Tarkken

by Annabelle Rex

  “You’re coming back,” he said, giving a lock a little tug.

  “Never knew you were so fond of my curls,” Marta said, an amused quirk to her lips.

  “You don’t look right without them.” He glanced over her shoulder at the computer room, the light from the monitors bleeding out into the bedroom through the gap in the door. “Do you have to go back to work straight away?”

  “No,” Marta said, eyes narrowing, even as a fizz of excitement bloomed in her emotions. “Why? Did you need me for something?”

  He pulled her to him, flipping her so she was beneath him. She laughed, the sound shifting to a moan as he kissed along her neck.

  “I had a few somethings in mind,” he said.

  Afterwards, he showered and dressed while Marta picked her work back up, the cat perched in her lap as she typed, pausing once every so often to scratch its head.

  “I’m going to take what we have to Superintendent Jackson,” he said.

  “Good idea,” Marta said. “I don’t mind a bit of sneaking round a club, but those guys had guns. That’s too scary for me.”

  “And me,” Tarkken said. “I’ll pass on the information and leave it to the professionals. Hopefully we’ve found enough for them to use.”

  “And quickly,” Marta said, shuddering as a little thrill of fear ran through her. “I’m going to finish up here, then go pay my Dad a visit. I did say I’d check in on him. Who knows, maybe he’s managed one of those job applications. I’ll send you the pictures I took. Will you call me later? Let me know the update?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Call me on my phone, not my comm,” she said. “I’m going to start trying to talk Dad round about the whole Intergalactic Community thing, but let’s take it one step at a time with that. I don’t want to give him any details until I know he’s not going to spill them to someone like Ethan.”

  Tarkken nodded. “No problem. I hope your father is feeling receptive today.”

  She smiled, rising from her chair - the cat deposited back on the floor - and crossed the room to him.

  “Me, too,” she said, then pressed a sweet, chaste kiss to his lips. “Good luck with your pet Superintendent. I hope she’s feeling receptive, too.”

  Tarkken called ahead, so Superintendent Jackson was waiting for him when he arrived, two takeaway cups in her hand.

  “Walking meeting?” she asked, handing him one. Tarkken breathed in the steam rising from it, relieved not to detect the bitter tang of coffee. “I spend far too much time stuck behind my desk.”

  “Sure,” he said, allowing her to lead the way.

  He laid out what he and Marta had discovered, from Jennifer Gillespie’s fake ID to boxes of ammunition the Starbright Lounge, careful not to speak too specifically where he could be overheard. Superintendent Jackson didn’t require the full detail, she was smart enough to read between the lines. When Tarkken pulled out his comm to show her the pictures he’d taken, the only outward sign of her emotions was a single raised eyebrow, but Tarkken could see the surprise, followed by satisfaction.

  “I’m not going to ask how you got this, I don’t want to know,” she said. “But we can use this. I had some of my team pulling old records for those buildings - the planning permissions and building plans. I’ve got a good idea of the layout, the entrances and exits now. And if he’s got firearms and intent to use them… I can’t see it being a problem to get the authority to send a specialist team in to take him out.” She took a long sip of her drink. “This stuff with Deborah Fiennes bothers me, though. If he’s using her address, we need to know. Can’t risk blowing his hidey hole open if he’s not going to be inside it.”

  “I had much the same thought,” Tarkken said.

  Superintendent Jackson drained the last of her drink and threw the cardboard cup into the nearest bin.

  “Shall we see if we can find her, then?”

  An hour later, after an intel team did some rapid searching of police systems and the internet, they were on their way to a nearby hospital, where Mrs Deborah Fiennes had been checked in just that morning, following a fall that broke her arm.

