Ceteroquin: Three Messages, Two Briefings, Zero Order

This is the eighth part of The Trapping of the Ceteroquin. This story appears in full in M/U's 2020 speculative fiction anthology, Demiurges and Demigods in Space, Vol. 1 and will be run as a serial online every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of months and each entry can easily be found here. To read this in its entirety, along with all of the other brilliant pieces included in the collection, you can obtain paperback and PDF copies in our store, with Kindle versions available on Amazon.

The situation was hardly better the next morning. The mood went beyond merely the hungover and into the surly. 

Worse, the collective and individual memory anomalies were now officially a trend. Maybe even a theme. 

Frank and Melissa were arguing about who had spent the night with Jason, something both of them clearly remembered doing. Jason himself couldn’t say for sure which room he’d spent the night in, further enraging both of them. He seemed to have hazy recollections in both directions, even though he too acknowledged that both could not be true. 

Frietag, out of nowhere, started in on Molly. “I saw you creepin’ outside the priest’s door,” he pointed his finger at her. “Were you looking to make the poor bastard cry or, well, were you there to give an apology of a …personal…nature?”

Everyone looked at Molly, especially Ben. He may not have been a fetishizer of monogamy but he sure appeared less amused than everyone else. 

“I did nothing of the kind!” she said indignantly.

The priest, for his part, agreed. “If she was outside my door, she never came in.” 

This time Molly turned to look at the priest with a different kind of shock. “What do you mean? Are you that good of a liar? You invited me.”

“I did what?”

“See!” the Doctor shrieked giddily. 

“Where was I?” Ben jumped in. “Asleep?”

“You were still out making friends with the luminaries,” Molly shot back with an odd hint of resentment. 

Still worse, both Hancock and Laura now also had experienced contacts with supposed Group agents that could not be independently verified by the others. The only proof they had actually happened was that the messages themselves existed. There wasn’t any alternative explanation for that. Hancock’s had been manually pushed to his communication device by the pretty young assistant to some no-name Vice Mayor. Laura’s had been scrawled onto a small card surreptitiously stuck like a coaster to the bottom of a glass handed to her by a server who had flashed a Group hand sign before giving it to her. 

Ben’s message had called a rendezvous for that afternoon, Hancock’s for the following afternoon, and Laura’s for the day after that. It was too neat. 

*

That evening’s briefing seemed slightly more subdued at first, but it was mostly an illusion. The overt hysteria and confused hostility had merely been replaced by the crackling atmosphere of raw frayed nerves. 

Frank Mario was making the case that everyone – everyone but the officers anyway – should engage in some heavy-duty stimulants. These had proven readily available, and cheap, everywhere they went on the Blue Striper. They’d spent the middle part of the day hungover and halfheartedly peddling their wares (the tally from which couldn’t be agreed upon by any two of them, with none of their claims ultimately the actual numbers). Under such conditions, the idea of behaving celebratory and recreationally became a burden. It was now work. This, he reasoned, would help. 

Everyone turned out to be fairly open to the idea, even Molly and Nick. Everyone was already at that edge-point and they were willing to try something new, maybe anything. The gravity here was heavy or something. They could all feel it in their souls as much as their nerves, something more than just the anxiety of danger. 

The officers were holding their own meeting, trying to piece together what had happened that afternoon. There were big discrepancies between the three accounts. They managed to come to a consensus of sorts: as instructed, they’d ordered drinks and appetizers at an out-of-the-way but still charming piano bar. Out of nowhere, the pianist had come to their table on his set break. According to Piano Man, most of the staff were affiliated with the Group. It operated as a front and staging ground for certain novitiates. Piano Man needed the Ceteroquin to deliver a sensitive message up the chain – if their operation was going to survive, assistance was required. From on high. 

Not to minimize the dangers faced by this cell, but this seemed mundane enough – close to harmless. It was more or less what one would expect to come out of a mission like this one. But something still didn’t seem right. Not to any of them.