They were on a tight schedule. They both had the day off from their regular work - jobs that were only covers anyway -, and Hershel had arranged for Merle's shift to be switched from afternoon to morning by means unknown to Daryl. As usual, he had left after making synthcaf for himself and his brother and getting dressed in his fancy uniform before Daryl was awake. As usual, Daryl was grateful to discover upon waking that he was already alone in their apartment. They were both still weirded out from the nightmare scare a few nights ago and doing their best to avoid each other.
Glancing at his clock, he reassured himself that there was still plenty of time to get ready before contacting Carol. From their last few practise runs he knew that she was as eager as he was to go out there again, and he was thrilled to have a partner he was so very much in tune with. For the first time in years he had a spring in his step as he walked through the apartment to get his caf, get washed up and dressed, and have a bite to eat.
When his next look at the timer told him that he had only five minutes left, he could feel his heartbeat and breathing speeding up with excitement. This, he thought, was better than drugs. He never felt as alive as when he was going out on a mission, even though he no longer got to physically go out himself. And linking with Carol over the past few weeks had showed him that going through her would be almost as good as being there in person.
They were supposed to be in and out within two hours tops, then take a break for thirty minutes to give both of them time to recover from this first run before passing on the information they had obtained. After that, they were to link again at regular intervals over the next few days. Their task then would be to return to the Feina base to record the times when watch in and around the building changed, as well as record the protocol they followed. It was understood that covering the entire 24 hour schedule for a full week would take them several days, maybe even up to two weeks - after all, Carol was not supposed to visibly loiter in the area, and they would need to rest several hours every day.
Under no circmstances were they to risk capture, for any reason whatsoever. Safely getting out any information they managed to obtain was their next highest priority - which was another reason why they were to take breaks long enough for Carol to return home and both of them to rest between every two runs.
Carol would bring back any physical material she managed to extract while Daryl would use some of his downtime to take notes on what he had seen, heard, witnessed through Carol's senses. Carol would receive the locations of drop sites for her material from Hershel through her link, while Daryl would link up with him separately to give him visual access to his notes which would make it easier for Hershel to understand directions and descriptions. Whenever he went to work during their mission, he would take his files along and upload them to a restricted access drive on the company network for pick-up directly by another TE contact there.
Looking up again, he felt a shiver running down his spine.
It was time.
.-.
Carol was already outside, walking toward their target area, when he linked with her. She had been expecting him and was so used to his touch by now that none of the people passing her as their minds melded noticed any change in her, however minute. She continued walking as before, never breaking stride, her movements fluid, her eyes continuing to roam ahead.
„Second right", she felt more than heard him say, and then he casually moved her head left and right to get a look around. Being controlled by another person's mind had never felt so natural to her. Next, her left hand went up to her right shoulder as if to brush off a hair or a piece of lint, and he turned her head to slyly look not at but over her shoulder to see if there was anyone following or watching her.
Dropping the shoulder brushing act, he faced her forward again and had her walk on at a brisk pace, turning the corner as he'd indicated. Once they were approaching their target, he asked - again without words, but more as some kind of prompting sensation - how she was supposed to get inside. Smiling, she projected reassurance, and he withdrew to give her control.
When they reached the gate in the massively reinforced walls around the compound, Carol opened her handbag - which she would have to place into a scanner - and withdrew from it an official looking letter. She handed it to the human guard. „Good morning, I have an appointment here", she beamed at him and watched him unfold and read it.
He didn't greet her back, or answer her in any way. Looking her up and down, he reached for the comlink at his belt. „This is Gate 3, I have a human woman here, one -„ He glanced back down at the letter again. „Carol Peletier, for Guardian of the Peace Esnik, in ten minutes?" His eyes never leaving Carol, he listened for a moment before nodding. „I'll send her in."
He picked up a white plastic card from a stack on the desk beside him and inserted it into a grimy metal device. A green LED started flashing on it as soon as he let go of the card, and a low humming noise indicated that the device was imprinting or saving something to the card. Once the light stopped flashing, the guard took it out again.
