Hard Magic psi-1

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Then: “Who placed the work-order? All ongoing investigation requests are supposed to pass by my desk.”

  Oh, shit. I was ready to really panic, try to Transloc out of there right in front of the guy, when Nick took a step closer, his hands in plain sight, totally nonthreatening.

  “You already signed off on it,” he told the guy, his disgruntlement modifying into honest puzzlement and a hint of much-put-upon underling. He was one hundred percent convincing as a loyal and long-suffering schlub.

  “I did?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Total assurance, confidence, security in those words, and like Stosser’s glamour, it soaked into the suit, making him believe it, too. Oh, I so needed to learn how to do that!

  “All right, then. Make sure you lock everything up again when you’re done, and damn it, don’t scratch the finish! Car’s supposed to go to auction next week—not surprisingly, the daughter refused to claim it, after all that.”

  The suit nodded once, briefly, to me, and turned away. We waited until he disappeared out of sight behind the first line of junkers, before breathing a sigh of relief.

  “These are not the droids you’re looking for?” I was more impressed than my comment indicated.

  Nick shrugged. “It’s not polite—” that was an understatement “—but he really didn’t want to deal with the paperwork, and I didn’t want to deal with him. A little pushing seemed the lesser of two evils, overall. You ready to go?”

  He made it sound easy. I could have been choked to the gills with current, and not been able to pull that off. “Yeah, yeah. The hell with Pietr, you could have been a serious Evil Mastermind, you know that?”

  “Nah. Too much work. Same with the NSA.”

  “The what?” I’d heard him, but I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard him.

  He gestured with his tool kit that I should precede him out of the bay. We were supposed to go out to the parking lot and walk about a mile away before calling for a Translocation back. “The NSA. Yeah. I got calls, starting about halfway through college. I started keeping a lower profile, after that. Like I said, too much work. They still keep calling, though. So did a few less official organizations. Venec just got in with an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Which was?”

  “Excitement, puzzle-solving, and nobody shooting at me.”

  “Better offer than I got,” I had to admit, holding the fire door open for him. Besetting honesty wasn’t always my sin, but something about Nick seemed to draw it out of me. “I got offered a job, period.”

  He shrugged again. J was right; it did look ungraceful. “You didn’t have any other options, I bet,” he said, not meaning for it to sting. “I did. They had to woo me.”

  We walked through the parking lot, and the fresh air and sense of a job accomplished almost relaxed me. “Huh. Are you saying I’m easy, mister?”

  “Torres, after almost two months working with you, I think I can say with some veracity that you’re not only easy, you’re cheap.”

  Ouch. “Ha. I—”

  I didn’t get a chance to say anything more, because the sound of something slamming past me way small and way fast triggered drop-and-freeze reflexes I didn’t even know I had. Nick had the same ones, the way he hugged the pavement next to me.

  “They said no shooting, damn it!” he yelled, even as I was pinging home.

  *get us the hell out of here!*

  Ten

  An emergency Translocation’s fast and nasty, and it’s not something you want to do on a regular basis, but I was never so damn glad to feel the molecules of my body being sucked through a current-straw in my entire life, and when we popped into place back in the office, I could have wept with gratitude.

  “What happened? Did you get your evidence?”

  Venec was damn near shouting, and everyone was crowding around us, and my gratitude got tempered, fast, with annoyance.

  “Someone shot at us, and all you can ask is if we got the evidence?”

  That stopped them, for about three seconds. Then the clamor started up again. I ignored them, turning to look at my partner, who was still sprawled on the floor next to me.

  “You’re bleeding. Oh god, did you—”

  “Nah,” he reassured me, lifting his bloody hand away from his shoulder. “Took the pavement too hard, is all. I think.”

  Sharon shoved her way through everyone else, and for once I was actually glad for her abrasive take-chargeism, because it didn’t take long at all for her to send someone off for bandages and stuff, and to get Nick out of the jumpsuit and his T-shirt underneath so she could see the damage better.

