March 1, 2363 AIA
Ionu
It was Jun Fenn’s turn on watch. Regulations stated that someone had to remain in the building if there were prisoners, but nothing in the regulations said that person had to stay awake. Fenn wanted to sleep, but despite how quiet the building was, he couldn’t manage it.
He’d emptied his pockets onto the coffee table and taken off his weapons, badge, and uniform shirt. It was still miserably hot. He tossed and turned, trying to find some section of the sofa he hadn’t already warmed with his body heat. There wasn’t one.
At home he slept in his shorts, but he wasn’t going to do that here. Even though he was still wearing his undershirt and long pants, he felt painfully exposed.
And it didn’t help that the couch was so small.
As he lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, his feet sticking over the edge, he wondered if Norwood would have anything to say about him buying a bigger couch with his budget. He dismissed the idea. It was inevitable the commissioner would ask why he needed it. The initial question wasn’t too awful, but the follow-up question, “what’s wrong with the beds in the bunk rooms,” would be problematic. To pass the time, Fenn imagined his superior’s reaction to being told that the two female prisoners had already claimed them.
The sheriff thought about taking one of the bunks in the cells, but, somehow, that seemed like a bad idea.
He was still entertaining dimly amusing ideas about the irony of his situation, when he heard noise coming from the stairs that led up to the roof. Since there was no attempt to be stealthy, he assumed it was one of his highly secured prisoners.
With a wry smile he only allowed himself when he was alone, he tried to settle back into the couch.
Four seconds later, he was walking up the stairs, cursing his curiosity the whole way.
He found Reyer standing at the edge of the roof, staring at the horizon. When she heard him, she leaned back on one foot and turned her head to check who it was. The gesture seemed natural to her, but it said volumes to the sheriff. That was how you moved when you didn’t want to twist your back.
He came up beside her. “Those beds aren’t very comfortable, are they?”
“They’re better than the ones in the cells.” She turned back to the horizon. “But not by much.”
“I suspect we’re not meant to sleep comfortably when we’re on watch.”
“A watch, Sheriff, is when you fall asleep between each footstep and pray your rifle strap will finally cut your head off because you’d rather die than carry it for one more second—then you realize you have an hour left. That’s a watch. What you do might be called babysitting.”
There was a short silence.
“Zookeeping,” Fenn said.
He felt her eyes on him.
He said, “We put them in cages, make sure they’re fed, and watch them so they don’t escape. A woman clawed me once. I had to pull her fingernail out of my arm. I think the word is zookeeping.”
A smile crept onto Alix’s face. “All right. I’ll give you that.”
“And what are you doing, Miss Reyer? A vigil?” When she didn’t respond, he continued: “No rifle, and you don’t seem to be sleepy so—”
“Vigil is just another word for watch.”
“Do you think so?”
“No, not really.”
“I couldn’t help noticing that you’re staring in the direction your ship should be flying back from,” Fenn glanced down at his watch, “any minute now.”
“If they made it.”
The sheriff thought he was hard to surprise, but he was surprised now. “You don’t think they made it?”
“I think they probably did—they’ve done the hike three times before—but I get nervous when officers don’t have someone there to help them.”
Jun thought about that.
“It was rather irresponsible of you to let them out on their own.”
“Yes, well.” Reyer’s eyes dropped to the rooftop. “He’s stubborn and I’m injured.” She looked up at Fenn. “Besides, why is it my responsibility? Aren’t you their zookeeper?”
“Those two are hardly worth my time, Miss Reyer. They’re officers—not exactly an endangered species.”
Alix laughed out loud. It was swallowed by the sheer emptiness of the planet, but before that, it rang out like a bell.
After the laugh, she eyed him for a moment, then asked, “Why are you working with us, Sheriff?”
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t be?”
“I’ve heard you’re a very law-abiding man.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“The man at the bar—Hatanori. Tate seems to agree with him. He’s wondering when you’re going to arrest him.”
There was another short silence, then the sheriff said, “It’s easy for rebels and criminals to misunderstand something like that, isn’t it?”
“So you’re not law-abiding?”
“Oh, I am. Or…I was.” He turned to her. “I joined the academy when I was sixteen, Miss Reyer. The only people who do that are desperate or idealists.”
“Which are you?”
“I think I’m a desperate idealist. I believe peacekeepers serve a vital role. I believe that laws should be obeyed, and I believe in justice. I’m also a perfectionist, a stickler, and enough of an egotist I think I should be allowed to make you obey the same laws I do.”
In a soft voice, Reyer said, “So what changed?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said, ‘I was…’ What changed?”
Fenn stared out at the desert. Starlight illuminated the familiar ridges—jagged scars splitting the ground from the sky. “I did. This planet changes the way you think. I’ve learned a lot from it.”
