by C. Gockel
He reached up and waved the lights to almost nothing.
Despite being tired, he was still keyed up from the evening. He’d proved he could control his talent, and he’d achieved the first step in his grand plan for building a life with the woman he was deeply and desperately in love with. Who was moving in with him.
“You once said you’d tell me about Mairwen Morganthur...”
He focused carefully on her breathing and the feel of her body. He didn’t want to bring up bad memories for her, but he had to know if he needed to worry about who the real Mairwen Morganthur had been. She passed civilian background checks with flying colors, but someone might look more thoroughly someday.
Her hand flattened on his chest. “It’s not pretty.”
He knew she was worried about how it would affect him, especially after the evening’s experience. “I figured, ljósið mitt. I’ll be all right.” He tightened his arm around her waist with gentle, reassuring pressure.
She took a deep breath. “Most tracker targets are political or covert, but sometimes they’re criminal. Two years after I... graduated, I was sent to a frontier planet to take down slave traders. When I found the camp in the middle of a monsoon jungle, the slaves had revolted and the traders had killed most of them. I followed my orders and killed the slavers and guards, then against orders, I looked for surviving slaves. I found four: a woman, about my age, and three children. The woman had protected the children, but at the cost of her own life. She was mortally wounded, and I could do nothing except stay with her while she died. I promised to get the children to safety.”
He felt her shake her head, perhaps at some memory that made her regretful. He stroked her back slowly.
“The woman was an orphan, the last of her maternal and paternal lines, from a failed colony on a different frontier planet.”
“Waimaakole,” he said. The planet she’d said she was from.
“Yes. The foster house illegally sold her as an indenturee to care for the slaver’s younger ‘merchandise.’ She was unafraid to die if the children were safe. I was... sad she wouldn’t be missed or remembered.”
His intuition twitched. “So you took her name, in her honor, when you got out.”
He was continually amazed that the CPS imagined they had obliterated the humanity from Mairwen. Her feelings ran deep and strong, no matter how well she controlled the surface.
“Honor, yes, but expedience, too. All trackers dream of freedom. It’s the only thing we ever agreed on when we weren’t trying to kill one another.”
“Kill? Why?”
“The CPS makes sure there are no tracker alliances. We’re hard enough to control as individuals. There were rumors of a rebellion early in the program, long before my time. It took battalions of Jumpers and telekinetic minders to crush it.”
He smiled in the dark. “Considering your extraordinary skills, I’m not surprised.” He caressed her shoulder with his free hand. “So there was a woman your age, now dead, with an off-the-net past.”
She nodded. “I was already planning to escape. Since my own identity was irretrievably lost, I knew I’d need a new one. Hers was ideal. When I took biometric samples of the slavers as proof of death, I took her samples, too, and hid them. I used them to build a life for her. I taught myself some Welsh, the language of her mother, plus computer twists, under the guise of improving my tracker skills. Each time I was on a mission and unobserved, I hunted for the few real records of her and altered or destroyed them. I kept her alive in new records and created accounts to funnel any untraceable funds I could find. She moved often. She was on Rekoria when I ‘died’ on my last mission. She moved to Etonver and accepted a night-shift guard job at La Plata.”
“How did you handle the biometrics? Your former employer must have virtual tripwires throughout the galaxy just waiting for a stray biometric from the ‘lost’ to show up somewhere.”
“Blackmarket chimera implant to match the samples I’d saved.”
He tightened his arms around her as he realized the implications. Without a healer or the ability to use pain medications, she’d have been very sick and in excruciating pain for weeks, maybe months, and very vulnerable. The CPS had already meddled with her DNA, and the implant could easily have killed her.
It was such an unlikely convergence of chance that had brought them together that first night in the spaceport warehouse. He shivered in spite of himself. No wonder people were tempted to believe in fate or destiny.
“I am,” he said, tilting his head down to kiss her, “a very lucky man.”
