The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  Rebecca noted her poise thoughtfully.

  Min-jun ignored the increasingly frantic technician, sitting down on the laminate floor of the server room, and closing his eyes. He took a series of deep breaths, packing oxygen into his lungs, and then his faint, sickly-green barrier surrounded him. The technician finally went silent as he watched the barrier expand like an inflating balloon, filling the room and then encompassing it, settling just beyond the drywall.

  There was a momentary delay.

  The telepathic channel flickered with the impact. Rebecca was hit with impressions of noise and fire and blurred motion.

  Beside her, on the roof, Karim charged his rifle.

  Min-jun closed his eyes, so remote viewers were the only option.

  There was a great deal of smoke, perpetuated by a confusion of secondary explosions. Most the warehouse was missing, replaced by a smoking, shallow crater. Several compressed tanks of volatile gasses had already exploded in the remaining portion of the structure, and fire threatened several more. The office was damaged, but on the intact side of the warehouse, though it had shifted dramatically when one of the supporting walls collapsed below, the whole structure listing badly to one side. High velocity shrapnel had penetrated the prefabricated walls and riddled the offices with metal fragments. The first thing Min-jun heard above the roaring of explosions and the crackle of fire was the combined dissonance of a score of voices crying out, in pain or for rescue.

  Only the room he occupied, along with the prostrate and terrified technician, remained intact. Flames licked the edges of his transparent green barrier, and the floor beneath him was buckled and unsteady.

  Chike, go.

  The apport technician snapped into existence not far from where Min-jun stood, flashed him an easy and brilliantly white smile, and then set about removing the drives from their housing with a tool that looked a great deal like a short crowbar.

  Min-jun suffered a prolonged coughing fit.

  Across the damaged and tilting hallway, a silver Weir smashed down the door and charged toward the server room. The creature was in its hybrid state, somewhere between wolf and man, hunched and terrible, claws dragging on the ground and rivulets of saliva running from a distended jaw. A fragment of the warehouse’s metal siding had impaled it through the midsection, and blood flowed freely, but the Weir paid it little mind. Behind him, other Weir pushed and jostled for access to the hallway.

  The Weir made it within a single stride of the door of the server room when the back of its head exploded, pink tissue splattering against the far wall. Karim’s carefully positioned body absorbed the recoil, the rifle hardly shifting in position despite the enormous .338 Lapua round. The momentum of the shot pulled the Weir sideways, and the creature tumbled to the ground, twitching and howling.

  Karim fired again, and a portion of the Weir’s left eye and orbital bone sheared off. Despite bracing herself, Rebecca jumped each time the rifle discharged.

  There was no time for a third shot. The Weir had succeeded in demolishing most the wall pinning them back in the adjoining room, and they spilled into the hallway in mass. Karim burned through the rest of his magazine, the muzzle shifting only slightly to acquire targets. He had abandoned the pretense of using the scope attached to his rifle, as his targets were on the other side on an intact wall. The telepathic channel became nearly useless, dedicating all resources to relaying the detailed telepathic imagery Karim used to judge angle and position.

  A scraggly-looking Weir with bald patches and pink eyes made it as far as the door, and then bent double and howled, gut shot and bleeding. Chike levered the first of the housings open, cut the connecting cords with his knife, and then tore the hard drives free, dumping the contents in an anti-static bag with shaking hands and moving on to the next. Min-jun stood unsteadily, looking ill.

  The dying Weir was pushed aside by his companions. Another fell as it set foot inside the server room, clawed feet digging into the prefabricated flooring. The armor-penetrating round passed through the Weir’s cranium, leaving behind a hole big enough to look through. It took another three rounds to the chest before it fell and stayed down.

  Karim cursed and ejected the magazine.

  The remaining Weir charged into the room. The first wolf-creature through the breach eviscerated the lonely technician before he could express his dismay, tearing his abdomen open with elongated yellow nails. Chike glanced over his shoulder nervously, but continued to attack the second drive housing. The remaining Weir made a beeline for Min-jun, tossing aside furniture and equipment in the process.

