Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) (48 page)

A number of AG-60s had made their way into private hands before the takeover, but without the right modifications a registered military shuttle would get flagged the first time it hit a major port.

Coop was hard at work on the cosmetic side—painting over the stripped official markings. Gram had his hands, and Kate's hacking rig, in the real work—reprogramming the nav system with the bogus history Kate had pulled together for its freshly forged transponder. The heaviest piece of work would come later when Kate would have to hack into the listed ports to plant corresponding records. That part would take a deft touch, not to mention time, but as long as they kept the shuttle hidden in the meantime, they'd be in the clear.

Kate took her time walking toward the shuttle. Gram had his back to her, and Coop was preoccupied with his painting. Neither of them noticed her for a minute. She used the time to push aside the sound of Coop's sprayer, the light tap of Gram's fingers on the keys, the hum and putter of the compressor.

Coop finally spotted her and lifted his mask to the top of his head. "Well, well, well. Look who's finally up. Morning, sunshine."

Gram looked over and gave her a wink and nod. "Good morning," he rattled. Then he glared at Coop. "That thing's not going to paint itself."

"Don't mind him, darlin'," Coop said with a grin. "He's just being his usual dark self. Not bright and sunny like me, if you get me." He gave her a wink of his own.

"Shut it. Spray," Gram snapped. "Leave Kate to her business."

They knew why she was here, and they were handling it just like she'd anticipated—Gram with coarse affection, Coop with well-intentioned bumbling. She considered starting with Gram since his mind promised to be easier to understand. The idea of delving into Coop's thoughts made her shudder, but that's exactly why she decided to tackle him first. She loved a good challenge.

Both
, Max said.

Kate blinked. No matter how many times it happened, she wasn't getting used to his voice sounding in her head like he was standing right next to her.

Listen to both of them,
Max answered her unvoiced question,
at the same time.

"Right," she whispered to herself. Good thing she loved a challenge.

Kate started from the top. She opened herself up to everything, then started shifting her focus, eliminating the sounds one at a time. She had more to work with this time, but only because the hangar was a trove of mechanical white noise. It took far longer to work through everything she could hear, and when she did—she was left with nothing. Again.

She heard voices, but only the same two she'd picked up from Max in the galley.
 

She took a breath and relaxed her focus, letting Max's music rush back in.
 

If everybody could do it, it wouldn't be worth doing,
she told herself.
Reboot, Kate. Start again.

You're done,
Max said.
Come to the command center.
He'd been around his sister too long. He was picking up Ace's command tone.

I can do this,
Kate argued.
I just need more—

Green and yellow. Come to the command center.

Kate turned and strode from the hangar without a word to Gram or Coop.
 

Failed attempts weren't frustrating. They were a necessary part of the trial and error process. Sometimes the only way to find the right answer was to eliminate the wrong ones. She could stand the micro disappointments inherent in that process. What she couldn't stand was somebody blurting out the answer to a puzzle before she could solve it.

Kate was not a violent person. She believed any conflict she couldn't solve with reason, logic, or simple kindness was probably a lost cause. That didn't stop her from imagining giving Max a thumping for sabotaging her test, a fantasy she entertained most of the way to the command center.
 

She stopped outside the door and took a second to calm herself. Max was just trying to help, in his special way. She couldn't fault him for his methods, not when they'd been so effective so far.

Max wasn't alone in the command center. Ace was sitting across the tac table from him when Kate walked in. They were engrossed in a game of chess that had been going on for a while. Not only had Max been monitoring her thoughts, playing music in his mind, and plotting out movie scenes—he'd also been giving Ace a run for her money in what looked to be a stalemate match.

Kate walked up the steps, her gaze drifting up to the display screens beyond the dueling Achterbergs. Ace had the internal camera feeds segmented across the three wide screens. The now-empty galley, Coop and Gram in the hangar, the empty gym, Gideon alone in his dim room working at his archaic desk.

"You haven't lost your touch, kid," Ace said, leaning back and stretching her long arms over her head. "I was hoping celebrity life had made you lose a step or two."

Max looked at his sister like she was speaking nonsense. He was good at that look.

"How did it go?" Ace asked Kate.
 

Kate shook her head, glancing up at the displays where Ace must have tracked her failure from one screen to the next.

"Perfectly," Max said.
 

Kate looked at him, expecting to see sarcasm or disappointment. His face, like his voice, held nothing but sincerity.

"I didn't get a single color," Kate said.

"No. You wouldn't," Max replied like he was telling her grass was green. "Not from them. They're not like us."

"Then why make me—never mind." She stopped for another calming breath halfway through. She'd gotten to know Max well enough to know questioning him was futile. What was done was done.
 

"What do you mean, 'not like us'?" she asked.

He cocked his head, but his eyes said she was the confused one.

"You mean genesis."

He nodded distractedly, his eyes drifting off over her shoulder as his mind went somewhere else. Part of him was still right there with her, she knew, but he was also paying attention to Ace, to the story he was writing, to any number of other thoughts. Max knew how to hone his focus like he'd been teaching, but unlike Kate, he didn't need to.

It's your conduit
, he said in her mind, his eyes drifting back to hers.
Now we know
. "What's the last color?" he asked aloud.

He knew how disorienting that was for her, his switching back and forth, which is why he persisted. Getting used to her different channels was part of her training, the part with which she continued to struggle.

"Camera twelve," he said.

Ace rolled her chair sideways so she could reach the controls and dropped every security feed but one, filling the central display with the image of Gideon's room.

Kate's heart skipped a beat in its haste to speed up. She'd avoided reaching out to Gideon's thoughts so far, for one simple reason—fear. She was afraid of what she'd find in the mind of the man. Afraid of what she'd find in the mind of the creature underneath. She'd touched those thoughts before.

