“Come on, baby, hold together,” she told the ship.
“We can’t hold this turn for very long,” Roman said, his patented calm straining.
“Almost out!” Mallery added.
Shirin called the next turn. “Left seventy, then down twenty-five immediately.”
The turbulence increased, Leah’s teeth chattering like she was back in the Chicago winter.
“Ninety right, thirty up on my mark. And…mark!”
King made the turn, and the ship rattled its way through a patch of dimensional chop.
And up, and out, and then…nothing.
Leah looked at the screen, then Shirin. “We good?” she asked.
“We’re clear,” Shirin confirmed.
Cheering came through the radio. Leah joined in with a whoop of her own.
“Now bring her home,” Preeti said.
“Roger that, Mid-Atlantic Actual. Tell the commissary to get me some burgers ready.” King looked down from the nose of the ship and gave Leah a for-reals smile. “And a pizza.”
“Copy that, Mid-Atlantic Three,” Preeti said. “Prepare for docking.”
As Preeti guided them in to dock, Leah’s rode the last of the adrenaline high back to thoughts about the case. And about her whole time with the Genrenauts. The Tall Woman’s face crept back into her mind. Then she jumped to her first case. To Shirin’s report about the mercs and the Ra’Gar connection. And to Theo’s story in Rom-Com world.
Lightning arced across a dozen points of data and memory, and Leah gulped.
She had to talk to King. As soon as they landed, he was out of his seat and giving orders.
She shrunk back, dismissed the idea. It’s ridiculous, she thought.
Then, No, screw that. Worst case is I’m wrong and he chews me out. But if I’m right…
She unbuckled and hurried to chase after the team lead. She’d speak her piece. She’d earned that much, at least.
Chapter Nine: Consequences
King unsnapped the restraints and slid down the ladder, hitting the floor of the ship with a metallic clang-thud.
He turned to Roman. “Work with the crew in getting the ship cleared. Chances are, that turbulence rocked something loose.”
The action hero looked at the smoldering, dented ship with a smile. “You think?”
The ship would be fine. It had to be. They had even fewer ships to spare than crew.
King’s mental to-do list started spinning like the old flap displays at train stations.
File the mission report, ward off flak from the Council, debrief the team, put in the redeploy request…
“Boss?” Leah asked, hustling to catch him as he tore his way across Ops, toward their ready room.
“Yes?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about that last mission.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, no kidding, right? I mean a specific bad feeling. It okay if I toss a theory at the team?”
Interesting. He had his own ideas and questions to process. Maybe her theory fit into it, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was residual wackiness from going so deep into archetype. “Sure. I’ve got to report in; that gives everyone a few minutes to grab some food or drink before the debrief. Gather your thoughts.”
“It might be better if I pitch this before your report.”
“The Council doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“Would they like it more than having you call them right back and say ‘Oh, by the way, everything about that last mission report might be wrong?’ Because that’s what I’m thinking.”
He stopped.
“Your gut telling you this?”
“My everything is telling me this.”
“Then you’re pitching the theory now.” King pulled out his phone and called Roman in from the hangar. “Emergency debrief in the ready room.”
He looked to Leah. “Let’s hear what you have to say.”
* * *
No stress, just maybe your job on the line, Leah thought, facing the assembled team.
Her mind raced back through the last mission. And the one before that. And the others. Every one a puzzle piece. Pieces she didn’t even know were pieces, were even the same puzzle, until minutes ago. But if she was right, they needed to hear. Hell, the High Council needed to hear, though hopefully King could be the one to face them.
Shirin had melted into her comfy chair, Mallery sat with a power bar, Roman was stretching on a yoga mat, and King stood, arms crossed, watching her.
She wiped off the white board and started.
“Okay, so this might be totally off base, but here it is. Every mission I’ve been on, something’s been off, right? Mallery’s western posse bit the dust—we had the wrong hero. Then one of the bandits pulls some serious moves and gets away. Who is she?”
Gentle nodding from Shirin, blank silence from King.
“Then in Sci-Fi World, the gang kidnaps the Ambassador but no one can trace who hired them. Shirin said it would be incredibly unlikely for the Ra’Gar to have done it, so who? The report says it’d have to be someone that knew the Ahura-3 station well.”
“Then in Rom-Com, we have a weird story breach after Theo gets run down by a driver. And all he remembers? Tall woman, dark hair. And the doc’s mysterious stranger that told her to go for Theo? Then our mysterious hit-woman just now—tall, dark hair, moved like a pro.”
“All circumstantial, newbie,” King said.
“What did your shooter look like?” Roman asked. “How like a pro did she move?”
“Studied. And totally in control of the situation. At first. She put Ricardo up to the first murder, and then she took a shot at DeeZee.”
“And she had the chops to sneak a weapon into the hospital and get past CPD to try to seal the deal.”
“So, we’re talking Big Deal villain, right? Some kind of heavy? So, we’ve got an uncommonly competent henchwoman in at least two missions, and weird instigations of story breaches in another two missions.”
