Absolute Power (Book 1): Origins (12 page)

“This is taking too long,” Alison said.  “Do you know how to read the language?”

“No,” Jess answered.  “Fugen does all the translating.”

“Then he can find the girl?”  Alison asked.

To answer her question, Fugen dropped to the ground and transformed.  He stood on four legs with the face of a lion and the body of a bear.  Fugen barked then sniffed the air.  He barked again as he trotted down the hall.  The guard and the nurse had watched the whole thing but were too shocked to do anything other than stare.  Sniffing the doorways and corners Fugen led them to a door with a small window.  Alison had been following close and was the first to look inside.  She immediately grabbed the handle and shoved at the door.

“We need the key,” Alison said desperately and looked around.

“Alison,” Jess said.  She peeked quickly into the window.  “Alison, what's going on?  Talk to me.  I know you were a Lost One, right?  Did they do this to you too?”  Alison couldn't hear her.  “Fugen, open the door,” she said to her familiar.

Again, Fugen transformed.  This time he became a massive beast, bigger than a bear and ten times stronger.  Without straining himself, Fugen dug his claws into the steel door and tore it out of the wall.  Alison charged inside, grabbing the girl.  She was small and curled up on a cot.  Her black hair was knotted, and pieces had been ripped out.  Alison held her as she stared blankly into space, a sliver of drool dripped down her cheek.

“That's a lot of Thorazine,” Jess said from the doorway.  She found the hospital chart hanging on a nail and read her name.  “Shruti Pandey.”

Alison's eyes glowed with anger.  “Juvenile detention,” she said.  “I robbed a bank to show my mom that I was different.  I just wanted her to see me for a second.  I know it was a mistake, but I was a kid and...  Four years.  Four years till The One found me.  The kids beat me up because they knew I was different.  The adults still didn't notice, even when I escaped.”

“That's how you got flagged by SHT?” Jess prompted.

“Yeah,” Alison went on, “I was with this girl.  It was her idea to run, but when we got caught she blamed it all on me.  Called me a freak. One of the hundreds of keywords SHT scans for.  I used to pity the Norms.  Now I'm beginning to hate them.  I don’t want to be like the others in SHT.  I don’t think I can do this, Jess.”

“I hear that,” Jess agreed.  “Put in for a transfer.  It's easy; I’ve done it a bunch of times.”

“It won't look good on my record,” Alison said.  “I already messed up once to get posted out here.  Not even two days and I want to leave.”

“Do you want to be a General or something?” Jess asked.  Alison shook her head.  “A Colonel?”  Alison shook her head again.  “Then why do you care about your career?  All I'm looking for is a comfortable place in The One where I can spend the rest of my life.  I'll keep hopping from department to department until I'm happy.  It's not my job to please The One, and they know it.  The One is here for us, to keep us safe and make us happy.  Do whatever you want, they won’t stop you.”

“You think they'll let me take her with me back to America?”  Alison rocked Shruti in her arms.

“It's worth a try,” Jess replied.

Inside the Administration building at the Colorado Complex, Porter shifted around in his desk chair.  The room smelled like dust and the leather on his chair squeaked.  He had been given the office seventeen years ago when he'd made Colonel.  Since then he could count on his hand the number of times that he used the room.  They hadn't even bothered to upgrade his computer because he was never there.  The huge CRT monitor was covered in dust, and the once white keyboard was tan.  Porter sat in here now to read a report that he didn't want to be seen reading.

“You're Pawn put in for a transfer,” Phillip Green said suddenly.  He appeared in the corner smiling devilishly.

Porter wasn’t startled, but turned to him annoyed, “I'm going to start pulling a pistol and shooting every time you do that.”

Phillip laughed.  “Private Cortez wants to come home already,” he said.

“I know,” Porter replied trying to read the report.

“You put a lot of faith in an eighteen-year-old,” Philip commented.

“It was a gamble.  OSO thinks she has a secondary precognitive ability,” Porter informed him.  “Cortez has a tendency to find chronological focal points; links to significant turns of events.  I wish I would have caught her when she first came in.  She has a lot of potential.”

