Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

  “Quit lurking, Soleil Benoit, and come back in,” said Tuzan. He emphasized her new name and exaggerated the French accent with a smartass grin.

  “Jumpers don’t lurk,” she said sternly. “We stomp in and kick ass.” She crossed the soft, plush carpet to put her glass on the table and sit on the settee next to Josh. They were both barefoot because of house rules. He slid his arm around her shoulders, and she liked the weight of it, like it was her anchor to the real world.

  Tuzan relaxed into the corner of the doublewide chair he sat on and smiled. “When is the flat-warming party?”

  Josh laughed. “First, we have to furnish it.” In the ninety minutes between leaving the broker’s office and arriving at the doorstep of Tuzan’s flat, Josh had activated one of his dormant companies on Mabingion, which he apparently had quite a few of from his Kameleon days, and leased the flat she liked as “corporate accommodations for visiting staff.” It kept their personal names off the records, and explained the all-new contents and any number of guests. He’d also told her how much money he had—enough to buy his own moon—then dropped a bombshell.

  “You have the same.”

  She snorted. “Not unless I won the galactic lottery while we were in transit, I don’t.” She’d already been thinking about what to do for a job so she could pay her half of the rent.

  He took her hand and kissed the back of it. “You do, because I transferred half of everything I have to you.”

  “What?” It was a good thing they were in an autocab, because if she’d been at the controls, she’d have probably crashed them into the next high-rise. “When?”

  “I started doing it the first day on Branimir, while you were asleep in the flitter. I did the rest in the Faraón’s packet drops and the first day here. It’s in various sealed estate escrow accounts. The Branimir part is in the Nevarr name, so we’ll have to deal with that.”

  He was serious. She forced herself to breathe. “Why?”

  “Because it’s what I wanted to do the day we separated four years ago. I let the bomber stop me, because I thought we’d have time later.” He squeezed her hand. “The money meant nothing to me. You meant everything.”

  Jumpers didn’t cry, so she hadn’t, but something got in her eye.

  “What style of decor do you like?” asked Tuzan. “I can introduce you to some wholesalers.” She got the impression he loved shopping, which gave her an idea.

  “I like your style.” She waved her hand to encompass the eclectic mix of utilitarian and one-of-a-kind pieces that made his place into a home. “How about I commission you to work your magic? If you have the time, that is.” She gave Josh a pointed look. “It seems Soleil recently came into an inheritance.” She still wasn’t comfortable with it, but if he could come to terms with being a minder despite his ghastly childhood, then she could learn to accept presents from the man she loved with all her heart.

  From the sparking gleam in Tuzan’s eye, she’d made the right choice. “I’ll see what I can do.” He glanced at her hand resting high on Josh’s thigh and gave them a knowing wink and smile. “Starting with a bed.”

  She laughed out loud. “Oh, yeah. We discovered on the way over here that we’re too damn tall to have sex in autocabs.” Josh smiled and shrugged, and Tuzan guffawed.

  “Did you have anything to do with the new story on Charisma this morning?” she asked. “The one by Charrascos?”

  Tuzan shook his head. “No, we only targeted her with that first rumor because she’d written the ‘Mabingion Purge’ story. I’m not surprised she found where more of the unwilling subjects came from. She’s tenacious.”

  “That she is,” Kerzanna agreed. “She interviewed a bunch of my platoon once for a story on Jumpers. We usually ate reporters for breakfast, because they typically produced crap stories that fit whatever angle they’d already decided on, but Charrascos was fair. And fearless.” She smiled at the memory of the tiny woman standing her ground in front of a bad-tempered mech-suited Jumper. “I liked her.”

  Josh cleared his throat. “I made sure she saw some teaser rumors from Davidro’s journals about the independent contractors he collected. Most of them weren’t willing, either.”

  Soleil patted his thigh in comfort, knowing it bothered him that he hadn’t recognized the full extent of Davidro’s abuses until reading the journals. It bothered her that the CPS had allowed it to go on for so long, or worse, hadn’t even noticed or cared. It was a haunting echo of how Rashad Tarana had happened under the Concordance’s nose.

