by Lauren Esker
Pradhan let the front drape fall and walked swiftly toward the kitchen.
"Hey." Gary struggled to his feet.
Rhodes dropped the candy wrapper and tensed to get up. "You sit right back down, buddy."
Pradhan turned back from the kitchen doorway. "No, it's okay. Let him look. I'll keep an eye on him." She smiled at Gary. Pretty gal. Too bad she was a member of Club Fed, not to mention half his age with the gleam of a wedding band on her finger. "You're going to want to see this, Mr. Metzger."
"Better you than me," Rhodes said after them. "The less I see of those freaks, the better."
Gary reached for a walking stick. "Leave those," Pradhan said.
"I can't walk without 'em."
"They're also a weapon."
"C'mon, lady, what do you think I'm gonna do, use my karate moves to overpower you? I'm a sixty-four-year-old guy with a back injury."
The sense of heaviness and pressure was greater now, making his head ache. Pradhan looked like she was feeling it too. "Okay, yeah, whatever," she said, but watched him carefully as he limped to her with the stick in his hand.
When she turned around to go into the kitchen, Gary gave a passing thought to whacking her over the head with it. Trouble was, she probably knew all the karate moves he didn't. And there was still her partner back there with a gun.
So he didn't, and they went into the kitchen together. Pradhan opened the back door. "Stay here," she told Gary.
"Where you think I'm gonna run to?" he asked, with a pointed look at the cane in his hand.
Outside, night had fallen, dark as the inside of a black cat. It wasn't raining, but the air had the clammy thickness that meant it wanted to. Good night for Halloween, if not a good night for the county's trick-or-treaters, but all of that flew out of Gary's head at the sight of something in the pasture that wasn't supposed to be there.
Lights.
They weren't bright. A string of dim red and amber running lights traced out the lower edge of something big and dark that was just settling down in the pasture. Warm air rushed past Gary's face out of the cool night, blowing his hair back.
"What the heck is that thing?" He squinted as if he could make his eyes pierce the darkness through sheer willpower alone. The yard lights penetrated only dimly back here, but as his eyes adjusted, he could make out the rough outline of the dark shape against the grass just as the red and gold running lights winked out. Its surface was faintly reflective, and it was too big to be a helicopter. Anyway, it hadn't made any noise, none at all except the heaviness which was gone now. And he didn't think it was his imagination that it had been in the air when he'd first seen it. It had flown here, not driven.
"What do you think it is, Mr. Metzger?" Agent Pradhan's voice was soft, and she was leaning forward intently. One of her hands, Gary noticed, had crept under her jacket to touch her gun.
Sudden bright light appeared in a door-sized block against the dark backdrop of the ...
Okay, fine, let's just call it what it is: it's a spaceship, a goddamn pardon-my-French spaceship sitting in my cow pasture, and those people walking out of it right now are probably more of Rei's blue guys.
They'd found Rei.
There were four of them, each one built like a brick outhouse. The door in the side of the ship closed behind them, and as they strode toward the ranch house, Gary kept revising his mental estimate of how big they were. Taller than NBA basketball players, wider than linebackers. The fact that two of them were female didn't seem to make an ounce of difference; the women were brick walls just as much as the guys. By the time they reached the back porch, Gary was trying to come to terms with the fact that all three of them were close to eight feet tall and probably three-fifty, four hundred pounds of pure muscle.
And they weren't Rei's type of alien. These guys were big cats. He'd seen alien cat people like that on the cover of one of Sarah's science fiction novels once. The fellow in the lead was a lion-type guy; he even had a sort of mane. The others were a tawny-colored woman, a woman with tiger stripes, and a leopard-spotted guy.
Pradhan stepped forward, interposing her own body between Gary and the aliens as they reached the back porch.
"Sergeant Kyaroi," she said, pronouncing the word carefully. "This is Mr. Gary Metzger, and this residence belongs to him and his family. The Metzgers, their livestock, and their property are not to be harmed in the search for your deserter, are we clear?"
