Evolution

by R S Penney

  He rounded on her.

  Larani stood just inside the front door with hands folded over her stomach, refusing to look up at him. “I'm sorry, Ben,” she said softly. “They aren't willing to allow you any off-world contact until you complete your recovery process.”

  “Worth a shot.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “Don't be; you did your best,” he said, marching across the room. “I actually wanted to talk to you about Nassai.”

  A yawn stretched Larani's mouth into a gaping hole before she stifled it with her fist. “Goodness,” she murmured. “It really is contagious. What would you like to know about Nassai?”

  Ben crossed his arms, frowning down at himself. “Anything you can tell me,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Specifically, I'd like to know whether or not they can tell each other apart.”

  Larani turned her head to stare at the wall, blinking as she considered the question. “I'm not sure,” she replied. “My symbiont can sense the presence of another Nassai, but I have to get within a few feet of the host.”

  “What about distinguishing one Nassai from another?”

  Larani winced, shaking her head in frustration. “It doesn't work like that,” she said, leaning against the door with her arms folded. “Nassai are fragments of a larger collective consciousness. They aren't individuals.”

  “Not at first,” Ben countered. “But they become more individualistic over time as their personalities are shaped by blending with a Keeper. Everything you experience has an effect on the symbiont you carry. That's why Jack's Summer is a little different from Anna's Seth.”

  A frown appeared on Larani's face before she smothered it. None of the orthodox Keepers much liked the idea of Jack naming his Nassai, and the fact that Anna had done so as well only made them worry that the trend might catch on. That was how Keepers viewed things. One Nassai was indistinguishable from another. “Why are you asking?” Larani murmured after a moment.

  Ben turned his back on her, and marched across the living room with his arms crossed. He paused with the window on his left, and for one brief moment, he could feel the chill coming through the glass. “I have a theory,” he explained. “I've gone over the footage of Calissa receiving her symbiont. It strikes me as odd that Slade would be able to somehow ensure that she received one of the corrupted Nassai.”

  “Yes, I thought so too.”

  Ben squeezed his eyes shut, a tremor passing through him. “Which is why I don't think that's what happened,” he said, spinning around to face Larani. “I think that at some point, Calissa received a new symbiont.”

  Larani stood with fists balled at her sides, her eyes glued to the floor. “You believe that she somehow…swapped Nassai?” The woman sighed as she stepped away from the front door. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? Were I to give up my Nassai, I would die in less than five minutes.”

  “And if someone had another symbiont ready to go?”

  “It's an interesting theory.”

  Ben dropped onto the nearest couch with his hands on his knees, staring down into his own lap. “More than a theory,” he murmured. “Think about it; if what Calissa said is true, then Slade has agents everywhere.”

  That made Larani stop in her tracks. After nearly two months of working together, Ben had discovered that his new partner did not like thinking about the prospect of moles in her organization. It was a common problem among Keepers: sometimes they bought into their own press. They were so convinced of their own nobility that they refused to see a conspiracy lurking right under their noses. Now, spies on the other hand…A decade of working in intelligence gave you a healthy cynicism. “All right,” Larani said. “Suppose we grant that you're correct. Slade has dozens of agents among the Keepers.”

  “It doesn't make sense that every single one of those traitors would have been his from the moment they first bonded a symbiont. Some would have been brought into the fold after serving for several years. And if we can truly be sure that a Nassai would never condone the misuse of their power…” Ben wasn't so sure of that, but he had no intention of arguing the point. Not with a woman as stubborn as Larani. “Then it stands to reason that many of these people received a corrupted symbiont only after they joined Slade's little cabal of evil.”

  “So you're saying…”

  “I'm saying that Slade has been gathering recruits slowly over the years,” Ben went on. “When he finds a willing convert, they extract the Nassai that he or she carried and replace it with one of these twisted symbionts.”

  Clenching her teeth, Larani shook her head in disgust. “That is a disturbing notion,” she said in a voice dripping with contempt. “It means that the Keepers have truly fallen from grace.”

  “It's worse than that,” Ben said. “We don't know how long this shadow organization has existed. It's possible that we're coming up against a faction that has existed within the Justice Keepers from their very inception.”

  Saying that out loud made him feel cold inside.

  Aamani descended the stairs with her arms folded, her shoulders hunched up as if she wanted to shiver. The stairwell was cool, but hardly chilly now that summer was in full bloom. Still, she hated it. She had come to associate this place with fear.

  On the bottom level, she opened a door into a huge parking garage with concrete walls and banks of fluorescent lights in the ceilings. Empty parking spaces were marked off with yellow lines, and the air smelled of gasoline.

  Aamani strode forward.

  “I was beginning to think you'd stood me up,” a cool, crisp voice said from behind. So, he had been waiting just outside the stairwell door. Somehow, the man always found some new way to ambush her. “I tend to take such things personally.”

  Aamani winced, trembling as she drew in a hissing breath. “I'm well aware of the terms of our agreement,” she said, spinning around on her heel. “So, you can rest assured that when I have new information, I will share it.”

