9
THE SACRED DUTY
LIKE MALLORY, XAN had left college before graduation. The reasons didn’t involve murder, but that didn’t mean he didn’t consider it.
When he’d been eight and his brother, Phineas, had been three, their parents had died in a car accident when an earthquake had struck the Smoky Mountains, splitting the Linn Cove Viaduct and sending their parents’ car plummeting down the side of a mountain.
Secured in car and booster seats, the boys had been relatively unharmed, minus the terror of the accident and the hours of waiting for rescue as their parents had died.
Phineas always said he didn’t remember it, but Xan heard Phineas crying in his sleep more than once, and he was deathly afraid of heights.
After the accident, their grandmother had raised them. She lived on a huge plot of land outside Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Norma Morgan was mean as a snake and twice as crafty. The best part about growing up was finding out he had gotten a full scholarship to UNC–Chapel Hill, giving him a chance to escape.
He was twenty when his grandmother had a stroke. He dropped out to enlist in the army so he could send some money home for her care and Phineas’s schooling.
A friend had asked why going to the army was preferable to just moving back home and getting a job, but Xan mumbled something patriotic and let it drop.
His grandmother was the reason.
Xan resembled their mother, thin and wiry. Phineas resembled their father, tall and beefy. Their grandmother had hated their mother and always showed a clear preference for Phineas. This was the only reason he felt safe leaving his little brother in the house with her.
The army took Xan’s interest in logic and organization and put him on supply lines. He could take supplies and stretch them as far as they could go, and he essentially eliminated waste in any company he was attached to. He went to Afghanistan with the quartermaster battalion, mortuary division. He was there when First Contact happened, but it barely registered on his radar. He was too busy finding, identifying, and cataloguing injuries and collecting personal effects from his fellow soldiers’ corpses to pay attention to the news that had nothing to do with his current situation.
Mortuary service was a grim duty, but he’d been drilled in its importance and sacred aspect. He did it without complaint and even quietly suffered the mocking all quartermasters and ordnance officers got from combat soldiers, knowing he wouldn’t want his brother left in pieces on a battlefield, so he wasn’t leaving anyone else’s out there. He served his time and then came home to serve at Fort Sam Houston.
Ironically, it was on US soil that his breaking point came, and after one horrific incident, he left mortuary service (for the most part) and was transferred to the new Fort Bowser in North Carolina.
Bowser was roughly equidistant from both Fort Lee in Virginia and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and several people asked why they needed another fort so close to the existing ones. Very few received the truthful answer: Bowser covered the completely new area of dealing with extraterrestrial situations. Xan’s job was to help establish a quartermaster battalion to prepare for supplying troops specifically for alien encounters. And not tell a soul.
The job required a high-level security clearance. Humans didn’t want aliens finding out that the military was studying how to protect Earth from an alien attack while the governments were talking about diplomacy. The official word concerning Fort Bowser was that Fort Bragg in Fayetteville was undergoing some major renovations and a temporary base had been erected near Raleigh. The secrecy suited Xan just fine, as he didn’t want his grandmother to know he was in North Carolina.
The security clearance and promotion had been a shock, since Xan had expected a demotion because someone had found out what had happened on the Texas border. Only he and one other soldier knew what had really gone wrong when they had lost an entire patrol, but that other solider had been a bit of a loose cannon—to put it mildly—and he wondered if she had given him up.
But it turned out she hadn’t talked; he was promoted and given a higher security clearance, and suddenly the fallout from First Contact became his daily focus.
Soon after Xan was established in Fort Bowser, Phineas emailed him to say he had decided not to go to school because of a big “opportunity” to chase his creative dreams. Xan thought about his abandoned degree at UNC, and what had happened due to him joining the army, and his mouth felt full of ash. He got very drunk that night.
The next day, haggard and hungover, he was called to the quartermaster general’s office to discuss a new responsibility: in addition to helping establish what the new Terrestrial Guard quartermasters would need, he was to work solo within a new area of mortuary affairs.
QUARTERMASTER GENERAL ERIC Rodriguez’s office stank of degassing carpets and new plastic. The room could have used some serious airing out, but he sat at his new desk with the windows tightly shut and the air conditioning on full blast as if he didn’t smell anything.
Rodriguez always wore a tight smile, as if a tack was sticking out of his chair and poking him somewhere, but he would be damned if he would shift or show discomfort. The stench of plastic made Xan’s head pound even worse when he arrived and saluted. The memo detailing his new responsibility was clenched in his fist, damp and crumpled.
“Close the door, SPC,” Rodriguez said.
Xan shut the door behind him and didn’t speak.
