Overload Flux

by Carol Van Natta

  Luka nodded. “Top galactic news trend for months.”

  “Just so. The pharma development company was unwound in the first year, and the production company was next, but twenty years later, Concordance prosecutors are still uncovering individual owners to this day. That was for a high-profile case. If the problem is less damaging, perhaps turning your hair the same delightful shade of blonde that Mairwen—may I call you that?—wears to such advantage, even the hungriest of lawyers will look for easier commissions.”

  Tewisham seemed surprised when his flirting got no visible response from Morganthur. He was probably used to seducing women with his accent alone. Luka was mildly pleased he could tell she found Tewisham’s overtures tedious.

  An idea sparked in Luka’s mind. “What about counterfeits?”

  “Ah, now you’re sailing in blackmarket seas. Most drugs can be back-engineered or cloned eventually. Rival companies do it regularly. It’s generally only a matter of time, and not much time, before they begin eroding profits. The costs to trace the clone back to the blackmarketer’s temporary laboratory are prohibitive. Consequently, pharmas flood the market with new product as quickly as possible to skim the profits, then drop the price to make it less profitable for rivals and blackmarketers to undercut them. It’s an arms race, really—the faster to market, the higher the profits. I’d wager every pharma company in existence has a blackmarket mole or two.”

  “What if the clone is bad, and causes the bad side effect?”

  Tewisham plopped himself in his chair and steepled his fingers. It looked like a practiced gesture.

  “Nobody wins. It’s hardly worth the original producer’s expense of recalling the drug, because the damage is done.” He gave them both a wicked, piratical grin. “Sadly, greedy and sloppy blackmarketers crop up every year.”

  “You approve of blackmarketers?” Luka asked in surprise.

  “They’re the only real check we have on pharma companies. The expansion of galactic civilization has given us millions more chances to encounter new diseases, and the pharma industry has blossomed. Pharmas are monstrously profitable as is, and they expend a great deal to avoid regulation and accountability. If pharmas had no competition, imagine where we’d be.”

  On their way out of the building, Luka detoured to the lab and asked them to add amino origin tracing to the array of tests he’d ordered. The clone idea was worth pursuing, if only to rule it out.

  The only thing worse than Etonver ground traffic was Etonver parking, which explained why they had to walk six blocks to where they’d left the vehicle. Fortunately, pleasant fall days were one of the compensations for living in Etonver.

  Despite the relief of being able to stretch his legs, Luka’s thoughts were chaotic. He’d been off balance ever since coming back to Rekoria, and he still hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about the patterns and possibilities that fit the too few facts they had. He had no objectivity left to work on a murder case in which one of the victims had been a good friend.

  It had been Leo who’d convinced Seshulla Zheer that La Plata needed a reconstruction specialist in the first place. Luka had a large number of casual acquaintances across the galaxy, but few friends. Sooner or later, his obsessiveness, intuition, and hidden talents made most people uneasy or angry. Leo was one of the few who took them in stride, and more than that, respected and valued them.

  Luka knew he wouldn’t be good for anything unless he regained some equilibrium. Maybe a long run after work would help him find it.

  They turned a corner, and he wished he hadn’t been distracted by his upcoming meeting on the way in, because then the presence of a Citizen Protection Service minder treatment clinic would have been less of a shock. There was a sameness about the look of the clinic, like all the other CPS clinics he’d ever seen or been in on other planets. But it was the distinctive smell that got him, a kind of smoldering-medicinal-plastic miasma that drifted out over the walkway. Almost as bad as the cheap potato-mash alcohol his father favored. The rest of his thoughts fell apart as dark and bitter memories came tumbling like sharp rocks swept in by floodwaters.

  * * * * *

  Mairwen was puzzled when Foxe slowed to a stop on the sidewalk in front of the local CPS minder clinic. She was almost getting used to his sudden changes in focus. She waited for him to turn and explain, but he was staring at the door with unseeing eyes. His expression reminded her of the haunted look from the warehouse and in the spaceport, though not as vivid.

