Trespassers: a science-fiction novel Read online

  Jin nodded as if he had just been given an official order. Dexim looked to the instructions that Lyntic was holding. “What’s next?”

  She pointed to the vial of blood in Jin’s hand as she read, “Draw fifty clicks of the blood sample into container zero. The blood must then be prepared by adding six clicks of number one to container zero.”

  Every item in the field vaccination kit was clearly marked with a number, and all the syringes were fitted with clicking dials that rotated to control the dosages. The step-by-step system made it simple. And after seven-and-a-half minutes of following the instructions, they had a vaccine.

  As Dexim administered the shot to their quarantined patient in the bathtub, Lyntic made her way to an upstairs bedroom in search of something to wear. She marveled at the details of life on Earth: the handcrafted wooden furniture, the canvas paintings, and the felt-lined jewelry boxes. She ran her hand across the sea of fabrics that hung in the closet. The materials on Earth were vastly different from those of her home world. Visually, what stuck out were the oranges. There was something especially vibrant about the color orange on Earth. It had a depth and a quality that just wasn’t found anywhere else in the universe. She pulled an orange blouse from the closet and admired it. It would certainly do. And her skin welcomed the feel of cotton.

  9

  Lunch and Speculation

  Inside Trino’s, a family-style restaurant, Mindy was sitting at a booth next to a large window, her eyes shifting from table to table. She was amazed that no one knew what she knew. She was experiencing a wonderful sensation of having a secret so big it made everything else seem insignificant. As Mindy watched these people, they seemed so routine and so undisturbed by the alien spaceship that had just flown over their city.

  Her eyes shifted back to her own table where she saw New Guy staring over the crowd just as she had. She could tell that he was having the same thoughts. Then her eyes landed on Web who was perusing the menu as if he was studying for an exam. Mindy would come to learn that Web was captivated by food and that he was an amateur chef who dreamed of opening his own restaurant.

  Mindy glanced out the window to see the SUV sitting peacefully in the parking lot. It could be waiting on a third-grade soccer team to finish its milkshakes for all anyone knew. There was absolutely no indication of the alien trespasser who was asleep in the cargo area. Stewart had assured Mindy that this trespasser would be sleeping off the sedative for a few more hours if no one intervened. At the time, she hadn’t thought to ask what intervened meant. She would later learn that a simple ice cube to the temple would revive him because of some effect on the nervous system, which was fully explained to her, though the explanation didn’t fully stick.

  Mindy pulled her gaze back inside the restaurant and found Stewart swirling a spoon in his cup of hot tea. He wasn’t much of a tea drinker, but the waitress informed him that the coffee machine was broken. As Mindy watched him stir his tea, it was apparent that what he was actually stirring was his thoughts.

  “What are you thinking?” Web asked him. That’s exactly what Mindy would have asked, and she couldn’t wait for the answer. She was here to learn, and she was ready to soak it in.

  Stewart looked up from his cup and took a moment to gather his thoughts. “I’ll probably just go with the chicken sandwich,” he said, without even the slightest tone of humor in his voice.

  Could that really be the case, Mindy wondered. Could he have thought Web was asking about his order?

  “I wonder if the lasagna is any good here,” Web replied.

  Mindy suddenly realized that they were serious. They were so accustomed to all this alien stuff that they didn’t think twice about it. She wanted to scream, Are you serious!? You were in a spaceship twenty minutes ago! But she didn’t scream anything.

  “What are you getting, New Guy?” Web asked, in a way that made the generic pseudonym seem endearing.

  “I’m not hungry,” New Guy answered. He had the right look in his eye. He had the look Mindy expected from a person who had just confiscated an alien spaceship.

  “Me either,” Mindy quickly followed.

  “Order something, both of you,” Stewart commanded, suddenly seeming like a father figure. “You need to eat.” Mindy and New Guy turned to their menus. Stewart turned back to his tea.

