Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two (32 page)

“What was Gavin doing?” Kavanaugh wondered.

“Working as a courier for Outrider. I’m not sure where Gavin was supposed to deliver the drug. He could have been smuggling it on the side—that wouldn’t have been out of character—or it could have been meant to go to Coalition Command, along with me.”

Kavanaugh said, “I can’t deny the smuggling, but I never pictured Gavin as a drug runner. What happened to the shipment?”

“I don’t know. Gavin said that when Thallian’s minions boarded his ship, they confiscated the drug when they captured me. I don’t know where it went from there.”

“Sloane was pretty vocal about his disgust for drug users when we were younger. I’d always thought he stayed away from chemicals, until Ariel told me about accidentally hooking him on the Dart.”

It was Vezali’s turn to jump in. “What’s the Dart?”

“It’s a Templar drug,” Raena explained. “I’m not sure how
they
used it, but apparently it makes human brains focus. Users determine the project they want to accomplish and, as long as the drug stays in their systems, they arrange their whole lives in such a way as to achieve the goal.”

“That’s a good summation of it,” Mellix said.

Raena stared at him. She realized she’d just told the journalist that she was captured by Thallian during the War. She had completely blown any cover story she might have been trying to hide behind.

Mellix’s whiskers twitched into a smile that was meant to be reassuring. “We can talk later. For now, get me up to speed on the Messiah drug.”

“Wait,” Mykah said. “First: Humans can take a Templar drug?”

“I’m told our physiologies are very similar,” Raena said, all business again. “I don’t know how true that is.”

“So your man Sloane has a history of abusing Templar chemicals?” Mellix said.

Raena nodded. “He had the connection to Outrider and Messiah, although I don’t think he could have afforded to use it back then—and Ariel gave him a taste for Templar-made drugs while they were together, before I got out of prison.”

“Well, it’s not a smoking gun,” Mellix said, “but it is an interesting set of coincidences.”

“Isn’t it?” Raena said. She turned to Coni. “Vezali said you had figured out how the Messiah drug works.”

“Not entirely,” Coni said. “I’ve been able to read some of the trial transcripts, but there are fewer declassified documents than I expected—and there weren’t many trials to begin with.” She sneaked a moon cake off the tray and took a bite, chewing meditatively before she went on.

“Messiah addicts claimed that they could travel back in time. They believed they could change the past, but since those changes didn’t carry through to accepted modern-day reality, their assertions were discounted as hallucinations.” She took another bite of cake, licked her teeth, and said, “And yet, in our agreed-upon reality, the governments they were working to overthrow did actually fall. Not because of anything the terrorists did objectively in the real galaxy, but because the victims apparently had bad dreams that drove them mad. The victims made bad decisions, or fatal mistakes, or in a pair of cases, became dangerously violent on live news feeds.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Mykah protested. “The drug users didn’t do anything except trip out on the past. How could that cause other people to freak out and destroy their own governments?”

“Exactly so,” Coni said. “It makes no sense to us.”

“Which makes it sound exactly like Templar tech,” Mellix pointed out.

No one raised any exceptions to that truism, so Coni continued. “Every legitimate government in the galaxy—continental, planetary, interplanetary, all the way up to the Council of Worlds—fell over themselves to condemn the drug and its users, because they knew there is no defense against it. How do you defend against something happening somewhere else because of strangers you’ve never been in contact with? Everyone recognized the Messiah drug as exceptionally dangerous to those in positions of power, even if they never touched the stuff or personally knew anyone who did. They couldn’t prove any connection between the handful of users they captured alive—and most that they found were already dead, used up by the drug before they were discovered. But when your government is being brought down by insanity from within, searching for the nest of dying oldsters responsible for destabilizing it was never the chief priority. Damage control from within got far more attention.”

“How do you track a drug when there’s no connection between its users and its victims?” Raena asked.

“Exactly,” Coni said. “Try as they might, they caught no manufacturer, no distribution network, no organized crime, none of the usual players in the culture or dissemination of a drug. All they had was a number of destabilized Empire-friendly governments and a bunch of old, dried-out, dead humans, who were bio-identical to younger freedom fighters. And the name Outrider.”

Raena set her coffee down before she spilled it. “They caught him?”

“No. They had descriptions of him, but never physical proof of his existence. No video recordings. No DNA evidence. Apparently, he never traveled anywhere, never touched anything, never left a record of himself anywhere that could be tracked or duplicated or stuck on a wanted poster. They never caught sight of him. They never even identified his species, although it was widely assumed he was human. He is the ghost at the heart of the mystery. Where did he come from? Why did he go? Where did he get the supply of the drug that he peddled?”

“I saw him,” Raena confessed, “in one of my dreams. He was serving as the Prime Minister of the Council of Worlds.”

“Did you hear his name?” Mellix asked. “His real name?”

She shook her head. “It was a dream in which the Templar were not wiped out. That weirded me out sufficiently that I lost track of pretty much everything else. And to make it hyper-realistic, the Templar had come to the Council of Worlds for no more exciting reason than to propose some new trade plan. Vezali and I watched them on the news.”

Vezali’s coffee cup hit the table’s edge with a loud crack.

Raena looked at her and smiled. “You remember that?”

“I thought it was a hallucination,” she said. “There was a blond woman, with a white shirt and her hair like this.” She used a tentacle to mime a braid hanging over her shoulder.

“You remember meeting Ariel on Callixtos?” Raena asked, waiting until Vezali nodded. “She remembered you from her dream, too.”

“Not to theorize about someone else’s hallucinations,” Mellix said, “but that could be evidence that Outrider was working with the Templar and they rewarded him with a position of power.”

