The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  “I understand. I was simply stating a preference; I was not making a complaint.”

  “Right.”

  “Am I interrupting something, Director? I assume you had a purpose in visiting us today.”

  “You aren’t interrupting, but I do have a reason for being here. It’s kinda convenient, honestly, bumping into you. Saves me the trouble of finding you later.”

  “Now I’m intrigued! Have I done something, Director?”

  “Nothing that I’m aware of.” Rebecca brushed her hair back and wished she had thought to tie it into a ponytail that morning. “This is more of a checkup. There have been a lot of changes recently, and you’re pretty new to the Auditing game. How are you doing with all that?”

  “That’s quite a question,” Chike said thoughtfully. “Not one to be taken lightly, given who you are, Director. You would be putting me in quite a spot, if I were dissatisfied.”

  She had built Chike’s mental shields herself, so bypassing them was a breeze. She employed one of three backdoors built into his mind during their first session, and slipped into his consciousness like a ghost, surveying and assessing. What she found was…complicated.

  “Are you dissatisfied?” Rebecca asked the question sincerely, simultaneously making small adjustments to his emotional wellbeing. “You can tell me. There will be no repercussions, I promise.”

  “I am perfectly content.” Chike offered her a private and ambiguous smile, and Rebecca immediately violated that privacy, hungry for meaning and context. “I only meant to illustrate a point. I do not believe that you will get honest answers to such questions, Director. You cannot be so direct.”

  “Oh, Chike.” Rebecca patted his bony knee. “Don’t be silly. I can do anything I want.”

  She was firmly in control at that point, gauging and rebalancing moods and opinions. She casually bulldozed any objections.

  His mental state was riddled with contradictions, and he had been suffering from insomnia, Rebecca discovered, something that Chike should have reported already. She suspected from the outset that the trouble would be rooted in Chike’s genuine and profound faith, the importance of his Christian ideals, but she found nothing untoward, only the normal doubts and compromises. The root of his malaise was instead based on his role in the assassination of Mitsuru Aoki, an act that felt too much like betrayal for Chike to sleep comfortably, even as he recognized the necessity of the action. This conflict created a cascade of doubts regarding the work of the Auditors, Rebecca’s legitimacy and the soundness of her decisions as Director, and his own moral character.

  Rebecca was privately outraged by his guilt, considering her own inarguable responsibility for a grievous and personal loss. It was a petty and unfair reaction, but she nursed it nonetheless.

  The solution was quick and obvious. Rebecca excised the particulars of his own role in the operation from Chike’s mind, leaving only a muddled and nonspecific cluster of emotionally neutral recollections. His body language immediately relaxed, his posture loose and slack, his expression content and optimistic.

  She took a distinctly guilty pleasure in this.

  There was nothing nefarious about it. The only pleasure an empath could find was in the glow of another person’s happiness – or suffering, depending on the empath. Fortunately for all concerned, Rebecca considered herself more of a Fairy Godmother type.

  The conventional line was the empathy couldn’t actually solve problems – she could reduce someone’s stress, for example, but could not affect the source, limiting her influence, in theory, to a temporary fix. Rebecca found that emotional turmoil was often its own cause. Anxiety fostered further anxiety, depression piled atop itself in a crushing blanket of misery, self-inflicted wounds were continually probed and irritated. Old wrongs were carried forward and worn like leaden jewelry, and old and forgotten errors were held so tightly that the wounds festered, even years later. Rebecca couldn’t do anything about unrequited love, unpaid mortgages, or unfulfilling careers, but often, she found that was not the source of the problem.

  People really were their own worst enemies.

  And Rebecca was their secret best friend.

  “Of course you can. How foolish of me.”

  Chike laughed, throwing his head back and getting into it. The nearest Tai Chi fan paused to stare, but Rebecca gave her something else to worry about, and she renewed her movements with enthusiasm. Chike shook his head, and then rubbed his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, yawning. “How terribly rude. I’ve forgotten what we were talking about.”

