Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) (9 page)

Jerome Salmera had built what he’d never had—but real life was neither that tidy nor that easily modified. Maybe somewhere at the intersection of garden fantasy and Xirtaxis Minor’s limp communal reality lay whatever was causing problems here. It might come from the man himself, or a project he’d created, or from one of his underlings. My mind considered what I had seen that morning. Smoldering lab techs and chameleon ones.

It wasn’t only plants that thirsted for water.

“Good morning.”

For the second time in an hour, I found my musings interrupted by a voice behind my head. It didn’t happen that often—Fixers were hard to sneak up on.

Jerome’s eyes snapped to the new arrival.

I turned, breathing my chakras back onto solid ground as I did so. Toli stood at the entrance to Jerome’s planter beds. She glanced at him, eyes careful, and then at me. “Nikki said you were looking for me.”

I hadn’t told the tech any such thing, so either she was psychic or she’d thought I might need to be rescued. Both were interesting possibilities.

I made a mental note to check Nikki for Talent. Anyone who enjoyed a prickly little plant that much might be a Grower, although mine wasn’t the Talent most likely to wreak psychic havoc. That would be the Shamans—Raven had sent her entire habitat on midnight cooler raids when her Talent had manifested.

I made a second mental note to find out if there were any preteen girls living in the biome. If there was a young Talent or psychic sensitive on the loose, I needed to find her. It wasn’t the most likely cause, or Yesenia would have sent a Psych or a Seeker instead of a Fixer—but it paid to cover all the bases.

“Grower?” Toli’s voice sounded mildly concerned.

I snapped back to real time. “Sorry. Travel lag.” Not something I suffered from, at least not this long, but almost everyone else in the universe did, so it made a handy excuse to cover for inappropriate mental wanderings. I gave the head of the labs my best innocent smile. “I was hoping to borrow some basic equipment for testing pheromone levels.”

It would knock another thing off my suspect list, and it would provide cover for testing as many of the younger inhabitants of the biome as I could lay my hands on.

Her eyebrows twitched. “Certainly. Can I ask why?”

I tried to stay focused on her face and still keep an eye on the man beside me—because if I was reading him right, he’d just gone on full alert without moving a muscle. “I was going to do some basic elimination.” And since I was, I might as well jump in with both feet. “The data on who has been affected would seem to suggest a link to the experimental domes. I thought I’d start there, take a quick read to see if there’s any unusual pheromonal activity.”

Jerome’s eye’s darkened. “I can assure you there isn’t. We monitor that kind of thing on a regular basis.”

Not with Talent, they didn’t. “I have some ways of scanning that will differ from your equipment.” I tried appealing to the scientist inside the glowering man. “You’re welcome to join me if you like.” A chance to shadow a Grower at work didn’t come along very often.

His face made one of those abrupt shifts again, back to charming, diplomatic scientist. I was getting very wary of that particular persona. He shrugged in pleasant acquiescence. “Toli, please provide whatever she needs. Take what readings you like, Dr. Lightbody. I’ll be happy to provide reports from our latest monitoring scans as well.”

Toli’s head was bouncing back and forth, tracking our conversation like a ping-pong ball.

“I’d appreciate those.” I gave in to the tug inside me that wanted to try to move past this particular shield of his. “Your gardens are beautiful, Jerome. If something in them is doing this, I trust there will be a way to set it right without harming that beauty.”

I saw it then. Just a flash. Hurt. Disbelief. A small boy who had heard such promises and grown into a man who didn’t believe them anymore.

He bowed slightly, the consummate scientist firmly back in place. “Let me know if your data shows any anomalies.”

I watched him walk off, trying to reconcile the wildly complex set of data that was Jerome Salmera. And felt Toli stirring beside me.

She studied me like I’d studied Nikki’s prickly plant, and then grinned. “You look pretty innocent, but you’re not, are you?”

I had no good answer for that. “I hear that looks can be deceiving.”

She laughed. “You’ll have your equipment within the hour, Grower. See that you keep it clean and bring it back to me in one piece.”

I smiled and said nothing. I knew better than to make promises I might not keep.

I
inspected
the box of supplies Toli had just dropped at my feet. It had been years since I’d run ambient sensor equipment, but the air-sampling gear looked like a shinier, newer model of exactly what I was used to. “Thanks—that looks perfect.”

The lab manager grinned. “I stole you the best of what we’ve got. I don’t suppose you need help running it?”

I didn’t, but a friendly face was always welcome, especially one who knew how to run an air-intake valve. “If you’ve got time, I’d appreciate an extra pair of hands. Especially if you’re up for what will probably be a lot of boring staring at readouts.”

