The Changeling Game, Chapter 46

46.
Heirs to the Caldera

The official story, which began circulating an hour before Jack and General Toal left for the old apartment, was that the second of the two Star Jumpers irreparably damaged in the spaceport explosion had also been compromised worse than anyone had realized. One of the reactor cores powering its sublight ion drive had slowly destabilized until it ruptured almost exactly seven Tangiers days later… a little under two of the planet’s long days after a similar rupture had allegedly destroyed the other damaged Star Jumper, the ill-fated Scarlet Matador. Jack, who knew exactly what had really happened to the Matador and where to find it, rolled her eyes and saw Ewan doing the same thing.

The unofficial story, which General Toal said was only being whispered by a handful of eyewitnesses, was that the ship had abruptly imploded some five hours after the Quintessa Corporation had tried to run an unexplained test… one that had begun at almost exactly the same moment as Jack’s strange fit toward the end of the morning-day. The test had ended not long after it had begun with everyone involved fleeing the ship, but no warnings of an impending crisis had been issued until the implosion itself occurred hours later. What little of the massive vessel was left was disturbingly friable, even its protective hull plates disintegrating when touched.

“They tried to use its Isomorph Drive to open a bridge to U322A,” Jack said when the General finished his update. The family had insisted on bed rest for her, but cabin fever was already building and making her antsy. Everyone crowding into the bedroom to listen in just added to the weird near-claustrophobia. Sebby, chittering in annoyance, had already retreated under the bed.

“You know this?” the General asked. “You remember?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember much of anything after feeding Sebby.” She actually did remember the abortive tickle-battle, and the conversation with Kyra that had followed, but it seemed like everyone was more comfortable thinking that had been lost to her, too. “Just… we took away every other potential bridge they had, so…” She shrugged, wishing she could explain where her certainty came from. Usually she could, but there was a strange fog in parts of her mind that had never existed before.

“Yes,” Ewan said. “When we were going to the Scarlet Matador, you said that would be the only way for them to gain access to Elsewhere once everything else was gone. But why would they want to?”

“The envoy said she wanted to understand what made this Level Five Incident so different from all the others,” Jack mused. Sometimes, she felt like she knew, or should know, much more, but when she tried to chase the feeling down, it evaporated.

“Hopefully, having her attempt to re-establish a connection end in another disaster will deter her,” the General said. “Perhaps there is a way to make her believe that it’s a problem with that universe, itself.”

“Won’t that get any shipping route that uses U322A for a Jump suspended?” Cedric asked, frowning.

“Likely. But they can route around it. They have, in point of fact, done so several times in the past with other universes, and with Jumps they decided were too long. Better that than the realization that there might be a human mind behind so much of their ill fortune, or even two.” The General’s gaze on Jack, and on Kyra, was speculative.

“You think we did this?” Kyra asked him, looking shocked.

“Well, that’s the interesting thing,” he rumbled, his voice contemplative. “Neither of you ever left this house. And your whole focus, during that period, was your adopted sister. I don’t think you did anything…”

His gaze moved to Jack.

“…and you don’t seem to remember anything that happened while you were under.”

Under…

…beneath, below, under…

Yes, a soft voice murmured somewhere far away. You may know and tell that much… it will do no harm.

“I think I was with the Apeiros,” Jack answered slowly. “Whatever was happening… they were afraid. Terrified.”

“Do you think U322A, your Elsewhere, might be their home? Perhaps the bridge would have endangered it.”

She shook her head after a moment’s careful thought. Navigating her memory, at least where this was concerned, felt like jumping from one steppingstone to another, but instead of water between the stones, there were vast, fathomless gulfs of strange emptiness. She’d never experienced anything like it before in her life. It was unnerving.

But, strangely, there were other things that she knew with iron certainty now, which had never been in her head before.

“They call us ‘little larvae,’” she told everyone, “because our five-dimensional shapes are so small… only two universes wide. They’re much bigger…”

…tiny but enormous…

“I don’t think they could think of Elsewhere as their world any more than…” She cast about in her head for a suitable comparison. “…than you could think that chair you’re sitting in is your world.”