  Min-jun’s barrier flashed as a Weir collided with it, bone splintering as the monsters crashed headlong into the nearly invisible obstruction. The barrier flexed at the point of contact, bending like plastic, but it held. Min-jun winced and stumbled back, face reddening from lack of oxygen. Rebecca had nearly forgotten that Min-jun’s barrier only lasted for long as he could hold his breath, and started to worry. Karim flipped over the coupled magazine and inserted the fresh side. He charged the rifle and then settled back behind the weapon, steadying his aim and analyzing telepathic telemetries.

  Chike forced open the second housing. The nearby Weir finished with the hapless technician and turned his attention to Chike.

  Beside Min-jun’s flickering barrier, a Weir with a mouth full of broken teeth tottered on a broken leg as it beat its arms against the barrier. Another Weird crawled across the floor, pulling loops of intestine behind it.

  Karim opened fire, dropping the Weir closest to Chike with successive hits to the knee, chest, and head. Rebecca lost count of the shots after seven. With covert emotional reinforcement from Rebecca, Chike not only held his ground, but finished looting the second housing and moved on to the third.

  Min-jun collapsed as his protocol dissolved, dizzy and out of breath. The Weir who had been assaulting his barrier immediately sensed the change, and leapt for the Auditor. Rebecca sheltered him from the fear as instinctively as a mother holding her child. Nearby, Karim made a minute adjustment to his position. Thanks to the shared awareness of the telepathic link, Rebecca knew that his eyes were closed, all his attention focused on the sensory data his remote viewing protocol provided. Rebecca held her breath and waited for the crack of the rifle.

  The shot went wide. Karim cursed and ejected the magazine from his rifle to the ground, reaching for the spare on the ground just beside his elbow. It was obvious to everyone connected to the telepathic link that he would be far too late, including Min-jun; thanks to Rebecca’s intervention, however, the barrier tech faced the oncoming claws and teeth of the Weir in a state of empathically-induced bliss.

  The telepathic channel was overwhelmed with a confusing jumble of impressions, as the emotional and sensory content strained the linkage. Rebecca boxed up Min-jun’s perfectly reasonable terror and concealed her own misery, all while moving to squash the guilt that was already taking hold in Karim’s mind. Chike was frozen in the act of pulling a hard drive from the third housing. Around them, the compound recovered slowly from the shock and the blast, and the sounds of gunfire swelled, as security forces fired on shadows, or, thanks to Karim and Rebecca’s combined efforts, each other. The air was thick with the acrid scent of burning plastic, and the view was obscured by the plumes of foul-smelling black smoke that rose from multiple fires scattered about the main warehouse.

  The Weir snatched Min-jun from the ground, and lifted him overhead. Then the creature tumbled to the ground, Min-jun falling with it in a tangled heap.

  The Weir was not injured. It appeared to have spontaneously forgotten how to walk.

  Karim stared at his rifle in confusion.

  The Weir fell to the ground like a plug had been pulled.

  Sorry, guys.

  Hayley’s cheer was not at all tempered by the situation, no help required from Rebecca.

  Cleaning up after that thing with the missile was really complicated. I got held up.

  The rush of gratitude Mi
n-jun felt was the first unadulterated emotion Rebecca allowed him since the start of the attack.

  I’m not going to complain about just in time.

  “There we are.” Karim activated the safety and offered Rebecca an entirely disarming grin. “Director Levy, you wanted to speak to me about something?”

  “It’s nothing important.” Rebecca had already satisfied her curiosity when inside Karim’s head. She had not found anything approximating a doubt, or even a shred of guilt. “Just popping by to check in on the kids.”

  ***

  “I’m fine, Director Levy.”

  As a woman, Rebecca knew when she was being patronized. As an empath, it was easy to divine why.

  “Really? No problems at all?”

  Of course, she also knew when she was being lied to. While Min-jun might have been placating her, he also wasn’t lying.

  “No.” He shook his head. “All is well.”

