by A. D. Bloom
"You've got the wrong man. I don't have any exceptional abilities. None at all. Really." The entire scientific community remained convinced human to human telepathy was a fairy tale, a myth. What made Pavic so sure they were wrong?
"Mr. Samhain, my well-paid stable of human telepaths tell me you're 'lit up' as they say and casting your thoughts about brightly enough to be indiscreet. Think less, listen more, please."
"I- I honestly don't understand, Mr. Director Pavic."
"People spend a suspicious amount of time answering questions you were about to ask." Pavic winked then. "Do take care not to think too loudly at the wrong times. We don't want our secrets out, now do we?" Samhain blinked in silence, not knowing what to say.
"I would never te-"
"You appear to be the unfortunate sum of your errors, Mr. Samhain, but you also have a talent. Learn to use it and you might have a future with us. Would you like that?"
"I don-"
"First, you will continue Dr. Gellanden's search for the Weirdling technology."
"I can't finish what Gellanden started."
"You won't have to. Look for the alien artifact, but don't find it. Tell the rebels it's beyond you and move on to your real mission."
"The rebels?"
"I'm sending you to find the leader of the Otherworld criminal secessionists, the man who ordered your mentor's death. You're going to find the elusive Ram Devlin, Otherworld's prisoner 001. There's only been a few confirmed sightings since he escaped from prison. You're going to find him. You're my messenger."
"What am I supposed to tell him?
"Tell him not to start a rebellion for one. You of all people know what will happen. NAU politicians made careers of clamoring for fast action in Houston so long ago. It was they who sent in Staas Contractors and it is we, the company who have lived with the repercussions of that made manifest in widespread distrust and disdain. We followed our orders on that terrible day. We don't want to be forced into the same position again. It did more harm than good in the end; I'm sure you'll agree. Lies were told. It was a regrettable occurrence." The pause the Director gave then was like a moment of silence, either or respect or regret, he couldn't tell. "If there's an outright rebellion, they'll order company ships to raze Otherworld. We can crush them, but the price is too high for all involved. It is a myopic solution. We cannot let that happen again. Would you agree?"
"Yes."
"Help me find a better solution. They'll reach out to you. They want the artifact Gellanden wouldn't give them. Try and find it as a gesture of goodwill from me and once you have Devlin's ear, use it. Persuade him. Transport arrangements have been made. You'll be outfitted and leave for the Alcyone system and Otherworld immediately."
"Mr. Pavic, there's no way I can get close to Ram Devlin. Just 12 hours ago I was a sailor on a Staas Company cutter. We board ships like theirs looking for contraband and prosecute those who don't pay to transit with our breaching ships. The Otherworld rebels will never trust me."
"You can tell them exactly why you're there. You're no spy. You're just Martin Samhain. You'll have a cover for nosy customs and immigration inspectors and the like, but you won't have to lie to Devlin's people."
"So you want me to tell them I work for you."
"Yes."
"They'll kill me."
"They'll need you to find the artifact. And Ram Devlin will want to hear what you have to say."
"How do I convince him?"
"You're the son of the Houston Preacher, leader of the last, biggest, failed rebellion. Orphans like you are what comes after a revolt like his. Tell Devlin that. Tell him the truth of what happened there. Believe me, I've planned this from a thousand angles. You're going to Otherworld and you're going to avert a conflict that would weaken Earth while she's fighting the Imperium. You'll save lives, many lives. If you succeed, there won't be a new generation of orphans on Otherworld. The powers that be have no more willingness now to tolerate dissent now than they did then. Their response should you fail is already determined. Rivers of blood will flow on Otherworld if the rebels go through with their plans. What happened before is about to happen again, but his time, the body count will be higher. Order will be maintained. You, more than anyone else know the bloody truth of it. This time you can stop the tragedy before it happens. We'll be sending a partner with you, someone that knows the ropes so to speak. I know it all sounds dangerous, but I think you're willing to take that risk because you know you owe it to us."