“And yet, whatever it was the Quintessa Corporation tried to do this morning-day, bridging U1 and U322A perhaps… terrified them and incapacitated you.” His eyes turned to Kyra. “But not you.”

Kyra shook her head. “Tizzy told them they were forbidden to talk to me anymore unless I talked to them first.”

General Toal looked fascinated. “You were able to forbid these beings to do something?”

Jack shrugged. “I told them they were hurting her. I guess they didn’t want to do that.”

“So they let her be…?”

“I think so. But…” She looked over at Kyra. “I think I remember you screaming that something was wrong.”

“Yeah, because you were having a fit.” Kyra shook her head. “Whatever it was, I didn’t feel any of it except what I could feel coming off of you.”

“And what was that?” Takama asked.

“Something was screaming for help and she was trying to go to it, in her head. And then she was gone.” Kyra shuddered. “I swear, it was like she wasn’t even in her body anymore…”

“Completely unresponsive,” Usadden murmured, and Jack saw him shudder, too.

“Except,” Ewan spoke up, “the brain-wave readings my portable scan got were off the charts.”

“Please tell me I don’t have to go get another CT scan,” Jack groaned.

“No, that would be ill-advised indeed,” General Toal said. “Were her readings like that after the last… incident, Ewan Zdan?”

Ewan shook his head. “They were normal… but those were readings I took afterwards, not during. She might have lit up the scan the same way if I’d used it when she was moving the Matador out of our universe.”

“Perhaps you should scan her again now.”

Ewan looked at Jack, a question in his eyes. She nodded, watching him get the portable scanner back out of his field kit. Kyra tensed a little as he came over to Jack’s side, as though she expected both of them to fall under each other’s thrall again.

After all, he had almost needed to be pried off of her earlier.

Even as the alerts had begun to go off, he had dropped everything he’d been carrying onto the chair and raced over to her, landing beside her on the bed and pulling her into a hug so tight that she almost hadn’t been able to breathe. Sebby had screeched and begun posturing threateningly—snapping his pincers like rapid-fire castanets but, at least, not brandishing his stinger—until Kyra, hurrying in after the others, managed to calm him down. Although intensely and inappropriately aware of Ewan’s powerful torso pressed to hers, Jack had found herself even more aware that he was shaking. It had taken a long moment for Usadden to get through to him and convince him to let her go… and then convince her to let him go when her mixture of concern and desire made her clingy. Only then did Jack find out that, for the prior few hours, she had appeared to be comatose.

Now, though, Ewan was all business, running his scan the way he had undoubtedly done countless times when he had worked as a paramedic. “Much closer to normal. But…” He swallowed and shook his head. “When I still worked for the UMA, I had been instructed that if I ever saw readings like this, I should refer the patient for Quantification.” He shook his head again. “They didn’t look like this last time.”

The General looked as if a suspicion had been confirmed for him. Ewan, giving Jack an apologetic look, put the scanner away and returned to the chair he’d been sitting in. He was keeping his distance, but she could feel how much he didn’t actually want to.

“Okay,” she sighed, sitting up. “Brain is normal…ish. No signs of physical injury, right?”

Usadden nodded.

“Then can I please get up? I have a lot I still need to do. Today.”

“Perhaps it should wait until things calm down—” Tafrara began.

“No, I think she’s right,” the General said. “While all eyes are pointed at this new disaster, she may have an easier time insinuating herself into the systems she needs to access, in order to plausibly get the word out about Makarov. I will accompany her to the apartment and watch over her.”

At Jack’s request, he took her to a nearby tech shop to purchase a tablet she could use just for the purposes she had in mind, before driving her to the apartment building. The place was almost entirely empty and still; most of the tenants had moved out after the owners had been unresponsive and uncommunicative in the wake of the spaceport bombing. None of the shattered west and north windows had been repaired, although a very few had been boarded over on the lowest levels. Jack led General Toal up the filthy, stinking stairway, more conscious than ever of how nasty it was; if it bothered him, he showed no sign.

