“Jetta—we need to leave this place,” Triel whispered across their headsets. She backed against the wall, frightened, and moved back to the center of the lab.
Not wasting any more time, Jetta shoved the desk away with her foot. With the force of her movement, a hidden drawer popped open, revealing an old revolver inside.
“Cool!” Bossy exclaimed as she pulled out the gun. “And it’s loaded!”
“Gimme that,” Agracia tried, but Bossy whipped around and protected her find.
“It’s mine!”
“Hey—there it is,” Agracia said, removing the protective cover and pointing to the safe hidden under the desk. Jetta noted the scorch marks around the exterior. Someone had tried multiple times, without success, to get inside. “Exactly as I found it. Could never get it open. Just saw your mark.”
And there was her tattoo, scrawled in blood across the safe door. Her inner voice screamed as she took off her glove, extended her fingers, and touched the past.
Catapulted into another time, Jetta watched as the walls of realities shattered and the rules of physics and reason broke.
“Please forgive me for all that I have done...” someone whispered as pieces of the world reformed. The only light came from the emergency systems, casting the laboratory in shades of blood.
Another voice came from the sightless, impenetrable shadows. (You were useless, blind, inhibited—but I showed you your power. I destroyed that which was unnecessary inside you. Now, Josef, and you can help me end this war.)
“Stay away from me!” the first speaker screamed, stumbling forward and swinging blindly at the dark.
Jetta saw his face in the red light. Josef Stein. Doctor Death. The man with the immeasurable second shadow. Dark brown eyes had transformed into black wells of fury. Something possessed him, something unearthly and inhuman, turning his skin into a mottled canvas stretched over prominent bones.
A dark form slithered in the shadows. (Now is the time to be reborn.)
That voice—so familiar. The inflection, the way each syllable was enunciated with a venom she could never understand.
(Victor.)
“No!” Jetta screamed as three sets of hands tore her from the safe. Hugging her tightly, the Healer tried to keep her from flailing about. “He was here! Victor was here!”
“Jeezus,” Bossy said, backing away as Jetta broke free and smashed her fist into a wall, taking out a chunk of siding.
“Calm down.” Triel raised her hands. “Tell us what you saw.”
Jetta fell to her knees, gripping her head. It wasn’t Victor. Not exactly, at least. Someone else—
Something else.
“I saw... Josef Stein. He was—” Jetta wanted to say murdered, but that didn’t feel like the right word. “He was taken here.”
Jetta shined her light into the far corner of the room and spotted a splintered, dusty cylinder labeled: Smart Cell Technology Series #117.
“This is it—the lab where he created the Smart Cells. This is where the world ended.”
“And where we will find a new beginning,” Triel said, helping her stand.
Crossing over and running her fingers along the cylinder, Jetta hoped to glean something, but nothing came to her.
“We have to get inside that safe,” Jetta concluded. “Something was hunting him, so he hid the most crucial elements of his work.”
“Believe me, I’ve tried.” Agracia kicked the dial on the safe. “But this thing is bulletproof, explosive-proof—Jock-proof.”
“You’ve just never had the right tools,” Jetta said, running over to rummage through their gear sack. She withdrew the feather grinder, socket lugger, and laser bolt gun. “Now we do.”
“Pshhh,” Bossy sputtered, “a feather grinder? That ain’t gonna work.”
Not bothering to explain her intent, Jetta picked apart each piece of equipment to fashion something more useful from their components. Outside of the knowledge she’d stolen, making new tools out of old ones was the one thing she had always been naturally good at, and her days on the mining ships had given her plenty of practice.
Jetta went to the safe and ran her newly fashioned splicer along the edge of the dial until it came off neatly. After inspecting the inside wiring, she fried the remaining locking device.
“I’m impressed,” Agracia said.
“So am I,” Triel added.
Jetta pulled open the safe door. Grumbling, Bossy kicked the side of the desk.
“Whoa,” Agracia said, bending over and aiming her flashlight inside. “Not exactly what I expected.”
