Battle of Earth Read online

  Palta and their secrets.

  At least now she was building up her own fair share.

  “Tell me more,” Cassie said.

  “We don’t know a lot about them,” Troy said. “They keep to themselves. If anyone has ever given one medical treatment, I’ve never heard of it, and I don’t know where their home world is, if they even have one.”

  “Any biology?” Cassie asked.

  “None,” Troy said. “I’d have to work for a week or two to even track down the tools it took to work on them. I know something about their power fields, because you can measure those passively, but it’s always as a collective. I don’t know anything about what they’re like as individuals.”

  Cassie nodded.

  “Well, we can measure that, now.”

  He nodded back.

  “Very interested. Why would she go into you, and not just tell you what she wanted and go back where the rest of them were?”

  “Help us,” Cassie said, shaking her head. “That’s important. She didn’t say ‘help me’, she said ‘help us’. Is it possible she represents more than one individual?”

  Jesse shook his head, chewing thoughtfully.

  “I’ve never heard of it, but they’re a little-known species. Hard to say what the limits are for possible.”

  “We have measurements to take,” Cassie said. “Known predators?”

  “There are a few creatures in the universe who consume energy directly,” Jesse said. “And a few of them are designed to hunt under odd circumstances, like through a water portal medium, but I don’t know of any who actually do. Sirens are the kind of creature whose natural predators get wiped out because everyone likes them.”

  “So what kind of crisis would they have?” Cassie asked. She could think of a few. She could think of a few that she could cause directly, if she chose, and she took a moment to wonder if that was normal Palta, if it was because she’d had Midas in her head for so long, or if it was something about being a human-Palta hybrid, because that’s what she really was, at the end of the day.

  “Population,” Jesse said. “No one knows how they reproduce or find each other. Artistic? Could be a new predator. Could be a simple enemy. Evolutionary split and civil war.” He paused. “Us. Help us. She could be an emissary, or a scout, looking for people who can help solve a problem, and she just stumbled across you. Hard to imagine what would make a chorus of Sirens split up.”

  Chorus.

  She should have guessed that one.

  Cold sloshed, and Cassie took another bite of her meal.

  She was almost missing the exquisite seasoning job they’d done, she was so preoccupied with the cold in her chest.

  Growing.

  “She’s strong,” Cassie said. “I can’t tell you how intelligent she is, but she’s strong.”

  “Even with the water helping the transition, and their native advantages…”

  “… meaning the fact that they don’t have mass,” Cassie said, and Jesse tipped a hand in an obviously motion and continued speaking.

  “… it takes a lot of energy to do point-to-point transitions. They have that, and they’re very good at recouping it from place to place as they spend it.”

  Cassie nodded.

  “How?”

  “Various methods,” Jesse said. “No one is going to be able to tell you which ones, for Sirens, but energy species aren’t unlike any other creature that doesn’t consume mass for survival energy.”

  “Photosynthesis, kinesthesis, radiosynthesis, pyrosynthesis, thermosynthesis,” Cassie said.

  “Magnetosynthesis…” Jessie started to add, but Cassie said.

  “That’s not a thing,” she said. “If you have a magnetic field that you convert to energy, that’s just electromagnetic conversion.”

  “Not when you convert directly from magnetic energy to chemical energy,” Jesse said.

  “No electricity as a middle form?” Cassie pressed. He gave her an amused frown and shook his head.

  “All right, I’ll give it to you,” she said. He grinned, looking away.

  “They do seem to have electric features,” he said, “but it’s hard to say what’s a part of how they choose to appear and what’s really going on there.”

  Cassie squeezed her sides with her elbows.

  “I don’t know if she can do her thing, from in here.”

  “We just have to trust that she knows what she’s doing,” Jesse said.

  “They’re clever enough to do that?” Cassie answered, and he shrugged.

  “I’ve just heard them sing.”

  She grinned with just one corner of her mouth.

  “There’s no such thing as just hearing them sing, when you’re Palta.”

  He gave her another playful shrug, finishing his food and shifting his plate to indicate that he was done. A member of staff appeared and took it, replacing it with a tray of drinks of three different colors and heights. Cassie tipped her head back at them, and Jesse took the nearest one, holding it out to her in a sort of toast.

  “They match it to your meal,” he said.

  “You know what they are?” Cassie asked. He put the glass under his nose.

  “I’ve got some guesses, but no, no specific knowledge.”

  She nodded.

  “Adventurous.”

  “Luxurious,” he answered. “So how are we going to get her out?”

  “I assume it’s going to be by getting her the help she needs,” Cassie answered.

  “You going to respond to someone taking you hostage like that by doing what they want?”

  “Doesn’t really look like hostage-taking from where I sit,” Cassie said. Jesse smiled.

  “But you’re Palta. Things that would easily result in mind control for other species would merely feel odd to a Palta.”

  “I’m going to assume she knew that until I can prove otherwise,” Cassie answered.

  “Translation, you’re curious,” Jesse said.

