Song of Scarabaeus (3 page)

Edie frowned. “You can't blame the Crib. Humans have always taken the worlds they want, and always will. Sometimes I think the eco-rads have a point.”

Zeke spoke up, his voice low but scathing. “Rads killed your trainer, isn't that right? Don't go defending them.”

If Haller had chided her like that, she'd have bitten back. But she could only stare at Zeke and feel her face warming with shame. She lowered her gaze quickly and then glared at Haller, hating herself for being tempted. Not because she cared about the Fringers—Haller was no doubt misrepresenting their plight—but because stealing BRATs was an appealing way to thumb her nose at the Crib. Her status as an abductee would protect her if they got caught.

“Why not hire a cypherteck from the Fringe? I heard there are illegal training programs out there. And Crib Central is swarming with legal cyphertecks, ripe for kidnapping.”

Haller seemed very pleased with the question. “Do you know what CCU's overall success rate is for seeding planets?”

“Those figures aren't released to the public.”

“But you're not the public. You know the figures.”

“Well, they're not great.”

“One in five is a success. Eighty percent of terraforming missions fail, often within a few months of dropping the BRATs, and usually due to cypherteck error.”

“It's not an exact science.”

He waved that aside. “And what's your success rate, Edie?”

“I don't have any successes yet. It takes years to assess whether—”

“Eighteen missions, eighteen new worlds molded by your hands, your mind, over the last seven years. And not one has failed. Two of them have already been announced publicly as colony worlds, with recruitment calls going out for settlement within the next five years. The others are well on the way to success. You're the best there is.”

There had been
nineteen
missions. Nineteen. And yes, she
was good at what she did. She also recognized clumsy attempts at flattery when she heard them.

“Forgive my cynicism, but I don't believe you're doing this purely out of compassion.”

“It's a business operation, of course. And we don't expect you to work for free.”

“What are you offering?” She had no idea how much she was worth. She'd never been a commodity on the open market before.

“Twenty thousand for your first run and another twenty in bonuses, depending on how the mission shapes up.”

Edie couldn't help herself—her eyes popped wide. Haller and Zeke exchanged a look.

“How many missions?” she asked.

“As many as we can manage over the next few months.”

“Until my implant runs dry?”

Haller
tsked
but didn't address that concern. “Here's how it works. Our client sets up the runs, finds us the customers at the other end. There's even a little downtime to spend your earnings. 'Course, we may have to monitor your downtime—wouldn't want you skipping out on us early. But I think you'll come to see things our way. I think you'll want to stick around.” His equanimity and confidence were irritating, as though he was certain of her eventual capitulation.

“What happens if I refuse?”

“That would be a pity,” Haller said, still affable. “I don't want an uncooperative teck aboard, one with wires in her fingertips and wet-teck in her head so she can talk to any teckware just by touching it. Makes the crew nervous. This is a big dock—I'm sure we can find a rover ship that's not so fussy. We'll get a good price for you.”

Edie clenched her fist, feeling the wires crackle under her skin. The offhand manner of his threat was infuriating, but that didn't change the fact that his proposal was more appealing than anything the Crib had to offer. And it was more
creds for one mission than she'd see in a year with CCU. Assuming she could trust anything he said.

“We're doing you a favor, Edie, and you know it. The Crib trained you for eight years and you owe them twice that in service—eleven years to go, and no way out. You were a kid when they signed you up. Doesn't sound like a fair deal to me.”

It was better than the camps. Better than spending another day with
her people.

“So, what do you say? Are you with us, or shall I start looking for another crew that might be interested in you? Of course, I can't promise they'll be as concerned as I am about your medical requirements.”

With her life on the table, it wasn't as if she had a choice. Her only decision was whether to go willingly, how far to play along. A likely outcome, after all, was that the Crib would track these rovers down and take her back. Perhaps she could at least bargain with Haller for the one thing she really wanted that the Crib had always refused to give her.

“I want my Crib records.” She pointed at his palmet. “All of them. Everything you have.”

That took him by surprise, and Edie was perversely satisfied that something could disturb his smug demeanor.

“You can have them. But not until we board the
Hoi
and get under way.”

That would have to do.

