Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4 Read online

  Jess handled the takeoff well enough, and the sync to the local traffic system. She sipped the blessedly rich hot chocolate he’d bought for her and watched as he inserted a wirejack from his clunky-looking percomp into the flitter’s console, then promptly set about hijacking the flitter’s systems. She suspected he could take over a military dreadnought in a couple of hours, so ordinary civilian transports didn’t stand a chance.

  He patted the console and gave her a small smile. “It thinks we’re going to Wunderschön Inseln. When the local traffic system hands us off to the planetary system, I’ll drop us off the grid and pick it up when we hit Branko.”

  The “Wonderful Islands” was a good choice. Branimir’s only luxury resort destination got a lot of traffic from all over the planet. She didn’t trust her own memories any more, but she trusted him, or at least, she wanted to.

  Now that she was comparatively safe and comfortable, she allowed herself to ponder the dozens of questions that her busy little brain had been bothering her with ever since she woke up. She’d have to prioritize them, or she’d miss something important.

  He beat her to the first question. “Why were you going to Markalan Crossing?” He finished entering something on his percomp and checked the coordinates readout on the console.

  “I had a meeting.” She frowned. “I can’t remember why or with who, though. I don’t have any customers in farm country. I could check my calendar… No, that’s not safe right now.” Like most service businesses, her booking schedule was public, meaning nosy people could easily monitor net traffic to it. She shook her head, but it just made her neck complain. “I remember the time, thirteen hundred, and that it was room six in the public flitter port, and that’s it.” Her head injury could mean the memory was lost forever.

  Jess swore, something he rarely did.

  “Problem?”

  “Yesterday, a CPS representative pinged an ‘invitation’ for a meeting today at thirteen hundred in room six of the public port. That’s why I was in town.” His jaw tensed.

  She knew without asking that he’d have verified the sender as legitimate. Which suggested her meeting had been with the CPS, too. A cold knot formed in her stomach. “The CPS discovered one or both of us is still alive and wants to change that.”

  “I don’t think so.” Jess engaged the autopilot controls and swiveled his seat to look at her, so she turned hers to face him. “Much easier to kill us separately.” He drummed his long fingers on the plushly padded armrest. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring us together again.”

  “So the flitter sabotage was to stop us from getting together?” She couldn’t imagine why.

  He shrugged, and his right eye twitched once. “Maybe whoever is after you found out about me through our shared history.” The Nordic accent clipped his consonants. Most people didn’t notice the minute changes, but she’d learned to be hypersensitive to them, since he tanked at telling her what was going on with him.

  Of all the voices in his head, she disliked the paranoid one the most, though she grudgingly appreciated that its devious turn of mind had probably saved her. Like most Jumpers, her usual solution to problems was to stomp all over them with a planet-fall mech suit until they went away. She’d learned discretion while on the run from the CPS, but she’d never make a good spider, setting up webs of intrigue to catch her prey.

  She shook her head. “You already said it. If they found you, it would be easier to kill us separately.”

  Jess frowned and drummed his fingers again. “Business rival, or someone looking to corner the market?” His right eye stayed still, and he was back to flat Standard English.

  “I have a few competitors, but transporting ores and minerals to and from mines and refineries is a niche business with a low profit margin.” She shrugged. “It suits me because I get to fly. When my partner died, his family was grateful when I bought out his share. They needed the funds, and no one else was offering.”

  She swallowed the last of her chocolate and folded the cup for the recycler. Mysteries made her tense, and unrelieved tension was bad for her health. She counted three breaths as she willed her body to stand down. Thank the stars that Jess had prevented the town medic from giving her oxy-stim. She’d have needed days to recover.

  She caught Jess’s gaze again. “How did you know about my waster’s disease, and how to work around it? The CPS is jealous of its security secrets.” The confidentiality section in all Jumper contracts included serious consequences for disclosure even to family or civilian medics, and the CPS regularly made public examples of violators.

