One
of the artefacts found in the moon base had reminded Adam and I of the device we’d
found floating in orbit the first time they went to space – when we rescued the
hibernating body of Charles MacAllister. Stef hadn’t seen it, so on returning
to the Hub we took her to where it lay on Benedict’s desk as a paperweight; he’d
seemingly been distracted when studying it, although the blueprints held
beneath suggested he’d learnt as much from it as he’d needed to. Stef was
fascinated.
We
wanted to find out more about it. MacAllister explained it came up on the
rocket with them as one of the projects to be worked on in the Galatea, the
space station whose explosion more or less coincided with the eruption of the
first known novas. The suspicion was that this device was in some way involved.
So,
with MacAllister in tow, Adam and I flew to Florida to speak to the guy in
charge of the mission. We learnt that he didn’t know how the item had been
added, but that it shouldn’t have gone. However, its weight had been taken into
account for the rocket launch which severely limited the number of people who
could have got it into the mission.
Cape
Canaveral itself was closed down due to the problems in the aftermath of
Vienna, but we got a bit of advice and broke in to steal the CCTV records. We
spotted someone behaving oddly – standing around, staring at walls for extended
periods of time, as though in some kind of down-mode, and also bringing in and
leaving a bag large enough to contain the device. The guy in charge confirmed
this person had gone missing for weeks after the launch and had been fired as a
result, but claimed to have no memory. We looked him up, but he wasn’t willing
to talk beyond that he didn’t remember and actually didn’t want to remember.
Disheartened, I was going to fly back to London, but Adam knocked the guy out
and brought him with us.
We
asked Sadiq, the emotion-manipulating nova who joined us in Tiblisi, to see if
he could take a look. He’d spotted that ‘Benedict’ wasn’t quite right (“I never
used to be able to see inside his head”). Fortunately, he seemed satisfied to
stay quiet, so our body-double subterfuge would survive a little longer, at
least. Sadiq, however, wasn’t able to help with this particular problem, and it
was time to call in the big guns.
Team
Tomorrow might be pretentious wankers (although the more I work with them, the
more I think they’re not. I like Pax. But I still haven’t forgiven him for
Minna Trang), but Antaeus is very good. He’s been doing something over in the
Sahara, building on what he’d been working on in Vienna. Must get over and
check it out at some point – if he can make the desert arable again, that would
be pretty huge.
Antaeus
was happy to come with us to check on our ‘patient’, who remained unconscious.
We used Mark’s portal so Antaeus wouldn’t know where we were, but he was
suitably impressed with our facilities.
He
was very gentle with the man, resting his hands on his forehead and talking
about the damage done whilst healing it: some telepath had gone in and hacked
out parts of his memory. Antaeus gently put it back together, and told us what
he saw. A man and woman had made the guy get the part on board the rocket. They
were clearly novas, but this was before even Adam and I erupted. The woman was
the telepath – careless or lacking talent, to have left such a mess – and the
man had a strange accent.
Mark
took Antaeus back and we discussed what he’d found. Along with Benedict’s notes
on the device and Stef’s findings, we discarded our initial premise that the
device was what had caused the eruptions, and instead surmised it was some kind
of distraction against the real trigger, here on Earth. For now, we had no
further leads on that.
Adam
ran the guy back to his house and nicked his wallet, so he’d think he’d been
burgled rather than abducted.
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