by R S Penney
Instinct kicked in, and Anna flicked the hat-switch, ordering the gravitational drives to propel the shuttle upward while rocks rained down upon them. They broke through the debris and rose into the open sky as missiles streaked down from the heavens and hit the canyon wall.
Tilting her head back, Anna blinked several times. “Good trick,” she whispered. “I really have to give you credit for that one.”
“The Brivan is breaking orbit,” Jack said. “In less than a minute, they'll be able to go to warp!”
“There's no way we can catch them in time!” Anna barked. Anger made her want to slam her fist down on something, but this was not a good time for outbursts. “What about the fighter?”
“My sensors have it climbing out of the canyon,” Jack said. “In a very steep ascent. Looks like the pilot might be trying to catch up to his friends.”
“Let's see what we can do about that.”
She keyed in an intercept course and pushed the gravitational drives hard. It wasn't long before she was staring at what appeared to be a metal arrowhead pointed up toward the open sky.
“Is the fighter warp capable?” Melissa asked.
“A fighter that small?” Anna said. “There's no way.”
Her instruments warned her that the Brivan had gone to warp. Already the ship had reached an effective velocity several times that of light, and it would only accelerate as it got further away from the sun. Bile rose to the tip of her tongue. The data she needed was in that ship's computers; now, they would never find Leo.
Except…
The small fighter was still straining for the upper atmosphere, still racing to catch up to its mother-ship. Why the pilot bothered was beyond her. Without a warp drive, he or she was stranded here on this barren, inhospitable world. Suddenly, Anna understood the purpose of Melissa's question.
Sliding her hand across her console, she brought up a square-shaped menu and hit several icons to activate the comm unit. “This is Special Agent Lenai to the pilot of the Class X-7 fighter,” she said. “Seems you're in a bit of a bind. Maybe you'd like to land your plane, come aboard our shuttle and let us take you back to Leyria.”
Silence was the only response.
“We treat our prisoners fairly well: good food, lots of sunshine, a comfortable bed to sleep in. It's better than remaining here and suffocating when you run out of air.”
Several seconds passed with only the hiss of static over the comm channel. Finally, the fighter pilot spoke. “You win, Agent Lenai,” he said in a gruff voice. “I'll set down about a hundred metres from the canyon. You can pick me up there.”
Twenty minutes later, Anna was waiting in the shuttle's cabin, listening to comm chatter from Jack and Melissa as they ushered their prisoner across the sun-scorched rock of this barren world. The temperature outside was higher than the boiling point of water. No one in their right mind would choose to stay here, not when the alternative was a nice, comfortable cell. Bleakness take her, even a Ragnosian labour camp would be a thousand times better than this.
Part of her wished that she was out there with them. Anna was the sort of lady who wanted to do everything herself; delegating always made her feel like she was shirking her duties in some way. But somebody had to stay with the shuttle, and she was the best pilot among them, so…
In her black pants, vest and t-shirt, Anna sat upon the table with her arms folded, a lock of white hair falling over one cheek. “Come on, you guys,” she muttered to herself. “Don't you know it's a bad idea to keep an impulsive lady waiting?”
On the port side of the room, a thick metal door led to an air-lock. There was a loud beeping sound as that door slid open, and then she saw a figure in a silver-coloured space suit with Jack's face visible through the clear duraplastic bubble. “We got him,” he said, his voice somewhat muffled as it came through a speaker.
He stepped out of the way to reveal another man in a similar suit with a bronze tint. This fellow had a grizzled face with a thick mustache on his upper lip and flecks of gray in his hair. He said nothing.
Melissa was the last one through, and when she entered the cabin, she holstered the pistol she had been carrying and then reached up to remove her helmet. There was a hiss of air, and then the girl shook her head. “You know, just a few years ago, I wouldn't have ever imagined that I would be walking on an alien world.”
“Nothing like it, huh?”
The fighter pilot removed his bronze helmet, producing a similar hissing sound. When it was off, he let out a breath. “I don't mean to interrupt your party,” he said. “But what do you plan to do with me?”
“Needless to say, you're under arrest.”
“Figured.”
Anna sat with hands clasped together in her lap, frowning down at the floor. “We'll take you back to Leyria,” she said with a shrug. “After that, we'll have some questions for you. Maybe if you cooperate, the sector attorney-”
“Oh, you want me to rat out my friends?” the man exclaimed. “Put a microphone in front of me, and I'll sing any song you want.”
Jack's helmet came off last, and of course, his hair was even messier from wearing it. “That was easy,” he said. “You'll forgive me if I'm not eager to sing the new friend's song with a perp who seems too willing to cooperate.”
“Those bastards left me here to die,” the pilot said. “So, I'm thinking…Loyalty? Not high on my list of priorities.”
“Fair enough.”
“Why don't we start with your name?” Anna suggested.
The pilot smiled a wan smile as he studied his own booted feet. “You want to know my name?” he asked, eyebrows rising. “It's Varnel Talarath. And I know what you really want to hear.”
“What's that?”
