Occupied Earth Read online

  I hurried up an enclosed stairwell and gained the top floor, the third landing, and blew out the lock of an apartment door with my handgun. I lucked out and no one was home. I made my way to a rear window and opened it. The small convoy was coming straight up the road and I got out the RPPG; sited it, took in a slow breath, and let loose the grenade. It struck the hood of the lead vehicle, blowing up the engine and dropping it to the pavement like a rock. The Lincoln, unable to stop, skidded along the wet pavement and T-boned the skimmer at full speed.

  Sweet.

  Given its armor, I figured nobody inside the limo would have been injured too badly. But now they were stalled on the road and I was that much closer to my kill shot. Staying in the apartment would be sure death as mocktech was already zeroing in on the origin of the assault. Odds were they wouldn’t exit the vehicle. They’d sit tight and wait for back up. Then the trailing skimmer hit the limo.

  I ran down the stairs. Ascending was a cop, a Mahk-Ra.

  The fuck?

  Was he one of the uniforms I passed in the patrol car? How could they have responded so quickly?

  “Halt. Hands up,” he said, his gun already out of its holster and starting to rise.

  I shot the deputy in the face, his dark blood staining the compact stairwell’s walls. I kept going, stepping over his crumpled corpse. I was traveling light. I only had the one shell for the RPPG so I’d left it upstairs. I wasn’t wearing gloves or a DNA blocker. Fuck it. It wasn’t like they didn’t know me.

  On the ground floor it became clear why the cops were in the vicinity so quickly. They’d come to see the two poolside chicks, a regular mid-day nookie run I figured. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, the other cop had already pulled his piece and started blasting away. I dove behind a row of shrubbery while also tossing one of the flash-bang grenades I had strapped to my ankle under my pant leg. When the device went off, it blew him back into the pool.

  “Rickie,” one of the women yelled from where they were crouched in a far corner next to a cool-heat unit.

  “Really?” I laughed. “Rickie-re?”

  Rickie was alive but stunned. Blood was running from his ears as he treaded water in the pool. I bolted from the premises as the rain began again and fuck me if another cop car didn’t come roaring up, jumping the curb and skidding mud tracks across the postage stamp lawn. Out came a lone Mahk-Ra deputy leveling his semi-auto shotgun at my head.

  No time to reach for the gat I’d re-holstered in the small of my back.

  Dumbshit.

  I snaked an arm out and the butterfly knife in its custom housing left my sleeve, the razor sharp blade aimed for his upper body. He swatted it aside with one hand, the other trying to aim his shotgun. But the move distracted him enough to give me the time to cover the distance between us. I dropped down using a leg sweep to up-end the tall motherfucker. He was six inches taller than my six-four.

  Still I do okay for a man my age. I sport defined eighteen inch biceps and call on a mixture of fighting styles from wing chun to bare-knuckle brawler. That and them enhancement nanobots my once alien masters saw fit to graft into my nervous system when I was part of Specter Squad Zeta didn’t hurt either. Besides, the taller they are and all that. He went down hard to the ground.

  He didn’t stay down, though. Faster than you might think, given his size, the cop leaped to his feet, as did I. His shotgun was on the ground but like a lot of mocks, he figured to overpower me physically. He crowded in swinging and connected with a left that dropped me to a knee. Only, I wasn’t as rattled as I seemed. As he prepared to accordion my skull with his pile driver fist, I hit him in the nads and he groaned, doubling over. Then rising quickly, I jabbed three stiff fingers onto a spot just next to his heart.

  This combination of attack put a momentary stop to the fight as the mock struggled for the air that suddenly exited his lungs. But the bastard was tough and recovered faster than I’d thought he would. He managed to land another solid left to my jaw, exploding fireworks in my head, and was looking to follow that up with a right that would probably have put me down for the count, but I moved in under his guard and unleashed an uppercut worthy of Floyd Mayweather back in the day. That momentarily spun those black eyes of his. I followed with a rapid series of edged hand strikes at his head and nerve points around his neck and shoulders that sent him to the lawn face first.

