Trespassers: a science-fiction novel

by Todd Wynn

  Exhibit B: His jaw. It was still sore from where Jin had sucker punched him . . . with a closed fist. The blow had taken him completely off guard and had dulled his reflexes long enough for Jin to overtake him. Bruner grimaced as he relived the experience. Five years ago, when Bruner was in better shape, there’d’ve been no way this kid could have taken him down. Bruner analyzed the struggle more carefully. He was able to recall the kid’s clumsy moves. As amateurish as they were, they showed signs of training. But it wasn’t training from any federal agency. Agents were taught open-handed strikes and martial-arts-based takedowns. Can you really identify someone’s training just from one scuffle? Bruner thought. Of course you can. He had hit the training mats with hundreds of fellow agents and servicemen back in the day, maybe thousands. He knew the style. And that style certainly didn’t include sucker punching someone in the face without properly identifying yourself. Okay, Bruner conceded, no handcuffs and no federal training . . . what’s next?

  Exhibit C: His badge. Seconds before being attacked, Bruner had flipped his badge perfectly and had clearly identified himself as a federal agent. In fact, as he thought back on the incident, it seemed that identifying himself as an agent was exactly what incited the man to attack him. Bruner added this to the pile of evidence.

  Exhibit D: Ernesto Arturo Miranda. A curious image to have pop in one’s head, he was a man twice convicted of kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery, whose first conviction was set aside by the US Supreme Court because he was not advised of his rights after his arrest. That landmark ruling led to the Miranda warnings, which were taught to every law-enforcement agency in America. It became ingrained in every agent’s natural thought process. Miranda warnings were automatically read to anyone taken into custody. The only way Bruner would have been attacked in such a way after identifying himself as a federal agent would be if he were suspected of being a dangerous man who was impersonating a federal agent. That’s the only explanation that made sense. However, if he was suspected of impersonating a federal agent, he would have certainly been arrested, and he would have immediately been read his Miranda rights. But that never happened.

  Bruner watched Jin and Lambert walk up the drive and out of sight. He wanted to file a report on this incident, but you don’t file a report about a misunderstanding with another agency.

  As Jin and Lambert returned to the farmhouse, Stewart was easing into a chair in the living room as if he planned to kick back and stay awhile.

  “You realize I can’t officially help you sneak a fugitive off the planet, right?” Stewart said, without looking at anyone in particular. The others were still filing into the room and finding their places.

  “I’ll say it again,” Dexim replied, as he slid into a chair across from Stewart. “She’s not a fugitive. The Mundle are playing word games to manipulate your people.”

  “Yeah, fine,” Stewart said. “But if I get caught with her, she’s a fugitive.”

  “Fair enough.” Dexim nodded.

  Lambert quietly sized up the room. He identified Dexim and Jin as the two main threats. While Lyntic was probably the fiercest and most capable (after all, she had single-handedly rescued the rest of her team back at the Juniper Hotel), she had proved she wasn’t a threat, since she had used nonlethal force on the bounty hunter and had let Mindy go. Dexim, however, seemed to have a distain for Stewart’s job and a personal grudge against Stewart himself.

  Jin was a whole different creature. He wanted to be benevolent, but an underlying fear threatened to take control of him at any second. That made him dangerous. He was the one who attacked Bruner.

  “Our first obstacle would be the Limestone Group,” Stewart said, as he looked to Web. Web was already opening his computer as he took a seat. He had complete access to Home right on his desktop, and he pulled up what he needed.

  “Yeah, they’re tracking her all right,” Web groaned. “The heart-signal tracker was removed from the vault this morning at 11:03 A.M.”

  “How do we know that’s for her?” Dexim said.

  “When’s the last time it was moved out of storage?” Stewart asked Web.

  “Uhh . . . never,” he said, reading from the screen.

  Stewart nodded. His point had been proved. “If they took the heart-signal tracker out of the vault, they have a heart-signal to go along with it. That means they’re out there searching right now, and they should find her in no time. This thing’s already over.”

  “Not necessarily,” Tobi interjected, stepping out of the corner. “Heart-signal trackers have a limited range, and they’re very touchy.”

  “Heart signals don’t fade,” Web said.

  “No, they don’t,” Tobi agreed, “but it’s more complicated than that. If Sarazha was the only person on a barren planet, then the heart-signal tracker would pick her up with no problem. She couldn’t make a move without it registering. But every organism has an effect on the tracker. Anything that emits a signal will dilute its clarity. If you add a hundred people to that barren planet, it will make her heart signal appear weaker to the tracking device, because it has to sift through all those frequencies. With billions of people on this planet, you have to be almost right on top of the signal to distinguish it. On top of that, radio, microwave, and radar frequencies clog the receptors even more.”

  “So, what does that mean?” Stewart asked.

  “It means they would have to know where to start,” Tobi explained.

  “And what’s the range?” Dexim inquired.

  “It depends on the unit.” Tobi turned to Web. “Do you know what it looks like?”

  Web turned the computer screen to show a photo. Tobi leaned in to take a look.

  “Double cylinder, reverberating model,” Tobi mumbled to himself, “not the best, but it’ll do.”