  Tuzan traced the decoration on his wine glass with his gold-lacquered fingernail. “Getting back to your new flat for a minute, would you be willing to take some of Majiril’s things? I don’t want to put them in storage, but I’m not sure I could handle them right now. If it’s too creepy–”

  “We’ll take them on loan,” said Josh. “They’re yours whenever you’re ready.”

  “Good.” Tuzan’s smile turned wistful. “She was fearless, too. I wish you could have known her before the riots. She was a professor at the CPS Academy and Institute in Arazak, and she loved teaching. She was a high-level polymath, meaning she had all talents—healer, teke, sifter, forecaster, you name it. Polymaths often develop late, so the CPS thought she was just another obedient multi-talent, like me. They’d have leashed her tight and never let her near impressionable young minders, otherwise. She taught them to think, to ask questions.”

  A phantom image flashed in her head. “Did she know Ayorinn?” She tapped her temple. “Neirra.” That was their shorthand for the leftover memories that Neirra’s various packets had left in all their minds. Random smells, sights, or music sometimes triggered them, at least for her.

  “Probably. Majiril never admitted it, but I think she reviewed early drafts of the Ayorinn forecast, and it made a believer out of her. The CPS heard about the forecast and deemed it a clear and present threat to the galactic peace, so they stirred up the riots as an excuse for finding and purging anyone who’d read it. By then, it was far too late, of course, but the CPS didn’t know that. During the riots, Majiril helped as many people escape as she could, but someone betrayed her. The top enforcement team for the CPS—they called themselves the Skullrippers—tried to pull her mind apart. Neirra caught them and stopped it, and together, she and I together cleaned and twisted them so they thought they’d succeeded. Neirra twisted my memories so I couldn’t give anyone away, but she hid the real memories and later sent me the keys to unlock them. Majiril was never the same, though. She convinced me to help her build her shadow railway to help more minders escape so she could continue her mission.”

  “We’re sorry for your loss, Tuzan.” Jumper Soleil showed him her respect for his pain. “Part of why we wanted to come over tonight, other than because we like you and we’re tired of restaurants, was to talk to you about the railway. We can help.”

  Tuzan shook his head. “I’m shutting it down. All it took was one long-range telepath and one sifter to compromise it and get her killed.”

  “We know the risks,” said Josh. “We can improve the security.”

  Soleil thought about all Tuzan had done for them, and probably others. Insight hit her, maybe from Neirra, or maybe from her own intuition. “Majiril just wanted to save you. It was you who built the railway to help other minders. You even helped the telepath Xan, and cleaned bel Doro’s memories like she begged you to. Are you sure you want to burn it down?”

  Tuzan looked away, clearly troubled.

  Soleil let the silence settle. To give him time and to distract her impatient self, she threaded her fingers through Josh’s and soaked in the warmth of him by her side. She’d missed him for so long.

  Tuzan stood and walked to the small side table where the wine bottle was, but instead of wine, he picked up a percomp. “What do you know about Ayorinn’s Legacy?”

  She looked to Josh, who shook his head. She turned back to Tuzan. “It’s a bunch of vague, poetic quatrains that could mean anything. When
my older brothers and I heard it was banned, we immediately tracked it down and read it, but we couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.” She shrugged. “But we weren’t minders, we were just ranch kids.”

  Tuzan sighed. “The forecast isn’t just for minders, it’s for all of us. Ayorinn believed we’re stagnating as a civilization, and that it’s killing us. We’re preserving ourselves in amber. We’ve curated our languages, our cultures, our family tribal structure, even our ecosystems, but we’re not evolving new ones, and we try our damnedest to stamp out variances. His forecaster talent drove him mad with visions of a horrific future, so he spent fifteen years developing the forecast that would save humankind. Unfortunately, the cost to individual humans will be unspeakable.”

  “Did you know Ayorinn?” asked Josh.