The lion-man, Kyaroi, answered with a flood of liquid syllables. Gary couldn't understand a word, and he also couldn't tell if it was Rei's language with a different accent, or a different alien language entirely.
Pradhan seemed to understand perfectly, which meant she either had one of those same things Rei had put in Sarah's head, or she'd known the cat-people long enough to learn their language. Whatever he'd said made her scowl.
Damn it, Gary thought. And here I never used to listen to Sal Prouty down at the feed store when he'd go on about how the government was covering up alien moon landings. Looks like I owe ol' Sal an apology.
"It was my understanding that your organization and mine would be working jointly on this," Pradhan said.
Kyaroi jerked his head at the lion-woman. She nodded and went past Pradhan, shouldering her unceremoniously out of the way. Gary moved hastily aside; the woman didn't even look at him and gave him the impression she would have gone through him if he hadn't moved. She was tall enough that she had to duck to avoid bumping her head in the kitchen doorway.
"As a representative of Earth—" Pradhan began. Her hand had drifted near the butt of her gun. Kyaroi reached out, almost casually, and gripped her wrist.
Inside the house, there was a sudden yell—Gary jumped— followed by a thump, and silence.
"Get your hands off me," Pradhan said softly. She didn't look nearly as freaked out as Gary expected any reasonable person to be with eight feet of alien cat monster looming over them.
Kyaroi said a few words, his voice low and calm, but Pradhan's face twisted in fury. She lashed a foot out at Kyaroi's ankle; he blocked it. Gary moved hastily as far from them as he could get in the confines of the porch, mentally calculating his distance from the one gun on the property, a shotgun he used for duck hunting, which was stored in the basement. No chance, he thought.
Pradhan lost her brief scuffle with the alien leader, leaving her with a bruise on her cheek and her gun and phone in Kyaroi's hands. At a word from him, the tiger-woman moved forward and shoved both of them unceremoniously back into the house. Once again Gary found himself being escorted through his own kitchen, this time in the opposite direction.
In the living room, Pradhan's partner was slumped in the armchair while the lion-woman prowled the room, looking at everything. Pradhan cried out in dismay and hurried to him, kneeling to feel his pulse. Gary simply sat down on the couch. Still wasn't much he could do. He didn't think Rhodes was dead; he could see the agent's chest rising and falling from here.
Pradhan had a brief, angry exchange with the two alien women that ended with her being frog-marched to the couch and made to sit beside Gary.
Despite his fear for Rei and Sarah, who would be walking straight into an even more dire trap than he'd feared, Gary couldn't resist twisting the knife. "Still think it's a good idea making deals with aliens?"
Pradhan gave him a flat look. "Shut up."
***
Driving on the familiar highway helped calm Sarah's nerves somewhat, but it also freed her mind to keep replaying the fight in vivid detail. She gripped the wheel tightly, turned the radio to a talk station to see if anyone was going to mention the appearance of aliens in downtown Eau Claire, and most importantly, tried to keep Rei from seeing how shaky she still was.
It's so stupid. What's wrong with me? I shouldn't be reacting like this. I've helped butcher chickens since I was a kid, I sat with my mom when she was dying ...
But there was something different about having someone come after her with intent to kill. She kept s
eeing the green light shattering on the air in front of them, the flash of the alien tiger's fangs as it sprang after Rei.
"Are there tools in this vehicle?"
Rei's quiet voice jerked her out of her thoughts. "There's a toolbox behind the seat," she said.
Rei knelt on the seat and rummaged behind it. After that, he was quiet again. Sarah glanced over a few miles down the road. With a small flashlight clamped between his knees, he was working with a small screwdriver on one of his bracelets.
... no, he was still wearing both his bracelets. This one was gold.
"Where did you get that?"
"From the Galatean soldier I killed."
Apparently she'd missed some of the fight while she was starting the truck. "I didn't see that. How many of them were there?"
"Two," Rei said absently. His tongue poked briefly out of the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on prying something out of the bracelet; despite the circumstances, she couldn't help finding it cute. "The one I shot was the transformed one."
