He laughed. “Breakfast, Cait, and your uniform.”
“Thanks. I’ll eat while I dress.”
She was due to meet with her OIC—Officer in Charge—one of the Sh’Aitan. OIC necessitated The Works. The full ST uniform complete with presentation medals, braiding, and weapons.
Cait always felt more kinship with the feline, sensual Kith than the rigid, bureaucratic, and very alien-squishy-weird Sh’Aitan, though she earned her keep on contract to the Sh’Aitan, just as the Kith did.
To her eyes, the Sh’Aitan were ugly as hell, insectoid, and yet somehow snail-like, complete with eyestalks, suckers, and multiple eyes. The stuff of yet more nightmares. They hired the Kith, the Kith found the Slip Travelers, and everyone worked for the Sh’Aitan.
By their standards, they were the pinnacle of civilization. By hers, they were honest-to-goodness bug-eyed monsters who insisted on protocol and pomp. There were other humanoids in the galaxy, of course. She’d even met some of them. Humanoids weren’t rare, but they weren’t the only game in town either. There was more variety in creation than any zoo could ever hope to match.
After meeting her OIC, she’d finish this term on-ship between missions with the First Kith Commander. The Commander would insure her insertion. It was a delicate procedure, one the Kith had perfected over the course of their thousand-year contract with the Sh’Aitan. They had very few failures.
But it was always a possibility.
She set out makeup, then dried and fixed her hair, maintaining the habits that made her feel human. As she finished breakfast, Lance held out the shimmering gold, black and red uniform jacket taken from its rolling stand inside the door.
“Computer on,” she said and her orders appeared in English on the mirror’s glassy surface. She was headed to DC this time, to handle the relocation of an alien pet dropped on Earth. Her heart soared. The Seers had determined she’d be needed on planet in October. They hadn’t known why, only that she would be, and this, apparently, was the reason which had manifested.
Washington, DC. It wasn’t New York, but it was America. Anywhere on Earth was great, but DC beat all hell out of Siberia, Guyana, or Barcelona, nice as they were. There was nothing like the bona fide, honest-to-Almighty-God, US of A.
She’d been to other planets, ten or twelve of them now, and nothing felt right, nothing smelled or looked like Earth. She always focused on that when she was returning a miscreant to another region, or as with the Barcelona mission, bringing home a thief turned hero.
“Why do the Sh’Aitan insist on these damn tarted-up uniforms?” she complained as she slipped the snug sleeves over her thin skinarmor. “I feel like a Laker Girl.”
“Last time you said it made you look like a hooker in a high-dollar porn flick,” Lance commented, adding two pieces of braid to the shoulders of the jacket.
“That too.” She slithered into the tight uniform pants. Sh’Aitan tailoring at its finest. In spite of her emotional ups and downs, the job suited her. The same couldn’t be said for the uniform.
“Do you want targeting and relocation medals next? Planetary awards? Or mission medals?”
“Targeting and relo. I’m a Rimmer, after all.” She pinned them on.
“You have garnered three or four per mission. Most do not.”
“All in the line.” She dismissed the implied praise. She was part cop, part game warden, part bounty hunter, and all Wild West sheriff. Kind of like a Texas Ranger, but for the whole planet.
Not bad work, really. The only drawbacks were the dead-to-all-you-knew bit and the knowledge that the bug-eyed monsters had their suckers on the button that could leave your planet a cinder, with nary a Darth Vader rasp or a Death Star approach to warn them.
When they’d woken her from coldsleep seven years ago, they’d reiterated that she was to protect her planet against non-Alliance pirate scum, smugglers and domestic “issues.” Basically to keep Earthlings from knowing that the Sh’Aitan and the Alliance existed. She’d headed to boot camp, where she learned her predecessor had perished in a fiery crash. They needed her up and ready within two Earth years to be a full ST.
“After five years of this, you’d think I’d get the hang of it.”
“Five years. A milestone. They will give you a bonus for surviving. That’s a record for Earth.”
