by Aer-ki Jyr
David knew there was something here, he just wasn’t thinking outside the box. The Word was devious and operated in the cracks where traditional methodology didn’t reach…meaning what in this case?
“Where is he now?” David asked.
“In the classroom,” one of the gold/white uniformed security officers informed him, glancing over at a live feed for confirmation. “He should be there for another 5 hours if his schedule holds.”
“Grab me a magic wand. I’m going for a walk.”
Jason walked around the perimeter of the darkened sparring ring, moving to Morgan’s left side as she stood near the center, unable to see her opponent but not needing much more than a sound to direct her concussion waves in the approximate direction. She’d knocked him down twice so far, but he was up on her 6-2, having snuck in to close range and taken her down to the mat from a variety of angles. Each time he did she adapted, and he to her as they both learned new combat strengths and weaknesses.
“Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” Morgan taunted as she slowly twisted around, not talking much so she could listen for Jason’s movements.
He knew better than to respond, for an invisible wave could come back his way a second after he spoke. That was how Morgan had got her first takedown.
Jason reached his right leg out, hovering his foot above the ground for a moment as he ‘looked’ at Morgan. Her arms were partially up, ready to throw some energy wherever she needed, but he’d learned it took her a moment to charge up so if he acted fast he had a chance to rush her.
That wasn’t the plan though.
Holding his leg out to the side he bent down on his left knee a bit, leaning that way as he lifted his foot up a few more inches before smacking it down on the mat, then pushing off towards his left as he dived out of the way.
As expected Morgan threw a concussion wave toward the sound. The two meter-wide blast missed Jason as he ducked to the side, dragging his left foot across the mat into a pivot and running straight in towards her.
To Morgan’s credit, she got her arm turned towards him, though all she had to work with was the sound of his half dozen steps. As she summoned another burst of energy Jason slid feet first underneath her arm and slipped directly underneath her spread legs, wrapping his arms around her knees and tipping her over face first into the mat.
His head got pinned underneath her body in the process, but that didn’t matter. He shoved her legs off to the side and stood up, flicking back on his spherical sight that had turned off when he got smooshed underneath her shorts.
“Seven,” he noted, standing back up and seeing her do the same from behind him. Jason was really starting to like being able to see every direction at once, even if it did pull some extra mental energy to sustain it longer than a few seconds…but that again was the point of these bouts. To push both of them into uncomfortable areas and give their bodies a chance to adapt.
“Center?” she asked, not being able to see where the ring was.
Jason walked over and pushed her by the shoulders into position and backed up, sidestepping as quietly as he could so she hopefully couldn’t track him.
Morgan drew in a slow breath and stood up to her full height, lowering her arms to the sides and splaying her fingers out wide, drawing a frown from Jason. He held still and waited, trying to figure out what she was doing because she wasn’t in position to throw off energy like she normally did…then he got the feeling she was going to go big and try a spherical attack, despite how much it would drain her of energy.
He knelt down slowly, positioning his right foot behind him to brace for the blast but Morgan didn’t move. She just held still as a statue.
Jason really wanted to say something, but knew he couldn’t so he just waited.
Eventually a smile crept onto Morgan’s face, a little at first, as if she was unsure about something, then it blossomed into full mocking mode as she twisted her body and pointed her left hand down towards him.
A directed blast hit him, and it was all he could do to keep from getting knocked over, but he held his exaggerated track start pose, only to see Morgan coming towards him and sweep kicking his forward leg out.
With that physical contact made and registered in her mind, Morgan quickly got her hands on Jason’s body and they wrestled around with him losing his spherical sight in the process. That little hiccup gave her the advantage and he quickly found himself smacked back down onto the mat with Morgan sitting on top of him.
He flicked his spherical sight back on and saw the grainy image of her ghostly face smiling at him.
“I…see…you,” she said in a poor imitation of Sauron.
“You have glowrods in those eyes now?”
“Well, I saw you. It’s completely black now,” she said, not letting him up.
“You developing a newfound crush on me?” Jason teased.
“No…just trying to do it again.”
“Do what? Is there something with your eyes?”
“Where’s your head at?” Morgan asked, feeling up his chest until she got her hands on the side of his face. She leaned forward and kissed him on the head, but missed and hit him in the right eye. “That’s two, sweetheart.”
“That’s three, actually,” he said, frowning. She didn’t usually act like this.
“Nope…two,” she insisted, tapping on his chest twice. “And I’m pretty sure I have you to thank for it.”
“Wait…” he said, reassessing what she meant by ‘I see you,’ and the fact that she’d known right where he was on that last concussion wave.
“It didn’t last long, but I saw you. I’ve been getting little blips the past two days, and always when I’m sparring with you. I think you’re turning me on, boy.”
“Spherical sight?” Jason asked, just to be sure.
“If it looks like a grainy black and white radar image?”
“What did I look like?” Jason said, keenly interested.
