The Rimes Trilogy Boxed Set

by P. R. Adams

  Another bolt of lightning, more pain.

  He slipped into oblivion.

  31

  9 March 2164. Darwin, Australia.

  * * *

  Deafening wind hurled thick, wet snow against every inch of his naked body. He shivered uncontrollably, rubbing his arms. He dropped to the ground and curled into a fetal ball to conserve his heat.

  Darkness hid everything, even the ground he lay upon.

  It felt like uncut stone—cold, hard, and rough against his frozen skin.

  I’m going to die if I don’t find cover. Clothing, shelter, heat. Especially heat.

  He forced himself to stand. He staggered forward several meters, stopped. The darkness was absolute.

  Maybe I’m blind? Damage from the lightning?

  He extended his arms as he walked.

  He had been sitting on a bench and Kwon had been lying on the examination table nearby. Chin had been placing sensors first around Kwon’s head, then Rimes’s.

  I’m still in his head. He’s dead now, and I’m still in his mind.

  Rimes staggered on. “Dana!” The winds swallowed his voice.

  Maybe it’s not Kwon that’s dead. Maybe it’s me. Is this what the brain experiences when it powers down?

  He’d seen research—solid science—about the brain’s perception of time and how it might change with death: looping, reversing, rerunning out of sequence, losing any sense of time at all.

  He ignored the cold. He’d been in Kwon’s head. He’d seen Kwon’s memories: disturbing, horrifying. But expected.

  He’d seen something else, though. Something unexpected.

  The lightning. The storm.

  The presence.

  It all came back to him then. Something—someone—else had been there, in Kwon’s mind. He’d felt it, but too late.

  This is not my body failing. I’m not here. This isn’t real.

  A crazy thought occurred to him, that he could will himself awake. It seemed impossibly simple.

  He tried to wish himself awake.

  Nothing happened.

  “It is never that simple, Colonel Rimes.”

  The voice echoed in the void. It was everywhere. It was in everything. It was inside him. He was nothing but the voice.

  “Hello?” Again, the wind swallowed his voice.

  There was no way the other voice could have been heard over the wind.

  It’s not real. It’s part of the experience, the dementia.

  “I am every bit as real as you are,” the voice said.

  Rimes vibrated with the voice’s power. He shivered from its existence. “Who are you? Where are you?”

  “I am you,” the voice said.

  No.

  “This is the moment of silence, the blade of grass standing erect before the tempest tears it from the ground by its roots,” the voice said. “This is the calm before the storm.”

  The presence.

  Memories came to him. Kwon’s memories. Rimes’s memories. The Sundarbans. Running through the jungle, running through the compound. Kwon had been there before.

  “Kwon?”

  “He is no more,” the voice said. “He is a dream now, a memory inside of you. You have embraced this fate, Colonel, just as we knew you would. You cannot stop it. You can accept it, or you can die needlessly on your enemy’s spear.”

  In the dark and cold, Rimes felt his body fail him, collapsing on the rough stone, the shivers becoming uncontrollable. Death throes.

  Dream or delusion or fever, he was shutting down.

  32

  9 March 2164. Several miles above the Pacific Ocean.

  * * *

  Rimes bolted upright. He gasped in pain and looked around wildly. He was in the cybernetics lab. Kleigshoen held him straight on the workbench.

  She blinked twice, then turned her head to the office door. “Brian!”

  A moment later, Chin ran back into the room.

  “They’ll be here any sec—” Chin stopped. He stared at Rimes and cautiously snapped his fingers. “Is he really there?”

  Rimes tried to reply, but his jaw was too sore, his thoughts too scattered. He got out a wordless mumble.

  Wheels clattered and squealed in the hallway, and Chin stepped to the doorway, then waved and jumped to get someone’s attention. A moment later, two young men stepped into the room. The smaller of the two stopped to kick at a black spot in the middle of a brass plate on the floor.

  “He’s alive, then?” asked the other man, a tall, bald bodybuilder.

