Chapter Two

 

I dream I’m trapped in a bottle, floating in green liquid. Minda, even more giant than in real life, has an eye up to the glass, squinting in at me. She starts chanting, “Mentiroso, mentiroso, mentiroso.” I know this is a dream, because there’s no way Minda knows the Spanish word for liar.

And part of me knows where this dream’s coming from: my friends and I had found cases of green liquid in the lab inside HGB’s cacao plantation inside the rainforest in Brazil. We analyzed it. Serum Green is an additive they’ve been putting in HGB chocolate for decades to make it literally addictive. Frank Sawyer, who works for HGB, had followed us back into the rainforest. Porque Frank y I have a history, he made us promise at gunpoint to keep it a secret.

Instead of just shooting us to ensure our silence.

Dream-Minda holds up a giant brick of HGB Dark and uses it to smash the glass. I go careening away on a waterslide of green. Minda plucks me up and holds me out to a horde of screaming Zantites, who are all mad about being addicted. I try to tell them the serum’s mostly harmless. One of the Zantites licks my face, tasting me, deciding if I should live or die.

I rise towards consciousness. Something really is licking my face.

My heart pounding with fear, the dream mixed up with surfacing memories of having been abducted, I open my eyes to full daylight. This squatty looking creature with a long, dark tongue and four hand-like feet is licking me from the next branch over.

Because I’m in a tree.

And because it’s high tide, the trunk of that tree is in the water.

Incongruously, my abductor has thoughtfully wrapped a blanket around my torso and legs. Who knows what happened to my shoes.

I think about that blanket, and about all the practical jokes the crewmen had played on each other in the short time I’d been aboard that Zantite warship. This feels more like a prank than an intentional attempt to hurt me.

If I had been another Zantite, maybe it would have been just that, pero Dios mio, I’ve been out here all night. Anything could have happened. And there could be Galactic repercussions.

Another of the creatures is hanging upside down from a branch above me, clinging on by three of its feet. The fourth foot-hand grips my left shoe, the creature chewing on it with all the zeal of a teething puppy.

“You don’t happen to know how deep the agua is down there, do you, muchachos?”

The creature that had been licking my face sticks the tongue up its own nose and pulls out a booger which it waves at me before sucking it into its mouth.

The other one offers me the shoe, as though I might want to share in its breakfast.

“Gracias, pero no.”

I call Brill over my sublingual.

Babe? He sounds groggy, and a little hoarse. Is that you? Avell, tell me you’re OK.

The desperate way he says the Krom word for please strikes something inside me.

“I’m fine, pero I’m in a tree, somewhere at the edge of the coastline.”

Can you see any landmarks?

I turn over carefully and start to make my way to the trunk. I spot the black cliff the kids were jumping from last night and… suddenly I’m not in the tree anymore.

I suck in a shocked breath just before I hit the water. I open my eyes, sure I’m about to crash into a rocky bottom, pero it’s deeper than I thought and teeming with life. Dozens of the same striped fish I was eating last night scatter at my impact, then hesitantly return to feeding on something growing on the trunk. A flattish creature slides away, glittering like a sea-pirate’s treasure trove as it burrows into the golden sand.

The agua is muy claro, even as it gets deeper past a drop off. There’s a crashed ship down there, in the process of becoming a reef. I can tell from the distinctive shapes of the writing that its markings are in Evevron. Pero, I don’t know how to read it.

I’m going to check out this shipwreck. Por favor, come get me. I’m not far from the cliff we saw last night. And bring Valeria. I’m going to need serious help with hair and wardrobe.

Shipwreck? Brill bubblechatters. I thought you were in a tree.

I swim towards the wreck. The hull’s gashed, the windows fissured. It must have been a horrific crash. Imagine having come so far, from Evevron to Zant, only to wind up at the ocean’s bottom. Are there skeletons inside? Cargo that should be recovered?

If I bring something back, maybe that will give Tawny something positive that she can spin for the media. I surface for a good deep breath before diving to within inches of the glass, peering inside. There’s a silver-tone inoculation gun rusting away on the pilot’s chair. On the floor, there’s a locked box that looks like someone had tried to hack it open.

What could that be?

Inside the ship, something moves. I jump as a blue blob with tentacles sucks itself onto the spiderwebbed glass, obscuring my view inside. It has a ring of teeth – each one bigger than my hand – that all arc in the same direction.

Maybe I don’t want to explore in there quite on my own.

I swim to shore.

A crack of thunder sounds close to me, and it starts to trickle and then pour down with rain. More dog-monkeys are sheltering under an overhang of rock. Running barefoot through the sand, I join them. Once I’ve entered the shelter, I turn, staring miserably out at the rapidly clouding sky. I let out a squeak as lightning hits the sand farther up the beach.

