by Pam Uphoff
He caught Chou's smug smile as the man left, saying only, "We will pick them up in three days."
Wolfgang slipped out behind another group and headed home, wondering if he'd made a strategic error. If Chou found what he was looking for, how would that change the running of the company?
Three nights later, he was careful to find the same world. The leader of the scouting team looked over at the Chairman and shook his head. Chou cursed and set a date for the next try.
***
"All right Mercy, close the gate." Harry's voice, firm and confident of their ability to do it slowly and carefully. Rebeccah felt the ebb in the power draw, and slowed the reverse flow to the rings. The smoky tunnel collapsed, the power dropped further, and she shut off the flow to the rings altogether. She waited until the last of the sparkle was gone from her snake, then released the bottle. It destabilized quickly and the techs shut it down.
Looking through the door to the ring room, she could see the large door on the far side was open, the vehicles just returned from the expedition all outside. The little helicopter and the lightweight planes were immensely popular with the teams—ordinary human teams, now. It had taken awhile after the timbering disaster for Dr. Verity to remember that he'd also lost two other Tellies on that world. Then a head count had revealed the missing women.
Shao Kennedy didn't follow Mueller into oblivion. Either his family connections were closer, or he failed to report the loss. After all, none of the four had been very useful, let alone crucial to the ring operations.
***
AK stretched. "I don't think I'll have any trouble finding that one anytime they want it. I'm picking the worlds we go to in a pattern, so we'll have that as well as the frequency of beacon pulses."
Mercy was leaning on Harry, and AK rolled her eyes and led the way outside. "She really is shameless."
"She needs to be less obvious. We want Harry to remain trusted, so we'll have an information conduit." Rebeccah waved to Charlie, leaning on a tree and waiting for her.
Jason snorted. "Humph. You and your good ideas. Gisele is getting the student library a newspaper now."
"I know. I almost wish I didn't read it. The election rhetoric is getting nasty. It's not just us gods anymore, it's all the genetic engineered. Got your sickle cell gene fixed? You're not human anymore."
"Yeah. And anyone with a power gene is automatically assumed to be cheating on tests, not allowed in the schools' sports programs and watched like a hawk. Although for murder or suicide, they don’t seem to know." Jason shrugged, frowning.
Rebeccah nodded. "I thought Wolfgang was wrong when he said we ought to wait for them to exile all the engineered people. Less than a year and now that's what they're talking about. Everything has switched to horrible."
"Only in politics." AK glanced over at the guards. "The situation in the company has gotten better. The guards don't bother us, for a while there we were even working with them on exploration teams. I think Wolfgang had visions of suborning the whole batch of them."
Rebeccah nodded. The only two people who had tried to abuse Tellies had died suspiciously soon after. A car wreck, and a drowning that had been ruled an accident. Rebeccah hunched her shoulders. She'd never seen the rapist guard again. There had been no rumors of a suicide, so he must have just quit or been fired. Must have.
Now all the staff was professional and polite to the Tellies. The Chef was getting real turkeys and hams for Christmas. AK had forcibly mentioned to Harry that a two hundred dollars each online clothes shopping spree for the Tellies would be a Real Good Present from the company.
***
Congress narrowly defeated a bill authorizing forced sterilization of genetically engineered criminals, when it was pointed out that it is worded so a traffic ticket was sufficient to invoke it. They promised to reword the bill so the meaning was clear, when they returned from their holiday break. Both pro and anti sides demonstrated, kept to opposite sides of the Capitol Building.
"If they were halfway competent, we'd be in trouble." AK made a rude gesture toward the vid screen and turned away.
Rebeccah kept watching, and was rewarded by a glimpse of her father in a crowd shot of the anti-demonstration. He was at the front and looked determined.
***
Jason smiled cheerfully at Rebeccah, and plunked down beside her with his breakfast. Charlie crossed his arms and glared. Jason's smile widened. "You two are just too easy to tease. But, let's get to business. Rumor has it that between the two of you, you can hack any computer, anywhere."
Charlie eyed him warily. "We have to be close to it. And we have to have the virus prepared and ready to go."
"What are you thinking of? All we've done is get information about the company." Rebeccah shivered. Is it time to take that first big step out of the safe cocoon?
"I've been dating a girl in their employee relations department."
Under his breath, Charlie muttered, "And one in sales, and one in security."
Rebeccah jabbed him with an elbow. "We're not employees."
"But we could be." Jason's smile blossomed into a full scale grin. "If someone could come tickle a computer next week."
"We'd have to fake some social security numbers, at a minimum." Rebeccah sounded breathless. "We haven't done much, it was more a matter of seeing if we really could tickle computers and get around passwords and so forth."
"Why fakes? We've all got real ones, after all." Jason pulled out a data card. "And I just happened to copy them last night. Kennedy's computer has all sorts of interesting information about us."
"And now he's dating Kennedy's secretary." Charlie muttered. "We are all going to die."
"Titch! All we need is a few hours access to Donna's computer in employee relations. Well, and to figure out how to cash our paychecks."
