Cosega Source: A Booker Thriller (The Cosega Sequence Book 5)

by Brandt Legg

  She remained silent for a moment, and he wasn’t sure if the great lady was still there.

  “No,” she finally said. “Let her go.”

  Tracer frowned back at her. “I . . . don’t understand.”

  “Follow her from a very safe distance.”

  “She’s heading into the Mistwave forest,” he explained, somewhat piqued. “It is extremely difficult . . . we could lose her. We’ve lost her father there twice,” he reluctantly admitted, still bitter about each time he had been bested.

  “It is worth the risk.”

  “But—”

  “Under no circumstances is she to see you, or is she to be taken into custody. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he replied stiffly. “However, you should know that our intelligence tells us Trynn is close to making an insertion.”

  “I saw the report.”

  “Then you know that the only thing preventing it is that his globotite is depleted. If she gets through, he could be successful at placing another Eysen into the far future, and . . . I certainly don’t begin to understand the consequences of that—”

  “No, you don’t even remotely have an inkling to the first breath of understanding that—not that you could be expected to grasp what those ramifications are.”

  “Regardless, it seems reckless that you’re willing to risk that.”

  “Do not forget whom you are addressing,” she replied slowly, her tone low.

  “Of course.”

  “So there is no ambiguity here, let me state unequivocally that I am ordering you not to impede Mairis.”

  “And if she meets Trynn?” he asked, certain an arrest would be warranted then.

  “You record the exchange, but that is all.”

  “If we witness a globe runner turning over the banned mineral to Trynn, defying countless Circle decrees, most you authored yourself . . . we are to do nothing?”

  “Correct.”

  “And if we locate a facility in which he is conducting far future manipulations?”

  “You report to me immediately.”

  “But we seize it immediately?”

  “Tracer, listen to me. Do not act outside of your understanding,” the Arc bristled. “You report any and all developments to me immediately. Clear?”

  “Clear,” he replied, astonished at the orders, wondering if some new, horrible thing had happened that he just didn’t know about yet.

  Mairis reached the rendezvous point and found no one there. Unsure of what to do, she began scouring the area for signs of activity. Being raised among the Etherens, she’d been taught to track animals, humans, machines, thoughts, even energy. The Etherens deeply believed the movements of anything mattered to understanding everything.

  Soon Mairis uncovered a goeze. “At least I won’t have to walk home,” she said to the trees. “Wonder who left it?”

  She got in and quickly powered on the digital manifest.

  “Dad,” she said, surprised at seeing his name. A little careless not wiping your name . . . must have been in a hurry.

  She took the steps to erase him from the log. It was illegal to do so and took almost three minutes.

  Least of my crimes, she thought, smiling as she got out.

  Leaving the vehicle, she easily picked up his trail and followed it until she came to the point where it crossed his tracks and the herds from the previous day. From there, she went along following the earlier trail of the animals, since it was the strongest. She checked back often, but saw nothing. Sensing she was close to her father, and unaware that she was being watched, Mairis felt optimistic for the first time in days.

  Where are you, Dad?

  That’s when she saw the body.

  Seventy-Seven

  Mairis approached the rumpled body carefully, unsure if the person was alive.

  “It’s a woman,” she whispered to herself as she got closer. “She’s breathing.”

  Maris looked around for guardians, traps, anything that could make this worse than it already was. She could see where the woman had come from, the broken trail.

  She’s wet, the river is that way . . . she must have been in the water.

  “Are you okay?” Mairis asked as the woman opened her eyes.

  “Mairis,” the woman said with a pained smile.

  Mairis almost didn’t recognize Julae, and had no idea that her old friend had survived an incredible dive from a stone arch in the canyons, and then remained underwater for longer than any Cosegan had been known to do before.

  “Julae, what happened to you?”

  “Globotite . . . guardians.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Only exhausted, I think. Must get this to your father.” Julae rolled on her side and pulled the pouch off her leg.

  “I will take it to him,” she told her. “You need to get safe. There is a goeze, it can take you to Camsoen.”

  “Why Camsoen? I just want to go home to Teason.”

  Mairis shook her head. “Guardians took everyone.”

  Julae’s eyes filled, then her shocked expression turned to anger. “They are wrong.”

  “I know.” Mairis held out a hand. “Come now, we must go before they come here, too.”

  After Mairis helped Julae to the goeze, she headed back into the trees and picked up the trail. She was not surprised to see it run along the river. “Of course,” she said to herself. “The ocean. Where else could he hide an installation capable of housing his work and all the people who must be helping him.”

  Tracer contacted the Arc and was once again annoyed that the leader ordered him to allow Mairis to escape, but at least his people could pick up the Etheren woman. “I am amazed she is alive,” the Arc said.

  “I am, too,” Tracer said, trying to hide his bitterness.

  “See that she is unharmed,” the Arc said. “And have her immediately brought to me. I should like to question the remarkable woman myself.”

