Men in Black International

by R. S. Belcher

  H actually blushed a little at the question, and Em could have sworn she saw a little hurt in his eyes—but just for a second. Then his feelings were hidden again with a nonchalant shrug.

  H looked over to the aliens, still fighting. “Just keep it covered,” he said as he walked out of the garage.

  18

  In the busy mezzanine below High T’s office, Agent Eye, part of the MiB forensics tech surveillance division, approached Cee sitting at his perfectly organized desk. Cee was currently thinking up and organizing comebacks he should have said to H when he’d swaggered his way into the forensics lab and taken Agent Em off on another wild goose chase.

  “What?” growled Cee.

  Agent Eye handed Cee a plexi-tablet. There was some grainy black-and-white footage from the street battle with the twins on it.

  “We were doing sweeps,” Eye said. “Pulled this from a surveillance camera outside the club.”

  Cee saw in the jerky footage a brief exchange between Agent Em and the dying Vungus. Vungus handed something to Em. Cee paused the footage and rewound it, zooming in on Em and the Jababian. He froze the image. On the screen was an unusual alien puzzle box, pictured in the moment Vungus handed it to the young agent. Cee refocused the screen on the box, getting a clear capture of the alien artifact.

  He looked up at Agent Eye. “You show this to High T?”

  Eye shook his head. “You said everything goes through you.”

  “Good,” Cee said. “I’ll do it.”

  Eye nodded and departed.

  Cee examined the image on the tablet, lingering on the alien puzzle box for a long time. Finally, he picked up his phone and began to dial a number.

  * * *

  H and Em arrived in front of the small curio shop just down the street from the sprawling Souk Semmarine. Em noticed the stack of Amazon packages piled beside the door; many of them had addresses located on other planets and even galaxies.

  “Couple days’ worth,” she said, pointing at the packages. “No one’s been out to collect.”

  Without further discussion, Em drew her pistol while H withdrew a sleek MiB-sanctioned lock-pick device. Em covered him and scanned the street while H knelt and applied the device to the doorknob. Needlessly, as it turned out. The door creaked open on its own, already unlocked. H put the picks away and drew his gun.

  The doorbell jangled as they entered the dark room, guns sweeping, making sure each shadow was only a shadow. Dust hung in the air. The pair advanced toward the counter. Em paused, looking toward the floor. “H,” she said softly. A pair of prone legs was sticking out from behind the counter.

  The tall, lanky man must have been the shopkeeper. He lay face down; it was clear he’d been dead for several days. One of his long arms pointed behind him to the wall of shelves beyond the counter. Em looked at the wall, then to H, who nodded and covered her as she stepped over the dead man and behind the counter to examine the wall.

  Em felt along the back wall, searching the sides and then the edges. On the bottom edge, she felt the indentation of a hidden button. She pushed it and then stepped back. The wall hissed as the pressure seal was opened and then hummed as it retracted.

  They entered the hidden room, guns out. H parted the curtain, and they saw all the strange and wondrous alien artifacts that filled the room. Then they saw the chessboard. Tiny alien “pieces” were scattered across it, all dead.

  “Chesixians,” H said as they stepped toward the board. “I’ve heard of them but never actually seen them. Very ordered society, lots of customs to be followed precisely. Intricate caste and social system. It’s strange, it always seemed very familiar to me, for some reason.”

  Em paused and looked at H, gesturing to the board. “Uh, chess?”

  H frowned and nodded. “Always more a baccarat man myself, but yeah, I guess I can see that.”

  The agents stood over the board. They could see the Queen alone was still alive. Her tiny chest rose and fell in ragged breaths. She had been covered with a minuscule blanket, and a damp rag was on her forehead. A small cup lay beside her.

  “W… W…” the Queen gasped, looking up at Em and H.

  “Water?” Em said. She found a little cup that looked as if it was filled with water and lifted it to the Queen’s lips. The Queen weakly raised herself to take a drink, but immediately spat the water out again.

  “Whiskey!” the Queen demanded.

  H holstered his gun and hunted around the room until he found a bottle. He filled the cup and helped her sip from it. Her color improved immediately; her eyes opened wide.

