by Jay Aspen
Sharksinger
Infinity Paradigm Origins
Jay Aspen
Published by Sandfire Publishing, 2020.
Table of Contents
Title Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Maps
Further Reading: Webdancer
About the Author
1
My room in the unfamiliar apartment has a wide window looking out onto tall white towers with a glimpse of blue-grey sea beyond, the first streaks of sunrise gleaming pale orange on iridescent shellfish-coated walls. It’s all very different and still a little alien after the cool green domes of my home province.
Piece by piece, the disastrous events of the last two days filter back into my adrenaline-and-ayan hammered memory until I feel I’ve arranged them all more or less in the right order.
I got back to Merkaan last night. On the bullet train with Severin. After he saved me from a murderous gang of thieves.
I went home to Kar to visit my sister and discovered I’d been tricked into taking on an illegal courier run, in a deal to exchange guns for drugs.
Looking back, I can’t believe I’ve been dumb enough to forget all the usual parental advice, fallen for a handsome, smooth-talking guy called Vander, agreed to carry a package for him... and didn’t check inside first to see what it contained. At least meeting Severin and my last-minute efforts to put things right seem to have given me a way out of being arrested––though I admit it’s as much luck as good judgement.
Although not all of what happened feels exactly lucky.
I cautiously flex my left arm.
‘Good as new by tomorrow,’ Alis had promised me yesterday but that isn’t exactly how I would describe it. Still, it seems to function fairly efficiently and doesn’t hurt quite enough to threaten distraction if I need to move fast.
I carefully peel off the bandage and the quantum device, peer at the healing bullet-hole and decide it’s good enough.
I head off to look for Alis. I’m waking up enough now to remember where the main room is and find the experienced and somewhat intimidating Qat agent staring at her holo-vis, a look of shock and disbelief on her face. The images from her distraught mind suddenly flood into my own, bringing a wave of revulsion and nausea that stops me in my tracks.
‘Who killed him?’
Even as I say it I’m wondering why there still seems to be ayan in my system and why the hell I can’t stop myself blurting out the unexpected insights it gives me into what someone is thinking.
Alis looks up sharply, fierce green eyes focused on me.
‘I had a feeling there was something odd going on with you yesterday. Sit.’ She waves me to the spare hover-seat. ‘Severin’s message from the transit station said you’d never experienced ayan concentrate before. But you didn’t explain why you’d decided to use it in the middle of a very risky situation. Explain now.’
I sit, feeling my confidence wilt under her cool gaze.
‘No decision really. More of an accident. I thought I was collecting leaves, so when I saw a smudge of white around the tear in the package I didn’t know what it was and I tasted it. I wasn’t expecting the effect. It did help me escape at first, then it got too much and I couldn’t even think straight.’
‘Hmph. You’re lucky you didn’t eat any more than you did. I tested the contents of that pack you and Severin brought back from Kar and it’s the most concentrated form I’ve ever seen. It would have been cut and diluted many times before being re-sold––but even so, you’ve saved a lot of ruined lives by getting it off the streets. I’m grateful for that. So. Tell me what happened when you walked in just now.’
I try to focus on what Alis is thinking at this moment but her mind is an inscrutable blank page once more. Maybe that’s why I find her intimidating––even though she’s small and wiry, not the kind of muscle-bound superwoman the way fiction stories love to portray field agents in Pangaea’s secret service.
Still, there’s something about the way she moves that suggests she’d defeat me in the dojo in a matter of seconds. Or less. The hint of well-honed skill underlying her physical fitness makes her seem way too young to have been given the role of Severin’s support-mother.
‘Um, seems like some of the ayan is still in my system this morning. Not as much as before. It lets me know when someone is lying and every now and then I pick up a fragment of what they’re actually thinking. At least, I did with Severin. Not with you until...’ I try to re-run what I’d felt. ‘I think just now it hit me because you were upset. Makes it stronger somehow.’
‘Hmm. Impressive, without training. Dangerous, so don’t try using that stuff again!’
‘Wasn’t planning to.’ I’m still shivering from the gory image I’d picked up from Alis. Whoever he was, the man had died a horrible death. ‘You going to tell me what happened to the person you were thinking about when I walked in?’
Alis lays her holo-vis face down on the table. ‘Looking at the expression on your face, probably better if I skip some of the details. Do I assume you already learned who I am from Severin?’
‘Yes. He tried very hard to hide it though. He’s not in trouble for it is he?’
Alis gives a wry smile. ‘Qat doesn’t go as far as acting as thought-police, in spite of occasional inconveniences.’ She stands and walks to the door. ‘Severin! In here, now.’ She goes back to her seat. ‘It’ll save me having to go through everything twice if you’re both here.’
Severin arrives pulling on a somewhat rumpled shirt, his hair standing up in unruly sunbleached spikes. He sounds like he’s still half asleep, the strong lines of his face softening as he yawns.
‘Whatever time is it?’
Alis raises an eyebrow. ‘Still too early for someone who should have slept on the train yesterday by the looks of it. But I’m glad you stayed awake and kept an eye on Hannik while she was recovering. Things have taken a turn for the worse. Professor Rankin is dead. Estimate is, he was killed three days ago.’
