by Audrey Faye
I planted the rod in my hand and jiggled another nugget loose in my head. The Wanderers were of interest to KarmaCorp because they had Seers. A rare ability believed to be distantly related to Talents, although if memory served correctly, we didn’t recruit many Fixers with a penchant for colorful skirts and bangles. Perhaps they didn’t exist—or perhaps, like on my home world, they were carefully protected in ways the Seekers would never be able to smell.
I thought of the power in the scrap of fabric riding in my amulet pouch and smiled. It hadn’t felt like Shaman, and remembering that sorted me out in a way that words and thoughts never could. I was simply here to be a small piece of something greater. I flowed down the lines of my spirit web and let the choice already shaping there flow back into me.
The spirit web of my companion shifted to meet it before I uttered a single word. Her hands lifted, traveling in undulating figure eights. “I speak now to one of The People.” The timbre of Elleni’s voice had dropped into something I instinctively understood as ritual, even if it wasn’t mine.
I held out my palms and slowly pointed them in the four directions. To the sky, to the earth, to her heart, to mine. “I honor your words as those of a grandmother.”
She spoke a few words of a language I didn’t understand, but knew as sacred. “The Sisters are the keepers of a guardianship passed down to us for millennia. There are energies that collect in some places in the universe. Nodes, I believe you call them. Pivot points where destinies change and time bends in ways that rational minds refuse to understand.”
It wasn’t only my tribal child listening now. I assumed she had picked her words very carefully. Nodes was a KarmaCorp term. Travelers used nodes. I let her see that my eyes had heard.
“They have existed since the beginning of all, these places where the fabric of time and space and power weaves itself in new ways.” Elleni handed me another rod. “The Sisters are the most recent incarnation of the guardians of those nodes. I was sent by my clan, as those with my gift have been sent before me.”
My head was reeling, but that was a distant clamoring I was well used to ignoring. “The Harmonium technology—what will it do to the nodes?”
She calmly wrapped a second flower around her rod. “We don’t know.”
I didn’t know either—but I knew this mission had just gotten a whole lot bigger. KarmaCorp was a brash newcomer to the role of guardianship. They hadn’t learned all there was to know yet, no matter what Regalis might think from his StarReader throne. My grandmothers had sent me to be a Fixer because they believed KarmaCorp was capable of learning—and because it needed the eyes of one who had grown up in a jungle with dirt under her feet and wild in her heart and servanthood in her soul.
The woman beside me had left her tribe for the same reason I had left mine. To serve in a way that only those of The People could see needed to be done.
I set down my rods and wound my fingers into thinking pose. If the tech had the potential to impact the nodes used by Travelers, that was the kind of threat that could change KarmaCorp’s position on the Harmonium project substantially—but they would need far more than guesswork.
We needed to be certain, and Elleni was right—I currently had access that mattered. As did she. Which meant it was time to share. “Dr. Miori appears to be competent and unlikely to be swayed by anything that can’t be measured on her instrument arrays. She may also be aware that there were some anomalous effects on sensitives in Epsi’s employ and moved to hide that knowledge.”
That was information that should only be going to KarmaCorp, and only after substantially more data collection on my part, but tribes measured things differently.
Elleni raised an eyebrow. “A formidable opponent.”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure she is one yet.”
“Your aura is sure.”
It had been a long time since I’d been with someone who could see inside me this well. “It is.”
“And those who work for the good doctor?”
This wasn’t a report, no matter how much she might wish it to be. “I’ve given you the thread I think you need for your weaving.” I wouldn’t insult her by asking for one in return.
She smiled and gave me a look that said she was well pleased by my manners. “We, too, have heard rumblings, although Jonas was the first hard evidence of a triggered psychic gift. Most have reported discomfort. There was also a woman, pregnant with her third child, who felt the baby was unnaturally quiet when she was at work.”
The kind of report that likely got scoffed at in a med’s office, but any spirit walker worth their drumming sticks could tell you that babies touched the woo more deeply.
Elleni tapped a rod into place with her finger. “Why did KarmaCorp send a Shaman?”
That much I could probably tell her and still keep my head attached to my shoulders. “We had a report from a visiting Shaman with some concerns.” I paused a beat. “Have you felt no effects?”
She shook her head. “None—but my training is different from yours.”
Dremelia had thought the tech might interfere with shielding. “What if you turn that turtle shell of yours off?”
Elleni shrugged. “I can’t. It’s like my skin. It holds me together. I can make it more permeable, but all I hear then is the noise of five billion people invading.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re an empath as well?”
She smiled. “It’s all one thing where I grew up, but yes. I have some gifts that overlap with yours, some that make me unusually sensitive to emotional projections, and a few more that need to stay the secret they’ve been for centuries. But it’s entirely possible that my empathy prevents me from opening up far enough for my more shamanic senses to feel the perturbations from the new technology.”
Which meant somebody with less of a turtle shell needed to do exactly that. I pulled a tablet out of my pocket and consulted the insane matrix that was Epsi’s organizational chart. “I believe I need to pay a visit to somebody who plays with Harmonium’s actual levers and buttons.”
