Mindguard (14 page)

“There’s not?”

“Well, none was
ever really needed since there are basically no women in the Enforcement Unit…
except you. And, to my knowledge, for as long as I’ve been with the enforcers,
no male colleagues have ever been together either.”

“I don’t know,
it just seems -”

“Wrong?”

“No… no, not
wrong,” she quickly assured him.  “It just seems… I figure it’s something
that would bother the commander, that’s all.”

“The commander
doesn’t give a damn. That I can promise you.”

“Well, why else
would he be calling me to the briefing room?”

“He probably
talked to Miller.”

“I’m an idiot,”
she suddenly realized. Of course, the two weeks were almost up and the
commander was probably back from his meeting with Horatio Miller. He was
calling her to inform her how to proceed with the mission. She had completely
forgotten about that and she felt embarrassed. Villo jumped at the opportunity
to tease her.       

“You’re not an
idiot, you’re a girl in love. Your judgment is clouded by my irresistible
charm.” He winked. “Now don’t keep the commander waiting or he’ll send his
hologram in here again and that always creeps me out.”

●

“I just finished
talking to Miller. He will go ahead with the transport, so you have a green
light on the mission.”

Commander
Anderson was not the man to waste time with decorum like saying hello or asking
about your day. He had the habit of starting a conversation in a way that
sounded like he was just picking up where he had previously left off. This
particularity of his speech had the effect of making his soldiers and cadets
instantly think about all the conversations they had ever had with him, which
created  the illusion that he was always near and that he knew everything.
Tamisa often wondered if he did that on purpose.

“Talk to Irvin
Kernis and consult the timetable for this mission, then prepare your men!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Dismissed!”

A surge of
adrenaline rushed through her body as she left the briefing room. The chance of
a lifetime lay ahead. Tamisa knew what an immense opportunity this was. In her
heart, she never expected this mission to actually happen. She was surprised
that Horatio Miller would go ahead with the transport after a personal warning
from the High Commander of the Enforcement Unit. Miller’s audacity was
unbelievable. Tamisa wouldn’t have imagined that there was even a single person
in the world who would not back down when confronted by the commander. And yet,
it seemed that Horatio Miller had issued a challenge. Tamisa was anxious to get
to work.

Heading for the
timekeeper’s laboratory, she sent a message to Villo to meet her there. She
thought back to the day when the enforcers landed on Aanadya and rescued her.
The second when Kaye Wright hit the ground dead was also the moment when Tamisa
started living. She remembered running home as fast as she could, running to tell
her stepmom that she had finally found a way to get off that horrible planet.

It was only late
afternoon but Melody was already drunk. It seemed like her periods of sobriety
got shorter with each passing day. Tamisa found her lying on the bed, absently
staring at the ceiling. She tried to get through to her. She desperately tried
to explain that they needed to go, that they needed to leave as fast as
possible, and that she was going to become an enforcer. The glazed look in the
woman’s eyes predicted nothing good. Tamisa painfully realized that precious
time was being wasted.

She grabbed her
face in her hands and roared in frustration, roared like a wounded beast.
Melody started laughing like it was the funniest thing she had ever seen. She
laughed and laughed, teary-eyed, screeching and hiccupping. Tamisa was all too
familiar with her stepmother’s fits of drunken laughter. She knew the spectacle
was going to last a lot longer than she had the patience to wait under the
circumstances.

“I’ll come back
for you,” she promised and left the house with haste, her mother’s crazy laugh
echoing behind. It took her half an hour to get to downtown Tuson. She stopped
running only when she got to the administrative building, the former
headquarters of the Worker’s Union. Exhausted, she collapsed on the building’s
front steps, where she remained for a few minutes, trying to catch her breath.

“Careful, Curly,
someone might trip over you.”

