The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage (9 page)

Marc had no idea. There had to be a reason, though. Something to do with the business between the Charters family and Tyndale Labs, maybe. That whole ugly mess last year. There had to be a reason.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “I’m sure you’ll be able to ask them.”

Schwippe laughed. “Oh, sure, what, during the weekly Sovereign poker game?”

Marc didn’t laugh. He imagined strategy sessions—had the vague idea of a war room, like in that movie with the Pink Panther guy and Slim Pickens. The image gave him a bad feeling.

Schwippe said, “What if your kid…Byron, right? What if he just…wants to be there?”

“He wouldn’t.” Marc’s voice was flat. “There’s nothing there for him. He’s a prisoner—don’t you get that?” He kept his jaw tight to avoid yelling. “Your…you freaks…are holding my kid a prisoner. That’s the kind of p—" He stopped himself. “The kind of trash you’re running to. Get it?”

“Boy,” Schwippe said with a small smile, “you have no idea of the kind of trash I’m running
from
. Seriously.”

Marc fell back against his seat. Fucking freak.

Schwippe didn’t say anything for a few blessed minutes. Marc ground his teeth and tried to get his ears to pop. He wondered how much farther it was. How much longer he’d have to endure Eddie Schwippe’s company.

“But…” Schwippe said.

“Fuck. Give me a break, would you?”

“But…seriously, even if he’s not a Sovereign—what will you do if he says he wants to stay there? What if he’s not a prisoner, after all? What if it’s something else?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know! Sake of argument.”

Marc shook his head. “He’s a minor. He’s my kid. He does what I say. If—and I mean it’s a big fucking if—he’s just sitting up there…laughing at me and his mother…” Marc couldn’t deny the thought had crossed his mind. The kid might think he had plenty of reasons to get back at his dad. Marc would have thought the same at his age.

He shook his head again.

“No difference. He comes home with me. He doesn’t get to do what he wants until he hits eighteen years old and gets a job.”

Schwippe’s eyes went wide. He stared at Marc and covered his mouth with a spidery hand. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he did his best to stifle a laugh.

“Oh, right,” he finally said. “Eighteen. Totally.” A single laugh burst out. “That’s when us big kids get to do whatever we want. You bet.”

Schwippe calmed down. He shifted in his seat, stretching his left leg into the aisle before slowly, apparently painfully, bending the hinged stick back in place.

“Hit eighteen, the world’s your oyster!”

He whistled another sigh, gave Marc one more crooked-head, glassy-eyed glance, and didn’t say another word the rest of the trip.

Marc had no idea why that bothered him more than anything Schwippe had said or done so far.

Marc Teslowski – Four

Marc didn’t have any baggage other than the carry-on duffel bag hanging from his shoulder, but he couldn’t help stopping near baggage claim to gape at the display of a stuffed mountain lion chomping on the neck of a billy goat.

The exhibit made him grin until his cheeks hurt. He was not in Orange County any more. He was in Missoula, Montana, unlikely as it seemed the closest city to the Donner Institute for Sovereign Studies.

Tomorrow morning, he would be at the gates. By tomorrow night, he would be back on a plane for home, and instead of a chatty, sarcastic Sovereign freak in the next seat, it would be Byron, his son.

Marc tore his eyes off the garish taxidermy display and turned toward the car-rental stations. On his way, he caught sight of Eddie Schwippe, the sarcastic Sovereign freak himself.

Hard to miss. The Sovereign towered over everyone else, even if there were teenaged girls in the terminal who probably outweighed him.

Schwippe was talking with three redneck-lumberjack types. Other Sovereign come to meet him, right out in the open? Marc’s lip curled, but as he watched, he realized his initial assumption wasn’t quite right.

He was too far away to really make out what was being said, but it was clear the three guys around Schwippe weren’t very friendly, despite their smiling faces. Marc had used that same sneer himself to throw people off balance. It was almost a reflex.

They crowded around him, gradually herding him toward the door. Schwippe seemed resistant to the idea, but he was going, all the same.

One of the rednecks put a hand around Schwippe’s pipe-cleaner bicep. Marc could see a splash of red and blue on the back of the redneck’s hand. Jesus, a tattoo there would hurt like hell.