Elleni smiled and planted her last rod. “In that case, we need to get your strength back up. There’s squash soup for dinner. And homemade bread.”
I grinned and apologized to the flowers I hadn’t yet tended. “I have recipes to swap.”
She laughed and pushed up to her feet. “You might wait to see if the soup’s any good.”
I wasn’t worried. In my experience, wisdom and good food tended to be very close acquaintances. And if the soup was terrible, I had recipes to trade for that, too.
10
The guy walking toward me, friendly look on his face and greasy wrenches in his belt loops, didn’t look like the head of the Harmonium engineering project. I reached out a hand to meet his easy clasp. “I’m guessing you’re not Dr. Su Yin.”
He laughed. “No, that’s my boss, and he has an important meeting he can’t miss. You got punted to me. Sorry.”
That saved me several steps in what I thought I’d have to do today—and this man had exactly the kind of spirit web I would have handpicked. Clear, steady, pragmatic, and flexible. “I’m not at all sorry. I wanted to see the tech, and I bet you actually know where it lives and might let me touch it.”
He grinned. “Maybe. Call me Scotty, everyone does.”
I laughed. Him and half the engineers in the galaxy. “Thanks. My friends call me Raven.”
He nodded, eyeing my hair. “Suits you.” He led me through one of the ubiquitous white sliding doors of Epsi’s hive. “So, how come you want to touch my machines?”
I could feel his pride in the work, his sense of ownership. “I like levers and buttons and knowing how things work.” I risked a quick glance to see if he was buying my bullshit and decided he wasn’t. “And I wanted to talk to the people who actually work with the tech. Asking to touch seemed like the fastest way to get there.”
He relaxed noticeably. “Thanks. My bullshit meter’s pretty strong.”
I
kept walking, hands in my pockets. “So’s mine.”
He eyed me. “You’re a Shaman, aren’t you.”
He hadn’t phrased it as a question. “I am. You’ve met one before?”
He headed us left when the corridor split and shook his head. “Nope. Heard about you down in the spaceport bars, though. Some of the stories are pretty good.”
I’d heard a few of those myself. “The ones where we can turn water into alcoholic beverages are total lies.”
Scotty laughed. “Good to know.”
I gave him another quick glance to let him know this next question meant something. “Some engineers think what I do is a load of crap.”
“Yup.” He shrugged. “I’ve got a friend—he’s a wrench monkey out on one of the big tugs. He always knows when something’s about to go wrong. Makes the back of his neck itch. His boss pays him double every time he helps them fix trouble before it happens. Says he’s the most valuable guy on the ship.”
Smart boss.
We turned one more corner, stopped in front of one more sliding door, and then stepped into another world. One where the noise factor rivaled a major vid concert, the few people I could see all had dirty hands and a grin or a wave for the guy I was with, and the energy pulsing against my spirit web had the integrated feel of a well-oiled jungle.
I stared at all the buttons and levers a girl could ever want. “This is a Harmonium reactor?”
“Nah.” Scotty grinned and handed me some noise-dampening ear inserts. “This is just the cooling systems and feeding tubes and such. But it’s where we bring people first because it looks impressive.”
It was impressive. I followed the tubes, sorting out which were back alleys and which were main drags, and finally pointed at an innocuous gray canister about as wide as I was tall. “That’s the core there?”
Scotty raised a surprised eyebrow. “Your woo stuff tell you that?”
I snorted. “No. That’s where most of the pipes are headed.”
“Shit.” He looked pretty impressed. “Most paper pushers couldn’t figure that out in three days of trying.”
I grinned at him. “Wait until you see my woo.”
He laughed and put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Let’s head over this way. I have an office I never use, and the guys will leave us alone in there.”
At least three-quarters of the guys I could see weren’t actually guys. “You have a lot of women on your team.”
He shot me a look. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those idiots who think girls can’t use a wrench.”
I shot a look right back. “I come from a planet where girls do every damn thing there is to do. Not much call for using wrenches, though.”
He looked totally fascinated. “Wild planet?”
“Yup.”
He took a seat behind something that was probably supposed to be a desk and had turned into a mechanic’s workstation. “One of those ones where the ladies are the bosses, right? Do you happen to know a guy by the name of Swift? About as tall as my knee and the best musician in three sectors?”
I sat down and huffed out a laugh. There are almost a hundred wild planets, and I came from one small jungle continent on one of them. The same one Swift grew up on. “Yeah, I do, actually. Is he still a really chatty drunk?”
Scotty grinned. “Yup. One night in his cups, he tried to tell us about that ritual you do with the feathers and the fire breathing.”
Hopefully most of it had been lies. The grandmothers weren’t foolish enough to try to get in the path of a good story, but the Federation committee that oversaw closed worlds might not be so impressed. We all took oaths when we left, some that stood the test of too much alcohol better than others. “We’re cousins, if you take that word really broadly.”
