Published at 12th of August 2022 9:14 pm

Book 2: Chapter 86: Into the Unknown

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Dan marveled at the sheer amount of crap being pulled out of what appeared to be an eight by ten shack. Uniformed officers and the occasional SPEAR Team member passed documents, hard drives, and bags of shredded paper out of the narrow entrance to the People cache. MPD specialists had already come and gone, clearing the inside of the building with clockwork efficiency. No lingering traps nor esoteric effects had been found in the shack, so the gathered officers immediately went about pillaging the contents.

Dan monitored their progress with his eyes and his veil. His entire purpose here was to monitor the situation. Anastasia clearly worried something would go unreported to her, either because of a mole, political machinations, or some other threat that Dan was missing. He knew all that, yet he’d still brought this cache out into the open. Had he not been short on time, he might have looked for another way, but that wasn’t the case. He was giving up some level of anonymity here, but it wasn’t as if the People weren’t already his enemy. Still, it was discomforting. The uncomfortable reality of the situation had settled heavy around his shoulders. Any of these officers could be a People sympathizer, and any one of them could attempt to hide or destroy evidence.

Not on sight; Dan doubted it would be so simple. There were eyes everywhere at the moment, with over a dozen officers inside the shack alone. Most of what was retrieved was too big to stuff down one’s shirt or in a pocket, but Dan scanned each person exiting the building with his veil, just in case they were hiding something. Every piece of evidence was loaded into a waiting van, which Dan had dedicated the rest of his veil to monitoring. If a piece went missing, or never arrived, he would know almost instantly. No one could take his prize.

Nor could they attempt to attack Dan himself. He was surrounded by armed men, most of whom seemed to expect an attack of some kind, all with itchy trigger fingers. Dan was no different. If someone drew on him, he’d be gone in a blink, and they’d likely be dogpiled by their fellow officers. He had no fear for his life at present.

Dan almost hoped someone would be dumb enough to make a move. Having a mole to interrogate would be incredibly convenient. Despite this cache having obviously been concealed, its contents appeared to be less than immediately useful. There was just too much of it. Bags upon bags upon bags of shredded documents were pulled from the shack’s insides. Dusty, crusty hard drives filled with rust and dead bugs, manila folders packed with hundreds of fast food receipts, and literal discarded trash were among the other things being taken out and carefully documented.

Dan didn’t think the People needed a spy here. It was looking increasingly more likely that there was nothing worth hiding inside this cache. That did lead to a more interesting question, though: What had Donovan Drake done with all the stuff he had needed to hide. Undoubtedly, there had been something that the owner of this house had needed to conceal before going on his suicide mission.

“This does not look promising,” Hauss commented from beside Dan. The lead investigator had finally arrived on scene not twenty minutes ago. He watched the shack being unloaded with a critical eye and a deep scowl.

“Could be something useful on those hard drives,” Dan noted quietly.

Hauss snorted. “Nasty things looked like they were from the eighties. I’m not rightly sure if our IT department can even spin up something that old. Not to mention how degraded they were.”

“They were a little rank,” Dan admitted. The rusted computer parts had the musty stench of something that had sat beneath a pile of rotten wood and leaves for a decade or two. “But why bother hiding it, then?”

“To waste our time,” Gauss answered with certainty born of experience. He waved at the officer taking inventory, and the increasingly long list of items being carefully bagged and catalogued. “We’ll need a second van at this rate. Time, tools, and manpower that could be used otherwise will now be spent on this trash. And we have to do it, too, because there might genuinely be something useful in this mess.”

“He did have something to hide,” Dan pointed out. “There must be something incriminating that he had to get rid of. Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place?”

“I’ve already put out our man’s name and description to the local dump,” Hauss replied grumpily. “They’ll check their records and see if he’s paid them a visit in the last month. I’ve also got officers checking dumpsters within a a mile of here, which they already hate me for, but none of that will turn up anything.”

“No?” Dan asked. It sounded like Hauss had covered his bases pretty well.

“No,” Hauss repeated. “There’s too much ground to cover. I can’t look everywhere. He could have dumped anything useful in the ocean, and we’d never find it.”

“I didn’t see a car,” Dan commented.

“No car. He has a driver’s license and a bus pass, but no vehicle registered to his name.”

“A friend’s, maybe?” Dan asked. “I imagine you’ve got people interviewing the neighbors?”

Hauss grunted an affirmation. “We’ll see what turns up.”

