by K. D. Mattis
“This is it?” the guest asked.
Gibbs nodded.
“I expected something larger.”
With a forced smile, Gibbs said, “This is one of the main facilities. We’re spread out all over the place. It wouldn’t make much sense to put all of our operation centers in one location.”
“We did.”
“Yeah, and your people lost.”
The guest stared down the commander for a minute but realized it didn’t have an effect. “I wouldn’t be quite so cocky, Mister Gibbs. Without our help, your planet wouldn’t have survived the last encounter with the Culdarians.”
The commander grasped his guest by his shoulder and gave his hand a firm shake. “It’s Commander.”
After navigating the maze of corridors, Gibbs knocked on the door to his commanding officer.
“Come in,” said a voice, cracking through a small speaker.
Gibbs entered, offered a salute, and stood off to the side. “Admiral Asher, your stalker.”
Standing, Asher stretched before lazily returning the salute and stepping forward to shake the hand of her guest.
“It’s good to see you,” she said.
“I’m not sure I can say the same, Admiral.”
Asher dismissed the guards from her office and told them to wait outside while she made her way back to her desk. After she took her seat, the guest and Commander Gibbs took theirs.
“Admiral, I—”
“Commander,” Asher said, interrupting the guest, “did he give you any problems?”
“None so far, sir.”
“Good.” Turning back to the guest, she said, “You were saying?”
The man cleared his throat and clasped his hands together. “Admiral, I don’t think I appreciate this arrangement. I came to you voluntarily to offer information. Having your soldiers apprehend me seems unnecessary.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but I thought it was necessary given our previous encounters. You haven’t exactly done much to garner my confidence.”
The man opened his mouth to speak, but Asher cut him off again.
“First question: how did you acquire your host? Is he still in there?”
“Not really. He was a homeless drug addict. If anything, I kept him alive by taking over his body.”
“Would he agree?”
“Admiral, if you’re implying that I took someone who would resist—”
Asher stood and spun her globe. “I’m not implying. You warned me about an alien invasion, and your people have given me information to help fight against it. I’m grateful, but I also have to wonder if there’s an invasion by another group that I should be worrying about too.”
The man tried to stand as well, but a quick move of Gibbs’s hand forced him back in his seat. The guest glared at Gibbs but continued. “We would never do anything like that. We lost our world. We know how much that hurts, and we would never put another species through that. But yes, we need hosts to survive. We try to accept willing hosts, but if we can’t find one, sometimes we must make due. That’s what I did with this man. He was behind a building, doped out of his mind. I figured that if his life was so bad that he considered that an option, then he probably wouldn’t mind if I took over.”
“Did you ever ask him?”
“I tried. He never responded. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what that means.”
Leaning against her desk, Asher picked up her model of the Explorer and turned it over a few times in her hand. Then she tossed it to her guest. He fumbled but managed to catch it.
“You’re going to help us, and you’re going to fight for us,” Asher said, crossing her arms.
“We might.”
“You will.”
The man placed the model back on its stand. “You think you’re going to force us? You don’t even know how to find us.”
Smiling, Asher said, “I won’t have to force you or any of your people. You’ll fight for us, and you’ll do it willingly. I know, because if I lost my planet to the Culdarians and I had the chance for revenge, I’d take it. Since you reached out to me, I have a funny feeling that you’d do the same thing.”
The man stared forward for a moment before bowing his head and nodding.
“Good,” Asher said. “I want you to join Commander Gibbs here. Something big is coming, and we need every advantage we can get. Your job is to get us those advantages. I don’t care if it’s information, resources, or people. If it can help, we need it. Do you understand?”
The man nodded again before leaning back in his chair.
“Anything to share before we go?” Gibbs asked.
“The Culdarians aren’t gone, and they aren’t going to quit. If you understand that, you know about as much as I do at this point. I haven’t yet contacted my people since you destroyed the weather device.”
“Good,” Asher said. “You’re free to go. I expect regular updates.”
Gibbs and the Symbiant stood and walked to the door. Before they could leave, Asher said something that made them turn.
“I’ll read the report of your conversation with Commander Gibbs, but I want to hear something directly from you. What exactly are we up against?”
Wincing, the Symbiant said, “Monsters, Admiral. Absolute monsters.”
Back in the hall, Gibbs and the Symbiant walked with guards close behind. As they moved, the Symbiant couldn’t hide his amusement.
“What?” Gibbs asked.
“Nothing. It’s just that, your guards, do they really think it would take so many of them to kill me if I decided to try something?”
Gibbs laughed. “No, of course not. Mostly it’s for show. It’s for their benefit as much as it is for anyone else. They need to feel useful, so they’re escorting a high-profile guest. Helps with morale, I guess.”
As they moved into the lobby, the Symbiant turned his head toward a group of young men and women walking in unison while following a senior officer.
“What are those?” the Symbiant asked.
“New transfers. Just a tour of the facility.”