“So they keep saying,” she muttered, stamping into the regulation footgear. The heavy soles gave traction on the ship’s decking, but it was like walking in concrete combat boots.
“You’ll get new braiding and uniforms,” Lance continued. “Full Alliance STs receive a long cape, medals and property at the five year mark. It is a luck year among the Sh’Aitan. Occasionally they extend the same courtesy to a Rim ST. You will be one to whom they extend the honor, I am certain.”
Lance was the conduit by which she would know what an honor it was and not embarrass the corps by declining it or doing something equally honorless and Rim-mannered.
Once again, she let the difference in what each race considered civilized remind her that although Lance was her lover he wasn’t her friend, no matter how it seemed. And as usual, she played along, because life as the only human among a bunch of aliens was lonely enough.
“A cape? Seriously? And more medals?” Add on a cape, and she’d look like an Elvis impersonator.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I’ll leave the building now.
“You must be presentable as you achieve higher rank.”
“Sure. Of course.” Just goes to show the vast difference between what each species considers presentable.
“Indeed.” He offered her the gauntlets that completed the outfit. “The plating on the gloves was quite tarnished again.”
“They haven’t been the same since Meena Pal. Could you order me a replacement set?”
The gloves had been slimed when a multi limbed sea creature had tried to suck her and her detainee off the transport platform on Meena Pal.
She set the Barcelona mug aside. Suddenly, she didn’t want any more coffee. It had taken her seven months to find her quarry on Earth, in Barcelona, Spain, and return him to Meena Pal.
The worst part of mission had been those horrifying moments on the landing platform, as she handed him over to the Meena Pal officials. She and he both had faced a watery, monster-gullet-end.
Meena Pal’s ocean life was of Leviathan proportion and appetite. If you offended the four, related, ruling Queens, you got The Hook, and the sea creatures got you. Meena Pal gave thorough meaning to Earth’s “sleeping with the fishes” treatment.
“You shivered, Cait. Should I adjust the temperature?” he asked as he handed her the last set of knives. She fitted them into the sheaths across her shoulder blades.
“No, I’m good.” A frown furrowed his perfect brow and she could tell he wasn’t going to let it go. “I was thinking about Meena Pal.”
“A premonition? Should you speak with the Seers before you drop?”
It was the Seers who had known who Cait was, where she was, and that she was the best option for the next ST. It was the Seers who knew when—though seldom why—an ST would be needed on-planet at a given time.
If you were psi-gifted, even just the bit Cait had, the Seers saw you as kin in some weird way she couldn’t fathom. The guys in her old Marine Corps squadron had nicknamed her Mystic because of her hunches. The Kith had improved those hunches, and those same hunches meant the Seers were more willing to do a little extra for Cait even if she was a Rimmer.
Cait almost never took advantage of it. She trusted her weapons and her skill, and only then, her hunches.
“No,” she finally answered. “I’m good. But thanks.” She turned in front of the mirror. “Damn, that’s a lot of hardware.” There were weapons on virtually every body surface.
“You look splendid, Cait.”
“Dangerous and outré,” she disagreed, but genially.
“So you always say.” He touched his lips to her cheek. “I will have your things
at the loading dock before your return.”
She returned his peck on the cheek, then headed to the Command Ledge.
Chapter Three
Cait checked the gauges as she sat in the Insertion capsule. The symbols on the board in front of her flashed in a shade of purple that was nearly beyond her vision. She knew what the shapes and forms meant, though. Countdown to Insertion was underway. The destination info for Washington was offset by three letters.
“Ah, BWI.” She grinned. They were bringing her in at the airport near Baltimore, Maryland. She pulled the travel documents from the pocket of the suit Lance had laid out for her. Sure enough, she had a stamped, ‘used’ airline boarding pass and claim checks for baggage coming in from Istanbul.
A limo would be waiting for the drive to DC, and keys to a spacious condo the management company had leased already rested in her purse. Years, maybe centuries before, the Sh’Aitan had created accounts and developed ways to do business on Earth, through management companies, holding companies and other, more nefarious means. All without ever having to prove who they were or what they were doing.