  “Don’t you fucking move,” a loud voice said from a corner of the room. H instinctively moved to draw, but a howling laser blast of energy exploded, blowing a head-sized hole in the wall beside him. “Next one melts your face, pretty boy.”

  The agents looked up in the direction of the blast. On a high shelf, a tiny figure stood, clearly having the drop on them. The alien looked a lot like the Queen and the other dead aliens on the board. He was only a few inches tall, with dark green, scaly skin and features that reminded Em of a frog: no nose and a tiny slit of a mouth. He had big, amber eyes, and Em saw a sadness in them that he was trying to hide behind a tough exterior. The inches-tall warrior wore a conical helmet, a kite shield slung on his back, and pointed a forearm-mounted energy weapon down at them.

  “Easy,” H said. He opened his jacket slowly and removed his sidearm with two fingers. “We don’t want trouble.” He held it up for the alien to see and then placed it on the floor by his feet. He nodded for Em to do the same, and she set her own pistol down. “What do we call you, sport?”

  The little alien looked offended. “A name? Why would I have a name? Pawns don’t have names. We’re pawns!”

  “What happened here?” Em asked.

  “We had a party,” the pawn said, sarcasm dripping from every syllable. “What’s it look like? We got our asses kicked!”

  The Queen groaned; her color was fading again, and her breathing was becoming erratic.

  “My Queen!” the pawn shouted. She began to wheeze. The tiny pawn jumped from the shelf to a tabletop and then to the chessboard, scrambling to reach her.

  He knelt beside her, rubbing her forehead with the damp rag. She whispered something to him, and the little pawn took her in his arms, holding her tight. He began to cry, the sobs wracking his whole body. The pawn looked over his shoulder at the two agents. “A little personal space?” he asked.

  H and Em, somewhat embarrassed, took a step back from the board.

  “I’ll never serve another; I swear it,” the pawn said, gazing into his queen’s eyes. “I’ll plunge my dagger into my own body, pull it lengthwise—like this—through my vital organs, then up, like this, and leave it there. Until I’m dead.”

  The Queen seemed to take great comfort from the pawn’s oath. She raised her arm weakly and touched her subject’s face gently with her hand. She tried to say something to her loyal servant, but she no longer had the strength. With a final soft sigh, the Queen died, her arm slipping away from the pawn’s cheek to lie still on her breast.

  The pawn laid his fallen queen down and covered her body with the blanket. He drew his tiny dagger. Em immediately recognized it as a twin to the one that had killed Vungus. The pawn lifted up his breastplate, revealing his pale belly. He readied his knife to plunge it into his flesh.

  “You’re not seriously going to—”

  “A queen’s pawn without a queen is just… a pawn. A nothing. A loser. This is the noble rite. I must end my own life. In the most—” the pawn gulped as he struggled to pull out the words “—painful way possible.” He pushed the blade to his stomach, gasping as it snicked his body. “Ow! That’s sharp.”

  Em glanced to H and mouthed, “Should we stop him?”

  H shrugged. “I think it’s kind of sweet.”

  Below on the chessboard, the pawn had rallied and prepared again to commit alien seppuku. “Here goes, then,” the pawn went on. �
��I’m going to do it.” He was clearly stalling, now. “It’s killing time.” He cocked an eye up at the agents. “Yes? You said something, didn’t you? One of you said something.” When neither replied, the pawn extended his arms, preparing to give the blade a good plunge.

  “Wait!” Em shouted, not able to let this happen and definitely not wanting to watch it. “I’m sure she… wouldn’t want you to, you know, go through with it.”

  It was clear to Em that the pawn was definitely relieved, but he seemed bound to some custom or protocol that required a fuss. “Who are you to say what a queen would or wouldn’t want?” the pawn said. “Are you a queen?”

  “No, I’m… Em. Agent Em.”

  “Agent,” the pawn turned the term over in his head. “Is that… a title?”

  Em saw H’s face light up and knew immediately that it was bad.