"I'm not what you think I am."
"No? You can tell what I'm thinking at this very moment, can't you?"
"Mr. Pavic, please..."
"What am I thinking?" He didn't need anything but his wits to understand there was no way of backing out now. Feelings of entrapment and anxiety scrambled his mind and squeezed in on his chest and sides and made the corded muscles spasm across his back. "What am I thinking?"
Samhain tasted the same chilling sense of total commitment he had when they'd first met. It surrounded Pavic's core. Through that armored ring, he glimpsed amusement. The Director thought sending him was so appropriate, so fitting, it couldn't have happened any other way. "You think this is my fate?"
"See? Wasn't that easy?" Pavic said it as if he'd proved something. "I told you you're good at this game. Did you think you were the only one?" Then he put his finger across his lips. "Welcome aboard, Mr. Samhain."
The ageless spymaster stood and offered his hand. Pavic held it out to him over the desk and Samhain had to rise and bend slightly to reach it across the expanse of ironwood. When he finally shook the Director's hand, a haze appeared in front of his eyes that wouldn't be blinked away. The last thing he remembered as he lost consciousness was a metallic taste and the exquisite arabesques of the wooden desk's grain seen too close. After that, there was only darkness and falling.
3
Unknown location
Martin Samhain had never known his consciousness of who and what he was to be a distinctly layered thing until the layers had vanished and he found himself as nothing. He couldn't say how long he'd been like that; he only became aware of it after he sprang to as a thought, a disembodied question without form floating in a perceptible region of imperceptible size. The very question became a layer that separated him from the surrounding darkness that hummed with unknown, but familiar presence. In what seemed like an instant, a knowledge of what he was flooded his mind, but whom and when was still lost to him. He groped wildly in the dark with limbs he didn't have and what hummed in the hot void around him were things like him. As for who when he was, he remembered then, and the thoughts 'Martin Samhain' and '2187' came and wrapped themselves around the other envelopes of self-consciousness now encasing the nameless thing at his core.
From inside the safety of that prison, he could still feel the vibrations that rippled impossibly through the void as if that nothingness was a medium. The humming rumble that tingled the palm of his hands when he touched it was a sound made by infinite singers. That's what vibrated out there - things like him in the darkness.
He called to them and they answered. All he wanted was to reach them. He tried to get back outside of what now contained him, but he couldn't no matter how he clawed at the boundary. The next memory that came fell on him with panic as he remembered his last moments with Balthus Pavic. Waking Samhain would have screamed if not for a suddenly shining and radiant warmth like the sun on his skin that bathed him from all sides at once. It shone between his ears and as his lids opened, the face that flooded his vision beamed at him.
The way she looked down at him, her straight black hair hung about the edges of her face like dark sunbeams. She was beautiful, yes, and all he wanted was to drink her in, but what held him transfixed was how her gaze made him feel loved. She was the source of the warmth. It came from her eyes or maybe behind them.
"Wake up darling," she said. "You're drooling and we're going to dock at Rhodes Station any minute now."
His hands grippe
d the walnut arms of a wide seat. The light glowed soft through the shoji as shadows from the other side processed silently across the segmented wood and paper walls. They had the entire 4-seat compartment to themselves. "Is this Nippon-Exo first class?" he asked her.
"You better believe we flew first class. You're traveling with Scilla Price, adventuress extraordinaire."
"Who?" A glance was all it took to note she'd dressed the part. Both the scarf around her slender neck and her short-cropped leather jacket were meant to reference Emilia Earhart. She smiled at him and pulled a vintage aviator's hat over her dark hair.
"Who. Me, darling, me. Scilla? We're on our way to Otherworld remember? Dream vacation, yes?" She actually winked then. "You should take less sleeping pills."
