Their Fractured Light: A Starbound Novel (38 page)

“No, I get it.” My weariness is fading, making way for a spark of curiosity. I’ve got no idea who this woman is, beyond someone Sofia was trying to reach at LaRoux Industries, but whoever she is, she’s brilliant. “They’re hacking people’s brains, essentially.”

Sanjana’s lips twitch into a smile, eyes meeting mine. “Not really how I’d put it, but that’s more or less right.”

What she’s saying makes perfect sense—it fits with LaRoux’s little devices, explaining why the electromagnetic fields our shields produce would hide us from the whisper. And then I see something else, something more urgent, and I scramble to rip my vest open, and pull my kit out from inside it. “Oh, hell.”

Six sets of eyes swivel to me, and I point at Tarver, then Flynn. “We just fried them. I don’t know how quickly the whisper can find us, but it won’t need a husk to lay eyes on us anymore. Our minds are unprotected.”

Soft curses echo around me, horrified glances are exchanged, and then Tarver and Flynn are both scrambling to pull the palm pads from inside their vests, sliding them across to me. “Can you fix them?” Jubilee asks, pressing down on the folded bandage Flynn had been using to stop the bleeding on her hand. “Did the EMP fry your equipment, too?”

I hold up the bag. “It’s aluminized.”

I get the same blank stares Sanjana was on the end of a minute ago.

“Any techie worth their salt carries their gear in one of these, protects against static charges, magnetic fields—and EMPs.”

Sanjana slowly pulls a palm pad from a pocket sewn into her jumpsuit, pushing it across to me with her good hand. “I followed the specs you sent. Smart. How far do they project when they’re working?”

“Several feet,” I say, starting to unscrew the casings to get at their innards. “They might even turn the husks back, but I think it’d take minutes at best, and minutes up close with those guys is longer than we’ll ever have.”

In the silence that follows, I know everybody is thinking about what those several minutes would entail. Flynn breaks it by introducing himself, and then the rest of us, and Sofia stirs to hand Sanjana a water bottle and a granola bar.

Flynn’s brow is furrowed throughout the introductions, though, and I don’t blame him—this is physics beyond my understanding, and I didn’t grow up on a backwater swamp planet halfway across the galaxy. “So, Dr. Rao…you know how she’s doing this? Controlling people?”

Sanjana pauses, clearly reorganizing her thoughts, figuring out how to explain the concept. “Basically…our brains run on electricity, right? Biochemical electricity, of course, not like a battery, but…all the little impulses in our brains are electrical sparks that tell us what we’re seeing, tasting, hearing—and everything we do, all our muscle responses and movements, they’re responses to electrical signals too. I believe that the rift entity—”

“Rift—ow!” Jubilee starts to interrupt, then hisses as Flynn applies alcohol from their first-aid kit to the gash on her hand.

He glances up, lips twitching. “Crybaby.”

“Shut up.” But her lips seem to respond to his, twitching once, then twice, into a smile. Her eyes flicker back toward Sanjana. “I meant—rift entity? What’s that?”

“They’re…right, you wouldn’t know about that. You know how everyone’s…acting strange? The people out there, the ones who mobbed you?”

“The ones being controlled by the whisper, right.”

“By the…” Sanjana’s brows lift. “Whisper? That’s what you call them?”

“Lilac came up with the name,” Tarver interjects quietly. “She was the first person to know about them. They showed up like whispering voices in her mind when we were shipwrecked.”

Sanjana hesitates, sympathy in her gaze as her head turns back toward her old friend. Her hesitation lingers, as she clearly wants to ask him about Lilac—she might be fooling her father and the public, but Sanjana knows something’s not right. “Right. Well, then you know what they can do. Cause muscle spasms, pupil dilation, a taste people describe as metallic—”

“Tastes like blood,” mutters Jubilee as Flynn finishes wrapping medical tape around the pad against her palm.

“I’d describe it more like the sensation you get when you lick a battery, but I suppose that’s accurate. Under the right circumstances, they can even cause auditory and visual hallucinations—the whispers Lilac was hearing. And in the most extreme cases, they can control a person’s motor functions completely.”

“But what does this have to do with the EMP grenades?” Tarver’s voice is quick, carrying far more animation than before Sanjana’s arrival.

