“They rewrite the history of our planet to make it appear that we live in a Utopia. Filling you up with drugs to keep you complacent. By the time you might have feelings for someone or something, they are relocated, removing all possibility of developing any deep emotional commitments.”
I thought about how I felt about Astrid. I thought about what was keeping her from becoming more to me, and I realized that it was due to the fact that she would rather be high on synth than be with me. Was that planned too? Now he had me thinking in a paranoid manner. I mentally shook myself.
"So how do you propose to change the order, Kai?" I asked sarcastically.
“It’ll be best if Kull explains it.”
“You know I could just turn you in.”
“But I have something you don’t.”
“What?” I asked.
“Faith.” But what I really thought he meant was that he had Kore.
• ѻ ● Ѻ • ○ ☼
We were spotted and then escorted by two men to a door that led under the dome. We traveled down some slippery steps, and then we were led down a narrow corridor. One of the men used a med grade club to knock on the door.
“Hey, are you a hunter too?” I asked.
His smile was not unlike the stars in the sky, with lots of dark spaces between the white ones. “No, but I took it from one.”
“They have trackers in them you know” I pointed out.
“Used to.” Then he knocked again on the door.
The door opened. A woman in a med outfit stood in front of us. After she looked us over, she said, “Don’t stand there staring at me, frisk them both down and then return to your post.”
They did as they were told and then we were roughly pushed into a room. It was well lit and more massive than I thought the base of a telescope would be, but I wasn't a scientist, so what did I know. I hoped Kai knew with whom he was associating himself.
There were about ten people in the room, and they were arguing amongst themselves. "What do you mean?" a tall, nearly skeletal man yelled at a small, dark woman.
“It’s been twelve oras, she’s gone. We’ll have to progress our plan without her.”
“She was the proof we needed.”
“We have other problems than her. What about the signal?” an average looking man with thinning brown hair asked.
“Damn the signal. Let the Council deal with that. The girl is the key. She is what we need to persuade the people.”
I was confused, but I was able to determine their assignments quickly enough. The tall man must have been Kull, although I never followed politics long enough to identify anyone involved in them. He definitely was the one in charge though. The balding man must have been one of the scientists assigned to this post. I was not sure about the woman yet, perhaps another scientist.
“What is going on? Where is Kore?” Kai asked.
“Who is he?” Kull returned.
“He’s a hunter who is going to help us.”
“What about his oculus?” the woman asked.
"Nage is rerouting his signal, and he's got a camo shirt on." I understood now that the technology that went into the shirt Kai had given me would shield me from surveillance. I underestimated Nage apparently. I took out my oculus to look at it, but it seemed untampered to me.
"Jett, your device will work just fine, but it will be a few reals slower than normal." I decided to search out the other hunters using it, and sure enough, after a real or two slower than normal, it showed all the locations of them in the immediate vicinity.
The people in the room seemed to calm down at his news. “And I’m freeman now, so I left my ocu back at the hotel.”
Kull looked me over and said, “He’s a liability. Kill him and then take his device.” I let my hand reach down for my CO2 gun, but of course, it had been taken when I was frisked at the door. He went for a standard plazgun that he had in a hip holster. I would have thought a Councilman had better access to weapons than that, but he was just another runner, like the rest of them now.
Kai put a hand across my chest, “Let’s not jump to any rash decisions Kull. Now did I hear correctly, she’s gone?”
“She ran after we received a cryptic message from Kahel,” the scientist told Kai.
“The moon? There’s nothing there,” I said.
“There used to be nothing.”
“Do they know about this too?” Kai asked.
“How can they not, if we know about it,” the thin man snapped.
“What evidence do we have that they have?” Kai asked.
“None so far,” the woman said.
"Maybe they targeted this post because they knew she was here," Kai absently said.
“What is so special about this girl?” I asked firmly.
“You didn’t tell him?” Kull asked Kai.
Kai shook his head.
Kull walked up to me and looked me over more closely, and then he turned to Kai and asked, “You think he can help us?”
Kai replied with a quiet, “Yes. He’s the best hunter I’ve ever met.”
“Killer you mean.”
“Hunter,” Kai asserted.
Kull looked at me and asked, “Can you find her and bring her back here?”
“Not until I’m told why she is so fracking important.”
Kull looked at every other person in the room, and after nearly non-existent nods from each of them, he said, "She is perfect."
Chapter 7
“What the frack does that mean?”
“She is an evolved version of us,” Kull told me.
“What do you mean?”
“She never gets sick,” Kai quickly answered.
“We hardly get sick as it is,” I countered. “We killed off all our ancestors with the weakest immune systems, remember?”
“No, that is not exactly what we mean,” Kull corrected me.
I stared at him, tempting him to explain himself further. He did not disappoint.
