Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles)

by Jody Wallace

  Raniya’s expression finally returned to an impassive mask. With seeming reluctance, she allowed Cullin to show her his tablet. They spoke in scientific lingo for a minute before both lifted their heads to stare at Adam.

  “He’s got a greater instability than the pod structure—almost as unstable as a daemon,” Cullin said. “He reads almost like a shade when we stimulate his electrons.”

  “I didn’t expect that,” Raniya said. “The morphing in the pod and the daemons—is that shade fusion, too?”

  “Have you seen him eating people?” Claire snapped. “Obviously he’s not a shade.”

  “Obviously he’s not completely human,” Raniya explained, regarding Adam with her large, unblinking eyes.

  “How would you know if you’ve never run this on a human before?” he asked, voice scratchy.

  “We assessed a number of species when we formed a baseline to compare to the daemons,” Raniya said. “I’m sorry, but the test proves that you were wherever the shades and daemons come from, and it transformed you on a molecular level. There’s no other explanation.”

  “He was on the other side,” Cullin agreed. “That’s where he was the past two years. How he got back here after the rift between the dimensions was sealed—and why he came back—is the mystery.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “You’re not a daemon and you’re sure as hell not a shade.” Claire rubbed her blaster band while Kenna drove the Jeep down the snowy road. She’d wanted to laser that gasbag Cullin in the face so bad, but Raniya had been in the way. “I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen you…”

  She almost said naked and stopped herself. Kenna didn’t need to know that. “I’ve seen you eat regular food.”

  “Of course he’s not a monster,” Kenna agreed. “Those Shipborn are crazy.”

  Adam had been silent since they’d left the compound. He drooped in the backseat like someone who’d believed the crap those scientists had fed them. “It would explain where I’ve been. We all know I jumped through the hole. It’s on video. If I got trapped on the other side…”

  “Priiit will set them straight when she wakes up. Your wavelengths, or whatever the shit they were measuring, are like an entity because you got shade touched. It’s obvious. Hope she’s not too mad that I shot her.”

  “I’m sure they took the shade touch into account.” Adam had a lot more confidence in them than she did. “We need to face the fact that I’m not normal. I pass as human under regular scrutiny but not on every level.”

  “I don’t think we should tell anyone this,” Kenna interrupted. “People will use it as an excuse to hurt Adam. He was sent back to us for a reason.”

  “I’m not going to lie,” he argued. “What if there’s something wrong with me?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Claire insisted. “The scientists were guessing, not confirming.” His belief that he was stronger than he should be came back to her, and she wondered. But only for a second.

  Kenna let up on the accelerator, as if slower travel would give them time to figure this out. There wasn’t enough time in the world for that. “What do you think the scientists will tell people?”

  “They’ll tell Niko, Ship, and the trine, not the Terrans. That’s the way their information flows. Then the Shipborn will decide whether it’s covered by the treaty with the Global Union. As for us…” She was about to give Kenna and Adam orders about how to handle the bombshell the scientists had dropped when her headset crackled.

  “Claire, I’d like to request your presence at City Hall as soon as possible.”

  Elizabeth Newcome had hailed her. Before today, Claire had had no idea the mayor used a sensor array. To contact someone via sensor, you had to be implanted with Shipborn endo-organics, and it was dumbfounding that Elizabeth had allowed that.

  “Why do you need me?” If Elizabeth had already heard Adam was some wacked-out hybrid and intended to banish him, Claire was going to turn right back around and junk punch whichever Shipborn had been the blabbermouth.

  “Daniel is here and he says he knows why the shades have been showing up all through the buffer zone.”

  Daniel “The Asswipe” Kravitz was their mole with the warlords. He was such an unmitigated jackhole that nobody suspected he would ever be on the side of the semi-government.

  “Are you kidding me?” Claire scoffed. “Kravitz thinks he knows what the Shipborn haven’t been able to figure out for six months?”

  Kenna and Adam stared at her—they hadn’t heard what she’d heard, but they could hear her response.

  “He won’t tell me anything else until we’re together. Says he doesn’t want any information leaks,” Elizabeth said, her voice quavering slightly.

