Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) (11 page)

Awkward, stiff words—and under them, so much fear. That of a father for his child.

Or in this case, a father for the child who has suddenly turned into an unfathomable, explosive teenager. I remembered my dream, and it totally fit the volcanic emotions of my own teenage years. Even as a Lightbody, those rotations had been filled with so many stirrings. Drama, alienation, temper tantrums, a wild need for freedom, and some really detailed revenge fantasies. The tree version of those pretty much described what had been lurking in the dreams and antisocial urges of the biome’s inhabitants lately.

Unlike Jerome, I knew better than to try to stop it with beautiful, tranquil surroundings and time.

“We need to talk to her.” Carefully, after lots of planning—I wasn’t about to lose all my water again.

Nikki stepped forward, stance diffident, but eyes firm. “Your Talent seemed to set her off, so maybe it needs to be someone else.”

Jerome eyed her with disdain. “And you think that should be you? Just how do you imagine you might communicate with a willow tree, Dr. Jeffert?”

I was really tired of him dismissing people in general, and her in particular. On general principles, and because if I was right, he’d likely communicated that antisocial bias to his willow offspring. “Nikki has the best skills in the biome with temperamental plants. She would be a very good choice.”

I eyed the tech, who had nearly swallowed her own tongue. “However, I’m not prepared to put you at that kind of risk—not just yet, at least. I’ll talk to her.” I held up a hand as Toli and Glenn jumped in at the same time. “After setting up some very thorough scientific and medical protocols.”

I looked at Jerome and spoke quietly, gardener to gardener. “Someone needs to talk to her. I’m the best chance you’ve got to keep her alive. You know her best—help us figure out how to do it right.”

The lab was dead silent for a moment as four people checked in with their guts and made their own hard choices.

And then all four of them started moving at once. For tablets, for equipment, for a brainstorming board—and for each other.

I watched, just a moment, as my team began the first awkward steps of figuring out how to gel. There was still discontent and disconnection and uncertainty evident in every movement. Toli and Glenn still harbored significant doubts, Nikki was having trouble aside setting her fear of Jerome and her awe of me, and the complicated Dr. Salmera was still hiding something.

But despite all that, I could feel them coalescing into that strange organism that was a team—fiercely independent cells working out how to hook themselves together for the good of the whole.

That was what I’d needed. And that, I knew how to water.

I
wrinkled
my nose as I walked into the main caf. After three hours of painfully hashing out protocols for chatting with a temperamental tree, I was starving. Something smelled really good—and that wasn’t the only thing tickling my senses.

The caf was loud. Not Stardust Prime loud, but the place was a whole lot noisier than it had been a day or two ago. I sighed as the most obvious explanation came to me. Hot gossip raised the temperature of most rooms.

Nikki waved from a table to the left of the buffet line. I waved back, and did a double take. Most of the others at her table were techs, but there was at least one member of the garden staff, and a certain medical who looked very pleased with himself.

Not a notable thing on most worlds, but on this one, that kind of mingling was an act of rebellion—and I was pretty sure the people sitting at that table knew it.

Not hot gossip after all. Someone had decided to mess with the soil around here.

I smiled down at my plate and shuffled into the buffet line.

“Grower?”

I looked up, startled—and met a mountain of broccoli spears balanced gingerly on a large spoon. The woman holding the spoon squared her shoulders and smiled tentatively. “Want some? I heard they were picked fresh this morning.”

I’d have taken them if they were soy-shaped poison. I held out my plate and studied a face that I knew I recognized from somewhere. And then blinked as another spoon, this one holding steamed greens, came into view. The quiet man offering that one worked in Nikki’s lab—and turned on the light switch in my head.

More faces from Glenn’s files. These were two of the people who had been on the receiving end of the willow tree’s tantrums, or whatever they were. The ones who had dreamed, and stomped out of their labs, and thrown things, and generally behaved in ways that were deeply embarrassing to their scientific souls.

I stared at the third person offering me a spoonful of food, and the three waiting in line behind him. They were filling each other’s plates too, but their intention was clear. I reached out and gently brushed a hand as the next spoon was offered, carefully making contact when the woman nodded shyly, and confirmed what I needed to know.

They weren’t offering me sympathy. Just like Shelley on the night I arrived, they were offering support. Quiet, defiant allegiance.

Which was lovely—and almost certainly meant that I was about to need some.

