by C. Gockel
They ran along in silence for long moments. Foxe was the puzzle solver, but she shared the underlying curiosity that drove him. Something twitched in her memory, from long ago, about the origin of the carrier phage that made the tracker alteration possible. It was one of the CPS’s bigger secrets. “Perhaps it came from a hybrid planet.”
Foxe’s whoop of laughter startled her. “A hybrid planet? I’d have never taken you for a fan of science fiction spectaculars.”
Mairwen shrugged and said nothing. Like most people, he probably thought hybrid planets, those deadly cauldrons of combined alien and terraform seeding, were impossible. The Concordance Ministry of Health may have convinced the known galaxy that failed terraforms were always poisoned to protect civilization from novel microorganisms to which the populace had no immunity, but she knew better. The CPS even hid a hybrid planet right under the nose of Concordance Command headquarters. She should know, because it had been the location of her barracks for nineteen years. She definitely wasn’t going to tell him about that.
Foxe gave her two quick looks. “You’re serious, aren’t you? It’s improbable, I’ll give you that.” He smiled as if to reassure her, though she didn’t know of what. He returned his gaze forward. “Even if the poisoning didn’t kill everything, the odds of finding viable...”
His words trailed off as his intuitive imagination began bubbling. She knew that look. She’d be getting no more conversation from him for a while.
She heard distant footfalls from behind them on the trail. The fog changed the acoustics, but she thought the two runners would overtake them in a couple of minutes. She shortened her stride so she could drop behind Foxe. He didn’t notice. He was probably slipping into focused intuition mode, and the sure sign came when he started a mumbled dialog with himself.
As usual, when his mind started sparking, his speed picked up. Running seemed to be just a faster form of pacing for him. She dropped back a few strides farther and slid the hood off her head, focusing more of her attention on the runners coming up from behind. She was relieved to hear their pace was slowing to a walk. At that rate, they wouldn’t catch up any time soon.
The fog made the trees and decorative grasses along the trail look dreamlike, and it also carried Foxe’s scent to her, which gave her a warm feeling that she didn’t care to examine too closely. Though he wore a mid-weight loose jacket, his pants were sleek and form-fitting. He had the most beautifully proportional legs and rear she’d ever seen. He could stop traffic if he ever wore tight shorts. Maybe he already had and would be a footnote in the next Etonver traffic study.
She wondered if he admired her body as much as she did his. It was outside her experience to want that. She’d been preoccupied with keeping her senses practically comatose so she could blend in and be normal. If anyone had been interested in her in the past, she’d never noticed, and her sex hormones had never been engaged. She’d been repulsed by physical contact. Now she had no idea how to tell if Foxe noticed her, or felt the same fascination she did for him.
Hope, regret, and frustration threatened to roil up and overtake her, so she centered on the steady effort of running to soothe her thoughts and order her senses, dropping farther back so his scent wouldn’t keep distracting her. She could meditate on unknowable things on her own time. Besides, the two runners from far behind them were on the trail again, and it sounded like they were racing each other. Imprudent behavior, considering the poor visibility caused by the fog and approaching twilight.
10 * Planet: Rekoria * GDAT 3237.036 *
THE INCIPIENT BURN in Luka’s legs and lungs told him he’d gotten carried away again while he savored the possibilities that arose from Mairwen’s out-of-the-box suggestion of a hybrid planet. Suddenly, he was in the trail end’s cul-de-sac, and he couldn’t remember the last kilometer he’d run. He’d also lost Mairwen somewhere, probably outpaced her without meaning to.
He slowed to a walk and started around the circular perimeter to give her time to catch up, and to let his breathing ease. The cul-de-sac was big, maybe twelve meters across, and was ringed by curved benches at the edge and an informal hedge beyond that. The fog was dense enough to make it hard to even see the benches on the far side. On impulse, he used his percomp to send a short message to Zheer, suggesting she contract with a finder to look for a hybrid planet that could be the source of the “weird” DNA from the drug samples. More than likely she’d think he was being absurd, but maybe her forecaster talent would see some merit.
