Minder Rising: Central Galactic Concordance Book 2 Read online

  Table of Contents

  DESCRIPTION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  EXCERPT FROM OVERLOAD FLUX

  Minder Rising (Central Galactic Concordance Book 2)

  Copyright © 2015 Carol Van Natta

  Published by Chavanch Press

  ISBN: 978-0983174127

  DESCRIPTION

  * * * * *

  A millennium into the future, all children are tested for minder talents, and the best are recruited for the Citizen Protection Service.

  Agent Lièrén Sòng is recovering from a near-fatal crash. He should want nothing more than to get back to interrogating criminals for his covert CPS field unit, but being sidelined gains new appeal when he makes friends with a woman and her son. Imara Sesay, road-crew chief and part-time bartender, breaks her ironclad rule never to get close to customers when she asks Lièrén to teach her son how to control his burgeoning minder talents.

  Unexpected deaths in his field unit make Lièrén suspect he isn’t a lucky survivor, he’s a loose end. He should pull away from Imara and Derrit to keep them safe, but when the local CPS Testing Center is entirely too interested in Derrit’s talents, Lièrén must make an impossible choice. Can he stay alive long enough to save Imara and her prodigy son?

  * * * * *

  PROLOGUE

  * Planet: Concordance Prime * GDAT 3238.203 *

  Timing was everything. Fortunately, the target’s habits were known and his clothing distinctive, so it was easy for her to track his progress along the pedestrian walkway. The city of Spires was famous for its transparent roadways and walkways, making it possible to watch him from below, where only the most paranoid would think to look. They’d given her a tracker synced to a tracer the target unknowingly carried, but it was subject to ghosting, probably because everyone in crowded Spires carried tech, even farkin’ babies and pets, and it swamped the signal. The target headed to the metro platform, as she’d been assured was his habit. She’d timed it earlier, watching random pedestrians, so she knew it would take about ten minutes to get through the crowds, past the kiosks, and up onto the platform where she wanted him.

  The stolen ground hauler's cab was the bubble style, offering a panorama view of traffic, but it made her more visible than she liked. Carefully, slowly, she used her telekinetic talent on the heavy ground hauler's controls to creep forward, a few centimeters at a time, while keeping her body relaxed and bored, as if she was still parked. It didn’t help her concentration that the cab smelled like a colony of sewer rats had died in it, though it explained why the cab had been left wide open. She had to make it look like the ground hauler was being directed by the traffic-control system, because the occupants of other vehicles would complain to the controllers if they noticed her vehicle wasn’t. People should just mind their own business.

  Two more minutes to wait. Once she was on the ramp, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and only had four minutes before the ground hauler arrived at the platform, where her target would be waiting. The ground hauler was just the right height to cause a tragic accident. She felt a momentary pang of regret for the other passengers who would be on the platform, but shrugged it off. There were too many damned people in Spires. Really, she’d be doing the city a favor by reducing the surplus.

  One minute more. She was tempted to turn the entertainment back on, but she was tired of hearing the politicians posturing about some local march by the Talent Support and Advocacy Committee. Sure, supporting minder veterans was a good cause, but the TSAC, or tea-sackers, as she liked to think of them, seemed more interested in media coverage than in helping minders. Not that the politicians weren’t equally guilty of that. She was glad she’d never had to catch-and-release one of those wastes of carbon. That was the problem with Spires. As the prime city of the Central Galactic Concordance government, its primary business was political power, which drew money and influence peddlers like flies to a compost pile. Maybe she’d luck out and the “accident” would take out some politicians and lobbyists, too. If so, she’d deserve a commendation.

  She leaned forward, watching the road-surface lights glistening in the soft rain as she prepared to merge into the traffic flow and take the ramp. Suddenly, all traffic slowed to a stop. From her higher vantage point, she could see into some of the vehicles, where countdown clocks were lighting up. She only had about a five-minute cushion and couldn’t afford the delay. Maybe it would be short. She casually reached under the dash and reconnected the traffic-control system by touch. The news wasn’t good. The system announced there’d be a six-minute wait to clear a path to get fire rescue to a building fire. She’d just lost her cushion.

  She swore as she disconnected the controller again. Returning tomorrow was impossible, since she was supposed to be hours into interstellar transit by then. She couldn’t keep the stinking ground hauler long enough to find her target again, since the theft had undoubtedly been reported by now, making the vehicle glow plasma hot on the stop-and-detain list. And she didn’t have time to locate and steal another vehicle, override its access, and spoof its traffic-control unit.

  She glared at the now out-of-reach platform. Like everything else in Spires, the gleaming showcase of the galactic government, the platform was transparent, with a soft pink tint to denote the gathering area, where the target would soon be standing, self-satisfied and oblivious. Even the farkin’ support pillars were clear, to add to the illusion that the lofty citizens of Spires were walking on farkin’ clouds.

  She eyed the pillars again, an idea forming. If she couldn’t get up there to take out the waiting passengers, maybe she could take out the whole platform. The ground hauler was heavy enough, and with enough speed, the closer pillar wouldn’t stand a chance. With luck, the momentum would take the hauler to the farther pillar, guaranteeing the platform would fall.