  “You would be, too,” Cassie answered, and he shrugged.

  “But I’m not known for my reliable decision-making.”

  She pushed her plate away and watched as it disappeared and a faintly blue hand replaced it with the drinks tray.

  Hers were different from Jesse’s.

  “Interesting,” she murmured, taking the first one and sipping at it.

  It had an almost cinnamon flavor, sweet, with an alcohol tang and a flavor she had no word for in English. She recognized the fruit as Denalae. They had excellent fruit.

  “We need to run tests,” Jesse said, and Cassie shrugged.

  “Once we’re done. Either she pops out or we’ve got a captive audience. Either way looks like a win, to me.”

  Jesse nodded slowly, switching to his second drink.

  “You’re taking this pretty casually for someone who’s been possessed for the first time.”

  “This happen often enough, then?” Cassie asked.

  “When you’re a part of a diplomatic party,” Jesse said sardonically and Cassie grinned.

  “What kind of poorly-thought-out plan involves trying to gain leverage on a Palta diplomat by possessing his son?” she asked.

  “A desperate one,” he agreed.

  “A desperate one,” she emphasized. “Whatever is going on with her, she’s desperate. I want to know what’s going on with that before I just dismiss her and wish her the best.”

  Jesse grinned.

  “There’s the human I knew,” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” Cassie said. “Palta aren’t all heartless.”

  “No, but they’re much more methodical,” he said. “I’d build a trap for her, pop her out, and then interrogate her before I decided to help.”

  Cassie paused, dropping an eyebrow slowly.

  “Would not.”

  He gave her a suppressed smile and nodded.

  “Maybe, maybe not, but it’s your call.”

  He put down his glass as Cassie switched to the second d
rink.

  There were no words. One single flavor, intense, heady, and green.

  She was in love.

  “What is this?” she asked, handing it across toward him to sample.

  “Rude to ask,” he said. “Just enjoy the moment.”

  She frowned.

  “I think I disagree.”

  He stuck his tongue between his teeth and nodded.

  “And that’s the Palta. I missed you.”

  “I know you did,” Cassie said. “I was too busy to miss you.”

  “I noticed,” he said. “I want to know where you were.”

  “You aren’t responsible for me anymore,” Cassie said.

  “I’m more responsible for you than I’ve ever been,” Jesse answered. “You understand that you and I are the only independent, living Palta in the universe, as far as either of us are aware.”

  “You don’t know that,” Cassie said. “You just know that you don’t know of any others.”

  “Did you find other Palta?” Jesse asked sharply.

  “No,” Cassie said. “I’m just saying that you don’t know what I know anymore.”

  He pursed his lips.

  “I’ll admit, that’s going to take some getting used to. But it doesn’t change the point. You matter to me more than anyone else in the universe. For reasons that are a lot bigger than they used to be.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Says the man who’s afraid to kiss me for fear of giving me ideas.”

  He opened and closed his mouth.

  Points, Cassie.

  He hadn’t seen that coming.

  She hadn’t been sure if he’d kiss her. She knew he wanted to; that had been apparent for a while, but there was a sense that he couldn’t, that he shouldn’t, and that he needed to hold himself back and away from her to keep both of them safe. There were things about Palta relationships that he thought she hadn’t figured out, things that he thought were inappropriate about the very idea of a relationship between the two of them, that he thought were inescapably complex and dangerous.

  Cassie suspected she’d gotten a lot closer to the heart of understanding, meeting Mab, than Jesse ever would have guessed.

  He picked up his third drink and drained it in a single swallow.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  She raised her eyebrows, picking up her own third drink and sipping at it daintily.

  He shook his head.

  “It all matters, Cassie,” he said.

  “Should we talk about breeding plans?” she replied. “Or would you prefer to co-opt Mab’s technology and just make more of us that way?”

  “Shut up,” he said. She raised an eyebrow, taking another sip of her drink. He shook his head. “I had a wife, Cassie. I did love her. I had children. A family.”

  “You are centuries older than I am,” Cassie said. “You never had children. You had a child at a time and former offspring, off living their own lives, largely unaware of each other.”

  He sat back in his seat.

  That.

  That right there was Midas, not Cassie.

  A habit she needed to break.

  At the same time, it was the truth, and she wasn’t going to shy away from it.

  She didn’t apologize.

  She did finish her drink, a warm drink with a light, slick feel, like a heated oil kind of broth, and she sat back, looking at it.

  It finished the meal. There was no question about it. It finished the meal in a remarkably nuanced way.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  “We have to go through,” he said.

  “We need to figure out why a Siren came to me for help,” Cassie said.

  He sighed.

  “Let’s go take some measurements.”

  *********

  It was a replica of the portal room floor, on the surface. Troy recognized all of the features, the security lines that marked where you could safely stand while the portal was active, the guards watching over it to make sure that everyone coming and going was authorized and well-behaved. The window, a story above the actual floor, where the operators sat, doing their complex math and the mysterious voodoo involved in running the portal.

