Minder Rising: Central Galactic Concordance Book 2

by Carol Van Natta

  He could see why the CPS might want to keep minder talents easily explainable for the public, especially considering the prevalence of overt prejudice against minders, but he wasn’t sure that such a simplistic view did minders any favors.

  He wasn’t sure it did the CPS any favors, either. He suspected a high percentage of the Testing Center’s data mismatch problems centered around trying to use an inadequate classification system to record test results. Even the testing itself was constrained—how could they test something they didn’t know about? He’d noticed a surprisingly high incidence of records with “re-test required” flags. Maybe an improved classification system would significantly lower that number.

  He stopped the Testing Center build and tried a query on the smallest cubes. When it proved satisfactory, he automated it to run against all the cubes. The deskcomp had a thin matrix, so it would probably have to run overnight.

  His prepaid percomp gave him a “task complete” notice through the wire he’d stuck in the high collar of his shirt. He pulled out the percomp and put his ring finger on the biometric reader.

  He nearly jumped out of his chair when his office door slid open unexpectedly.

  “Are you Agent, uh, Soong… Sing…?” The speaker was a hard-faced, hard-bodied woman named Mateliff, with eerie, silver-edged red eyes and the characteristic nothingness of an active shielder. He remembered her name because of the unique flavor of her talent and her body mods. Her role was security, and her mods also included reinforced and sharpened fingernails and pointed teeth, which gave her the intimidating guise of a predator.

  He turned to face her, casually leaving the percomp on his desk. “I am Agent Sòng. How may I help you?” He added warmth to his tone, to tell her he wasn’t insulted by her getting his name wrong. She had a thankless job and a talent that isolated her from friends and family as much as his did, though for different reasons.

  She didn’t relax, exactly, but she didn’t escalate, either. “I take it that was you accessing the omicron-level hypercube to look at classified personnel data?” She used her eyes to indicate his deskcomp, not letting her hands get too far from him. From the feel of the strength of her talent, she probably wouldn’t need the extra insurance of touching him to shut him down.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged, then added, “I have clearance.”

  “Yeah, well, you may have clearance, but that deskcomp doesn’t. Its encryption wouldn’t stop a two-year-old with a Little Starshine babycomp.” She shook her head and sighed. “I suppose no one bothered to give you the security briefing?”

  “No, but my schedule is unpredictable, and the field office is busy and understaffed.” He tilted a hand to indicate the main part of the office. He clasped his hands together non-threateningly and shifted his torso, to draw her attention to his distinctly non-corporate attire. He hoped she’d think he looked too young to be an agent, which was sometimes an advantage.

  “What data were you looking at?” Her tone was mild, but her body language said she was testing him.

  “My own file.” He didn’t know what the system alerts told her, and there was no reason to conceal this truth.

  She snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “I remember now, you’re the twonk doing the Testing Center data tagging.” She gave him a crooked smile and relaxed a little more. “I don’t know who you pissed off to get that job, but I guess someone has to do it.”

  He shrugged and tried to look chagrined.

  She started to leave, then turned back. “Look, kid, if you have to look at CPS files again, use one of the green terminals in the main room, or get Supervisor Yamazaki to upgrade this one.” The CPS had fought for years to get their own independent network, but neither the regular military nor the Central Galactic Concordance government agreed, so the CPS had built multi-layered, multi-point security and monitoring methods to protect their sensitive data and communications. He knew them well.

  He nodded. “I will. Thank you, Agent Mateliff.” She wasn’t responsible for the rules, just enforcing them.

  “Oh, dead gods, no, I’m a security specialist, not an agent. I leave that kind of work to your lot.” She didn’t bother to hide her disdain, but he didn’t take offense. He wouldn’t want her job, either.

  She waved a negligent hand at his parting wish for her to have a pleasant evening.

  He waited until he could no longer feel even a hint of her shields before turning back to his prepaid percomp.

  He wished he hadn’t.

  His queries, which he checked twice just to be sure, pointed to the disturbing conclusion that his dead partner, Fiyon Machimata, had been trading favorable interrogation outcomes for cash.