“So,” Jack asked as she unpacked the tablet, sat cross-legged on the floor—she refused to ever touch the couch again—and began to configure it, “why are you really here?”

He sat down in the chair they had left behind, steepling his fingers. “You are getting very good at reading people, Tizzy. I do, indeed, have an ulterior motive for wishing to speak with you alone.”

Maybe that should have scared her, but it didn’t. She knew that, as a military general, he was undoubtedly a dangerous man in at least some way… but she’d been associating with dangerous men for months, starting with Riddick and Johns. She just looked over at him and nodded encouragement.

“You have always had some esper ability, haven’t you?” he asked.

“Seems like it. Nothing obvious, but…” She restarted the tablet to let some of her custom configurations take. “…I think there were signs when I was little. Strange stuff. Nothing too freaky, though. Nothing that couldn’t be explained away.”

“But since the Scarlet Matador, and since your communions with the beings you call the Apeiros, it has grown considerably.” It wasn’t a question.

“I guess,” Jack said, busy armor-plating the tablet against incursions with the protective systems her father had liked best. “It’s… hard to tell. Like Ewan said the other night, I don’t know where my limits are until I crash into them—”

Oh, oops. Nobody but Kyra knew she’d heard that.

General Toal only laughed softly. “In truth, you would make an extraordinary recruit. An Operative who can stand among her targets, listening to their whispered secrets, without them ever knowing…” His expression grew serious. “That is what I needed to speak to you about.”

“You gonna try to recruit us?” The tablet was almost ready. Jack glanced over at the General. “Kyra might be interested if it means rescuing girls from the shit she was put through, but—”

“No, I am not,” he said, surprising her. “I have worked with Operatives before. Officially, slavery is illegal within the Federacy… except where they are concerned.”

Well, that wasn’t a chilling statement or anything… “Why?”

“Your own abilities would terrify most people, child. You can spy on any discussion without people knowing you’re standing among them. You can come and go from a locked and impregnable fortress as you please, regardless of its security systems. You have made bodies disappear from a morgue, hidden valuables vanish from a high-security vault, and a twenty-thousand-ton Star Jumper travel from one universe to another with a touch of your hand. And may, possibly, have imploded another Star Jumper in your sleep.”

Jack opened her mouth to protest… but…

Holy fuck. She really had done all that. Phrased that way, she sounded scary as shit. And that wasn’t even touching on what Kyra could do, killing people without any sign she was anywhere near them…

“What government would ever allow such power to go unchecked?”

His rhetorical question sent an icy wind blowing through her. “What… would they do?”

“Espers are taken to a secure facility for training and conditioning. I don’t know exactly what happens there. They will not speak of it. But every Operative I have met is mentally and emotionally incapable of exercising their powers except under orders. Their ability to improvise, as you two do so well, has been taken from them, something that has cost more than a few of them their lives when situations went pear-shaped, the chain of command broke down, and there was no one left with the authority to tell them how to use their abilities to save themselves or others.”

“That’s…”

“Not a fate I could ever wish for you, no. I serve the Federacy to serve humanity, and this is one of the great conflicts between those two callings. I will not tell them about you or Kyra.”

“Th…thank you. What… is that all they would do? Psychological conditioning?”

The General shrugged. “You would have a tracker implanted in you… one with an explosive device inside, just in case you found a way to break through that conditioning and tried to escape. I know of only one Operative-in-training who has ever managed to successfully remove it and flee captivity. You have met him.”

It took a moment to find her voice. “Riddick.”

“They point to him, his kill count and the various crimes he has committed—or allegedly committed—in the last decade, whenever anyone objects to the way espers are handled. Did you ever see him use his abilities?”

