by David Ryker
“That’s only temp’rary,” said Ulysses. “Ah’ll hire yuh soon’s I git m’billion-dollar lawsuit settlement.”
He dropped a hand on Tiffany’s shoulder, then quailed and quickly removed it when he saw her icy look.
“All right, then,” said Quinn, reaching down to remove his wristband. “Looks like we’ve got a plan, or at least as good a one as we ever have. Let’s get moving.”
“Keep the money,” said Drake, pointing to Quinn’s wrist. “Consider it a gesture of goodwill.”
Tiffany nodded. “Duly noted, Mr. Tribune. We’ll speak again soon.”
“We most certainly will.”
With that, the group followed her back across the lobby and out the front door into the intense sunshine of the square. Quinn found it easier than he’d thought to resist the urge to flip Drake the bird as they left.
“Who did hire you?” Chelsea asked Tiffany. “Was it my father?”
“Most definitely not.” She pointed to a large hovercraft idling on the immaculate street twenty meters away. “Your benefactor is a recent acquaintance of yours.”
Chelsea gave Quinn a questioning glance. He responded by drawing a crude crown in the air with his fingers.
“Ohhh,” she breathed, nodding.
The others appeared to have picked up on it as well, and they filed toward the door to the waiting transport.
“Where are we going?” Ellie asked as the door slid shut behind Bishop and they took the last two seats.
Tiffany tapped her wrist and the hovercraft whirred away from the curb and into the street. Some of the commuter traffic in San Francisco had returned to the ground where it had been for decades before the advent of fusion power sent most of it into the skies, Quinn had noticed. But there wasn’t enough to cause the kind of gridlock that had snarled cities before the development of Towers, so there was little congestion for the transport’s AI to navigate.
“I own a building in New Richmond, overlooking the bridge,” she said. “There is a suite of rooms there that should accommodate your needs. They won’t be as spacious as the ones Mr. Drake had you in.”
“That’s fine with me,” said Schuster. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was getting agoraphobic in mine.”
“Whut’s agro-phobic?” asked Ulysses. “You scareda farmin’ or somethin’?”
“It’s fear of open spaces.”
“Ah.” Ulysses nodded. “Yeah, I’m readin’ yuh on that one, hoss.”
Quinn tuned out of the conversation and stared out the window at the marvels of this new capital city. He had to admit, the new government had done an incredible job of bringing it back to the former glory he’d seen in historic videos of the city. But he also had to wonder about the cost; San Francisco had been the most expensive city in the United States, even up to the alliances that created the factions around the middle of the century. How much would it cost now, after everything that had been done to restore it?
Then he thought about what Ben had said about the world being on the verge of a fundamental change, and he had to wonder how the people who lived here were going to react to that when it came.
Whatever the future held for the world, he doubted that change would come easy.
10
Chelsea and Ellie sat next to the dining room window of Chelsea’s new suite, looking out at the changing colors of the setting sun as they lit up the Golden Gate Bridge. The wine they were drinking was exquisite, though Chelsea wondered whether Ellie would be able to appreciate it. Anyone who didn’t have their own personal supply of vintage wine from the first half of the 21st century—which was anyone who wasn’t a billionaire—only knew wine that had been produced in a factory. And people from lowtown (slums, she reminded herself; stop using euphemisms) had likely only tasted alcohol that had been made from rotting fruit in homemade stills.
It had been a long day, and the two women had started talking in Quinn’s dining room over the sumptuous dinner Tiffany Tranh had ordered for them. That had led Chelsea to invite her new friend back to her own suite for a nightcap after Schuster and Gloom had left together, and the men had started talking in military terms.
“I could get used to this,” Ellie sighed. She took a sip and raised her glass to Chelsea. “And this. I mean, holy shit.”
Chelsea grinned. I guess that answers that question.
“And I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more time in the shower in the last three days than I did in the three months before that,” Ellie continued. “The water rationing system in Old Montreal automatically shuts off your taps after they’ve run for forty-five seconds, and you can’t turn them on again for another hour.” She flashed a sheepish look. “Sorry, I bet I sound like a total slumdog, gushing over all this stuff that you grew up with.”
“Actually, this place would have been the servant’s quarters in the Bloom family home.” She saw a blush rise in Ellie’s cheeks, which made her heart drop. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she added quickly. “I meant to point out how ridiculous my lifestyle was growing up compared to yours. It’s one of the reasons I struck out on my own and distanced myself from my family.”
“That’s the way of the world,” Ellie said, without a trace of self-pity that Chelsea could detect. The woman was nothing if not a realist. “My grammy used to say that ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,’ but my granddad would argue with her and say everyone had the opportunity to make money if they just rolled up their sleeves and got to work. Funny thing was, he never had any money himself.”
“But I bet he was a hard worker, though.”
Ellie shrugged. “Everyone was. Grammy said when she was a young woman in the ‘20s, there was work everywhere, but things started to change after the ‘30s, when AI started taking over office jobs. Then the fusion revolution changed everything, of course.”