“Beats running inventory, which is what I have to go do if you kick me out.” Toli was already digging into her box, hooking up connectors and valves and tablet interfaces. “I assume you want this set up for immediate read-out?”

She obviously knew more than intake valves, and I was happy to save anyone from inventory duty. “That would be great—here, I’ll patch you in to my tablet.”

She rolled her eyes. “That would break at least fifteen rules before we even get started. I’ll send the data to mine, and then I can get you a copy of whatever you need later.”

That seemed like it should break fifteen rules too, but I didn’t comment. I knew how bureaucracies worked, and how pragmatic managers got around them. “I’ll run a basic pheromone sampling first, but I don’t expect it to show much. Just looking for a baseline.”

“Sure. Continuous collection or point data?”

I might as well use her to full advantage. “Can you tweak it to run both?”

Toli’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, yeah.”

I adjusted my plans for the morning. She could more than handle the straight-up science, which would leave me free to do the kinds of scans that involved Talent. I wandered the central pathways of dome Alpha, touching my hands to various bits of foliage as I went. Noticing details that looked different by day than they had by night.

I could feel Toli’s eyes on my back. “What are you up to—Grower stuff?”

Curiosity, but with the polite offer of a brush-off if I wanted it. Which struck me as off, somehow. Someone with Toli’s personality would have her nose in everything with even the slightest invitation.

Clearly those were scarce in these parts.

Poor tribal soil. I kept circling back to that, even though it wasn’t what I’d been sent here to fix. “Yeah. I’m getting a baseline read right now, just like I’ll have you do once you’ve got the gear set up. Then we’ll stir things up a little and see what happens on both your measurements and mine.”

She chuckled. “Does Jerome know that you intend to wreak havoc with his babies?”

Interesting choice of words. “It shouldn’t interfere with any of his work.” Not unless one of the plants here was the guilty party, anyhow, and that would rapidly make it
my
work.

“That won’t make him any less displeased when he finds out what you’ve done.” Toli suddenly sounded serious.

“Fixers don’t ask for permission.” I glanced her way and offered an exit door if she wanted one. “I’m happy to run the equipment if you need to go take care of your inventory.”

She snorted. “You calling me a coward?”

“No.” I could feel my lips twitching—it was going to be very tempting to take her home at the end of this. “Just making sure you know what you signed up for.”

“I’m a lab manager,” she said dryly. “If something hasn’t exploded before noon, it’s been a really boring day.”

She likely meant that literally—explosions were a fairly unavoidable consequence when you mixed beakers, fire, and scientists who didn’t think things all the way through before sticking the first two in the vicinity of each other. “I blew up my first test tube when I was five.”

“I was eight.” She tapped the equipment on the stones in front of her, indicating it was ready to go. “But I blew up four at the same time. Distilled pure alcohol by accident—I was trying to make fuel for my brother’s rocket.”

I nodded that she should take her baseline readings, and took my hands off the plants while she did so. I was pretty sure nothing in here was wildly Talent sensitive, but I was scientist enough to value clean data where I could get it—and team members who could make a good rocket fuel. “The schools on Stardust Prime issue the chemistry teachers with extra hazmat suits when they have a Lightbody in the class.”

KarmaCorp had just issued mine straight to me. Fixers were expected to clean up their own messes.

Toli looked down at her machines, grinning appreciatively. “Baseline data’s done. You guys have a good lab manager?”

It was a casually asked question, but even a Grower could hear the layers underneath. I eyed her carefully. “A cousin of mine, but good lab bosses are always in demand.”

She shrugged a shoulder in acknowledgment. “Most of us are picky about where we go.”

Toli and Glenn, both looking to finish their rotations and ship out. When a community couldn’t keep gold like those two, it was in deep trouble.

Poor soil.

Which I could contemplate after I got on with the job I’d actually been sent here for. I crouched down and laid my hands in the dirt. “I’m going to send out some small test signals. Let me know if your equipment picks up anything.”

She nodded, watching avidly.

If I did my job right, there wouldn’t be anything interesting to see. Carefully, I reached for resonance with the water molecules in the soil—they were easy to read and should touch pretty much everything in the dome. I sent a small message of peace, harmony, good drinking.

Toli shook her head. My Talent wasn’t receiving anything unusual either.

I sent out a different pulse, this one a question. To roots. To things which reached down into the dirt.
Where do you belong?

What came back was a deeply satisfying litany on a single theme.
Here.
Nothing felt alien, nothing felt lost. Green, growing things that understood their part in the whole and engaged in it willingly and with trust that their efforts would be seen and rewarded.

The human inhabitants of Xirtaxis Minor could take lessons from this garden.