“Now you’re
all
talking crazy,” Kavanaugh said. “It doesn’t matter if the Templar hired some human Quisling to pimp their drugs to fuck up governments during the War. It happened decades ago. The damage is done. What does it matter to the galaxy now?”

Raena laughed. “Oh, Tarik, you’re on the
Veracity
. We solve historic atrocities and see that the perpetrators are brought to justice.”

“You’re mocking us,” Mykah accused, actually hurt.

“Never,” Raena said. “I fully expect you to find Outrider, so that he can take responsibility for his crimes.”

“But why am I here?” Kavanaugh asked. “I mean, it’s all a fascinating thought game, but …”

“I need your help tracking down Gavin. If he’s using the Messiah drug to mess with my past, that means the drug still exists in a useable form. It means the galaxy is in danger. Destroying me, that’s micro scale. But what if a couple of the bigger planetary governments fell? What if humans provided a convenient scapegoat once again? What if there’s another galactic war—and this time, the galaxy doesn’t choose to stay its hand? What if they all band together to wipe humanity out? What if humans don’t actually have rights after all?”

Silence followed Raena’s litany. She reached calmly forward and helped herself to a second moon cake, spilling its powdery coating across the table in a trail like the arm of the Milky Way.

“How does the Messiah drug work?” Haoun asked.

“I’ve been researching it,” Mellix explained. “It’s similar to the Dart, except that instead of moving around in the world of the living, fixated on finishing your project, Messiah addicts lie down somewhere that their bodies won’t be disturbed. Then the drug knocks their spirits, ghosts, souls, whatever you choose to call them, loose from their flesh and lets them move back—only backward—in time. They can only go somewhere within the span of their own pasts, not back before they themselves were born. And the farther back they go, or the more often they go, the more of their own life energy they burn up. That’s what makes them appear to age so quickly.”

“But how does it work?” Mykah asked. “What does it allow them to do in the past?”

“They can only make minor changes. As soon as they interact with someone in the past and change things, then a bubble forms in the river of time. It’s like knotting a new string onto an old one. The original string continues on as before, but there’s a split where the new timeline is added to the old one. Sort of like branches on a tree.”

Raena asked, “Can Messiah users see what changes progress from the alterations they make?”

“Only for a brief period of time. Then the participants in the new reality develop autonomy and move forward beyond the time travelers’ influence and control. Eventually something happens that jolts the time traveler’s consciousness back into his flesh in this universe.”

“So Gavin never gets to enjoy rescuing you?” Kavanaugh asked Raena.

“As far as I’ve seen, Gavin never stands a chance.”

Coni dragged the conversation back to the addicts. “Its effects on the body are so brutal, why would anyone use the drug more than once?”

Mellix grinned. “Raena, you’ll excuse me for speaking frankly?”

“Please do.”

“Sloane has been affecting your dreams for how long?”

“I was looking at my notes earlier. It’s been about a week.”

“And has he driven you to do anything dangerous yet?”

“Other than the night I was sleepwalking and had the seizure, no. My judgment has been impaired, though.” She meant: I’ve admitted more in front of you than I ever intended, but she didn’t confess that now. Instead, she said, “The others would be a better judge of my behavior.”

“Well, now that I know what you’ve been going through,” Mykah said, “I think you’ve held it together remarkably well.”

“Exactly,” Mellix said. “For the revolutionaries to bring down the planetary governments, they would gang up on some functionary, a president, say, or a prime minister. They would research everything about that person’s life and then would take it apart in his or her dreams. And the dreams didn’t need to be limited to once a night, since every addict in the team could attack every single night. Eventually, the target’s sanity would be so broken that the Messiah users could attack during the day, any time the target closed his eyes.”

No one bothered to point out how this sounded exactly like what Raena was experiencing.

Kavanaugh said, “I don’t understand why Gavin would do this to you. Isn’t his whole goal just to get in bed with you? Brainwashing chemicals aren’t hard to find, if you know what you’re looking for. Why would he go through all this trouble when he could just find you and dose you?”

“I think he was trying to find me for a while,” Raena said. “However, except for our trip to Capital City, I haven’t been off this ship since we were on Callixtos. I haven’t had a legitimate identity since the Emperor had my death certificate forged. I didn’t want anyone to pick me up on some civilized world before I could prove I belong in this galaxy here and now. Gavin couldn’t get to me, because I wasn’t anywhere he could get.”

She knew Mellix was watching her face, but she didn’t look up to meet his eyes.

“What makes you think Sloane will be hard to find?” Kavanaugh asked. “All he wants is you back, right? Maybe he’s just waiting for you to call.”

“I don’t have any idea how to reach him,” Raena said. “Sounds like he burned Ariel badly enough that I didn’t ask her. I checked the directories, but all the Sloane Incorporated stuff, they’re all just dead ends. He has vanished from the news grid.”

“I’ve got a couple of old addresses for him,” Kavanaugh offered. “One of them might work, or at least forward to him. But if not, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Raena said. “He’s burning himself out fast, if the way he’s been aging in my dreams is any indication. He’s going to get really desperate, soon. I think he’s already been trying whacky things like killing Thallian so that the plague didn’t get disseminated and the Templar didn’t die, or killing the Emperor so that the plan was never hatched. In those futures, humanity sticks to its little segment of the galaxy and does not mix.”

She licked the flour off of her fingers, then added, “If we don’t find him and his cache of Messiah before it kills him, then that stuff will be loose in the galaxy. So time is short, people.”

“What do you need us to do?”

“Finding Gavin is priority one.”

CHAPTER 15

R
aena retreated to her cabin with Coni and Vezali. “I need your help,” she said. “If Kavanaugh can reach Sloane, what do I say to him that will get him to agree to see me?