  “You were going to tell me,” Rebecca said kindly, bracing herself, “about what you are reading…”

  Chike lit up.

  “It’s very interesting, actually!” Chike seized the book from beside him to show her the cover. “It’s an examination of a recently discovered cache of scrolls attributed to the Pharisees in ancient Israel. Due to textual similarities to several works of early Rabbinic Judaism, scholars suspect that they are foundational documents. This particular researcher, however, has spent the last two years mapping out links between the scrolls and the esoteric works of another Judean faction active in the Holy Land at the time…”

  Rebecca smiled politely, empathically buoying her own spirits.

  ***

  Her sweater was too thin for the wind. She tried to light a cigarette, but could not shield it effectively, and eventually gave up. Her fingers ached, and she tucked them beneath her arms, stomping her cold feet on the asphalt of the roof.

  Karim Sabir ignored the scene, his eye never leaving the massive scope attached to his rifle. Occasionally, he made minute adjustments to one of the dials on his scope, muttering numbers and Kurdish obscenities. Rebecca was frustrated by his inattention, clearing her throat impatiently.

  Please control yourself, Director. I am working.

  His telepathy was just as charming and sonorous as his voice, even as he chastised her. Rebecca shivered and glared, but it was water off a duck’s back, when it came to Karim. He showed no further awareness of her presence. Rebecca considered contacting Central for an apport to somewhere warmer, but that sounded like more trouble than it was worth. She looped herself into the telepathic channel that Karim had created for the operation instead. There was a brief pain behind her eyes, like a sinus headache, while her mind struggled to cope with the overwhelming amount of data it received – telepathic briefings and databases, remote viewing imagery and ongoing surveillance, empathic impressions from every Operator involved. There was a sensation in the back of her mind, like a dam bursting, and then it all coalesced.

  This was the conclusion of a rather lengthy intelligence operation. Analytics had gigabytes of data on the case, but it all boiled down to a rather mundane issue of supply lines.

  Central and the Outer Dark shared the same basic vulnerability – nearly everything had to be imported, from food to fuel to raw materials. The war between Central and the Anathema was in one of its quiet phases, with both sides unwilling to directly engage. Both sides instead focused on disrupting the flow of critical supplies, a brutal war of attrition and counterintelligence, with the possibility of industrial collapse or starvation a constant concern. Whenever the Auditors could be spared from internal turmoil, they had waged a campaign of sabotage and destruction against Anathema interests – and the Anathema had done their best to return the favor.

  The target of this operation was a multinational logistics firm, which acted as a front for cartels sympathetic to the Anathema, facilitating the buying and transport of medical and industrial materials from a shipping yard outside Busan in South Korea, destined eventually for the Outer Dark. Per recent intelligence, the site was also to be used to duplicate an Anathema linguistic archive. It was an indirect operation, inspired by the intel Jin provided to Alice Gallow, with finances handled by a corporate front. In better times, the Auditors would have watched the transport company, infiltrating it to acquire intelligence on Anathema operation
s. That sort of operation would have been more valuable in the long term, but Rebecca lacked the luxury of thinking long term. She needed immediate victories to consolidate her hold on Central and to prevent further infighting.

  Are you in place, Min-jun?

  Rebecca stretched out her awareness, via the telepathic channel, and located Min-jun, walking openly into what appeared to be corporate offices, composed of Chinese prefabricated units clumsily grafted to one side of the main warehouse. He was secure within a telepathic disguise that would alter his appearance to meet a viewer’s expectation, but Min-jun was very nervous despite that, sweating heavily and holding his breath each time he encountered anyone in the hallways. Rebecca took pity on him and provided a subtle boost to his confidence – enough that he could take his eyes off the ground occasionally, at least.

  I’m close. Give me a moment.

