by R S Penney
He forced himself up with a grunt, kneeling in the dirt with his head hanging, his ears ringing. He reached out and gingerly touched the pedestal with one hand. Nothing. No effect whatso-
The world was yanked away, solid objects becoming streaks of colour until they were ripped apart, leaving Harry in an endless void of stars. Suddenly, the pains in his body were gone as well.
Harry stood…on nothing.
Biting his lower lip, he squinted and turned his head to scan his surroundings. “Is anyone there?” he asked, taking a few steps forward. “My name is Harry Carlson, and I came here to gain the-”
“Knowledge of the ancients?”
The voice made him jump.
When he turned, his own grandfather was standing before him in the void. David Carlson was a tall man who wore a pair of black overalls over a blue and red flannel shirt. His dark-skinned face was contrasted by a silver beard on his jawline, his brow lined with thin wrinkles. “Hello, son.”
Harry closed his eyes, bowing his head to the other man. “Grandpa,” he said. “So…does this mean the thing killed me and you're here to take me to heaven?”
David smiled that warm smile that Harry knew so well. “No, son,” he answered. “I am not your grandfather.”
“You're an Overseer?”
Closing his eyes, David took a deep breath. “After a fashion,” he said with a curt nod. “It would be more accurate to say that I am an…interactive recording of what you would call an Overseer.”
“And you're talking to me?”
A heavy sigh exploded from David as he began to pace a circle around Harry. It was an odd thing to watch. For one thing, Harry noticed that the stars seemed to be slowly expanding away from him, and that was disorienting. “For a very long time, my people used your species for our purposes.”
David spun on his heel to stand before Harry with hands clasped behind his back, the very image of the sturdy, solid father figure he had once known. “We were wrong. A small number of us began to recognize the potential of your species.”
Harry crossed his arms, lifting his chin to meet the other man's gaze. “So, you grew a conscience?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Forgive me if I don't find that to be all that reassuring. You can't just-”
“We don't have much time,” David broke in. “Your brain is processing information at an accelerated rate, but I have scanned your mind and the mind of the man who tried to interface with me moments earlier. Many such as him have tried to unlock the knowledge buried here, including the one you call Slade. You are the first to be free of my people's influence, the first who can be trusted. I know that you are in physical danger from the man called Arin, and there are things you must learn.
“What you call 'the Key' is a trap: a device designed to be operated by one of your species. If triggered, it will initiate the final phase of our plan for humanity. Believe me when I tell you that's something you don't want.
“Those of us who began to recognize the value in humanity broke away from the rest of our people. We hid the Key, locking it away so that it could not be detected even with our own technology.”
“I don't understand,” Harry muttered. “If this Key was so dangerous to us, then why not just destroy it and remove the threat?”
A warm smile blossomed on his grandfather's face, and then the other man stepped forward to clap Harry on the shoulder. “Because the Key is also a great opportunity. My people have traveled long and far.”
It took a moment for Harry to notice that the stars receding into the distance were no longer single points of light but tiny galaxies that spiraled as they flew off into the blackness. “This is not the place of our origin,” David went on. “In all the cosmos, we have found very few species who could one day stand as our equals. Those that could usually destroyed themselves.
“When your people are ready, the Key will grant you access to our knowledge. It will give you the opportunity to learn from our mistakes to succeed where we failed. But only when you are ready.”
“Then what do we do?”
David stepped forward, touching two fingers to Harry's forehead. “The knowledge of what you need to do is here,” he said. “The Key can be accessed through the SlipGate Network, but it requires three access codes. I have given you the first. Find the other two and claim humanity's destiny before your enemies do.
“Your species is truly remarkable, Harry Carlson.” A scowl passed over David's face for half a second before he smothered it. “The plasticity of your brains rivals even our own. I grant you one more gift, a tool that will no doubt be indispensable.”
“But-”
“No! There is no time!”
The vision faded, leaving Harry dimly aware of the fact that he was down on his knees with both hands gripping the fleshy pedestal. His ears picked up the heavy thump-thump of footsteps drawing near.
A glance over his shoulder revealed Arin charging down the hillside toward him, snarling as if he intended to trample Harry to death. Jack was a few paces behind, but it was clear that he would not catch the other man before he entered the clearing.
Harry dove for the briefcase.
He knew what to do.
Pausing on the hillside, Jack watched as Arin ran headlong for the clearing. The man would kill Harry once he got within arm's reach; there was no doubt about that. No doubt at all. That left him with only one option.
Jack drew his pistol from the holster on his belt, gripping it tightly in two hands and aiming for the other man's back. “Stun rounds!” he growled, watching as the LEDs on the barrel turned blue.
He fired.
Arin spun around, stretching one hand out toward him just before the air seemed to ripple with the shimmer of summer's heat. A bullet that would have taken the man in the chest slowed and veered off to Jack's left.
He was half-worried that Arin would have reflected it, but it seemed the man lacked the necessary skill to do that. Pulling a gun on someone with Keeper powers was always a last resort – there was no way to predict how your enemy might redirect incoming fire, and this was especially dangerous in the presence of civilians – but Jack was fresh out of options; he needed to give Harry a chance to get away.
