Dark Light

by Randy Wayne White

  She never saw the big Oscillator 600 bearing down on her in the heavy fog. It was only her intuition and Elvis’s anxious chortling that had caused her to leap back onto the curb in the nick of time. The close call had left her already sleep-deprived senses badly jangled.

  The last straw had been walking into Fontana’s office a short time later and discovering that the subject of her interview had the power to raise the hair on the nape of her neck.

  “Elvis isn’t a pet,” she said, pulling herself together with an effort. “He’s a companion. Now, if you don’t mind, I have another question regarding your plans for the Crystal City Guild.”

  Fontana looked amused. “You seem to be obsessed with the future of this organization.”

  “The Guilds wield enormous power in all of the city-states. That was especially true here in Crystal under your predecessor’s administration. Naturally my readers are anxious to know what to expect now that there is a new chief.”

  Fontana shrugged. “The Guilds are respected, well-established institutions. They have always played active roles in the political and social affairs of their communities. I see no reason for that to change.”

  In Sierra’s opinion, the Guilds were all about power, and there was certainly a lot of it here in Fontana’s office—not just the political and social kind but also the sort produced by raw psi energy. Some of that was coming from Fontana himself. But the room also shimmered faintly with energy. In fact, there was so much psi swirling in the atmosphere she knew there had to be a secret entrance to the ancient underground tunnels somewhere nearby. Here in the Old Quarter there were reputed to be hundreds of old holes-in-the-wall, as they were called.

  She straightened a little in her chair. She had come here for answers, and she intended to get them.

  “I’ll allow that the Guilds are well-established institutions,” she said briskly, “but don’t you think it’s going a bit too far to say that they are respected? I’m sure you’re well aware that all of the organizations have serious problems when it comes to public relations.”

  Elvis chose that moment to leave the spotlight. He drifted across the desk, cape fluttering behind him, and came to a halt in front of Fontana’s coffee cup.

  “Any large corporation has a few public relations issues,” Fontana said. He watched Elvis with a mildly wary expression. “Is the bunny housebroken?”

  “Dust bunnies are naturally very clean, and the Guilds are not normal business entities,” Sierra shot back. “The best that can be said about them is that they are uneasy crosses between emergency militias and closely held, highly secretive private corporations.”

  Fontana’s dark brows rose slightly. “Would that be the dust bunnies or the Guilds?”

  She flushed. He’s trying to push your buttons. Don’t let him do it. “I’m talking about the Guilds, of course.”

  “Corporations run like military organizations,” Fontana repeated in that maddeningly thoughtful way. He inclined his head. “That’s a fairly accurate description. You have to admit that the Guilds are unique.”

  “Many people feel that it would be more accurate to say that they are little better than legalized mobs of gangsters. Guild chiefs have traditionally considered themselves to be above the law.”

  “No one is above the law, Miss McIntyre,” Fontana said gently.

  “The former chief, Brock Jenner, took a different view.

  Some would say a more traditional view. He ran the Crystal City Guild as if it were his own private fiefdom. There were persistent rumors to the effect that under his watch the organization dabbled heavily in a variety of illicit activities.”

  “You ought to know, Miss McIntyre. Your stories in the Curtain were responsible for a lot of those rumors.”

  “Naturally my readers want to know if they can expect more of the same now that you’re in charge.”

  “I think that is what is known as a loaded question.”

  “Are you going to answer it?”

  “Are you certain that your readers care about my plans for the Guild? I was under the impression that the readers of the Curtain were more interested in insightful investigative reporting about people who have the misfortune to get kidnapped by aliens and dragged down into the catacombs for strange sexual experiments.”

  Sierra bit back her frustration. She had done some good work at the Curtain. The problem was that when you ran a piece with a headline like “Guild Conceals Discovery of Secret Alien Lab” next to a story entitled “Woman Pregnant with Alien Baby,” credibility became an issue. Few people seemed to notice or care that the gutsy tabloid was the only paper in town that had dared to print negative stories about the local Guild organization.