I finished moving through the line, soaking in the subtle demonstrations of support, ignoring the equally numerous signs of quiet distancing. Something was clearly on the move, and even those who weren’t supportive were telling me plenty. I let the ripples travel as they would—good communities needed to know how to handle disturbances. The more the baby muscles in this tribe started flexing, the better.

I winked at Glenn and Nikki and kept walking, heading to the table on the dais where I’d taken all my meals. I could hear the murmured confusion behind me, and then the amusement. Two novice troublemakers, recognizing the footsteps of a veteran.

When you’d grown up a Lightbody, there wasn’t much a clan gathering could throw at you that would put you off your food, not even the grumpy faces of the Xirtaxis administrative team and their minions. I noted as I took my customary seat that they’d collected a couple of new ones. And that Jerome Salmera was nowhere to be found.

That raised my eyebrows—he didn’t seem like a man to give up without a fight.

I didn’t have time to contemplate the missing, however. Those present were clearly here on a mission, and it didn’t look like it played nicely with mine. I picked up my fork, sending what I hoped were vibrations that the baby rebels trying to repair this community could read. With clear, purposeful moves, I speared a tender young broccoli and raised it to the table in salute. “Hello, everyone. I hope you’re enjoying your meal.”

It wasn’t likely—the only fork moving at the table was mine. I chewed away on my broccoli, perfectly happy to wait them out. My roommate fought her battles by moving first. I rooted in the best soil I could find and waited for whoever was on the other side to do something dumb.

John Bastur cleared his throat and went first. “We’ve reviewed all the circumstances of this matter, Grower—and we’ve come to the conclusion that we have no choice but to remove the dangerous tree from dome Alpha. It will be placed in stasis by skydusk today.” He handed his tablet my direction, gesturing at one of the minions as he did so. “Our board of directors has passed this motion, and our legal team here assures me we are well within our discretion to do so.”

I glanced at the man who was sitting in as the on-planet legal mind. I was pretty sure I’d seen him tending scopes in the lab, but whatever his experience, he likely had a fleet of off-planet lawyers backing him up. Bureaucrats didn’t challenge Fixers with a lab tech as their best legal weapon.

I took the tablet and read quickly. It was full of the oversized words that lawyers tend to use when they’re trying to say a whole lot of nothing. Fortunately for me, scientists were often guilty of the same, and I had a pretty good bullshit filter. I made it to the end of the document in the time it took me to finish eating the rest of my broccoli.

And then I looked up. “This gives you the authority to remove a tree that has caused grievous bodily harm to a visitor to this biome.”

“Absolutely.” Mary Louise looked ready to chew ship hulls. “We have an obligation to protect those who enter our habitats from unreasonable harm.”

And to protect themselves legally, which would have been the far more effective argument with the distant, poorly informed board of directors. Employees signed all kinds of waivers—visitors didn’t.

It was a well-played effort, even if the visitor in question wasn’t prepared to be the chief witness in the death of a tree. Unfortunately for them, I’d also signed things they’d apparently forgotten about. And I’d learned a thing or two from my boss, who chewed up bureaucrats as appetizers before she got started on the ship hulls. “This is an interesting document, but it errs in a couple of important aspects.”

Mary Louise nearly growled.

I tried to keep in mind that she was protecting her people.

And I blessed Yesenia Mayes, who had rendered me immune from the average authority figure throwing a hissy fit—and who had made me sit through the interminable hell of our fifth-year class in Federation contract clauses. “Fixers don’t travel as visitors. Our constitution automatically assigns us rights equivalent to that of permanent residents anywhere we travel. In this case, as you are a Federation signatory, that gives me the right to appeal the decision of any corporate board to a Commonwealth traveling judge. I am hereby invoking that right.”

The part-time lawyer to Mary Louise’s left looked like he desperately wanted to go back to his microscopes.

I nodded at the Basturs. “Contact judiciary dispatch—I imagine they can have a judge here within a day or two.” Unfortunately, Xirtaxis Minor was pretty centrally located, so it wouldn’t take any longer than that. “You can, of course, invoke another board meeting to overrule my right to appeal, if you believe it is important enough.”

One in which they would be required to hear my testimony before they voted. Overruling a Fixer in absentia was one thing. I was reasonably sure they wouldn’t do it to my face, especially if they heard more than the Basturs’ carefully skewed version of events. If the head duo had any brains at all, they didn’t want me to have air time in front of either their board of directors or a traveling judge.