"The—wait, do you mean the tiger was a Galatean?"
"You know that I can shift. The Galateans have jaegan among them as well."
Stupid genetics-meddling super-powerful ancient aliens. "I thought it was some kind of bloodhound. Uh, a tracking beast, I mean."
"It was also that." Rei clicked the gold bracelet around his wrist above the usual silver cuff, then started tinkering with the a second gold one.
"What are you doing?"
"Among other things, I'm trying to ensure that I don't give away my position as soon as I activate these. They should be subsidiary to my usual cuffs, but this will give me much more power than I would normally have."
One Galatean with a pair of these could kill hundreds of your people and lay waste to a city block ...
"How many Galateans do you think are here?" Sarah asked, her mouth dry.
"Small military ships usually have a crew of six or eight. It depends on how many ships are here. I don't think they would send a heavy cruiser just to recover an escaped slave."
"How many on a heavy cruiser?"
"Around three to five thousand if it has a full complement of troops."
"Okay, yeah, wow, let's hope they don't have one of those."
She slowed at the outskirts of Sidonie. Nothing looked different than usual, but what did she expect: the town under martial law, swarming with cat aliens?
A white blur appeared suddenly in her headlights, and Sarah slammed on the brakes, then sat shivering in reaction as a party of costumed children, accompanied by a cheerful retriever and an older child as chaperone, ran across the road. A sheet ghost was what had flashed in her headlights.
"Will there be a great many children out of their homes tonight?" Rei asked as they started moving again. There was a small click as the second gold cuff closed around his wrist.
"Not for much longer. It's starting to get late enough that little kids are going to be in bed, even on Halloween night."
They were nearing the farm. She'd tried to call her dad a couple more times on the way and each time it went to voice mail. And yet, there were no roadblocks, no signs of anything amiss as she left the town behind for the deeper darkness of farm country. Only a paranoid worry buzzing in the back of her head that this wasn't like him, he wouldn't be out of touch this long.
Maybe it's nothing to do with the Galateans at all. Maybe he left his phone in the house while he was out working in the barn. Maybe he fell and couldn't get up, and he's been lying in the pasture all this time, while I was out on a date ...
The driveway was coming up on her left. She began to brake, and then just as smoothly accelerated again, sweeping on past with her heart beating like a triphammer.
"The porch light's not on," she told Rei. "And there's a car out front I don't recognize."
Rei twisted around to look out the back window. "Your people, not mine?"
"Unless your people use cars now. It could just be trick-or-treaters, but the light's not on, and Dad always leaves the light on. He never forgets, he didn't even forget the year Mom died. Damn it!"
There was another turn coming up on the left. She slowed and took it. The truck swayed on deep ruts.
"Where are we going?" Rei asked.
"We're on an old road that goes up the back side of the Haverford farm, the neighbors next to our place. I used to be friends with their daughter when we were kids." She paused to concentrate on not getting the truck mired in a boggy place. The road was in much worse shape than it had been the last time she came this way, and it had been a wet fall. "We can drive through their back hayfield and park behind the old mill. Actually we might be able to drive all the way through our pasture to the house, if we can find a place to get the truck through the fence and it's not too overgrown back there, but I don't want to try. We don't know what we'd be driving into."
"Approach on foot and leave an escape vehicle at our back." Rei sounded approving. "You're a good tactical thinker for one who has never been in battle, Sarah."
Sarah hoped she wasn't blushing, but she knew she probably was. "Is it possible you could ... uh ..." She reached out to point at his bracelets. "Since you have an extra set now, could you give one of those to me and teach me how to use it?"
Rei shook his head. "I'm sorry. It won't work for you. You would need nanites and implants."
"Damn," she muttered. Briefly, she wished they kept a gun in the truck, as some of their neighbors did, but her dad had never been that type.
Anyway, from what Rei said and what she'd seen in Eau Claire, a gun might not be much help anyway.