  She’d never heard the older woman sound so rattled. “Be right there.”

  Adam, Kenna, and she made it to City Hall in record time. They glimpsed Kravitz’s team in the mess hall, reminding her it was nearly lunchtime. She’d hated staying associated with his felonious ass, but he owed them a lifetime of favors after what he’d done, and she intended to collect. So far, he hadn’t betrayed them again, but she couldn’t bring herself to trust him completely.

  When they arrived at the conference room, Claire convinced Kenna to remain in the hallway and ensure their safety.

  “Nobody gets in without my say-so,” Kenna agreed, holding her rifle carefully across her body.

  Inside were several people Claire didn’t recognize and several she did. “If you’re going make me come to meetings when I’m supposed to be eating, you need to get these things catered,” she told Elizabeth.

  “I traveled all night to get here with this information. Food can wait, Lawson.” Kravitz, a big man with dark, thinning hair and a military bearing, stood at the head of the conference room next to the screen. He wore a cast-off naval uniform in blue camo. One of his men fiddled with a projector.

  “Bet you ate,” she grumbled.

  “Why is Alsing with you?” Elizabeth, despite how unnerved she’d seemed on the comm, looked fresh and feisty. She touched her temple, where the sensor array was implanted, with distaste. She’d wrapped the wire extension around her neat grey hair like a headband.

  “I didn’t have time to stash him anywhere,” Claire lied. The truth was, it already felt natural to take him wherever she went. He wasn’t an accessory or a sycophant but a buttress. A partner. It hadn’t occurred to her to leave him behind today, despite the likelihood that he’d again bring up the sex she wanted to pretend hadn’t happened.

  “I can leave,” Adam offered mildly. Granted, Elizabeth hadn’t been snide to him, like at the beginning of the week. “I can get everyone lunch, if you want.”

  “You stay. I’ll order us food.” Claire tapped her sensor array, located one of her people, and arranged for a meal. She had to admit, sensor arrays were handier than walkies. They shared geo-coordinates and other details in addition to providing a link to Ship and its databases.

  Approved by Kenna, Elizabeth’s aides came and went from the room. At Elizabeth’s side was Sophia Bettles, from the vigil last night. As one of Riverbend’s council people, she’d been asked to join Elizabeth’s staff to acclimate the new Chanute citizens. Two folks Claire didn’t recognize also sat at the table—a Native American guy with lots of wrinkles and a black guy dressed in a Hawaiian shirt with a thermal under it.

  She addressed Kravitz first. “What do you supposedly know about the shade deaths? Masterminded somehow by the warlords, is my guess.” She’d love a reason for the Shipborn to clean out that nest of vipers.

  “I’ll get to that,” he said, his normal obnoxiousness subdued. “When Ward, here, figures out the projector.”

  The other guy glared. “It’s an old piece of crap, and I don’t even know if it works with this laptop. I don’t see why we can’t use Shipborn tech.”

  “To get our hands on that, we’d have had to tell the Shipborn everything,” Kravitz explained, not so patiently. “We need to
be in control of the information flow.”

  “I’m not going to hide anything from the Shipborn,” Claire warned. “You know that.” She’d come a long, long way from the woman who’d fled the Shipborn two years ago while trying to save her planet. Now she was hiding the scientists’ wild theory about Adam from her Terran counterparts instead of the reverse.

  “Today’s the day I’m ready to go to the aliens myself, but first we Terrans are going to discuss it. Do I have everyone’s agreement?”

  “I agree,” Elizabeth said, staring at Claire, the only other person in the room who had a sensor array. “Sheriff?”

  She considered linking Ship in right this minute, just to be an ass, but decided against it. “Fine. I’ll hear you out.”

  Satisfied, Kravitz strode up to Adam and inspected him from head to toe. “So you’re the Chosen One. You look soft.”

  The old Native American guy frowned as he watched the greeting. Elizabeth steepled her fingers, and Mrs. Bettes—Bitty—tsked.