  “If you have such a low opinion of me, my paper, and its readers, why did you agree to do this interview?” she asked.

  Elvis chose that moment to go up on his hind legs. He hooked his front paws over the rim of the coffee mug and dipped his head inside.

  “Oh, dear.” Mortified, Sierra leaped to her feet, pen and notepad clutched in one hand. She leaned over the wide desk, scooped up Elvis, and sat down quickly. “Sorry about that. He’s a little caffeine junkie.”

  “Not a problem.” Fontana got to his feet with a lithe uncoiling motion and crossed the room to a handsome serving cart. He picked up the coffeepot and filled a mug. “Does he take cream and sugar?”

  “Uh, no.” Sierra clutched the wriggling Elvis. “He likes his coffee straight. But this really isn’t necessary.”

  Fontana carried the mug back across the room and set it down on the corner of the desk.

  “Help yourself, big guy,” he said.

  Elvis did not need a second invitation. He bounced from Sierra’s knee up onto the desk and ducked his head into the mug. Tiny slurping sounds followed.

  Sierra watched him uneasily. Elvis usually had excellent instincts when it came to people. If he didn’t like someone, he made his feelings clear. But he had taken to Fontana right from the start. She wasn’t sure what to make of that. Or course, it was possible that dust-bunny intuition, like her own, wasn’t infallible.

  Fontana looked at Sierra. “Another cup for you, Miss McIntyre?”

  “No, I’m fine, thank you.” She glanced at her notes, determined to take charge. “Are you aware of the growing problem of the illegal drug called ghost juice?”

  “I’ve read your stories about it, yes.”

  “Then you know that, for some reason, the majority of the addicts are former Guild men who are now living on the streets of the Quarter?”

  Fontana lounged against the edge of the desk and crossed his arms. “I believe I read that in your last piece on the subject, yes.”

  “It’s the truth. The experts think that for some reason, ghost hunters might be more susceptible to the drug because of their particular parapsych profiles. There’s an old saying that the Guild takes care of its own. Don’t you think that the Crystal organization should be actively working to get the drug off the streets?”

  “You know, my public relations people advised me not to grant this interview.”

  “I’ll bet they did. I’m sure they would prefer that you not talk to the press at all.”

  “It isn’t the press, in general, they’re worried about.” Fontana smiled. “It’s you, Miss McIntyre. You have something of a reputation.”

  “Your public relations people don’t like me very much, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean.” He uncrossed his arms and reached back across the desk to pick up a copy of the Curtain . He held up the front page so that she could read it.

  “This is your most recent scoop, I believe,” he said. “Oddly enough, my PR people felt that it was a little biased.”

  She glanced at the paper. Beneath the masthead with its familiar slogan, “Go Behind The Curtain for the Truth,” was a screaming banner headline: “Mystery Man in Charge of Crystal Guild. What Is He Hiding?”

  The headline was accompanied by a pho
to of Fontana getting out of a sleek, black Raptor sports car. Phil Trager, the Curtain’s staff photographer, had grabbed the shot on the fly, but it was a good one. In the picture Fontana looked a lot like he did in person: dangerous. But the impression was not a function of his looks or size. Fontana dominated his environment with his seemingly effortless aura of controlled power.

  Brock Jenner had been a big, thick man, both physically and, in Sierra’s opinion, intellectually. There was no question that he’d wielded power. Self-control, however, had certainly not been his forte. He’d been a heartless womanizer, and his temper had been explosive. Although he had officially died of natural causes, Sierra suspected that the reason he was no longer around was directly related to his habit of stabbing his fellow associates in the back. She wondered if the last back he had taken aim at had been Fontana’s. If so, he had miscalculated badly.

  If Jenner had been a bull of a man, Fontana was a specter-cat. You wouldn’t know he was hunting you until you saw the fangs, and by then it would be too late.