Bossy stuck her helmeted head between the two of them to have a look. “What a load of crap!”
Jetta withdrew a blood-stained envelope. Inside she found a photograph of a smiling young man with golden-brown hair and warm eyes. Someone had written on the backside: Kurt Stein. 29 years old. May, 2049.
Wisps of emotion touched her senses. Smelling cologne, she felt the soft press of a knitted sweater in a tight embrace. Her fingers ran through fine hair, and her lips kissed a stubbled cheek. As grief knotted her chest, tears wet her face. “This can’t be goodbye.”
“Kurt Stein,” Agracia marveled, snatching the photo from Jetta’s hand. “Wow. This’ll fetch a price.”
“Be careful,” Jetta said, taking it back.
She searched for more in the envelope and came up with an ancient, battery-driven video-recorder module. Turning it over in her hands, she saw the flecks of dried blood in the cradle.
“It’s dead. It needs power,” Jetta said as she flipped open the battery cartridge and inspected the housing. “Skucheka.”
Jetta shook out the rest of the envelope’s contents. A wedding ring and billfold dumped out onto the desktop, as well as a flattened origami crane.
“Weird,” Bossy said, pulling the dollars from the billfold and discarding the rest.
Picking up what Bossy tossed aside, Jetta sifted through the assortment of licenses and pictures. Her attention snagged on a picture of a blonde-haired woman that had been torn to pieces and carefully taped back together. A susurrus passed through her, carrying with it a dank chill. Edina. Wife. Dead.
Jetta shivered and dropped the photo. It landed on its face. Scrawled on the back was a note in German, followed by love always, your Dina.
“What’s this?” Triel said, picking up a plastic card from the billfold.
Jetta took it from her. “It looks like a keycard.”
Agracia shone her light directly on it. “That’s an access pass, alright. Look at the numbers! Let me see—” Her excitement only increased as she inspected the keycard more closely. “This is it! This is it!”
Agracia and Bossy jumped around in a frenzy, puzzling Jetta and Triel with their over exuberance. “Chak yeah!” they expressed in unison.
“What is it?” Triel asked.
Jetta tasted the nature of Agracia’s thoughts before she spoke. The keycard is evidence that there are still ‘treasures’ left on Earth. She also sensed the conflict inside the Jock mount as her opposing personalities warred for control. Will Tarsha Leone stand for Agracia the Scabber’s goals?
“Sycha,” Agracia said, falling to her knees.
“Grab her,” Jetta directed. Bossy helped her stand up as Jetta pressed her consciousness inside Agracia’s head, trying to help her sort through reality and illusion.
I don’t understand this, Jetta thought, unable to make distinctions between the Scabber and CDP candidate. Clarifying her true past should have fixed the problem, not exacerbated her confusion.
“She’s getting worse,” Triel whispered to her on the private channel. “I don’t know how help her.”
“Neither do I,” Jetta admitted. “We might have to take her back to Alliance grounds. They’re the only ones that will know how to undo what they’ve done to her.”
Jetta flipped back over to the group channel as Agracia came to. For whatever reason, the Scabber personality won the latest round.
&n
bsp; “I’m alright, jeezus!” she said, shoving everyone off. “Just winded.”
Bending over a broken canister, Agracia caught her breath. “Alright, here’s how it is: Me and Bossy gonna explore a little,” she said, trying to take the keycard.
Knowing better, Jetta held the keycard away. Agracia the Scabber wouldn’t be as cooperative as Tarsha Leone, and she was still stupid enough to try and hide her ultimate agenda.
“I see right through you, Agracia,” Jetta said. “I see the cryotubes you’re after. We have to complete this mission first. That’s our priority.”
“Scoring is our only mission,” Bossy said, muscling her way through.
Agracia held her companion back. “You’re getting what you want, right Doc? All this junk? I need more than a payout from Victor. I need an insurance policy—a real score. If me and Bossy were to find a private, subterranean cryovault, then hell, we’d be set for life. That keycard is proof. I know those numerics—I spent years studyin’ all the particulars.”