  “He just came around,” Kleigshoen said.

  “He’s got motor problems,” Chin said. “Can’t speak, hasn’t moved that arm where the current went in.”

  The smaller man began checking Rimes’s vitals. “Heart rate’s all over the place. You said he took a jolt from the machinery?”

  Chin scratched his stomach. “Craziest thing. It should’ve hit me by all rights, right?”

  The smaller man nodded at the larger one, and they lifted Rimes between them and carried him to the gurney.

  “We’ll get him down to the ER. It may be nothing—or it could be serious. That scorch mark on the floor’s pretty nasty. You two got lucky.”

  Rimes watched the ceiling move overhead.

  How close was I to dying? It’s like Dana said, I can’t go on like this forever. My luck will eventually run out.

  “Jack? You okay?”

  Rimes blinked rapidly and tried to focus. His eyes registered nothing but the darkness for a moment, then lights blinked. Numbers glowed softly.

  He was in the cockpit of a private jet. Kleigshoen sat to his left. The instrument panel’s soft glow highlighted her black jacket.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” Rimes rolled his head, trying to work a kink out of his neck. “Just a dream. Or a memory. Or a memory of a dream. One of those. I was just … it’s going to take a bit to get over the injury.”

  Kleigshoen squeezed his hand gently.

  Searing pain shot up his arm. He gasped in surprise and pulled away. The sudden motion fired off a series of burning sensations. The gasp turned to an inhaled scream. Tears filled his eyes; he stiffened until the pain slowly subsided.

  “I am so sorry,” Kleigshoen said. “I forgot! I keep thinking you’ve healed up. They said—”

  Rimes shook his head. “It’s okay.”

  He forced himself to breathe slowly, evenly. He looked at his hand, saw the bandages covering the blisters where the electricity had entered. There was a much bigger bandage on his right heel, where it had exited.

  “We don’t have to meet with Jim until tomorrow afternoon,” Kleigshoen said. “You’ll have plenty of time to rest and let the restoratives do their work.”

  Rimes looked out the cockpit at the clouds floating far below them. So high up and washed in the moonlight, everything had a spectral, unearthly glow about it. They were still a few hours out from US airspace, but he already felt the pressure building inside.

  His trust in the world he thought he’d known was obliterated. His trust in himself was no better.

  “How does it work?” Rimes looked at Kleigshoen. He didn’t even try to hide his anxiety. “Do they arrest Captain Moltke? Is it a court martial or does it go to civilian courts? What’s he facing?”

  Kleigshoen focused on the instrument panel rather than meet his eyes.

  “I don’t know. We need to present our findings to Jim. He's very interested in what I've sent him so far, but, bluntly, he's worried about the strength of the case. This is a major accusation. Involvement in something like this—murder, selling classified data, selling sensitive weapons—is huge. Everything has to be airtight.

  “I guess there’ll be a court martial. I can’t see how he’d escape the death penalty … for something like this.”

  Rimes slowly flexed his left hand, ignoring the pinprick sensation running through each fingertip. “What about plea bargaining or getting someone to testify in return for immun
ity?”

  Kleigshoen shook her head. “You’ve got Moltke selling weapons to Kwon. We just need to figure out where and when that happened, and we can backtrack the rest.” She looked at him, brow wrinkled and mouth pursed worriedly. “Were you … were you able to remember the other person at the buy?”

  “No.” Rimes frowned. “And I don’t think it’s just a matter of remembering. I’m getting more and more details now. Things that were just a flash when I was connected to Kwon are …”

  “What?”

  Lightning played across the cloud tops in the distance. Rimes remembered the canyons, the dark clouds, the electricity crawling spider-like across the stony surface, reaching for him.

  “It’s becoming real,” he said. “They feel like my memories now. I think my brain is filling in gaps, separating things, sequencing them. There were things I didn’t realize I saw, memories I had no idea were there, but they’re coming together now.”

  Kleigshoen stared at him. “You remember the … killings?”

