Damocles (14 page)

“That’s weird,” Effan One said. “Where are they going?”

That seemed to be the question the engineering team asked too, especially when several minutes passed without the Urfers returning. The three remaining aliens turned back to the crowd as if ready to resume work as usual. Meg walked toward Loul, her long strides a little less certain than before. She pointed behind her toward the occupied shelters. “Urfers dropping.”

What did it say about the unpredictability of the universe, Meg wondered, when sleep was an oddity but press conferences were universal? There was no mistaking the abrupt intrusion, the shouted words, and the demanding tones she could hear on the far side of the barricade. Prader had first seen the oddly shaped orbs hovering over the scene. They looked like volleyballs with tiny sails that rode the breezes over the landing site. Someone had followed her pointing finger and the soldiers had erupted into action.

Captain Wagner withdrew his sidearm as one of the hovering spheres drifted closer to him. “Looks like someone’s upstaging us for attention. Whatever these are, our hosts don’t look very happy to see them.”

“We’ll get to see one up close,” Prader had said, her gun at the ready, “if this little son of a bitch gets any closer.”

“Put your guns down.” An orb bobbed in fat waves over Meg’s head, the little sails adjusting themselves for steering. “Whatever they are, we let the Dideto handle them.”

“Unless they shoot ray-gun laser beams and melt us.”

“Okay, that’s the plan.” Wagner kept his voice level. “We let the Dideto handle it unless they shoot laser beams and melt Prader.”

Jefferson snorted. “How badly melted does she have to be before we start firing? Like, completely liquefied or can we start when she starts to smoke and bubble?”

“Keep it up, laughing boys, and when it turns out we’re being groomed to be household pets for these hairy bastards, you can all—”

Meg tuned out the chatter, turning instead to Loul, who pounded his fists against the front of his hips, his eyes watching the hovering orbs. He bent forward in a half-crouch that made the muscles in his arms and legs strain. Whatever these things were, they were making Loul tense.

“Loul?”

He jumped when she spoke, springing from his rigid posture as the orb dropped lower, almost close enough for Meg to jump up and touch. She stared up at the intruder, noticing small, transparent panels in the sphere’s surface. Loul stepped in close, close enough to break into the light screen, and held his thick fists up at the thing but came nowhere near high enough to block Meg’s line of sight. The orb wheeled about, circling her, and Meg could hear the low vibration in Loul’s throat rising, picking up an erratic hitching rhythm. That sound, more than the proximity of the strange object, put her nerves on alert.

“Loul?” She asked again, and this time he met her gaze, his eyes narrowed and a dark flush blossoming around the edges of his face. She pointed to the hovering orb. “Yes? Okay?”

He growled a low sound in his throat, his fists pumping once again at his hips. “No.”

“No.” A cold spot formed in her gut. “Loul,” she said, tipping her head toward the hand that held her sidearm. “Okay no?”
She really didn’t want to have to start firing at these things. She knew that decision would take this encounter down a new, dark, and probably explosive road, but if Loul was in danger, if any of them were in danger, she wasn’t going down without a fight. An unfunny thought crossed her mind, that this is probably how Prader felt all the time.

Loul followed her gaze to her hand, and she tipped her body forward enough to block anyone but Loul from seeing the handle of the weapon. She had to assume he knew what this was, at least in theory. Apparently he did because as soon as the trigger of the gun came into view, his breath caught, a high yelp escaped his throat, and he dropped his voice to a rough tone. “No. No. No.” He even reached out and pressed his hand against her arm. “Meg. No.”

She saw that he no longer looked up at the orb, his gaze boring into hers with more intensity than she’d seen so far. “No.” She let the gun slip back into her pocket, keeping her gestures small, and she saw him relax. “Guns down, everyone.” She heard mumbling through the coms. “Whatever these are, shooting them is a bad idea.”

“Unless these are their way of taking us down once and for all.”

“Hey, Prader,” Cho said, “dial it back a notch. You don’t have to be Meg to see that these people didn’t send these things in. Whatever they are, they’re making them as nervous as us and for all we know they could be flying nuclear warheads. Put your freaking gun down.”

“You know what they look like?” Jefferson asked. “They look like the hovercams they used to use at the football stadium. You know the kind with the parabolic microphones that hover over midfield? When I played for the Belters, we used to try to nail one each game.”

“But they’ve got cameras on posts,” Meg said, glancing over Loul’s shoulder at the high-mounted slender cylinders pointed their way. “Isn’t that what those are over there?”

Wagner squinted up at an orb that hovered just out of his reach. “They have a lot of broadcast on this planet, don’t they? Maybe somebody else is trying to get in on the show. That would explain why the authorities are so nervous about it. Second rule of an unknown situation is to control information.”

“What’s the first rule?” Jefferson asked.

Prader snorted. “Don’t get killed.”

Meg saw Loul watching her, watching her crewmates, leaning in trying to hear their words. He also kept an eye out on the hovering orbs. “Let me see what Loul wants us to do.” He heard his name. Meg kept her hand low, close to her body, and pointed up at the orb.

“Yes? Okay?” She didn’t know what else to do, so she slipped a finger to the light screen and pushed the question mark button repeatedly. Loul watched her, grinding his teeth, and she could see he wanted to tell her something but didn’t yet have the words. He tilted his body as the orb swooped down closer, and Meg could see him trying to put himself between it and the light screen. Jefferson was right—these were cameras or spy objects of some sort.