It was astonishing what could be done by wire transfer, FedEx and email these days.
“ST Patten, you are cleared for Insertion. The servers are aboard. Are you prepared?”
“I am prepared, First Kith, Malkali.” Launching an ST was always done by the First Kith Commander, in this case, one of the most High-Ledge senior Kith she’d yet met. She’d had to work not to show how impressed she’d been by his immensely long tail, wide, red neck stripes and serious battle scars. “Ism-wroool, First Kith, Commander Trrrch.” She managed the standard parting—good hunting—and a respectable rolling-r version of the Commander’s name.
“Ism-wroool, ST Patten. Rwm-re-maaante.” Good hunting. Return victorious.
And they thought humans were battle-mad barbarians.
“Azante. Begin Insertion.”
As the countdown reached fifteen, she closed her eyes. It helped with drop disorientation. She tapped the papers again, reciting her alias. She was Dr. Cait Brennan, geologist. A brunette with brown eyes and a tattered, stamp-laden passport, a just-renewed DC drivers’ license, and a well-stocked bank account.
It would be nice to actually use her real first name again.
The transparent shell of her capsule silvered over at drop, and she looked at it long enough to see her reflected features.
The latest look was very much the sober, serious scientist. She’d need that anonymity as she searched for the abandoned interstellar pet lurking in the Potomac river basin near DC. An easy mission for once.
A two-tone chime alerted her.
She was about to be slipped into the space between moments, her body mass compressed and reassembled in a kind of timeless space that was then speeded up to match real time.
That was the closest anyone could explain it to her.
She hummed a Beyoncé tune as the capsule pressure increased. It reminded her of pilot training, and that made her smile. To stay focused as the pressure reached unbearable levels, she mentally disassembled and reassembled a Kalashnikov standard issue weapon. The capsule went dark, warning her to expect the final punch of Insertion.
For an excruciating moment, she was weightless. Then came the distinct, gut-twisting spin that signaled the time transition. She fought hideous nausea for the remaining sixty seconds.
With a reassuring thunk, the capsule settled into the space between moments. The Kith’s unique, albeit limited, ability to slip between streams of time and space made the whole Rim Planet ST Program possible. She never complained about Insertion. No matter how she hated it, it took her home.
A scrape of metal signaled the droids going to work. They uncoupled luggage and unsealed the capsule. Their footsteps snapped in the swirling, white silence as they scurried away to deposit her mountain of bags in a luggage cart passed and tagged by customs and ready to be offloaded onto the baggage carousel.
At the oxygen hiss of the hatch’s opening, she checked her watch. Fifteen seconds to time return.
She accepted a droid’s help out of the capsule. There was a black dot in the mist, and she straddled it like an actress hitting her mark.
Ten seconds. Two more droids scurried out of grey nothingness as the other resealed the capsule. They stepped into a compartment in the side, and the door slid noiselessly closed behind them.
“Baggage claim number four,” the last droid said, picking up the black dot before handing her another set of claim stubs before it too disappeared.
Five seconds. Cait braced for the sucking power of the capsule’s departure and her own reentry into normal time. She’d thrown up for two days after her first mission. Now she knew how to keep her stomach braced for the jolt.
“Four.” Her skin crawled with the sensation of a thousand biting ants, signaling the whirl of molecules as they resumed their speeding path to solidity.
“Three.” The ground gained texture, pressure.
“Two.” Air blew gently on her skin, and colors came into focus.
“One.” Gravity, humidity and sound returned in a staggering rush. A blast of noise heralded her return to the spatial world. It coalesced into separate sounds—the faint bing-bong of a passenger cart, the muffled roar of jet engines, and the omnipresent sound of hundreds of voices.
A deodorizer smell assaulted her nose and the echoing flush of a commode was so loud she jolted at the reverberation. Her elbow hit a metal partition—the restroom stall—and with a shaky laugh, she leaned on its reassuring firmness. Strangely appropriate, she decided, for them to plop her into a stall in the ladies room.