  Lièrén spent another two hours trying various scenarios that would fit the facts as well, but failed. Official records and his own meticulous notes all pointed to corruption, and decades of it. Which made Lièrén as unbelievably naïve as his CPS advocate Patwardan and his great-grandfather thought he was, if not for the reasons they thought.

  Even more deeply distressing, it became glaringly obvious that Fiyon had been cleaning Lièrén’s mind of inconvenient memories, probably since Lièrén’s first week on the job. It couldn’t have been anyone else other than Fiyon, because no one else had the access. Or Lièrén’s trust.

  Because he’d let Derrit practice erasing specifically created memories, he now knew exactly what it felt like to have unnatural blanks. He had too damned many holes, far more than could be explained by his historically poor memory. Earlier memory holes felt like they’d been clawed out with a garden fork, while later holes were more neatly excised.

  The field-office data and his own case notes proved it. Take his birthday, eight months ago. The expense records and his private calendar said he’d had dinner out with Fiyon and Supervisor Uvay Garbey, and his ID was on the receipt along with the others. That evening, the case files recorded an interrogation by Fiyon and Lièrén of a jack-crew captain who had been let go soon after. His memory of the evening wasn’t just fuzzy or disjointed, it was totally blank. He’d found dozens of similar examples in the last few years, and almost every time, they correlated with an interrogation subject being exonerated or released.

  The most egregious case had been two years ago, when his unit had intercepted a fugitive pedophile in the Con Prime Space Station for a covert interrogation. The pedophile had been one of a pair of predators who had collected children to molest, maim, and murder, then preserve their broken bodies like cordwood in the cryo-hold of their specially modified interstellar ship.

  Lièrén remembered with sickening clarity the excruciating texture and stench of the pedophile’s mind, and the post-twist headache, but his memory of the interrogation and the twist itself was a black hole. Not moments after Lièrén’s memory picked up again, the pedophile had escaped because Fiyon wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

  Twelve hours later, a shrewd military forensic investigator figured out where the pedophile had gone, but had nearly been killed when he’d cornered the monster in a joyhouse kitchen right there in Spires. Lièrén hadn’t helped the pedophile escape, but his naïve blindness had let it happen. He felt as though he may as well have handed the pedophile the knife.

  He numbly closed his files, shut down his percomps, and just sat in his tiny office for a long time, stunned. He didn’t know who to trust, and he knew a lot more people not to trust. His thoughts were spinning uselessly, like a tumbleweed in a whirlwind, and his emotions were a chaotic mix of betrayal, fury, guilt, and despair.

  How the hell could he have been so willfully, outrageously abused, and so complacently oblivious to it?

  * * * * *

  Two hours later, he was seated at the end of the bar, nursing his glass of iced lime water like it was 180-proof ice wine.

  “I’m tellin’ ya,” said the long-faced woman in a red tunic who Lièrén recognized as a regular, “Red Shift had a perfect season in ‘31.” Lièrén had no idea what sport she was talking about.


  Her companion, also a regular, was an older woman dressed in a casual charcoal-gray jumpsuit. “And I’m telling you, the Event Horizons beat them right before the master levels. Wanna bet?” She held out her hand, palm up, inviting the wager.

  The woman in red turned to Rayle, who’d just served them brightly-colored iced drinks with frilly decorations. “Rayle, help me out here. Tell Luli I’m right. I forgot my percomp at the clinic again.”

  Rayle laughed and held up his hands in surrender. “I don’t even know who won the galactic championship last year. Ask Imara.” He nodded toward her, then made his escape.

  “Sorry, Betz,” said Imara, as she dispensed a pink liquid into a shaker. “Red Shift lost to the Event Horizons, six to five, on 3231.144. Red Shift beat them seven to four in the pinpoint pattern round, using trim jets.” Based on that, Lièrén guessed it was a space-based competition of some sort, the kind his great-grandfather liked, and had probably competed in himself.

  Betz, the woman in red, slumped as her companion Luli grinned triumphantly. “See? Another fan!”

  Imara shook her head as she added a powder to the blender, causing the mixture to turn sunset orange. “No, I just have a good memory for trivia.”

