Hard Candy

by Angela Knight, Sheri Gilmore

Mercy’s smile faded as she spoke with the gentleman. The conversation sounded like any other business discussion, and yet she seemed nervous.

  Vincent stood with casual deference and nodded in complete understanding. He spoke in mild and polite tones, but his smile seemed a tad sharp and his eyes ... his black eyes ...

  Luxi awakened her quiescent mental talent from the depths of her mind and focused it on what she was feeling. Synchronicities, the lines of coincidence and possibility ruled by the decisions made in the here and now, clarified and stretched outward into bright skeins that created the warp and weft of potential futures. Her attention slid down the threads of prospect, decision, and chance that the unnerving man shared with her boss, seeking the future they would create.

  She cringed. This man was a con-artist that preyed on fear. If Gentle-fem Symposia did business with him even once, her boss would never be rid of him.

  Luxi turned away. If she said anything to her boss, she would have to tell Gentle-fem Symposia how she knew. She had no doubts that she would be believed. Psi-talents were not unknown. Most people showed some trace of telepathy or telekinetic ability, but strong talents were rare. And her talent was very reliable.

  That was the problem.

  Exposing the existence of her particular talent would cost her her job. The ability to track potential futures was just too much for any company to deal with. No one wanted to know that someone else was privy to their business decisions before they even made them. It didn’t matter to them that she wouldn’t know if she didn’t actually look. They were all so busy angling for an advantage over the next company, it wouldn’t occur to them that she simply did not care.

  But if she didn’t say anything, Luxi would lose her job anyway. The company would not take kindly to Gentle-fem Symposia’s embezzlement to feed this man’s need for cash. The office would be closed for months during the investigation. Mercy would be indentured to the company for life and her staff disbanded, including the receptionist.

  Luxi’s possible futures burned in the back of her mind. No matter what she chose, her future was no longer here in this office. There was nothing she could do to stem the tide. The real decisions were not in her hands. Once that man had entered Mercy’s life, Luxi’s future had been doomed. Keeping silent would not save her.

  But Gentle-fem Symposia’s gratitude might.

  There was one slim chance that Luxi would not end up living in the under-city slums -- but it was slim indeed.

  Luxi shut down her holographic display, pulled out her data jack, and set the communications switchboard on auto. Damn it, I really liked this job! She took a steadying breath and lifted her chin. “Ms. Symposia, that man cannot be trusted.”

  Mercy turned a sharp look Luxi’s way. “Luxi, you have no idea what you’re talking about. He’s a monk.”

  A monk? Luxi swallowed but held her supervisor’s gaze steadily. “Gentle-fem Symposia, with all due respect, he’s a blackmailing con-artist.”

  Her supervisor frowned. “What?”

  The man suddenly focused on Luxi. His black eyes narrowed. “Miss, do you know what you are saying?”

  Luxi stared coldly into his eyes. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.” Abruptly, her small secondary talent stirred within her. She had no grasp on it or control over it; the talent came and went as it pleased. It wasn’t particularly useful. All her little talent saw were the threads of the past -- and ghosts.

  As she stared into Vincent’s black eyes, her second talent suddenly opened wide and showed her why her skin was crawling.

  Vincent was possessed by a second soul. It was staring straight at her from within his eyes with malignant intent. It was very dead, and very hungry.

  Vincent suddenly smiled. It wasn’t pretty.

  Luxi literally felt the ground move under her feet as her future abruptly reshaped itself.

  * * * * *

  Mercy Symposia’s office was not particularly large, but it boasted a full wall of solid windows that overlooked the heart of Estrella City’s corporate district. Her broad desk was an understated work of art made of real imported blackwood. Mercy tapped at her keyboard and frowned thoughtfully at her holographic display.

  Luxi sat in the elegant back-curved chair before the desk with her hands folded quietly in her lap. She had been right. Mercy had not had any difficulty believing, once she understood Luxi’s odd talent. Fortune-tellers were a dime a dozen, but none of them in Estrella, upper-city or below, had the accuracy that Luxi possessed. It was not something she talked about.

