by Blaze Ward
The Nari woman had backed up another step, ears back and eyes showing white around the edges.
Gareth suspected he looked like all their worst nightmares brought to flesh before them. He certainly felt like it.
But Marc Sarzynski was here. Running loose in the wider galaxy. Who knew what terrible grief the universe would come to if that man wasn’t stopped.
And they had upgraded him, whatever that meant. These three people, he suspected, held all the guilt at such work.
What was it Xiomber had said? Only humans could be genetically engineered to go beyond the limits placed on everyone else by the Chaa?
Marc had always been a fantastic athlete back at Earth Forces Institute. He and Gareth frequently alternated first and second with everyone else vying for a distant third.
Academics had been the same way, with only three thousandths of a point finally separating them on graduation. It was one of the few times Gareth had actually been better, however thin that razor.
And then Deputy Agents with the Sky Patrol.
And Philippa.
She had chosen Gareth, and something had died in Marc Sarzynski. Turned him to darkness. Got him cast out of the Sky Patrol one short step ahead of his arrest.
And then he disappeared, until Gareth came that close to catching him in the process of breaking up a band of smugglers and slavers operating out of the UnderHives of Mars.
To apparently come here, to the Accord of Souls.
Gareth hoped it wasn’t all a fever dream leading his subconscious over the rainbow.
Another breath.
Gareth forced his fists to unclench, noting how nervous the two Yuudixtl were in addition to the Nari woman.
Yes, he was capable of devastating violence. They all were. It was part of what made humans what they were.
And why Earth Force needed the Sky Patrol.
“He’s here, and he must be stopped,” Gareth finally said heavily, eyeing each of them individually. “Whatever the cost.”
“Are you sure?” Xiomber asked. “We might could somehow try and erase a chunk of your memory instead, if we got lucky.”
“Whatever the cost,” Gareth repeated.
Part Two
Hunters
Examination
Gareth studied the secret lab Talyarkinash had taken him to. They had passed through a door hidden by a swinging bookcase, gone down a level, and entered into a smaller space that reminded him more of a dentist’s office than anything else.
The scents in here were almost nothing, layered over with floral hints and something subtle his brain kept wanting to interpret as Talyarkinash herself. Recessed lights filled the room with bright white illumination.
One wall was a glass window that felt heavy enough to stop bullets when Gareth had tapped it.
She and the two lizardmen had gone through another door and sealed it up tight behind them. They were on the other side of that glass now, watching him intently.
“First, I’ll need to scan you, Gareth,” the Nari woman said over a speaker. “Please make yourself comfortable in the chair and let it adjust itself to your body.”
Dentist chair. Mad Scientist Dentist’s chair.
Xiomber had said that a male Vanir could be over seven feet tall, with the females close behind. This chair would fit them.
For once, he actually felt rather like a juvenile Vanir, by comparison.
But he climbed in. Let the cold leather warm slowly against his back, with his jacket and flannel shirt hanging on a hook by the door. He had only the tight, white, t-shirt against the chill, but that cold was in his soul.
The air in the room was a pleasant seventy degrees.
Slowly, the chair moved. Gareth would have jumped up, but she had warned him.
It seemed to shrink under him, adjusting and accommodating until it fit like a hammock.
After a moment, it tilted itself back, giving Gareth a view of a device hanging from the ceiling that was in no way something so simple as the X-ray machine to take pictures of his teeth.
“Ready?” the woman asked nervously.
She sounded more emotional than he felt right this moment, but Gareth supposed she was expecting a Viking Berserker to break loose in her lab. He just needed to get this over with so he could go out and hunt down the man who had once been his fiercest rival.
And his best friend.
“Ready,” Gareth said.
“I’ll need to hold you in place while I scan you, Gareth,” she reminded him for the fourth time. “Tell me when you are comfortable.”
“Go ahead,” he called, holding all his emotions tight inside.
They were long since past the time to panic. Or to stop.
Gareth locked all his muscles as the dentist’s chair seemed to unfold itself a second time. Metal bars slid over his wrists and shins, binding them tight against the chair. Another strap crossed his chest, and a helmet lowered itself to cover most of his head, leaving only his mouth and part of his nose uncovered.
He wasn’t claustrophobic, but the feelings weren’t that far away right now.
“This is only supposed to tickle, Gareth,” she said over the intercom. “Please let me know if you start experiencing pain.”
“Will do,” he said.
Ants. Walking across his skin but not biting. The leaves of a weeping willow as he walked through them. The cool chill of a morning fog as he jogged around the track, back at the Institute, watching the sun come up higher on every lap.
A bright light passed through his eyelids and bored a tunnel into his mind like a three-quarter inch bit being driven by a three-quarter-horse-power motor.
Gareth ground his teeth together and refused to make a sound.
“Everything okay?” Xiomber asked. “Vital signs just jumped.”
“Sharp, but controllable,” Gareth called back, willing everything to stillness again. “Keep going.”
Hunt the man down. Bring him to justice, whatever that looked like here.
Whatever the cost.
