Overload Flux

by Carol Van Natta

  So Beva’s promotion was the directorship Malamig had been convinced he’d get. Probably better not to mention that Beva had offered her a job. She kept her face blank.

  Malamig eyed her up and down with contempt. “But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? You’re probably bobbing and spreading for Foxe every chance you get.” He stared at her crotch, then gave her a sloppy leer. “You owe me some of that. I was nice to you for three and a half feckin’ years.”

  It suddenly occurred to her that now that she worked for Foxe, she didn’t have to stay and listen to Malamig. She started to step around him, but he countered to block her.

  “You need a lesson in cooperation,” he hissed, and reached out to grab her arm.

  She evaded him easily and he staggered, off balance, but he recovered and spun on her faster than she’d thought possible. He was fumbling at something under his jacket, and she belatedly remembered he carried a handgun.

  She dropped into full-tracker mode and time slowed...

  Mairwen counted the security eyes and calculated their angles. If she could lead him two steps to her left, the eyes would only see the back of him and nothing of her. She slung her coat at him from the right, causing him to shift and trip over his own feet in the direction she wanted him to go. Taking a chance, she followed with a slow shove with her shoulder, causing them both to step out of eye view. She used her foot to sweep his legs out from under him, and as he fell, she cocked her left wrist to release the hilt of a flat stiletto into her waiting fingers.

  She waited until he was mostly down, then lunged and pressed one knee on his rounded stomach and sternum and slid the knife to his throat. She allowed him a few thousand milliseconds to register where he was and the threat she posed. She eased time into half speed so she could form understandable words.

  “Be still.”

  Even as she spoke, she saw the raw panic in him, causing his head and shoulders to buck in an effort to throw her off. She didn’t move the knife away fast enough to avoid a shallow slice on his neck, and blood welled up.

  She put more of her weight on him and, with her free hand, pushed his head back down to the plascrete with more force than was strictly needed. She leaned in closer to his face, ignored his putrid breath, and stared into his wide eyes. “Be. Still.”

  He froze. Finally. She fished under his jacket and found his gun still in its unsnapped holster. She lifted it out with two fingers, then rose up off his chest and stepped back. She breathed deeply and allowed time to come back to full reality.

  She took another small step away, still out of camera view, and showed him his gun as she flicked the safety on. “This will be at the front desk.”

  He must have felt something wet at his neck, because he felt for the cut, then looked at the blood on his fingers.

  “You horse-shagging, helio skag! You cut me!” Malamig was trying to sit up, holding his bloody hand out in front of him, staring in disbelief. “You feckin’ stabbed me!” Adrenalin was making him shake.

  She slid her stiletto back in its sheath. “Perhaps you should see a medic.”

  She folded her coat over her arm and walked back into the building, ignoring Malamig’s increased bellowing. She took the gun to the front desk and said she’d found it in the parking area, then rode the lift to the fourth floor rather than chance meeting someone on the stairs. She likely had at least another fifteen minutes to wait, so she used the fresher down the hall from Luka’s office to clean the few drops of Malamig’s blood from the stiletto and its sheath.

  She examined herself in the mirror, but she looked the same as ever. Her asymmetrical spiked hair, her only vanity, didn’t even look out of place.

  In retrospect, it was reckless to have visibly injured Malamig, but she’d underestimated his ability to function while impaired. She felt no remorse for hurting him, but knew it might well cost her the job with La Plata. That thought brought a strong wave of regret. She now had two friends where she’d had none, and in Luka, maybe more.

  She sighed. When she’d first met Luka, she’d wanted nothing to do with him, and now here she was, wanting to do nothing without him.

  Emotional pain was worse than physical pain, but she couldn’t afford to wallow in it. She forced it into a mental hypercube and stored it away as something to deal with later, when she was alone. It was cold comfort knowing CPS training was good for at least that. She went back to Foxe’s office to wait to take him home.

  When they finally got to his townhouse an hour later, he asked if she was up for a run—he was desperate after two and a half hours without being able to pace.