  Mindy’s eyes trolled down through the entrees, trying to find something easy to digest, since her nerves still had her stomach twisted. She knew this meal would be on the expense account, so she didn’t have to worry about the cost, but she didn’t want a reputation as the girl who always ordered the most expensive meal, so she kept an eye on the prices as well. Spicy Chili . . . Pulled Pork, no thanks. Fried Shrimp, not even close. Tuna Melt, better, but no.

  Chicken soup, yes that would do, and some crackers, too.

  Stewart was still gazing into his tea, stirring much deeper thoughts now. Something was bugging him. “Why weren’t there any passengers?” he pondered aloud.

  Web lifted his eyes from his menu. “Ships don’t always have passengers.” He shrugged.

  “They don’t?”

  Web shrugged again. “Maybe he was picking somebody up.”

  “So, you’re saying he was abducting someone and making a vaccine so that he could transport a visitor off the planet?” Stewart countered.

  Damn, Stewart was making sense. Web shrugged anyway. “Let’s just eat first, before we start with the questions,” Web was more interested in lunch at this point than talking Stewart down from another mysterious mission. Web didn’t mind indulging Stewart’s hunches, but he did mind when those hunches threatened to cut his lunch short. He had spent far too many days balancing food on his lap, bouncing down the road, chasing one of Stewart’s hunches.

  “What if someone was on the ship?” Stewart asked.

  “You checked the ship.”

  “I could have missed someone,” Stewart said. “I was in a hurry. . . . Do you think those energy pulses could have been other passengers, bailing out?”

  “Bailing from a moving ship?” Web scoffed. “No way.”

  This piqued Mindy’s curiosity. “How exactly does one . . . bail out of a moving ship? Or any ship for that matter.”

  Web perked up. He loved teaching and never missed an opportunity.

  “Ships like that one—transporter ships—have deceleration slopes, which allow cargo to be dropped to the ground at ten percent g,” Web explained, as if giving a miniature seminar. “That means that if you drop something from ten feet, it would be like dropping it from one foot. And if you dropped it from one hundred feet, it would be like dropping it from ten feet. It all works off an invisible pulse that dampens the gravitational pull on the selected object, but that object is still uncontrollably falling, just not as fast . . . just like when we dropped—” He swiveled his thumb around like a weather vane to point at the vehicle in the parking lot. Mindy nodded, and suddenly what she had seen was making more sense.

  “But when an object is dropped from a ship that is moving, only the drop is slowed,” Web continued, “there’s nothing to dampen the forward momentum. So, if the ship’s going twenty miles an hour when you leave, you’re going twenty when you land. And if you leave at a hundred miles an hour,” he smiled, “you’re going to be smeared across something.”

  Mindy nodded, feeling a little more up to speed.

  “What if they're not just vacationers,” Stewart pondered aloud. An ominous silence fell over the table.

  In that silence, Mindy noticed something. She noticed . . . Stewart. He seemed powerful and confident in a way she hadn’t realized before. She looked a little closer and saw that it was something more than confidence. There was something spectacular about him. It was . . . oh, no . . . it was attraction. She had developed a crush on him. Somewhere in the excitement it had happened. It happened before she could even detect it . . . somewhere in the midst of lying on that red-and-white blanket and watching him confiscate a spacecraft.

  M
indy noticed Stewart looking back at her. Had she been staring? Had she given herself away? She hoped not. She tried to act nonchalant. She would have to rein it in.

  Stewart had noticed. His favorite type of person was a person who was impressed with him. And his favorite type of girl was a girl who was crushing on him. He sensed Mindy was shaping up into that type of girl. He just needed to make sure she didn't take it too far. That could be bad for business. Mindy found it hard to hide in the silence, so she broke it.

  “If they’re not vacationers,” she asked, “what would they be?”

  Her plan worked. Stewart’s thoughts returned to the trespass.

  “I’m not sure,” he responded, as he swirled his tea a few more times. “Order me the chicken sandwich.” He slid out of the booth. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Mustard?” Web asked.