Minor, gentle reverberations under my hands, but nothing on Toli’s equipment.

I lifted my hands long enough to set us both back at baseline, and then put them down on the dirt one more time and sent out a more focused probe—one intent on being substantially more disturbing.
Who sent me dreams?

Silence. Green, growing things trying to understand the mysterious human concept that was a dream, or at least my Talent’s best attempt at rendering it into something cells would understand. I tried again, this time sending more shading.
Memories. Real and not real. Things that might have been, could be.

The smaller plants near me disengaged, headed back to drinking their water, finding clear paths for their roots. They were mostly annuals, and this question only confused them. A few months wasn’t enough time to process that kind of question—not at the cellular level, anyhow. I waited. Some of the perennials and trees in here came from stock that counted life in decades and centuries instead of weeks.

More silence.

Toli squinted at her equipment and shook her head.

I didn’t feel anything either, but something was coming—I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising up in recognition of something that had not yet happened.

My fingers clawed into the dirt.
I feel you. I see you.

A momentous, shuddering pause, and then all hell broke loose, under my hands and everywhere else.

Heaving, reaching, chewing force, aimed straight at the dirt where I’d asked my question. What my Talent could only translate as a green, growing thing mad as hell. And scared. And very certain I was the problem.

Violence, amassing under my fingertips.

I was under attack. I could feel the horrible squeezing as my cells tried to empty themselves of water, of calcium, of silica—the basic constituents of life. My Talent reeled, not remotely equipped for meeting savagery.

Somewhere in the deep background, I could hear Toli yelling. I didn’t have time to listen.

I threw everything I had into the dirt under my hands.
Stop. Am. Friend.

Brief confusion—and then the pull on my cells got stronger. The death call of an organism who spoke more strongly to water than I did.

I felt the hands on me, felt them lifting me off the dirt, settling me on something padded. Flat. Felt the violence dim.

Gritting my teeth against the searing pain in my head, I reached over the edge of the stretcher and brushed my fingers against the dirt one more time. Seeking. Letting some of my precious water go and tracking it to source.
Who are you?

I felt the black taking over, felt its blessed eating of the pain.

But not before I heard my answer.

I
’d gone
under to the sound of Toli’s voice—and I came awake to it too. She sounded at least as worried as when I’d blacked out.

“She’s coming back to us.” Glenn, with the professionally reassuring tones of medicals everywhere.

My body issued screeching confirmation. I was indeed waking up—and I hurt everywhere. I started running the simple chakra resonance check that all Fixers were taught to use when we’d been idiots. By definition, any of us who ended up feeling this way had most certainly done something dumb.

Or that would be Yesenia’s conclusion, anyhow. She had very little tolerance for Fixers who ended up on the wrong end of a collision with a pod bus.

Except in this case, I couldn’t even claim a few tons of traveling plastic and steel. The last few drops of water I’d sacrificed had yielded the answer I needed. A searing signature from a young willow whose beautiful form I remembered gracing the center of the dome. I ran my aching head through the litany of problems from Glenn’s files, and watched the data click into place.

Totally consistent with people picking up on the psychic sendings of an angsty teenager. I could remember the fractious, hot resonances of my own dream.
Skin too tight. Breath not enough. No one understands.
Classic teenager angst, and almost certainly the source of the biome’s problems.

Except in this case, the teenager wasn’t human—and she had just tried to suck all the water out of the one person in the biome who had a hope in hell of being able to reason with her.

My head pounded harder. I’d been wasted by a tree. Those were always the really fun reports to write up. I groaned and tried to pry an eye open.

“I have a spray here, Tyra.” Glenn, saying important words. I tried to focus on them. “It’s got a mild stimulant and an analgesic—it’s the strongest thing I have for the pain that won’t leave you dopey.”

I could correct for the dopey, but I was pretty sure he didn’t have anything strong enough to manage the hammers in my head. “Go ahead.” There was no harm in trying.

I felt the spray land, and immediately knew it wasn’t going to accomplish anything useful. Which was a shame, because I had a really big mess to clean up. We suddenly had a monumental science problem on our hands—and a bunch of scientists I suspected weren’t going to be very happy to hear about it.

Which was exactly the kind of thing Fixers were sent in to address, but it generally worked better if the Fixer in question could actually open her eyes and focus.

I gave it my very best effort and squinted at what I could make out of Glenn’s face, and Toli’s behind him. There was no way I was going at this sideways—this was a small community, and even in defective tribes, scuttlebutt travels at the speed of light. “We need the head science team. All of them.”

Glenn raised a questioning eyebrow. “Jerome too?”