  “Let’s run to the cul-de-sac and back,” he said.

  She met his smile with a small one of her own and agreed. That direction was the longest distance he could have chosen. After the day she’d had, she might have suggested it if he hadn’t.

  She changed into her running clothes and added a hooded waterproof jacket to ward off the chilly fog that had never lifted that day. She liked fog better than wind because it carried scents better. Maybe they’d even see the early first moonrise.

  When La Plata terminated her contract, she was going to miss the quiet camaraderie of loping along just behind him on his favorite scenic running trail. Most of it was wide enough for four or five people to run abreast, but the fog made it seem like they were cut off from the rest of the world. She indulged herself in opening her senses to him, letting his fog-borne scent slide across her thoughts like the caress of a silk scarf.

  “Help me think, Mairwen,” he said. He slowed his pace to make conversation easier. He hadn’t used her first name often, and she decided she liked the way he said it, as if it was a new word he’d found.

  “About what?” She eased closer so they were running side by side.

  “The lab results on the vaccine packets. The DNA tests were ‘weird,’ to quote Dr. Tewisham.”

  “Technical term, is that?”

  Foxe laughed. “‘Weird’ as in completely unknown basal structure.”

  She edged forward a few paces in front of him when another runner came into view up ahead, although she’d been hearing the sound of feet and fast breathing for some time. She kept herself between the woman and Foxe until she was gone, then evened up with him again.

  “Before you ask,” he said with a smile, “it wasn’t a testing error, it’s not registered for research or license, it wasn’t a corrupt clone, and five other labs, including Concordance Prime, all said the same thing. That’s what took so long, because Tewisham got stubborn and called in favors.” At their slower than usual pace, Foxe was running and talking easily. “I’m out of probable explanations, so now I’m looking for the improbable.”

  She was flattered he imagined she would have thought of asking any of those questions. “What does ‘unknown basal structure’ mean to a biochemist?”

  “Something about epsilon aminos with isomers that aren’t right or left, and I have no idea what that means. Tewisham thinks he’ll get at least a top journal article and a galactic conference tour if he can figure it out.”

  They ran along in silence for long moments. Foxe was the puzzle solver, but she shared the underlying curiosity that drove him. Something twitched in her memory, from long ago, about the origin of the carrier phage that made the tracker alteration possible. It was one of the CPS’s bigger secrets. “Perhaps it came from a hybrid planet.”

  Foxe’s whoop of laughter startled her. “A hybrid planet? I’d have never taken you for a fan of science fiction spectaculars.”

  Mairwen shrugged and said nothing. Like most people, he probably thought hybrid planets, those deadly cauldrons of combined alien and terraform seeding, were impossible. The Concordance Ministry of Health may have convinced the known galaxy that failed terraforms were always poisoned to protect civilization from novel microorganisms to which the populace had no immunity, but she knew better. The CPS even hid a hybrid planet right under the nose of Concordance Command headquarters. She sho
uld know, because it had been the location of her barracks for nineteen years. She definitely wasn’t going to tell him about that.

  Foxe gave her two quick looks. “You’re serious, aren’t you? It’s improbable, I’ll give you that.” He smiled as if to reassure her, though she didn’t know of what. He returned his gaze forward. “Even if the poisoning didn’t kill everything, the odds of finding viable...”

  His words trailed off as his intuitive imagination began bubbling. She knew that look. She’d be getting no more conversation from him for a while.

  She heard distant footfalls from behind them on the trail. The fog changed the acoustics, but she thought the two runners would overtake them in a couple of minutes. She shortened her stride so she could drop behind Foxe. He didn’t notice. He was probably slipping into focused intuition mode, and the sure sign came when he started a mumbled dialog with himself.

  As usual, when his mind started sparking, his speed picked up. Running seemed to be just a faster form of pacing for him. She dropped back a few strides farther and slid the hood off her head, focusing more of her attention on the runners coming up from behind. She was relieved to hear their pace was slowing to a walk. At that rate, they wouldn’t catch up any time soon.

