A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  He was seriously overdressed compared to me. I started to do something about that, but he grabbed my hands. "There's something we have to settle first," he said.

  "Settle away," I said lightly, "I'm all for it." If "settling" was a necessary precursor to ripping off his clothes, I could be very cooperative.

  "I love you," he said.

  I wasn't quite ready to use the L-word yet, but I made encouraging noises. If he wanted to go on in this vein, I could wait a few minutes before we got to the ripping-off-clothes part.

  Unfortunately, he wasn't headed in quite the direction I was anticipating.

  "Thalia, you came this close to getting shot today. Twice! You need to understand that it's not like the movies. If you take a bullet that doesn't kill you, you do not tell the medic "It's just a flesh wound," look brave for a few minutes while he bandages you, then leap up and rejoin the action. A bullet is a tremendous insult to the body. Any time you take one, you could be looking at weeks of painful physical therapy, loss of muscle tissue, and a strong chance of permanent damage."

  "And you're telling me this from personal experience?"

  "Actually, yes."

  "You don't seem permanently damaged to me."

  "That's because I'm an obsessive maniac when it comes to rehab and physical therapy."

  "Can I see your scars?"

  "Later. Thalia, can't you focus on one thing for more than a minute?"

  Of course I could. Right now I was focused on the promised showing of scars, and wondering where they were and how much he'd have to take off to display them. But I wanted to make him happy - and get this whatever-we-were-settling out of the way. So I nodded. "Right, Lensky. That's me. Laser-like focus."

  "I love you and I can’t stand to think of you getting hurt. And apart from everything else, if I have to worry about your being injured because you’re in the middle of a firefight, it screws me over. My attention's split and my priorities are fucked up, because all of a sudden my top priority is protecting you. Now do you understand?"

  "Right. Got it." And at that point I really thought I did. "Stay away from bad guys with guns if you're anywhere in the vicinity. Only get involved if you're not around."

  He made a noise that reminded me of a garbage disposal eating a fork. I didn't know the human larynx was even capable of such sounds. Maybe those long Polish words that looked like a train wreck of consonants were just a warm-up for speaking Jammed Garbage Disposal.

  "Thalia, the point is that you're to keep out of these situations regardless of where you think I am." He said a couple of things in Polish that I didn't ask him to translate.

  "You're leaving town," I pointed out. "Whatever I do or don't do won't be your problem after tonight." And given that schedule, I could think of better ways than bickering to spend this night. So I didn’t even mention that the ‘situations’ might not have turned out so well if I had stayed out of them the way he claimed to want.

  "Thalia, you're always going to be my problem."

  That wasn't logical, but evidently he was as tired of bickering as I was, because his mouth covered mine and he pushed me down on the bed and - do spooks get special training in Stealth Clothing Removal? Because I discovered that his pants were out of the way already, and I hadn't even begun to rip.

  By the time I came up for air, I couldn't even remember what I'd meant to say next. I was pretty much reduced to panting and gasping. Lensky had more control: without losing focus on what we were doing right now, he started talking about what he wanted to do to, with and for me next. Which only raised my gasp-to-speech ratio even higher.

  When he got around to the first part of those future plans, some time later, he implemented it with admirable thoroughness and attention to detail. I would have mentioned that in his performance review if I'd been up to talking. By the time he was finished, the only thing that kept me from becoming a boneless puddle was my desire to reciprocate.

  That - during the reciprocating, I mean - was when I first got a good look at one of his scars. It was a long, ugly, raised and crinkled line that ran from his pelvic bone diagonally down to his inner thigh.

  "How did you get that?"

  "Ricocheting bullet."

  "Came awfully close to the family jewels, didn't it?"

  "Can't you concentrate on what you were doing? Before you stopped for this friendly little chat?"

  I gave him some of my finest undiluted concentration then.

  "Jesus," he said afterwards, "I felt like my brain was going to explode out of the top of my skull. You're a dangerous woman."

