Kangaroo Too Read online

  “No,” Alisa says. “That’s a bad idea. What if he loses track of us? What if he—”

  “He’s not an idiot,” Jessica says.

  “Thank you,” I say. “How big are these shuttles?”

  “No more than five meters across,” Khan says. “You can open the portal that wide, correct?”

  “I can do up to fifteen,” I say, “but only if I have to.”

  “The shuttles will fit in five,” Khan says. “This is our best option, Doc. We’ve got a lot of people and equipment to move.”

  “Will you need any help getting everything out of the Genesis cave and into a shuttle?” I ask. If nobody’s going to tell me what this secret project is, maybe I can sneak a peek with my own eyes.

  “What’s Genesis?” Jessica asks.

  Alisa glares at both of us. “My assistant and I can handle it.” She turns to Khan. “We’ll need a path cleared between B-wing and the hangar bay. No spectators.”

  “Fine,” Khan says. “You’ve got thirty minutes.”

  “Alisa. Seriously. Do you want any help?” Jessica asks as Alisa steps off the pedestal.

  “Don’t talk to me,” Alisa says, and walks out.

  * * *

  I wait until Alisa has left the control center to ask, “Can’t OSS send any other spacecraft to intercept the incoming object? Or at least get some telescopes on it to see what it is?”

  Khan speaks to one of the officers seated next to her, who works his controls. One of the wall screens changes to a series of blurry still images of an irregular grayish rock.

  “That’s our bogey,” Khan says. “Looks like your basic stray asteroid, right? Except when you look at it in infrared.”

  The screen changes to a very colorful shape, with a bluish fuzz off one side of the rock, separated by a stripe of solid black like the empty space around it.

  “Wait,” I say. “That looks like heat back there. And why is the rock itself so warm?”

  “Because it’s not a rock,” Khan says. “Not entirely, anyway. Looks like someone hollowed out a small asteroid and hid some drone controls and a mini-ionwell inside. That heat flare back there is a plasma exhaust.”

  “But there’s no engine trail.”

  Khan gestures to her officer, who changes the display again. Now the background becomes gray, with tiny pinpoints of light—distant stars, invisible until the brightness gain was turned up—but the stripe to the left of the rock is still solid black.

  “Stealth cone,” Khan says. “Energy-absorbing material around the engine bells. Unless you’re directly behind the rock’s direction of travel, meaning way out in the outer solar system, you won’t see any heat. But it’s accelerating at ten gees.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Hong says.

  “OSS is scrambling some X-4 interceptors,” Khan says. “But we won’t know for at least another hour whether they were successful. I’d like us to prepare for the worst. Kangaroo, do you need any special preparation to open the pocket with a five-meter barrier’d portal?”

  “No,” I say. “Not really. I’ll be dehydrated afterward. And probably have a headache. Maybe just have some vitamin water and painkillers on hand for that.”

  “We can do that.” Khan makes a note on her tablet. “Mr. Hong, why don’t you show Kangaroo to the hangar deck so he can get a look at the shuttlecraft.”

  “Just one more question,” I say. “Do we have any idea who’s attacking us?”

  Khan frowns. “Knowing who threw this rock isn’t really going to help us stop it.”

  “Not the rock,” I say. “But if they do have people on the Moon, just waiting for you to evacuate so they can expose you, knowing who it is might tell us something about their methods or help us identify who their operatives or accomplices might be.”

  “Jeremiah Burgess,” Jessica says.

  “Who’s that?” Khan asks.

  “Municipal power employee. He was on the agency payroll. But he was—flexible.”

  “A loose asset?” I ask. The agency deals with a lot of people who are “loosely affiliated”—meaning we just pay them to fill a specific need, whether it’s information, hardware, or services. These assets are usually mercenaries or career criminals, but in some cases, all you need is a lowly maintenance worker to copy some data or open a back door.

  Jessica nods. “He had contacts here at SDF1. Burgess arranged my meeting with Alisa, without telling her it was me.”