“We have injected things into her,” Kull cautiously said. I could easily imagine the things in which they exposed her.
“All right, so she has an amazing immune system. Find out which gene it is and use it to engineer the next generation.”
Kai looked away, and the woman coughed nervously. What weren't they telling me?
"She also experiences no emotions." Whatever I was expecting, it was not this. I thought about all the implications of what this might mean for us on Icharus. No more attachments to people, well we were already halfway there. No more fear. When it was your time to die, would anyone run anymore? There would be no more hate or jealousy. No more power plays on the Council. Everyone would think unemotionally and rationally. The government would definitely run better. No more pills for when you were sad. Altogether, this did not sound so bad.
But there would be no more happiness. Any contentedness in a job well done would be gone. Would food and drink taste like ash on your tongue?
Then something occurred to me, and I asked, "She does experience pain though, right?"
“Not that we can discern,” Kull replied. That might make my job a little tougher. Without fear, tracking her would be a challenge.
“When was she last seen?”
"We're not certain. She has had little experience with our world, and the longer she is out there, the better the chance she has of dying."
“So she can die?”
“We believe she can,” the male scientist told me.
“But without fear, the odds of her dying go exponentially up,” I said, pointing out the obvious.
“But you will find her and retrieve her,” Kull said more as a statement than a request. The only problem was that I had not agreed to anything yet.
“What was on the transmission?”
“We think it is one of the other colonies.”
“Have you responded?” Kai asked.
"Not yet," the man said. "We've been monitoring the other sectors, and no one else has responded
yet either."
“It might have been sent only to this station,” I said.
“Why?” Kai asked in return. That would be the question.
“Do they know of her existence?” I asked.
“Unlikely, unless she can communicate to them using a system we are unfamiliar with,” he answered.
“But you’re not sure.”
“No.”
“Do you think they are going to come for her?” Kai asked.
“We don’t know yet. We are still translating the message. We only received it a few tigs ago.”
Kull turned to me and asked, “Will you find her?”
I thought about my options. If I did this, I would be going against my direct orders to return her to the Council, but I still needed to hunt her either way. Obviously, I had to make a more immediate choice of whether or not to take down Kull. He seemed harmless enough to me right now. They needed me, but if I did this for them, I was probably going to be not only expendable but a liability to the government.
“What do I get if I do this for you?”
“What do you get?” Kull asked incredulously. “You get to not die right now.” He powered up his plazgun.
Kai stayed my arm and said, “Men, we can come to a civilized agreement. What do you want to do Jett?”
"I'd like a little time to think about it. I'll decide after I retrieve the girl. But let me make this clear, you want me to not only retrieve her but to also not tag you or report your rebellious organization either? That is going to cost you big."
“Kai will go with you,” Kull told me. “Hand your device over to Lars. He’ll install a tracking device so we can follow your progress.” I glanced at Kai, but I could tell he was not too pleased with this turn in the conversation.
“Won’t the government know it’s been tampered with?” I asked.
“If you are as good as he says you are, by the time it shows up on their radar, you’ll be living so far under it, they’ll think you are dead.”
“I’ll make sure he goes to ground when this is done,” Kai added.
Kull returned his attention to the display where the thin man was stationed, the conversation obviously had ended. I considered my options. I had no doubt that I could lose Kai if I wanted to later. He was good, but I had picked up a few tricks here and there along the way. I could report the station and continue the hunt for the girl. Kull wasn't the important one here, and he knew it.
However, I could do as he asked and return the girl to him. Something was amiss here though. What was in that communication from Urania’s moon? I felt I was in one of the moral conditioning tests I was always taking.
My life was balanced on a precipice. If I caught the girl and returned her to Kull, what would he do with her? Harvest her eggs and make a new super-human race? Did I want to help him with this? Regardless, his time was running out. Runners all around the globe were in pursuit of him… and I’ve been the only one assigned to find her. Why?
On instinct or impulse, I said, “I’ll do it.”
“Of course you will,” Kull said, without turning around from a blinking control panel.
“What does she look like? How old is she?”
He turned his head to say, “She is a child to the world. She has platinum hair and fair colored skin, and she has a birthmark behind her right ear.”
“Do you have a viz of her?”
"We have none since I destroyed them all before I left the Council."
“How long have you been aware that she has been missing?” Kai asked.
“Half a dag,” Kull told us.
"Any ideas where she might have gone?"
“None. She’s been in an education facility her entire life.”
“How did she escape?”
He frowned and said, "We were in transport here, and she needed to use the facilities. Another of us was in charge of her at the time. When they didn't return after half an ora, we went in search of her. We found his body, but she was gone."
“Did she kill him?” I asked.
“His body was broken.” I took that for a yes.
