Page 41 of Star-Born Anomaly
Time passed slowly as he examined each folder, each file, then tried to piece it back together on the far side of the encryption. The dynamic encoding made it challenging.
The storm raged on the other side of the window, but he did not see it as he focused inward and searched for hidden answers.
Much time passed before he abandoned the task. He recalled his essence into himself, left the terminal as it was, and straightened. He refocused on the outside world, on the rain, and mud, and wind, and lightning.
He had vague memories of a similar event, but they were hazy, from a disconnected life. Images filtered in and out of his mind. He had seen Earth through a large window, so close it looked like he could touch it. He remembered a hospital, and doctors, and his mother crying.
They could not help him there either.
Turning away from the view, he crossed to the other side of the lab, and to the door that opened near Wynn’s quarters. He would stay there, and watch over her, and make sure she slept.
Chapter fifteen
Gibbous Prime
Earth?
Carver hated the fucking place. A dying rock with no purpose.
People acted like it was the center of the universe when it was a reminder of humans’ complete and utter failure. His species couldn’t even keep a planet alive. He didn’t know why the CORE government didn’t just pull the plug on the pointless conservationist efforts, extract whatever resources remained, and never look back.
The doors to his quarters opened, and he stepped inside the sparsely furnished suite—one place of many he called “home.” A functional, disposable room he may return to at some point. Or not. Nothing in his life was ever guaranteed.Nothing was solid.
He crossed to the reclamation unit, stripped, and stuffed everything he wore inside, including his PALM. The end of a job meant hitting the restart button on his life. A new mission, a new identity.
Except they hadn’t given him a new identity in the packet. He mulled that over as he took a steam, cleansing himself of his last job. He had only read through the first file by the time he’d arrived at the next station and needed to reconnect to the grid. There’d been no point of entry in a political setting or an assassination target.
The more he read, the more his objective eluded him. They’d given him information, more than he ever had on a job, and it made little sense.
“Off,” he said aloud, turning off the steam shower. “Dry maximum.” Air flowed around his naked body, drying his skin in seconds.
He exited the washroom and grabbed a clean PALM from the top drawer of his desk. He slid it on, and it connected to the grid a second later. Media updates and reports streamed across his ocular implant.
He strode to the wall compartment that held his uniforms. A spectrum of professions confronted him in colors of tan, and white, and navy blue. He hesitated, not knowing which one to grab, when a new directive passed in front of his eyes.
Possible target: Dr. Wynn Lambdin.
Finally, he had an objective, but it didn’t state whether they wanted the person terminated or apprehended. The code to wait for more orders blinked beside her name.
This is bullshit.He’d never accepted a job to be denied the full details. The unbalanced feeling returned.
He closed the wall compartment and stepped to the next. It opened to reveal all-black attire. If he didn’t need to play a part for this one, then he would wear whatever the fuck he wanted.
While dressing, he scanned through the files he’d already downloaded, searching for anything attached to the doctor’s name. A personnel file surfaced, tagged with over a hundred media reports. He opened the file, and an image of her flashed in front of his eyes.
The picture was from the personnel file at her current post. She wore a tan science officer’s uniform, her black hair cut to her chin. Sad brown eyes stared at him from a face devoid of any other expression. Her location tag said Earth, and she had one of the million pointless conservationist positions on the shitty rock.
But her image gave him pause. This was his target? A grunt worker? She wasn’t like anyone he usually disposed of, but appearances could be deceiving.
And for the hundredth time over the past day and a half, he reminded himself that it wasn’t his job to ask questions.
Sitting on the edge of the bed to pull on clean boots, he opened the media reports attached to her file. Multiple newsreels streamed in front of him, all depicting an event that had happened a few weeks ago.
He remembered it. A new species of animal had mutated on Earth’s surface, and an unfortunate scientist had died making the discovery. Dr. Foster Kish was Dr. Lambdin’s colleague.
Another sign that everyone should abandon the conservation efforts on Earth. The animals that could exist on its toxic surface didn’t want them there either.
Each media outlet covered its own version of the death, trying to outdo the others in hypotheses of where the animals came from, and how they’d stayed hidden for so long. None of them came up with straightforward answers.