  Rimes nodded and looked away, ashamed. “He was a terrible person, Dana. What he did to his victims was inhuman.” He clenched his hands into tight fists. “He saw us as animals. It wasn’t just his genes. They cultivated it. LoDu encouraged it. All of it. The beliefs, the behavior, the … killing.”

  Kleigshoen watched the clouds beneath them. “What about Nakata?”

  “Colonel Weatherford personally knows the Special Security Council military liaison. After that, it’s up to the Japanese to decide how they deal with him. But the Special Security Council won’t select him for missions anymore, not once they know he’s compromised.”

  “Can you identify the nightclub he was in yet? It’ll just be your word against his. We need something stronger than that, Jack. This needs to be airtight, or we don’t only look bad, we lose.”

  “I was hoping we could trade. Nakata’s dirty. He nearly got my friend killed. He betrayed the trust of the Special Security Council. He’s no different than Moltke,” he said. “I give you Moltke, you give me Nakata.”

  “Jack—”

  “I can sketch the Japanese symbols from the nightclub—kana, kanji, whatever. And the girl … I’ll never forget her face. There can’t be many nightclubs with the same details—blue lights in the walls, the tables were high-grade stainless steel. Some sort of fish tank with a naked diver.

  “You get the nightclub, you get Nakata at the nightclub for me. Tie him to Kwon and let him cut a deal to save his career. That’s Nakata.”

  “Let me think about it,” Kleigshoen said. “We can’t risk everything over a vendetta. Keep your eye on the prize.”

  Rimes sighed. “Sure.” He checked his earpiece’s display. It was just after nine in Oklahoma. Molly should still be up.

  “You think I might be able to call Molly?” he asked.

  “Why not? You’ve been talking about calling her forever. I could use a minute alone.”

  “Thanks, Dana.”

  Kleigshoen exited the cockpit. Rimes listened for the toilet door shutting before synchronizing his earpiece. Several seconds passed before a noisy connection opened; another few seconds, and Molly’s face came into view.

  Rimes smiled. “Hi, baby.”

  Molly stared back coldly. “Where have you been?”

  “We’ve been traveling.” His guilt suddenly became crushing. “All over the place. It’s been a real mess.” He looked down as he spoke. “It’s been a very … demanding mission. I’m not cut out for this, Molly. I can’t do it.”

  “No one said you had to, Jack.” Molly looked confused. “You were meant for the military, not the … the Bureau or whatever.”

  “The money is so much better, though. You’d like the way they live. Dana has such nice things—dresses, jewelry, purses. I’d like to be able to buy you things like that.”

  Molly pressed her lips together. “Dana who?”

  Rimes stared at Molly’s image for a moment. It slowly dawned on him he had never explained who he was working with. “Special Agent Kleigshoen.”

  “Dana Kleigshoen?”

  He was on treacherous ground. “Yeah. You remember her? She was in my Ranger unit. I told you about her.”

  “Your old girlfriend?” Molly crossed her arms over her chest. “The really pretty one?”

  “She’s in the Bureau. I told you I worked with her recently.”

  “You didn’t tell me any such thing.” Molly leaned toward the console, her face seemingly millimeters from his. “What’s going on, Jack?”

  “You know I can’t discuss the mission, Molly. Look, I’m sorry for not talking to you until now. I should be home in a couple days. I’ll ask Colonel Weatherford to take me out of rotation, if possible. We’ll go somewhere, visit Cleo and Alejandra, maybe visit your mother.”

  Molly squinted. “You disappear for a week with your old girlfriend, and you don’t call me once?”

  “Molly, baby—”

  The connection closed abruptly. Rimes realized he’d been clenching his fists. The wound ached. He forced himself to relax and exhale deeply.

  He’d felt more anxiety facing Molly than going into a live fire situation. Years of training gave him confidence he simply couldn’t find in difficult situations with his own wife. He rested his head in his hands.

  “You are a hard man to reach, Captain Rimes,” a man’s voice muttered from nearby.

  Rimes spun.