  “No. Majiril tried to keep me in the dark.” Tuzan shook his head. “I liked the light too much.” He sighed again. “The forecast scares the CPS for two reasons. One, because they never saw it coming and couldn’t contain it, and two, because it’s still unfolding, and they still can’t stop it. The version you read is what, thirty years old? There are at least twenty or thirty more quatrains after that. They came out at random times, random locations, and it makes the CPS crazy that they can’t find the source. There haven’t been any new ones for the last four years.”

  He keyed something on his percomp, and his wall display lit up. “This came out two days ago, the day my sister died.”

  Glowing nets must from shadowed ashes rise; fractures healed with found hope

  Grasp the tail and swing the comet at the chained amber chrysalis.

  Red sparks travel faster than light and swallow the dark flooded city.

  Cleanse your heart, change your fate, remake the world.

  “What do you think it means?” asked Josh.

  Tuzan took a deep, noisy breath. “That we will burn down the old shadow railway and build a new one.” He crossed his arms. “Even if we don’t want to, even if it’s dangerous, even if it gets us all sent to the Skullrippers.”

  “If you truly believe we are instruments chosen by something bigger than ourselves,” said Josh, “then we should take charge of what we can, and do it right. I let the CPS take control of my fate once, and I barely survived it.” He squeezed Soleil’s fingers gently. “Believe me, second chances are to be treasured.”

  Soleil had joined the Jumpers to make a difference, and she wanted to continue that mission, even if it wasn’t the way she’d envisioned it. “People have been hurt and died for me. Hell, I’ve died for me—twice. Every day is a gift, and I’m trying not to fight that.”

  She smiled as she gazed into the mismatched eyes of the man she loved, then turned back to Tuzan and waited for his answer.

  Tuzan turned off the display, then sat back down in his chair.

  “I’m in.”

  EPILOGUE

  * Planet: Mabingion * GDAT: 3242.026 *

  RENNER WOKE, IF he could call it that, to a sound. It was a nice change from the phantom fireworks behind his eyes. He’d been fooled before, though, so he decided he needed a plan. He would wait. It was a good plan, as plans went, because he couldn’t do anything else.

  That was a lie. He could do one other thing. He opened his eyes.

  Daylight again.

  Still? No, again.

  The sound bothered him. He should do something about it, but he couldn’t think what. The universe was laughing its ass off. He’d been so sure of his death that he’d taunted it, and now here he was, dying of the motherfucking collar.

  Unbelievably, a face appeared before his. Blue eyes. Red hair. He blinked, slowly, but she was still there when he came back. Angel of death, maybe.

  Lips moved. Her lips. Speaking. “Hi, there, Mr. Renner.”

  A hand came into view holding a wad of fabric. It brushed his lips, and something painful hit his tongue. Moisture. His throat tried to work, but of course it couldn’t. It was enough for him to move his lips. “Kill… me….”

  “What? No, I won’t kill you,” she said, looking deeply offended. “I just met you.”

  The motherfucking collar ratcheted. The phantom fireworks returned.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed as she looked at the collar. “Be right back,” she said, then vanished. He should have known she wasn’t an angel, because angels didn’t have freckles. She wouldn't make it in time, but he was mildly grateful that she was putting in the effort. He drifted into the dreamland of hypoxia.

  Suddenly, her face was back in front of his again. Not a dream, then. “Hope you have high pain tolerance.”

  She had a butcher knife in her hand. Hope flared. Maybe she’d kill him after all. Instead, he felt pain in the muscles of his neck, the burned skin screaming. He felt his eyes water and was surprised they still could. She grabbed his collar with both hands and forced it forward, into the new wounds, but easing the pressure on his trachea and allowing precious air in. Why one of the collar’s failsafes didn’t kill them both was a mystery.

  “I've got help coming. An emergency response team, and a fixer who owes me a favor.”

  The rushing sound in his ears made it hard to hear. He had the oddest feeling that he should know her, but the memory wouldn’t come.

  Her expressive lips parted. “How long until the collar tightens again?”