I paused for the morass of that to sink in and then brought down my hammer. “Know that in any future hearing regarding this matter, the visitor in question will be testifying that she suffered no harm that couldn’t be corrected by a cup of tea and some sleep, and that she believes the tree to be a unique life form potentially worthy of protected species status.”

That was dramatically underplaying the severity of my attack, but I had reasons. The willow might well be the pinnacle of their work here—a green, growing thing capable of a level of symbiosis they’d never even dreamed of.

And something every member of my family had sworn to protect even before they knew she existed. The Basturs tangled with Grower and Lightbody both.

Mary Louise’s eyes bulged. “That tree is dangerous.”

It was. “So are scientists who have forgotten what matters.” I pushed back from the table, taking my plate with me. “I’ll be in the domes, working on the smaller of those two problems. Try the broccoli—it’s excellent.”

There was no applause as I walked away, no stomping feet.

But the carefully exchanged glances and the occasional salute with a fork felt like it.

I gathered the small victories into my chakras and tried to steady for what came next. We didn’t have time for finalizing a scientific plan anymore, or readying a long protocol with well-thought-out safety precautions.

It was time to go have a talk with a tree.

Because all I had really just accomplished was a stay of execution.

I
walked
into experimental dome Alpha, having a brisk talk with my own cells. They didn’t get to give up their water today, no matter how convincing a certain tree might be.

I could feel my DNA shifting restlessly at such a message. It didn’t like the content—partnership with green, growing things was a foundational part of who I was, who my people were. My cells didn’t like this place, this strange island in space where the green, growing things were pushed to work in community with each other, and the people weren’t.

I soothed. I was a Grower. Fixing that was part of why I was here, but to do that, I needed to stay functional and conscious and able to use my Talent for good.

That was far too complex a thought for my cells. I made it simpler.
Don’t be stupid.

That one they understood.

I paused at the edge of Jerome’s gardens, taking off my boots and soaking in the feel of the symbiotic ecosystem he’d created, the carefully balanced paradise. Gingerly reading what I felt there. Looking for tectonic shifts.

There weren’t any. Whatever the tree had done, she hadn’t ruptured anything critical in her own soil. I dug my toes into the slightly damp, cool soil and sent out an experimental touch to the plants at my feet. Dancing, silly, ephemerally happy annuals. If anything was amiss here, or if there were any warnings to be on guard for my presence, they didn’t know about it.

They reminded me of my little cousins under the table. Guarding wasn’t their job.

I moved past them to the presence I’d come to see. When I had assembled my team, I’d left out one very important team member. It was time to rectify that, even if a certain tree had tried to suck out my brain cells the last time I’d tried to have a conversation. I hoped, deeply, that she’d only been reacting to what she saw as a threat—protecting her own and not aware of her own strength, especially as far as feeble human cell walls were concerned.

I knelt in the dirt far enough away to be able to see the entire willow with ease, and close enough that she would know I meant business. My Talent jangled some—my cells were still raw from our last encounter. I sent a soothing message.
No hard feelings. Need your help.

What I got back was a blast of teenager loose in a b-pod with some home brew and the music on loud.

I groaned.
Smarten up, or they’re going to dig you up by your roots and put you in a place that has no light and no oxygen and no friends.
Or the best translation of stasis that I could render into plant-speak, anyhow.

Dead silence.

And then the sharp jolt as the kid joyriding in the b-pod realized she was hovering a thousand meters in the air and had no idea how to land this thing.

I grimaced—teenagers didn’t tend to appreciate co-pilots, but I couldn’t let this one run wild, not while she could mess with the heads of half the biome.
I can help.

Spew, primal and violent and scared. And energy, reaching for my cells. For my water.

I was ready this time. My fingers reached into the soil, Talent streaming. Collecting water. Resisting breakdown. Telling a rebellious willow in no uncertain terms that she needed to stop this, and she needed to do it right now.

She listened about as well as her human counterparts.

I scowled, not at all pleased with what I needed to do next, even as I slid a slime-yellow potion out of my pouch. It was one I’d brewed at home to inoculate my brain against outside influences. I’d been carrying it to ward off the next attack, but it would be a lot more effective injected directly at the source.

