by R S Penney
His mother stepped into the kitchen with a cardboard box held in both hands, her honey-coloured hair in a state of disarray. “The peace and quiet makes it all worthwhile,” she said setting the box on the table. “Honestly, this is the first time in years that I haven't felt like I had to walk on eggshells.”
Jack winced, turning his face up to the ceiling. He drew in a soft, hissing breath. “I can't argue with you there.” Just thinking about it made his chest tighten. “So how's Dad taking the separation?”
“Well enough.”
“That bad, huh?”
Crystal let her head hang, slapping an open palm over her nose. She ran her fingers through her hair. “He keeps going on about the degradation of family values,” she hissed. “Apparently women having the right to leave a bad marriage is a sin in the eyes of God or something like that.”
It made anger bubble in Jack's chest, white hot rage that burned through his veins like acid. The man pushed everyone away with his scathing criticisms, then complained when he ended up alone. Twenty damn years of never feeling adequate in that man's eyes was enough to relieve him of any urge to earn his father's approval.
Summer offered comfort.
Jack hopped up on the counter and sat with his hands on his knees, hunched over as he let out a sigh. “You know you're going about this all wrong,” he said. “Most TV moms would have guilted me into helping by now.”
Crystal spun around, turning her back on him. “I can handle a few heavy boxes, my dear,” she said, marching over to the open doorway that led to the living room. “Just stay and keep me company.”
She stood there with fists on her hips, surveying the mess of unpacked knickknacks she had left on the living room floor. “Having somebody to talk to eases my stress,” she said absently. “Every time I call Lauren, she asks me why your father and I can't just sit down and work it out.”
“Lauren's an idiot.”
“Nathaniel Jack Hunter!”
Clenching his teeth, Jack felt his face grow warm. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “I'm sorry, but it's true,” he insisted. “She was always more concerned with looking like a happy family than with being one.”
Crystal's shoulders slumped, and she leaned against the door-frame like a wilting flower. It saddened him to realize that he had just upset his mother, and made him angry to realize that the source of her frustration was the fact that she agreed with him. It had always been that way in his family: Jack and his mother vs Lauren and his father. Not that Lauren didn't occasionally have her own spats with the old man, but more often than not, she wanted to smooth things over, which suited Arthur just fine.
Jack decided to let the conversation die and watched as his mother went into the living room to resume her work. One thing he had learned over the years was that when Crystal was upset, she needed a few moments to work things out on her own.
He had left a tablet on the counter beside him. A Leyrian tablet: which was to say a large piece of smartglass that had been synced to his multi-tool. Picking it up, he tapped the surface to pull up the page he had been reading.
The dossier of a professor appeared in white text, complete with a picture of a man with dark olive skin and gray hair in the upper right-hand corner. Dr. Aldin Nareo was an academic who had dedicated his life to studying the Overseers. He had authored fifteen peer-reviewed papers on the subject. It was safe to say he was Leyria's foremost expert on the subject. If anyone knew how to find this Key, it was him.
Three months of searching, and they had come up empty. Anna had scanned the Earth four times in a fly-by with her shuttle; there was no sign of Overseer tech anywhere. Not anything large enough to be detected from orbit, anyway. It occurred to him that Slade must have tried the exact same thing on numerous occasions, and too many scans would be conspicuous. That left them with no option but to comb through ancient texts, and that was getting them nowhere.
His mother returned a moment later, carrying yet another box. “So when do I get to meet this new girlfriend of yours?” she asked, setting it down on the table next to the first one. “I hear she's quite the woman.”
“As soon as I can get her to come down here.”
Crystal looked up at him with lips pursed, blinking as if confused by his response. “You realize that's not a good sign, right?” she inquired. “That your girlfriend isn't eager to meet your family.”
“I'm not sure Gabi would call herself my girlfriend.”
“I see.”
Their conversation was cut short by a beep from his multi-tool. “Transfer call to tablet,” Jack said with a little more roughness in his voice than he would have liked. Why did everyone always want to talk about his personal life?
The screen lit up with a close-up of Jena as she sat behind her desk. “I need you up here now,” she said, leaning closer to the camera. “We have a situation on our hands, and it's gonna be ugly.”
He stepped through the door to Jena's office to find Anna already there, facing the desk with her arms folded. Something in the atmosphere radiated tension. Jack began to worry that Slade might have done something.
Jena sat behind the desk with her chair turned so he saw her in profile, frowning at the wall. “That's two out of three,” she said, swiveling around to face him. “Now we just have to wait for-”
Harry came through the door behind him with hands shoved into his jacket pockets, a wince twisting his face. “Sorry I'm late,” he muttered under his breath. “I was driving Melissa to school when you called.”
Which meant that he was arguing with Melissa. The two of them had been at each other's throats lately, ever since she had become more involved in their search to find the Key. Leave it to the Overseers to screw up everything right down to the love between a father and daughter.
“It's fine,” Jena said.
