House of Midas Read online

  “They’re all linked together, now, through the music. Cassie is hard to kill. They’re going to have to pull her down in order to kill everyone else down there, and she’s going to go down fighting.”

  Troy nodded once, sharply. That was the Cassie he knew.

  “Okay. So what do we do?”

  Jesse twisted his mouth to the side.

  “You haven’t done this before. I just make it up.”

  He shrugged and pushed the door open.

  “You’re here because, from time to time, I need someone with scrambling skills,” he said as he walked into the fluorescent-lit room. “You know that Cassie once saved the day by wrestling a fish?”

  He turned to walk backwards, holding his hands out to either side and jerking his eyebrows at Troy.

  “That… sounds like her.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a fish, certainly, and he’d have won hands down if they’d been competing in water, but it’s still impressive.”

  “Sounds like,” Troy said, looking around the room quickly, trying to keep his head pointed straight at Jesse. Jesse grinned and spun on his heel.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, and hippopotami of all shapes and sizes,” he started, then began speaking in a language that Troy’s implant didn’t immediately recognize. After a few sentences, he started picking out words.

  Not that he noticed them.

  The room was full of huge bodies, curvy creatures of at least two-hundred and fifty or three-hundred pounds apiece, with broad, flat faces and short limbs. Something went ding in his head at hippopotamus.

  And they were moving. It was different from the way the people downstairs were moving, but even Troy’s eyes recognized the similarities.

  “Troy,” Jesse said. “Are you with me, Troy?”

  The language was the same strange one he’d been speaking, but apparently Troy’s implant had mostly caught up.

  “Yes,” he answered in the same language. It had been years before he’d started doing that instinctively in class, and he was glad, now, that the reflex was there. Answering in English made you sound ignorant at a time that you wanted to blend in.

  “Excellent,” Jesse said, clapping his hands together once and then holding them up in front of himself. “I just wanted him to be here as a representative of the species that you’re” the implant lost a word, “downstairs. Seemed right. He’s here to make an angry face at you while we talk.”

  He glanced back pointedly at Troy, who took his cue and frowned. Was he supposed to wrestle one of these things?

  “You know what you’re interrupting, Palta,” one of them growled. The room continued to wobble and wave as they continued to communicate with each other, and Jesse tossed his shoulders in a careless shrug.

  “And you know what we think of your stupid marriage rites,” he answered. “You can kill off your own people and that’s fine. Certain markets, you can even buy the people you’re going to kill off. You haven’t got any standing to be here, doing what you’re doing, and I don’t plan on letting it happen.”

  “What exactly do you think you can do?” someone else asked. “It’s all done.”

  Jesse laughed.

  “In a fair fight, this one would wallop any one of you,” he said, motioning over his shoulder at Troy. Troy looked sterner. He was going to have to wrestle one of them. “You show up with technology that you didn’t even invent, most of which you wouldn’t understand if I gave you a dozen years to learn it, and you think that you’ve outsmarted a Palta? No. I said no and I meant it. You guys can just pop back home and we’ll forget it ever happened. That’s your one alternative.”

  One of the massive foreign terrestrials, one with mauve skin, made its way through the group with a very firm full-body shake, and everyone else fell still.

  “The ceremony has already begun. If you weren’t Palta, you would already be dead for interrupting it. Your disrespect will not be tolerated.”

  There was another sharp motion, and four of the foreign terrestrials made a simultaneous move forward as the mauve speaker turned and began to return to where he? she? had previously been standing. Troy knew there were universal clues to gender, when it existed, but he’d never studied them. Cassie would be much better at this.

  He looked angry.

  “No,” Jesse said. There was no play in his voice now, none of his normal manipulative charm. The room hesitated. This was the moment when Troy’s body finally reacted, the unreality of being in a room of foreign terrestrials, actually being outnumbered by them, replaced with an awareness that his life was in danger.

  He took a step back to get his weight off his heels and started looking at the individuals.

  Guards. Guests. Important people.

  The couple.

  He could see it immediately once he stopped being dazzled by it. Skin color, as was so common, seemed to correlate to rank. The purpler end of the spectrum was more powerful, ranging through blue, green, and brown back to a candied orange that all of the guards had.

  They were big. Short limbs meant huge leverage. Crushing force. But he would be faster than they were, and this was home, dammit. He wasn’t going to be killed by a foreign terrestrial on Earth. That just didn’t happen.

  “There’s one thing you don’t know,” Jesse said. “There’s a Palta downstairs.”

  “There are no more Palta,” someone called dismissively. Troy was disappointed that Jesse’s bluff had been that bad. “It’s just you, wandering the universe looking lonely. We all know.”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “You think you know, but we’re Palta. We’re hard to kill. She’s down there and she’s going to keep your music spinner from killing them.”

  One of the bluer foreign terrestrials turned.

  “You think we haven’t killed Palta before, like this?” he asked. There was one long, intense moment of silence.

  “That was a mistake,” Jesse said. “Before everything, I would have just shrugged. Palta are inquisitive. They’re invariably going to end up in bad places. Today, as things stand… No. That was definitely a mistake.”