The night Nikki locked herself in the vault had been the worst. When the creature had first come to the surface, it was all rage and hatred, a boiling tempest of fury. Its screams had been so loud they'd pushed everything else from her mind, even Michael's voice, the one thing Kate had wanted to hold onto, even though at the time she'd believed it was stealing her sanity. The creature had calmed after a minute, but the cold, emotionless menace that replaced the fury was somehow just as terrifying.
 

The thought of reaching out to Gideon, the thought of even the briefest contact with the mind of the creature, made Kate's blood run cold.

"Are you sure I can hear him?" she asked, when what she really meant was,
How can I make myself go there again?
She knew hiding her fear from Max was pointless, however.

"You can," he answered both questions.
You've been in his thoughts all day
.

She almost argued, but she knew doing so was pointless. Max didn't say things that weren't true. The truths he saw weren't always obvious to anyone else, but that didn't make them any less true. If he said she'd been hearing Gideon, she had.

"Do it now," Max said. "I won't distract you this time."

Kate ignored her racing heart and opened herself up to the sounds around her. Eliminating the externals was quick work this time. There wasn't much to hear in the command center. She knew the hum and click of the servers so well she automatically pushed it aside, and Max and Ace stayed still and silent.
 

The internal sounds were even easier to sift through. As promised, Max stopped the music assault and cut the younger voice from his story, leaving just the one voice, the low drone running through formulas.

Gideon. She should have known from the start.
 

Kate lifted her gaze to the display and focused all her attention on Gideon's voice.

I hear what I want to hear.

Gideon's voice filled her mind as the rest of the world fell away. On the screen he was motionless, staring at three tablets arrayed in front of him on his old wooden desk. In her mind, he was working quickly but methodically through a set of formulas that were beyond her comprehension. She recognized enough to know he was doing something with energy transfer, but that's all she could interpret. One thing she did know for certain was there was no hint of color in his surface thoughts. Not that she could understand.

Dig deeper
, Max said.

Digging into Gideon's mind was at the top Kate's don't-ever-do list, as Max had to know. He had to know why as well. He could hear everything going on in her head, in the heads of everyone near him, in fact. He had to know about the creature buried inside Gideon. He had to know the consequences of unleashing that monster, yet he was telling her to dig. She'd trusted Max so far, and he'd done nothing but make her stronger. She had to trust him now.

She carefully shifted her focus from Gideon's voice to the negative space around it. Not to the silence, but to the areas where she felt sound should be. The distinction was subtle, but she'd encountered similar pockets of nothingness in her exercises with Max, areas of emptiness so solid they felt almost like…walls.
 

Gideon was shielding his thoughts from her, concealing all but his most immediate thoughts, and those were consumed with the complex calculations he was performing.

Now what?
 

Kate shifted her focus to Max, letting her sense of Gideon slip to the background.
 

How do I hear what he doesn't want me to hear?
she thought. She glanced over and saw him nodding his head and getting as close to a smile as he ever came. He didn't raise his eyes from the chess board though.
 

He'd explained how she might broadcast to only one person when she could hear more than one, but she hadn't tried it until now. Apparently she'd done it right. Surprising, considering she hadn't given it much thought. She'd just done what he'd described. Max was a good teacher.

How do you think?

Kate frowned at the top of Max's head. If only he didn't pick and choose when to teach and when to be cryptic.

He looked up.
How do
you
think?
he repeated, the emphasis clear this time.

Oh. He wasn't being a jerk. He was telling her to put herself in Gideon's place. What made her think about something she wanted to bury? What brought her thoughts back to something she wanted out of her head?
 

Good question.

How was she supposed to know what started a train of thought or made it take a certain turn? Dumb luck? Random synaptic flare? If she'd learned one thing over the past few months it was how unpredictable the human brain could be. Unless her inner voice asked a specific question—

Yes.

Yes?
she parroted back to Max.
Yes what? You mean his inner voice is the answer?

Be it,
he said.

Be…Gideon's inner voice?
 

Max didn't answer. He rarely repeated himself. She looked over to see him watching Ace, his almost smile courting one side of his mouth as he contemplated his sister contemplating her next move.

Be Gideon's inner voice. It made sense, logically, but how was she supposed to make him think her voice was his own? Wouldn't he know the difference? Especially since he was expecting her to make an attack. He'd be on his guard. Fooling him wasn't going to be easy.

But that's what made it worth doing. Easy was boring. This was a challenge, and Kate loved a challenge.
 

She shifted her focus back to Gideon, and listened. Gideon's inner voice, much like his outer one, was soft and even, its subtle cadence hard to measure, so Kate took her time. She listened, she measured, she recorded, she waited. She buried herself in Gideon's voice until it was all she could hear.

When he finished his calculations, Gideon fell silent and stared at the result.
 

The degradation should be greater,
he thought.
Every time I run the numbers, the result is the same. She is telling the truth
. He didn't put to words how he felt about his conclusion, but Kate could read the relief in the slope of his shoulders.

She inhaled slowly and imagined his low voice saying,
Do it again
.

On the screen, Gideon straightened his shoulders and lifted his head slightly.
 

Kate held her breath.
 

Be certain. Do it again
, she repeated softly.

On the screen, Gideon wiped the center tablet. In his head, the calculations started to flow again.

Kate let her breath out in a whoosh, but she kept her focus razor sharp on Gideon's thoughts. Part of her wanted to dance, but what felt like her first success could just as easily have been coincidence. As far as she knew, Gideon had planned to start over anyway. He was the embodiment of caution after all.