  “We follow the same protocols as the primary floor,” Major White said. “No one from that side talks to this side and no one on this side talks to that side.”

  “How did they staff it?” Troy asked. He’d never known how they staffed the main portal, for the math wizards running it, but he was in charge now, and he had the right to know.

  “There’s a parallel leadership,” Senator Greene said. “The only officer on this side who gets to meet Colonel Levine is the base leader.”

  “I’ll set up a meeting later today,” Bridgette said, and Troy nodded.

  “He may be involved,” Senator Greene said. “I want your input on whether to open an investigation into the other side of the base, or if they were ignorant of what was going on enough that we can treat them as if Donovan used them as tools.”

  “How could he?” Troy asked.

  Senator Greene nodded.

  “That’s the attitude I want to hear.”

  Troy sighed.

  He felt like an anaconda he’d seen in a picture who had tried to swallow a crocodile.

  You didn’t get halfway through it and turn back, though. He’d done what he had to, to get control of the base away from Donovan. He’d do what he had to, to get it back under control again, from there.

  “How are they powering it?” Troy asked.

  “Secondary set of power cables from the main power plant,” Major White said. “The General wanted a secondary power plant…”

  “But sneaking a new nuclear reactor in here under my nose would have been a bridge too far,” Senator Greene said. Major White glanced at her with nervous eyes, but he continued to address Troy.

  “We had to run at off-peak times,” Major White admitted. Troy nodded, drawing a breath and slowly letting it out.

  “All right,” he said. “Now. Why?”

  Major White nodded, putting his arms behind his back.

  “I asked them to postpone a shipment an hour so that…” He sucked on his lower lip, then nodded again and swallowed. “So that you would be here to see it.”

  “Stand back, ma’am,” Peterson said to Senator Greene, indicating the line on the floor.

  “I’ve been here before, young man,” the Senator answered, and Troy grinned, feeling a strong quease in his stomach.

  It was a big secret.

  A big, big secret.

  Conrad hadn’t even known how to evaluate it; all that Troy knew about it came from the big man, and all Conrad had seemed to know was that people were getting drafted to work over here and they came back angry and silent. The forms they had to sign to stay on the job were… stringent.

  “I want to look at the contracts that everyone had to sign before they came here,” Troy said quietly to Bridgette and she nodded.

  “I’ll have them on your desk before lunch,” she answered.

  He thought about warning her that he didn’t have a desk, but it didn’t seem worth the breath as a large wooden crate appeared on the portal floor with a subtle thud and a shudder in the floor. There was an odd smell, the air from another planet, and then voices as the men who escorted it came around and into view. The floor manager walked past them, checking a clipboard and looking over his shoulder at the gathered group - everyone knew what was going on, and they were just doing their best to continue to be professional - and he signed them in.

  “If you’d like to accompany the shipment to the processing room…?” Major White asked.

  Processing room.

  Troy pursed his lips.

  They hadn’t had the budget for a room big enough to hold the things that came through the other portal, and his people had to do everything while they were actually on the floor, in danger of getting hit by the other jumps.

  Troy knew that someone ha
d gotten hit, recently. Died. And that Donovan’s people had blamed him for being somewhere he hadn’t been supposed to be.

  This was why.

  Stretching the organization too thin to support whatever was sitting there in that crate.

  A fork truck came and lifted the crate, and Troy and the rest of the group followed along on the other side of the safety line, reaching the corner of the portal floor and cutting across the far wall, going through a large garage door into a smaller room. The fork truck left the crate and returned to the portal room, and Troy took the papers from one of the guards, reviewing them and sending them to the wall where they could supervise the cargo, but where they were not going to be able to eavesdrop on what were obviously going to be classified conversations.

  “So what do you do with a beast like this?” Senator Greene asked.

  “There will be one side that comes off,” Troy said. He stepped up to the crate, looking up at the top corners, three or four feet above his head. He couldn’t reach the top of the crate without jumping.

  “Big,” he muttered, going to another side. He found the hinges at the bottom of this side, but as he was looking up at the top for the bolts, something moved.

  He stepped away reflexively.

  Looked over at Major White.

  Things inside of crates sometimes shifted. Jumpers on the other side, packing them, thought that they could do anything they wanted to, because the crates weren’t going to move again before someone unpacked them, but they ignored that the pallets underneath them didn’t always come across in their entirety and crates ended up at an odd angle, on this side of the jump.

  But that…

  It happened again.

  It was big. And it had the sound of air moving. Almost like…

  “Was that a grunt?” Malcolm asked.

  Troy looked at Major White again, then went back over to the guards, seizing their paperwork and going through it much more carefully.

  “Where is this going, after here?” Troy asked.

  “Estonia,” one of the men said.

  Troy gritted his teeth and went back to Major White.

  “Donovan got approval for economic relationships in secret?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Major White said. “I didn’t ask.”

  “You didn’t want to know,” Troy said, sucking on a back tooth.

  “What’s in there?” Senator Greene demanded of Major White.