  She snuck a look in his head, just to be sure. His emotional state was mature, balanced, and entirely at ease with his job, actions, and identity. Rebecca marveled at his composure and self-assurance, and suppressed her jealousy with an effort.

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded again. His head was still loosely wrapped from the Operation in Busan, his eyes mildly glassy from what the infirmary said was a significant concussion. Min-jun’s mind was a bit sluggish, his reactions slightly dulled, but his responses were thought-out and coherent.

  “Yes. I am certain, Director.”

  This time, though, there was something. Just a trace, maybe, a stray anxiety, but in contrast to the stable uniformity of the rest of his emotions, it caught her attention.

  “You know, you can talk to me about anything, Min-jun.” Rebecca invested her voice with a generous measure of sympathetic confidence. “Anything at all. Nothing is bothering you?”

  He looked at the floor, considering. Rebecca gnawed at the inside of her lip and waited, caught up in the suspense of his internal debate. She was tempted to influence the outcome, but decided that it wasn’t entirely clear which buttons to push to get the response she had in mind. Rebecca waited, instead, for what she felt sure would be a revelation. Min-jun was one of the most composed and mature young minds she had encountered, after all, so whatever issue he wrestled with seemed certain to be of dramatic import.

  She felt his decision; knew that his mind was made up long before he realized it.

  “Well,” Min-jun said slowly, almond-colored eyes deep and thoughtful, “there is one thing…”

  Rebecca sat forward.

  “Yes?”

  Min-jun hesitated, agonizing. Rebecca eroded just a bit of his reticence, eager and impatient. To her surprise, he blushed, and then spoke haltingly.

  “Since you asked,” Min-jun explained bashfully, “I have been having some issues with my fiancé…”

  Rebecca smiled thinly and lit another cigarette, cursing curiosity.

  ***

  She found the Auditor alone, lying on her back on the roof of the Far Shores Biotechnology building. One of her pit-bull mixes, Kant, was curled up beside her, his black-and-white hindquarters wedged beneath her legs, propping up her knees. A cloud of kush smoke floated sluggishly above her.

  “Evening, Director!” Hayley had wedged one arm beneath her head, eyes turned to the scant and unfamiliar stars of Central. “Am I not supposed to be up here?”

  “Yes, but you know that already.” Rebecca shut the stairwell door firmly behind her. “That’s not my problem, though.”

  Rebecca heard a lighter strike, and then Hayley’s face was momentarily illuminated as she held the flame to the open bowl of a blown glass pipe, orange light reflecting from embedded gold leaf in bulbous glass. The lighter clicked off, followed closely by an abbreviated coughing fit which amused Rebecca to no end.

  Fucking millennials, Rebecca thought, taking a seat beside Hayley on the roof and giving Kant a good scratch behind the ears. No respect for authority or office.

  Hayley covered her mouth to muffle another round of coughing.

  That’s probably true. I’m sorry, Ms. Levy, but I’m not sure what generation I’m supposed to insult in return. Which World War did you fight in?

  You little bitch. I’m exactly as old as I appear to be – which is not an invitation to inquire further, by the way.

  Of course, Director.

  Rebecca, please.

  Hayley smiled and offered the pipe to Rebecca, who made a face, probed the partially burnt contents of the bowl, and then accepted it with a false air of reluctance. Appearances were important, Rebecca reasoned, when one occupied a position of authority. She wanted to be a good influence.

  “Be careful, Ms. Levy.” Hayley grinned in anticipation. “It’s kinda strong.”

  Rebecca snorted and hit the pipe.

  Twenty seconds later, she managed to stop coughing long enough to pass the pipe back to Hayley, who was literally rolling on the ground with laughter. Kant, excited by all the activity, barked and danced around them, nudging Rebecca periodically with his wet snout.

  “Are you going to be okay, Ms. Levy?”

  “Shut up, brat.” Rebecca wiped tears from her eyes, trying to reconstruct whatever dignity she might have originally had. “I have a sore throat. That’s all.”