“Are you saying this was fate?  Maybe you both need a shrink?” Philip was rummaging through a filing cabinet.  “Word from the top is they're putting her in for a psych-eval.  Seems she’s not towing the company line and then there’s that Indian girl she refused to let go of.”

“Works for me,” Porter said offhandedly.  “If I act now, it’ll draw attention.  The evals and red tape will keep her on base and off duty. Afterwards, I can quietly put Cortez where I want.”

“My Rook is about to graduate,” Phillip said.  “He asked me again about getting into OSO.”

This time Porter looked up from the report he was reading.  “I hope you're not about to ask me to put a word in for him,” Porter said.  “I like the kid enough, but you've screwed him up.”

“Admin is gonna stick him in R and R because that makes the most sense,” Phillip explained.  “I've been trying to get someone into OSO.”

Porter sighed knowingly.  “I'm waiting for the part where you ask for your favor, Flip,” he grumbled.

“If you’re right about that secondary skill, this girl Private Cortez has with her could be important,” Phillip said. “I have it on good authority that she's a hell of a telepath.  She’s six years old, and the only people from The One she's dealt with are the two girls who found her.  I can fiddle with the paperwork and get her transferred to you immediately.  Your name won’t even come up.  And if I can work it, you can get Private Cortez too.”

“And you want what?” Porter asked.

“The Board wants inside OSO,” Phillip said seriously.  “The Rook is our only option.  If you can’t do anything overt, then I need him placed so the right eyes can notice him.  He'll do the rest.”

“You think everyone in Special Operations are chums?”  Porter scoffed.  “Getting him moved to OSO alone…  And I already said I wasn't taking him on.”  He tapped his fingers on the desk as he thought.  Porter groaned and said, “OSO has an Ultra-secret test regarding the extreme range of Super-Human abilities.  It's disturbing stuff, but it's essentially a proving ground for shadow operatives.  Lately, they're having a problem keeping their test subjects alive.  The kid might have an advantage there.”

“Sounds like a foot in the door,” Phillip said somberly.  He sighed and said, “Sometimes I don't know who the villains are in this play.”

The last two years in SHT hadn't done much for Jess's happiness.  She had seen a number of partners come and go.  Some of them were like Alison, who had too much heart for the work.  Others became obsessed with finding The Lost Ones, much like Jess now.  Every day she saw the atrocities of human nature, but she was compelled to help her fellow Super-Humans.  She was ruled by the fear of missing one of these lost souls.  It wasn't a splendid way to live.  Nevertheless, she kept her ear to the ground following rumor after rumor.

Recently Jess had been working on her own.  SHT protocol was for her to have a companion, but it was too hard to get used to a person and then have them leave; whether it was due to depression or ambition.  Her new attitude had gotten her reprimanded, threatened and even once called a Free Flight by superior officers.  Jess would disappear on jaunts and wind up places she wasn't assigned.  She did her best to stay in the same sector, Japan, Korea, but mainly in China.

The country was vast and overpopulated, making it the perfect breeding ground for The Lost Ones.  The latest rumor had come from some dock workers.

They were talking about a ghost ship or perhaps it was a ship that had a ghost. Fugen had trouble deciphering between all the dialects.  She found herself at a sailor's bar talking to a drunken man that kept trying to buy her a drink.  His face was red from the alcohol, but it was almost hidden behind his weathered skin.

“...went to piss in the middle of the night,” the drunken man told his story.  “And I was out on the deck.  I don't know why I was there, maybe it was the spirits calling my name.”  He took a long sip of beer.  “I think that it was my time to die that night.  The waves were rough, and one of them came at me from port side.  The shrimp cages broke free, falling over me.  Then something hit me, knocking me out of the way.”  He drank some more and struggled to keep his head up.  “I swear to you...  I swear no one else was on the deck, and it wasn't the waves.  There's a ghost on that boat.  A guardian swooped down and saved my life.”

