Minder Rising: Central Galactic Concordance Book 2

by Carol Van Natta

  Derrit was working on an assignment for school that he wasn’t ready to show her yet. He got that trait from his father, who had loved building suspense before revealing some secret project. Like the time he’d learned to crochet and made an afghan throw for Derrit as a solstice gift. That the afghan was decidedly polygonal instead of square hadn’t mattered to her adoring son in the slightest. On busy nights like tonight, she set up a tiny table near the pantry for Derrit, or he’d never get any work done, especially when other kids came in. Derrit was very social, again like his father. She herself was shy by nature, or at least she had been, until she’d had to learn not to be, so she could put food on the table. Shy road-crew employees got little respect, and bashful bartenders got few tips.

  Miraculously, Lièrén stayed, and took the opportunity to snag his favorite booth once it became free. Remembering his dry-mouth problem, she sent Rayle with another glass of water. It was sometimes still hard to remember that in Spires, or more officially, Novi Nadezhdi, potable water was plentiful and cheap enough to offer for free. She’d grown up in a near-desert, where the only oasis was a hundred kilometers away, and water was how wealth was measured.

  After refusing to serve brandy to a thirteen-year-old, it got her wondering how old Lièrén was. Certainly over seventeen, because the CPS didn’t hire children as field agents, but he looked about twenty-five. Even without the standard rejuve treatments that everyone got, he’d probably look young most of his life. Whereas her people, especially the women, looked like the proverbial old crones by the time they were fifty, without treatments, and she was behind on hers. She didn’t skip the regular health maintenance checkups and procedures, because she was all Derrit had, but body work at her age was considered elective. She even skipped the expense of a body parlor for her hair, meaning it had grown longer and shaggier than ever, despite occasional home trims. On the other hand, her great-times-three grandmother was still alive and running her own sheep station at age 168, so at least she had natural longevity going for her.

  She knew why she was worrying about her looks, when she usually couldn’t be bothered. He was sitting in the back booth. Even though she was only thirty-seven, she was still probably too old for him. Twelve- or fifteen-year age differences didn’t matter much these days, what with increasing human life spans, but it was still a consideration for a successful relationship. She rolled her eyes at the direction of her thoughts. She had no business whatsoever thinking about a relationship with a transient. Maybe she needed to visit the Red Blossom to take the edge off.

  Finally, the big party at table six broke up, which seemed to be the signal for other patrons to leave, too. The crowd thinned out, and Rayle took a break so he could make something to eat in the kitchen. As employees, they were allowed to use it unless the restaurant was busy, which was hardly ever. Derrit had made himself an omelet there earlier. Thank Neptune he thought cooking was an adventure, and was now responsible enough to be trusted in a kitchen.

  She loaded the glassware into the quicksan in the corner, rather than send it to the kitchen. The unit was fast, but small, so it would take several loads. It wasn’t worth the argument with the resentful restaurant staff to ask them to do it, even though it was their job. She straightened up the supply bottles and boxes, and entered ordering notes for those that were running low.

  The second Rayle came back, she asked him to watch the bar for a few minutes. She poured a flat orange for Derrit and took it to him, then took her glass of kelasa and slid into the vacant seat in Lièrén’s booth. Whatever he was reading on his very elegant, high-powered percomp was making him frown, but when he looked up at her, he smiled.

  Suddenly, she was nervous. “I’d like to make you a proposition.”

  At his raised eyebrows, she realized how it sounded. “Oh, sorry, not like that. I’m trying to propose a trade… I’d like to….” She was sounding like a complete idiot. “I’m not chemmed, I promise. I want to ask you for a favor.” She took a deep breath. “I’d like you to teach Derrit to use his talents. I know you’re still recovering, so I’ll understand if you’re not able to, but I’m just a general filer, and I can’t do it, and I don’t know anyone else. In trade, I’ll serve you whatever you want for free, as long as you’re here. I know it’s not much, but he could really use the help in learning to control his talents.”

