by Rob Horner
“The girl you met at the carnival, right?”
“Right. She could see an aura around certain people.”
He snapped his fingers, an old-fashioned way of saying Eureka! “White was people like us, red meant demo…Dra’Gal.”
“And yellow means Quin, like Fish,” I said. “Angelica can do the same thing.”
“I get it. There’s no need for us to expose ourselves, or alert them, if we can just check on the monitors.”
“That’s it,” Iz said. The older man adopted a new look, like he was seeing Brian differently, sizing him up. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, son. Let’s plan on having dinner together tonight. I’d like your take on a few operational plans.”
“It’d be my pleasure, sir.”
On the monitors, helmeted figures and regular soldiers went about their routines, either unaware they were being watched, or unconcerned about it. With their full-body dress and thin gloves, it would be impossible for me to purge them without exposing their skin to our atmosphere.
“Fish, can your skin be exposed without hurting you?” I asked.
“Why worry about it?” Iz said. “You could just purge the whole building.”
I shook that idea away. Doing so had knocked me out the night before. The fall afterward might have killed me if Ricardo hadn’t been there.
“It’s more about our suits maintaining the atmosphere inside of them,” he answered. “They are designed to seal a breach, of course. So, if a glove is removed, for instance—”
Moving slowly, with exaggerated, overly dramatic motions, he grasped the fingertips of his left glove in his right hand and gave a pull. The glove came away easily, revealing an egg-white, five-digit hand like ours, but with an extra knuckle on each finger. The briefest hiss of air escaped from the cuff of his sleeve before something cinched tight around his wrist, closing off the flow. He held the hand up for us, flexing and extending the fingers, which ended in smooth, rounded points without nails of any kind.
“While I can’t say if there are any long-term effects of your atmosphere on our skin, I don’t believe there are. It’s more about the nitrogen content that we can’t tolerate.” He slipped the glove back over his fingers, allowing it to cover his cuff. “I can’t make the sleeve loosen out here; the suit won’t allow a breach to reopen until it senses an acceptable atmosphere outside. But it’s fine like this for the next few minutes.”
A quick beep signaled the door behind us unlocking.
“You wanted to see me?” Angelica asked, walking into the room.
“Actually,” Fish said. “I’d hoped that a day like this would never come again.”
“I’m sorry?” she asked.
“Please, just look at the monitors over here, and tell me what you see with your ability.”
She sucked her breath in through her teeth. “Three Dra’Gal in a kitchen, and five…no six— My God, are those possessed Quins? Their auras alternate between yellow and red.”
Fish’s helmeted head tipped forward, the equivalent of a human bowing his head in despair. “All of them?”
“Everyone I can see,” she replied.
“All right. Let’s get Jeff in here and take care of it,” Iz said.
“Not yet,” Fish said.
“Why not? The longer those things are up there, the worse it’ll be!”
“Those might not be the only ones,” Fish said softly. “We run two shifts up there, twelve hours each, back and forth.”
“No days off?” Brian asked.
“Not for us. Remember, we don’t get tired like you do, and we really have nothing else to do.”
“Not like you can go to the movies, huh?” Angelica said.
Fish laughed. “Rocky Horror, maybe. Listen, we should wait until four. The oncoming group will arrive then, and there’ll be a fifteen to twenty-minute period of overlap.”
“Pass down,” Brian and Iz said together.
“Jinx,” Brian said, earning a laugh from Iz.
“Exactly,” Fish continued. “Let’s plan on getting Jeff and Danielle involved, maybe a few others. We can’t afford to let them Manifest.”
“But our environment is safe for the Dra’Gal,” Angie said.
“It is. But they’ll shred the clothing and helmets if they change.”
“Even if it hurts their bodies?” Brian asked.
