Free Short Stories 2013

by Baen Books

  Swearing, Jane pulled the chip out of the camera and slotted it into her home video editor. She flipped through the frames until she found the cleanest shot of the creature.

  "Does that look like a winged man to you?"

  "What exactly do these oni look like?"

  "Tall. Strong. Red haired. No one said anything about wings."

  "So there's another player in town."

  Jane cursed, dropping F bombs, and she found the clearest picture of Tinker being caught by the winged man and sent it to her printer. "They're searching the river for her body and she never went into the water."

  "Congrats on the scoop."

  "Scoop hell." Jane snatched the picture off the printer. "We're telling her family what really happened to her."

  "Really?" He looked surprised and pleased by the news.

  Jane pointed across the room at the center television where the camera dwelled on the Viceroy's open grief. "He thinks his bride went into a river full of man-eating fish. If anyone should know that Tinker was still alive, it should be him."

  #

  It was like having two children in the car with her. Okay, one child and a young adult that kept backsliding. Hal, of course, was attempting to prove he was really only eight years old. Taggart could resist the taunting part of the time. Nigel was the senile grandmother who never noticed that the children were fighting. He sat in the backseat, smiling serenely at the passing landscape. What made things worse was that Taggart called shotgun so he could film through the front window. That made it so she couldn't reach Hal to swat him into silence. She found herself tempted to hit Taggart just because he was beside her. And because he'd changed into a dark blue silk shirt and cologne that smelled so good she just wanted to roll in it.

  "I can kill us all," Jane growled, gripping the wheel tightly, and resisted the urge to drive the production truck into the ditch to prove her point.

  Somehow they reached downtown without her killing anyone.

  The EIA had Hummers in camo blocking the on ramp to 376 and then again at Second Avenue where it ducked under the Boulevard of the Allies. She avoided the EIA for the outsiders that they were. She cut up Forbes Avenue to the Armstrong Tunnels. There was a Pittsburgh police cruiser and a wooden barrier blocking the inbound lane. Luckily it was Bo Pedersen. He started to wave her away until she rolled down the window. The motion turned into a greeting.

  "Didn't recognize the truck. What happened to yours? Hal blow it up?"

  "I didn't do a thing to our truck, Bowman!" Hal shouted from the backseat, leaving out that he'd set himself and a good portion of the neighborhood on fire.

  "He's still on pain meds," Jane said.

  Bo laughed. "Yeah, I heard that Hal set himself on fire yesterday."

  Hal started to say something. Jane held up a hand to silence him without looking. Now that they'd stopped moving, she could and would climb into the backseat to beat him. Judging by his quiet, he knew this.

  "I need through, Bo," Jane said.

  Bo shook his head. "The elves are on the war path, Jane, and that means EIA is being pissy about who has access."

  "Oh, Jesus, Bo. Just open the gate and let me through, or I'll drop Hal on you and let you babysit him."

  "Hey, hey!" Bo backed away. "My wife's expecting. I'm going to be a daddy. You keep Hal."

  "Congrats, Bo. Tell Patty to let me know if she wants my place for the baby shower." The price of taking over Hyeholde was constantly being asked to host family weddings, showers, and birthday parties. Since every single party triggered old nightmares, she hated the invasions. Still, if offering up her house would get her through the tunnel, she would just have to suffer.

  Bo's huge smile indicated she'd just made someone very happy. "Will do!" He glanced toward the tunnel. "I suppose since WQED is on the 'approved' list that I can let you in. Just be careful! Tie Hal down or something."

  "Thanks! I just might do that." Jane waited for him to move the barrier and then drove into the tunnel.

  "I take it you know him," Taggart murmured.

  "His wife is my second cousin." Far enough out that Patty probably wouldn't have asked Jane to use Hyeholde but would be overjoyed at the invitation.

  "Jane is related to everyone," Hal said.

  "Not everyone," Jane growled. "It just seems that way. Most of the people who stayed in Pittsburgh after the first Startup did so because they had a shitload of family staying. My family on both sides has been here for hundreds of years."