She looked behind her as the toilet flushed, and grimaced.
It was a typical airport bathroom.
* * *
“I’ve been out of the country for two years,” Cait said as the limo driver hefted piece after piece of luggage into the car. “I’m excited to be home.” He didn’t need to know she’d never seen her condo in DC, much less lived there.
“Good thing you requested the SUV,” he said, settling the last carton into the Ford’s roomy cargo area. He put two metallic cases on the back seat floorboard and let her battered, and very full, briefcase collapse onto the seat’s soft leather. They pulled away from the terminal, rolling smoothly through traffic onto I-95 South toward Washington.
After a few miles of silence, the driver asked again for the address, speaking it clearly into his iPhone.
“That area is nice,” he commented as the phone chirped out the route. “You live there long?”
“Not long, no. And the way things change in DC, I won’t be much help in getting us there.”
“I have the app on my phone, so we’ll be fine.” He patted the phone he’d clipped into a holder on the dash.
“Then I’ll get my reading finished,” she said, unfolding the mission notes she’d used as a bookmark. The driver turned music on, very low, and let her read.
The current op was simple. A quick pick up of a Tyranalnid Opthoid, a stranded ship’s pet. As with any culture, if a pet behaved badly or became a nuisance, the idiots among the galaxy would just drop it on the interstellar version of a deserted country road. In this case, the ship belonged to a Gretzprtica Trader, and the deserted road was Earth. They’d been caught exiting the atmosphere and questioned, hence her mission.
The Ty-Op was currently hanging out in the Potomac basin, and/or its tributaries. For the moment, it was actually purifying the water.
She flipped the page and shuddered. The damn thing was uglier than a mud fence dipped in misery. A combination squid/octopus with maybe some platypus thrown in for laughs. Ugh. Nearly untraceable otherwise, due to their physical makeup, the Ty-Op had to be hunted down and returned to space.
“Did you need the heat turned up?” the driver asked. He must have seen the movement.
“No, thanks. Just a momentary thing.”
“Ah, someone walked on your mother’s grave? My mom used to say
that.”
She frowned. As a marine, she’d been superstitious as hell, and being an ST only made it worse. Talk of graves on the first day of a drop wasn’t a serious omen. And as far as she knew from her last mission, her mother was alive.
Still.
“Yes, that sort of thing.” She dropped her gaze back to her notes, closing the conversation.
The difficulty with Ty-Ops, other than having an alien life form on the planet, was that if they didn’t mate regularly, their water cleaning ability shifted to toxin production. Either worked on-ship, as the toxins they produced made an excellent fuel. For an Earth river, it wasn’t so great.
What would be worse though, was if another one got dumped. The nasty squelchy things would climb over, eat or otherwise dismember anything in between them and the prospective mate.
For a week, the happy couple would go at it in the water, being amphibious, sort of. They’d poison any Earth watercourse irretrievably and create a cesspool of Ty-Op slime that no Earth hazmat cleanup team could handle. Worse than any oil or chemical spill.
Shipboard, their handlers just switched tanks from purification to fuel production. No big deal.
On-planet, even one of the damn things would kill a significant sector of wildlife and, if left alone too long, possibly portions of the DC population. Her mission was to catch it and get it back off planet.
Yee-haw, let’s rope some aliens! She grinned at her own fancies even as she evaluated the chances of the Ty-Op doing serious damage. This was why she likened being an ST with being a Texas Ranger. The old Texas Ranger motto—one riot, one Ranger—applied to STs as well. One planet, one ST. She was it, baby, and if it meant ropin’, shootin’, or runnin’ some squelchy space things off the “range” of Earth, she was up for the task.
“Would’ve been easier in Texas,” she muttered to herself. Why did they have to drop the slug near DC? Why not some bum-fu place in rural Montana or in a nice swamp in Florida? It might have given Florida Fish and Game a leg up on handling the boa constrictor problem in the Everglades if it had landed there.
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