The way she made him feel about himself made it easy to forget she worked for Pavic. When she rose to leave their private compartment and depart the inter-system transport for Rhodes Station, Samhain followed her. "I hope those wrinkles shake out of your suit." He hadn't noticed until she mentioned it, but someone had dressed him in clothes he'd never seen before. At least they were comfortable.
Scilla took his arm as if he was leading her through the thin crowd of first class travelers now disembarking from the transport to the terminal. The minute they stepped out the hatch and into the transfer tube, he looked out the crystal-pane windows that lined it from floor to ceiling to see if they were really getting off a transport as she'd said. The sleek, 400 meter hull of the TR-98 had been flashed with exotic particles and blasts of plasma on so many runs through interstellar transits that the glare from Sirius reflected off her ablated flanks in a rainbow of colors. They shifted and scintillated as his angle of observation changed. It was real alright.
He glanced back to Scilla on his right arm, and her eyebrows raised as she nodded at him and grinned. "We're certainly on our way now, aren't we?"
Even wrapped in the cocoon of warmth she cast over him, the panic set in when he realized he was walking into an immigration checkpoint completely undocumented. He looked up ahead at the doors the other passengers and their four-legged carry-ons disappeared into and stopped in his tracks. Scilla's carry-on dug in with its stubby legs and pushed forward, butting at his heels with its plaid front face as she pulled Samhain along.
"I've got the passports, darling." she said, patting the antique leather mail bag she wore across her body. "Smile. Let me do the talking." His knees both gave way at once and then came back quickly, leaving him stumbling forward. "I told you that was too many sleeping pills," she said with a sigh.
Down the wide hall and past a more than a dozen cubicles full of travelers having their papers checked, Scilla stopped at number 17, pressed the button, and waited for him to lead her in after the door slid open.
The space behind the counter was empty and the door was closed, but the data terminal was already on. It projected a welcome message to them along with a request for the absent agent to 'Input traveler name.' Next to that counter was the door into the station. He shuddered thinking of all the guns probably pointed at them from behind the thinly printed and low ceiling panels.
The contraband and weapons scans started, and his retinas flashed with refracted energy from the beams. Scilla's black eyes flashed silver rings at him. She squeezed his arm tighter grinning like they were on some kind of amusement park ride as the spectra of the scan went UV and then the cubicle went dark.
When the lights came up, the door on the far side of the counter had already opened and a pointy-faced man stepped into the box with them. He wore the uniform of a Staas Customs and Immigration inspector. The string of hash marks imprinted on his jacket that showed decades of service ensuring people passing through Staas Company Stations were who they claimed to be. The jacket no longer fit his belly and since it only took five minutes to fab a new one, Samhain thought it was vanity that kept him wearing this one. The mustache had been darkened, but not the gray at his temples.
"Hello, hello," he said. "Papers, please, you two lovebirds...."
"Is it that obvious?" She somehow managed to blush as she said it. Or maybe he only thought he saw that. He wasn't sure. Her demeanor had changed. She seemed almost unaware of him now and entirely focused on the agent on the other side of the desk. What reflected off the pointy-faced man wasn't the same warmth she'd wrapped him in - this was something else.
He'd expected her to reach into her mail bag and produce a pair of expertly forged documents, but after her hand pushed the flap aside and reached in, it came out holding a bound paper book with a featureless black cover. When she opened it and began to flip through the blank pages, he assumed the passport cards had been tucked inside, but she opened to a pair of pages somewhere near the middle.
"Why, here they are," she said. She handed the customs agent the open book and Samhain couldn't see anything but some scribble on the opposing pages. He might have panicked if not for the fact that as the object passed from her hand to the immigration agent's, he saw that same loving, warming light he remembered from waking. It reflected off the agent's face as both eyes glassed over.
"Let's have a look, then," the agent said, glancing back and forth between them. "Business or pleasure, you two?"
"Pleasure," she said. "Most assuredly pleasure."
"Pleasure," Samhain said. "Vacation."
"On Otherworld."