  He was right; it was just a nasty-looking pavement burn, tearing his skin open in places and oozing blood, but nothing that was going to need more than a few wipes and tape. The skin around it was pale and flushed-looking, but that was pretty much his normal skin tone. He did not, unfortunately, show to any better advantage undressed than dressed, and I made a mental note to get him started on some basic weights, try to bulk him up, before I worked on any more cases with him. He might be a fast thinker, but sometimes you needed a fast hitter, too.

  “You got the evidence?” Venec let Sharon deal with the medical stuff, and knelt down, leaning forward into my personal space with that pit-bull intensity. Those impossible eyes bored right into me, and if you’d asked me on my life I couldn’t have told you what precise color they were, but I knew every wrinkle and sag around the edges, and the exact shade of soot-black his eyelashes were. Damn damn damn. “We got what Nick sent back, safe and secure,” he said, “but was there anything else in the car?”

  “Yeah.” The weight of what I was carrying suddenly, now that I thought about it, felt like cold iron in my brain, and his gaze-hold on me was lessened enough so that I could look away. “I got it. I…” I hesitated, suddenly aware of a problem.

  “What?” Stosser swooped in, eavesdropping, if listening to something you had the right to know could be considered eavesdropping. Could it? My head hurt, so I stopped thinking about that and focused back on the problem at hand.

  “I don’t know how to get rid of it, though. I mean, we spent so much time learning how to gather, I guess…I don’t know how to dump it.” And I had to do it soon, I knew that, otherwise it would be tainted with my own signature, and nobody would ever believe it wasn’t tampered with.

  “We thought of that.”

  Of course they had. I wish to hell they’d thought to tell us all that before—although I suppose that was my lesson, to think of this stuff myself, and ask. Like the man said, if you’ve got questions…

  Then again, he hadn’t actually answered Sharon’s question, had he?

  With that gaze still on me, I was relieved that it was Stosser who offered me his hand, hauling me up off the floor with more power than his skinny frame suggested. Skinny, maybe, but not frail. I wouldn’t stack him up against Nifty, but he could probably take most of us in an unfair fight. I got the feeling those were the only kind boss-guy fought.

  “The chat room,” he said to me, dropping my hand and turning to walk away. It was almost as though he was pissed off at me, or something. I tried to think about how I might have screwed up…by getting shot at? We didn’t know who, or why, or anything, so how could he assume it was my fault rather than Nick’s? Because Nick got hurt? That made no sense at all.

  I tabled that question, too, and followed him out of the room. First things first; to get this stuff out of my brain, and into evidence.

  Stosser let me change out of the jumpsuit and back into my own gear, then had me sit in the armchair while he perched on the desk, taking up his usual lecturer pose. He was wearing another of his crunchy-granola outfits today, and I was starting to wonder which was the real Stosser, the stylish image-conscious guy, or the one who didn’t seem to remember that his hair was Pippi Longstocking red?

  “All right,” he said, either not aware or not caring that I was dissing his style-sense. “What we’re going to do is this. You
open your core—”

  “Whoa.” All thoughts of anything else went right out of my head. “I the hell will not.”

  Stosser made a placating gesture that was obviously supposed to calm my objections. “It’s all right.”

  I didn’t feel at all placated. “The hell it is.”

  Your core was a private place. It was the seat of your personal current, the furnace that fed our abilities, the…well, it was private, was all, and here my boss was telling me blithely to open up and say ah?

  “You’re doing all the work,” he said. “I’m not going to go in, you’re going to take it out. That’s all.”

  “Uh-huh. And you’ve done this how many times before?”

  “Once.” I liked the fact that he didn’t hesitate in answering, or try to fudge the number. But reassuring did not translate to reassured.

  “You experimented on Venec?”

  “Ben did the experimenting, actually. As I said, I am merely the receiver. You will control the entire process.”