Handing back the letter, he gave her directions to the main entrance of the compound's admin building and warned her against going anywhere else. „We've got lookouts, and they're under orders to shoot on sight. They've just received a notification for your desitination, and they'll notice if you try to go anywhere else. Don't get curious." He glanced at the scan of her handbag, making sure there were no weapons hidden inside, then got it out of the scanner and held it out to her along with the coded plastic card. „This is your key card. Your're cleared for an hour. If your appointment takes any longer, it will be extended by GoP Esnik himself while you're still with him."
She nodded at him with a smile. „Thank you so much. Will someone meet me at the door?"
„There will be an escort waiting for you after you've passed the metal detector at the entrance. She will give you a pat-down and then take you to the meeting room for your appointment." He stared at her darkly, as if blaming her personally for not being familiar with their procedures. „You should go now, or you'll be late."
Smiling at him once again, she stepped through the arch of the gate and noted the whirring noise and a small green light in the arch's apex as she passed it. „Did you get all that?" she silently asked Daryl and was instantly flooded by a reassuring warmth. How could anyone ever have complained about working with him? Even when he stayed in the background so she could follow her own instructions, he was always there, making her feel safe without ever being overbearing. She'd need to ask him about that incident, she decided.
Crossing the yard, stepping out of the way of heavily armored cars and trucks making their way toward the gate, she approached the main entrance of the compound's central building. There was a scanner next to the sliding glass doors with the outline of a stylized card just like the one she was holding printed on it. She tentatively held the card up to it and the card outline blinked red once before turning green. A warning beep sounded, and the glass doors whirred open.
She found herself walking through a metal detector arch just inside the door even as the doors were closing again after another warning beep. A red-haired woman was waiting off to one side, and she stepped up to her once yet another green light had flashed at the detector's control console. Unlike the officer at the gate, she was making a deliberate attempt at a smile, but was failing miserably. It looked like a rather forced grimace and didn't make Carol feel at all more welcome here.
„Carol Peletier?" she asked as she accepted Carol's key card and ran it through a reader which also flashed green briefly with a single beep. „My name is Sandra, I'll be your guide through this building for your stay with us. If you'll allow me -„ She faltered, stepping up to Carol, who remembered that she was supposed to get a pat-down from her escort. Holding her arms out to both sides, she stood patiently as Sandra quickly slid both hands along her arms, down the inside and outside of her legs, down the center of her chest and belly and up her back. Once done, Sandra stepped back with an apologetic smile. „If you would follow me?" She handed the card back to Carol as she turned away and toward the bank of elevators lining the far wall.
Taking a deep, calming breath to control her fluttering nerves, Carol followed her, turning her head this way and that, taking in everything there was to see - all the security cameras, stun devices, spray nozzles and infrared emitters and detectors that he needed to record. Daryl kept giving her feedback every time he had seen enough in any one quadrant of the hall, prompting her to look in a different direction or take a few more steps.
Finally, she caught up to Sandra who had summoned an elevator which arrived just as Carol stepped up behind her guide. „This way, please", Sandra said in a sugary, sweet voice that made Carol feel sick to her stomach.
They stepped into the elevator when the doors opened, Carol one step behind Sandra and careful to note that Sandra used her own key card on the elevator controls before actually stepping into the car. Next, she looked closely at the control panel inside, the opening doors as they whispered into the car's walls to the left and right, and up at the ceiling, which sported not only two rectangular light panels behind protective metal grids but also two security cameras.
Another reassuring nudge from Daryl, signalling that it was okay to look back at Sandra now and make some small talk as the elevator took them up to the third floor. They exchanged meaningless chitchat about the weather before Carol confided that she was endlessly annoyed about how hard it was to find fresh vegetables these days. She completely ignored Daryl's alarm over this remark which could very well be taken as criticism about the way things were run by the Feina. She was convinced, however, that someone who came here without an agenda would talk about this, without being afraid to mention it to one of the human intermediaries.
Nevertheless, to make sure that this came across in just the right way - and to reassure Daryl - she tucked a coy smile at the end of her remark, adding: „I can be sure you won't report this, can't I? I will need to work with these people if they accept our proposal."
Sandra gave her a vapid smile. „Believe me, I hear this everywhere I go. In fact, I've had friends acutally ask me if I have an inside way of getting fresh greens and fruit - but I don't." Her quirky laugh did little to convince Carol, but she made a show of laughing along.