  “And you look like someone who wouldn’t randomly pick a fight,” Adam answered. He didn’t smile at Kravitz, but he didn’t tense up or bluster. Could it be he didn’t give a shit about the testosterone display? Hell, maybe he wasn’t human. “What is it you’re hoping to achieve by calling me soft? Let me know so I can get it out of the way and we can move on.”

  Kravitz appeared startled for a minute before he laughed and shook Adam’s hand. A real shake, Claire noticed, not one where he tried to crush the other guy’s fingers.

  After introducing David Villa from the Acapulco colony and Cory Fox from Fort Berthold, Kravitz turned to the whole table. “I’ve just come from Chicago. I need to share some information that the survivalists have gathered about the shade deaths.”

  Claire picked a chair near Elizabeth, to keep an eye on her. She still wasn’t convinced Elizabeth hadn’t been the one to summon Ditmer Sieders, though Elizabeth swore she hadn’t. Adam sat on Claire’s other side.

  “You got this through your informants?” she asked.

  Kravitz functioned as a dealer, selling Shipborn curatives, Terran tech, and other hard-to-get items to survivalist groups, pretending to be one of them. Camp Chanute kept him supplied with trade goods; he kept them supplied with information they could use to protect themselves from Chicago.

  “One in particular. This person was in Chicago when the nexus opened, working for…let’s just say surveillance. She had access to good intel, so she stayed. When I found her, she agreed to help us.”

  Claire sympathized with anyone involuntarily stuck in Chicago for three years, out of a sense of duty. The voluntary ones she didn’t have much sympathy for.

  “You all know there are a lot of communities who don’t trust the Shipborn for shit,” Kravitz continued. “They won’t share info, won’t accept humanitarian aid—fuckers prefer to steal it. Most hide out in the buffer zone. Chicago’s a hub of sorts, a center for a network of anti-alien, anti-government types.”

  “A hub. You’re saying they’re organized,” Claire said, unsurprised. “More organized than you’ve previously led us to believe.” She spared him a mean glare, and he just smirked. “What does it have to do with the shade deaths?”

  “They do share intelligence with each other. They have ways of delivering it that the Shipborn don’t pick up on. Couriers. Radio codes. Some are supposedly using pigeons, but whatever. Their shade death reports tell a different story than the Shipborn have been telling us.”

  “You’re just now getting this from your informants?” Elizabeth asked, eyebrows raised. “This sounds long-standing.”

  “I have to protect my sources,” Kravitz explained. “Particularly this one.” An odd expression crossed his features. “She’s in a vulnerable position. Besides, we all know shit has changed recently. All these shade deaths in the buffer zones and daemons killing and eating people for the fun of it, not to mention Alsing showing up out of the blue. They’re starting to piece it together.”

  “Piece what together?” Claire asked.

  Kravitz, despite the fact he rarely seemed to care about anyone’s feelings, glanced at Fox and Villa with sympathy. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the small attacks aren’t random. They lead up to bigger attacks in an identifiable pattern. Acapulco, Riverbend, and Fort Berthold weren’t the first. The survivalists just didn’t report the others.”

  “Are you saying this could have been predicted and we could have prevented the attacks?” Villa, the black guy, demanded. “Do the Shipborn know about this?”

  “Nobody knows why this is happening,” Claire gritted out. “Don’t any of you dare suggest otherwise. I’m telling you right now the Shipborn wouldn’t hide this from us. Why the hell would they benefit from shades eating us and becoming stronger?”

  “Yeah, I don’t think they know.” Kravitz leaned on the table, braced on his arms. “Shipborn sensors can’t pick some stuff up. Parks—the main warlord guy I’ve been surveilling—has some sensor arrays that don’t connect to the Shipborn network. They’ve been jury rigging them, changing them around.”

  “They have firewalled comms?” Sensor arrays could be disconnected from Ship’s network and used to communicate on the planet’s surface, as well as to run scans and analyses, but you had to know how to do it…or steal ones that had been rigged. “How’d Parks get his hands on those? The Shipborn don’t dole out arrays like they do curatives.”

  Kravitz shrugged. “I had to trade them something good to get me in.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “Daniel, that wasn’t one of the items we authorized you to sell.”