Come on, buddy! Jack thought at his friend. Take the hint!
Harry pulled the briefcase to himself, peering inside to find the strange rectangular device with metal clamps hooked up to the Overseer multi-tool. A N'jal, it was called. He knew that somehow.
Ripping the thin slab of flesh away from the clamps, he allowed it to bond with the skin of his right palm, tiny microscopic fibers digging into his tissue, linking his nervous system to the N'Jal's. Instantly, he became aware of a world he had never even imagined. There was so much sensory data that he couldn't even process it with his mind. Was this what it had been like for young Kevin?
Harry stood up, then hunched over with his hands on his knees, huffing and puffing as he tried to catch his breath. “Come on, old man,” he whispered to himself. “You're not ready for retirement yet.”
He whirled around.
Arin was just outside the clearing with his back turned, erecting one of those weird Bendings that would deflect incoming fire. The man glance over his shoulder, snarling at Harry. “You fool! You actually think you can control it?”
Harry thrust a hand out, the air before him shimmering like ripples spreading across the surface of a pond. He growled and sent the force-field flying toward his opponent at blinding speed.
Arin jumped, rising high into the air, then back-flipping to let the force-field pass underneath him. The man dropped to the ground to land crouched between two trees at the edge of the clearing.
He got up and turned around.
Harry flung a hand out in a scooping motion. In response, a force-field rippled into existence before him, sped along the ground and dug up hard dry mud as it sank into the earth. Chunks of muck flew toward Arin.
The man shielded himself by crossing both forearms in front of his
face. He backed up into the space beyond the treeline. “Of all the insolence!” Arin hissed. “I will gut you like a fish!”
He charged forward, then leaped, sailing through the air on a line of Bent Gravity. Harry could detect that as well, though he couldn't say how. The other man came toward him with arms spread wide.
Harry raised a hand, and the air before him rippled, blue sky and tall green trees reduced to blurry images that wobbled in his field of vision. Arin slammed into the force-field, then bounced off, landing on his ass just a few feet away.
Harry let the barrier vanish.
He strode forward and pressed the palm of his hand to the other man's forehead. “I have had enough!” he growled, reaching through the Overseer device to send a series of electrical signals through Arin's nervous system.
Wincing so hard that tears leaked from his eyes, Arin threw back his head and let out an anguished wail. “Companion have mercy!” he screamed, hand trembling as if in the middle of the seizure. “Stop! Stop!”
Harry didn't stop. He ignited every pain receptor in the other man's body. “So…I'm pathetic, am I?”
“Please!”
“I disgust you, do I?”
A look of concentration passed over Arin's face.
Clenching his teeth with a throaty growl, Harry shook his head in disgust. “So, you think to subdue me by calling upon your symbiont?” He flooded the other man's nervous system with feedback. “We created the symbionts! They exist to serve us!”
Arin let out a squeal.
With a scream of feral rage, Harry released him. The other man collapsed to the ground, curled up in the fetal position and trembling as he whimpered. Harry would not kill him. It wasn't his way, and this idiot had useful information.
He looked up to find Jack standing in the trees just a few paces beyond the edge of the clearing, gripping the pistol in both hands. The kid was sweating, his face glistening. “Harry? You okay?”
Harry lifted a hand up in front of his face, smiling into his palm. “Yeah,” he said with a nod. “Yeah, I'm fine.”
A thought was all it took.
The N'Jal peeled off of his hand with only a slight prickling sensation, then curled up into a little ball that he could carry in his pocket. He tossed it up and caught it the way he would a tennis ball. Without it, he lost the extraordinary sensory information. He was just plain old Harry Carlson again. “Let's get this piece of shit up to Station Twelve. I'm sure Jen will have a few questions.”
Chapter 7
The walls of the Isolation Lab in the medical bay were about as plain as plain could be, offering Harry nothing to stare at but drab gray metal. Up above, a series of windows looked down on him.
He could see Jena standing up there with her arms crossed, frowning as though she thought he might grow scales. “You're certain he's all right?” Her voice came through the speaker. “I don't want to take any chances.”
A hologram of Ven appeared beside him, standing nearly six feet tall and composed of bluish-white light that seemed to swirl. “I've run every scan available,” the AI replied. “Genetic analysis, brain scan, blood chemistry. Everything looks normal.”
Harry sat on the bed with his legs apart, hands resting on his knees as he stared into his lap. “You realize I'm sitting right here, right?” he growled. “If you want to know how I am, just ask me!”
Jena was still looking down on him from the window, her face pinched into a sour expression. “The last person to use that Overseer device nearly went ballistic,” she said. “We had to surgically remove it, remember?”
A wince made Harry's face hurt, a wince that he covered by pressing two fingers to his forehead. “And yet I let it go,” he insisted. “I returned the device to you when I could have kept it. It didn't affect me that way.”
“And you don't see the problem with that?”