  Oh, he was a cool one, not a worry in the world. J was right: Stosser was a schmoozer of the highest order, and his calm assurance and smooth delivery worked, even when you knew he was working you. Amazing. Also damned annoying, because I dislike being manipulated. But he was paying me for the privilege, so…

  “You don’t seem at all curious about who was shooting at us,” I said, trying to make myself comfortable in the chair.

  “I let Ben handle those details,” he said. “Especially since nobody was actually shot.”

  Oh. There. Just on the edge, just a sliver, but it was there if you were watching for it. Ian Stosser wasn’t anywhere near as cool about that shooting as he wanted us to believe. He was pissed, or worried, or something seriously not-calm. I noted it, and let it go.

  Stosser didn’t seem to notice that I’d caught him. “Now, when you’re relaxed, I want you to reach down inside and imagine your core like a Fabergé egg, hinged, and filled with fabulous treasures that are meant to be displayed….”

  His voice droned on, soothing and scholarly, and I tuned it out the same way I used to tune out professors in gut courses back in college, because by the time they got to the second or third long-winded sentence, I already knew what they were talking about.

  Same here. The image of the Fabergé egg worked, and I spared a moment to wonder if he’d have used the same image on Nifty, or Sharon, because J took me to see an exhibit once when I was a teenager, and although I thought at the time that they were horribly gaudy things, the idea of them stuck with me. It was amazingly easy to see my core, not as an egg, but in the same way: my own personal, private treasure that, if I wanted to, I could open up and display some part of it to someone else, so that they could see how fabulous the secret was….

  *show me?* Stosser’s mental voice, not so much pinging as wafting by. But under the polite exterior there was something harder, something less pleasant, and I shied away from it. *show me*

  He was the boss. Reluctantly, I touched that thread of current with one of my own, and brought forward the evidence I had collected; the shards of broken current, remnants of power-use, impressions of emotions and actions trapped by the endless webs of current that surround us, at all times. Delicate, tricky stuff, and every touch was done with mental breath held, for fear of cracking something and rendering it useless.

  Stosser opened his current up wider and took those things from my touch, never—as he promised—actually going into my core, just looking at the one small section I opened to him and taking the things that were there.

  Curious, my current followed, and he allowed it access…not to his own core, but to a wide-open space that made my eyes hurt from the reflected light; all gleaming white, sanitized, and empty.

  *evidence locker* he told me.

  It was…amazing. Impossible. A virtual space made of current, outside anything physically existent. We might be making this shit up as we went along with baling wire and chewing gum, but my god, this was some amazing wire and gum.

  I could feel the entrances, now that I was inside, and knew that I’d be able to access it any time I wanted to, in the future.

  *anyone on team can* Ian agreed, *once they have the key*

  And a small portion of that endless space darkened, shadows appearing, as he carefully, gently, placed the trace I had collected into one corner, labeled it, and locked it down. I got a sense from him of a key, glimmering pale green neon, tucked into a pocket, and the sense, likewise, that there was one in my pocket, too.

  Anyone on the team could get in here, but only the two of us could open that particular spot, unless we gave them the key.

  He released his hold on my current-strand, and I slid slowly backward, feeling myself leave a place that didn’t exist, sliding easily, gently, back into the awareness of my body.

  Stosser was still sitting there, leaning against the desk. I was still in the chair. My legs were tingling like they’d gone to sleep and were only now waking up, but otherwise…

  I checked inside. Yeah, the heavy weight of the trace was gone.

  “If I asked you how you made that, and you told me, would I be able to understand any of it?”

  “Possibly,” Stosser, said, standing up, but he didn’t elaborate. All right. Every wizard gets to have his secrets. For now.

  “We should rejoin the others now that the fuss will have died down, and determine who will be working on what.”

  “And figure out who was shooting at us?” Just because I wasn’t going to let him know I knew he was hiding something didn’t mean I was going to let go of the topic. I was still unnerved by that, and figured Nick would be, too. We deserved to know, if there was something happening.

  “I told you.” Stosser was, in direct contradiction to the myths about redheads, remarkably mellow, but every now and again some vinegar leaked into his voice. “Ben is dealing with it.”

