Veiled Designs

by Amy DuBoff

  Ava half-raised her hand. “I know I’m just supposed to be an observer here, but what kind of variance are we talking about?”

  >>I told you that you wouldn’t be able to keep quiet,<< Ruby ribbed in her mind.

  Yeah, well, you were wondering the same thing.

  “At four points during your mission on the ground,” Dwyer continued, “there was a shift in the brainwave pattern—almost like it had entered a sympathetic resonance.”

  “Like when Kurtz and Jared were subverted?” Luke asked.

  Dwyer shook his head. “No, this wasn’t a control signal. It was more like a sync.”

  Ava frowned. “What does that mean in this context?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” the doctor replied. “I was hoping to get a record of the Raven’s sensor logs, and a copy of the environmental data gathered via your armor’s sensors to get a better picture of what may have been going on.”

  “I was tapped into the suit,” Ruby interjected over the room’s comm system.

  “Yes, and that was filtered and combined as part of Ava’s experience. I’d like to see how that compares to the raw logs,” Dwyer explained.

  “Ah, and in that discrepancy may lie the solution,” Ruby stated.

  “Precisely.” Dwyer met Luke’s gaze. “The reason I wanted to meet with you, Luke, is I have a hunch that this resonance is related to Ava’s TR structure.”

  “Again, not a neuroscientist,” Luke muttered under his breath.

  Dwyer shrugged. “You’re as close to an expert as we have on this tech, all the same. And this resonance may be a variation of the remote communications we’ve observed.”

  Ava came to attention. “If that theory holds, I bet I know at exactly what four times that resonance happened—when I entered the rock formation, when we saw the central nexus thing, when we came to the pit, and when we were trying to escape.”

  Next to her, Luke’s expression turned to horror. “I really have no idea what you just said, but that sounds awful.”

  “It was a fun day.” Ava patted his knee. “I can access the mission records on my account, if you want me to log in.”

  “Please.” Dwyer motioned to the desktop.

  Ava placed her hand on the surface to gain access and then navigated to the appropriate directory containing the logs.

  “All right, so,” she went to the raw logs from her powered armor, “we entered the rock formation right around here.”

  Using the combat video recorder as a guide, she cycled through the frames until the view matched her recollection. She played it forward for Luke and the doctor.

  “Those rocks are so weird looking,” Luke commented, tilting his head.

  “Made of the same material as the TR,” Ava explained.

  Luke crossed his arms. “Huh.”

  Dwyer leaned forward to study the details. “Yes, that timestamp does align with the first resonance,” he confirmed.

  “So far so good.” Ava advanced the record. “Now, the next…”

  Ava advanced the recording to the point where she entered the cavern with her team. The central monolith had to be connected in some way.

  “Hmm, I’m not seeing a spike,” Dwyer observed.

  “No, there has to be something here,” Ava insisted.

  Luke looked at her. “What were you expecting?”

  “This cavern,” Ava pointed to the image on the desktop, “is made of the same material as those rocks. And there’s a lot of it. If there’s some sort of resonance with the material and the structure in my head, then this would have to be the place.”

  “Maybe it’s not that simple,” Luke mused. “Just because a material is there doesn’t mean that it’s used at any given time. Think about all the dormant code we have in our genome.”

  “That’s a valid point,” Dwyer agreed. “Maybe this material needs to have a signal running through it, or something of the sort.”

  “Then why did the rocks on the surface cause such a strong reaction?” Ava asked.

  “Well, it’s the perimeter of the facility. Perhaps there’s a trigger of some sort,” Luke suggested.

  She tilted her head. “Like a security system?”

  “Or proximity alarm,” Dwyer said. “You did feel faint when you first stepped inside, yes?”

  Ava nodded.

  “I had to make some significant adjustments to compensate,” Ruby chimed in.

  “Not everyone would have an AI capable of cancelling out the effects,” Dwyer continued. “I can only speculate, but the information I’ve seen points to a net, designed to catch anyone with remotely compatible tech that would enable potential telepathic control.”

  Ava decided to go with the line of reasoning. “And since I made it out of the net, and my team wasn’t susceptible, we were able to proceed. But that’s a really shitty security system, if anyone else can just walk inside.”

  “Except you didn’t find anything,” the doctor stated.

  “We accessed the computer system and were loading a ton of data onto an external drive,” Ava pointed out.

  “Yes, but you never got that off the planet. After the mission, you were essentially in the same place you began,” he countered.

  “Are you suggesting that it allowed us through the facility?”

  Dwyer shrugged. “I don’t have enough information to say. Let’s go through the rest of the mission recording to see if any patterns emerge.”

  “Right.” Ava continued advancing the video.

  “The next spike to your vitals came about ten minutes later,” Dwyer said, consulting his notes.

  “Yes, I know exactly what that one was about.” Ava braced for the viewing of the next segment—their visit to the mysterious pit.

  The voices wouldn’t come through on the recording, since Ruby hadn’t heard them, but Ava remembered the chill that had run through her as they’d whispered in her mind.