  The Terminus clock had plunged to its lowest time ever: one day. Trynn could not allow himself to mourn for Shanoah right now, and he knew she would not want him to do anything other than try to find a way to stop the Doom, to save the future. He pushed everything he could think of into the Eysen shields.

  “What are you doing?” his assistant asked.

  “I’m taking all that we learned from the Nostradamus incident.”

  “That’s dangerous.”

  “Not half as dangerous as what I’m doing with the Jesus information.”

  The assistant looked at him, a frightened expression on his face. “But Trynn,” he pleaded, “if you distort the future, what will the consequences be to us?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “At least there will be a future.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I have to start with something. We can’t just let it all fall apart.”

  “What if we take the globotite from these Eysens and put it into the master one?”

  Trynn shook his head. “There isn’t enough time.”

  “Let me do the calculations again. I think we’ll see there is enough.”

  “Remember, we lose the exponential amount in each transfer. Might even lose our vision.”

  “What about the others?” the assistant asked, now panicked that Trynn was going to destroy any semblance of a consistent future. “If we asked all the scientists and Eysen makers to give us their globotite, certainly even with the loss of the transfers, there would be enough.”

  Trynn did not respond. There was no point. The assistant was talking nonsense and would soon realize it. Even if they could convince all the others to scrape and scrounge for every molecule of globotite, even if it was enough, even if they could somehow get it all past the guardians, install it, run the correct sequences, and hit the precise dates, by then the window would have closed and none of those things were going to happen anyway. Although some of the Eysen makers actually believed the Eysens could make a difference, none had any idea how deep Trynn had gone, h
ow far the adjustments, how close to the eruption of the Terminus Doom and the end. Trynn’s desperate attempts to make more adjustments with the remaining globotite was all that he could do.

  “There isn’t time . . . is there?” the assistant asked.

  Trynn still did not answer. He stood consumed and lost, juggling the nuances across eleven million years, tweaking events in anticipation of changes, of outcomes, the complexities too great to imagine . . . like a puppet master controlling marionettes, like a stage director cuing lines, like a god creating existence itself.

  Two of the other scientists in the lab were trying to keep up with the changes Trynn was inflicting upon the future. “Slow down!” they begged.

  In his blind fury, Trynn ignored them.

  The assistant watched helplessly as famines and wars, shipwrecks, plane crashes, plagues, and all manner of disaster wreaked humanity across the ages.

  “These things would never have occurred without our manipulations into reality,” the now terrified assistant vied in vain for Trynn’s attention. “Far future manipulations are illegal for a reason. The ramifications go both ways!”

  “What have you unleashed?” one of the scientists whispered.

  “There is nothing left to lose,” another answered for Trynn. “Humanity is going to end if we take no actions, so what is the worst that could happen?”

  They had been through all the arguments in their minds many times, and each had given their loyalty to Trynn because at least he was trying.

  “He can’t know what might happen!” the first one countered.

  Trynn continued the moves. Several elicited gasps as a glimpse of the Missing-Time came into view.

  Seventy-Eight

  Ovan’s eyes widened at the glimpse into the Missing-Time. “You’ve cracked it!” he yelled to Trynn, elated.

  “I can’t hold it,” Trynn moaned, and the view slid closed again.

  “It was Cosegans,” Ovan said. “At least another million years in.”

  “I know,” Trynn said. “One point three million. But it’s faded out again. Imagine what we can do with this new Eysen.”

  “No globotite,” Ovan reminded him, “and the guardians are on their way.”

  “I’ve bought us a bit more time, but we must go,” Trynn replied. “Prepare the vessels.”

  Mammoth research vessels with the ability to stay at sea for months at a time, and could conceivably remain submerged for years, had come with the abandoned facility. Trynn had repurposed them long ago for just such an event.

  “It’s as if you knew,” Ovan said.

  “I might have had an idea . . . ”

  Ovan looked back at him for a moment, then nodded slightly. “Very good.”

  Trynn scoffed. “If I’d been good, I would have had enough globotite.”

  “You bought us time,” Ovan said. “We’ll find more.”

  “The Terminus clock is at three days,” a man announced as a woman ran into the room.

  “Trynn,” she said. “Your daughter is here.”

  Trynn blinked back at her. “Mairis? How?”

  “The escorts brought her in. They spotted her wandering and went out to get her.” The entire area around the shoreline closest to High-peak was covered with monitoring equipment and cameras to warn of intruders.

  “Is she okay?” he asked, having been so beaten down by the events of recent hours he wasn’t sure he could handle another blow.

  “Appears to be. You can see for yourself in a few minutes.”

  Tracer did not want to admit to the Arc that Mairis had escaped, so he kept searching long after he should have called it in. Finally, when it became too obvious, he resigned himself to sending the report.

  “We lost the girl.”

  “Of course you did.”

  He wanted to tell the Arc that it was actually her fault they had, that she had been the one who’d stopped him from taking Mairis when he’d wanted to. “Yes, well, what do you want us to do?”

