The Dark Intercept

by Julia Keller

  Fainting was not an option. So Violet gave herself a quick internal pep talk. Come on, girl. Be strong. She wished she’d taken a moment on her way over here to call Shura and tell her what was going on. Shura was another kind of anchor. The best-friend anchor. Without a best friend, you could fly off the face of the world. Any world.

  “I know Danny died,” Violet snapped at him. “That’s how Reznik found out who you aren’t.” She spoke in short, choppy bursts of outrage. “Did you kill Danny? Take over his identity? Is that what happened?”

  “Did I—” The man formerly known as Danny shook his head. “Come on. You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t know what I believe right now, okay?”

  “I can explain all this.”

  She glared at him. “Oh, I’ll just bet you can. The question is—will it be the truth? Or just another lie?”

  He started to say something. She put up her hand to make him stop. There were tears in her eyes now. She’d willed herself not to cry. But here they were, anyway—tears, and lots of them.

  “I love you,” Violet said. She said it not with tenderness but with frustration. “I mean—I love Danny,” she corrected herself. This was not how she had dreamed it would be, the first time she told him she loved him. This was not the scenario. This was a confusing, overwhelming mess.

  With the heels of her hands, she wiped roughly at her eyes. She wanted to get rid of these stupid tears. “Pretty lame, right? Loving somebody when he’s not even who he says he is. God, what an idiot I am. What a—”

  “I love you too, Violet.”

  He caught her totally by surprise. She felt a soft flutter in her stomach. For a second or so, she couldn’t breathe. Her cheeks were suddenly warm.

  He followed up his words by gently pulling her close and holding her. Without thinking, she let herself be held for a few golden seconds—and then reality returned.

  She broke free. Now she was more upset than ever.

  “How dare you!” she exclaimed. She backed up a few steps. “You’re mocking me, right? I waited and waited all those months for you to say something—I thought you were feeling it, too, but you never said anything. You let me just—just wait and hope and yearn and—and NOW? Now you say this to me? Now you say you love me? When it doesn’t matter? When I don’t even know who the hell you are? What kind of monster are you, anyway?”

  He looked stricken by her outburst. “I mean it,” he said quietly. “I do love you. I always have. But until I could tell you the truth about myself—there was no way I could ever consider a deeper relationship with you. No way. Until the moment I could admit who I really was, I couldn’t—”

  “Then for God’s sake,” Violet said, interrupting him and doing it with so much heat and passion that she barely recognized her own voice, “who are you?”

  “I’m Kendall.”

  * * *

  Before she could fully absorb the meaning of what he had just told her, his console chirped. He checked the text.

  He grimaced. He was wearing his Cop Face now: eyes hooded, mouth a straight line. He spoke to her in a series of bullet points. “We’ve got a situation. I have to go. They’ve found Callahan and Stark. They’re cornered.” His voice softened. “I know there’s a ton more we need to talk about and so—could you wait here until I get back? We can talk all night, if we have to. We can—”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Violet, this is police business. I can’t let you do that.”

  Even through the haze of her shock and incomprehension, she wouldn’t put up with his bossiness. “You don’t have to ‘let’ me do anything. I do what I please,” she declared. “And I’ve been involved in this from the beginning. I’m sure as hell not going to start sitting it out now.”

  He tried one more time as he strapped on the belt for his slab gun. “You could get hurt.”

  The look she gave him was a combination of mild contempt and not-so-mild sadness. “Really,” she said. “Really. So I could get hurt, could I? Listen. With what I just found out, I’ve been hurt about as badly as it’s possible to be hurt. No matter what happens—it can’t be any worse than what I’ve already suffered. So come on.”

  “Okay. One thing, though. Let’s put off dealing with this—with who I really am—until this is all over. Out there, I’m still Danny Mayhew, the cop. Because that’s what they need right now—a cop. Not a scientist.”

  35

  On the Run

  “They’re heading to the transport site,” Garrison said.

  She had set up a staging area along Riemann Ridge. It was a hasty hodgepodge of portable tables and telescopes and weapons caches. All around her, cops checked and double-checked the photon-pulse charges in their slab guns, then slid the slab guns into their holsters.

  There was tension in the air—but there were other things in the air, too. Violet noticed them right away: Intensity. Expectation. Alertness. New Earth cops didn’t have a lot to do these days, except to clean up after the Intercept had done its job. We’re glorified janitors, Callahan once had complained to Ogden Crowley, when Violet was listening.

  And now they had a chance for some real action. No one would have admitted it, because Callahan’s betrayal was so astonishing and the mood was supposed to be grim, but Violet could feel the excitement. It moved in the air like an electrical current.

  She and the man she’d known as Danny had arrived a few minutes ago. Garrison frowned when she spotted Violet, and turned her eyes immediately to Danny. One of her eyebrows was raised. He shrugged.

  Violet saw the raised eyebrow, too. She addressed Garrison directly. “I’m not leaving,” she said.

  “Fine,” Garrison replied. “But you stay out of our way. Or I’ll have you removed.”

  I’d like to see you try, Violet thought. Out loud, she said, “Copy that.”