  “And if you could pay him to do that on the sly,” I say, “someone else might have bribed him to find out which specific power plants to bomb in order to shut down the tube transit system.”

  “Thereby forcing SDF1 to evacuate into space instead of underground,” Hong says. “That’s fairly devious.”

  Khan shakes her head. “I see your point, Kangaroo, but this is all we have to go on right now.” She waves at the pictures on the screens. “And anyone in the Solar System could have made that rock.”

  “But how would they know exactly where and how and when to hit us?” I ask. “Not many people have access to all that information.”

  “Maybe not last year,” Khan says, her mouth turned down at the corners, “but our former D.Int has been selling a lot of secrets on the black market.”

  Something clicks in my mind. “You think this attack is happening because Sakraida sold information about this facility?”

  “Yeah.”

  Holy shit. “He knew about Project Genesis!” What one D.Int—Morris—can find out, another D.Int—Sakraida—probably discovered a while ago. “He didn’t know exactly what ‘Dr. Jill’ was doing here, but he knew it was beyond top secret, and he knew the secretary of state was directly involved.”

  “Which is why he wants to destroy it,” Khan says.

  “No,” I say. “If he wanted to destroy it, he could have gotten somebody into this facility with a suitcase nuke and turned it into an actual crater. He knows your security procedures. He knows exactly where this base is. Think about it. Why would he get someone to attack in a way that gave us two hours’ warning? Enough time to evacuate the entire facility?”

  “He doesn’t want to destroy it,” Jessica says. “He wants to steal it.”

  “Dollars to doughnuts,” I say.

  “What?” Hong says.

  “You know what a doughnut is, right?”

  “They cost more than a dollar.”

  “Forget it,” I say. “The point is, Sakraida knows you’re running high-value research up here—including whatever the hell ‘Genesis’ is, and whatever it is, it’s clearly super important to State. So it’s definitely worth a ransom, if nothing else.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” Khan says, “and I look forward to reading the analyst reports once we’re safely repositioned.”

  “I can find out,” I say. “I can talk to them.”

  “Excuse me?” Jessica says at the same time that Hong asks “How?” and Khan says “I hope you’re not proposing what I think you’re proposing.”

  “Hear me out.” I hold up a hand to request silence while I explain. “If we’re right about this, whoever threw that rock will be watching, waiting for us to evacuate so they can intercept us. Right? Well, when they see only one ship leaving, they’re going to be extra curious. And I can make it very easy for them to catch me—”

  “No,” Jessica and Khan say at the same time. Hong raises his eyebrows and shrugs. Some support would be nice, fella.

  “You’re a triple-A Diamond asset,” Jessica says. “We are not risking your safety.”

  “Or the safety of everyone in this facility,” Khan says. “I need to ensure the security of all personnel and agency material from SDF1. We can worry about unmasking the villains later.”

  “We may never have another chance to make direct contact!” I say. “This is primary source intel. Agents have died for less reliable data.” Both Jessica’s and Khan’s eyes widen at that remark. In hindsight, that probably wasn’t the best argument. “Come on, am I really
the only one who sees the value of this? Lieutenant?” I turn to look at Hong.

  He raises both hands, palms up. “I’m just a pilot, sir.”

  “No one is disputing the potential value of that information,” Khan says. “But it’s not worth the risk, Kangaroo. We don’t know what these people might do once they capture you. They could knock you out and take you back to the asteroid belt or somewhere else without enough empty space for you to pull our vehicles and personnel out of the pocket. If their other ships are also equipped with stealth canopies, the agency won’t be able to track them.”

  “I’ll have two whole days before your air runs out,” I say. Agency shuttles are overengineered to provide life support for pretty long flights, just in case there’s a “variation” that requires them to stay out in space longer than expected. “I can find a way to get a message back to the office. I’ll figure something out.”