  I picked up his hat, and saw a uniform jacket on the back seat of his prowler. Putting them on, I jumped behind the wheel and gunned the engine to life. Maybe if I stayed in the car, hat on, jacket on, the others on the roadway would think I was a cop coming to help – I needed it to work just long enough to fool them and allow me to blast Maastas-ra to Kingdom Come.

  I KNOW the mocks’ surveillance of us goes back at least to the 1930’s. Sure, they must have seen plenty of human entertainments before they invaded. I still don’t get their fascination with Hollywood, though. Especially among what I guess is their underclass, the Mahk-Re. But hey, it’s good for business, so I’m not complaining.

  I wasn’t complaining either, that day I sat on a bench outside Delphinion Studios’ Stage 1, waiting for Iawan-Re and his daughter Iolawn to be piloted my way by noisy native guide and chief scenarist on their project (and my undeniable acquaintance), Jake Lenfants. Delphinion was built in the 1970’s, almost half a century before the invasion. I guess that makes it Old Hollywood, for the mocks. My realty agency had the place “For Sale or Lease.”

  Glancing around from the bench, I took in Delphinion’s four sound stages and associated buildings. The studio complex stood beside a light-industrial cluster of what had once been adult movie outlet stores, now pleasure ‘bot emporia, also on land once owned by the studios. Smog-smudged, dilapidated, and dusty in the summer afternoon heat, everything in the neighborhood seemed a throwback to earlier days, earlier tech – yet also at the same time somehow raw and new, as if the pads for the buildings had only yesterday been bulldozed into the stone-and-gravel dry wash in which those buildings now stood.

  Jake Lenfants’ car wheeled in off the frontage road and up to the gate. I heard Jake buzz down his driver’s side window and present bona fides to the security guard. It took a moment for the guard to walk back to the kiosk and start the gates swinging out of their way. In a moment more, they had pulled into a parking space in front of Stage 1, around the corner from where I sat.

  “...a real fixer-upper,” I heard Jake say. “At least the location’s good. Close to the old 210 and Foothill Boulevard.”

  “And the price is right for the project,” said an older male Mock voice – Iawan-Re’s? -- in the accented Mahklish some call Mahkanese.

  “Which project, doc? The whole Family Odyssey thing? Or just Home From The Swarming Stars?” asked Jake, also in Mahklish. He once told me he learned the lingo from his brother-in-law, a guy named Harper whose partner in the FBI was the first Mahk-Ra to be fully integrated into a human law enforcement department.

  “The former is a program – technically -- but both, I should think.”

  “Shouldn’t we all,” said Jake. In a moment more I heard Jake direct their attention to the studio’s emblem.

  “I ‘should think’ that’s a fitting sign for your work, that logo.”

  “Why so?” a female voice (presumably Iolawn’s) asked, again in Mahklish .

  “It shows the stars of the constellation Delphinus, overlaid on the image of a delphinium flower – see?”

  “What’s Delphinus?” Iolawn asked.

  “Delphinus, the Dolphin, is the constellation between Aquila the Eagle and Pegasus, the Winged Horse, in the human ‘constellation’ system,” said the voice I presumed was Iawan-Re’s.

  “That’s right, doc, but don’t steal my thunder,” Jake said, before launching into his spiel. “In Greek ‘delphinion’ means ‘little dolphin.’ The flower is called ‘delphinium’ in Latin because the spur made by its sepals was thought to resemble a dolphin’s fin.”

  “So w
hy’s it fitting for the project?” asked the female voice. I was surprised to hear that it wasn’t Jake who answered.

  “Aquila carries the thunderbolts of war,” said the Mahk male, “and Pegasus the thunderbolts of inspiration – for poetry, all the language arts.”

  Abruptly, Jake laughed.

  “You some kind of search engine on all things human, doc?”

  “Only about certain subjects.”

  “Then let me do my stuff, okay? Both dolphins and delphinium flowers have long been associated with healing and medicine -- ”

  “-- and all of those elements will come together in what we’ll be doing here,” Iolawn said, tumbling to it.

  They came around the corner to where I sat, beside the nearest shutter roll-up door, which was down.