  The fog made the trees and decorative grasses along the trail look dreamlike, and it also carried Foxe’s scent to her, which gave her a warm feeling that she didn’t care to examine too closely. Though he wore a mid-weight loose jacket, his pants were sleek and form-fitting. He had the most beautifully proportional legs and rear she’d ever seen. He could stop traffic if he ever wore tight shorts. Maybe he already had and would be a footnote in the next Etonver traffic study.

  She wondered if he admired her body as much as she did his. It was outside her experience to want that. She’d been preoccupied with keeping her senses practically comatose so she could blend in and be normal. If anyone had been interested in her in the past, she’d never noticed, and her sex hormones had never been engaged. She’d been repulsed by physical contact. Now she had no idea how to tell if Foxe noticed her, or felt the same fascination she did for him.

  Hope, regret, and frustration threatened to roil up and overtake her, so she centered on the steady effort of running to soothe her thoughts and order her senses, dropping farther back so his scent wouldn’t keep distracting her. She could meditate on unknowable things on her own time. Besides, the two runners from far behind them were on the trail again, and it sounded like they were racing each other. Imprudent behavior, considering the poor visibility caused by the fog and approaching twilight.

  CHAPTER 10

  * Planet: Rekoria * GDAT 3237.036 *

  The incipient burn in Luka’s legs and lungs told him he’d gotten carried away again while he savored the possibilities that arose from Mairwen’s out-of-the-box suggestion of a hybrid planet. Suddenly, he was in the trail end’s cul-de-sac, and he couldn’t remember the last kilometer he’d run. He’d also lost Mairwen somewhere, probably outpaced her without meaning to.

  He slowed to a walk and started around the circular perimeter to give her time to catch up, and to let his breathing ease. The cul-de-sac was big, maybe twelve meters across, and was ringed by curved benches at the edge and an informal hedge beyond that. The fog was dense enough to make it hard to even see the benches on the far side. On impulse, he used his percomp to send a short message to Zheer, suggesting she contract with a finder to look for a hybrid planet that could be the source of the “weird” DNA from the drug samples. More than likely she’d think he was being absurd, but maybe her forecaster talent would see some merit.

  As he got to the farthest point of the circle, he was starting to wonder what was keeping Mairwen when he heard crashing of bushes from behind him, and suddenly a man was tackling him. The only thing that kept him from going down was an instinctive quick lunge to the left, but a second man joined the first, followed by someone’s hand on his neck. And with that touch, his body was no longer his own.

  A telepath, a woman he thought, though he couldn’t turn his head to look, compelled him to start walking toward the hedge, pinned between the two men gripping his arms. He tried to push the telepath out of his mind, but he’d never been good at that, and she already had multiple hooks into him. The best he could do was obscure his surface thoughts and ruthlessly bury any worries of what might have happened to Mairwen.

  Though the telepath forced his gaze forward and blocked his speech, she didn’t bother controlling his hearing. Unfortunately, the men who were guiding him weren’t talking. From his peripheral vision, he could see they both wore nondescript cheap civilian clothes, but they carried themselves like gunnin—ground-based military personnel—or mercs. The taller one on his left was dark skinned and bald, and the shorter one on his right was pale skinned and sported an ugly diagonal scar across his face like a badge of honor. He saw and felt one of them attach a tech suppressor to the front neckline of his shirt, good for blocking any incoming or outgoing transmissions from his percomp or any tracking devices he might have.

  Luka gained grudging respect for the telepath controlling him as they made their way past the hedge and up a slope to the sidewalk. She kept his movements fluid and balanced instead of jerky like a puppet. Anyone seeing them from a distance would assume they were all friends having a good time, and the fog would cover up any incongruous details. He could still feel the damp chill on his face, and the feeling of movement, he just couldn’t do anything about it.

  He’d assumed they’d get him into a vehicle fast, but instead they kept him marching down the sidewalk for eight blocks into a crumbling neighborhood that had seen better days. Even kidnappers avoided Etonver traffic, it seemed.