Rebeccah gulped. "We'll need to open bank accounts, and have our pay deposited directly to them. I know some sites to open an account on line, but we'll need some money to start . . . Let's talk to Wolfgang."
"Oh, he had all those false IDs . . . can we use that? Do we still have it all?" Charlie turned to stare out the glass front of the cafeteria. "Why does that man always run? Here we are plotting away, and he's exercising. In the friggin' snow!"
***
Wolfgang smiled, shook hands with the nice lady at the bank and strolled out. Filling out the paperwork online for a new bank account had worked, but he'd had to show up personally, with ID and a starting deposit before he could do anything else. Jason's brilliant idea was going to need some serious footwork before they got to the point of making themselves employees.
He'd sequestered a portion of his army pay in what he hoped was an undiscovered account. If the check he'd just deposited, from Wolfshead Winery to Wolfgang Old, didn't bring more government investigators down on them, he'd be writing checks to everyone. Thing was, did he want to let everyone know about this? Especially, did he want to tell everyone about the way he was using bubbles? Pax was the only other Tellie he'd seen with them, and Pax had discovered a new twist. Pin the opening of a bubble down to something solid, then drag the other side of it with you. Then open a new hole, pin it down. Step in one side and out the other. Distance didn't seem to matter.
Wolfgang had stretched one from his room to an alley in Eau Clair, hitchhiking invisibly once he was off the New Gene grounds. On this end, he'd stuck the bubble opening around a door in a derelict building. So far no one had come through, but he was going to need to do something different before some drunken bum or gang banger tried the door. And if all, or at any rate some of the Tellies were going to start using it, he'd need to move it out of his room.
Hadn't Rebeccah said something about her illusions lasting? Maybe he should find out how good they were, and how long they lasted.
Chapter Twenty-three
Washington DC
North American Union
2 January 2116
"So now we're back to the eugenics movement." Harry slum
ped in a new chair. Same office, though. "Mike, the company has sent me to talk to some Congressmen about colonization, and I'm meeting with a couple of mining company bigwigs while I'm here. If the government wants to control cross-dimensional travel, it's going to have to move fast."
"Colonization. Designed by Congress. God help us all." Mike's eyes narrowed. "I wonder if Trans World Travel is doing this on purpose, to slow the government down?"
"I . . . don't actually know. Sleight of hand? See how careful we are of the pristine environments of these worlds? Pay no attention to those ore hauling trucks, they're just working on a world that stopped evolving at algae."
"Algae?"
"Yeah, and a few, very few, things that eat it. Worms and snails. I'm telling the mining companies to keep their operations at least a hundred miles from the shore with sensible runoff control, and they can go to town. Unfortunately our experiments with even larger rings was a total flop. The bigger the rings, the less 'distance' we can reach. For some definition of distance. And the algae worlds are quite far away."
"So can't you look for a close by algae world?"
"No, they clump. All the nearby worlds have people living there. We avoid them like the plague. Partly because we don't want to spread a plague."
"Heh. Now that would be bad publicity."
Harry glared. "That would be a tragedy, a crime, massive arrogance and stupidity. We've only had contact with people in a single world, and we've never found it again."
***
"Well, go boohoo to Harry when he gets back. For now, I want Rebeccah, Harriet and Isobel to get wired up." Jack looked smug, and looked around to check the effect he was having on people.
Rebeccah glanced too. Wolfgang had disappeared. Excellent. That meant he would be observing. And when he didn't want anyone to see him, he was very, very unnoticeable. Sometimes she'd swear he flat out wasn't there. She finished the last bite of mushy over cooked peas, got up and dumped her tray. Harriet and Isobel followed her.
"We don't do gates right after lunch." Isobel hissed. "Why are they doing an extra gate today?"
Rebeccah shook her head. "I think this is some grand idea of Jack's. I think . . . we might want to look first and maybe not leap today."
They both frowned at her.
"Is that one of Wolfgang's stupid ideas?" Harriet hunched her shoulders. "He's using us, he's got something planned. Most likely another escape, and we'll be left holding the bag. Again."
Rebeccah glanced over her shoulder. Pax and Marty were following them, with Jack behind, trotting to keep up with their long strides.
In the ring room, techs were setting up the mobile quarantine chamber, and there were more guards than usual.
"Right." Jack clapped his hands, a tight smile of smug satisfaction flashed across his face. "Today we're going to take a brief look at some nearby, inhabited worlds. We will touch down briefly at several, looking to get some idea of the numbers and extent of the inhabited worlds. Away team, you will go only on my command."
Rebeccah swallowed. "Pax and Marty are the away team? But they are both control team members. Pax is especially . . . " She intersected his glare and stopped.
"I can do anything that Wolfgang can do, and better. Today, there isn't a regular team ready to go, so we volunteered."
Rebeccah didn't like the sly looks. What is he up to? Or was it just jealousy, that Wolfgang had done things he hadn't been allowed? She kept her thoughts to her team mates. :: We're not supposed to go near other people. ::
:: What if we spread diseases? Or bring them back? I can't believe he's doing this. :: Harriett wrung her hands, but started sticking down the electrodes.