“I don’t think so…” But there had always been something preternatural about him, about his speed and timing and the way he hadn’t even had to look behind him, most times, to know who or what was coming. He wasn’t invulnerable—he’d very nearly died on the crash planet—but…

She had watched him take a knife and cut his own neck open to remove the explosive tracker that Chillingsworth had ordered implanted in him, and had found herself thinking that it wasn’t the first one he’d removed that way…

“Espers were much rarer even a generation ago,” the General told her, “before the Furyan Diaspora. Many of the orphans of that… disaster… have turned out to be quite powerful. It’s something about their world itself, it seems. The powers have even appeared among the children of the relief troops who were stationed at the Caldera Base on Furya in the aftermath—”

Jack’s breath caught. Her father’s last tour of duty in the Corps of Engineers, the year before he met her mother, had been on Furya. He had shown her pictures of the Caldera, and the base that sat beside it, and had told her it was the strangest world he’d ever visited. But it was also the world he’d chosen to return to when he re-enlisted.

Was that where all of this came from?

General Toal was watching her with interest. He’d figured her out, knew she had to be the daughter of some member of the Service who had been stationed on Furya… where she had been headed, herself, before everything went wrong. What would she have found there, she wondered, if she had made it?

Except…

“I… don’t think Kyra has any ties to Furya…”

“No. The sublight colony ship she was on never passed that way. But the files on her are extensive. Did you know she was born on late twenty-first century Earth?”

Jack nodded.

“Before her mother joined her father’s church and gave up such things, she was a performer of some renown. Minerva Kirshbaum-Wittier, better known to her world as Minnie Sulis. A stage magician whose act included mind reading, levitation, and teleportation. Most such acts are elaborate trickery of course, but the records indicate that many of her signature ‘tricks’ could be neither replicated nor debunked. When she converted to the Church of the New Christy Pilgrims, though, she quit the stage and claimed that she had turned her back on the devil.”

“So she was probably an esper the whole time,” Jack mused.

“One who became convinced what she was doing was witchcraft, it seems. But yes.”

“You… need to tell Kyra all of this, too.”

The General nodded. “I will, yes. It’s important that both of you protect yourselves from discovery. Tomorrow evening, when I come to Ewan Zdan’s send-off party, I’m bringing each of you a very special device. A neurofeedback training unit. It will help you learn how to control your own minds, and the readings your brain scans produce, so that you can hopefully beat a Quantification test—should you ever be subjected to one—and pass as normal.”

For a long moment, Jack was rendered speechless. He was giving them something incalculably precious… and incredibly dangerous to him. If anyone ever discovered that he had helped two espers hide from the Federacy, it would be the end of more than just his career.

“Thank you,” she finally managed, wishing she could say something that would convey how much she knew he was risking, how much generosity he was showing.

“You’re welcome, Tizzy. Now… another reason I came here today is to help you deal with these terrible files you have found. I understand why you don’t want anyone else to have to see them,” he said as he walked over to sit down beside her on the floor, crisscrossing his legs with the limberness of a man a third his age, “but I have served as a judge on a great number of courts martial, and have reviewed evidence of the worst war crimes human beings can perpetrate. Please allow me to help you with this. I am far more inured to the trauma that even pictures of such things can cause than you should ever have to be.”

Jack felt relief suddenly untying the knots in her spine. The idea of looking at those images again, of sifting through them for examples that could be sent on, that would show enough to provoke outrage without being too graphic to ever be published, had been on the very edge of bearable. To look again at the misery and agony in the faces of those women and girls…

“I’d… really appreciate that. Last time I looked at this stuff, I ended up puking up everything I’d eaten for the last month.”

“I’m truly sorry that you had to see such things at all.”

Kyra, she thought, had lived through such things, which was immeasurably worse. Sometimes she had to remind herself that, for every man who was capable of such egregious brutality, for every Red Roger, or Duke Pritchard, or Javor Makarov… or even a William Johns… there were men like General Toal, like Cedric, Gavin, Ewan, and all the men of ait Meziane… like Riddick. Men who, although perhaps fearsome in their own ways, had too much honor to ever engage in such hideous, sadistic acts.

