Talent Scout (Tales From The Margin 2)

Talent Scout (Tales From the Margin 3)
Mikala Ash
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Copyright ©2017 Mikala Ash

She was out of place.

That was my first impression of her, and nothing since has altered it. Not the good she has done, the joy she has brought to me and others, nor the deaths that surrounded her every move. It was like she somehow existed in two universes, shimmering back and forth, straddling both with each foot precariously rooted in two realities.

As first impressions go, it made me uneasy.

The ship's mess was empty but for us. The only sound was the constant background white noise common to all spacecraft; the hum of the air-conditioning, and the thrum of the quantum energies that forced the ship, like the girl, into two realities.

She was sitting at a table in the corner, partly shielded from view by the bulkhead, reading a book, a real paper book, while picking at her food. She seemed so disconnected from the here and now, sitting in a starship hurtling through the quantum void and reading what I later saw was Pride and Prejudice, a story millennia old of horse-drawn carriages bumping along on potholed roads.

She was neither rich nor a refugee. She wasn't an elite slumming it or some poor deluded slob escaping God knows what despair, hoping to fall into something better out on a margin world. Like me, she was in-between; a worker.

Given the absence of enhancements or other costly procedures I put her age at somewhere around twenty. She was short, small-boned, petite as they say, with a small heart-shaped face, pale skin, and long blonde hair pulled back severely into a neat tail held by a pink ribbon. She wore pale grey leggings with matching high-necked tunic. She wore no jewellery at all.

As for looks, unless you studied her closely, you wouldn't see how beautiful she was. She was deliberately hiding her good looks. If she had troubled herself to use even the minimum of make-up she would have been a conversation stopper, but it was clear she didn't seek to draw attention to herself.

But there was something undeniably and perversely fascinating about her, something out of kilter, and my first impression was strengthened. The only other time I'd been close to her I'd noted her topaz eyes which told of a keen intelligence and a gentle nature. She had nicely shaped lips and her voice, though accented, was crystal clear and melodious.

That she was special I had no doubt. After all, she was the reason I was on this rust bucket of a transport.

An unexpected interaction I'd had eight months ago with a precog returned unbidden to my thoughts. Before having her way with me, the precog had been waxing lyrical on the nature of fate, and her role in predicting the future.

"This very moment is fixed," the precog lying on my bed had said. "Everything that has ever happened, all of recorded history and before, moment by micro moment, lead to this single point in time. Think of it, the actions of our ancestors all the way back to Cro-Magnons, everything they did inevitably led to this precise place in time; you and me, lying on a dirty bed in a hovel you call home. And this moment will lead onto the next, and the next, and the next for all of eternity. What do you think of that?"

That "precise place" as she called it had directly led to me being on this ship, watching this out of place woman reading a book. That moment, this moment, and whatever else happened in the next few minutes, would lead to something.

What that something was, I couldn't guess. But for some reason whatever happened to Miss Dorothy Moreland was important to the precog, and that meant it was important to the Commonwealth, to humanity itself.

The precog who had fucked me on my bed had set something in motion, and it needed this particular woman in order to play out. She was somehow significant. Dorothy Moreland was the star of some existential drama in which I too would play a part, though in the beginning I had only the slightest notion of what my role would be.

"Protect her. She must live."

"Protect her from what?"

The precog let that vague yet omniscient expression flow across her coldly beautiful face like a soft ripple across a pond. "You'll know. Trust me. I can tell these things."

The ping of the autochef brought me back to this particular moment in time, and I collected a steaming tray from the slot. Putting on my most charming smile, I headed over to Dorothy Moreland's table.

"Hello," I said. "May I join you?"

She started, looked up, and her initial expression of surprise quickly turned unmistakably into fear. Her body had stiffened, and that cute set of lips had curled into a grimace. There was, I saw, clear panic in those topaz eyes. I'd seen panic before, in combat, and there was no chance of misreading it.

Her eyes darted about, no doubt seeking help. She would have noted all the empty tables and seats I could have chosen. But a fellow passenger asking to sit with her should not have evoked such a reaction. Her fear made the precog's instructions manifest. There must be something to protect her from.