  Min-jun hurried down the hallway, pausing occasionally to stick his head in the various identical offices, each furnished with the same metal framed desk and black office chair. Most were occupied by Korean men in suits, who invariably recognized Min-jun as a colleague or coworker, and greeted him as such. Since it was his native tongue, there was no need to implant knowledge of conversational Korean in Min-jun’s mind, but that convenience was incidental. He was chosen for the operation for entirely different reasons.

  The telepathic channel was choked with traffic, as Analytics hopped onboard to suggest two different locations for Min-jun to explore, based on data flow and energy consumption. The young Auditor picked up his pace, conscious of the many telepathic eyes on his back. Rebecca wondered idly what he might have done, had he known that her eyes were among them.

  A team of hackers working out of Processing back at Central had already riddled the company systems full of spyware weeks ago, and had been steadily logging and identifying traffic, as well as downloading the entire contents of the company email correspondence. Analytics combed the acquired data, but the archive and the forbidden lexicon were nowhere to be found among reams of business records. The suspicion that the archive would be stored cold and offline, somewhere in the company offices, had motivated Min-jun’s role in the operation.

  Min-jun located the stairwell and climbed up another story to the third and uppermost floor. The carpet on this level was identical to that below, but in a remarkable display of independence, the walls were painted a slightly different shade of cream than those below. Min-jun’s anxiety rose as he climbed, feeling like he was extending his arm into a primed trap. Rebecca sympathized, and her sympathy alone was enough to bolster his resolve.

  He hustled down a corridor that was oddly crowded with suited Koreans and what looked like private military contractors, burdened with tactical gear and bulletproofing. Min-jun studied them closely as he passed, with the practiced eye of a former soldier, thanks to South Korea’s mandatory conscription and his own late discovery and Activation. The mercenaries were a motley group, mainly British or Irish by accent, though there was a liberal sprinkling of Indian and Pacific Islander. Their equipment was just as varied, but was generally military-grade and showed signs of hard use. Some of the mercenaries were clustered in a pair of vacant offices, while others were scattered about the floor, walking the twin hallways or wandering conspicuously through the offices. None of the corporate workers seemed to know what to make of the presence of so many armed men. The air was charged with unspoken resentment and cigarette smoke.

  There was no good reason for the mercenaries to be there, but when Rebecca spearheaded an invasion of their minds, she did not find the tension that proceeds a confrontation. They were bored, annoyed by the Koreans, unhappy to be stuck in the country. Many of them desperately disliked the food and none of them spoke the language. The assignment was dull and had no fixed end. They had been there for a while, in other words, and they were on guard duty – the general kind, where no one expects anything to happen.

  Rebecca explored the emotional state of a random sampling of the office staff to confirm, finding them furious with the imposition of the armed men upon their daily routine, and frightened by the implicit and explicit threat that the contractors and their weapons represented. They were well-compensated, however, and a recent performance bonus had quieted staff dissension, at least for the moment.

  Min-jun’s doubt returned.

  I don’t like this. Do we abort?

  Rebecca cut in smoothly, mentally daring anyone to stop her.

  They aren’t here for us. It’s just part of the general security ramp up on the part of the Anathema. If anything, it just makes the archive a slightly higher-value target. We proceed.

  Min-jun hesitated. Rebecca curbed her temper.

  No one ever hesitated when Gaul gave an order.

  Instead, she invested her thoughts with enough Authority that it practically dripped from the words.

  The Operation is on.

  There was no room left for disagreement. Min-jun excused his way through the crowd at the center of the hallway, passed by the guards stationed at an open security door with a familiar nod, and found himself in an adjoining hallway. It was nearly empty, only the clattering of isolated keyboards and the omnipresent hum of server fans and air conditioning to muffle Min-jun’s footsteps on the tacky patterned carpeting.

  There was only one door on either side of the hallway. Analytics suggested that the potential hard drives they sought would be behind one door or the other. Rebecca thought that would have been pretty fucking obvious, with or without the help of a bunch of stuck-up precognitives and remote viewers.