  The silence lay thick in the office.

  Luxi swallowed hard. “I’m ... I’m sorry, Gentle-fem Symposia.”

  Mercy sighed and folded her hands on her desktop. “I have been having strange dreams and odd ... occurrences in my condo. I was led to believe that this man was an expert on such things.” She gazed at her hands rather than at Luxi.

  Luxi turned to get her purse, which was hanging on her chair’s slender arm. She pulled out a slim data card and set it on the desk. “This is a friend of mine. She’ll take care of that for you, and she won’t ask for more than she’s worth. If you have any other problems, she’ll tell you who you can trust.”

  Mercy took the card. She glanced briefly at it, then tapped the edge on her desk. “When you told me what you told me ... I was under the impression that there was a lot more that you ... didn’t say.”

  Luxi closed her purse and nodded. With the entire company hard-wired for surveillance, “embezzlement” was the one word that never came out of your mouth.

  Mercy’s hands clenched into fists. “You just saved my career, didn’t you?”

  Luxi clutched her purse. “None of that will happen now. You’re safe. He’s not after you any more.” He’s after me.

  Mercy pressed her fingers to her brow and released a breath. “Damn it, Luxi, you just saved my ass and I have to fire you!”

  Luxi nodded miserably. She had done the right thing. She knew she’d done the right thing, but it still hurt like hell. “The company cannot afford to have me work in their offices.” She closed her eyes. “I’m a ... an information leak.”

  Mercy leaned back in her chair and glared at her closed office door. “It’s also company policy to report strong talents. Once it’s recorded on your personal essay, it goes on your resume. Not one company will hire you.”

  Luxi stared at her purse. “I know.”

  Mercy scowled at her hands. “You could have kept your mouth shut.”

  I would have lost my job anyway. Luxi lifted her shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “I’m a nice girl. It’s what nice girls do.”

  Mercy blinked, then smiled bitterly. “Nice girls, huh?” She stared at her holographic display and tapped her desktop with a manicured nail. “Loyalty should be rewarded -- not punished!” Abruptly, she leaned forward. “Luxi, can you look for yourself? Can you see if there is any way I can help you? Any way at all?”

  Luxi’s fingers tightened on her purse. Within her mind, her talent hummed and possibilities dropped into place. This was it. She had reached the juxtaposition moment she’d been waiting for, the turning point in her personal future where everything came together and hinged on a single decision. She glanced up at her former supervisor. “As a matter of fact, there is.”

  Chapter One

  Port Destiny Station

  Imperial Space - Outbound Corridor

  “We are approaching dock to Port Destiny spaceport,” the shuttle’s gentle voice announced. “Please secure all personal belonging in preparation for return to gravity.”

  Luxi woke from her nap and stretched in her padded chair. The shuttle had taken nearly an hour to cross the distance from the starliner to the spaceport. A zero-gravity nap had filled the time nicely.

  She peered up over the heads of the other shuttle passengers. The yawning mouth of Port Destiny’s sixty-five-meter-wide docking bay door filled the forward view-screen. The cylindrical station slowly took on truly gigantic proportions. Al
l of a sudden, Luxi had no trouble at all believing that the station employed over sixty-five hundred people.

  From the starliner’s stateroom view-screens, the station had appeared small. Measured against the spaceport station she had transferred from, Port Destiny station was small. It was only a little over eight kilometers long and archaic in design. Rather than a modern docking ring around a habitat globe, Port Destiny was an old Terran-built station that was tubular in shape. The entire barrel-like body of the station turned, generating nearly normal gravity the old-fashioned way, by centrifugal rotation.

  Luxi pursed her lips. Port Destiny was practical rather than aesthetically pleasing, but practicality had its advantages. Since the entire station turned, pocket regions of the station were less likely to lose gravity through unexpected power outages.

