Refraction

by Christopher Hinz

  As for the train attack, too many individuals had been involved to keep it under wraps. The government sprang leaks and the “Battle in Montana” was featured for several news cycles, putting Tau Nine-One under the spotlight. But the spin-doctors ultimately triumphed, and the government’s cover story held: the attack had been planned by a Tau employee with a grudge. Whether by nefarious behind-the-scenes action or simply Washington’s good fortune, blaming Héloise Hoke, the daughter of disgraced Colonel Jenkins, had been a winning move.

  So far she hadn’t been found and therefore couldn’t be questioned. Agents had traced her as far as Mexico City before the trail went cold. Supposedly.

  The interrogators wanted very badly to question Michael de Clerkin. But he hadn’t regained consciousness from slamming his head into that railing. The last Aiden had heard, he was being kept alive through a medically induced coma.

  Despite weeks of extensive searching over hundreds of thousands of wilderness acres, using high-tech tools ranging from drone and satellite scans to overflights with lidar and ground-penetrating radar, no clues to the location of the missing quiver had yet been unearthed. The storm that had pounded the area shortly after Aiden’s return from Elementary had wiped away tire tracks, footprints and other forensic evidence of where Michael might have hidden it.

  Perhaps that was just as well. Considering the trouble quiver had caused, Aiden figured it might not be such a bad thing if the stone remained lost. Maybe someone would uncover it again in another seventy thousand years.

  The searchers did find the gravesite of a woman who’d gone missing a while back. If and when Michael awoke, he could be charged with her death. Then again, it was unlikely the government would allow him within a thousand miles of a courthouse.

  Aiden was prohibited from contacting Keats, Rory and Chef. He had no intention of pushing the envelope and seeing just how serious the government was about putting him behind bars for violating the nondisclosure agreement. Besides, he had a hunch that everyone involved in the Battle in Montana would be under surveillance, their phones and computers tapped.

  Word of their fate reached him anyway. Two weeks ago, an innocuous spam email from an unknown address had arrived at the same time as a prepaid phone was mysteriously left at Darlene’s back door. The phone came loaded with the app Keats had used to access Icy Ned’s information about Maurice Pinsey. Aiden used the app to unveil the email’s encrypted data.

  It was a letter from Keats. Among other things, that was how Aiden learned of the fruitless search for the quiver.

  Keats had recovered from his injuries and was back working at the GAO. He, Rory and Chef also had endured long interrogations. But since the three of them were decorated ex-soldiers whose actions at the bridge had disrupted Michael’s plan, they’d been released too after signing nondisclosure agreements. Although the government wasn’t about to give them medals for taking down a band of vicious mercs, they did provide Rory with a new prosthetic limb. According to Keats, he’d promptly modified it.

  The helicopter pilot and the other surviving mercs had been caught but let go as well, their continuing silence bought with the promise of no jail time.

  Keats’ letter concluded with the latest on Jessie. After her release she’d returned to Nebraska, where she’d been scrapping with insurance adjusters trying to deny paying the policy on her burned home. Although government agents had swooped in and removed all traces of the slain mercs and her basement experiments, the insurance company was claiming that the fire was arson, with Jessie the likely culprit.

  Aiden wished her well.

  The wind picked up. A pile of fallen leaves swirled into a vortex on the trail before him. The air dampened. Soon the rain would come.

  He kept running.

  Thankfully, he was no longer plagued by subconsciously created chunkies, or by the green dream and its signature phrase. But some nights when he was drifting off, in those twilight moments between awareness and slumber, those last words from Elementary washed over him.

  All we know for certain is that you have the potential to become…

  Become what? Did the rest of that truncated sentence contain a more profound message? Was there still some unknown destiny he was slated to fulfill? It seemed likely. After all, he was the anomaly.

  But he was no longer a plurality as he’d been within the shroud and within Elementary, cognizant of his unique six-part consciousness. Passage through that last donut hole into Reality had refracted him back into a singularity – sort of the reverse of how white light through a prism dispersed into a rainbow of colors.

