“Your request is approved, Wixcombe. We’ll be making a stop at Code Gauntlet in two days’ time. You can depart there. I can give you three weeks, then I want you back aboard the Stiletto. Work out the details with the XO. In the meantime, I want you to carry on as I’ve instructed. Debrief the civilian about to disembark from”—she paused as something suddenly blocked the view out of the docking port with a heavy, metallic clunk—“that shuttle. I’ll find someone else to run the case. You can hand off to them once I do.”
“Understood. Thank you, ma’am.” Relief colored her tone, a genuine sensation she hadn’t felt in a long time.
Densmore didn’t leave immediately; instead, she waited for the pressure light to turn green on the airlock, the doors to slide open, and an unremarkable man in unremarkable clothes to step out of the shuttle. As soon as he did, Densmore spoke, a single word.
“Well?”
The civilian shook his head, and Densmore withdrew, leaving Kira with the bland man who gave her a wan smile.
“Smith, or is it something else?” Kira asked him.
“Smith will do fine.” He grinned, the expression not reaching his eyes.
Kira looked skyward, exhaled, then fixed him with a look of tired resignation. “But of course.”
Mister Smith, it turned out, was a civilian contractor who’d been verifying the installation and proper operation of certain new security features in ON information processing systems, under a project codenamed Hermes. Debriefing him took all of ten minutes, since there was very little he was willing to share with Kira beyond the project’s name and the fact that he’d visited four bases in swift succession. He mentioned the food at Code Gauntlet, the beds everywhere else, and a general poor quality of coffee at all four locations. Beyond that, he was an enigma, a hole into which her focus could get lost the moment he started speaking in his sonorous tone.
It didn’t matter to Kira. She simply took down everything he said verbatim and asked a few standard follow-up questions, then she thanked him and let him be on his way. She’d been doing this long enough now to know that his statements no doubt contained hidden messages, included as particular phrases or combinations of words. By dutifully recording his statements exactly as he spoke them, she was capturing both the frankly boring overview of his recent work, as well as the coded messages, which would presumably mean something, to someone, somewhere.
The messages were, no doubt, tied to Densmore’s single word question—well?—and the negative head shake. Beyond that connection, Kira knew her involvement ended when she closed the report and sent it on, to be lost in the mire of endless information fetishized by the navy.
She would, of course, never hear any feedback, and that was fine with her. Flirting with the idea of a mind probe ended when she carried such an action to its logical conclusion. Of all the outcomes, none were good. There was even a small chance this was a test, but if that was true, it only served to reinforce something Kira had come to know over the past three years.
Kira hated the spy business.
She finally returned to her quarters, hoping that Mister Smith didn’t need any further handling for the next couple of days. Subjects, as those like him were called, rarely did. Not for the first time, Kira wondered why they bothered with human debriefers like her at all. Why couldn’t Mister Smith have just recorded his statements? What point was there having her sit there and write them down? Again, there was probably a reason—but no one had yet shared it with her.
Need to know sucks.
Kira stretched her legs out as far as the cramped cubbyhole of her quarters would allow and let out a long, slow sigh. She assumed the spooks knew what they were doing, but to a frontliner like her, it just seemed like a lot of convoluted bullshit, all intended to keep as many people as ignorant as possible of the facts. Being siloed was a necessary thing, but it made her job into a series of half-secrets and lies that built up inside her like the sludge in a fuel tank.
No doubt about the spy business. It was hateful. Leave would do her good.
Kira lay down on her bunk, clearing her mind of spooks and lies and the web they wove. At the center of her thoughts was a fixed point.
Thorn.
One of the benefits of being an accomplished Joiner, it turned out, was potent mental discipline; it was what made Joining work. Kira could organize and compartmentalize her thoughts pretty much as she wished—right up to the moment she couldn’t, and it all came crashing down around her. Joiners would bend until they broke. For now, Kira was bending.
She needed a clear mind, though, so she ruthlessly pushed away anything that wasn’t just blank, empty thoughts. Her breathing slowed as she found the mental place she called her center, the point around which the lever of her Joining rotated. She envisioned it as the point in her mind where all of her conflicting thoughts and feelings effectively cancelled out, equidistant and neutral. In that place, Kira centered her thoughts, and feelings, and the braiding of the two in that place where Joining moved from possible to real. Kira slowed her breathing, and felt her heart rate slow in tandem.
Clear the slate, Kira. And she did.
She was ready. Kira made her awareness expand outward from her fulcrum, radiating through time and space like a pulse of radio energy. But her awareness had no mass, no physical existence at all, so it wasn’t bound by the laws of physics or the constraints of lightspeed. In what amounted to no time whatsoever, she’d found her mental destination, a particular, familiar glimmer in the mental ether, at once both light-years away and right before her, right there.
Thorn.
She knew the curves and textures of his thoughts as well as she knew those of her own skin. There was no mistaking his presence in the space their minds now shared.
Thorn, it’s me.
The glimmer didn’t change, though. It was as though she’d found where Thorn lived, but he wasn’t home.
Thorn, it’s Kira.
Except he couldn’t not be home. He was there, behind and inside that glimmer, but he was refusing to acknowledge it. He was home, yes, but he wasn’t answering the door.
Thorn, please, talk to me. Why won’t you talk to me?
Nothing.
Kira would have been worried, fretting that he’d been injured, unconscious, rendered catatonic, but she knew he was none of those things. She’d been doing this long enough to know the feel of a wounded mind. No, Thorn was doing this out of choice, walling off his thoughts behind barriers so tough and thick that even Kira, prodigious Joiner that she was, couldn’t breach them. He was, in fact, one of only a very few who could stand up to her like this at all.
The question was, why?
Thorn, please—I have to speak to you. Please answer me!
She’d heard from him only once since the Vision—a brief, panicked connection between them in the immediate aftermath of that horrific event, one that might very well have only been involuntary, a reflexive thing. Since then, nothing, no matter how hard she tried. But she needed to talk to him, needed to know he was okay, because there were reasons he might not be.
Thorn, please! Dammit, talk to me!
She tried again and again but might as well have been trying to Join with a forest slug. The mental glimmer that was Thorn Stellers stubbornly refused to open to her, to change in any way, to do anything but just exist and glimmer, tantalizingly present but so far away.