“Couldn’t see your face or arms or legs. Just a whitish blob low to the floor…and I could see the floor.”
“How far?”
“About a foot past you. Everything further out kind of just didn’t exist.”
“Did it turn on by itself?”
“No…I kind of coaxed it out. Sort of a Jedi trance thing. How do you do it?”
“It had a mind of its own in the beginning, then I just found the switch. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like finding a third arm I never knew I had. How do you explain how to mentally move your arm?”
“Point.”
“So…are you going to get off me or are we going to make out?”
“If you insist,” Morgan said, leaning forward and finding his nose, then moving down to kiss him on the lips for a split second before she couldn’t help but snicker.
Jason playfully punched her in the gut and flipped her off him, then got to his feet. “You’re in a good mood.”
“New powers do that for me,” she said, not knowing where exactly to look, given that the room was still pitch black.
Jason didn’t have that problem. “What did you mean about me helping?”
“I think your energy field is prodding mine,” she said, her playfulness gone. “Now that it’s happened once, fully, I should be able to exploit it…but I would ask that we keep training in the dark so I can soak up your effect as much as possible. I’m guessing the others aren’t as strong.”
“I don’t know about field strength, but mine is more sensitive and has longer range…however that works.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Sure. I want to keep an eye on you anyway.”
“It’s a lot worse than you’re letting on, isn’t it?”
“Ahh…” Jason sighed, not liking the question.
“Come on.”
He walked over next to her and sat down on the mat where she was sprawled out and touched her shoulder so she knew he was there. “It was. I’m past the worst of it now.”
“Scary?”
/>
“Like you’re going to die and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he admitted. “I hate feeling helpless.”
“Have you had time to read my log?”
“No, but I did hear about the gravity trap.”
“I should be dead,” Morgan said, with Jason hearing something in her voice that he didn’t like. “I was dead. The gravity was crushing me, there was a shield in my way, and I only had a tiny pistol, not enough to get through the shield, not to mention that I couldn’t lift it. I’d walked into a trap and they had me dead to rights. The others died, and I should be dead too. I’m glad I’m not, but it doesn’t feel right. It feels like…total luck. I screwed up. I didn’t deserve to live.”
“Hey…that doesn’t sound like you at all.”
“I don’t know what happened, Jason. And it still freaks me out sometimes.”
“How did you get out?”
“I was stuck on the floor, tipping the pistol and firing into the shield. I levered my shoulder up so I could lean against it, hoping to add some more disruption and after a few tries I fell through. In retrospect I figured out it was the concussive energy manifesting. It disrupted the shield enough for me and the pistol to come through. After that I was almost dead anyway, but I crawled down a hallway and into a room with machinery and just fired off a few shots at random. I couldn’t see well and I still don’t know how I hit what I needed to.”
“The gravity shut down and I woke up floating in the room. After that I managed to get through the ship to the hangar bays where the Calavari recovered me.”
“Well the lucky shot I can understand,” Jason said, trying to work it through for her, “but the shield was all you. However the ability manifested, it was your body that produced it and got you through.”
“I know, I know…my brain does, anyway, but I still remember what it felt like on the other side. I was dead and I knew it. I never should have put myself in that situation. I deserved to die and I didn’t.”
Jason saw a ‘shiny’ tear roll down her black and white face so he scooted close to her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled his face in close opposite from hers and tipped their foreheads together.
“If the others had survived, barely, would it still bother you? If you’d knocked out the gravity in time, and they lived, busted up royally but lived, would you still be kicking yourself?”
“That’s not the problem, Jason. I mean, it was, but I got over it. I didn’t like losing them or the Calavari, but I know sometimes things just go wrong and you have to move on. We learned that from the Black Knight lots of times. I know how to lose.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s like…the enemy got inside my defenses and is still there. I’m still scared.”
Jason didn’t say anything for a few seconds, nor did Morgan. She just sat, letting Jason hold her in the silence. He shut off his spherical sight so he was in the same boat as her, then finally whispered in her ear.
“Me too, sis. That’s why I want to make sure you and the others don’t have to go through what I did. I was dead too. And I don’t have an explanation for why I pulled out of it. I’m not out of the woods yet, so maybe me still being in combat mode gives me some perspective. You can’t go back to the gravity trap, so you’ve only got a few memories to work through, and those alter with time. My enemy is still in my head, hammering away. It’s not the same beast it was, but the fear is lying there under the surface. I’ve got it under control for now, but since I really don’t know what I’m doing, there’s always the worry that it’ll get worse again and I won’t be able to stop it a second time.”
Morgan reached up and ran her fingers through his hair, a silent way of saying thanks while she was too choked up to talk.
“Then,” Jason added, changing the tone, “I remember that Paul would gladly trade places with me. He hates that I’ve got Jedi powers and he doesn’t.”
“Ha,” Morgan laughed. “He would.”
They didn’t say anything else for a few seconds, then Morgan wiggled her way free and stood up, pulling Jason up with her. “I think Davis was right to recall us. Our best bet is always working together.”
