She and Shandra were linked, far more intimately than the loop by itself allowed.
Are you okay?
Yes. It’s weird. But… yes.
Okay, let’s touch Andy’s forehead.
They reached out to touch Andy. An electric shock ran up her arm, and then they plunged into her world.
They were standing in the empty tent again, the orange-and-white-striped circus tent that Marissa remembered. It was quiet and still in the dusty space.
They looked around.
She was here? With you and the other kids?
Yes, this is where it happened.
They knelt, and they reached out her arm to touch something.
It was a slender golden thread. As they touched it, it vibrated and glowed. It extended to the edge of the tent and beyond.
Come on.
They followed it to the side of the tent. They ripped open the fabric and climbed through the rift after it.
The golden thread traversed a desolate gray space the color of an empty vee plain, before Andy and Ana painted the details on.
This is amazing.
You’ve never been here before?
They followed the line as it plunged into the gray.
Andy’s taken me once or twice. But it’s been a long time.
They gasped as the fog cleared, and they found themselves on Transfer Station. The station was quiet as it spun through space. They went to one of the portholes and could see Forever hanging in the inky blackness outside.
They followed the golden thread down the Runway, halfway around the circle of the station. It veered right, into a cabin whose door was closed. They reached a hand out to palm the door open.
It slid clear quietly.
They stepped into the room and looked around.
Andy sat huddled in a corner, her arms around her knees.
A man sat next to her, holding her hand.
“Get away from her!” Shandra shouted, ready to throw themselves at the man.
It’s okay. That’s Ronan. Or a memory of him.
Andy had introduced the kids to him once, or at least to the memory of him that still lived in Andy’s mind.
Ronan?
The station mind.
The man stood and nodded at them. “Marissa, so good to see you again. She’s a little shaken up, but she should be okay.”
“Thanks, Ronan.”
He shrugged. “She needed me. So I came.”
He was a good man.
“This is her girlfriend?”
“Yes. Shandra and I came to find Andy.”
“Nice to finally meet you.”
Marissa felt the discomfort through her link with Shandra. This was way outside of her experience. It was a little odd for her too, truth be told.
They knelt next to Andy. She looked up at them, her eyes wide, like she was six years old. “Shandra. You came.”
They nodded.
“Who brought you?”
“Marissa is riding with me. Or me with her.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Andy threw herself into their arms.
“We’ll take her home. Thanks for looking after her.”
“Good to see you again.” Ronan squeezed Andy’s arm.
He’s just a memory.
A memory that deserves our great respect. Because of him, not a single additional life was lost when the station blew.
Shandra nodded. I’m just not used to treating memories like people.
Me neither. But you get used to some strange things in vee, especially where it runs up against the human mind.
I guess so.
They lifted Andy gently and carried her home.
Chapter Two: Telltale Signs
MARISSA RODE with Shandra as she called Aaron. “Aaron? This is Shandra, and Marissa.”
“What’s going on?” Aaron sounded calm, self-assured.
It made Marissa feel better.
“Something’s happened to Andy.”
Marissa could feel the steel behind Shandra’s words through their bond.
“Is she okay?” Aaron’s calm, measured tone cracked, just a little.
“I think so?” Shandra was holding her concern in check.
“What happened?”
“She was in vee space with the class. The kids say she was holding a snake, and it bit her.”
“That’s impossible. And even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have hurt her. That place isn’t real.”
“I know. But she wouldn’t wake up, so Marissa took me into vee to find her. We brought her back, but she’s pretty shaken up.”
“Okay. Let’s keep everyone out of vee until we figure out what’s going on.”
“Will do.”
“Can I talk to her?” The fatherly concern in his voice was clear. She wished she had a real father, and not for the first time.
“She’s sleeping,” Shandra said. “I’ll have her contact you when she wakes.”
EDDY MOUNTED up, glancing at the Sheriff’s Headquarters. He’d started to pull together a small informal sheriff’s force after the events at Agartha. They’d gotten the blessing of the newly formed city council in Micavery, and the previous year they’d built a new building to house it out of gray block manufactured by the fabrication center. The result was a staid and serious headquarters befitting a police station.
The force was about twenty strong now, and they’d settled into handling mostly local disputes—things the world mind sent them and issues that arose when someone got a little too drunk or a lover’s quarrel escalated into a public nuisance.
They’d taken a page from England on Old Earth and had issued all the officers billy clubs. They were also trained in knife play and crossbow use for patrol up on the Verge, but no other projectile weaponry was allowed.
So far there’d been no outright murders on Forever, except for Colin, of course. But their civic infrastructure wasn’t growing nearly fast enough to accommodate the increase in the population.
Fifteen years before, the world had been staffed by professionals and their families, but the influx of refugees and the abrupt departure from Earth had changed all of that. Now it was a motley mix of people from all kinds of backgrounds, ethnicities, and religions. There were bound to be issues.