  "You're no slouch yourself," I said, "apart from your brutal control-freak side."

  "Which gets you hot, admit it," he growled into my ear.

  "Me? Oh, no, this is just how I react to men in general, any man..."

  You'd have thought that by this time it would have been safe to tease the man.

  Not Lensky.

  Chapter 24

  Four weeks after the Foundation Fiesta and the Battle of Mayfield Park, life at the Center was getting back to… well, I hesitate to use the word “normal” in connection with this group. With Lensky and his demands for results gone, we were free to do the serious research of analyzing our new abilities and integrating them with existing topological theory.

  Yes, I felt about as excited as that sentence sounds. But this was, after all, what we were here for. If I just kept working on it, the excitement would probably return.

  It wasn’t all theory. Ben and I felt that as dedicated researchers, we were obliged to investigate the exhilaration/low blood sugar effects of teleporting long distances. So far we had extended our workable range to the outskirts of Round Rock, but that was dependent on a series of kluges. First we put a box of doughnuts in the break room. (Chocolate covered for preference.) Then, having threatened the rest of the Center with violence should they touch our vital research materials, we persuaded Jimmy or Annelise or someone else to drive us out of town to a point at least a mile from our previous longest jump. We jumped back from there, scarfed enough doughnuts to keep from fainting, and wrote up trip notes.

  After the first couple of longish jumps we learned that it was best to wait until the exhilaration wore off before completing the trip report. Dr. Verrick was scathing about reports consisting mainly of “Whee!” and “Better than Six Flags!”

  We were still a long way from being able to teleport as far as the East Coast. Not that I had any intention of doing that anyway.

  I didn’t even know what Lensky’s place back East looked like.

  Ingrid showed no interest in joining us on these excursions. Her excuse was that she had to catch up on the course work that she’d neglected at the end of the semester, and then she needed to prepare for the written and oral qualifying exams that would get her into the doctoral program. I thought something else was eating her; she spent a lot of time staring into space, and she wasn’t sleeping all that well. I knew because I wasn’t sleeping either. I wasn’t willing to discuss what was keeping me awake, so I didn’t ask her about her insomnia. We were doing a pretty good job of ignoring each other, these days.

  Our expanded, non-research staff didn’t quite fill up the third floor of Allandale House, but we were using enough offices to get the trustees off our backs and to remove the threat of sharing with the Office of Diversity Compliance.

  Annelise had graduated and was installed as our full-time receptionist and Ben’s part-time girlfriend. He managed to tick her off on a regular basis, to the extent that they were only “together” about a third of the time. The rest of the time she treated him with an icy civility that perceptibly lowered the temperature on the public side.

  Jimmy DiGrazio’s consulting job had become a permanency: Dr. Verrick’s excuse was that the Lensky investigation had been a harbinger of a future in which we would have to deal with computers, and we needed someone on the staff who spoke their language. Jimmy was the obvious choice, being possibly the only computer expert
in Austin who would work for the pittance Dr. Verrick paid just to be close to magic and Ingrid. He seemed perfectly happy to be snubbed daily by Ingrid. I think his master plan was to be standing close to her the next time she put on that horned helmet.

  Meadow Melendez was also on the expanded staff, though I didn’t know how long we’d be able to keep her. On graduation she’d received numerous offers from engineering firms that used words like bonus and stock option. For now, though, she talked about specializing in neuro-mechanical programming. She spent long hours with Mr. M., designing new capabilities for his prosthetic body. So far she’d equipped him with wi-fi and GPS. He was agitating for torpedos, or at least a machine gun mount, but Meadow told him she couldn’t add projectile weapons because he wasn’t heavy enough to handle the recoil. It might even have been true.

  When not tinkering with robot snake bodies, she spent her time reading the in-house (uncensored) report on the late investigation and going, “Holy shit!” at intervals.

  Nobody had yet moved into the office Lensky had been using.

