Laura stayed up all night combing over the details of the meeting with Simon and Tanya while Bill crashed on the bed. Her telepathic and empathic abilities weren’t as strong as others’ in District Three. She hated using them, feeling like imposter for using something she had only got through a rapid transformation of her mind and body. She’d asked Stephen to reverse the changes straight away and return her to human, as if her appearance disgusted her.
How could she look human and use abilities she had no right to keep? How could she claim to be something she was not?
Not that it mattered much. She hadn’t gained much insight from Simon. She’d felt him block any attempts she made to link with him telepathically. Her efforts had left her drained. At least Bill had been happy to talk. But while Simon had been a closed book, she’d sensed something from Tanya. When Laura looked at her it was like she saw two versions: one in her white robe, the other a black figure that peeked out from behind Tanya any time she promised Bill something.
She’d seen her ability in action before. It usually occurred right before a person’s nervous twitching alerted her to a lie. It was how Bill used to profile criminals and still did, using telltale habits that people could rarely hide. But with Tanya, it was different. The shapeless black mass representing the lie took form and looked straight at Laura.
Laura shook her head. She’d been another species for half a second eight years ago. And now she had a skill the others didn’t? It didn’t make sense. But this new manifestation prompted a desire to discuss her changes. Serena and Arianna came to mind. As did Margaux, the elder from District Eight with an ability to see what others didn’t.
Bill snored in the bed beside her. She snuggled under the covers, careful not to wake him. He rarely slept through the night.
Morning came a few hours later and Laura left a cosy looking Bill to sleep. Since she had started to see black shapes as lies a few months ago, her own sleep had suffered. Maybe her Indigene side needed less sleep than her human one.
In the kitchen she started on breakfast. She replicated the raw ingredients for an Irish breakfast—sausages, bacon, eggs—and set the pan on the heat. Few people cooked like this any more, even on Exilon 5 where raw ingredients could be sourced cheaper than on Earth. Laura found cooking therapeutic. She set a pot to brew in the coffee machine. Her husband’s favourite.
‘Something smells good.’ Bill appeared at the door. He slid into a seat and rubbed his eyes. ‘You should have woken me. I’d have made you breakfast.’
Laura shrugged. ‘No trouble. As soon as the sun’s up, I’m ready to go.’ She pushed half the sausage, bacon and scrambled eggs on to his plate and the remainder on to hers. ‘Besides, I enjoy the alone time.’
‘You thinking about last night’s meeting?’
Laura poured a mug of coffee. She placed it in front of him. ‘Among other things. I think we should find out more from the splinter groups, see what they know. I got a weird feeling last night.’
‘Me too.’
He ate too fast and drank half his coffee in one go.
Laura sat down and nibbled on her eggs. They had a slightly better flavour from being replicated raw and cooked.
‘You’ll get indigestion eating like that.’
‘I want to get in early. I’ve got some snooping to do.’
Laura ate quicker. ‘Okay, give me a minute to finish this and clean up.’
Bill got his DPad and called the car to pick them up. When they exited their apartment block, the driverless car idled outside. Bill climbed into the driver seat in front of a console with a hidden steering wheel. Laura sat beside him.
The car passed through the city that covered an area half of London’s size on Earth. Laura looked out at replicas of smaller parks and pretty streets with the prefix “New” attached to their old-world name.
Ten minutes east of the docking station and New St James’ Park, the car pulled up outside a large, glass building. The offices were located in the Whitehall/Shoreditch area known as New Shorehall. The area contained the best of replicated British architecture, from the old war office building to Westminster. But among the opulence sat warehouse spaces that once housed goods. They had been converted into glass monsters for use as luxury apartments and office spaces. Bill said the warehouses reminded him of the Shoreditch area in the real London, which had become a virtual tech hub in the late twenty-first century.
Laura got out and looked up at the glass building with six floors nestled between replica nineteenth-century buildings. The ITF occupied the entire building but only operated on three of those floors. She glanced at the entrance to a nearby MagLev train station that connected them to the other cities on Exilon 5.
In the foyer, they scanned their security chips at the security station—a tradition of the old regime. It didn’t matter that things were less volatile on Exilon 5 than on Earth. She and Bill had both agreed to keep the security in a world not comfortable in its own skin.
Laura headed for the stairs that would take her to the first floor and her team. She shook her head when Bill called the lift to take him to the top of the six-floor property.