  “It helped keep you and your people safe from the warlords, didn’t it? But it’s not Chicago you need to worry about right now. It’s the shades.” Kravitz checked on the guy with the laptop. “Ward, have you got the fucking projector working yet?”

  The other man finally activated the machine. A shaky terrain map of the western half of the Americas decorated the screen, covered by small and large dots. If those dots were all shade hits, a lot were news to Claire, and she checked Ship’s maps frequently. Ward dimmed the lights so they could see better.

  “Here’s the area with known shade hordes,” Kravitz said, waving a hand over the blotches on the west coast, “and these red ones are the small attacks. When the little attacks get closer and closer to the center until they hit the motherlode, they call it a convergence. The, ah, people putting this info together think there were previous large scale hits in in Nevada, Washington state, and Mexico. All in the past five months.”

  “Nevada’s completely in the bad zone,” Claire said. “Nobody’s supposed to be there. It’s too close to the primary horde.”

  “People were hiding in a military base north of Vegas.” Kravitz tapped the map. “Big group of survivalists. All gone now except the few who escaped.”

  “You’re sure they weren’t attacked by a tendril of the horde?” Claire asked. “It’s not that far off.”

  “Nah, the leading edge didn’t reach Vegas until recently,” Kravitz said. “Besides, that doesn’t explain all the rest.”

  “I don’t like this,” the elderly Native American guy, Cory Fox, stated. “This implies a level of intelligence and calculation the Shipborn claim the entities don’t have.”

  Claire pulled up the latest horde maps on her sensor and displayed them as a hologram in the middle of the table, confirming Kravitz’s claims about Vegas. Shit.

  “What about the pods?” she asked. “Have your survivalist buddies found any of those?”

  “A few,” Kravitz said. “Here’s the weird thing. They disappear if not relocated in a couple hours. Probably why nobody saw one until recently, when it happened in Chanute’s territory.”

  “This is information we could have used earlier,” Elizabeth criticized. “The pods are clearly involved with this invasion, and we need to know how.” She cut Adam a suspicious glance, and Claire glared at her.

  “If you keep looking this gift horse
in the mouth, Elizabeth, it’s gonna buck you off,” Kravitz snapped, patience thinning. “I’m lucky I was able to get you this information at all. I endangered my cover.”

  “So sorry,” Elizabeth said, though clearly she wasn’t. “Please continue.”

  Beside Claire, Adam’s knee brushed hers under the table. She wanted to lean against him and face this news together, the bad news she could sense was coming, but she discarded that urge immediately.

  She had all the support she needed. Family. Friends. Employees. A somewhat xenophobic but useful mayor. The Shipborn. Mostly obliging townsfolk. She didn’t need to lean on anybody, least of all an amnesiac movie star. Whose cherry she’d popped last night, like a lust-addled idiot, if the fact he couldn’t remember having sex before her counted as a cherry.

  Yeah, she’d better not lean on that. Getting attached to the Chosen One, of all people, could mess her up big time.

  “Ward, next map,” Kravitz told the projectionist. The screen changed to a close focus on the middle of the Americas. The concentric patterns around Riverbend and Fort Berthold were clear as day, convergences like the others, and their representatives inhaled audibly.

  “We knew there were some attacks, but not that many,” Fox commented solemnly. “I wasn’t aware we had residents in those locations. Are you certain?”

  “Checked your territory myself,” Kravitz confirmed. “Sorry, Fox. I wish we’d figured this out in time.”

  Villa rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “The pattern around Acapulco isn’t the same. Are you just assuming what happened to us?”

  “I don’t have people that far into Mexico.” Kravitz wiped a hand over his mouth as if it pained him to admit an imperfection. “Had to go through another group there to get intel—maybe you’ve heard of the Cabeza Cartel? The remnants of those bastards run Southern Mexico.”

  “They’re scum. You can’t trust anything they claim,” Villa said.

  “That’s why the info for Acapulco is sketchy,” Kravitz agreed. “We only believed about half of it. But here’s the bad shit.”

  “It gets worse?” Claire’s skin chilled, even the parts close enough to Adam to feel his heat.