Edie went to Pris, who sat hunched over and trembling. “Are you okay?”
Pris nodded and sniffed. She looked so forlorn that Edie
sat and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. She’d not anticipated this moment in her mind, the moment when she’d meet the child she injured. With luck, Pris didn’t know the details of what had happened that night.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Pris said quietly.
“Do what?”
“I’m no good in the datastream. I can’t fix things. My head’s all messed up.”
“That’s not true. Your head is fine. It’s your wet-teck interface. I’m sure they can repair it.”
Pris shook her head. “No, it’s no good. Nothing feels right anymore.”
Resentment bubbled to the surface as Edie thought about how these children had been raised, believing their only purpose was to serve the Crib as cyphertecks. And now, when one of them could no longer perform adequately, she was left with nothing.
“There are other things you can do, you know.”
“Like what? Ms Natesa always said I have to do my duty.” How familiar was that refrain.
“Is that what you call her?”
Pris looked away and mumbled, “She wants me to call her Mother.”
“Why don’t you?”
“It’s not fair to the others.”
“Where are we?” Galeon called out suddenly. “Where are we going?”
“We’re on the
Molly Mei
,” Edie said. “We’re going to a planet called Scarabaeus.”
A few hours into the journey, with the ship in nodespace, Edie ventured out to find food. The crew apparently had no notion of the children’s schedule. Edie had kept them occupied with toons and games, but that only lasted so long. They were hungry and tired and cranky, and Edie wasn’t much better.
She searched for the galley through a maze of mismatched
corridors and annexes. It was strange to think that Cat and Finn were nearby in these locked rooms, isolated from contact. Maybe Vlissides would relax his strict confinement rules later, if everyone behaved.
A milit rushed past her yelling into his commlink for assistance. Something about prisoners brawling. Edie didn’t need to hear more to guess who was involved. Someone had put Finn and Achaiah in close quarters—a very bad idea.
She followed the milit around the corner. Up ahead, one hatch was wide open and a second milit hovered in the doorway. He beckoned urgently.
“Private Gleick, get over here!”
Edie could hear yelling and the sounds of a scuffle, and from Achaiah’s indignant cries she could tell who was winning. Vlissides approached at a jog from the other direction. Before he got there, Achaiah was suddenly thrown out of the cabin and hurled against the opposite bulkhead. He slid down, winded. Blood ran down a gash on his cheekbone.
Vlissides marched up to the hatch. Edie dodged around Gleick to join him. Finn stood in the center of the room absently nursing reddened knuckles. He looked otherwise unharmed, which was to be expected—the infojack stood no chance against a Saeth.
“I’ll talk to him,” Edie said before Vlissides did anything stupid.
At the sound of her voice, Finn looked up at her. His expression of desperation and lethal fury sent a chill through her. What the hell was going on? Was this simple revenge, even though the leash was now cut?
“Lock him in,” Vlissides told Gleick. To Edie he growled, “Thought you said he’d cause no trouble.”
“I’ll find out what happened,” Edie said. “Please let me talk to him.”
“Not now. He stays here to cool off.” Vlissides gave Achaiah a quick look. “Gleick, take this one to the infirmary and patch him up. Then I guess you’ll have to review the bunking arrangements.”
Confused and frustrated, Edie remembered her mission to find food and retraced her steps. She came face-to-face with Galeon.
“What are you doing here?”
“I followed you. Everyone’s very hungry.”
“I know. Come with me. We’ll find something to eat.”
The galley, when she finally found it, was little more than a kitchenette with one table and two long benches. The ship clearly wasn’t intended to carry more than about six people, and right now it had over a dozen on board. Their difficult encounter on the
Learo Dochais
seemingly forgotten for now, she and Galeon companionably gathered up ration packs and heated them in dishes. They found a couple of trays and returned to their cabin carrying the five meals between them. Sitting in rows on the lower bunks, everyone dug in.
“That was Finn,” Galeon said through a mouthful of noodles. “I heard Finn yelling.”
“You’re right,” Edie said. “He’s here, but he’s not coming with us all the way.” At least, she hoped not.
Pris picked pieces of rehydrated meat out of her soup and made a neat pile out of them on her napkin. “Ms Natesa’s very angry with him. He’s a nuisance.”