‘Wh...’
Severin is still struggling to shake off his unfinished sleep. Alis pushes a thermo-cup across the table towards him.
‘You need to wake up quickly. We’ll have to move a lot faster than I first thought, before someone else gets killed.’
Severin removes the lid and the aromatic, bitter-sweet steam of freshly-brewed ayan leaves fills the room. My stomach does a nervous flip, followed by a powerful longing to get my hands on my own cupful. I look anxiously around for another thermo-cup but all I find is Alis watching me intently.
‘Hannik. How bad is it?’
Somehow I know exactly what she means.
‘Like it’s taking all my willpower not to run over there and grab Severin’s cup from him. Even the smell of it is bringing back more of the heightened awareness I had yesterday.’
‘Hmm. You’re going to have to give up your habitual morning wake-up drink, maybe permanently. The concentrated version you experimented with yesterday is very addictive and now you’ve become sensitive to it, seems like even the normal leaf infusion has set off the craving again. Have some more pinkleaf instead.’ Alis pushes a glass teapot across to me.
Severin is starting to look more alert. He peers at Alis over the top of his thermo-cup.
‘Prof Rankin was head of psy-tec at the university. Nothing to do with the restricted dart-weapons lab I was doing research in. What happened to him?’
Alis notices me wincing as Severin’s question reminds me of what I’d seen earlier. She hastily takes my pulse but I must be keeping it in the ayan-recovery safe zone because she decides to continue.
‘I won’t go into details while Hannik’s still a bit over-sensitive. But Rankin’s body has just been discovered. Looks like he was tortured to death. We have to figure out why. Fast.’
Severin stares at the cup in his hands, going back over his memories of the last few days.
‘I saw him walking off campus a couple of days before Hannik was given the package to take to Kar. I didn’t see him after that, but it’s a big campus. I suppose it’s possible he was the courier the gun-runners were relying on, and then they had to make hasty rearrangements when he wasn’t available. Maybe why they tried to use Vander instead––and he passed the job on to Hannik. But that doesn’t explain the connection with psy-tec.’
Alis folds her arms and looks Severin in the eye.
‘Hmm. He passed the job to Hannik? I think, before we go further into what’s happening at the university, you’d better start at the beginning. Particularly how and why you or someone else got this student involved in something so risky and didn’t tell me?’
Oh chaos. The expert Qat interrogation Severin and I have been dreading since yesterday. If we don’t get our answers right we’ll both be grounded and all our plans to solve this mystery will be over before they’ve even started.
2
Severin takes a deep breath and I have to hide behind my mug of pinkleaf, desperately trying not to giggle at his discomfort. I can still pick up some of his agitated thoughts as he searches for the best way to present the story.
‘Ah. Yes. Why Hannik volunteered to help me with the investigation.’ He hesitates, trying to figure out what to say. He’s clearly very fond of his rather severe support-mother, but totally in awe of her.
He tries again. ‘I told you I’d been watching Deron, the creepy first year kid who’s been acting suspiciously around the restricted weapons lab. I was pretty sure he was the one pilfering dart-gun components but I couldn’t prove it. Well, a couple of days ago I spotted him carrying something bulky and I followed him home. Except that he didn’t go home. He met his elder brother Vander and gave him the backpack. They looked to be having a bit of a row about it. Then Vander walked over to Oceanside plaza, gave the pack to Hannik and she disappeared into a landcar. I barely had time to grab a taxi, follow her to the station, jump on the train and send you a message before I went out of the five-mile coms range.’
‘And a very incomplete message it was.’ Alis frowns at Severin before turning her intimidating stare onto me. I make an instant decision that the less I say and the more I leave to Severin the better. I take a deep breath.
‘Um, where to start? I met Vander in my first combat class when I moved to Merkaan from Karesh just over a week ago. I wanted to make a return trip to meet up with my sister and friends, and Vander asked me if I’d pick up some ayan leaves for him while I was there. Then at the last minute he asked me to take the backpack to Kar with me––’
Severin interrupts just as I get to the awkward part.
‘When Hannik got to Kar she looked inside the pack, figured out what was going on, hid the guns, and went to meet Vander’s contact so she could identify him to the police afterwards. I went after her to tell her it was too dangerous, but she’s one of the most adept camouflage experts I’ve ever seen, and I lost her. By the time I caught up with her, some kind of gang war had broken out.’
‘Hmm,’ says Alis.
I can tell from her expression that she’s perfectly aware of the serious gaps in this narrative but has decided to go along with it for the time being. Maybe my pulse rate has something to do with it. She fixes Severin with a look that says she expects a little more accuracy and detail from now on.
‘So what happened next?’
‘I watched Hannik meet her contact and hand over her package which she’d already replaced with rocks and grass. Then she took the exchanged pack that we later discovered was ayan concentrate instead of leaves.’ He hesitates and I can tell he’s doing some rapid editing on the next bit.
