PLAYING WITH DOLLS

by

Jasmine Giacomo

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2009 Jasmine Giacomo

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

~~~

Playing With Dolls

“This isn’t the sort of central government I expected,” Ambassador Lu Xi-wei said, as she and her military escort followed a humble villager down a rough, spiraling tunnel into the bowels of the planet. SpaceCorps had been observing Terra-329 for six months, and had assumed they knew which buildings in which towns were run by the local equivalent of mayors. They’d sent a probe into geosynchronous orbit and recorded enough of the local language to craft a reasonable lingual-upload program. At that point, Xi-wei and her escort—all volunteers hoping to score a diplomatic coup as the galaxy was rapidly explored—had received the upload and been dropshipped into 329’s atmosphere.

“Copy that,” Captain Gregor, the military team’s leader, muttered, not taking his hand off the squeeze bar of his pulse rifle. “I don’t like it. No one had a clue until today that there were any subterranean structures in use. Lazy sat-map readers. If our sensors were being jammed instead of reading interference, we just walked into all kinds of bad.”

Sergeant Lovell spoke up. “I’m not sure this qualifies as ‘in use’, sir. It’s a tunnel wide enough for six humvees to drive abreast, and we’re the only ones using it.”

The room opened up into a massive chamber, according to the echoes of their boots. The small lantern their mossy-skinned guide carried was the only light, and it didn’t reach to the corners of the room. The short, squat man turned to them and bowed. “Wait here,” he said, his voice chittering like a sonic drive with a loose actuator. He handed Xi-wei the lantern, then headed back up the ramp in the dark.

“Boys and girls,” Gregor said, “something’s wrong here. We should pull out.”

“No,” Xi-wei said, smoothing her long black hair back from the shoulders of her blue ambassadorial robe. “We’ve come on a diplomatic mission. Clearly our intel missed something, but SpaceCorps is spread thin over dozens of new planets. We’ll make do. If we want to trade with these folks and have peace, we need to adapt.” She put on a smile and waited, holding the lantern high.

A slithering noise reached their ears. She turned to face it and saw a figure in the gloom. “Greetings,” she said, using 329’s local language. “We’ve come to introduce ourselves--”

Curiosity. Unfamiliarity. Surprise.

The mental sensations took Xi-wei by surprise. All the villagers had spoken out loud. “I’m sorry?”

More rustling. The figure seemed to bounce on its toes. Curiosity. Expectation.

“Great leader,” Xi-wei began, “we come before you with peaceful intent, wishing to learn of your culture and share any knowledge we have that might be of use to your--”

Insularity. Xenophobia. Imperialism.

“No, I assure you, Great Leader, we have no such intent. We are peaceful explorers.” Xi-wei stepped closer.

The figure hopped up and down. Lovell made a face in the lantern light. “Is it angry? Is it threatening us? And what’s with the telepathy? Isn’t that just one of the villagers?”

“Looks like a villager to me.” Gregor noted the man’s pale tunic and dark pants, with what appeared to be dark suspenders holding them up. He casually let the muzzle of his pulse gun drift toward the distant man.

Xi-wei knew that without risk, there was little chance of reward. She stepped closer to the villager, keeping her face calm and smiling in the light of the lantern she carried. Her escort followed closely.

When she had closed the distance to about fifteen meters, she gasped aloud. What she’d taken to be the villager’s dark suspenders were in fact long, slender digits, holding the villager upright from behind. His arms were stiff, his face unmoving. Xi-wei laughed in relief. “I think it’s a doll.”

“What?”

“A doll, so the creature behind it can relate to us. It’s not like us, or like the villagers. Its habitat is entirely different. For communication with new visitors like us, it uses a humanoid face. It’s trying to communicate similarity.”

Gregor blew out a laugh and relaxed his grip on the squeeze bar. “At ease, boys and girls.”

The team eased up a bit, except for Lovell. “A giant black monster hiding in the darkness below the planet‘s surface. Its hand is big enough to play with people-sized dolls. I’m keeping my hand on the trigger, thanks.”

Xi-wei glared at the tall soldier. “We need to present a united front, Lovell. Dissention among new arrivals signals weakness--”

She was interrupted by the shaking of the doll-villager. His head waggled back and forth, then the black-fingered hand shuffled him a few meters closer and thumped him onto the stone floor of the cavern. The newcomers heard the crack of leg bones, and froze.

“Ambassador,” Gregor breathed, bringing his weapon back up, “I don’t think that’s a doll.”

“The secret underground ruler of the planet plays with minion corpses. I am so out of here,” Lovell said, turning to leave.

“Stop right there!” Xi-wei protested, though the fracturing of the doll‘s bones had made her shudder. “This is my mission, and I order you to stay here. If this initial contact gets fubared, you know what that’ll do to our careers in the competitive environment of exploration. Now listen to me. We didn’t get enough information to really understand this culture, but just because it’s scary to us doesn’t mean it’s meant to be a threat of any kind. I’m an expert at this, people. This is what I do. So please, lower your weapons. I’m going to approach the doll, and I want you and your guns to stay back here.”

“Ambassador, you’re not serious,” Lovell protested.

Gregor’s face closed down, and Xi-wei knew he was calculating escape options. Finally he sighed. “Your mission, your funeral.”

Xi-wei nodded curtly. Turning toward the villager-doll, she took a deep breath, put on her most charming smile, and walked closer.

***

Ambassador Freya Edmundsen and her military escort followed the quiet, mossy-skinned villager down the rough, curving tunnel to an enormous black chamber. Their guide handed Freya the lantern and bowed, instructing them to wait. Then he left them in the chamber and returned to the surface.

Freya squinted in the circle of light. It had been two weeks since Ambassador Xi-wei had come down to the planet, and there had been no communication from her or her team since they’d reported arriving safely. Satellites hadn‘t spotted them. None of the villagers had claimed to know anything. Outreach Command had ordered a second Ambassadorial team to replace her, not wanting to send in military searchers and risk losing a potentially friendly ally over a miscommunication.

Now, here in the dark, Freya’s instincts began to twitch. “Lieutenant.”

“Yes, Ambassador?” her team leader inquired, eyes roaming the surrounding darkness.

“I think we--”

She broke off at the sound of slithering. Looking in its direction, she saw a figure in the gloom.

Suspicion. Doubt. Frustration. Territorialism. The thoughts popped into her head, and she jerked back with surprise.

The figure in the shadows lurched up and down stiffly, then slid toward them without touching the floor. As it drew closer to the light, Freya could make out long black hair and a ragged, dirty blue robe. Two long black digits held Xi-wei by the torso. Her entire body was stiff, her skin oddly shiny. Her eyes stared up and to the right in horror.

Instantly, her team’s pulse guns snapped up, aiming at the doll, and Freya‘s lieutenant began barking orders.

“Wait!” Freya called, throwing her arms out between her team and the doll. “Wait a moment. This situation seems horrific to us, but we don’t know what happened here. It may be using the ambassador to communicate with us specifically. Stay here, and don’t shoot anything.”

Turning toward the Xu-wei doll, she took a few steps in its direction, a charming smile on her lips.

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