  “Yeah,” Stewart replied as he headed for the door, too preoccupied to actually hear the question.

  Stewart crossed the parking lot and slipped into the passenger’s seat of the SUV, where he placed a call to a pleasant chap named George Roman. Stewart didn’t like to think of himself as having a boss—maybe just a friend who was farther up the ladder—nonetheless, that’s what George was, Stewart’s boss.

  “Gooood afternoon,” George said into the phone.

  After a few pleasantries, Stewart explained the situation and officially requested authorization to take the trespasser to a remote facility for questioning. This would require a translator and additional security to be dispatched, and it required George’s approval.

  “You don’t have any proof that those were actually aliens that were dropped from the ship, though,” George observed, still making up his mind.

  “No, but we don’t have any evidence that they’re not.”

  George wasn’t fully convinced, and he knew he wasn’t going to be. Questioning by a field agent was not unheard of, but it was rare. The normal protocol would be to turn the trespasser over to a holding facility for a light slap on the wrist. George trusted Stewart, but he had learned to keep a tight rein on him. “I don’t want to send an interrogation team just to find out that the pilot tossed five bags of trash overboard in the middle of a cornfield.”

  “The pilot was sedated,” Stewart argued. “There had to be someone else on that ship . . . someone who’s not still on that ship.”

  “Okay,” George conceded. “You can do the interrogation . . . but this probably isn’t anything.”

  Stewart was George’s discovery—his apprentice. When George first happened across him, Stewart was a twenty-one-year-old kid, in college because his parents had paid for him to go. Stewart could have breezed through the textbooks, but that didn’t interest him. Past the walls of the school, in the wide-open expanses of the real world, that’s where Stewart wanted to be. He knew his life wasn’t going to take place in a pile of stale books. This attitude didn’t sit well with the university, and the professors dismissed Stewart as yet another lackadaisical underachiever.

  When George visited the university to interview students for a handful of entry-level government assignments, he had the misfortune of forgetting his briefcase. On the elevator ride back down to retrieve it from his car, he had the fortune of meeting a slacker named Stewart. That short elevator ride would change both men’s lives forever and reshape Earth’s relationship with alien visitors.

  10

  Water

  Jin ran the tap in the kitchen sink, filling a glass he had found on the counter. It was Rusty Wallace in the number 2 car, and Jin set him next to the other collectable NASCAR drivers, all filled with water and sitting in a line. He dropped two drops from a silver bottle into each. Vaccination or not, no one was allowed to eat anything for the first eighteen hours after landing on a planet. Water was all that was allowed, and the drops helped with the body’s transition to the new environment. Without them, the water rumbled in the pit of the stomach, like spoiled fruit.

  Jin took a sip from the Jeff Gordon glass and set it back on the counter. There was always a heavy, metallic twinge to that first sip—not from the water itself, but from the treatment. A metallic twinge was better than spoiled fruit though, and Jin knew this first hand, having experienced both. He gathered the other three glasses and headed upstairs.

  Upstairs, Lyntic was looking through the drawers and closets for anything that might assist them on their mission. Jin appeared in the doorway and set a glass of water on the dresser for her. Lyntic looked up and nodded a polite thank you. He didn’t make it farther than a step out the door before she called him back.

  “I found those for you,” she said, pointing to three pairs of sunglasses on the dresser. “You should probably have some spares.” It wasn’t exactly a heartfelt gift. Concealing his eyes was a necessity. Jin nodded, but inside it felt like a knife to the heart. He knew it was necessary to the mission, but being reminded that he was different wasn’t pleasant. When someone pointed this out, he couldn’t help but feel accused of being like the family he left behind. But he was nothing like them.

  Lyntic noticed the other glass of water in his hand. “Don’t bother Dexim while he’s thinking.”

  “I know.” Jin nodded and disappeared into the hall.