  On this particular fine June morning, Ben was arguing with Annelise instead of preparing for the next test of our teleportation range. I could have gone on my own, but we had agreed to have two people on every test, in the hope that if one got in trouble the other could save the day with prompt and decisive action. That was possibly the only time the words “prompt and decisive” had been used in connection with the Center. And in this context, “hope” was short for “forlorn hope.” Or possibly “delusion.”

  Anyway, I didn’t feel wildly excited about seeing another chunk of Round Rock. So I sat in the break room, surreptitiously nibbling on a chocolate-covered Berliner that should have been reserved for post-jump blood sugar treatment, and listened to Annelise turn down Ben’s request for a date with one of her trademark fantasies.

  “Annelise,” he said, sounding exasperated, “that story may work on other guys, but I know you are not committed to a speaking part in a Matt Damon movie being filmed on location at the Driskill. Why don’t you just say you don’t want to go out with me?”

  “All right. I don’t want to go out with you,” Annelise said promptly. Tiny icicles dripped off each word. “Not to hear Money Chicha tonight, not to Jitterbug Vipers this weekend, not to any live music venue ever again in this life.”

  I wondered what Ben could have done to put her so totally off live music.

  “I promise not to jam with a remotely controlled saxophone ever again.”

  Oh.

  “It wasn’t just that you did it in public and frightened the band,” Annelise said, “you were flat.”

  Personally, I thought Ben should give up on this argument and come do another jump test with me. But what did I know about maintaining relationships? Less than nothing.

  Someone was coming up the stairs two at a time. Annelise and Ben stopped arguing to gawk and I moved to get a better view of our visitor from the break room door.

  It was a broad, blond-haired man in a rumpled tan sport coat and a blue shirt that lit up his blue eyes. They lit up even more when he spotted me lurking in the break room, and he made a beeline in my direction.

  “You have chocolate on your face,” was his deeply romantic greeting. Or no, I guess the prolonged kiss that followed that comment was the romantic part of the greeting. Though I could have done without the background accompaniment of claps, whistles, and “Get a room!”

  “So do you, now,” I answered when I caught my breath. I wanted to spit on a paper towel and rub the chocolate smear off his cheek, but that was too much of a girlfriend sort of thing to do before I knew what was going on. “Why are you dropping in this time?” Another investigation for his agency would be fine news. A long-running investigation. But more likely he was just in town to visit Linda – and, as an afterthought, me.

  Ben dropped his hopeless attempt to win Annelise round and butted into our conversation. “What does the agency want now, ‘Boris’?”

  “Nothing in particular,” Lensky said.

  I knew it. Just a flying visit.

  For all I knew, he could have a girlfriend in every city that boasted a direct flight from Washington, and I was just his Austin stopover.

  Sure, he’d used the L-word the last night we were together. But I hadn’t heard any words at all from the man in the subsequent weeks.

  He was grinning. “Following my report,” he said, “the agency has decided that this Center is a potentially valuable asset which must be preserved if at all possible. Not only will funding continue, but I’ve been assigned here permanently because the report also made it clear that you maniacs need somebody sane to protect you. I’m also ordered to discourage the FBI representatives who’ve been sniffing around since you broke the sex trafficking ring.”

  “How did you know about them?” Annelise asked.

  He looked surprised. “You really have been approached by the FBI? I just put that in my report in the interests of, ah, creative verisimilitude.”

  “You did know the FBI took over once we knew it was sex trafficking, not terrorists? Several agents wanted to know how we did, um, what we did,” I told him, “except they didn’t really want to know, if you take my meaning. Annelise has been defending our privacy with fantastic tales that take time to check out.”

  “Excellent,” Lensky pronounced. “The agency will never recall me now. This Center is far too valuable to let the Fibbies get it.” He glanced around the open space. “Ah, good, you haven’t given away my office. I’ll just…”

  “Drive us to Round Rock,” Ben said. “You can settle in later.”

  I didn’t really need another long jump; I was already exhilarated, out of breath, and craving sugar. I hoped the traffic between here and Round Rock was terrible.