Reyer waited.
“I know what matters now,” he said. “I used to think I loved justice and order because of what they were, but when you live so long on a planet where no one can survive alone, you realize what’s really important.”
“What’s that?”
“People. They’re there to protect the people. That’s the only thing justice and laws are good for.” He looked at her. “That’s why I’m working with you, Miss Reyer. Right now my job is to protect and serve the people of Ionu. You haven’t done anything to hurt them. You’re trying to save them—god help you.”
“But if he won’t, you will?”
Fenn raised an eyebrow. “That’s right.”
“Even though we’re a bunch of—”
She stopped when Fenn raised his hand.
“Take care, Miss Reyer. It should be ‘they,’ not ‘we.’ Captain Vas spent an exhaustive amount of time explaining to me that you weren’t a member of the Rising, and I don’t want him to feel compelled to explain it to me again.”
Reyer smiled as she looked back out at the skyline. She spied a momentary blink of light.
“That’s them.”
She tried to sound indifferent, but Fenn could hear something in her voice. Before he could decide if it was joy or relief, Alix had turned.
“I’ll go see if Ciro’s up.” She made her way over to the door.
Fenn joined her. “I’ll open the hangar.”
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When Tate arrived the next morning, he found Ciro and Jane setting up a lab in one of the bunk rooms. Everyone else was in the breakroom. Lynx and Reyer were at the counter, running DNA scans. They had already processed most of the samples Joseph had brought back from the heap. Lynx had found the xeno DNA pattern in so many of them, even the unflappable Jun Fenn grimaced when the bot announced the final number.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The queen was on-planet, and unless they were very much mistaken, she had already created a hoard of her own human-xenos.
“How many?” Fenn muttered from his chair. He was staring at the coffee can in his hand.
“We can’t say,” Reyer said.
Lynx added, “That number represents the number of bodies we can confirm belonged to a xeno. It doesn’t necessarily represent their current numbers. Technically, it could be only one. Before we can begin to estimate—”
“Lynx,” Adan groaned. “Shut up.”
The captain was lying back on the couch with a hand over his eyes. Tennama was slumped in the armchair next to him.
“But, Captain—”
“We all know how xenos work, Lynx,” Reyer said.
“It’s more than one.” Tennama didn’t open his eyes or raise his head to speak. “Not even a memory-keeper would be willing to transform that much.” His next sentence came out in a barely coherent mumble: “We don’t like to switch bodies.”
“Why not?” Tate asked.
Reyer took over for the exhausted xeno. “It’s instinctive. We think they’re afraid of losing the thread.”
“What thread?”
“The thread of memories. The information they’ve gathered from past bodies.”
She put away the last sample and motioned to Tate to hand her the cover for the tray. Once that was in place, she turned to the rest of the room.
“Speculating on the numbers won’t help us,” she said. “We can count them when we find them.”
Tennama forced himself to sit up. “Miss Reyer, they aren’t in town.”
Alix leaned back on the counter so she could watch the xeno.
Tennama went on, “I’ve been almost everywhere. I might miss a few of them, but this is a small town, and we aren’t talking about a few of them.”
“They have to be somewhere,” Reyer said. “If they aren’t walking around town, then maybe the queen is hiding them.”
The captain started saying, “Take it from someone—” but he cut himself off. After clearing his throat, he said, “Take it from someone who may or may not have known someone who, once or twice, long ago, had to smuggle things…”
Sheriff Jun Fenn stared at Adan Vas with a blank expression on his face.
Thus encouraged, Vas continued, “Humans aren’t easy to hide. They eat. They take up space. They produce waste.”
“Then someone must be very good at covering their tracks,” Alix said.
“There is an alternative, Miss Reyer,” Lynx said. “They could no longer be on the planet.”
Tennama’s quiet “no” was muffled by his hand resting over his mouth. He moved it enough they could hear him. “That’s wrong.”
“You don’t know that, Mr. Tennama.”
“I don’t know it for certain, but that’s wrong, Lynx. She wouldn’t do that. She’d want them around her. To protect her. To make sure she isn’t alone. If she’s here, then they’re here. I think Miss Reyer’s right. They’re hiding somewhere. We just have to figure out where.”
Tate glanced at the sheriff. Fenn put his half-empty coffee can down on the low table.
“We’ve long suspected that they’re hiding people somewhere in the warehouse block,” Jun said. “Taking in and processing refugees and fugitives is a large part of their profits, and they’ve been doing it for years. By the time I arrived, they already had a system in place that covered everything from food, water, and physical space, to the paperwork needed to conceal where the resources were going. I don’t know if the xenos are there, but it would’ve been a ready-made hiding place.”