“At ease,” the quartermaster general said. “I’d like to discuss your new assignment.”
Xan fought the urge to wipe the clammy sweat off the back of his neck. He kept his face neutral and said, “I’m unclear why you want my attention split between quartermasters as a whole and mortuary affairs in specific. I had thought I was to move away from mortuary. And sir, understand that my time in mortuary affairs has been rewarding, but I’m worried my responsibilities will split my attention and quality of work.”
“You don’t have to sugarcoat it, Alexander. No one wants to shovel the shit.”
He stiffened. “I was taught mortuary affairs is a sacred duty, sir. No one would ever call it—”
Rodriguez waved off his objection and Xan shut his mouth and set his jaw. He could always spot someone who had never served with the quartermasters. They didn’t consider repairing gear, providing food, and retrieving corpses to be respectable work. Soldiers don’t do that kind of work. And we all want to be soldiers, don’t we?
During his training, Xan had studied historical reports about quartermasters and supplies during wartime. He developed a real admiration for the leaders up top who knew they couldn’t win wars without solid supply support. A previous commanding officer had once told him, “People who downplay our role usually regret it. Do you want to be left on a battlefield with a dog eating your face and an enemy stealing your wedding ring, or do you want your remains treated with respect?”
“Do you trust your commanding officer?” Rodriguez asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said. It’s not like there’s another option, he added mentally.
“Then accept your position.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “But why me, sir?”
“You have the experience we need and the security clearance. You know what we’re studying here, and we need your skills as a mortuary expert. We have procured a number of alien corpses to study, and we need your forensics ability.”
A soldier didn’t need to ask where their superiors “procured” corpses to study, but Xan’s spine went cold. He hadn’t found any alien race that couldn’t destroy the human race if crossed.
“So why the promotion? Why not just keep me with MA?”
“You needed the security clearance that came with the promotion. This is a big deal, Xan. We’re on the cusp of something. Have a seat and I’ll explain.”
XAN WANTED TO talk to Stephanie alone but knew that he couldn’t really have a private conversation with the Gneiss. Or rather, she couldn’t moderate her volume to converse quietly with him, since she already had to shout to communicate. Still, there were things he wasn’t ready to reveal to Mallory.
Mallory infuriated him. The only other human he could talk to on the station, and she was still tiring. He knew it was part jealousy; she acted on instinct and didn’t seem to worry about consequences, and he’d been burned by that mindset far too often. He had to plan shit, or bad things happened. He’d been startled that, while they had both been impulsive in college, he was the only one to have grown up. Back then impetuousness was not a trait that could get your companions killed.
Mallory had seen darkness, he knew, but it hadn’t broken her. He couldn’t say the same.
“Stephanie. We need to talk.”
All four of them turned toward him. Mallory’s face was dark, but he could read the distrust in her eyes.
“You knew about this?” Mallory said.
“I knew some of it,” he allowed. “I didn’t kill him.”
“Do you know who did?” Mallory looked from him to Stephanie. Tina was vibrating almost visibly, but she hadn’t vocalized anything yet.
“No,” he said.
“I think you need to fill me in on some holes in this story,” Mallory said.
“All right. If I can.”
“Tell me how y’all met,” she said, looking from him to the Gneiss. “You’ve never given me details.”
“That’s . . . what? That’s what you want to know?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I can’t figure out what’s going on until I know some things about your past. You’ve been a closed book up to now, but I need to know some things if I’m going to trust you.”
This was easy compared to everything else he tried to keep secret. He nodded. “All right. What do you want to know?”
“Start at the party. You showed up there with a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five and you were yawning like you were on Benadryl.”
A FEW MONTHS after his assignment to Fort Bowser, Xan arrived at fellow quartermaster Billy’s party, holding something that could get him thrown in jail if he was found with it. If he was lucky. He just had to make the drop at a specific time and then it would be out of his hands.
Finding Mallory had been a shock, one that nearly unmoored him. He was there on official business and needed all his wits about him. But after one beer to calm his nerves, he had started to get drowsy, and then a woman from college showed up. He didn’t even realize that civilians could attend parties on the base, especially if idiots like Billy were going to just talk about the classified stuff as if it were nothing. Who knew who could be listening to the moron babble?
But the way Mallory had been talking, she hadn’t realized that Anira worked on the base as well.
Why was Anira really here? And why bring Mallory?
“ANIRA WORKED ON the base?” Mallory interrupted slowly. “That’s . . . interesting. She never told me that. That makes a lot of sense now.” She had a faraway look in her eyes.