“You sure you’ve got a handle on everything here?” he asked his lieutenant, Jendra Khan.
“Yes, for the tenth time.” She glared at him. “Things are quiet at the moment, but you’ve trained everyone well enough to handle a two-day absence.”
“Sorry! It’s just—”
“It’s just that ‘nobody knows how to do this job like you do,’ blah blah blah. Now go! We’ll see you on Thursday.” With that, she turned and went inside the station, letting the door slam behind her.
Eddy laughed. “Guess I deserved that.”
His two deputies, Brad Evers and Santiago Ortiz, grinned.
Santi laughed. “You do need to learn how to let go.” He’d lost most of his thick Spanish accent over the last couple years.
“It’s just….” Eddy sighed. They were right. He was a control freak. “Yeah. I do. You two ready to ride?” The train to Darlith was down again and had been for weeks. Keera was working on fabricating some replacement parts, but for now, horseback was the fastest way to get around, after glider, and gliders weren’t great for arriving at precise destinations or for taking off from ground level.
Someone had been experimenting with travel by balloon too. There had to be a better way.
For this trip, Eddy had opted for his trusty crossbow, while Santi and Brad were carrying throwing knives.
“Let’s go.” Brad had been part of the informal group that had evolved into the city council to run the day-to-day operations of Micavery, but he’d jumped at the chance to be a sheriff.
They set off toward the hills that separated Micavery from the Verge. Micavery was bustling. It was Market Day, and everyone who wanted to buy or sell something was heading down to the town square.
“Hey, Eddy!” one of them called. It was Jared Smith, the retired traxx driver who now grew luscious tomatoes in his home garden. He was carting a wheelbarrow of them toward the Market.
Eddy waved. “They look beautiful!”
“Thanks. I found a new way to fertilize the plants with more nitrogen.”
“Looks like it’s working.” He gave Jared the thumbs-up.
“You know everyone, don’t you?” Brad said drolly.
Eddy laughed. “Don’t you? It’s a small town.”
“Yeah, I know everybody. But you know everybody.”
They passed through the new Thatch Hill residential district, where the houses were all built with dark red mallowood, a fast-growing lumber that took on a lovely dark sheen as it aged.
They made it out of town with only fifteen or twenty more greetings and soon crossed over the stone bridge that marked the northern end of the city. It was a beautiful day, like pretty much every day on Forever.
Eddy loved the good weather, but sometimes he longed for a really hot day, or a night that would make him shiver and raise goose bumps on his arms.
“So who is this guy?” Santi asked as they climbed into the hills.
The road from there to the Verge had been paved years before, but the horses preferred to trot along the edge over the hard-packed earth.
Eddy had his suspicions. “We’re not sure. I should have an image of him soon.”
“Who do you think he is?”
“We think he was involved in the whole Agartha mess five years before.” They’d kept the details to a minimum, letting the rest of the world know only that there’d been a cult with a separatist camp set up in a cavern under the Anatovs.
Brad whistled. “Big mess, that. Those poor kids born in that place.”
Eddy nodded. “Imagine what that would do to your head.” He’d been out to the schoolhouse a few times, visiting Andy and Shandra, who were doing a great job with the kids.
As they rode up into the hills, he spotted a stand of alifirs off to the east that had gone dark, their needles sagging. The normally healthy brown of their bark had taken on a gray pallor. “That’s odd.” Eddy pointed at the trees.
Santi shrugged. “Things die.”
Eddy snorted. “True enough. But I’d like to go take a look.” He didn’t like things he didn’t understand. He pulled Cassie to a halt and slipped off her, patting her side gently. She put her head down to graze on glowing blades of grass along the side of the road.
To get a better look at the anomaly, he crossed the open field, leaving dark footprints in the grass in his wake. There were seven trees, each twice as tall as he was. The trunks looked almost burned, although there was no sign of fire in the other plants in the vicinity.
He reached out to touch the needles on one of the branches, running them through his partially closed hand.
They dissolved into a fine ash, which wafted into the air on the breeze.
Puzzled, he pushed on the trunk.
There was a soft crack, and the whole tree fell, knocking over two more.
Brad and Santi had come to stand next to him.
“That’s not normal.” Brad touched one of the other trees.
Eddy tapped his loop. “Lex, any reports of strange tree deaths this month?”
“Checking…,” her voice said in his head. “Some trees up on Tanner Ridge burned last week. Looks like it was a camping fire.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Anything else?”
“A mallow tree was replaced in Micavery. It was probably poisoned by industrial activity at the fabrication center nearby. That’s all.”
“Okay, please let the administrator know I found a stand of dead alifirs a little way outside of Micavery. They look like they were burned, but there’s no other signs of fire.”
“Will do.”
