by R S Penney
The anxiety that had been a nothing but hot knife in her chest mere moments ago suddenly a black hole threatening to crush her from the inside. She couldn't lose Jack. She couldn't lose Jack! But at the same time, she had responsibilities. When friendship crossed the line and threatened your relationship, what else could you do?
The tears were flowing freely now. Companion have mercy, why did this always happen whenever she got into it with one of her partners? She could handle gunfire with stone-faced serenity, but confront her with the unsavory reality that she had hurt someone she loved, and Leana Delnara Lenai became a quivering mess. “I'm sorry.” The words came out hoarsely. “Maybe I need to take some time away from Jack.”
“I don't want you to take time away from Jack,” Bradley muttered. He tensed up, shivering as he spoke. “I want you to decide for yourself whom you spend time with, but that said, I need to feel like I'm the person you come to first.”
Anna closed her eyes, then pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know,” she said into her own palm. “This is all my fault…Sweetie, there's no one in this world that I love as much as I love you.”
He turned around, leaning against the windowsill with his head hanging. “Yeah,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “I know. I just…I get that you can't tell me everything you do, but I feel so out of the loop.”
“Maybe it's time we changed that.”
“What do you mean?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then immediately swallowed her own words and replaced them with something that wouldn't pour oil on the fire. “A friend told me that your soul mate is the person you share everything with.” Best to avoid telling him that advice had come from Jack. “We're searching for something called the Key; we have no idea what it does, but if Slade gets his hands on it, things could go very wrong. Jena was hoping that that thing I recovered in Tennessee might give us some clues to what…”
Isara flowed through a hallway of scarred walls, her cloak flapping behind her with every step. The sheer destruction. Bullet holes everywhere, smears of dried blood with a distinctive silver sheen. At the end of the corridor, a small room stood empty. No doubt the Keepers had taken Pennfield's SlipGate.
Isara crouched down.
Clothed in a navy blue dress that left her arms bare and matching gloves on each hand, she tugged the hood up a little further. One never knew when it might be pertinent to hide one's face.
A sliver of light penetrated the hood, enough that she would be recognized if there had been anyone here to see her, but she allowed herself to smile anyway. “Fool,” she said, shaking her head. “Insubordinate, disobedient fool.”
She tapped a spot of dried blood on the floor tiles, then rubbed her thumb and her index finger together. The substance flaked away, but she had no doubt that there were microscopic nanobots on the surface of her glove.
She produced a metal disk from a pouch on her belt – a multi-tool – and she pushed a button on its surface to bring up the main menu. A few gestures with one hand allowed her to place a call to Slade, and then she set the tool down on the floor.
The man's hologram appeared before her, standing tall and proud in a black silk robe, his head turned to stare at something off to his left. “Report,” he growled in tones that indicated he was in no mood for pleasantries.
“Pennfield is dead,” she said, rising gracefully, drawing herself up so that he could see her at full height. Subtle things about one's image would create the right impression: clothing, posture, the way in which one moved. She used them all to her advantage. “The Keepers have been here, and I have no doubt they took his body. Which means they have his symbiont as well.”
A frown twisted Slade's mouth, and he heaved out a sigh before bowing his head to her. “We had anticipated this eventuality,” he said. “A shame. I had hoped that Pennfield would do away with Jack Hunter.”
“You always overestimated his competence.”
“And you overestimate my patience.”
Isara crossed her arms, frowning down at the large sapphire that dangled from her necklace. “Do you wish me to recover the symbiont?” she asked, raising one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “It can be done.”
Slade winced, shaking his head in dismay. “No.” He clasped hands together behind his back, assuming the posture of a man who intended to give a speech. “Even you would not survive the attempt. Not on a station full of Justice Keepers.”
“But if they are allowed to uncover its secrets…”
“An inevitability at this point.”
Tapping her lips with one gloved finger, Isara shut her eyes. She heaved out a sigh of frustration. “There is one more thing to report,” she began. “Pennfield chose to use a ziarogat against Hunter.”
“He did what?”
Soft, musical laughter filled the hallway while Isara contemplated the delicious irony of Slade's failure. Master manipulator indeed. “Did you expect Wesley to exercise prudence in the pursuit of his vendetta?” What a rare joy it was to see Slade off-balance. “Our long term goals were of no consequence to him, not when he was in the grip of his foolish need to assert his own dominance.”
Slade was stroking his chin with the fingertips of one hand, his eyes narrowed to slits as he considered this new eventuality. “And the Keepers have the ziarogat as well?” he asked. “You can be certain of this?”
“Quite certain.”
“Then it seems we must accelerate our timetable,” Slade murmured. “Report back to me at once, Isara. It's time we concluded our business on this miserable little planet.”
The hologram rippled and faded away.
Chapter 29
The small containment unit looked very much like a fish tank, but instead of water, it held swirling clouds of pink gas that flashed as if a lightning storm were brewing inside. Angry lightning. Perhaps it was just his imagination, but something in those brief pulses of light felt hostile.
Jack was bent over with his hands on his knees, peering into the containment unit. “So that's Pennfield's symbiont,” he muttered. “Have we been able to communicate with it?”