“Something we rarely get to do nowadays.”
“War aside, I think we need to make a change there.”
“I think you’re right,” Jason agreed.
“Now,” Morgan said, swiping away the moisture around her eyes. “You wanna have another go or find some second gens to knock around?”
“They are getting a bit cocky with their new powers, low level as they are.”
“I was thinking the same. Now,” she said, grabbing hold of Jason’s hand, partly gesture, partly necessity in the pitch black, “show me where the door is.”
7
David passed the small, pencil-like ‘magic wand’ over the alpha numeric keypad/swipecard box in the residential area of City/Building #35 and remotely unlocked Seamus Kilmeade’s quarters. The door slid aside to reveal a modest, yet compact living area with three doorways leading to other rooms. It was neat, but not too neat, with a few scattered items laying around without any actual trash or grime.
David stepped inside and shut the door behind him, then began a visual sweep of the living area. One wall had a large video screen, with another having a morphable mural that changed from dull orange to blue as he watched, emitting a low glow along with depicting a fantasy landscape. It wasn’t holographic, but rather another type of video screen…one intended to give the occupant a sense of having a ‘window’ while inside the giant cube of the building, as well as to visually make up for the tight confines.
David had never been the claustrophobic type, unless he was being restrained in some way. A small room was just a small room, but these types of murals apparently helped many individuals with both the transition to an interior, urban lifestyle, as well as prepping them for life on airless planetoids or space stations where there literally was no ‘outside’ to go strolling through. Star Force facilities usually had interior parks of some sort, along with spacious warrens for people to mingle through and this city/building was no exception, but given the newb status of most of the occupants, the murals had become standard issue in all the building’s quarters.
This set had a single chair in the center of the room facing the video screen. It was plush, but where most units had a couch or two this one did not, belying that the man who inhabited it did not feel the need to welcome guests. On the wall opposite the video screen and next to the three doorways there was a small table with a high stool, on top of which was a comm terminal and an assortment of items. David walked over and visually ran through the lot, seeing nothing uncommon.
He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he suspected that whatever the operative was doing here had to be happening where he knew there was no surveillance. There were small items coming into his quarters…that much they’d been able to confirm from hallway monitors. He’d never been seen leaving with anything in his chest pocket, but the trouble was there were many places on the body to hide such things that wouldn’t be visible.
David was pretty sure this operative wasn’t that cagey. If he was pocketing the package in his chest pocket upon arrival he doubted he would smuggle it any other way coming from his quarters…meaning that whatever it contained was probably still here.
He had to be passing something on to the colonists moving out, David was sure of it, but nothing had shown up on visual records. That left these quarters as the end of the thread, meaning there had to be something here.
The fourth wall, bordering the hallway outside, was blank, standing in stark contrast to the mural on the opposite side. At the end of both were two doorways, with the third on the mural side nearby the table. David walked the perimeter of the room three times, checking in every nook and cranny he could find, but there wasn’t much to search through. The room had almost no furniture and looked like it hadn’t been lived in more than a week, though that wasn’t the ca
se.
Next he checked the restroom, which was on the hallway side of the table. It was also spartan, with the cabinets full of little items but nothing overly important. Toothpaste, shaving kit, makeup, anti-acne ointment.
David frowned, taking a second look at the makeup. He opened the lid on the small circle and saw several shades to choose from, all skin tone, one of which was half gone.
Interesting, David thought. A guy with makeup, but no social life? You’re hiding something. Tattoo maybe? Or a wound?
He set the makeup back down exactly where it had been and moved on, finding no other items of interest. Next he searched the structure of the room, trying to see if there were any secret hideaways. Lastly he checked the shower tube, noticing nothing significant other than the fact that it was a walk-in model rather than a vertical entrance.
David left the door to it open, as it had been, and checked the next room whose entrance was on the same wall on the opposite side of the table. There he found the probable cause of the makeup cover up…a bit of blood on the carpet, directly underneath the broken edge of a portable workout kit of shoddy construction.
Best guess was he slit his shoulder on the edge while doing dips. One of the modular pullouts had a nub tapped over heavily, padding it against another cut rather than buying a new unit. The guy was cheap, as well as clumsy…and the fact that he didn’t want to go to the communal workout areas further hinted that this guy spent most of his time in his quarters, but doing what?
At least he worked out…or tried to. David couldn’t say as much for most people, and doing this kind of upper body work wasn’t going to help him on his running quals, so it must have been self-interest or vanity…which was also odd for an operative that seemed to want no social life other than from his official interactions with his students.
The workout room was otherwise empty aside from a series of shelves built into the wall. They had an earbud mount on them, which Seamus obviously used for workout music, but then again earbud technology could be used for a lot of other things as well. David walked over and gave it a closer look, but everything seemed standard and there wasn’t anything else on the shelves so moved on and tried the fourth room.