“Is that what she told you?” Edie asked.
“Yes. But she sorted it out.”
Edie swallowed and put down her fork. “What d’you mean?”
“She said it was all sorted out and she could get rid of him any time she liked.” Pris’s innocent words hid a host of sickening possibilities.
“When was this?”
“A few days ago when I was in the infirmary. I heard her talking to someone. I didn’t see who it was.”
Surely that didn’t matter now, Edie told herself. Natesa was locked up on the
Learo Dochais
, and, in any case, Finn
was by the minute farther and farther from her reach. Still, she couldn’t help worrying. Natesa was unstable enough now to do anything.
With a sixteen-day journey ahead of them, the last thing Edie wanted on her hands were four bored and irritable children. The only ship’s entertainment caps suitable for kids were a handful of toons. She rationed them to one a day to make them last. Because of their hasty departure, the children had brought nothing with them but a change of clothes. Being unused to packing, they’d managed to screw that up. Galeon had brought three spare tees but no clean underwear. Hanna and Raena were devastated because they’d forgotten their hair ties. Edie felt like she was taking a crash course in parenting as she tried to deal with each disaster as it cropped up.
Vlissides relented and allowed them to leave the cabin and stretch their legs for a couple of hours a day, and to eat in the galley. It wasn’t enough to keep them happy. Edie knew their options on the
Learo Dochais
hadn’t been much better, but they’d been less restless there. It soon became painfully obvious that the children missed the ten or twelve hours a day they used to spend in the classroom, riding the datastream.
She had one solution for that, and by the third day she was ready to try it. She took O’Mara’s datacap from her tool belt and gave it to them.
“I thought Prisca was dead. We couldn’t fix it fast enough,” Pris said.
“That wasn’t our fault,” Galeon said indignantly.
“No, it wasn’t your fault,” Edie said. “This isn’t from Prisca. It’s a sim from Scarabaeus, the planet we’re going to visit.”
Much as she disapproved of their involvement, she was curious about what they’d make of the sim. In any case, they needed some sort of primer on Scarabaeus. They were going to be working for Theron, regardless of Edie’s objections.
The children gathered around the console as Edie uploaded
the sim. They used their hardlinks to jack in, eager for a new datastream to explore. Before Edie had the chance to join them, an intraship call came through from Vlissides.
“Meet me on the bridge. We could have a problem on our hands.”
Edie left the children to the sim and went to the bridge, a glorified cockpit with only one seat—the navpilot’s—and two standing consoles behind it. Vlissides was alone, in the navpilot’s seat, which he spun around to face Edie.
“I’ve been talking to Captain Lachesis,” he said. “The man has a strange idea of what constitutes an emergency, but I thought you’d want to know. Liv Natesa called on some friends in Central and they’re sending a ship for her. She intends to follow us and demand we hand over the children. I doubt it’ll work, but it’ll sure make a scene. The last thing the colonel wants is to draw attention to that planet.”
“Why? Because he has nefarious plans for it?”
“Well,” he drawled, “I don’t know about that. Anyway, she has no legal standing, but I get the feeling that’s not going to stop her.”
“What do you plan to do about it?”
“She’s a few days behind us, probably won’t catch up until we reach the planet. Colonel Theron’s ship has the manpower and firepower to handle whatever she’s brought with her. I’m not worried. Like I said, the only problem is a possible security breach if she decides to kick up a fuss.”
“There could be another problem—not that you Crib drones even care—but I think Finn could be in danger. Natesa wants him dead.”
“What’s he to her?”
“Nothing. He’s nothing at all. She’d kill him to spite me.”
“She won’t get the chance.”
“I’m not so sure. One of the kids overheard something—I think she’s already arranged it. I don’t know how. Maybe she’s paid one of your men here to kill him.” Edie hoped she didn’t sound so paranoid that he’d completely dismiss her concerns.
“I assure you, that’s not possible.”
“Then maybe she organized an assassin on Falls Station. Listen, I just want to talk to him. Find out what he knows. I don’t think that brawl with Achaiah was a disagreement over who got the top bunk.”
Vlissides relented. “Okay, but I’m putting a guard on the door.”