  Not knowing what else to do, she simply stood with him, keeping watch to make sure he wouldn’t be a casualty of some inattentive pedestrian. After a long passage of seconds, an obnoxiously loud vehicle horn caused him to startle and wake from his trance. She waited, keeping an eye on him as he found his bearings and noticed where he was.

  “Sorry, I...” he said, and then hesitated. He slanted a long look at her, then focused on the pavement. “Old, bad memories.”

  “It’s okay,” she said softly. She had more than her share of her own, just buried deeper at the moment.

  He took a slow, deep breath, then started walking again, faster than before. Once they were past the clinic, some of the tension left his face, but not his shoulders or his gait. She didn’t expect an explanation, so she was surprised when he spoke, his voice low and flat.

  “My mother was a high-level telepath in the Citizen Protection Service, recruited right after second testing, but she didn’t do well on the enhancement drugs. After she left the service on disability, my fökking father refused to take her to the treatment clinic because he thought it was her own fault for getting addicted. As if the CPS had given her a choice. He believed she should be able to kick the addiction if she really wanted to.” He took a ragged breath. “When I was nine or ten, I started going with her to the clinic when he wouldn’t. Toward the end, I had to jump school to take her while he was at work or he’d stop us.” The fingers of his left hand curled. “He got violent when he couldn’t control things.”

  Mairwen had the feeling he didn’t talk about this often, and she had no words for him. When the CPS had gotten their hooks into her, she’d lost everything at once, not by centimeters and days and bruises at a time.

  At the next crosswalk, she gave into impulse and stepped closer to him than usual and briefly brushed his hand with her fingers. She hoped he would understand it as a gesture of comfort. To her astonishment, though he didn’t look at her, he threaded his fingers through hers and gave her hand a gentle squeeze before letting go. She was equally astonished with herself. She didn’t like physical contact with anyone, but with him, not only had she initiated it, she realized she liked the feel of his skin on hers. Danger, hissed her cautious brain.

  As she walked beside him in silence, she experienced a curious sense of emptiness in her chest, almost painful. It wasn’t external, because she’d already opened her senses to take in Foxe and their surroundings, and she’d have felt it sooner. She resolutely set it aside as something to think about later. He was too vulnerable to see to his own safety at the moment. Even if she didn’t know how to ease his pain, or didn’t know if it was even possible, she could at least keep her senses open and extended for him.

  That was why she knew there was a disturbance between them and their destination. Traffic was slowing. She heard people’s feet slowing and the excited murmuring of voices, and smelled fuel, burned lubricant, and hot metal.

  Rounding the corner proved her senses right. A chaotic accident involving a public transport and a traffic column was blocking the far lane on the next block. Emergency responders began arriving on foot, pushing through the offloading passengers and milling spectators. At least the injured were fortunate to be in a medical district. If she and Foxe could get to the parking structure quickly, they had a chance to get out before the street became impassible. Unfortunately, they’d have to push through the crowds to do it.

  She looked at Foxe and was grateful to see that he’d r
egained most of his customary alertness. He apparently saw the same options she did. “Let’s take our chances with the horde.” Even as he spoke, a damaged lamppost toppled to the ground, adding to the chaos.

  She nodded and fell into step beside but one step behind him, evaluating possible threats as they entered into her sphere of influence. Providing close-in personal security was an unaccustomed use of her skills.

  They were about halfway to their goal, just coming up on a garish chems and alterants shop, when their already bad luck took a nosedive. Something was happening in the shop, something noisy and violent, something they needed to avoid. She grabbed Foxe’s coat sleeve to pull him to the side and around, but they were hemmed in by people and walls and the fallen lamppost. The sound of crashing glass told her they were out of time, so she turned to face the trouble and dropped into full-tracker mode.

  Time slowed...

  A halo of iridescent glass shards showered out from the shop window. A monstrously huge woman, the tallest and most muscular Mairwen had ever seen, burst through it in an explosion of forward motion.