  She looked at his altogether too-handsome face as he considered her words. She hoped for Derrit’s sake he’d agree, and at the same time, hoped he’d take her for a babbling fool and turn her down, so she wouldn’t be tempted by him anymore.

  CHAPTER 3

  * Planet: Concordance Prime * GDAT 3238.206 *

  After the incident with the telepath, and after revealing his twister talent, Lièrén had expected uncomfortable questions, accusations, or avoidance, but he certainly hadn’t been expecting Imara’s request and the trust it implied.

  “I’m honored to be asked, but please give me some time to think about it,” he temporized. His first instinct was to say yes, because it was Imara asking, and he liked the kid, but it wasn’t as simple as that.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ll be at the bar.” She slid out and away fast.

  He toyed with his glass of water. He didn’t know whether or not working with a child on minder skills would be against CPS protocol for field agents, though he suspected that if asked, his supervisor would forbid it. The whole unit was reeling over a murder-suicide of two of their own.

  Lièrén had spent the previous evening with the Office of Internal Inquiry, repeating ad nauseam that, although he was in the same field unit, he rarely interacted with others, since their job was retrieval and security, while his and his partner’s specialty was interrogation. He hadn’t heard from anyone in his unit except his supervisor since his accident, and had no idea what the victims were doing on Con Prime. He didn’t volunteer the fact that his now-dead partner Fiyon hadn’t trusted any of the other agents in their unit, for reasons he never explained. The OII could develop their own opinions.

  From what the OII said, Agent Carlo Baretti had pushed his lover, Agent Traci Apfel, off one of the famous lotus park platforms in Spires, then jumped to his own death. Lièrén felt guilty that, between their separate jobs and his own poor memory, he could barely remember the talents, much less the faces, of his dead coworkers. Considering their obviously dysfunctional relationship, they likely had other things on their minds besides visiting an injured coworker they hardly knew.

  It had taken some time to convince the OII that he didn’t have any useful information to provide them. He would have told them if he did, because the CPS needed his unit to be functional, and his absence wasn’t helping. With Fiyon dead and Lièrén disabled, the unit was down to one part-time interrogator, Talavara, who was a low-level twister, but impatient and careless as a telepath. Lièrén had only met her in person a few times, but Fiyon had often grumbled about having to clean up after her.

  Teaching Derrit would distract Lièrén from feeling sorry for himself, a distressing habit of late. He’d once imagined the CPS would keep him on New Kulam at the Academy or the prestigious Minder Institute as an instructor, but his mid-level twister talent had been strong enough to make him more useful in the field. Sifters were often used in interrogation, adjusting brain chemicals to encourage trust and relaxation, and because of their lie-detection capabilities, though his didn’t used to be that good. Lately, perhaps because he’d had little else to think about or occupy his time, he’d been noticing the lies more. The OII interrogators had tried lying to him as an investigation tactic, until they remembered his talent. Then they’d brought in their own sifter.

  People lied all the time in the bar, usually about how much they’d pre-chemmed themselves before arriving. Fortunately, Imara and Rayle together were good at figuring it out for themselves. Imara was hard to read, but he was fairly sure she only pretended to like sports when customers wanted to talk about them, and Rayle wasn’t seriously interested i
n most of the people he flirted with.

  Lièrén was grateful that Imara’s questions hadn’t yet strayed to What exactly do you do for the CPS?, which he couldn’t answer without lying and would have to report it. Lièrén already knew he was on thin ice for not reporting what he and Derrit had done to the telepath, but he was reluctant to stir up trouble for another minder, however antisocial. Minders had a poor enough reputation as it was. It was better for minders to take care of other minders quietly, among themselves. Lièrén had found the twisting easier than usual, which he assumed was because of the adrenalin and working with the unexpectedly powerful Derrit. The post-twist headache had been as vicious as always, but at least he’d slept through that night without the usual falling dreams from the accident.