  Below them was the dense forest that spread out between L’Engletown and Higgsville, a tightly woven thicket of green and brown. The designers of New Earth had decided to put something magnificent here. Clear streams curved around tall stands of pine trees. Woods opened out upon lush meadows like louvered shutters revealing a new day. A fairy-tale quality suffused this place, and that was no accident: The designers had consulted the illustrations in several books of Old Earth fairy tales when they put it together.

  “How do you know the transport site is their destination?” Danny asked.

  Garrison tapped her console. “Take a look.”

  He leaned in. Violet did, too. The Intercept feed provided a perfect view of Callahan and Stark, deep in the dark furled heart of the forest.

  The fugitives had paused to rest alongside a small, fast-flowing creek. The chief was kneeling down to dip her cap in the water; her tunic was torn and streaked with dirt, and somewhere along the way, she had lost a boot. Sticks and leaves were caught in her hair. Stark looked even worse: He was stretched out on the ground, eyes closed, resting his head on a small rock. He was clearly fading, and so was his HoverUp. Violet could tell from the sound of the machine that its batteries were running perilously low; the engine had switched to the auxiliary power reserves.

  “I don’t get it,” Violet said. “If the Intercept has known where they were all along, why can’t we just do an intervention?”

  “The signal keeps getting jammed,” Garrison answered. “We don’t know why. We’ll have it for a while—as you can see on my console—and then it goes out again. It’s okay for surveillance, but the signal’s not nearly strong enough for an intervention. We’ll let them get a little closer to the transport site and then move in. We’re being cautious. We don’t want anybody to get hurt. And Callahan still has her weapon.”

  She turned up the volume. Callahan was talking to her husband. Her voice was gentler than Violet had ever heard it be.

  “We’ve got to make it to the transport site. If we can reach it, we can get away. We’ll hop in a pod and go back to Old Earth. Hide out and rest. Figure out how to contact t
he Rebels who escaped the roundup. Then we’ll slip back to New Earth—and try again to destroy the Intercept.”

  Stark opened his eyes and tried to lift his head, but gave up. “I know you don’t want to hear this, Michelle, but I’m not sure I can survive the trip back to Old Earth.”

  “Shut up.”

  He smiled at her. “You’re a bully. A hard-ass.”

  “You bet I am. That’s why they made me chief.”

  He smiled again, but the effort was almost too much for him.

  “But seriously,” Stark said. “If I can’t make it, I want you to go on. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. One individual is irrelevant. What does matter is getting rid of the Intercept.”

  “I know that now.”

  “I’m glad. I hated having to keep the secret about leading the Rebels. It tore me up inside. I never wanted to have any secrets from you. I never will again.”

  “You did what you had to do, Paul. Before today, I’m not sure I would have understood. But now I do. I always thought the Intercept was a pretty good idea. Keeps people in line. Cuts down on collateral damage when we have to go after a bad guy.”

  “But the price is just too high. Safety’s a good thing—but it’s not the only thing. It’s not even the most important thing.” His voice trailed off a bit. He was very, very tired. He had to rouse himself to go on. “And now your career’s over,” he said. His voice was thinner still. “I’m so sorry, Michelle. I know how much you loved the chief’s job.”

  “I did. But I had no choice. What they were doing to you—” She shuddered. “It was wrong. I love you, Paul. My place is with you.”

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Yes.”

  “Are you warm enough?”

  He murmured another “Yes.” She settled next to him, and she looked up at the sky that stretched over New Earth like a cathedral dome.

  “Remember, Paul? Remember the night, right after we were married, when we went to that beach? That rocky one on Old Earth? We tried to name the stars. Remember? The planet was in terrible shape. All anybody talked about was the rumor about a new civilization. A new Earth. It sounded so far-fetched.” Her voice sounded wistful. “And now here we are.” She looked over at him. “Paul? Are you asleep yet, my love?”

  “Not quite. I’m only going to rest for a bit. I’m pretty tired.”

  “I know. It’s okay. Take as long as you need.” Callahan sat up. The woods were very close. The occasional noises—a frog plopping into the creek, spring peepers and their chanting—were computer-generated. There had not yet been time to introduce the smaller species on New Earth.

  “Paul,” Callahan said. “We’ll be okay, right? Even if they try to use the Intercept to track us down? And get us to surrender?”

  “We’ll be fine.” He laughed softly. “That’ll be the least of our worries, honey.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, why do you think we’re still free? Why haven’t they hit us with an intervention?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Because I made us both immune to the Intercept.” Pride had restored a bit of his strength. “We know how to do that. It really works. It’s only effective for short periods of time now, but we’re increasing the duration. Bit by bit. We started out with just a few minutes. We’re up to several hours now. We’ll get there.” He yawned a long, slow, languid yawn. “One of the Rebels discovered it by accident. And it was just what we needed.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Deckle,” he said.

  “Deckle? What do you mean?”

  “If you take it in small doses, it blocks the effects of the Intercept. I don’t know the brain chemistry behind it—so I don’t know why it does that. I don’t think anybody knows why it does. Even Kendall Mayhew himself didn’t know why—and he invented the Intercept.”

  “But it’s an illegal drug. Even if it does block the Intercept, doesn’t it have bad effects? Doesn’t it impair your judgment?”