The cheerful
voice came from a few steps above her. She turned around and found herself in
front of a man the size of a bear. He was middle-aged and balding, with a bushy
beard the color of a Kodiak bear’s fur. Tamisa recognized the color because she
had seen a picture of the animal in one of her father’s nature books. She also
recognized the man in front of her: Martin Anderson, the commander’s brother
and first lieutenant.

“Oh my god, you
need to take me to Commander Anderson!”

She wished she
had said something else, something that didn’t make her sound like a spoiled
five-year-old, but you only get to make one first impression. The bear just
raised his right eyebrow.

“Sir, I’ll do
anything, I’ll be a maid, I’ll clean your uniforms and stuff, you have to need
a maid, a cleaner, right? I want off this planet, sir, I want to become an
enforcer!”

The part about
becoming an enforcer had just sort of slipped out with the rest of the tirade.
Tamisa instantly regretted it. She was afraid that the man would start laughing
at her. Instead, he extended his large paw to help her up. He seemed pleased
when she refused and got up on what was left of her own strength. Fifteen
minutes later she was standing before Thomas Liam Anderson, who measured her
with his gaze.

“Kid wants to be
an enforcer,” Martin said.

“What’s your
name?” the commander asked.

“Tamisa Faber.”

 “What’s
your age, Ms. Faber?”

“Fifteen, sir.”
At first she thought about lying and telling him that she was nineteen, but she
ultimately decided against it.  Now that she had come to know the
commander as well as anyone ever could, she was glad that she had told the
truth that day.

“Fifteen,” the
commander echoed. “The legal age on Aanadya is nineteen, but in most of the
Federation it’s eighteen so we’ll go with that. You can stay with us until
then. We’ll find a way to put you to use and when you turn eighteen, you can
enroll in the academy.”

“Yes, sir!”

“All right,
board the ship, one of our men will show you where you can bunk. Good luck and
welcome!”

Martin nodded
and told one of the men to take her to the ship. Thomas Anderson turned his
attention back to something on his retinal insertions. Everything happened so
quickly. Speed! The symbol of the enforcers. No more time was spent on anything
than was absolutely necessary. Speed was essential. Speed was key.

“Sir?”

The commander
blinked as if awoken from a daydream and he looked at her again. He seemed
surprised that she was still there.

“My… mother… she
lives with me, I mean I live with her. Can she come… with me? She can cook,
she’ll… you won’t even know she’s around.”

She had to try,
even if she instinctively knew what he was going to say. 

“No, only you.
And you will need to board the ship now. There will be no time to return for
your valuables, if you have any.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tamisa had tears
in her eyes as she was being led through the hallways of the dirty
administrative building, like a death row inmate to the electric chair.
Outside, she boarded a vehicle which took her directly to the spaceport, where
the enforcers’ ship awaited. It would take her far away from Aanadya. She cried
all the way to the spaceport and the enforcer that drove her never asked her
why.

“I’ll come back
for you,” she thought, but she knew it was a lie. She rested her head on the
vehicle’s window and took one more long look at the landscape of Aanadya,
taking in it for the last time. The sickly-grey ground that appeared brown only
because of the compromised sunlight. The lung-disease color of the sky that
made the clouds seem solid, impenetrable, suggesting that nothing could escape
this wretched world. And yet, in a short while, she would be leaving this
planet. Forever. 

“I will send
somebody after you!” That’s what she told herself in those moments. She saw the
hill where, in one of the houses, Melody probably lay passed out, if she wasn’t
still laughing like a madwoman. She couldn’t tell which house was theirs; they
all looked the same from a distance. Blisters on diseased skin. Now, ten years
after that day, she was facing her first mission as an enforcer and, at the
same time, her first command. Her heart was racing, as if to remind her that
its nemesis, the mind, was not in complete control after all.

The only
conceivable way a religion could ever survive is to treat man and God as equal;
codependent and inseparable entities. Any religion that does not assign the
same spiritual value to man as it does to God and does not place both beings on
the same celestial hierarchy is condemned to eventually crumble and become nothing
more than mythology. That is why every religion in history has failed.