As he got to the farthest point of the circle, he was starting to wonder what was keeping Mairwen when he heard crashing of bushes from behind him, and suddenly a man was tackling him. The only thing that kept him from going down was an instinctive quick lunge to the left, but a second man joined the first, followed by someone’s hand on his neck. And with that touch, his body was no longer his own.
A telepath, a woman he thought, though he couldn’t turn his head to look, compelled him to start walking toward the hedge, pinned between the two men gripping his arms. He tried to push the telepath out of his mind, but he’d never been good at that, and she already had multiple hooks into him. The best he could do was obscure his surface thoughts and ruthlessly bury any worries of what might have happened to Mairwen.
Though the telepath forced his gaze forward and blocked his speech, she didn’t bother controlling his hearing. Unfortunately, the men who were guiding him weren’t talking. From his peripheral vision, he could see they both wore nondescript cheap civilian clothes, but they carried themselves like gunnin—ground-based military personnel—or mercs. The taller one on his left was dark skinned and bald, and the shorter one on his right was pale skinned and sported an ugly diagonal scar across his face like a badge of honor. He saw and felt one of them attach a tech suppressor to the front neckline of his shirt, good for blocking any incoming or outgoing transmissions from his percomp or any tracking devices he might have.
Luka gained grudging respect for the telepath controlling him as they made their way past the hedge and up a slope to the sidewalk. She kept his movements fluid and balanced instead of jerky like a puppet. Anyone seeing them from a distance would assume they were all friends having a good time, and the fog would cover up any incongruous details. He could still feel the damp chill on his face, and the feeling of movement, he just couldn’t do anything about it.
He’d assumed they’d get him into a vehicle fast, but instead they kept him marching down the sidewalk for eight blocks into a crumbling neighborhood that had seen better days. Even kidnappers avoided Etonver traffic, it seemed.
He got a glimpse of the telepath when she was reflected in an eye-level window, but she’d compelled his head away too fast for him to make out any details beyond very short brown hair and brown skin. The people they passed hunched their shoulders and didn’t make eye contact. It wasn’t a part of town anyone wanted to be in after dark.
Their destination turned out to be a grungy, single room in a rundown cashflow-only hostel. Once there, the two mercs efficiently taped him to the room’s only chair, anchoring his legs, arms, and torso. A closeup look at the mercs’ clothing told him it was disposable, meaning they intended to leave no forensic evidence behind. It didn’t bode well for his future.
They removed his jacket and percomp and put them on the bed, but left the tech suppressor clipped to his shirt. The telepath’s fingers never lost contact with the back of his neck. She loosened control of his body except for his head, which she kept facing forward. The bald merc stood near the door watching Luka, and the scar-faced merc stood next to the window and looked out through the cheap blinds. Neither looked angry or sympathetic, just two people doing their jobs.
“I’m going to ask you some questions,” said the woman behind him. Her voice was surprisingly high-pitched, almost girlish, and her English was accentless. “If you scream or act out before I can stop you, Mr. Brown or Mr. Blue will hurt you.” He guessed the pseudonyms were based on the respective colors of
their thin jackets. “If you cooperate, I’ll send you to sleep, and we’ll leave you here unharmed for your people to find. Do you understand?” She eased up on her control of his voice.
“Forgive me if I doubt your benign intentions.” He could already feel her nibbling at his shields. They weren’t strong enough to stand up to a focused probe by even a low-level telepath or empath, and she’d already proven she was better than that. Thanks to his mother’s tutelage, he had developed another line of defense, and he steeled himself to use it.
“We’re professionals, Mr. Foxe,” she chided almost primly. “Violence isn’t nearly as effective in ensuring we’re getting the information we need. We’ll start with the binary. Is your name Lukasz Foxe?”