  “Please remain in your seats until the shuttle has come to a complete stop,” the shuttle’s voice continued. “Please have your data cards ready for swift assessment through customs. Thank you for traveling with Imperial Princess Starlines.”

  Luxi reached into the zip-sealed breast pocket of her deep-violet jumpsuit and pulled out her holographic data card. The card marked her identity, such as it was, the last of her personal credits, and her passage through the corridors of space on her way to a new planet, a new job, and a new life. A reward from Ms. Symposia for her loyalty and the price she had paid for it.

  The first moment she had touched the card, Luxi’s talent for reading the future betrayed that her arrival at the card’s final destination would mark the beginning of a long, stable career marked by utter misery.

  She was going to loathe her new life.

  However, a crossing thread marked a single moment in time heavily weighted by chance, hinting that an opportunity for a better future could cross her path before she ever arrived. It was only a whisper among the tangled threads of synchronicity. A possible knot of juxtaposition whose threads were not yet in place. Others had yet to make decisions that would bring this moment of opportunity forth.

  That slim possibility had been enough to make Luxi sell every trace of her entire life. One hand-carry bag and the card were all she had left.

  Luxi’s hands tightened on the arms of the chair as the view-screen filled with the interior lights of the station’s dock. She had traveled for sixteen days and eight jumps from star system to star system, on two different starliners, to reach that moment. It was here, on Port Destiny station, that the tangled threads of opportunity, chance, and decision would cross. It was here that her last chance for happiness would occur. Her talent hummed actively within her. Possibility was coming closer to being opportunity with every breath she took.

  Luxi hoped with everything in her that the opportunity presented itself soon, because yet another moment of synchronicity was actively chasing her with malevolent determination.

  The ghost-possessed monk, Vincent, was trailing her across the stars.

  She could feel his vile intent crawling across the threads of possibility into her future. Her talent warned that no matter what course she charted, sooner or later he would catch up with her. From that meeting, all her lines into the future ended in a single moment marked by a single decision, a decision that was entirely in her own hands.

  With not one hint of what that decision would bring -- or cost.

  * * * * *

  Customs was a huge, well-lit, and crowded hallway that curved to the right. Three lines of passengers moved at a crawl past plain and featureless cream walls painted with a broad band of bronze. The long lines ended in a wide doorway blocked by full-body scanners and armed guards in dark uniforms. Their snug, half-armored doublet coats were emblazoned with Sojourn Corp. across the breast, and swords graced their hips. In the sealed environment of a space station, where a pinhole could mean the deaths of thousands, energy weapons were tightly controlled. Even the state-of-the-art live-steel blades worn by Imperial officers could not cut through armored plating.

  Luxi tucked an errant wave of her red mane behind her ear. The shuttle’s zero-g had really done a job on her hair. She was going to have to dig out her brush and re-braid the whole mess.

  Boredom weighed heavily. It had been a long, dull flight, then a long, dull wait, and then this long, dull walk.

  She arrived at the gate to enter the station proper, and had to force herself not to yawn in the guard’s face.

  He winced. “Please don’t yawn,” he said softly. “I’ll start doing it, then the rest of the guys will do it, and it looks really bad on surveillance.”

  Luxi smiled to cover the almost-yawn. “You? Yawn, when you have such an exciting job?” She turned over her data card for assessment.

  “Oh, yeah ...” He rolled his eyes and grinned. “I’m so fulfilled.” He slid her card through his hand-held reader. The light over the doorway scanner went green. He returned her card and handed her a folded flyer emblazoned with the station’s logo. “Welcome to Port Destiny Station.” He leaned closer and added in a stage-whisper, “... where nothing ever happens.”

  “Thank you.” She glanced at the station flyer. “Personally, I’ve had enough adventure already.”

  The guard snorted. “Then you are going to love Port Destiny.”