Shirin piped in. “This whole year has been off, though. More breaches, and stronger ripples at every juncture.”
“What if that’s because we’ve got a rogue element? Someone else moving across the dimensions?”
She let that sink in. Mallery and Shirin sat forward; King’s arms had uncrossed. Roman was uncharacteristically still.
Leah asked again. “What if someone else got ahold of our tech?”
King cracked his knuckles.
“So, do you think I’m right?” Leah asked. A bit too much hope ended up in her voice. She felt all alone, on the stage again. But this time, her audience wasn’t hecklers. It was colleagues.
Shirin bobbed her head, as if considering. “I think it’s possible. Highly unlikely, but possible.”
“Maybe it’s a part of one of the breaches,” Mallery said. “The same character from one world ended up on another. I don’t know about the Ahura-3 mission, wasn’t there, but the others? It’s possible.”
Roman nodded. “That henchwoman’s moves were impressive. Patrols and sources haven’t turned her up in any other stories since we left. You’d think a major character like that would recur.”
“Roman, excerpt me your portion of the report for Leah’s first mission. Shirin, I want your full analysis on the Ra’Gar’s capabilities and what it’d take to set up that kidnapping. Mallery, pore over your case file too.”
King looked straight at her.
“I think you’re probably wrong.”
Ouch, she thought, trying not to flinch.
His face brightened. “But I’m incredibly impressed by your performance on that mission, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s to trust your team.” He looked at the other members of the team. “I’ll present the team’s findings to the Council, raise the possibility. We can put an APB out for this tall woman, clue the other teams in, see if we can spot her elsewhere. Good money says nothing comes of it, but this was a good call.”
“Thank me when we have the Council’s response. Get me that material in five minutes. I’ll start apologizing for the delay.”
* * *
This time, the Council barely made him wait to call in. He didn’t have a full written report, didn’t even know what to think about everything that had happened.
What if Leah was right?
A rogue Genrenaut, perhaps, someone who had jumped ship and replicated the technology to cross dimensions? Or maybe someone from a technologically savvy world had replicated the Council’s discovery and taken it into her own hands to travel the worlds and make changes?
The implications were staggering. If she knew how the multiverse worked, she could cause untold damage.
King was still organizing the reports from their last missions when the call light came on. The team had thrown everything together in ten minutes, but it was still rough, loose clusters of hunches cobbled together with scant data.
But it was too big of a question mark to let pass unsaid.
He queued up the packet, ready to send during the call for maximum effect. The High Council had a flair for mystery and drama, so he’d speak their language if it helped them take his assertion seriously.
Behind him, the servers and processors whirred as the connection was established, The panoramic screens before him lit up, going from flat dark to the organization’s logo, worlds identified by genre circling Earth Prime. Then the image cross-faded with the live feed, showing the Council chamber room as five figures stepped forward into overhead light, casting them in shadow.
“King. You cut that return very. Very close,” said Gisler, always the central figure.
“The breach was sealed, and I got my team home safe. And we’ve formed a disturbing hypothesis.”
“First, your report,” said D’Arienzo, to Gisler’s left.
King gave as cursory an overview of the mission as he could without prompting the Councilors to ask him to elaborate.
“And Ms. Franklin?” Gisler asked as she came up in his report.
“No signs of remembering her tenure as a Genrenaut, nor any memory of me outside of the story world.”
Gisler bade him continue.
King finished the report, underplaying elements about the Tall Woman until he was done. He tapped send on the email he had prepped, sending the reports to the Council.
“This Tall Woman, who we believe shot DeeZee and shot at me, who I saw kill Ricardo Hernandez, we believe she is the same woman who was a part of Jack Williamson’s posse during our last mission to the Western World. Even with a PPM, her build and movements were too similar to be sheer coincidence. She matches Roman’s report, and matches the description given to our team during our mission in the Romance world, a description of a tall woman behind the wheel of the truck that injured Theo, causing the story breach.
King adjusted his stance wider, weathering the glare of the Council. “Given this recurrence and her actions, I have good reason to believe that this woman is a dimensional traveler, crossing between story worlds with her own agenda, possibly diametrically opposed to our own. I would ask that all stations immediately enact a BOLO for this woman and bring her in, given opportunity.”
The Council members shifted, looking at their displays. King waited, hands held behind his back, letting them absorb the information on their own. This would only work if the evidence convinced them, if the reports painted the picture he believed they painted.
“And you do not have proof that it’s the same woman.” Another Council member, on the far left. The voice was a middle alto, and he’d never been able to get a read on the Councilor’s gender.
“No, Councilor. But we have three independent accounts across three worlds, each placing a similar woman at the scene of a breach.”
Gisler gave a dismissing wave. “This evidence is all circumstantial, stitched together into a patchwork tale thanks to your admittedly valuable imagination, and animated by your need to make this increase of breaches into something you can fight, instead of the reality of our situation.”
“If you see this woman again,” another Councilor, female, said, “and can obtain incontrovertible evidence that she has traveled between story worlds, then bring it, and her, back to HQ. Until then, you hold the line.”