  Tarkken hated hospitals. They were full of raw, uncontrolled emotions. Most of them negative. Despair and fear and impotent rage rattled out of every ward they passed. And when they arrived on Deborah’s ward, it was even worse. Deborah had the money for private care, which afforded her some privacy, but though the rooms were closed off, Tarkken could still sense the roiling confusion coming out of them. Elderly people in the throws of awful mind diseases, dementia and Alzheimers. Childlike in their emotions - all feeling and no understanding, no control. The tragedy of it hit him fresh with every new emotional signature he brushed against.

  At last, they arrived at Deborah Fiennes’ room.

  “I’m not sure how much she’ll be able to tell you,” the nurse said, an air of practised sympathy about her. Inside, she was almost numb. Too accustomed to seeing the worst after years of working as a nurse.

  “Thank you,” Superintendent Jackson said. “We won’t be long.”

  The nurse nodded, then left them to it.

  Tarkken followed Superintendent Jackson in to the room and as he watched her approach the chair where Deborah was sitting, he saw her not as the senior officer that she was, but the beat cop that she had been. Her care and compassion shining through.

  “Mrs Fiennes,” she said, taking a seat beside her and drawing her attention with a touch. “My name is Katherine Jackson. I’m a police officer, love. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s okay.”

  Deborah Fiennes blinked slowly, then resumed staring out of the window at nothing. She looked frail, elderly, her arm set in a large cast and cradled to her chest.

  “Mrs Fiennes, I’m here about a girl you used to know. A girl called Jennifer Gillespie. Or Jennifer Harris. She disappeared a year ago. I think maybe you might know something about that?”

  Tarkken looked round the small, impersonal room. There were cups of tea half drunk, draws left half open. A book with all the pages torn out had been scooped up by someone and thrown in the bin. Deborah Fiennes’ lunch remained on a tray, uneaten. It looked like the room of someone who was only present half of the time, but as Tarkken brushed up against Deborah’s emotional landscape, something felt off.

  “Mrs Fiennes, I’d like to know what you know about a man called Nick Gillespie,” Superintendent Jackson continued.

  Fear, clear and present, bloomed in Deborah’s emotions, even though outwardly, she continued to stare at nothing.

  Superintendent Jackson turned to Tarkken. “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere here.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Tarkken said, gesturing for her to move aside.

  She frowned, but did so, and Tarkken took her seat, looking at Deborah Fiennes, allowing his sixth sense to filter through her emotions. He reached behind his ear and switched off his translator.

  “You must forgive my English,” he said, aware of how his accent twisted the words. “My name is Tarkken H’Arran. I’m the Head of Security for the Intergalactic Community delegation. It’s come to my attention, Mrs Fiennes, that Jennifer Gillespie used your daughter’s identity to acquire a Match test without the knowledge of her husband. But I think you already knew about this, Mrs Fiennes. I think you helped her.”

  Again, that fear blooming. But this time not fear for herself. Fear for someone else. For Jennifer.

  “She’s okay,” Tarkken said. “You can fake an ID card, but you can’t fake DNA. She’ll have met her Match by now, and I’m sure she’s very happy.”

  Relief, a flood of it. And love. Love for the girl who wasn’t her daughter, but who reminded Deborah of her so much.

  “Mrs Fiennes, I know you can understand me. I can feel your emotional response to everything I say. And your emotions are crisp and sharp. They’re not fuzzy round the edges like the other people on this ward. I don’t think you’re sick. I think you’re terrified. I think
you’re terrified of Nick Gillespie and what he might do if he finds out what you did.”

  “He already knows,” she said. “He figured it out a long time ago.”

  Tarkken felt Superintendent Jackson’s surprise, but she recovered quickly, pulling up another chair.

  “We know that friends of his have been coming to your property, Mrs Fiennes. Has he been threatening you?”

  “He’s been using it for deliveries. Things turning up all the time, and always collected the following day by someone, never Nick. Always one of his lackeys. That didn’t start til a few months ago. After all that trouble with the riots. He turned up one day and said he needed to lay low, that he wanted to use my address so he could get what he needed, but keep people off his scent. He threatened to hurt me if I didn’t comply. Said if I tried to go to the police, he’d have my Jennifer killed. I know most people would say she’s not really alive anyway, but she’s still my daughter…”

  “Mrs Fiennes, we can protect you and your daughter. We want to see Nick Gillespie behind bars - for good.”