  He blinked, and she knew she’d startled him with her question. He never talked about his past, so she’d had to piece it together from observations and little things he’d let slip. Maybe she’d get a straight answer, for once.

  He turned his seat forward again.

  Or not. “Never mind.” Pain was making her irritable and impatient. “I appreciate you stopping the chemmed medic from malpracticing on me.”

  She wanted to ask him a dozen questions about his life, from what happened to him that day four years ago after they’d split up to avoid the detain-and-restrain order, to what he did for a living now, to who he thought had meddled in their lives back then and why, but they all formed a logjam in her throat. He’d barely shared anything when they’d been intoxicated with passion and love. He’d have considerably fewer reasons to trust her now.

  She swiveled her seat forward and stared at the clouds, relaxing into the moment, letting her imagination free-associate while she reached for the serenity she needed to stay alive. She smiled briefly. If her method could help her deal with meeting her surprise-he’s-not-dead lover and running from possible killers, or just his paranoia, it could handle anything. She let the smile slip away as she breathed and counted heartbeats. Since the day she’d been told she had no hope for a future, she’d made a vow to herself to enjoy each moment of body feedback while she still could.

  His voice almost startled her. “I always knew about the waster’s. Well, part of me did. I studied it whenever I could. The CPS isn’t as careful with their data as they like to think.”

  She glanced at him, but he kept his face forward. It was as close as he’d ever come to talking about what went on in his head. The least she could do was give him honesty in return.

  “I’m in Stage Three, with an impairment percentage of thirty-eight, as of yesterday’s test. Stage Four officially starts at forty-two percent, with noticeably degraded reaction times. The CPS clinic will issue a testing unit so I can check the percentage and track the disease’s progression. By fifty percent, I’ll experience intermittent motor intention paralysis, and by sixty percent, if I live that long, I’ll probably be in an end-stage sensory-deprivation coma, with my delusional mind locked in a paralyzed body. I have seven or eight years with quality of life, if I’m lucky. The official CPS line is that only half of us have it, but I’ve never met a single Jumper veteran who doesn’t have it, and I’ve met a lot of us and chatted with more. No one I’ve run into has ever met the waster’s-free Jumpers the CPS trots out for the media. Neither the CPS nor the pharmas have even found a way to slow it down, despite seventy-plus years of research.” She smiled humorlessly. “Medical treatment may be a foundation right for all CGC citizens, but it’s no help if there’s no cure.”

  “Why are you telling me?” Implied in his question was, why now?

  “You always wanted to know. Back when we were in Ridderth, I was still in my high orbit about ideals and the oath I signed. I thought the CPS had good, valid reasons for the secrecy.” She’d been incredibly naïve and stubbornly thick skulled about a lot of things. “I lost what was left of my faith in the CPS when they chased me across the galaxy after your…” She took a deep breath, and willed the adrenaline to subside, but her temper was winning. “The fact that you’re alive means some farkin’ CPS minder telepath twisted my memory, made me think you were a police informant, passing on information
you learned from me about Minder Veterans Advocates. Some of that day is a blur, but I have an indelible memory of a CPS Minder Corps field agent forcing you to kneel on the walkway and executing you in broad daylight. Your brains decorated the wall behind you like a splash of curdled paint.”

  The memory used to be her worst, the one that sucker-punched her each time and left her shivering, but every moment she spent now with a living, breathing Jess was diluting it into a vivid scene from a bad horror holo.

  Unlike some of her more binary-thinker squad mates, she’d never hated minders, but she’d been queasy around telepaths, especially twisters, with the power to warp memories into believable lies, or cleaners, with the power to erase memories altogether, leaving anything from neatly excised bits, to gaping holes, to blank-slated zombies. The CPS Minder Corps recruited the most powerful minders in all classes—telepath, telekinetic, patterner—and subcategories, and used them without compunction. They also gave telepath and telekinetic categories powerful enhancement drugs with usually debilitating side effects.