Edie drew an unsteady breath and glanced at Zeke. That one she felt safer with, if only because she identified with the no-nonsense approach of a fellow teck.

“Given my options, I guess I'm in.”

Haller's eyebrow twitched. Perhaps, after all, he hadn't thought it would be that easy.

“By the way,” he said, standing up to leave, “what's with that pretty little thing at your throat? The medic tells me it's organic, but the DNA doesn't match up with anything on record.”

Edie touched the smooth warmth of the beetle shell. “What about it? You want one?”

He must have taken her sarcasm as some kind of breakthrough in their relationship, because he grinned. “Latest fashion on Talas, huh?”

Zeke chuckled.

She cut off further conversation by turning back to the window, looking past the girders to the polygon patterns of space beyond. And the stars, those blazing pinpoints crowding the view—she'd visited a handful in her years on the seeding team and she'd left her mark on their planets, but it had all been dictated by the Crib. Here was her chance for a new start.

The possibilities were out there.

She can make the lights sing.

In waves of silver and crimson she spins them in the night air and they sing their pure, clear drops of music. Carving ever-decreasing spirals, trailing fire, and then bursting outward again in an explosion of color and sound, raining down like glowing embers.

Her audience gasps, awestruck. She shuts out their voices and concentrates on the lights. They leap over each other, chanting arpeggios as they gambol in a wide circle, racing and turning. They jump out of line, three by three, pulsing with simple chords and then falling back to resonate with the dance of melodies. And then she makes them fade away, their song becoming a hum, a whisper, until they vanish into the night with the faint curlicue of a sigh.

The camp guards whoop and cheer and applaud the performance, and it isn't the effusive artificial praise one gives a child. It's real. She unhooks the sensor from behind her ear and hands it back to Ursov, along with the small flat holoviz projector. He grins and pats her on the head.

They're inside the double-ribbed perimeter fence, near the hog pens where the talphi that nest in the feed troughs are settling down for the night, chattering among themselves.
Gossiping women, Ursov calls them. She doesn't know what gossiping women sound like. The women in the camp gather in groups to weave or carve or cook, their hands flying in stilted conversation, often one-handed while the other hand attends to their work. But it's almost entirely silent conversation.

The guards start to disperse. They'll get into trouble if they're found shirking their duties or interacting with a Talasi child. Some of them break those rules, like Ursov. She was wary at first. It was hard to shake the fear that the other children instilled in her, those who deigned to communicate with her at all—but she's always been treated well by the guards. She trusts their kind actions more than she trusts the warnings handed down by the Talasi elders.

Sometimes Ursov shares food. She likes it best when he shares his stories. Now he squats down beside her.

“They're very impressed with you,” he says.

“Why? It's so easy to do.” Her hands sign the words as she vocalizes them—a habit she's not yet broken when speaking aloud.

“It's not easy, you know. Controlling the lights like that. You've got a special talent.”

“Can we play the swan-dive game?” This is another trick from that little flat box, a game for two using the lights to battle for territory.

Ursov laughs. “No. You're too good for me now. I'll have to go back to playing it with my son.” She must look crestfallen, because he smiles and holds out the box toward her. When she reaches for it, he draws it back. “Tell you what, I'll make you a deal. I'll let you have the holo if you promise to do something for me.”

“Okay.”

“There's a lady in the city, in Halen Crai. She's very interested in your special talent. I've told her all about how good you are with these games. She wants to meet you. Will you talk to her and show her what you can do?”

She thinks about that. The very mention of the city churns
up strange emotions. The people who live there are the ones responsible for killing off the forests and ultimately forcing the Talasi into camps. She's supposed to fear and hate those people. But the city is also where the camp guards come from, where their families live, where they board ships to the space station and to the mysteries beyond.

She would perhaps be very pleased to meet a lady from Halen Crai who is interested in this silly game of musical lights.

“Okay, if she really wants to meet me.”

“She really wants to meet you.”

“Can I have the box now?”

“One more thing. She's going to ask you questions. About your life here, how they think there's something wrong with you because your mother wasn't Talasi, and how they make you live out here minding the animals, and won't let you eat with them or play with the other children…”

She shuffles her feet uncomfortably. She doesn't want to talk about that. It will certainly cause trouble. But Ursov's voice is very gentle and kind.

