Eons Semester (The RIM Confederacy Book 8)

by Jim Rudnick

  “Just so you know—your bullshit ends today. I want all inspections done same day as you get notifications that tasks are completed—and passed too. Otherwise, I’ll just add a name-your name—to the Baroness’s list. Got me?” he said, his eyes drilling down into the poor man’s face

  That got him a nod, several nods, and the bureaucrat almost ran away toward the tower.

  Tanner got back into his flyer and began the startup routine.

  Tower Four done, now on to tower Three.

  He wondered what he’d find there.

  #####

  In Aporia, in the far west dome, Kendal sat and stared out the side windows toward the small garden that she’d so carefully tended the past few years. Once it held roses; her fame for being able to even get them to root in such low gravity here on the Eons moon was a mainstay of her reputation within the local gardening community. She had used a simple trick her mother had shown her decades before—tying the roots down to sections of plastic pipe filled with sponges. That kept the roots mired deeper than they’d actually grow, and the sponges allowed more water to collect there as well. Her roses grew and that was a nice thing.

  Now, they lay dying in the ruined garden. The petals of what had blossomed earlier had fallen off the blooms, and the usually thick and thorny stems were brown and sagging. It had been months since she’d even been out to tend to her garden, and she felt no shame in her lack of attention to things that grew.

  She also realized she’d been paying almost no attention to David either—and that was unlike her normally. Since he’d lived with her for more than a dozen years, she’d always been the aunt who cared. When her sister had died years ago, David had come to her as a shy introverted pre-teenager, and he’d grown to be a shy introverted twenty-three-year-old man. A techie guru, he’d just quit his job with the Academy Network IT department after working there for only two years, and yet running a department all on his own hadn’t seemed to matter to him. Now, he kept pretty much to himself in his room out back; and other than being on the net all the time, he had little to say to her as usual. If she had had any other way than to get him to help her with her Mariam issues, she would have used those avenues. But as she’d hesitantly explained what she wanted him to do—hack the MedWards network—he had just nodded and held up a hand, she remembered.

  “Not a problem, Auntie. Been in already a while back—nothing there really but patient records, vids of procedures, and the like. What are you after?” he had asked, and that had stopped her cold.

  She’d then taken more than an hour to explain to him who his grandmother had been; what the inner circle was; and how twins were a new but necessary way for them to solidify their future. And about the aunt he’d never met—Mariam.

  He’d been a bit shocked—not that his life experience would have ever helped him to get ready for this kind of truth. He nodded. He said he’d have the vids on tape by dinner, and she’d spent the longest afternoon ever at her storefront wondering if he could provide that vid—and he had.

  She’d asked him if he’d watched it all—and he nodded and looked away from her face to speak.

  “Auntie, she is your twin that I can see—anyone can see. But she looks like she’s in pain and mad and frustrated—yet if they keep her in the secure wards, she must be a threat to herself. Right?” he asked, and she knew he wanted to feel that this was true.

  It was not.

  But she had no real reason to tell him the whole truth, so she just nodded.

  He handed her the thumb drive and left the kitchen to go back to his room.

  She didn’t see him for days after that, and when he finally came to the supper table, the topic of Mariam was never mentioned again.

  Like my garden, and she half-smiled to herself.

  As if things that I tend grew at all, only to die when nature said it was their time.

  “Just wish that we humans were like that,” she said, her voice spitting venom against the window.

  Worried she might be late, she stopped her reverie out the window. She had to get going.

  Minutes later, she bustled down the alley in front of her small bungalow in the west dome, headed toward the bus, and boarded it less than five minutes later. She knew she’d still be late, but not too late, and she thought about what she was going to say and how much malice to include. New twins meant new to more than the group. New twins meant unknowing twins.

  She wished she could have avoided what came next, but the warnings were always less than a minute in coming.

  Her gut seized up like a cramp from hell. Her head ached instantly, and the pounding in her temples could be seen as she grasped the top of the bus seat in front of her and breathed slowly in and out, in and out.