Kinsey Ayers –
Religion  and the Mind, a complex hierarchy

When Tamisa
entered the timekeeper’s laboratory, she was not surprised to find him working.
He rarely left the confines of his lab. When he did, it was just to eat or work
out. All enforcers were required to be in peak physical shape, whether they
were field agents or, like the timekeepers, base allies.

Timekeeper
Kernis seemed especially dedicated to his work. He had little interest in
anything else and was always immersed in the rivers of data flowing through his
workstation - analyzing, calculating, rendering timetables for the missions.
Tamisa found him positioned in front of two enormous holomonitors which rapidly
displayed symbols she didn’t even attempt to understand. She was aware that,
aside from the giant holoscreens, the timekeeper also received volumes of
information on his retinal insertions, sifting back and forth between the screens
and what was meant for his eyes only. Villo was also in the room. When he saw
her, he grinned.

“Let me guess,
he didn’t give a crap.” 

“Shut up,”
Tamisa said and instinctively looked at Kernis. Predictably, the timekeeper
remained focused on his data, looking like he didn’t even notice that she was
there.

“I’ve done the
math; we’ll go ahead with the same course of action,” he said, proving that he
did, after all, acknowledge her presence.

“Same?” she
asked, perhaps louder than intended.

“Same,” replied
Kernis flatly. Villo tried to explain: “Father Time over here believes that, no
matter what, the transportation will go ahead as planned. In fact, he is one
hundred percent sure.”

“Ninety-Seven
percent,” said the timekeeper, who either didn’t pick up on the sarcasm or just
pretended not to.

“How’s that?”
the woman asked.

“Educator Miller
is aware of the legal ramifications of his actions. As I understand, the
commander chose the unconventional approach of openly threatening the
educator.”

“Openly threatening
him? What do you mean?”

“He threatened
the educator’s life.”

If, for a single
second, Tamisa would have suspected Timekeeper Kernis of being capable of
humor, she would have thought he was making fun of her. But timekeepers were
analytical creatures who shunned the cursory nature of wit.

“Has he ever
done anything like that before?” she asked.

“No such
approach has been recorded before.”

Villo noticed
the evident concern on his partner’s face. “Tammy, it’s a delicate situation,”
he said. “The commander is adapting, he is doing something he has never done
before. That’s the sign of a master strategist.”

Tamisa did not
seem convinced. “What was the Educator’s reaction?”

“He threatened
back.”

“What?”

Villo started
laughing like he had just heard the funniest joke. Tamisa was annoyed with his
monkeying around. It was distracting and she needed to focus.

“Basically, he
held this dramatic speech saying the people were behind him, that there would
be hell to pay if we tried to intimidate him,” Villo said.

“Wow, he’s
ballsy.”

“He’s also
right. Going after him too openly or too strongly for something that, frankly,
doesn’t  warrant it, could end up hurting us. We’re not as popular as we
used to be.”

That last
statement was news to Tamisa. She had personally always held the enforcers in
the highest regard and viewed them with the greatest respect. She automatically
assumed that everyone else did too. In reality, opinions about the Enforcement
Unit were divided. Like every other historical force, its stability depended on
achieving balance between its supporters and its
detractors.    

“So, what do we
do?”

Villo shrugged.
“You’re in charge, you tell me. Basically, Miller just called our bluff.”

“How determined
is he to go through with this?”

“That all
depends on the nature of the information package. That’s the one thing we
haven’t been able to find out. Indications are that it’s really big.”

“Anything else?”

“Oh yeah, it
turns out the source the commander wouldn’t tell us about was the educator’s
own brother, Marcus Miller.”

“The educator’s
brother was working with the commander?”

“Seems like it.
Miller figured it out during the meeting. I mean he
is
one of the
smartest people in the world.”