“Yeah, I was surprised she hadn’t told you that. She just said Billy and that crew were her friends, right?”
Mallory nodded. “Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted. Keep going.” She still had that distracted look.
THE DROP SITUATION felt sloppy and dangerous. After nine o’clock, he was to go to the kitchen for a beer and leave the package on the counter as if he’d forgotten it. His contact would pick it up there.
He worried about leaving it out there in the open, but from what he knew of the people at the party, no one would be looking to read Vonnegut so long as the beer was cold.
But his timing was already off. At eight thirty, the party started focusing on a game. It was the perfect time to slip away, but Mallory—the only person there who would investigate a random book—went to the kitchen. He wanted to reconnect with her, but he had this drop to worry about and couldn’t let Mallory get her hands on the book.
She left him with a sad, exhausted look on her face, which surprised him. He looked after her thoughtfully and didn’t really hear the rules of the game. The lights going out surprised him, and he felt the long hours of practicing paying off as his other senses sharpened.
Or they tried to sharpen. As his brain melted into molasses, he realized with dawning horror that he wasn’t tired. This feeling was closer to being drugged. If someone had drugged him when he was about to make a high-security drop, he needed to abort entirely. He tried to edge toward the door.
Still, through his brain fog, an old friend’s voice came back:
If you’re doing it right, everything will slow down, and it becomes like a dance, and you’ll feel the fucking air move before your opponent gets to you. No, stop moving, stay still and listen, and sense what your eyes tell you to ignore. Four fighting requires you to use what you have.
I’ve never heard of four fighting. Is it kung fu or something?
Fuck, no. My uncle taught me what he learned when he was in prison for dealing drugs. If you take one sense away, you have to pay extra attention to the other four. It’s usually sight that goes, but he made me work without all five senses. Touch is the hardest. Taste means nothing unless you’re trying to detect poison, I guess. Anyway, he’d tell me, “You know, Waste, you might need to dodge a shiv in the dark one day.” So I’m telling you. Xan, you might need to dodge a shiv in the dark one day.
Someone moved behind him, and things slowed down. The air brushed against his neck, and he stepped to the side, stumbling slightly. A cold sliver of pain passed over his bicep and a body passed by him, the inertia of their missed stabbing carrying them forward. Someone grunted, someone laughed, and then Billy fell against Xan. Confusion reigned for a few seconds, and behind him, the door opened.
When the lights came on, the reality of the situation struck him as Billy’s blood coated his shirt and hands from the open stab wound. He lowered Billy to the carpet and stared at him. His brain screamed at him to check that he still had his data and get the hell out of there before the drug took him out and the murderer got a second chance.
He ran.
Xan was getting lethargic and slower, stumbling into the street. He lived on the other side of the base; there was no way he could get home. Across the street from Billy’s was a field that was destined to be another highly secure research facility, but they hadn’t broken ground yet. He could possibly get to the wooded area on the other side of the field before he passed out. If he made it through whatever this drug was doing to him, he’d try to figure out his steps after that.
Then the sky was bathed in light and the ship—Infinity—appeared above him. And then he passed out.
“YOU WERE THE murderer’s target?” Mallory asked, eyes wide. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you would have asked why,” he said. “And I couldn’t tell you classified information. I was shocked that security let a civilian into an on-base party.”
“Of course I’d ask. I’m asking now. Why did someone want to kill you?”
He sighed. “All I can tell you is what you probably already figured out. We were doing some high-security stuff at Fort Bowser. I knew more than I should have. Someone drugged me and then tried to kill me. They failed and Billy took the hit.” He frowned. Billy had been a dumbass, but he didn’t deserve a knife to the chest.
“And we came to the rescue!” Tina said, delighted.
“Or we made things more complicated for him,” Ferdinand added.
XAN CAME TO with his cheek in a puddle of blood, his ears throbbing. His arm was wet, and his shirt was plastered to his chest with blood. He opened his eyes to see aliens towering above him. They were . . . arguing about him? As large as they were, he could barely hear them.
But he could hear them.
His hand touched the ear not stuck to the floor. It too was coated in gore. They must have given him those translation bugs he’d heard about. Only high diplomats and heads of state had these things.
His captors sounded like teens who had stolen Dad’s car for a joyride, picked up a dirty stray dog, and then worried about the consequences after the fact.
“You thought it was cute, you thought it would be ‘funny’ to pick up, and now what are we going to do with it?” The voice was irritated.
The second sounded blandly amused. “I think you hurt it when you put the translation bug in its head.”
A third voice. “That red stuff was already on the outside of its body. It’s fine.”
“Are you sure that’s where the ear is?”