Behind him, Nareo sat at the table with his elbow on its surface, his chin resting on the knuckles of his fist. He was fixated on the smaller Overseer device that still hung from metal hooks. “Several Nassai specialists have been in and out of here over the last few days,” he said absently. “They're not sure what to make of it.”
Jack stood up straight, crossing his arms with a heavy sigh. A frown tugged at the corners of his mouth. “I'm not sure either,” he said, turning away from the containment unit. “Summer felt hatred and malice from that thing.”
“Is that odd for a Nassai?”
“Very.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Nareo wore the kind of skeptical expression you would expect from a scientist. “Perhaps it's simply a matter of lived experience,” he suggested. “Being Bonded to a man like Pennfield would have been torture for that thing.”
Jack closed his eyes, sighing softly. “It's possible,” he said, nodding once. “But it wouldn't account for Wesley's abilities to craft Bendings. Host and symbiont must work together to Bend space-time, and no Nassai ever would.”
Summer echoed his sentiments with a burst of pride.
Swiveling in his chair, Nareo faced him with hands on his thighs, head hanging as though the topic were a source of great frustration to him. “Well, then I will tell you what little they told me,” he said. “Nassai exhibit patterns in the electrical activity they display. Patterns that indicate sapience.”
“And this thing?”
“Doctors Kavinar and Venshal tried to communicate with the symbiont in the same way those pioneering scientists communicated with the first Nassai they recovered from Laras. They tried to induce electrical activity in the gas and see if the symbiont would mimic the patterns. The first Nassai we brought back from Laras did precisely that. This thing doesn't, almost as if…”
“As if it has no will of i
ts own,” Jack finished. He covered his face with one hand, massaging his eyelids with the tips of his fingers. “So is that it? That's the only attempt we've made at communication?”
“What else would you suggest?”
Throwing his head back, Jack felt his eyebrows climb upward. “Well, it all depends on how creative you want to get,” he said. “One should never underestimate the ability to find common ground through the power of interpretive dance.”
The lab doors split apart, revealing Jena and Raynar standing side by side in the hallway. As usual, Jena took the lead, striding into the room like a whirlwind on course for a dilapidated farm. “Lab techs have been in a fury all day,” she declared. “You guys just keep bringing in more stuff for them to poke at.”
“The ziarogat?”
Jena scowled, shaking her head and hissing. “They don't even know what to make of that…thing,” she said, stopping in the middle of the room. “But they're sure of one thing: that man has Overseer technology in his body.”
“Is it the same thing you fought on that ship?”
“Definitely.”
Clamping a hand over his mouth, Jack shut his eyes tight. “Well, that's just grand,” he muttered into his own palm. “If they've been mass producing these things for over a year, there's no telling how many are out there.”
A heavy sigh exploded from Jena, and she doubled over with a hand gripping her shirt. “Yeah, I had the same thought.” It seemed this subject made her uneasy. “I was hoping that whatever those things were, it was just some kind of random experiment.”
“But if they're building an army…”
No one wanted to finish that thought, but Jack was suddenly aware of Nareo and Raynar. His words had sucked the life right out of the room. Ziarogati. Jack could still hear Pennfield's voice in the back of his mind. The pinnacle of military prowess. That thing was quite literally a killing machine. To call it merciless was wholly inaccurate. It had no motivation of its own, no impulse other than serving the ends of its master. There had been no malice in its attempt to kill Jack, just cold machine-like precision.
An army of these things, each one a match for the very best Justice Keepers, each one outfitted with weapons that responded to a single thought. How much damage could they do? There were fewer than three thousand Keepers operating in Leyrian Space: less than three thousand people responsible for the lives of billions. How could they stop an entire army of ziarogati?
Raynar stood in the middle of the room with three fingers pressed to his lips, his eyes fixed on the Overseer device. What exactly was the kid doing? Just leave him to it, Jack told himself. You have larger concerns.
“It's not often that irony kicks me in the ass,” Jena muttered, pacing a line with her hands shoved into her pockets. “All those times when I lectured Anna about being able to make the hard choices, and now I wish that she had kept Pennfield alive so that we could question him.”
“He wouldn't have told us anything.”
“Probably not.”
Jack sat down in a chair with his elbows on his thighs, his face buried in his hands. “The man clearly had friends in high places,” he muttered. “Pennfield escaped from one of our cells before; if we took him alive, he'd probably-”
“Gods be good!”
Jack looked up.
Raynar's eyes were so wide they might have fallen out of his head, his skin so pale you might have thought he'd seen a ghost. “I know where it is,” he whispered. “Jack, I know where it is! I know where it is!”
“Where what is?”
The boy gave his head a shake, then touched his fingertips to his temples and let out a groan. “The Key,” he said. “The thing that Slade's been looking for. That Overseer device has records, Jack! Records of where they left their technology. Computer, give me a holographic display of Earth.”
In the middle of the room, a transparent globe nearly six feet in height rippled into existence. Raynar made a motion with his hand as if he intended to spin the thing, and the motion sensors interpreted his gesture by having the globe turn its axis.