“Well…the whisper’s abilities all have to do with ‘hacking’ the electrical impulses in the brain. My theory was that a large enough electromagnetic pulse might interfere with that control long enough to sever the connection. I grabbed these from the lab when I got your text—I was working late, that’s the only reason I was even at LRI when the
Daedalus
went down. I couldn’t get you on the phone and knew you’d be walking straight into…well,
that.
” She tilts her head toward the opening of our makeshift cave, where moments before we’d been running for our lives.

“You came to find us without knowing whether those things would work?” Flynn’s eyebrows go up, clearly impressed.

“It wasn’t much riskier than staying where I was. Half the trauma center had fallen to those things already, I wasn’t about to stick around and become one of them. I rigged my palm pad in line with the instructions you sent, and I’m not a husk yet, so I’m guessing it works.” Sanjana rubs at her arm, just below the elbow. I’d thought she was wearing some kind of metallic mesh glove, but as she massages the spot where the “glove” begins, I realize what I’m looking at—it’s a cybernetic prosthesis. And the EMP grenade knocked it out just as surely as it knocked out the husks—that explains why she couldn’t afford to test her theory before she found us.

“You gave up the use of your hand to save us?” Sofia’s been quiet during all of this, but her eyes are on the same movement I noticed.

“I owe Tarver a lot,” Sanjana replies quietly. “I’d have lost much more than a hand if it weren’t for him.”

When Tarver doesn’t answer, Jubilee clears her throat. “She’s one of the survivors from the outpost on Patron that Tarver liberated. In a way, she—that outpost—started all of this. Tarver never would’ve been on the
Icarus
in the first place if that operation hadn’t landed him on a publicity tour to make people feel all warm and fuzzy about the military”

“Full circle,” Sanjana murmurs.

“The EMP, though.” Tarver’s insistent, cutting through the discussion with a grimace, as though they’re discussing his failings rather than his heroism. “It
did
work. And those people—they’re alive? They’re not hurt?”

“They should be fine,” Sanjana replies. “Theoretically, they’ll wake up with not much more than a bad headache. And whatever injuries they’d already sustained, of course—wait, where are you going?”

Tarver’s moving before Sanjana can finish, reaching out for her satchel. “How many of these things do you have left?” he asks urgently.

“Two more—
why
?”

“This is how we save Lilac.” Tarver pulls out one of the grenades, a spherical object the size of a tangerine. His eyes flick up toward Sanjana. “The whisper has her, too. She’s the one doing all this—or rather, the whisper’s forcing her to do all this.”

“Tarver—I know. I saw her.” Sanjana reaches out with her good hand, resting it on Tarver’s arm to stop him from getting up. “She’s at LRI Headquarters. Tarver…”

“We use one of them to get through the husks to where she is, then we use the other one on her—free her—then destroy the rift.”

But Sanjana’s shaking her head, pain written clearly across her features. “Tarver, stop—no. Those others, they’re just being controlled. Like puppets, or androids all running on the same programming. Lilac…” She swallows, some of that pain shifting into fear. “Lilac is different. I saw her, just before I got out. She’s not being controlled, some mindless shell.…She
is
that entity. I saw what she could do. I don’t know how it’s possible, or why it is, but she’s
different
, and that entity is wearing her like a costume. I don’t think that EMP will have any more effect on her than it would on you or me. That thing’s a part of her.”

Tarver’s eyes stay on her for a long, tense moment, his hand tightening around the grenade. Then he lets it fall back into her satchel, shoulders sagging as he sinks back down onto the cracked floor. “What about the shields? If we got one of those close enough to her, for long enough…?”

I shake my head. “They’re less powerful than the EMP. No chance.”

The silence rings for a heartbeat or two until I find my voice, clearing my throat. “We know why she’s different,” I say quietly. When Tarver says nothing, I relay the story to Sanjana that he told us—of how Lilac died, and came back, and brought with her some connection to the other side of the rift that’s been inexorably drawing her back toward the whispers.

“And now,” Sofia adds when I’ve finished, “LaRoux’s sending representatives back to every planet with plans to build more rifts, like the one on Avon, and the one here. We think that she’s letting him think he’s still running the show, that he’s not the risk. He’s losing his mind, and she can drive him over the edge anytime she wants. Once he’s put everything in place, she’ll be able to spread the whispers like an infection until every person in the galaxy is one of those empty shells. Unless we figure out a way to stop her.”