Like most people, she mispronounced his first name. He delayed answering as long as he dared. “Ja,” he finally said. He switched to thinking in Icelandic. English was the Concordance’s official standard language, and most people could get by in Mandarin and few other common languages, but Icelandic was obscure, almost a relic. She’d have to use his mind’s language center to translate, and it would slow her down. A trick he’d learned from another telepath. The longer he took, the better chance for someone to get him rescued. Someone he wasn’t going to think or worry about.
“How many moons does Rekoria have?” she asked, punching at his weakening shields to compel him to give up the information.
He gritted his teeth. “Tvö,” he said. “Nakú-aben Ússí hefur einn tungl.” Naku-aben Uzzi has one moon. And two deaths. He plunged into his filed reconstruction memory to call up each and every pool of blood from the boy who had been unwillingly sacrificed to the moon by his own mother, who’d later thrust the knife up into her own throat. The clearing in the woods smelled like an earthy slaughterhouse, and the filtered sunlight made a halo on the child’s face. That’s why the mother had placed him there, because the boy had always loved the sunshine, despite his heart belonging to the moon like the shape of his birthmark. She’d cut open the boy’s chest and removed the heart first, then washed his face clean with the hem of her dress so...
An impact sent Luka’s head snapping back and the pain of a hard slap brought him to the present. Luka opened his eyes to focus on the bald merc in brown standing in front of him, the likely source of the blow. The merc nodded once to the telepath behind him and returned to his post.
“That wasn’t very cooperative, Mr. Foxe,” the telepath said. “Don’t do that again.” Her voice sounded shakier than before. “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Do you know where Dr. Tansa Onndrae is?” She accompanied the question with a hard thrust that shattered his shields and imposed a strong compulsion to answer.
Luka didn’t even have to work at it to associate the name with Vadra Amhur and let the phantasms flood his mind with recent visceral memories of how a killer had used a wirekey to mark the flesh of the naked woman zip-tied to a chair, and how the killer had centered on the sexual organs for his own gratification. Someone else had stood watching as the torturer plunged into soft tissue as the woman screamed into the gag wrapped around...
Luka’s head snapped back with the force of another slap. The bald merc was already moving away by the time Luka looked up. He felt blood trickle from his nose and the side of his mouth.
“I told you not to do that again,” said the telepath. Her voice was definitely shaky.
“Farðu í rassgat,” he thought to her. Go fuck yourself. He switched to standard English to speak. “It was your question,” he said, then spat out blood onto the stained carpet. “I can’t help it if you didn’t like the answer.”
He tried to project confidence, but he knew he couldn’t hold out indefinitely. Eating up their time was all he could hope for. He was risking losing control over the memories, and maybe sending himself into a fugue state, leaving the telepath free to slip in and browse through his mind at will.
Why do you remember murderers like that? She asked the question in his mind.
I don’t, he thought back with vehemence. I remember the victims.
He felt a wave of revulsion in her mind and body, though she tried to hide it. Her fingers were turning to ice on the back of his neck. Then she shored up her shields and with that, her resolve.
“If you do that again, I’ll have Mr. Brown break something,” she said with a steely tone.
“Then pick another subject,” said Luka. “You saw what they did to her.” Ice was freezing his blood and bones.
She was silent a moment. “Very well. What do you know about Loyduk Pharma?”
“Það framleiðir og dreifir lyfjum.” The telepath made his mind translate to English. “They make and distribute pharmaceuticals.” He was quoting from an article he’d read the day before. He visualized each sentence and focused on translating them into Icelandic. She used it as a hook into other related memories, including the lab’s report on the squibs. He tried to avoid the memory of the warehouse, but he was losing control and the horror started to saturate his thoughts. The telepath thought he was doing it on purpose and it made her mad.
“I warned you,” she said with tight anger. “Mr. Brown, if you please. Something painful.” Luka felt her take control of his whole body again as the bald merc stepped close. He lifted Luka’s left hand and casually forced all four of Luka’s fingers back until they cracked. The pain was overwhelming, and the telepath didn’t allow him the outlet of vocalizing or even gritting his teeth. His eyes watered involuntarily and his breathing came in shallow gasps.
