Crystal Choice: The Second Novel in the Projector War Saga

by K. A. Excell

  “And that’s why this extended training session?”

  He snorted. “Kid, this ain’t no extended training session. You’ve barely scratched the surface. Put that thing away and follow me.”

  We went back out, but instead of going to my locker so I could put my gun down we turned into the armory. My blue lines went wild, and I gasped.

  Hung on the walls in neat rows were weapons with sleek silver casings and the tell-tale flare at the end.

  “Those are plasma weapons,” I said.

  Black’s eyes narrowed. “You ever seen one in action?”

  I shook my head. “Only in simulations.”

  “And where would you have seen a simulation?”

  I tapped my head and then whistled as I started getting the energy outputs readings off them. “I tried to build one, but decided to make the plasma pulser instead. It’s a little less deadly. I never could figure out how to get over the efficiency wall with either device, though. These have to be running at seventy-six percent efficiency at least.”

  Black snorted. “Twenty discharges per cartridge, point-eight second recharge time, and a range to rival a standard firearm.”

  So that was how they got around the recharge time I had on my pulser. A cartridge of pressurized, concentrated gas from which to draw would keep the weapon from having to pull it from the surroundings.

  “How long have you had these?” I asked.

  “As long as I’ve been around,” Black responded and ventured farther into the room. “Here’s one you’ll admire,” he said and pointed to a wall where the casings had a similar design, but without the flare. There was something about the cartridges—

  I blinked as the blue lines spit out an answer. “Electrical weapons? This is what you were talking about in D.C..”

  He nodded. “Quick, dirty, and mostly survivable. Lets you shoot first, ask questions later. As of the Alert 3 announcement yesterday, everyone who’s certified is carrying one.”

  I squinted at them, but my blue lines didn’t have the background information to provide much more data. “Can I try it?” That way I’d be able to get more complete specs.

  “Tolden said to certify you when he found out you’ve got a contact discharge version in the works. Grab one and let’s go.”

  The energy pistol had dismal range—barely larger than the range on my plasma pulser—and only two charges per cartridge. I stored the information in my mind, and pointed the muzzle down range. I squeezed the trigger, expecting a little recoil and some sort of boom. The thing tried to jump out of my hand, and only the training I’d had in the last few weeks stopped me from dropping it. I started to turn to comment on the excess recoil, then stopped as my blue lines spit out energy discharge specifications. If someone caught a full blast to the head, they’d end up in a coma.

  I pulled the trigger a second time and re-checked the numbers. They were correct. I slammed the gun back down and turned on Black. “That’s not mostly survivable—that’s everything-except-dead! If someone gets hit in the head with one of these blasts, it’s going to take years to recover, if they recover at all!”

  Was this really what the Agency used to go after people they weren’t even sure were criminals?

  Black grinned. “That’s why we’ve got pods. Mostly dead is still a little bit alive, and that’s all the pods need to work with. Just think about what shape you were in when we got back from the mission with Houston. It would have been a long road to recovery without those pods but you were back to combat within the day.”

  “And if one of the pods fails?”

  I looked back at the electrical weapon. This thing was nothing like the glove I was working on. This was designed to fry most of the neural network in the human body.

  “If the pods fail, then we have worse problems than one prisoner in a coma. Our line of work is dangerous, and the medics rely on those pods to wake up anybody we bring back half dead. That said, we’ve got three of them, so there is some redundancy.”

  My eyes widened. “Only three? Why not make more?”

  What if someone came in and all three pods were full?

  “We can’t. We found them in an abandoned lab thirty years ago. Occasionally, a new R&D type tries to reverse engineer them. We’ve gotten a few useful technologies—like the biocards—from those attempts, but nothing near the level of the pods.”

  I frowned as he motioned to the electrical weapon again.

  “Break-time’s over. You wanted to work with the electrical weapons, so work with them.”

  I grit my teeth and picked the weapon back up. It wasn’t much better than a bullet to the brain, but it was progress. Plus, the data I got from these weapons would help me make a better version of the electropulser.

  Chapter fifteen

  Smith had been crying. I could see the redness around her eyes when I sat down next to her for lunch. My blue lines spat out a reasonable explanation: she knew Briggs was gone.

  ::We’ll find him, Smith,:: I projected to her.

  She stiffened. How are you going to do that when he doesn’t even want to be found?

  ::Doesn’t want to—:: I reviewed the conversation I’d overheard between Hunt and Briggs. He almost certainly wanted to be found.

  He’s on some sort of Military training mission.

  ::And he left without telling anyone?::

  You know what it’s like, working with a school like this. He couldn’t exactly spread it around. His class might not be as secretive as ours is, but they don’t advertise.

  And a training session wouldn’t inspire so much terror—or make him start working with Hunt. Something else was going on here, and the numbers suggested that it might be the same ‘something else’ that had the Agency and the Company at each other’s throats. What was it Ms. Graff had called it? The Institute?

  I’d heard that name before, but where?