  Min-jun chose the door on his right.

  Oh, shit!

  The disguise must have been good. The half-dozen Weir in the room hardly looked up when Min-jun opened the door. The most he got was a grunt.

  They were in human form, but had not bothered to disguise their Etheric Signatures, which were primal and unmistakable. They were outfitted similarly to the mercenaries in the hallway, but most of them didn’t bother with a flak jacket, and their rifles were piled casually in a corner. Circled tightly around a small table in the corner, the Weir sat in folding chairs and played a heated game of Uno with tattered cards.

  Min-jun backed out of the room slowly, closing the door behind him.

  Do we still…?

  Rebecca groaned internally.

  The other door, Min-jun.

  He squared his shoulders and crossed the hallway. There was a bare moment of hesitation, when the Auditor touched the door knob, and then he threw it open and strode in boldly.

  The lone technician in the room looked puzzled, blinking unsteadily as he glanced away from a bank of monitors he was parked in front of, but then his confusion resolved into a grin of relief. He hurried over to Min-jun, shook his hand, and then led him in, chattering away brightly all the while. Min-jun was too stunned to make a credible response, but the technician’s overwhelming loneliness – stoked only slightly by Rebecca’s intervention – pushed aside such considerations.

  There were two large server racks in the room, which was kept cold enough that Rebecca could see Min-jun’s breath emerge like a transient fog. Along the walls on other side of the room, there were secure powered and shielded housings. A laptop on a tray, likely with an embedded hardware security key, was attached to one of the drives with a length of silvery network cable, the screen displaying little more than a flashing prompt.

  This must be it.

  Rebecca was inclined to agree, unless they found another room full of hard drives.

  Did they already duplicate it? Which one is the archive?

  Ignoring the technician’s babble, Min-jun paced the room, eyeing the featureless spun aluminum exteriors of the hard drives. They were grouped into four armored housings, each bolted firmly to the floor and wall.

  No way to tell. We need all of them.

  Karim’s telepathic intrusion startled her, since his body was still huddled over his rifle, oblivious to the world.

  We nee
d to protect the room. Can you do that, Min-jun?

  Min-jun glanced about him nervously, gauging the size.

  Yes. I can do that.

  Karim did not hesitate, and his confidence bled through the telepathic channel. Alice had been right to put him in charge of the Operation.

  Very well. We are ready on site, Hayley. You are clear to proceed on your end.

  Rebecca stretched her awareness out, following the branches of the telepathic channel outward, several kilometers distant, to Hayley’s current position.

  The Auditor was seasick, and Rebecca was immediately hit by the psychic blowback of her misery.

  Hayley was aboard a South Korean patrol boat, returned to Busan for maintenance, before returning to the waters adjoining North Korea. She was currently in possession of the chief gunnery officer on board, standing at the fire controls for the missile system. Technically, they were anti-ship missiles, but they had high explosive warheads, so they were suitable for the task at hand. It was a complicated process, requiring Hayley to take over the captain, two officers, and then half the gunnery staff before she managed to persuade all aboard to participate. She had been forced to rely on crew memory and cooperation to load and aim the gun, all the while fighting the urge to be sick.

  The young Auditor had succeeded at the first task. The mess splattered on the floor and bulkhead beside the digital fire controls spoke to Hayley’s failure at the second.

  We’re ready. I think.

  The Director felt, rather than heard, Karim’s affirmation.

  Through a second, secure channel, Rebecca listened as Karim sought, and received, Alice Gallow’s remote approval before proceeding.

  Fire when ready.

  Hayley’s possessed officer gave an order, and then she body-hopped to the sailor on duty, to confirm the firing. The sound of the missile launch was minor, compared to the deafening screech of the alarm that proceeded it. Hayley neatly erased the last few moments from the four men she had possessed, and then departed, leaving them to their confusion and horror as they pieced together the current situation.