“Especially for that reason,” Fish whispered. I knew it wasn’t possible, but I wished I could see his face. The pain in his voice spoke of memories of a similar event. Perhaps the Dra’Gal had done the same thing on his world, even after they knew Manifesting would result in the demise of their hosts. Maybe it didn’t even hurt them. Being a projection of thought energy, perhaps they escaped back to some nebulous collection of formless personality, like a cloud of consciousness, awaiting the next vessel to infiltrate.
“Four it is, then,” Iz said. The tone of his voice indicated an end to the discussion.
Brian and I began to rise from our seats, both of us hearing a dismissal, but Fish had a few final words.
“Before you go. Angelica, let Jeff know he’s going to be needed for ferry duty shortly. We’ve had two calls on the hotline, and I want you on one of them. Brian and Johnny will go on the other.”
“Okay. Anyone else I should notify?” Angie asked.
“Chris and Jason, at least. Better get James ready, too.”
“Sounds like a lot of bodies for a meet and greet,” Angie said, the tone of her voice showing her disapproval.
“What hotline?” Brian asked.
“I’ll fill you both in later,” Fish said. “And the reason I’m sending so many with you, Angie, is because you’re meeting a small group. Might be nothing, but you know I share your discomfort with these missions.”
“It works though,” Iz said.
This had the feeling of a long-standing dispute between the Quin and the Marine. And from the look Iz gave us, he wasn’t about to get into it again. “Remember, Barracks room A-7,” he said before turning back to the keyboards.
“I’ll let everyone know,” Angie said.
“Okay. Thanks,” Fish said. “You two get to your room and get into some decent clothes. Meet in the Assembly Area at noon.”
“That’s the room at the bottom of the staircase to the outside,” Iz put in.
“All right,” Brian said. “We’ll be there.”
PART II
Time for Some Action
Chapter 12
A simple meet and greet
As far as transportation goes, I’d prefer being shot out of a cannon and landing without benefit of a net to being teleported. Jeff’s warning that it might be a little uncomfortable was a bigger understatement than if I told you the Titanic was just a big sailboat that sprung a little leak. If you can imagine someone turning you inside out like a fuzzy shirt, running you through a wash and dry cycle, then flipping you right-side out again and placing you in a steam press to iron out the wrinkles, you’re about halfway to understanding how it felt to ride shotgun with the tall academic. My only consolation was Little Jack standing on Jeff’s other side, looking every bit as nauseated as I felt.
Bright sunlight shone down, high noon at the oceanfront.
“God, I hate that,” the big soldier said. He leaned over and placed his hands on his thighs, no doubt hoping he wouldn’t puke up breakfast.
“I’m very sorry about that,” Jeff said, taking his hand off my shoulder. “I can only warn you from anecdotal observations. I feel no personal discomfort, you understand.”
I waved my arm in his general direction as a reply, not trusting myself to speak.
“I’ll be right back with the others,” he said, and vanished. There was a little pop sound from where he stood, like air rushing in to fill a sudden professor-sized vacuum.
“We should move a little away,” the big soldier said, still hunched over but lurching forward. “He’ll come right back where he was, and we’ll get shoved out of the w
ay.”
The nausea was fading, but the world still spun a little as I staggered forward, trying to take in our surroundings without moving my head too much.
The call to the hotline had come from a young woman claiming the white lights of a week before had “done something to her,” though she hadn’t specified what. The arranged meeting place was 17th Street near the Atlantic Avenue crossing, a hub of small storefronts that catered to the tourist trade during the late Spring and Summer.
We had appeared behind a walk-in pizza diner, part of a trio of shops all sharing one building space that separated us from the avenue. To our right was the last block of Virginia Beach Boulevard, also known as 17th Street. The sounds of the Atlantic Ocean provided a soothing background roar, small waves crashing into the beach just a block away. Seagull cries warred with vehicle engine noises. Even at lunchtime in the off-season, the oceanfront was busy. Smells of fresh pies from the pizza joint in front of us clashed with older smells of day-old cheese and stale dough in the trashcans nearby. Nope. Nausea wasn’t going away anytime soon.
