Waypoint Kangaroo (3 page)

I blink my left eye into spectrum analysis mode. The fluorescent lights here flicker at a very high frequency, imperceptible to unaided human vision, and the variation between individual lighting panels indicates a path through the maze. The maze has many exits, all of them blank walls, but one of them hides a doorway. There are many possible paths to that door, but only one path is ever valid, and that path changes daily. Pressure plates in the floor and motion sensors in the ceiling detect whether you're following the correct path, and if you're not, bad things happen.

I walk in circles until I reach the exit, then press my hand against the wall. Hidden sensors in what looks like concrete read my fingerprints, pulse, and subdermal agency transponder, and then the wall parts like the Red Sea, nanobots flexing their molecule-thin shells and scurrying out of the way to reveal a manual door—the kind with a handle you have to turn. I push it open, step into the stairwell, and close the door behind me.

Down one flight of stairs, out another manual door, and I'm back in time.

Our department's current office space used to be some kind of military bunker, built near the beginning of the Space Age to hide VIPs and shield them from any surface bombardments up to and including thermonuclear warheads. It's been retrofitted with automatic doors, a modern power system, and better toilets, but it's still cold and gray and heavy and linear.

I'm glad I don't have to stay down here all the time. But I think Paul actually likes being isolated from the modern world. He's always been fascinated with the end of the twentieth century—what he calls “the turn of the millennium”—and it tends to rub off if you spend any amount of time around him.

“Profligate,” Oliver says as I walk into his workshop. He's tinkering with some kind of disk-shaped gadget, probably a flying thing—I see four exposed rotors. He doesn't even look at me. His dark eyes stay focused on the machine he's either building or taking apart.

“Them's fightin' words, cowboy,” I retort. Oliver always throws around a lot of technical jargon, but when he pulls out the vocabulary words, I know he's looking for an argument.

“An electromagnetic lance is an expensive piece of equipment,” he says. “More importantly, it is a very specialized instrument, only constructed by a few manufacturers, only available to a small number of people.”

“Private security firms have them,” I say. I've had a few hours to fashion rebuttals to his most obvious criticisms of my operational performance.

“And how many private security firms take contracts in Kazakhstan?”

I shrug. I didn't research that. Probably should have.

“The EM lance is a weapon of last resort,” Oliver says. “It's too sophisticated for private security. Anyone who gets hit with an EM lance is going to know that it came from a first-world government agency.”

“Didn't you tell me that the pulse charge also fries the casing? Burns away serial numbers, fingerprints, all that good stuff?”

Oliver sighs, rubs the bridge of his nose, and casts a baleful gaze from under his shaggy mop of dark hair. “It doesn't matter if they can trace the weapon, Kay. They don't need to know exactly where it came from. Their
suspicions
about its origin are enough to cause trouble.”

Now I'm getting a little annoyed. “It's the only weapon I discharged on this op,” I say. “I'd hardly call that ‘profligate.'” He doesn't need to know about the AED; that's Jessica's inventory.

“We'll see about that,” says Oliver. “Let's go check you in.”

I follow him out of the workshop and down the corridor to the armory. He puts the flying disk thing on a flat, empty table and taps at a wall screen, bringing up the inventory of equipment I signed out last week. I put on a pair of insulated gloves. Grabbing one object out of the pocket's deep freeze is not a problem, but I'm going to be unpacking a lot of stuff here.

“One EM lance discharged,” Oliver says, looking over my inventory list with a sour expression. “Which one was it?”

“Blackbird.”

He manipulates the screen, updating that list entry. “Right. Robin Red-Breast, then.”

I visualize the reference object—a small brown bird with an orange chest—and open the pocket.

My code name, the only name I have within the agency, is KANGAROO. Not because I'm originally from Australia, or because I can jump supernaturally high, or because I'm a genetically engineered human-marsupial hybrid. None of those things is true, and come on, that last one is pretty ridiculous.

I'm Kangaroo because I have a universe-sized secret pouch.