Men who possibly needed protection of their own from the schemes of monsters like Pritchard and Makarov.

“There’ll be stuff we need to delete, too,” she told the General. “Aside from following Kyra and me around to try to get to Riddick, he was helping Makarov track Toml— Gavin Brahim. I don’t think we want everything he recorded about that where people can nose into it… and I don’t want any of the pictures he took of Kyra and me getting out.”

“Agreed. We will curate this collection carefully.”

Jack logged them in and they got to work. It wasn’t long before she let him take over almost entirely, looking away as he examined the different image collections that Pritchard had assembled and chose examples from each collection to include in their fictional pervert’s stash.

“Hmm,” he said at one point. “I recognize three of the women so far. Former fugitives now serving prison terms… I think their sentences may end up being vacated on the strength of this evidence.”

“That’s… good, right?”

General Toal sighed. “Possibly. Unfortunately, I doubt they will receive much compensation or assistance, aside from being released and having the relevant crimes expunged from their records. Few in their positions do.”

“Is there anything you can do to help them?”

He shook his head, looking somber and a little regretful. “I suspect that this release of information is as much as I can personally do for them. Any overt intervention on my part could draw too much attention to what I might know about Pritchard and Makarov, myself… and how I might have learned it.”

Shit. “Yeah…”

Maybe, she thought, someday there would be something she could do. Her father had told her about working with various NGOs, when he was stationed on different worlds, which had provided targeted aid to groups in need. Maybe she could join, or if need be create, one that would help victims of these kinds of crimes—

“Dear God.”

“What?” Jack looked over at General Toal. “Something bad?”

The General was frowning, advancing through a series of pictures. Bracing herself, Jack leaned over to look.

Nothing remotely pornographic was on the screen anymore. Instead, a surveillance camera showed a man dressed in traditional Amazigh attire, a tagelmust covering his head and obscuring most of his face, exiting a swanky-looking restaurant, the image taken from behind him. It vanished and was replaced by a new shot, from a different angle—

Jack recognized this frame. The surveillance camera it originated from had been covering the entrance to the pilots’ lounge. The same man was emerging from the lounge, partly turned as though waving goodbye to whomever had brought him as a guest. She remembered watching him leave the lounge when she’d reviewed the footage.

Glancing at her, his expression suddenly a little wary, the General closed the folder without advancing through further pictures. “I don’t understand why they would be so interested in collecting stills of the people they murdered that day,” he said. “I may wish to examine this more closely… but I think its presence would cloud the investigation we wish to see pursued.”

As she watched, he took a chip out of his pocket, connected it to the tablet, and transferred three folders to it—none of them from the “Bad Kitties” folder—before deleting them from Pritchard’s account.

Jack had the strange feeling that some kind of sleight-of-hand had just occurred, but at the same time, she didn’t feel any ill intent coming off of the General… more a sense that he had just done something to protect someone else. Maybe it was, as she’d pondered earlier, someone who would be harmed by the scrutiny that even drawing the two mercs’ interest could generate. One of the other folders, she realized, was the one that contained the surveillance pictures of her and Kyra.

He already knows who we are, and he’s risking a shit-ton to hide us from his own bosses…

Whatever else he was hiding, whoever else he might be protecting, she’d let it slide. It probably wasn’t any of her business.

“There is,” he said slowly, pocketing the chip again, “one more thing I need to discuss with you while we’re here. If you and Kyra haven’t already begun to plan your exit strategy off this world, now is the time to do so.”

“Why?” Jack already had her exit in place, but his words sent a chill through her anyway.

“Because it’s only a matter of time before a formal investigation of the repeated calamities at the spaceport is initiated by the Federacy,” he told her. “Such investigations always include at least two esper Operatives. One of the things they will be looking for…”

He locked eyes with her, and she could feel him willing her to understand how serious the matter was.

“…is evidence of someone like you.”