  There was a motion, and then a series of reply-motions, and the guards closed ranks while the rest of the room turned in on itself, making the couple the direct focus of everyone’s attention, save the fierce-looking creamsicles. Troy nodded to himself.

  He could take one. He was fast and he was well-trained, and Jesse said that he would win in a fair fight. Given that the guards appeared to be unarmed, he was wary about what way they would have available to them to cheat, but he let that one go, trying to pick the weakest of the four to target.

  Jesse sighed.

  “You try to be civil, to give them an opportunity to walk away,” he muttered in English, walking across the room. He just turned to his right and started walking. Troy glanced after him once, twice, and again, but Jesse was not paying attention to him at all.

  What was he supposed to do?

  The guards looked from Troy to Jesse, shuffling a bit as guards everywhere apparently did when they’d been given a direct order and something important and confusing was going on.

  Troy readied himself again.

  Was the goal to stop the wedding?

  Would that end it?

  If he was going to have to get to the couple, he had at least a thousand pounds of candy-colored flesh to get through, first. He wished he were armed.

  Jesse started tapping on the wall with a finger, just loud enough for the sound to resonate through the room. It called Troy’s attention to the low hum of a beat that simply turned on and off at intervals. It was even and steady and unimportant. He’d picked his target, and he had no idea how long a wedding ceremony was going to last.

  Consummation?

  He didn’t want to be here for that.

  Something in his head absurdly noticed that, while there did appear to be some furniture sized for the large bodies in front of him, he didn’t see a bed anywhere.

  What would consummat
ion look like?

  He focused again, looking over at Jesse once more. The Palta had apparently found a spot he liked and was leaning against it looking at his arm.

  Troy sighed.

  Jesse’s plans were outrageously opaque. Always had been.

  Identify weak points, identify advantages, attack with surprise and violence.

  He charged.

  And every one of the foreign terrestrials staggered sideways.

  Troy checked himself up as the synchronized jag to the one side turned into a chaotic mess of stumbling and falling. Troy stood straight, now, and watched, astounded and completely out of sorts. It had the makings of a dream, if the details hadn’t all been coming in so clear. He looked at Jesse, who appeared to be peeling strips of tape off of his arm and affixing them to the wall.

  “Keep an eye on them for… ten minutes,” the Palta said, looking around the room. “And don’t hurt yourself. Cassie would kill me.”

  And then he vanished.

  Vanished.

  Troy blinked, looking from where Jesse had been to the piling lumps of foreign terrestrial scattered around the room. It was like sea lions sunning themselves on the piers in California, stacked body on top of body.

  Why were they here?

  Foreign terrestrials. And not ones like Jesse. Troy had long been able to believe that there might be foreign terrestrials at loose on the planet, unknown by anyone, particularly after having spent time with Jesse, but these ones were weird. They were the blue aliens of old science fiction, completely unable to blend in or go unnoticed. And yet, here they were in the top of a building in Chicago.

  How had they gotten here?

  And where had Jesse gone?

  Troy was beginning to feel himself drown under the sense that there was too much that he didn’t know.

  The portal room was the portal room. It was the core of the technology required for inter-space jumps.

  Jesse couldn’t just disappear.

  He couldn’t.

  He couldn’t.

  Troy looked across the sprawled bodies once more, feeling as though he should investigate them, but too wary to get close. He was afraid of breaking a spell he didn’t understand, and his rational mind was furious that he had regressed to complete, full-out superstition. There had to be an explanation. Jesse had done something, and then he had vanished.

  Leaving Troy to watch them. What was he supposed to do?

  Jesse never told him anything.

  Lacking something better to do, Troy went to go look for the tape on the wall, but, like with his cell phone, the wall appeared to be completely featureless where Troy had been working.

  How had putting tape on the wall managed to render an otherwise perfectly competent group of hostile people completely senseless? Were they dead? Had Jesse killed them?

  Again, Troy had the instinct to go check, but foreign terrestrial anatomy was a dark art that he had no part of. Most bodies were hydraulically powered on a water-based solution - some were hydrocarbon based, a few were other non-hydrocarbon ketones - but beyond that, he had no idea how to tell if one was still alive. Some of them had pulses, using a pulsated valve system to transmit nutrient-bearing fluids, but others didn’t, using smooth muscle waves to transmit a near-constant flow of fluid throughout live tissue.

  If he knew their normal operating temperature, he could check to see if they were getting cold, but that was both impossible without a good baseline and irrational, only five minutes after they’d collapsed.

  Five?

  How long had it actually been?

  Surely he was getting close to Troy’s promised ten minutes.

  Watch them.

  Sure.

  And what was he supposed to do if one of them looked at him funny?

  Dammit, Jesse.

  And then the room was full of large, black-skinned bodies. The joints of their knees were backwards, making Troy think of werewolves. One of them said something and Jesse answered in the language Troy could translate.

  “Gana, if you don’t mind, for the witness.”

  “Pisbe and Clay,” someone said, stepping through the bodies. “How did you disable them?”

  “Discord,” Jesse answered. One of the great black foreign terrestrials turned to Troy.

  “Who is he?” he asked.