Scotty picked up a small silver rod from his desk that looked suspiciously like the ones I’d been planting with Elleni, slid it into a fat round washer, and winced at the scraping sound it made. He picked up a steel-polishing rag and got to work, his hands clearly operating very independently from his brain. “Swift’s good people. Any cousin of his is welcome to touch my machines.”
I’d had worse introductions. “Can you tell me a little bit about the tech? In plain English? So far, all I’ve managed to figure out is that it sounds like a great big galactic vacuum cleaner.”
He was one of those guys who laughed right from the bottom of his belly. “Damn. Don’t let the head honchos hear you say that out loud. It’ll knock too many zeroes off the price tag.” He grinned at me, amusement shining from all his pores. “But you’re not really wrong about how it works. It’s basically an attractor. It reaches for unneeded energies and pollutants and mops them up.”
I raised an eyebrow. “How does it tell which ones are unneeded?”
He grinned. “Same way you know how to vacuum dust bunnies under the bed.”
Iggy never let anything like that grow in our pod. “Got a plain English explanation of how that’s done?”
His eyes were amused—and full of intelligence. “My girl out there looks for energies that are unused, ignored, unstructured, in a state of decay. She learns as she works, and we had hundreds of eggheads combing through the data making sure it was only dust bunnies that she vacuumed.”
That only worked if everyone had the same definitions. “One person’s dust bunnies might be another person’s treasure.” I gestured at the scraggly pieces of metal on his desk. “I’m betting a lot of people would think this was junk.”
Scotty glared at me, and he was only half kidding. “Not anyone who wants to keep working here.” He ran his fingers over a small grouping of octagonal nuts. “You’re right, and you’ve probably already figured out that the higher-ups don’t want to hear it. But I’m a practical guy. If this tech can help make things safer for my friends traveling in tin cans, I’m okay with a few useful things under the bed getting vacuumed up too.”
I could feel myself on that delicate balance point, standing with one foot on wobbly rock and figuring out where to step next. I eyed Scotty carefully and made my move. “What if one of the dust bunnies that got vacuumed was your mechanic friend’s itchy neck?”
His eyes shot up to mine. “Shit. That’d be bad.”
He did my kind of math. “Exactly.”
Scotty’s fingers moved, sanding the rough edges on another bolt. Thinking.
I let him do it. I knew better than to underestimate a practical guy with grease on his hands.
Eventually, he wiped his fingers on a nearby rag. “You’re maybe thinking that this galactic vacuum cleaner of mine might mess with what you do?”
I looked at him and shrugged, noncommittal. “I’m thinking maybe somebody should check that out.”
He looked over at the big room visible through his office window. “Want me to power it up, see what it does to your head?”
More than he could possibly know. “Is that something you would have to report?”
He carefully didn’t meet my eyes. “There’s a group of Federation bigwigs coming for a tour later this afternoon, and Dr. Miori wants everything running. I was thinking I might get my girl out there cranked up a little early, make sure there’s no dust on her pistons or anything. If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll take you down to the caf after that, stand you for a meal. Bacon burger’s pretty decent.”
I wasn’t at all fooled. I had no idea what a piston was, but there was no dust on this man’s tech or in his brain. “That’d be good. I’ve got a fondness for bacon.” And a stomach that preferred the real stuff, but I’d have eaten sawdust if he wanted to offer it to me.
Assuming his vacuum cleaner didn’t suck anything too important out of my brain first.
11
I sat in my chair across from Scotty’s cluttered desk, looked at miscellaneous piles of bolts and dirty rags and pristinely polished and oiled shiny bits that were headed back into active duty, and waited. He’d left with no pomp or circumstance, just a guy headed off to throw a few switche
s before he took his inconvenient guest to lunch.
I tapped into my spirit web, running through the basic flows of breathing and awareness I’d been taught as soon as I took my seat by the fire. If the Harmonium tech touched my Talent at all, even dimly, I’d see it. I did web repair work as I sat, breathing a little reinforcement into places worn ragged by all the humanity of the last few days, shoring up spots that looked like they were getting ready to fray. The Shaman equivalent of Scotty’s polishing rags.
A tech stuck his head through Scotty’s door, letting in the ocean of sound in the next room. “Boss said to tell you he’s got his girl up and running, but he needs another minute to check into a rattle in one of the condensing tubes.”
The tech was gone before I could offer any reply, but none was really needed. A good engineer going above and beyond, making sure I had my data collection in gear at the right time. Which I did, but so far, I was reading exactly nothing. The solar lights in Scotty’s office touched my web with more force than any unidentified energy streams.
Then again, I was sitting here as well shielded as a military outpost. The Shaman who had reported in to Yesenia might not have be quite as thorough in her personal defenses. Carefully, I let myself open, peeling back some of the layers of protection I carried around my own life force.
I paused when all I had left up were standard-issue Shaman shields. The ones KarmaCorp taught, and any decent graduate with my Talent wore every day, retired or not.
Nothing.
I sighed and let my standard shielding get a little permeable. Not enough to be overrun, but enough that I should be able to sense anything trying to knock at my door—or suck my brains out through my ears. I rolled my eyes at my own hyperbole and doubled down on my careful listening.