  Since lunchtime, his talent had felt like tiny pins and needles in his head. As a high-level sifter, he was accustomed to being stronger than most; he wasn’t accustomed to being slow in anything regarding his primary talent. He hoped the new enhancement drugs, which he’d taken an hour ago, would fix the problem. He’d had to wait two extra days to get the replacement enhancement drug order refilled, some problem with a custom compound and a different pharma supplier.

  The extracurricular activity of teaching Derrit certainly wouldn’t impact Lièrén’s current usefulness to the CPS. Owing to the investigation, plus the various follow-up procedures, medical checkups, and therapy sessions that were part of his treatment plan, he could only be in the office part-time, on irregular days and hours. Yamazaki, his supervisor, had assigned him the catch-up filing task for lack of anything better, and had truthfully apologized for it being such a nasty job. Lièrén was grateful that Yamazaki could give him something useful to do, and told him so. It wasn’t Yamazaki’s fault that he got saddled with a non-local team’s injured field agent, especially considering the perceived cloud Lièrén was under with the internal investigation still pending.

  He was diverted from his musing by Rayle and Imara at the bar.

  “…restaurant staff was in a panic,” Rayle was saying gleefully. “One of the station delivery tubes is clogged, and it’s backing up the system, making them leak all over the tables. The manager ordered them to shut down until maintenance can get to it, so they have to send all their customers to us.”

  Rayle’s enjoyment was infectious, and was answered by a smile from Imara. “Which tube? Hot water?”

  Rayle shook his head. “Kaffa. Someone forgot to replace a filter, and the granules got in the system. They’ve got housekeeping scrounging around for extra towels. It’s an unholy mess.” All the hotel room freshers had solardries, quick-dry concentrated-heat blowers, so Lièrén imagined the hotel didn’t have very many towels to begin with. A lot of people considered them unsanitary.

  Imara, who had been wiping down a carafe, looked thoughtful, then eyed one of her dispenser hoses. “Tell them to try coupling their fizzy line to the main tube and flushing it to the drain. The extra gas pressure ought to get the particles moving along.” At Rayle’s crestfallen look, she added, “Don’t worry. Knowing them, they’ll drag out the cleanup for at least a couple of hours. We’ll still get all the customers, and you can sell more tickets to your show.”

  He grabbed her hand and kissed it. “Excellent plan, my precious, practical darling!” He executed a graceful spin as he turned to leave.

  Lièrén couldn’t help but smile at Rayle’s irrepressible personality, while admiring Imara’s clever solution. He wished he was that fast a problem solver.

  The pressure in his bladder reminded him he’d been downing liquids almost nonstop since he’d arrived, so he went to the fresher, and took the opportunity to try smoothing his hair down with a little water. It had looked stupid ever since his nap, and he hadn’t been in the mood to take a shower before coming to the bar. He really needed to find a decent body parlor sometime soon, or he’d look like a frilled cockatoo. He made a mental note to ask Imara for a recommendation. If he trusted Rayle’s choice, Lièrén was afraid he’d end up with a cherry red mohawk with glow-in-the-dark skull studs.

  When he returned to his booth, he found Derrit seated, waiting for him.

  “Nanay says you’re still thinking about teaching me,” he said without preamble.

  “Nanay?” asked Lièrén.

  “It’s ‘mother’ in Filipino. It was what my dad called her. He’s dead.”

  The boy’s matter-of-fact tone about his father’s death was unexpected. As his own recent survival attested, modern medicine had reduced human mortality rates. Parental death wasn’t a common experience for children. He himself had been only one of two orphans out of thousands of students at the Academy. He nodded respectfully to Derrit. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Derrit shook his head. “He wouldn’t have liked us still being sad.”

  He glanced toward his mother, who was chatting with a patron, then back to Lièrén. “She told me not to bother you, but I wanted you to know that I really want to learn. It’s not like Sula’s mother, who made her take classical teslaharp lessons because it looked good on school applications.” He was very earnest. The Filipino heritage explained the boy’s slanted eyes and lighter brown hair, though he’d clearly gotten the springy, pointed corkscrew curls from his mother.

  “If I may ask,” said Lièrén, “why are you so interested?”