Loul ground his teeth a moment longer, pointedly not looking at the orb. When Meg pulled the screen down closer to the ground, bending over Loul’s shoulder and effectively blocking any overhead view, the orb spun and swooped and Loul smiled. If Loul didn’t want those things to see the screen, she’d do all she could to keep it from happening. That it felt like a secret pinkie swear between grade-school kids just made it that much nicer.

“Okay?” Meg asked again.

He flicked his gaze to where the orb hovered and then spoke in a low tone. “Yes. No.”

Prader’s voice hissed through the coms. “That’s helpful.”

“It is helpful,” Meg said. “It means it’s not good but it’s not too bad. If those are cameras, I think it means the military here has got an uncomfortable situation on their hands. Someone else has found out we’re here, someone they probably wanted to keep this a secret from. Maybe another government? Maybe the population as a whole? It’s what we would do.”

“Which begs the question,” Wagner said, “what are they going to do about it now?”

They didn’t need to wait long for an answer. The trio in charge at the barricade reemerged from the huddle they’d slipped into once the orbs had appeared. From behind the barricade, a team of men unpacked a squat metal box, pulling out an equally squat metal dish, like a small satellite dish. All around them, people shouted gruff words, and down the line of the barricade the sound of machinery stuttered to silence. When all the machinery was quiet, Meg couldn’t help but notice just how loud the human-made thrumming sound really was. At first it registered on several notes, like cocktail party chatter. As the machinery went silent, however, the sounds came together, an audible harmony that was nearly palpable.

“What is that?” Cho asked. Meg didn’t know if he meant the machine or the sound. Before she could venture a guess, a piercing squeal emanated from the squat metal dish, a sound pulse loud enough to be felt like a wind. Before she could react, Loul yanked her arm hard, sending her sprawling toward him, the crash of her body not moving him an inch. He held her tight enough against him that she knew she would have bruises on her back, but that wasn’t what took her breath away. Seconds after the dish’s loud squawk, the hovering orbs stilled and their sails collapsed. As one they crashed to the ground.

Blacking out the news cameras had done nothing to stop the tide of reporters on the site. He knew the orbs had captured perfect visuals of the Urfers and might even have captured the sounds of their voices. Images of the ship parked right there on the Roana Temple would shoot around the web, and for just a second he wondered if Po and Hark had seen him there in the middle of the action. If his face had been captured on video, even for half a frame, he knew Po would see it, doubtless scanning frame by frame over each second of video to find the truth.

The generals had conferred with him about the press conference, making it clear he would not be a part of it. Their main concerns, understandably, were to keep the population at large from panicking. That’s what always happened in the movies. Aliens landed. People died. Terror burned through the streets. He’d even recommended measures against such events in his report—that bunkers be stocked in the lowest tunnels, crucial personnel prepared for evacuation, and international communication set up for a team resistance effort. It seemed so strange now, all that work, all those eventualities he’d spent months considering.
And the administration had believed him. They’d probably implemented a lot of his plans.

But this? He had never anticipated this. The immediacy of it, the…well, there was no other word for it, the intimacy of it. The generals had their press conference and the archivists had broadcast it within the barrier. Images of the Urfers were posted to the web and reporters were given carefully constructed answers to their raging questions. Details were kept to an absolute minimum due in large part to the fact that details were at a premium. Even with the language building, even with the bond he could feel between him and Meg as surely as he could feel the ground beneath his feet, they still had surprisingly few hard facts about the Urfers.

The stasis events drove the frontline team to distraction. The engineers who had been trying to communicate with the palest and smallest Urfer had huffed and stomped and thrown down their equipment when the two aliens did not reemerge from their shelter. The Urfers stayed hidden away for nearly a shift and a half before climbing back out. Loul had urged Meg to follow him to that side of the field to help convince the engineers to remain calm. When two engineers had decided to approach the shelter, Meg and the leader had stood in front of them blocking the way.

It was Cho and the Effans who managed to smooth things over. Cho had invited the scientists to see the shelter he had climbed into earlier. They had both squatted down, peering into the low dome, and Cho had climbed in between them. Several moments later, the women returned to their portable lab and began writing out a long list of notes.

“They call it ‘leep’ or something like that.” Effan Two didn’t look up from where her knuckles furiously pounded in the input box. “I can barely hear him but it seems like a necessary
biological function to them. Like dropping but it looks like they have to be on the ground.”

“Do you think the domes have an effect?” Effan One rechecked the data her partner entered. “I didn’t pick up any trace minerals or chemical interactions. It didn’t seem like the dome emits any type of chemical or pheromone.”

Loul, with Meg peering over his shoulder, listened in. “What do they do once they get inside the shelters?”

Effan One shrugged. “All he did was lie there, eyes closed. Maybe they extract something from the soil beneath them, some sort of nutrient.”

“Holy crap,” her partner laughed, “maybe we were right about them needing to land on this site. Wouldn’t that be a hammer to the head?”

Loul watched them work, fascinated and happy that they were making connections with Cho. The more people able to communicate, the faster communication would develop. If the Effans could explain this “leep” thing to the engineers, maybe they would cool down and work with the two reemerged Urfers to gain some real technological headway. The Urfers were clearly scientifically advanced, and the chance to learn from their knowledge could change the history of Didet forever.

He occupied himself with these and similar lofty thoughts until he realized Meg had grown very quiet. She watched the Effans working at their lab with eyes that were only half opened. The white surrounding the remarkable brown circle had grown redder by the moments, and once Loul had thought she was going to tell him something, snapping him to attention, only to watch her open her mouth impossibly wide showing every single one of her white teeth. She squeezed her eyes shut as her mouth kept opening and opening and he could hear a sound as breath rushed from her mouth.

He jabbed the question mark button but she only blinked at him. “Okay?” He asked.