by Jay Aspen
Truthseer
The Phoenix Enigma, Volume 2
Jay Aspen
Published by Sandfire, 2019.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Truthseer (The Phoenix Enigma, #2)
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Further Reading: The Phoenix Enigma
About the Author
Archives 1
At time of recording this archive-volume, the resource wars have ended and the scattered survivors in these half-drowned, storm-wrecked islands are desperate for any government, never mind how repressive, to end the famines, produce food and rebuild a guarded city to house and protect them.
But within fifty years, citizens must act. When the old people die, no-one will remember free healthcare, government-maintained roads, and life without the constraints of Avarit’s sefet-credit system of debt-slavery.
When these memories are lost, citizens will find it harder to break free.
There is hope. Exiles in the deserted wilds of forests and mountains are developing ancient skills into a new intense mind-body training, using heightened-awareness lieth focus to enhance their close communication and physical abilities. These forest rangers intend to make links with the Resistance volunteers in the city itself––those who break Avarit law to provide free food, shelter and medical care, motivated by aims other than greed and lust for power.
For them, overthrowing tyranny means ensuring that in the process they don’t become more of the same, rising from the proverbial ashes. That is the Phoenix Enigma.
It presents difficult choices.
Archives 1; v2
1
Raine forced himself to look away from his handset’s blank screen and stare instead out of the storm-lashed window, trying to control the empty ache Jac’s brief phone call had left inside him.
He was responsible for the hundred and forty outlawed rangers regrouping here at the Tarn under his command and they would all be in danger if he didn’t stay focused. It was barely two weeks since Avarit’s armed raid had forced them from their previous forest base at the Warren and their situation was still precarious.
The storm was passing, slowly revealing the bleak windswept valley of rough pasture and stunted trees, a few grey curtains of rain still drifting in sheets of fine spray across the open hills. The wind was dying. Probably why the coms interference had dropped enough for Jac’s brief message to get through at all.
Raine paced back to his desk, his lean body yearning for action, frustrated by constricted space that allowed no more than two steps in any direction before running into piles of equipment they’d evacuated from the Warren. It was all stacked against walls and wedged between chairs. They still hadn’t found anywhere in the cramped Tarn outbuildings to store it and he was impatient with constantly having to navigate round it.
Jac’s image haunted him. He could see her running across the clearing outside her farm, chestnut curls blowing across her face, green eyes full of laughter, body lithe and graceful even in her grey-brown outlander work clothes...
He wondered why he remembered her as she’d been when he’d met her, before the rangers’ strict camouflage discipline made her cut and darken her hair, before she exchanged her grey hemp coveralls for a shadow-coloured flak jacket and weapons for which she’d had no training and couldn’t use.
I shouldn’t have let her talk me into taking her away from her home. She wasn’t ready to deal with the evac before she’d learned to defend herself and it’s more dangerous now she’s in the city, closer to Avarit HQ...
Hell, even years of training didn’t always keep his rangers alive. Even with all their skill and camouflage they’d lost friends to phos-grenades and automatic fire in the attack on the Warren. In spite of six years’ experience in command Raine knew that being forced into it at nineteen had left him over-protective of his team.
He had to concentrate on the immediate demands of maintaining security for the outland farmers scattered across the western forest. They were still at risk from paramilitary gangs, refugees from the city were starving to death in the wilds before his patrols could find them. The Tarn was still in chaos––
His handset buzzed. The interference was back, giving sound but no image, crackling with the bad connection from the city––but he recognized the voice. Colonel Michael Parry, high-ranking security forces officer under the Avarit administration. Another source of both fear and hope. It was only the second time the colonel had contacted him and the fragility of new trust between old adversaries cut a sharp edge to his words.
‘Raine. It’s Michael. I’ve just seen an autopsy report on twenty-three bodies in the morgue. Pulled out of the sewer tunnels with sarin gas poisoning. Which of us screwed up? Did I misunderstand your message in our previous call, or did you really not know there were people down there?’
Raine shook his head, even though he knew Parry couldn’t see him.
‘Something’s wrong. I don’t know the answer but I can show you where to look. Find a forensic whose secrecy you can rely on and ask them to check those autopsies. I’m sure there were no people in those tunnels.’ He hesitated, trying to make a snap judgement on how much of the Resistance false-trail program it would be safe to reveal to someone he couldn’t yet fully trust. ‘That message we leaked to your boss, about rebels hiding down there––it was a hoax to trick him into clearing out the rats because the city authorities refused to do it. It was the only way to cut off the source of the epidemic.’
‘What epidemic?’
‘There’s been a cover-up. If I have your word not to call in enforcer patrols, I’ll send a guide to take you to our east side free-clinic. See for yourself how the disease has spread. No one would go into those infested tunnels––it’s common knowledge the virus is transmitted by rats. We’re hoping new infections will go down now the source has been eliminated.’