Another pop sounded behind us, accompanied by a sudden outrush of air that pushed us forward another step. A loud retching followed. I turned to see Gus, the young soldier who’d ridden shotgun in the van carrying the prisoners back from the carnival, turned away from us, covering the ground with the remains of his ham and cheese omelet. Brian stood on Jeff’s other side, eyes closed and mouth tight, trying to keep from joining the soldier.
“While you two recuperate, let me go over the particulars of this interview,” Jeff said. “We’re here to meet a young lady by the name of Joi Chen, who contacted us through the hotline. She didn’t give any information other than her name, and didn’t seem frightened, according to the person who took her call.”
“So, she’s got no idea about the Dra’Gal?” Brian asked, stumbling over the name.
“Not that we can tell,” Jeff answered. “As you know from personal experience, Johnny, the Dra’Gal in this area started closer to Norfolk and spread west, rather than moving toward the waterfront. Iz says they wanted access to the major media outlets on their way north to the state capital and Washington DC. This area will be a good opportunity for them to spread their infestation during tourist season, but that hasn’t started yet.”
“Didn’t Fish say something about there being a limited number of surrogates one resonator can control?” I asked.
“That’s conjecture, as far as I can tell,” Jeff replied. “For all their advanced technology and knowledge of our common foe, there are still very large gaps in the Quins’ understanding of exactly what the Dra’Gal can do.”
Brian looked up at me and mouthed the word “Later,” which was enough of a reminder that we needed to keep what we’d learned as quiet as possible. I hated secrets then and still do today. I’ve never been one of those people to enjoy knowing something that others don’t, like knowledge should impart power over another. Hopefully this could be resolved at four. Then everything would be out in the open and we could move beyond it.
I checked my watch: 12:15. We were fifteen minutes early for our meeting with Joi in front of the Virginia Gift Shop. The store was the third of three businesses sharing space in the building, so it would be a matter of less than a minute to walk around the front.
Gus was recovered enough to reach into a pouch at his belt. He pulled out five small black devices. My first impression was of an insect, though made of plastic. It had a small, circular centerpiece, no more than a centimeter in diameter, and it looked soft. Like, squishy-soft. There was a rectangular body attached to it, perhaps an inch on the long side, and around the entire thing ran a flexible ring, very thin.
Taking one from Gus, I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. Brian looked at his with an expression matching mine. But Jeff, Little Jack, and Gus lifted the things to their ears and maneuvered the outer ring in such a way that the smaller center piece—the squishy part--squeezed into the ear canal. My mind flashed back to the still image of an apparent arrest in Norfolk, a demon on the ground surrounded by gifted people, all but one of them with a black thing like this on their ear.
Jeff took the earpiece from my hand and gently affixed it to my right ear, while Little Jack did the same for Brian.
“These are like miniature walkie-talkies,” Jeff said, “though the Quins call them Port-Comms. They operate on a frequency outside standard radio waves.”
“Do they communicate with each other?” Brian asked.
“Actually, no,” Jeff replied. “Each of them is in direct communication with a hub—” he pointed to the small pouch on Gus’s belt. “The hub routes the communications continually back and forth between the Port-Comms, and it provides a feed back to Mandatum.”
“Big Brother is watching you,” Brian said, quoting one of my favorite lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. He pitched his voice low as he did it, earning a smile from both Jeff and me.
“Precisely,” Jeff said, nudging his glasses back up onto his nose. “And more importantly, Big Brother can communicate with us. We use these devices whenever we’re outside of Mandatum.”
“Two on the roof, please,” came through my Port-Comm, the voice tinny but recognizable as Fish. “You’ve got ten minutes until the rendezvous, so let’s get into position.” It was clearer than the reception on a telephone, but not so loud as to be distracting.
“Try to remember you have them in your ear,” Jeff said, “and sit or stand with your right side near a wall. They are a Quin technology and may occasion question or comment.”