  “It is a title, Pawny, old pal,” H sang out. “A title of great eminence and stature. Em here is an agent, an agent without a pawn. If you see my meaning.”

  “Uh,” Em said, “I don’t.”

  The pawn stood proudly to his full four-inch height.

  “Maybe you’re right,” the tiny alien said, newfound energy in his voice. “Maybe the best way to honor the dead is to go on living.”

  H nodded seriously in agreement. The pawn turned to Em. He fell to one knee and held his wrist blaster aloft.

  “I swear loyalty eternal to you, Agent Em—my Agent Em—my one and only.”

  Em raised her palms, slowly shaking her head. “You really don’t have to…”

  “Such nobility, such grace,” H said, smiling. “It’s humbling.”

  The pawn continued despite Em’s discomfort, “And if you should die before I, I promise to end my own life, rather than suffer the shame of living one moment longer.”

  “In the most painful way possible,” H added helpfully.

  The pawn gave H a dirty look. “Of course,” he said through gritted teeth, and then he lowered his tiny, helmeted head before his new queen and bowed.

  The brass lamps that lit the hidden room flickered, and Em’s eyes flashed toward the storefront. She put a finger to her lips and shushed H and the pawn. Carefully, Em pushed aside the curtain that separated the rooms and slipped back into the shop.

  “Impressive,” the pawn said, gazing after Em. “You and her a thing?” he asked H.

  “All you, big guy,” H whispered with a wink.

  “We’ll end up together,” the pawn said, wistfully. “It’s inevitable. When you protect someone, a closeness develops. Lines become blurred…”

  In the curio shop, Em saw that all the lamps in the storefront were flickering. She remembered the lights in the nightclub doing the same thing… just before…

  * * *

  Throughout the marketplace, electronic devices and lights flickered as the twins strode through the quarter as if they owned it, seeking their prize. The many aliens in the area knew trouble when they saw it, and quickly began to close and shutter their shops as if a powerful sirocco were barreling in off the desert. The human shopkeepers followed their lead, and soon the Dyad twins were making their way through narrow, empty streets. They passed Nasr’s bike shop, as the owner and his beard alien partner watched the lights flicker when the ominous pair walked by.

  “Here comes trouble,” Nasr said.

  Bassam the Beard shifted as they watched. “I like trouble.” Bassam hopped off Nasr’s face and dropped to the floor. The hairy little alien looked a bit like a possum; and Nasr didn’t look right at all without the beard.

  Bassam looked up at Nasr. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  An evil cut of a smile grew on Nasr’s face as Bassam pulled his cell phone out of the reaches of his hairy body. “Yep,” the mechanic said. “Call Riza.”

  19

  Em stepped back into the hidden room behind the curio shop. She closed the wall-door behind her. “They’re coming,” she said to H and the pawn. “The Dyads.”

  The pawn activated his blaster, cranking the power dial up. “They killed my queen!” He tried to charge toward the door, but H held him back.

  “Whoa! Easy, killer.” H felt the pawn struggling against his hand as he knelt and retrieved his gun from the floor and tossed Em hers.

  “H, I think we should go,” Em said, glancing toward the CCTV unit in the hidden room that showed the storefront. The screen’s black-and-white image was punctuated with static. “I know why they’re here.” The image on the screen cleared long enough to show the twins entering the curio store. They both stared straight into the camera and then the image drowned in static. H opened a back door that led to a side street. He gave Em a “to be continued” look and then stepped out, sweeping the street with his pistol. Em followed.

  “My lady?” The pawn beseeched her with his big, golden eyes. Em paused, sighed, and plucked the pawn off the chessboard.

  * * *

  In the store, the Dyads moved toward the secret room. One of the twins picked up an antique iron candlestick. In his hand, it melted, shifted and flowed into a long, deadly sword. The other twin reached for the hidden catch to open the wall behind the counter. He looked to his brother. The sword-wielding twin nodded and moved to stand by the door. The wall slid away, and the twins stepped into the hidden room, pushing past the curtain. The room was empty.

  * * *

  H and Em, pistols in hand, rushed down the empty, twisting streets, heading to the next quarter, hoping to find a crowd to slip into.