Isobel's natural warm tanned complexion couldn't pale much, but she looked a little greenish. :: Why is Jack doing this? ::
:: And who—if anyone—gave him permission? :: Rebeccah frowned. Is he looking for a specific world? Why . . . And what world? As far as she knew, they'd only physically touched other people once. Or is he looking for that one? How would we know we'd found it? Worlds with beacons . . . they had a blemish, a scar, almost a crimp, in their "crumpled paper" universe that marked where the gate had attached. Could they look long enough, carefully enough, to have any chance of finding a crimp? It had been at least a year, hadn't it? Would the crimp even still be there? And why? And why is Pax helping?
She stuck on the last electrode, and even without consulting the computer, she could feel the magnetic containment field. She powered it up. The rings were whining, and Harriet closed her eyes. Rebeccah fed more power in and the rings sang. Isobel pushed the whirlpool out cautiously. It wobbled and slopped toward something and Rebeccah tried to split her attention between the mag bottle and the world out there.
:: Slow down, hold back and just look. See? A busy city, no sign of a crimp. Pull it away, and look for a different world. Is that one down there? :: Rebeccah withdrew and returned her attention to the mag bottle, fed the rings power when she felt it snap into contact. A confused babble from the other room, alarm and disagreement. She felt the pair of men pass through, a brief pause and then return.
Then Jack slammed back into their room. "Close it! Close it now!"
Startled, Isobel dropped the contact and the rings detuned. Rebeccah held hard to the mag bottle as the capacitor maxed out. A long long time. She ignored Jack shaking her shoulder. The racing electrons settled back into their orbits and Rebeccah released the bottle.
" . . . like being ignored, Girly! You listen to me!" Jack sounded sharp and strained, and just a bit wild in an unsettlingly eager, pleasurable manner.
Rebeccah looked over at the door leading to the mag chamber. Both techs, looking a bit frightened. She nodded to them. "It's quiet now, you can turn it off."
Jack slashed a hand. "No. Keep it up. The afternoon group will be assembling in half an hour."
The techs ducked out, and Jack smiled nastily down at the girls. "So. I always knew you lot didn't really need one of Wolfgang's stupid beacons. And now Harry's precious Yellow Team, and one of Derrick's Purples have just rediscovered a world without one . . . pity all that we saw was dead bodies. Lots and lots of bodies, rotting where they fell."
Dr. Kennedy blew in through the doors to the outside. "Who is in charge here?"
His eyes narrowed as Jack stepped forward. "You did not disobey express orders to avoid worlds known to have people living on them. You did not find a world full of dead people. You did not return a sample from a diseased person."
Jack's mouth flapped. "But . . . "
"It did not happen." Shao Kennedy leaned close and his mouth moved, but no one but Jack heard what he said. Jack paled. Kennedy's eyes swept the room, settled on the Tellies. "You attempted to count close worlds. You connected with none of them."
Rebeccah nodded, nudged Harriet and Isobel. "We couldn't actually touch anything close. I think there might have been two or three worlds."
Kennedy nodded "Smart girl."
Kennedy swept out, Jack anxiously clinging to his wake.
Rebeccah sank to the floor, and let the tears flow.
"Rebeccah? What's wrong?" Harriet hovered.
"They're all dead. Because of us. We killed all those people, just like the Europeans killed Indians when they came to the Americas. We killed thousands, maybe millions of people."
Isobel shook her head in denial, backing away. "No, no. That can't be the same world we found before. It can't be."
"Unlikely." Wolfgang stood up from where he'd been sitting cross-legged in the corner. Without anyone seeing him. "I don't think we ever found a world we'd hit before until we had beacons. Dr. Heath did DNA studies of the plant samples, and was sure of that."
Rebeccah nodded, wistful, but not really convinced.
Dr. Heath quarantined everyone who had been in the ring room, and disinfected the entire area. The week without Jack was wonderful. The Red Team had a party in their dorm, but since Charlie was the only one who knew about Wolfgang's sources of extra goodie
s, they'd had to do their partying mostly sober and without female assistance.
When Pax and Marty were released from quarantine a week later, they smirked and reported that the quick sampling across had allowed the doctors to identify a close relative of Influenza A Taipei. The strain of flu in circulation the previous year. "Probably some sort of pneumonia that did the actual killing. But Emre, when he was attacked, didn't return any samples. He had pollen on his clothing, a few scraps on his shoes. But not enough species for certainty. So we couldn't do a DNA check to determine if that really was the same world. There's nothing provable. But the doctors sure got threatened. They won't ever talk."
Jason nodded. "Emre described the people as Arab or Indian, low tech from the appearance of their clothing. What were the dead bodies wearing?"
"I didn't particularly notice. We were in a town. There were no motor cars." Pax shrugged. "I don't know any history, or historical architecture, but no doubt someone is checking it out."
Rebeccah closed her eyes. Please, make it a coincidence, please, not the same world, not my fault. She pushed the thoughts away with a deep breath. "I wonder how Kennedy caught on so fast. How he knew exactly what Jack had done."
Pax snickered. "Gee, it's almost like someone called him, as soon as possible from the quarantine building."