Especially him. “He created this.” And I would honor him for it, because there was scientific marvel in this as well as scientific terror. “He’s most likely to know what we might be able to do next.”

“He’ll know.” Toli’s face was pale. “That doesn’t mean he’ll tell you.”

I was very aware of that, too. But I believed, deeply, in giving people the opportunity to do the right thing. “All of them. We’ll see what happens.”

I could see my two allies exchanging dark looks.

I ignored them, even though it scared me to know I was about to walk in lands where even pragmatic optimists feared to tread. Instead, I rubbed at my temples, resolutely trying to get my head back online, and wished furiously for my cupboard of potions back home.

Glenn held out an analgesic spray. “This would help with the pain.”

I didn’t bother to read the label. Anything strong enough to take care of this kind of agony would also turn my brain to mush. “Some really strong passionflower tea, if you have it. Chamomile if you don’t.” Every planet in the galaxy had that one. It would at least get the soothing started.

“I know where to find both.” Toli was on her feet and gone, almost before I managed to blink.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. “Assemble them in your outer office. Give me a five-minute warning when they get here, and have them all come in, sit down, and be quiet.”

“Done.” I heard Glenn breathe in to ask a question—and then breathe out again, leaving it unasked.

I kept my eyes closed, working on inner healing right up until the moment I knew there were five scientists present on the other side of my eyelids. And the pungent, snapping smell of a passionflower brew strong enough to bend a spoon.

It was that I reached for first. My face screwed up at the first swallow. “Ugh, what did you put in here, gym shorts and toe fungus?”

“Neither of those,” said Toli almost primly, “are allowed in my labs.”

I managed the ghost of a smile. It tasted exactly like a really effective tea should. My insides whimpered in gratitude as I took a second sip, this time adding a wisp of Talent to augment what the tea was already trying to do.

“Grower.” Mary Louise Bastur practically sparked with irritation. “We have proper, modern analgesics to take care of a headache.”

I pinned my gaze on the female half of the biome’s head duo. She needed to know who was in charge in this room—or who would be soon, anyhow. “I find it easier to modulate the resonance of plant essences in this form. For my purposes, a cup of tea is an unbeatable delivery mechanism.”

I could see my words register for her—and the realization that I had options at my disposal that could beat her science in the ring every time.

Which wasn’t precisely true. I honored science at least as much as anyone here. But I also knew its limits and when to go around them. This was one of those times. I could feel the Talent-infused passionflower finding the nooks and crannies the drugs had blown right past. It wouldn’t fix my head, but it might at least keep it attached to my shoulders.

Glenn relaxed a little in his corner. Clearly he could see his patient getting better too.

It was John Bastur who picked up the reins this time, with a sympathetic smile that did nothing but grate on my already-raw nerves. “Grower, we understand an event of some magnitude happened in experimental dome Alpha, and you were at the epicenter.”

An earthquake wasn’t a bad analogy for how it had felt. I nodded my head and then winced sharply—that form of body language needed to stay far off the menu for the time being.

John appeared not to have noticed. “I need to ask you to describe it for us so we can take appropriate measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

It wouldn’t be him leading this effort, but I could make that clear later. First, I needed to entirely freak them out. “I was running some baseline diagnostics, standard ones and Talent-enhanced readings. Once we had our baselines, I added some measured use of Talent as a stimulus.” Scientists understood the basic testing of stimulus and response—and hopefully remembered that sometimes, the reaction wasn’t the one you expected.

Jerome’s right eyebrow lifted slightly. I could see him working out the rest, or at least the flashing red arrows pointing at what had likely happened.

And then, to my surprise, he stayed silent.

I kept my eyes on the head duo. “The first two stimuli had no effect. The third one triggered a very significant response, which appears to have been primarily directed at me.” I raised an eyebrow at Toli to confirm.

She assumed the stance and tone of a police corporal on report. “I experienced no effects. In addition, Dr. Jeffert and myself have thoroughly checked the instrumentation and found no evidence of any response we can measure.”

I blinked at the use of Nikki’s full name, and at how fast they’d moved to find data.

“I have also checked the recorded data.” Jerome’s words were clipped and far less friendly than Toli’s. “And done a thorough inspection of the dome. It appears none of the important experimental work we are doing there was affected.”

This time I kept my wince non-visible. If someone had played around in my research, I’d be ready to feed them to the recycler in teeny, tiny pieces. “I had no intentions of disturbing your work, Dr. Salmera, but I took a larger risk with that than I expected to, and for that, I apologize. I’m glad your work is intact.”

He didn’t seem the least bit mollified. “You will inform me in advance of any further such intentions.”

It was an order, and one he felt well within his rights to make.