Jetta didn’t want to waste time arguing with the Scabber. After all, she already knew what she wanted to do. She’ll sell the tubes of centuries-old, frozen humans to the highest bidder, regardless of whether they are humanitarians, flesh collectors, or farmers.
Tarsha would have thought differently, and Jetta could sense her opposition rubbing up against Agracia’s conditioned logic.
But then it kicked in. Maybe it was the original, Alliance-driven mission that had made Agracia obsess over cryotubes and brought the Scabber personality back to the forefront. If it was a covertly planned mission, it was possible that allowing her to complete her assignment would put to rest the ugliness that was Agracia Waychild.
The building above them quaked. A plume of dust sprinkled her visor. As she wiped it off, she reassessed their situation. The only way to extract the material on the module is to find a compatible host or energy source. It would be tough to find anything on Earth that had survived eleven centuries and the hands of Scabbers. Our only other option is the research labs on Alliance grounds, or possibly the Hub.
“Mugarruthepeta,” Jetta muttered, stuffing everything back in the envelope and shoving it inside her suit. Her questions about the Steins and her tattoo would have to wait. For now, they needed to resume the assignment Victor gave to Agracia. “We still have to find a smartserver.”
“This way,” Agracia said, leading them through a cluster of cubicles to an elevator at very back of the room. The doors had been pried open, but the car was missing.
“You did that?” Jetta shined her light down the shaft, illuminating the car at the bottom of the shaft with the hatch flipped open.
“Yup,” Agracia said. She brought up a wad of mucus, opened her visor, and spat down the empty shaft.
Laughing hysterically, Bossy followed suit. Jetta felt Triel’s disgust echo in her own mind.
“It’s a few hundred meters down. Can you slide down on the cables?” Jetta asked.
The Healer nodded, but Jetta couldn’t tell if she was lying.
(Not that I’m doing much better.)
She flexed her arms, trying to increase the blood flow to rubbery muscles. No, can’t think that. Still so much farther to go.
“Last one down is a rotten egg!” Agracia proclaimed, jumping into the empty shaft and grabbing hold of a cable. She whizzed down with Bossy at her heels, howling. A loud thump reverberated off the plated walls as they hit the top of the car, as well as the subsequent sounds of play fighting.
Taking Triel by the waist, Jetta leaned over and grabbed a cable. “Hold onto me, okay?”
“Thanks,” Triel whispered as she wrapped herself around Jetta.
Don’t let go, she told herself. Every meter of cable that passed through her gloved hand threatened to strip away her control, but she couldn’t adjust her grip, not with Triel’s life in her hands.
A new, surprising feeling bubbled through to her awareness. Despite exhaustion, sickness, and hunger, holding Triel during their descent into the unknown sublevels of Stein’s laboratories filled her with a strange, tingly warmth that lifted her from pain. It felt just as strong as when she was with her siblings, but on an entirely different level.
(I love her. I really love her.)
Jetta reflexively bit her lip. Although she couldn’t deny her drive to protect and support her friend, she could still resist her other more uncomfortable feelings for the Healer. Can’t do this. Not now.
She pushed on, embracing the pain that seared her hand as the material on her glove eroded down to flesh. When she finally touched down, she looked at the gaping hole in her glove and the deep abrasion underneath.
As Triel moved to remove her own gloves and heal her, Jetta stopped her. “It can wait. We can’t risk your exposure, too.”
“Come on!” Agracia called insistently from below. The two Scabbers had already dropped to the floor of the car and were crawling through the gap in the doors.
Jetta helped Triel down as gently as she could. When it came to her turn, she narrowly landed on her feet.
The thought crept into her head before she had time to censor it: (It won’t be too much longer for me.)
“Skucheka,” she mumbled to herself.
“Oh my Gods,” Triel said as they popped through the doors into a new arena. “This is a launch site!”