Chelsea nodded. The advent of fusion energy had turned the entire world economy on its ear, resulting in jobs that either required specialized skills and education or back-breaking labor. The Trade Wars only made it worse, until soon cities across the globe were divided into Towers and slums, and economic factors were the driving forces behind wars. Climate change had forced science to develop new ways of creating food after farmland began to disappear, and that drove a wave of even more advanced technological development, which finally led to the Trilateral War and the fragile peace that followed.
“My family’s money goes back to the middle of the last century,” said Chelsea. “My great-great-great grandparents lost everything in Europe in the Second World War, so they came to America to seek their fortune. They opened a small deli, then a supermarket, then several supermarkets, and within a generation they had a nationwide chain. Their children expanded the business from there, and eventually their children did the same thing, until my father and his siblings inherited an international empire.”
Ellie raised her glass in a toast. “And here we are drinking together, trying to figure out how to stop an alien invasion.”
Chelsea snorted a surprised laugh. She hadn’t thought of that.
“To alien mind parasites,” she said, touching her glass against Ellie’s and prompting a deep, resonant chime between them. “The great socioeconomic equalizers.”
The two women continued to talk and laugh until the sun had sunk into the bay and the bottle was empty.
Maggott plunked the empty liter bottle on the table and let out a Herculean belch.
“Damnation, son!” Ulysses crowed. “I thought some o’ my Saints could drink, but y’all’re in a different league!”
“Yeah, well, he also weighs as much as three normal people,” said Bishop. Quinn could see his friend was starting to drift off from his own prodigious alcohol consumption and the lateness of the hour.
“And kin lift more’n four regular people, too,” Maggott pointed out, still compos mentis even after seven liters of beer. “Less nae forget that, ye long stream o’ piss.”
Quinn chuckled and left the
three to their conversation, such as it was. They were in his suite and he hoped they would all find their way back to their own places eventually, the way Chelsea and Dev and Gloom had; he’d spent more than enough nights with Maggott and Bishop as it was over the past seven years.
He poured another shot of bourbon into his glass—only his third of the night—and ambled out onto the balcony to join Ben, who had been scanning his wrist for the past half-hour.
“Earth to Ben,” he said as he stepped out into the sultry night air. The smell of it was so sweet, it was almost intoxicating on its own.
Ben glanced up and blinked. “Oh, hey. Sorry, I’ve been kind of absorbed here.” He looked through the sliding glass doors into the living room. “Where’d everybody go?”
“It’s the start of Balls to Four watch.” Quinn saw the look on his face and grinned. “That means it’s midnight. The party’s starting to break up; only the hardcores left now. What’s got you so fascinated?”
“A lot of things.” He looked back down at his display. “There are a lot of xenobiologists and philosophers discussing life forms that are based on thought rather than physical forms.”
“Seriously?”
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a ton of network traffic on how everything in the video was faked, and that it’s all a conspiracy by the rich to exploit the poor even more.”
Quinn shook his head. “What the hell is wrong with people?”
“You can’t really blame them,” said Ben. “There hasn’t been any public follow-up to the video, and the government just keeps saying they’re looking into it. If something doesn’t happen soon, there’s a very real chance that the public will just forget about the whole thing.”
“I know we should worry about that, but right now, the top priority has to be getting back to Oberon. You-know-who said it himself.”
Ben grinned. “You mean Voldemort?”
“What?”
“Just a joke. It’s a reference to some literature from the turn of the century. The characters called the bad guy ‘you-know-who’ rather than use his name.”
“Sorry,” Quinn said with a shrug. “We didn’t read the classics in my school. But I do know that there’s a possibility we’re being monitored, and we owe our benefactor anonymity, so…”
“Say no more, and yeah, I agree. The journalist in me really wants to blow this story open, but I know the video did what we needed it to do by forcing the government into acknowledging the threat. It’s time for the next phase.”
“We just need to figure out exactly what that is,” said Quinn. “But that’s not going to happen tonight.” He took a sip of his drink just as a sudden idea popped into his head. “Hey, can you look up people on the network?”
“It’s not as easy as it was before they outlawed all social media except for the monitored anonymous ones, but it’s still possible. Why, you want to look up an old girlfriend so you can ask ‘how do you like me now?’”
“No.”
Ben saw the look on his face and turned serious. “Sorry. Who are you looking for?”
“Marcie Han. Used to be a Marine lieutenant on my special ops team. She might still be in the service.”
“There were other Jarheads? Why didn’t they end up in prison with the rest of you?”
“It’s a long story. Can you find her?”
Ben scanned his display for a full minute before tapping the screen triumphantly.
“Marcie Han, former Marine, current security consultant. Heads up a firm with three other people—”
Quinn suddenly felt disquiet creeping its way into his mind, despite the mild buzz from the alcohol.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Their names are Elliot, Gomez and Shane.”
Ben looked up from his display. “If you already knew, why did you have me look it up?”
“That’s a long story, too. What info is there on them?”
“Lots of government contract work on their résumé page… looks like they’re pretty elite. Advertised rate is double what I’d expect.”
“Huh.” It could be a coincidence, Quinn told himself. “What’s the company name, and when did they open their doors?”