  “But he didn’t murder his wife,” Deborah said.

  “I know, but he still planned and coordinated terror attacks. We have reason to believe he’s planning another, and we want to stop him before anyone else gets hurt. Does he use your address for anything other than deliveries? Does he ever stay there?”

  “No, he doesn’t stay there. He’s never stayed. Just the deliveries. And always his friends picking them up. Never him.”

  “And does he know you’re in hospital?”

  “No. The latest delivery came today. I fell carrying it inside. One of them will be along to pick it up tomorrow. Then they’ll know. I thought… I thought if I pretended I’d started losing my marbles, that he’d stop bothering with me, that he’d leave my daughter alone.”

  “What now?” Tarkken asked as they marched from the hospital.

  “Now, we get on to putting doors in at that club as quickly as possible,” Superintendent Jackson said. “If we leave it til tomorrow and he finds out Deborah’s place is empty, there’s every chance he’ll start moving between the two, and it will become a whole different game. We won’t be able to get eyes on a place like that in private land so easily. We need to get him today, and we need to get him before the public start arriving at the club tonight. We have static cameras set up outside. We’ll know if he’s left the building, and if he does, the minute he goes back in. But I’ll need to organise the firearms team, risk assessments, a plan of attack. It’s going to be a busy few hours.”

  “Is there anything we can do to support?”

  He sensed the impending rejection, and the moment she changed her mind.

  “You know, ordinarily I don’t think my bosses would go for it, but... this job is of unprecedented importance to both my lot and yours. Would you be alright with calling in your troops? Even if we don’t end up using them?”

  “Not a problem at all,” Tarkken said, thinking of Cribishk twiddling his thumbs, and all the other security staff on two weeks of leave, probably equally bored out of their minds. Two weeks wasn’t really long enough to go anywhere in Intergalactic terms. They were all still on the Station, ready to go. “Is there somewhere I can use to make the calls and coordinate from?”

  “You can use my office,” she said.

  Excellent, he thought. Within an hour or so he could have the best of the Station’s security personnel ready and waiting. Nick Gillespie wouldn’t know what hit him.

  As they got in the car and Superintendent Jackson started driving them back towards the Police Station, Tarkken pulled out his Human phone to call Marta and give her the update.

  Chapter 12

  MARTA WAS WALKING FROM THE TUBE station to her father’s address when Asha called.

  “Just checking in to make sure you’re okay,” she said.

  “I’m fine, just on my way to Dad’s place. Fingers crossed he’s done what he’s supposed to and I don’t have to kill him.”

  “Fingers crossed,” Asha said, then, after a brief pause. “Was this morning alright or was it all of the awkward?”

  Things had been so not awkward, it actually took Marta a moment to work out what Asha was referring to.

  “It was fine,” she said. “There may have been more sex involved.”

  She smiled to herself, recalling how delicious it had been.

  Asha went silent a moment. “Marta, you do realise you can’t date him.”

  “Who said anything about dating?”

  “Your moony expression,” Asha said. “You’re smiling, Marta. You don’t normally smile at this time of day unless you’re still coming down off the coffee from the night before.”

  “It’s mid-afternoon,” Marta protested.

  “Exactly. No calls before lunch time and grouchy until at least five.”

  “I got up early this morning to catch up on work. My timetable has shifted. I’m not dating him, that’s not what this is.”

  But wasn’t she already thinking about when she could see him again? Marta had never done that before. Never felt the need to see someone again so soon.

  “Just be careful,” Asha said. “The Intergalactic Community don’t view relationships the same way Humans do. I’d hate for you to get hurt.”