  She resumed playing the video at normal speed at the appropriate point. When the video showed Ava’s perspective of looking into the pit, Dwyer and Luke inched back in their chairs.

  “How deep is that?” Luke asked.

  “Too deep,” Ava replied, knowing her team on the video was about to state the results of the scan. She waited for the onscreen discussion to conclude.

  “All right, this is when I heard them,” Ava said. She watched Dwyer follow along with her vitals feed.

  “Yes, that’s definitely the second resonance spike,” the doctor confirmed.

  Ava frowned. “That’s all well and good, but you said there were four, and this is the second for you. I had four incidents in mind, and this was the third of those—the last one being when we were attacked.”

  Dwyer nodded. “Based on the end time of the mission record, I can confirm that the last incident corresponds with the attack. The third incident was approximately six minutes before that, but it wasn’t a spike, so much as a sustained, low-level increase.” He pointed to a timestamp in his notes.

  “We were just walking through the hallways. Nothing stands out.” Ava skipped ahead to the timestamp the doctor had indicated.

  When she reached the point in the recording, the doctor’s observation suddenly made sense. “Of course, that’s when we entered the exit tunnel.”

  “They may have been subtly influencing you, trying to get you to stay,” Dwyer suggested.

  “I didn’t feel it at all.” Up until that point, Ava had been confident that she’d know if she was under the aliens’ influence.

  Now she wasn’t so sure.

  Did you notice anything, Ruby? she asked her AI privately.

  >>I thought it had something to do with your nanocytes, so I was trying to keep you balanced. Now I know what to look for in the future and what it may mean.<<

  Lesson learned all around.

  Ava looked between Luke and Doctor Dwyer. “We know the circumstances around the telepathic resonance now, but why was it just those four times? Was it a communicat
ion attempt, and I missed it?”

  “It’s really strange that nothing happened in the main chamber, like you said,” Luke interjected. “If they were trying to communicate, I’d think they’d do it in the place with the most material to act as a conduit.”

  “I agree. The fact that nothing happened in that chamber is an anomaly,” Dwyer said.

  Luke’s eyes narrowed in thought. “These guys are smart. All of their moves have been calculated and intentional.”

  “That’s what worries me,” Ava replied. “I can’t shake the feeling that we were the ones being investigated, not the other way around.”

  “Or hunted,” Luke said. He straightened in his chair and had a spark in his eyes.

  “Yeah, that makes me feel way better.” She shot him a venomous look.

  Luke shook his head. “I didn’t mean it facetiously. I’ve been trying to think through the behavior from a biological standpoint—analyze it in terms of the traits we know to be evolutionarily beneficial. I think I have a working theory.”

  “These things are unlike anything else we’ve seen,” Ava reminded him.

  “But in broad strokes, there are predators and prey,” Luke began. “On the prey side, when a threat is spotted, creatures either run, or freeze with the hope they aren’t spotted.”

  “But they attacked us while we were trying to leave,” Ava countered.

  “That’s what got me thinking,” Luke continued. “We can’t see these beings, so it’s easy for them to hide. But it doesn’t follow the prey pattern of waiting for a threat to pass and then coming out of hiding. They’re hunters. They set a trap for what they wanted, and when it didn’t work, they waited for another opportunity to strike.”

  Ava crossed her arms and sighed. “I knew that whole thing was a trap.”

  “But how, specifically?” Doctor Dwyer prompted. “Why not go after the team when they were deepest inside the facility?”

  “That’s the part that didn’t click for me until just now,” Luke went on. “Like any predator, they have their preferred hunting grounds. In this case, they lured you, Ava—the prey—toward their hiding place. The first trap didn’t work, and they also saw that you had backup. So they waited for you to go to another location where they knew they could corner you.” He pointed to the video again. “You were behind everyone else. It’s the only point in your entire walk through the facility that the rest of the team was closer to an exit than you were.”

  “Shit, you’re right!” she realized. “I had consistently been walking in between them except for that moment.”

  “And that’s when they tried to snare you in a different sort of trap—a stronger, better one.”

  Her stomach turned over. “And it almost worked.”

  Dwyer nodded. “They don’t have a good understanding of our technology, despite their apparent integration into Nezaran society. But, the Nezarans also don’t have Federation tech.”

  “Okay, so we were able to catch them by surprise with firepower superior to what they were anticipating, and we got free,” Ava said. “But none of this answers why they wanted me, and only me, in the first place. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to take the rest of my team, too?”

  “Not if they’re purely after your nanocytes, or a physiological model of how the nanocytes have changed you, and mixed with the unique parts of you that come from having been born on Coraxa,” Luke replied. “I haven’t done a lot of fighting, but I do know it’s better to get an opponent on their own. The more of you that the Dyons captured, the harder it would be for them to contain you.”

  Ava crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. “That’s a riveting analysis and all, but it tells us nothing new. We already knew they wanted me, and this only confirms our suspicions that they’re on the offensive.”