  “I certainly hope so!” Luxi grinned and stepped through the scanner, towing her overstuffed hand-carry bag on its small wheels. No alarms went off. She released a small breath and continued on, grinning foolishly as she strode past another set of guards and out of the customs ring. It was time to find her future.

  The good news was that she didn’t have to worry about getting on the next flight for a whole thirty hours, so she had thirty hours to figure out where she needed to be -- and be there.

  The bad news was that she didn’t have the credits to get even a cheap room to rest in for any of those thirty hours. Her berths and meals were included on the starliners, but the spaceport stopovers had proved very expensive. According to her personal account, she had just enough credits left to get a cup of kaffa and a snack. If she wanted a decent meal before her next flight, she was going to have to do something to make the credits to buy it. Luckily, there wasn’t a spaceport that didn’t have a kafé, or a kafé that didn’t appreciate a good fortune-teller.

  Letting the corporate office know that she could read the future could get her fired, but here in the middle of nowhere, it was a way to make a little cash.

  Luxi held up the paper flyer the customs officer had handed her, reading as she walked. According to the flyer, there were seventeen kafés in the station’s Garden District concourse. And according to her talent, she definitely had an appointment with one of them.

  Luxi approached the row of lifts that would drop her on the Garden District concourse. Her talent shifted within her.

  Something didn’t feel right.

  She stopped, letting the other shuttle passengers brush by her. Now what? She frowned in concentration, trying to get a better grasp of what she was feeling.

  Synchronicity was out of place. Taking the lift wouldn’t put her in the right place, in the right moment in time, for the future she was chasing.

  Luxi rolled her eyes in disgust. Great, a complication ... Following the lines toward the future was proving to be a real pain in the ass. She glanced around. Okay, so if I’m not supposed to go down the lift, where am I supposed to go? There was a small hallway off to her right. Something clicked into place. Ah ...

  Following the thread of synchronicity, Luxi slipped through the line of passengers and into the small hallway.

  The hall ended at a single lift access. According to the sign by the call button, this lift led to the cable-car tramway that traveled from one end of the station to the other, right through the station’s center. No one was waiting for the lift.

  Luxi’s brow rose. Apparently, it was not a popular mode of transportation. But this was where she was supposed to be, so ... She pushed the call button.

  Chapter Two

  Luxi stepped out on the
tramway deck, trailing her bag, and grabbed onto the rail that ran all the way around the tram station. Gravity was very minimal this close to the station’s center.

  Not one person was waiting on the tram.

  On the other side of the deep track where the cable-tram would pull in was a huge window, and beyond it, the floor of the world turned upward very slowly, meters and meters, and meters, away -- all the way overhead. Oh, glory ...

  She suddenly felt as though she were falling, and falling, and falling ...

  Luxi had to consciously make an effort not to fall over. According to her sense of perspective, the entire world was rotating sideways at a dizzying distance. She tore her gaze away and turned her back to the window. Okay, let’s not look at that anymore. She swallowed, suddenly understanding why the tramway had few passengers.

  According to the chrono on the wall between the two lifts, she had about five minutes to wait for the next tram. Once she was on it, the tram would reach a stop just short of every five minutes, and she had seven stops before she would reach the stop she wanted. That should be long enough to do something about my hair. Brushing her hair would also give her something to concentrate on, rather than the dizzying view. She knelt and dug into her bag to retrieve her brush.

  Brush in hand, she stood to tug the elastic free from the end of her braid, then dug her fingers into her thick curls to get them out of the braid. It took more effort than she thought it would to untangle the long coils enough to pull a brush through them. The bright copper of her waist-length mane blazed in a cloud of sunset waves against her deep-violet suit. She winced. Her hair was beyond frizzy. The shipboard sonic projection vibro-showers and antibacterial lighting had not been good for it. Brushing it in low gravity did not help any. She shook her head and kept brushing. Well, at least her hair wasn’t dry and crispy ...