  He remembered that. “Two… hours…” And something else. “Dixon… key….”

  She frowned. “Oh, well, that’s a bit of a problem.” She patted his cheek soothingly. “We’ll have to muddle along without him.”

  She moistened his mouth again with the rag.

  “How… long…”

  “How long have you been here? I’m guessing you went down with the ship, as it were, so it's been a little over two days. The table saved you. The front part of the building is history.” An angry frown crossed her face, making her look much older and more formidable than he’d initially taken her for. “The police should have fucking found you.”

  Police? The last thing he’d remembered was baldly lying to Dixon about the Jumper being dead, and then… buried in rubble. He’d called for help, but no one listened. His eyes drifted shut.

  He felt fingers on his cheek again. “Stay with me, Mr. Renner.”

  He opened his eyes. He didn’t think he’d ever seen freckles that close up. Faint, reddish, like a pale reflection of her flame-colored hair.

  She suddenly moved back and looked up. “In here!” Her voice was so loud it echoed.

  She leaned in closer to him again. “My friends are here. They're going to help you.” She leaned in even closer, her lips almost touching his ear. “Don't fry anyone, okay?”

  It should have alarmed him that the red not-angel knew about his talent, but it didn’t. “Can’t… it’s… empty.”

  “That’s good. I mean, bad that you… oh, never mind.”

  Her face vanished and a new one appeared, a dusky lavender-faced man with shining purple hair. The man spoke to the woman in an accent he couldn't place. “Light here.” He pointed, and she complied by shining a handheld. It dazzled Renner’s eyes. He shut them against the pain.

  The lavender-faced man began working with tools. He hummed and made burbling sounds, almost like an espresso machine, all while working on the collar. Finally, the man leaned back and said. "The maker did good work. Not as good as me, though." The man's hands went once more to the collar, and suddenly, the collar was looser than it had ever been. “May I keep it?”

  “It’s dangerous. Failsafes.” Renner whispered, and breathed deep. He couldn't tell if he was successful.

  “Oh, yes. Very nasty. I de-fanged them.”

  The collar came off in two pieces, and the lavender man dropped it into a clear bag. Renner wished he could see what his neck looked like without the collar. The woman's face came into view.

  “That was the easy part. This next is going to hurt, I'm afraid.” She looked resolute, but the finger that gently caressed his cheek was shaky.


  She was right. Even with the painkiller patches the medic slapped on him, the extraction process was agony punctuated by excruciating pain and unbearable torture as the circulation came back to crushed and broken limbs. The motherfucking collar had saved his neck from breaking, probably because it wanted to kill him itself. They finally got him into a medevac capsule.

  Her face appeared above him again. In the better light, he noticed the freckles extended down her neck and to her chest.

  “Where am I going?" he asked.

  She gave him a perky, smartass smile. "To the medical center, silly."

  He awoke again in the halls of the medical center, to the sound of her telling someone that he was her cousin Brenner who’d been in a terrible construction accident, and she’d send them his medical history, but there wasn’t much because he was a specialist who traveled a lot and didn’t have a regular medic. Inexplicably, they believed her.

  She stayed with him all the way to the surgical suite, up until the point where medics barred her. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, then whispered, "I'll be here when you get out. Try not to zap anything." She would have pulled away but he stopped her with his one good hand.

  “I’m sorry, but who are you?”

  She blinked in surprise, then smiled. “I’m Charrascos, the reporter you were sent to kill.”

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Thanks for reading Jumper’s Hope, book 4 in the Central Galactic Concordance space opera series. If this is the first book you’ve read in this series, welcome. As you might have gathered, the next book will continue with the events begun here, including how Renner and Charrascos fit into the picture.

  By the way, if you haven't already read them, Overload Flux (Book 1) introduces the Central Galactic Concordance universe, and Minder Rising (Book 2) delves into the Citizen Protection Service. The short novella, Zero Flux (Book 2.5) is a short thriller and mystery, and Pico’s Crush (Book 3) reunites characters from previous books for an explosive adventure on a paradise college campus.