Anthony smirked. “She chose her planet well, didn’t she?”
“When you investigated, what did you find?” Vas asked.
“I haven’t been able to investigate,” Fenn said. “I have dead bodies that don’t belong on this planet, but I can’t tie them to Ashtell, so we haven’t been able to get a warrant.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Reyer said.
Vas added, “But I don’t think that’ll be a problem for us.”
Fenn’s jaw tightened and his gaze dropped.
When Vas noticed Fenn’s reaction, he said, “Sheriff, this mission is important to us. If we have to work outside the law, we will.”
Jun Fenn stood up from his chair. “Captain Vas, at this point, I don’t think there’s anything you could do that the Supremacy would consider inside the law. You’d be prosecuted for defiling government property if you waved a Supremacy flag in a patriotic manner.”
If Adan’s proud smile was anything to go by, he was not unduly upset by this assessment.
“You’ll go,” Fenn said, “and I won’t stop you. But I won’t go with you either.”
“It has to be done, Fenn,” Alix said.
“I know, Miss Reyer, but no matter how practical I’ve become, I draw the line at personally committing a felony.” He walked over to the door. “I’m sending Tate instead.”
Joseph stood up straight. “Any instructions, Boss?”
“Yes. Don’t get caught.” Fenn went over to the counter, picked up the tray of samples, and went to the door. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get some more coffee. I might be a while.”
“How thin are the walls?” Vas asked.
“Now that you mention it, I’d be grateful if you didn’t talk too loud.” Fenn shut the door behind himself.
“He’s an interesting man,” Tennama observed.
“He’s a good man,” Alix said.
“He is,” Tate muttered. He turned to Vas. “All right, Captain, what’s the plan?”
“You, me, and Tennama. We’ll go out tonight, as soon as the town’s dark. We’ll check out as much of the warehouse block as we can. If we fail, we’ll go out again tomorrow.”
“Captain,” Lynx said, “both you and Mr. Tennama are still suffering ill effects from your hike out to the ship. You should rest before engaging in possibly hazardous activities.”
“We can rest before the sun goes down. The longer we’re here, the more chance there is the queen will hear about it.”
“While it’s theoretically possible for you to rest during daylight hours, I’ve never witnessed you actually doing something so responsible.”
“Lynx.”
“Shutting up now, sir.”
“We don’t have a lot of weapons, Captain,” Tate said.
“That’s fine,” Vas said. “We brought a few of our own, and I don’t want to go walking around with a dozen guns. It makes it hard to sneak.”
“And I suppose I stay back here,” Alix said, “staring out the window, waiting for your return?” The words were so twisted with sarcasm, they almost came out sideways.
“With a candle burning beside you and a wistful look on your face.” Adan pointed to her. “Don’t let me down.”
“Tate, pass me something I can throw at Captain Vas.”
“There’s nothing readily at hand, Sarge.”
Adan winked at Alix. “He still likes me better.”
“Both of you can go to hell,” she said.
“We love you too, Sarge.” When Tate saw Anthony doing his best to repress a smile, he added, “Nothing to say, Tennama?”
The xeno held up his hands. “Not a thing. At the moment, I seem to be the only one spared from damnation.”
“I’m not sure you qualify as her friend until you’ve been damned,” Vas mused.
“Ah!” Tate cautioned. “He’s a friend. She said so. And he’s definitely not a specimen.”
All three of them were watching Tennama, waiting to see how he’d respond to the teasing, but he didn’t know what to say. The comment had left him feeling hollow. After only one false start, he managed to say, “I’ll take what I can get.”
Tate caught a glimpse of Reyer’s cheeks when she turned to Lynx. They were red.
“Come on, bot,” she said. “I have no doubt Jane or Ciro will have some work for you.” She crossed over to the door and opened it. “These boys have some planning to do, and I have to find a candle.”
As the door shut, they could hear Lynx trying to explain to Reyer that the captain was most likely being facetious.
Tate said, “Captain?”
“Do you have any maps of the warehouse block?”
“I do.”
“Can you get them?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tennama and Vas were left alone in the room. A minute passed before Tennama broke the silence.
“Do you need me here while you plan?”
“No.”
“Then I think I’ll take the wise advice of your bot and try to get some rest. Is there anything I can do before I go?”
Vas said, his voice quiet, “I’ve seen how you look at her.”
“I’m sorry?”
Louder: “I’ve seen how you look at her.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sure. You say that. You keep saying that. I don’t want you to know what I mean, but I want you to know, I’m not blind.”
Tennama stood up. Adan rose with him. For a moment, they stood there, watching each other.