“Hold on, what
are the odds that this can work in our favor? I mean, surely it must have been
a shock to Horatio, right? His own brother working against him. Maybe it will
throw him off his game or make him question his actions. What do we know about
his current emotional state? 

 “Well, I
don’t know what to tell you about the educator’s emotional state, but it seems
he’s killed his brother.”

Now Tamisa
really thought Villo was making fun of her. She was about to snap at him when
the humorless timekeeper interjected himself into the conversation. “Right
after the meeting concluded Marcus Miller left his brother’s estate through the
transporter in the front yard. It’s likely that his brother forced him off the
premises. Allegedly, he was returning to his home on planet Malar, but he never
made it there. It seems the gateway malfunctioned and just didn’t deliver him
to the other side.”

“I’ve never
heard of anything like that,” Tamisa said. How often does that even happen?”

“It doesn’t,”
the timekeeper said. “Odds of such a malfunction in the gateway generators are
0.000000000000068%. I calculated this myself, since I believe it’s of
importance to us. The accident happened right after Marcus Miller’s betrayal
was revealed to his brother. The educator has extensive knowledge of
Muench-Henriksen gateways. I suspect he also has the necessary knowledge to
sabotage these highly complex devices. There is no doubt in my mind that the
educator murdered his brother. I also believe this gives us valuable
information for our mission, about the psychology of Horatio Miller but also
about the importance of the information package that was entrusted to his
daughter. We now know the Educator would kill his own brother in order to
protect it.”

“So let’s have
the law enforcement agency on his home planet arrest him. That would give us an
enormous advantage.”

“We can’t. We
have no proof beyond my personal analysis, which is not accepted as evidence by
any federal law enforcement bureau. It would also reveal our involvement and
the commander doesn’t want that.”

“Why?”

“He refuses to
specify.”

“Goddamn it!”

Tamisa was
getting frustrated with the whole situation. She was facing a monumental
challenge: commanding a field unit on her first ever mission. That alone was
unheard of. On top of that, she wasn’t being given full information, which was
not the way the Enforcement Unit usually operated. Though she knew she had no
right to question the commander’s decisions, she was unsettled by many aspects
of the mission, especially by the Commander’s unusual behavior.

The unbending
loyalty of the enforcers had always stemmed from an undaunted faith in
Commander Anderson. Though Villo had called it ‘adapting’ and being a ‘master
strategist’, Tamisa could not help feeling a bit uneasy about the commander’s
unpredictable behavior. She was also unnerved by the discovery that Horatio
Miller had murdered his brother. She didn’t know why she felt so scandalized by
that; she had never met the man and all she knew about him was from the media.
Still, he was well-known and respected businessman and politician, an inspiration
to so many people.

In a silly way,
Tamisa felt personally disappointed by the Educator’s actions, as if they
offended her directly.
Why is it that we always feel that the very famous
owe it to us to be perfect
? she wondered.  Commander Anderson, Martin
Anderson and even Villo were all men who had countless kills under their belt.
Yet, she viewed the deaths for which they had been responsible as necessary,
even honorable, while the educator was a monster for killing his brother. What
made one crime acceptable, but not the other? Hadn’t she herself killed a human
being? Yes, it had been in self-defense, but what about the horrible way in
which she had massacred that man, disfiguring him like a wild animal, turning
his cranium into slush? Was Horatio Miller then more of a monster than Tamisa
Faber?

“There’s
something about this mission that doesn’t make sense to me,” Tamisa said after
a long pause. “We’ve established that this information package is vital to
Educator Miller. In order to protect it, he not only killed his brother but he
is willing to go to war with the Enforcement Unit. Clearly, this information
means more to the educator than perhaps even his own life. But what about
Maclaine Ross? From what I’ve found out about Ayers-Ross, this is a high-end thoughtprotection
agency that is always very selective when it comes to the cases it takes on.
How is it possible that they wouldn’t foresee the legal consequences of this
mission?”

