by David Ryker
Toomey cleared his throat. “Just, ah, reacting to the effects of gravity. I’m not as young as I once was.”
“Age is simply a tool of measurement in your limited perception of the universe, Doctor. Once you understand the true nature of space-time, you’ll realize how silly the notion is.”
“I’m sure.” He stepped out from under Kergan’s arm. “I think I can make it on my own now, thank you.”
“Of course.” Kergan looked back up to the honor guard, who then started moving toward the stairs that would take them down to the corridor. “We’ll start unloading your supplies now.”
Toomey’s eyes narrowed under his severe glasses. “How did you—”
Kergan grinned and tapped his temple with an index finger. He had to remind himself that, like space travel, this was all new for the doctor.
“I am one with everyone on this station,” he said. “So efficient, wouldn’t you say?”
“Uh, yes. Certainly. Well, then.”
“They’ll be at your disposal for any of your needs. You can even mate with them, if you feel the need.”
Toomey’s beady eyes bulged and his face went pale. “Ah. Would that, um, not essentially be the same as having sexual congress with you?”
Kergan waggled his eyebrows. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”
He saw Toomey’s squeamish response and simply chucked him on the shoulder.
“You said you weren’t able to bring everything I’d asked for,” said Kergan, hoping to distract him from what he obviously found unsettling. It would be an adjustment period, to be sure.
“No, I’m afraid not.” Toomey seemed to appreciate the change in subject, which made Kergan happy. “I was forced to leave in a hurry, after all.”
“Don’t get me started on Quinn and his friends,” he said, shaking his head. “Pains in the ass, every last one of them, don’t you agree?”
Toomey stared at him blankly. “Indeed,” he said finally. “In any case, I was able to secure the holographic control modules, nanites and the means of working with them, power converters—all of which, I believe, will be of great use to us.”
The doctor stood back against the corridor’s curved wall as the drones marched past them toward the airlock and the ship that was docked beyond it. Kergan would use them to take the supplies to the engineering lab that had once been home to Kevin Sloane’s engineering work. For the last month, it had housed his own efforts to improve the technology of the station in preparation for his plans.
But things were about to take a quantum leap forward, now that his new friend was here. He clapped the doctor on his narrow back and grinned.
“You must be starved for some decent food,” he said. “Let’s head up to my office. Your welcome dinner awaits!”
Kergan led Toomey through the corridor to the central zero-gravity tube and up to the 11th level and the office that, like the suit he was wearing, used to belong to Sean Farrell when he was still warden of Oberon One, before his mind had been erased and his body taken over.
They pulled themselves up with the rungs set into the wall, and when they reached the hatch, Kergan went through first.
“It takes a bit of practice,” he said, pushing himself along the corridor as the centrifugally-generated gravity gradually pulled him back to the floor.
Toomey followed, ending up on all fours at the end before struggling back to his feet. Kergan grinned at the strange little man as he offered a helping hand, but didn’t laugh. They were friends now, after all.
He led them to the anteroom of the warden’s office, where the meeting table was covered with cured meats and hard cheeses, along with smaller portions of rehydrated breads, vegetables and cakes. Two of the station’s three cooks had survived attenuation and the riot, and Kergan had put them to full use in creating the feast for his guest.
Toomey acted like he couldn’t even see it, even though he’d been subsisting on space rations for three weeks.
“Where is the toomium?” he asked.
Kergan fought hard against an encroaching frown, but it finally got the better of him.
“Manners, Doctor,” he said, more sternly than he’d intended.
Toomey’s scrawny throat bobbed with a swallow. “Yes, of course,” he croaked. “I’m very sorry. The dinner looks, ah, delicious.”
Kergan brightened. He couldn’t stay mad at Dr. Toomey, even though he was beginning to realize he couldn’t trust his new friend. No matter—he couldn’t trust Kevin Sloane, either. That was all part of the fun. Regardless, he and Dr. Toomey would go on to do great things together.
“Thank you,” he said, bowing theatrically. “Now was that so hard?”
Toomey stared at him silently, and Kergan finally breathed a sigh through his nose. It was like being the parent of an eager child on Christmas morning.
“Fine, wait here.”
Kergan went into the office proper and emerged with a chunk of what they were now calling toomium, the element the Gestalt had been using for millennia in a variety of ways. It was in a small metal box and glowed like a beacon in the dim light of the anteroom, projecting all colors of the visible spectrum at once, merging into an almost unbearably white incandescence.
Toomey’s beady eyes appeared to glow themselves as he gazed at his namesake element, his normally expressionless face now beaming with naked hunger. Kergan’s earlier pique had completely vanished now, replaced with an eager excitement.
“Tell me, Doctor,” he said, his voice low and intimate. “What do you see?”
“I see…” Toomey breathed. “I am the wealthiest man on Earth. And I’m being awarded the Nobel prize for physics.”
His eyes seemed to wander for a moment, which Kergan knew meant the vision he was experiencing was changing. A smile crept across the doctor’s thin lips.
“What’s happening now?” Kergan asked.
Toomey said something unintelligible. The Kergan part of the dual entity identified the language as Russian. They had absorbed the ability to speak English, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese, but no one on board the station spoke Russian.