“I injected it with the good stuff, and it stopped leaking eventually, didn’t it? It’s fine.” The third voice sounded worried and defensive.
The first voice spoke. “I think it’s awake.”
He sat up, wincing as his cheek peeled off the metal floor; he’d been out long enough for the blood on his face to create a tacky adhesive. He rubbed his head and winced at his tender ears. “What happened?” he asked.
“Hello! Can you understand us?” The third voice belonged to a reddish-gray Gneiss that loomed over him. It was speaking slowly and loudly as if to a foreigner (which Xan supposed he was).
“Yes, I can understand you. Stop shouting,” he said, also irritated. “What the hell happened? And what did you inject me with?” He felt his arms, trying to find a puncture wound. He found nothing; even the laceration on his arm had faded to a scar.
He tried to struggle to his feet, still weak. The reddish-gray alien held out a hand to help him up, and it was like grabbing a stone wall. He pulled himself up easily but wobbled a bit when he stood.
There had been a dream when he was out, but it was fleeting. Something about a repaired bridge and being encased in a warm blanket. He wished he could remember.
“We saw you in a field, and I thought you might be looking for a ride,” Red said. It was massive, having at least a foot on the other two, so its head nearly brushed the top of the shuttle.
“No, you said you wanted a pet,” the second voice said. This Gneiss was purple and seated in a huge chair in front of a complicated-looking console. “So we picked it up. Unfortunately, my grandfather insisted on an autopilot when we took this shuttle, and it engaged and took us off planet. You see, someone decided at the start of this trip that we’d probably be too wasted to drive home anyway.”
“We are wasted. Was I wrong?” Red said.
“Yes. You’re the only one wasted,” the first said, leaning against the wall. It was the most intricate, made entirely of dark gray granite with veins of white going through it.
“Yeah, okay,” Red said, giving in. It focused on Xan again. “We gave you a translation bug that attaches to your ear nerve. We think it did, anyway. If you can hear us, I guess we did. Then we gave you some of the healing stuff that the bugs make. Just in case. Can you understand us?”
“That should be obvious by now,” Xan grumbled. “Did you say something about autopilot that you can’t change?”
“We can have a medic look at you on the station,” the purple Gneiss said. “Although I don’t know if they’ve ever seen a human before.”
“You’re taking me to the station? What station?” he asked, the haze slowly clearing and making way for a mental alarm to start ringing faintly.
“Station Eternity,” the purple one said.
“Hang on, you need to drop me somewhere on Earth.” He couldn’t think of a good place off the top of his head, but it seemed it didn’t matter.
“Autopilot—it’s the only way her grandfather let us take the ship,” Red said. “It’s out of our hands.”
“Then how did you pick me up if you aren’t in control of this ship?”
“Long story,” Purple said.
“But Eternity is light-years away! How am I supposed to get home? For that matter, how am I supposed to get aboard the station since humans aren’t allowed!” he said, alarm rising. At least the adrenaline was making him metabolize that drug faster. His head was almost clear.
“They aren’t allowed?” Red asked, looking at the other two.
The red one was either drunk or stupid. Xan couldn’t decide. It said it was drunk, so Xan figured he could cut it some slack. “My country’s government just sent an ambassador to the station to help negotiate for Earth, but as far as I know they’re not getting anywhere yet.” He looked at the seated purple Gneiss, the first voice, who seemed to be in charge. It was at least more engaged than the gray one and less drunk than the red.
“We can just ask Eternity to send you home,” Red said. “It’s our fault you’re here anyway; you’re not to blame.”
“ ‘Our’ fault?” the purple pilot said, finally turning around. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s all your fault, Tina,” the gray one said.
“Hey!” the red one—Tina?—complained. “Don’t get me in trouble, you guys.”
Xan had a strong feeling of awkward interpersonal dynamics going on here and didn’t want any part of it. His emotions felt plastic and distant, as if the events of last night had happened to someone else. Blood, Billy’s and his own, was still tacky on his hands and shirt. “So I don’t have any say as to where you’re taking me?”
“It’s okay, neither do we!” Tina reassured him.
“Wonderful,” he said. He dimly felt like he could get angrier, but he was too tired. He tried to rub his temples, but his arms felt heavy. Shit. “Listen, I can’t worry about this right now. If you can’t drop me home, is there anywhere I can clean up and get some rest? I’m not feeling great.”
The more responsible Gneiss—Stephanie and Ferdinand, he learned—gave him a wet towel and showed him to a Gneiss-size bunk area resembling a king bed. He collapsed and passed out.