  “He represents the planet,” Jesse said. There was a motion that might have been agreement or understanding. Or rage. Troy had no idea.

  “There’s a ceremony going on downstairs?” someone asked. There was a chorus of growls or grunts.

  “Which is why we’re pressed for time,” Jesse said. “Do you want them or not?”

  “This is your planet?” the first speaker asked Troy.

  “It is,” he answered.

  “And they don’t belong here? You’ve entered into no agreement with them?”

  “No,” Troy said. “They’re killing innocent people downstairs.”

  There was a noise he was quite certain was a scoff.

  “Aldins don’t believe in innocence,” Jesse said.

  “Doesn’t change anything,” Troy said. “They don’t deserve to die.”

  The elegant black head swiveled away from him.

  “Good enough?” Jesse asked.

  “We’ll take them,” someone else said. “Thank you of thinking of us.”

  “I never fail to think of the Aldins,” Jesse said, dropping a knee to the floor in a quick motion. Scant seconds later, the entire room was empty.

  “Intergalactic police?” Troy asked.

  “While moving, Troy,” Jesse said, already on his way to the door. “We haven’t got much time.”

  The adrenaline hit him belatedly, but with force.

  “Those were foreign terrestrials,” Troy said, sounding even to his own ears like a giddy small boy.

  “They were,” Jesse said, jogging down the stairs.

  “Were they law enforcement?”

  “Just making sure they weren’t starting any wars they didn’t want to start,” Jesse said.

  “Then why did they come?”

  “The planet of Alda is quite diverse. The smaller, weaker races there have been farmed by the Burdal for generations.” Jesse looked up the stairs over his shoulder as he reached a landing. “Eaten.”

  “Were they dead?” Troy asked.

  “No, just senseless,” Jesse answered.

  “How did you do it?” Troy asked.

  “Palta don’t have nursery rhymes,” Jesse said. Troy opened his mouth and closed it. Did that actually make sense, and he missed it? No. No, that definitely didn’t make sense. He chose not to pursue it. Jesse never said anything useful after something like that.

  “So is it all over, downstairs?” Troy asked.

  “Hope not,” Jesse said. “The ceremony should have lasted at least a couple more minutes. I think we have time. The consummation is just ceremonial, though. They do it fully clothed at the end of the ceremony, so it isn’t that much time.”

  “They were clothed?” Troy asked. Jesse looked back at him again, then continued down the stairs.

  “So what do we do? Why wouldn’t they just quit?”

  “The DJ has no clue that it’s over. Even if he did know, he can’t not kill them, at this point. Turning off the music is going to stop them all dead.”

  “I though you said Cassie was hard to kill.”

  “If she has music to fight, sure,” Jesse said. “Without it… They all just stop.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Troy asked. Jesse burst through the door at the bottom of the stairs.

  “I’m going to stop the music,” he said.

  “What?” Troy asked.

  “You find her and keep her alive. Just keep her alive.”

  “What?” Troy asked again, but Jesse was off, pushing his way toward the stairs at the base of the DJ tower. Troy went more slowly, watching for Cassie.

  Olivia went by at one point, but she didn’t seem to notice him. The threa
d of the dance was slower now, but more intense. The dancers around him seemed woven into an elastic fabric that he disturbed by his very presence.

  He watched Olivia just for a moment, then pressed on, finding Cassie at the very center of things, where even he could tell that the rest of the room was simply orbiting. She saw him, making a small space for him in the crowd, but continuing to dance.

  “Is it done?” she asked.

  “They’re gone,” he said.

  “Does Jesse have a plan?” she asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Troy answered, stepping out of the way as a couple went past, only inches away from Cassie. She waved a hand after them in a way that made Troy think of a puppeteer.

  “It will be okay,” she said. Troy looked up at the crow’s nest where Jesse and the DJ appeared to be jostling for control of the sound board.

  “It will be okay,” Cassie said again, moving away from him slightly.

  Jesse apparently won out, and the sound in the room went dead.

  It wasn’t like with the foreign terrestrials upstairs. There was no stagger, no thrash, no spasm. The entire room fell down like the power had been pulled from a set of electric dolls.

  “Keep her alive,” Jesse called from up above. “Keep her alive.”

  Cassie was on the floor, a tangle of limbs, limp, unmoving, and unbreathing.

  Here, he was on much more familiar ground. They’d all had advanced training in first aid and triage, and it had been drilled so many times that it was second nature, even all this time later.

  He took her pulse.

  There was nothing there. This gave him pause, a certain cold shock as he came face to face with reality, then he folded one hand over the other and started chest compressions.

  He counted to sixty, knowing that he would have gone a lot faster than the minute it was supposed to take, then started taking fast, breaths, hyperventilating himself to get a lungful of unused oxygen, then pushed Cassie’s diaphragm up and into her rib cage, forcing all of the stale air out of her chest. He took a fast, deep breath and pushed the clean air into her lungs, then went back to chest compressions.

  Cassie could hold her breath for no less than two minutes. He knew that. The oxygen was less important than the circulation, but the current reigning theory was that, with sub-optimal circulation, it was still worth improving oxygenation.