“But you’re not hopeful,” Dan observed.

Hauss’ scowl said everything his mouth would not. He gestured to the little building, then to Dan.

“You’re supposed to be the specialist,” Hauss said. “Do you usually find useful information in these things?”

That was tricky to answer honestly. He had no idea how much he should or should not say. Given Anastasia had made no particular demands on the subject, Dan went with the truth.

“Usually, yeah, but it’s not like I’m the guy who makes that evaluation,” he said. “But those were all old caches. The People weren’t really a threat again until very recently, and I’m assuming that this cache was hidden in the days leading up to the attack on the Keys. I don’t have any answers for you, Hauss. I just find the stupid things.”

It took another hour to fully remove and document the container’s contents. As Hauss predicted, another evidence van had been needed, and had arrived shortly afterwards. Dan kept his veil on both, carefully monitoring the contents for anything odd. Nothing at all happened. If the People had a spy on the premises, they were very patient.

With everything finally documented, Dan could relax his guard. At the very least, if something were to go missing now, they would know it. He had become fully bought in to Hauss’ theory that this was designed to waste their time. He couldn’t imagine finding much of use in the metaphorical and literal trash heap they’d pulled from the building. But that was fine. Dan had another purpose, here.

He hadn’t forgotten Anastasia’s… he was going to be charitable and call it a request. It was important to know whether or not the People could use these ‘caches’ as portable safe houses. They obviously resided in the Gap when not deployed in reality, and the Gap was violently hostile to human minds. That said, Dan’s own power proved it was entirely possible to shield oneself from the effects of exposure.

Neither the shack, nor its contents, were tainted with cosmic radiation. It was the very first thing that had been tested for, even before the specialists had arrived. García had a handheld scanner in his cruiser, something apparently standard for the MPD. He had waved the thing at the shack and found exactly nothing. Dan thought that to be very strong evidence in favor of Anastasia’s theory. The cache-creating Natural—Dan decided to mentally refer to the Natural as Vault—could obviously shield the contents of whatever he shunted into t-space. That in mind, he needed to run a few experiments.

“I need to run a few experiments,” he told Hauss, as they watched the last evidence van drive away. Only a handful of officers remained, including García and the pair of officers who had first arrived on scene.

Hauss looked at him askance. “Experiments? With what?”

Dan pointedly turned towards the back yard.

“With that?” Garcia threw out incredulously. “What do you want to do with it?”

Dan considered how best to explain, then shrugged. “I’m gonna poke it with a stick and see what happens.”

“I can’t condone that,” Hauss replied immediately.

“Okay, but not really,” Dan said grinning wryly. “I want to put something living inside of the shack, then send the whole thing back to where I found it before pulling it out again.”

“You can do that?” Hauss asked, eyes narrowed. “Just make that thing vanish and reappear at will?”

“I have no idea,” Dan admitted. “That’s why I said it was an experiment.”

“Sounds dangerous, boss,” García noted.

“Your people already cleared the building,” Dan pointed out. “There are no traps for me to set off, and no lingering Natural bullshit that might randomly kill us. The worst that would happen is I can’t bring the shed back from… wherever it goes.” Dan almost said the Gap, but these officers neither knew nor cared what that was. As far as they were concerned, it didn’t matter in the slightest where the caches specifically vanished to, only that they did.

“Your CSI guys have already combed every inch of the building,” Dan continued. “You’ve pulled everything out of it. There’s no risk involved.”

Hauss stared at him for an uncomfortable few seconds. Finally, he asked, “What is it you’re hoping to get out of this?”

Finally, something he could answer convincingly!

“If a living thing can survive the transition,” Dan began leadingly. To Hauss’ credit, he immediately spotted the implications.

“You think the people are using these things as safe houses.” he stated more than asked.

Dan shrugged. “It’s a theory. I’d like to put it to rest one way or the other.”

Hauss mulled it over, but ultimately conceded. “It’s a reasonable goal, and I’ve got some legal leeway here. If the People are hiding out in invisible, nigh-undetectable safehouses then we need to know. Let’s try it out.”

Little preparation was necessary. Dan quickly found a living creature with his veil—a large, lethargic beetle—and deposited it on the floor of the shack. He stepped back outside, shut the door, and extended his veil into the building. Once again, he could feel an odd sensation. Some strange interaction between his concept, and Vault’s power.