It wasn’t one I could obey, but this also wasn’t the fight I needed to pick first. “That’s a reasonable request.”

His eyes made it very clear he knew I hadn’t agreed—but again, he kept quiet.

A man who knew there were bigger stakes still to come. I went on sheer instinct. “How is the willow tree?”

He glared at me, every muscle stiff. “If you are referring to the
Salix babylonica
, it appears unaffected by the events of the morning.”

Time to make clear to him that you can’t bluff a Fixer. “That tree was the
source
of the events this morning.”

I watched his eyes as I said it. Saw the wild array of emotions flowing through them as I laid the stakes that mattered on the table. And noted the emotion that wasn’t there.

Surprise.

I opened my mouth to shred him, and then processed the rest of the resonances I was picking up. He knew something, that much was very certain. But if my aching head hadn’t misled me, the best scientific mind on Xirtaxis Minor was proud. And afraid. And ready to go to the mat to protect a certain willow tree.

I opened my mouth again, not yet sure what I was going to say—and felt us both get swallowed up in a cacophony of scientific panic as the rest of the team reacted to what I’d just said. I absorbed their words for a minute, trying to make sense out of the maelstrom of sound. And concluded they had it mostly right. We had a very dangerous tree on the rampage—and the threat had just escalated, big time.

It was what to do about it that was going to be the real fight.

I stuck up my hand into the melee. “Stop. Please.” Any louder, and my head was going to crack.

Their compliance probably had to do more with Glenn’s low growl than my feeble words.

I cleared my throat. “Yes. A tree, an experimental willow created as part of the research here, rendered a highly skilled Grower unconscious.” It had tried more than that, but I wasn’t ready to ascribe motive to a tree. All I knew so far was that I had found my sensitive—and it had leaves, not fingers. “I also believe it was responsible for a dream I had last night that fits the profile of what many of your staff have been reporting.”

That set off more protestations of alarm.

I held up a hand again, this time a far firmer one. “If you keep that up, you’re going to cause a nice repeat of what your tree just did.”

Only Nikki had the grace to look embarrassed. I blinked—I hadn’t even realized she was in the room.

“The tree needs to be removed.” Mary Louise looked ready to take a hatchet to it herself. Gordie and John glowered from their stations at her left and right shoulders.

Nikki sucked in a horrified breath. “You can’t.”

“You won’t.” Jerome’s words were only a fraction of a second behind those of the young lab tech.

Mary Louise didn’t back down an inch. “If it can hurt a Grower, what could it do to someone else?”

The maelstrom of words started up again, more wild speculation on what had happened and why and how to stop it. I wished, deeply, for noise-cancelling headphones—and some brain cells that weren’t ready to explode. It didn’t take a Fixer to read the vibrations. People were digging in to intractable positions in a matter of seconds.

The Basturs had taken the favored path of leader bureaucrats everywhere. Eliminate problems, stay in a zone of safety. They were already thinking about the report they’d need to write. It made me sad to see. They’d both done radical, field-altering research—that had been what earned them this post in the first place. But somewhere along the road to administrative power, they’d lost their sense of scientific adventure.

Gordie wasn’t the kind of scientist who’d ever had any. He was a pragmatist, a man who wanted science to be useful. Most days of the week, I blessed guys like him—they made research matter, translated it to the real world so it contributed to the lives of human beings instead of just the halls of academia.

Today, however, he was lining up beside his bosses and adding his bulk to their roadblock.

Digging in on the other side, with a fierceness I hadn’t known she possessed, was one previously chameleon lab tech. Every line of Nikki’s body spoke of horror at what she was hearing. The woman who loved the spiky little red invader plant couldn’t fathom killing a tree for bad behavior.

Beside her, the glowering countenance of a scientist who was barely holding in his fury—or his grief. I wondered if I was the only person in the room who saw the latter. Or if Jerome had any idea that the small woman standing to his left was currently his best ally.

Because three of us in the medical waiting room had yet to declare ourselves. I was waiting, because I needed to be last—and because the choices of the other two would tell me a whole lot about what options I had. A team of five would be far more powerful than a team of three.

I looked at Glenn and Toli, understanding why both of them looked torn, and knowing this was a choice they needed to make freely. Neither of them had said a word during most of the fray, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have anything to say. I kept my gaze steady, professional, and quietly demanding.

It was time for them to pick a side.

Glenn waited for a moment when no one else was talking and then cleared his throat. “I don’t like the idea of a clear and present threat that we don’t understand very well.” He glanced my way.

Mary Louise nodded sharply, and I revised my impression of her. A little. An irritating bureaucrat she might be, but she was trying to protect her people, too. That I could respect.