  She realized that Doctor Dwyer had disengaged from the conversation and was looking over data logs on the desktop. He met her gaze with a slack jaw. “There’s something we missed.”

  “I took the liberty of going through the Raven’s sensor logs while you were talking, to compare the resonance readings and activity timeline with what was going on elsewhere on the world,” Ruby said over the comm.

  “And there was definitely something.” Dwyer added, and zoomed in on what he had been examining.

  A line indicating the ambient readings around the planet was relatively smooth for hours, and then rhythmic spikes initiated at the timestamp when Ava and her team exited the stairwell. The intensity of the spikes increased during the time they were in the central chamber, and then dropped off again.

  Luke frowned. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Dwyer admitted.

  Ava did. She’d been on enough ops and used enough communication systems to recognize those patterns anywhere.

  “It’s a transmission,” she stated. “The valley around the facility wasn’t the transmitter—it’s the whole fucking planet.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Even with the FDG working on an analysis of the data she had helped retrieve from the valley lab, Karen found her thoughts drifting back to the facility and what she’d seen.

  I can’t begin rebuilding this world so long as I know there’s something lurking down there.

  She slumped in her desk chair. If that ‘something’ was what she feared it was, no one would be safe.

  When Ava and her team had come to the Nezaran government building and taken out Chancellor Heizberg, Karen had wondered about how the alien could go down so easily. A race capable of projecting their consciousness across systems wouldn’t give up on a three-decades-long mission because one host was gone.

  Karen had trusted the FDG when they said they’d eliminate the threat, but they were focused on Gidyon. There was a facility only kilometers from the city where Karen was at that very moment, and it was too connected to the aliens for her liking. The pattern contained in the data archives hinted at the threads the aliens had been pulling behind the scenes. The figurehead was gone, but Karen wasn’t convinced that the danger had passed.

  And, naturally, the FDG wouldn’t share a damned thing about what they’d found.

  Figures they’d thank me for the information and not say another word.

  There was one way to get more information, and that was by talking with the people who’d know.

  Karen walked down the short hall to Fiona’s office. The other woman was on a call and held up her finger for Karen to wait when she saw her outside the glass door.

  After twenty seconds, Fiona ended the call and beckoned Karen inside. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “No trouble. I wanted to ask you about those people you used to send to the facility in the valley.”

  Fiona’s brow knit. “Karen, I thought the matter was handed over to the FDG?”

  “They’re focused on Gidyon. I want to know if we have a threat right outside the city.”

  “Nothing that can’t wait.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I’m not,” Fiona admitted. “But this isn’t something for us to handle.”

  “Any information we can provide will get us outside help that much sooner. If you’re holding back any sources, this is the time to share.” Karen fixed her with a level gaze.

  “I do know of someone—the only person I know who spent time there and has said more than five words about it.”

  “I’d like to speak with this person,” Karen said. “I know I was sent here to vet political candidates, but I can’t focus on that until I’m confident there isn’t an opportunity for another subverted person to work their way in.”

  “Keep talking like that, and you’re going to find yourself in charge,” Fiona said with a smile.

  Right! That would be the day. Karen dismissed the notion. “Can you set up a meeting?”

  “Not really necessary. You can just drop by.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He lives in a care facility. He was never quite righ
t after the assignment.”

  Karen’s heart leaped.

  “I was hoping we wouldn’t need to dig any deeper. I’m not proud of my part in what happened to the people on this world,” Fiona said with a tone of genuine remorse.

  “That’s all the more reason we need to be certain no one else gets hurt. If there’s any chance that these aliens will seek refuge here when their main base is destroyed, we need to be ready to contain them.”

  Fiona paled. “More of them could come here?”

  “I don’t know any more about them than you do. But we can be certain that they came from somewhere at some time, and set up a base of operations. They’ve been using us for materials, hosts, travel, and I’m guessing that they’d go back to their old ways as soon as they had the means, if we let them.”

  “So we take them out once and for all now, before they have a chance to regroup.”

  Karen nodded. “Precisely.”

  “I don’t know how much Edgar can tell you, but I’ll take you to see him.”

  As the two women exited the government building, the plaza between their office and the NTech tower was bustling with workers on their lunch break.

  “We can take the train,” Fiona said.

  They walked to the stop a block away. The temperature in the dome was several degrees warmer than Karen’s climate control settings in her office, and she found herself missing Alucia again. “It’s a wonder everyone doesn’t roast here.”

  Fiona cracked a smile. “If we didn’t have these domes, we’d all be slowly cooking.”

  Her tone was jesting, but Karen suspected it was true. Nezar was barely habitable. Even the location of the cities near the poles was a stretch, but humans were tenacious. At one time, Karen had found the domes comfortable. Even though it now seemed too hot, if she spent long enough there, she’d adapt again.

  The waiting platform for the train was almost empty, with workers already at their destinations for the day. After a two-minute wait, the maglev train arrived, and they got on board.