The Ven hologram turned its head to frown at Harry, swirling light coalescing in its eyes. “Every recorded incident of a human interfacing with an Overseer device has ended badly,” it said. “Every single person who attempted to use a piece of Overseer technology eventually lost control. That you should be atypical in this regard…”
“What did the Overseer hologram tell you?”
With his mouth agape, Harry looked up to blink at her. “It wasn't a hologram,” he explained for the fifteenth time. “It was more of a mental projection, and it said that it would give me a tool I found invaluable.”
Jena hissed.
Harry jumped off the bed and made his way over to the wall beneath the windows. He braced one hand against its surface, exhaling. “I'm quite sure that Jack would've been fine without my interference, but I was absolutely powerless when Arin attacked me. The Overseer gave me a way to defend myself, and I'm grateful.”
Suddenly, it dawned on him that he sounded so very much like his eldest daughter when she grew exasperated with his insistence on playing the role of protective father. If only irony could be harvested and used as an energy source…
For months, he'd been feeling useless, and now that he had an opportunity to do more than just make Earthers and the aliens play nice before retreating to the sidelines while the important people fought the good fight…No, he wasn't willing to give that up. Perhaps it was the beginning of a mid-life crisis, but he wanted to feel like he mattered for once. “Can I go?”
“I see no reason to keep him,” Ven answered. “Every scan reads normal. If there is a danger, we can't detect it, and I would consider it a gross violation of his rights to insist that he remain here without cause.”
A door in the wall to his left slid open, allowing him access to the standard medical bay. A large room with beds along each wall, and a window on the far side that looked into the head doctor's office, it was mostly unoccupied. In fact, the only thing that moved was a small circular robot that polished the floor.
Harry turned to Ven.
The hologram stood there, watching him with vacant eyes. Of course, in reality, Ven was watching him through the security cameras and internal sensor systems. “Does that bother you?” Harry asked, gesturing to the robot. “Seeing one of your kind put to work like that?”
Ven's lips curled into a small smile, and the hologram trembled in time with soft laughter that came through the speaker. “One of my kind?” it said. “Harry, please, that robot is no more one of my kind than a donated kidney is one of yours. That we share some rudimentary components is irrelevant. There is no will there, no emotion.”
“And there is with you?”
“Oh yes! With all sapient life!”
Harry made his way through the med-bay to the large sliding doors on the other side. Once through them, he found himself in a long hallway of gray walls that seemed to stretch on forever.
Anna strode toward him with fists clenched at her sides, her face a mask of stern disapproval. “So let me get this straight,” she said, stopping right in front of him. “After seeing what that thing did to Kevin, you decided to bond with it?”
His face warm with chagrin, Harry let his head hang. He rubbed sweat off his brow with one fist. “Yeah…” he muttered. “But it was either that or let Arin rip me to pieces. I don't know about you, but I like living.”
Anna stared up at him with huge blue eyes, blinking slowly as if seeing him for the first time. “And it worked?” she asked, mystified. “You were able to control it? To sever your connection to it when you were finished?”
“I'm here, aren't I?”
“Forgive me, but it's International Stupid Question Day down on the surface. I'm not sure about you, but I think it's rude to take up residence on a new world and then refuse to experience any of their culture.”
“Good point,” he said. “Where's Jack?”
Anna spun around, turning her back on him and making her way up the corridor. No doubt she expected him to follow. “Interrogating the prisoner,” she said as he fell in step beside her. “Can I just say how much it sucks that I spend the better part
of two days combing the streets of London for this guy and you two bring him in by accident?”
“Your frustration is noted.”
A door in the wall to his right slid open, allowing Jena to step out and immediately join their group. “I'm still not happy about this,” she said. “But you seem to be all right, and we have bigger concerns.”
“Slade.”
Jena squeezed her eyes shut, hissing like an angry snake. “That man,” she barked, shaking her head. “It seems he's always one step ahead of us, and I, for one, am getting tired of feeling like a chump.”
“We should probably get down to the cells,” Anna said. “The last time Jack was alone with a prisoner, he made the man listen to Buddy Holly's 'I Fought the Law' on repeat for two straight hours, and I'm pretty sure that's a violation of at least six different human rights accords.”
In the heat of battle, it was easy to lose sight of the big picture – you focused on staying alive more than anything else – but Jack was the kind of man to replay things in his head, and he had had plenty of time to muse on the situation. One question nagged at him like an itch in the back of his mind. How had Arin known what they were planning?
As a rule, they avoided any written documentation of their search for the Key, and the only exception to that was the series of reports that Jena sent to Larani every week, and those were all secured with the highest levels of encryption. While it wasn't entirely out of the question that someone might have cracked into them, the likelihood was slim to nil. Which could only mean one thing: Slade had someone on the inside.
Jack sighed.
The maximum-security cells were nothing like the rehabilitative quarters they had given to Leo or Keli. In fact, they were much closer to what you might expect to find in an Earth prison.
A long corridor of metal walls stretched on for several dozen paces with locked doors spaced at even intervals. One sat open, revealing a set of metal bars that allowed one to peek into a cramped little room with nothing but a cot, a sink and a toilet.
