Originator by Joel Shepherd Read Free Book Online

coffee?”
    The coffee machine was in a hall by big windows, surrounding offices still quite busy despite it being two hours from dawn. Sandy took hers strong, milk, no sugar. Raylee, even stronger.
    â€œYou’re not attending debrief?” Raylee wondered.
    Sitting opposite, elbows on knees, Sandy shook her head. “I get the summary. Nice thing with being the kinetic asset, I get to stay a few degrees separate from all the talking. Form my own opinions.”
    â€œSounds more like you’re the overview than just the kinetic asset.” Sandy shrugged. Raylee couldn’t deny that it made her edgy. So much power this woman had acquired. At this range, she looked astonishingly normal, shortish hair, wide features, strong figure. She had a power about her, a poise, like the gym junkies Raylee had known who walked and sat with rippling muscle, never a slouch or an awkward pose. Ari swore by her, this killer with the blood of hundreds on her hands, as though she’d never had an evil thought. Surely that wasn’t possible, given what she was, and what she’d done.
    But her three victims from two hours ago, she’d been astonished to learn, were all still alive. And the one Rhian had shot.
    â€œSo, what do you think?” Sandy asked with a jerk of her head back to the interrogation room.
    â€œWell, he was the go-between,” Raylee summarized. “Between your Subject A and some of the Pyeongwha radicals you haven’t caught yet.”
    â€œQuite a few of those, sadly,” Sandy said into her coffee. “The question is, what does a League splinter group guy want with Pyeongwha radicals?”
    â€œWell, Mr Moily’s no help there. But they’re all into mind alteration, aren’t they? Moily’s just a low-grade hack, but he’s interested in personality change, technologically induced psychology. Which is pretty interesting, when it comes to Pyeongwha.”
    Two years ago, the FSA had ended the regime of the planet Pyeongwha. Consensus was that Pyeongwha’s brand of uplink technology, called Neural Cluster Technology, was causing radical sociological extremism, leading to a paranoid regime sabre-rattling at its neighbours, and massacring its own noncompliant citizens by the tens of thousands. NCT caused humans to go mad in groups. Now, word was, the entire League had caught a similar disease.
    â€œSeems pretty strange that the representative of a group that just murdered an entire moon would be seeking out a group even more radical than his own,” said Sandy. “They’ve no other connection. Pyeongwha’s never had direct League contacts, they were xenophobic about other Federation worlds, let alone League worlds.”
    â€œSeems logical that a group that’s going insane might want to find out more about the condition,” Raylee reasoned.
    â€œCan ideology recognise its own extremes as insanity? Most of humanity’s genocides have been carried out by lucid and rational individuals.”
    â€œYou think?”
    â€œIt’s not an opinion, it’s basic psych analysis. Radical politics is a natural function of human society. Pyeongwha’s condition isn’t something new, it’s just created by something new. The condition itself has been observed thousands of times before in human history, statistically frequent enough to be considered normal.”
    And this was disconcerting too. Kresnov was crazy smart. Even Ari thought so, and Ari was so smart it sometimes made Raylee’s head hurt. Why these two had ever left each other, she didn’t know. They seemed a perfect match.
    â€œThose guys who tried to kill us,” said Raylee. “Ari thinks they’re FedInt.”
    â€œWell, Ari would.” Sandy sipped coffee. “They’re underworld, scary well equipped, and they’re not talking.”
    â€œEmployed by FedInt. Ari insists. He says they do that sometimes, to hide their