“We’re both lucky. Who else would teach me how to be human?”
He took several long, deliberate breaths and stroked her skin slowly, letting the simple actions and her warmth help clear his mind of the sadness and anger he felt for the too-young woman who’d had to steal another’s identity because the CPS had erased hers. And had treated her and her fellow trackers worse than slaves, making them disbelieve their own humanity. The ironically named Citizen Protection Service had gotten away with far too much for far too long.
“Your former employer deserves to be taken down, piece by nasty little piece,” he said, with more vehemence than he’d intended.
“Yes,” she agreed, “but not by us.” He heard determination in her tone, and worry.
She must think he wanted to single-handedly take on the whole government covert operations organization. He didn’t. He wanted to enjoy a long life with his socially artless, impossibly skilled woman. Putting her in the CPS’s sights would cut that decidedly short.
He laughed. “No, my heart, the men you follow are brilliant, not insane.”
She laughed and touched his face with gentle fingers. “There’s only you.” Her voice was soft and warm. “Ég elska þig.”
“I love you, too, more than I can say.” He found her mouth for a long, sense-drenching kiss. “Like I said, I’m a very lucky man.”
Epilogue
* Planet: Rekoria * GDAT 2128.001 *
SESHULLA ZHEER SMOOTHED the front of her gold gossamer caftan, enjoying the color and the freedom from the restricting suits she usually lived in. The view from her fifth-floor executive office overlooked a park that had floating fairy lights all night long. The early summer weather made Etonver more bearable than usual.
From an ornate and velvet-lined box, she gently removed the hand-blown bottle of two-hundred-year-old, flamed, five-barrel cognac, then put it carefully on the serving cart.
It was the first day of the Galactic Standard new year, but still a few minutes before midnight on Rekoria. It was a minor event, hardly celebrated at all compared to the local summer solstice, which was still a couple of weeks away. Still, it meant something to her. She’d been born on a galactic new year, far longer ago than she’d ever admit.
As her guests seated themselves at her worktable, she served them the beverages she’d arranged with them each in mind. For Jerzi Adams, in casual clothes that showed off his muscular physique, a perfectly chilled dark lager from Rekoria’s best brewery, served in a stein decorated with ancient rifles. For Luka Foxe, stylish in a grey resilk shirt and black vest, white champagne in an antique ice flute, the closest she could come to acknowledging his maternal Icelandic heritage. She knew he didn’t care for hard alcohol. For Beva Rienville, comfortable in a brightly floral sundress, a classic black Nero d’Avola in a handmade Bordeaux stem, because she knew Beva’s tastes. And for Mairwen Morganthur, in non-descript dark red knit, with long sleeves as always to hide the plethora of knives she was never without, an artistically minimalist glass of iced herbal Schisandra tea steeped slowly in triple-filtered water.
Lastly, she poured herself another snifter of outrageously rare cognac, then sat in the only empty chair at her worktable. She knew they were genteelly shocked at her casual appearance, and the fact that she was undeniably tipsy.
She smiled at them all. “I know the rumor is I don’t sleep. I actually do, but not for long.” She centered her snif
ter on the coaster protecting the worktable’s hand-polished finish. “You all know I was a forecaster for the CPS, and Beva knows I retired on disability. The ‘enhancement’ drug they used on me gave me permanent hypnolepsy.”
She’d been lucky. Most of the others in the secret “study group” who’d received the same experimental version of the drug had died within a year. She ran a finger along the rim of her snifter.
“I can take a regimen of daily drugs and be normal, or I can be an effective forecaster, but not both. Since I choose the latter, I have to sleep in two-hour intervals, day and night.”
It wasn’t news to Beva, but it was to the others. Jerzi looked surprised, and Luka looked intrigued. Morganthur looked… quiet. It was what made people underestimate her at first, the way Seshulla had.