  As he straightened back up, Tobi noticed the others still waiting for the prognosis.

  “Oh.” He remembered the question. “About five to ten miles, I would think.”

  “That gives us some time,” Dexim said.

  “What about your tracker?” Stewart asked. “What’s the range on it?”

  “About three miles,” Tobi replied.

  “Then we’d need to know where to start, too,” Stewart said. He looked to Dexim, “I need a moment with my team.” Dexim agreed and called his group out of the room. With Web, Lambert, and Mindy circled around him, Stewart laid it all out.

  “This is a big thing,” he said. “We’re way out of bounds with this. How I see it, we have three options.” He counted them on his fingers. “We go Home and stay out of it.” He put up another finger. “We call Home and let them know what’s going on and assist in handing this girl over to the Mundle—in which case we get credit for saving the planet and I move into the big office at the end of the hall . . .Web, you’ll get my old office . . .”

  “Or?” Mindy asked.

  “Or we help them . . . we help them find this missing girl, we help them sneak her off the planet, and we do it all under the Limestone Deposit Survey Group’s nose. Worst-case scenario, we start an intergalactic incident that ends up destroying the planet in the process. Best-case scenario, nobody knows we did anything . . . and we probably get yelled at by George either way. What do you think?”

  In the kitchen, Lyntic could see the smallest glimpse of Stewart as he spoke with his team.

  “He’s looking for an opportunity to use us,” Dexim whispered.

  Lyntic shifted her eyes from the sliver of Stewart over to her brother. “And what . . . you’re looking for an opportunity to help him?”

  “I’m not saying this situation can’t work. I’m just saying we can’t trust him as much as you want to.”

  “Whether you trust him or not,” she said, “he’s a valuable asset to our mission.”

  It was a good try, but Dexim could see she wasn’t concerned with Stewart’s value to the mission. She still had feelings for him. Stewart arrived at the kitchen.

  “Okay,” Stewart said. “We
’re in.”

  “Hold on.” Dexim caught him before he could return to the living room. “Before we get started—” He slapped a quoret on the counter.

  “You’re not serious,” Stewart said, as he picked up the cube. It was expertly crafted, made of a wood that could pass as indigenous on most inhabited planets. Maple was the wood it was most likely to be mistaken for on Earth. It wasn’t the wood that was concerning Stewart, though. It was the technology that lay inside. Stewart wasn’t afraid of the quoret. He had been successful in defeating one in a practice drill back at Home. A triangle had been placed in a box and participants were asked, What’s in the box? The first seven agents were all unable to lie and said, a triangle. Stewart, however, simply said, air. He found that focusing on the honesty of his answer allowed him to slip past unaffected. He would do the same here.

  Dexim was going to ask whether Stewart intended to turn Sara over to the Mundle. It was a fair question, but Stewart couldn’t answer it honestly. There was no telling what might happen. And if push came to shove, he might be in a position where he had to turn her over. Stewart had no intention of betraying them, but he couldn’t say it wasn’t a possibility. He would have to keep that concealed.

  Web, Mindy, and Lambert collected around him as he switched the quoret on.

  “Go ahead,” Stewart said. No matter what Dexim asked, Stewart would have to find a truthful answer that Dexim would want to hear. Dexim’s mind would assume the rest. Stewart nodded that he was ready.

  “Are you still in love with my sister?” This, Stewart was not ready for. He set the quoret back on the counter.

  “You’re in over your head,” Stewart growled. “The Limestone Deposit Survey Group is looking for this girl right now. And they’re good. The only shot you have at pulling this off is me. Now if you’re done screwing around, I’m going to get to work.” He stormed off to the living room.

  Web got on his computer and pulled up Sarazha Bant’s visitor file. She had checked in as a research student, just as Dexim said.

  “Sara Baker,” Web said, “that’s the name she was using, according to the file.”

  Stewart ordered Web to start a telephone feeler search for the name Sara Baker.

  “How wide?” Web asked.

  “Let’s start with the town here and see what we get.”

  Web printed a list of business names and numbers for the town of Juniper. These were divvied up among members of both teams, who systematically made calls asking for Sara Baker. It took only fifteen minutes before Mindy got a hit from a hardware store.

  “Nathan's Hardware,” she reported. “I told the lady I was looking for Sara Baker, and she said she wasn’t in. I asked when she would be back, and the lady said she expected her anytime.”

  Within ten minutes, Stewart’s government-issue SUV and Dexim’s borrowed Ford Edge were on the road and closing in on Nathan's Hardware. The team members were mixed and matched in the two vehicles for cohesion—which was a polite way of saying that each team wanted to keep an eye on the other.

  “You can restore a memory, even after eight months?” Mindy asked, from the back seat of the Ford Edge.

  “Sure,” Tobi replied from the front passenger’s seat. “It’s just that she will have developed so many new memories in that span that it could be difficult to convince her to let go of them and return to a life that she doesn’t know at all.”

  Web nodded along. As a technical specialist, he was well versed in this subject.

  “What do you mean, convince her to let go of them?” Mindy asked.

