands on his hips. “I was never supposed to be the deputy, either, but here I am.”
“And here you are,” Dalton said. “Just as useless as me.”
“I don’t know that I’m useless,” Chumley said. “You know how I’ve survived this long?”
“By being a liar?”
“By being adaptable.”
“All right,” Dalton said. “How are you going to be adaptable right here, right now?”
Chumley put a finger on his chin. “When the ships land, I can disable their engines.”
“And how, pray tell, will you do that?”
“There are things I haven’t told you.”
“Let me guess. You got paid to undergo scientific experimentation to help pay for your Gran’s expenses, and now you can turn invisible.”
“Not invisible, no.”
Dalton folded his arms. “I don’t have time for this. I need to go out there and start a fecking war, and your cryptic bullshit isn’t going to help me or anyone else one fecking bit.”
Chumley frowned at him. “My cryptic bullshit might be important. I want you to watch something. But back here, where no one can see.”
Dalton supposed he should humor his deputy, because it kept him from going back outside.
“We’ll go in my office,” he said. “This way.”
Once inside the office, Chumley closed the door and said, “I don’t want you to harm me.”
Dalton tensed. “Why would I do that?”
“Because I’m going to do something you won’t expect.”
“I might just harm you if you don’t hurry up and tell me what’s going on.”
Chumley smiled, but only briefly. “Very well.” He scrunched his eyes shut, and there came a sudden twisting of his features that made Dalton’s head spin.
The next thing Dalton knew, a pile of men’s clothing lay on the floor, with no Chumley inside them. He leaned forward, too stunned to comprehend the implications of this, when a hamster of all things wriggled out of the fabric and sat back on its tiny haunches to peer up at him. It had a white body and a light brown head, with one light brown patch near its rump.
“You have got to be fecking kidding me,” Dalton said.
The hamster’s pink nose twitched. Dalton squatted down and held his hand beside the rodent, and it stepped into his palm. The creature felt warm and soft, and Dalton resisted the urge to stroke it.
He held it at eye level. “Is that really you in there?”
The hamster nodded.
“I’ve heard about shifters,” Dalton said. “Rich folks pay for the ability on the black market. It’s illegal on just about every settled world.”
The hamster let out a short squeak.
“But you didn’t pay for it.”
The hamster’s head shook.
“They paid you?”
It nodded.
“Because you needed to help your Gran.”
Another nod.
Dalton felt a grin stretching across his face. “Turn yourself back into you so we can discuss our next steps. I won’t watch.”
He set the hamster on the floor and turned the other way. He heard a squelching noise like something stretching, and Chumley said, “Not just yet, let me get my trousers on . . . you can look now.”
Dalton turned back to him. Chumley remained bare-chested and held his shirt draped over one arm.
“Shifting has been around for decades,” Dalton said. “Read about it when I was a boy and dreamed of turning myself into a bird to get away from my brother when he annoyed me too much.” He paused. “Why would they have needed to experiment on you when the tech exists already?”
“They were working on transformations into smaller animals. Always before it had to be something roughly human-sized—something to do with mass redistribution. They gave me the experimental gene therapy, and about five thousand pounds less than they’d promised me.”
“I saw a hamster in the hangar at the mining base.”
Chumley raised his hand. “Hello.”
“But . . . you have a cage and a wheel and everything. That’s for you?”
“Whenever I’m stressed I, well, I go in there and run. It’s very relaxing.”
Dalton rubbed at his eyelids. “So, you’re going to hamster your way into the Haa’la ships and what, chew the wiring to bits so they can’t leave?”
Chumley shrugged. “It might work.”
“What benefit does that give us?”
“It gives us the chance to keep them prisoner here.”
“I’d rather scare them away and have them never come back.”
A wrinkle appeared in Chumley’s brow. “Can an army of Greens and a few thousand inexperienced humans do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say we run them all off. What’s to stop them from coming back with reinforcements?”
The sound of a door banging open spared Dalton from answering. To his utmost horror, Summer Kane of all people appeared in his office doorway, her eyes gleaming with murder.
“Someone in the street told me you came back,” she croaked. Her strawberry blonde hair looked wild, like she hadn’t brushed it in days.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” Dalton said.
His former sister-in-law stepped nearer to him, a blue gem twinkling from its chain around her neck. “I knew you weren’t dead when they said you were missing. I knew it in here.” She thumped her chest with one fist. “You’re the last one. I would feel it if you died.”