She knew she should gently lead them up to the reason she’d called such an inconveniently late meeting, but she was suddenly chafing at the rituals of politeness.
“I know you all have secrets and may know some of them about each other. Now you know one of mine.” She took a deep breath. “Here’s another. There’s an upheaval coming, and it’ll affect the whole Concordance. Not tomorrow, or even next year, but in six years or eight years at the outside.”
To their credit, none of them gave even a hint that they suspected she might be chemmed on hallucinogens in addition to being drunk.
“Have you ever heard of Ayorinn’s Legacy?”
Luka, Beva, and Adams shook their heads. Morganthur gave no indication, which Seshulla took to mean she probably had, but not in a context she was willing to admit. Seshulla would bet her best handwoven spidersilk carpet that not even Beva, with her galaxy-class interrogation talent, could get anything out of Morganthur she wasn’t willing to give.
“Once upon a time…” she stopped and smiled playfully. “That’s how all the best stories start.”
Beva smiled with good humor. Seshulla allowed herself one sip from her snifter. It was exquisitely breathtaking.
“Maybe twenty-five years ago, there was a legendary, and possibly mythical, forecaster named Ayorinn. The best there’s ever been. You must understand that good forecasters do more than predict the future, they can influence it. Ayorinn spent ten years developing a forecast, because he wanted to move the entire galaxy. He knew certain government organizations would do everything they could to suppress it, so he hid it in a series of coded poetic quatrains on timed release. The goal of his forecast was freedom for people with secrets.”
Beva reached out and patted Seshulla’s hand on the table. “Seshulla, mon bon ami, you’re two sheets to the wind. Are you sure you want to be telling us all this?”
Seshulla laughed, but it sounded hollow to her ears. “I’d feel worse if I didn’t. You’re the closest thing I have to friends, and if that isn’t a telling commentary on my life, I don’t know what is.”
She knew only Beva wasn’t astounded to be considered a friend. Luka, of the generous heart and insatiable curiosity, took it in stride. Adams was visibly startled. She hadn’t spent much time with him directly, but she admired how he’d come into his own after surviving the pharma case, settling in with his family, and helping Beva exceed the return on investment for the Personal Security Division. Unless she missed her guess, his daughter would be joining the “people with secrets” category. Seshulla still didn’t have a handle on what Morganthur was thinking, and maybe never would, but believed they had more in common than either of them might imagine.
“Why…” asked Luka. “Oh, I see. Another part of the Ayorinn forecast came out.”
There, thought Seshulla, was the brilliant investigator that Leo Balkovsky had sold her on, making those uncanny intuitive leaps.
She tried to smile encouragingly at him, but the weight of what was in the newly unfolded piece of Ayorinn’s Legacy made it hard. The gathering storm clouds were dark and deadly. “Yes.”
She was grateful he didn’t think to ask about how she came by the cryptogon to decode them, or he might guess more than was safe.
“My talent doesn’t usually work well for individuals, but for groups, yes. Change is inevitable for us all. Some factions have been trying to prevent it or control it. When they’re cornered, they’ll be dangerous. You could try burying yourselves on some frontier planet to ride it out, but knowing who you all are, you won’t. You can’t.”
The alcohol was making her maudlin. It was also making her shaky, because it interfered with her carefully tuned wake-sleep cycle. She’d crater soon, and pay for it for the next few days until she got back on schedule. But rare cognac and rare company were worth it.
A single chime went off, then the very old, lovingly tended bell clock rang out thirteen perfectly pitched and timed notes in succession. A tone poem meditation on time slipping away.
When the last bell’s harmonics finally faded, she raised her glass to her friends.
“To a prosperous new year.”
Beva, Luka, and Jerzi raised their glasses and touched rims. Morganthur watched them all with a slightly bemused expression, as if she’d never seen the ritual before. Seshulla occasionally wondered if the woman had been raised by wolves. She was slightly envious. It would have been much better than being raised in the rigidly proper, obscenely rich, and oppressively stultifying environment of her own youth. It was a good thing her family thought she was long dead.
