The Impossible Future: Complete set by Frank Kennedy (mini ebook reader .txt) 📕

without jubriska, easily the longest stretch in more than a year. His fraying nerves pointed to the thing he’d be known as on first Earth: an alcoholic. Screw you, he’d tell the holier-than-thou friends and family who would intervene to “save” him. You try living in a universe where everybody wants you dead and tell me a bottle don’t look damn sweet.

For the moment, the poltash weed held him together. The high wasn’t as potent as marijuana, but it kept him from feeling as if his body was fragmenting. Best of all, poltash did not disturb his mental sharpness. Unlike jubriska, for which the cupboard was bare, almost all the thirty Solomons who escaped to this mountain outpost brought multiple pipes and extra stock along. In their moments of desperation, his fellow assassins revealed their priorities.

After the initial, chaotic hours during which the equity movement put out the word to its members, they began arriving at this former research outpost, abandoned more than a century ago when Chancellor geologists lost interest. Rikard landed the uplift in a cedar forest after circling the eastern half of the NAC before achieving blind flight, which removed the ship from the continent’s aerial stack grid. Michael, Rikard, and Helene Yaffetz – the Pynn family cook who joined them – were the fifth through seventh to reach the refuge, lugging weapons and supplies a half mile up unstable, rocky, and deeply forested terrain. Rikard, a smaller man who was great with a navigation cylinder and a pulse gun, struggled with this journey. Helene, on the other hand, managed as well as Michael. She attributed her success to a job that kept her on her feet.

The last of them arrived after sunset. They secured provisions, determined patrol shifts, and ate a makeshift dinner as they introduced themselves. The motley collection amazed Michael. Eighteen men, twelve women, at least a dozen ethnicities, aged eighteen to sixty. Only Helene never killed a human, but she was eager to learn.

“Don’t get so cozy with the idea, Helene,” said Rikard’s husband Matthias, who reached the outpost first. “Everyone here will tell you the same: Once you take a life, there’s no going back. Doesn’t matter whether you did it because you had no choice, or you were fighting for a cause. For now, you’re the only cook here, and we don’t have any kiosks.”

Helene nodded. Michael could have expanded on Matthias’s lecture, but the night was already too tense. He didn’t need to talk about the corpses who visited his nightmares, or how easy it was to kill a man after you’d done it often enough.

A cloud of smoke dominated the common room as they shared their skillsets, contact circles within the movement, and offered thoughts about the most pressing question: What now?

Michael exhaled a stream of smoke. “Here’s what I need to know. When are we gonna be able to contact the people we love?”

Matthias deferred the question to Raimi Inhofe, an expert in stream amps and stack sabotage. Raimi, the last Sioux descendant on Earth, was a burly man with a twitch in his left eye.

“My contacts are still running filter analytics. Here’s the problem with catalyzing your amp, Michael. There are nine certified pilots here, including you. That means nine of us have a transponder loaded into our circastream. According to law, the Chancellors can only track your personal transponder when you’re flying a commercial vessel on attainder. But for all we know, they installed bleeder loops into these transponders. If they did, your stream amp becomes a tracking device the second you catalyze it.”

Michael understood the tech dilemma; he didn’t need a recitation from the expert.

“Look, I get it, dude. I see what’s at stake. But Sam was at the GPM when all this went down. There’s gotta be a way to contact her without mucking up the works.”

Raimi shrugged. “We’re all in the same web, Michael. Give my people another ten or twelve hours. Soon as they file the results on my admin, you’ll know first thing.”

“What about everyone here who’s not a pilot?”

Rikard intervened. “Probably safe, at least in accessing the public streams, but I want us to wait until Raimi’s team reports. We’re a hundred fifty kilometers from the closest city. If there were a sudden spike in amp traffic where no one lives, a clever analyst might deduce a few things.”

Michael wanted to argue, but too many heads nodded agreement. He took another tack.

“OK, so we’re squirreled away in a back-ass corner of the world. When we left Boston, you said we weren’t hiding. Look, Rikard, I’m just gonna say what everybody’s thinking: Are we planning to wait out these killers and hope they grow tired and go home? Cause that ain’t happening. Not for what they’re probably being paid.”

This time, Michael drew nods and grunts of assent.

“You’re right,” Matthias said. “They won’t give up. They’ve been assigned to hunt us down and kill us. If they found us, I doubt any of us would walk off this mountain alive. We’d give them a fight they’d remember, but these assassins are former peacekeepers. They’ve taken down powerful indigo armies without casualties. No, Michael, we’re not going to sit here and wait to die.”

Matthias turned to his husband, who said, “Tell them.”

“There are only two of us on each continent who appreciate the entire picture of our movement. Rikard and I have shared this burden for the NAC. We met nine years ago at an equity organizing conference in Madrid. We were the only ones from this side of the Atlantic. That week, aside from falling in love,” he grabbed his husband’s hand, “we worked with others to form a global council. We convinced the council to add subversion to our agenda. We knew diplomacy alone would not work. It never has.

“By the end of the first year, we set up