Dan worked entirely by instinct, not entirely sure exactly what he was doing, yet somehow fully certain he could pull it off. His veil invaded every inch of the building, soaking its structure and connecting to the lingering traces of Vault’s power. It was similar enough to Dan’s own, but Dan’s understanding was far superior.

He was closing a door. Not his veil, but through it. The order flowed from his power to another’s, and the other bent to the command. Liquid bloomed across the shack’s surface, its features melting into muddy silver. It sloughed down and around the air, sliding across an invisible, immaterial mold. The entire shed condensed down into a ball the size of Dan’s torso. The bubbling mass hovered in the air, shivered, then vanished.

“Well I’ll be damned,” García whistled.

Dan ignored him, focusing instead on his veil. He’d kept it linked this time, wanting to feel the entire process. It was decidedly odd. His power did its best to relay information to him, but Dan lacked context to process it. He was working off instinct, suspicion, and a great deal of improvisation. He had a feeling that there was an opportunity here, that there was something else he could do.

But that was for later.

First: “Open up.”

The silver orb popped back into existence and quickly expanded. Liquid spread itself across the grass, forming and hardening. It settled back into shape, and the little storage shed appeared once more in the yard. Dan stepped forward, opened the door, and looked inside. The beetle remained more or less where he’d left it, no worse for wear. He picked up a nearby twig and poked it in the bum. The insect scuttled forward a few feet before settling itself, threat seemingly dealt with.

“Huh,” Dan stated numbly. It wasn’t a perfect test. The beetle wasn’t sapient, and thus less affected by the mind-bending nature of the Gap. It held no connection at all to that other space, to the extent that Dan’s veil could probably dismember it if he really tried. But that wasn’t the point. It hadn’t been atomized, or otherwise reduced to liquid components, despite the visual presentation of Vault’s power. It was still alive.

Dan turned back to García. “Do you still have the scanner?”

He did. The confused officer waved the devices sensor at the shed, then poked the beetle with it. No beeping. No cosmic contamination to speak of.

“Huh,” Dan repeated. “Well that’s not good.”

“Not in the slightest,” Hauss agreed with a scowl. He looked at Dan. “How many other people can detect these things?”

“I’m not sure,” Dan admitted honestly, only to clarify with a hasty lie. “I can only do it because of an odd interaction between my mutated short-hop and this Natural’s power.”

“So we might be fucked is what you’re saying,” Hauss observed. “One man can’t hunt an entire organization. How many of these can they make?”

“I’m not sure,” Dan repeated. “Could be limited, or could not. Impossible to know at present.”

“Fucking Naturals,” Hauss sighed. He didn’t sound angry, so much as exhausted. “I need to report this.”

“Wait,” Dan said, stopping the man. “I want to try one more thing.”

Hauss sighed again, but motioned for Dan to go on. Dan walked forward, pressing his veil into the storage shed. He searched for that ethereal connection between himself, his veil, and the foreign power. He had a theory, one that he absolutely would not be testing yet, and it revolved around his Navigator.

The eldritch thing had a connection to the Gap, given that it lived there, a connection to reality through Dan, and was the method by which Dan navigated both. It could clearly see where the Gap overlapped with the real world, and helped Dan arrive where he intended to. Dan had tried, multiple times, to teleport directly to a person, and had failed every time. His assumption was that the same connection to the Gap that prevented his veil from dismembering them, also shielded them from his Navigator’s gaze. It seemed reasonable enough, given his limited understanding of how these things worked.

So Dan intended to cheat. He didn’t need to know where a person was if he could track the power attached to them. Or, rather, the effects of said power. Like this shack that he was connected to, and the power that he could so clearly feel. Powers were nothing more than the chaos of the Gap crystalized into reality. They held no special protections. They weren’t conscious, or sapient, or shielded in any way. They were just…

Landmarks.

Now that might not be the case for all of them. Surely, any power with an internal expression would remain concealed from his Navigator by the same mechanism that shielded the person. So, tracking some guy with super strength might be impossible. But even then, couldn’t Dan just search from the side of the Gap, rather than reality? So long as he had a sample of what he was looking for, his Navigator should be able to find it. That was literally what it did.

And this ‘Vault’ was even easier. Dan didn’t even need to find the man. He just wanted the caches, and the contents within. He had a perfect example of the power, right here in front of him to search with. He could feel the power’s lingering traces, still connected to its larger parts. It had been locked away and abandoned, but Dan’s veil was a gateway.

Opening things was part of what it did.

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