“What was in the lab report?” she asked, and probed deep again. Control on his body eased, and he thought maybe she couldn’t both physically compel and deep probe at the same time. Luka let the throbbing pain radiating from his left hand fill his mind. He couldn’t stop her from rooting around, but he could make her pay for it.
“What did Leo Balkovsky find out about Loyduk?” He felt her trace the connection in his mind and triggered the nauseating memory of Leo’s lifeless body curled around the forceblade that had killed him. His gut roiled as he tried to think of something else, anything else. But not of Mairwen who had anchored him, who might be hurt, or might have sent for the cavalry. He could feel the telepath tracing his mental thread, getting closer. He pressed his broken fingers to the chair arm and gasped as the overload of pain fluxed through him, obliterating all coherent thought.
As the pain subsided, the scar-faced merc in blue watching at the window spoke. “Problem outside.” His right hand hovered near a thigh holster, but Luka couldn’t see what was in it.
“Company?” asked Brown.
“Street fight.” Something hit the thick security window with a loud thump. “They’re throwing rocks. Fucking fog. Can’t see shit.”
It sounded to Luka like a riot might be brewing, one of the unfortunately more regular things Etonver was known for. And with Etonver’s open-carry policies…
“Weapons will be next,” said Brown, proving he was well aware of the pattern. His accent sounded Russian. He looked above Luka’s head to where the telepath was presumably standing. “We must move. Are you done here?”
“Soon. I need five more minutes,” said the telepath. She sounded angry and nervous.
Two quick, loud thuds hit the window. Luka would have twitched if his body hadn’t been locked down.
“Too dangerous,” said Brown. “We must take him somewhere else.” He crossed to Luka and used his large combat knife to cut through the tape. The telepath’s touch kept Luka immobile, then compelled him to stand. Brown stood nearby. “Left or right?” he asked, presumably asking which direction they’d be taking once they got outside.
“Right,” said the scar-faced merc. He crossed to the door, checked that Brown and the telepath were ready, then opened it.
All hell broke loose.
The scar-faced merc staggered back as the door slammed into the wall and bounced into him, but he was already falling, his face a bloody mass as his nose sprayed blood like a burst water balloon. Someone streak
ed into the room and out of Luka’s view, but Brown was slowed by having to drop his combat knife before reaching for the beamer in his holster. The overhead lights went out.
Luka felt the telepath’s unshielded panic as she lost control of him. He dove to the floor, then almost passed out from the pain when he landed on his broken left hand. He rolled onto his back and was bombarded by a shadowy kaleidoscope of images and sounds. Brown’s leg extending in a high kick and someone’s grunt of pain. A brilliant flash of light and a roar from outside the door. Brown’s body spinning as he pointed the beamer. A glimpse of pale blonde hair. A crash of security coilglass. A flash, and a woman’s high-pitched scream abruptly cut off. A sickening thump, and Brown’s body dropping like a sandbag on top of Luka, smashing his broken hand between them and sending him into deep twilight.
When the darkness receded, the roaring chaos had subsided and all he heard was heavy, unsteady breathing in the room and the rumble of the riot outside, moving away.
Someone called his name, and he recognized the voice.
“Mairwen?” he croaked. He couldn’t imagine how she came to be there.
It took him a couple of tries to one-handedly shove Brown’s unconscious but still breathing body off of him. The pain from his left hand was blindingly intense. He cradled it against his chest as he sat up. The supposedly unbreakable window was shattered. The scar-faced merc’s body was lying in the doorway, covered in some of the coilglass shards.
Next to the overturned chair was the body of a beefy, dark-skinned woman, presumably the telepath. She was dead, her shoulder and neck fried, likely unintentionally, by the beamer that was still in Brown’s hand. Luka was grateful that the excruciating pain of his hand kept his talent dark for the moment.