‘Oh, I meant to ask... I promised Stephen I would,’ said Bill, with one hand on the open lift door. ‘Ben Watson wants something to do. Is there anything you can give him?’
Off the top of her head, Laura could think of nothing. But she remembered Jenny had sung the boy’s praises, said he was great at research.
‘I’ll give it some thought. He’ll have to sign a confidentiality agreement.’
‘We can give him access to non-classified information.’ Bill stepped into the lift. ‘I’ll do some independent research on these splinter groups, see what turns up.’
Laura nodded. ‘I’ll do the same and let you know.’
She jogged over to him before the door closed and kissed him on the cheek. Then she tackled the short climb to her floor. The brief burst of exercise did little to settle her nervous energy.
She exited the stairwell and entered a large, open-plan office with a dozen hot desks with monitors. Her team of fifteen often rotated between monitors depending on the work they did. To the left was a glass-walled boardroom. At the back, another glass-walled room: her office. A forensic analysis station took up the rest of the space.
‘Morning, Laura,’ said Julie, her second in command.
‘Morning. Let’s meet in the boardroom in ten minutes.’
Julie nodded; her blonde hair, shorter than Laura’s, bobbed. She announced it to the rest of the room while Laura slipped into her office with a view of the entire floor.
She sat down and activated her monitor. A list of documents appeared on screen and for a moment it transported her back to her old job in the Earth Security Centre where she had filed paperwork on the population and never asked why the ESC and government kept a paper trail on them.
While she still kept notes on the population, at least her reason was to help innocents.
The sun streamed through the window and caught Laura in its glare. She squinted and reduced the brightness in the command-activated glass with a flick of her hand. Lately, her eyes had become more sensitive to light. It had begun around the time she started to see the manifestation of lies. Maybe she’d never get used to sunshine. She’d suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder for so long before Stephen treated her. And while the condition no longer afflicted her, she still wasn’t used to the sun.
Laura looked out at her team who read and listened in on conversations in the pursuit of peace and order. When she and Bill had first moved to Exilon 5 eight years ago, the ITF operation in New London had been much bigger. The board members with security detail to match the original numbers of the GS had still been human and active in the operations on Exilon 5. But as their interest, more notably Tanya’s, shifted to the geneticists they’d commissioned to work on their code, the resources went with them. Bill had had no choice but to scale back the operation. He and Laura had agreed to mirror the underground operations that were happening on Earth. Without Tanya’s knowledge, he’d reassigned men and women to work as undercover operatives who continued to this day. Their identities would remain known only to a few, including Stephen and Serena.
One of the roles of the underground operatives was to monitor the peace treaty on the ground, to get a feel for things. Things were not good.
Boxes divided up her inbox filled with chat-room conversations sent over interstellar wave that she and her team had hijacked. The illegal chat rooms used interstellar wave to transmit communication on Exilon 5, something that had been used to communicate between the two planets. The conversations rarely lasted long, disappearing seconds after they’d been posted. The rooms required round-the-clock monitoring. If anything of interest appeared, one of her team would take a screenshot and send it to her. Nobody liked the onerous task. Her team could spend hours watching data that yielded nothing. Ben Watson came to mind. Could this be a job for the boy?
Laura was in an enviable position. She saw the most interesting conversations, or moments of time, without having to trawl through the clutter.
Today, a screenshot showed a man discussing an attack on one of the power grids outside New Tokyo. She forwarded the snapshot of the terrorist threat to the ITF office in Tokyo. Another was of a group of three discussing ways to get inside the Indigene tunnels. This type of chat happened on a regular basis and never amounted to anything, but Laura took each threat seriously. She forwarded any chat referring to the tunnels to Anton.
Was this trio chat from one of the splinter groups working with the rogue Indigenes? There were plenty of humans who hated the Indigenes just because they existed. She couldn’t assume it was without a verification of the source. To do that, she’d have to locate the start of the group thread and find the original poster. If the poster was a recruiter, there could be some place they regularly met.
The sun disappeared behind a cloud, plunging her already dark office into a deeper grey. Laura looked out at the open-plan office. Julie had gathered her team in the conference room bar five including Mike, her senior analyst, who stayed behind to monitor the Wave.
Julie gave her a nod. She got up and joined the remaining ten in the boardroom and closed the door to give Mike and the others privacy. Members of her team, including Julie, sat around an oval, glass table, DPads at the ready.