In the same level voice, Vas said, “If I ever catch you looking at her like that again, I’ll gouge your eyes out.”
Tennama turned and went to the door, but he stopped with his hand on the handle. “That’s not exactly fair, now is it, Captain?” He half turned and said over his shoulder, “After all, you’re in love with her.”
With that, the xeno left.
Adan needed to move. Agitation was bubbling up in his blood. He walked to the window, but when he reached up to lean against the frame, he noticed his hand was shaking. He closed it into a fist and pounded it on the sill. With his eyes squeezed shut, he swore under his breath.
A voice behind him said, “You know he’s not competition, right?”
Adan jumped, startled. But then he saw who it was. “Tate.”
Joseph put the rolled maps down on the coffee table.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Vas said.
“The door doesn’t latch properly if you don’t know how to shut it.”
“You were waiting outside?”
“Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to walk into a conversation like that.” Tate moved toward Vas and leaned on the counter. “Captain, you know Sarge would never—”
“I know.”
“Do you? You didn’t sound so sure a minute ago.”
“Have you seen how he looks at her?”
Tate sighed through his nose and turned away from the captain’s glare. “Yeah, I’ve seen it.” After a few seconds, he said, “Reyer doesn’t—”
“It’s not about that.”
There was a pause.
“Vas, you threatened to gouge his eyes out.”
“Have you seen her scars?”
“You mean the ones on her naked back? If I said yes right now, what would my chances of survival be?”
There was an uneasy moment, then Joseph heard the captain’s quiet laugh. “Dammit, Tate. No wonder she likes having you around.”
“No, Captain. I haven’t seen the scars.”
“Then you don’t know what he’s done to her.” Adan stared out the window at the orange sand. “He doesn’t get to hurt her like that and then fall in love with her.”
“I don’t know. Can you blame him?”
“Were you ever in love with her, Tate?”
Joseph sighed again—much louder this time. “I had a crush on Reyer for almost fourteen whole seconds. Then she opened her mouth and started yelling at me. She was my trainer, then my sergeant and my team leader. We fought together for years, Vas. I love her. I always will. It broke my heart when I thought she died.” There was an unexpected edge in his voice when Tate added, “You didn’t go through that.”
He took a breath before he continued. “But if you’re asking if I wanted to date her or sleep with her?” He shook his head. “She occupies this weird spot in my head where she’s both my bossy older sister that tells me what to do, and my younger sister who obviously needs to be protected—don’t…don’t tell her I said that.”
With a half-smile, Adan held up a hand to indicate Tate didn’t need to explain.
Tate returned to the coffee table. “Anyway, what does it matter? If it’s not about that.”
Vas pulled himself away from the window and went to join Joseph. He collapsed on one of the cheap chairs nearby. “I don’t know. Maybe I am tired.”
“I know you’re tired, but you know what she says about that.”
“‘Go to sleep, you idiot?’”
Tate laughed. “No. I mean—come on. You don’t know this?”
Vas shook his head.
Tate shrugged. “She warned us to watch what we say when we’re tired. That it’s more likely to be the truth.”
“Is that supposed to be a warning?”
“‘Misplaced honesty doesn’t belong on the battlefield,’” Tate quoted. “‘We lie for a reason.’”
“Yeah, that sounds like something she’d say.”
“Are you worried about Tennama?”
“No, I’m furious.”
Tate glanced up when he heard the vitriol saturating the captain’s statement. Vas had braced his elbows on his knees; his knuckles were white where his hands clasped each other.
“I can see that.” Joseph unrolled the map of the warehouse block and put a few empty coffee cans on the corners. “I don’t think he can help how he feels, Adan.”
Vas looked up at the sound of his first name. Tate’s eyes, full of sympathy, watched him for a moment, then returned to the map.
“He’s lonely,” Tate said, “and Sarge is a kind person. Has he done anything…” When he couldn’t think of the right phrase, he tried again: “Has he tried to cause any trouble between you?”
“No.”
“Is he a friend?”
“He’s a xeno.”
“I don’t think that matters. Sarge doesn’t call someone her friend for no reason.”
Vas unclenched his hands so he could rest his head on his fingertips. Unbidden memories flowed through his mind: Tennama smirking as they joked together, the xeno’s hand on his shoulder while crossing the desert, the look of wonder on Tennama’s face while he was copiloting the Colibri.
“He said she was the prettiest bird in the galaxy,” Vas muttered.
“Oh, my god,” Tate said. “Please tell me he wasn’t talking about Sarge.”
When Adan was done laughing, he had to wipe the tears from his eyes. He pulled himself close to the table and slapped the map. “Come on, Tate. Let’s hammer out something that looks like a plan. That’ll make her happy, and then I can get some sleep.”