‘Then someone shot the contact person. I stayed hidden and saw the killer tell his friend to snatch the package from the corpse. I’m guessing the gun thieves were probably just using the drug smugglers as convenient transport because something had gone wrong with their original plan. But maybe they figured the drugs would be valuable so decided to grab them as well while they had the chance––’
Alis holds up a hand to silence him.
‘So. Hannik, why do you think you escaped being killed along with the others?’ She frowns suspiciously. I suppose it does rather look as if I’d survived because I was part of the plot.
‘They let off a few shots in my direction. That’s when I got hit. I didn’t figure it out till later, but I put the pack on my back to make carrying easier and then I heard someone behind me shouting that they had to be careful not to damage the goods. So I suppose it saved my life.’
‘And I’ve never seen anyone move so fast to get under cover,’ adds Severin admiringly.
‘Hmm,’ says Alis.
I almost dissolve into nervous giggles again as I pick up snatches of Severin’s anxious thoughts that I might volunteer my opinion about him charging into the fight like a superhero. He gives me a warning glare and launches into his own version before I can open my mouth.
‘So I stayed hidden and tried to identify the two who were running around with guns, but both gangs seemed to be killing each other fairly efficiently. There were about five with knives versus two with guns. It seemed to make both sides evenly matched.’
I can tell Alis doesn’t entirely approve of Severin’s description of the carnage in terms of a football game but she doesn’t comment.
Severin seems to have decided not to mention the wildcat’s contribution to the body-count, or rather, the missing-body count. There’s an awkward silence for a few moments before Alis fires her next question at him.
‘I checked your dart kit this morning. You’ve accounted for the small dart you used to sedate Hannik while you got the bullet out. What about the other two?’
‘One of the drug runners was threatening Hannik with a knife. So I put a tiger-strength dart in him, tied him to a ferinbush to keep predators off, and sent your police contacts to pick him up when they went in to collect the bodies from the gang war. And, um, I think I might have dropped the other dart.’
‘Hmm,’ says Alis again. ‘If you’re sure that any of the considerably large sections you’ve edited out of this story can wait till later, we’ll move on to the mystery of Prof Rankin’s murder.’ She leans over for another check on my pulse but I seem to be doing reasonably well at keeping it low.
Maybe suppressed nervous laughter is part of the cure.
Severin is trying unsuccessfully to disguise his relief that the interrogation is over.
‘I still can’t think of a better connection with what happened to us in Karesh yesterday than the rather implausible one I already came up with about Prof Rankin being the original courier. I only took a couple of his classes but I dropped out as soon as I was given the option. Secretly manipulating people’s ideas without them being aware of it... the whole idea seems so sinister, but also so far-fetched. I couldn’t believe we needed to be warned about it because no-one would ever want to be so dishonest and manipulative.’
Alis keys her archive to the wall screen so we can see it, although it looks like nothing more than university records right now. Hardly an interplanetary conspiracy.
‘Luckily not many do want that, but it’s a powerful tool for anyone planning an armed takeover of Pangaea. Gather enough weapons, create discontent and feed everyone with a sense of insecurity to help you recruit plenty of followers, and you’re ready to start another civil war.’
‘Kittens!’ I feel my face going red. ‘Sorry. I need to learn to stop blabb
ing things out loud when the ayan shoves images into my brain.’
Severin’s brow furrows. ‘Erm, I don’t think either Alis or I were thinking about kittens just then, Hannik.’
He glances across at his support-mother for confirmation and Alis shakes her head. Still, it’s nice to see her severe expression finally mellow a little as she tries not to laugh at the ridiculous change of subject. Probably the only thing that could give me enough confidence to explain.
‘Alis, this is a bit different. Something’s been bothering me for a few days, a series of weird events, and suddenly I saw a connection. But unfortunately it arrived in my head along with the image of one of my sister’s white kittens.’ I pause, struggling to attach words to the cute mental pictures frolicking across my closed eyelids. Well, words that won’t make me sound like a complete idiot in the middle of a Qat briefing.
Alis is nodding slowly, as if I’ve already explained something perfectly clearly.
‘Hannik, don’t worry about it sounding daft. I think you may have a natural gestalt ability and maybe the shock of the last few days has triggered it into manifesting unexpectedly. Just let the images run through your mind and let the words come out as they associate. If I’m right, you have a gift that lets you connect scattered bits of information and spontaneously find relationships between them that make sense.’
Trying not to feel self-conscious, I keep my eyes closed and reel off the words that pop up alongside an odd collection of inner visuals.
‘Kittens, tigers, hunters. No, not hunters, police hunting tigers––no, that’s stupid!’ I stop suddenly. ‘Oh. I’ve just remembered a bit more. A bit of newsfeed I couldn’t find when I went back through my archives. Government disbanding the Webdancers––no, arresting them! Alis, I’m sorry, this is really silly. Does ayan poisoning give you hallucinations?’
Alis frowns and starts scrolling back through her holo-archive at a speed that makes my eyes go blurry trying to watch.
Sometimes, but I don’t think that’s happening with you. You’re perfectly lucid at the moment. I think there might be a link to random reports I’ve been getting about similar events. But first, tell me, does your sister like kittens? Does she message her friends, send them pictures?’