“La Plata did well this year, thanks in no small part to each of you.”
Beva laughed. “It doesn’t hurt to have a forecaster at the helm, either.” She turned to the others. “Seshulla won’t tell you, but she saved this company seven years ago, and the board made her president.”
“For my sins,” said Seshulla, with a self-deprecating smile.
Everyone smiled at her humor, and relaxed a little.
Luka turned to Jerzi. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Now that Dhorya and Pico have been here six months, are they missing her family?”
Jerzi shook his head. “Not for a minute, but the family is sure missing Dhorya. Or rather, they’re missing her free accountant services, and the chance to meddle. She’s happier than I’ve ever seen her. Pico, too. If I’d known how bad things were…” He shrugged, guilt seeping into his expression.
“Don’t kick yourself, cher,” said Beva. “They’re here now, and that’s what counts.”
Luka nodded. “You can’t change the past, only the future.” He glanced at Morganthur in silent communication.
“Speaking of the future,” said Beva, “our oldest kids are planning a huge party for our thirtieth wedding anniversary next month. It’s supposed to be a secret, so I hope you’ll let them think it still is when they invite you. Jen and I are practicing looking surprised.” She demonstrated, melodramatically gasping and clutching at imaginary pearls. Everyone laughed.
The conversation meandered a bit, and Seshulla let it breeze around her like a drift of butterflies until Luka mentioned that he and Mairwen were looking for a new place to live. One near running trails and that had a flitter pad, since their cases often took them out of town.
Mairwen, whose chair had somehow ended up close to Luka’s, slid her hand into his and threaded their fingers together. “He just doesn’t want to drive in Etonver ground traffic.”
He laughed. “Guilty as charged.” He squeezed her fingers playfully. “It’s gotten worse. I didn’t think that was even possible.”
Seshulla was relieved her little party had finally made Mairwen feel comfortable enough to engage, even if it was just with Luka. Beva was right. They were good for each other.
Seshulla smiled. “I had an uncle once who hated traffic jams so much that he bought a mixed-use highrise and moved his business there so his commute choices would be the lifts or the stairs. Of course, it may have been because the province revoked his permit permanently for causing so many accidents. He hated traffic rules, too.”
They laughed, as she’d intended, and the others recounted their own traffic horror stories. Everyone
who lived in Etonver had them.
She hoped it hadn’t been too much of a nudge. Luka had finally begun seriously looking for an assistant, based on the idea seed she’d planted months ago. She could have wished he’d started sooner, but he’d been distracted by falling in love. It was nice to see.
Like most forecasters, she tended to be too obsessed by tomorrow to pay attention to today, and none of her relationships had survived that.
She needed to be slow and careful when dangling threads at smart people like Luka, or they’d see them. When chess pieces became self-aware, they sometimes went their own direction. La Plata had been a good place for Luka to recover from whatever had hurt him so badly, but both he and Mairwen, wildcard that she was, needed to get away from the corporate environment to flourish.
La Plata would perform well in the coming year, barring catastrophes. Beva and Jerzi would grow the Personal Security Division enough to keep the board happy, even when Luka and Mairwen moved on. She’d make sure it was an amicable split, to preserve present alliances. La Plata was a useful tool in furthering bloody Ayorinn’s legacy, but she selfishly wanted her friends to be safe from people or organizations that wanted to hurt them.
She was fading fast under the influence of the cognac. She served everyone another round of their selected drinks, then brought out the bag she’d discreetly left behind her desk.
She pulled out twelve ancient coins with round edges and square holes in the center. They had little left of their original engraving, so their value was more sentimental than intrinsic. She stacked them on the table in front of her.
“In pre-flight days on old Earth, there was a tradition of making way for good luck by making resolutions for the coming year. I’m going to be rudely presumptuous and offer some for you.”