  Her clothes and skin art proclaimed her a hardcore merc, and her grotesquely overbuilt musculature screamed blackmarket ramper. Her face was a kabuki mask mix of berserk rage and gleeful insanity, the result of one too many bad drugs and backstreet bodyshop mods.

  A few hundred milliseconds dragged by before two burly men from the shop came through the opening in pursuit. The berserker broke the first man’s neck as her feet hit the concrete. She ripped the throat out of the second with her other hand. The unlucky pedestrian who’d been passing by died almost as easily when his head smashed like a melon into the wall. The bodies were still falling when a quicker-thinking woman to the left drew her projectile gun and shot, but the berserker didn’t even notice the shoulder wound as she bellowed and tore the shooter’s arm off with a terrifying laugh.

  Mairwen knew none of her knives would penetrate berserker’s bulging muscle mass very far, so she scanned the crowd for visible weapons. Finally the universe deigned to favor her, because the man two paces from her, who clearly had more money than sense, was carrying a holstered, non-safetied Davydov plasbeamer, with only a thin strap to keep it in place.

  After confirming that no one was noticing her, except maybe Foxe, which she couldn’t help, she glided low over to the rich man and relieved him of the Davydov, careful to keep her shirt cuff between her skin and the grip. She waited the dozen milliseconds it took to get a clear line of sight and for the berserker to finish turning toward her. She focused her aim on the woman’s head and shot twice, then focused on the woman’s loud, rapid-fire heartbeat and disintegrated it with a final shot.

  Even though the berserker’s massive body was dead, it tried to follow through on the last orders it received, but the puppet strings had been cut, and she started to collapse. Mairwen dropped the Davydov on the ground, then pushed and tripped its owner on top of it, careful to thrust his body toward nearby spectators so they’d add to the distraction. She slid back to Foxe’s side, trying not to think about the fact that he might have registered her actions.

  She breathed deeply and pushed her tracker senses back into a corner of her mind. Time sped up and approached reality. Ten seconds had passed.

  She needed to get away, to get Foxe away, before the questions started. Now in realtime, she pulled his sleeve, and he followed behind her as she threaded them quickly through the crowd that was just now reacting to the stunning events.

  To Mairwen’s relief, Foxe sat in the back seat of the vehicle and said nothing for the entire drive back to the office. She desperately needed the time to choose the answers she’d give him once his brilliant mind found the right questions to ask.

  More immediately, she also needed to eat, and soon. Full-tracker mode, even the dozen actual seconds she’d indulged in, came with a price.

  She’d reacted on instinct, and although her rational brain was blaring very bad idea, she knew she’d do it again to protect Foxe. She had no idea why he was different. He just… was.

  The next two days Foxe worked at home, so that’s where she, Velasco, and Alhamsi covered the personal security shifts for Foxe’s waking hours.

  Mairwen thought his open and airy townhouse suited him, though its abundance of pretty morphglass windows and the exposed back courtyard weren’t much good for security. There were also no flitter pads anywhere within five kilometers, which explained the assigned vehicles. He kept the townhouse warmer than she was used to, though it wasn’t uncomfortable. He’d converted one of its back rooms to a combination office and exercise room, and he spent most of his time there with the door closed.

  She didn’t know what he did during the other shifts, but during hers, he ran in the late afternoons in a nearby park on a wide, well-designed trail, and she accompanied him. When he wasn’t running, he did a lot of reading, pacing and mumbling, and a few domestic chores. Mostly he ignored her.

  She always declined his offhand offers of meals, officially because she was on duty, but also because she wanted to avoid opportunities for him to ask her what happened with the berserker in front of the chems shop. He’d trusted her with a private piece of his past, and she didn’t want to repay him with evasions and lies.

  As it was, she couldn’t resist opening her senses around him, indulging in the sounds and sight and unique scent of him. When she ran with him, she was careful to always stay two strides behind him and let him set the pace. He seemed to need running as much as she did.