Jetta couldn’t contain her surprise. She had seen the videos of the lifeboat launch site sweeps when the United Starways Coalition briefly resumed interest in the dead planet, but it was a grafted memory, and an old one at that. None of the sites the USC had located were as structurally intact as this one, nor as well preserved. Ancient orbiter schematics hung on the far walls, while backup rocket boosters lay dormant in carefully arranged stacks. Verdigris copper rings were still piled high in hunchback loaders. Best of all, no one had looted the area for any of its invaluable electronic or mechanical parts.
“This must be a private site or someone would have already found it,” Jetta said.
Popping her head out of a hunchback loader, Agracia chimed in. “Lots of rich bastards paid for private lifeboats. This one is definitely off the map.”
“You found this a few years ago?” Jetta asked while circling beneath the control tower.
“Yeah, but we had to turn back. Ran out of juice. Didn’t have fancy suits like this last time.”
Jetta came to Triel’s side near the launch pad, where old scorch marks still scarred the foundation. “What is it?”
“This isn’t right...”
Stooping down for a closer inspection, Jetta took off her torn glove and tracing the burn marks with her fingers. “These patterns are strange. This isn’t like the old rocket boosters of the twenty-first century. This is more like...”
No. Impossible.
Jetta shined her light into the infinitum darkness above, but she already knew the truth without having to see it. The bay doors are still locked. Whatever launched from the site could not and did not pass through locked doors.
“Something happened here that broke the laws of physics,” Triel said, coming to the same conclusion. “That is why this entire place feels so... haunted. This is where two sides of the mirror became one.”
“Whatever lifeboat launched here wasn’t like the others, was it?” Jetta said.
Triel shook her head. “This is a place of crossing.”
“A what?” Bossy interjected.
As she stood back up, Jetta kicked something out of the dust, sending it skidding across the room toward a computer terminal. She retrieved it, shaking away the debris.
Huh, a bracelet, she thought, running her fingers along the intertwined silver and wood. She turned it over, reading the inscription on the inside. “My dearest Ariya, my heart has always been yours. Kovan Kyron.”
“Sycha!” she screamed as an invisible force ripped her mind from reality.
“Please, we can’t leave her here,” the woman with auburn hair pled, holding her swollen belly with both ha
nds. Ample hips and thighs, thick with extra weight, struggled to keep her upright in the last stages of pregnancy. She waddled away from the docking bay toward a door with a red-painted symbol, reaching out as if she could somehow cross the super-steel barrier.
A man with fair skin and tall stature wrapped his thick arms around her and pulled her back. “We have to respect your mother’s choice. Come on—we don’t have much time. He’s coming for us.”
The foundation quaked as the bombs rained down on the surface.
This is the launch site, Jetta realized, but centuries ago, back when it was up and running.
A lifeboat cycled in the bay, but it looked different than the ones she had seen in the videos. Someone had modified it, fitting it with the same transphasic modulators she had seen Victor crafting in his video.
That’s Victor’s design!
Jetta also noted the logo painted across the lifeboat’s broadside: a blue and green world cradled by human hands. Black letters beneath the image spelled out Cause For Earth.
“I can’t leave my mom,” the woman said tearfully, resisting the man as he tried to drag her inside the modified lifeboat.
“You have to. This is what she wanted,” the man said firmly.
Those eyes, Jetta said, seeing the familiar blue. He has my brother’s eyes.
“Come on!” another man said, running down the lifeboat’s ramp and helping the first man. “We have to go—now!”
Jetta recognized his golden-brown hair. Kurt Stein!
“Jetta!” Triel said.
Jetta came to with the three of them huddled over her, still clutching the bracelet.
“Gods,” Jetta said, in shock from the abrupt transition.
Bossy rolled her eyes. “What happened this time, freak job?”
Too stunned to answer, she looked at the bracelet in her open hand. I just saw my mother and father. And Kurt Stein. They were traveling together on that ship, Victor’s lifeboat.
“They bent space-time,” Jetta whispered, putting the pieces together. “That’s why they didn’t have to go through the bay doors.
“Like jumpin’?” Agracia said. “But then this whole place would be blasted!”
Triorion Omnibus Page 125