  A few fuzzy memories flashed over my vision, but they didn’t leave me any wiser. Except—the only other times these memories had surfaced were while I was looking at Superiors, and every one of them was at the Agency, both from my first visit, and just after I had told Medina what I’d found at the D.C. overflow facility. What could possibly make me forget, or even blur, something I’d seen?

  A headache cracked over my skull, and I groaned.

  “What’s wrong, Farina?” Smith asked.

  I waved her off as I finally put the pieces together. It was obvious, now. Someone had placed a strong set of suggestions in my mind and blurred my memories. Once, because I’d seen something they didn’t want me to see, and a second time because I had almost figured something out. I archived that information and set a timer for them to resurface, just in case there was another set of compulsions set to keep me from pushing through the first layer, then tried to shake off the headache. I could work through all that data later, but I only had so long I could talk with Smith.

  “I’ll be fine.” Then, ::Briggs has been acting strange, lately, right?::

  Smith nodded. It’s textbook sulking, though. He wanted to tell me about his new training assignment, and he couldn’t so he was sad. Now he’s gone without even a goodbye. I understand it, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

  Except, according to Vera Hunt, he wasn’t on a training mission. I couldn’t exactly tell Smith that without blowing Hunt’s cover as a double agent. But that did bring up an interesting question. ::If he couldn’t say anything about the training mission, then who told you?::

  She looked up. He went missing this morning. I didn’t think anything of it until the Agency’s announcement yesterday. When I told Ms. King I was worried about him, she checked the military’s database for me. I thought something worse might have happened. Sometimes people just disappear, you know, and they might be in trouble. Plus, there are those Superiors who are taking people—like the prisoners
they abducted from D.C.. I don’t know what I would do if they had taken him.

  I choked on my food. Was Ms. King was involved in this mess? My odds of keeping my investigation for Hunt secret just plummeted. But Ms. King had to know that Hunt was a double agent, she was the Agency’s recruiter! Was she also investigating how to get Briggs back? That would explain the misdirection. Ms. King was buying herself time to investigate by feeding Smith a believable lie—which meant she probably wouldn’t be very happy I was meddling in it. Still, why didn’t Ms. King trust Smith with the investigation? Smith was a full agent, and had far more training than I did. We were both on one of the Agency’s most prestigious tactical teams!

  No, Smith had a right to know. Briggs was her friend, too.

  I clenched my jaw and tried to figure out how to deliver the news, but there wasn’t really a good way, so I just told her. ::Briggs isn’t on a training mission. He’s been taken by some bad people.::

  Smith hissed. “What are you talking about? Ms. King said he was fine.” She bit her lip as we drew looks from the students around us at the lunch table.

  ::I don’t know what Ms. King was thinking, but Briggs is anything but fine. I felt some of his thoughts spill past his walls earlier, and he is terrified of someone. I don’t know who, but I’m going to try to figure it out. I’m going to need some help with that, though. Has he been going anywhere different than usual? Staying at school more? When did he start getting distracted?::

  I compiled the information as Smith gave it to me, growing more grim by the second. She was convinced the Superiors had taken him. I wanted to argue, but as I sorted through recent footage of him, I could see changes in his physical form. They were slight enough I hadn’t noticed it, but a full analysis showed it all. He was taller, with denser muscles in strange places. Upon closer inspection, I could find puncture marks in his arm that matched the syringe marks I’d seen in the base in D.C.. The Company was right. The Institute was taking Turnips and turning them into Superiors.

  So why hadn’t they just made Briggs disappear? Why let him return here, and risk him asking for help? I didn’t have answers for those questions, and Smith couldn’t think of a single place where he might have met someone from the Institute. Still, I had more information than I’d started with.

  I wrestled with the potential models during my next academic period, but couldn’t make much headway until an alert began to flash in the corner of my vision.

  Fix the tampering? What—

  The memories flashed again, and my headache returned. It was definitely a good thing I’d set that alert, because something had made me forget all about the memories that had been tampered with.

  The models of Briggs could wait. Whoever had messed with my mind was going to regret it when I fixed what they’d done to me. I dove deep into my own mind, like I was going to my safe space, except I never entered that room. Instead, I found the deep storage vault where I kept all of my memories. I set my blue lines to work finding scenes with blurred faces or mental frequencies that didn’t shift with my thoughts. The first time was over a semester ago after Robbins had finished vetting my memories. I had been convinced that he hadn’t messed with anything. I clenched my jaw and watched the memory through. Sure enough, there was a notification there telling me that something was off, but the medical teleprojector had wiped it away with a gentler touch than I could ever hope to achieve.

  I found the compulsion he’d grown into the fabric of my mind and ripped it out. The memory sharpened until I could even hear the words he spoke. The sounds were strange in my mind, so I moved on. I did not want to think about the implications of that right now.

  The next memory was of the Superior woman I’d encountered when Tolden first brought me to the Agency, and the things I’d found in her head as I escorted her from the rotunda to her cell. Her face, the models I’d built, the conversation we’d had—all of it was covered in a web of compulsion and forgetfulness. No wonder I got a headache every time I tried to pull all the data I had on Superiors to the front of my mind. I had sort through, dismiss, and then fight free of this mess every time I did it!

