Again she tries to master herself before responding. But I can feel her disquiet grow at the question, her fear for me, born from the love of a guardian. Tell me what you see, when you look into yourself.
I tell her about the gray dome with the patchwork ceiling. I describe the jagged lines that don’t quite match, with gaps between them.
A great sadness wells up inside her and leaks out her eyes. Oh, Emre, what you have done?
I do not know, Wisdom.
How many times did you split? When I don’t answer, when I can’t remember, she screams in my mind. How many times did you split!
I look at all the different patches, jammed into one another, fighting to seal themselves to one another. At least thousands of times. Probably so much more, I feel … incomplete.
The dome warps and bends as I probe it from the inside. The gaps grow large in some places. I can see through to some sort of wall. It blocks me in. It’s weakening, unraveling in places. There’s too few threads.
The probing has exacerbated the weakness in the wall. It begins to unravel. Wisdom, the wall is failing.
Emre— She struggles to remain calm.
Goodbye, Wisdom.
Emre, no—!
The jagged lines burst inward. The gray patches explode downward, into the void.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SUMIKO SITS in the armored vehicle, her head hanging down, weighted by the loss of her only son and Karon. Where did Karon go? she wonders. Her dark hair flows down past her, bounces into her chin as the vehicle rocks from the motion, lightly scratching against her neck. Karon used to love her hair; she wanted to cut it short once for easier maintenance, but he begged her not to.
Why did he leave me?
He had said he was going for help, but that was forever ago—before they shut the doors to the armored vehicle, cutting off the clamor of the city, cutting off Branden’s cries. It was before she heard the other vehicles start to leave one by one. It was before the armored vehicle began its journey, however long ago.
The vehicle comes to a stop. Sumiko prepares herself. Karon had said to remain calm, make them complacent. Inherent in that, is to then exploit it. She willed herself to appear calm, while preparing to attack— No, a new lightly tilted voice says in her mind. It wasn’t Karon, it was female. But she spoke in her head the same way that Karon had been talking to her. Do not attack the policeman coming to free your bonds.
The back doors open. A single policeman climbs in and steps in front of Sumiko. Is it my imagination or does he look glazed? Sumiko asks herself.
He waves the reverse-magnetizer, then bends down to remove the cuffs from Sumiko without looking her in the eye.
Now leave, the woman’s voice commands.
And go where?
Walk down to the end of the street. Once there, there will be a vehicle waiting with three men and your son.
Sumiko jumps out of the armored vehicle and starts walking confidently, nonchalantly so as to not draw attention to herself. She sees the vehicle immediately, a white standard auto-passenger. The surrounding street becomes a blur; she has only tunnel vision to her destination.
She tries hard to regulate her pace, to step normally over the concrete sidewalks, to feel the minute grooves beneath her thin-soled shoes. But when the door opens and she sees Branden cradled in a man’s arms, she runs, her feet slapping hard against the concrete, whack-whack-whack, the sound lost in her single-minded focus.
And then he’s in her arms, cradled to her breast as she sits in the auto-passenger. The man that had opened the door gets in, and the vehicle drives off. In a vehicle with three strange men, Sumiko without thought takes out her breast and begins to feed Branden. She doesn’t feel bashful—she feels proud, she feels complete.
No one says anything as she feeds. The moment too powerful to interrupt. When Branden has had his fill, sleeping happily back in his mother’s arms a voice breaks into them all.
To the free people of the Ancillary Universe, the woman’s voice from before says, you are not alone— Sumiko exchanges glances with the other men—they hear it too. Sumiko looks out the window, people are stopping in the street, looking around, looking at each other, bewildered.
You were once members of the Prime Universe, but were shuttled into the Ancillary Universe as test subjects against your will and your knowledge. I have given your key scientists across your universe the knowledge of the Watch. It is technology that you will need to ensure your protection. It is an asymmetrical threat, symmetrical strength is your only option. Good luck.
The city is silent. Slowly, people start to breathe, ask one another what just happened. Sumiko holds a sleeping Branden and wonders if he heard it too. What did it mean? Who was that voice? Where is Karon? Was he a part of this?
Sumiko’s head whirls with questions; then she realizes she can ask, that perhaps she’s the only one that has talked to this woman before and Karon. What is going on? she asks in her head in the way she would have of Karon.
The woman’s voice answers almost immediately, The Watch technology represents a power unlike any other in existence. The only option is to level the playing field, take away the Regency’s advantage.