  “Not that I don’t trust your operational prowess, Kangaroo,” Khan says, “but there are too many unknowns. We’re not taking the risk. We need to evacuate. We put you in our fastest ship, we put everyone else inside the pocket, and then you outrun these bastards when they try to catch you on the way out. That’s the plan.”

  “Your plan doesn’t get us any more information about who’s behind this,” I say. Doesn’t anyone else around here actually want to catch the bad guys?

  “That’s not my priority,” Khan says.

  “Maybe it’s not your decision.”

  She frowns at me. “Are you going to disobey a direct order from a superior?”

  “I’m Operations,” I say. “You’re Science. I’m not in your chain of command—”

  “Okay,” Jessica says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You can stop playing lawyer now, Kangaroo.”

  I continue staring down Khan. “I’m not playing anything—”

  “I apologize, Director,” Jessica says, yanking me backward. “He gets like this sometimes. Low blood sugar.” She turns me to face her. “When’s the last time you ate something?”

  As if on cue, my stomach rumbles. “I’m fine.”

  “You’ll be fine after you eat something.” Jessica glares at me. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Khan says. “We can finish this discussion after you’ve had breakfast.”

  “Breakfast?” I look around, confused. “Wait, what time is it?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Moon—South Pole—SDF1

  I guess it is morning after all

  I hate it when Jessica’s right and I’m wrong. Which means I hate large portions of my professional life. Maybe I should look into that.

  She marches me out of the control center, down to the cafeteria, and makes sure I’m seated at a table with a large plate of food before leaving me to dig in. Hong sits next to me and sips a cup of coffee while I eat. It’s a surprisingly palatable breakfast, for a government facility: the scrambled eggs actually have the proper consistency, and the texture of the bacon is almost entirely unlike cardboard.

  “Excuse me,” says a voice from the other side of the table.

  I look up and see a man with big eyes and curly hair. The name tag on his lab coat says JOHNSON. He’s carrying a cage with a chicken inside.

  “Is that a chicken?” I ask.

  “Oh. Yeah. Are you—” He darts his eyes left and right, then leans down and lowers his voice. “Are you Kangaroo?”

  That’s not a question I hear very often. Usually, people either know exactly who I am, or they think I’m someone else entirely. “Yes. Who are you and why do you have a chicken?”

  “Oh, I’m—may I sit?”

  “Feel free.”

  He sits across from me, puts his tablet down, and extends a hand. “Richard Johnson. It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kangaroo.”

  I shake his hand. “It’s just Kangaroo.”

  He nods. “Cool. Uh, you can call me Rich.”

  “I suppose that’s better than the other thing.” Dick Johnson? Your parents had some sense of humor.

  “What other thing?”

  Ignorance is bliss. “Never mind. But seriously, what’s with the chicken?”

  “Oh, we have a few different animal species housed here for experimental purposes,” Rich says. “Rats and mice, mostly. We’re studying how they develop in the lower gravity environment.”

  “Do you keep snakes here?”

  He frowns. “No. Why would we have snakes?”

  “Forget it. Not important.” His staring is making me really uncomfortable. “So how do you know who I am, Rich?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry if I ambushed you a little. It’s just—” He waves a hand. “Let me start over. I work with Dr. Jill. Alisa Garro. You know her, right?”

  I nearly choke on the food in my mouth, but manage to wash it down with some orange juice. “Yeah. I know her.”

  “Well, Science Division—the agency—had to give me a very high security clearance in order to work on her project—that vetting process was not a lot of fun, let me tell you—but it did turn out to be worth it, you know, because one of the perks is I was authorized at a high enough level to also know all about you, Kangaroo.” He waves an open palm at me. “And, wow, your ability—the pocket—is just amazing.”

  “Yeah, it’s something.” I study Rich’s face. “So what is Project Genesis?”

  Rich frowns. “You know I can’t talk about that. I’m sorry.”