Parry hesitated. ‘This is getting complicated.’
‘Did you expect it to be easy?’
‘No.’
The connection went dead, leaving Raine wondering where those apparent casualties had come from. Would this bring Parry’s cautious collaboration to an end almost as soon as it had begun? Maybe it had been too much to hope that someone in the colonel’s position would be prepared to negotiate with an outlaw for very long––especially as his CO was repeatedly claiming that forest rangers were responsible for the recent terror attacks.
Raine had hoped Parry would see through Burton’s manipulated evidence, but he knew Parry’s motivation was to avoid civilian casualties and if he believed their cooperation had made things worse...
Raine contacted his team in the city, warning them to collect the colonel from the coordinates he’d texted and escort him, blindfolded, to their east side clinic. Then he told them to find out anything they could about twenty-three mysterious corpses.
2
Six hours’ drive south of the Tarn on potholed forest roads and war-damaged bridges, the new capital lay quiet within its razor-wire perimeter on the western bank of the flooded Severn estuary. At
least, as quiet as it ever was between the midday and midnight shift changeover. On the surface.
Deep below the city streets a long cellar hummed with activity as two dozen earnest technicians hunched over their desks, connecting and monitoring their dark-network encrypted messages on the abandoned analogue system. Others were building and maintaining the adapted unregistered handsets and connectors that would extend their clandestine message range even further, undetected by the security forces’ blanket surveillance.
Jac could see why the Resistance volunteers working here called their city nerve-centre the hive. It was constantly buzzing with low voices as the admin team kept disparate groups coordinated between food banks, free clinics and the elite protection-corps of city ‘tigers’ who volunteered as bodyguards to escort debt-threatened citizens out under the wire. Or occasionally, to bring medic experts in.
The memory of her own illicit route inbound past the perimeter brought sweat to Jac’s palms.
She’d been gazing at her handset screen for more than ten minutes, reluctant to put it away. That brief vid-call with Raine hadn’t been enough to fill the empty space of their separation. The ever-present danger had filled the time so intensely it felt far longer than two weeks since the attack on the Warren had driven them in opposite directions.
She tried to hold on to her memory of Raine’s presence. The deep brown of his eyes set against strong lines of his face, leather-tanned from so many days out on forest patrol. The way his arms felt around her, and now the sound of his voice reassuring her that another day, a long ride through the forest and they’d be together again.
Jac still hadn’t learned why she’d so suddenly been recalled from her role in the city to train her apparently unusual perceptive skills to another level. Whatever ‘training’ might involve for a nineteen year old medic with a mental block when it came to a fight––
Something in her hearing suddenly jarred and she looked up, staring at the wall screen.
‘Razz! Turn up the TV sound a bit more. There’s something about this newscast...’
Her temporary city-guide and bodyguard raised a puzzled eyebrow and hastily swallowed the last bite of his sandwich as he reached over and flipped the volume control.
‘You interrupted my sandwich just to listen to another tedious waffle-speech by the president?’
Jac flashed an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry Razz. It’s just... there’s something weird, deceptive about it.’ She peered at the live-feed on screen. ‘But I admit I’ve no clue why I feel that.’
She tried to concentrate, hardly hearing Razz’s comments about relative levels of weirdness being somewhat irrelevant in the middle of making plans to get her under the wire and out of the city. She wasn’t even hearing the president’s words. It was the intonation of his speech, the way he used his hands, shifts in facial expression...
Instinctively, she moved her concentration into heightened lieth focus. The subtle clues from the screen grew clear and sharp, weaving images of deceit and manipulation so powerful it brought a tightening to her chest. There was something hidden beneath the president’s words, maybe woven into body language or eye movements, maybe the oily tone of voice. It felt threatening, uncertain... a growing sense of dread for which she could find no logical explanation.
‘Razz, something is wrong. I can’t read exactly what’s going on, although I feel I should somehow. I often notice tiny details that other people miss, but I can’t always piece them together and figure out what they mean, beyond catching the overall feeling of it.’
He frowned, dark eyes fixed on the screen. ‘Can’t see more than the usual bland hypocrisies.’
Jac focused again. ‘It’s more than that. I wish I could be more specific, but the president is hiding something big. And it’s something immediate, I mean, it’s about to happen soon.’ She willed herself to see deeper, to make sense of tiny clues beneath the slick professionalism of the president’s speech but the meaning was still elusive.
‘Jac, if you’re sure? Raine said you had some kind of extra-perceptive-whatever. But it’s why you’re supposed to be going back to the Tarn for training. If I call Raine about this and he decides to act on it, you won’t be leaving till it’s all played out one way or another. He just texted intel he got from somewhere about twenty-three people mysteriously killed in the sewer tunnels. He’s ordered a surveillance op on the security building to find out more. Your bit of info raises the threat level for all the tigers who just volunteered and went off to do it.’