“Still…”
Crossing her arms, Jena leaned back in her chair to stare up at the ceiling. “About an hour ago, we picked up a signal from a small town in Tennessee.” The low grunt that passed through her lips made it clear that she was feeling pretty stressed right now. “Only one thing gives off that kind of signal: Overseer tech.”
Closing his eyes, Jack let his head hang. He touched two fingers to his forehead. “Which means Slade will have picked up the signal too,” he said. “The bastard probably has someone on the way already.”
“Spot on.”
Harry shuffled forward with a growl, hunched over as if he hadn't slept in days. “All right, you might have to spell this out for me,” he said. “I thought we scanned the planet multiple times and found nothing.”
“Overseer tech can remain dormant for centuries,” Jena explained. “But when it's unearthed, it sends out a signal to broadcast its location. Presumably this is a fail-safe of some kind, a way for the Overseers to recover whatever they had lost. Sunlight is one of the things that can trigger reactivation.”
Anna stood by the desk with arms folded, her face tight with anxiety. “My people have developed the technology to detect these signals,” she added. “Which means Slade will have detected it as well.”
“Do we know what this thing does?”
Jena leaned forward, setting her elbows on the desk's surface. She buried her face in her hands. “No we don't,” she muttered. “And we won't find out until we locate it, which means this is our number one priority.”
Something occurred to Jack, something that had been tickling his brain for the last few minutes and only now jumped to the forefront of his consciousness. “Why are we the ones being assigned to this case?” he asked. “Our division handles eastern Canada. Why isn't someone from Station Eleven taking this?”
Jena threw herself back in her chair, pressing the heels of her hands to her eye-sockets. “Larani Tal gave this one to us,” she said. “We got this assignment because she knows for certain that we aren't working with Slade.”
Jack puckered his lips and blew out a deep breath. “And anyone else might be,”
he said, shaking his head. “What a glorious world we live in. Is now the appropriate time to reaffirm my faith in the glory of Almighty God?”
“All right,” Jena murmured. “Let's get-”
“Wait,” Jack cut in. “There's something else.”
He swiped a finger across the touchscreen of his multi-tool, bringing up the main menu. Then a few quick taps accessed the holographic imaging software. “I've done a little research on my own.”
The dossier of Professor Aldin Nareo appeared above his outstretched hand, crafted from transparent light. “This man's an expert on the Overseers,” he explained. “So far, we haven't had any luck finding the Key. Maybe it's time we brought in a little outside help.”
Spinning around, Harry paced over to the wall with hands thrown up in frustration. “How far are we going to take this?” he snapped. “We've been searching for this Key for three months with zero results. Am I the only one who wonders if that's because it's not there to be found?”
Gritting his teeth, Jack squinted at the other man. “Yeah, because this is all about the logic,” he said, marching forward. “This couldn't possibly have anything to do with your need to smother your daughter.”
Harry turned halfway around, glancing over his shoulder with snarl that belonged on a wounded lion. “Don't you talk to me like that!” he growled. “What the hell would you know about what I'm-”
“Enough! Both of you!”
Jena was on her feet in half a second, casting thorny glares at both of them. “If this keeps up, I'm going to put you both in the med-bay,” she said. “Seems like you've got a severe case of testosterone poisoning.”
A heavy sigh exploded from her, one that made her deflate like a balloon that had lost its air. “Jack, do you really think this professor could give us some insight on how to find the Key?”
“I do.”
“Then congratulations, you just earned yourself more work.” Jena dropped into her chair and began trailing her fingertips across the surface of her desk, bringing up various menus. “You think this man knows something about the Overseers? I want you to make contact. Get a sense of who he is and decide if we can trust him before you give him any crucial information.”
“Got it. I'll make the call.”
“No,” she said. “I'm booking passage for you on a star-liner. You'll go to Leyria and make contact yourself. Slade got away because he rigged up our computer systems with a bunch of back-door commands. I don't trust any call to be secure.”
Pressing a fist to her mouth, Anna squeezed her eyes shut. She cleared her throat quite audibly. “If someone has to go to Leyria, it should be me,” she said. “Jack doesn't know the culture as well as I do.”
A frown put creases in Jena's forehead. “Maybe,” she said with a quick bob of her head. “But he's a little less trusting than you, and I want him to put those keen instincts to good use. You're going to Tennessee.”
“Where I get to be the fish out of water.”
Planting her elbows on the desk, Jena laced her fingers and rested her chin on top of them. “You're the one with a mind for technology,” she replied. “If anyone can track down whatever they unearthed, it's you.”
Jack backed away from the desk with his arms crossed, his eyes downcast. “Just a thought,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “But if I have to go to Leyria, it might be better if I don't go alone.”
The bright smile on Jena's face could have melted the permafrost. “Good point,” she said. “So I guess it's your lucky day. You and your girlfriend just won an extended vacation to the Capitol.”
Chapter 3
A dirt path cut through a forest where trees stood tall on either side, their branches providing shade from the fierce afternoon sun. The sound of birds chirping filled the air, and every now and then, she caught sight of a squirrel.