Branden snuggles closer. Sumiko doesn’t know what to do with that explanation, where to start. She doesn’t know what all this means, or what the future will hold.
But she is thankful to have her son back, his warm body tucked in close to hers where it belongs. A question comes to her mind unbidden, Why are you helping me?
An answer isn’t immediate. Sumiko begins to think the woman’s voice isn’t going to answer when she finally says, A part of your son … reminds me of an old friend. Raise him well. Then the voice is gone.
EPILOGUE
BRANDEN IS SATIATED, and sleeps warmly snuggled up against a soft chest, the chest he had just fed from. The rhythmic heartbeats within lullabying him into a deep sleep. It’s her, he knows, the one right from the beginning. She smells of perspiration, and he feels her long dark hair resting comfortably over him.
Deep, deep down, in a dormant part of his consciousness that will never wake, only feel, only experience, lay the barest sliver of an extra shard of consciousness. The warm, overwhelming contented feelings reminding it of an echo of a sharp, spicy floral scent. They remind it of a ghost of sky-green eyes.
He was home.
The End
WHAT’S NEXT?
If you enjoy science fiction and heist and con stories, then may I humbly suggest picking up Underwater Restorations next. It’s a futuristic science fiction series centered around a heist and con team, led by the clever and bold Isa Schmidt. The first story was published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine show and has been re-released (cover, blurb, and FREE PREVIEW here). The first full length Under Restorations novel is set to be released in early Winter 2015, sign up to the newsletter to be notified when it first becomes available!
Sunken City Capers Debuts October 2016!
Sunken City Capers is an exciting new urban science fiction heist series for fans of Ocean’s Eleven and strong, smart-ass female protagonists.
Blurb for The SolidState Shuffle: Sunken City Capers Book 1 debuting October 2016:
After cracking an underwater vault in their first major job in the Seattle Isles, Isa and her crew think they’re on easy street again—that is, if they can figure out what it is exactly they stole. A question, they soon learn, where their very lives hang in the balance.
Thrust into a high-stakes game of subterfuge and deception by the local mob Boss, Isa and her crew must scramble to unravel the mystery of what is they stole while unseen forces move against them.
Harried. Threatened at every turn. Isa and her crew must stay one step ahead to stay alive.
But it’s not theft if you put it back. Right?
Click here to read a free preview of Underwater Restorations: A Sunken City Novelette (available now), first published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine S
how.
Interested in an e-Advance Reader Copy (eARC) prior to October 2016 in exchange for an honest review on Amazon? Sign up here! Please note the eARC will only be available in .mobi format which can be read on all Kindles and through all other devices on the Amazon Kindle app.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Word-of-mouth and reviews are vital for any author to succeed. If you enjoyed reading this story, please consider leaving a review wherever you purchased it. Taking a moment to leave a few lines sharing your thoughts would be helpful for other readers and very much appreciated. Thank you for reading!
Jeffrey A. Ballard currently releases a new story every other month. If you want to be the first to know when a new story becomes available (and receive a free exclusive story available only to newsletter subscribers and occasional other goodies) you can sign up for his mailing list at: http://tinyurl.com/jaballard. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.
ALSO BY JEFFREY A. BALLARD
The Oracle Algorithm (Novel)
The Bear that Painted the Stars (Novella)
Underwater Restorations: A Sunken City Capers Novelette
The Highlight of a Life (Short Story)
Vacationing Offworld (Collection)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey A. Ballard is a nomadic Yankee that currently lives in the Texas Hill Country. A long time fascination with the ocean lead him into academia, where he happily spends his days playing scientist and spends his nights and early mornings writing about the science he wished existed. His science fiction has appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show and Fiction River: Time Streams to date. You can learn about new releases, sign up for his newsletter and connect with Jeffrey at www.jaballard.com.
Available Now!
Flushed out from the criminal underworld of pilfering underwater graves, Isa must gamble to survive. Cut off from the world she knows, and in the open without a citizen’s chip, she attempts the desperate. Among the stakes gambled: another man’s life—the only decent one she knows. A fast-paced, action-filled adventure where loyalty could get her killed … or worse, arrested. Available now!
The first full length Sunken City Capers novel is set to be released October 2016, sign up to the newsletter to be notified when it first becomes available and to learn how to receive an advance reader copy!