That made sense. Just seeing one in that video clip made me curious enough to remember it through the entire news broadcast, even after Crystal’s discovery of the “yellow” people. What would I have done if I’d seen one in the flesh, so to speak?
“Johnny, you’re with Jeff on point,” Fish said. “Angelica is out on another meet and greet, so do your thing when you shake hands. Gus and Little Jack, I want you on the roof, watching for trouble.”
“Do you expect any?” Brian asked.
There was a sound of mumbling, as though Fish had picked up the habit of the nonsense-cursing some people do under their breath when they don’t want to speak ill of someone specifically but can’t hold everything inside. “Let’s just say I’m not a fan of an advertisement that can draw us out. It’s worked for us so far, but it could easily go the other way.”
“I can see that,” Brian said. “How about if I hang back a bit, like I’m perusing the Old Time Photo display? There are a lot of tricks I can summon if I need to. Anything that can fit into my hands, really.”
“The militaristic Mary Poppins, I remember,” Fish said.
Not for the first time, I wished it were possible to trade places, or powers, with Brian.
It wasn’t about his power, not really, though having the ability to summon anything you could think of would be very handy. No, it was more about wanting to lay off some of the responsibility heaped on my shoulders.
I was only sixteen. That’s too young to be told you’re the only one who can purge an alien possession and give hope to an entire…what? Resistance? Is that what we were?
Little Jack moved over to Jeff while Gus began an intensive study of the back of the building.
“Let’s get into position,” Fish said. “No helmets means no video for me, so you two on the roof have got to be my eyes as well as ears. Talk everything out—”
“—like we’re narrating a movie, got it,” Little Jack finished. Turning to the thinner soldier, he said, “Come on, Gus, let’s get up there.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Gus whined. “There has to be a ladder around here somewhere—"
Jeff laughed, then took Little Jack’s hand and reached out for Gus’s shoulder.
“Not again—”
They disappeared with a pop and a brief flash of light, and a second later the sound of renewed retching came from somewhere above us and to the left. They’d
be over the gift shop now, watching and waiting. And puking, but hopefully that would pass soon.
“I’ll go around the other way,” Brian said, turning toward 17th Street. Jeff appeared beside me, heralded by the gust of air. Interestingly, the flash of light only happened when he disappeared.
The older man fell into step beside me as we moved behind the large commercial building, turning right at the feeder lane for the parking area, heading up to the storefronts on Atlantic Avenue.
“Fish,” I said softly, unsure if I needed to turn my head or cup my hand over my ear. How did they do it in the spy movies? Didn’t the actor always press a finger to his ear?
“Reading you,” he said.
“Can you tell me a little more about the advertisement? Has it worked yet?”
“I was the first one, I think,” Jeff answered.
“You and Scott and Chris,” Fish said. “The idea was to find a way to reach out to those who received abilities after we spread the Catalyst, give them a place to go and offer them protection from the Dra’Gal, without overly-alarming the general populace. Remember the net cast by our modifier was world-wide, but closely-followed the signals used by the Dra’Gal.”
“Didn’t you say there were extra qualifiers or filters of some kind?” Jeff asked.
“Indeed. For the most part, the Phosphorescent Catalyst was meant for younger people, those who, in the commonly accepted parlance, are more open to change. Though we were tied to the Dra’Gal signal, we tried to limit the lights somewhat, hoping to focus it on areas where we already had a command structure in place.”
“Wait,” I said. “Are there more here, more…um…Mandatums?”
“There are four in the US, scattered around a bit. That’s where we concentrated our advertisements. Nothing too flashy, you understand. They were deliberately vague and prompted people who were experiencing changes since the night the lights came down to call a one-eight-hundred number. Once we get them on the line, we trace the call. If we happen to have a team in the area, we try to make contact immediately. In the case of this Ms. Chen, we had to settle for arranging the meet today. These are the situations that give me the most concern.”