I call it “the pocket.” Yeah, boring name, but give me a break; I was ten years old when the ability first manifested. Nobody knows how it works—not yet, anyway. Science Division keeps testing me every chance they get. They say I have the ability to open a “hyperspace shunt”: a variable-size portal into a “pocket universe,” an empty, apparently endless void that looks like deep space. It's very useful for smuggling things into places where they don't belong, or out of places where we don't want them to stay.

The reference objects—Science Division calls them “pointers”—help me keep track of where everything is inside the pocket. Having a different image in my mind when I open the pocket will put the portal in a different part of the empty universe on the other side. But imagining a pistol, or a clip of ammunition, doesn't help me if there's more than one in the pocket. I need a unique pointer to each location.

Opening and closing the pocket is a purely mental exertion. I have to be awake, and I have to concentrate, but it doesn't feel any different from moving a part of my body. It's like making my hand into a fist or sticking out my tongue. My brain just knows how to do it. Science Division hates that answer, but it's the only one I can give them.

Oliver watches as I pull the unused EM lance out of the pocket, followed by the rest of the special equipment I was issued for this operation. We weren't sure how deep underground the item was buried, so there's a lot: shovels, pickaxes, chisels, electric and hand drills, deep radar and lidar scanners, subsonic resonators, laser cutters, a portable plasma torch, maser cannons, lots and lots of battery packs, several bricks of malleable explosives with matching remote detonators, bundles of Kazakhstani banknotes, and three field ration bars.

This accounting is one of our post-op rituals. I always keep a lot of stuff in the pocket—it's the size of an entire universe, so why not?—but the agency demands that certain equipment be accounted for periodically. Other things, like perishables or delicate machinery, wouldn't survive floating in deep space for more than a few days.

Most equipment that goes into the pocket has to be stored in therm-packs to prevent freezing. It takes Oliver a few minutes to unpack everything and lay it all out on the table. I tried to help him once, and he nearly ripped my head off for lining up a set of seemingly identical power cells in the wrong order. So now I just wait while he does the count.

“I see you got hungry in the desert,” he says, putting the ration bars in what appears to be alphabetical order by flavor name. “Where's the canteen?”

“Sorry,” I say. “Forgot it in the hovercar when the Rangers burned it.”

The soldiers who airlifted me out of the desert also used pyro charges to destroy any trace of our having been there. I could have put the hovercar in the pocket, but it was a bit large for a souvenir.

Oliver gives me an exasperated look. “That was a thermal canteen. State of the art. Do you know how much trouble it was for us to develop that? Not even astronauts need special containers to keep their water liquid!”

“Give me a break, will you?” I say. “I drove through the desert for three days straight. I'd already melted out all the ice I had. I needed to rehydrate after using the pocket. I was taking stimulants to stay awake. It was an emergency situation.”

Oliver glares at me. This is another familiar post-op ritual. “I'll look forward to reading your full report.”

“Are we done here?” I ask. “I can come back later if you want to yell at me some more.”

“Much later,” he says, turning back to his flying disk. Is that a smirk on his normally languid face? “By the way, Science Division would like you to stop by and run some new scenarios for Project Backdoor.”

“I just got home,” I groan. “By the way, can we change that project name to something else? Anything else?”

Oliver shrugs. “It's descriptive. Quite elegant, really.” He holds up his hand with the palm facing flat toward me. “Front door.” He rotates his hand 180 degrees, so the palm faces him. “Back door. And it was
your
idea, as I recall.”

He returns to tinkering with his flying disk. I imagine using my own palm to slap that grin off his face. The bastard knew letting me choose that ridiculous code name when I was a teenager would come back to haunt me later in life. Nobody at Science Division ever says “Project Backdoor”—they say “the rotation problem” to avoid snickering. And they say it a lot, because pocket rotation is kind of a big deal.