  Grecken Slade stood next to the door in gray pants and a long black coat that fell to mid-thigh, a coat with silver birds on its high collar. The man's face belonged on a statue, with pronounced cheek bones, tilted eyes and smooth skin. “Still, you've been spending an inordinate amount of time with my enemies.”

  Clenching her teeth, Aamani let her head hang, then drew in a hissing breath. “That is called infiltration,” she growled, striding forward. “You might have heard of it. It's how people in my line of work gather information.”

  Slade lifted his chin to study her with lips pursed, blinking slowly as he considered that. “Very well,” he said, stepping away from the wall. “What exactly have you learned about Jena Morane's plans?”

  This was the part she hated most; in her long career, Aamani had faced more than her fair share of tense situations – the worst of which involved two autonomous robots tearing her people to shreds in a parking garage just like this one – but she had always felt as though she were on equal footing with her opponents. Slade made her feel like an eight-year-old girl trying to challenge a three-hundred-pound man. He couldn't read her thoughts; he wouldn't know that the information she was feeding him was precisely what Jena wanted him to see, but that didn't make her feel any safer. Those dark eyes of his cut deeper than most swords.

  Aamani fished a memory chip out of her purse, caressing it with her thumb before she tossed it casually. Slade caught the chip with a grunt, then paused for a moment to inspect it. “It's all right there,” she told him. “They think they have a lead on the Key.”

  “Where?”

  Aamani felt her mouth twist, then turned her head so that he wouldn't get a good look at her expression. “Northern Oregon,” she muttered, her voice dripping with disdain. “Some Willapa legends about spirits that made Jack say, 'Oh, that sound like Overseers.' ”

  The site she was sending him to was one that Jack and Anna had investigated just last week, and – as usual – they had found nothing of substance. Still, if a false trai
l could keep Slade's people busy, it was worth it.

  As usual, she kept her composure, but she would be lying if she said she didn't feel a growing tension in her chest. The knowledge that some telepath had been tweaking her emotions was unsettling, to say the least. Raynar had trained her in the art of resisting such influence, had taught her how to dissect, analyze and root out foreign influence, but they were still no closer to identifying the culprit. Did Slade know? What if his telepath had told him everything that Aamani was thinking? The other shoe could drop at any time. She had to be ready.

  A vicious grin spread on Slade's face, and he lowered his eyes almost respectfully. “Excellent,” he said with a curt nod. “You've done well, Aamani. Very soon now, we will free your world from my people's influence.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  The man turned on his heel and marched back to the stairwell door, halting there for just a moment. “Keep them off balance,” he said almost as an afterthought. “I'm going to be rather busy over the next few weeks, and I'd rather not find myself tripping over Anna Lenai or Jack Hunter.”

  “Whatever you say,” Aamani hissed. “Let's just conclude this business as soon as possible.”

  Through the cockpit window, Keli saw a clear blue sky stretching from horizon to horizon above an endless desert of hard-packed clay. The engines powered down, their whine slowly fading away to nothingness.

  Keli sat in the co-pilot's seat with hands in her lap, frowning down at her own shoes. “This is the place?” she asked, arching one dark eyebrow. “You're sure this is where they discovered it?”

  Skoro, the tall man with a scraggly beard of salt-and-pepper hair – was on her left, baring his teeth as he stared through the window. “This is it,” he said, gesticulating with one hand. “If you've lost interest, we'll go now, but if you must see it…”

  Keli rose from her seat.

  Hunching over, she twisted around and made her way to the back of the cockpit. “I must see it,” she said, bracing one hand against the air-lock in the port-side wall. “If you wish, you may remain here.”

  “Idiot woman.”

  The air-lock slid open with a hiss, revealing a ruined landscape that seemed to go on forever without a trace of green to be found. Just rocks and stones, clay and dust. No one in their right mind would live here.

  Keli descended the steps, pulling the hood of the cloak up to shield her face from the sun. A hot breeze assaulted her the instant she was out in the open, but she managed to ignore it with some effort.

  She rounded the nose of the small cargo hauler only to sense Skoro coming out behind her. The man was still a few paces away, and he had no hostile intentions – she would have picked up on that very quickly – but she didn't like anyone walking where she couldn't see.

  Keli froze, doubling over with her arms folded, a hiss escaping her. “Hurry up if you're coming,” she said through her teeth. “I would rather not have to stand here until I pass out from dehydration.”

  Her companion said nothing and chose instead to make his way up the rising slope in front of the ship. He stopped halfway up and let out a grunt. “Complain all you want,” Keli muttered, following him. “But you'll stay in front of me.”

  At the top of the hill, she found a steep cliff that dropped some twenty meters to a wide-open expanse of where a strange rock formation clawed at the sky like the fingers of a grasping hand. Her heart was pounding. That was it. She knew it. Even if the rocks had not been a clear indication, she could feel it lurking beneath.

  “There it is,” Skoro said.

  Shutting her eyes, Keli ignored the hot sun on her skin. She wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of one hand. “So the legends are true. Have either of your tried taking a scan of it?”

  Skoro's face twisted, and he tossed his head about. “You must be joking, bitch,” he growled before spitting over the edge of the cliff. “That thing slips into my dreams at night. You think I should go antagonize it?”