  Unease settled in Marta’s stomach as she hung up her comm, replacing the warm fuzzy feeling that had settled there ever since Tarkken had pinned her to the bed and told her he had ‘a few somethings’ in mind. Because he’d said himself that casual sex in the Intergalactic Community required a wilful forgetting of the fact that your partner was dreaming about their Match the entire time. Tarkken had said his mind was only on her, and the way he played her body had her convinced that was true. But unlike him, she didn’t have the advantage of being able to sense his emotions. He could have just said that to her to get what he wanted.

  No. What he wanted, what he needed, was access to her deep emotions. And he had asked permission for that, and tried to stop when things got a bit overwhelming. And afterwards they’d explored some of her darkest thoughts and memories with his arms wrapped around her.

  Which, now she thought of it, went above and beyond ‘casual’. At the time, it had just felt so normal, so right to be talking about all that stuff, but in the light of day it felt intimate. Way too intimate. Far more so than any of the sex, before or after.

  She never allowed herself to be so vulnerable with a person. So why had she been so vulnerable with Tarkken? Not the tears, that was just a side effect of his ability, but the explaining the tears afterwards. Why had the words just spilled out of her like that?

  Because she trusted him. Because she liked him.

  Well, shit.

  Arriving at her father’s house share cut the time for self reflection short, and Marta stuffed her feelings about Tarkken away to examine later, dragging out the reserves to do battle with her father once again. She took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

  Lukas greeted her with a smile and invited her in - a promising start. He didn’t look annoyed, and offered to bring her through a drink to her father’s room. Whatever had happened since Piotr arrived home from their brief stint in the custody suite, it clearly hadn’t been anything to aggravate Lukas.

  She knocked on her father’s door before letting herself in.

  “Marta!” he said with a beaming smile and rose from his desk to envelop her in a hug.

  Marta accepted it, partly because she was feeling generous towards him for being in his room and not at the pub, but also because it gave her a chance to have a nose over his shoulder at what he had been looking at on his laptop. She was pleasantly surprised to see a job website.

  “Are you actually applying for jobs?” she said, stepping back from his embrace.

  “I’ve applied for two already today,” he said, chest puffing up with pride.

  “That’s great,” she said, unhooking her bag from her shoulder and setting it down in the corner of his room. She too
k her phone out of it, putting it on the top of his chest of drawers to be sure she would hear it if Tarkken rang, but left her comm hidden away.

  Although, if he was actually applying for jobs, maybe she’d be able to break that bit of news to him sooner rather than later.

  She sat on the edge of his bed as he resumed his seat at his desk, giving her another broad smile.

  “And how is your policeman?” he said.

  It took her a second to recall that this was what he’d called Tarkken.

  “Not mine,” she said, hating how that felt like a lie. “And not a policeman, either.”

  Piotr gave her a confused look, but didn’t question.

  “He seems like a nice man,” he said.

  “You’ve not actually spoken to him, Dad.”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “He was looking out for my baby girl. That makes him nice in my book.”

  The temptation to just tell him there and then that the man he was talking about wasn’t actually Human was strong, but even as Marta opened her mouth to say something, her eyes caught on a little plastic card on Piotr’s desk. A card about the size and shape of a credit card, with the logo of the Starbright Lounge printed on it.

  “What’s this?” she asked, picking it up and turning it over.

  It was blank on the other side, innocuous. But Marta was pretty sure it was the keycard to unlock the back door into the store rooms in the Starbright Lounge. The rooms where Nick Gillespie was holding his little meetings.

  Piotr just shook his head.

  “Ethan gave it to me, invited me to some club. He said they had meetings there, him and some friends he wanted me to meet.” He scoffed. “Meetings in a club? I told him I’m too old for that. Makes my ears ring for days. I was supposed to go last night, but… I decided maybe I should listen to my daughter. Maybe I shouldn’t get carried away with some scheme this time. Maybe I don’t want to spend any more time in prison not seeing you.” He smiled broadly, plastering over the emotion in his face. “So, your father is going to pick up some factory work. You think you can be proud of me, even if I’m only working in a factory?”