Homeworld: Beacon 3

by Valerie Parv

  Movement up ahead caught his attention. A figure he recognized. Cautiously, he moved forward.

  “Guy?”

  The other man sat at a table under a woven grass shelter, a pad in one hand, stylus in the other and a messy stack of papers beside him, anchored by a rock. The papers fluttered in the sea breeze as if trying to escape.

  Guy kept on working although he must have heard. “Of course it’s me.”

  “Why, of course?”

  “This is where I come from.”

  Adam gestured around them. “This city?”

  Guy looked up and quirked an eyebrow at him. “You’re the genius, you work it out.”

  Had Adam sounded so cold and abrupt in his pre-Shana days? He didn’t like to think so. “If you know something, tell me,” he pushed.

  “All I know is, I was working at your house—”

  Adam stood over his counterpart. “What were you doing at my house?”

  “Checking your computer. After you disappeared, I needed to know what you were working on, in case there was a connection.”

  Adam bristled. “You had no damn right.” Bad enough that Guy was his double without having him running loose in Adam’s life. “How did you get into my systems?”

  “The same way you’d get into mine if you had to.”

  Because they thought so much alike. If he got back – when, he amended – he’d have to think outside his usual parameters if he wanted to keep his double out.

  “Wasting time,” Guy muttered in a tone Adam recognized only too well. “If you have half the mind everybody credits you with, you’d be working on solutions, too.”

  “When I was brought here, I wasn’t graced with the means.” Lame response, but the truth.

  Without a word, Guy handed him the pad. Habit made Adam scan the equations. Nodding because Guy’s reasoning paralleled his own, he swiped through screens and stopped, realizing he wasn’t absorbing the information as readily as usual. “You think the flux is protecting me?”

  “Why not both of us?”

  “It didn’t bring you here.” The certainty wouldn’t last, but for now Adam felt familiar ground under him. When things were falling apart, come back to the problem. Work the numbers.

  A smile ghosted across the too-familiar face. “You see that?”

  “I see that you used the same process to follow me here. Why?”

  “We need each other.”

  About to deny needing Guy, Adam bit the comment back. He still didn’t know why the other man had appeared in his life. And lack of data was Adam’s second worst nightmare. The first was losing Shana. “Have you seen her?” he made himself ask.

  “I was a bit preoccupied with you.”

  Swiping through more screens crowded with figures, Adam stopped at the last one. “No solutions?”

  “Not yet.”

  Adam heard the hesitation. “You want me to finish this?”

  “It’s possible that only you can.”

  “If you know how to get back to my reality, we can go together, work as a team.”

  Before Guy could respond, a couple of papers dislodged from under the rock and fluttered along the ground. Adam chased them down. By the time he turned back, the table was empty, only the pad and working papers remained.

  He was getting mighty tired of disappearing acts, including his own. They had no purpose he could discern. If they were the flux’s doing, they made no sense.

  Random chance didn’t sit well with Adam. He picked up the device Guy had left behind, its familiar feel denying his fear that he, Adam, was the one who’d gone mad. Were Guy and the deserted city real or delusions? Adam didn’t think he was crazy but how would he know?

  His brain had never let him down before. He’d have to trust it hadn’t now. The figures were real enough, giving him somewhere to start, at least.

  Buried in the work, he lost track of time until a sound broke into his awareness. A few meters away, a young girl was bouncing a green ball on the path that followed the waterfront. She looked to be about nine or ten and vaguely familiar, although so many facts of everyday life slipped by Adam, he couldn’t be sure. Ask him to reel off the Planck-Einstein Relation and he could do it in a heartbeat. But ask him to remember people he’d met at a party an hour before, and he was at a loss.

  The girl fumbled the ball and it rolled to Adam’s feet.

  She came closer. “Thank you,” she said, taking the ball he held out.