He brought Africa around to face him, then spread his hands apart to zoom in. Closer and closer. Eventually, the globe vanished to be replaced with a flat image of the land from above. Jack had to had to walk to the other side of the room to see it from Raynar's perspective. Lush green fields dotted with trees.
Raynar took a step back, then pointed. “There,” he said. “Those coordinates. That's where you'll find your Key.”
“Western Kenya,” Jack said. “Less than a dozen kilometers from the place where they unearthed that first SlipGate.” But surely, if there was anything of value, someone would have found it by now.
He turned to Jena.
She stood with fists balled at her sides, staring at the hologram with an open mouth. “All right,” she said, nodding slowly. “New orders. Nobody hears a word about this until Jack and I have a chance to check it out.”
“So we're going?”
“Get your ass up to the shuttle bay, kid,” she replied. “We're about to take a little trip.”
Through the shuttle's cockpit window, Jack saw green fields that stretched to the horizon under a blue sky that was slowly darkening with the onset of evening. Jena set them down gently with a jolt so mild he barely felt it.
He could only see the back of her seat, but he didn't have to observe her posture to know that she was tense. The soft sigh she let out while she powered down the shuttle's systems was evidence enough of that.
Stroking his chin with the tips of his fingers, Jack narrowed his eyes. “You realize this could be a wild goose chase,” he murmured. “We're not exactly on the border of a major city, but there have been archaeology teams in this region.”
Jena swiveled around.
She stood up with a grunt, crossing her arms and shutting her eyes tight. “I know,” she said, nodding to him. “But we've been looking for this thing for months, and I will take any lead I can get.”
Jack turned around, marching to the back of the cockpit, hesitating there while the doors to the cabin slid open. “So what's your play?” he asked. “Do we go in armed, or is this a 'we come in peace' thing?”
Jena winced, touching fingertips to her forehead. “I'm not sure,” she muttered under her breath. “But my instincts say be careful. Light pistols only. If there is anything down here, I'd rather not spook it.”
That seemed like as good a plan as anything. At the back of the cabin, there was a compartment that opened with a bio-metric palm scan followed by his latest access code. Inside, he found several pistols holstered side by side. Jack took one for himself and then offered one to his boss.
They exited the shuttle cautiously despite the fact that they were probably the only human beings within ten kilometers of this spot. The sun was sinking toward the western horizon, painting the sky orange and yellow and finally a deep dark blue with tiny stars twinkling up above.
“Let's go,” Jena said.
Northward, they walked through nearly two hundred meters of open grassland with nothing but the odd tree or boulder, the ground sloping gently upward toward a rock wall with grass on top. It was hot and sticky even without the sun beating down. This close to the equator, it was always hot.
They said nothing, of course – Jena could be pretty damn taciturn when there was something on her mind – but Jack had plenty to occupy his thoughts. He kept imagining what he'd find. Some kind of Overseer device? A ship? Was it underground? If not, then why had no one ever found it?
Jena stopped in front of him some ten feet away from the rock wall, planting fists on her hips. “Well, this is the place,” she said, turning her head to survey the surrounding area. “Whole lot of nothing.”
Biting his underlip, Jack lowered his eyes to the ground. “You think Raynar was wrong?” he asked, his eyebrows slowly climbing. “The kid seemed pretty sure we'd find something out here.”
He stepped forward.
As expected, ther
e was nothing here except a wall of rock with grass sprouting from the top. The sounds of cicadas began to fill the air; this would make for a lovely campsite, but-
He saw it.
A hole in the rock just wide enough for one person to walk through, leading down into what seemed to be a cave. That had to be where the Key was. Unless maybe Raynar had misread what he saw in the device…
Jack slipped both hands into his pockets, bowing his head until he looked like some kid standing in the corner at this first high school dance. “Well, then,” he muttered. “Who votes we look inside the creepy, ominous cave?”
Jena turned her head to watch him with a flat expression, her eyes full of challenge. “You think that's a good idea?” she asked. “In all likelihood, the only thing you'll find in there is a broken ankle.”
“We came this far.”
He turned on his heel, trailing his fingers over the rock wall until he reached the mouth the cave. Something inside him felt tense; he was dimly aware of the beating of his own heart. When he peered into the hole, only darkness stared back at him.
Thrusting his left fist out, Jack said, “Multi-tool active. Flashlight.” A bright cone of radiance penetrated the cave, illuminating dark gray walls and an uneven floor that sloped slowly downward. Not that he would need light to see – Summer could handle that – but it was best to rely on all his senses.
Jack stooped low.
He shuffled through the opening with a grunt, then stood up straight and blinked to give himself time to adjust. “Aliens just have no standards anymore,” he said, descending the rough incline. “If they're gonna leave their stuff in the middle of nowhere, you would think they'd at least put up some defenses. An energy shield or a-”
His light fell on something.
A cylindrical device about as tall as his knee sat in the middle of the floor with red LEDs blinking on its surface. But this wasn't Overseer technology; Jack had seen devices like this before. It was a portable, holographic generator.