Once they'd arrived on their floor, Carol followed Sandra down the hallway until they reached a set of double doors which looked elaborate even by the standards set by the doors they had passed so far. They seemed to be made of real wood and sported intricately patterned inlays made of a lighter, finely grained wood that, once Carol paid attention to it, turned out to be a detailed line drawing of a Feina starship.
The entire hallway had been studded with cameras and infrared sensors and emitters. Therefore, it came as no surprise that both Sandra and Carol had to hold their key cards up to a reader set into the wall next to the door. In addition to that, Sandra had to enter an eight-digit code into a keyboard and hold her thumb against a scanner. Only then did the locking mechanism in the door give a soft clicking sound, and Sandra reached for the wooden handles of the door - a complete circle split in half by the seam in the doors.
Carol followed her into the office of Guardian of the Peace Esnik, whom she would have to convince to lease the next replacement batch of computers from the company that she was pretending to represent. She could feel her pulse in her wrists and temples - she had never met a Feina in person before, and her excitement made her lightheaded.
They looked intimidating even on the public newsvid screens, and the newsvids only showed the Feina from afar. Walking toward him, forcing herself not to stare but continue to unobtrusively take in the room and its security systems, Carol realized why they were never shown up close in any of the public feeds.
He stood over six feet tall, with gray skin and a hairless skull. His eyes were a metallic gray without visible pupils, heavily lidded and with a kind of nictitating membrane closing over them every few minutes. He had sharply defined protruding structures under his eyes that, in a human, she would have called „cheekbones" - but of course she had no idea what they were in him. There were two more sharp ridges above his eyes, slanting outward and down, that seemed to have the function which eyebrows had in humans, and two smudges near his jaw angles where the gray skin looked more shiny than on the rest of him, and she assumed that these were his acoustic membranes - the Feina equivalent of eardrums, unprotected by visible auricles.
A soft-looking, tentlike structure, remotely looking like the feathery growths she had seen in some species of bats, protected his two narrow, slash-shaped nostrils, which were located high above his toothy, tight-lipped mouth, much closer to the eyes than in humans. She wondered if the Feina, unlike humans, had separate cranial cavities for smell and taste, but quickly called herself to order again. If there was one thing she didn't need right now, it was distracting thoughts like this. Funnily enough, his head almost had the classic near-triangular shape in which alien heads had been depicted in human pop culture for so long - the only difference being that it was slightly too elongated, the top of his head was not round enough and his jaw was a bit too square to fully fit the cliché.
There were four three-jointed fingers on each of his two hands, with the one on the forward edge opposable, like the human thumb, and the webbing between his fingers reached up to the first joint. He had three ochre rank marks slashing up across his „cheekbones" from where she guessed his ceeks were, ending just below his temples. Whenever he turned slightly sideways, she could see the raised edges of bony or cartilaginous structures on his back where the shoulder blades were located in humans, hidden under his clothing with only the top edges peeking out.
Compared to the rest of his body, his arms and legs seemed overly long, and both his body and his arms, naked from what she assumed were his elbows down, seemed lanky to her. He was loosely draped in a dark orange robe adorned with the same ochre rank markings on the left side of his chest that he wore on his face.
After politely rising from his chair, he remained behind his impressive desk, this, too, made of real wood with intricate inlays and several technical gadgets on it whose functions she couldn't even guess at. They looked like nothing she had ever seen and were probably technology that he had brought down from his ship. They Feina took great care to leave humanity in the dark as much as possible about the technology they were using, even if they introduced it to Earth for all to see. Technical specifications were top secret - which made Carol's mission that much more difficult.
When Esnik welcomed her, it wasn't his own voice she was hearing - there was a device set into the desk which translated Feina into English and vice versa - although Hershel had warned them during his briefing that TE suspected that the Feina understood several human languages just fine, English among them. She presented her invitation once again, which he waved away dismissively.
„Carol Peletier", the translation device warbled, mauling her last name, several seconds after Esnik's squeaky voice, uttering his gravelly language, had fallen silent, „please have a seat so we can begin our discussion." Once the device was silent as well, Esnik made an expressive gesture toward the chair next to her with one thin, gray hand.
She accepted the invitation, sitting down with her legs crossed and her handbag in her lap from which she now took an impressive-looking briefing folder.