  Whenever he considered the analogy he was reminded of Cyan, whose intercession had enabled him to survive the shroud, the Corruption. In retrospect, the rumor he’d heard from Grant, that she’d become some kind of monk, seemed to make sense. That brief, tantalizing glimpse he’d been afforded into Meira Hirshfeld’s deepest self suggested that a monastic life of spirituality and enlightenment would prove attractive to her. Someday, he hoped to encounter her in the flesh here in the real world.

  Of all the quiver kids, he sensed they had the most in common.

  Naturally, there was a way for Aiden to possibly learn more about her, as well as answer many of the other questions still haunting him. He could create another cleaving, dive back into the Corruption and cross over into Elementary.

  Not today.

  He’d been mumbling that rejoinder frequently over these past months, whenever he found himself seriously considering a return. Eventually, he might indeed do it. But for now, the reassuring solidity of a normal life here on planet Earth with Darlene and Leah was all he desired.

  That life incorporated some major changes. He’d been in freefall for way too many years. Since coming back, he’d stopped drinking, other than an occasional beer or a glass of wine. He’d also gained the confidence to talk himself into a new job, one with more responsibility and greater promise. Beyond that, he was seriously considering a return to college to get a degree. Maybe in philosophy. Maybe physics.

  “Character building,” Darlene called the change she saw in him. She sensed his reluctance to talk about what had happened during his time away and hadn’t pressed him, even though she obviously suspected he’d been involved in what had transpired at Tau Nine-One. But for now she was satisfied that whatever her adoptive sibling had undergone, it served as a healing experience.

  The skies unleashed. Waves of droplets splattered Aiden’s cheeks. He raised the hood of his sweatshirt, turned his back on the storm and sprinted for home.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A hearty shout-out to the dedicated editorial nucleus of Angry Robot Books, Eleanor, Gemma and Sam, whose efforts qualitatively improved this novel. As always, a huge thanks to Etan, publisher, entrepreneur and maestro of mind sports, and to Mark at Trident Media Group, whose resolute efforts ensure smooth sailing.

  CHAPTER 1

  The assignor had a hunch the meeting would be unpleasant. He wondered if the young woman entering his office already knew the outcome.

  LeaMarsa de Host wore a black skirt and sweater that looked woven from rags, clothing surely lacking even basic hygiene nanos. Whether she was making some sort of anti-Corporeal statement or whether she always dressed like a drug-addled misfit from the Helio Age was not apparent from her file.

  The assignor smiled and rose to shake her hand. She ignored the courtesy. He sat and motioned her to the chair across from his desk.

  “Welcome to Pannis Corp, LeaMarsa.”

  “Thrilled to be here.”

  Her words bled sarcasm. No surprise. She registered highly alienated on the Ogden Tripartite Thought Ordination. Most members of the bizarre minority to which she belonged were outliers on the OTTO scale.

  “Would you like something to drink?” he asked, motioning to his Starbucks 880, a conglomeration of tubes and spouts. The dispenser was vintage twenty-first-century, a gift from the assignor’s wife for his thirtieth birthday. “Five hundred and one
varieties, hot or cold.”

  “I’ll have a juggernaut cocktail with Europa cryospice. Hold the cinnamon.”

  “I’m sorry, that one’s not in the menu.”

  She grimaced with disappointment, which of course was the whole point of requesting such a ridiculously exotic drink.

  He unflexed his wafer to max screen size and toggled through her file. An analysis of her test results appeared.

  “The Pannis researchers at Jamal Labs were most impressed with your talents. You are indeed a gifted psionic.”

  She flopped into the chair and leaned back. An erratic thumping reverberated through the office. It took the assignor a moment to realize she was kicking the underside of his desk with the toe of her flats.