  “Secure the area.” Although she now knew where Trynn was (but by other means, the capture of Cardd and the Havloses), she didn’t need the guardians, whose loyalties could be tied to any members of The Circle, to know where Trynn was. Weals and a team were already on the way.

  Trynn looked at the escort. “Was she followed?”

  “Yes, but at a distance. It allowed us to enact the shimmer,” he said, referring to a miles-long series of overlapping digital curtains that could render anything behind the shimmer virtually invisible. “It gave us just enough time to get her.”

  Trynn knew that unlike his recent entrance across the rod, the conduit that brought energy and oxygen streams to High-peak, Mairis would have been brought over by a submersible.

  “The shimmer is down now?” Trynn asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then the guardians are closer than we thought,” Trynn said. “Board the vessels, now!”

  Mairis walked in as he was giving the order. “I’m sorry I brought this trouble down on you.”

  He hugged her. “No. They were coming anyway.”

  “But they’re here sooner now.”

  People raced past them, carrying equipment and gear.

  “It doesn’t matter.” He released her. “I’ve made my own mess of things.”

  “Will this help?” She pulled out all the pouches of globotite.

  Trynn stared down at the pouches in her hands, speechless for a moment. “How? Where did you get this?”

  “Long story.”

  “You just saved the world!” He smiled at her proudly, then ran to bond the minerals with the source linked to the Jesus Eysen. “Get in one of the vessels,” he yelled. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  “Can’t I wait with you?” she called after him, that oh-so-familiar flare of abandonment rising again.

  “Come on,” Ovan said, taking her hand. “You risked so much to get it here, let him use it. While we’re waiting for him to join us, tell me of your adventures. It must be quite a story.”

  An escort told Ovan they had to go. “This vessel must disembark now.”

  “We have to wait for my father,” Mairis insisted.

  “All the other vessels have gone,” the escort said. “We cannot risk everyone onboard. There are several smaller submersibles Trynn can take.”

  “Then I’ll go with him,” she said stubbornly.

  Ovan was about to argue when Trynn ran up.

  “Thanks to you, Mairis, we did it!” he said. “Or at least we’ve got another chance. The Terminus clock is at twenty-nine days!”

  “Good work!” Ovan said. “We need to get working on the next insertion.”

  “We need to go!” the escort yelled.

  “We’ll need another Eysen recipient,” Trynn said.

  “I happen to have a name,” Ovan replied.

  “I’m not surprised. Who?”

  “We’re leaving!” the escort said.

  “Come on, Dad,” Mairis said, tugging on his arm. “You can talk on the way.”

  But Trynn shook his head. “I can’t go with you. I have to go to Solas, but I’ll meet you soon.”

  “What? No.” Mairis looked at him pleadingly. “I’ll go with you.”

  He took his daughter in his arms. “Listen to me. I will be safer alone. You will be safer without me. I will see you at the Varvara Port.”

  “But that’s in Havlos territory.”

  “I know. We’re all outlaws now.”

  “They rounded up all the Etherens at Teason,” she told him, now teary eyed.

  “We’re going to fix all this, get everything back to good,” he promised her. “What you did, finding the globotite, bringing it through . . . you gave us this chance. Thank you.”

  “Trynn,” the escort said, “Guardians are at the shore. We have to go now.”

  He nodded. “I’ll see you soon, Mairis. I love you.”

  “Close the hatch,” the escort said.

  Mairis mouthed, ‘I love you,
’ as the hatch sealed. A second later, the last High-peak vessel was headed out to sea.

  Seventy-Nine

  The Arc watched the projections, angered by what she now faced. The faces of Prayta, Kavid, Julae, Anjee, and Markol stared back at her. Of course, none of them could see her, but they knew it was the Arc that held them prisoner. No one else could command such an atrocity. Each in a separate cell, and kept well away from the Havloses, other Etherens, and more than a hundred globe runners, the Arc was now heading an actual prison, like something out of Rip’s time.

  She quickly cleared the projections. No one could be allowed to know about them, especially the man who had just walked into her office.

  “You wished to see me,” he said.

  “You are not my first choice,” she said. “However, these are strange and uncertain times.”

  “I’m not surprised, but first choice for what?”

  “Who to confide in.”

  “Confide, huh? That is surprising. Confide what?”

  “The Imaze mission has failed. As soon as word leaks out, we will have a revolt on our hands.”

  “Possibly.”

  “No,” she said irritably. “It is a certainty. There is much more fear than The Circle has been led to believe. Fear breeds distrust of leadership. The people feel that I made the wrong choices . . . they believe there is nothing to lose.”

  He nodded.

  “And the Etherens . . . ” she added.

  “I’ve heard you purged several settlements.”

  “The ones closest to Solas, but now the farther reaches are banding together, planning an uprising.”

  “That is to be expected. Why did you purge—”

  She waved a hand to silence him. “And the Havloses . . . I believe they may declare war with us.”

  “What?” He stepped back suddenly, as if her words had pushed him. “Why?”

  “I have arrested them for selling, smuggling, and storing globotite and other minerals.”