  “You’re Cate Rossi, Garrett’s niece,” Adam said, when the child’s name sprang to mind. She was probably no more real than Guy, but Adam couldn’t ignore her. She could be another piece to this increasingly exasperating puzzle.

  “That’s right. Did you know my mother?”

  “Only what Garrett told me about her.”

  “He said she was very brave.”

  Uncomfortable with idle chatter even under these conditions, Adam nodded but said nothing. If he was in the flux, what did the child symbolize? Again, he had no answers.

  “I’m going home this week,” she volunteered.

  “Home is Washington DC?” He was doing well, he thought; first her name then her home city. “What are you doing here?”

  “There’s a huge wave coming. I wanted to see it.”

  The flux – if this was the flux’s doing – was getting more cryptic by the minute. “If you don’t get to higher ground, you could be washed into the sea.” The same for him, but he doubted the flux would let that happen unless as part of some design.

  His history of being found floating amid the wreckage of a vessel gave him an instinctive respect for the ocean. Living in an island kingdom, he swam and scuba dived, but always with an awareness of the dangers. The notion of a giant wave carrying him away wasn’t exactly comforting, even if it was an illusion. You could die in the flux, as Adam knew from bitter experience.

  “I’ll be okay,” Cate told him with a confidence beyond her years. “I’ll hear the wave before it gets here.”

  Sensation prickled at the back of Adam’s neck. “How will you hear the wave?”

  Her narrow shoulders lifted. “I don’t know, I just can.”

  Garrett had introduced his niece to Adam when he brought her and her chaperone to Black Tree for a tour. Even if Adam hadn’t been told about her listener skills, he’d have known the moment they met – he’d felt the same psychic connection with her as he had with Garrett.

  “What else can you hear?” he asked.

  “Lots of things. I was at Uncle Garrett’s apartment when I heard you walking here.”

  “I didn’t make any noise,” he pointed out. Until he’d spoken with Guy, and she would have been close enough to have heard that the normal way.

  “It doesn’t make any difference. I hear stuff from all over.” Her voice dropped. “I can hear people up near the Moon right now.”

  The Kelek? She didn’t seem fazed by her discovery so he let it lie, not wanting to alarm the child. “Do you know who they are?”

  “Bad people,” she said, her delicate features scrunching. “I think they’re the ones making the big wave happen.”

  Definitely the Kelek, but Adam kept his face impassive. All three beacons had sensed the Kelek’s approach. Adam hoped they weren’t the ones who’d brought him here.

  “Your uncle can hear things a long way away, too,” he said.

  “He told me. He’s promised to help me get better at this listening stuff when I’m old enough.”

  Both Elaine and Garrett had told Adam that the genetic influence was strong, making it likely that any child of Adam’s would also have beacon powers. Now there was a thought.

  “Garrett told me you came here with a friend and her mother. Where are they?”

  “Up in the mountains, where it’s safe.”

  “Shouldn’t you be with them? They’ll be worried about you.”

  “It’s okay, they think I’m with some other friends I’ve made while I’ve been here.”

  “
And the other friends?”

  “They think I’m with Ruth and her mother. Nobody will be worrying about me.”

  The child’s assertion added to Adam’s belief that he was in a flux-induced illusion. In all probability, the real Cate was physically with her traveling companions, this child another creation of the flux.

  Normally Adam enjoyed figuring out answers. The more complex and challenging the question, the better for his scientific mind. This time, even Guy’s figures were telling him nothing he could use.

  “What makes you think the people near the Moon have made the wave?” he asked

  “I heard them talking. They argued about how big it should be. Now it’s coming, and I’m going to watch from Uncle Garrett’s building. Do you want to come too?”

  The penthouse had been gifted to Garrett by the monarch, in gratitude for Garrett’s part in dealing with the first Kelek ship. Adam looked up, identifying the spinnaker-shaped tower a few blocks back from the water. As one of the newest structures in the city, the building’s observation level was a designated evacuation point for people who couldn’t reach the mountains in time.