  "Anyone that she's not related to went to high school with her or one of her five brothers."

  Boo would have started high school soon. No one would have the chance to sit beside her in class, write in her yearbook, or ask her to the prom.

  At the end of the tunnel, Jane turned left onto Second Avenue and drove down to the parking lot. The elves were still clustered around the Viceroy by the river's edge. At a safe distance were the human camps: the police, the EIA, and, of course, the news crews. Jane really didn't want to park near the reporters. They were bored and looking for something of interest and, if nothing else, Taggart and Nigel were something new. If she avoided them, though, it would be like blood in shark-infested water. She pulled in and parked beside the WQED news van.

  Leaving Chesty to guard the CBM truck, she got out with her camera in hand. Hopefully she could get to the Viceroy without attracting attention. The more people who knew that she wanted to talk to him, the more likely she would be blocked completely. After the news crews there were another rank of police, the EIA, and the Viceroy's guards.

  Complicating her attempt was the fact that Hal, Taggart and Nigel chose to trail behind her. Mark Webster knew already knew everything about Taggart and Nigel. He recognized their truck and waved in uninterested greeting. Kimberly Schotts was intent on filming the elves. She glanced over, saw Mark wave and dismissed them.

  Chloe Polanski, however, locked on target. She was the type of person that gave reporters bad names.

  "What are you and Hal doing here?" Chloe closed on them quickly. "You're not news – unless you run over your own cameraman."

  "That was an accident," Hal said.

  "Hal!" Jane tried to get around the woman but Chloe kept shifting at the same time, blocking her. "It's none of your business what we're doing here, Chloe."

  "I want to know because I am news. What do you two walking accidents think you're going to do? Help kill river sharks?" There was a huge booming explosion and water fountained upwards nearly a hundred feet and came raining down with dozens of silvery fish of all sizes. "Because the Viceroy is doing well enough on his own."

  "It's none of your damn business," Jane repeated, gripping her left fist tight. She normally didn't hit women, but normally women didn't need hitting. Chloe had been a bitch after Boo had disappeared, something Jane had worked hard to ignore at the time. She'd been under the mistaken impression that news coverage would actually help find Boo. All it did was make everyone in Pittsburgh think her mother was a horrible person, her mother included.

  Chloe flicked her gaze down to Jane's fist and smirked. "What? Are you actually going to try and hit me? You do realize I'm filming this?"

  Jane snapped her fingers over her shoulder at Taggart, trusting that he still had his camera in hand. "Film this. There, now so are we." She gave her camera to Hal. "Either get out of my way or I'm going through you."

  "Oh, the college drop-out is going to try and make me move."

  "Was that supposed to make me mad? I've seen your interviews, Chloe, you can do better than that." Jane gave a "come on" with both hands. "You want to fight, we can fight."

  Chloe smirked and shifted into a karate stance. Being that the reporter knew all about Jane's upbringing and high school sports metals, her confidence could only mean that she was even better trained.

  For a moment Jane was sure that she was about to get ass kicked but was equally sure that if she could get one good punch landed on Chloe's face, it would all be worth it. But th
en Chloe dropped out of ready stance and slid sideways, alarm filling her face.

  Jane shifted, bracing for whatever third party was joining the "discussion."

  One of the Viceroy's body guards was suddenly in their midst, a tall female with her hair dyed the same color as the protective spells tattooed down her arms like Celtic knots. Anyone with half a brain cell skittered backwards, hands raised in the universal sign of being unarmed. The female elf was one of the sekasha-caste, a holy warrior thought to be perfect, and had the freedom to kill anyone that pissed her off.

  "What's going on here?" the female snapped in English that sounded pure Pittsburgh.

  "We have something that the Viceroy needs to see," Jane said.

  "It's important that I see it," the female held out her hand.

  Jane reluctantly gave her the photograph of the winged man holding Tinker. There was no way she could fight her way past the female.

  The warrior stared at the photo and then gave Jane a hard look. "If this is faked, I'll kill you myself. How did you get it? When was it taken?"