D’Arienzo cut in. “Debrief your team and stand down to ready status. When the storm clears, we may need to send you out again if further breaches have emerged.”
And with that, the call dropped, and King was alone once more.
Instead of their doubt stoking his own, it siphoned the life out of it. The Council was very slow to act, and over this last year, that conservatism had run right up against what he thought needed to be done. He and the other team leads had practically had to beg for permission to recruit more operatives.
If his team believed, and the Council didn’t, he’d take his team’s side. Running down all of the options and discovering Leah was wrong wouldn’t help her ego, but it would help them all sleep soundly.
He clenched and unclenched his fists, then turned and walked out to return to his team. If it was evidence they wanted, then evidence they’d get. And when he saw the Tall Woman again, he’d get some real answers.
Epilogue: Wave Form Collapse
A few minutes after King headed off to give the report, Leah caught Mallery’s attention. She nodded out into the hall, and the comedienne returned the nod.
Leah went first, taking a right out of the ready room and walking down the hall. She pondered where to hide that would be private but not suspicious. The women’s bathroom wasn’t private enough, not without sneaking into a toilet stall or something equally ridiculous.
How would they do it in Rom-Com World? she thought. That didn’t help, since in Rom-Com World, you had privacy whenever you needed it, unless the story said you didn’t.
She settled for leaning against a wall, futzing with her phone. A minute later, she spotted Mallery out of the corner of her eye.
Three times she tried to say something, eventually getting out “Where’s a good place to chat?”
Mallery pointed down the hall, confident. She was always confident, strutting even with a broken arm. “Requisitions, I think. All of the teams are in, and the others got back hours ago.”
They walked in silence, Leah’s face getting warm as the tension thickened like sauce in a pan. They’d been simmering the whole mission, not that they’d seen each other much after she went off with King for the short-lived scouting segment of the mission.
The lights were off in requisitions, so Mallery led them into a quick right, then a left, until they came to an alcove with furniture. She navigated by the light of her phone, then pulled a lamp off a shelf and plugged it into one of the many outlets located on the stations themselves.
“No reason to take stuff twenty yards away to test it, right?” She clicked the lamp on, taking them from spooky phone-lit to intimate mood lighting. “Very handy.” She pulled down a foldout chair, handed it to Leah, and then grabbed one of her own. They set up their chairs and sat.
“Okay. So.”
One side of Mallery’s mouth twinged toward a smile. “So.”
A moment of silence passed between them. Leah got up the gumption, shook her head, and started. “I feel like this has gotten really built up and I don’t even know where to start, honestly.”
“Let’s start with I’m sorry. I should have said something earlier.”
“Blame enough to go around on that. So, let’s throw that out.”
“Done.”
Leah brushed hair out of her eyes. “That night, I didn’t even remember thinking what I said before I said it. I didn’t mean to make things awkward.”
“I pushed you right into a couple-y cover when we’d barely met. That and being your first time in that world, I could have guessed.”
“You’re that irresistible?” Leah asked, raising an eyebrow.
Mallery laughed. Full-v
oice, unselfconscious laugh. “That’s very fair.”
“But it came from somewhere. I think you’re pretty awesome. And that mission was amazingly fun. Even if much of it was pretend.”
The comedienne’s smile broadened. “It was.”
“So, that’s my…” Leah looked to her left, reached up to a shelf, and pulled out a bedside table. She set it down between them.
“That’s my cards on the table,” she said, miming the action as she spoke.
“Well played.” Mallery took a second, exhaling. “I like you, too. Just about no one can keep up with me when I’m in whirlwind mode, and you handled it like a champ. I like the idea of a girl that can give me a run for my money. Someone I can learn from.”
“I don’t know about running,” Leah said, recalling their Central Park jog, “but I’ve got plenty to share.”
“A few more weeks of Roman’s workout regimen and we’ll both be right as rain.”
“So, that’s a yes? Or the interest of a yes? Also, will we get fired?”
Mallery waved the question away. “King’s a softie about this stuff. You probably saw that when he was with Nancy. He plays all gruff, but he’s got the soul of a poet underneath those layers of tweed and regulations. Plus, Shirin’s already caught wise.”
“Really?” Leah asked. “But we’ve barely talked since the last mission.”
“Exactly. I talk to everyone, all the time, often to excess.” She shrugged, again full of confidence. “It’s clear I don’t dislike you, so the other option…”
“So, Shirin already knows, we probably won’t get fired, and we’re both interested. Where does that leave us?” Leah asked, doing her best to be all mature and grown up in this conversation that was light-years from the other start-of-relationship or define-the-relationship conversations she’d had. Is this what grown-up romance looks like?
Mallery stood out of the chair and offered Leah a hand. “I think that means we can stop trying to be all cautious and responsible and go back to finding our own way.”
Leah’s cheeks got warm again, blood flowing to her head as she stood. She took Leah’s hand, feeling her warmth, her smooth skin. She squeezed and said, “Then how about we blow this popsicle stand and grab some dinner? I could murder some bao right about now.”
Genrenauts: Season One Page 37