  Lièrén would have smiled at her understatement, but it reminded him too much that his own memory was full of jagged holes. He resolutely focused on the bottles behind Imara, counting them, as a way to keep his thoughts from plunging into deep waters. It wasn’t productive, and he was too distracted to keep empathic Rayle from sensing the turmoil. He couldn’t talk about his troubles and didn’t want to have to lie to either him or Imara. If the CPS Office of Internal Inquiry telepaths ever came snooping around, their ignorance would save them.

  Lièrén couldn’t prove that the high casualty rates in his unit were related to Fiyon Machimata’s corruption, but it wouldn’t surprise him. He could easily imagine vengeance from the victim of someone that Machimata had “exonerated.”

  On the other side of the two women, a balding man thumped a shot glass down loudly on the bar top. The curve of the bar meant Lièrén had a clear view of him and his two friends, and he thought they might be regulars, too. The man, clearly in need of a depilatory for his face and a body shop for his budding obesity problem, cast an ugly look at Imara.

  “Oh, frellin’ hell, you’re one of those, aren’t you? You’re a subbin’ minder. You’re a whatchacallit, a filer, right? Cheater is what I call it.”

  Lièrén forced himself to remain still and relax. It was nothing minders hadn’t heard before. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the woman in red, Betz, hunch her shoulders a little. Lièrén’s talent said she had an animal affinity, maybe birds, judging from the extra padding on her tunic’s shoulders and a tiny feather stuck in her hair. None of the other patrons seated at the bar had talent. Imara did, though she was containing it well enough to be a shielder herself.

  The delicate-looking, brown-skinned woman seated next to the balding man shook her head in disgust. The slender black man on her other side leaned in. “Shut up, Tace. You’re drunk.”

  The balding man thrust up his middle finger in a cross-culturally rude gesture. “Wank off, Warner, I ain’t drunk yet. Minders ain’t like you and me. There’s nothin’ to stop ‘em from messing with every one of us, jus’ ‘cause they can.” He turned to look at Imara. “Or winning bar bets ‘cause they’re freak cheaters.”

  Imara gave no sign that she’d even heard him as she poured the orange drink into a frosty glass of ice.

  With a carefully casual smile, Lièrén said, “I’d love to have a memory like hers. It’d save me a year of penance for forgetting my grandmother’s birthday.” He nodded his head toward Imara without looking at her. “Besides, it’s nice when a bartender always gets your order right.”

  “Sync that,” agreed Luli, the woman in the jumpsuit. She smiled and pointed to her and her companion’s mostly empty glasses. “Another round, please.” Imara returned her smile and opened the cold box.

  Tace grunted and turned to Warner, the man next to him. “That’s as may be, but you and Priya here are foolin’ yourselves if you think minders don’t want to see normal people jacked. You know what they call us? Nulls. Like we’re nothin’. If you ask me, the lot of them oughta be blank-slated.”

  Lièrén had to admit that some minders he’d known used that term, but no one liked being called subhuman or a freak, so some defensiveness was understandable.

  The pretty brown-skinned woman gave Tace an exasperated look. “And who’s going to do the blank-slating? It takes a cleaner—a minder—to do that.” Her Hindi accent gave a sharp, precise edge to her words. “Or perhaps we should send them all to the frontier, or treat them as if they were old Confederation enemies of the state and just disappear them in uncharted space.” She slid off the barstool, keyed her percomp, and waved it at the tab indicator. “You’re an unmitigated jackass when you’re drunk. I’m not going to stay and listen to your drivel.” She nodded to the black man. “Have a good evening, Warner.” She grabbed her light coat from the hook and left.

  Tace tossed back what was left in his glass. “Lightweight.”

  “She’s right, you are a jackass.” said Warner. “Did some minder pee in your tea today?”

  “No, but how would I know? Anyone in here could be a minder, and we’d never know it.” He waved a hand to include everyone in the room, but ruined the gesture by nearly falling off the stool. “They got no moral compass.”

  Warner’s eyes narrowed. “Suck hard space, Tace. My sister’s a fixer, and my uncle’s a healer. They’re just people, like us.” He keyed his percomp and paid his tab. “Next time you crack your flitter or get busted up in another bar fight, you can damned well call someone else.”