“You want to know about the blonde psychopath we rescued from an Earth prison. Am I right?” Obviously, something in her face confirmed his suspicions because the man nodded and kept right on talking. “Yeah, I figured. It was the only thing we've done that would attract the attention of a Justice Keeper. I can't tell you much. But anything I know is yours.”
“Well then,” she said. “Maybe we should be on our way. Jack, Melissa, you two will have to guard him in shifts. It's gonna be a long flight back to Leyria.”
Chapter 25
Tilting a watering pale ever so slightly, Larani watched as water sprinkled from the spout and fell upon a small flowerbed of red roses. Though only a few weeks of summer remained, Denabria was deliciously hot. She had no love for the coming months of cold rain that never quite managed to become snow. But that was a good ways off. There was time yet to enjoy the good weather. Funny how she told herself that every year, and yet she never seemed to accomplish it by the time Fall set in.
From her vantage on the southwest corner of the Keeper building's rooftop, she saw skyscrapers lining the gently sloping hill that led down to the blue waters of the ocean. It was a lovely afternoon. Not a good time for bad news.
So, of course, the bad news was here.
She turned around.
Anna Lenai stood in front of a line of hedges that grew on the rooftop, flanked by Jack and Melissa, all three of them looking somewhat disheveled. They had come back from their mission to Velezia late last night.
“Report,” Larani said.
Anna stood with her hands behind herself, head held high as she stared off into the distance. “We have been interviewing Varnel Talarath for the better part of the morning,” she said. “He seems to know where Leo went.”
A frown tugged at Larani's mouth, but she nodded to her three subordinates. “And you believe that he can be trusted?” she asked. “We've tangled with Slade before, and he consistently manages to surprise us.”
Jack had his arms crossed as he backed up to the hedge-wall and let out a grunt. “I don't sense any duplicity from this guy,” he said. “Trust me, I've been keeping my eyes peeled for any hole in his story, but he seems legit.”
“So where is our wayward murderer?”
In response, An
na lifted her forearm and tapped a few commands into her multi-tool. The disk on her gauntlet projected a two-dimensional hologram of what appeared to be an aerial view of a lush green field with a river running through it and trees dotting the landscape. Clearly, this photo had been taken from orbit. There were structures along the riverbank, but she couldn't make out what they were.
“Talarath says that he was watching as one of his crewmates sent Leo through the SlipGate,” Anna explained. “The coordinates that he saw would place the receiving Gate somewhere in the southeast of Iyra Province, but he can't say exactly where.”
“It's a start.”
The hologram vanished when Anna let her arm drop, and then the young woman stepped forward. “The region is littered with old, abandoned castles,” she said. “And we suspect that Leo is holed up in one. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out which.”
Larani nodded. “Go to it then.”
Her three young Keepers turned and started across the rooftop to the stairwell door. “Agent Hunter,” she called out, causing Jack to stop in his tracks while the other two kept going. “Remain a moment.”
Turning back to her with his hands in his pockets, Jack shuffled over with his head down. “What's up?” he asked with a shrug of his shoulders. “Did you need to go over my mission report?”
“No,” Larani answered. “I have other questions.”
“Such as?”
She turned to face the chest-high wall that bordered the rooftop and looked out on her city. How to phrase this in a way that wouldn't make the young man suspicious of her motivations; he could be quite prickly. “I've been reviewing reports, polling data that was taken after Dusep's speeches.”
“And what have you learned?”
A grimace twisted her features just before Larani shook her head. “His toxic views are garnering sympathy,” she said. “People are beginning to feel that Leyria is a bastion of civilization in a galaxy that tends toward savagery.”
Jack leaned over the wall with his arms folded, his mouth a thin line as he stared out at the city. “That's generally how fascism works,” he said. “Appeal to people's civic pride, a sense of cultural superiority.”
“We need to counter that message.”
“With respect, ma'am, I don't think that's our job.”
Larani had suspected that that might be his response. Tanaben had been the one to suggest that she make Jack her attache, and despite his deep-seated dislike for authority, the man did have a talent for sniffing out duplicity. His job was to find rogue Keepers, but somehow, in the last six months, she had taken him under her wing.
Jack saw the Keepers as public servants – which they were – and public servants did not shape public opinion. That was a very high-minded ideal, one that she approved of. Perhaps, if she had never been posted to Earth, she would share Jack's sentiments. As it was, she had a hard time believing that he wasn't willing to do anything and everything in his power to stomp out hatred in its infancy.
Larani remembered the horror she felt, the creeping unease when she realized that she would have to hide the fact that she was assigned male at birth. It was a sensation that she had never truly experienced until the moment she set foot on that troubled world.
Oh, there had been some difficulties throughout childhood. It wasn't easy in those formative years, knowing that she didn't look like the other girls. But her parents had loved her unconditionally. There were bumps, of course, but she never felt targeted. Not the way she did while trying to lead a team of Keepers on Earth. Things had gotten even more complicated when she became head of the Justice Keepers. Dealing with all those Earth politicians and their backward opinions…
It was easy to feel a sense of Leyrian pride – her skin, her gender, her preference for women over men: none of that diminished her ability to live her life here on Leyria – but that was how it started. It was easy to go from pride in the fact that her people had adopted a more progressive outlook on equality to a sense of superiority. To the belief that Leyrians were better than Earthers, more civilized than Earthers.