The ants were biting now. Nasty, Texas fire ants pouring acid into his veins. The willow was a rose bush, slashing him with thorns. The fog was an icy pond he had just fallen into, through the ice.
Whatever the cost.
Something changed in his brain. The pain was there, but pushed to one side. He could think through it, or at least around it. Gareth focused his will, pushed, and the pulsing turned outward, as though he was somehow driving the drill bit backwards and closing the hole up, faster than the machine could tunnel.
Everything let go so suddenly Gareth thought he would pass out.
The pain was gone. The fire. The cold. Everything.
The chair let go and moved him more or less upright.
Gareth swung his feet over and stood up, only wobbling slightly.
“How are you doing in there?” Morty asked carefully.
“Headache,” he replied. “But it’s going away now.
“You had pain?” the woman asked. “It’s not supposed to do that.”
“I overcame it,” Gareth growled. “What’s next?”
“Come in here and we’ll watch the readouts,” she said. “It will only take a few minutes to process everything.”
The door unlocked noisily and swung open on silent hinges. Gareth stepped through into a sound studio.
One long console sat under the window, filled with hundreds of gauges, knobs, and sliders. Gareth had no idea what it all did, but he recognized the human outline on a large monitor beside the window.
The writing on the screen was mostly words he could make out, but Gareth was completely lost as to what they said.
He took a chair in a far corner and concentrated on breathing and reducing his heart rate.
It felt like he had just run from Marathon to Athens in a single instant.
A machine spit out a long strip of paper, clucking to itself like a hen.
Talyarkinash was studying the readout, holding it low enough for
Morty and Xiomber to read it as well.
Someone whistled, low and startled.
Gareth looked up and studied the three scientists.
“Gareth,” she said carefully. “Where would you say you rank, in terms of expressed, human potential?”
It took him three tries to process her words into something that made sense.
“Probably near the top, in terms of mental, physical, and emotional,” he replied through his exhaustion. “Sky Patrol Institute is a grueling test that lasts four years. I graduated at the top of my class. Marc Sarzynski was a very close second.”
“You went to school together?” She was aghast.
“I told you that.”
“I thought that meant you knew of him,” she countered. “How close were you?”
“He would have been my best man at my wedding, one of these days,” Gareth said firmly. “Now I’ll see him buried under the jail, if it’s the last thing I do. Why?”
“So we scanned him then, but not to the level we just did with you,” Morty explained as the Nari woman fell mute. “Plus, I know roughly where we put him, so I was looking for what we could do to improve you. We’ll probably only get one shot to do it, and I want to get all we can. You’ll be facing both Maximus and the Constabulary at the same time. Neither will play nice.”
“So what did you learn?” Gareth felt some level of anxiety creep into his voice.
“It’s just that…” Morty’s voice tailed off.
Xiomber stepped up and gave Gareth a level gaze.
“What he’s trying to say, I presume diplomatically, is that you appear to be using fourteen percent of your expressed, genetic potential, Gareth,” Xiomber said. “For comparison sake, members of the Accord are generally fixed at right around ninety-eight percent. We can tinker with ourselves, but nothing significant.”
“Meaning?” Gareth asked. He was tired, sore, and his head hurt.
“Meaning we were able to turn Sarzynski into a genius-level Vanir, Gareth,” Talyarkinash explained. “But we stopped there because we apparently didn’t dream any bigger.”
Genius-level Vanir.
Seven feet tall. Three hundred, twenty-five pounds of hard muscle, trained to be as dangerous as an Agent of the Sky Patrol could be. With an IQ of two hundred.
And that was dreaming too small?
“How big should we dream?” Gareth finally asked.
The Arsenal
Royston pulled the ticker-tape readout from the side of his radiation scanner, made a note, and scrolled backwards on the tape nearly three feet to another set of results. Briefly he wondered if the radiation machine was broken.
Or if he had tuned it too sensitive and it was reacting to just the movement of the air at this point.
Except, Gareth’s room was the only place where the readings changed. Royston looked around, but nothing was out of the ordinary. The place was as standard and regulation as they came, which was to be expected of Gareth. His pocketcomm was still sitting on the desk, next to a book the young man had apparently been reading when the emergency happened. The bed tucked tight, except where he had pulled the covers slightly while sitting on them.
Uniforms all arranged in the drawers and closet exactly according to specification.
Royston had even scanned both chester and closet, on the possible chance that Gareth had brought something home with him from a recent mission, but nothing reacted.
No, the only time the machine pinged at all was when he pointed the detector at the telephone’s handset, or at a spot in the middle of the floor, almost in the center of the triangle between bed, dresser, and closet. And in both of those, the radiation reading went off the charts. It made no sense at all.
Royston turned the machine off and moved to the door. He opened it and looked out at his daughter, patiently waiting on a chair just outside.
“Any news?” she asked as she looked up.
“No,” he replied. “Come inside, please, Pippa. I want to review what I’ve learned.”
She rose with all the grace of her mother and flowed past him, holding a book of Tacitus written in Latin that she had been reading while she waited.