“English, Doctor, please.”
“I’m breaking someone’s neck,” Toomey said with more animation than Kergan had ever heard in the man’s voice. “I’m a young man again, back in the relocation camp in Philadelphia.”
Kergan cocked an eyebrow. He was curious as to whether this was a memory or a fantasy. He had learned months ago that the element could invoke either experience in humans. Judging by the imagery, the earlier vision had definitely been fantasy.
“Why are you breaking his neck?” he asked.
“He tried to steal my bread ration.” Toomey’s eyes were dancing again. “My God, I’m strong. His neck is like a chicken bone in my grasp.”
Kergan scratched his beard. This sounded like a mix of memory and fantasy, which he hadn’t encountered before. And, of course, the sexual connotation was new. Unless… was it possible the doctor actually had broken someone’s neck as a young man? He couldn’t be sure. At the very least, it gave him a whole new insight into the doctor’s character and temperament. He was quite obviously more than just the nebbish scientist he appeared to be, which gave Kergan hope that he had truly found a kindred spirit.
He slowly closed the box, plunging the room back into the ordinary, sallow glow of the overhead lights, and Toomey’s expression sank in accordance with the gloom.
“Don’t worry, Doctor,” Kergan soothed. “You can get too much of a good thing, especially in the early stages. We have plenty of time.”
“Plenty of time,” Toomey breathed absently. “Yes.”
Kergan raised his hand in the direction of the table, and the two men walked over to it. Kergan pulled a seat out for Toomey, then tucked it back in behind him as he sat down. Then he took his own seat across from the doctor.
“Dig in,” he said with a grin, pulling the stopper from a bottle of fifty-year-old bourbon and pouring each of them two fingers�
� worth. “Eat, drink and be merry, isn’t that what they say?”
“For tomorrow we die.” Toomey’s gaze seemed to be returning to this world, the here and now. After several moments, he finally hoisted his glass in a toast.
Kergan frowned. “Well, that’s a downer, Doctor.”
“I’m not exactly a sentimental man.”
No shit, Kergan thought with an inner giggle.
“But I feel a strange urge to acknowledge this wondrous new adventure we’re about to embark upon,” Toomey continued. “This is truly the next step forward in the evolution of the human race. To the future.”
“To the future.” Kergan clinked his glass against the doctor’s and downed all his whiskey in a gulp. He’d become enamored with the effects of the liquor on his new brain, and took advantage of it often.
Unfortunately, you and I likely have very different visions of what that future will be, he thought sadly. But it doesn’t matter. By the time you realize exactly what’s going on, it’ll be far too late.
16
“You’re enjoying this way too much, you know.”
Quinn grinned. “So are you. Just admit it: you want to turn it on, don’t you?”
Chelsea bit her bottom lip. “Can I? Really?”
Quinn pushed the joystick to the left and the airship followed the order, banking toward the shore after spending about thirty minutes flying due south at a leisurely pace over the San Francisco Bay. In the rear monitor, he saw the drone change course to keep up with them, keeping its distance at almost exactly seven hundred meters.
“Be my guest,” he said, pointing to the black dot on the ship’s control panel. “Should we do a countdown?”
“Three,” she said, positioning her finger over the button.
“Two,” said Quinn.
“One.” She giggled and tapped the screen, and suddenly the airship’s large windows went blank, and they were flying entirely by sensors and cameras.
Quinn looked at the rear sensors and his smile widened. The drone had stopped in its tracks; whoever was observing the video feed from it was no doubt frantic, wondering how the hell their quarry had just disappeared from the sky.
“That was more fun that it should have been,” Chelsea confessed as she sat back in the passenger seat.
“It’s always fun to stick it to the man,” said Quinn.
He turned his full attention to the sensors. Now that they’d activated the cloak, it was more important to keep an eye on other traffic in the sky, since other ships couldn’t detect them. Schuster had installed the tech on the ship, loaned to them by Tiffany Tranh, during his rare time away from his lab. He’d been spending almost all his waking hours there since the incident with the drones a week earlier.
They continued south, first over Fremont and then banking right to bring them into San Jose. The ship followed the same route that they’d taken when they were abducted—scratch that, “escorted”—by King’s people the first time. Quinn brought them to a landing next to the shipping container and switched the cloak to the conventional holographic projector to hide the ship from the air. There was no need to worry about the ground, because no one ever came out here.
The heat inside the container was oppressive, but cool air flowed up from below as soon as they stepped through the hidden door to the stairs, where Frank King met them with his trademark thousand-watt smile.
“Glad you could make it,” he said as he ushered them into his apartment. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
“First of all, thank you for sending Tiffany,” said Chelsea. “She’s been an enormous help to us.”
King winked. “She owed me a favor.”
“It must have been one hell of a favor. She must have spent a million credits on us by now, not to mention carrying the messages back and forth between us and you to keep us from having to communicate electronically.”
Speaking of that reminded Quinn to check his wristband. He’d blocked incoming commlink calls, and, thanks to Gloom, they’d encrypted all their devices against any tracking abilities Drake might have. So it wasn’t surprising when a text message appeared on his display in all caps: WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU???