The whole thing seemed weird. But Schwippe was a Sovereign, so Marc figured he could take care of himself. In fact, the idea Schwippe might cut loose made him a little nervous. What if the freak caused an earthquake, or started shooting lightning bolts out of those black-marble eyes?

Marc didn’t want to be around for that. He started for the car-rental counter and hoped it wouldn’t take long to put some real distance between him and Schwippe.

Last he saw of Eddie Schwippe were those wide alien black eyes aimed in his direction as the freak left with his pushy friends. Marc wasn’t sure if the Sovereign was looking at him or not.

Andrew Charters – One

Reality, as perceived by Andrew Charters, was more than the discriminate input of five senses. For Andrew, the universe was a torrent of metasensory, aggregate sensation that pelted him, from all sides, at all times.

The dry soil delivered granular data through the soles of his filthy, calloused bare feet. He knew, in quantifiable terms he could not elucidate, how long ago the dew had burned off that day. He knew, from his impression of the relative warmth of the earth, how soon the ants would wake up from their winter torpor. If anything down to the mass of a rabbit moved anywhere within a fifty-foot radius of his crouched position on the ridge, he would feel the vibration like a superhuman version of the proverbial Indian with his ear on railroad tracks predicting the arrival of a train.

The slightest breeze carried libraries of information to Andrew’s olfactory bulbs. Turning a slow circle, he could pinpoint the locations of edible plants, animals alive and dead, and their droppings with an accuracy that depended on intensity and distance but far surpassed the inherent sensitivity of any other living thing on the planet.

Andrew’s hearing was equally discerning. If the rabbit fifty feet away happened to scratch itself, Andrew would, if he concentrated, be able to count the strokes of its leg.

His eyes soaked up photons with such vociferous appetite, he could successfully navigate a china shop crowded with playing-card houses, with the shades down, on a moonless night, if called upon to do so. In full daylight, his visual acuity was, like his sense of smell, without parallel among life on earth.

His sense of taste, tied closely to his sense of smell, was delicate enough that he could distinguish ingredients very nearly by their constituent long-chain molecules.

Working together, Andrew’s sensorium plowed unending information into a brain that had failed to successfully adapt to the augmented, collective assault of sight, hearing, scent, smell, and touch.

The overload had driven him crazy long ago.

It was so much worse where people were, with their cars and televisions and phone calls and music and perfumes and talking and sweat and pheromones and smelly emotion. So Andrew preferred to spend as much time as possible in the wilderness, where the sensorium was not necessarily less intense, but the individual data, at least, were smaller and more…natural.

Surrounded by dirt and trees and lizards and bugs and birds and furry things, he didn’t have to put himself through the painful effort of making room for thoughts, for words. He could just…be.

The problem with this was, despite the extreme modifications and augmentations Project: Rancher had inflicted on his physiology, Andrew Charters had begun life as a human being and he was still a human being in several ways that mattered very much. Self-imposed solitude was all well and good until loneliness grew and ached and gnawed through him like a twisting feedback loop.

That kept him from retreating too far into the wild places, literally and psychologically. He lived on the periphery, wandering all over the western United States, but most often staying no more than a day’s loping walk from Kirby Lake in the San Bernardino mountains.

He’d been skulking around the mountain town last year, toying with the idea of breaking into his mother’s vacation cabin and enduring the deliciously melancholy impressions of history to be found there, when his uneasy balance of exile and need was thrown all to hell by the appearance of his son.

He knew it was the boy before he’d actually seen him. The scent was too much like his own—but cleaner, newer, and yes, inhuman…but not
so
inhuman.

The kid didn’t seem to have as much trouble with his gifts as his father. Andrew stayed upwind, and when he’d caught sight of Nathan’s face in the pale light of the cabin porch light, he understood. The scientist he had once been extrapolated on what he saw:

Andrew’s own augmentation was forever in conflict with his human origins. The changes had been forced upon his genetic structure by the Augmentation Regimen.