  It slipped into his dreams?

  They had traveled over five thousand kilometers from the small listening post these two criminals had commandeered. Which meant her suspicions were true. That creature down there was a very powerful telepath.

  She leaned forward to get a better look at the rocks. She wasn't willing to risk using her talent until she became absolutely certain that the creature would not retaliate. After what she'd seen on Alios…A shiver went through her, and she had to fight off the memory of a headache that had nearly killed her. The pain. Such terrible pain.

  She remembered the hooded woman's mad cackling while the creature she served lashed out at Keli. The horror as it ripped through her best mental defenses. That shriek in her mind…She had survived its attacks, of course, but only just. Fleeing through a dense patch of palm trees, masking her mental presence so that it would not find her. The shock as she realized what it was she faced.

  A part of her didn't want to believe it, but somehow, she knew it was true. She had seen an Overseer. She had touched its mind with her own, and if the legends were true, then another one lurked beneath those stones. She had to know. “I'm going down there,” she began. “Wait for me at the-”

  A high-pitched whistle cut her off, and she looked up to see something traveling through the clear blue sky. It was a ship, but not one she had ever seen before. This one was thin, tube-like, with spines that protruded from its body and curved inward toward the front. Could that possibly be?

  “Yes,” Skoro said, guessing her thoughts. “It is them.”

  He stood with one hand raised to shield his eyes, peering into the sky with wonder on his face. “They have been coming frequently in the last few months,” he went on. “We have seen two, sometimes three ships at a time. If they notice our presence, they do not care. We've learned to stay out from underfoot.”

  “You mean…”

  “Yes. Their visits become more and more frequent, and it is clear they are preparing for something. The Overseers have returned, woman. And I do not believe they are very happy with their children.”

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Daylight through a window that looked out on the city made Jena into a silhouette that stood with her back turned, gazing out on a lovely afternoon. “What's this one called, again?” she asked with amusement in her voice.

  Jack's living room was a small space with a couch along one wall, an easy chair on the other and a coffee table between them. At the moment, a jangly indie-pop guitar riff came through the speakers he had hung on his walls. He wasn't entirely sure why Jena wanted to hang out, but he didn't mind the company.

  Dressed in gray jeans and a black t-shirt, Jack sat on the couch with hands folded behind his head. “Gwen's Revenge,” he said over the music. “They're a new band out of Halifax. This is their debut.”

  Jena tuned.

  Her lips were curled into a small smile as she glanced over her shoulder. “So this is what you consider a good time?” she asked, raising one eyebrow. “Hanging out, listening to music?”

  Jack closed his eyes, letting the sound wash over him. “You're the one who wanted to spend your Saturday with me,” he replied, sitting forward. “Besides, I don't get much time to just sit and listen to an album like I used to.”

  Jena paced across the living room with her arms crossed, grinning down at herself. “Well, I've listened to pretty much everything you've sent me,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. “Most is pretty good. And I've got an extensive collection. I mean you've got stuff from the middle of the last century.”

  The ring of an oven timer told him that the pizza was ready; so he got up with a grunt and decided to be a good host. His small, galley-style kitchen with white floor tiles and gray countertops was just large enough for one person to move freely. Grabbing a pair of oven mitts, he opened the stove.

  Jack winced as a blast of heat hit him in the face, then forced his eyes open. “That's the thing about rock and roll,” he said, blinking. �
��It's always evolving. Each decade has a unique sound.”

  He set the pizza on the stove-top, the cheese still sizzling and filling the apartment with a delicious scent. Pepperoni, green peppers and olives: his favourite combination. If Anna were here, she would want a purely vegetarian option, but Jena was less interested in Earth's food politics.

  He turned around.

  His boss stood on the other side of the chest-high wall that separated the kitchen and the living room, smiling at him. “Okay, then,” she said. “The best song of this decade: what is it?”

  “The Grand Shirleys, 'Moving Parts.' ”

  “And the 2010s?”

  “The Arkells, 'Systematic.' ”

  “The 90s?”

  “Our Lady Peace, 'Naveed.' ”

  Tapping her lips with one finger, Jena squinted at him. “Interesting,” she said with a curt nod. “And you know, it's really odd, but I can't help but notice the fact that these are all songs by Canadian artists.”

  Jack smiled down at the counter, shaking his head. “Oh, Jen,” he said, his eyebrows rising. “I can hardly help it if my country just happens to have the best damn music scene on the planet.”

  They ate pizza for a while, talked about work, family, relationships. The only rule Jena had made when she'd asked for this little hangout was that under no circumstances would they mention their never-ending search for Slade's Key. Not that Jack wanted to discuss that. He still had nightmares whenever he thought about the hologram they had spoken to in that cave.

  Jena lifted a bottle of fizzy water to her lips, then tossed her head back and took a swig. “Okay, one thing I have to know,” she said, setting it down on the counter with a thunk. “You and Anna. Why isn't that a thing?”

  Chewing on his lower lip, Jack shut his eyes tight. He took a deep breath and then let it out again. “I really don't know,” he answered. “We were very close when she came here the first time, but…”