  H peeked around a corner. Seeing it was clear, he moved to head down the new street.

  Em hunted through her jacket pockets for the puzzle box. “Look, I was going to tell you. I wanted to.” But her pockets were empty, except for the little pawn, dodging her hand. The box was gone. “Where is it? Crap!”

  H reached into his own pocket and retrieved the box. “You mean this?” he asked, waving it at her.

  “You stole it from me?” She was obviously angry and hurt.

  “No.” H was still alert as they went, sweeping the street ahead of them. “I recovered evidence that you stole from a crime scene.”

  “Vungus said to hide it.” Em caught up to him. “That I couldn’t trust anyone.”

  H, his back to a wall, gun at the ready, psyched himself up to step into the street on the other side of the wall. “And you believed a Jababian lush you just met—rest his soul—over your senior agent?”

  “In a word: yes,” Em snapped back.

  He took a quick glance and then slipped around the corner. The street opened into a busy square. This was another medina, an open market. There were people everywhere. Cars, beasts of burden, and motorbikes crept their way through the crowd. Merchants even walked up to the windows of the cars or accosted the riders to try to hawk their wares. H began to smile. It would be easy to slip into this churning throng and disappear.

  “H—look.” Em nodded at the crowd. Then H saw it too—the patches of black among the sea of colors. H’s smile fell.

  There were MiB SUVs at every major avenue that fed into the medina.

  “There, too,” Em said, beside him, spotting MiB agents, lots of them, spilling out of the Chevy Suburbans, scanning, searching the market. “What are they doing here?”

  H’s instincts were screaming that something was wrong. He spotted a good hiding place near a fountain and headed toward it. “Over here,” he said to Em. The agents crouched near the fountain. It obscured them but still let them keep an eye on the majority of the Men in Black spreading out over the marketplace. H knew it wasn’t a permanent solution, but it would give them a chance to regroup.

  “Whatever that thing is,” Em said, referring to the box, “Vungus died to protect it.” She nodded toward the agents who were even now searching unrelentingly through the busy square. “He gave it to me so it wouldn’t go to them.”

  Her urgency gave H pause. Staying close behind the fountain, he gave the other MiB agents a closer look…

  * * *<
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  High T stepped through the circular elevator doors directly into the special operations room. As he walked around the elevator tube, he found Cee and a group of agents reviewing live footage from a bank of wall screens. The footage was coming from agent body cams and from MiB stealth drones. The scene was an open-air marketplace.

  “Could someone tell me what’s going on here?” High T asked.

  “Sensitive situation, sir,” Cee told him. “In Marrakech. I thought it best to keep it quiet.”

  High T noticed that there were profiles of H and Em on one of the monitors, including their pictures. A dark banner declaring WANTED appeared below their faces.

  “A word, Cee.” High T stepped away from the other agents. Cee followed, his ever-present tablet in hand. “This is nonsense,” High T said in a low voice once they were out of earshot of the others. “Despite your personal feelings to the contrary, H is one of the best agents ever to wear this suit.”

  “Was one of the best.” Cee also kept his voice down. He clicked on the tablet. “He hasn’t been the same since the incident with the Hive.” Cee held up the tablet screen. “Look,” he said.

  High T watched the surveillance footage that had been recovered from the scene of Vungus the Ugly’s death. He saw the alien giving Agent Em the puzzle box as he died. Cee made a few gestures on the tablet screen, and the grainy image of the box was zoomed in on and enhanced, until it matched up with a schematic image of the box on an intergalactic bulletin covered in red symbols T recognized as the Jababian language. The Jababian royal family’s crest and the seal of the Jababian military high command were prominent on the communiqué. “My sources say Vungus stole it,” Cee said, “from the Jababian War Department, Advanced Research Division. He brought it here.”

  High T looked up from the data, his face pale with anger, his eyes dark. “You kept this from me?” His voice was rising, and the other agents were beginning to notice. “For how long? Explain yourself.”

  “Explain myself?” Cee said, not backing down. “Whatever that thing is, H and Em had it—in your office—and you let them go.”