“I’m glad you believed in me. Now if you’ll just—”
“But you know what I didn’t know would happen?” She stepped even closer, forcing Dalton to scoot back against the wall while Chumley watched in grim amusement.
“What?” Dalton asked, because he honestly had no clue.
Summer dug into the pocket of her long skirt and withdrew a crinkled paper, which she smoothed out and held in front of Dalton’s face.
It was an invoice.
Dalton read the line items and the prices, and winced.
“You had the motorhome towed back here to be fixed,” he said, hardly believing she’d gone to the trouble.
“Are you going to help me pay for this?”
“Summer, I really don’t have the time right now. You may have noticed the plant army?”
A commotion outside made both their heads turn. The door to the police station swung open, and someone shouted, “Sheriff, get out here!”
“Just a minute!” He focused his attention back on Summer. “We can talk about the bloody motorhome if we survive this.”
Her face paled. “We’ve got to survive this. We have to, me and you, because that’s what we do.”
Dalton felt his jaw stiffen. “You’re right. So go home and stay there. You live far enough outside of town that you might be safe. Where’s your quad?”
“In the public lot. I drove into town early to pick up a few groceries and saw the Greens.” Her eyes watered. “I don’t know if I can get back there in time now.”
“Then take one of the quads out back. We usually keep the keys in the ignition. And hurry!”
She stepped away from him and gave him a lingering look containing more emotions than Dalton could interpret.
“Sheriff, please get out here!” the voice cried again from the lobby.
“Go,” Dalton said to Summer. “Take the quad, and don’t look back.”
Summer drew in a deep breath, nodded, and hurried out the back door.
Then Dalton turned and strode toward the front entrance.
Going outside was the last thing in the world Dalton wanted to do.
He did it anyway.
He was the sheriff, after all.
“What’s happening now?” Dalton asked no one in particular.
“The ship just landed on the west end of town,” said a young man with a mohawk, who held both a donut and a cup of orange juice, as if the coming spectacle was just some light morning entertainment and not potentially the end of all human life on Molorthia Six. “And those just showed up.”
The young man pointed with the hand holding the donut, but he didn’t need to. There was no overlooking the four gleaming ships that hovered a kilometer above the ground northeast of town. They were all round, like giant saucers.
If the Verdants were going to dump combustible acid on them like the Haa’la mining company had originally planned, then there was no point in fighting. The good citizens of Richport and their apparent leafy allies might as well curl up on the spot and wait for the fire to consume them.
But combustible acid might damage the environment, a little voice muttered somewhere in Dalton’s exhausted mind.
So do bombs, Dalton thought back at it.
He wished he could send a message to the Verdants so he could beg for everyone’s lives.
He wished he had an air conditioner in his house, too, but wishing wouldn’t get him one.
Movement near his feet made him look to the ground. A hamster hunched there, peering up at him.
Dalton cleared his throat and said, “Where on the west side of town did the ship land?”
“Looked like near the quad dealership,” said the young man with the orange juice and donut. “Or thereabouts.”
“Thank you,” Dalton said, and scooped the hamster into his pocket before it could make a run for it.
He hurried inside the station and out the back door, where one remaining quad sat alone. Hoping the battery had finally been charged, he hopped on the closest quad and gunned it down the back street that thankfully wasn’t clogged like the one out front.
Dalton made two jarring turns and screeched to a stop when he spotted a silvery Haa’la ship sitting atop its landing gear beside the dealership, where dozens of new and used quads sat in dusty rows waiting to meet their buyers. He dug in his pocket until he felt something squirming, and withdrew the transformed Chumley, who chittered at him.
“Sorry,” Dalton said. “I didn’t want you to get trampled trying to run here on your own. Now see that ship?” He pointed. “Go do your worst to it—and try not to get hurt.”
The hamster cocked its head.
“I don’t want to have to find a new deputy already, that’s why.” He set Chumley on the ground. “Now, go! I don’t care that these are Ashi’ii’s people. They’re Haa’la, and we can’t trust them.”
The hamster gave him a long look before turning tail and scurrying off in the direction of the Haa’la ship. The gangplank had already been lowered, and at least two dozen veiled Haa’la stood outside, holding guns that looked a bit more menacing than the one they’d tranquilized him with out in the desert.
He wondered if Kedd or Maasha were among them. It was hard to tell with everyone dressed the same.