  "I took it!" Hal leaped forward. "I was at the hospital." He pointed at his raccoon eyes as evidence. "And I was completely stoned. Still am slightly. Pain medication. Makes me all loopy."

  "Hal!" Jane cried. "You're going to get yourself killed."

  The female caught Hal's chin with her hand and turned his head this way and that. "You're the silly grass man."

  "Yes!" Hal cried and then, "No! I'm not silly."

  "Yes, you are," Jane growled. "Trust me on that. That's a single frame of a video he took while he was in the hospital."

  "Why didn't you come forward earlier?" the warrior snapped.

  "Because he was drugged, I thought he had only imagined a giant bird. I didn't hear about Tinker's disappearance until this morning. Once I realized that she went off the Boulevard right beside the hospital and that Hal had a clear view of that, I checked the footage. When we realized what it showed, we came straight here."

  "We want to see this video."

  #

  Jane had never been this close to the Viceroy Windwolf before. All the elves she knew were young looking; immortality made them practically ageless. Surrounded by his hardened warriors, though, Windwolf looked like a lost boy.

  He took a deep breath and breathed out, "Oh, thank gods, she didn't go into the river."

  "It's a tengu," Wraith Arrow, head of Windwolf's bodyguards, said. "An oni spy. Their masters made them from crows; they like to flock together. If there's one here in Pittsburgh, there's more. There's probably several watching us now, laughing at us."

  "He appears to be drugging her." The blue haired female was the only one of the elves that seemed familiar with the concept of "camera" and had explained it in detail while showing the video. She'd stopped it now on one of the frames and zoomed in on where the tengu held something white against Tinker's face. "So she would stop struggling and be easier to carry."

  The female advanced a dozen frames and then turned, holding up the camera to align it with the lay of the land. "He took her upriver."

  "He probably was trying to get to the treeline." The Viceroy's personal assistant, Sparrow, pointed out that the tengu was flying toward the closest edge of the forest without crossing the heavily populated section of Oakland. "Away from witnesses. From there he could have flown along the Rim and crossed back into the city where there're few humans."

  Windwolf looked to the blue-haired female. "Discord?"

  She looked frustrated down at the ground. "I don't know. This." She waved at the river. "This has always felt like a waste of time but short of racing blindly about, hoping for something to hit me, no. Nothing. Forgiveness."

  "She's alive," Windwolf said. "That is what is important. And she is more useful to them alive."

  The looks on older elves' faces said that death might be more pleasant than being at the mercy of the oni.

  "The sooner we find her, the less damage they can wreak on her," Sparrow said. "We can cover more ground if we split into several search parties."

  #

  Having plowed through all three channel's news crews, it was no surprise that Dmitri called moments later. Jane winced at her phone's screen and glanced toward Mark's cameraman to verify that Dmitri was probably watching her as well.

  "Hm?" Jane tried for innocent sounding.

  "What are you doing?" Dmitri asked totally deadpan.

  "Omniscient," Hal sang quietly.

  Jane snorted. Nothing supernatural about Dmitri's ability when half the time they were beaming straight to the studio, just in case Hal managed to blow up the entire neighborhood. She explained about Hal filming Tinker's kidnapping.

  "And you didn't think to share this with our news crew?"

  "Her family had the right to know first," Jane said.

  There was a long pause on the other side. "Jane, I know that you're going to want to help but you of all people can't."

  "Why can't I?" Jane tried to keep her voice neutral but it came out cold and hard.

  Dmitri sighed. "To make a long story short, because I said so. Do you really need the long story?"

  "Yes." Her voice had gone colder and harder. Her father's voice when he was truly angry. Hal was retreating, quickly.

  "I've tried several times to syndicate Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden. I know that the American audience would love it, but every time I get close to closing a deal, everything suddenly goes south for no reason. Nigel and Taggart told me yesterday about the troubles they've had getting visas to come in to film, so I checked with the other stations. They both have run into similar news black outs. This Chased by Monsters got past whatever gatekeepers are blocking us. We need for it to succeed because so far it's going to be the only voice Pittsburgh has on Earth if the elves and the oni go to full out war."