  After he went to bed, she checked in with the external night-shift security guard that La Plata had assigned, which only a week ago might well have been Mairwen. Each night before she left, she stood for a few minutes in the mostly dark living room and listened to him breathe, because it settled something nameless in her.

  The night of the berserker incident, she had decided that Foxe deserved her taking her new job seriously, even if it meant exposing more of her unusual skills than was wise. She hadn’t expected to find a use for them in the normal, civilized world. She wasn’t sure why she experienced the increased sense of duty, but it was undeniable. It felt like a kind of justice to use the skills the CPS had shaped and sharpened to protect instead of destroy.

  She’d found a martial arts studio with an open sparring session to test how badly out of practice her personal combat skills were. Running, plus her regular strength and stretch exercise regimen, had kept her fit, but it was exhausting to keep her reaction times normal and to take hits she could have easily avoided. She was sore and sweat-soaked by the time she left, but the workout felt good enough that she planned to add it to her routine. She knew she’d have to avoid the better schools or risk being noticed. Fortunately, nearly every weapons shop in Etonver had an associated studio of some sort, so there were hundreds to choose from.

  She knew nothing about Foxe’s specialty, so she spent her downtime reading about crime scene reconstruction. His intuition was well suited for his profession, and she wondered how he’d discovered it. He was, surprisingly, the author of a dozen or so technical articles in his field, and was still a certified expert in the interplanetary High Court. He’d presented and testified in hundreds of proceedings.

  His last case had been horrific, involving a pair of pedophiles who had kidnapped, abused, and killed dozens of children over several years. The media had dubbed them “the Collectors” because they’d turned a converted commercial interstellar ship into their nightmare playhouse. Foxe’s crime scene reconstruction had led to the capture of the pair, but he’d been badly wounded when he’d cornered the one who was trying to escape.

  Was she any better than the sadistic twists who collected and killed children? The CPS’s procedure and training had made her into a remorseless, deadly machine. In choosing to live, she’d done what they demanded, but she never liked the killing, even when it was deserved. To some, that might be a distinction without a difference, but since escaping the CPS, she hadn’t so much as bruised anyone
until the berserker, and she’d only done that to protect Foxe.

  She would always be a killer, but now it was her choice how, when, and why.

  CHAPTER 6

  * Planet: Rekoria * GDAT 3237.032 *

  On Monday, Foxe went to the office, so Mairwen began her afternoon shift at La Plata, taking over from Velasco, who complained about having to hang around the office all day instead of just being on call. He implied it was a waste of his considerable skills, but as far as she’d seen, his only skills were blathering on about nothing and staring at women. Fortunately, her small breasts weren’t worthy of his attention.

  She went to Foxe’s office to check in, but he had commandeered the conference room again, where he was reading multiple files on a large display and referring to a holo of a data hypercube. He saw her and smiled, and her breath caught momentarily.

  “Morganthur. Good, I was afraid this was your day off.”

  He waved her toward a chair in the corner, but she declined. Why just a smile from him should affect her was a mystery. It took more effort than it should have to regain control of her awareness of him. She laid her overcoat on the table, then stood at ease near the wall, next to the door. He smiled at her again, as if amused by her presence. This time, she made sure her breathing stayed even.

  She expanded her senses to immerse herself in the sounds and scents of the office to set a baseline, so she’d know when something changed. The conference room had a lot of human scents, most of them stale. Velasco’s smell clung to the chair in the corner.

  She couldn’t help but indulge herself in the sounds of Foxe’s breathing and his steady heartbeat, and the smells of him. She’d realized just before dawn that morning, when normal people would have been sleeping, that sometime in the past few days, she’d imprinted his exotic, buttery pearwood scent in her memory and could track him anywhere. The CPS had trained her to use the imprint for hunting, so it worried her that her subconscious thought of Foxe as a target. But now the scent of him helped ease the empty ache in her chest that had never really gone away, so she ignored the voice in her brain that said very bad idea.