  “Dad told me before he died that I needed to look out for Nanay once he couldn’t. I’m not big, yet, like he was, but if I get better at all my talents, maybe I can keep buttwashes like that telepath from hurting her.” The fierceness in his tone reminded Lièrén of how angry the boy had been that night.

  It dawned on Lièrén why Imara had always been harder for him to read. “How long have you been using your shielder talent to protect her?”

  Derrit shrugged. “I don’t know. I just kind of think about putting up shields for her, and they happen.”

  “How do you get them to stick? The few shielders I’ve known have to be nearby and concentrating.”

  Derrit shrugged again, more uncomfortably this time. “I don’t know. Am I doing it wrong?”

  Lièrén shook his head. “I don’t believe so.” He didn’t want the boy feeling ashamed of his talents, but Lièrén didn’t know much about shielders.

  Derrit’s expression morphed into hopefulness. “That’s why I need you to teach me.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eleven, but I’ll be twelve in a month,” he said with pride. He clasped his hands and shoved them in his lap, as if to keep them from fighting with each other.

  Lièrén hid a smile at how eager Derrit was to be older, impressed with how mature and responsible the boy was for his age. He remembered his own days at the CPS Academy, wishing constantly to be treated like the older students he had classes with. He’d probably been a snot-nosed brat compared to Derrit.

  He made his decision and nodded. “Yes. Please tell your mother I’d like to speak with her when it’s convenient for her.”

  Derrit smiled widely, then scrambled out of the booth and shot like a meteor toward Imara. In mid-flight, he veered off to Rayle and pointed him to the bar, then pulled his mother’s hand to practically drag her to Lièrén.

  “You two have a lot to talk about,” said Derrit, who nudged her toward the open seat, then scampered back to the bar, where Rayle was watching with open amusement.

  Lièrén spoke before Imara could sit. “My apologies for the interruption. I should have anticipated Derrit would be impatient. I can wait until it’s convenient.”

  Imara laughed as she sat. “Now is good.” Not for the first time, he was struck by how much her smile lit up her face, turning pretty into extraordinary.

  “I will do my best to teach Derrit, but you must understand that there are other, better teachers at the CPS Academy. I’m not recruiting for them, but they have the experience I lack. Also, I am still adjusting to new enhancement drugs, so my own talents may be… unpredictable.”

  “You seemed to do
okay a few nights ago.”

  “Yes, but I believe that’s partly because Derrit has strong talents. Did you know he’s been shielding you?”

  Her eyes widened. “He has?” She was still a moment, then sighed. “I’ll have a talk with him. I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess. Torin—Derrit’s father—was always hiding things from me so I wouldn’t worry. Derrit is very like him. Torin hated medics and didn’t trust healers, so when he got sick, he didn’t tell anyone until he collapsed one day on the job. By then, it was too late, and he couldn’t be saved.”

  Her tone was even and her expression calm, but he got the impression she still felt… betrayed that Torin hadn’t trusted her. Lièrén made a mental note to talk to Derrit about giving Imara the choice of whether or not to be shielded. It had no effect on her filer talent, but unless the shielding was done correctly, it bottled up any other talents she might have, which was why shielders were used in security work. Although she claimed she was only a general filer, with the enviably comprehensive memory of everything, Lièrén wouldn’t be surprised if she had another talent, too, maybe more than one. His own sifter talent said she might, though it was equally likely his misbehaving talent was wrong.

  He was heartily sick of not being in control of his talents, and of drug withdrawal and side effects, and the near-constant headaches, flatlined sex drive, and still not having stamina even after six weeks of surgery, treatment, and therapy. Other than that, he thought sourly, he was the bloody picture of health.

  Once again, he was feeling sorry for himself, when he should have been paying attention to the friendly woman across from him. “We can begin the day after tomorrow, if that’s acceptable. That is your next evening here, isn’t it?”

  She smiled once again. “Yes, and thank you. I’m sure Derrit probably already told you, but he’s really looking forward to whatever you can teach him, for as long as you stay.”