  He was a couple of inches above average height; not so tall as to tower over everyone in the room, yet somehow you would always know that he was the man in charge. No one would ever call him handsome, Sierra thought, but that did not matter; not to her at any rate. What he was, was fascinating. As in, the most intriguing man she had ever met. No wonder the hair on the back of her neck refused to settle down. Her pulse had been skipping along at high speed from the moment she had walked into the room. She was intensely, intimately aware of him in a way she could not explain.

  There was nothing nervous or fidgety about Fontana. You got the feeling that it would require, at the very minimum, a volcanic eruption right here in his office to catch him by surprise. Even then, you would probably discover that he had contingency plans for such an event.

  Rank-and-file ghost hunters were very big on tradition, right down to their wardrobes. They favored a lot of khaki and leather, probably because it went with the swagger. But those who made it to the top of the Guild preferred to dress like the CEOs they pretended to be. Today Fontana wore black, a lot of it. His black trousers, black shirt, black tie, and black jacket would have looked perfectly appropriate in her father’s boardroom or any of her brothers’ clubs. Each item screamed expensive fabric and brilliant tailoring; discreetly, of course.

  The sartorial difference lay in the details. Unlike the silver or gold accessories that her male relatives favored, Fontana wore amber. Even the buttons of his shirt and his cuff links were set with amber. So was his belt buckle, the face of his watch, and, of course, the seal ring.

  She was sure that every bit of the amber she could see was tuned. What’s more, she suspected that he had amber elsewhere on his person, perhaps embedded in a shoe or on a key chain. Guild men carried backup amber in the same spirit that cops carried concealed guns. They knew that someday their lives might depend on the extra firepower.

  But ghost hunters worked underground in the catacombs and the mysterious alien rain forest where the unpredictable currents of psi energy made high-tech weaponry and most machinery useless. Down below in the tunnels and in the jungle, survival depended on the ability to work tuned amber.

  The paranormal ability to psychically resonate with amber and use it to focus the brain’s natural energy had begun to appear among the colonists shortly after they had settled on Harmony. At first it had been viewed as a kind of biological quirk or curiosity. Scientists had concluded that something in the planet’s environment stimulated the latent power in the human mind.

  But the true value of the para-resonating talent had soon become evident. Now, two hundred years after the energy Curtain had closed, isolating the colonies, amber was the chief source of energy. It was used to power everything from washing machines to computers.

  For most people, the ability to generate and direct currents of psychic energy was a low-level, generalized talent. There were those, however, who exhibited much higher levels of para-resonating ability. In such cases the talent always took a highly specialized form and was directly linked to objects and artifacts left behind by the first colonists on Harmony, the long-vanished alien empire. All of the relics of the lost civilization radiated heavy psi energy.

  The aliens had disappeared eons before the arrival of the settlers from Earth, but they had left behind a vast network of catacombs that crisscrossed the planet beneath its surface. Recently a massive underground rain forest had also been discovered. Like the tunnels, the jungle was filled with strong currents of psi. Some of it took dangerous forms. That was where ghost hunters came in.

  Hunters were prime examples of para-resonators with strong but extremely limited talents. Their psychic abilities, while admittedly impressive, were not exactly multifunctional skill sets. As far as anyone had been able to discover, the only use for a hunter’s talent was to manipulate and control the highly volatile, potentially lethal balls of fiery, acid-green alien energy known technically as unstable dissonance energy manifestations—UDEMs. Everyone called the miniature storms ghosts, because they seemed to drift like lost specters through the underground world, creating major hazards for those who ventured beneath the surface.

  Getting singed by a ghost was no small disaster. A close encounter with the wild energy fields could destroy a person’s psychic senses. It could also put the unlucky victim into a coma from which he might never recover. The only people who could control the ghosts were those who could resonate with the chaotic dissonance energy that fueled them: ghost hunters.