  When she’d volunteered for the Minder Veterans Advocates and worked with all the CPS veterans, she’d come to realize that minders had it worse than Jumpers. She had the data to prove it. And that nasty drug addictions and waster’s disease were an easy-glide ride compared to whatever the CPS had done to Jess. The supreme irony was, they’d all volunteered for it, minders, Jumpers, and Kameleons alike, in the name of keeping the galactic peace.

  “Thank you.” His face was turned away from her, so she couldn’t watch for telltales.

  On impulse, she asked, “Who’s thanking me? The just-Jess part of you, or the medically-trained part of you that speaks classical French, likes ancient pre-flight jazz, and is a workaholic?” She smiled in soft amusement. “The one who pilfered medical supplies from the town clinic?”

  He stared at her, blinking rapidly a couple of times. “What else do you know?” His tone was more cautious than accusatory. He dropped his eyes, and a visible tremor went through his body.

  Dammit, she should have known better than to step into this minefield. When they’d been together, rare conversations like this had ended with him in near-catatonic withdrawal.

  “I’m sorry, Jess.” It was cruel to push for answers just to satisfy her curiosity. She owed him kindness for getting him involved, both four years ago and now, and for saving her both times. He owed her nothing.

  Numb with empty, creeping cold, she wrapped her arms around herself and focused on the ever-changing, never-changing clouds.

  CHAPTER 6

  * Planet: Branimir * GDAT: 3242.002 *

  JESS GRITTED HIS teeth against the fire that danced on his skin. He knew it was an illusion, but it still hurt. He’d figured out how to neutralize the self-preservation routines in the various overlays, but clever Kerzanna had taken him by surprise and had unwittingly triggered the fire feedback loop that was the default warning built into the neural net hardware they’d implanted deep in his cortex. The bioware alert was supposed to have been purged by the CPS when he’d retired, but he couldn’t very well complain without them asking how he knew it hadn’t been.

  The fire subsided, and he wanted to explain, or maybe apologize. He hadn’t been able to tell her anything four years ago, and he knew it hurt her feelings. He could talk more now, but he didn’t know where to start.

  When he’d officially retired, his CPS handler, the military-to-civilian transition coordinators, and the CPS Minder Corps counselors observed, evaluated, and monitored him for a full year. Ironically, the very things they’d been looking for, the inadvertent residual personalities known as “bleedovers,” had helped him hide the truth, or the CPS would have brought in a trusted Minder Corps cleaner to blank-slate him the day he left active duty. He was a walking security breach.

  Since then, he’d used trial and error—mostly error, at first—to develop internal controls for the remnants of the personality overlays in his head. The complex Kameleon procedures and technologies supposedly prevented the bleedovers, and he’d been tested after each mission, but either the tests weren’t effective, or the CPS ignored the results. Few Kams retired after career time in service like he had. Most left on disability, either because the overlays couldn’t take full control any more, or because they were leaving too many residual memories and knowledge in “unmonitored” areas of the brain, which was code for the organic, not the bioware.

  The existence of the CPS’s Kameleon program was an official secret, so there was little accountability for it. In the rare, cautious discussions he’d had with the few other Kams he’d met between assignments, he’d concluded that in his case, his CPS handlers had played fast and loose with the protocols that were supposed to prevent using the same overlay too many times, not purging his onboard record storage unit often enough, and not giving him enough downtime between missions. There’d been no accountability for that, either.

  He glanced at Kerzanna, but she’d turned away. “I try not to use the… other parts of me if there’s no need.” Tension gathered in his left temple.

  Silence stretched between them. He ignored the temptation to open his percomp, which he recognized as a subtle push from the bleedovers to end the conversation.

  “What do you call them? I mean, do they have names?”

  “Not really. Just jobs, like ‘medic’ and ‘spaceship engineer.’”