  As Lyntic continued her search, she found something very useful under the bed: a duffle bag. It was blue and white, with a large blue horseshoe emblem on one side, just above the words Indianapolis Colts. She remembered them being a football team, and she thought they had won the Super Bowl. She was right. This bag was a suitable replacement for the nawmas bag. Mission protocol dictated that the alien bag must be destroyed, so Lyntic had filled it with charcoal briquettes, placed it on the grill in the backyard, and set it ablaze.

  Across the hall, Jin headed to the bathroom where Tobi was soaking.

  “Thirsty?” Jin asked.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Tobi said.

  “Try it before you thank me.”

  “Oh, right.” Tobi cringed, remembering the treatment.

  Jin set the Jimmy Johnson glass on the edge of the tub, within Tobi’s reach. “I’d wait as long as you can before drinking that, in case it doesn’t sit well with the vaccine.”

  Downstairs, Dexim stood in the center of the living room, studying the supplies sprawled out over the furniture—a medical bag in the cloth chair, communication devices on the coffee table, and field rations spread across the couch. Dexim didn’t fly by the seat of his pants. He organized a mental playbook that accounted for every possibility. Long before they entered the Earth’s atmosphere, Dexim had visualized the possibility of the ship being confiscated—not because it was likely, but because he was obsessed with getting into all the nooks and crannies of possibility. He had a gift for picturing his way into and out of every problem.

  What if she’s not out there? What if someone else found her already? He didn’t have the answer, and neither did Dale Earnhardt. He hadn’t even noticed when Jin slipped the glass onto the table. He picked it up and got the first gulp over with.

  11

  Stone Ridge Cabin

  A modern wooden cabin rested on the edge of a secluded lake, nestled in a thick, green forest, as if a postcard had come to life. It was called Stone Ridge Cabin—the last place on Earth one would expect a government interrogation to be taking place.

  Inside the cabin, Denokin was coming to terms with the fact that he had been arrested—abducted from his own ship, no less. He sat across a table from Agent Lawrence. Both men had a cup of coffee in front of them. Denokin scratched his nail across an imperfection in the cup’s handle, as he listened to the earthling in the business suit churn out polished alien sentences.

  Denokin’s thoughts flashed back to the orders he had received just twenty hours ago from his regional supervisor. He was to pick up four passengers and drop them on Earth, and he would be paid well to sit and wait for their return. There was nothing unusual about that, except the urgency of it and the amount of the pay.

  Denoki
n was a transporter, shuttling tourists and business travelers from space stations to foreign planets and back again. He had worked all over the galaxy, but for the past four years, he had been doing mostly Earth. So, he knew the rules associated with making drops on Earth. There were certain times and places that ships were allowed to land, and abductions were NEVER allowed. Denokin knew he was breaking these rules. But he also knew the money made it worth the risk.

  Since Denokin never left the ship during these drops, there was no need for him to speak English. The few sayings he had picked up were not enough to maintain a conversation. Fortunately, Agent Lawrence was a proficient translator. Denokin wouldn’t need to try to recall any of his English phrases.

  Agent Lawrence was one of a long line of agents that Stewart would happen across. While these agents always knew Stewart, whose reputation had a way of preceding him, Stewart never knew any of the agents until their names were whispered into his ear by some helpful assistant. Agent Lawrence’s face was weathered and old. Other than that, he was all suit.

  “Where were you headed?” Agent Lawrence asked, in Denokin’s native dialect of Chuman (pronounced CHEW-min). Denokin respected how clean the pronunciation was. It didn’t make him feel as if he was at home, though.

  Denokin shifted his eyes from his coffee to Agent Lawrence, then did a slow arc of the room. It was a nice interior, the kind out of a magazine. These two were alone, but there were undoubtedly more agents in other rooms. They were babysitting him, and they were being extremely polite about it. Denokin knew this politeness could come to an end at any moment. He didn’t like the position he was in, but he took full responsibility for it.

  Denokin liked running back and forth to Earth. It was a good job, and he didn’t want to lose it. He took a deep breath and sipped his coffee. He liked coffee. It had taken him a long time to get used to it, but he had developed a taste for this Earth delicacy.