“You can tell her everything, Edie. The truth. If you promise to do that, I'll let you have the holo and you can keep it. Because Ms Natesa is a very important lady, and she's going to want you to be properly looked after. If you tell her how unhappy you are, she might be able to get you away from here. Let you live in Halen Crai.”

Her eyes pop wide open. “Just because of this game?”

“That's right. So will you show her what you can do and tell her everything? Do we have a deal?”

She reaches again for the little flat box. They have a deal.

 

Edie woke with a clearer mind—and a clearer understanding of the deal she'd struck with Haller. The last time she'd made a deal that dramatically changed her life, at least she'd trusted the man on the other end of the handshake. This time she might be in over her head.

But she'd play along with these rovers, at least until Haller
handed over her records. Maybe even go on a mission or two, if they lasted that long before the Crib found them. And if they could evade the Crib and she could escape the
Hoi
, the creds they'd promised her would pay for someone to steal neuroxin for her. With a sufficient supply of the drug, she'd finally be free of Talas, and free of Natesa's stifling grasp.

The rhythmic low-frequency engine thrum told her she was shipside and they'd left dock. Being shuffled from place to place while unconscious only reinforced the feeling of being viewed as a commodity. An adolescence spent at Crai Institute on Talas meant she was used to that sort of treatment, but she'd never learned to accept it.

The room was small and dark, the bulkhead lined with locker doors, with a washbasin in one corner. The gray and blue décor was as worn as the medfac's, in contrast to the well-maintained CCU vessels she was accustomed to. A jumble of clean clothes on the end of the bed signified her welcome to the
Hoi Polloi
.

Checking the lockers, she found more changes of clothes, a personal palmet, and other essentials. Among the clothes that someone had preselected for her was a long-sleeved zip-up navy-blue tee, which she discarded and replaced with a gray one from the locker. This minor act of defiance felt ridiculously good.

She grabbed the clothes and looked for a shower. The only door in the room led to a tiny annex with a console and, curiously, a narrow bunk. She'd never had a roommate before. Opening the main hatch from the annex, she looked up and down a long corridor. No one in sight. She found the shower room directly opposite her quarters and went in. Behind a frosted panel that divided the room in half was a row of showerheads. Edie flung the clothes over the door of a toilet stall and gratefully shed her hospital garments. Hot water and steam lifted the last of the drugged stupor from her mind and muscles.

Done with her shower, she pulled on the tee, dark gray pants, and a paneled sleeveless jacket shaped by vertical
spines around the rib cage. Typical space-flight gear for a teck. Back in her spartan quarters was a pair of ankle boots, new and stiff and a size too big. She tossed them across the room in a flash of frustration and doubt. The unknown future felt more like freedom than anything she'd known, but did she have any more control over her life now? She didn't even have her own boots.

She wandered into the annex and touched the dataport. The information she could immediately access was limited. She scanned the ship's manifest, the crew roster, the flight plan. From these she learned that the captain of the ship was named Francis Rackham, a decorated war hero from the Reach Conflicts. Apparently, piracy suited him more than basking in that glory.

The “client” Haller had mentioned was a prospecting and mining company called Stichting Corp. It legitimately employed the crew of the freelance
Hoi Polloi
and then covertly organized and funded their illegal seeding activities to make the real profit under the table. It was a shell company and there was no way to trace its ownership, at least not with the information at Edie's fingertips. The ship carried all the necessary survey equipment in its holds and had all the correct flight plans in its logs to support its cover story, in case it was ever inspected.

Ignoring the internal memos blinking for her attention, she considered how she might breach security. She was at the mercy of these rovers, and if things turned sour she needed all the information she could get. She was no infojack—her expertise was biocyph, not dry-teck—so the higher levels of security were out of reach. But she didn't doubt that she could hack the lower levels. It would take time—that was a task for later.

She ran a scan of her quarters to make sure she wasn't being spied on. The process took a couple of minutes. When that was done, she resisted the urge to poke further and withdrew to explore the physical environment instead.