  It would take careful timing, but she could do it. She reconnected the traffic-control unit and programmed address coordinates that would put her in the correct lane to take her right by the pillars, then watched the clock like a hawk, willing the countdown to continue uninterrupted. When it was down to seconds, she carefully centered her teke talent on the spliced connection. She was more of a heavy teke, so doing the fine work with the splice was like trying to pick up a toothpick wearing exosuit gloves. She watched the other vehicles start to move and had an anxious moment when she thought the traffic system wasn’t going to allow her hauler into the flow, but it finally slid into an open slot. The system obligingly gave her priority for the lane, and that was all she needed. She let the splice go, dropping her vehicle from the system, and punched in maximum acceleration, overriding the safeties. The sweet creators of chaos were with her and miraculously opened an almost clear path to her new target. She kept the vehicle straight, gaining satisfying velocity. The millisecond she had a clear view of the support pillars, she angled the vehicle toward them, froze the steering control with her talent, and scrambled into the rear seat
to strap herself in.

  The safety equipment did its job in cushioning her from the impact, but she hadn’t expected it to take so long or be so farkin’ loud, though it was probably just adrenalin heightening her senses.

  She grabbed her bag and used her teke to help her get out of the ruined cab. Her first look at the destruction was rewarding. The first pillar was completely sheared, and the second shattered and twisted. The platform above it was now at a ninety-degree angle, and satisfyingly empty. Torn fiber cables and handrails flapped in the breeze. On the street in front of her, a few bodies were strewn about, but none of them were the man in the gradient-blue vest and matching kilt. It was too much to expect that her target would have splatted at her feet.

  Fortunately, she’d planned a contingency for this scenario. She opened her bag and removed her rigged device. She flipped its switch, then tossed it into the cab, where an acrid smoke began spewing out and soon filled the cab and billowed out. Hidden by the smoke, and holding her breath, she pulled on a white tunic with red armbands and buckled on a red utility belt, the universal gear for emergency responders. She pulled on a dark red rain hat over her hair, giving witnesses and security cameras one less thing to identify her by. Lucky for her, the rainy season had come early this year.

  She slung her bag over her shoulder, then stepped away from the cab, as if she’d been looking for the driver, and was nearly knocked flat by a dazed pedestrian.

  “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” sobbed the man. “All those people!”

  She grabbed him by the shoulders. “Where are the rest of them?”

  “What?” He coughed from the smoke.

  “Where is everyone else?” She pointed to her red armband.

  The look on his face said he’d remember the carnage forever. He pointed to the intersection and the ramp. “Up there.”

  She let him go and started to lope toward the intersection, but changed her mind and ran up the parallel walkway instead. It was smarter not to be seen coming from the direction of the ground hauler. Besides, it was starting to rain harder, and the road was slicker than the walkway.

  She made a show of stopping at bodies when she found them, glad they were obviously already dead, because she didn’t know the first thing about how to treat the living. None of them were the target, which meant she’d have to get closer to where the majority of victims had landed. The klaxons and whumping sounds of emergency air vehicles began to multiply, and she knew she had to hurry.

  Why couldn’t the target have been in High Spires, where a simple push with her mind would have him plummeting a few thousand feet? It would have been a more fitting death for a high-and-mighty telepath who stuck his talent where it didn’t belong. That way, innocent passengers wouldn’t have been killed because of him. True, she would’ve had to have been fairly close, because the man was a full-grown adult, not some snot-nosed kid or a frail great-great-grandmother. It would have been harder to do it undetected, since the city was too farkin’ crowded, but she was good at what she did.

  When she rounded the corner, she knew she was farked. Too many people had already converged on the scene, and too many of them were in white with red armbands. She might be able to pull off a claim of “just lucky to be in the area” to civilians, but she couldn’t fool the professionals once they asked about her organization and specialty.

  She ducked into a recessed doorway and pulled the last item from her bag. The ugly brown raincoat would cover the tunic long enough for her to snag the nearest unoccupied autocab. She left the empty bag crumpled on the street, trusting it’d be mistaken for just one of dozens that had fallen with the waiting passengers.

  She’d have to tell the others she wasn’t sure of the kill, and it was an understatement to say she wasn’t looking forward to that. Some of the blame fell on their shoulders, giving her all those strictures and limitations about how and where it had to be done, and disagreeing with each other about the timing, but the crux of the matter was that she couldn’t say with certainty whether or not the target had been eliminated. And she couldn’t lie, either, since most of the others were telepaths, and wouldn’t hesitate to pluck it out of her mind. Farkin’ untrusting assholes.

  She’d be happy to fly that evening and never look back.

  CHAPTER 1

  * Planet: Concordance Prime * GDAT 3238.203 *

  Minder Corps Field Agent Lièrén Sòng stared at his no-kick fizzy drink but didn’t see it. He had shrunk his world to as small as he could make it, but even from six meters away, he could feel the big bald man sitting at the bar broadcasting a prickly synaptic haze of barely contained violence as he stared at the dark-skinned woman behind the bar, as if trying to hypnotize her. Lièrén might have let it go, might have followed protocol to stay out of it, but he couldn’t. He counted the bartender as a friend, even if she didn’t know it.