  “Ah!” Jake said, breezing in and introducing me before I even had a chance to stand. “That square-jawed man with hair like a steel brush is Starr Strewnfield. Sounds like the stage name of an ex-astronaut who went into real estate, which it isn’t, though he is.”

  I was tempted to ask if Lenfant meant his name could be translated as Baby Jakes – and if that might be too close to “Babycakes” -- but I didn’t. Jake nattered on.

  “Hey, Starr-crossed! I hear the most florid liars are real estate agents and wine reviewers. That true?”

  “I always heard wannabe screenwriters were the worst,” I said, shaking Jake’s hand and allowing him to drag me to my feet as Jake, simultaneously, introduced me to Iawan and Iolawn, our prospective buyers and/or lessors. I could see my height came as a surprise as I loomed up before Iolawn and shook her hand.

  “Oh! You’re taller than you look!”

  Mahks are tall enough that they aren’t used to humans being able to look them in the eyes – or be in any way on the level with them.

  “My daddy always said I was big for my size, ma’am,” I aw-shucksed, glancing away. I turned and shook her father’s hand. “My height’s all in my legs -- ”

  “ ‘His worth’s unknown’,” Jake said, “ ‘although his height be taken.’ “

  “ -- but at least I’m not light in the heels like Kid Jakespeare, here.”

  “So long as you don’t call me Kid Red Spear,” he said with a broad wink, as if he were just making an off-color joke. I grimaced. What did he think he was doing, making a crack about the Red Spear movement in front of Mahks? That could get a person picked up by Resistance Zero, and I’d heard what happened in those RZ camps.

  “No, just light in the head, buddy,” Jake continued, turning back to his Mahk clients. “He’s definitely not Hollywood – or even Houston, anymore. Only thing Starr’s got to do with rocket stages or sound stages these days is selling the latter.”

  “Which I had better get to. If you’ll follow me . . . ”

  We entered through the more human-scale entrance beside the roll-up door. We made our way upstairs, so I could show the prospectives the main studio office suites. Jake made tourist-attraction comments on how I was dressed -- “California casual, see? Attire equally appropriate for closing a megabuck deal or going for a morning jog.” I tried to ignore him, with as little success as usual.

  Over the next hour I led them through the cavernous spaces of Delphinion’s four sound stages, my talk full of square footages, heights to catwalks or perms, cycloramas, amps and phase power, silent air conditioning, wireless web, parking, numbers of production offices, conference rooms, kitchens, restrooms, roll-up doors. To break up the litany of physical description and give the clients a chance to take it all in, Jake and I wandered away, tossing the occasional jokes and odd speculations back and forth, when we thought we were out of earshot.

  “Hey Starr, you hear what the good ol’boy said when the reporter asked him a question about how the Mahk have orgasms?” Jake asked, standing in a corner draped in cyclorama. “ ‘I don’t know what the big deal is, about that. My wife and I been married near forty years, and she has Mock orgasms all the time!’ ”

  “Here’s one for you, Hollywood,” I said from the edge of the stage. “How can you tell which starlet on a production is the most clueless?”

  “She’s the one banging the screenwriter. Very funny. That was old before your parents were born. Hey, speaking of which, you think they ever shot pornos here?”

  “The company history says no.”

  “Yeah, right. I suppose it’s just a coincidence there are all those adult pleasure centers next door? You really think this was never a Destry Rides Again kind of place -- liquor in the front, poker in the rear? No Stagedoor Johnnies, Backdoor Billies, or Marlene Dietrich-Una Merkel one on one? No? Come on! This place must be positively ectoplasmic with the ghosts of money shots!”

  “Maybe you ought to add it to your location-shots tour, Hollywood.”

  “Studios are not on the location-shots list, by definition,” he sniffed. “But then I suppose the only shots you know about are space shots.”

  Iawan and Iolawn, having appreciated the cavernousness of yet another cavernous sound stage, walked toward the cyclorama. We began to make our way toward them.

  “Are you really a human astronaut?” Iolawn asked me as we approached.