“On Avon, we destroyed the rift.” Flynn’s voice is troubled. “And that stopped the whispers, too. We were hoping you’d know enough about this rift to tell us how to destroy it.”

“We were hoping,” Sofia adds, “that you’d be willing to help us. Since you were almost willing to help me once before.”

“Help…” Sanjana’s brow furrows deeper, but then her eyes widen. “You’re Alexis? You’re the one I was going to meet, the day of the riots at LRI Headquarters?”

“Yes, except that it’s actually Sofia,” Sofia replies. “I was worried they’d caught you, when they turned up at my apartment.…Thanks for trying to warn me.”

“I’m glad you’re safe, I never knew.…” Sanjana shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can help you, but I’ll try. How did you destroy the other rifts?”

“I don’t think LaRoux had figured out yet how to build shields like the ones we’re using, when we were on Avon.” Jubilee’s quick to answer. “There was a self-destruct mechanism built in, I assume so he could terminate the project if things got out of hand. He wouldn’t need that now, though.”

“No,” Sanjana agrees. “I doubt there’s a self-destruct switch this time. He won’t make the same mistake twice.”

Tarver takes longer to answer. “I don’t entirely know,” he says finally. “I jumped into the rift with Lilac. I thought it would kill me, to be honest, but I thought there was a chance it would save her. I think it was the whispers themselves that destroyed the rift.”

“Any portal between dimensions would have to be highly unstable,” Sanjana says quietly. “Adding your own energy and disrupting the field by leaping into it could have released the whispers contained inside, allowing them to destroy their own prison. But anything that unstable is unpredictable, and we have no way of knowing what changes LaRoux has made. It was the very first rift, after all. He’ll have learned more since it was built. If you were to try that again, you could end up doing exactly what the whisper wants, opening the way for more of its kind to come through.”

“And I don’t think it would be survivable this time,” Tarver says, though there’s an edge to his voice that scares me—an edge that says failing to survive is an option for him, if that’s what it takes. “Whether it was having two of us to dispel the energy, or Lilac’s connection to them protecting me, I don’t know, though.”

Sanjana blinks, then shakes her head. “It’s just a theory. I’m working blind here, without a net. I’ve only been able to work indirectly on the project, so my knowledge is limited.”

“But you’ve thought of something,” Tarver insists. “I know that look.”

Sanjana lets her breath out slowly. “Well…these entities, the whispers. They don’t belong here. They belong in their universe, what we refer to as hyperspace. Just as it takes huge amounts of energy for a ship to skip through hyperspace to travel between star systems, it takes a huge amount of energy to hold the whispers here. They’re constantly being pulled back toward their own universe, but the rift machinery—you’ve seen that, right? Looks exactly like a hyperspace engine, a giant ring, glows blue when it’s on?” She pauses, taking in the scattered nods around the circle. “The rift machinery is what holds them here, on our side. It creates the tiniest tear in the fabric separating our worlds, and keeps them inside. It’s an intensely intricate, delicate balance, governed by some of the most complicated programs anyone’s ever written. But, theoretically, if someone could rewrite the program to open the rift just a little wider, the forces pulling at them
might
pull the whisper back through the rift, into its own world. Leaving Lilac, physically, behind.”

“Physically?” Tarver’s voice shakes a little. “What about mentally? What about
her
, her thoughts and memories?”

Sanjana rubs at her temple, clearly uneasy. “I don’t know. She might be fine.”

“She would be,” Tarver murmurs. “If anyone can survive it, she could. Can you do it? Program the rift to send it back?”

Sanjana shakes her head, eyes widening a little. “Tarver—I’m not a programmer. I deal in theory, in physics—executing something like this is way, way beyond my experience. LaRoux’s got a team of the fifteen best programmers in the galaxy working constantly to tweak and perfect that machinery. I got printouts of some of the programming fragments before I escaped, but it’d take me years just to understand what I’m reading. It’s—it’s just a theory.”

Tarver’s gaze, haunted now, stays trained on Sanjana’s face. It’s Sofia who speaks, and though she’s speaking to everyone, her eyes are on me. “We just happen to
have
one of the best programmers in the galaxy. Dr. Rao, meet the Knave of Hearts.”