  She knew what the seizure was—it was her twin, Mariam, crying out for help. Mariam reached out to her twin with her brain on full throttle as she screamed in her locked MedWard room miles away from the bus. She did this almost daily trying to reach out to find her sister, her twin, to ask for her help, and all Kendal could do was to breathe in and out, in and out.

  She hadn’t been able to visit her in person now in months as the pain of seeing what Mariam had become was so traumatic.

  Now her eyes welled up with tears, and her breathing was ragged but still the same in and out pattern. One of her legs was now twisted beneath her, but she knew it would pass.

  Across from her and up a seat, a youngster stared at her, wondering what was wrong, and Kendal just held up a hand and forced out the words “Got a cramp …” and that seemed to work as the teenager turned back to look out the window.

  As Mariam was given a larger dose of whatever it was they used on her, her reaching out started to ebb, and Kendal was able to straighten out her leg, loosen her grip on the seat, and sit up a bit straighter. The cramps were leaving as her stomach returned to normal, and the throbbing in her temples began to subside too.

  “They’d pay for this. The Issian inner circle would pay for this dearly,” she said to herself repeatedly as her stop came up at the edge of the downtown section of the center dome.

  As she left the bus, she nodded to the teenager and half-smiled. A few minutes later, she found herself at the front door of a small commercial building with a large sign painted on the glass storefront that read Twins Cooperative and in she went.

  Her assistant bustled over immediately, and Kendal could see that already there were four new groups of twins sitting in the larger room off to the side waiting for the meeting to start.

  “Hi, Kendal,” her assistant, Jane, said and stuffed some files into her hand. She leaned back and then took a good look at her. “Did you have another of those … those incidents?” she questioned as she squeezed Kendal’s arm.

  Kendal nodded, handed Jane her coat, grabbed the files, and went in to sit and lead the new twins meeting.

  She made her introductions. She listened to each of the twins as they introduced themselves individually and then went on to point out why they were here and what they might be looking for from such a group.

  One of them said she had seen some of the Twins Cooperative members protesting at a recent public inner circle presentation and she wondered why. She and her twin had come to find out.

  Kendal nodded. Here we go.

  “It’s often that we protest, because some twins—not all twins, but those of us who have been used by the inner circle, know that their meddling has cost lives. Many lives—and while I’m sure some of you doubt what I’m saying, let me just ask you this,” she said.

  “It is true that twins share—as I’m sure you all agree here—some kind of a special bond that others—non-twins—do not know about at all. Do we agree there?” she asked and everyone nodded.

  “It is also true—and I’m no doctor, but we have the full medical reports on file, which, yes, you can see—that at the time of conception, it is possible using standard medical procedures to create twins. Monozygotic twins may also be created artificially by embryo
splitting. It can be used as an expansion of IVF to increase the number of available embryos for embryo transfer, which was discovered more than hundreds of years ago. So medicine can create twins, do you agree here too?”

  Everyone in the room nodded again. This was not new and had been reported in the news often.

  “One more thing then that you need to know. Each of the current—and from what we can determine the past as well—members of the Inner Council from our Master Adept on down is a twin.”

  Not a head nodded. Some faces looked like they wanted to ask a question, but Kendal held up a hand.

  “Wait—I know. You’ve seen the current Inner Council, and you’ve never been told or had any idea that they were twins, right?”

  Again, everyone nodded.

  “Because the twin—the ones we’ve never seen—did not live. They all were stillborn. Every single one of them. And do you know why?

  Nodding once more meant that she was making her point.

  “Because instead of using medical procedures to split the embryo—the Inner Circle used their minds to do that splitting and transferred over from one of the twins all the chlorians and genes to the other. That made the resulting live born twin superior—and the stillborn one really just an empty shell. The medical reports spell all this out—but what you need to know is that there is a systematic program carried out by the Inner Council to use twins to gain and hold their positions,” she said quietly and looked around the room.