  The bar had cleared out early that night. Only a half-dozen patrons occupied the booths and nursed their drinks, chems, and solitude. The piped-in music, a lilting jig in ancient British folk tradition, now jangled in his head like a wind chime warning of an approaching storm. It made him want to put his hands over his ears, but that wouldn’t shut off his sifter talent.

  It was yet another problem piled onto a truly lousy day. He’d awakened from his prescribed afternoon nap with a jolt, another dream of falling. Unsurprising, since only six weeks ago, he’d actually fallen several thousand meters out of a high-low flitter that was breaking apart and on its way to a fiery crash and burn.

  After three weeks of trauma care and reconstructive surgery, he checked into the long-term residence hotel for the duration of his continued rehabilitation, which included being treated by another sifter for his post-traumatic experience therapy. His recovery had been slowed due to withdrawal symptoms from his Citizen Protection Service-mandated program of enhancement drugs, which he couldn’t take while his new cloned liver integrated with his body. Beyond the headache, dry mouth, and sweat flashes, his primary minder talent felt thick and muddy. It didn’t help that he’d run out of the temporary replacement enhancement drugs the CPS's medics had prescribed for him. He hadn’t noticed until he’d gotten back to his hotel room that day, which wasn’t like him. He was forgetful, but usually well organized.

  He wanted his ordinary, balanced life back, where he mostly stayed in ships and space stations, and where the weather was controlled and it didn’t rain whenever it felt like it. There were too many empty drawers to fill in the hotel room, a silent reminder that his few personal possessions had been destroyed along with the flitter. His replacement clothes, even though autotailored to his exact measurements and range of motion, felt too new.

  He shouldn’t be feeling sorry for himself, because at least he’d lived through it. His senior field unit partner and friend, Fiyon Machimata, hadn’t been so lucky.

  If Fiyon had been with him now, he’d have insisted on going someplace more upscale. The Quark and Quasar, which was a part of the residence hotel, was designed as a family-style pub and was much more congenial than the hotel’s restaurant, which had marginal food and surly service. The pub had two- and four-person booths and an eclectic mix of round tables of varying heights, suitable for adults and children alike. The decorator had lined the walls with mysterious metal pieces purporting to come from preflight Earth sailing ships and farm equipment, but Lièrén suspected they were copies of random machine parts that caught the designer’s eye. Behind the bar’s simulated wooden façade, the prep area and the dispensary were modern, if not exotic or extensive.

  When he’d first visited the bar after moving into his hotel suite, he wasn’t sure he liked the music, which was billed as “preflight British traditional,” even though whoever selected it had a rather elastic definition of the style. It had grown on him in subsequent visits, to the point that he looked forward to the live musician scheduled to perform the next week. It was… odd to be able to plan things like that. Usually his job kept him constantly traveling.

&nb
sp; The lowlight of his already zhào chū day had been being stuck in the metro station while the city figured out how to reroute the skytrams because of an accident. A ground hauler had crashed into the pillars of the passenger platform, killing at least thirty people outright and flooding the area trauma centers with the injured. If he hadn’t stopped to help an older couple with toppled packages and wayward grandchildren, he might have been back in the trauma center again himself, and back to waking hallucinations of falling. He was glad he didn’t have to go anywhere near the gruesome ground levels where the victims had landed.

  After another nightmare had terminated his too-short nap, Lièrén had been too irritable, thirsty, and unsettled to stay in his hotel room another minute, so he’d gone to the bar. It had been surprisingly crowded for an early weeknight, and he’d retreated to a back corner booth to get away from the pressure of the unknowingly broadcasting patrons. He was only a low-level telepath, so their current, running thoughts didn’t bother him from a distance, but his high-level sifter talent meant he couldn’t avoid feeling the ebb and flow of them. Without the CPS enhancement drugs helping him control his talent, the active minds around him felt like constant raindrops on a sunburn.

  The usually boisterous server, Rayle Leviso, who chatted with and teased everyone, had thankfully left him alone that evening. Once the bar emptied, Rayle had slid out early, too, leaving only Bartender Sesay… Imara, she’d invited him to call her, to deal with the few remaining customers. She was cheerfully competent and wasn’t given to idle chatter, and it didn’t hurt that she was easy on the eyes. Even her outgoing son, Derrit, was thankfully quiet tonight.

  In the earlier crush, Imara had asked if Derrit could sit with him to do his homework. Lièrén had nodded and said less than was polite, but his pounding headache made it difficult to do anything more. The medics and healers had done admirable jobs in repairing his ribs, diaphragm, lung, and liver, but they couldn’t do anything about the withdrawal symptoms, owing to his sifter talent that made most chemical painkillers useless. His choices had been to stay in the rehab unit for another three weeks with the constant company of a healer, or deal with the pain and discomfort on his own. He valued his privacy more than his comfort, although it was hard to remember why on nights like this one. At least he wasn’t having to regrow teeth—he’d heard from other rehab patients that it took months for the new ones to feel like they belonged in their mouths.