Children of the Sky (The Talari Subversion Book 1)

by Houston V. Grant

  We walked further along and I eventually got another brief flash of the biosim.

  “It’s up on the ridge,” I told Tati.

  She scanned the area where I was pointing. “What could be up there?” she asked. “A bear?”

  “Maybe,” I said, trying to think of what kind of large predator lived in this area. “Unless they have a prehistoric mountain lion or something.”

  Tati chuckled, but I was serious.

  “It’s still further up though, so no need to try climbing those rocks just yet.”

  We walked on. This was apparently a popular day for hiking. I wondered if the biosim would be more out in the open if there were fewer people around, but it didn’t matter—I had to find the thing regardless. I did have some concerns though. Depending on what kind of creature it was and what I had to do to catch it, it could attract unwanted attention. Every hiker out there probably had cell phones. We needed to stay incognito and the last thing we needed was a bunch of people live-streaming us chasing some wild animal down a mountain.

  The signal had stopped moving. It was somewhere above us. I reached out to try to establish a link to it, but I couldn’t grasp the thing. I could sense it clearly, but not cleanly. Trying to establish the link was like listening to people talking behind a closed door—you can hear them, but can’t quite make out the words.

  I considered that getting a signal was probably made difficult by all the physical obstructions where we were. From what I could tell, sensing and controlling a biosim was a lot like using a radio.

  Shielding our eyes from the late morning sunlight, we scanned up to the ridgeline for signs of movement or anything standing out, but didn’t see anything. It was probably on the other side of the ridge, or perhaps it was too well camouflaged to see from our vantage point. The rock face was pale grey and nearly vertical, with lots of pebbles and fractures. Climbing it would be a very difficult for anyone who wasn’t an expert climber, which I wasn’t.

  “Tashmit would love this,” Tati said, following my gaze.

  “She’d love the mountain?” I asked.

  “Yeah. She loves rock climbing. I did a bunch of it with her on Tkosa while you were on that last mission. I’m pretty good at it too, if I do say so myself. And the chumahai helps, obviously.”

  It made sense that she’d be good at it—Tati was petite, but very strong. She could probably pull herself up the wall much more easily than I could.

  “Are you volunteering to climb up after the biosim?” I asked.

  She looked up the wall, scanning for handholds and footing. “I can climb this, but I’m not catching the biosim. You have to do that.”

  She was right, but I had an idea how to do it.

  “How fast do you think you can climb this?” I asked.

  She scanned the area again and got that look of concentration that I found so sexy.

  “I can’t say how long it would take, but I’m pretty fast.” She sharpened her expression and wagged a finger at me. “But I’m not gonna try to catch your biosim, Nathan. So whatever you’re thinking—“

  “You don’t have to catch it,” I said. “You just have to flush it out.”

  “You want to use me as bait? What if it’s a bear?”

  “Not bait. I don’t want you to draw it out. I want you to scare it out of wherever it’s hiding.”

  “So it can get spooked and attack me? Not a chance.”

  “I can control it,” I said. “I just need to get a clear line to it first. Right now it’s hiding somewhere. I can feel it, but I can’t grab it. It’s like trying to grab your phone after you’ve dropped it when you’re driving.”

  She looked at me blankly. “I’ve never had that experience.”

  “Ok, bad analogy,” I said. “But just trust me.”

  She looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Kiss me,” she said.

  I obliged.

  She kissed me deliciously, then bit my lip and pulled back. “If you get me killed you’ll never feel these lips again. Just remember that.”

  I kissed her again, letting my hands wander over her curvy body.

  “I plan to feel all of this a lot more,” I said. “So don’t worry.”

  She brightened. “Ok then, let’s do it. What do you want me to do?”

  I looked around at the other hikers who were still coming and going. “I think we should wait until it gets dark. I don’t want anybody seeing us. Too many questions if they do.”

  She opened her mouth to object and I added, “Even if you Neuroconceal to make us look like mountain goats, a bunch of goats chasing each other across the rocks will attract attention.”

  “What do you mean chasing? ” she asked. “Can’t you just make it come to you?”

  “Once I have a neural link with it, yes. And before that, as long as I have clear sight to it, I can control it, but right now it’s staying away from me. It’s not coming to fight or stalk us, it’s just keeping its distance.”

  “So not only do you want me to climb this rock and flush out some unknown dangerous wild beast—which you may or may not be able to control—you want me to do it at night?”

  I grinned and nodded. “It sounds bad when you put it that way.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky I like you,” she said. “I’ll do it on one condition.”

  I immediately became wary. “What condition?”

  A mischievous smile blossomed on her face. “What’s a mile? 5,000 some feet?”

  “Yeah. 5300 or so.”

  “How high is it where we are now?” she asked.

  “About 6500 feet. Why?”

  “We’re about to join the mile-high club,” she said, nodding towards a narrow space that ran behind a large rock outcropping maybe forty feet from where we were standing. “If you take me, I might climb your rock for you.”

  We managed to sneak into the space unseen. I don’t know which of us was more turned on, but we kissed each other urgently. I spun Tati around in the confined space, turning her back to me and scraping my elbow in the process.

