Mistress of Siren Cove

Chapter 13: The Science Lover

Elysia's daughter was two, and she still worked part-time in the Palace legal office. Her main job was the oversight of the office, ensuring that the legal office and the rest of the Palace departments worked together. Elysia also oversaw finance, intergovernmental relations, personnel, and other administrative departments. Her training with the Mistress continued, but the sessions were less frequent. Elysia had awakened all the powers she inherited from her mother, and the Mistress had little left to teach her. She consulted with her mother only for practical advice on using these powers in different situations she encountered.

Mother and daughter had become adept at combining their power to feel disturbances around the globe that might signal an imbalance in masculine and feminine forces, which could lead to violent or destructive events. Over the past year, they were able to neutralize the rise of a charismatic colonel with dictatorial ambitions in a budding African democracy, the development of experimental technology by a team of men that would allow them to manipulate the Japanese stock market, and another group that was trafficking in women on a massive scale.

Mother and daughter spent an hour each day together in a communications room, watching and listening to news feeds from around the world. Their combined power allowed them to sense information that was not necessarily being broadcast but which lay behind what they saw and heard.

In addition to broadcast information, they had a team that spent all day, every day, reading newspapers, scientific and technical journals, government announcements, and the like, looking for anything that might indicate potential changes in the energy of the world. Lately, they had been employing artificial intelligence to read and summarize information being published and flag information that might be of interest to the Palace.

The name Connor Bechner popped up as a person of interest to the Palace one afternoon. A search of his background found two PhDs: one in software engineering and the other in environmental science, both from Harvard, and received at the age of twenty-two. Now thirty-five, he had his own lab in Switzerland, with funding from an unknown source. His name came up because of a short paper of his in an older scientific journal, which set out a theory about reducing global greenhouse gases through technology. If successful, this reduction could reduce the pressure to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. A critic of the theory wrote that the technology could work for one hundred years or so, but then the technology would cause the global atmosphere to collapse. An early promoter of the technology discounted this fear and assumed that scientists would find a solution to this flaw before it became an issue.

Bechner was flagged by AI because of information that his secret lab had expanded in size. The Mistress and Elysia listened to the presentation of what was known and then worked together, using their energy-sensing abilities, to determine if there was a threat worth investigating. Their ability could not provide specifics but could gauge the extent of the masculine energy surrounding this individual and his lab. If there was someone involved who knew the danger of this project and was going to go ahead with it anyway, they could sense this, regardless of how far away the activity was. They concluded that there was this kind of destructive energy and decided to send someone to have a look.

They sent one of their siren women to the lab, who, after a few days, was able to lure one of the scientists, Chambers, to her bed. From him, they learned that Bechner did not take meetings with anyone other than his senior scientists. They also learned that, as far as Chambers knew, none of the data could be taken from the lab. The funding for the lab was rumored to be in the tens of millions, per year. In other words, those backing the project believed in it and would spend a lot to see the technology implemented. Finally, there was a rumor that there was potential danger in this technology, but he did not know the specifics. Given what they knew, the decision was made to send Elysia, Antoinette, and three other sirens to Switzerland to gain influence over the lab personnel and neutralize the project.