Jac’s brows furrowed in concern. ‘Feels like our people could be caught in the middle of whatever’s being planned.’ She could feel tears stinging her eyes, longing to be back with Raine... and to have the journey all set up, only to have it snatched away again...
But if I leave and then something terrible happens to my friends here?
‘Razz, I don’t have any training or experience on how to use my insights yet. It’s all instinct and intuition, but I feel I need to see it through. The Tarn will still be there after I’ve managed to make sense of it one way or another.’
His tone softened, surprisingly gentle for someone sporting so much size and muscle. ‘I know how much you want to be back with him. If you’ve convinced yourself you have to give it up for a few days, you’ve surely convinced me.’
He plugged his own handset into the analogue hotspot on the wall and keyed in. He got lucky and the unreliable connection made it first time of trying.
Jac listened in to the conversation but she’d already guessed Raine would act on the information, however tenuous. However much it conflicted with his own desire to have her back at his side.
She turned at the sound of the door opening as Kit strode into the room, his powerful frame and assertive movements a stark contrast to the studious tech experts still busy at their desks.
‘Jac, we have to leave now. I’ve been scouting escape routes and the west side perimeter is thick with patrols trying to track down anyone they think might be still coming in after the attack on the Warren. If we’re ready to go under the wire directly after curfew––’
‘Erm, Kit, looks like there’s going to be a delay. I noticed something suspicious in the president’s latest broadcast. Check with Razz when he finishes his call with Raine.’
Razz cut the connection and looked round. ‘Raine says I’m to guide Jac to the east side clinic. She can keep an eye on TV updates as they come on air and if she has time between newscasts, help the medical crew with the epidemic. I’ll take her over there. Then I have to be at the west side perimeter fence to fix things up for an unregistered jeep with med supplies coming in through the checkpoint. You––’
‘I’m going with Jac.’ Kit’s tone said he wasn’t going to be swayed on this. ‘I just checked the street-routes out to the city perimeter and there’s a lot of patrol activity. If something goes wrong and we have no choice but go under the wire, I’m the only forest ranger here––there has to be someone to guide her through the forest to the Tarn.’
Razz shoved the handset back in his pocket. ‘Fair enough. Raine wanted you to join the team setting up surveillance on the security building, but we’ve enough city-tigers for that. Main problem is, Jac’s bit of mind-sleuthing reinforces Raine’s intel that trouble’s brewing, but we don’t know what we’re looking for apart from something out of the ordinary. Anyhow, let’s go.’
Jac shouldered the small flat pack with her few belongings and cinched it tight to her waist, assuming there would be a deal of running and hiding involved in this journey and hoping she could keep up with two powerfully-trained athletes with longer legs than her own.
Wishing her dependence on a bodyguard didn’t make her feel quite such a liability.
3
In his cramped office in the security building, Michael Parry was hurriedly searching for a way to get an unauthorized second autopsy without questions being asked.
Although the thought didn’t occur to him, he could have been an
older version of Raine––in the unlikely event the outlaw actually survived another thirty years. The colonel was in his early fifties, still lean and fit, a bit of grey at the temples, a few lines around the eyes... And there was something else, a kind of ever-present tension. Driven, but by conflicting imperatives.
He ran fingers through the dark grey stubble of his hair, then stopped himself. His daughter had often reminded him that the habit gave away his agitation. It hadn’t mattered these last few years since his career had stalled. No one had cared too much about what he was doing or how he felt, but if he went on playing this dangerous game with one of the nation’s most wanted...
There would be questions asked eventually and he’d need to be ready to face them down. The photo of the dark-haired teenager stared back at him from the ruthless tidiness of his desk. No matter the cost, he had to know if she was among those twenty-three corpses.
The brief phone call kept playing over in his head, as if Raine’s denial of any knowledge might suddenly be revealed as a web of lies. Breaking a promise made, a reassurance given two weeks ago on a dark trail above the Warren, a last faint thread of hope that Jess might still be alive.
Even if, as he feared, she had joined the Resistance.
No. Parry’s sense of the man’s integrity persisted. If Raine had traced her, even if he knew she’d been killed, he would have said so.
And now my last hope rests on the word of an outlaw.
He requisitioned records of registered forensics in the city, checking names against the list of Jess’ college friends, still stuck in his memory. One of the few things he had left of her. Only two cross-referenced, and one of them worked for the commercial security division.
He contacted the other one. Not that there was much difference between the Avarit franchise that ran the security services and the subsidiary that controlled the production and storage of processed food. Both were central to the regime’s system of citizen control, keeping the workforce at maximum output while maintaining food security through the frequent bad-weather cycles of failed harvests.