  He got a glimpse of the telepath when she was reflected in an eye-level window, but she’d compelled his head away too fast for him to make out any details beyond very short brown hair and brown skin. The people they passed hunched their shoulders and didn’t make eye contact. It wasn’t a part of town anyone wanted to be in after dark.

  Their destination turned out to be a grungy, single room in a rundown cashflow-only hostel. Once there, the two mercs efficiently taped him to the room’s only chair, anchoring his legs, arms, and torso. A closeup look at the mercs’ clothing told him it was disposable, meaning they intended to leave no forensic evidence behind. It didn’t bode well for his future.

  They removed his jacket and percomp and put them on the bed, but left the tech suppressor clipped to his shirt. The telepath’s fingers never lost contact with the back of his neck. She loosened control of his body except for his head, which she kept facing forward. The bald merc stood near the door watching Luka, and the scar-faced merc stood next to the window and looked out through the cheap blinds. Neither looked angry or sympathetic, just two people doing their jobs.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions,” said the woman behind him. Her voice was surprisingly high-pitched, almost girlish, and her English was accentless. “If you scream or act out before I can stop you, Mr. Brown or Mr. Blue will hurt you.” He guessed the pseudonyms were based on the respective colors of their thin jackets. “If you cooperate, I’ll send you to sleep, and we’ll leave you here unharmed for your people to find. Do you understand?” She eased up on her control of his voice.

  “Forgive me if I doubt your benign intentions.” He could already feel her nibbling at his shields. They weren’t strong enough to stand up to a focused probe by even a low-level telepath or empath, and she’d already proven she was better than that. Thanks to his mother’s tutelage, he had developed another line of defense, and he steeled himself to use it.

  “We’re professionals, Mr. Foxe,” she chided almost primly. “Violence isn’t nearly as effective in ensuring we’re getting the information we need. We’ll start with the binary. Is your name Lukasz Foxe?”

  Like most people, she mispronounced his first name. He delayed answering as long as he dared. “Ja,” he finally said. He switched to thinking in Icelandic. English w
as the Concordance’s official standard language, and most people could get by in Mandarin and few other common languages, but Icelandic was obscure, almost a relic. She’d have to use his mind’s language center to translate, and it would slow her down. A trick he’d learned from another telepath. The longer he took, the better chance for someone to get him rescued. Someone he wasn’t going to think or worry about.

  “How many moons does Rekoria have?” she asked, punching at his weakening shields to compel him to give up the information.

  He gritted his teeth. “Tvö,” he said. “Nakú-aben Ússí hefur einn tungl.” Naku-aben Uzzi has one moon. And two deaths. He plunged into his filed reconstruction memory to call up each and every pool of blood from the boy who had been unwillingly sacrificed to the moon by his own mother, who’d later thrust the knife up into her own throat. The clearing in the woods smelled like an earthy slaughterhouse, and the filtered sunlight made a halo on the child’s face. That’s why the mother had placed him there, because the boy had always loved the sunshine, despite his heart belonging to the moon like the shape of his birthmark. She’d cut open the boy’s chest and removed the heart first, then washed his face clean with the hem of her dress so...

  An impact sent Luka’s head snapping back and the pain of a hard slap brought him to the present. Luka opened his eyes to focus on the bald merc in brown standing in front of him, the likely source of the blow. The merc nodded once to the telepath behind him and returned to his post.

  “That wasn’t very cooperative, Mr. Foxe,” the telepath said. “Don’t do that again.” Her voice sounded shakier than before. “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Do you know where Dr. Tansa Onndrae is?” She accompanied the question with a hard thrust that shattered his shields and imposed a strong compulsion to answer.

  Luka didn’t even have to work at it to associate the name with Vadra Amhur and let the phantasms flood his mind with recent visceral memories of how a killer had used a wirekey to mark the flesh of the naked woman zip-tied to a chair, and how the killer had centered on the sexual organs for his own gratification. Someone else had stood watching as the torturer plunged into soft tissue as the woman screamed into the gag wrapped around...