Broken don’t get sent to penal colonies. They’re too volatile and dangerous. They get housed and doped to the gills, not sent out to an environment where they might do harm to others.”
“So the magistrate screwed up?”
“No. I checked the records. Renaud was able to suppress his madness for the duration of the trial. Even when the defense called in a panel of psychologists and medical experts, they couldn’t find evidence he was Broken.”
“Then he’s not Broken,” she said with bitter conviction.
“Just like evidence of alien civilizations doesn’t exist?”
“That’s not—” She closed her mouth.
“Not fair or the same, right? I know. Look, I asked you to keep an open mind. This is costing you nothing, and might just provide an answer or two.”
“But why are you doing this?”
Long-suppressed memories rose up to threaten my composure as I searched for an explanation that would suit. “Because Broken often seem to know stuff they can’t reasonably know. Because if, like Renaud says, something called him here and made him right in the head while he lied to the magistrates and the experts, then maybe that thing could offer us a way to fix the Broken.” My throat was closing by the time I finished, making the words come out in a choked, harsh whisper I hadn’t heard in almost a century . . .
“Charges ready, boss,” Mohammed said on the general push, covering whatever Dumont might have said.
“Right. Get clear and we’ll set them off,” I answered.
“Copy. Clearing. Renaud?” Mohammed moved behind the shelter of the bunkhouse on the far side of the dig.
“Copy. Can’t wait to meet the singer!” he said, jetting smoothly away from the trench workings.
“Detonating.”
MARVELS
“What the fuck is that?” I whispered.
“It’s the singer—or part of it,” Renaud said, wiping some slurry from the smoking object/concept/color/object/color/concept/object? The thing Renaud had uncovered seemed to change physical dimensions every time I blinked or looked away.
“Jesus Christ,” Dumont breathed. “I never . . .”
“Are you seeing what I am?” I asked.
I gave up trying to fix it in my head but forced my mind to take an average of its appearance in order to place it in some meaningful category of thing. It was, perhaps, glowing a bright white-green, mostly describing a gentle arc approximately one hundred centimeters in length and fluctuating at about ten centimeters in width.
“You bet.” Renaud was gleeful, gloved hands digging more of the amorphous thing from its grave.
“Fuck,” Dumont said.
“What?” Renaud and I asked, nearly simultaneously.
“Maths. Some mathematicians and physicists theorized how objects formed of or in a higher-order dimension might not possess a fixed state to lower-order perceptive capabilities like ours.”
I wasn’t sure I understood her, but I for damn sure didn’t understand what I was looking at.
“Oooh . . .” Renaud’s gasp sounded as if he’d been stroked along every nerve at once. The object he held seemed to melt and run into another form, this one more boxlike and far smaller.
“Shit,” I said. Some part of the thing had seemed to penetrate Renaud’s hardsuit for an instant.
Renaud suddenly went rigid, arms and legs flung straight out at his sides like Vitruvian Man. He slowly drifted, gurgling, from the surface of AL-1517B.
The thing, half pulled from its grave by Renaud, changed again.
I reached for Renaud, but Dumont slapped my glove away. “Don’t! He may be contaminated.”
I checked his beacon. All sensors in the green.
“And don’t tell me you checked! We have no fucking idea what happened, so the suits can’t very well test for it.”
“Boss?” Mohammed’s orange suit appeared about ten meters above the stricken man, cargo capture gun aimed and ready.
“Do it.”
A fat, spinning, ten-centimeter-long dart chugged from the gun on a puff of gas. The net deployed in a glittering circle that captured Renaud’s immobile form. The edges of the net, striking the surface of the asteroid, immediately bonded with it, bringing the Broken to a halt.