Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

Quinn knows it is only a matter of time before they share the intimate experience of patching up each other’s bullet holes.

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She drains her glass of champagne, dims the cabin lights, and turns toward the window. The airspace over Paris is no longer restricted, and at Quinn’s request, the jet has dipped slightly south. Even from this altitude, she can see the distinct black circle etched into the city’s plasma-white glow from the steel and concrete containment dome. This is the closest she has ever been to Ground Zero, and it is probably the closest she will ever get. Her job is not to analyze the past anymore. Her job now is to always look ahead.

The CIA has confirmed that the attack was the work of a single man and that, in some sense, it was an accident. He was a Japanese astronomer, and while he was using a neural network to analyze the backlog of data from an array of solar probes, he found something. A message along with a set of schematics for a device capable of generating particles that could travel faster than the speed of light. The instructions were clear. He was to make contact with the United States. It was critical to the security of the entire planet that the Americans have access to this technology. They would not believe him, of course, so he would need to show them. He would need to prove the effectiveness of the device by conducting a simple test.

The event did put a dent in spacetime, but that was not its primary objective. The promise of time transmission would inevitably attract The Scorpion—a former CIA analyst turned terrorist hunter whom someone in the future desperately wanted dead. She’s the one the CIA would send to witness the demonstration and would therefore be eliminated long before she could become a threat.

Officially, the assassination was successful. According to records retroactively updated by the CIA, Quinn was with her husband at Station F in Paris, and both were killed instantly. The two of them had recently remarried. Now they have side-by-side stars on the CIA Memorial Wall in Langley. James and Quinn Claiborne. Symbolic remains were placed in the two reserved graves beside Molly’s praying angel.

She has not been back to the cemetery, nor has she seen the Memorial Wall, and she can’t imagine that she ever will. Quinn and Ranveer went from Kilonova directly to Dulles, used one of their new identities to fly into Iran to pick up Ranveer’s case, hopped from Tehran to the Persian Gulf, then skipped onto The Grid via Quinn’s first Dragonfly ride. This time, it only took the twins a few days to decrypt the first block. While they waited, Quinn and Ranveer stayed in a vacant exclave that had belonged to someone Ranveer once knew, but whom he would not discuss. Instead, he taught Quinn about his equipment, and together they explored the deadly potential of Moretti’s cases. But when they weren’t working, Quinn knew that Ranveer fixed himself strong drinks and went through the woman’s remaining things.

Quinn does not know what became of her own belongings. She figures either her mother and brother drove down from Boston to rummage through her former life, or they let everything go to auction and collected their checks. Her mother would have used her portion to update her kitchen or put in a new bathroom, and her brother would have used his to stay high for as long as possible. Both would have been disappointed that it wasn’t more. Other than her car, the easiest objects to pawn would have been her engagement ring and wedding band, but she and James had been poor back then, so even combined, they were probably worth less than the Glock she left on the top shelf of her closet.

For some reason, Quinn is glad that they did not get access to her digital life—that they would never get to scroll through all her pictures of Molly or watch the hologram of her laughing as a baby. That they could not claim her as their own loss. Along with her CIA credentials, Quinn relinquished her handset and all her private digital keys to Moretti. Everything left of her daughter was re-encrypted and is now in a cold-storage archive where it will probably remain forever—or at least for as long as the agency survives.

She wonders if anyone found the letter her father left for her when he died and which she kept in the same box as the Glock. In it, he told her that she’d always been a difficult child, but that he’d done his best with her. Even though she’d grown distant and hostile toward him over the years, he still loved her, and he wanted her to know that he forgave her for everything. That he forgave her. “Distant” and “hostile” were the exact words Quinn had used to describe her father to at least three different therapists throughout her life, and now he was projecting that back onto her. Quinn remembers checking the envelope for another page. Checking the back of the paper. Sobbing while she reread the whole thing three times, looking for something she already knew was not there. Searching for something that had never been there, and that she had come to believe she did not deserve.

Quinn now clings to what she learned from the last paper Henrietta published before transitioning from academia to the CIA. “Existential Risk Mitigation: Avoiding Astronomical Impact Events Through Early Intervention.” The important thing to remember about how objects and events influence one another, the paper explained, was that the effects compound over time, meaning that the earlier the interaction occurs, the more profound the effects. Intercept an asteroid headed for Earth when it is still millions of miles off, and just a small amount of energy is required to ensure that it