  “Tight fit in here,” I grumbled.

  “I thought you liked that,” she said, pressing her ass against me and opening her chumahai. I watched her for a moment and she flipped her hair and looked back over her shoulder. “What are you waiting for?”

  I opened my chumahai, then grabbed her hair with one hand and took my dick out with the other. She gasped when I pulled her head back and kissed her again, deeply.

  “Pants down,” I growled into her ear and she yanked them off her ass. I slid in smoothly and she cried out. Still gripping her hair with my right hand, I clasped the left over her mouth. “Shut up,” I whispered roughly as I started stroking her. “If you make too much noise, I’ll have to stop. You don’t want that, do you?”

  All her concentration was on staying quiet while I fucked her.

  I yanked her hair again. “Answer me.”

  “No,” she moaned.

  I moved my hands to her hips for better leverage and had at it. Despite her promise, she moaned loudly. I loved the way she sounded when I was inside her, but I really didn’t want to get caught by anyone, so I took off the scarf I was wearing and gagged her with it. That just turned her on even more, but the scarf muffled the sound.

  “Shut up,” I said again, pulling on the scarf while digging into her as hard as I could. For Tati, the whole experience of being wedged in a mountain crevasse, gagged, with people all around while getting pounded from behind turned her on so much that she came in just a few minutes and I came right after.

  We gathered ourselves, then went back out. A couple walking past gave us a knowing look, but didn’t say anything.

  “I was sure someone was gonna come walking back there,” I said. “I can’t believe no one was curious enough to look. I figured that crevasse would be like an open door with a flashing sign.”

  “I Neuroconcealed it,” Tati said. “If anyone came close enough to see, it would’ve just looked
like a wall to them.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I liked what you were doing,” she said with a smile.

  The mountain cleared off as dusk approached. No one wanted to get caught by darkness. It was time for us to start. There was a narrow ledge about fifty feet up the wall that looked like a good place to base ourselves, so we climbed up. We considered just Tati climbing up and me using the caduceus to teleport to her, but it was too risky—unless the caduceus beamed me to the exact spot, I’d go rolling down the side. We both had to climb. Tatiana climbed the wall like a spider and went ahead. It was much more difficult for me, as I’d predicted.

  I tried again to Electrosense when I finally reached the ledge where she’d been waiting. The rock was barren, but I could still feel the biosim. It hadn’t moved from its earlier position, but I could sense it more clearly now. I tried a neural link, but again, no luck.

  We started up again. There wasn’t much moonlight, and visibility was worse than where we started, so it took a moment to see the first handhold. The climb was slower and harder for both of us this time.

  Tati climbed ahead of me and I could hear her struggling. She grunted as the handhold she’d just grabbed broke off and went bouncing down the rockface. I made the mistake of looking down. The rock wall extended for a few feet below me, then disappeared into darkness. I never heard the dislodged rock hit the ground.

  We kept climbing and crested the ridge. I could feel the biosim now. “I can’t see it yet, but I’m sure it’s right up there past that next outcropping,” I said.

  “Can you make it come down?”

  I reached out. I still didn’t have line of sight to the thing, but the signal was strong enough that I thought I could work with it. I concentrated hard, trying to grasp the neural link and connect with it, but every time I thought I had it, it slipped away.

  “I can’t quite grab it,” I said. “It keeps getting away from me.”

  “What do you mean? Is it fighting you off? Maybe you should wait until you can see it. I don’t want you pissing off some prehistoric mountain bear.”

  “It’s not fighting exactly,” I said. “I mean, they can kinda push back. They don’t just sit still and let you neural link to them, but it’s not that, I just can’t quite get a grip on it.”

  “Ok, so we keep going up. You’ll keep track of it, right? I don’t want it surprising me.”

  “Yep, I can still sense it. It’s not moving.”

  We started up again, feeling our way in the dark. We made it atop the peak—the signal was coming from just beyond the next ridge—which was at least a hundred feet higher than the one we’d just crossed. We started up the next face and I tried to link it again, with no success.

  As soon as we made it up onto the narrow ledge we’d spotted from the ground everything became much clearer.

  “The signal’s strong,” I said. “It’s right around this corner.”

  We pressed ourselves against the wall and stayed low to lessen the wind’s impact as we crept along.

  The ledge widened enough to stand comfortably as we neared a corner where it wrapped around a curve in the rock face, and a few hardy plants took advantage of the purchase. I took a deep breath, then rounded the bend. The shelf was even wider here—close to ten feet wide, I estimated—and it extended for about eight feet. There were clumps of grass and a twisted little pine tree, but no biosim.

  I checked the signal again. It felt muted now, but we were in the right place. We were right on top of it. I let out an exasperated sigh as I looked around.

  “This is the right place. It’s gotta be hidden here somewhere,” I said.

  Tati looked skeptical. I could understand her skepticism—she couldn’t feel the biosim like I could.

  “Could it be the elevation difference making it hard to locate?” she asked.