"Ah! The frontier! Very exciting," said the agent before he lifted a scanner and held it over the open page of the sketchbook to treat it as if it were a real document. The console blinked an error message.
"It's not reading properly," she said. "If they spent more and gave you equipment that wasn't faulty, you could do your job better."
"I agree," he said. He paused then and looked confused.
"Looks like you'll just have to input our names manually."
"It does at that." He looked down at the book she'd handed him and placed his index finger over what had been written in ink across the left page in a hand-lettered print. Now that it was still, even upside-down, Samhain could read it enough to determine that it was a set of input menu instructions for the desk's data terminal. "Let me just manually enter this name... Mrs. Console Man Input Term F10 Delete Traveler scan reference /s -A -2 return."
"It's miss, actually. Until this one gets his nerve up." She winked again as the agent brought up the manual input terminal and typed until the terminal flashed: Traveler deleted. Ready for input.
"Ah, yes, there we go, Miss. The system approves of you. Now let's see about that boyfriend of yours, Mr. uhh...Mr. Term F10 Delete Traveler scan reference /s -A -2 return."
"I..."
"That is your name, isn't it, sir?"
"Don't make the poor inspector suspicious, dear."
"Yes, of course it's my name. I'm Mr. A -2 return."
As the agent input the string of commands, the terminal flashed green letters in front of his face that read: Full console reset. No record made. "And the system confirms your identity as well, sir. No way to fool this system. The two of you are all in order." The immigration inspector closed the sketchbook book, held it out to her and said, "Have a lovely vacation, dear."
"We will! Thank you so much." She took Samhain's arm again, and when the door next to the agent's corner desk slid open, they walked through it, down a short hallway, and out into the color and noise and bustle of Rhodes Station. The claw-feet of Scilla's carry-on clicked at the tile as it followed behind them.
Three steps inside the concourse, Scilla didn't so much let go of his arm as push it away from her and him along with it. Whatever they'd drugged him with slowed his reflexes enough that if she hadn't caught him, he'd have toppled over. This time, she made an exaggerated motion of releasing his arm with both hands at the same time a grunt of what sounded like utter disgust came from her slender throat. Her skin was no longer a field of smooth and fascinating translucence. Now, it had a greenish cast from the lights that brought out small spots he hadn't noticed before across the skin
of her forehead. The angel that had woken him had vanished.
"Our passage to Otherworld won't depart for another three hours," she said as she took a step away from him. "I'm going to the Nippon-Exo Lounge."
"Did I do something wrong?"
"No. I'm dropping the act, that's all. I needed to put on the charm to get your wobbly legs off that transport and into Rhodes without incident and I needed it to get us in here without any record of it, but..."
"But what?"
"But it's goddamn tiring. Really. I don't even like you, Samhain. And you smell like cabbage. There isn't a cabbage within light years of us, but you smell like a day-old, steamed cabbage. You stank up the compartment for the last eleven hours. So, no. I don't like you and I need a drink now. Or whatever they've got."
Samhain understood. The sunshiny, make-you-feel-loved thing was part of her routine. She was better at what she did than he ever thought a person could be. The strange part was that even knowing full well that it had all been her projection and that she'd stopped, it was as if his brain was still charmed, still struggling to shake free of the effects.
By the time he'd followed her across the station's Neo-Deco gilded concourse and up the invisible escalator, he'd watched her chicken legs and the odd shape of her hips and her weirdly narrow shoulders in that tight jacket for long enough that when he finally caught up with her at the doors of the Nippon-Exo First Class Lounge, he didn't feel any attraction at all when he looked into her black, purple-ringed eyes.
Suddenly he felt under-dressed and he'd never before thought that once in his life. "Sorry," she said. "I feel like I'm wearing the wrong clothes all of a sudden. You're going to feel that way too until I calm down. You look great. The suit really does look good on you," she said as the doors opened and she stepped into the redlit dim, pulled off her pilot's cap, and clawed her hair into order.