After I put something in the pocket, when I want to pull it out again, I can open the portal on the far side of the item, rotated 180 degrees around it. Because the portal is locked to the item in the pocket universe and my location in our universe, Newton's laws of motion dictate that if I threw the item into the “front door,” it'll come flying out the “back door” at the same speed. I just have to make sure I associated the item with a reference object that has two distinct sides—like a room with two entrances.

The problem is, I can only reposition the portal in that specific way, on the far side of the item directly opposite its original placement. If I could arbitrarily adjust the angle of the portal with respect to the item, I could add a whole new set of party tricks to my repertoire. I wouldn't even need to carry a gun. We could just shoot a few bullets into the pocket, and I could later open it back up, rotated and pointed at my target. Wham, bam, thank you, physics.

Unfortunately, I'm the only one who can train myself to do that. And I have no idea how the pocket actually works. It's simply a thing I can do, like bending my fingers—and just like I can't bend my fingers backward, I can't arbitrarily rotate the pocket. It's one-eighty or nothing.

However, Science Division believes they can help me overcome this limitation, and they love thinking up increasingly outrageous methods to expand my mind.

“Are these new ‘scenarios' going to involve psychotropic compounds or invasive electrodes?” I ask.

Oliver doesn't look up. “We can only hope.”

“Boy, it's great to be home.”

*   *   *

I run into Jessica on my way from Oliver's workshop to Paul's office. We stop in the corridor, facing each other, and she looks me up and down.

Jessica Chu, M.D., Ph.D., is the third person in my three-person department, and very scary. Well, she scares me, anyway. She doesn't actually frown or grimace all the time, but the sum of her thin, angular features is a permanent disapproving look. And her long, slender fingers give the appearance of claws, especially when she's holding some sharp medical instrument. Her job title is “Surgical and Medical Intervention Practitioner,” which also doesn't help. I don't like the idea of anyone “intervening” with my bodily functions.

“What's with the suit?” she asks.

“Job interview,” I say.

Her face is a mask. “I need to download your med logs.”

“Nothing about the tie?” I ask, following her into the exam room. “It depicts an ancient Russian folk tale. Very cultural.”

“Take off your shirt.”

“Why, do you mean my button-front, Oxford-weave dress garment?” I didn't spend two hours with a clingy personal shopper to
not
have someone notice these threads.

“Or I can just use the scissors.” She holds up a pair of trauma shears.

“Okay, okay.”

I hang my jacket on a wall hook, then sit down on the plastic-covered bench and remove my necktie. I carefully pull the thin end back through the loop holding it together, not wanting to undo the knot. It took me fifteen minutes and an instruction manual to tie the damn thing this morning, and I want to keep it until after I see Paul.

I've barely gotten my shirt unbuttoned when Jessica yanks my left arm up and jams an electrode into my armpit.

“Are we in a hurry? Hey, careful with the merchandise!” She jabs another electrode up under my chin and slaps an interface patch over my left eye. Half my vision disappears as the computer starts downloading sensor logs from my various implants.

“You're dehydrated,” she says, studying a display screen.

“Had to use the pocket.” Physiologically, opening the pocket acts like a night of heavy drinking, sucking water out of my body and suppressing certain neurotransmitters. I basically get a hangover afterward. “And I wasn't sleeping.”

“You had a water surplus. What happened to the ice?”

“Spilled most of it,” I reply. “You try pulling a frozen brick through a hyperspace shunt while driving a hovercar through the desert.”

I stare at the side of her head. Jessica hasn't looked at me once since she started the exam. That's not normal. Usually, when I get back from a mission, she's all over me like Martian dust on … well, everything on Mars. There's a reason they call it “the red planet.” Those fine-grained ferrous particles get into every nook and cranny.

Similarly, when I report in, Jessica usually examines me from head to toe, checking everything from my back teeth to my bowel movements. I'm the only person we know of who's ever manifested any persistent superhuman ability, and the agency doesn't want their prize Kangaroo getting sick. It's Surgical's job to make sure I keep laying golden eggs. So to speak.