Anna stood on the path in jeans and a dark blue t-shirt with white sleeves, her face shielded by the bill of a baseball cap. “Can't imagine why they sent me down here,” she said for Seth's benefit. “The girl who's likely to piss everyone off with her big mouth.”
He responded with amusement.
The path stretched on for several dozen paces, but she saw light at the end, a place where the forest gave way to a field of yellow grass. Her multi-tool directed her to move onward, toward the coordinates where the Overseer device had sent its signal.
Anna closed her eyes, tilting her head back. She took a deep breath through her nose. “At least we'll get a little fresh air,” she muttered. “Better than a day spent filling out forms at my desk.”
A few minutes later, the path ended in a wide open field that stretched on to a chain link fence, and beyond that, she saw the back wall of what appeared to be a school. The small group of teenagers who hid in the shade, sharing cigarettes, were her first clue. So, the device had been unearthed by high-school students; that might pose a problem.
About ten feet from the fence, she found a hole where the ground had been recently disturbed and a shovel that had been abandoned. Whoever dug up the device must have taken it and ran.
Anna approached the hole.
Dropping to her knees in front of it, she hunched over with a hand pressed to her chest. “How long do you think it was down there?” she asked her symbiont. “How many centuries passed before someone decided to dig here of all places?”
Inside the hole, she found nothing but dirt. There was no sign that anything out of the ordinary had ever been buried here, nothing that she could detect with her naked eye, anyway. Seth, however, was quite apprehensive. Some Nassai preferred to have a more open relationship with their partners, but her symbiont was something of an introvert. For her to feel his concern so strongly…It didn't bode well.
Thrusting her left fist into the hole, she said, “Multi-tool active!” The metal disk on her gauntlet responded with a soft chirp. “Run a level three scan. Highlight any biological or technological anomalies.”
The tool began its work.
Anna winced, rubbing her nose with the back of her fist. “Whoever took this thing could be anywhere by now,” she said, leaning forward to peer into the hole. “Assuming they're still alive, of course.”
Her multi-tool beeped, and the screen on her gauntlet lit up with bright text. It was as she had suspected; the scan had detected cellular residue consistent with that found in Overseer devices. Well, that settled it then. Not that she had expected any other results – the signal given off by Overseer tech was unique – but it was best to be thorough. A few years as Jack's best friend had left with a propensity to assume nothing was quite what it appeared to be on the surface. She had yet to decide whether that was a good thing.
With the presence of Overseer tech confirmed, the next step was to figure out who had dug up that hole. Not an easy task in a school with several hundred students, but she had an idea of where to start.
Sunlight through a pair of rectangular windows was split into thin bands by blinds that were left half open, silver rays falling upon a rectangular table that took up most of the space in the staff room. The sweet scents of spring filled the air, and Anna picked up the sound of birds chirping in the distance.
Miss Sutherland was a tall woman in a black pants suit who sat at the table with her head down: a truly beautiful creature with dark hair that spilled over her shoulders in thin ringlets. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Who did you say you were again?”
Anna leaned against the wall with arms folded, sucking on her lower lip. “Special Agent Leana Lenai,” she said, pacing across the room. “With the Justice Keepers. Your principal told me to speak with you about Kevin Harmon.”
The title was still new: granted to her less than two months ago in recognition of her success in recovering the telepath Keli Armana. Anna wasn't sure she would call it a success; the incident had almost resulted in an interstellar war.
Miss Sutherland looked up with a tight frown, creases lining her forehead. “I told them not to start digging until I got
out there,” she said. “I would have been there sooner if I hadn't caught Paul Rutherford dealing pot.”
Anna lifted her chin to stare down her nose at the woman. “Are you assuming that I'm trying to place blame?” she asked, eyebrows rising. “'Cause I can assure you that I'm not. I just want to know where those kids might have gone.”
The teacher winced, shaking her head in dismay. She sat forward with her elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands. “I honestly don't know. Kevin's a good kid, but he's got a history of truancy.”
“And he took off?”
“He was gone by the time we got out there.”
Well, of course he was. Overseer tech was something of a wild card. Sometimes it did nothing – nothing they could detect, anyway – and sometimes it had a strange effect on the minds of anyone who got near it. The SlipGates were relatively safe; researchers on her world had studied them extensively before implementing them as a mass transit system. There was no evidence that traveling through SlipSpace had any influence on human behaviour, and every paper claiming otherwise had been discredited.
SlipGates, however, were something of an anomaly. For one thing, they were made of metal when most Overseer technology was organic in nature. It was almost as though they had been designed for human use.
Shutting her eyes, Anna tilted her head back. “We need to find him right away,” she said, nodding once. “There's no way to know what he dug up or what it might do to him if he holds on to it for too long.”
“It can't be that bad, can it?”
Anna dropped into a chair near the table, crossing one leg over the other. She stared into her lap for a long moment before saying anything. “We've seen Overseer technology produce serious health defects in people who were exposed to it.”
The other woman studied her with a scowl that could crack rocks, shaking her head as she considered Anna's words. “Can't you do something?” she hissed. “You have all this technology to watch us from orbit.”
“We don't watch you from orbit.”