FREE PREVIEW
THIS IS MY FAVORITE PART, thirty feet above the ocean, falling at a hundred and ninety miles an hour. Close enough to see our reflections hurtling to meet us. It's the second just before the agitator lasers ahead to break the surface tension that's the sweetest. When all the adrenaline of a ten-thousand-foot free-fall culminates in a terrifying second of, "Oh, shit."
A hundred things could go wrong. The agitator may not move enough water out of the way. The air pocket could collapse before entry. The subroutine that mixes water and air for the controlled deceleration may miscalculate and flatten me into a shark pancake. Almost a hundred different ways to die in under a tenth of a second. I love it.
Then it passes and we're down fifty feet underwater and descending. Only when the static of the comm comes online through my earpiece, trying to make a connection, do I remember to breathe. The rush of the entry fades into focus on the job at hand.
Another fifty feet later, we stand on an exit ramp from I-95 and the rookie, Winn, brings up the holo-map with incomplete sonar data overlaid. Hurricane Gretchen passed through last night and did us the favor of muddying up the waters, an expected development—the Feds are just as blind.
"Lovers, you're all clear." I can hear the smirk in Puo's voice, ten thousand feet above in the Seagull and driving north in the South Florida Memorial Airway.
"We descended four miles too far to the east." Winn points at the blinking dot on the holo-map. "I think we'll need to jetflow. Listen, about last night—"
The flow jets will make too much noise; the squiddies are tuned to it. Its only purpose is to outrun the damn things. "No, we'll have to jump, skip, and hop to the site. It's quieter and doesn't disturb the water as much. Adjust your buoyancy in rhythm to your jumps and try to keep up." I initiate my jump subroutine and leap.
Puo. That nosy punk's always got to stir the pot. I land forty feet away at an intersection and wait. Let Winn struggle; I'll send over the subroutine after he falls several times. It's just a fling. My father always said we Schmidts think with our cocks. Well, in my case, insert the female equivalent.
Winn is still just standing there. "Rookie, what's taking you so long? Let's move."
"I'm writing a subroutine to automatically manage the buoyancy adjustments. I can transmit it to you when I'm done."
"That's very kind of you, Rookie," Puo breaks in. "Don't you think that's nice, Isa?"
"Puo—" He is so going to pay for this. "—focus on our pickup. Rookie, nice thought, here you go. I don't have time to wait for you to flounder through it." I transmit the subroutine.
Soon enough he's leaping as well. I keep one leap ahead of him as we make our way to the destination. What's left of the urban sprawl of South Florida passes by in blue-green shadows. Most of the buildings are intact, some are collapsed, but all of them are still. They seem to defy the churning of the water from the hurricane that passed through.
With less than a mile to go, alarms start going off: squiddies—the autonomous eyes and ears of the Federal Government below the waves.
I cancel the subroutine and look for a place to hide. There's a Chick-fil-A thirty feet away. I glide through a broken window and hug up against the ceiling in the play area. Hopefully, Winn's done something similar.
What are the squiddies doing this far west and north? There's nothing out here they should care about. The juiciest loot is in Miami and along the old coast. South Florida isn't even in the top ten of the most federally protected underwater sites.
I move smoothly between the top of the slide and the roof, trying not to stir any silt. The more obstacles between me and the squiddies, the better the chance their sonar can't find me, particularly after a hurricane.
A tense half hour later Puo says over the comm, "It's gone. It's two miles south and continuing to move in that direction."
"It was supposed to be clear," I say.
"They changed the modulation on the carrier frequency." His voice is agitated. "I got it now. There's definitely a swarm of them farther north than normal, but they're hanging out by the old coast. The President must be looking for some electoral year victories or somethun'."
Catching grave robbers of the sunken state is definitely a low-risk, high-profile political victory. Too bad we don't have enough credibility to tell the masses the Feds do the same thing. The real reason they police it outside of public opinion is to protect their claim.
"Rookie, check in."
"I'm here, one block over in a half-collapsed gas station. I wasn't sure whether to break comm—"
“Hurry up and meet me at the site."
Read the rest of the exciting fun here!
Copyright Information
The Watchers
Copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey A. Ballard
Published 2015 by New Rochester Publishing, LLC
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by New Rochester Publishing
Cover design by New Rochester Publishing
Cover art copyright © Vasabii/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Table of Contents
Newsletter Goodies
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Also by Jeffrey A. Ballard
About the Author
Underwater Restorations Free Preview!
Copyright Information
The Watchers: A Space Opera Novella Page 6