He showed it to Chelsea, who grinned, then he tapped out a reply.
“What did you tell him?” she asked.
“Up your ass and around the corner.”
King snorted a laugh. “You are one for the books, Mr. Quinn. Or should I call you Captain? Have the pardons come through?”
“Just call me Lee,” said Quinn. “No pardons yet—they have to go through a classified committee first, and they have to review all the information—”
“And half the committee is at a ‘conference’ in Singapore, which is double talk for ‘vacation on the taxpayer’s dime,’” said King, shaking his head. “Trust me, I know the wheels of government grind slowly, especially when they really don’t want to do what they know they have to.”
“It’s not a priority for us right now, sir. As you know, we’re working on developing the technology we need to mount the assault on Oberon One.”
“And you’re still not interested in letting me know how?” King asked with a half-grin.
“Not unless you’re willing to tell us how you got away from Zero,” said Quinn.
King let out a laugh. “You are one cagey bastard, Quinn. That’s one of the reasons I know you’re the man for the job.”
Chelsea flashed Quinn a grin of her own, and he felt an odd tug inside at the thought that she might be proud of him.
“Anyway, sir—”
“Frank, please.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen, sir. I’ve been a Marine too long. Anyway, there’s a team working around the clock to retrofit a quartet of surplus Rafts with the same technology as the ship that brought us back to Earth. They expect to be done in a few days.”
King nodded. “And any idea what’s happening on the receiving end?”
“Toomey must be there by now,” said Quinn. “We can only assume that he and Kergan are working on building the receiving end of the wormhole generator. And we have to assume they’ll expect an attack, and soon.”
“But how?” King asked. “As far as Toomey knows, he stole the only ship on Earth capable of getting to the station in less than six weeks.”
Quinn and Chelsea exchanged a glance. He wasn’t willing to tell King—or anyone outside of their group, for that matter—about Schuster’s circumstances. It would raise too many red flags and slow down the work he was doing. As it was, they were lucky that Drake had just left the tech team alone, and had agreed to Quinn’s demand that they have round-the-clock security. Right now, Dev Schuster was the most important person in the entire solar system.
“We believe Toomey assumed that we had the means to upgrade more ships,” he said. “And, to be honest, sir, we’re dealing with a species that takes over minds. We have to go on the assumption that they may be able to read thoughts, even from a distance.”
Not bad, he told himself. You could have a career in public relations with spin like that.
King sat forward on the sofa and propped his elbows on his knees, his expression grave.
“It all just seems so… I don’t know, impossible, like a science fiction CR experience,” he said. “To be honest, Lee, if it was anyone besides you telling me all this, I’d dismiss them out of hand. But given our history, I have to believe you.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“So you’ll be leading this assault, then?”
Quinn frowned. “That’s still up in the air, sir.”
“Why? Who else could possibly be more qualified?”
“Drake has been avoiding the subject. To me, that means he’s looking at having his own people do it.”
“Would that be such a bad thing?” asked Chelsea. “I mean, we’ve been through a lot the last couple months.”
Quinn looked at her, saw the exhaustion in her eyes. He’d been feeling it himself the last few days
. Not physically—he was better rested now than he’d been in ages—but in his soul. He’d been constantly on alert for years now: first in the war, then on Oberon One, and now on Earth. Until Tiffany Tranh showed up to rescue them from Drake, it seemed like they were little more than stray dogs, jumping at every noise and scrounging for their next meal.
In other words, he was starting to like the good life, and he was pretty sure the others were, too.
“We’ll have to see,” he said. “I agree that it makes the most sense, but at the same time, I don’t know that it really matters who’s behind the controls of the ship. There are certainly better fighter pilots out there, and people with plenty of experience in space combat from the war, even if it was just in orbit around the Earth.”
“That makes perfect sense,” King said, nodding. “From a totally logical standpoint, there are much better qualified people to carry out the mission.”
“But you still don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Quinn, reading King’s expression. “Why not?”
King sighed. “I’m afraid I didn’t have Tiffany ask you two here just for an update on the situation. I have some intelligence that I believe you both need to be aware of.”
Quinn saw Chelsea’s expression drop, and he immediately knew what she was thinking: if she was here, it had to have something to do with her father.
“What is it, sir?” he asked.
“I take it Ms. Bloom here is aware of what happened in Astana,” said King.
“To a degree,” she said.
“Basically, I was taking a secret vactrain from Berlin to Seoul for a summit meeting. Morley Drake, at that time a general in UFT command, assigned Mr. Quinn and his team to be my security detail for the trip.”
Quinn nodded. “Drake told me it was an opportunity to redeem myself for being busted down to sergeant after punching out a militia colonel in Brazil who just happened to belong to the Almeida family.”
“I know them,” said Chelsea. “We ran in the same circles, obviously, since we’re both so-called Global Families.”
“We stopped at an abandoned warehouse complex in Astana to change trains,” Quinn continued. “The nukes had created a fault underground there that prevented the vactrain line from continuing on, and to take that particular route, you had to leave the underground, go topside, then back down again to get to the line that would continue on to Seoul.”