Ben searched for a moment. “Precision Private Security, incorporated almost two years ago to the day, on the hundredth floor of one of the Manhattan Towers. That’s pretty high-rent real estate; they must have had some serious start-up capital.”
Quinn knocked back the last of his bourbon. It could all be a coincidence, he thought again, hoping he could quell his growing unease by repeating it to himself.
“So when do you plan to tell him?” Gloom asked in her usual mildly annoyed tone.
Dev Schuster peered at her, trying to keep his eyes open. A cup of coffee, his fifteenth of the day, sat unfinished and congealing on the coffee table in front of the sofa he shared with her.
“I haven’t really had the opportunity to get him alone,” he said. “We’re always with the group.”
“So what? Don’t you think everybody should know?”
His red-rimmed eyes widened. “That I’m losing my marbles? How about no?”
She smacked his elbow and frowned at him. “You’re not losing your marbles, Dev. There’s obviously a reason for what you’re experiencing, and I’d be willing to bet that it’s really important. We just have to figure out what it all means.”
What you’re experiencing. Like she could have any idea what the dreams were like. He’d given her some of the details, sure, but unless someone had had their brain opened up and occupied by an alien’s ghost, they couldn’t understand what he was experiencing, particularly when he fell asleep.
The dreams had started the first night back on Earth, when he’d crashed for a few hours in the apartment that Ulysses’ friend Bocephus had offered them in San Antonio. He’d seen an image of Kevin Sloane behind a glass plate, shouting at him silently, then Sloane suddenly morphed into Kergan, who was looking at him with crazy eyes and laughing. Schuster had woken with a start, sweat beading on his forehead, and dismissed it as just a nightmare.
But then it happened again their first night in San Francisco, and this time he couldn’t explain it away. In this vision, Sloane had broken through the glass barrier and was screaming at him, but the words came out as mathematical symbols and formulae. In the dream, Schuster had been able to understand it all, and he could feel Sloane’s urgency echoed in himself, as if what they were discussing in their dream language was the most important subject in the universe. But then Kergan appeared again, only this time he was sporting the beginnings of a beard, and was watching him intently from a monitor on the bridge of Oberon One somehow. Schuster had felt cold dread in his belly as Kergan activated a device that Schuster somehow, with dream logic, knew was the attenuation amplifier. Only now it was bigger.
Next thing he knew, he was at the controls of FUBAR, racing away from an an attenuation wave just as they had when they escaped from the station. Only this wasn’t a memory, and the wave didn’t stop: it followed him all the way back to Earth, and when he landed the ship, he stepped out and watched the wave crash across the skies like a hurricane, wiping out everything in its path. He jolted awake to the sound of Kergan laughing. But it didn’t end there: in the instant before he opened his eyes, he heard his dream antagonist speak three words that chilled him to his very core: I see you.
Schuster shuddered and swigged back the cold dregs of his coffee.
“There’s only one way I know of to figure out what it all means,” he said. “And I’m not going to do it.”
Gloom leaned in closer. “You’ve already contacted Sloane twice. Why not again, especially if it means you can actually sleep without worrying about your sanity?”
Why not, indeed? He’d asked himself that question a hundred times over the last several days. The answer had eluded him each time.
“It’s easy for you to say.” He knew the excuse was bullshit, but it was all he had for a defense. “You�
��re not the one with the brain parasite. You didn’t see what happened to the people on the station when they were attenuated. It’s bad enough I’m carrying one of those assholes around in my head; I’m not about to start inviting him out for drinks and a chat.”
Schuster expected Gloom to leave in a snit, but she surprised him with a sympathetic look and soft voice.
“You’re right,” she said. “I can’t imagine that. But believe me, I can imagine a world where we don’t stop those bastards. Where everyone has been taken over, and a million years of human history is erased forever. I wish it wasn’t so, Dev, but you don’t have a choice. We need what’s in your head if we want a fighting chance of stopping them.”
“You fucking better believe I have a choice!” he snapped. “There’s no law on the books anywhere that says I have to open up my mind to anything! Ask Tiffany Tranh!”
That appeared to tick her off, which, strangely, made him somehow feel more comfortable with her. This was the Gloom he’d come to know.
“So what are we supposed to do, then?” she asked, leaning away from him again and crossing her arms. “How are we going to get back to Oberon One and stop whatever it is this Kergan guy is doing there, especially now that Toomey has FUBAR? He’ll be there long before we show up, and from what I know of the situation, the two of them working together is the last thing we want to see.”
Schuster pushed out his bottom lip in a pout. “I don’t care. I’m not doing it.”
Gloom threw her hands up. “Then I guess that’s that, huh? Might as well just get drunk and stay that way till the armada shows up in the skies over San Fran, right?”
“Why does this all fall on me?” he blurted. “It’s not you Kergan can see, Gloom, it’s me! I’m the one who’s carrying the ghost of an alien parasite in his head, and I’m the one who pays the consequences if it turns out he’s just trying to lure me in so he can take over my mind!”
For the second time in one night, Gloom’s face softened and she leaned forward to put a hand on top of his. It was warm and smooth and comforting.