  I set to work dismantling the strings piece by sticky piece—only when I shifted one thread, the others started growing to fix the hole! After twenty minutes of playing whack-a-mole with the web, I snarled and jerked the whole thing free. This was my mind, and Robbins couldn’t mess with it!

  Suddenly, I was inside the memory. The Superior woman stared at me with muted horror.

  I am not an Instructor, I am a defect to be corrected or thrown away. Just like you neurodivergents, and the rest of humanity. They will not stop until they have created the perfect Superior—their perfect soldier. Not human, but better than human.

  This was the Institute the Company was chasing—and the Instructors were doing genetic experiments on people like Briggs. The Agency had a Superior in InDep, and Ms. Green had still walked out of that meeting? They had proof of what the Institute was doing in their own Intelligence department! And Medina? He had seen this Superior with his own eyes when I helped transport it to his department last semester. They were deliberately turning a blind eye to this. Was that what the Superior woman had meant when she asked if I was just going to go along with the Agency’s machine?

  I curled my fingers into fists. No. I was going to go down there and get some answers. Then I was going to find whatever place the Institute was hiding Briggs, I was going to tear it down, and then I was going to bring him back so Smith wouldn’t be sad anymore.

  I was going to protect the people I cared about. Otherwise, what was the point of being a Projector?

  Chapter sixteen

  That weekend, I woke up early to go down to the wing of Interrogation where I remembered dropping the Superior woman off. I scanned the memory for any signs I could use, and hoped my clearance would hold. The elevator didn’t have a problem with my card, and neither did any of the doors between the rotunda and the desk that blocked the interrogation portion of InDep from the rest of the department.

  The agent at the desk was in full tactical gear—and so was I. Ms. King said that the best way to get somewhere you weren’t supposed to be was to look like you belonged there. I figured that a tactical agent in full gear would be waved past faster than a kid in street clothes.

  I nodded to the agent at the desk, who was staring intently at the computer. His thoughts revealed that he was playing Pac-Man. I suppressed a snort and waited for him to run into a jelly. Finally, he looked up. “Tac’s down the other elevator, hon.” He tapped the key to start a new game.

  I clenched my fists at my side. The last person to call me ‘hon’ had ended up under a car. ::Actually, I’m Agent 32. Not ‘hon’.:: I projected.

  He jumped to his feet, away from the computer as he realized his mistake. There were only five projection telepaths assigned to this base, and only three were on-site at a time. One was a PS1, and the other was Robbins, an old hand. The other two were assigned to Strike teams, so they were cycled in and out—and none of them had a Tac 47 patch on their tactical suit. From his thoughts, I could tell that stories about me had gotten around.

  “U-uh, what can I do for you, Agent?” He started to salute, then aborted it and settled for standing at attention.

  Just like that, the anger rising in my mind turned to humor. I projected a thread of assurance. “I’ve been told there’s a prisoner who’s requested to speak to me.”

  “Uh, ma’am? I don’t see anything like that in the system.” His wariness skyrocketed, and I took a moment to smooth the edge off. I was going to have to be careful with how much coercion I applied. The Agency didn’t look kindly on Projectors using their abilities to get into places they shouldn’t.

  I tried again. “The prisoner is in room twenty-four.”

  He looked at me, then back down at the computer. He typed in something, then blinked. “That’s stra
nge. It’s requesting a security code.” He typed in a few digits. “It doesn’t look like I’m cleared for this information.” He reversed the screen and handed the keyboard over.

  Big red letters covered the screen, “Access Denied”. I tapped in my code, and the screen changed.

  “Report to Director Medina immediately.”

  I swallowed. So much for that plan. The agent looked at the screen, and pointed down the hall the other way. His other hand was on the firearm on his belt. “I’ll escort you there.”

  My stomach twisted as I followed the tac agent down the hall. I ran as much analysis as I could on Medina’s past behavior, hoping it would give me some insight on how he would take this little venture once he found out, but there wasn’t anything conclusive. Medina was a hard man to read.

  The tac agent opened the door to Medina’s office, and I stepped inside. The director motioned to the chair on the other side of his desk without looking up from his tablet. After a long moment, he set it down with a sigh.

  “You’ve been busy, Agent. R&D has nothing but praise for your work, AnAd has spent the last two days trying to recreate the analysis you did in two minutes, Tactical can’t figure out how you’ve become proficient in every commonly used firearm they have, and now I find you trying to access a prisoner you should know nothing about.”

  A chill ran down my spine as I reached for his surface thoughts, only to find a cold hard wall. Medina was as unreadable as a chunk of ice. I marshaled my blue lines to map out the possible consequences of the line of reasoning he’d just laid out, only to swallow hard.

  There were very few people who could accomplish the list of tasks he’d just described—and most of them were spies who weren’t learning those skills, but who already had them. Suddenly, I regretted trying to get in there to talk to the Superior. I’d charged in without thinking because I’d been blinded by a need to help Briggs.