“I believe
Maclaine Ross does, but that he is withholding the information from the rest of
his team,” the timekeeper said.

“Why would he do
something like that?” Villo asked.  

“Because there
is more to this than you know so far.”

“I’m all
ears.”     

Timekeeper
Kernis displayed a hologram of Maclaine Ross, as if the life-size image could
stimulate them into better understanding his psychology. The visual fidelity of
the three-dimensional model made it seem as if he was really in the room, a
silent and dangerous observer. Tamisa was impressed. She had prepared for the
mission extensively, researching the company, its employees, its history and
business patterns. She never thought to pause upon the physical appearance of
any of the men. She had seen a few images but she’d been more focused on their
intellects, on what she could find out about their behavioral patterns. Now,
with Ross appearing to stand in front of her, his holographic frame towering
over them, she felt as if she understood him better just by studying his
physique.  

Sometimes the
physical appearance might reveal things about one’s character
, she
realized, thinking about her own efforts to diminish her natural beauty.
Maclaine Ross was an impressive physical specimen. Only from his life-size
representation could one really get a sense of how intimidating he actually
was. An extremely tall man, taller than any of the enforcers Tamisa had met, he
was also remarkably muscular. His immense arms were battering rams and his legs
were like tree trunks. He seemed to make an effort to accentuate the visual
impact of his massive body by wearing skin-tight clothing that looked ready to
burst at the seams. His crew cut completed the image of Ross as the
quintessential warrior. 

And yet, Tamisa
knew that Maclaine Ross was the only person in history who had simultaneously
been a mindguard and a bodyguard. That meant that he was by no means just a
mindless thug. He was purposefully advertising this image, no doubt in order
for his adversaries to underestimate him. In fact, it was the complete opposite
of what Tamisa had done when she had cut off her hair. She had tried to
deemphasize her womanhood, so that she wouldn’t be underestimated. It had never
occurred to her to use it to her advantage.

Tamisa was
beginning to respect Ross. She realized that she herself had fallen into his
trap. She had underestimated him. She had thought of him as nothing but a
brute, an unworthy adversary. Although he was the Head of Operations, she had
always given little importance to him, choosing instead to focus her attention
on the legendary Sheldon Ayers. Now she realized that she was dealing with not
only one formidable foe, but at the very least two, probably more. Ross was as
dangerous to them as Sheldon and Tamisa knew now that it was vital to remember
that.

“Maclaine Ross,“
Irvin Kernis started, with the tone of a museum guide. “At fifty-seven years of
age he is in exceptional physical and intellectual condition. That is due, in
part, to his extensive and costly geriatric treatments and his countless
muscular and neurological enhancements. It is evident that Ross is incredibly
strong, but there is more to him than meets the eye. Below the surface, you
will find hundreds of thousands of credits worth of physical enhancements of
all conceivable sorts: from genome advancements that make him more resilient
against disease or biological toxins, to improvements of the muscular and
osseous tissue making him borderline unbreakable, to neural and memory
enhancements that increase his perceptive capabilities and give him
considerable control over his own physiological functions.”

“To what
degree?” Tamisa asked.

“Well, to our
knowledge he has control over his breathing, he can slow down his metabolism,
can change the way nutrients are dispersed in his body, can actively choose
which physical functions to favor at a given time, can -” 

“It means he’s a
freakin’ weapon,” Villo said. He was staring at the image of Ross with a look
of disgust. The enforcers always stressed the development of the body’s natural
abilities, taking them far beyond what anyone had ever achieved, with very
little aid from technological enhancements. Tamisa could only imagine what a
veteran Enforcer like Villo Kantil thought of a man like Maclaine Ross, who was
a veritable ode to scientific and biological improvements. To Villo and any
other enforcer, a man like Ross was an abhorrent insult to nature. Tamisa
sensed that, just as she had chosen Sheldon as her own personal adversary in
this mission, Villo had picked Ross.