Fugen was in the shape of a monkey-like creature.  He had been picking at a bowl of peanuts when the drunken man finished his story.  His cackling laugh startled the sailor who took a swing at him.  Fugen easily ducked.

“Where's your boat now?”  Jess asked.

“Dry dock,” the man answered.  “That ghost, it warned us about that too.  It's the soul of all those sailors who got it out there in the ocean.  They came back to protect us.”

The sailor fell off his chair, and Jess decided that was all she was going to get out of him.  From the bar, they could reach the port by foot in a couple of minutes.  Fugen hopped onto Jess's back, and they left.  The shore front reeked from the summer heat.  Rats skittered into alleyways feasting on discarded fish.

Finding the man's boat was easy.  Dry dock only had room for two ships.  One was a coastguard cutter that was being repainted.  The other was a shrimping boat with a small hole in its side.  It was late, and the only other people on the dock were too busy to pay Jess any attention.  She made her way up a flight of stairs and onto an elevated platform.  From there, she crossed a gangway to the boat.  No one was on board, so she searched without interference.

The boat had three different levels, the wheelhouse, the living quarters and the engine room.  Jess started with the wheel house and climbed up the narrow stairs.  A lot of the crew's personal possessions had been cleared out.  Odds and ends were scattered about; charts, books and some trash.  She poked around a little, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. When she went down to the crew quarters, it was pretty much the same story.  It was messy, but nothing to indicate ghostly or Super-Human activity.  It was possible that one of the crew was a Free Flight.  Maybe he had saved his crew mate and used the ghost story to hide the truth.  On the engineering level, she paused to find a light switch.  The huge machines and dark corners gave her the creeps.

Fugen agreed with the feeling.

“Let's split up so we can get out of here faster,” Jess suggested.

Fugen grabbed onto the overhead pipes and swung through the compartments.  Jess went in the opposite direction.  The creaking and expanding metal around her added to the feeling that she wasn't alone.  As she searched, she thought she heard a door shut in the distance.  Jess hoped it was only Fugen.  Along the side of the boat, she found a small storage room.  It was hardly wide enough for a person.  Jess had to shimmy sideways and push through the shelves of junk.  There was old fishing gear, some emergency supplies and cardboard boxes.  At the back of the room, a bunch of wool blankets had been piled on the ground.  The shelves back here had been cleared out and organized.  A number of cans and bottles of water were stacked up.  It was obvious someone had been living here; a stowaway.  Jess searched the room some more and found a small hatch in the wall.  She pulled it open and heard something.  For a good minute, she crouched there listening for the sound to come again.  Her instincts told her it was a person, more likely a child; based on the size of the hatchway.

“Hello,” she said.  There was no reply, so she said, “My name is Jess.  I'm not going to hurt you or anything.  I heard this story about a ghost and decided to see for myself.”  Still nothing.  “Well, okay, I'll be out here.”  She resolved that she was going to wait things out.  There was plenty of food on the shelves.  Hopefully, whoever was in there would get hungry soon.  Or she could send in Fugen.

One hour turned into two.  Then two hours into four.  Jess had Fugen keep watch while she slept.  He woke her in the morning.  Whoever was in the hole started to shift around.

“I have to pee,” a boy's voice said.

“Well then come out and go to the bathroom,” Jess said with an annoyed tone.

“You're with The One, right?”  The boy questioned.

It occurred to Jess that the voice was speaking English with a British accent.  She answered, “Yes.  I'm with Super-Human Tracking.  We go around looking for people like you.”

“My father sent you, huh?”  The boy asked.

That took Jess by surprise.  “No.  Who is your father?”

“Lieutenant Joseph Brown,” the boy replied.  “He was stationed at the French headquarters.  If my father didn't send you, then who did?”

“No one did,” Jess replied.  “I'm kind of rogue.  I'm supposed to report in and follow leads that my CO hands me, but I like working on my own.”  Jess chuckled.  “I think I'm actually still officially stationed in India.”