  “I occasionally heard stories about Kameleons and the Kam Corps from Minder Corps veterans, but mostly after a lot of drinks or chems.” She snorted softly. “Until I met you, I thought they were a confabulated myth, like Ayorinn’s Legacy.”

  “There aren’t that many of us, and we’re made for stealth, so it’s easy for the CPS to pretend we don’t exist.” He gave her a sardonic smile. “I’ll bet they wish the Legacy was as easy to control.”

  She laughed. “Can’t send in the Jumpers to stomp a meme.”

  “Can’t erase history, either.” The safer conversational ground soothed his incipient headache.

  She nodded agreement. “Not unless they clean the memories of everyone who was living in the city of Ridderth at the time. Hell, Ayorinn’s forecast was the talk of my blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town, thirty years ago. Not that it’s sparked transformation of anything, like it was supposed to.” She rubbed her palms on her thighs. “I don’t suppose you or the medic happened to stuff anything to eat in that bag, did you? My stomach has suddenly woken up to the fact that I missed breakfast and lunch.”

  “Sorry, not even nutrient concentrates.” He should have thought of it. He’d grown selfish in his solitude on the farm, not having to think of others. A memory fluttered of when Kerzanna had been teaching him how to fly, something about flitters throughout the galaxy still having supplies for a crash landing, a holdover from frontier planet days. “We could raid the emergency stores.”

  “Yeah, I think I’m going to have to.” She released her seat web and stood. “Make sure to add the rental company’s up-charge to your invoice to me.”

  She came back with three mealpacks stacked on top of one another. “Water?”

  “In the bag, short side, closest to me.”

  She kneeled to fumble with the bag. “Want one?”

  “Sure.”

  By the time he had opened the water pouch and taken a sip, she’d already triggered the top mealpack’s heater, and began using the included spoon to efficiently shovel food into her mouth as fast as she could chew and swallow. She only slowed down about halfway through the second mealpack. “That’s better,” she said between mouthfuls. “Autodoc happytime drugs mess with my feedback.”

  Guilt flashed through him. “Emergency wake-ups probably don’t help.”

  She glanced at the flitter console readouts and the sky periodically as she ate. He doubted she was even aware she did it. The few former squad mates he’d ever met of hers said she’d been a legendary pilot, both atmosphere and interstellar, and he believed it.

  His clunky-looking but highl
y customized percomp pinged with an incoming message from his neighbor, Bhalodia. He read it while Kerzanna folded up the two empty mealpacks for recycling. Bhalodia reported that the port manager, Bhalodia’s poker buddy, said two mercs had been nosing about for information on the flitter crash and seemed uncommonly interested in the pilot, who they somehow knew was female and a Jumper. Bhalodia ended the message with a warning that Castro would probably be happy to sacrifice the flitter pilot to draw attention away from Pitt.

  He showed Kerzanna the entire message, without comment. She was smart, and he doubted she’d be in the mood for Jess-the-bomber’s “told you so” attitude. He wasn’t, either.

  He braced himself for an argument about changing the plan, but instead, she took a deep breath and held it, then let it out slowly.

  That was the second time she hadn’t lost her temper. It dawned on him that she’d probably had to train herself to stay calm to control her waster’s disease symptoms, the way he’d had to train himself to control the bleedover fragments, or fracture permanently. He intended to ask her about her methods, once they were in the safe seclusion of an interstellar ship’s stateroom.

  He quieted his thoughts and embraced the silence as he watched the sky and the console readouts.

  “Did you ever buy that farm you wanted?”

  “Yes.” He’d have told anyone else to mind their own business, but he’d never been able to resist the low, velvety tone she reserved for people she cared about. Something about her attracted the people who needed her, and she compassionately let them in. “It’s small, only about two square kilometers. The previous owner depleted the soil with monoculture fiber plants. I rotated in some grains and have a greenhouse full of new seed starts for biofuel crops ready for planting this week.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Mostly, though, I repair the pest repellers, irrigators, and the sensor arrays.”