Private Gleick let Edie into Finn’s cabin. She found him playing cards with his new roommate, Corinth. They were a picture of grimness. Finn couldn’t even manage a smile, but he did look somewhat relieved to see her. He pushed back his chair and stood.
“When do we get off this boat?” he asked.
“About ten days, if I can get permission from Theron. I’m not allowed to contact him until he reaches Scarabaeus.” She hesitated at the door, acutely conscious that both Gleick and Corinth were unwelcome on the scene. “What happened the other day?”
Finn rubbed his hand over his face in a gesture of exhaustion. “That day when they knocked me out…Achaiah told me your boss offered to cut his sentence if he did a little job for her. He thought he was there to cut the leash. Instead, she had him make a new link to the bomb in my head. She has the detonator. She taps in the code and I’m dead.”
“No…”
Edie wrapped her arms around her ribs as if to prop herself up as the blood drained from her head. So this was how Natesa had planned her revenge. When she felt Edie had stepped far enough out of line, she’d planned to kill Finn with the push of a button.
“I checked out his chip,” Corinth said. “The infojack was telling the truth. He hacked the receiver and locked it to a commlink.”
“What’s the range?” Edie asked.
“Same as a regular commlink—a few hundred thousand klicks.”
“Why didn’t she use it already? She could’ve triggered it before we left Prisca’s system.” And Edie would never have known why it happened.
“I don’t know,” Finn said. “I don’t know what her plan is, or was.”
“Wait…” Edie replayed the events of her last few minutes on the
Learo Dochais
. “Lachesis confined her to quarters because she got a little hysterical about the transfer orders. I think she was stuck there a few days. Maybe she didn’t have the detonator with her.”
“This Achaiah sounds like a real sweetheart,” Corinth said.
Finn began to pace. “I knew he was hiding something when they put him in here with me. Didn’t take much to make him talk.”
“We always knew Achaiah had the morality of a nematode,” Edie said.
“I’ll say this for him—he had just enough conscience left to feel guilty about it.”
“Can he undo it?”
“He claims no. The detonator’s at her end. As long as this bomb is in my skull…” Finn stopped pacing. “Maybe nothing will come of it. The Reach is wide and I fully intend to stay out of her way.”
Edie bit her lip. “One problem. She’s following us to Scarabaeus.”
Both men were instantly alert.
“She wants to take the children back,” Edie said. “Specifically Pris, I suppose.”
“How long do I have?” Finn asked.
“We’re a few days ahead of her.”
“Doesn’t mean much if we don’t know how fast her ship is,” Corinth said.
Finn moved to sit on the bunk. “Damn. This is a fucking bad way to die.”
“That’s not going to happen, Finn. Vlissides will have to let you leave at Falls Station, regardless of Theron’s orders. Once I tell him about this—”
“She could be waiting for him at Falls,” Corinth observed.
“Then what do we do?” Her voice was thin, wavering with fear. She looked from Corinth to Finn, hoping one of them had an idea.
Finn did. “Put me back in cryo.”
Every ship had at least one cryo capsule on board for medical emergencies. At least, the reputable ships did. The
Molly Mei
was from the Fringe, and Fringe ships weren’t necessarily reputable. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Vlissides, who agreed to their plan for what he called
logistical
reasons, confirmed with the ship’s databank that there was indeed one cryo capsule and it was in the cargo hold.
The only person on board with medic training was Finn himself. As he checked over the capsule in a musty corner of the hold, Edie struggled for some final words to say. Her voice was as frozen as her feet, and she could neither speak nor go to him.
Vlissides had also agreed, at last, to drop off Finn at Falls Station with the prisoners. He wasn’t interested in Natesa’s charges against Finn—she’d never formalized them anyway—and the only charge on Corinth’s file was failure to keep his crew key on his person, a relatively minor security breach. As far as Vlissides was concerned, both men could go free at Falls.
Corinth, whose cover as a utility teck was still intact, volunteered to take charge of the capsule on Falls until Finn could be safely defrosted.
What all this meant to Edie was that Finn had less reason than ever to come back for her. Natesa’s career might never recover from this crisis, and in any case she’d washed her hands of Edie, but Edie still had a contract to work off for the Crib. All Natesa had to do was give the detonator to someone close to Edie, and if Finn ever did return…he’d be killed instantly and at a distance. He’d have to stay away.