She stood at the top of the room next to a large screen on the wall, sensing her team’s anticipation and excitement. They had no idea of her abilities or her alteration into another species. Laura had thought about telling them, but with the increased activities of the GS 100 and the splinter groups, it never felt like the right time.
‘We discussed yesterday how to locate the meeting areas where the human groups and rogue Indigenes meet. There seems to be very little chat about it over the Wave.’
Julie leaned forward. ‘It’s possible they’re staying off the Wave because they know we monitor it.’
‘So what does that tell you about this group?’ said Laura.
‘That they’re cautious?’ one of her team suggested.
Laura nodded. ‘Yes, but they’re also familiar with how the Wave works and what we do here. Not many know how the Wave works. These people could have been high-level operatives on Earth. Not every specialist on Earth was assimilated into the GS 100 fold.’ She folded her arms. ‘We know they’re in the cities but not using the Wave, which means they’ve found another way to communicate. What do we do?’
‘If we can’t monitor their activities online, we have to do it offline,’ said Julie.
‘That’s what I’m thinking. Suggestions?’
‘Old-fashioned detective work,’ said one. ‘Feet on the street. Talk to the locals, sound out activity of any large groups meeting in their establishments.’
‘A good suggestion,’ said Laura. ‘But as soon as we talk to locals, we tip off the groups and they move elsewhere. How do we pinpoint the activities of a group of men and women who have managed to evade us?’
The room fell silent and Laura sensed their frustration at the lack of progress. Actually, she felt it like goose bumps on her arm. She shook off the weird feeling. She’d never had it before.
Maybe it was one of her Indigene traits.
They had concentrated their efforts on locating these groups but now their work took an urgent turn with the GS 100’s new environ and drain of power. If she could locate just one group with knowledge of the GS 100, maybe she could shed some light on Tanya’s plans.
Her team’s tension sent a shudder through her bones.
‘What about the ships?’ said Lisa, one of her operatives.
Laura’s head whipped round to look at Lisa, drawing gasps from the room. She’d turned too fast. Only Julie knew what she had once been. The more she denied her abilities, they more they appeared to come out naturally.
She diverted attention to Lisa. ‘What about the ships, Lisa?’
The team looked at their colleague.
Julie gave her a discreet nod that the others didn’t see. Laura released a tiny breath.
‘The passenger ships. Is it possible that the passengers arriving here are being recruited for these groups?’
‘It’s possible. Check that out,’ said Laura.
She hadn’t considered that avenue but fresh bodies and minds would be too tempting to pass on. She and Bill had been at the docking station just yesterday, too preoccupied with Ben Watson’s arrival. Were the groups recruiting from Earth? Had they used the ships to ferry their people to Exilon 5? Plenty of criminals with a desire to escape Earth would jump at the chance to join a fight.
‘Do we know where the group from the recent ship went?’
Julie checked her DPad. ‘Straight to the processing centres. They were assigned work based on their skills and taken to the safe houses.’
‘It’s possible these safe houses are a cover for a recruiting drive.’ Laura paced the room. ‘Can someone pull up the manifest for the last ship please?’
‘I can,’ said Julie.
She hit a few buttons on her pad and set the device in the middle of the table. She pulled the image out with two fingers and the manifest, listed in alphabetical order, rotated three-sixty degrees.
Laura stopped pacing and read it. ‘Does anyone recognise the names on that list?’
Ben Watson’s name was at the bottom.
Julie pointed to a name. ‘This guy used to be a ship engineer, and this woman worked in tech.’
Laura nodded. ‘Good, it’s a start.’
Julie shook her head. ‘No, you don’t understand; the emphasis is on “used to”. They’re both dead.’ She tapped the names again and brought up images of both men. ‘These two are travelling under false names using the identity of dead men. And if they are—’
‘Then others are too.’ Laura stared at the photos of the supposedly dead travellers. One was of a man called Martin Casey. The other travelling under the name John Caldwell was a face she’d never forget. ‘Harvey Buchanan.’
Shit.
‘Who’s Harvey Buchanan?’ said Julie.
‘Someone who was a big deal on Earth.’ Laura had to tell Bill. ‘Locate his chatter on the Wave and we’ll find the head of the splinter group. And be careful. Use your fake identities to lurk. This man is dangerous.’