I poured a few drops into the soil at my feet, unhappy with how my hands were shaking, and pushed the concentrated plant energy in a circle big enough to encompass me and a willow I dearly hoped wouldn’t realize I’d just gone on the offensive. Willing water molecules passed the energy of the potion quickly. I huffed out a sigh as the circle closed. Not an overly elegant solution, and the safety would only hold until some dummy stepped inside my line in the dirt, but it would serve to hem in the tree, at least for a little while.

Hopefully long enough for me to figure out how to negotiate with a frightened, spoiled girl who was trying to spread her wings. She hadn’t grown up with wise elders setting limits and teaching her the ways of the clan—she would have to learn those things for herself.

The willow thrashed.

I pushed her a quiet message.
I can’t let you hurt people.

No sign that she even heard me. Just a green, growing thing running hard into her first experience with captivity.

“What have you done?”

I felt the words more than heard them—and then I saw the flying shadow of a man pass me and nearly run headlong into the tree.

Jerome Salmera slid to a halt, both hands slapping into the willow’s trunk.

I cringed as the tree’s energy flailed. “Get back!” I plunged my fingers into the soil, prepared to protect him however I needed to—and felt the willow exhale.

Gulping now, crying. A stressed, fractured being who had remembered she was still mostly a child.

And flowing back into her bark—comfort. Peace. Shelter.

From the hands of a man with enough Grower Talent to make mine shake in its boots.

I froze, barely processing what the energy running up my fingers was telling me, and yet unable to avoid it. The charismatic, complicated scientist who had created this willow tree was a rogue Talent. Someone who had managed to evade both KarmaCorp’s web and the almost certain self-destruction that stalked any of us left untrained.

I watched, cells stuttering, as he calmed the tree. And felt my scientist brain gibbering. He wasn’t only a rogue Talent. He was a brilliant man who had created a uniquely symbiotic species—one who partnered with Talent. Who somehow used it. Because now that the obvious was right in front of my eyes, I knew it wasn’t pheromones or psychic analogues or anything else that the willow used. She’d learned some kind of tree version of Talent from Jerome. I could feel the truth of it under my fingers.

And the threat. Because neither of them considered me a friend.

Slowly, the man with his hands still on his tree turned to face me, eyes fierce. “She’s a child. I’m not.”

Neither was I—and I had the advantage of decades of training he didn’t have. Which, on a day when I wasn’t standing on his turf, in gardens he’d tended, would make victory mine. Today, I wasn’t prepared to take bets on that. “How long have you been a Grower?”

His eyes flashed disdain. “I don’t accept your labels for what I am.”

That didn’t make them any less true. “It would have come to you late.” That wasn’t unusual for boys. Most of the very few rogue Talents these days were men. Still, to fly under the radar of the Seekers was a major accomplishment, especially for one who could touch the energies as strongly as the man in front of me.

His tree pushed on me, hard. I pushed back. I didn’t need any rebellious teenagers in the mix at the moment—and now that I knew what powered the willow, she was a whole lot easier to talk to.

She slunk into a corner, pouting.

Jerome scowled, and the tree’s signal dampened considerably. “Leave her alone.”

It terrified me that he could do that. And it gladdened my heart—she listened to someone, at least some of the time. He, however, might not, and I was fairly certain that here, on this soil, I lacked the power to force the issue. “You need training.” The tree was no longer my primary mission. He was.

He snorted. “What, you want to throw me into a classroom with a bunch of prepubescent girls?”

Gods, no, but I somehow felt compelled to speak up for the tadpoles. “You might find them more interesting than you think.”

“Hardly.” His tone was scathing, that of a man used to treating highly skilled adult scientists as lab peons.

This was the wrong battle to fight, and the wrong way to fight it. I looked at Jerome’s stance, bare feet in the dirt just in front of the roots of his tree. A warrior, ready to defend the only family he knew.

I quieted my own body language, sent messages of calm through my feet. “She’s beautiful. Let me help you save her.”

I felt it, the tilting moment when he considered my offer. When the grown man who trusted no one but himself tried to find it within him to accept the help of another.

And I felt the hard, booming rejection. A united one. Even the soil under my feet no longer welcomed me.

Carefully, gingerly, I picked up my boots. I wasn’t the kind of Fixer who picked fights if there was any way to avoid them. And when I did, I tried to pick ones I knew I could win.

I backed slowly away. Without training, he wouldn’t have any skill with potions. With a little luck, he wouldn’t detect the one I’d used to ring the tree.

I’d bought a little more time. Now I needed to be really smart and go use it.