“How do you know the government didn’t find and take her?”
“She’s still a run for you, isn’t she?”
I opened my oculus, and sure enough, she was still listed under my nab-and-bag. I noticed that Kull had been taken off my tag list. I wondered if there will be other hunters after her now if she had been moved up on the priority list. “She is.”
“Now, go find her,” he said all the while keeping his focus on the communications board before him.
Kai started walking out of the room. “I’ll be waiting up top. I hate crowded rooms.”
I took a moment, swallowing the consequences of my decision, and then I handed my device to Lars. He ignored me and the woman stepped forward and took it. After opening it, I watched her nimble fingers work over the instrument, deftly adding the desired modifications.
“Do you do this often?”
“Not for hunters,” she said cynically.
Once she was done with the device, she soldered the piece shut. Then she handed it back to me. I took it and said, “I’ve only terminated a handful you know.”
“If you lead the snake to the rat, does that make you any less of a snake?”
“I can’t be a snake, there aren’t any.” They were remnants from old Earth. They did not exist anymore.
“They live so long as we remember them.”
“If he has his way, we will be just memories too,” I said as I nodded towards Kull who was deep in conversation with Lars. “Choose wisely.”
“You don’t know her.”
“But I will.”
She grimaced and said, “You better find her. I have other things to do other than talk to a killer.” She got up and walked to a control panel across the room, firmly ignoring me. I looked over the small squad of people in the room. If this was their central command, they were woefully undermanned to stage a revolt. They had to have more people, but how many more?
After I collected my weapons, I left and met Kai topside.
• ѻ ● Ѻ • ○ ☼
“Do you think she is still here?”
“What do you mean? In the city or in the sector?” Kai said as he blew out a smoky breath.
I wanted to say in the solar system, but chose instead, "Near the transport station."
“With at least half a dag head start, fracking unlikely.”
“Do you think she was capable of killing her chaperone?”
“Kull certainly thought so. I think someone must have taken her, but who else besides the government even knows she exists?”
“Should’ve asked Kull that before we left.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ll do this the hard way,” Kai said.
He started to walk away from me, but I grabbed his arm and said, “Why are you doing this?”
He turned around and stared at me. I let go of his arm, and then he said, "I'm dying."
“How?”
“I have the brain blight, stage three.” The blight was caused by a parasite only found on the Torva side. Not much can survive on the icy plains, but if you drank contaminated ice melt, your dags were numbered. They staged it by how far it had invaded your cerebellum tissues.
I snorted, “And they promised you extra time for helping them.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all of it,” he told me.
“Do you think that she can somehow heal you?”
“I don’t know. They’ve experimented with her plasma and found some surprising results.”
“What kinds of experiments?”
“Kull says that it has restorative properties.”
“Enough to rid you of the blight?”
"Maybe." He didn't know. Kull had political aspirations for her. Kai believed that he needed her in order to live and there is another colony attempting to contact her. Who didn't want her? I considered ditching Kai and forgetting the past dag ever happened.
/> I agonizingly sighed, fortifying my decision to find her. “Let’s start at the station house.”
“There will be people there who will help us.”
Or at least one female officer who could. “Lead on, Kai.”
• ѻ ● Ѻ • ○ ☼
"She's over there," I said, as I looked straight at the redhead who was making sure people loaded the next train swiftly. "You sure you know her?"
“Not personally, but Kull keeps all of his operatives from knowing each other on purpose,” he replied.
“Makes sense. We never associated with any of the other tag teams either. Must be a Council thing.”
“Listen, about that, I didn’t want to say anything earlier, but about Damus being re-conditioned…”
“What?” I asked as I grew taut, ready for whatever was about to happen.
“I’ve only known one other person who had a partner go in for reconditioning.”
“And?”
“They were assigned to tag their own partner at the end of the run.”
Frack. I believed Kai. I rechecked my oculus for a time update. I had on the outside, until the end of a tad, and then he would be coming for me. I just hoped it was not sooner than that.
The train was finally off, and there were only a few people left lingering in the station. The girl spotted and walked towards us. As she passed by, she brushed against my arm before making her way back to little room where we had hid from the dust storm. That was invitation enough for me, and we followed behind her.
She opened the door, and after we entered the room, she locked it behind us. “She’s not here.”
“How do you know we are looking for someone?” Kai asked her.
“I told you that she lives,” she told me. “You were bound to come back here. Who is this? He has hunter written all over him.”
Kai looked at me and then he said, “I used to be a hunter.”
“I didn’t think they retired your kind.”
“They don’t.”
She narrowed her eyes at him and said, “You running?”
“Can’t run when you aren’t even on the grid anymore.”
“Humph,” she replied. “Kull send you?” she asked me.
Icharus_ARC Series Page 5