Eddy tapped off his loop. “The administrator” was the code word he used for Colin when in company. He pulled out a sample bag and gently took a few needles off one of the trees, before sealing it tightly. “Brad, can you take this to Keera?”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Santi and I can manage with the stranger. I don’t want to leave this too long. It’s probably nothing, but if I’m wrong….” He handed the sample to Brad.
The deputy nodded. “Wouldn’t want something like this to spread.”
They were all passengers on a small world. Eddy was acutely aware of how quickly damage to the biosystem, which they depended upon, could get out of hand.
“Good luck out on the Verge.” Brad mounted his horse and set off toward Micavery.
Eddy climbed back onto Cassie as his loop beeped. “Tremaine.”
“Eddy, it’s Colin. I got your message from Lex. With what happened out at the schoolhouse, it has me a bit worried.”
“What happened?”
Santi shot him a questioning look.
“Just a sec.” In his head, Colin filled him in.
“Oh shit,” Eddy whispered when Colin got to the snakebite part.
“What?” Santi asked.
“Something happened out at the schoolhouse.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.” To Colin, he asked, “Did we get a pic of our lost boy?”
“Yeah. Here you go.”
Eddy whistled. “It’s Jayson.”
“Yes. Taken all together….”
“It makes a nasty picture.” He scratched the back of his head. “Where has he been this whole time?”
“Maybe you can ask him.”
“I will. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Thanks, Eddy. May you live in interesting times, huh?”
“Indeed.” He cut the connection.
“So?” Santi looked a little annoyed at being kept out of the loop.
“Looks like our little quest just got more important.”
ANA CROSS-CHECKED the seed ship’s trajectory, making slight adjustments to the sail that scooped up particles and fed them down into the belly of the world as it harnessed the solar wind to push them out into the void. The ship had crossed the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn now and was still picking up speed.
Their chosen destination, 82 G. Eridani, at twenty light-years distant, was the closest star the project scientists had decided had a good chance to have an inhabitable planet.
At the speed at which Forever was capable of reaching, it was a five-hundred-year one-way trip, and the slightest error in calculations at the beginning of this journey could have huge consequences on the far end.
She recalled when she’d been a little boy in New York, staring up at these same stars when the city was almost dark and wondering if she would ever find her way to them.
Ana smiled at the memory. It was one of Jackson’s, not hers, but she had become accustomed to having them by now.
He’d left them behind when he and Glory had passed on, and they had become a part of the mind of the remaining Immortals, along with his hopes and weaknesses, his aspirations and fears.
She’d even caught herself wondering at the possibility of an afterlife once or twice.
Are we on course? The thought floated through her consciousness, though she recognized it as Lex’s. They were shading into each other more and more, something that had really bothered Ana at first.
Now she was a little more blasé about it. They were engaged in an unprecedented experiment in the fusion of human and artificial minds. Everything evolved, even Immortals.
I think so. It’s sad, leaving our home behind.
In response a wave of blue washed through her mind. Colin is reporting some strange things.
Ana sighed. Their newest member was still insisting on keeping his identity confined to himself. He communicated with them only in the old-fashioned way, interface to interface. Ana sent back a wave of greens and blues that meant “I’ll go talk to him.”
She wrapped up her course corrections and opened a connection to Colin’s space
.
She stepped through, imagining herself as she had been when they’d been on the Dressler. She liked to feel young and vital again. “Lex said you called?”
He nodded, shuffling papers on his virtual desk. She supposed it helped him to keep this semblance of the “real world,” but it seemed like a big waste of time. “Andy was attacked this morning.”
“Really? What happened?” She could feel Lex’s consciousness embedded with her own.
“She was in vee space with her kids, showing them some Earth animals.”
“I know. We helped her make them.” She smiled weakly. “The hippo was my favorite.”
“One of them, a rattlesnake, bit her.”
“Not possible.” She pulled up the file for the circus they’d constructed. “It’s not part of the programming.”
“Even so. Andy got lost, and Marissa and Shandra had to go pull her out.”
“That’s odd.” Something must be off somewhere in the system.
Colin grunted. “Then there’s this.” He handed her a video.
“What is this?” She passed her hand over it and set it in the air between them. It ran, showing her a stand of burned trees. Alifirs, if she was right.
“I sent Eddy out to check on a mysterious stranger’s appearance out on the Verge. On his way, he found those.”
“Fire?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Nothing around them was burned.”
“Who’s this stranger?”
Colin handed her another file. “Jayson Hammond.”
Ana stared at it. The moment they had feared might be coming to pass. “If Jayson Hammond has turned up, where is Davian Forrester?” She shuddered, remembering the abomination the man had visited on the world.
Colin nodded. “Where indeed?”
Chapter Three: Thunder
MARISSA SAT next to Andy’s bed, carving a piece of wood into the shape of a dolphin, one of her favorite of Old Earth’s creatures. She’d grown the wood to the right general shape and was using a small knife to whittle it into the form she wanted. It was one of the things that helped her cope when the blackness from Agartha threatened to swallow her whole.
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