  Exploration and excavation of the mysterious tunnels and, more recently, the rain forest was big business. Corporations, university research teams, and private individuals all competed to discover and recover the secrets that the aliens had left behind. Only hunters could offer protection underground in the heavy psi environment. If you wanted to hire a few as security for your research or exploration team, you had to go through the Guilds.

  The result was that the Guilds exerted enormous control over who got to conduct business underground. The law of supply and demand being what it was, the organizations had become extremely powerful over the years. Their tentacles reached down into the underworld and throughout society as well. A man in Fontana’s position could exert enormous pressure on politicians, CEOs, and influential people at every level.

  In Sierra’s opinion, the situation had gotten considerably worse in the past year with the opening up of the rain forest to explorers, researchers, and old-fashioned treasure hunters. The Guilds, never slow to recognize a business opportunity when they saw it, had moved swiftly to exert their authority over the eerie buried jungle, just as they did over the catacombs.

  There was no question but that jungle exploration was hazardous. In addition to a host of strange new plant and animal species, treacherous currents of energy flowed through the rain forest. It turned out that certain types of hunters could navigate the so-called ghost rivers. The Guilds had found a new and extremely profitable market niche.

  Power was power, and whether he admitted it or not, Fontana wielded a lot of the stuff.

  He looked up from the piece she had written on him, his expression politely neutral. “You seem to think that, on their good days, ghost hunters are just a bunch of overpaid bodyguards. On our off days we’re flat-out criminals.”

  “I never wrote that you were all criminals,” she said quickly. Ivor Runtley, publisher and editor of the Curtain, had made it clear that, while he was willing to allow her a lot of leeway, he definitely did not want her bringing the full wrath of the new Guild boss down on his beloved paper.

  Fontana tossed the paper aside. “Okay, I’ll concede that you did not actually use the word criminal. But it’s obvious that you don’t think highly of those in my profession.”

  “I believe that the Guilds have far too much power when it comes to what goes on underground. A great deal of power in the hands of any one organization is always dangerous.”

  “Do you really think it woul
d be a good idea to strip the Guilds of their authority underground?” he asked.

  “I’m not saying that some control and organization isn’t necessary. Everyone knows that people with your sort of talents are necessary for safe exploration.”

  “My sort of talents?” he asked softly. “What do you know about my talents?”

  “You’re obviously a hunter, a powerful one, I’m sure. You wouldn’t have made it to the top of the Guild unless you were a very strong dissonance energy para-rez talent.” She paused. “Of some kind.”

  She tacked on that last line very deliberately. Historically, the Guilds had always maintained that there was only one sort of hunter talent: the ability to work green ghost light. But in the course of her new career as an investigative reporter, she had picked up some very interesting rumors hinting that some hunters could work other kinds of alien psi, specifically silver and blue light. If it was true that there were some exotic hunter talents, it was yet another secret that the Guilds were keeping. She doubted very much that she could trick Fontana into admitting it, but it had been worth a shot.

  “Let’s assume for the moment that you know all you think you need to know about me,” he said, ignoring the subtle dig about unpublicized talents. “What about you?”

  She froze. Elvis, sensing her distress, left his coffee and skittered across the desk. He jumped down onto her knee and then bounded up her arm to sit on her shoulder. She reached up and touched him in a reassuring manner.

  Fontana could not possibly know about her own talent, she told herself. He was fishing in the dark, trying to provoke her the same way she had tried to prod him. They were after each other’s secrets.

  “I’m a reporter, Mr. Fontana,” she said coldly. “Whatever talents I have are in the realm of journalism.”

  He gave her a slow, knowing, shatteringly intimate smile. “I’m not buying that, not for a minute. I know power when I sense it, Miss McIntyre.”

  “I did not come here to talk about myself. This was supposed to be an interview with you.” She closed her notebook and slipped it into her purse. “But it appears that isn’t going to happen, so I might as well be on my way.”