  “You can’t restore her memory without her permission,” Lyntic said from the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, she has to be involved in the process, and there’s no way to do it against her will,” Web explained. This time Tobi was the one nodding along.

  “So what happens if she doesn’t want to do it?” Mindy asked.

  “We convince her,” Lyntic replied, sounding already annoyed by the possibility.

  “But why wouldn’t someone want to have their memory restored?” Mindy said, suddenly feeling she was the only one in the car who didn’t understand.

  “When her memory is restored, there’s a strong possibility that all the memories she has collected in the last eight months—since the blocking—will be destroyed,” Tobi said.

  “So, she gains her whole life but loses the last eight months?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a tough choice?” Mindy said.

  “Unless she has made any new memories that she really wants to hold on to,” Web interjected.

  Lambert parked the SUV along the curb in front of Nathan's Hardware, with the Ford Edge pulling in just behind it. Stewart and Dexim entered the store and located Mr. Nathan behind the counter.

  “What can I do for you?” Mr. Nathan asked.

  Stewart flashed his credentials. “I’m Stewart Faulkner from the Limestone Deposit Survey Group, and I’d like to speak with Miss Sara Baker. Is she available?”

  “No, I’m afraid she’s not here.”

  “Do you know where I could find her?” Stewart asked.

  “No . . . Limestone Deposits did you say?”

  “Yes, we have a crew working in the area. We’re taking radio measurements of shell densities and transposing them against densities recorded from past years’ measurements to analyze any significant historical shifts in calcification patterns that indicate a density trend—”

  “Uh, I think she might be out with a boy named Jeremy Borden,” Mr. Nathan interjected, falling victim to the power of limestone boredom. “I think I have his father’s number. Why don’t I just give him a call and see if I can find out where she is.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Stewart said, sliding his card across the counter. “Just have her give me a call when she returns. And, it was Jeremy Borden, did you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mr. Nathan studied the card as Stewart and Dexim exited. “And that’s how it’s done,” Stewart said, as they stepped onto the sidewalk.

  Lambert appeared from the alley and gave a thumbs-up. “I put a box.”

  “Good,” Stewart said. Lambert was referring to a flow box, which he had just installed. Its purpose was to intercept all incoming calls for Nathan's Hardware and redirect them to Mindy’s cell phone. If the Limestone Group tried to perform its own telephone feeler search, Nathan’s Hardware would prove to be a dead end.

  Web ran a search on Jeremy Borden, finding a home address and a cell phone.

  “Where’s the cell phone?” Stewart asked.

  A quick trace showed the phone to be at Jeremy’s home address.

  “Let’s go get him and see what he knows,” Stewart said. “With any luck, she’ll be right there waiting for us.”

  33

  Visiting Camp Whatever

  “Were you really that small?” Sara asked, as she sat Indian-style on Jeremy’s bed, with his laptop in her lap. She was flipping through his childhood photos—pictures his mother had saved in a digital photo album. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning against Jeremy in such a way that if he were to move, she would tumble onto the floor.

  “I was younger—I was only like twelve,” he said, as he rubbed her back.

  “Yeah, but you were still small for twelve.”

  “That was before my growth spurt.”

  Sara broke into laughter as she came to a picture of him dressed as a pirate.

  “That was Halloween,” he countered. “Haven’t you ever dressed up for Hal—” An awkward pause hung in the air.

  “I’m sure I have,” she finally said. “And I’m sure I looked almost as funny as you.”

  “What’s funny about me?”

  “Pirates don’t wear sneakers,” she said.

  “Oh, big deal.”

  “Or digital watches.” She pointed at the screen.

  “Next picture.”

  Somewhere in the middle of the Niagara Fall
s photos, Sara mentioned that he could give her a much better back massage without the awkward bra strap in the way.

  “You can unhook it, if you want,” she said.

  A quarter of a second later, the bra strap fell loose inside her shirt.

  “Wow,” she said, “that was fast.”

  “Yes, I’m an expert with bras,” he said, making her laugh, “not the kind with girls in them, though—the kind on mannequins.”

  “You date a lot of mannequins?”

  “No, but I undress them. My Aunt owns a ladies’ clothing shop in Canton. So I have plenty of experience changing out the displays. I could have you undressed in twelve seconds.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Do you have a stopwatch I could borrow?” she asked. She put all her weight against him now, and if he knew what was good for him, he would lean down and kiss her. This was finally a signal he picked up. He slid his hand up the back of her neck and combed his fingers into her hair. But just as he leaned down—

  Ding-dong. The doorbell rang. He straightened back up and took hold of her shoulders so she wouldn’t tump onto the floor. Jeremy made his way down the hall, and Sara followed, hooking her bra back as she walked. Peering out the thin window beside the front door, Jeremy saw Mindy standing alone—the picture of innocence.

  “It’s some lady,” he said.

  “You don’t know her?”

  “No.” Jeremy cracked open the door, and before he could even get a word out—

  “Hi, I’m Mindy Craddock, from the Limestone Deposit Survey Group.” She flashed her credential. “I’d like to speak with you and Sara about getting her memory back.”