  And with that, at least for now, I had to be content.

  We walked back into a madhouse. The fuss hadn’t quite died down, mainly because Venec had disappeared, Sharon tried to take control of the situation, and then she and Nifty got into a shouting match over who was actually in charge of the situation. Nick had sided with Sharon, and Pietr… Where the hell was Pietr, anyway?

  “They’ve been like this since you left.” His voice appeared at my elbow. “Personally, I don’t think either of them’s fit to lead a cat to tuna, but nobody asked me.”

  “Probably because they couldn’t find you, Fade, m’boy.”

  He looked hurt, and I felt as if I’d kicked a puppy, which was exactly how he wanted me to feel. So I kicked him in the shin.

  Stosser leaned with the door against his back, and watched them with what really only could be described as the sardonic eye of a jaded third-grade teacher. “You want to take odds on when they’ll start pulling hair?”

  “You’d know about that more than we would,” Pietr said. Good point—his hair was close-cropped to his scalp, and mine was chin-length: hair pulling wasn’t something we had to really worry about.

  Meanwhile, our two darlings were facing off, literally.

  “You’re a know-everything busybody but that doesn’t mean you have a clue about how the real world works.”

  “Oh, because spending four years knocking people down with big bad muscles makes you so smart? You’ve never even worked in—”

  “Children!” That vinegar was back in Stosser’s voice, and it splashed over them, stopping them hard. I guess class was back in session. “You can fight out your alpha pack issues later. Right now, there’s work to be done. Lawrence, Mendelssohn. You two need to work together, not against each other. Go over the physical trace Shune sent back. A 3-D sketch before you touch anything, and then lift any prints you can find. Odds are they’re useless, but we have to document everything, so anything we find is validated. Shune, are you up for work, or do you want to watch this one?”

  Nick flexed his arm carefully around the makeshift sli
ng Sharon had rigged for him, and managed a one-armed shrug. “I’m better as a pair of eyes at this point, boss.”

  “Fine. Torres, you do the same. Try to learn something useful. Cholis, come with me. I have a job for your particular skills.”

  Pietr’s expression verged somewhere between pleased and really worried. I didn’t blame him, but was more worried about having to get between Sharon and Nifty without making things worse. They exited, and the four of us were left standing, silently, in a really awkward face-off, two glaring and two trying to look anywhere but at each other.

  “All right.” Sharon was the one who capitulated first, surprising all of us—including, I think—Sharon. Her body language was still tense, but her shoulders relaxed a little under that linen blouse, and I didn’t feel the same electric vibe off her. “It’s been a really long day that we weren’t expecting, and this is stupid. Nick, you’re the one who handled the stuff. You direct us.”

  Nick looked started as hell, but rallied. “All right. Who’s got a decent handle on the 3-D sketching?”

  “That would be me,” Nifty said. His voice—and vibe—still had a bit of challenge in it, but not anything that demanded a takedown. Anyway, it was true; I was an abysmal failure on that level, and I’m not sure the others were much better.

  “All right, then you get started with that, and Sharon, you’ve got the best recovery skills. When he’s done with the sketch, see if you can lift anything useful off anything. Bonnie, we need to get it all cataloged, before we forget what was found where.”

  He dispatched us with evident satisfaction, and a little arrogance, but probably he hadn’t been deferred to a lot in his life—if you’re skinny, geeky, and not a tech-god, you don’t get a lot of respect, no matter how smart you are—and damn, Sharon had managed us Council-worthy. If she’d chosen me, Nifty might have felt it was a girl thing, and if she had pushed herself forward we all would have been annoyed, but this way Nifty was appeased, and Nick felt gratitude toward her, and me…. I didn’t care one way or the other, I realized. I was still worried about who the hell had shot at us, and part of my mind was still chewing over how easily Nick had pushed that supervisor into letting us go, and there was another part of my mind still working on the concept of the white virtual storeroom, and wondering where the hell Venec was and what he was doing, and there just wasn’t any room left in my head for dealing with intragroup politics.