Connie's Weed Pt. 04

Showoff, Connie thought, and then the warmth of embarrassment flushed her face as she remembered the horny and freakish make-out session they had shared the night before.

"Well, Connie? Caryn's here for rehab after the — a little incident. Oh, she's really a whole new woman now after that much-needed holiday. But you are part of the team now, so maybe you'd like to get up to speed on what's going on here. So — care to join me for a little tour? Maybe take a gander and sample the new harvest at our plantations before we take a look at what your strengths are?"

~

"Connie, meet Valkyrie!"

Amanda pushed against the huge gate embedded in the almost vertical rock face of the mesa that rose straight out of the forest to two hundred feet. The engraved lines lit up, starting from her hand and spreading over the square yards of the black metal. Somewhere inside, a bar slid back with a thump that shook the floor. The massive doors opened slowly with no sound but the whooshing of displaced air.

"Is that —" Connie started, and then her voice failed her. In the darkness of the cavern, the silvery object with its ever-changing, flowing shape hung in mid-air, suspended in a light beam. There were no eyes, or lenses, or anything resembling a sensor on it, but Connie felt its gaze on her. She felt it in her head.

"—a three-dimensional projection of a higher-order interstellar probe of non-human origin? Yes," Amanda replied.

"And its name is Valkyrie?"

"No. Its job description is Valkyrie. The Chooser of the Slain. Of the infected. Of the diseased."

Amanda held her temples.

"Look, it's a long story and I've had a rough night. I'll try to give you the Cliffs Notes version. Ever since this planet formed, a few alien robots kept tabs on it. Explorers, record keepers. Their kind was ordered to lay low and watch if and how life would evolve on Altaerna. The only time they violated their hiding rule was a hundred years ago, when one of them got cozy with my great-great-grandmother. She was given this suit as a reward. That's how the Valkyrie found me and lured me here.

"They left to ogle another planet, but not before they tagged our world for further examination by their masters. Someday soon, they will show up. The explorers learned about the residual magic, how it works, how to use it, and they passed on that information. Now their masters use it to power their long-range sensors and hyper-engines. This causes ancient magic to re-erupt at their destination. To them, that's barely noticeable, maybe like a footprint on a beach. To us, well, we're the tiny crabs unintentionally crushed by their footfall. You barely saw the first of what can happen if magic runs rampant.

"Things here will become more unhinged the closer the visitors' ship gets. Our job is to keep this contained. Find the sources, the leaks where this energy seeps through, keep those places sealed up and away from the clueless and the crazy."

From the corner of her eyes, she glanced at Connie.

"You saw Caryn? She was a cold, efficient bureaucrat. Then she got caught in the first massive outburst of magic we've so far identified."

Amanda bit her lip.

"It was my fault. By the time I found her, she had already grown to fill a room the size of a cathedral, and the fallout began to spread to others nearby. And then I thought I could swat three flies with one strike. Make her pay a little for past wicked games. Bring her back down to movable size at the same time. And use the inevitable magical discharge to mark our world for the visitors so they'd at least turn down their force feed a notch or two. And there's no harm in a little fun at a mean bitch's expense, right?"

She lowered her head for a moment before she continued.

"Wrong. You leave anyone for too long on a bloat trip, their thoughts become all garbled by their ecstasy. Oh, the Valkyrie can untangle that. She's incredibly powerful. Sometimes, she grants me some of that power. But she doesn't obey me. She's got her own priorities. She's not loyal to us, but she's the only thing we have. Now she sort of plays with Caryn out of curiosity, in the way that someone might play with a puzzle. Whenever she feels like there's nothing better to do, the Valkyrie puts some more of Caryn's brain back together."

Connie regained a bit of her composure. "Hold it. I don't understand. This thing is alien, okay. Others are coming, okay. They're powerful. I mean, if she can fix brains, then why doesn't she handle all of —"

"She's kind of a second-tier cleaner, built to keep others of her kind in line. She figured that I, being Altaerna native, might do a better job than her at handling human interactions while not sticking out. Turns out I'm a horny antisocial klutz. Maybe you'll do better."

Connie ignored that last remark. Instead, she asked:

"And your suit is —"

"A shape-shifting semi-sentient autonomous particle robot swarm. I only learned about that a couple of years ago. Maybe I'll tell you the story someday. Maybe you'll even get your own.

"Then the Valkyrie calls to me, and guess what? Now I'm stuck with taking out the trash in this planetary cleaning woman hell of a job."

She grabbed into the floating liquid, sending concentric ripples over the silvery mirror. Moments later she pulled her hand back out and threw Connie a V-shaped badge. O.A.O. it said in embossed letters, and around a big #02 in the center curved the words Office of Anomalous Occurrences.

"Welcome to the twilight zone. Now you're official. Don't flaunt it too much, m'kay?"

~

The End ... for now.

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