The Symbiant stopped and turned. The guards lowered their guns in his direction, but he ignored all of it and walked past them. They only held their fire because Gibbs didn’t show any concern.
“What is it?”
“Two of those transfers. They’re Symbiants.”
Grabbing a radio from his belt, Gibbs asked, “You’re sure?”
“Positive. I’m not sure which ones, but two of them are definitely Symbiants.”
Gibbs pointed to the group and the guards all broke off and apprehended the entire group of transferred personnel. While the guards handled the transfers, Gibbs and the Symbiant kept walking toward a large elevator, taking it up to exit the facility.
22
“Where are we?” the Symbiant asked.
“You don’t know?” Gibbs replied.
“No. Should I?”
Gibbs shook his head. “Probably not, but we hoped that you might. There was an incident here that caught our attention. It’s been cleaned up a bit, but it’s still a mess. I hope you don’t have a weak stomach.”
“Technically, I don’t have a stomach at all.”
The men stepped out of their car and walked through an apartment complex. The dogs that barked at them and the children that ran by barely registered, and they walked on as if no one else in the world existed or mattered.
“That’s it?”
Gibbs nodded, and the men continued to an apartment at the back of the complex. Yellow tape covered the windows and doors of one of the rooms, but Gibbs pulled out a key and made his way inside.
A chemical smell coming from the carpet filled the air and burned their nostrils. The cleaning agent had done a decent job of distorting the bloodstains on the floor, but it didn’t remove them.
“What happened here?” asked the Symbiant.
Gibbs walked around the room while pointing to the bloodstains and looking around. “We w
ere hoping you might know.”
Shaking his head, the Symbiant carefully stepped over the mess and poked his head in each room of the apartment. After a few minutes, he sat down on the couch with a bored look on his face.
“Nothing?” Gibbs asked.
“It would help if I knew what I was supposed to find.”
“We don’t know, but we think this is related to another Symbiant. One of our former corpsmen said this doctor did something to him. He didn’t give any details.”
“Well, if there was anything here, it’s gone now.”
Leaning against the wall, the commander asked, “You don’t even want to look around? We have free range of the place for our investigation.”
The Symbiant knelt and ran his fingers through the carpet. As they crossed over a stain, he paused, considering the sight before him.
“My host has eyes, Commander. I do not. I can use his eyes, but that’s not really how my species looks for things. We feel for certain energies and changes in the environment. This area has nothing for us to find. At least, not as far as I’m concerned.”
The pair returned to their car and drove for a long while without saying a word to each other. Gibbs watched the road and his surroundings like normal, but the man in the passenger seat just stared forward with blank eyes and a gaping mouth. On several occasions, Gibbs looked over to see the man sitting like that, but he never worked up the nerve to say anything.
Pulling into the parking lot of a government building, Gibbs put the car in park and stepped out. After a moment of staring, the Symbiant stepped out as well. A plump woman met the pair at the front desk and took them to a well-lit lab with stainless-steel cabinets at the back. The woman pointed to one of the drawers and reached forward to pull it open, but Gibbs put up his hand, stopping her.
“Thank you,” he said, “but I’ll take it from here. We need some time alone with the body. If you don’t mind, I also need to know where his belongings are.”
“Sure,” the woman said after making a note on a pad of paper and sliding it into her pocket. “I’ll get the tub with his stuff and give you some time. Before I do that, there is a bit of a formality.”
Gibbs preemptively pulled on a tag attached to his neck by a lanyard and pushed it toward the woman. Her eyes went wide before she forced a smile, nodded, and left the room.
The Symbiant cleared his throat. “I still find it odd that your species relies on writing to convey messages. It just seems terribly inefficient.”
Ignoring the comment, Gibbs pulled on the handle of the cabinet. As the cabinet pulled out, so did a long, metal slab with a cold body sitting on top. Gibbs grabbed the sheet covering the body, looked at his companion to make sure he was watching, and pulled back.
The body on the table wasn’t remarkable in any way except for the absence of most of its head.
“What happened here?” the Symbiant asked.
“You tell me.”
The Symbiant leaned over the body and closed his eyes, as if concentrating on something particularly hard.
The Symbiant’s eyes shot open again, and he took a step back. “There was a Symbiant in that body. I can feel traces of it, but it’s been removed.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happens when one of you is removed from your host?”
The Symbiant stared at Gibbs like he was stupid. “We die. Obviously.”
“So, this was a murder?”
“It looks like it.”
“Why?” Gibbs asked, pulling the sheet back over the body.
While he waited for an answer, Gibbs pushed the body back into the wall and stood there with his arms crossed. The answer never came, so the commander walked out of the lab and to the front of the coroner’s office, where he found the woman waiting for him with a tub on the counter. She jumped out of her seat when she saw him and handed him a clipboard.
“Here’s a list of the contents. Just his clothes, keys, wallet, that sort of thing. Nothing unusual.”