  He felt himself shudder on Cate’s behalf. Whether the building was safe or not would depend on the size of the tsunami.

  Adam had few worries on his own account. His first death inside the flux had been unpleasant enough that he wasn’t anxious for a repeat, but he’d survived that experience. He’d survive whatever this scenario brought.

  Illusion or not, Cate was still a child and a stranger to the city even in this reality. “I’ll walk you to Garrett’s apartment,” he told her. Shana would be proud of him. Not long ago, he’d have let the girl walk away without a second thought, not out of callousness but because he had a blind spot where everyday human interactions were concerned.

  Until meeting the beacons, he’d lived as an island unto himself. When forced to socialize for professional reasons, he’d done so with a sense of inadequacy. Social activities still baffled him, but he was improving. Sometimes he enjoyed the times spent with Garrett and Elaine. He still preferred having Shana to himself, but that had nothing to do with social phobia.

  “No thanks, I know the way.”

  And she was gone.

  He hadn’t seen her walk away, she just wasn’t there anymore. If the green ball hadn’t rolled back to his feet, Adam would have thought he’d imagined her.

  It seemed to him that they were messengers: Guy to deliver the figures and Cate … He couldn’t think of a reason. But give him time. Work the problem. Discarding the rock, he pulled Guy’s papers toward him and shut out everything else.

  Chapter 11

  “Are you sure you loaded enough stuff?”

  Elaine surveyed the Global Express. Last time she’d been aboard Timo’s private plane, it had felt spacious and luxurious. But then the bedroom, galley and most of the cabin hadn’t been filled with the supplies they were taking to Carramer.

  He helped her to strap into one of the remaining empty seats. “I spoke to Prince Lorne and to Shana Akers. Fresh water and power supplies are likely to be the main problems in Reve and surrounds.”

  The generators stacked against the rear wall of the cabin and secured by cargo netting made sense now. The boxes tied down between the other seats must contain bottled water.

  Timo settled opposite her and she heard the snap of his seat belt.

  “What about medical supplies?”

  “They’re on board; with luck they won’t be needed for the moment.”

  The tsunami hadn’t caused substantial loss of life. There had been deaths and structural damage, although things could have been far worse. The area surrounding the space center was sparsely populated, thank goodness. A tremor shook her as she recalled her vision of the sightseers swept away by the wave as it crashed over the city foreshore.

  She shut the images out. “Poor Shana.”

  “She’s coping remarkably well. Her time in the police is paying off.”

  Elaine hadn’t known Shana in those days, and had trouble imagining her in uniform. Her impression of Shana was the mystical figure who’d gathered Elaine and Adam around her on the floor of the old mission control, leading them in what was practically a séance, enabling Adam to contact the homeworld. Not the image Shana projected to the world as the governor, Elaine thought with a silent chuckle. But then, neither were the beacons.

  Fully laden, the Global took seconds longer than usual to become airborne. At least they weren’t in anybody’s gun sights this time. The harrowing fire fight at the airfield in Fresno, after she’d snatched Garrett from the hands of ESIN, sprang to Elaine’s mind. They hadn’t given him up easily, and Timo’s plane had been damaged, but they’d made it back to Atai in one piece.

  As they reached cruising altitude, she saw Timo break out the champagne. Not exactly averse to his habit, she accepted the glass he held out, noting he’d given her sparkling water in deference to her condition. She touched her glass to his. But as she sipped the drink, she couldn’t help dreading what she’d find when they got to Atai.

  Given the time difference between Hawai’i and Carramer, the Kelek captain’s deadline would be approaching rapidly. Despite the threats, Shana had refused to consider giving the beacons up, and had forbidden them to surrender themselves.

  Not that Shana’s edict would have stopped Elaine. But she’d agreed with Garrett that Akia Zael could take them and still unleash weather havoc wherever she chose. This way, the beacons retained the freedom to act if the chance came. That Zael would make the next move in accordance with her deadline sent a chill down Elaine’s spine.

