turned off her shield. Standing in the darkness, she sensed rather than saw movement. The slightest click told her that her opponent had followed her example.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered, and thought some more.
The laser weapon simulators, set too low to cause harm but high enough to be noisy, carried digital memory chips that communicated with the shields they wore. All hits and their placement were recorded in the computer, to be tallied at days’ end. She was an empath. Could she add to that communication? Direct it?
She ran a hand over her weapon. It was already set to connect to her opponent’s unique energy field. And she was, in general, very good at messing up technology. She felt for the motion of energy, seeking the human thought her weapon communicated with. Then, she raised it, rounded the corner, and rolled.
She closed her eyes and fired, thoughts directing energy in the dark. The shot smacked into a darkened vest, ricocheted off, and hit something on the wall. Lights began to blink wildly around them, making noises like small firecrackers. Her opponent cursed freely.
“Game called,” a voice said over the loudspeaker. “Get Stan. She fucked it up again.”
Full light flooded the corridor. Jaguar pulled herself to standing, went to her opponent, and helped him up. “Nice move, turning your vest off,” she said to him. “You almost had me.”
He brushed off his knees and glared at her.
“Dr. Addams,” a new voice said over the loudspeaker above them. “What did you do?”
“I think I won, Stan,” she replied.
“Yeah,” the voice said. “But did you - uh -”
She let him try to figure out how to complete the sentence. Although everyone knew she was an empath, ambivalence about use of such skills made some people reluctant to name it publicly. Jaguar grinned, enjoying his struggle.
“Never mind,” he said at last. “Just - come up here.”
She turned to her opponent. “Do you know what I did?” she asked him.
He scratched at the back of his head. “Kind of.”
“Kind of won’t save your ass. Go and learn, little one.” She gave his shoulder a slap, and made her way back down the corridor to a door set discreetly into the black padding. She opened it and wound her way upstairs, to where the technicians played.
Stan Wokowski sat in front of a panel of lights and buttons, swinging his head back and forth and pressing buttons. He looked morose.
She stood behind him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey Stan,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“It was better before you got here,” he said.
“If you don’t want me in the training games, tell Alex not to assign me.”
He turned large sad eyes up to her. In general he had the aspect of a basset hound with doleful secrets to keep, but his sorrow always increased when she was on the scene. In spite of that, she appreciated his skill with machinery, and his willingness to explain the details of the technology he worked with. The more she knew about such things, the easier it was to mess with them.
“I tried,” he said. “More than once. He says it’s important for the new people to work with - um - “
“Empaths,” she whispered, behind her hand. “You can say it. There are no children in the room.”
He tugged at his collar. “Did you?” he asked mournfully. “With the laser memory?”
She held up thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart. He raised an eyebrow at her. She opened her fingers wider. “Just that much. Honest Injun. I wanted to see what’d happen next.”
“What happens,” he said, “is that the system backfires. Too much memory, and it can’t digitize it fast enough. So it backs up, and lets off steam at the loose end.”
“Fascinating,” Jaguar said. “I’m glad to know that.”
“Yeah,” he said.
A button on his panel started blinking and he pressed it. A disembodied voice spoke into the room. “Call for Dr. Addams. Supervisor Dzarny wants her in his office. She’s on assignment, as of now.”
“I’m doing training this week,” Jaguar said.
“Not anymore,” the voice replied.
“Okay,” she said, “but Stan will be very disappointed.”
The voice went away, and Jaguar turned back to Stan.
When she saw his face, she chuckled. “Well,” she said. “At least now I know how to make you smile.”
* * * *
Jaguar walked the few blocks between the training center and the Supervisor’s building, enjoying the warm sun on her back and the scent of growth in the air. Springtime on the Planetoid, she thought. Lovely. Perfect.
Although winters were not quite as cold or snowy as on the home planet, and summers weren’t as hot as she liked them, spring was just about perfect. Stan told her once that more moderate weather was inevitable in their kind of system, explaining in great detail how the mass generator created atmosphere in the first place. She listened to some of it, then lost track and amused herself by seeing if she could set off his intercom with a telepathic message.
The Planetoid, constructed from the base of a large asteroid and shuttle-loads of material from the home planet, was enough like earth that the prisoners they brought here could be fooled into thinking they hadn’t left home. Unlike the first bubble dome Planetoid, here there were cities such as the Toronto replica she worked in, eco-sites and the rivers and lakes they’d created in the holes and valleys of this small world. They’d brought thousands of extra tons of dirt from the home planet when they learned this made residents healthier, and less prone to depression. Carefully placed buildings and mountainous structures created the illusion of horizon, and wave shields put the right stars and a moon of the right size in the night sky.
They hadn’t put in the mesa lands that Jaguar loved, but shuttles ran frequently enough for her to get home when her blood and bones cried out for the baking heat and limitless views of New Mexico. And though there was sometimes a sky island sense of boundaries here, she knew she would stay.
She’d been working in the prison system as a Teacher for more than six years, her job to create and run programs that led criminals to face and overcome their deepest fears, going on the post-Killing Times theory that all evil, and therefore all crime, grew from fear. It was work she considered important, and work she happened to be very good at.
She also knew that in spite of suspicions like Stan’s and the Board governors’, it was much easier to live as an empath on the Planetoid than on the home planet. Although attitudes there about psi capacities were shifting, the pace was glacial, and many people still saw empaths as either ludicrous freaks or dangerous lunatics. Only in places like 13 Streams, the New Mexico village where she was born, were the empathic arts seen as normal. In their terms, and in the terms of Jaguar’s Mertec people, the arts were