  "You think there's enough oni here to start a war?"

  "If the elves didn't want news leaking out, they'd be creating roadblocks for us here in Pittsburgh. EIA Director Maynard was handpicked by the Viceroy and he's proved himself loyal. To keep you and Hal off American televisions, they'd simply keep you from filming. Everything we know about the oni suggests that they're getting to Elfhome via Pittsburgh during Shutdown. If someone is blocking us at network level in New York, it’s the oni not the elves."

  "You really think the oni care if humans watch Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden?"

  "This is about politics, Jane. The number of troops sent to support a peace-keeping effort could be influenced by the fact that thirty percent of all Americans recognize the name Hal Rogers and know the faces of a handful of Pittsburgh homeowners."

  In other words, whatever they could get out, in whatever form, was actually propaganda.

  "Tinker is not your baby sister. The elves will look for a thousand years if they have to. I need you to make sure Chased by Monsters is our voice on Earth. Nigel and Taggart only have visas for two months and then they have to take whatever they have and leave. If they don't have enough footage for an entire season, the whole thing is canned. Do you understand?"

  "Fifty-six days, counting today, to do an entire season?"

  "You're the only one that has any hope of doing this because you're only one with the right experience with the kind of shit Elfhome can throw at a film crew. I need you focused."

  "Fine." She hung up on him just to salvage some pride. Fifty-six days. They would need to do approximately one episode every three days to meet the network's minimum. "Taggart, Nigel! Set up! We're doing a shoot here."

  "Shoot what?" Taggart asked.

  "You want to do river sharks and jumpfish. There." She pointed at the dead fish piled on the shore, the larger fishes cut open so their stomachs could be searched for one missing princess. "Whole ecology of Elfhome rivers."

  "We were hoping for living examples…" Nigel started.

  "We will get to those. Right now everything within miles is probably dead or stuffed. This is once in a lifetime shot. We'll get this now
. Now!" she shouted to get them moving.

  "Right." Nigel clapped his hands and turned to Taggart, who was already filming. "Here we are with an unexpected bounty. In one place, a full selection of all the fish found in the rivers around Pittsburgh. This massive example here is known as a river shark. They are believed to have evolved from an ancestor similar to the fresh water sharks of the species 'requiem' on Earth. Like their cousins, these sharks have round eyes and their pectoral fins are completely behind the gill slits, which normally are five in number. While Earth cousins are normally found in warm seas and mouths of rivers, the Elfhome river sharks have slowly worked their way the entire length of the Mississippi and the Ohio, an amazing one thousand, eight hundred and eighty-one miles, to find their way to Pittsburgh."

  Nigel crouched beside the shark. It dwarfed him. "While the largest of Earth's requiem sharks rival the Great Whites, Elfhome's river sharks are remarkably larger. This one here is nearly five meters long. The record here in Pittsburgh is an unbelievable six point four meters. What do these massive creatures eat? Let's see!"

  In a move rival to one of Hal's, Nigel plunged his whole arm into the slit cut in the shark's stomach. He jerked back his hand wrapped in the pulsing glowing mass of a water fairy. "What do we have here?"

  "Put it down!" Jane cried in warning.

  "Trying to," Nigel said calmly despite the wince of pain that flashed across his face.

  "That's a water fairy." Hal whipped out his ever-present expandable grab-stick. Joining Nigel in the frame, he used the tool to pry the gleaming mass from Nigel's hand. "It's a distant cousin of the cuttlefish that has been crossed with a jellyfish. This one is just a baby, but still a sturdy little critter, despite its appearance."

  "How poisonous is it?" Taggart murmured as the water fairy was peeled free to expose a massive welt on Nigel's hand.

  "Not very. Keep filming." Jane headed to her truck for her first aid kit.

  Mark met her at the jersey wall. "Dmitri wants to know if you gave me a chip yet." Chloe and Kimberly trailed in his wake, hoping to glean what they could. "What chip?"