  Two of the twins stared at her. Their faces were questioning which meant her points had been made with these two.

  Two more had leaned back and were half-smiling. They’d never be back.

  And the remaining two sets of twins were shaking their heads—they’d need to read the reports, and she called out to Jane to bring in the coffee and tea and those damn heavy binders.

  Each took a refreshment and then looked over the binders and cherry picked at what they’d read.

  One of the won’t-be-backs spoke up. “Ma’am, what you said—is there any truth to this? I mean, truth that doesn’t come in a ten-pound three-ring binder?”

  Kendal nodded. It usually came down to this too.

  She eyed Jane and nodded. On the near wall, the large view-screen lit up, and the inside of the MedWard room of a patient, who was tied down—restrained they called it—to her bed filled the screen.

  She was facing the other way from the camera, but her tangled hair was knotted and very unkempt. Her bare skinny legs jutted out from below the gown. Her leg hair was long, and her toenails were long, curled, and a dull yellow. She was tossing one arm trying to get it loose, but the tie-downs were solid, and she failed again and again.

  As her head thrashed, the camera showed she had an open sore on the close temple. Pus caked it and dried up blood surrounded it.

  And then she turned her head over to face the camera.

  And it was Kendal's face.

  Ragged and ravaged and ugly, but it was Kendal's face.

  The gasp from the room of new twins was loud and very audible.

  “That is my twin—Mariam. Our mother was Master Colleen, one of the Inner Council more than forty years ago. She was pregnant and the Inner Council tried to take her embryo and make twins. They succeeded and yes, I’m the one who got her sister’s share of all things that make one human. But instead of being stillborn, Mariam was born as you see her now. There but not there. Alive but not alive, and a prisoner in the MedWard for those decades now,” she said flatly.

  She sipped her water.

  “So yes, we do have proof. And yes, we want something done about this too. We want the practice of creating new Inner Council members using twins and this mental procedure to stop. Stop now. Stop today. So yes, we protest even though we know that none—or rather so very few—even listen to us. Or believe us.”

  The new twins were all quiet. The two who Kendal had figured would leave to never return were still sitting too, perhaps …

  She went on to close the meeting.

  “We know you’ve just been asked to digest a lot of new information. We know that twins are the only ones who get this too. We know that you need time. Our next regularly scheduled meeting for all our members is next week at eighteen hundred hours. Please just let Jane know if you intend to come so we can schedule refreshments. I thank you all for coming to learn …”

  Minutes later, Jane looked at her and held up a hand palm up.

  “Don’t know—might be all of them,” Kendal said, meaning that perhaps all four sets of twins would be back.

  Jane nodded and then patted her on the shoulder. “We need to talk about budgets for the big academy opening and how we want to disrupt that sometime today,” she said as she began to clean up the empty cups and snacks.

  Kendal grabbed a pastry and balanced it on her file folders as she went out of the large communal space to go to her office.

  More to plan. More to fund. Being a twin was twice as much work as anyone had ever imagined.

  #####

  Tanner reminded himself that a soft Faraway alien’s tail that would simply drop to the floor and lie still with little twitches meant that the owner was going to be approachable and work with him. At least that’s what it seemed like.

  Again, he was sitting in the anteroom to the admiral’s offices, and again he was waiting for some time. From the large windows on the side wall, the bright sunlight streamed inside, and one could feel the heat even here in the air-conditioned offices. Outside, if he squinted just a little, Tanner could see ships that were in port, getting serviced or delivering goods perhaps. There was an Alex’n sphere ship—a larger one than he’d seen before—close by, and the ship’s chandlers had steady streams of delivery trucks lined up at her cargo ports. Beside her, but a bit to port, lay two frigates—from the Duchy, it appeared, and Tanner wondered what they were doing as they seemed to be buttoned up and ready to depart—or maybe they’d just arrived.