  He contained his annoyance. Someday, he hoped to have enough seniority to avoid working with her type. And this young woman in particular…

  She was thin, with long dark hair hanging to her shoulders, grossly uncouth. His preadolescent daughter still wore her hair that long, but who beyond the teen years allowed such draping strands, and LeaMarsa de Host was twenty three. Her skin was as pale as the froth of a milkshake and her eyes hard blue gems, constantly probing. She smelled of natural body scents. He didn’t care for the odor.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. “Do I get a starship?”

  “At this time, Pannis Corp feels that such an assignment would not be in the best interests of all involved.”

  “What’s the matter? Afraid?”

  He’d been trained to ignore such a response. “Pannis has concluded that your particular range of abilities would not be conducive to the self-contained existence of stellar voyaging.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It boils down to a matter of cooperation.”

  “Haven’t I cooperated with your tests? I took two months out of my life. I practically lived in those hideous Jamal Labs of yours.”

  “And we’re certainly pleased by your sacrifice. But when I’m speaking of cooperation, I’m referring to factors of which you may not even be conscious. Psionic abilities exist primarily in strata beneath the level of daily awareness.”

  “Really? Never would have guessed.”

  He paved over the snark. “You may wish to behave cooperatively but find your subconscious acting in contrary ways. And trust me, a year or more in a starship is a far cry from what you underwent in our labs.”

  “You’re speaking from experience?”

  “Actually, no. I’ve never been farther out than Luna.”

  “Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She stared at him so intently that he worried she was trying to read his mind. The fear was irrational. Still, like most of the population, he was categorized as a psionic receptor, susceptible to psychic forces, albeit mildly.

  He forced attention back to the wafer.

  “Pannis is willing to offer you a choice of more than a dozen positions, all with good salary ranges. And the benefits of working for a mega are remarkable.”

  “What’s the most exciting position?”

  “Exciting? Why, I don’t know.” He tapped the wafer, scanned pages. “Ah yes, here’s one that sounds quite exciting. Archeological assistant, digging up ninteenth century frontier cultures in the American southwest in search of lost caches of gold and silver.”

  “Blizzards?”

  He looked up from the wafer. “Pardon?”

  “Do you have anything with blizzards? I like storms.”

  Storms? Dear god, these people were a trial, and more trouble than they were worth. Still, he understood the economics behind the current frenzy among Pannis and the other megas to employ them.

  Only last week the latest discovery attributed to one of LeaMarsa’s kind had been announced, a metallic compound found in the swamps of the dwarf planet Buick Skylark. The mega funding that expedition, Koch-Fox, was touting the compound as key ingredient for a new construction material impervious to the effects of sunlight.

  He scanned more pages on the wafer. “Yes, here’s a position where storms factor in. The south polar regions, an industrial classification. You would utilize your abilities to locate ultra-deep mineral deposits.”

  “While freezing my butt off? No thanks. Anyway, no need to read further. I’ve made my decision.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I choose a starship.”

  The assignor couldn’t hide his disappointment. “Again, you must understand that a starship is not in the best interests of…”

  He trailed off as the door slid open. An immaculately dressed man with dark hair and a weightlifter’s build strolled in. He wore a gray business suit with matching headband. A pewter-colored vest rose to his chin and a dwarf lion perched on his shoulder, a male judging by its thick mane. The cat couldn’t have weighed more than two pounds. A genejob that small cost more than the assignor earned in a year.

  The man was a high-ranking Pannis official, the InterGlobal Security VP, a rank rarely seen on this floor of the Manhattan office complex. His name was Renfro Zoobondi and he was hardcore, an up-and-comer known and feared throughout the corporation. The fact that Zoobondi was here filled the assignor with dread.

  A black mark, he thought bitterly. I’m not handling this situation correctly and my file will soon reflect that.

  Zoobondi must have been monitoring their conversation, which suggested that LeaMarsa was even more important than her dazzling psionic ratings indicated. The VP was here to rectify the assignor’s failure.