Gibbs read over the clipboard before handing it back to the woman. He pulled off the lid and reached around. He hoped to see something that wasn’t on the list, but the list was precise, right down to the forms of identification and credit cards in the man’s wallet. Pulling out the wallet, Gibbs flipped through the cash in the hopes of finding something hidden. He came up empty, so he sorted through the business cards.
The cards seemed perfectly normal. They were the sort of cards anyone might pick up from people they met. One, however, stood out from the rest. It was the only from a town different than the doctor’s home.
Holding the card up, Gibbs asked the Symbiant, “Does Jasper, Texas mean anything to you?”
The Symbiant shook his head.
“Good. I guess we’re taking a road trip.
“Stop here.” The Symbiant’s body grew rigid as he spoke.
Gibbs slowed down, but he kept driving. “We’re not at the address.”
“It doesn’t matter. Stop here.”
“What is it?”
The Symbiant focused too intently on something outside the window to answer. Frustrated, Gibbs let out a sigh, made a U-turn, and drove to where he was asked to stop.
The Symbiant ran out into an empty field, then to a line of trees, disappearing. Gibbs muttered something under his breath and took after the man in a mad sprint.
In the maze of trees, Gibbs looked around desperately for the Symbiant. It took several minutes, but he found him desperately digging in the soil with his bare hands at the base of a tree. Despite several attempts from the commander to interrupt and figure out what was going on, the Symbiant kept right on digging. Frustrated, Gibbs leaned forward and placed a hand on the Symbiant’s shoulder. The Symbiant whipped around, grabbed him with both hands, and threw him off to the side before returning to his digging.
Gibbs jumped up and pulled out a pistol from the back of his waistband.
“Get up!” he shouted. The order went ignored, so he shouted again, seriously considering pulling the trigger.
The Symbiant pulled something from the soil. He marveled at it while he slowly stood and turned to face the commander. As Gibbs let his eyes fall on the cylinder in the man’s hands, he lowered his gun and put it back in place.
“What is that?”
Looking up, the Symbiant offered a dazed smile. “I haven’t seen one of these in a while. It’s a beacon, and it’s how we share information with one another.”
“Who drops them off?”
“Oh, anyone. They’re not particularly difficult to make, but it does take considerable time to find the appropriate materials. Since this one’s fairly new, I’m going to venture a guess that your doctor friend put it here. That or someone sent him here to find it.”
Gibbs stepped forward and reached out for the device. The Symbiant looked at his waiting hands but didn’t push the device forward.
“I wonder if he ever saw it,” Gibbs said. “What kind of information do the beacons hold?”
Shrugging, the Symbiant turned the device over in his hands, still struck in awe of its appearance. “Anything and everything. They react with our senses and draw us in. It used to be that we put these out to help new Symbiants find their way after the Culdarians stranded them on Earth. Nowadays, we’re not dropped off very often.” The Symbiant’s face twisted in delight. “Commander, would you like to see it?”
Gibbs gave a curt nod and leaned against a tree to watch the display. The Symbiant set to work. He turned it over in his hands a few more times, inspecting the object closely. When he found the button he was looking for, he placed the object on the ground and gave it a press.
As soon as the Symbiant pulled his hand away, the cylinder melted into a deformed puddle on the ground. The surface of the puddle bounced, slowly at first, but it picked up speed by the second. With each bounce, a different shape formed at the top of the puddle. It started as just another cylinder, but it quickly changed to sharp, sta
r patterns. With every bit of movement, the puddle broadcast a bright, neon light. Sometimes it broadcast a solid color, sometimes in a sort of confused rainbow.
After several minutes of constant bouncing, the puddle formed into a pyramid that spun under its own power. Each side showed a different color grew so bright that the edges of the pyramid were no longer distinguishable from each other. The lights died down, and the edges of the pyramid looked as though an invisible fountain poured water down its sides in a constant stream.
Gibbs couldn’t hide his smile at seeing something so beautiful, but the Symbiant backed up against a tree, recoiling in horror.
“What’s the matter?” Gibbs asked, now aware of his companion’s concern. He reached out for the man, afraid that the beacon somehow hurt him, but the Symbiant barely noticed.
The display from the beacon finished, and the liquid pooled back into the shape of a cylinder and went completely still.
The Symbiant stepped forward and swept the beacon up into his arms.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why would they do that?”
“Do what?”
“It’s—No, it can’t be. We need to find another beacon. I need to know what’s going on.”
23
The car came to a stop, and Asher finally looked up from her tablet. Her eyes burned from the strain of staring at the screen for so long, but she knew she still had so much work to do and begrudged stopping.
The man in the front passenger seat jumped out of the car and opened the door for the young admiral. She stepped out, offered him a curt nod, and walked to the front door of her father’s house. A second man ran up behind her with her luggage dangling awkwardly from his hands. He managed to carry all of it on his own, but just barely. As Asher rang the doorbell, he continued holding the luggage. He shifted the weight in his arms, but he didn’t make any attempt to place the bags on the ground or readjust.
Asher’s dad charged out the front door and swept his daughter up into a hug. He swung her around like a child before noticing the men that accompanied her.