  Well past them, almost at the far edge of the enormous landing port tarmac sat a Barony Navy ship, and Tanner saw that it was the frigate Callisto with the twin crowns shining in the bluish sunlight. Tanner knew there had been a group of interns being sent to Eons for their inclusion in the new academy, so he assumed that the Callisto had been the carrier of same. Wonder whom they brought and just how much help a hundred or so cadets would be—but then any help at all seems like a good idea. With the huge move-ins of equipment and desks and the like, bodies with hands were a good idea.

  He glanced once again at Lieutenant CoSharan, the admiral’s assistant, who was busy on his console was and was either too busy to acknowledge him or just wanted to look too busy. His tail was just lying on the floor though, which made Tanner think about the engineers who designed office chairs for all the aliens that lived here on the RIM. Faraway aliens had tails, Ttseens needed boosters, and DenKoss fish needed—well, they needed a tank really. He shook his head. Beyond me.

  He contemplated tuning his PDA into the latest newscast, but then he remembered that news had been taken over by celebrity news—and how badly did he need to know about the breakup of yet another unknown vid star. He shook his head again.

  The summons to appear here this morning was not surprising—he wondered how much of a dressing down he’d be given in that he’d circumvented all the building codes and bylaws just to get those three extra elevators up and running.

  The door to the admiral’s inner offices burst open, and he came out in a hurry with a stack of files tucked under one arm.

  Dropping off those files in a pile on the credenza behind his assistant, he quickly marched right over to Tanner.

  And grinned.

  “So … they behead folks over in the Barony, do they?” he said as he clapped Tanner on the shoulder.

  “Glad to see you found a way to get one of our issues fixed. Heard back about it big time though from everyone from bylaw control to head of the Provost Guard, from Customs whose excise tax is now unpaid—the list is
long. But, the elevators are running. Well done, lad. More of same—much more, I’m afraid, lies ahead. Oh—and Gallipedia reports that it’s been two hundred years since anyone was beheaded in the Barony—treason, I think, was the crime. But nice one, Captain!” he said, as he shook his head and went back to his own office.

  Lieutenant CoSharan cleared his throat, and when he had Tanner’s attention, he waved him over with a file in hand.

  “Captain—you’ll need to shepherd the latest batch of student cadets over to quarters—they just came in on the Callisto. Find CPO Pope over at the quartermaster’s office, get the cadets checked in and issued billet items, and then march them over to—let’s see”—the lieutenant looked down at his monitor—“they’re going to be in Officers’ Building C-3. Get them squared away, appoint someone in the group to be their cadet leader, and then have him—or her—report back here to me STAT. We’ll arrange for transport over to the new academy site for them then. Got that, Captain?” the alien said, and for a moment, Tanner felt like a cadet himself.

  But he nodded, took the file, and then left the administration building to traipse over to the Callisto and pick up his newest helpers—if one could call any cadets that.

  #####

  David knew he’d have little time, but if his plan worked, he’d be able to handle the task easily.

  He’d walked his block, using an anonymous WiFi finder, and had located the target house only a dozen feet down the block from his Aunt Kendal’s home. The WiFi that this house was using was fine, right up to date, but the router that was in use was an older model. Like many net users, what worked was what you keep, so when these people moved in they simply brought their old router and plugged it in. He’d checked on the public database, and they’d lived there almost five years,you were you’re doing.

  He eyed some of the blue boxes that folks had brought out to the curb to get their recyclables picked up tomorrow morning and remembered he had to still do that back at Aunt Kendal’s house.

  He smiled as he slowly walked the length of the block and crossed the next street. At the third house on his right, he stopped to turn to his left to look out of the dome. Craters and more craters made their way toward the horizon. There was a vast plain there too, and he could still see the remaining vertical struts of the large signs that had held advertisements. Someone who was a smart marketing guy had figured if you pointed a sign with the name of your product at the dome, folks couldn’t help but read it, increasing brand exposure and resulting revenues too.