Barefoot, Edie stepped into the corridor, searching the wall paneling for directions. From the length of the corridor and number of hatches leading to crew quarters, the ship seemed to be a mid-sized cruiser—as befitted its cover.

A tom darted into her path and inspected her with a glittering eye, decided she didn't require cleaning or reporting, and trundled away. The little dome-shaped mecks, a ubiquitous feature of ship and station life, were programmed for cleaning, maintenance, medical monitoring and first aid, or as gophers to fetch and carry. Edie called after the tom with the intention of jacking in and getting to know it, but not surprisingly it ignored her. The toms would need to be primed before they responded to her voice. She could probably do that via one of the ship's consoles, but she didn't want Haller to know exactly what she could and couldn't do. Not yet.

At the end of the corridor, a ladder cut through the deck in both directions. She climbed down the well to the lower deck and found herself in a shorter corridor with a faded striplight. She pressed it firmly and it flickered to full strength. In front of her, a hatch swung ajar on old-fashioned hinges. Someone approached from the other side. Not wanting to be found snooping around, Edie returned to the ladder.

“Hey, there.” It was Zeke, the op-teck. There was no reproach in his voice. “Glad you decided to join our merry little crew.”

Hardly an accurate statement, but she let it slide. “What's down here?”

“Main engine, aft.” He waved a hand in the direction of a large double hatch behind her. “We have a couple of engineers, but I doubt you'll see much of them.”

“I was…looking for the seeding equipment,” she bluffed.

“Ah, the rigs, my babies.” His white teeth flashed in the dim light. “Most of them are here belowdeck. I'll show you later. The extractor rigs are stored in the landing skiffs. Saves having to move them around.”

“What about back there?”

Zeke glanced over his shoulder at the room he'd exited. “Come on, you may as well get reacquainted.”

“What…?”

But Zeke was already heading back in. Edie followed him, and noticed a heavy bolt running the full width of the outside of the hatch.

“Primitive but effective,” Zeke commented.

Through the hatch, she found herself in a narrow room lit by the sickly green glow of a bank of monitors near the door. At first all she could see were pale striplights marking a regular pattern down each side of the room. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she realized the strips were attached to grilles, and the grilles formed two rows of cubical cells.

“Serfs,” she breathed.

“Sure. We use them to work the rigs. Cells are empty now, but we'll be loading them up at the first stop.”

Zeke disappeared into the gloom, striding past the empty cells. Edie hung back, a sinking feeling rolling over her. The Crib claimed that renting out serfs—convicts and POWs—for labor gave them a more useful and interesting life than rigid incarceration, but that didn't mean she wanted to travel and work with them. The seeding team from Talas had never used them.

At the last cell, Zeke stopped. The cell was slashed in red light, indicating it was locked.

“Come on.” His matter-of-fact tone contrasted with the cold despair of the place.

Edie approached the grille with caution. A bunk clung to one wall of the cell and a water drain ran the length of the floor at the back. The occupant was a silent shadow in the corner.

“Edie Sha'nim, meet your new bodyguard.”

She drew in her breath. A serf for a bodyguard? How could that possibly work?

Zeke noted her reaction and gave his characteristic grin.
“You didn't think we'd set you loose in the Reach without protection, did you?” He cooed into the cell. “Don't be shy.”

Edie moved closer, feeling the soft heat of the striplight on her face. The man inside the cell shifted almost imperceptibly, as though he was reacting to the sight of her and deciding what to do next. Then he moved forward in three smooth strides, coming to stand against the grille directly in front of her. Despite the instinct to back away, she forced herself to hold her ground.

“Say hello to an old friend,” Zeke said.

She stared at Finn. He still wore his Crib coveralls, sleeves rolled up to reveal strong forearms, voice snag fitted at his throat. His eyes bore a hard expression that had been missing the first time she'd met him. What had they done to him?

“I—I don't understand,” she stammered, gripping the grille. Finn had been cooperative when she was deactivating his boundary chip, when his life was at stake, but she sensed a tension in this caged man, like a coiled spring—restrained, calculating, and frighteningly unpredictable. She shook her head and dragged her eyes away from him. “I don't want a bodyguard—not a serf, not him.”