She stopped to let them through the Haverfords' pasture gate. They jolted through tall grass, the truck rocking as it hit unseen ruts in the darkness. The Haverfords hadn't cut this field in years, from the look of it, and Sarah parked when it finally got too rough to drive, in the edge of a stand of brush and small trees along the property line with the Metzger farm.
"The mill is right on the other side of that fence," she told Rei quietly as she stepped down from the truck. She reached behind the seat and felt around until she found a tire iron.
"That's not going to be much use against energy weapons."
"Maybe not, but it makes me feel better."
Once she closed the door and the truck's dome light went off, it was utterly dark. Light from the town reflected off the low clouds and cast a dim, orangey light that her eyes slowly adapted to. Down at the bottom of the gently sloping pasture, the Haverfords' cluster of house and yard lights had a warm, homey look. Sarah wished she was heading that way instead of into the dark woods to face aliens or the Army or God only knew what.
With a small sigh, she squared her shoulders and followed Rei into the dark woods.
She regretted instantly that she was wearing a dress instead of jeans. Her legs were freezing, and the skirt kept snagging on brambles. It wasn't actually raining, but everything was damp, and even the dim town-glow was lost among the trees. She had to grope her way by feel, while roots tangled her impractical shoes and branches snatched at her hair.
She stumbled into the wooden fence rail and climbed over it, thinking of the long-ago days when she used to do that to go play with Susie Haverford. At the time, however, she hadn't been doing it in a skirt while cold and wet and carrying a tire iron.
"You're still here, right?" she whispered.
"I am still here, Sarah," Rei's quiet voice came out of the dark. He was perfectly silent. If he hadn't spoken, she would never have been able to find him.
The darkness was weirdly disorienting. She knew the farm as well as she knew her own face in the mirror, but without landmarks to guide her, she had to struggle to orient herself. She could hear the millstream, and she knew the mill was around here somewhere, but it seemed to appear out of nowhere, a dark shape framed against the faint amber glow in the sky. They'd come upon it from downstream rather than approaching directly from the back as she'd thought.
Rei touched her arm
to stop her. He leaned close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body and see the faint shine of his eyes in the dark. "You must stay very close to me now," he murmured. "If my people are here, they will be able to detect us approaching by our body heat and other traces. I can shield us from that sort of detection, but only if you are very near."
Sarah felt in the dark until she found his hand and wrapped hers around it. His fingers felt very warm to her cold ones. "I will be."
***
Rei adapted his pace to Sarah's, exerting a small effort of will to keep her shielded along with himself. The sensor shielding was low-power enough that he could keep it up for hours, and it was passive, making it unlikely the Galateans would be able to detect his nearby use of the cuffs. He still didn't dare use the cuffs' scanning or communication functions, but he was fairly sure everything else was safe enough, including the weapons. The Galateans weren't used to having their own tech used against them.
However, there might also be sentries out here that he couldn't detect. Good to keep that in mind.
They crossed the stream with Sarah's small, cold fingers quiescent in his. Rei's eyes had fully adapted to the dark by now, and he could see clearly, if a bit fuzzily. Sarah seemed to be almost completely night-blind, so he guided her with small tugs of his hand as they retraced the path they'd taken a few days ago when she had first shown him the old mill.
Pleasant memories ... to be recalled at a later, less desperate time.
If there was a later.
They came out of the trees behind the Metzger farm. Sarah let out a tiny gasp just as Rei jerked on her hand to pull her down beside him. Maybe she could see in the dark more than he'd thought.
There was a Galatean ship parked in the long expanse of Metzger pasture between them and the house.
It was dark, all lights off, but he could see it well enough to tell that it was a mid-size chaser, an elongated teardrop shape with a pointed prow and smoothly rounded sides flaring out into stubby winglike extensions just ahead of the engines. Eight crew, probably, on a ship that size. He couldn't tell from this angle if either of the two skimmers were docked to the back of the wings in their usual location. Most likely, the team in Eau Claire had taken one of those, unless there was a second chaser in the area.