Conversely, those chimeric genes went into what made Nathan Charters from the moment of conception. Nate’s face showed that: unusually large eyes set in appropriately large sockets, with the bone structure to support it. A barrel chest to accommodate vigorously pumping lungs and heart, which were required to drive a metabolism designed to fuel the extra dense muscles of the boy’s body…and the extra neural connections in the boy’s brain handling the input of his senses.

Trembling with fascination and yearning and regret, Andrew had watched his odd, tentatively graceful teenaged son that night and realized, correctly, that the boy would not equal the father’s remarkable abilities, being entirely half-human.

Nathan would be at least half again better at living with the abilities he had, though. With luck, the kid would never be more than a little crazy.

Andrew found it hard to stay away after that April day nearly a year ago. It was a good thing, too—Nathan wasn’t crazy enough to deal with the augmented thugs Lester Brenhurst had sicced on him. Andrew was, though.

He grinned, his snarled beard pulling back to reveal strong yellow teeth, and remembered how it felt to have the hot guts of one of Lester’s agents slap against him. That was a good day.

But Andrew knew it was not so good for his son, or for Nathan’s mother. The complications presented by his very existence helped Andrew decide the best thing he could do was disappear again.

Over the last eleven months, though, it had become difficult for Andrew to deny that running mostly only made things easier for him.

Andrew saw newspapers in people’s trash. He watched television, when he could bear it, through people’s windows. He knew Nate and Lucille were going through a rough time.

Andrew Charters – Two

A delicious scent, tangy and warm, pulled him out of his reverie. Unconsciously, his whole body tensed. Crouched on the ridge, he balanced on the balls of his feet and the fingertips of his left hand. He right hand automatically curled into claws tipped with half inch long, filthy fingernails.

Just down the ridge, maybe forty feet away, a field mouse made its way through the chaparral in halting, jerking bursts. Andrew couldn’t see it—yet—but between a headwind and the remarkable sensitivity of his ears, he could plot its position from point to point as it moved.

It would make a fine little snack.

Andrew let himself be whittled down to the input of his sensorium. It was easier to hunt—easier to live—when he subsumed thought and memory and feeling and let his body be guided by hunger and sport.

He inched down the ridge. The breeze was still in his favor. He visualized the vector of the field mouse as if lines were traced on the ground ahead of him.

A flutter, above.

Andrew unlocked his eyes from the triangulated location of his prey and glanced up. A hawk circled.

Andrew bit back the urge to growl behind his spreading smile. Did the hawk think it could dive and reach the mouse before Andrew would?

For that matter, did the hawk suspect that if it tried, it would be in danger itself?

Thought pushed for bandwidth in Andrew’s mind as choices presented themselves and, consequently, delayed him. The bird would be more meat…but feathers were more of a hassle than fur.

The field mouse had frozen.

The hawk circled. Andrew knew he was being watched, that the bird was running its own kind of instinct-driven assessment.

That was the thing, though, wasn’t it? Andrew didn’t have to run on instinct. His choices were colored by, and benefited from, something else.

It wasn’t that his choices weren’t simply black and white, on-off, instinct-driven impulses. He had more than instinct ticking away inside his skull. That was what made things so…hard.

The revelation literally knocked him on his ass.

The hawk dropped like a spear, cried out, and snatched the field mouse in its talons. Flapping powerfully, it ascended again and made for a nearby treetop, where it could enjoy its morsel well away from the foul-smelling predator.

Andrew sat in the dirt and laughed, a hoarse croaking from his underused vocal chords.

“You can have it, birdie,” he chortled.

He watched the bird tear into the field mouse with quick strokes of its beak. It seemed to be enjoying itself…but really, it was just a machine.

“Not me,” Andrew husked to himself. “Don’t have to be.”

He could decide to be something other than what he was made to be, if he wanted to be. If there was
reason
to be.

Hazy memories coalesced in his mind. A fight—no, an argument—between him and Lester, a long, long time ago. Someplace bright, but there was a dark place there, too. With frightened people inside.

Andrew made a choice, back then. An important choice. A life-and-death choice. He couldn’t pin down exactly what it was, but he was sure he’d made a decision Lester hadn’t liked. He made a choice that kept the frightened people safe.