  “Nope. Turns out deckle is harmless. Somebody down on Old Earth started all those rumors about it a few years ago because they wanted to sell it as a narcotic and make some money. But it’s not. Not even close. It’s as mild as aspirin.”

  “So that’s how you do it,” Callahan said. “That’s how you block the Intercept.”

  “Yes. I gave us both a dose when we left the station. The water, remember?”

  “I remember.” A thoughtful look had moved into Callahan’s features. “And the material you wanted Anna Lu to smuggle in for you was—”

  “Deckle. It’s hard to find up here. So we have to use immigrants to get it for us. Or whoever we can find. I didn’t enjoy having to rough up Anna Lu—but helping us was the right thing to do. She should’ve figured that out on her own.”

  Callahan was silent.

  She touched her console.

  The moment Violet saw the gesture—Callahan pressing two fingers to her communication device—a cold dread rushed through her body.

  No.

  No, it can’t be.

  Giant floodlights suddenly drenched the area in harsh illumination. The heavy sound of a helicopter rotor blade throbbed overhead. As Violet watched on her monitor, the displaced air shoved the pine trees violently to one side and churned up the water in the stream.

  From a bullhorn came shouted words:

  “Paul Stark, you are hereby under arrest for kidnapping, conspiracy, and escaping from police custody. You will surrender immediately.”

  Stark struggled to his feet. It took him a long time, because his power-starved HoverUp had slowed down to less than a quarter of its usual speed. Confused, he turned to his wife, anguish in his face.

  “How did they find—”

  And then the realization dawned. No charges had been read out against her. He was the target. Not her.

  He had betrayed the Rebels’ secret.

  And she had betrayed him.

  Violet remembered the moment in Callahan’s office when Garrison suggested that they break off the questioning. And then she had gone home to take care of her father. That must have been when they planned this, the two of them: the chief and her loyal lieutenant.

  Violet’s attention returned to the feed. Callahan was talking to her husband.

  “I’m sorry, Paul,” she said. “But I had to find out how you were getting around the Intercept. Public safety was at stake.”

  “So you staged the whole thing.” He was angry, and he tried to slap away the hands of the officers who had just swooped in with their shackles. They subdued him easily. “So it was a show. Watching me suffer,” he went on, bitterness rising in his voice. “Pretending to care about me. Rushing in and holding Garrison at gunpoint. Escaping with me. It was fiction. You two set it all up.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry, but—yeah.”

  They led him toward the helicopter. He twitched his shoulders. He wanted to speak to her again. The officers looked at Callahan; she nodded, and they let him turn. His voice wasn’t bitter anymore. It was suffused with sorrow.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done, Michelle.”

  “The Intercept keeps us safe,” she said. “We need it.”

  “There’s more to life than safety.”

  “Like what?”

  “Freedom.”

  She motioned impatiently to her officers. “Take him away.”

  But he still wasn’t quite finished. He called out to her, “Why? Why did you do this?”

  “You know why. Once a cop, always a cop.”

  36

  The Story

  And now it was time for Violet to learn the truth.

  She was back in his living room, sitting on the couch. They were side by side, but they weren’t touching. She would not let him touch her. She didn’t know who he was.

  He had said he was “Kendall”—but what did that mean?

  “Ten years ago,” he began, “my brother, Danny, and I were orphans on Old Earth. Our parents were dead. Kille
d on the streets. We were on our own. If it hadn’t been for Danny, I wouldn’t have survived, either. He protected me. He was bigger and stronger and faster. He got us our food. Got us a place to live. Kept the predators away.

  “All I wanted to do was work in my lab. He’d rigged up this amazing lab for me. Down there, down in that place where most people didn’t have a crust of bread or a warm blanket, my brother, Danny, made me a lab.” There was awe in his voice. “So that’s what I did. I worked. And after a lot of time and a lot of very hard work, I came up with what you know as the Intercept.”

  He took a deep breath. When Violet didn’t say anything, he went on. “Word got out over the years, of course, about this weird new thing I was inventing. One person told another, who told another, who told another. The news even made it up to New Earth. And that was why your father came down to Old Earth and visited my lab that day. I hadn’t perfected it yet. I was still years away. But I was getting there. And when it was finished, I was sure that it would—it would take all the pain away.”

  “What are you talking about?” Violet said. “The Intercept is for law enforcement.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “It was about taking away the pain of emotion. That’s what it was for. That’s why I created it.” He seemed to be searching for a way to make her understand. “Every time I thought about my mom and dad, I got this blinding panic. The grief just paralyzed me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I could barely speak. So I thought, What if there’s a way to take the emotion—the one that’s tormenting me—and escape from it for a while? Turn it into a form of energy? And then put it back in my brain, once I had learned to handle it? Once I was stronger? And if I could do that, then maybe I could also find a way to make the positive emotions stick around. The happy memories. The ones that didn’t haunt me. The ones that felt good. So that emotions wouldn’t—wouldn’t rip me apart, which is what they were doing. That was my motivation. I didn’t want to control anybody.” He smiled ruefully. “I just wanted to get a good night’s sleep.”