  She glanced at Timo, so much more dear to her for his unconditional acceptance. He was reading, the faint glow from the device reflecting off his features in the dim cabin light. As if feeling her gaze on him, he looked up and smiled. “You should get some rest.”

  Although she nodded, any chance of sleep was far away. When she closed her eyes, she heard Timo resume reading. Under her hooded lids, she turned her alien gaze to Reve city.

  The sight of the debris clogging the streets around the waterfront presented a frightening reminder of Zael’s power. If this was the Kelek’s idea of a warning, Elaine hated to think what she might do next.

  No sense borrowing trouble. She concentrated until she found Garrett with the TV journalist, Amelia Takei. They were approaching his building. Recently built to withstand extreme weather, the tower appeared undamaged although the entrance had lost some of its roofing and most of the decorative greenery. The basement had been designed as an earthquake shelter.

  Garrett opened the security door and gestured for Amelia to precede him. The woman directed a smile at Garrett over her shoulder, and Elaine’s brows lifted. She knew a smile of seduction when she saw one. Impending motherhood must be making her soft – Amelia wasn’t Garrett’s type. Elaine quickly dismissed any idea that she could be jealous. She’d made love with Garrett to save his life, not because they were romantically suited, or wanted to be. Virtuously, Elaine reeled in her vision. Whatever they were doing at his place was none of her business.

  Without opening her eyes, she brought her vision back to Timo. He’d put his pad on a side table and was looking pensively out the window. She and Garrett would always be bonded by their beacon roles, but Timo was her future.

  The idea that Amelia could be Garrett’s was food for thought. Elaine’s mind tracked back to her first meeting with the journalist. She’d been covering his book launch and Elaine had rocked up to have a book signed for her mother. Elaine’s impression that Amelia had shown more than a professional interest in Garrett was seemingly bearing fruit.

  Okay, she was the tiniest bit jealous. Garrett had been special to her since their teens. The thought of sharing him with Amelia would take some getting used to.

  She tried again to see what was happening on board the Kelek ship but their shielding was back in place, not quite as impenetrable as before, perhaps because the ship had moved cl
oser to Earth. For the first broadcast, they’d lowered their shielding. That meant they would have to do it again before Zael could make good on her threat. Elaine settled her sight on the Kelek vessel. It was tiring keeping watch on a fixed point but sunset was fast approaching and with it, Zael’s deadline.

  *

  “You’ll have to forgive the untidiness. My niece and her friends have been staying here and decided to evacuate in a hurry,” Garrett explained as he let them in to the penthouse.

  Amelia went to the wall of glass lining the living room. “There’s a mess? All I can see is a spectacular view.”

  The coastline swept around to the emerald headland that lay between the city and Black Tree Beach. Most of the area was public park, any damage was invisible from this height. The ocean, so treacherous only hours before, glistened in the late afternoon light.

  “It’s really something, isn’t it?”

  She looked back. “Prince Lorne is a generous man.”

  “He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “I wouldn’t even have tried.” She sighed. “Why doesn’t anyone offer me such prime real estate? Your niece must be impressed.”

  With his hands full of beach paraphernalia, he stopped. “I don’t think much impresses girls her age other than the latest boy band or movie star.”

  “She doesn’t regard you as a celebrity?”

  “Too old.” At thirty he was hardly in his dotage, but to the girl, he must appear venerable. He didn’t tell Amelia that he barely knew Cate. When he’d shown her and her friend Ruth the penthouse, they’d been wide-eyed. Ruth’s mother, Megan, had been impressed, too. But the reason for their visit had cast a pall over everyone’s mood.

  He’d driven them to the hospital to see Lena the first time, but had left them alone, not wanting to intrude – and not really knowing how he felt about his sister, he conceded. Discovering her existence during the Kelek crisis hadn’t exactly been a good introduction. Knowing she headed the group that had held and tortured him didn’t help.