Laura ended the meeting and took the stairs two at a time to the sixth floor. She entered the partitioned space. The evenly spaced desks and chairs allowed no free movement, unlike her open-plan space.
She offered good mornings as she walked through the space to the back of the room where Bill’s office stood, with four solid walls and a closed door. Bill had always preferred privacy over intrusion. But Laura had spent too long working in a tiny booth in the ESC that offered no interaction. For communications to work best, Laura relied on collaboration.
She knocked on his door, just like any other employee. Bill owed her no favours and she would never take them.
‘Enter!’ he said gruffly, his distracted tone permeating through the solid wood.
She opened the door and he lifted his hard gaze from the monitor to her. Then it softened.
‘Close the door and come here.’
With her DPad in one hand, Laura stood behind Bill’s chair. A drone shot of the environ belonging to the GS 100 was on screen. The image was overlaid with schematics from Anton showing the highest concentration of gamma rock.
‘Tanya wasn’t lying about the concentration of gamma rock. She’s using it to amplify something.’
‘The power from the grid. She already said as much,’ said Laura. ‘Can’t we just give them a monitored allowance?’
‘Not without compromising our own supply.’ Bill tapped the screen twice with his finger. ‘Besides, I want to know why she really wants it.’
‘They want it to heal. I sensed that much from Tanya. From Simon I learned the Elite are in a bad way and will not stand more genetic experiments done to them. It’s possible they want to strengthen their bodies to continue with the experiments. A powerful mind in a weak body is not a good outcome for them.’
‘They’ve gone through all these experiments, why—to live longer in a body that will eventually die?’ Bill shook his head. ‘Tanya doesn’t aim low. There’s more to her request, I can feel it.’ He glanced at the DPad in her hand. ‘Did you find out something?’
Laura nodded and pulled up Harvey Buchanan’s photo from his identity chip. ‘I did and you won’t like it.’
She turned the DPad around and Bill released a breath. ‘Shit, I thought he was dead.’
‘With facial manipulation and stolen identity chips, who knows any more?’
The man who’d created false identities for Bill and Laura eight years ago when they needed to travel to Exilon 5, who’d almost killed them to gain their knowledge of replica identity chips, was on Exilon 5.
‘What’s he doing here?’
Laura sat on the edge of the desk. Bill rubbed the back of her leg.
‘We think he’s got connections with whoever is running the main splinter group out of West London. People have arrived on the ships travelling under false identities. We think the groups might have brought people here, or at least targeted people coming off the ships. Then Harvey Buchanan turns up, travelling under a false name.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘Assigned to a construction job in the west quarter. That can’t be a coincidence. We’ve never looked into these safe houses before. I think we should now.’
Bill stroked her leg with his thumb. ‘Who’s the foreman in charge there?’
Laura checked her DPad. ‘Ollie Patterson.’
‘Can we arrange a meeting with this Ollie, tell him we want to talk?’
Laura didn’t like the sound of that. ‘You want to negotiate with terrorists?’
‘They haven’t done anything yet, love. They’ve been passive until now.’
‘A quiet group is never idle, Bill.’
They’d both seen the repercussions of their own government’s silent operations. They’d ended with a bloody battle with the Indigenes.
‘I agree, but what if we meet them on neutral ground?’ said Bill. ‘If we can offer them something small, they might share what they know about Tanya’s plans. If they know anything at all.’
Laura stood up. ‘Of course they know something. Harvey’s with them. Now you want us, you and me, to meet with a potential terrorist? What if something goes wrong?’
Bill stood too and grabbed her hands. His confidence sent a tickle up her spine and drew her closer to his foolish plan.
‘It has to be just us, love. We don’t know for sure if Harvey’s involved, but this Ollie Patterson definitely won’t agree to talk if we go in there with numbers. Besides, we have your Indigene abilities to help us if anything happens.’
Her skills wouldn’t stop a Buzz Gun blast or a bullet. But maybe the manifestation of deceit as a separate black shadow would give them an advantage. She’d only use her skill as a last resort.
Laura squeezed his shoulder and smiled. She would not saddle him with more worry.
‘I’ll get Julie on it and have her set up a meeting for later.’
She left his office knowing that after this meeting, she needed to face her personal problem head on. Was she human or Indigene?
Stuck between two identities, she felt as if she belonged to neither.