  “Of course, Director.” Hayley sat up beside her and yawned. Kant leapt enthusiastically into her lap, which was far too small to accommodate his thirty-kilo frame. Hayley smiled indulgently and scratched his flank. “I’m curious, though – why was I last?”

  Rebecca was guarded.

  “Last what?”

  “You know what I mean.” Hayley shook her head. “You talked to all the other Auditors first.”

  Rebecca chewed on her lower lip while she considered her answer. It was a delicate matter, after all, and she could feel the knife-edge balance of Hayley’s emotions – the curiosity that consumed her now could easily become suspicion, or even resentment.

  “You worry me the most,” Rebecca said, with a shrug. “I can make sense of all the rest of ‘em, but you’re a puzzle, Hayley.”

  Hayley seemed amused, maybe even a bit flattered by the attention. Rebecca wanted to encourage those feelings, but restrained herself. While Hayley’s telepathic talents were deeply specialized toward her possession protocol, like all psychics, she had prodigious innate defenses. Rebecca could have overwhelmed them with an effort, but tampering without being detected was another matter. Unless it was truly required, Rebecca preferred not to take the risk – at least, not outside the context of an official consoling session.

  “Why do you say that? Because I’m an odd sort of telepath?”

  Hayley turned the pipe over and banged out ash and blackened bits of mostly-burned cannabis, startling Kant briefly.

  “Not really.” Rebecca watched moodily while Hayley refilled the pipe from a thin sandwich bag. “That makes things more difficult and interesting, but it doesn’t freak me out.”

  Hayley paused to look at Rebecca closely.

  “Because I’m part of the Hegemony?”

  She shook her head.

  “No. It doesn’t help matters much, honestly, but that’s not the real problem.”

  “Then what?”

  Rebecca watched her pack the glass bowl with torn bits of deep green cannabis.

  “Your baseline.” Rebecca slid her pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, and tapped one out. She hung the smoke from the corner of her mouth, but made no move to light it. “I did a full workup when the Hegemony nominated you.”

  “I remember that.” Hayley crumpled the empty bag and then shoved it in a pocket. “That long session we did, right? I had to let you poke around in my head. It was like a bad date with a clumsy pervert.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “Okay, so…my baseline. What does that mean?”

  “Think of it as a starting point. When I monitor, I look for deviations from the norm. First I have to establish what tha
t norm looks like.”

  “And in my case, what did it look like?”

  “Like you were troubled by violence,” Rebecca said, watching the girl closely, though her eyes were unlikely to tell her anything that her empathic abilities would not. “You don’t believe in the necessity of conflict between the cartels, and you disapprove of many the Auditors’ actions.”

  Hayley scratched Kant’s belly absently. Instead of looking at Rebecca, she continued to stare out at the twinkling lights of the Far Shores, and beyond it, the neutral mass of the sea of Ether.

  “Sounds about right.” Hayley shrugged her sunburned shoulders. “Most people think the cartel stuff is bullshit, and I’m not the first person to have doubts about the Auditors. Isn’t that all pretty normal?”

  “For a typical student at the Academy, maybe,” Rebecca allowed. “If they come from an orphan background. Among the Auditors, though? You’re a precious snowflake, dear.”

  “Really? None of the other Auditors harbor any doubt about our mission?”

  “Not since we lost Alex to the wild blue yonder.” It was a statement of fact, and Rebecca put some authority behind it, because she was not in the mood for an argument. “In the effectiveness or the efficiency of our actions? Sure. Not the moral underpinning, though. I’m afraid you are the Auditor’s token pacifist.”

  “That surprises me. Is it really a problem, though?”

  “Not by itself. A concern, sure, but not a real problem. If you hesitated or questioned orders, or experienced the kind of moral quandaries that would compromise your field capabilities – then yes. That hasn’t been the case, though, has it?”

  Hayley shook her head lazily.

  “No. Of course not, Ms. Levy. That’s silly.”

  “Is it?” Rebecca was genuinely curious. “Most people would say that it follows. If my baseline says you’re inclined to be a hippy, then why don’t I see any scruples out of you?”