  “Was,” I said, neglecting to mention I had also flown sorties against the invasion fleet. Or that I had done so because, once, years before, looking down from orbit, I had experienced that cognitive shift known as the “overview effect.” I had seen the Earth, fragile as a Christmas ornament of pale blue glass dusted with flashing sprites, hanging in a great dark universal tree decked with distant twinkle lights -- and felt the imperative to protect that frail ball against all that might threaten it.

  And when the Mahk-Ra blew my fighter apart from around me and I was hanging in space, dying, what I believed would be my last thoughts were simply to wonder why I had left Earth -- the better to see the stars, or the better for the stars to see me. I had told my ex-wife about it – Jake too, once. I don’t know if he got it.

  “That’s ancient history, now. Long story.”

  “Do you have a background in physics or engineering, then?”

  “I taught college courses in both – long enough to learn I was no teacher.”

  “We might be able to make use of you for our project, as a technical advisor, or on a consultancy basis,” her father said.

  “What’s your project?”

  “A contemporary version of Homer’s Odyssey with an all Mahk-Re cast.”

  “Sounds interesting. Science fiction? Space opera?”

  Father and daughter both nodded.

  “Film? TV? Webisode?”

  “More a full immersion sort of thing,” said Iawan. “It requires military security clearances, too.”

  “Hmm. I had clearance when I was in the service, and a different type of the same, as an astronaut. And I suppose your Mahk clearance requirements can’t be too high, if you’ve let someone like Jake in on this business.”

  “I’ve kept secrets you’ll never know, hoss.”

  “And probably wouldn’t want to. I’ve never worked as a consultant, but I’m interested, especially if there might be something in it for me.”

  By the time we finished the tour of the complex, exchanged contact info, and gathered together documents for their real estate lawyer to review, it was getting on toward evening. Since the clients were staying in Studio City, Jake suggested dinner at a restaurant called Hugo’s. I agreed to meet them all there in an hour.

  The food was good – “Ceviche and salmon and pork loin, oh my!” as Jake put it. The watermelon margaritas flowed. Jaw and Jo particularly enjoyed them – especially after surreptitiously spiking theirs with kronch, the hallucinant the Mahk-Re are so fond of.. The same one that the Makh-Ra have long outlawed, also known as “streak” out on the street – and the same one I had never tried before. Out of a sudden sense of comradeship, I let Iawan drip a few drops of the stuff into my last drink of the evening. It lent a slightly bitter tang to the watermelon sweetness of the cocktail.
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  Despite the fact that it was dark when we left the restaurant and our clients seemed more than a little inebriated, Jake insisted on giving all of us a tour of nearby location shots. The clients agreed. Having endured Jake’s “tours” before, I wished at that moment the clients had opted for an autonomous vehicle. I joined them grudgingly.

  Shortly thereafter, we were careering through the Southern California night, up onto freeways and down onto surface streets, headed places Jake seemed to know by memory as much as map. As he drove, Jake regaled us with tales of his industry: How the ever-forthcoming blockbuster bubble would bring about the long-awaited return to mid-size pictures. How the improvements in superlight cameras and handheld processing had done so much to blur the old distinctions between films of “high” and “low” production values. How Mahk crowd-funding and independent production were becoming the price of admission into Hollywood for young directors and screenwriters.

  Somehow, we eventually found ourselves moving slowly along quiet residential streets in a suburb called Arleta.

  “Iawan,” Jake said to the father, who was sitting in the front passenger-side seat, “check the street sign coming up, would you? What does it say?”

  “Uh, ‘Roslyndale,’ I think.”

  “Yep. This is it.” Jake turned right and drove slowly up the tree-lined street. We stopped across the road from a well-lit house fronted with what looked like white French doors. Jake nodded toward the house.

  “Okay, name the movie that features the house right there. No helping, Starr. I’ll give you a clue: ‘Ma-a-arty!’”

  Iawan looked to Iolawn questioningly in the back seat, but she could only give him a shrug expressing her utter ignorance.

  “Nothing? Not even a guess? How about this: ‘Good night, future boy.’ ”

  Iawan looked back at Iolawn, who just shook her head.

  “Oh, come on! I’ll give you one more clue. This makes it too easy. It’s a line from a scene that takes place right there in that driveway: ‘Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’ ”