  I shrug. “Worth a try.” And now I’m going to see just how much you’re willing to trade for some pocket chitchat, Rich. “So let me guess. You want to talk about the pocket.”

  “Oh, I would love that. If it’s not too inconvenient? I know you’re probably busy, planning the evacuation and all that.”

  “I’m not busy right now,” I say, doing my best to not sound bitter. “What do you want to know?”

  Rich leans forward again, conspiratorially. He seems to be studying my tray of food. “Have you thought about lungs?”

  “Not for breakfast, no.”

  He chuckles. “Sorry. I mean—” He waves his hands, like he’s trying to grasp an invisible ball. “When you open the pocket, you manifest a portal, but the event horizon of that portal can’t interact with solid matter. Right?”

  “Yeah. I can only open a portal in empty space.”

  “But you can do it in atmosphere,” Rich says. “I mean, you have to. So there’s some threshold for how much stuff can be in the empty space before it interferes with portal formation.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” I say. “Science Division tests that every so often. Apparently the threshold hasn’t changed since they started tracking the numbers. Solid matter, no; liquid, no; gas, yes up to a certain pressure. I don’t remember the number, but supposedly it’s high enough that I’d be crushed to death in that environment anyway.”

  Rich nods enthusiastically. “And you can vary the size of the portal, right?”

  “Yeah. And put a barrier over it, if I don’t want to suck all the air out of the room.”

  “That’s what I want to talk about,” Rich says, waggling a finger. “Because there’s air—empty space that would allow portal formation—inside someone’s lungs, right?”

  I frown at him. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “You could—in theory—open a tiny, microscopic portal inside someone’s lungs.” Rich makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “You don’t need to see the portal to open the pocket, right? You’ve done it from the other side of a wall before.”

  I’ve suddenly lost my appetite. “You’re talking about suffocating a person from the inside.”

  “Yes!” He’s way too excited about this prospect. “It’s theoretically possible, right? And it would be a completely undetectable method of assassination—”

  “I’m going to stop you right there, Rich,” I say, holding up a hand. “It wouldn’t work.”

  He frowns. “Why not?”

  Becaus
e I’d have to stay there and watch someone die. “Like you said. Solid matter interferes with the portal. I’d have to stay in the same position for however long it would take to kill a person that way.”

  “But the portal moves with your body,” Rich says. “Once you open it, it’s locked to your position in space. Right? That’s why you yourself can’t go inside. You can only reach in to store or retrieve items.”

  “Right. But also, like you said, solid matter interferes with the portal.”

  “That just means if the portal gets moved, you move along with it,” Rich says. “Right?”

  “Not exactly.” I always have trouble explaining the pocket to people. There’s no easy point of reference, no other well-known bodily function I can compare it to. I make a fist with my left hand and hold it up. “Think about this.”

  “Whoa!” Rich leans back, holding up both palms in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “No, I’m not—I’m just making an analogy,” I say.

  “Oh.”

  “Using the pocket is just something I can do. Like making my hand into a fist. I think about it, and it happens.” I flex my fingers open, then closed again for emphasis. “I don’t think about moving individual muscles or how far each finger has to go or anything like that. It just happens by instinct, by feel. You understand?”

  “Okay. Yes.”

  “So once you’ve made a fist,” I say, “you have to hold it closed, right? If you relax your fingers”—I let my left hand uncurl—“they don’t stay together. And if someone stronger than you pries your fingers apart”—I use my right hand to pull my left thumb away from the other fingers on that hand—“they can undo your fist.”

  Rich nods. “Yeah, still with you.”

  “Same thing with the pocket,” I say. “I have to concentrate to open it and keep the portal open. If I lose consciousness, the portal disappears. If something solid pushes on the event horizon hard enough, the portal disappears. You see?”

  I finish prying apart all the fingers of my left hand, then put both hands back down on the table. Rich continues nodding his head.

  “So you’re saying the action of someone moving their lungs to breathe could compress the micro-portal enough to dissipate it,” he says.