Closing the door, he found her seated on the one chair.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Pippa,” he began.
“I’m made of far sterner stuff than you think, Father,” she replied with a primness she inherited from dear Elizabeth.
“If I believed in angels and devils, I would have to only presume that one such opened the fabric of space/time itself and grabbed him,” Royston said. “But since we know that to be impossible, I’m at a loss.”
“Why do you presume the impossibility of such a thing, Father,” she asked, eyes glaring. “In science, you have always taught me that we use deduction to eliminate the obvious, and thus, what remains, no matter how far-fetched, must be the explanation.”
“Gareth Dankworth disappeared from this room in a way I cannot explain. And did so without opening any doors ,” Royston said. “The air vents are too small to admit anything larger than a mouse. But he is absolutely gone.”
“Then your understanding of physics are insufficient,” Pippa stated flatly.
“What?”
“As you said, science cannot explain it, and yet it happened,” she retorted. “Ergo, our knowledge of science is too rudimentary to explain that angel or devil and how they were able to open a portal through space and time to kidnap Gareth. Prior to Newton, we were still bound by the laws of gravity, even though we could not explain them. Gareth was here, and then he was not. The door did not open and there is no other method of egress. Therefore, something opened a different type of portal, one we do not understand. What did your radiation detector find?”
“Something my simple understanding of physics cannot explain,” Royston said, granting her the warmest smile the chills in his heart would allow.
Indeed, sterner stuff than he gave her credit. Stronger than many of the men he knew.
She was like Elizabeth in that. He missed his wife less, knowing how well their daughter had turned out.
“Tell me,” Pippa commanded, Queen of England facing down the Armada.
“There is a signal when I scan the handset,” Royston said, moving to the middle of the room. “The only other place I find it is here. I have scanned countless other places and rooms, and only here do I find that signature.”
“What does that tell us, Father?” Pippa continued. “It tells me that Gareth was talking on the telephone when this indescribable portal opened, right where you are standing. It pulled him through before he could resist, then the handset fell. The radiation only touched those two places, as you said.”
“But how did someone open a rift in space and time itself, in order to kidnap the man?” Royston asked.
“No,” Pippa stated flatly. “There is a more important question we should be asking. Namely, why did they want Gareth?”
Br’er Rabbit
“It helps that the perp is so damnably memorable,” Eveth said, turning away from the foot traffic on the street to study the scowl on Grodray’s face.
“I agree,” her partner conceded. “But now things will get interesting.”
Jackeith began to walk, so Eveth fell into stride beside him.
They were at the star ferry office downtown. Had just left, headed back to their own precinct building. The sun was clouded over, giving the day a soft and uncertain taste.
“How so?” Eveth asked. “We know they made it off-planet using the ferry.”
“We suspect,” Grodray corrected her. “We’ve got a witness putting them in an auto-car in the right time window. Records show that car deposited them at a haberdashery nearby. You haven’t called the operator of the shop, because we don’t want to tip our hand, and to get a warrant would require that we tell someone important what we think is going on, but more of your witnesses confirm the car’s arrival.”
“I’ve got a gut feeling on this one, Grod
ray,” Eveth said.
“And I have learned to trust your intuition, Eve,” he replied. “But all a raid gets us at this point is confirmation of who was there, and maybe an actual picture of the…perp.”
They were on a public street. Not even her by-the-books partner would use the word human here, for fear of starting a riot.
“What’s next?” she asked, knowing his penchant for deduction.
“So the next step was tracking auto-cars from the haberdasher,” he said. “Once you had the building identified, I went off and tracked outbound cars, assuming that they think they are safe. Pretty sure I found a target. Certainly, the credit account they are using belongs to a Warreth insurance salesman living on the southern coast. He’ll be in for a surprise when he gets his monthly bill, unless we warn him ahead of time. That also gives too much away.”
“It does,” Eveth said. “I don’t want to share this one bit more than I have to. Any judge we tell is going to call a Senior Inspector in.”
“They will, at the very least. That’s wherein the problem lies,” Grodray said. “Based on what we’ve run down today, all the other cars that left that address over the next two hours are accounted for, except for three that went to the orbital boost for the ferry, first stop: Hurquar. We have to presume they caught a ride up to space, and then left the system.”
“And walked right out of our jurisdiction,” Eveth grumbled.
“Perhaps,” Grodray countered. “Is it worth raising a fuss now?”
“Have you got the jets to lift this one, Grodray?” Eveth asked suddenly. “You’ve got a Level-7 Security Authorization.”
“And I am very careful about how I use it, Baker,” he replied. “I can go to a judge and fill out a probable cause request. That gets us a warrant to access the haberdasher’s records, but any judge we ask is likely to put in a call to a Senior Inspector, possibly the Command Inspector herself, and ask for clarification. That starts an avalanche of questions.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” she stated her position. “I want what you have. I want to be on the inside of some of those investigations you obviously can’t talk about around me because I’m only Level-3. And if we’ve got a human loose, maybe another human loose, then I absolutely want to be in on that takedown.”