  That apparently got home to the drunk man like nothing else had. “Your sister’s different,” he spluttered, wetting his cheap, sweat-stained shirt. “She’s not one of them telepaths that go mucking about in your mind and shit.”

  Warner shook off Tace’s grip on his shoulder and stood. “Nice. All minders are degenerates, except that ones that do you favors. You’re just a selfish prick.” Warner gave Imara an apologetic shrug before leaving.

  Tace hunched his shoulders grumpily and pushed his empty glass toward Imara with a grunt. “Blue Ruin. Double.”

  She took his glass and gave him a professional smile. “Sorry, Tace. That was your limit. How about something from the kitchen, or a detox?”

  Tace glared belligerently at Imara. “I only had the two.”

  Imara snorted. “Plus you drank most of Priya’s Superorbital Blitz, and whatever you had at lunch before you came here.”

  Tace dropped his eyes. “I got nothing for lunch. Got overtime instead.” He sounded truly disgruntled, but even through the distortion of the alcohol clouding Tace’s responses, Lièrén felt the partial lie.

  Imara leaned back and crossed her arms. When her seemingly wandering gaze flickered in his direction, he shook his head once, ever so slightly. She focused on Tace and shook her head. “Nice try, Tace. No more kickers for you tonight.”

  “It’s a free-range galaxy,” muttered Tace. “I can have as much as I want.”

  “Yep,” agreed Imara with another professional smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “But not here.”

  To Lièrén’s relief, Tace paid for a large cup of dark kaffa to go and left.

  Belatedly, Lièrén thought to wonder if Derrit had overheard any of Tace’s tirade. To his relief, he saw Derrit was still at the small table in back, finishing his school work. Imara had been forced to sternly order him there to get his school assignments done, instead of making friends with the kids lounging around the net terminals, looking for games. He’d been uncharacteristically willful and whiny, reminding Lièrén that Derrit, for all his impressive talent and strong sense of responsibility, was still a boy.

  After the other two women left, Lièrén had the bar area almost to himself, with only one other customer at the oppos
ite end who was engrossed in her percomp.

  Rayle, grumbling once again about being tipped in worthless lottery tickets instead of cashflow, took a break to get himself something to eat, so Imara had her hands full keeping the several occupied tables and booths serviced and happy. On busy nights, sometimes Derrit would step in and help, but he was probably still sulking.

  Lièrén had the impulse to offer to collect dirty glasses, like the Quark and Quasar had somehow become a family kitchen where everyone did his part. He shook his head at the odd feeling. He had no experience, so he’d probably just get in the way. He considered leaving, maybe even going for a walk despite the rain, except he still hadn’t had the scheduled session with Derrit.

  Rayle returned from the kitchen, holding the last of a sandwich. “You’re quiet tonight.”

  Lièrén felt Rayle’s empathic talent energize. Lièrén hastily contained his depression, kicking himself for carelessly broadcasting. “It’s been a long day.”

  Rayle patted Lièrén’s shoulder as he went by and headed to the cold unit behind the bar. “I heard old Tace spouting off again. He’s usually okay when he sticks to inhalers, but when he’s drunk, he’s a testa de cazzo.”

  “Who’s a dickhead?” Imara asked as she slid by him to the dispensary cabinet. The door beeped and opened, once it confirmed her fingerprints on its handle. “Order for eight at B-5.”

  “Old ‘valued patron’ Tace, with his bullshit about minders.” Rayle opened his sandwich to discover all he had left was bread. He threw the crusts in the organic recycler.

  “I heard a lot worse when I was growing up.” She opened a drawer and pulled out a pill. “Of course, Marmar Coklat is the planet that progress forgot, and they like it that way.”

  Rayle looked pensive. “It was no better in New Geneva.” Lièrén wondered if Rayle’s family was related to the Leviso Holdings of intergalactic finance fame, and if so, what they thought about his career choice. “I think attitudes are changing, at least in public. Warner and Priya were honestly defending minders.” He looked to Lièrén. “Weren’t they?”