  “No. It’s just hidden somewhere. The first one I found was buried in the ground. It’s here.” I looked around for a likely hiding spot but nothing stood out—just more rock. And my Electrosense wasn’t picking anything up either.

  “I don’t sense any kind of Neuroconceal signal here,” Tati said. I thought maybe they’d pulled the little trick I pulled to hide our little spot down there.”

  I checked the signal from the biosim and tried again to link to it, but the slipperiness was still there. The wind had picked up and if there was any sound, I couldn’t hear it.

  The signal seemed to be coming from exactly where we were. I would’ve thought it was buried under our feet, but there wasn’t enough soil. It had to be in the mountain, but the mountain was solid rock. Even if there was an entrance on the other side—which I doubted—it would mean that there was a tunnel coming all the way from the other side of the mountain to the exact spot where we were standing. None of this was adding up so I sat against the wall to think it through. And then I felt, very faintly, a thin whisper of air against my neck.

  I turned and squinted in the dark, then pulled out my phone to light the area where I was looking. I could just make out a thin crack in the rock. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of a crack in a rock, but this crack was so clean and linear that there was no way it was natural. I followed it to the ground, then back up, across and down. There was a door cut into the rock.

  Tati came over to see what I was looking at and we both stood there, amazed.

  “This is it,” I said.

  She nodded. “How the hell do we get in though?”

  I put my shoulder to the rock and pushed, but even with the chumahai, it didn’t budge.

  “Can’t you use your caduceus somehow?” she said. “Beam yourself in?”

  I considered it. “I feel like the answer is yes, but I don’t know how. Let’s test how precise the caduceus is if we beam to each other. We never figured that out.”

  “You want to do that now? On a mountain?” she asked.

  “We’ve got enough space up here,” I said. “This ledge is a good eight feet by ten feet. When we find this stupid biosim, I don’t want to have to climb back down if I don’t have to.”

  “So we’ll do it when we climb down. It’s safer that way.”

  “But I want to know now. Maybe there’s some way we can use it to get into this room.”

  “We have no idea what’s on the other side of this,” she said. “You don’t even know if it is a room.”

  “What else could it be? What’s on the other side of a door but a room?”

  She didn’t like what I was saying, but I was making sense. “Well you don’t know how thick the door is.”

  I put my hands on the stone and sent some current into it, but it wasn’t conductive and didn’t tell me anything.

  “Even if you’re right,” Tati began, “you can’t teleport in unless I’m in there with my caduceus.”

  “I know, but maybe there’s some trick we don’t know yet. C’mon, let’s just test it now while we’re thinking about it. It’ll be fine.”

  Tati hesitated, but she reluctantly agreed.

  “I’ll be the guinea pig and transport to you,” I said, and I went back around the bend and out of sight.

  The process was similar to making a phone call. The big difference was that the receiving caduceus first had to open a channel to receive the connection from the caduceus doing the sending. When the connection was made, both caduceus would emit a smooth steady vibrational tone that meant they were on a matching frequency. You felt it more than heard it—it reminded me of tuning my guitar with a tuning fork. Then, the transporting caduceus would initiate the quantum entanglement and the transport would happen.

  I rubbed the caduceus and the thin beam of blue light emanated, then spun on its edge and resolved into Tatiana. “Long time no see,” I said.

  She smiled despite herself. “You’re such a dork. Alright, let’s see if it works. And if you get hurt, I will actually kill you.”

  “Stand as far away from the edge as you can,” I said.
“I don’t want to land in the air like Wile. E. Coyote.”

  “I know that, doofus,” she said. “I’m opening my channel now. Transport when you’re ready.”

  I nodded and tried to establish the connection to begin the transfer. I immediately felt the clear vibrational tone, but there was something else too. Something out of tune with me and Tati’s two caduceus.

  Before I could react, the blue light thinned to a hair-width beam and scanned me. It took less than half a second. My skin tingled and I felt a sharp falling sensation. And then I was standing three feet in front of Tati.

  “It worked!” she said, jumping to hug me. I’d practiced this with Beltran back on Tkosa, even though we hadn’t figured out exactly what all the parameters were, but Tati had never seen it done.

  As excited as she was, I was even more so—I hadn’t gone tumbling down the mountain. I’d expected it to work, but I was still relieved.

  “Did you notice the tone when I established the connection?” I asked.

  She nodded and kissed me. “Yeah, you said there would be a tone thing. I felt it.”

  “Did it seem weird to you? Did something seem out of tune?”

  “I don’t think so. But this was the first time I’ve done it, so I don’t know. What was wrong about it?”

  “I need to check something,” I said. “Let’s try it again. I’m not gonna actually transfer, I just want to check the tone.”

  We went through the process again and I noticed the same thing—the connection between my caduceus and hers was there, but so was the slightly out-of-tune vibration or whatever it was. I had an idea what was happening.

  “Let me try one more thing,” I said. “Turn yours off and don’t open the channel.”

  She confirmed that the transfer channel on her caduceus was closed, and I activated mine to transmit. I immediately got a clear bell tone.

  “I think there’s another caduceus here,” I said. “In the mountain. That’s how we get in.”