  It was. And Lensky made Ben drive while we sat in the back seat and caught up.

  The End

  Keep reading for a preview of the next book in the Stars series, An Opening in the Air.

  An Opening in the Air

  Preview

  The job applicant Dr. Verrick had brought over edged into my office, kicked the trash can, dropped a sheaf of papers and went down on his hands and knees to scoop them up. “I’ll take those,” Dr. Verrick said when he stood again. “Miss Kostis, Mr. Edwards.” He collected the forms Mr. Edwards was clutching and disappeared. He probably considered that a lavish and informative introduction.

  “Call me Colton,” the young man said with a tentative smile. “Colton Edwards.” He pulled a chair out of the corner, banged it into his own shins, and sat without, thank goodness, further mayhem.

  Asking if he was naturally clumsy or just nervous would probably scare him even more, so I repressed the question. Though I did wonder. Given his appearance, I was voting for natural clumsiness. He didn’t look like a college graduate; more like a farm boy from a West Texas high school, one who had shot up eight inches and two shoe sizes the previous year and hadn’t yet learned to manage his extra height. Shaggy blond hair fell over a wide forehead and framed an open, friendly face. The rest of him seemed to be trying to figure out what to do with his outsize hands and gigantic boots.

  Before I could even introduce myself, the interview was interrupted by a crash of furniture and a string of curses in the office next door. “Would you excuse me for just a moment?” I abandoned the job applicant and zipped around the corner to the next office. What had happened to Ben? Unlike this Mr. Edwards, he was not given to falling over the furniture.

  His office was built on much the same lines as mine: a tall narrow room partitioned off by flimsy temporary walls that looked shabby against the exquisite woodwork of the oak floor. That’s the kind of décor that happens when you turn the top story of a Victorian house into office space.

  He had knocked over a stack of three chairs in the corner of his office, his hair looked even more like a light brown bird’s nest than usual, and there was a quilt trailing from his desk to the floor. Ohio Star pattern.
>
  I’m used to adding up clues, though in the research division of the Center for Applied Topology the addition was likely to involve numbers like the square root of minus one rather than anything as simple as two plus two. “Ben. Were you walking around with a quilt over your head? And why?”

  “I’m trying to use Riemann surfaces to make light. Operating on the molecular level.”

  “I still don’t get the function of the quilt in this theorem.”

  “I thought maybe I had made light, only it was too dim to see in here.” He gestured at the sunlight pouring in through his office windows. “So I was trying to create a dark working space.”

  For a topologist at the Center, this was as close to making sense as it got. “Well, next time just sit in the supply closet, okay?” I was dying to know how he thought a Riemann surface would enable him to make light out of nothing, but the theoretical discussion would have to wait until I didn’t have a nervous job applicant in my office.

  When I got back, the young man facing me across the desk looked even more nervous. I couldn’t blame him. Before Ben’s little problem, Mr. Edwards had walked through a wall in a way that twisted space around on itself – and that was only the start of the tour. That, and signing the stack of non-disclosure forms and agreements that Dr. Verrick had carried off. Since the spook from the nameless three-letter agency had come to stay, there were a lot of new rules and procedures aimed at preserving the secrets of the Center for Applied Topology. If this guy had even glanced at the fine print on the forms he’d just signed, he would know that he had acceded to terms of service even worse than Microsoft’s. Whether or not he got hired, discussing what he was about to see here with anybody outside the Center would guarantee that he spent the next twenty years in jail, and not a nice American one, either.

  That was the kind of arm-twisting Lensky’s agency did for us. Before they’d taken a hands-on interest in the Center, our secrecy-preserving measures had been more ad hoc: Dr. Verrick warned research fellows not to pursue their research in public, yelled at us when we did so, and hired an exceptionally gifted fabulist to persuade anybody asking inconvenient questions that they hadn’t actually seen what they thought they saw. Annelise was, in my opinion, a much better security system than a bunch of signed forms, but that’s not how Washington does things.