But the insidious reality of superiority was that it never stopped with just one group. Once her people had excluded their technologically-inferior cousins, they would find other groups to target.
“Larani?”
Jack's voice startled her. She had been lost in her reverie just long enough for the silence to become awkward. “What do your people do, Jack?” she asked. “Not long ago, several nations on your world had a brush with fascism.”
“For many, it was more than a brush,” he replied. “And many are still dealing with the aftermath of that conflict.”
“So, what do they do?”
Jack turned, pressing his back to the wall and forcing air through puckered lips. “It isn't the kind of thing that you can outline in a step-by-step plan,” he said. “Countering a man like Dusep requires a hostile media, one that challenges his every move.”
“No small order.” Larani sighed with frustration. “You'd better join your friends. I have a feeling they will need your help.”
When he was gone, she turned her attention back to Dusep and the unsavory trend he represented. Untangling that particular was going to present a challenge, perhaps the biggest challenge of her entire career.
Jack stretched a hand out and crafted a Bending, the light before him refracting so that the gray gymnasium wall was a blurry mess. Power surged through his body, and he felt a faint tingling sensation in his skin. The guilt was there, also. He practiced Bending to allow himself a chance to work through the grief that came every time he so much as thought about using his powers.
He could feel Summer's love for him, her encouragement, and he couldn't help but wonder if he really deserved it. The attack on Alia's wedding reception had forced him to work through some of his hesitation about using his abilities, but he would be lying if he said that he didn't worry about what he might do the next time his anger reached a boiling point, the next time someone pushed him…
Jack let the Bending fizzle away.
Dressed in track pants and a blue muscle shirt, he stood in the middle of a blue gym mat and let out a breath. “It makes me wonder, Summer,” he murmured. “Why you'd still trust me after what I did.”
His Nassai grew angry at that.
“Perhaps she knows you better than you know yourself.”
Those words came from Keli of all people. For reasons he did not truly understand, the telepath had come to watch him practice, and now she stood by the wall in a simple white dress.
Dabbing at his face with a towel, Jack shut his eyes and sighed. “Maybe,” he said with a slight rasp in his voice. “Probably…But I can't imagine that when she Bonded me, she would have expected me to do…what I did.”
Keli stood with hands clasped demurely in front of herself, a knowing smile on her face. “Ever since Tanaben died,” she began, “your pain has been a scream that even your Nassai cannot muffle.”
“Sorry for being so loud about it.”
“Not at all.”
The woman glided forward with impeccable grace, looking him up and down as if he were a prize horse she intended to buy. “It's always so easy, isn't it?” she murmured. “Telling yourself a comforting lie. You look at the men that you despise, and you remain secure in the knowledge that you could never do what they did.”
“This isn't helping, Keli.”
“Do you remember when I killed that man in Rio de Janeiro? The one who tried to sell me to one of your world's politicians? Goodness, I can't even recall his name.”
Jack strode toward her with his arms folded, shaking his head slowly. “His name was Rawlins,” he replied. “And yeah…I remember. A few years before I met you, I went up against battle drones that sliced through a spec-ops team like they were carving up a turkey, but what you did? That terrified me.”
“I wanted Rawlins to suffer,” she said. “To pay for the pain he had inflicted on me. Maybe that's something you can understand
.”
Damn it, this was not what he needed to hear right now. He was trying to move past his guilt, not undermine what small amount of progress he had made. But the sad reality was that he did understand where she was coming from. What Leo had done…There was still a part of Jack that wanted to punish the man for his crimes.
And he had lived a mostly happy life with a loving family. How might that instinct be magnified in someone who had spent their childhood in a cell, who had been mistreated because of her gifts.
He looked up to find Keli standing before him and nodding along as if he'd given voice to every thought. “So, you do understand,” she said. “When you spend your life in a cell, when violence is done to you on a daily basis, violence becomes instinct.”
Jack flinched, turning his face away from her. “You picked up all that?” He didn't mind telepathy in principle, but he wasn't comfortable with the idea that someone might read his mind without permission.
“Your thoughts were very loud,” Keli said. “It does make me wonder though. Have you noticed that Anna is so willing to forgive you for your mistake, and yet she continues to condemn me for mine? Why do you think that is?”
Thrusting his chin out, Jack narrowed his eyes. “Maybe it's because I feel terrible remorse for what I almost did,” he began, “while you seem to feel none at all for what you did do.”
He strode past her to a bench on the wall, then knelt there to retie his shoe. “Gabi, Harry, Melissa, Larani: all of us have something in common,” he went on. “We're not all Keepers, but we all believe in something greater than ourselves. You, on the other hand, have made it clear that you prioritize your own survival above anything else.”
Keli was there in his mind's eye, standing with arms crossed and frowning as if she thought he might sprout horns from his head. “Wouldn't you do the same?” she asked. “If you had lived the life I lived?”
“Maybe I would,” Jack answered. “But it really doesn't change anything. You can't expect people to trust you when you tell them over and over again that you're only out for yourself.”