His unconscious time aboard Infinity was soothing, almost healing. As the Gneiss and Infinity ferried him farther and farther away from Earth, he slept. As the drug worked its way out of his system through his blood and sweat, he became tangentially aware of a sense of protection and safety. Not the usual peace of being asleep, but the feeling of being cared for. It was how his grandmother had made him feel when she made Sunday breakfast, when he was a kid, before he knew more about her.
Xan had tried to be alarmed, but it was surreal enough to distance him. He couldn’t even see Earth on Infinity’s screens, so he didn’t have that visual cue to cement his situation in his head. Anyway, the aliens assured him that they would find a way to get him home.
He just wasn’t sure where to tell them to take him.
He guessed the trip took a day or two. He would wake up, the rock folks would say encouraging things to him as if he were a puppy, and then he’d retreat back to the bunk. At his request, they gave him water to drink, and, although he hated asking—and explaining why—showed him where he could take care of more private matters.
All he knew was that when he got to Eternity, he was famished.
Upon their arrival at the station, when Tina the Gneiss was fretting that they were “totally going to get in trouble” for bringing a human to the station, Xan met Eternity while stinking of blood and sweat, feeling as if he had literally been reborn.
“You’ve never been to a sentient space station before, have you?” Stephanie asked him.
“I’ve never been to any space station,” he replied flatly.
Stephanie nodded. “She wants to meet you before you come aboard. She can reach out and touch your mind. It’s standard, so just let it happen. You won’t be able to hide from her, but she’s pretty nonjudgmental, especially if she lets people like Tina aboard.”
“She reads minds?” Xan asked, feeling sick to his stomach. “Like everyone on the station is always having their minds read?”
“Not exactly. It’s hard to explain, and I don’t know how well the translation is coming across. It’s a lot of effort for her, and she only really reads the mind of her host—who is a wretched piece of basalt; stay away from him, by the way—who helps her establish a connection with each newcomer. There’s nothing you can do to avoid it, so just let her do her thing.”
Xan took a step back from the view screen that showed the color-shifting sphere that was Eternity. “And if she doesn’t want me? What happens then?”
“We’ll find a way to get you back to Earth,” Ferdinand said from the pilot’s chair. He, for one, had some confidence in his voice.
When he met Eternity, Xan still didn’t know what to expect, but it felt like a mental wave crashing over him, and when the tide withdrew, he had a sense of acceptance.
He could come aboard, and even stay; Eternity had granted him sanctuary. No one would come aboard and extradite him, she promised.
He had no idea if she had seen what he had hoped to hide from her, and the Gneiss, and most of the people at the party. If she had and she’d let him on board, she had to be a masochist. If she hadn’t seen it, then was it just a matter of time before she figured it out?
A sentient station was an enigma still. Instead of his own room, the shuttle Infinity would be his living space, provided he maintained her.
“AND ABOUT THREE weeks later, I think, you arrived,” Xan said.
Mallory watched him closely as he told this part of the story. After he finished telling it, she studied him for a moment longer, as if waiting for something else.
She knows. Just tell her. The thoughts were unbidden. The less she knew, the safer she would be. But if she already knows you’re hiding something, then she’s not going to trust you.
He sighed internally but said nothing else.
“And about this murder,” Mallory asked, addressing him and Stephanie, “you both knew a lot more about it than you told me at first. Why hide the information?”
He shrugged. “The truth doesn’t sound very good. I didn’t kill him, but you’re not likely to believe it, especially if I tell you more.”
“I can believe a lot of things,” she said.
Gone was the terrified Mallory who wanted to run, as well as the impetuous Mallory who jumped into danger without a plan. This Mallory had a keen eye and seemed to be drinking everything in.
“Wait,” Stephanie said. “You’re needed in the medical bay.”
“How do you know that?” Mallory asked. “I’m getting really tired of asking that question,” she added under her breath.
“Gneiss can communicate through vibrations. You know that,” Stephanie said. “There’s a nurse asking you both to come. They need help with human body physiology. They don’t know what to do with your wet insides.”
“We can’t be the only species with blood and organs,” Mallory said, but she had moved her intense stare from Xan, and he relaxed slightly. “I’m going to my room to change. I’ll meet you there, Xan.”
“You’re needed right now,” Stephanie said.
Mallory held up her foot, and the suit’s boot flopped around. “I’m not going anywhere quickly in this. They already have all the information about females they need, and if they need more, they can scan Xan first.”
They turned to leave the cold room, but Mallory fixed Xan with that cold stare again.
“This isn’t over. You need to tell me what’s going on.”
“I know,” he said, meeting her eyes.
But what would happen when she found out the truth?