 

When the van finally arrives, Valeria gestures me to the back seat, where she’s been waiting, warm and dry. We brought the van packed with supplies, pero now that it’s empty it feels huge.

As Tawny drives us back, Valeria tries to get a brush through my tangled hair. She’s the same stylist I had back in Brazil, for the brief time when I was working there for HGB. She’s in her forties and has long, dark hair, a dramatic counterpoint to her sensible cardigan and striped tee.

I can’t quite make out what Brill and Tawny are saying to each other in the front, not over the radio, which is spilling out a Zandywood song medley. The announcer introduces a song by Verex Kowlk. The live recording opens with a bunch of screaming fans.

Cringing at the noise, Valeria says, “These Zantites are terrifying. We should just give them what they want.”

Brill turns the radio down. “I suggested that we bring some cacao seedlings with us as a good faith gesture. I nearly got arrested just for asking.”

Earth can’t give anyone else chocolate. The fact that two planets are already growing chocolate seedlings is problematic enough – because of Serum Green.

HGB didn’t modify the cacao genetically. They’re adding Serum Green during processing. Which means that whatever the aliens harvest is not going to be the chocolate they’re expecting. Which means they’re going to find out we’ve been manipulating them to buy our product. Oye! Think how angry both the Nilka and the Zantites are going to be. Forget invasion, hola annihilation.

Pero, if we can keep the borders closed, no one will be able to prove what we’re growing is not the same as what we’re selling. But even HGB has to know that’s not a viable strategy long term – not with the Krom having a cacao plantation.

The Krom make it their mission to spread commodities throughout the galaxy, the equivalent of open-source software hackers. If this invasion coalition could wait long enough, the Krom would give them cacao seeds. They just have to let the Krom plantation’s trees mature, or give Krom researchers time to find a way to overcome the resistance to cloning that HGB bred into the beans.

Pero, because of Serum Green, the coalition members are choco-addicted. They may not even know why they’re so obsessed with getting chocolate for themselves. And that’s partly HGB’s fault.

“I understand you’ve been arrested before, mijo,” Valeria says to Brill, yanking my hair unnecessarily hard. She blames Brill for getting me involved with the whole stealing chocolate thing in the first place. She is not wrong. But she doesn’t understand the complicated reasons behind what he did.

Brill shrugs. “Wal. A couple of times. Kind of comes with the territory.” Brill’s a trader, mostly in luxury foodstuffs, especially fine wines. A gray market trader. Pero he has his boundaries.

Valeria whispers to me, “Nacido ladrón, criado mentiroso, en el krom del corazón.”

It’s a proverb about the Krom, relating to the fact that the word Krom in their language means center: Born a thief, raised a liar, at the center of the heart.

“That’s not true.” I bite my lip to keep myself from saying anything stronger. I’ve had this fight before – most people on my home world consider all Krom pirates and galactathieves – and I’ve never managed to change anyone’s mind.

The Krom/Earth First Contact was Earth’s first First Contact, and it did not go well. Krom look enough like Earthlings – hot, built Earthlings – that they figured they could pop in some opaque contacts to hide the chromashifting eyes and walk among us. A Discovery Vessel landed in Iowa, and a couple dozen of them got jobs and pawned stuff and started buying samples of plants and animals with Earth currency. Only, we caught on in the middle of their commodities cataloguing, and they left in a hurry – without getting a sample cacao tree.

Chocolate became the center of Earth’s economy, and our basis for trade with the galaxy. We fought a global war over it, restructured our entire world over it, wound up with HGB, a megacorp built out of the world’s chocolate companies, having too much power because it held a monopoly on this one resource.

The megacorp has only been in charge of chocolate for about forty years. But in that time, they’ve re-shaped the way the world thinks about candy, getting rid of much of the fun and whimsy, subtly discouraging humans from eating it – while at the same time, trying to find ways to grow more, to be sold as high-cost offplanet exports.

Most humans still blame the Krom for everything that happened during and after the First Contact War. They forget about how much of that we did to ourselves, forget about the riots that swept the globe after the aliens left, when people were accusing their neighbors of being not of Earth.

I don’t know how Brill puts up with the insults and the slurs without becoming bitter, pero when I ask him about it, he just says he’s used to it.

“El ciego no distingue colores,” Brill tells her. Literally, a blind man should not judge of colors. More bluntly, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I’m not about to tell Valeria that Brill learned that – like most of the Spanish he’s picked up – watching telenovelas. Especially not now, with her cheeks going red.