We would fight, Maasha had said when Dalton asked her what she would do if someone came to her planet and set it aflame. If she could admit that, would she understand that the humans of Molorthia Six were simply doing what they had to in order protect their own? Could she or any of the other Haa’la find enough empathy within themselves to call off the battle and leave?
He doubted it. Good fortune did not happen to Dalton Kane.
I’ve got to do something, Dalton thought when Chumley had vanished into the distance. Well, he could help Cadu and Maxine pass out weapons. That was something, right?
He took the quad to the warehouse where the city stored all the boomstones that the wind unearthed in the open desert. Cadu had slid up the giant bay door and was carefully lifting boxes off of shelves and passing them to Maxine, who in turn passed them to another volunteer who handed them out to a motley assemblage of citizens who had lined up outside.
“What are you doing here?” Cadu asked, hefting yet another box of explosive rocks off a shelf. “I thought you were organizing things at the station.”
“I’m here to help you arm the people. The ship from the mining base landed by the quad dealership, and they’re already disembarking. Chumley is going to sneak inside and disable the ship so they can’t leave.”
“So we’ll be stuck with them. Great. Here, you can bring down more boxes. Carefully, though, we don’t want you to lose a limb.” Cadu winced. “I mean, sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Dalton kept his expression neutral as he went to the nearest metal shelf and grabbed a sturdy wooden box off of it. Dozens of misshapen bronze stones nested inside, looking far too innocuous to be weaponry.
More citizens were lining up in front of the warehouse—someone in town must have been sending them their way. “Here,” Dalton grunted, bypassing Maxine and the other volunteer and approaching the next person in line. “Take as many as will fit into your pockets. Just don’t blow yourself up. That’s right . . . there. Next!”
It was tedious work. He retrieved four more crates over the next ten minutes, his dread steadily building and making him wonder when he would pop.
After his most recent crate had been emptied, Dalton looked up at where the four Verdant ships had been, only to realize they must have landed.
He grabbed another crate of boomstones.
Carolyn fled the spaceport with Ashi’ii, who held on for dear life as Carolyn gunned the quad as fast as it would go.
“I’m so sorry,” Ashi’ii kept saying. “Nothing like this has ever happened on one of my project worlds before.”
“I’m assuming that’s because you were too busy killing the locals to have anyone bother killing you,” Carolyn said.
“We never killed the locals! Put them to work, yes, but never killed!”
“So the Greens just died all by themselves?”
“They’re plants!”
Carolyn had to park the quad four blocks away from the army of Greens because the streets were so clogged, she couldn�
��t get through. “Now go find your company and tell them not to be fools about this. We will help them if they agree to help us fight these Verdant people.”
“I understand.” Ashi’ii climbed off the quad and growled orders into her comm unit, ignoring the stares she’d begun receiving as soon as they came into view.
Carolyn wished she could stay with the alien to make sure she didn’t attempt any treachery, but she needed to meet up with Dalton and discuss tactics. She almost laughed. Like she knew anything about tactics. The most tactical things she’d had to endure as mayor were budget meetings.
“Excuse me,” she said, nudging her way through a throng of gawkers armed with flamethrowers. “Pardon me.” She relaxed on her nudging a bit when she noticed several people holding boomstones. They’d already started unloading the weapons cache? Good.
She finally made it to the waiting army of Greens. Clearing her throat, she approached the one that had communed with her earlier and said, “May I speak with you again?”
The plant stepped forward. Things have changed.
“What?”
Our presence here has changed things.
“Is that good or bad?”
If we had not come, you would already be ablaze.
Carolyn thought of something as speckles of sweat condensed on her brow. “If your people have this kind of precognition, how is it the Haa’la—the new invaders—were able to hurt your kind? Shouldn’t you have known about it ahead of time and escaped?”
Many did escape. Some remained in denial and refused to leave until it was too late. This too happened when your own people first landed among us.
Ah, Carolyn thought. Typical.
“So, what do we do now? How do we get the miners and the Verdants to leave us alone?”
You will fight them. We will help.
“But how? What should our strategy be?”
We will fight together.
Carolyn had the sudden desire to run her fist through something solid. She needed so badly to talk to Dalton. He was probably over at the boomstone warehouse, distributing the tiny bombs that were their only shot at survival.
She called him on her comm. “Dalton? We need to talk ASAP.”