  A man sat in Kleigshoen’s seat. He had a high forehead and dusky skin, and wore a jumpsuit, the sort that was common on orbital stations. When he spoke, his words seemed drawn out, with excessive enunciation and awkward emphasis.

  “You have no reason to be alarmed. You are perfectly safe.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You might say I am the storm, Captain.” A twinkle shone in the man’s odd, glistening, amber eyes. “Call me Perditori.”

  Rimes suddenly recognized the voice. “You were in Kwon’s mind. The lightning, the presence … that was you.”

  The man bowed his head slightly. “And now I am in your mind. I am very selective about which minds I use. You should be honored.”

  “The lightning was some sort of message? Or a seed?” Rimes guessed.

  The man smiled in answer.

  “You’re a genie?”

  “So they say. I prefer to see myself as the savior of my people, a destroyer of our enemies. Time is short. I have need of your services, Captain.”

  “You keep addressing me by the wrong rank. I’m a sergeant.”

  “Of course,” Perditori said with a dismissive wave. “If you will listen for a moment, you will understand how you and I can be of assistance to each other.”

  “I’m listening.” Rimes tried to relax.

  Perditori coughed theatrically. “We share a mutual interest in T-Corp 72. While others are distracted by matters of a mundane nature, you and I both see the key to this situation as that clump of buildings nestled in that fetid swamp.”

  I do? But his pulse quickened.

  “While I know what those buildings held, I cannot access that data. While you have access to that data, you do not know what those buildings held. You see now the fragile balance in our relationship, and how we might pursue what is best for each of us?”

  Rimes rubbed his forehead. Dealing with Perditori was taxing. “What is the data?”

  Perditori slowly closed his eyes and gave a satisfied sigh. “It should suffice for you to know that T-Corp stole genie research from LoDu. Since LoDu and T-Corp both ended research into that line of work, we have only ADMP and EEC to carry it forward. Yet ADMP will not invest in this endeavor unless there is competition to drive them, and sadly EEC does not have access to the data or the DNA.”

  “You want the data taken from the compound to reach EEC?”

  “Your relationship with Mr. Tymoshenko seems most fortuitous in light of this, does it not?” The smug smile returned to Perditori’s face. “Nothing without a purpose … Sergeant Rimes.”
>
  Rimes watched Perditori for several seconds. Finally, he said, “I don’t have access to the data. The Bureau has it.”

  Perditori gave a long-suffering sigh and touched his head with his forefinger and index finger. “And now you return to the Bureau’s headquarters for a debriefing. Again, fortuitous.”

  Rimes shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “I’m no computer expert. I could never penetrate their systems or their security.”

  “With my assistance, you can gain access to it easily enough.” Perditori gave a melodramatic bow and rolled his hand in front of him. “The data appears to be unreadable, which it is, to a certain extent.”

  Rimes clenched his fists, ignoring the pain that shot up his arm. He’d let Kleigshoen talk him into thinking that it was his body that would be lacking in a fight against the genies—that the remotes would be the answer. An answer he hated.

  The genie threat was more than physical.

  Perditori concentrated for a moment, his face suddenly strained. “The Bureau has two of the data storage units; however, in order to decrypt the data, three data storage units must be obtained. With only two, it is incomplete, gibberish. A ruptured pattern.”

  “Let’s assume for a moment I can get your data for you and transfer it to Tymoshenko. What’s in it for me?”

  “Money is not sufficient to compromise you. Would you rather have Nakata? The Bureau will not consume further resources pursuing a problem within the Special Security Council’s internal operational apparatus, not unless it can be turned to their advantage.”

  Rimes looked up and out of the cabin, considering the offer despite himself.

  Perditori pulled a handkerchief from midair and rubbed his forehead with it. “The name of the dance club you want is Nepuchūn no fuka-sa: Neptune’s Depths. As you surmised, you have assimilated many of Kwon’s memories into your own. What you touched of his is now yours. You have not yet realized the full implications of that, but once you do, you will see that we have already given you more than Nakata.”