  He won’t come right out and criticize me. That’s not the Pannis way. He’ll say I’ve done a fair job under difficult circumstances and then see to it I’m given a black mark.

  Zoobondi sat on the edge of the assignor’s desk and faced LeaMarsa. The diminutive lion emitted a tinny growl.

  “You are being uncooperative, Mizz de Host.” The VP’s voice was deep and commanding.

  She shrugged. He regarded her for a long moment then turned to the assignor.

  “Access vessel departures. Look for a minor mission, something leaving within the next few weeks.”

  The assignor did as asked while cloaking surprise. Is he actually considering such an unstable individual for a starship?

  Zoobondi wagged a finger at LeaMarsa. “Understand me, young lady, you will not be given a major assignment. But Pannis is prepared to gratify.”

  The assignor called up the file. He scanned the lengthy list, narrowed down the possibilities.

  “The Bolero Grand, two-year science project, galactic archaeology research. Crew of sixty-eight, including two lytics–”

  “Perhaps something smaller,” Zoobondi suggested, favoring her with a smile. “We want Mizz de Host to enjoy the special bonding that can develop aboard vessels with a minimal number of shipmates.”

  “Yes, of course. How about the Regis, crew of six? Fourteen-month mission to Pepsi One in the HD 40307 system. They’re laying the groundwork for new colonies and request a psionic to help select the best geographic locations on the semi-liquid surface.”

  “Perfect. Does that work for you, LeaMarsa?”

  “No. Sounds boring.”

  “It does, doesn’t it,” Zoobondi said with a smile. “I’d certainly get bored traipsing across a world of bubbling swamps looking for seismic stability.”

  The assignor was confused. Something was going on here that he didn’t understand. If Zoobondi wanted her to accept the Regis mission, he would have made it sound more attractive.

  “Any other possibilities?” the VP asked.

  “Yes. Starship Alchemon, eighteen-month mission to the Lalande 21185 system. Investigation of an anomalous biosignature discovered by an unmanned probe. Crew of eight, including a lytic.”

  Zoobondi shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?” LeaMarsa demanded.

  He hesitated, as if working on a rebuttal. The assignor understood.

  He wants her to accept this mission. He’s
leading her along. The assignor had been with Pannis long enough to recognize applied reverse psychology, which meant that this meeting with LeaMarsa was part of a high-level setup.

  It was possible he wouldn’t get a black mark after all. “Departing lunar orbit in seven days,” he continued, following the VP’s lead. “They’ll be landing on the fifth planet, Sycamore, where the probe found evidence of bacterial life. It’s a violently unstable world, locked in perpetual storms.”

  He glanced up at LeaMarsa, expecting the presence of storms to produce a reaction. He wasn’t disappointed.

  “Sounds perfect. I want it.”

  The VP adopted a thoughtful look, as if pretending to consider her demand. The dwarf lion rubbed its mane against his ear, seeking attention. Zoobondi ignored the animal.

  “Where do I sign?” LeaMarsa pressed.

  “Would you please wait in the lobby.”

  She strode out with that stiffly upright gait that seemed to characterize so many psionics. Renfro Zoobondi held his tongue until the door whisked shut behind her.

  “You’ll take care of the details, make sure she’s aboard?”

  It wasn’t really a question.

  “Yes sir. But I do have some concerns.”

  The assignor hesitated, unsure how forthright he should be. This was obviously a setup. For reasons above his security clearance, Pannis wanted LeaMarsa on that ship. But dropping a powerful and moody psionic into such a lengthy mission fell outside the guidelines of standard policy, not to mention being enticing bait to some Corporeal prosecuting attorney looking to make a name. He didn’t want to be the Pannis fall guy if things went wrong.

  “Sir, I feel obligated to point out that LeaMarsa de Host is no ordinary psionic. The Jamal Labs report classifies her in the upper one-ten-thousandth of one percent for humans with such abilities.”

  “Your point?”

  “There are a number of red flags. And the OTTO classifies her as–”